Big If Page 22

  “Heading there,” said Peta, still pondering the blips and dropping balls. “I’m stuck in traffic.”

  “Me too,” Brian Ryan said. “Traffic’s bad up here. That’s the big surprise. I always thought New Hampshire would be pretty traffic-free.”

  “It’s not always bad,” Peta said defensively. She blamed it on the primary, like some kind of bomb test or mass evacuation drill, this staged craziness, three months every leap year.

  “What’s your Portsmouth ETA?” he said.

  “My ETA,” she said, “is not known at this time. I’m stuck on 95.”

  “Me too. Whereabouts are you?”

  “Just past the beaches exit.”

  “Me too. What cars are you near?”

  “FedEx truck, some motorcycles, and an SUV.”

  “You must be right around me,” Brian Ryan said.

  She saw a young man two cars over, talking on a cell phone. The young man wore a necktie and a white straw cowboy hat. She waved at him.

  “I see you in that hat,” she said.

  “What hat?” he said.

  The man was waving back.

  “You must be up ahead somewhere,” said Peta, sinking low behind the wheel.

  She promised to call Brian Ryan with any new developments. Including peace, she thought—that would be quite new.

  Traffic moved, rolling a few feet. The motorcycles revved, rolling to a stop. In the distance, Peta saw the source of the delay, a bus spun out on the grassy strip between the northbound and the southbound sides. The passengers were gathered by the bus. Trooper cars were pulled up, domers strobing, a harsh flicker in the daylight. The accident was not obstructing traffic and yet the cars slowed as they passed to inspect the crash. The highways were the place of straight ahead, lanes and lines, signs mounted high for visibility so that motorists wouldn’t have to make decisions at the final moment, all together—a place of architected flow, rails and information. Any break in flow, any accident, was doubly engrossing because the eyes were starved for something jarring. The first car slowed out of curiosity. The next car slowed to avoid rear-ending the first car. The next car, recognizing rubbernecking, tarried long enough to see what they were rubbernecking at, saw the bus on the grass and looked for the ambulance, the fire trucks, the bloody body on a gurney, pausing long enough to make the cars behind them pause and start rubbernecking too. By the time the back cars were braking to see, the front cars, which had started it, were gone, flying north through normal traffic. In fact, Peta thought, there couldn’t be a back because even after the wreck was towed away, the cars delayed by cars delayed by rubbernecking cars would pause to view the cause of the delay, and if the cause was gone, the motorists would only look longer, seeing nothing, searching disappointedly. Crashing bore, thought Peta.

  Traffic started moving. Space opened between cars.

  The phone rang.

  Brian Ryan said, “We’re moving!”

  Peta said, “I see that, thank you.”

  The bus coming up on Peta’s left didn’t look damaged and there was no ambulance, no skid marks on the pavement, no deep ruts in the grass. It was nuts, she thought, a thousand cars delayed by this? It wasn’t even a good bus crash. Where were the EMTs, the flame-retardant foam, the line of snap-light flares?

  She could see now that the bus belonged to the senator’s campaign. She paused, taking her turn as lead rubbernecker. As the daughter of Phil Boyle, the mortician-politician, Peta was solid for the party, the Rockingham machine, and the machine was solid for the VP. If she didn’t hate the dashing senator (she didn’t—she disliked him, she mistrusted him, and gave him high negatives whenever she was polled), she hated him a little for causing this delay. She only saw his bus, a knot of campaign workers, and reporters with boom mikes, but she knew that he was in the center, totally at fault. Someone honked at her.

  “Keep your shirt on,” Peta said.

  Peta was driving to meet Lauren Czoll at their second showing of the day when she got the call from Li’l People Montessori. The headmistress said that Jens had shown up around noon, barged into Kai’s classroom, dragged him out to his car, breaching several rules of Li’l People, all of which were spelled out quite clearly in a letter to the parents, the headmistress pointed out. Peta apologized, soothing the headmistress (the woman had connections to the admissions people at all of the best private schools in the county and could make or break Kai, come kindergarten time—she was nobody to fuck with, Peta knew).

  Peta said, “I’m sorry. My husband’s been—sick.”

  “Sick parents are not allowed in school,” the headmistress said. “Children pass these germs around.”

  “It’s not a germ-type sick,” said Peta. “It won’t happen again, I promise.”

  Peta called the house. The voice mail picked up, Peta’s rich-as-toffee phone voice playing back at her: You have reached the Asplund-Boyle residence. If you are a pollster, please press one for our opinions, and do not call back; if you are a human being, please press two and leave a message. Have a great day. ’Bye!

  Peta was tempted to press one, thinking that a roll call of all the things she believed might be calming or confirming, but the sound of her own voice was good enough. She called again and again, knowing that Jens would eventually pick up.

  He answered on the fourth call.

  “Jens,” said Peta, trying to sound like the impressive woman on the voice mail. “Did you go to Kai’s school today?”

  “I don’t like that school,” said Jens. “They practically tackled me. I have a right to see my kid. That headmistress is a psychopath, I’m telling you.”

  “Where is Kai now?”

  “I took the day off. I was driving. I went by the old house and I thought, well, it’s a nice day, and I felt like seeing Kai. You’d think the headmistress was president of Harvard from the way she carries on about her rules. Christ, it’s not even a school. It’s a pre-school.”

  Peta drove along a beach road. She saw Lauren’s silver Jeep parked on the shoulder up ahead. Peta counted to three, another trick to calm herself. “Tell me where Kai is now, Jens.”

  “He’s in his bedroom. He’s having a time-out.”

  “I’d like to speak to him.”

  “I think he’s asleep,” said Jens. “I haven’t heard him moving in awhile.”

  Peta and Lauren Czoll stood on a blasted dune facing the Atlantic. Behind them, on the landside of the dune, a stately Greek Revival home was sheltered in the pines.

  “Asking one-point-six,” yelled Peta to the wind. “Three acres to the road. Walk-in humidor. Semiprivate bridle paths. Gazebo with an indoor-outdoor disco ball.”

  The facts didn’t go together. She could feel the wind inside her mouth as she talked. She stopped talking.

  “So bleak,” Lauren said. “So beautiful. I could watch the gales roll in.”

  Peta tried to rally. “It’s perfect for you, Lauren. It’s just what you described under hypnosis. Let’s make an offer, darling. They’ll take one-point-five, I’m sure, so let’s offer one-point-two and see what happens.”

  Saw grass swirled around their knees.

  Lauren bit her lip. “No,” she said, “it isn’t right at all.”

  In that moment, Peta Boyle, mother, wife, and Realtrix, finally snapped. She started up the path. The path wound through the grass, down stone steps into the quiet of the pines. Lauren hurried after her.

  “Maybe you’re not ready,” Peta said.

  “Not ready?” Lauren said. “What are you saying?”

  “You can’t just go on looking forever, Lauren. I have other clients and new responsibilities and I’m not sure we’re making headway here.”

  The wind seemed to chase them, whipping Peta’s coat.

  “Maybe I’ve failed you as a broker,” Peta said.

  “No,” said Lauren. “No.”

  “Or maybe you’re not ready. There’s no shame in that.”

  “I’m so ready I could scream,” Lauren
screamed. “It’s just that I get nervous when you talk about the closing. It sounds so final, like the closing of the casket.” She grabbed Peta by the elbow and jumped in front of her. “Are you leaving me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Peta shook her off. “We’ll always have the memories, Lauren. Now get out of my way before I knock you on your ass.”

  There was a little struggle on the path, Peta pushing past, Lauren holding her. Then Lauren went limp in Peta’s arms, and Peta saw the other Lauren Czoll in full fragile glory, not the cashmere bitch, but the codependent six-year-old within.

  “Sometimes,” Lauren sobbed, “I think you’re the only one who really cares. Jerzy doesn’t listen, and all our friends just pretend to like me because of Jerzy’s money. I guess I’m scared that if I go to closing, we’ll drift apart, you and I. You’ve become more than a broker to me, Peta. You’ve become my best friend in the world.”

  Lauren grabbed her in a hug. Peta stood there, being hugged.

  The surf crashed in the distance.

  Peta said, “I see.”

  the wave (monday afternoon)

  Leaving the big luncheon at the steak house in Pinardville, the VP and his entourage started for the mountain towns. It was early afternoon and the clouds were moving in. They had covered eight events since dawn: the VP’s morning jog/photo op, a carefully “impromptu” drop-in at McDonald’s (the VP eating Egg McMuffin like An Ordinary Guy surrounded by a crowd of journalists), three cold ropelines outside crumbling mills in central Manchester, a quick visit to a Hooksett kindergarten (the VP reading to the kids as the cameras whirred), a tour of the shop floor of a fiber-optics firm (the VP nodding in a hard hat as the cameras whirred), and finally the luncheon in Pinardville with the New Hampshire State Association of Police Chiefs.

  Heading east, they came to Severance, a pretty lakeshore village (a photo op with trees, apparently—they were collecting the Sierra Club endorsement). In Severance, Vi and Tashmo were detached for special duty, Gretchen’s orders. Gretchen told them to report forthwith to Boone Saxon at Threat Assessment’s local outpost, a few miles down the highway from the lake. Vi and Tashmo, glad to be excused if only for an hour, borrowed a sedan and set off to meet the threatmen.

  Vi drove and Tashmo rode. They were passing malls and bowladromes and home improvement superstores. Boone Saxon and his trainee agents tracked local known, potential, or suspected threats from a shabby rented office on the second floor of the Bank New Hampshire building. The building had two floors, drive-through teller windows, a night deposit slot, three glassed-in cash machines, and a parking lot with shrubbery and about ten spaces. Vi parked by the cash machines. She was crossing the lot with Tashmo when Peta Boyle called.

  Vi walked and talked to Peta on the cell. The two women exchanged pleasantries, the usual: how are you, where are you, how is Jens, and Kai is fine. Peta was in Portsmouth, calling from her car. Vi hadn’t talked to her sister-in-law in many months and hadn’t seen her since the visit after Hinman. Vi knew that Peta had a point in calling—Peta, unlike Jens, always had a point. At first, Vi thought that something was wrong, that somebody was sick or hurt, but Peta assured her that it wasn’t so.

  “Really,” Peta said. “Everything is A-Okay, we’re chugging right along!”

  Vi heard a woman sobbing in the background. “Is someone crying there?”

  “Just a client,” Peta said. “Lauren, honey, hush now—Peta needs to hear. Vi, are you there? I understand the vice president is coming this way, and I know it’s probably impossible, but do you think you could come down to the house at some point? We’d love to see you, Vi. Jens would really love to see you.”

  The VP would cross the state that afternoon with a stop along the way, spend the night in Portsmouth, and work Portsmouth in the morning. Vi doubted that she could squeeze an hour free to see Jens and Peta. She’d have to go to Gretchen for permission, and Gretchen wasn’t free and easy on these things.

  Vi said, “I’ll try, Peta, I really will, but they keep us pretty scheduled.”

  “Of course—I understand,” said Peta. “It was just a thought.”

  The call ended as Vi and Tashmo clomped up a set of narrow stairs to the second floor of the bank building.

  Boone’s office was done in a certain style—Vi thought of it as Late War on Drugs, except (she knew) the War on Drugs was timeless and endless, and for all anybody knew it was still Early yet. Boone’s desk and chair on wheels and glued-plasterboard credenza had been built by prison laborers at Unicor in Leavenworth and sold at a profit by the government to itself, part of some half-abandoned crackpot scheme to make the Bureau of Prisons self-supporting, like Alabama penal farms of yore.

  Boone was on the phone when Vi and Tashmo came up from the parking lot. They waited for him as he flipped his desk blotter calendar, last month, this month, next month, making an appointment with the Concord FBI. The calendar was also jail-made and featured rousing productivity slogans, a different one each month, Think and Suggest for February, Always Foster Quality for March. Vi had seen this very calendar in every federal outpost she had ever visited or worked in, or worked out of, the Crim Division in New York, Psych Services in Beltsville, the ATF in Newark, even once the embassy in Moscow. She found it vaguely sinister: inmates jailed by the hard work of the agents being forced to print slogans rooting these same agents on to even greater feats of busy-beaverism.

  “Coffee’s on,” said a trainee agent, padding by the office in his socks. The trainee was named Christopher, a tall soft sofa of a boy, two months out of threat school. Of the eleven trainees, only Christopher was here. Two were out with flu; one was up in Concord, checking with the doctor of a man who blamed the pope on the Jews; two were down in Nashua, battling the flu, checking on a recent theft of fertilizer from a city golf course (a year’s supply, a hundred bags, just shy of four tons); one trainee was busy infiltrating a militia sect in the northern forests; one was on a flight to Montreal where he would liaise with the RCMP, rattling the cages of known Moroccan jihadin; one had gone across the highway for a sandwich; another was in Portsmouth, working on the violent splinter right-to-lifers.

  Tashmo was sitting on the edge of Boone’s credenza, his long legs stuck out, jiggling his little zippered boots, like a kid who needed to wee. He was looking at a picture of Boone’s wife, June, a stolid, freckled woman in a pageboy and safari jacket.

  Vi took the picture from him.

  “Know her?” Tashmo asked. “Helluva nice woman, Mrs. Boone.”

  Vi had met June Saxon once at a Beltsville function, chatted with her about her work at the National Zoo, where she was a staff psychiatrist. June had diagnosed the depression of the Chinese panda pair, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the marquee mammals of that zoo, which had finally explained the pair’s extended failure to mate in captivity. You couldn’t ask a panda how it felt, June told Vi, and so she had relied on long observation of the pandas, noting their listlessness compared to pandas in the wild, and their odd behavior, clawing at one spot in the dirt, tearing at one shoot of bamboo, empty, pointless, repetitious patterns of activity, for hours every day. June had watched them for hours before arriving at her diagnosis. Vi put the picture back on the credenza. Pandas and psychotics—Vi thought Boone and Mrs. Boone were perfect for each other.

  Christopher returned to the office with a plastic tray of mugs, sugar packets, milk in a little pitcher, and a pot of coffee, but no one felt like coffee. Christopher seemed bummed.

  “Apologies,” said Boone, getting off the phone. “Housekeeping—one must always kiss the butt of the sister agencies.”

  Vi thought this saying would look good on a calendar.

  Boone said, “Tashmo, how’s it going? How’s Shirl? She good?”

  Tashmo said, “She’s fine. How’s Jane?”

  “June. She’s doing great. Her panda memoir came out last year. You’d love it. It’s a touching story of friendship and depression.”

  “I’ll wait for the movi
e,” Tashmo said.

  Boone said, “I’m afraid you already missed it. It was in the theaters for about a minute. You can still see it on some airlines, Thai Air and maybe Continental. Tash was on the Reagan team, Christopher.”

  “Is that where you guys met?” asked Christopher, all wide-eyed. The Reagan team was famous in the Service, like the ’27 Yankees of Protection.

  “Boone wasn’t on no Reagan team,” said Tashmo. “Boone, have you been telling this poor kid that you were on the Reagan team?”

  “I was on the Reagan team,” said Boone.

  Tashmo said, “We let you hang with us because your wife was—nice. But that doesn’t mean that you were on the team.”

  “What do you mean, nice?”

  “Cheerful. Pleasant. Always a kind word.”

  “I guarded Ronald Reagan,” said Boone through a tight jaw.

  Tashmo said, “You guarded the ballet-dancing son.”

  “His legal name was Ronald Reagan. He was often with his father, and when they were together I guarded both of them. I stood ready with my life.”

  “They were not often together,” Tashmo said. “The father didn’t even like the kid. He used to say to me, ‘Ballet.’ Just that word, ballet. It tore him up inside.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Boone. “They had the special bond of son and father.”

  Vi said, “Let’s not fight about it, Christ. Yo Boone, why are we here?”

  Boone was sulking. “You had a screamer at the Marriott last night. Female white, brown hair, medium height, medium build, beige or tan parka. This is the script we got. You and Tash were on the body, closest to the woman. I thought we’d take a gander at the vid feeds, pool and Channel 9, see if we could pick her out.”

  Tashmo said, “We get a lot of screamers, Boone.”

  Christopher drew the shades. They watched two clips from two angles of the ropeline at the Marriott. The pool press covered every event, no matter how routine (it was called the death watch), but they didn’t always cover all of each event. They often got their requisite ten-or twenty-second clip, a rough cut for the uplink to New York, later trimmed to nothing or two seconds. At the Marriott, the cameras took the VP almost to the end, but Channel 9 cut out at three minutes eighteen seconds and the pool went black just after that, ropeline still in progress.