Hennessey let that one hang in the air for a while as the waitress showed up with the two number fives. She feigned surprise at their nearly empty coffee thermos, filled both their mugs, and replaced the thermos with a fresh one.
Both men went for the hash browns first: disks of golden brown, the outer shell as crisp as ice on a puddle, the center moist and soft but still chewable. Their eyes locked across the table. Hennessey sighed and looked as if he were about to weep. “Oh, yeah,” he said through his food. “Oh, yeah.”
“What’s yours?” Clyde said after they had been eating for a minute or two.
“Pardon?”
“What’s your character defect?”
“Exactly!” Hennessey said, stabbing his fork at Clyde. He spoke the word so loudly that heads turned around the room. Then he quieted down. “That’s exactly how you have to think in D.C. If you’re dealing with anyone who’s been there for more than five years, you have to ask yourself, ‘Okay, what’s this guy’s character flaw?’ After a while you develop a taxonomy. A classification system. So you have your people-on-a-power-trip. Your self-deluded types. The occasional fanatic, though the system tends to weed those out.” Hennessey paused long enough to pop another bite into his mouth. “Me? I like to win.”
“That’s your flaw?”
“It is when you like it as much as I do. It’s kind of a sick thing, the pleasure of winning.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Clyde said.
Hennessey laughed ruefully. “Your problem with this Iraq thing is that you’ve got tangled up, unwittingly, with people who long ago decided it wasn’t sophisticated to be sincere, that sincerity was for fools, that sincere people were put on earth to be manipulated and exploited by people like them—for the greater good, of course. This is currently the most common character flaw in the Washington establishment—attempts to be Machiavellian by people who lack the talent, the panache, to pull it off. So here you are, good old Clyde Banks, desperately trying to deal with this very real problem here on the ground, and it’s as if you’re in a nightmare where these fucking bush-league Machiavellis listen to what you’re saying but don’t really understand.”
“That’s pretty much what it feels like,” Clyde said, frowning at his corned-beef hash and nodding his head.
“You and I know that something is going on in Forks County, and we would like to do something about it,” Hennessey said, “but between the two of us are about ten thousand of these people who are too busy looking down their noses at us to actually grasp the problem and take action. You must know that taking action is looked down upon, Clyde. This is the postmodern era. When events come to a cusp, we’re supposed to screw our courage to the sticking place and launch a reanalysis of the eleventh draft of the working document. Actually going out and doing stuff in the physical world is simply beyond the comprehension of these people. They’re never going to do anything about the Iraqis in Forks. Never.”
“That sort of confirms what I was thinking,” Clyde said.
“Which brings us back, unless I’m mistaken, to your sudden desire for a last will and testament.”
Clyde nodded and ate for a while. Hennessey did the same, both men gathering strength for the next round.
“’Course,” Clyde said, “Army wants you to have a will anyway, when one of you goes overseas on a combat mission.”
“Of course,” Hennessey said.
“But you’re right in what you’re thinking,” Clyde said. He swallowed hard and turned his head to look out the window. His rib cage shuddered like an old truck engine trying to start up, and hot tears suddenly sprouted from his eyes and ran down his cheeks. He shifted his body toward the window, rested his head on one hand, and let the tears run for a minute or so, knowing that no one but Hennessey could see him.
Hennessey sipped coffee and looked out the window, too. “Sheriff Mullowney won’t help. FBI won’t help. CIA can’t help,” Hennessey said after a while. “Old Clyde is on his own, and this time he’s not going to lose, is he?”
Clyde shook his head and tried to say “Nope,” but his voice didn’t work.
“That’s the spirit,” Hennessey said. “You’ve got to love to win. Should we go out and win one, Clyde?”
“We?”
“I’m not going to sit here and bullshit you. In a little while I’m going to fly back to D.C., and I probably won’t leave until this thing is over. I won’t be here with you on the front line, I won’t be risking my life. Currently my stock is very low with both the CIA and the FBI, because I haven’t been winning recently. I’ve been getting my ass kicked, frankly, which really pisses me off—but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that I cannot arrange for planeloads of heavily armed federal agents to descend from the skies. Or anything like that. But I may be able to make myself useful in smaller ways.”
Chapter Fourty-Nine