Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [6]
I met Steve Crawford on the same driver-training course I am now passing, where they taught us how to stop a felon. We drove safety cars with popped-out wheels. All the guys love this part, but Steve was an ace. In the Board Room cafeteria, a bunch of us rookies sat around drinking beer, and Steve said if he did become an FBI agent, he’d have to sell his 1978 Mustang GT. Not likely he’d be drag racing anymore. He’d just painted it a “raspberry and gold dust color,” which sounded kind of luscious. This was before I had bought my ’71 Barracuda, but I piped up about loving muscle cars. He told how he’d hang out in a parking lot in San Bernardino, listening to the old guys talk hot rods; how he’d raced the Bonneville salt flats. By midnight, we were back at the driver-training course, testing out the fast track.
We were two Southern California kids crazy for cars and baseball, high every day on the adrenaline of being at the Academy, working our butts off, entwined in a heroic vision of serving a better world. Made for each other, it seemed.
A sudden coldness hits the rental car and I put on the heat. As I pass the final Marine checkpoint, a thunderstorm that has been on my tail since the D.C. airport breaks with almost comic intensity. Rain plays on the windshield like a cuckoo Caribbean band of tin pots and garbage cans. Cold fog curls up close and puts its lips on the window glass. When lightning forks across the lurid purple sky, again and again, I laugh out loud, for the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover must surely be upon me.
The old man has been dead for decades, but down in Quantico it’s still “Get off Hoover’s grass,” as if he owns our souls in perpetuity. All that stuff about him running around in a woman’s red dress and heels, that’s nonsense, although Hoover did make a fetish out of “cleanliness”—of body and mind, supposedly—fashioned after his own psychosexual obsessions. What a way to run a company.
Hoover liked white shirts, but he did not like homosexuals (although he almost certainly was one). Secretaries could make the coffee, but it was indecorous to be seen carrying a naked coffee cup across the office, so they would place the steaming mugs inside those wooden boxes made for index cards, pretending it was not coffee they were delivering to their white-shirted, not-gay bosses.
Laugh about it now (we don’t), but how far is a mad secret coffee ritual from compliance in a cover-up of dirty tricks? Or a bollixed siege? Hoover’s drive to avoid any sort of personal or bureaucratic shame created a culture of repression and fear that haunts us still. As I pull into the austere brick complex stained dark by the rain, I hear the grim, omniscient voice of the director, years ago embedded in my head: “Never embarrass the Bureau.”
The groundhog! I just remembered! He used to live in a grass quadrangle outside the administration building. Steve and I would set out crackers while pretending to study and he’d taunt me about shooting it on sight, detailing the effect of different-caliber bullets. It was considered good luck if you happened to spot the little guy from one of the glass passageways that connect the towers. We called them “gerbil cages,” scurrying to our classes through the glass tunnels like scores of frantic mice. For fourteen weeks, we lived inside a sealed environment with no fresh air and people always getting sick. That is why we went gaga over the groundhog: He was our brother, and he was free.
Now as I enter the lobby, water tracking from my soaking shoes, something clicks inside my chest, as if