Sweet land stories - E. L. Doctorow [48]
Given the general age and infirmity of the Elders, I now function as the managing partner functions in a law office. And Walter John Harmon has come to live through me and will speak in my voice. I have studied the three pages of his plans and I have made the decision that in the first days of thaw we will send our people out to the holy pastures to collect the rocks and boulders for our wall. And one of the newer members, a retired army colonel to whom I’ve given the plans, has gone out and paced the land. He says it is amazing that our prophet has no military experience. For, as designed, these breastworks take every advantage of the terrain and give us positions for a devastating enfilade.
We are assured of a clear and unimpeded field of fire.
CHILD, DEAD,
IN THE ROSE GARDEN
Special Agent B. W. Molloy, now retired, tells the following story: One morning the body of a child was found in the Rose Garden. The sun had just risen. A concert had been given the night before in celebration of the National Arts and Humanities Awards, an event held every year in May. The body was discovered by Frank Calabrese, sixty, the groundskeeper, who had arrived in advance of his workers to oversee the striking of the performance tent. Dew was on the grass and the air was fresh. The light inside the tent was soft and filled with shadows. What Calabrese saw under two folding chairs in a middle row at the east end of the tent was a small Nike running shoe protruding from a shroud-like wrapping. Not knowing what else to do, he phoned the Marine guard post.
In a matter of moments the on-duty Secret Service were at the site. They secured it and radioed the FBI. At the same time the President was awakened, the measures for emergency evacuation of the White House were put in motion, and in short order he, separately, and his family, their overnight guests, and the resident staff were away from the area.
The shroud was scanned and then unwrapped by the FBI bomb squad. The body was that of a boy, white, perhaps five or six years old. It bore no explosives. It was photographed, covered again, put in a plastic bag, and taken away in the trunk of an unmarked Agency sedan.
After the public rooms of the White House and the grounds had been gone over, the President’s party was allowed to return. The workers who had been held with their truck outside the gates were waved in and a few hours later all trappings of the ceremony of the night before had been removed and the White House grounds and gardens stood immaculate under the mid-morning sun.
AT SEVEN-THIRTY that same morning Agent Molloy, a twenty-four-year veteran of the Bureau, who worked in the Criminal Investigation Division, met with the chief of the Washington field office. You’re the SAC on this one, his chief said. Whatever you need. I don’t have to tell you—they are livid up there.
And so, just a few months from retirement, Molloy found himself the agent in charge of a top-priority case. It didn’t matter that the event was without apparent consequences. There was no place in the world with tighter security than the White House complex, and someone had breached it—someone who seemingly could carry a dead child wrapped in a sheet past all manner of human and electronic surveillance.
He had delicate issues to deal with. He wanted first of all to have all military and Secret Service personnel on duty the night before account for their actions. He wanted everything diagrammed. The agents he assigned this task looked at each other and then at him. I know, I know, Molloy said. They have their routines, we have ours. Go.
From the White House social secretary Molloy procured the list of the previous night’s guests. Three hundred and fifty people had been invited to the evening’s concert—awardees, their families, their publishers, dealers and producers, cultural figures, Washington A-list culls, members of Congress. Then there were the orchestra players, various suppliers, and press. Maybe as many as five hundred names and SS numbers to