No, Nick would stay forever in out-of-the-way, B-city offices; Baltimore or Richmond or Frederick were as close as he’d come to Washington and though less than a hundred miles each way from the Big Town, they were still universes away, and the leap from one to another, without a validating stop in New York or Miami or L.A. (where Nick would never go, either) was a quantum leap…impossible by the physics of Bureau culture.
Yet for all of that, he did not hate Howdy Duty. Utey had simply faced the hard decision of sorting out the Tulsa incident so that it would do the Bureau the most good, and if he identified himself and his own career as “The Bureau” in some way, it wasn’t a selfish decision so much as a helpless one. That was how it went; that was how he thought.
And so, when Nick picked Howard D. Utey up at the New Orleans airport, it wasn’t a particularly tense or awkward thing. They both understood.
Howard stood on the curb outside the American terminal and waved when he saw Nick in the gray government Ford. He even had a little smile as he ducked to come in, tossing his bag in the backseat.
“Hi, Nick. Boy, you’re looking great. Still keeping that hair, huh?”
“That’s right, Howard. It just won’t fall out, I don’t know why.”
“Nick, I was sorry to hear about Myra. Was she in any pain at the end?”
“No. She’d been in a coma for a long time. She just stopped breathing. It wasn’t hard end. She had a hard life but she had an easy end.”
“Well, thank God for small and tender mercies.”
“I know, Howard,” said Nick, dully, concentrating on not calling him Howdy, though it occasionally happened, and Utey, who knew his nickname well, always pretended not to notice.
Howdy Duty was quite a small man, actually, small and ferrety, but not stupid or slow. He had simply given himself totally to the Bureau, and had set about to rise with the patience and the fury of a poor boy. He managed it with certain political gifts, to be sure; but also by working as hard as it was possible to work.
“They still call me ‘Howdy Duty,’ Nick?”
“I’m afraid they do, Howard,” said Nick as they drove in from the airport.
“Well, that’s all right, as long as it’s behind my back, and as long as I never hear that it’s gotten to Secret Service, Nick. That I would have to regard as an act of treachery, not to me personally, but to the Bureau as a whole. You know, everybody here likes you, Nick – everybody everywhere likes you, that’s one of your gifts – and it’d do everybody a lot of good if you’d pass that information around. I know that informally passed information is sometimes more efficiently communicated than office memos. Fair enough?”
“Yes, Howard,” said Nick. That was Howard. He established the rules and played by them – unless it suited his purposes to change them.
“Now, Nick, a lot of what we’ll be doing in the next few weeks is liaison, which again is why it’s great to have you on the team. You have a wonderful gift for getting along with people. Don’t think it hasn’t been noticed. And you’ll need all your affability, all right? All of it. Every bit.”
“Sure, Howard. So what’m I going to be doing? I heard the pres – ”
“That’s right, Nick. On March first, the president will be flying down from Washington in the morning for a speech and presentation in downtown New Orleans. He’s going to be giving Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez the Freedom Medal – you know, the Archbishop of Salvador who won the Nobel Peace Prize?”
Nick knew, of course. Archbishop Roberto Lopez was a validated Great Man, the heir to the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero; he had worked tirelessly at getting the two sides in that bitter war, exacerbated so terribly of late by the Panther Battalion massacre, to talk.
Nick remembered the news footage: Bishop Roberto Lopez walking among the dead children by the riverbank in his humble black cloth with a humble silver cross about his neck, his eyes wracked with tears behind the wire-frame glasses. A poet, an expert on medieval Latin alchemy, a complete apolitical, who had the love in his heart to tell NBC, “I do not hate the men who did this. I love them and I forgive them. To hate them and to demand their punishment is to guarantee that such horror will be perpetuated.”
“The president’s popularity has slipped a bit since the war, Nick. I think he wants to get on the Bishop Roberto Lopez bandwagon. It certainly won’t do him any harm.”
“Maybe he just admires the guy,” said Nick. “A lot of people do.”
“Anyway, I know you’re not aware of this down here, you know” – he meant, Nick knew, at your level – “but recently relations between the Bureau and the Secret Service have not been very friendly. In Chicago three months ago, we ran into a problem of intersecting investigations – counterfeit money drew Treasury in and we were working it from an organized crime standpoint, and somehow we never knew the other was there. An arrest sequence got confused and one of our people shot one of theirs. Didn’t kill him, and they say he’ll probably be on his feet in six months or so, but it left bad feelings.”
Nick shook his head. It sure as hell must have. No one really liked working with the Secret Service, particularly on security details, where the guys in the sunglasses were absolute pricks, and by informal fiat took command of any situation. Feelings always were rubbed raw; no ten-year Bureau man liked being told what to do by a twenty-three-year-old boy in shades with an earpiece, a lapel pin, and an Uzi in a briefcase. And yet that’s the way it always happened.
“It’s the same drill, Nick, you know it. Secret Service will provide the manpower and the close-up security; they’ll run their own security investigations; but we’re there to back them up, to run interference with the locals with them, and to handle any investigative work that won’t fit into their time frames.”
To be their gofers, Nick thought bleakly.
“Now the director is adamant,” Howdy continued. “We’ve got some fence-mending to do. And that’s our job. Fence-mending. You and I, Nick, we are the fence menders. Through you, I’ll be turning over the resources of our New Orleans office to Secret Service; in turn, we’re to be granted a bit of security authority ourselves and indeed, we’ll be part of the operation on the day Flashlight arrives. It’s a good chance, Nick; it’s something I thought you’d enjoy, and if it goes well, I’ll certainly mention you prominently in the reports. You’ll have a great deal of latitude too; the freedom to do what best you can do. Who knows? Things can change. This might just get you out of your rut.”
“Sure, Howard. I appreciate the chance.”
But Nick knew Howard would be on him like a cheap cologne; that was Howard’s way, that was the Bureau’s way; it had happened in Tulsa; it was happening now.
“So, Nick, you’ve got a clean desk? You’re ready to swing away? Hap Fencl said you’d come to me with nothing hanging over you. Is that right?”
“More or less. I’ve got this one little thing going, a murder that was probably facilitated by some high-tech military equipment. You know, it’s funny, the guy was also Salva – ”
“Don’t we turn here?”
They had just sailed by a sign that pointed to downtown off a left-hand turn.
“Huh?”
“I’m staying at the Hilton. Weren’t we supposed to turn here?”
“Oh, uh, no, Howard, not that way. That’d get you there. But this time of day, it’s faster to stay on Sixty-one, then cut over to Ninety. See?”
“Oh, all right. It’s your town. But I would have turned there,” Howdy Duty said. He didn’t mean to sound displeased, Nick thought; but he did anyway.