Man in the Middle (12 page)

Theresa reached into the fridge and pulled out a carton of half-andhalf, then opened a cabinet and withdrew a bowl of sugar so old it had metastasized into white granite. She poured two cups and handed them to Bian and me.

While I added half-and-half and made a big mess trying to chip off a spoonful of sugar, Theresa looked away from us and mentioned, “I need a little sherry to settle my stomach.”

She stepped out for a moment. When she returned, in her hand was a tall cocktail glass filled to the lip with ice cubes and some blend of sherry that was peculiarly colorless. She said, “I’m sure it won’t bother you if I smoke.”

A cigarette was already dangling from her lips, spewing pollution into the tiny room.

“Do you mind discussing Cliff?” I asked her, stirring my coffee. “It helps when the investigators know something about the victim.”

“Shouldn’t you begin by asking where I was around midnight last night?” I took that for a yes.

So I asked her.

“Where I am every night.” She laughed. “David Letterman is my alibi. Why don’t you quiz me on his top ten?”

I smiled. This was getting weird.

Bian allowed a moment to pass, then said, “I’m not sure how to ask this.”

“Just ask.” She shrugged and added, “If I don’t like your question, you won’t get an answer.”

“Fair enough. What made your marriage fail? In the wedding picture over the mantel . . . your expressions . . . you seemed to be in love once.”

“The official grounds, the cause my lawyer filed, was infidelity.” She added, “There was enough of that. Near the end. But that’s only the superficial reason.”

I don’t really like to start a story at the end, so I asked, “How did you two meet?”

“At Fort Meade, in the late sixties. My father was a colonel working in the post headquarters. Cliff was a buck sergeant, an Arabic and Farsi linguist. I was young, eighteen, and I used to hang out at the NCO club. Officers’ kids aren’t supposed to mingle with enlisted soldiers, but I was too young for the officers and it was . . . I suppose . . . a way of thumbing my nose at my father. It was the sixties, after all. Everybody back then was dropping acid and screwing perfect strangers. I flirted with enlisted soldiers.” She emitted a smoker’s hack and took a long gulp of “sherry.” “We dated. A few months later he asked me to marry him.”

“It sounds like you were swept off your feet,” Bian commented.

“Yes. I suppose I was. I loved Cliff. He was . . . back then . . . intelligent, kind, ambitious . . . not much to look at, but as you’re going to learn, he could be very charming . . .” Also he could pole vault over tall buildings with his third leg, but she didn’t mention it. Neither did I.

And so on, for the next twenty minutes, Theresa described what sounded like an ideal beginning, an ideal marriage, an ideal life.

Cliff completed his tour in the Army and happily took his discharge. His next step, due to his Army intelligence experience and language competencies, was to apply for a position in the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, where he was immediately accepted. Theresa worked administrative jobs for about ten years to add extra bucks to the kitty, Cliff and Theresa bought this house, the biological clock began wheezing—bang, bang—two wonderful kids, she quit working, became a Kool-Aid mom, and so on. By the numbers, the American dream in the making.

On the professional side, Cliff was bright, hardworking, diligent, and highly regarded by his bosses; in the early years, promotions and step raises came through like clockwork. Ultimately, however, the role of DIA is support for our warfighters, and during the cold war the action was with Sovietologists and Kremlinologists; the Middle East was a strategic backwater and Arabists ended up with their noses pressed against a glass ceiling. According to Theresa, by the time Cliff awoke to the unhappy reality that he had a big career problem, he was in his early forties, too late to change his specialty or his professional fate.

As she spoke, we occasionally interrupted to ask for a point of clarification, or to steer her back on track. She had become chatty, and it was clear she needed to talk about this, not cathartically, I thought, but more as somebody indulging a tale they now knew ended on a satisfying note.

At times her narrative was chronological and organized, at times free-flowing and disconnected. Theresa frequently paused to light a fresh cigarette, and she twice left the kitchen to refresh her “sherry.” It was late afternoon; at the rate she was “refreshing,” she would be in the cups before dinnertime.

As a general rule, incidentally, I never put ex-wives on the stand. They make awful witnesses. They cannot recite the past objectively— they know their Sir Galahad on the shimmering white steed turned out to be a self-indulgent cad riding a fetid pig.

Yet, if I listened carefully, I was starting to form a picture of this man who died so weirdly in his bed the night before.

Cliff was raised in a small upstate New York town, father a garage mechanic, one brother, one sister. A local parish priest saw a young boy with spunk and intelligence and awarded him a free ticket through the local parish school. Cliff became the only one from his family to matriculate from high school, then college—to wit, Colgate—doing it the hard way—on brains, sleep deprivation, part-time jobs, and desperation. As with so many young men of his era, no sooner had the sheepskin greased his palm than Uncle Sam intervened to borrow a few years of his life. He was sent first to the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, where he mastered Arabic, then Farsi, followed by an assignment to a military intelligence center, at Fort Meade, Maryland, which, for sure, beat the alternative enjoyed by so many of his hapless peers—humping a ninety-pound ruck in the boonies of Southeast Asia.

And what jumped out from this narrative arc, in my view, was the moxie of the man. Having escaped a deeply impoverished background, he put himself through college, then was selected by the Army for advanced schooling, then for high-level intelligence work, and the pièce de résistance, he bagged a colonel’s daughter. Given the Army’s fraternization codes, this is akin to a commoner laying wood on a princess and, for Cliff, a big bump up in the social registry. With his entry into the Defense Intelligence Agency, he became a white-collar professional, an educated man in an honorable line of work, which—with luck, skill, and the right breaks—could lead to bigger things.

In the end, as Freudians say, it’s all about ego, and in my experience, self-made types are particularly susceptible to an omnivorous sense of self-worth.

So now we were past the early years, the marriage, the house, the two children, and Theresa, now past her fourth gin, was starting to slur and giggle at inappropriate moments. She said, “Throughout the seventies he was on the Iranian desk. In 1982 he was shifted to the Iraqi section, a real backwater. He thought it was the end of the world. Nobody cared about Iraq. Back then, Iran was the career-maker, and as I said, Cliff knew Farsi. He complained bitterly to his bosses and they claimed that’s where they needed him.”

Incidentally, Bian’s questions seemed more oriented toward their marriage and family life, which, I think, is one of those X versus Y chromosome deals. I, being a male, am confident that life’s mysteries and puzzles are all rooted in money, power, and lust. Men and women investigators bring different things to the party, but it seems to work out.

Predictably, Bian asked, “How did this affect your marriage?”

“If anything, Cliff became a more attentive husband, a better father. He always worked long hours . . . he began to scale back. He coached Little League, learned to play golf, spent more time with the kids.”

She lit another cigarette and drew a long breath. “The eighties were good for us. Happy years. He was professionally bitter, but our marriage was healthy. No fights, no stresses.” After a moment, she added, “Until 1991.”

“When Iraq invaded Kuwait,” I guessed.

“You’ve got it.”

“What happened then?” Bian asked.

“The beginning of the end . . . or maybe the end of the beginning. Those thoughts are so interchangeable, don’t you think?”

No, I didn’t think, and I found it instructive that she would.

“What were those problems?” Bian prodded.

“A lot of things came together. Midlife crisis . . . job dissatisfaction . . . I don’t know. Something inside Cliff snapped.”

Bian, who had obviously been paying attention, suggested, “Or was reawakened.”

Theresa took another long sip. “He was one of the few men in Washington who knew anything about Saddam. About Iraq. Ironic, if you think about it. The very thing that got him stuck in quicksand suddenly vaulted him into great demand everywhere. He briefed Schwarzkopf, Powell, and Cheney. He visited the White House a number of times.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately fired up another. “Overnight, he was briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, eating lunches in the White House mess, being flown on government jets to Tampa and Kuwait, getting calls in the middle of the night from reporters begging for tips and insights.”

I remembered a pithy quote and told her, “Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.”

This was a little too philosophical for a lady on her fourth gin, and she glanced at me with frustration and maybe annoyance. “I’m just saying he wasn’t equipped to handle it. For nine months, he was at the center of the storm . . . that was the play on words he liked to use. Then it suddenly ended.”

“Because the war ended?” I suggested.

“Why else?”

“Was he disappointed?”

“Disappointed?” She contemplated this question a moment, then asked, “Are you an ambitious man, Mr. Drummond?”

“That’s a complicated question.”

“Is it?” She blew a long plume of smoke in my direction.

Bian commented to her, “He’s a man and a lawyer. What did you expect? Introspective questions confuse him.”

They both laughed. This was funny?

Theresa stopped laughing, and opined to Bian, “I’ll bet that’s why he’s not married. That’s not a criticism, incidentally. Before he marries, a man should understand his ambition.” She looked at me. “Do you understand what I’m talking about, Mr. Drummond?”

“Well, I . . .” No, and I didn’t care.

She turned back to Bian. “We had children, for Godsakes. A home, a good marriage. Wasn’t that enough? . . .” and so on for another minute or so.

Suddenly, I found myself trapped in an extended episode of
General Hospital
. I offered Mrs. Daniels a sympathetic smile and eyed the exit.

Fortunately, Bian changed the channel and got us back to the good stuff. She suggested to Theresa, “You’re telling us he had a taste and he wasn’t going to relinquish it.”

“In his own words, he wasn’t going to slink back into the muck of anonymity. He had big ideas, big ambitions . . . big-shot new friends.”

Bian seemed to know where this was going and said, “Albert Tiger-man and Thomas Hirschfield—that’s who you’re referring to, right?”

Theresa nodded.

Bian explained for my benefit, “Hirschfield and Tigerman both held senior Pentagon jobs during the first Gulf War. When that administration ended, Hirschfield went to a Washington think tank, and Tiger-man returned to his law firm. As you know, now they’re back in the Pentagon.”

I remarked, “But they were out of power during most of the nineties.”

Bian said, “You mean they were no longer connected to a President. They still had Republicans on the Hill, the Republican Party itself, the web of Republican think tanks . . . Heritage Foundation, et cetera.” She observed, “Out of power these days is an illusion.”

I guess I knew what she meant. Like musical chairs, the winners take over the government buildings and the losers move a few blocks away into the office space recently vacated by the winners, where they proceed to cash in on their fame, connections, and influence. They collect great gobs of money and connive and hatch plots to get back into power so they can go back to residing in crappier government offices, making less money and working longer hours. How can anybody vote for people who think like this?

Bian turned to Theresa and asked a very good question. “Exactly how did Cliff remain connected to these men?”

“Well . . . as you might remember, Iraq stayed in the news over those years. There was the attempt on President Bush’s life in Kuwait, the UN sanctions, our Air Force planes constantly being shot at . . . Would you like me to recount the entire history? It dominated our lives for over a decade.”

I assured her we would check it ourselves, thank you.

She continued, “Everything became ridiculously hush-hush when he was home. Which wasn’t often. But Albert Tigerman called the house a lot.”

“Do you know what they talked about?” Bian asked.

“As I said, Cliff never shared it.” She waved her glass around the cramped kitchen and house. “But how could I not overhear what Cliff was saying?”

She paused to fire up another cigarette, and Bian and I stared at her expectantly.

Eventually she said, “They were like some silly cabal. They believed Saddam needed to be overthrown. Cliff, as a career civil servant, was still on the inside, still able to influence perceptions and to work actions inside the administration. Tigerman and Hirschfield were the thinkers. Cliff became their tool. They exploited him.”

I asked, “They were using him, or was he using them?”

She gave me a look, like I had asked a dumb question. “He was way out of his league with those two.”

“How?”

“Well . . . I wouldn’t know the particulars, would I? I’ll tell you this, though. Very often, after they spoke, he went on long overseas trips.”

“Where?”

“Sometimes Europe, sometimes the Middle East.”

“What did he do on these trips?”

“I think they were putting him in contact with various Arabs. I suppose Iraqis . . . people willing to help overthrow Saddam.”

“Was Cliff freelancing or were these trips authorized?”

“I can only tell you we weren’t paying for it. I suppose DIA for some reason authorized and financed his travel.”