Thief of Glory (37 page)

Rachel began to stand.

“I am sorry you misunderstood,” Senator Knight told Rachel. “What I meant was that any official representation by my attorney is over. I would be grateful if you remained after his departure so that you and I can have a private conversation.”

“Senator …,” Davey said, his face blanching beneath his handsome tan.

“It irritates me when I have to repeat myself to an employee,” Senator Knight told him. “She thumped your butt, and I am not going to forget how easy she made it look. At this point, because the remainder of my conversation is going to be a private matter between Ms. Prins and me and her father, I will assume that if I hear any whispers about World War II that involve my family, you and your firm will pay the consequences, as I will also assume that you have broken the confidentiality of the first part of this meeting. The meeting that is now over for you.”

Davey pulled in a deep breath and held it. That was the only dignity he could find as he walked from the room. The door clicked behind him.

Still pretending I wasn’t in the room, Senator Knight spoke with a sigh of regret. “If an offer to retain you as my attorney wouldn’t be seen as an attempt at bribery or conflict of interest, I would attempt to do so right now, Ms. Prins. You obviously have the same steel that your father does, and I have always envied that in him.”

He sat taller and shifted in his seat so that I was now partially in his field of vision, but he didn’t address me. “You weren’t there when I hit your father with the rebar. It broke his arm and he didn’t flinch. Seventy plus years later, it’s as vivid in my memory as if I were standing in front of him right now, both of us tied to a fence. I doubt that charges of attempted murder would stand at this point, but as you pointed out, it would not matter to the media. And the thing is, I really did want to kill him, nor would I deny that in front
of a jury. I felt the same way swinging my cane at him the other day. I should have known better, but Jeremiah is a man that can raise the worst types of feelings.”

Still not a glance at me from the senator.

“I understand the feeling,” Rachel said, not looking at me either.

“Laura Jansen,” Senator Knight said. Another sigh. “How could two boys know instantly that she would be worth whatever fight it took to win her heart? Boys, no less.”

“I understand that too,” Rachel said. “I’ve met her. And Jeremiah promises to tell me all of the story.”

Senator Knight’s attention on her flickered, as he tried to calculate the implication that she didn’t yet have the entire story.

He recovered well. “Please, no need for threats. We are past that. You know the power my past has over my son’s future.”

Rachel nodded. Aces on the table.

“Do you think people can change?” he asked. “I am not that boy anymore. I am less concerned about my son’s political career than you might believe. Instead, I wouldn’t want him to know me as that boy. My stepfather taught me a lot on the ranch. I was proud to take his name.”

I hoped his charm was not working on Rachel.

“People change,” she said.

Senator Knight smiled as if she had bestowed upon him a blessing.

“Well then,” he said. “What does Jeremiah want after all these years?”

“He wants two things. The first is a green marble with a horse statue inside. And the second thing he wants is time alone with you.”

“So he can try to pull my pants down again?”

I had to clench my jaw to keep myself from speaking.

“Up,” Rachel said. “He was attempting to pull your pants leg up. That’s an important distinction.”

This was my girl. I loved her so much.

“Then why does he need to be alone with me?” he asked.

Rachel said, “I believe all it involves is an apology. That’s why he is here in Washington. I’ve written up a contract for you to sign to promise delivery of the marble. Once you’ve signed it, I’ll leave the room and the two of you can be alone for the apology.”

“I have no idea what marble you mean.”

“Yes, Senator,” she said. “You do.”

Rachel was taking my word for this, so her certainty was a convincing piece of acting.

Finally, Senator Knight turned his gaze on me.

I held his gaze and said nothing.

“I am not a fool,” he said, turning back to her. “I’m aware of how today’s technology makes it easy to hide recording devices. The last thing I want is to give Jeremiah Prins the power of a recorded conversation that can embarrass me politically.”

So, he still assumed the worst of others. He would have expected me to bring a piece of rebar to a fight because that’s an option he would want for himself. I wondered where in this office he had that kind of voice recording technology, and how he had leveraged it on other occasions.

The senator put up a hand to forestall whatever protest of innocence my daughter would issue.

“We will meet tonight at 6:30,” he said. “Give me a number where I can reach you. Stay near the Capitol building. At 6:15, I’ll give you the location of the restaurant. At the front door, you’ll meet someone who will take you into the coatroom and discreetly but thoroughly do a wand sweep to ensure you are clean. Those are my conditions.”

“And my conditions now are that you give him the green marble before you speak to him.”

“I have it,” he said. “But it’s at my primary residence in Wyoming.”

“Then make a phone call and arrange for it to be flown here. There’s time for that if the jet leaves within an hour.”

He stared at her. I admired her toughness.

“That would make it an expensive marble.”

“Yes,” she said. Cool. Determined. Frightening. “Not as expensive, however, as the alternative.”

“Conditions met,” he said.

He paused. Even though he spoke to her, there was no doubt he meant his words for me. “After all, when it comes to protecting a child, a parent will do nearly anything.”

F
ORTY
-S
EVEN

Laura and I had agreed that I would find her on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after the meeting with the senator who had once been named Georgie Smith. Sixty some years earlier, we had had another agreement to meet that I had failed to keep.

The afternoon air was soft and warm, and I waited at the edge of the Reflecting Pool, the water as flat and perfect as the mirror it had become for the Washington Monument on the other end. The length of the image of the monument in the water stretched almost the length of the Reflecting Pool. Poetic. There was a rare daytime moon behind it, the edge behind the monument, three quarters of the way up. It was a tourist moment, with the iconic images meshing with the elegance and majesty that the designers had intended. Architecture should always be beautiful like this.

But the beauty that truly mattered to me was not here to share the image with me.

Because of what I was determined to tell her, I already feared this might be my last day with her. That she would abandon me like she would abandon her luggage in my condo, and take a flight directly from DC to Schiphol in Amsterdam.

To distract myself, I pulled my moleskin notebook from my suit jacket—Journal 35—and reviewed the main points I’d made about my breakfast with her. Yes, I saw with a twist of my heart, she had opened the door for me to suggest the rest of our lives together, and I had firmly closed the door. I pushed my sadness aside and reviewed the meeting with the senator. Later in the day,
alone, I would use those points to bring the impressions back, and I would use them to flesh out the details that I hoped would bring life some future day to a rereading of the events when I would not be able to pull them from my mind. My body was too healthy, and I would not quit by committing suicide. So, unless an accident occurred, there would come a time when the gaps between lucidity grew longer and longer; when I returned from those gaps, I wanted to be able to know who I was.

Time passed at the front of the reflection of the monument in the water. I wondered if I had misremembered the time and location.

Another look at Journal 35. No, there on page 33, I had underlined this time and location. Two neat, thin lines, so close to horizontal that it would have taken the edge of a ruler to determine exactness. Old habits and such.

I needed to fight my anxiety.

I eyed the reflection of the Washington Monument. I took out my moleskin. I walked and measured some deliberate paces. I wrote down the numbers, for future reference, careful to add bullet points to explain why I was writing the numbers. Then I began to use those numbers for calculations. The task immersed me. As I finished, I glanced back at the monument in satisfaction and saw Laura walking toward me, a paper cup in each hand.

True love. I heard the echo in my mind of Rachel mocking me in the holding cell.
Mawidge and twue wuv.
I told myself that when Washington was over, I would invite Rachel over to watch
The Princess Bride
and make bowls of popcorn for us to eat as we watched.

True love.

What a gift given to me, that at my age, I still felt that little catch in my heart at an unexpected glimpse of her. I remembered how it had felt so long ago, at the marble game, seeing her for the first time, that sensation of emotion coursing through me as thoroughly as if it were the very blood of my veins, a feeling I thought would never be repeated until later, in Amsterdam, when I’d
seen her walking on a sidewalk outside the brick walls of the private school that she attended.

It was an accident. I had not been looking for her, but wandering up and down the streets of the canals, in the shade of the tall bricked buildings and the stately trees, looking for Pietje, who was living on the streets, drifting from friend to friend, staying in the wrecks of ancient houseboats that should have been condemned.

I’d been drafted into the army because even though it was postwar peacetime, all male Dutch citizens were obligated for a stint. Architect school was not a possibility for someone of my economic and social status, not in postwar Holland, in a cramped country where rules and obeying rules mattered most. In the army, I’d been given the mechanic trade. If war broke out, I would fix vehicles. If I followed those rules, once out of the army, I could make a satisfactory living and pay my taxes and let the state take care of my needs.

Our eyes had met, and she’d run, unheeding of startled glances from schoolmates, toward me and had flung her arms around me.

“Jeremiah, is it truly you?”

Thus, our brief time together in Amsterdam had begun, evenings at cafés, long walks hand in hand, a desperate melding of bodies in alley shadow-embraces, tormented by our restraint and the purity of love that would not allow us to indulge in anything bawdy or tawdry, with the only blight in my life the knowledge that Pietje lived on the streets, an addict who had no heed for following rules or desire for a life plan laid out neatly for him.

My mind returned to the present, and I saw her along the side of the Reflecting Pool, pigeons scattered into the air in front of her.

She was unaware, for a moment, that I was watching her approach, feeling the same feeling all these years later.

She carried a leather-handled bag over her left shoulder. She wore an
emerald-green dress, long enough to reach down below midcalf, and a gray cashmere sweater. Just enough heel in her shoes to show curves in the portions of her calf that were exposed through sheer white stockings.

There was an aliveness to her, a luminescence that was breathtaking, and she drew admiring glances from those gathered at the pool’s edge. When we made eye contact, it was like the touch of static electricity from brushing a fingertip.

“Jeremiah!” She lifted the cups. “It took forever for the street vendor to make these. Espresso.”

When I had opened the condo door a few days earlier, I’d had to grasp the edge of the door frame to keep my balance against the shock of surprise and joy. We had squandered a lifetime apart. I could not bear the thought of losing her again, but I had steeled myself for the possibility. Yet it would be stupid to allow myself to throw away the time I might have with her now.

I held out my elbow, and she took it. Each sipping on espresso, we began to stroll, and I was aware that the two of us drew smiles from younger couples. Yes, if
GQ
had a special edition for geriatrics, I told myself, we could be on the cover, a benevolent image of romance that refused to fade.

“Let’s make this last forever,” I said. It was a courtly thing to say, and while I meant the sentiment, I knew that if she stayed, it was at best only a matter of years until she became a stranger to me.

“Or,” she said, with light elegance, “return again and again.”

We spent five minutes in comfortable silence. She knew where I had been, with Georgie, and that when I was ready, I would tell her. I hoped I would not need to refer to Journal 35 as I recounted it for her.

It could wait. It had to wait.

I pointed at a bench, inviting her to sit beside me, a bench beneath a streetlamp. It vaguely felt like a scene from a black-and-white movie, and that added melancholy to the moment for me.

She sensed it. “Jeremiah, you are troubled. I understand. The meeting with Georgie could not have been easy for you.”

I shook my head and explained that it would be delayed until the evening.

“So,” she said. “You and I have the afternoon to be tourists here.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t sound as delighted as I feel.”

“There is something that must be said.” I pulled out the moleskin notebook and peered at it.

She reached into her purse and dug out reading glasses. “Don’t be vain.”

I slipped the dainty frame onto my nose.

“While I was waiting for you,” I said, “I was admiring the architecture of the Washington Monument. Thinking about the foundation it would take to support the weight. I wanted an idea of how much all the stones would weigh.”

I glanced back at the monument. The pale outline of the daytime moon had risen so that it was just above the tip, as if the point were trying to burst a balloon.