“What do I do?”
“Keep plugging away. And be careful. You and your roomie are real good at not talking openly about what’s going on. But your tone and your nuances—especially your nuances—communicate volumes. Since your run out to Wildwood, the whole nature of your conversational tone has changed. Remind me, now that you’re a branch chief, to show you the voice-wave analysis systems. They’re damned good, much better than polys at reading people. Anyway, your patterns have changed.”
Betsy leaned back and looked out the window at the dawn. He was right. Paul Moses had changed things, but it had nothing to do with the search she was carrying out. There would be no point, though, in trying to convince Spector of that.
“I’m going to keep working on it,” Betsy said.
“Good. Just wanted to let you know where you stand. You want to let me out of this place?”
June had gone by with her days divided among serious work (four A.M. to eight A.M.), branch affairs (eight o’clock to noon), and meetings ad nauseam (noon to four). She was slapped on the wrist by Spector because her branch’s productivity had declined under her tenure. “That’s because you have me doing all this nonsense,” she responded.
“Doesn’t matter. You’ve got to keep the words coming.”
Weekends were spent with Paul when Paul wasn’t busy with his own work. After the events in Wildwood he had drawn away from her to a safe distance and become more of a buddy than a boyfriend. They exchanged the occasional snuggle or smooch, but even that level of intimacy seemed to make him uncomfortable. At first she assumed he was still embarrassed over his episode of impotence. But as time went on, she began to worry that it went deeper than that and resolved to have a talk with him when she could find time.
Betsy and Cassie began to make plans for their annual Fourth of July bash. With a bit of effort one could see the fireworks display from their balcony, so they always had a few people in. This time they were going to have the Wildwood group plus Kevin, who would be in town for the first week of July running errands for Larsen. Needless to say, their neighbor, Margaret Park-O’Neil, would be there, too, so they could entertain themselves by watching her and Kevin make eyes at each other.
Paul came early and brought a huge bag of ice. He bantered with Cassie in the kitchen, then sneaked up behind Betsy and gave her a hug.
The door buzzer kept sounding as the rest of the crew showed up. Soon enough booze was consumed and food eaten that the conversation was going at a dull roar. Jeff Lippincott and Christine O’Connell had got married in the interim—each still keeping his/her name. Marcus Berry had come back in from the Midwest, where he seemed to spend a lot of time on assignment, to spend the holiday with Cassie. Kevin and Margaret Park-O’Neil resumed exactly where they had left off—Betsy gathered that they had been exchanging a great deal of e-mail in the last month.
They turned on Channel 26 to watch the concert from the Mall and kept on talking and drinking. Betsy watched Kevin carefully. He had never handled his booze well, and it didn’t take long for him to reach the point where he was speaking very loudly and slowly, as if he had to taste each word before it got out of his mouth.
Kevin was trying very hard to impress Margaret, who at least looked impressed. He was telling her, in various ways, how important he had become. About his friends at the Jordanian Embassy. About the really important people coming in from all over the world to study or lecture or do research at American universities, and how he was bending rules and cutting deals with petty bureaucrats to help get them in, and how this was all part of Larsen’s international mutual back-scratching game, which would lead, like a pyramid scheme, to even deeper connections, larger grants, and greater accomplishments. As he talked louder and slower and became less aware of his impact, the room grew quieter and quieter until, aside from Kevin, the only sound that could be heard was “the 1812 Overture” coming out of the television’s two-inch cardboard speaker. “And Dr. Larsen is giving me a huge bonus. He got some new business from Jordan, and I get a five percent commission.”
Two minutes earlier he had alluded to this business from Jordan and had mentioned that it was “a couple of million dollars.” Everyone in the room had heard it.
Now the words “five percent commission” floated in the air for what seemed an eternity. Then a huge aerial bomb exploded above the river, so loud that Kevin startled back and sloshed his drink into his lap. “Time to go watch the fireworks,” Betsy said. “Don’t lean too far over the rail, it’s a hundred feet down to the concrete.”