House Reckoning (10 page)

DeMarco didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say—but Jake must have thought he was confused.

“Come with me. I want to show you something.”

DeMarco followed his broad form out of the office and about ten feet down the corridor. Jake stopped in front of a glass case containing a coiled fire hose and a red fireman’s axe. He pointed at the case and said: “That’s you.”

“Which one?” DeMarco asked. “The hose or the axe?”

“Whichever one Mahoney needs at the time.”

Well, that clarified everything.

Jake walked back to his office and dropped back into his chair. “Let me give you an example. Two years ago, Mahoney goes to a banquet in Cornhusk, Nebraska, Indiana, one of them places. He’s seated next to the lieutenant governor’s wife, who turns out to be a good-looking woman. The lieutenant governor’s not there because he just had his prostate removed. Well, Mahoney, of course, he can’t help himself.

“Last month, the wife of the lieutenant governor calls Mahoney. She says she’s found Jesus. She’s been saved. Halleluiah! And in order to make things right with the Lord, she feels compelled to tell the world what a sinner she’s been. So my job—and this is hardly the first time Mahoney’s dick has caused him problems—was to take care of the lady from Cornhusk.”

“What did you do to her?” DeMarco asked.

“I didn’t
do
anything to her. I just talked to her. I told her how confessing this one little transgression wasn’t going to be good for anybody, the press being the cruel, heartless jackals they are. When that didn’t seem to deter her, I pointed out that she had cosigned a document with her husband, something related to a development in South Cornhusk, and if people understood what was behind that document she could be talking to a U.S. attorney instead of her Lord and savior.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me,” DeMarco said before he could stop himself. He was about to begin a job where blackmail was apparently standard operating procedure.

“The other thing is, Mahoney will sometimes loan his fire hose, meaning you, to his buddies. Or his codefendants, as I like to call them.”

Jake seemed to think that was funny; DeMarco didn’t. “I’ve got a law degree, you know. I’ve even passed the bar already. I think—”

“Kid, every third guy you bump into in this town has a law degree. Hell, Mahoney’s even got one, if you can believe it. And if the boss needed a lawyer, why the hell would he come to you? You’ve been out of school for about two minutes, you didn’t exactly graduate at the top of your class, and then there’s your father. Uh, may he rest in peace.”

Jake sucked on his unlit cigar briefly before he continued with DeMarco’s orientation. DeMarco was beginning to wonder if he ever lit the damn thing or if it was just some sort of nasty pacifier.

“Look,” Jake said. “There are a lot of guys like us here in this town.”

Us?
DeMarco didn’t want to be included in
us
.

“Some of ’em work for the private sector, so-called consulting firms with names that don’t make any sense. Others have government staff positions like me, and now you, that don’t fit into a particular box on somebody’s org chart. We’re the guys the politicians turn to when they need things done that they’d just as soon not read about in the
Post
. And most of the time we stay under the radar like we’re supposed to, but every once in a while somebody screws up and everybody goes crazy. The most famous example, of course, being Watergate. I mean, what do you think guys like Gordon Liddy and Charles Colson were? They were red fire axes.”

“Are you saying that if Mahoney asked you to break into some politician’s headquarters . . .”

“Oh, hell no. What do I look like, a cat burglar? Although there was this one time . . . Well, never mind that. Anyway, stop looking so worried. I was a Boston cop for twenty years, and this job’s a piece a cake compared to that.”

Jake glanced at his watch. “It’s time to go meet the boss.”

DeMarco thought they’d be taking the stairs up to the Speaker’s office, but Jake led him out of the Capitol. They caught a cab on Independence, and five minutes later entered a small restaurant on Capitol Hill.

Mahoney was sitting at a table at the rear of the restaurant with four other men. DeMarco didn’t pay much attention to politics but he recognized Mahoney: the full head of white hair, the handsome features, the mean blue eyes—or at least they looked mean to DeMarco. He was only five eleven—the same height as DeMarco—but he looked bigger than that, maybe because he was so broad across the chest and shoulders. He was also heavy in the gut but it was a hard gut, not a soft, flabby one. Mahoney glanced briefly over at DeMarco and Jake, then looked away.

“We’ll just sit here at the bar until those other guys leave,” Jake said. “You wanna drink? I’m buyin’ to celebrate your arrival.”

DeMarco said no, not bothering to add that drinking at nine in the morning didn’t seem like the way to put his best foot forward his first day on the job. Jake ordered a Bloody Mary.

“Who are those guys?” DeMarco asked, figuring it was time for him to start learning the lineup.

Jake glanced over at Mahoney’s table. “Three of them are union big shots. God knows what Mahoney’s plotting with them. Oh, that reminds me. If you have a political opinion about anything, keep it to yourself. Nobody, including me, gives a shit about your opinion.”

This was the first thing DeMarco had heard that didn’t surprise him.

“Now the fourth guy at the table, the one sitting on Mahoney’s right with the really bad haircut? That’s Perry Wallace, Mahoney’s chief of staff. Wallace is the most devious, diabolical, conniving prick you will ever meet in your life and he’s also a no-shit genius. Think Machiavelli with a Boston accent. You do not ever, ever wanna get cross-wired with Perry Wallace.”

Maybe he should’ve had the drink.

Ten minutes later, the three union men shook hands with Mahoney and left the restaurant. Wallace sat with Mahoney a couple more minutes, his lips barely moving as he talked to him, then he, too, left. As he walked by DeMarco, Wallace looked at him for only a second but DeMarco had the impression of a camera’s shutter opening and closing and Wallace depositing his image in some sort of mental file cabinet.

Jake drained his Bloody Mary and said, “Let’s go say hello.”

DeMarco had planned to walk up and stick out his hand and say “Joe DeMarco, sir. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.” But he didn’t. The look in Mahoney’s eyes stopped him two feet from the table.

“The first thing I want you to do is get a decent suit,” Mahoney said. “The amount I’m paying you, you should be able to afford one.”

DeMarco restrained himself from looking over at Jake and pointing out that dress standards for Mahoney’s employees didn’t seem consistent. He also didn’t point out that Mahoney wasn’t paying him; the taxpayers were. He found out before long that John Mahoney viewed the U.S. Treasury as a large, not-very-well-guarded cookie jar and he stuffed his paw into it whenever he pleased.

“The only other thing I wanted to tell you is you got six months before Jake retires to prove to me that you’re not a total idiot. Your aunt thinks—”

“Actually, Connie’s not my aunt, sir, she’s my godmother.”

“Do I look like I give a shit?” Mahoney said. “And don’t interrupt me when I’m talking. Now like I was saying, Connie thinks she’s got me by the short hairs, but I got news for you. I won’t fire you because that might piss off Connie, but if you fuck up, what I will do is temporarily detail your ass to the Department of Transportation. They’re trying to get a road or railroad or some goddamn thing built across a reservation in South Dakota and I’ll let them borrow you and the law degree you barely got. Then you can spend the next ten years fightin’ with the Indians about some treaty that was signed the day after Custer was scalped. Now, beat it.”

As they were leaving the restaurant, Jake said, “I thought that went pretty good.”

Five and a half months later, DeMarco walked into the office and found Jake lying on the floor, on his back, his unlit cigar stuck between his fingers. His third heart attack had arrived. DeMarco checked Jake’s pulse, then pulled out the bottle of Maker’s Mark that Jake kept in the file cabinet. He found out his second day on the job there wasn’t anything else in the file cabinet because Jake had a saying:
They can’t subpoena air
.

He sat down and drank a toast to Jake’s corpse. He’d grown to like the guy.

He called the medics, told them there was no rush, then walked up to Mahoney’s office to inform him of Jake’s departure. He was surprised when tears welled up in Mahoney’s eyes. That would not be the last time John Mahoney surprised him.

Part II

13

DeMarco was thinking that this wasn’t a bad way to spend a lovely October afternoon. The guy he was supposed to meet was half an hour late and if he didn’t show up at all, that would be fine with him. The temperature was in the upper sixties, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the turning leaves across the river looked like God’s palette. The beer he was drinking was fresh and cold.

DeMarco was sitting at an outdoor table at the Washington Harbour. He didn’t know what pretentious snob had stuck the
u
in
harbor
. The Harbour was in Georgetown, on the banks of the Potomac River, and consisted of a elliptical-shaped plaza surround by high-end condos and restaurants. It also offered spectacular views of the Kennedy Center, Roosevelt Island, and the Key Bridge. Included with the other spectacular views was a woman sitting at the bar, wearing a skirt that showed off long, shapely legs. She had big-framed sunglasses stuck on top of her head, nested in a mass of red hair. She saw DeMarco looking at her and she smiled at him and he smiled back. Yeah, he’d be perfectly content to spend the entire afternoon sitting right where he was, sipping beer.

Unfortunately, at that moment he spotted a guy coming toward him and he was guessing this was the guy he was supposed to meet. He was young, in his twenties, with short dark hair. He was carrying a slim briefcase and wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt. On his feet were shiny black lace-up shoes that looked as if they might be part of an army uniform—and they were. The man was a sergeant currently assigned to the Pentagon.

“Are you Mr. DeMarco?” the young guy asked. He was so nervous he looked like he was about to come out of his skin.

“Yeah,” DeMarco said. “Sit down. And relax.”

DeMarco had worked for John Mahoney for a long time and he knew his boss was as corrupt as any politician on Capitol Hill. And Mahoney’s corruption sometimes went beyond the typical shenanigans related to campaign financing and preferential treatment given to wealthy constituents. Only the year before, Mahoney, with DeMarco’s help, had undermined three government agencies to get his daughter out from under an insider trading charge—and his daughter had been guilty.

There were, however, lines that Mahoney would not cross. The problem was that these lines were arbitrarily and inconsistently drawn, and it wasn’t always easy for DeMarco to know where they were placed. One of those lines had to do with veterans. Mahoney was a Vietnam vet and when it came to the proper treatment of veterans, Mahoney would do almost anything—and the national debt be damned.

The young man sitting with DeMarco—Sergeant Gary McCormack—hailed from Boston, Mahoney’s hometown, and he had sent Mahoney a letter saying that a colonel at the Pentagon was siphoning off money intended for veterans suffering from mental health issues. In terms of Defense Department spending, the amount being pilfered was meager—meaning only a few million—but Mahoney had ordered DeMarco to meet with McCormack and get the evidence he claimed to have. Mahoney wanted some facts before he started firing political artillery shells at the Pentagon.

McCormack looked around the plaza nervously before he put his briefcase on the table and took out a manila file folder. Before he could open the folder, DeMarco said, “Order a beer. And stop looking like we’re two spies meeting in Red Square. Nobody has a clue you’re here unless you told somebody.”

It took McCormack twenty minutes to explain the contents of the manila folder as it had to do with the army’s accounting system—a system that appeared to have been designed for the sole purpose of hiding from Congress where the army spent its money. After McCormack left, it took DeMarco about five seconds to decide he should treat himself to another beer. The redhead was still sitting at the bar by herself. The next time she looked over at him—she’d glanced his way half a dozen times—he was going to raise his beer glass and make a why-don’t-you-join-me gesture—and that’s when his cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID at saw it was a New York area code.

“Hello,” he said.

“It’s Tony Benedetto,” the caller said. Tony sounded odd; his voice was scratchy and he was breathing like he’d just run up the stairs to the top of the Empire State Building.

Tony Benedetto was an old-time mafia guy, now mostly retired, as far as DeMarco knew. He lived in Queens and had worked for Carmine Taliaferro; he’d been there at the funeral mass the day his father was buried. DeMarco had seen Tony less than a year ago to get some information he needed on another mobster in Philadelphia.