“The nurse asked me to tell you that visiting hours are over,” Quinn said. “They need to wheel him off for some more tests.”
Peter Kittredge composed himself. He had been loudly lamenting the unraveling of his world, curled up in a chair in Charley Arlinghaus’ hospital room when Quinn arrived. Quinn’s reappearance had brought the cathartic fit of crying to a premature and embarrassing end, adding to Kittredge’s growing resentment of the giant man with crazy wolf’s eyes who had tortured and then spied on him.
Kittredge realized that he was at Quinn’s mercy yet again, having ridden to the hospital with him. “Where are we headed?” he asked.
“The world is our oyster,” Quinn said. “Anywhere you want to go. As long as I want to go there, too.”
“Would you mind dropping me off at my apartment? I need some sleep.”
“Sure thing,” Quinn said. “Actually, on second thought, I have some business at the National Mall. Mind if we stop on the way?”
Who has business at the freaking National Mall? Then Kittredge reminded himself that Quinn was in no ordinary business, as the salted wounds on his back could attest.
Is that my business now, too? Kittredge again lamented the greed and boredom that had prompted him to moonlight for Exel, and felt a flash of anger as he looked one last time at Charley’s comatose frame. What have you gotten me into?
**********
The sun shone brightly and the temperature was perfect. The leaves had turned but had not yet fallen, and Kittredge sat on a bench between the Lincoln and War Memorials, watching ripples traverse the reflecting pool beneath a brilliant autumn kaleidoscope.
A few hundred meters to his right, the gigantic figure of Abraham Lincoln sat perched like royalty in what had to be the world’s largest stone chair. Roughly the same distance to his left, the long, arcing wall of the nation’s War Memorial, which Kittredge viewed as an overdone homage to the grisly human cost of the military-industrial-political complex, sat bathed in mid-morning sunlight.
Waterfowl approached him for handouts, and tourists paraded past, snapping photos and chattering. It was a gorgeous fall day, the kind of interlude between the crushing summers and the bone-chilling winters that made living in DC bearable.
Quinn had left him on the bench with clear instructions: “Do whatever you want. I’ll be back.”
Kittredge was taking yet another ride on the emotional roller coaster, departing hope and rapidly descending toward despair, when an elderly gentleman sat next to him on the park bench. “Gorgeous day, no?” he said in a native Spanish speaker’s accent.
Kittredge wasn’t much in the mood for idle banter with strangers. “Sure is,” he said.
“But if our minds and hearts are noisy, we cannot see what is before our eyes,” the old man said.
Kittredge turned. The old man was looking at him, his eyes startlingly intense and his gaze presumptuously direct. The man wore a tan leather jacket and a bright red scarf. “Do I know you?” Kittredge asked.
“I think not,” he said. “I am an old man and you are a young man, and our paths have not crossed.”
Creepy.
Kittredge wasn’t in the mood for another intrusion into his life. He started to stand up, but felt the old man’s surprisingly firm grip on his arm keeping him down. “What do you want from me?” Kittredge asked.
“Nothing. But you may want something from me,” the old man said. It wasn’t just a Spanish accent, Kittredge realized. The man had a Venezuelan Spanish accent.
“I’m sorry, sir, I think you might have—“
“I haven’t made a mistake. But you have. And you have new, unwelcome acquaintances in your life as a consequence.”
Kittredge tried to rise again, but the old man tightened the grip on his arm. “Listen,” Kittredge said.
“No, Peter Kittredge, please listen to me.” The old man’s stare intensified. “Your new friends are not friendly people. I do not like them, and neither do my friends. And, I think, you do not like them, either. So we all have something in common – you, and me, and my friends, that is.”
The old man reached into his pocket and took out a small piece of paper, and handed it to Kittredge. On it, a phone number was scrawled in shaky script. “Call anytime you need assistance.”
With that, the old man rose and quickly blended into the stream of passersby.
**********
Kittredge paced back and forth inside his DC apartment, keenly aware that a hidden camera recorded his every move. The car ride back from the National Mall with Quinn had been uneventful, and the two men had exchanged scarcely a word during the fifteen-minute commute through the Sunday DC tourist traffic.
But Kittredge had noticed something unusual. Despite the cool autumn day, Quinn was perspiring. And he had seemed somewhat out of breath when he collected Kittredge from the park bench at the reflecting pond. Quinn wasn’t dressed for exercise, so Kittredge wondered what Quinn had been up to during the time the strange old man had spoken with him near the reflecting pond.
But he didn’t ask, because he realized he’d rather not know.
He stopped his pacing long enough to refill his glass of vodka. They were watching him get buzzed again, he knew, but he didn’t care. He had to figure out what the fuck was going on, and he had to figure out what the fuck to do next. He felt the alcohol beginning to work its magic, and the apprehension and fear were beginning to loosen their grip on his psyche.
Let’s try this one out: Charley’s an innocent victim of a random crime. Maybe. DC still wasn’t a terribly safe city if you went more than a block or two in the wrong direction.
But muggings in the airport parking lot were almost unheard of. And he wasn’t mugged. The attackers hadn’t even taken Charley’s cash. That meant that they didn’t even try to disguise the attack as anything other than a targeted, deliberate act.
Plus, there was still the riddle of what Charley was doing in DC in the first place. Booty call? Business? Charley had lied to his bosses at Exel, and he had kept Kittredge completely in the dark about the trip.
Is Charley crooked?
Or, more precisely, was he more crooked than average? He was fond of observing that business, war, and politics were nothing but influence at the end of the day, and influence was about leverage, or the art of using what someone wants or needs in order to get what you want or need.
Over the course of their relationship, Kittredge had come to understand that Charley’s thoughts along these lines were more personal credos than mere observations. Charley was no bright-eyed idealist, and Kittredge had seen him work angles with the best of them.
There’s a word for that, Kittredge realized. Manipulation.
Charley was a manipulator. He’d never really thought about it in such stark terms before, but it was certainly the truth. Charley pushed and pulled a person’s levers to gradually bring them around to working for his own interests. He was patient and subtle about it, but, Kittredge realized, there was an ulterior motive behind almost everything Charley did.
So where does that leave us? Or leave me?
Was the relationship a lie? Kittredge felt there were genuinely soul-baring moments, and the day-to-day stuff wasn’t difficult, either, in the grand scheme of things.
Minus the manipulation. There was a lot of it, he started to realize, and usually over simple and silly shit, like emptying the dishwasher, doing the laundry, paying the bills. There was a thin layer of drama that covered things. Nothing too overt, but it was definitely there.
So, Charley Arlinghaus is undoubtedly a player. But in what game? And on whose side?
And do I want to keep letting him fuck me? Undoubtedly, yes, Kittredge realized. Charley was amazing in bed, and he smelled good, in a way that never failed to get Kittredge hard. That made up for many, many ills.
Kittredge called the nurse’s station in Charley’s hospital wing for an update. No news is good news, she told him. No more swelling, but no less swelling, either, and he was welcome to return during evening visiting hours.
As he ended the call, he felt his phone vibrate with a new text message. He looked at the small screen, and his blood ran cold. It was Arturo Dibiaso, demanding a dead drop at location four in Caracas. Tomorrow evening.