The Mandarin Club (10 page)

T
here was an intimate calm inside the ambulance as Rachel was rolled along. She lay with a Mona Lisa smile, wincing only when they cornered. The siren’s call seemed so very far away, in some other world. She felt the pulse of the drugs coursing through her veins. For the moment, she could rest secure.

“Who? Who is. . .” she finally said, struggling to move her lips, almost choking on the taste of dust. “Who’s going to meet Jamie’s bus?” Then she fell back into a smothered dream of whiteness, unconscious once more.

She was drifting, tumbling backwards in time, past work and men and motherhood, past Stanford and the Last Dance, back to childhood days on the ranch north of Cody. The remembered bits and pieces of her past seemed to flow magically into a coherent whole. She could discern the pattern now.

She saw vividly the mosaic of her years, assembled like the pottery shards at the old Indian campground in Sunlight Basin. She heard again the thunderheads of her youth, booming off the high Absaroka canyons east of Yellowstone. The battering storms would gather quickly, soaring clouds moving to cover the sky. Then they would strike, flattening the blues and greens of mid-afternoon, bringing dark into the main cabin.

At age twelve, Rachel used to sit cross-legged on the Navajo rug, ruing the fact that she, the youngest, had been left behind. Father smoked Marlboros on the porch, waiting for the storm to pass. Mother snuck gin in the pantry, her private ritual of escape. The brothers were already gone, away to State U. in Laramie, headed to Denver and Portland, to city jobs and city wives. At such times, Rachel had sat alone, watched over by the silent, impassive grizzly head above the stone hearth.

She recalled a moment when her journey had begun. She would close her eyes and spin the Rand-McNally globe, round and round and round again. She dreamt even then of fleeing, of finding an anonymous place to discover herself. While the globe spun, she would try to cheat, as an unobserved child will. She would hover her finger near tropical latitudes as the earth traversed her hands, feeling the topographical bumps flit by like Braille messages. As she chanted “I am going to live in. . .”, she would try to stop the spinning planet with her finger near the sea—on Hawaii, Tahiti, or the Philippines.

She longed for the sea, for the sensation of cleansing waves washing over her, salty and strong. She had never seen the ocean, though. No matter how hard she tried to trick the gods, it seemed her finger always came to point on that enormous pink land mass farthest from home, off in faraway Asia.

China.
From the start, she had been aware of some predestination. Even before she had devoured
The Good Earth
and Stilwell’s memoirs, she had imagined China awaiting her, mysterious, alluring, and utterly foreign. That danger—the very foreignness of it all—had been the attraction. Now, as she stirred from her dreams on her hospital gurney, she could see that for the first time.

It was almost noon when her mind began to ground itself back in the present and she felt she could speak once more. She was in the intensive care unit at George Washington Hospital, goofy from the painkillers and hours of disembodied remembrances. The medics had cleaned her up and stitched her scalp. Alexander Bonner was at her side, holding her left hand gently, peering over the back of a doctor reading x-rays.

“Nothing there,” she said, startling them with her attempt at humor, her voice gravelly and hoarse. The doctor turned and spoke firmly to her. She had a concussion, several nasty cuts, and a shoulder fracture.

Two serious looking men stood at the foot of her bed, she could see now, just to the left of where Alexander sat. Beyond them, she noticed a uniformed Washington cop.

“Ms. Paulson. Hello. I’m James Hickman with the FBI. This is Detective Bryant from D.C. Police. If you feel up to it, ma’am, we’d like a few words with you.”

They looked like a matching pair, thick and sorrowful. But the policeman had a longer face, his eyes sloping downward like a basset hound. Hickman from the FBI appeared more hospitable, a dusting of white in his Burt Reynolds moustache.

“Ma’am,” Rachel repeated vacantly. “Ma’am. Wow. You know, Mr. Hickman, nobody calls me
ma’am
, except one of my ten year-old’s playmates, a British kid. Doesn’t know any better, I suppose.”

She started up on her right side, then gasped. “Oh, Alexander. Have you called Jamie? The school. What about picking him up?”

“Rachel, I got it covered.” Alexander grabbed her good arm, steering her back to her pillow. “Don’t worry. I already talked to the principal. I’m going out to meet him before the extended day release.”

“The snow. What about the snowstorm?”

“It’s OK. No snow.

“Another AccuWeather false alarm,” she said, giggling a bit, then began to drift.

“Mr. Paulson, we really need to ask your wife a few—”

“Sergeant, I’m not Mr. Paulson,” Alexander said, looking down at Rachel, who was settled now. “I mean, Detective. Whatever.”

“Just a friend,” she said absently, “friend of the family.”

“I haven’t been able to reach Barry yet by phone or by email,” Alexander explained to Rachel. “He’s on the company plane, on the way to Seattle. They’re trying to raise the pilot through the FAA or something.”

“But weren’t you staying with Ms. Paulson at the Willard Hotel?”

He felt the cops’ eyes on him. For some reason, he felt sheepish, like he had something to hide.

“We just had breakfast. In the Main Dining Room.”

“And you were walking on—”

“F Street.”

“F Street.”

“Behind the hotel?” Hickman and Bryant were both taking notes. At the periphery of the scene, Alexander noticed Rachel seeming to float, like a helium balloon released from a child’s hand.

“Uh, right, in front of her office. I mean, we were just crossing the street to the, the TPB headquarters, crossing F right by Fifteenth Street.”

“The Talbott, Porter, Blodge—what’s that?” The FBI man was turning again to the detective, who gave him “Blow.”

“Oh, God!” Rachel was moaning now. “Mr. Talbott!”

Alexander had her arm again, as he, too, flashed back to the fluttering of the curtains from the shattered TPB windows. Mr. Talbott, indeed.

Now it all started to flow back over him. He could see the funereal curtains, the shattered SUV, the severed leg, still in pin stripes and a shoe. He staggered to his feet, about to retch, needing fresh air.

“Whoa there.” The detective steadied Alexander, sympathetic under the circumstances. “Have you had a CAT scan?”

The FBI guy was very much the doctor now, standing by as he added, “You might have a concussion there, too.”

“No, I didn’t get a direct hit. Just banged up a bit.” Alexander stood in the doorway breathing more heavily. The uniformed cop was pacing in the doorway, as jumpy as that policeman with the drawn revolver he’d seen on F Street.

“What was it?” Rachel was crying softly. “A bomb?”

“We think so, ma’am.”

“The TPB garage?” asked Alexander, cocking his head now, elbows on knees as he straightened.

“Yeah. The TPB building.”

“How many people were injured?”

“We’re still trying to ascertain casualties, sir. Can we get your name?”

“Alexander Bonner.
Los Angeles Times
.” Reflexively, he started to offer a handshake, then just shook his head.

Rachel was watching, her face ashen as she pulled herself just a bit higher on the mattress. She bore a look of animal fear, her eyes sliding towards the cops in the doorway. “Who would. . . why would anybody do this?”

“Ma’am, we know you’ve had a bad blow. We do need to try to get some information from you.” It was the FBI man again, very tentatively. “Others could be in danger.”

“Yes.” She lay back, her eyes closed tight.

“What did you see?”

“We were just walking out of the hotel together. . . the restaurant. I was just. . . I was just saying goodbye to Alexander. I. . . I had my back to the, uh, TPB. . .” Ripples of fatigue were spreading, eroding her efforts at coherent thought. Rachel could hear anxious hospital voices in the distance. But she was unanchored, her thoughts drifting away on some unseen tide.

“What did you see at the building? Did you see any people on the street? Any particular vehicles?”

Rachel’s eyes were closed, her face blank. But then she spoke with a sigh of resignation.

“I was just kissing Alexander.” She began to weep again, a low wailing sound. The men looked at their shoes. “A good bye kiss.”

Alexander was close by. He took a deep breath, calling up the image, taking control. “I was looking right at the building, talking with Rachel. It was, just, normal. You know, a bunch of cars trying to get into the garage. Nine a.m. rush and all that. There was a big gas guzzler, a black SUV trying to get in off F Street. A blue car in the chute. Parking attendant. A panhandler. A gray taxicab. Not that many people, really.”

“The building! What happened to the people inside?” Rachel searched their faces for clues. She tried to sit up again, to get on a level with them. But the sheets and the lights and the weight of the pain in her shoulder pressed back against her.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the detective said. “We really don’t know yet. Don’t know definitively about the casualties. We’re trying to put it all together, to figure out who was where and who is OK.”

“You work there, right?” The FBI man again.

“At TPB. Yeah. I’m the, uh, in charge of the Congressional work and a director on our board.”

“Law firm?”

“Yeah. I mean, mostly lawyers. But we, uh, do a lot of lobbying work.”

“You’re lobbyists?” He said it like
proctologists. “
Who do you lobby for?”

“We, uh, I mean, we have, oh, more than a hundred clients. A lot of corporations and cities, and. . .” She slowed as another wave of confusion rolled through her brain. “. . . governments.”

“Governments? You lobby the federal government for state governments?”

“No. We, uh, yeah. We help cities get federal dollars for construction projects. Like the Seattle airport expansion. And, you know, when military bases close and they need conversion funds. . . El Toro, California, the old Marine air field in Orange County.”

She began to ramble. How to explain? It was hard, like one of those old, inane SAT analogy tests. The drugs they had given her made everything pitch and roll. She couldn’t find her footing. The questioning seemed like it would never end, even though it was just beginning.

A cell phone rang. The detective regarded the number. “I gotta take this one,” he said apologetically. “Try to gather yourself for a few minutes while I deal with this.”

As he walked beyond her vision, she began thinking hard, more clearly, composing her own personal Talbott obituary. She knew the story line too well. He was such an odd duck—a gentle man with peculiar vanities.

Jonathan Talbott was a shy Episcopalian, distinguished by a series of touchstones like the green bow ties he wore daily. The awkward 1950’s-style plaid suits. The limo and driver who called at his Georgetown residence on P Street each morning at eight. But he would walk, sometimes for blocks, to take the air. The black Lincoln would trail discreetly before Talbott climbed in and rode the balance of the distance to his office.

Jonathan had been an unhappy securities attorney in New York before he and his law partners invested in a Washington outpost. This was around the mid-seventies time of the Lockheed and Chrysler loan bailouts. Porter and Blow had joined him in the enterprise. To their surprise, they masterfully navigated the political pitfalls and secured everything their clients needed from Congress. The three senior partners enjoyed the exercise and began to develop an extensive book of legal business in Washington. Ultimately, they established their own D.C. venture, divorcing their New York firm and starting their own.

Over the years, Porter had drifted away from the government relations side of the practice, dabbling in merchant banking. He leveraged his D.C. insider position to broker investments with some of the corporations and foreign enterprises that formed their client base, anything from purchases of East European pollution control equipment to Hong Kong real estate deals. Then, during a legislative strategy session on saving the B-2 bomber funding, Blow had keeled over with a massive heart attack. He was a board room casualty, DOA at George Washington Hospital.

Talbott continued to build the business, delegating the management functions to Rachel and a handful of driven colleagues. As revenues climbed, he placed the TPB imprimatur on everything, from the heavy brass doors of their Fifteenth & F Street building to the linen hand towels in their bathrooms. In the flashy, make-a-quick-buck world of influence peddling, Talbott was unique. The older he got and the more successful the government relations side of the firm became, the more he came to view himself as a trustee of the public interest, with a remarkably high load of pro bono clients. The Protestant ethic hard at work within drove him to harvest wealth from his clients, then use TPB’s considerable influence to secure funds for everything from Head Start programs to breast cancer research.

Painfully awkward with colleagues, he led a quiet private life. His spacey patrician wife, a recluse from the Washington social scene, painted an endless series of enormous, muddy brown canvasses. His only child, a daughter, lived on a vegan commune in New Mexico, meditating and making turquoise jewelry.

Central to the image of openness Talbott had created for the firm was his personal office design. He sat at the very center of the firm’s second floor perch, a line of oversized windows front and back. When the elevators opened on the firm’s reception, there, behind a wall of mahogany-framed glass, was Talbott himself, writing in longhand at his desk or speaking on an antique black telephone.

Talbott had been determined that lobbyists leave behind forever the days of hookers and cigar smoke, the times when winks to committee chairs were accompanied by envelopes of cash that got business done. He insisted that TPB advocates be professional advocates. They would shape policy on the public record, no longer second-class citizens like the stepchildren lobbyists in most of their competitors’ K Street law firms. They would comport themselves like officers of the court. Their objective was honest victory in the political arena. Talbott was known to detest the scores of cocky youngsters who came to town only to make money, punching their public service ticket in Congress for a matter of months before hanging out a shingle on K Street—as if they had years of experience to sell.