KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (37 page)

Karsarkis had claimed that my old Georgetown roommate, Billy Redwine, now counsel to the president, was on those tapes. If he was, and if — as Karsarkis claimed — Billy’s voice was recognizable talking to Cynthia Kim about components used in the Bali bombings having originated from a covert National Security Council operation, then the White House would be in very deep shit. At least it would be if the tapes ever became public.

I really had no doubt what Karsarkis had told me about the content of the tapes was true. That was precisely why he had wanted me as his point man in pitching for a pardon in the first place. Pardon applications were filed with the White House counsel’s office. If I had filed Karsarkis’ pardon application with Billy Redwine, he would have guessed immediately that Karsarkis had, as they say, an ace in the hole—and that his old Georgetown roommate was threatening him with what was nothing short of extortion.

The Thai Airlines flight left Bangkok at dinner time and took me nonstop to Los Angeles. I grabbed a shower and a few hours’ sleep at a Hilton on Century Boulevard, then I took the hotel shuttle back to the airport
and caught an early morning American Airlines flight to New York.

From thirty-five thousand feet the western half of the United States has always seemed lunar to me: unidentifiable rings that look like craters, ranges of mountains that appear impassable, anÀwesd a latticework of thin white lines scratched into the reddish-brown earth. I drank black coffee and watched Nevada become Utah, and I thought about the people who two centuries before had worked their way westward over that very landscape on horseback or even on foot. If they had realized what they were getting into, if they could have seen the place whole from thirty-five thousand feet like I could now, I was willing to bet they would have said
to hell with this
and just stayed home.

But they couldn’t see what they were getting into, of course, so they just kept going. Like the rest of us did when we were digging a hole for ourselves, they moved forward step by step, no single step seeming all that important, but the sum of all those steps propelling them into the heart of a wasteland so terrifying that surely they would have turned and fled if they could have seen it for what it really was.

I was still trying to decide what to make of that dazzling insight when jet lag took me and I fell into a deep if short-lived sleep.

ZOE’S FUNERAL WAS
at a Catholic church on Eighty-Third Street near Park. Predictably it drew a crowd of television and newspaper photographers, but there were actually fewer lenses poking at Zoe’s small, rose-covered coffin than I had expected. I gathered, in death, Plato Karsarkis was already on the inevitable slide to becoming nothing more than yesterday’s news. Another year and he would be in somebody’s whatever-happened-to column.

Karsarkis’ ex-wife, Zoe’s mother, was both younger and more striking than I had expected. She was tall and very thin, and her blonde hair was twisted up into what I think women call a French braid. A black Chanel suit set off her pale skin and her blue eyes looked both warm and guarded at the same time.

When the brief ceremony ended, she stood and crossed herself, and then while we all waited respectfully in silence she left the church alone by the center aisle. Strangely, just as she passed me she turned her head slightly and caught my eye. Normally I would have looked away, but she didn’t, so I didn’t either.

For a moment it seemed almost as if she was going to stop and say something to me, although I couldn’t imagine what it would be. She didn’t stop, of course, but stranger still, she tilted her head slightly in my direction as she moved past and appeared to mouth something that looked to me exactly like
thank you
. Then she continued out of the church onto Eighty-Third Street. By the time I had made my own way outside, she was gone.

I had no idea at all what that could have been about, or even if I might have imagined the whole thing. No idea at all.

Back at the hotel that night I ordered a burger and a beer from room service and I watched Monday Night Football until I realized I didn’t give a damn about American football anymore. After that, I went down to the bar mostly just to have something to do. Pleased to find the place nearly deserted, I took a stool and sipped a Bushmills and water in silence.

The television set at the end of the bar was tuned to New York One, a twenty-four-hour cable news channel that featured mostly local news. I didn’t pay much attention to it until I happened to glance up and see the church where Zoe’s funeral had been held that afternoon.

“Could you turn that up?” I called out to the bartender.

The ferret-faced man who looked like Al Pacino with bad hair was washing glasses in a sink at the other end of the bar. He dried his ƀquohands on the towel hanging over his shoulder, then picked up a remote control and raised the television’s volume.

As I listened to a woman reporter deliver a rambling and unnecessarily detailed description of Zoe’s funeral, the bartender eased over, tilted his head up, and watched along with me. The reporter wrapped her story with a brief account of Plato Karsarkis’ own death in a plane crash and then summarized some of the more outrageous stories that had swirled around him in life.

“Good riddance,” the bartender mumbled in a thick Eastern European accent of some kind. “The bastard.”

“I’m sorry?” I asked automatically, not entirely certain I’d heard the man correctly.

“I said the bastard got what he deserved,” the bartender repeated, gesturing with his towel toward the TV set. “Plato Karsarkis getting killed like that, I meant. Not the little girl dying, God bless her.”

I said nothing.

“That scumbag was a piece-of-shit criminal and everybody treated him like a movie star,” the bartender snorted in disgust. “Made a fortune helping the rag heads kill people. Got what he deserved, if you ask me.”

“There was never a trial,” I said. “Plato Karsarkis might not have been convicted of anything if one had taken place.”

The man snorted again. “I expect you got that right, pal. Make the crime big enough and nobody ever did it. Notice how that always works?”

The bartender tossed his towel up in the air, caught it smartly, and scrubbed a spot off the bar. Then he turned the television set back down and returned to washing his glasses.

I let him, finishing my whiskey in silence.

The next morning, wrapped in a hotel bathrobe and trying to read the
New York Times
over toast and coffee, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about what the bartender had said.

He was right about one thing, of course. The really big crimes had little or nothing to do with justice. What they had to do with was power. I didn’t like it, but I understood it. What I didn’t understand, at least not yet, was exactly what the really big crime had really been in this case.

Was it Plato Karsarkis’ deal to peddle smuggled oil and launder the profits? Was it corrupt Asian politicians taking payoffs when their countries bought the oil? Was it some cockamamie National Security Council scheme to subvert Indonesia? Was it the secret diversion of American weapons to terrorists who then used them to kill hundreds of kids? Was it somebody, maybe even the Americans in the White House who had set the whole scheme into motion in the first place, murdering people in an effort to retrieve tape recordings implicating them in the plot?

Or was it something worse? Something even worse than that.

Was it that a few powerful men knew exactly what they had done; that their scheming and plotting had set in motion events that they could no longer control; that innocents had been killed as a consequence; and that they were all going to get away with it?

When I thought about it that way, a hard knot of anger began to form deep within me. If they did get away with it, wouldn’t I be responsible now? Didn’t I possess both the means and the ability to see they
didn’t
get away with it?

I knew I had to forget all about abstract concepts like good and evil, fairness and injustice, honor and shame. What I had to foˀaway wicus on now was power. Who had it, how they used it, and where it was.

I knew where it was.

The White House was just at the other end o
f the Delta Shuttle, hardly more than an hour from New York.

In the bottom of my bag there was a flat manila envelope and inside that envelope was the printout of the NIA files Kate had given me together with the three microcassettes Plato Karsarkis had committed into my care. When I had packed in Bangkok, I had put them into my suitcase without really understanding why I was doing it.

But now I understood completely.

What Karsarkis had wanted me to do all along was to carry a message to the White House, to my old roommate Billy Redwine in particular. The message was to have been that Plato Karsarkis wanted off the hook for everything he had done or he would make them pay. He would tell the world what they had done, what the White House had done, and he would bring them down with him. He would bring them all down.

Plato Karsarkis might be dead, but the soul of his message still lived on the three little cassettes I had in my possession. The time had come for people to start doing the right thing, not because Karsarkis would expose them if they didn’t, but just because it was right.

I tossed the
New York Times
onto the couch and got dressed. Then I packed and took a cab to LaGuardia, where I caught the Delta Shuttle to Washington.

BILLY REDWINE AND
I hadn’t actually spoken since the time a year or so ago when he had flown all the way to Phuket to hear my tale about the Asian Bank of Commerce and the string of dead bodies somebody in Washington had been leaving across Asia to hush up the real story behind its collapse.

I was at National Airport waiting for my bag and trying to decide what to do now that I was in Washington when I noticed a big Hertz sign at baggage claim. That sounded like as good a start as any, so I went out to the curb, caught the yellow and black Hertz bus, and about half an hour later was tooling up the George Washington Parkway in a shiny red Mustang that smelled of new vinyl and old tobacco.

I pushed the radio buttons and found an oldies station and all at once I remembered how much I missed cruising the streets of a city listening to music on a car radio. In Bangkok or Hong Kong or Singapore, they didn’t get the idea at all. Driving just for the sheer hell of it was such an American thing to do. It wasn’t a concept that translated very well.

The disk jockey started playing the original Rolling Stones version of
Honky Tonk Woman
and I slapped out the rhythm on the steering wheel with my palms.

Damn, that feels good.

When I got to Key Bridge, I turned off the Parkway and crossed over the Potomac into Georgetown. A brisk wind slashed at the city from the east, bringing with it a damp chill off the water and leaving piles of yellow leaves splotched with crimson banked like snowdrifts against the hubcaps of parked cars. The wind spun the dry leaves into miniature tornadoes and lifted scraps of paper and sailed them over the car like tiny squadrons of paper airplanes. The Four Seasons was full, but the Georgetown Inn had a room, so I left the car with the doorman, got my bag out of the trunk, and checked in.

Then I picked up the telephone and called the White House switchboard.

I left a message with a woman who identified herself as Billy Redwine’s administrative assistant. I ΀he Wthink that meant she was his secretary. She was cool and correct, and her voice contained no suggestion she expected my call ever to be returned by anyone at all, let alone by Billy Redwine.

It was less than twenty minutes before the telephone in my room rang.

“Mr. Shepherd?” It was the voice of a different woman, her tone professional but with subtle hints of deference and warmth. “Mr. Redwine wonders if you are free for dinner.”

“That would be fine.”

“Do you know the Old Ebbit Grill?”

“I do.”

“Could you meet Mr. Redwine there tonight at eight?”

I told her I could.

“If you will give Mr. Redwine’s name to the hostess, they will seat you at his usual table.”

THE OLD EBBIT
Grill is right across Fifteenth Street from the Treasury Building, barely a five-minute walk from the White House. I left the Mustang with the valet, then lingered out front for a few minutes examining the place’s Greek Revival façade. At exactly eight o’clock, I took a deep breath and pushed through the revolving glass door.

Naturally Billy hadn’t turned up yet. I declined the hostess’ invitation to go to Billy’s table and instead went into the bar to wait.

Down one wall of the bar was a line of booths with tufted, rust-colored velvet benches and forest-green tops. Each booth had a little table lamp with a yellow-cream shade that threw a dim but appealing glow. A huge, gilt-framed oil portrait of a woman with impossibly ivory-colored skin and an outsized rump hung just above the long mahogany bar and there were some stuffed deer heads scattered around together with one wild boar and something else I took to be a walrus. Heavy brass chandeliers, vaguely art deco in appearance, hung from a very high tin ceiling, undoubtedly fake. The tiny bulbs flickering inside frosted glass cylinders made them look almost like gaslights.

I slid into an empty booth, laid down the large manila envelope I had brought with me, and ordered a Bushmills and water. Somewhere far in the background I heard Frank Sinatra sing the first notes of “Nancy with the Laughing Face”
.

When my drink came I slipped at it slowly and watched a television set tuned to CNBC that was hanging over the bar. It was discreet and silent, captions flickering over the bottom of the picture, and nobody but me seemed to be paying the slightest attention to it. The music changed to “Can’t We Be Friends”, then “That Old Feeling”, and finally, “I Can’t Get Started with You”.

Billy was an actor at heart, and when I saw him walking across the bar toward me about fifteen minutes later he looked every inch of one. He moved at a stately pace, rhythmically slapping a rolled-up copy of
The Wall Street Journal
against his thigh, nodding perfunctorily at the occupants of some tables and pointedly ignoring others. There were a couple of what I assumed to be Secret Service types trailing him and they sized me up professionally as he approached the booth. Since they didn’t shoot me, I guess I passed whatever test they were using.