"Meanwhile, how can I be of assistance?"
"Can you hack into Louderbush's phone calls?"
"I can try. It may depend on which phone company he uses."
"I want to know who he's talked to in the past week and, if possible, what was said."
"Who he talked to, sure. Otherwise I can only get you voice mails. If you're talking about the next two weeks, I can maybe do better."
"Do what you can. Thank you."
A loud bang rattled the house, and then we heard a low whoosh.
"What's that?"
"The guy next door works on motor bikes in his yard. I hope he's all right."
We looked out the window, and the motorbike repairman was fine—and trotting through an open gate and out toward the street.
I followed Bud down the stairs and out the front door. My car was ablaze, the flames rising high and licking the lower branches of a handsome maple tree, with oily black smoke 208
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billowing and a frightful stench spreading across the neighborhood.
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209
Red White and Black and Blue
by Richard Stevenson
Chapter Twenty-four
The fire department found it puzzling. They doubted my story about having not tended to a fuel leak, although one fireman complained that Toyota wasn't the brand it once was.
Anyway, one fireman said, the blaze seemed to have originated in the rear of the car near the gas tank. Two cops came by, acting mildly interested, and when the opinionated fireman told them it looked to him as if it could have been arson, one of the cops said to me, "Do you have any outstanding gambling debts, sir?"
I called a cab to take me downtown, where I rented another car. Bud had outfitted me with a fresh cell phone, having transferred the memory from my old one. The account holder on the new phone was his cousin Ephram. Bud kept the old phone and said he wanted to run some tests on it.
I assumed I was being watched—by multiple parties?—but I barged right into McCloskey campaign headquarters, Mr.
Nonchalant. The multicultural young Phi Beta Kappas in the outer office didn't gasp or even look up, and I could see Dunphy in his office behind his desk.
"Holy shit, Strachey. Get in here and shut the door."
"Have you talked to McCloskey about what happened?"
"He wasn't stunned to hear about it. He had some choice descriptions of you. Loose cannon. Royal fuck up. Goddamn blithering gay caballero. Those are the appellations that are repeatable."
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"I'm no longer an example of a bygone piece of colorfully beloved Americana?"
"He didn't mention that this time."
"Who does he think is behind this?"
"Merle Ostwind."
"That nice Republican country club lady? Come on."
"Not her personally. People who want her elected. Karl Rove? Rupert Murdoch?"
"So, this is all to protect Louderbush and keep him in the race. Then he trounces Shy in the primary and the freaked-out, mild-mannered New York electorate falls in behind Merle in the general. We're back to that scenario?"
"Did we ever leave it? If so, I missed that."
"How adept is Mrs. Ostwind with a gasoline-soaked rag and a match? Somebody just blew up my car."
He sat up. "No."
"Over in Pine Hills."
"Jesus, were you in it?"
"Do I look charred?"
"Oh my God. Are the cops on it?"
"Not in any serious way. Anyway, your name never came up. Or McCloskey's."
"I don't know what to say. God, I'm so sorry, Don. But I don't get it. If you've already been knocked out of the game by Louderbush's despicable blackmail, why would anybody do such a thing? Could it be something else you're involved in?"
"I think not something else, no. I assume it's the Serbians again. Whoever they are."
"More Serbians. Jesus."
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"So, am I still on your payroll?"
"I was going to bring that up. Yes and no. Shy thinks we need to put a bit of distance between you and the campaign.
All this impersonating a federal agent crap and the rest of it has given us all the heebie-jeebies. On the other hand, the senator doesn't want you turning into some embittered ex-employee going off half-cocked. Showing up on 60 Minutes with a paper bag over your head and describing Shy and me as a reeking cesspool of political corruption, et cetera, et cetera. Also, Shy feels that you're the one who enabled Louderbush to blackmail us in the first place, and he'd like to give you the opportunity to get right with the Lord by blackmailing—I use that term facetiously, of course—by blackmailing Louderbush right back. If you can manage it this time."
"Isn't that how this all started out?"
"Blackmail isn't the word I would actually have used for threatening to expose a man's sadistic criminal activities. I'd call it law enforcement by other means. Karmic retribution?
And of course it's all been in the interest of the higher cause of saving New York State from a bunch of Republican idiots."
"The only way out of this that I can think of is, I take the incriminating material I have on Louderbush and find somebody else to confirm it independently—a Times reporter?
The National Inquirer?—and then step aside. Louderbush will blame me, of course, and McCloskey will have to disown me—
your spokesperson will say I approached you guys with this odiferous stuff and you all told me to take a hike."
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"I couldn't have put it more succinctly. This is exactly the approach we were going to suggest. Indirection. And publicly we disown you as seedy PI scum."
"Plus, all the risk will be mine."
"But you'll still be paid. Though from a special fund—an investigative journalism fund set up by a few of Shy's supporters."
"Oh, it's journalism now."
"Will the muck you've raked get in the papers? I should certainly hope so."
I thought, I'm in over my head. It had been a sense of liberal civic duty along with outrage over Louderbush's cruelty along with morbid curiosity along with the need to make a buck along with a comically exaggerated sense of self-importance that had gotten me mixed up in this sociopolitical-twisted-personality phantasmagoria in the first place. But there was still so much I didn't understand about any of it, and it all felt so fraught—would my next car explode with me inside it?—that I considered for about thirty seconds saying to hell with the whole thing.
Then it hit me that that's exactly what somebody wanted me to do at this point: quit. It felt all of a sudden that from the very beginning, I had reacted exactly the way somebody had wanted me to. The more I got roughed up—but never seriously injured—the more determined I had become, and that suited somebody just fine. Under the guise of warning me off, somebody who knew who I was, was egging me on.
Somebody wanted an impasse between the McCloskey and Louderbush campaigns—but an impasse that could collapse at 213