Sweet land stories - E. L. Doctorow [53]
Molloy sighed and started in on the target list. He first looked for the age and struck out names of kids over seven. Then he eliminated names that to his mind connoted black children. With the names remaining, he read in detail the simply worded expressions of heartbreak: beloved son of . . . alive in our hearts . . . classmate of . . . taken from us . . . in the bosom of Jesus . . . It was not with any sense of satisfaction, but with something like a disappointment in himself, that he came upon what he knew he had been looking for. In the Beauregard, Texas, Daily Record a boy named Roberto Guzman, age six, had been remembered in three paid obits—by his parents, by his cub scout troop, and, crucially, by someone unidentified, who had written “Rest in Peace, Roberto Guzman, it was not God who did this to you.”
MOLLOY TOLD HIS secretary to make out the appropriate travel forms and book a next-day flight to Houston with a car rental at the airport. He had a pile of paperwork to go through—the agent interviews were still coming in—but he thought he’d have another look at the cadaver. He seemed to remember there was a small brown mole on the kid’s cheek. The on-site flash photos weren’t any good. He requisitioned a Sony Cyber-shot and went off to the morgue.
The kid was not there.
Molloy, stunned, questioned the attendant, who knew nothing about it. Wasn’t on my shift, the attendant said.
Well, someone took it. You people keep a book, don’t you? Bodies just don’t fly in and out of here.
Be my guest.
Molloy found nothing written to indicate a child’s body had been received or taken away.
Immediately, he called his bureau chief. He was told to come right over.
NOW, WHAT I’M about to tell you, Brian, his chief said—you have to understand a policy decision has been made that was explained to the director, and however reluctantly, he has chosen to go along.
What policy decision?
The investigation is concluded.
Right. Where’s the kid? I’m pretty sure I’ve made an I.D.
But you’re not listening. There is no kid. There was no body in the Rose Garden. It never happened.
So where’d they bury him?
Where? Where they would not be questioned, where nobody would see them at two in the morning.
The two men looked at each other.
They panicked, the chief said.
Did they, now?
They shouldn’t have detained that groundskeeper who found the body.
You’re so right.
Someone tipped his daughter over in Treasury. So they swore him to secrecy, sprung him, and allowed as they’d been holding him as a material witness on some classified matter. But they also told her that they’d perceived signs of dementia. So if he does say something—
That’s really low.
It wasn’t just that. The Post is nosing around. Someone sent them a letter.
From Texas.
Well, yes. How did you know?
I can tell you what it said, Molloy said.
WHEN AGENT MOLLOY got back to his office, he was seething. He sat down at his desk and, with his forearm, swept the stack of paperwork to the floor. There’d been a pattern of obstruction from the start. He’d felt an operative intelligence in the shadows all through this business. On the one hand they wanted answers, as why wouldn’t they, given an intolerable breach of security? On the other hand they didn’t. They may have made their own investigation—or they may have known from the beginning. Known what? And it was so sensitive it had to be covered up?
Whenever Molloy needed to cool off, he went for a walk. He remembers how, when he first came to Washington as a young trainee, he’d been moved almost to tears by the majesty of the nation’s capital. Quickly enough it became mere background to his life, accepted, hardly noticed. But in his eyes now it was the strangest urban landscape he had ever seen. Classical, white, and monumentalized, it looked like no other American city. It was someone’s fantasy of august government. On most any day of the week, out-of-town innocents abounded on the Mall. The believers. The governed. He kept to the federal business streets, where the ranks of dark windows between