The Devils Teardrop

“Uh-huh. Okay . . .” He closed his eyes, then shook his head. He listened some more. He hung up.
    “Well?”
    “They’ve scoured the entire theater and can’t find an iota of evidence. No fingerprints. No witnesses—no reliable ones anyway.”
    “Jesus, what is this guy, invisible?”
    “They’ve got some leads from this former agent.”
    “ Former agent?” Kennedy asked uncertainly.
    “Document expert. He’s found something but not much.”
    The mayor complained, “We need soldiers, we need police out on every street corner, we don’t need former paper pushers.”
    Jefferies cocked his smooth head cynically. The possibility of police on every street corner of the District of Columbia was appealing, of course, but was the purest of fantasies.
    Kennedy sighed. “He might not have heard me. The TV broadcast.”
    “Possibility.”
    “But it’s twenty million dollars!” Kennedy argued with his unseen foe, the Digger. “Why the hell doesn’t he contact us? He could have twenty million dollars.”
    “They nearly got him. Maybe next time they will.”
    At his window Kennedy paused. Looked at the thermometer that gave the outside temperature. Thirty-three degrees. It had been thirty-eight just a half hour ago.
    Temperature falling . . .
    Snow clouds were overhead.
    Why are you here? he silently asked the Digger once again. Why here? Why now?
    He raised his eyes and looked at the domed wedding cake of the Capitol Building. When Pierre L’Enfant came up with the “Plan of the City of Washington” in 1792 he had a surveyor draw a meridional line north and south and then another exactly perpendicular to it, dividing the city into the four quadrants that remain today. The Capitol Building was at the intersection of these lines.
    “The center of the cross hairs,” some gun-control advocate had once said at a congressional hearing where Kennedy was testifying.
    But the figurative telescopic sight might very well be aimed directly at Kennedy’s chest.
    The sixty-three-square-mile city was foundering and the mayor was passionately determined not to let it go under. He was a native Washingtonian, a dying species in itself—the city population had declined from a high of more than 800,000 to around a half million. It continued to shrink yearly.
    An odd hybrid of body politic, the city had only had self-rule since the 1970s (aside from a few-year period a century earlier, though corruption and incompetence had quickly pushed the city into bankruptcy and back under congressional domination). Twenty-five years ago the federal lawmakers turned the reins over to the city itself. And from then on a mayor and the thirteen-member City Council had struggled to keep crime under control (at times the District had the worst murder rate in America), schools functioning (students testing lower than in any other major city), finances in check (forever in the red) and racial tensions defused (Asian versus black versus white).
    There was a real possibility that Congress would step in once more and take over the city; the lawmakers had already removed the mayor’s blanket spending power.
    And that would be a disaster—because Kennedy believed that only his administration could save the city and its citizens before the place erupted into a volcano of crime and homelessness and shattered families. More than 40 percent of young black men in D.C. were somewhere “in the system”—in jail, on probation or being sought on warrants. In the 1970s one-quarter of families in the District had been headed by a single parent; now the figure was closer to three-quarters.
    Jerry Kennedy had had a personal taste of what might happen if the city continued its downward trajectory. In 1975, then a lawyer working for the District school board, he’d gone to the Mall—the stretch of grass and trees presided over by the Washington Monument—for Human Kindness Day, a racial unity event. He’d been among the hundreds injured when racial fighting broke out among the crowd. It was on that day that he gave up plans to move to Virginia and run for Congress. He decided to become the mayor of the nation’s capital. By God, he was going to fix the place.
    And he knew how. To Kennedy the answer was very simple. And that answer was education. You had to get the children to stay in school and if you could do that then self-esteem and the realization that they could make choices about their lives would follow. (Yes, knowledge can save you.