It was obviously the most interesting thing Linda did and she liked to talk about it once she got going. It was as if she'd forgotten why I was asking. She was an excited teenage girl telling about her adventures, except her speech was slurring while she talked. "Sonof.a.gun," I said. "I'd like to see that." Linda nodded. "It's really bogus," she said. "Some of those women, really high-cla.s.s women." She shook her head at the bogusness of it all. "Could you sneak me in?" I said. Her eyes widened.

"I'll bet you could," I said. "You sneak me in and you're home free. It'll be like I never saw you. I give you back the c.o.ke and the learner's permit as soon as we're out."

Linda said, "I don't know."

I said, "I'll bet you could. You can go right in the front door and through the living room and into the bathroom. If everything's happening in the bedroom, there's no way they'd see you."

Linda was silent. "Yeah, that's... How do you know what the place looks like?"

"There's not much I don't know," I said. "Keep it in mind." Delphic.

"I don't know."

"When's the next, ah, performance?" I said.

"Tomorrow morning," she said. "Eleven o'clock."

"The early bird catches the worm," I said. "I'll pick you up right here at ten of eleven. We'll slip right on in."

"Okay. I guess. I mean, what if I say no?" I smiled at her without warmth. Every year it got easier to smile without warmth. I was starting to feel like Jimmy Carter.

"Well, how will we do it?"

"You'll go in," I said. "Then when the action gets under way, you'll come and get me."

"I usually watch with my friend. What if she says something?"

"Tell her not to. Tell her I'm your dad and I believe in togetherness. That's your problem."

"You're older than my dad," she said.

"Maybe not, maybe I've just had a harder life."

She giggled a little and hiccuped. "Not unless you've been married to my mother," she said.

I let that pa.s.s. I didn't ask how old her father was. I was afraid to.

"Margy's okay," Linda said. "She'll keep quiet."

I took the cocaine and her learner's permit from my shirt pocket.

"Remember," I said. "I have you locked, if I want to press it."

She nodded.

"Don't get smart when the booze wears off," I said. "Don't think I'm too swell a person to bust you."

She shook her head vigorously. More vigorously than I liked. I drove her to the corner of her street and let her out.

"Here, tomorrow," I said. "Ten of eleven."

"Yes," she said, and got out and walked away from me fast without looking back.

Chapter 22.

Susan and I were having a drink in The Cla.s.s Reunion on H Street. The place was full of journalists and booze was at flood tide.

"An orgy?"

I nodded.

"You have a date with a sixteen-year-old girl to go watch an orgy?"

I nodded again.

"And you got the date how?"

"By impersonating a police officer," I said.

Susan nodded. She drank a small swallow of Dewar's and water.

"Do you plan to partic.i.p.ate?" she said.

"Not unless you turn up there."

Susan nodded and kept nodding. "At a-what did the little dear call it?"

"A granny party."

"Yes, a granny party."

"Well, they're not really grannies," I said. "The kids are so young, that's all. They just say that."

Susan nodded again. I poured some Budweiser from the bottle.

"I didn't order by name," I said. "Wonder if this is the house beer."

Susan ignored me.

"What do you expect to find?" she said.

"Same old thing," I said. "I won't know till I look. I just keep pushing and looking. Better than sitting and waiting."

"It requires a rather considerable negative capability," Susan said.

"Lots of things do," I said.

"Want to walk?" she said. "I don't get enough exercise down here."

"Sure."

I paid for the drinks and we left. It was a fine night. Temperature in the fifties, clear. At the corner of H Street we turned east, toward the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.

"Do you think Alexander would really drop out of the race rather than expose his wife?"

"Absolutely," I said.

"It would be hard to choose otherwise," Susan said. "Be hard to avoid feeling guilty."

"Yes, it would," I said. "But I think he is better than that. I think he doesn't want her hurt."

"If he dropped out," Susan said, "he could feel virtuous and make her feel guilty."

"He says he doesn't want her ever to know that he even knows about the films."

"It would allow him to feel superior to her," Susan said.

We walked by the enormous granite pile of the Executive Office Building next to the White House, across from Blair House. It was everything an executive office building should be.

"You shrinks are so cynical," I said. "Is there any behavior that is not self-serving?"

Susan was silent for a bit as we walked along in front of the White House.

"Probably not," Susan said.

"So that the woman who dies trying to save her child does so because if she didn't she couldn't live with herself?"

"Something like that. People will do a great deal to support the image they have of themselves."

"Hard to be romantic seeing life that way," I said.

Susan shrugged.

"Doesn't allow you to believe in heroes or villains or good or bad, does it?" I said. "If all actions are selfish."

"Heroes and villains, good and bad, are not applicable in my work."

"Grant that," I said. "But mightn't they be applicable in your life? How do you know how to act?"

We turned down along the east side of the White House.

"Of course I have vestiges of my upbringing, and religious training, and school inculcation that nag me under the heading of conscience. But consciously and rationally I try to do what serves me most at least cost to others."

"And when there's a conflict?"

"I try to resolve it."

The White House was brightly lit from all sides inside the iron fence that surrounds it. There must have been security apparatus, but I didn't see much. We turned left on Pennsylvania again.

"You don't understand, do you?" Susan said.

"Seems pretty Hobbesian to me," I said.

"Despite the fact that I have much more formal education than you do, and despite your somewhat physical approach to problem solving, you are an intellectual and I am not. You speculate on questions just like this one- how does one determine his behavior. You read Hobbes and G.o.d knows who else. I don't even know Hobbes's first name."

"Thomas," I said.

"Or what he said, or when. The kinds of questions about how to act that you are asking rarely come up for me, or the people in my work. We are results-oriented."

"They come up quite often," I said, "in my work."

"Of course they do. Partly because it's you that is doing the work, and partly because you've chosen a kind of work where those questions will come up."

The august march of government architecture reared on either side of us, the Federal Energy Administration, the Post Office Building, the Justice Department, and across the street the FBI Building. My knee started to bend in genuflection before I caught myself. The munic.i.p.al neo-cla.s.sicism of the architecture was a little silly, but on the other hand it looked the way it ought to. What would have been less silly?

"Can you a.n.a.lyze our relationship in the light of Silvermanian pragmatism?" I said.

"I love you because I find it compelling to be loved so entirely. You love me because as long as you do you can believe in romantic love."

Ahead on the right was the National Gallery with its new wing. Beyond rose the Capitol, on its hill.

We turned back up Pennsylvania Avenue.

"Too bad it's so late," I said. "If it were still daytime, we could take the FBI tour and maybe they'd show me a tommy gun."

"That's your closing comment?" Susan said.

"I have no closing comment," I said.

"What do you think of what I have been saying?"

"I think it is bulls.h.i.t," I said.

"Would you care to support that view?"

"No," I said.

Chapter 23.