The Hanged Man's Song

Weeping members of all four families were shown, the cameras lingering lovingly on the tears rolling down overweight cheeks. The victims had all been good providers.
    The government was now denying that the experiment took place, but nobody believed it anymore. There was too much money at stake.
    In rounding up the Bobby stories, the anchorman said that thespecial forces officer accused of executing an Arab prisoner had been flown into Washington and was being questioned by members of the Army’s criminal investigation division.
    >>> THEN a second guy, a media specialist, went off in another direction: “The one question that everybody is asking is, ‘Who is this Bobby, where does he get this stuff, and what does he want?’ ” To help him with this conundrum, he interviewed two congressmen who were newly enough elected to be fairly clean, two media advisors—public relations guys, we supposed—and the mayor of San Francisco.
    After cutting through the bullshit, the answer was that they had no idea of who Bobby was, where he got the stuff, or what he wanted. One of the PR guys guessed that Bobby was a hacker who was getting his information from government databases, said Bobby probably wasn’t acting alone, and referred to Bobby’s group as “Al-Code-a.”
    “That’s bad,” I said.
    “Carp’s gonna have a short life span as Bobby,” LuEllen said. “If we don’t get him soon, somebody else will.”
    >>> CARP’S apartment was in the District, two miles due north of the White House, on Clay Street between Fourteenth and Fifteenth, and a half-block east of Meridian Hill Park. The building was a crappy brown-brick five-story wreck; we cruised it once, and on the back side found that half the tenants had their washhung out on the balconies. The whole area was run-down, with the kind of street life that suggests you might want to look over your shoulder every once in a while: idle guys, walking around with their hands in their pockets, surrounded by an air of hip-hop cool; clusters of skaters; a drug entrepreneur whose eyes skidded right past me; women in government secretarial dress who walked as if they had a cold wind at their back, shoulders hunched, heads down. Alleys, with people in them; trash on the streets and sidewalks; and some graffiti.
    Up the hill from the apartment was Meridian Park, with a fountain that dropped in a pretty series of steps down a long hill toward the south. Down the hill was Fourteenth Street, with some ordinary strip-shopping-center businesses—nail places, a pizza parlor, a diner, a branch bank, like that. There was enough automobile traffic that nobody gave us a second look as we made the pass at Carp’s place. The curbs were packed with cars, mostly old and beat-up. No sign of a Corolla.
    From his bills, we knew Carp’s apartment was on the fifth floor, which, from the outside, appeared to be the top one. As we got to the bottom of the hill, at Fourteenth, an aging Ford Explorer started backing out of a parking spot across the street. I barged through oncoming traffic and grabbed the spot.
    We were now two hundred feet from the apartment entrance, parked in front of a place called either Lost and Damaged Freight or Major Brand Overstocks, or both; I never figured it out. We sat and watched for a while, then started working on a New York Times crossword puzzle, hung up on an eight-letter word across the middle of the puzzle, the clue being, “Old grape’s reason for being?”
    “Raison d’être?” LuEllen suggested. She took the words right out of my mouth.
    “Eleven letters,” I said, counting them on my fingers. “Unless I’m spelling it wrong.”
    “Look it up. Gotta be ‘raison’ something-or-other. The question mark in the clue means it’s a pun.”
    “Ah, man.” But I got out the laptop and called up the Merriam-Webster. Eleven letters.
    We were in the car for two hours, off and on, watching the sun go down, still working on the puzzle, hung up on the old grape. There was nothing going on in my brain that would answer that question, but I was still working on it when the streetlights came on.
    “Better think about what we’re gonna do,” I said.
    “Shush,” LuEllen said. “Look at these guys.”
    Two guys were walking up the street toward Carp’s apartment. They were hard to make out in the fading light, but one was black, one white.
    “The guys from Carp’s place, the mobile home?” I whispered, even though there was nobody