Freedom [105]
“Very nice to meet you,” Lalitha said, loosely shaking his hand and adding nothing about being honored or excited, nothing about being a huge fan.
Katz sank into a chair feeling sucker-punched by a damning recognition: contrary to the lies he’d always told himself, he wanted Walter’s women not in spite of his friendship but because of it. For two years, he’d been consistently oppressed by avowals of fandom, and now suddenly he was disappointed not to receive one of these avowals from Lalitha, because of the way she was looking at Walter. She was dark-skinned and complexly round and slender. Round-eyed, round-faced, round-breasted; slender in the neck and arms. A solid B-plus that could be an A-minus if she would work for extra credit. Katz pushed a hand through his hair, brushing out bits of Trex dust. His old friend and foe was beaming with unalloyed delight at seeing him again.
“So what’s up,” he said.
“Well, a lot,” Walter said. “Where to begin?”
“That’s a nice suit, by the way. You look good.”
“Oh, you like it?” Walter looked down at himself. “Lalitha made me buy it.”
“I kept telling him his wardrobe sucked,” the girl said. “He hadn’t bought a new suit in ten years!”
She had a subtle subcontinental accent, percussive, no-nonsense, and she sounded proprietary of Walter. If her body hadn’t been speaking of such anxiousness to please, Katz might have believed she already owned him.
“You look good yourself,” Walter said.
“Thank you for lying.”
“No, it’s good, it’s kind of a Keith Richards look.”
“Ah, now we’re being honest. Keith Richards looks like a wolf dressed up in a grandmother’s bonnet. That headband?”
Walter consulted Lalitha. “Do you think Richard looks like a grandmother?”
“No,” she said with a curt, round O sound.
“So you’re in Washington,” Katz said.
“Yeah, it’s sort of a strange situation,” Walter said. “I work for a guy named Vin Haven who’s based in Houston, he’s a big oil-and-gas guy. His wife’s dad was an old-school Republican. Served under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He left her a mansion in Georgetown that they hardly ever used. When Vin set up the Trust, he put the offices on the ground floor and sold Patty and me the second and third floors at a price below market. There’s also a little maid’s apartment on the top floor where Lalitha’s been living.”
“I have the third-best commute in Washington,” Lalitha said. “Walter’s is even better than the president’s. We all share the same kitchen.”
“Sounds cozy,” Katz said, giving Walter a significant look that seemed not to register. “And what is this Trust?”
“I think I told you about it the last time we talked.”
“I was doing so many drugs there for a while, you’re going to have to tell me everything at least twice.”
“It is the Cerulean Mountain Trust,” Lalitha said. “It’s a whole new approach to conservation. It’s Walter’s idea.”
“Actually, it was Vin’s idea, at least to begin with.”
“But the really original ideas are all Walter’s,” Lalitha assured Katz.
A waitress (nothing special, already known to Katz and dismissed from consideration) took orders for coffee, and Walter launched into the story of the Cerulean Mountain Trust. Vin Haven, he said, was a very un usual man. He and his wife, Kiki, were passionate bird-lovers who happened also to be personal friends of George and Laura Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney. Vin had accumulated a nine-figure fortune by profitably losing money on oil and gas wells in Texas and Oklahoma. He was now getting on in years, and, having had no children with Kiki, he’d decided to blow more than half his total wad on the preservation of a single bird species, the cerulean warbler, which, Walter said, was not only a beautiful creature but the fastest-declining songbird in North America.
“Here’s our poster bird,” Lalitha said, taking a brochure