Any Minute Now (5 page)

He was annoyed with himself for remembering the conversation verbatim. He hated being humiliated.

Draining the last of her whiskey, she set the glass on the sideboard and, without a word, disappeared down the hallway into her bedroom. Whitman stood and waited. He had a sense of what was coming, or he would have had it been three years ago. But this was now. Did he still know?

Four minutes and thirty-two seconds later—he was timing her—she returned clad in a pair of skin-tight jeans and a man-tailored checked sports shirt. The jeans showed off her butt, long legs, and powerful thighs, the shirt opened low enough to reveal enough of her cleavage to be distracting. Having exchanged her Louboutin pumps for a pair of powder-puff blue Nike Air Jordans, she crossed to the vestibule closet, took out an oblong case made of hand-stitched stingray skin, which glimmered like liquid in the light.

“Going out?” he said.

“Bravo.”

“To do what?”

She snapped open her case, displayed a custom pool cue in two parts that screwed together, drowsing in a bed of midnight-blue velvet.

He had got it right. His mind relaxed in a mental sigh.

She reached for the front doorknob. “Come or stay here, makes no difference to me.”

*   *   *

In this sense, at least, it was like the old days. How many times had he accompanied her on her nocturnal forays into the lower dens of the city, looking for marks whose money she cheerfully would take? But unlike her drinking bouts, she lost her pool bets as often as she won. Clearly, she was learning the form, feeling her way toward a better ratio. It never came, at least not when Whitman had been with her, and he had at last come to the conclusion that time and again the game rejected her attempts at mastery. This was initially a mystery to Whitman. He knew her sense of geometry and vectors was impeccable. It was some time before he realized her weakness: she would not figure the odds correctly. He sensed she could do it if she wanted, but she clearly did not. She was reckless; she wanted to defy the odds, to rise above them into a kind of goddess-like plane. She never made it. She never crashed and burned, either, which, he supposed, said something just as important about her psyche.

It was very late when they entered The Right Cue, a divey pool hall and bar in the none-too-savory southeast quadrant of D.C.

“Who are you hoping to take money from tonight?” he asked. “The indigent and the homeless?”

He was beginning to think she would ignore him, when she abruptly said, “This is where the best players in town congregate.”

She went not to the double rows of twelve green-topped tables, but to the bar, where she ordered a double Jim Beam. The bartender, a beefy man with a red face and wiry tufts of hair over his ears, complied without comment or interest. He had been watching ESPN when they had walked in, and seemed in no mood to be disturbed. There were two other people at the bar, both men, staring into their drinks as if trying to divine where their lives had made a wrong turn.

Whitman asked for an aged tequila, of which, the bartender said, there was none. He ordered a tonic water instead.

Behind them, the soft click of cues against balls was a slow-motion reminder to Whitman of the
clack-clack-clack
of mah-jongg tiles in Hong Kong dens he had frequented years ago. Being reminded of those days, when he was no more than a green-behind-the-ears field man, was good for him, especially at this moment in time when it seemed his plan for Charlie was teetering on the edge of oblivion and could so easily tip over into a horror show. Of course, what came after the golden days and crimson nights of Hong Kong was the FBI. And then St. Vincent had shown up. And then came the Well, a horror show of an altogether higher magnitude.

By this point in his musings, Charlie had knocked off her double Beam and had turned to face the tables. Most of them were taken and, from Whitman's admittedly amateur view, it looked like almost all of the players were involved in serious matches with serious money riding on them. Looking more closely, he could see that the play was almost pro-level stuff. How on earth, he wondered, was Charlie going to make money off these guys?

As if divining his thoughts, she said, “You think I can't do it.”

“I think you can do anything you want when you set your mind to it.”

“That's what you tell a child before she starts reading her first book.”

He wanted to tell her how full of shit she was, but he figured this wasn't the time, even though it might have been the place. Instead, he said, “I'm looking forward to the show.”

She smiled dreamily, but not at him. She hadn't taken her eyes off the action at the tables. “And a show it will be,” she said softly.

The opponent she found was a rotund man in his early fifties. He wore his trousers very high, supported by a pair of English braces. He had a head like an onion, nearly hairless, with the small ears of a simian, but his eyes were bright sparks, curious and cautious as a bird's. His name was Milt, he had just won a hard-fought match, and he was very, very good.

Whitman thought Charlie could have chosen someone with a bit less experience and skill to start in on, but obviously she had other ideas. The hubris of her goddess syndrome still appeared to be in effect.

They settled on the stakes—ten thousand. Whitman was frankly astonished. He stood against one wall and watched Charlie as she took out her cue, spiraled the two parts together. They broke for who would go first. Charlie pocketed one ball, but missed the second. Milt, following her, pocketed two. Smirking, he challenged her to double the bet. To Whitman's amazement, she agreed. Milt looked as pleased as a pig in a wallow.

He stuck a half-chewed cigar between his liverish lips and, bending over the table, got to work. He broke, then pocketed the next seven balls in a row. He missed on an elegant but difficult triple-bank shot, but only by a millimeter or so. Whitman wondered whether he had been caught showing off for his opponent. Either way, he appeared unconcerned as he stood up and backed away from the table opposite where Charlie was bending over. From there, he got quite an eyeful, which was mostly what he was interested in at this point. It seemed apparent to Whitman, as well as everyone else watching, that he could already feel Charlie's twenty grand in his pocket.

That was before Charlie finished up what he had left her without missing a shot, then ran the table twice. She would have done it a third time, Whitman guessed, but by that time Milt had had enough humiliation for the night. He slapped down his twenty thousand, took his cue, and went home in a huff.

After that display, no one in the place was willing to play her, at least not for money, and Charlie wasn't interested in playing pool unless it was to make money.

On the car ride back to her apartment, he said, “So many things have changed since I last saw you.”

Charlie, driving in her typically controlled, intense manner, stared through the windshield at the passing city. “I wouldn't know where to begin.”

Whitman sighed, but silently. He said, “Can we kill the foolishness?”

Abruptly, she pulled over to the curb. “Get out,” she ordered.

“What? Here?”

She leaned across him, opened the door on his side. “Out!”

“But this neighborhood is—”

“You're a big bad boy. You can take care of yourself.”

“Charlie—”

Her voice got low, and he slid out of the car, stood on the street as the door slammed shut and she took off. A block away the car came to a screeching halt. It stayed there idling, in the middle of the street. Not that there was any traffic this time of the morning. But still.

Whitman loped after her, feeling as foolish and giddy as a high school kid with his first crush.

When he reached the car, the doors were locked. He bent down and peered in. She was staring straight ahead. He wanted to tap on the glass, but instinct warned him otherwise. In a moment, her head turned and she stared directly at him. He tried like hell to read her expression, without success.

Keeping her eyes on him, her left hand moved and the electronic locks disengaged. He opened the door, but did not get in. He bent down, peered at her. He could see a pulse beating a tattoo in her right temple.

“Is it all right, Charlie?”

“No, it's not all right.” She had not blinked once since turning to look at him, another one of her mysterious tricks.

“Well, then.” He honestly did not know what she wanted, what he should do. This, he recognized, was a weakness in himself. The knowledge was an acrid taste in his mouth.

“You want to know how I did it?” she asked, after what seemed a lifetime.

Whitman blinked, as if coming out of a daze. “Did what?”

“Beat Milt.”

“You were better than he was.”

“No,” she said slowly, “I wasn't.”

Surprise arose in him like a flock of startled birds. “Yeah, I do want to know.”

He slid into the bucket seat, closed the door quietly without looking away from her. She put the car in gear, stepped on the accelerator, and they sped off into the quickening night. To Whitman's chagrin he was sporting a raging hard-on.

 

4

When King Cutler and Julie Regan weren't making love at night, they watched DVDs of
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson. They shared a love of nostalgia, especially when it came to TV shows, as well as a penchant for insomnia. At three a.m., while Whitman and Charlie were on their way back to her apartment, Cutler and Julie were in bed, naked, amid rumpled bedclothes. While Cutler watched Carson doing one of his Carnac the Magnificent bits, Julie was in the shower, soaping off the smells of healthy sweat and sex. Cutler wished she wouldn't do that; he liked the way she smelled after they had made love, but cleanliness was a kind of obsession with her. While he waited for her to return, he ate handfuls of mixed nuts, washed down with a bottle of Mexican Coca Cola, made with sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup, which Cutler could not abide. He had a closely held private opinion that America's addiction to high-fructose corn syrup was draining its males of precious bodily fluids. He possessed a balanced enough mind to see how that idea might strike an outsider as nuts. Therefore, he had never mentioned it to anyone, certainly not to Julie Regan.

Julie worked for the NSA. More specifically, and importantly, she was the assistant to Omar Hemingway. No one knew of her liaison with Cutler, which was about as illicit as it could get, being that Julie was married and, by all accounts Cutler had sifted through, quite happily. That was the fiction Julie spread around cheerfully and adeptly. In fact, her husband was gay and in the military; theirs was a marriage of convenience.

She had her own key and key card, arrived via the underground parking garage, never at the same time as Cutler, and always in some form of light disguise: a wide-brimmed hat, one of several wigs, a scarf tied around her head Audrey Hepburn–style. She liked the wigs best—even while they were making love. She had always aspired to long hair, she said, but found the care and feeding of it too time-consuming.

Cutler laughed at Carson in his outlandish turban, holding answer cards to the side of his head as he matched them “psychically” with hilarious questions, then welcomed Julie, wrapped in a Turkish bathrobe and smelling of lavender and violets, back into bed.

The DVD came to an end.

“Stream something from Netflix?” Julie asked.

“Not tonight.” He was sated in every way a man can be, and clicked off the smart-TV with the remote. “I've been watching screens all day.” He passed a hand across his eyes. “I've had enough.”

Julie, compliant, nestled down in the crook of his shoulder. She was a petite redhead with a foxy face, an enviable figure, and a mighty attitude that could stand up to her boss's bluster. It often seemed that Hemingway did his best to make her cry. Maybe it was a test of some kind. In any event, he had never succeeded.

“How's Hemingway's frame of mind? Since the Seiran el-Habib op blew up, I mean.”

“How d'you think?” Julie said. “He's pissed at everyone and everything. Especially Luther St. Vincent. He thinks chain of the Lebanon brief came directly from POTUS to St. Vincent, who tossed it over to him, and believe me when I tell you that my boss does not like taking orders from him.”

“Has he threatened to pull our contract?”

“Not that I've heard.” Julie lifted her head to peer at him. “You do great work for him. Why would you even ask that?”

“I met with him this afternoon. He certainly is a cagey fuck.”

Julie laughed. “I'll be happy to deliver the compliment.”

Cutler poked her affectionately. “Don't you dare!” He shook his head. “But this Lebanon brief—I asked him why Red Rover was being given a different brief instead of taking another shot at Seiran el-Habib.”

“And?”

“He told me Seiran el-Habib has vanished. He's in the wind again, lost without a trace or a whisper.”

“You don't believe him?”

“Maybe he's lost faith in us. Maybe he's given the el-Habib brief to another firm. Right now, I honestly don't know what to believe. If you get even a whiff of what his thoughts are, I'd appreciate a heads-up.”

She stirred against him. “I love giving you a heads-up.” She slid down, her hands gripped his naked hips. Her head bent and she took him into her mouth. His head arched back and his eyes closed. She began to hum. Then, all at once, she let him slip out. His eyes opened and he looked down. There was a curiously sly smile on her face that caught his attention. His eyes narrowed. “What do you know that I don't?”

She held him in the palm of her hand. “Hemingway lied to you. NSA knows precisely where Seiran el-Habib is; he's still in his heavily protected villa.”

“Then why—?”

“The rapidly morphing crises in the Middle East has turned them into children with ADHD; their collective eye has moved on from Seiran el-Habib. The situation in Lebanon has become too volatile. It's too compelling to ignore. Worst of all, it's affecting POTUS's numbers. The president is in trouble at home, he's given them an action directive: ‘Look for high percentage situations and bring me major successes I can sell to the American people.'”