Mark Costello - Big If

“Some,” said Jasper. “Some I don’t.”

“I mean, generally.”

“Are you trying to ask if I’m gay?”

“Of course not,” Tashmo laughed. “Why — is that a question in your mind?”

“Not until you showed up.”

“Well,” said Tashmo, “if you ever feel the need to talk sexual preference, give me a call. We’ll drink a beer, hit some wiffle balls, discuss the pros and cons. Or not. I leave it up to you.”

The minivan went down the hill.Tashmo watched it go.

Gretchen was waving from the curb. She smacked Tashmo on the back.

She said, “Don’t just stand there. Wave.”

Vi had meant to go to Center Effing earlier. She had no right to go at all, of course (she had asked Gretchen’s permission, which Gretchen had refused), which was why she had wanted to go that afternoon, when Gretchen and the detail were still mired in the hill towns. Vi had thought that she could hitch a ride with Christopher and Boone as far as Portsmouth, borrow a spare Taurus, visit Jens and Peta, and get back to the inn before the detail made it down from Rumsey, but this had proved impossible. After the lengthy (and, in Vi’s view, pointless) Q&A with the informant, Little Flower, Christopher and Boone took Vi into Portsmouth, stopping at a Denny’s on the highway, where they met two other threatmen coming up from Nashua with new bulletins concerning the recent theft of nitrate fertilizer from a golf course in that city. They had coffee at the Denny’s, four agents in a banquette booth, comparing leads, discussing threats, this one’s kind of interesting, this other one’s played out. Vi, who didn’t want to be there, spent half an hour listening to Boone work the phones as the two guys in from Nashua ordered cherry pie and Christopher called Beltsville to run a check on the names and AKAs Little Flower had supplied, Linda (also known as Lindy or Belinda) Johnson, Jo (for Josephine?) Jones, the threat men looking to the world like weary salesmen out hustling for customers.

From Denny’s, the threat guys took Vi to the inn. By then the motorcade had come down from Rumsey, and Vi couldn’t slip away until sometime after eight, when she bummed a pool car from the comm techs and started driving down the shore. She was flouting regulations, leaving the hotel, and risking a rip, or formal command discipline, a major rip at that, ten or twenty lost vacation days, Vi estimated, which Gretchen would administer only after a stiff, humiliating dressing-down. Gretchen believed in leadership by fear, but Vi was not afraid of rips or Gretchen anymore. The day had somehow lost its weave, its forward-moving order. Maybe it was leaving the motorcade in Severance, or maybe it was seeing the informant Little Flower imprisoned in her cabin by imagined signals. It made Vi think of her Crim Division time, her New York City tour, watching soaps and Oprah in the pens at JFK, tailing John Doe Russians from Brighton Beach to Queens, the endless, inconclusive tails, or running out to Nassau to collect the girl who called herself Mariah who had bought a bird with counterfeit to get real money back as change. ( Why the bird? Vi asked; Mariah said, He sings. ) It was tired, the scene with Little Flower, and later, in the Denny’s — tired in the way New York had felt tired in the months after Walter Asplund passed away. Vi’s solution in New York had been a transfer to Protection. What was her solution now? A transfer back to Crim? For the first time since leaving her hometown to join the Secret Service, Vi did the math and figured out that she was fifteen years and three months from retirement with pension.

1A came around the headlands into Center Effing. She saw the ocean by the road, beaches under streetlights, graffiti on cracked seawalls. She saw the gates to The Bluffs and signaled for a left.

Kai Boyle-Asplund was sitting,Indian-style, in the front room of the house watching the last scenes of a video called Earthmovers! The video consisted of muddy, grainy footage of large pieces of road-building equipment, graders, backhoes, and front loaders, being operated in a skilled and stylish fashion by burly, bearded men in yellow hard hats. Rolls of soil driven forward, boulders dropped like sugar cubes from bucket cranes into waiting dump trucks — Kai was transfixed.

“It’s his porno,” Peta said, pausing in the kitchen to look at her son. “He could watch it for hours.”

Peta brought the pot of coffee from the counter to the table in the dining nook, where Vi and Jens were sitting surrounded by a homey clutter: sections of the morning Union Leader piled at the end, some bills, some torn-open window envelopes for bills, a dirty sippy cup, and a large blue bowl of oranges. Vi was drinking coffee, Jens was drinking some sort of reddish soda pop.

Vi had been there for two cups of coffee, maybe twenty minutes, and in that time, she and Jens and Peta had talked about nothing really, catching up. Jens sat across the table, pale and work-obsessed, saying little. Vi thought that he had lost a lot of weight.

Vi and Peta talked about Brian Ryan, the trainee threat investigator Peta had to deal with in connection with the Dental Building. Vi didn’t know Brian Ryan personally, but she knew threatmen as a group.

“Ignore them,” Vi advised. “They’re paid to be obsessive. Eventually they go away and bother someone else.”

Peta washed the sippy cup and left it in the dish rack. “I asked him why he cared,” she said. “I mean, what’s the connection? He said they couldn’t wait until the ball drops. What the hell does that mean?”

“Different things,” Vi said. “You guys paint this kitchen?”

Jens said, “It means a goddamn bomb , Pet, what do you think it means?”

Vi said, “Really, Peta, it’s always nonsense with those guys. Was this kitchen yellow last time I was here?”

“Yes,” said Peta, “but it was a different yellow. We got it painted in October. This yellow’s called Morning Lemon.”

Kai’s video was ending.

Peta said, “All right now, Kaiyahoga. Book and bed, you know the ritual. Let’s go, buddy, up .”

The credits rolled as Peta hauled the boy onto her hip with a grunt and carried him into the small bedroom at the front of the house. Vi had slept in that bedroom when she came here after Hinman. She had slept on Kai’s racecar bed, surrounded by Kai’s toys and books and blocks and stuffed animal collection. Kai had slept between his parents in the master bedroom. Sleeping with the toys was part of what had made it a disorienting visit, Vi thought, waking up to see twenty pair of dolls’ eyes staring into space.

Peta and Kai came out of the bedroom, laughing about something. Kai wore a pull-up and spaceman pajamas. They settled on the couch to read a book.

Vi listened from around the corner. She thought, I’m never in a home these days, a real home with real people living in it. Tower South, Vi’s cubicle/studio near the Pentagon, didn’t count as home. Little Flower’s squalid prison cabin wasn’t a home either — it was closer, in spirit, to the sinking mobile homes Vi had seen as drifting derelicts in Hinman, Illinois. But this formica-bright condo in The Bluffs was a real home to a real family — a sample of the country the bodyguards defended. Vi thought, that’s the problem — I’ve lost touch.

Peta said, “Book time! What shall we read?”

Kai wanted Look Out for Lollipops , but this was a baby book, Peta explained. “You’re not a baby, are you, Kai? You’re a big guy now. Now here’s a big-guy book— Bomb-Dog Bob. This was a special gift from your Auntie Vi.”