The testament, p.6
The Testament, page 6
Bravo pressed his thumbs against his eyelids as if he could relieve the pressure building inside his head. "That day, Dad had something to tell me. It was important, at least it was to him. And I kept putting it off. I told him that we'd talk after dinner." Like a sprinter always gaining on him, that terrible day overtook him again, rendering him mute.
"Maybe what he had to say to you was important," Emma said. "But that's not the issue. You've got to go on, and you won't be able to do that unless you can forgive yourself." Emma put her arm around his shoulders. "Do you think you can do that?"
Bravo kept silent, knowing that she neither wanted nor required an answer. He simply listened, gave himself over completely to what she was saying. The truth was, despite whatever sibling-type fights they'd had when they were young, he'd always admired her, not just for her talents but for her innate intelligence.
"Before you turned your talents to risk management you were a scholar. The fact is, you're still a scholar, just as I'm still a singer. We're who we are, Bravo, whether or not we choose to believe it, because it's imprinted onto us at birth. By God? Yes, by God, through genetics. A risk manager is what you do, but that's not the same thing, is it? Dad understood that, even when you yourself lost sight of the fact."
Well, that was something, he thought as he walked out of the hotel. More than something. Right now, it was all he had.
Chapter 3
Bravo traveled to Washington on the shuttle, checking the faces and demeanor of his fellow passengers both in the terminal and on the plane. He took with him the two keys-the seven-star key, as he'd come to call it, and the more pedestrian Medeco key to his father's apartment-and nothing more, except for the money he'd taken from his safety deposit box. He didn't know why he'd brought the money-a hunch, or a presentiment similar, perhaps, to the one that had brought his father to the Quai de Crenelle six months ago. One other thing: he also carried in his head a growing constellation of facts in search of a pattern.
The dense southern humidity rolling up the edge of the Chesapeake attempted to smother him the moment he strode out of the terminal. Halfway toward the rank of taxis, he stopped, as if abruptly unsure of himself. The sky was a uniform white, tinged with the palest blue lower down, away from the burning sun. Small eddies of a spendthrift wind stirred fistfuls of soot and candy wrappers into brief trembling spirals. Without warning, he turned and purposefully retraced his steps. Back inside the terminal, he walked past the huge plate-glass panels, watching the crowds coming and going. What he was looking for he could not at that moment have said, but like an animal with its snout to the wind he had responded to a peculiar prickling in the hollow between his shoulder blades. He went and got himself a cup of coffee, stood sipping it while he covertly watched the faces of passersby. Part of him felt ridiculous, but another, growing part of him, would not allow him to relax.
At length, satisfying some deeply buried instinct, he threw his paper cup into the trash and headed back out to hail a taxi.
Dexter Shaw had lived in a modest one-bedroom apartment in Foggy Bottom, that curious section of Washington between the White House and Georgetown. A century ago, the low-lying area was damp and swampy, owing to its proximity to the Potomac. Fog swirling in off the river often combined with a thick, greasy airborne mass, an industrial London-like smog emanating from the nearby Washington Gas and Light Company, Godey's lime kilns and Cranford's Paving Company. Nowadays, it was home to many legislators and a good place to network, which was, after all, the currency that greased the wheels of DCs curiously old-fashioned engine.
The apartment complex was in a huge redbrick building that took up most of the block on H Street. It was a modern, completely anonymous structure without ornament or interesting angle, form following function, typical of an unfortunate school of postmodern architecture.
Identifying himself to the uniformed doorman, Bravo took the elevator up to the twelfth floor, went down the blue-carpeted hallway. He slipped the Medeco key into the front door to his father's apartment. It didn't work. He tried again, wriggling it back and forth as if perhaps it needed only some small encouragement to fulfill its function.
He was about to try for a third fruitless time when he heard a voice behind him and, turning, found a small, dark-faced man coming toward him.
"I'm Manny-the super. Johnny-the doorman-phoned down to tell me." He offered his hand. "You're Mr. Shaw's son, ain't you?"
"That's right," Bravo said.
"We were all tore up when we heard of Mr. Shaw's untimely passing. Everybody in the building liked him. He was quiet, you know, kept to himself-but friendly all the time."
My father, the politician, always honing his image, Bravo thought as he thanked the man. "I thought he'd given me the key to the apartment, but it doesn't work."
"No worries." The super took out a ring of keys and, searching through them, inserted one in the lock, opened it. He stood back for Bravo to enter.
"I gotta stay here while you have a look around," he said. "Building rules. You understand."
Bravo said that he did. But when he entered the apartment, he realized that he understood nothing at all. The apartment was empty. As he moved through it, looking in all the rooms and closets, he could find not a stick of furniture, not an item of clothing, nothing that would indicate that the apartment had ever been occupied.
Stunned, Bravo turned to the super. "I don't understand. Where are all my father's belongings?"
The super pursed his lips. He smelled of tobacco and sweat. "I thought you'd have known. They removed the contents of the apartment days ago."
"They?" Bravo shook his head. "Who are 'they'?"
The super shrugged his shoulders, "State Department, government men. Showed me their ID and everything. Was there something in particular you was looking for?"
Bravo shook his head, unable to speak. His father's entire life, where had it gone?
The super gave him an almost furtive look of pity and said that, after all, he thought in this one instance it would be okay to leave Bravo alone in the apartment. Bravo thanked him, and he left.
Bravo closed his eyes, breathing deeply as if trying to find a lingering trace of his father. His eyes snapped open and he went again from room to room, checking drawers, closets and cupboards in the kitchen and bath. Not only had the contents been removed, but the apartment had been thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom. Sanitized. He'd once heard his father use the term when they'd had to abandon the embassy in Nairobi several years ago.
He took out his cell phone and called his father's office at State. After several minutes, he was connected with Ted Coffey, a senior analyst his father had introduced him to several times.
"Hey, Braverman, I'm so sorry. How are you doing?"
"As well as can be expected, I suppose," Bravo said.
"And Emma?"
"Also."
"We all miss him, you know, but no one more than me. He was a goddamned fixture around here. Twenty-plus years, I can hardly believe it myself. Frankly, I don't know what I'm going to do without his expertise. That goddamned analytical brain of his simply can't be replaced, and everyone here knows it."
"Thanks, Ted. That means a lot to me." Bravo walked into the center of the bedroom, turning slowly in a full circle. "Listen, Ted, what did you guys do with my father's belongings?"
There was a moment's pause. "I don't understand."
"Well, I'm standing in his apartment in Foggy Bottom and there isn't a stick of furniture or an item of clothing here. Everything's been cleaned out."
"It wasn't us, Braverman."
"The super said some government men came. He saw their IDs."
"I don't care what the super said," Ted Coffey said. "No one authorized the removal of the contents of Dex's apartment, and that's a fact. Strictly against departmental policy."
Bravo stood for a moment in the silent, bare apartment. Vainly, he tried to imagine his father in this place. Thanking Coffey for his time and heartfelt condolences, Bravo closed the connection.
He looked down at the Medeco key, using his remarkable memory to once again recreate the conversation on the misty Parisian quai. What was it exactly his father had said? Ah, yes. "If something happens take the spare key I gave you and go to my apartment." He'd never said that this was the key to the apartment. Bravo turned the key over and over, light glinting off its machined facets. What had he meant, then?
Assuming he'd wanted Bravo to go to his apartment if something happened to him, why was there nothing here? Again, he felt the peculiar pricking between his shoulder blades. Was this a warning of some kind? Bravo remembered the couple outside the bank, shadowing him. What did they want?
As these thoughts rolled around in his head, he was staring at the key, and now he thought he saw something glittering that he hadn't noticed before. Taking it over to the window, he saw etched into it a string of sixteen tiny letters. They seemed to have no rhyme or reason-certainly they formed no known word. Bravo wondered what they signified.
All at once, a familiar thrill raced through him. He was thinking of the grand games he and his father would play-the messages his father would leave for him in code-which would drive his mother crazy because only he and his father could read them.
It was a basic number substitution code that needed to be worked out because some of the letters were used to tell you which letters to substitute for the ones written. Taking out a pad and pen, Bravo wrote down the letter string, then sitting with his back against the radiator, set to work. What would have baffled a cryptographer was laid out for him like a blueprint. Within five minutes he'd broken the code and what appeared before him was a single word: gangplank.
He knew, of course, what a gangplank was, but he had no idea what his father meant or why he had bothered to encrypt the word. Sunlight, filtered through dirty panes of glass, shot repeating patterns across the parquet floor and barren walls, sadly emphasizing the utter emptiness of the space, which had been scrubbed clean of every last vestige of Dexter Shaw's presence.
As Bravo took one last circuit around the apartment, he searched his memory for an instance of the word gangplank, but he couldn't recall his father ever using it. Leaving the apartment was more difficult than he had imagined. He recalled with a painful vividness his mother's illness and felt now as he had each time he'd left her dying in the hospital: heartsick that she was held prisoner by her illness, by the betrayal of her body, when he was fit and free to walk into the cool neon-lit evening air.
At the elevator, he paused and turned back toward the apartment door. If only he could reach inside and extract whatever was left of his father.
On the way through the lobby, he asked the doorman for directions to an Internet cafe, the closest of which, it turned out, was on 17th Street, more or less midway between Dupont Circle and Scott Circle. He called a cab and waited in the cool of the lobby until it pulled up to the curb.
Ten minutes later, he was sitting at a computer terminal, an iced coffee and a roast beef sandwich at his right elbow. He searched gangplank, but so many results came up that he knew he'd have to narrow his search criteria.
As he munched through half his sandwich, he considered the possibilities. Going on his father's principle of hiding in plain sight didn't work with this particular problem, because Dexter Shaw had gone to a lot of trouble to encrypt the word. Why would he do that? Bravo frowned, concentrating. He no longer tasted the sandwich, no longer heard the soft murmur of voices of those around him; he'd entered into that extraordinary private world his father had observed in him even at an early age. His entire being was directed at unraveling the puzzle at hand. And in the silence of his concentration something came to him. If his father had hidden the word, then gangplank was something well known-something in plain sight. Bravo's head came up. He knew he was right-his father had simply applied his "hidden in plain sight" dictum in a different way.
Putting what was left of his sandwich aside, Bravo returned to the computer terminal, his fingers flying over the keyboard. On one of the many Washington, DC, sites, he typed in the word gangplank. What he came up with surprised him. Gangplank was the name of a marina within walking distance of the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building.
At the marina office, a grizzled old-timer with a cigarette between his bloodless lips told him that there was no boat registered in the name of Dexter Shaw or anyone named Shaw for that matter.
Thanking the old-timer, Bravo walked down to the water and out onto the slips. The day was overspread with a glare of haze that reduced the visible spectrum of light, leveled everything to the dull colors of old laundry. He inhaled the sharp, almost rotten mineral smell of the water as he passed one boat after another. He didn't yet know what he was looking for, but there must be something here-his father's message told him so. Then, on the third slip over, he saw a dark blue and white thirty-seven-foot Cobalt 343. Steffi was stenciled across its stern plate in gold. Steffi, his father's pet name for Bravo's mother. He stood very still, his aspect tense and watchful. It could be a coincidence, but he didn't think so. He didn't believe in coincidence.
He glanced down at the mysterious Medeco key. The more he thought of it, the more it seemed likely that his father would not have kept a boat registered under his own name, especially in light of what had happened to the contents of his apartment after his death. The boat meant something, he suspected, something vitally important, otherwise Dexter wouldn't have named it Steffi, then hidden it so that only his son would find it.
All at once, the marina appeared bleached out, the skyline of DC receding to some other reality. He was alone on the wooden slip, feeling the last remnant of his father he'd been searching vainly for in the apartment. A connection had been established through the boat, a kind of umbilical that drew him ever closer.
It was with this profoundly altered sensibility that Bravo went aboard. He was looking for clues now, the part of his father that remained after his death: an elaborate set of clues and codes that would guide him-and only him-to what his father wanted him to know. He paused, considering this notion for a moment. What if there were others after whatever it was Dexter wanted his son to find, others he was wary of, even afraid of? Bravo thought of the blond couple, the man's incongruous shoes, the woman's feline smile that now seemed to him sinister, a sign not of a flirtation but of a secret she knew and he didn't.
Once again, he felt that peculiar prickling between his shoulder blades, and with an eerie sense of foreboding, he looked around, abruptly fearful that his inattention would lead to sudden disaster. What if they were here, what if he was being watched as he had been in New York? But no, he saw no one suspicious in the general vicinity. The marina was quiet, virtually deserted. Anyone trying to spy on him would have been revealed in an instant. And yet, as he looked farther afield, he saw high-rises whose dizzying banks of windows faced him. Behind any one of them someone could be standing with high-powered binoculars or a telescope, recording his every movement.
With an acute and uncomfortable sense of his own helplessness, he turned and, with equal parts resignation and determination, concentrated on what had to be done now. He began his search in the crescent high-tech cabin with its cream-colored seating-area storage compartment and head, but found nothing there. Returning deckside, he spotted a compartment door just to the left of the wheel, below the array of dials. In its center was set a Medeco lock. With his heart beating fast, he fitted the key into the lock, turned it. The door popped open.
Inside, he discovered a rat-eared address book, a pair of cubic gold cuff links, an enamel American flag lapel pin, a pair of eyeglasses, two packs of cigarettes, a gunmetal Zippo lighter. That was it. Taking this assortment of everyday items, he returned to the cabin, where he slit both packs of cigarettes down the sides, spilled out the contents. To his disappointment, he found only cigarettes. These he slit, too, pawing carefully and vainly through the tobacco.
He held the cuff links in the palm of his hand, as if he could feel in their considerable weight the lingering presence of his father. Flipping open the Zippo, he lit the flame and almost immediately extinguished it. His vision went blurry as he peered through the glasses. They weren't magnifying lenses that could be picked up at any drug or convenience store, they were prescription lenses.
He held the glasses at arm's length, wondering, because so far as he knew Dexter Shaw had perfect vision, he'd never needed glasses.
But perhaps he was wrong, perhaps this was one other thing his father had kept from him. There was only one way to find out. He leafed through the address book, found the number of his father's opthamologist and called him. He was busy with a patient, but when Bravo told his receptionist who he was, she retrieved Dexter Shaw's file.
"Glasses?" she said when she came back on the line. "Why would Dr. Miller prescribe glasses for Mr. Shaw? His vision was exceptional. He had no need for glasses, even reading glasses."
And yet, here he was holding glasses with prescription lenses. Another clue? What other hypothesis was there? He decided that he'd have to go with that one until it proved incorrect.
Now he examined the glasses more closely. On the inside of the right temple was the manufacturer and the model. On the inside of the left was stamped the name and address of an optician. He phoned a taxi service, then carefully gathered up everything he'd found and left the boat.
Walking briskly back down the slip and out of the marina, he kept an eye out for anyone loitering or seeming to work when he actually wasn't. Two teens on bikes sped past him, and a middle-aged man carrying a six-pack of beer and a too-large gut strode by. Bravo turned and watched him walk out onto the slip, climb aboard a boat named TimeGoesBy. Then he resumed walking, hurrying up the street to where the red and white taxi was waiting, engine idling. He got in, gave the driver an address in Georgetown.
Twelve minutes later, he got out in front of the Four Seasons Hotel, an elegant low-rise brick building at 2800 Pennsylvania Avenue. Without looking around, he strode into the lobby, then turned right and stood, shoulder against a column, peering through one of the huge windows at the avenue. The atmosphere was cool, hushed, serene, a perfect sanctuary to gaze out upon the world and once again wonder whether he was being vigilant or paranoid. For a time, he watched taxis and Town Cars pulling up, disgorging fashionable women in stiletto heels and expensive coifs, festooned with shopping bags. Two businessmen stood smoking and chatting, then moved off. He saw no one suspicious, yet he had to wonder whether he knew what to look for.
