Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [14]
“Do you know you’re being watched?”
Come to think of it, we have noticed Ford sedans idling out front from our place and down to the dead end of the street. One or two straight-looking guys are always inside, smoking cigs and watching everything.
“Yes, but who are they?”
“It’s hard to say. We have so many agreements with other countries that let us spy and break the law in their countries, there’s naturally reciprocity among international intelligence communities. It could be anyone.”
Foreign cars, more of a rarity back then, make an appearance too. Parking is a premium in this old neighborhood, and these guys, thinking perhaps they are invisible, stick out like sore thumbs to anyone looking for a space.
Our phones are clicking and beeping and hissing too. “Israeli intelligence,” Willy speculates. He has been cornering the market in international banking with an emphasis on Middle Eastern—meaning Arab—countries.
“Well, as long as they stay in their cars and don’t call their friends everything should be fine. So you’ll stay off the phone and out of sight?”
“Sure.”
At the prospect of being bugged we are sanguine. Someone listening in would learn all about band bookings, audio production problems, script rewrites, mailing lists, and romance.
One night, he returned and gave us a real fright. He had taken a pair of scissors to his hair, cutting his sandy locks into random shards of uneven lengths. Scarier still, his right pupil had exploded. Where there was earlier in the day a normal round black dot, there was now an uneven square, like a little black box with the bottom ripped out. His speech was hesitant and jittery and he wasn’t making much sense. Something had happened and he couldn’t tell us what.
The next day the guy was gone. And, thankfully, he never came back.
Roaming the side streets in post-Watergate D.C. has us seeing shadows in every parking garage, and looking for signals from balconies, and hidden in newspapers. We begin to see everything through this fantastic lens. Even poor old Lewis starts to take on a sinister, conspiratorial air.
On a night when the band was playing at a nightclub on M Street in Georgetown to a packed house, I was standing by the soundboard in the back watching the show. The band was roaring through a pro set. The whole gang was there and having the time of their lives. And watching them it came to me. It was over, and I was the only one aware of it. I knew what Gordo was about to pull, I knew Chuck was a failure. I knew my girl was going to jump ship. I knew that the band members were still enthralled with Gordo’s bombastic swagger, and that the power play he was about to initiate would prevail, but that ultimately, he would not. I leaned back against a wooden column like a man stunned, and sipped my beer. The smoke, the music, the people I loved, this moment, would stay with me as a funereal bookmark to this chapter of my life. They were all so happy, but by their own misshapen loyalties, they were all so doomed.
The next day, when Willy learned of Gordo’s defection, he banged his fist on the dinner table so hard he broke his wrist.
On another day, at the bank, he arranged for a loan of several million dollars to a company in Spain he would later find out was a shell organization for a consortium of arms merchants who used the money to buy weapons to kill innocent people in South America. It put him off his international banking career and sent his conscience spiraling off into deep dark space. Willy sold everything and took off in his Jeep to become a roughneck throwing chain in the American oil patch out West, dropped the name Willy and became Zak. Only Thomas Merton’s pale philosophy and Native American mysticism could follow and retrieve him. Everyone has to find their own secret cure for what ails them, I suppose.
A white station wagon came for Miss Blake on a hot spring afternoon. She cried as she blew goodbye kisses to the squirrels. Sam moved to a group house full of really sweet people, married a nice guy, and then came down with an incurable arthritis. Lewis