The Hanged Man's Song

name and a password that would allow you to access the system. You may reply to . . .
    I had to stop and go into my own notebook, and look up the address of one of the sterile dump sites I keep for this kind of one-time messaging.
    As I was typing it in, LuEllen asked, “What good is that gonna do?”
    “Everybody likes a chance to talk to the boss,” I said. “But nobody wants to remember more passwords than they have to—everybody’s already got too many. At least a couple of these guysare going to send me the same name and password they use to sign on to the committee system.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Never fails,” I said. I pushed the button that sent the memo. “But we won’t hear back until tomorrow.”
    “So let’s go get a decent dinner. Can we do that? I mean, I’m so screwed up.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Something French. With snails in it. Or diseased goose liver. Or Italian. I could do Italian, but I’m pretty fuckin’ tired of panfried catfish.”
    Before we left, I checked for William Heffron of MacLean, Virginia, one of the guys who’d visited Bobby’s trailer. I found his home address and phone number, but no employer listing. Going back through one of the credit agencies, I found U.S. Department of Justice, 1989–1996, and then U.S. Government, 1996 to present. That usually wasn’t enough for a credit agency. They wanted specifics, and since they had settled without them, I assumed that Heffron was an intelligence operative of some kind.
    “He’s dead,” LuEllen said.
    “I know. We’ll probably find out more about him tomorrow.”
    I closed down the notebook, and we went looking for a restaurant.
    >>> I’M probably totally and utterly wrong about this, if totally and utterly don’t mean the same thing, but I’ve always gotten the impression that half of the people in Washington are sleepingwith someone they shouldn’t be sleeping with, in either the sexual sense or the political sense, or both. As a result, the city and the surrounding suburbs have these great little restaurants with tables where you can’t be seen. Exactly the opposite, say, of LA.
    We wound up right across the Potomac at Birdie—singular—a French cafe in Georgetown, a half-block off M Street, where LuEllen ate some things that nobody should ever eat. I stayed with rock doves, which I’m pretty sure are pigeons, but looked, on the plate, the size of sparrows with drumsticks like kitchen matches. They also had dainty, feathery little uncooked plant leaves across their roasted breasts. I lifted the leaves off and looked around, and LuEllen said, “No, don’t throw them on the floor, give them to me.”
    We had a bottle of wine with the dinner, and because we couldn’t be seen or heard, talked about the Carp pursuit.
    “The thing that’s interesting is that the FBI is chasing Bobby’s killer, but they still think it’s a racial killing,” LuEllen said. She was wearing black, as she always did when she got into a decent restaurant east of Ohio, and small diamond earrings. “But we know a high-up security person knows that Bobby was Bobby, so they ought to be all over it, but they’re not.”
    I poked a fork at her. “And somebody else, not the FBI, is chasing Carp, and now they might have a couple of dead bodies,” I said. “Did they know that Carp killed Bobby? Did they know he’s the guy dumping the stuff under Bobby’s name? Or is this some kind of operation? Is it the NSA, which it might be, because Rosalind Welsh apparently isn’t talking to the FBI? But one of the guys looking for Carp used to be with the Justice Department,and the FBI is a branch of the Justice Department. What the hell does that mean?”
    “Whoever it is, we’ve got government people killing each other.”
    “No. We’ve got Carp killing government people. Like you said, those guys didn’t even look like they were armed. They did the same thing we did, stumbling into him. I really don’t think the government goes around killing people . . . except like in wars, and so on.”
    “I don’t have your faith,” LuEllen said. “I know there are cops who’ve killed people who pissed them off.”
    “Sure. But they did it on their own. And maybe somebody higher up didn’t look into it as deeply as they should, but basically it’s not policy. If the killing’s found out, there’s a trial.”
    “So? So we’ve got an outlaw group.”
    “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll tell you one thing—if the FBI doesn’t figure