The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [52]
“You must be Mr. White, correct?” She got my name from when I checked in at the guardhouse. “Relax, Mr. White. They keep the doors unlocked so that the patients feel they have more freedom. But not that much freedom,” she says with the puffy laugh, pointing at a thick steel door that looks like a bank vault: the real door to get inside.
“Um… great,” I blurt, not knowing what else to say.
“So how can we help you, Mr. White?” she asks as I realize she’s one of those people who says your name over and over until you want to eat poison.
“Actually, it’s Beecher. I’m here from the National Archives. Anyhow, we were thinking of doing an exhibit on the history of St. Elizabeths—when it was run by the government and founded to help the insane… then converted in the Civil War to help wounded soldiers… It’s just a great part of American history—”
“Just tell me what time your appointment is and who it’s with.”
“That’s the thing,” I tell the woman behind the glass. “They told me to come over and that I should take a quick tour of the campus.”
“That’s fine, Beecher. I still need a name to call first.”
“I think it was someone in Public Affairs.”
“Was it Francine?”
“It might’ve been—it was definitely a woman,” I bluff.
She lowers her chin, studying me through the fingerprint-covered glass.
“Something wrong?” I ask.
“You tell me, Beecher—you have no appointment and no contact name. Now you know the population we’re trying to help here. So why don’t you go back to the Archives and set up your meeting properly?”
“Can’t you just call the—?”
“There is no call. No appointment, no call.”
“But if you—”
“We’re done. Good day,” she insists, tightening both her jaw and her glare.
I blink once at her, then once at David Bowie. But as I turn to leave…
The steel door that leads upstairs opens with a tunk.
“—sure it’s okay to go out here?” Clementine asks as she walks tentatively behind a man with salt-and-pepper buzzed hair and chocolate brown eyes that seem too close together. At first, the gray in his hair throws me off—but that bulbous nose and the arched thin eyebrows… God, he looks just like the video on YouTube.
Nico. And Clementine.
Heading right for me.
* * *
28
Mr. Laurent, your next appointment’s here,” the girl called out from the front of Wall’s Barber Shop, a long narrow shop that held seven barber chairs, all in a single row, with Shoeshine Gary up near the front door and local favorite James Davenport cutting hair in chair one.
Laurent glanced at her from the very last chair in the back, but never lost focus on his current—most vital—client.
“I should get back. It’s late,” Dr. Palmiotti said from the barber chair.
“Don’t you go nowhere. Two more minutes,” Laurent said, pressing the electric razor to the back of Dr. Palmiotti’s neck. Cleaning out the tater patch—that’s what Laurent’s grandfather used to call cleaning the hair on the neck. The very last part of the job.
“So your brother…” Laurent added, well aware that Palmiotti didn’t have a brother. “If he needs help, maybe you should get it for him?”
“I don’t know,” Palmiotti replied, his chin pressed down against his chest. “He’s not that good with help.”
Laurent nodded. That was always President Wallace’s problem.
This close to the White House, nearly every business had at least a few hanging photographs of local politicians who’d helped them over time. Since 1967, Wall’s Barber Shop had none. Zero. Not even the one from Newsweek, of Laurent cutting President Wallace’s hair right before the Inauguration. According to the current owner, in the cutthroat world of politics, he didn’t want to look like he was taking one side over the other. But to Laurent, the blank walls were the cold reminder that in Washington, D.C., when it all went sour, the only person you could really count on was yourself.
“Just be sure to say hello for me,” Laurent said, finishing up on the doctor’s neck. “Tell him he’s in my prayers.”
“He knows that. You know he knows that,” Palmiotti said, trying hard to not look uncomfortable.
Laurent wasn’t surprised. Like most doctors,