Night of the Avenging Blowfish Read online

  “Well, does your team have a name?” the woman asked.

  “Not that we’re aware of,” I said.

  “We’re an expansion team,” Horner said. “The front office hasn’t given us a name yet.”

  “Do you play with a recreational league?” another woman asked.

  “We haven’t found our league yet. We’re still looking for it,” Widdiker said, which I think was the final disquieting remark that drove the two women away, right as Lou Benador of the CIA saw us at the bar and, with a suspicious smile, walked up to us and stared at our jerseys.

  “Where’d you get those?” Benador asked.

  “The store, Lou. They sell them in sporting goods,” Widdiker said, because we had no intention of telling him anything that mattered.

  “Who the fuck,” Benador said as he turned to look at the back of Horner’s jersey, “is Miss Ophelia St. Clare?”

  “You guys in the CIA don’t know shit,” Yamato said.

  “How can you call yourself an intelligence organization if you’ve never heard of Miss Ophelia St. Clare?” Horner asked incredulously, although now that he’d had four or five beers, Horner probably didn’t remember who Miss Ophelia St. Clare was, either.

  “Is this for the spookball game?” Benador asked.

  “Pardon me? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Widdiker said.

  Horner whispered in my ear, “Who’s Miss Ophelia St. Clare? I forget.”

  “Are you guys taking this seriously?” Benador said, squinting at us with disbelief. “Have you already formed a team?”

  “These are our bowling shirts,” Yamato said.

  “How come you have grass stains on a bowling shirt?” Benador said, looking at Yamato’s jersey.

  “We bowl outdoors,” I said.

  “What makes you think there’s even going to be a spookball game? That’s just bullshit. No one believes it,” Benador said.

  “We’ll kick your ass,” Horner said.

  “So you really formed a team?” Benador persisted.

  “Bowling,” Yamato said.

  “Don’t play dumb with me,” Benador said.

  “He’s not. He really is dumb,” Widdiker said, staring at Benador. “So have you guys formed a team?”

  “No. But our jerseys are better than yours,” Benador said.

  “I doubt it. You assholes in the CIA can’t even spell,” I said. “That’s why you abbreviate the name CIA.”

  “Where do you guys practice?” Benador said.

  “North America,” Widdiker said. “Come by and watch us sometime.”

  “It’s useless talking to you guys,” Benador said.

  “Well, we’re always willing to be of no help to you,” Yamato said.

  “See you at the game,” Benador said.

  “No you won’t. We’re not going to tell you where it is,” I said, although it was equally possible that we wouldn’t be able to locate the game either. As Yamato said later in the evening, under the mystical effects of alcohol, “It’s not whether you win or lose. It’s whether you find the game.”

  “Who said that? Ralph Waldo Emerson?” Widdiker asked.

  “Why?” Horner said. “Is Emerson on our team?”

  “He’s dead,” Yamato said.

  “We’ll have to put him on the injured-reserve list,” I said. It occurred to me, and not with any understandable reason, that even if we didn’t find the game, it was going to be played anyway—an insight that was either Zen or Michelob Dry.

  3

  Americans liked to believe that the White House was a center of power and wisdom, but I favored the idea that the White House was like Disneyland with machine guns. Like Disneyland, the White House had its famous and fabled characters, instantly recognizable, known primarily for a few exaggerated qualities, who came into and out of the public’s lives in thoroughly controlled rituals. Just as people went on pilgrimages to Disneyland to see Mickey Mouse and Goofy, they came to the White House to see the president or other stray eminences. There was no Goofy at the White House, but you could soundly argue that the public always elected one, and he went by a different name. The White House didn’t have any rides, unless you figured that since the president controlled intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple nuclear warheads that could transform hundreds of foreign cities into gigantic clouds of radioactive dust, it was sort of the world’s scariest ride that no one had taken yet.

  Disneyland didn’t have machine guns, but we did, which was one of the strangest things I never got over—how we were required to be groomed immaculately, with short hair precisely combed, wearing neatly tailored suits and neckties so we’d project a handsome, civilized presence during our protection assignments as we looked warily through every gleeful and obsequious crowd, ready in an instant to shoot someone to death with complete civility and grace. I thought that, if this ever happened, if at an elegant state dinner amid all the stray eminences someone’s life was threatened and I had to shoot someone, I’d stand over the body and say, “Excuse me.”

  I tried one time—I think when I was at a bar with Widdiker and Yamato—inventing lines I’d say to someone I’d just shot during an assassination attempt, and what I thought of was, “I hope your death isn’t an inconvenience to you.”

  This was at the Nevermore Bar & Grill, which seemed to have gotten its name from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe that we hadn’t read, although we sometimes enjoyed sitting around at the bar getting slightly drunk and trying to show off our erudition to strangers by saying we could quote Edgar Allan Poe by heart. And if someone asked us to do so, one of us would stand up, pause significantly, and say: “Nevermore.”

  It seemed appropriate for Secret Service agents to hang out at a bar associated with Poe, because Poe was grim and morbid, and so was the Service, to which all of life was an imminent death. This put us in the same brooding category as soldiers, police officers, and medical examiners. The only reason we existed was that we expected the worst. We were always trying to think up new mottoes for the Service, such as “When in doubt, pull the trigger.” Yamato said the Secret Service motto should be something concise and lyrical: “Aim for the head.”

  “Shooting someone in the head isn’t lyrical,” I told him.

  “But it’s concise,” he said, smiling that night toward three young women nearby, none of which he was likely to meet and fall in love with. We were expected to be very careful about who we met and who even knew we existed, since it was our obligation to remain as secret and anonymous and unknown as possible, never telling anyone who we worked for, except to describe our employer as “the government,” which almost always caused people to assume we worked for the CIA or the Secret Service. At this point, if any of us had talked with anyone long enough to mysteriously announce that we worked for the government, they’d say, “You mean you’re spies?” To which we frequently responded by saying, “Yes, but we’re not supposed to tell anyone.” One night, a woman who assumed Widdiker and I were spies said, “Do you work for our government?” And I said, “I don’t know. Which government is yours?”

  It was a bad thing, going into a bar after work, wanting to meet some woman you couldn’t really talk with because, if she wanted to get to know you, you had to make sure she didn’t. Although usually I never met any women anyway. It’s not as if every time we went to the Nevermore there was a handy supply of unmarried women eager to meet whatever strange man entered their field of vision. Usually, nobody met anybody, and being alone in the world awhile longer was still painfully certain. Most of the agents were married, so they didn’t hang out with us in bars (which was somewhat discouraged anyway, since drunk or hungover agents were professional liabilities). Still, bars were where Yamato and Widdiker and I often gathered to drink immoderately and look with wonder at all the women we’d probably never know. Even if you did finally meet a woman—and I think that was partly why I existed, to finally meet a woman—there was very little you could tell her. One night I
met an agonizingly cute woman named Marcia, who sat next to me at the bar, periodically bumping her knee against my thigh, either because she was attracted to me or because she had bad coordination. She told me freely about herself, that she was a Senate staffer, and described the legislation that she was working on. Then she asked what I did.

  “Things,” I said.

  “Things?” she asked. “Could you be more specific?”

  “Yes. I do things and stuff.”

  “And for whom do you do things and stuff, or is that too personal?”

  “It couldn’t be personal. I work for the government.”

  “Which branch?”

  “It’s not a branch. It’s more like a concealed root.”

  “You’re being awfully secretive. Are you a spook?” she asked, looking a little bit amused and uncertain.

  “No. I’m real. Touch me.”

  She laughed, and put her fingers on my wrist, saying, “I don’t doubt that you’re real. I just want to know who you work for. Is it the CIA or the NSC? Am I getting warm?”

  I put my hand on her forehead and said, “You’re a little warm, but it seems normal.”

  “Are you with the Secret Service?”

  “No. I’m with you.”

  “I’ll bet I’ve seen you on the TV news before, standing behind the president with your sunglasses on. Why do Secret Service agents always wear sunglasses?”

  “I think they like Ray Charles.”

  “Do you protect the president when he sleeps?”

  “I’ve never slept with the president. I think his wife does that.”

  “Wow. You really aren’t going to tell me anything about your job, are you?”

  “I’d like to, but I’m not supposed to.”

  “You mean you can’t even say who you work for?”

  “Oh, I can say that. I work for the government.”

  “Well, maybe I’d like to get to know you, Doyle, but how am I supposed to do that if you won’t tell me anything about yourself?” she said with exasperation.

  “It puzzles the hell out of me, too.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Well, who do you talk to at the end of the day?”

  “I’m allowed to talk to myself, as long as I don’t reveal very much.”

  “You must be lonely,” she said, putting her hand briefly on my shoulder.

  “My employer doesn’t restrict that. We can be as lonely as we want to be. It gives us something to do when there’s no one else around.”

  ACTUALLY, Agent-in-Charge Doltmeer approved of male agents being married, since he believed men were more emotionally stable when they had a woman to share their lives with. But he also preferred us to be single, so we wouldn’t be distracted by marital problems. I got the impression from Doltmeer that the best male agents (and the majority of us, by far, were male) were men with wives and children to live for, while the equally ideal agent was an unmarried man who couldn’t be interfered with by a woman. And I thought of Natelle, the one woman in the world I always wished would interfere with me. Sometimes in a meeting when we were being briefed on the most critical details of protecting the president or some visiting benign tyrant friendly to the United States, Natelle spontaneously came into my mind, as if she’d always been there and always would be. Natelle was a fundamental truth to me, like air. She was the one person I loved more than I could recall love ever involving before. And when I thought of death, or the afterlife, I didn’t imagine rushing joyously toward the embrace of God, but toward Natelle—who might be available in the afterlife, but not now. She was married. And one day, when my emotions were ready for something that my reason didn’t know anything about, I fell in love with her. That was a violation of a commandment, the one saying thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. But Natelle wasn’t married to my neighbor. She lived across town. Perhaps there should have been a commandment saying thou shalt not covet someone’s wife even if she lives across town. But I didn’t really covet her. I secretly, wistfully, loved her, which maybe was the same thing as coveting, but it sounded better.

  And of course I never told her. It was hard to be in love with a woman and not tell her, but it seemed like a kindness I owed her. Maybe it was because I had morals. Possibly I was born with those morals, because I didn’t remember adopting them. There were times when I wanted Natelle, and I couldn’t tell her, and I felt so moral that all I could do was crumple in my heart and cry. That was my secret life. Everyone had a secret life. Everyone waited to find the one person they could tell it to. I found her. I just wasn’t supposed to tell her so.

  Psychiatrists call that neurosis. Most people call it love. Both sides are probably right.

  One day at the end of work as Yamato and Widdiker and I were getting ready to go out drinking, Doltmeer told us we should try to meet some nice women, as long as we didn’t talk with them. No one understood Doltmeer, and we didn’t particularly try. What he asked of his agents was that they give the Service 110 percent, the same kind of routinely stupid exhortation that coaches gave their athletes. Whenever he did this in a meeting—asked everyone again to give 110 percent—someone would always say, “I think 109 percent’s enough,” or someone might say, “I’m a little tired today. I’m only giving 102 percent.”

  Of course there were people like Sandlin and Ardink and Yegg, utterly somber and obedient career agents who would never annoy or contradict Doltmeer and who regarded people like me with pious distaste. Ardink in particular was proud of giving 110 percent and tried to politely scold any of us who wouldn’t. He said, after one meeting where some of us had pissed off Doltmeer again, that, at least for the morale of everyone, if for no other reason, we should shut up and stop taunting everyone who was willing to give 110 percent.

  I said, “Ardink. Do you know how much 110 percent is? It’s 10 percent more than exists.”

  “I’m not stupid,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t be modest,” Widdiker said.

  “If you guys don’t like the Service, why don’t you just quit?” Ardink suggested.

  “If we quit, you might have to give 120 percent,” Oxler said. “You’d go into a meeting one day, and Doltmeer’d say he needs everyone to give 160 percent. And then you’d die.”

  “You guys aren’t nearly as amusing as you think you are,” Ardink said. “If you can’t show a simple sense of professionalism, why don’t you consider resigning?”

  “Resign? This is the only job in the world where you can dress up like you’re going to church and carry a machine gun. It’s too neat to resign,” Yamato said.

  “I can’t stand here jabbering. I’ve got to go now and give 101 percent,” I said.

  We didn’t invite Ardink or any of the bothersomely serious guys to join our covert spookball team, partly because they didn’t want to join it and partly because we thought they were pricks. Which was also what they thought we were. A troubling fact I figured out years earlier when I was in my twenties was that for every five people you could name as pricks, they could also name at least five, one of whom was probably you. So I thought that, at least once in their lives, and probably a lot more than that, everyone in the world was a prick, or they’d at least been called one.

  4

  Yamato frequently didn’t want to protect the president because he hadn’t voted for him. Naturally, we’d all been meticulously screened for loyalty and psychological suitability for the Service, with great emphasis on our supposed moral character and sanity, although I was never convinced it was provably sane to have a job where you carried pistols and machine guns and were willing to shoot any human in the world to protect a politician you didn’t vote for and maybe didn’t even like.

  Usually, when I was assigned with Yamato to protect the president from the various crowds that invariably had no interest in killing the president, Yamato would say to me privately, “I’m not going to pr
otect him. He’s a Democrat.”

  This didn’t matter. Of the approximately 260,000,000 people who lived in the United States, not including the fifteen or twenty million people the U.S. Census Bureau didn’t count because they didn’t feel like it and said so, almost nobody wanted to kill the president. Possibly a few thousand people at any given time wanted to slug the president, maybe even knock the wind out of him. But these weren’t enemies of the state. These were voters. If the Secret Service had an accurate list of all the Americans who ever said threatening things about the president, we’d have needed a new federal prison just to hold them for questioning, and some of the people being questioned would be senators, representatives, and members of the White House staff. A president might be beloved by many, but he’s endured by the rest.

  Including Yamato, who always seemed willing to turn the other cheek and let someone slug the president just once.

  “I’ve been practicing my timing,” Yamato said to me quietly as we stood in our vigilant poses at the edge of a grandstand where the president was making a few tedious and self-serving remarks at a lower-income housing project in Houston, Texas. We looked in the crowd for assassins. Assassins were allowed to look like anybody, so, unfortunately, the Secret Service had often relied on a proven method of identifying assassins:

  Boom! Boom!

  Aha!

  I glanced at Yamato and asked, “What timing?”

  “If someone lunges at the president,” he said.

  “You mean your timing to stop them?”

  “No. I mean my timing to valiantly get there after they’ve hit him at least once.”

  Yamato almost always had a kind and cheerful expression, as if he possessed some inscrutable spiritual tranquility that would make him do whatever seemed best for anyone, but this could easily have been a genetic disguise, a deceiving accident of the way facial features appear on people regardless of their real emotions and desires. Despite Yamato’s soothing countenance, he could be just as moody and sullen and hostile as any normal person, so it was always a little astonishing and funny to look at his kind and cheerful face as he said, “I wouldn’t mind it if someone hit the president with a board.”