The Red House. Derek Lambert
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in the way of commercial economy.
Among the Embassy’s neighbours are the National Geographic Magazine and the University Club. The Washington Post lies around the corner.
A little way down 16th from the Embassy C.I.A. agent Joseph Costello sat at the wheel of his Thunderbird chewing on a dead cigar butt and privately expressing his opinion on what Mother Russia could do to herself. Snow mixed with freezing rain bounded along the street encasing the car in ice. And what’s more he wouldn’t put it past the stupid bastard to walk: he wouldn’t put it past a Russian to break the ice on the Potomac and go for a swim.
But I know my limitations, Joe Costello, Vietnam veteran and hero, acknowledged. Not for me the cocktail parties with The Beautiful People. I am strictly for surveillance and I am eternally grateful for the opportunities afforded me by my heroism (refusing to act stupid in front of my buddies) under enemy fire. Costello, hairy, squat and honest, further confided to himself: I wish to hell I’d made the grade as a professional football player for the Redskins. Still, I’m lucky to have a job like this, a cut above the F.B.I., two cuts above the precinct.
But surveillance on a shitty night like this! And for what? All he knew was that he had to follow the Russian and make sure that the meet with the State Department clerk took place as scheduled and that the Soviets didn’t try and hi-jack the clerk or anything. As far as he, Joe Costello was concerned, he would be very happy if they put a bullet in the State Department guy’s guts if he was a traitor. But who was he to express an opinion? Just surveillance.
Tardovsky, tall and thin and unmistakable, emerged from the embassy. Please get in your nice comfy little Volks, old buddy. But the Russian bent his thin neck into the rain and snow and walked quickly down 16th.
You sonofabitch! Costello got out of the car quietly and spat the cigar butt on to the sidewalk.
The meet was supposed to be in a bar on 14th, where pornography and bare flesh prospered alongside the palatial seats of national and world power. Very dark, probably, with a dirty movie grunting along in the background.
Tardovsky was heading in the right direction. But hadn’t anyone told him that Washington was the worst city in the States for getting mugged? And what the hell did he do if the Russian was jumped? On 14th anything could happen. On this sad street the orifice-filled bookshops and the girlie clip-joints were doing fair trade. A few bums, junkies and sharply-dressed blacks hung around the doorways. Jesus, Costello thought, right on the President’s doorstep.
Then he became aware that he was maybe not the only tail on Tardovsky. Behind the two of them he sensed another shadow. They were about to play games. But who the hell was the playmate?
Tardovsky entered the bar just off 14th and sat down at a table. On the screen a long way down the tunnel of the bar a couple stripped and simulated copulation; the girl showed her genitals with abandonment, her lover was more coy—maybe he was ashamed of them, Costello thought.
Tardovsky ordered a beer and took his hat off. Right, Costello thought—you should take off your hat in the presence of a lady. He sat way behind Tardovsky and glanced at his watch: five minutes till the meet. He ordered a Scotch from the girl in the crotch-high black skirt.
The second shadow sat down to the left of Costello, three tables away. Costello took a look at him. Very wet, like himself, very cold. Powerful looking, impossible to distinguish his features behind the turned-up collar of his bulky topcoat.
Why hadn’t they told him more? ‘Just keep your eye on them to make sure nothing goes wrong. Keep in touch.’ But they hadn’t mentioned a third party who could be Russian, American, British, Czech (they were pretty high in the espionage stakes these days). Three minutes to go.
Tardovsky, who looked bored with the repetitive sex looked at his watch and went to the toilet. The man in the bulky topcoat followed. Which means I have to follow too, Costello decided.
But the toilet wasn’t designed for espionage or the prevention thereof. With two big men bulging in the confined space behind him, Tardovsky didn’t bother to finish what he was doing at the stall. He zipped up, ducked between them with giraffe agility and was gone.
‘Shit,’ said Costello. He turned to follow.
‘Not so fast,’ said the other man, his face blond and fierce behind the collar.
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Who the hell are you, buddy?’
‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Costello heaved towards the door.
‘Oh yes it does. Sure it does.’ The stranger chopped at Costello’s neck but hit his elbow on the wall. Costello got him in the stomach with two karate fingers; although the topcoat blunted the impact.
They fought savagely for a couple of minutes. But the toilet wasn’t designed for pugilism either. So they identified themselves and, while the faucet over the stall urinated noisily, silently contemplated their plight.
On the screen in the bar corner the young man indicated facially that orgasm was near while the girl sighed with what could have been ecstasy or frustration.
The personality of Wallace J. Walden was split down the middle on the subject of his capital city. He revelled in its dignified masonry, smooth lawns, stern statues, its libraries and museums and broad avenues, the stately homes of President and Government, the Washington Monument poised like a stone rocket set for launching. He loved to see tourists patrolling beneath Japanese cherry trees and expressing admiration at such a graceful seat of power. Sometimes he interrupted—‘I couldn’t help overhearing’—and put them straight on historic facts: Washington offered 500 dollars for a design for The Capitol and Dr William Thornton from Tortola in the West Indies won (‘Italian Renaissance, you understand’), the city was originally conceived by Pierre Charles l’Enfant, a protégé of Lafayette, as ‘a capital magnificent enough to grace a great nation’—‘And did you know that Washington who chose the site here in Maryland and Virginia was a surveyor himself? Few people seem to know that …’ Then he gave them the Visitors Information Service number (347–4554) before moving on to survey the Reflecting Pool, pillared palaces of bureaucracy, the spruce, beech and magnolia, with an awe and pride that had survived twenty-five years acquaintanceship.
The split occurred because Wallace J. Walden detested Washington’s principal industry—politics. Or, more particularly, he disliked intriguing politicians. Which was ironic because Walden’s own job was intrigue.
He admired ambition but abhorred its crude application; if there was one person he disliked more than a senator peddling a cause with votes in mind, rather than humanity, it was a senator’s wife pursuing the same objective over tea or Martinis. Jesus, he thought this glacial morning as he walked beside the whispering ice on the Tidal Basin, God save us from the women of Washington. (He was both a blasphemous and God-fearing man.) But, like it or not, Washington was a women’s city, every secretary trying to do a Jackie Kennedy. Only last night he had read in the Evening Star that the president of the Democratic Congressional Wives’ Forum was advising freshmen lawmakers to employ professional comedians to spike their speeches with gags. If they had their way, Walden ruminated without humour, Bob Hope would become president. Or Bill Cosby.
The wind blew eddies of snow across the ice separating Walden from Thomas Jefferson standing on pink Tennessee marble behind the white portico of his dome. ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’ So had Walden. He regretted that the means to his end involved intrigue, subterfuge and murder. But he had no doubts that the means justified the end.
He gulped down the iced air hungrily, felt the cold polish his cheeks. A lonely figure with heavy pipe gurgling, welted shoes marching firmly on the crusty ground, hat never too firm on the springs of his greying cropped hair.
Here every morning, after leaving his wife and enigmatic teenage children in Bethesda, Walden assembled his day. Today he was thankful for the ache in the air because, to an extent, it numbed his anger at the stupidity that had once again spoiled an inspired