The Hanged Man's Song

they did, they’d come through the door with an Abrams tank.
    Before we went to sleep that night, LuEllen said, into the dark, “My real name is Lauren. My mother named me after Lauren Bacall.”
    She still hasn’t told me her real last name; maybe we’re getting to that.
    >>> CONGRESSMAN Bob had been busy with the CD I gave him, though not exactly saving the Republic. When the Bobby attacks suddenly stopped, most of the air went out of the other charges, too. The political counterattack started with a lot ofmedia bullshit about responsibility and McCarthyism and anonymous smears, despite the black-and-white evidence for many of the charges.
    The hottest charge, the supposed Norwalk virus experiment on San Francisco, cooled off when the governor of California, a possible presidential candidate in three years, congenially agreed that there wasn’t much evidence to support the claim. Somebody, I thought, had gotten to him. With evidence from the DDC files? Who knows?
    >>> ONE politician who did take a heavy hit was Frank Krause.
    Like this: Two weeks after the Bobby attacks ended, a UN deputy secretary-general got rolled on the east end of Capitol Hill. At a previously scheduled press conference, somebody asked the President about it. The President made a few comments about the poor physical condition of the capital city—the bad roads, the deteriorating building stock east of Fourteenth Street—and suggested that America could do better. A week later, the Senate majority leader named Krause to head a special Senate Committee on the Capital, said that Krause would now be the Capital Czar, and everybody shook hands and smiled.
    Bob, in a mildly lubricated call a few days later, told me that the Committee on the Capital was the political equivalent of an isolation chamber. Krause could remain a senator until his constituents realized that he could no longer deliver the pork, but he wouldn’t have any real clout. He’d hurt too many colleagues.
    The DDC itself disappeared. The initials did, anyway. They tried to hide it all away, but nothing hides from the All-SeeingBobby Eye. The Inter-Service Research Bureau is slowly gathering itself back together—same people, different building. They work under the guidance of the House Special Sub-Committee on Coordination, Congressman Wayne Bob, chairman.
    >>> SO IN September, after time to talk and do a bit of contemplation, I went back to Louisiana and the Penders project. I stopped in Longstreet and talked with Marvel and John, and they were full of each other again. Rachel was as deep into her laptop as ever. We didn’t talk about Carp.
    Lauren calls every night. She’s at my place most of the time, now. The Minnesota weather had turned crappy; they got snow flurries on the fifteenth, she said. She grumbled about the shortness of the golf season and said she was planning to rent a place down in Palm Springs in January, February, and March.
    I was invited.
    “There’s a golf club there, they’ve invited me to join.”
    “That was nice of them,” I said. “Nonsexist.”
    “The downstroke is a nonsexist quarter-million dollars.” A downstroke, she explained, was the up-front membership fee.
    “Ah. Maybe they’re not liberals after all,” I said.
    “Maybe not. I’ve got the money. I’m thinking about it.”
    “A quarter-million dollars to chase a little white ball around a sod farm?”
    “Hey—remember what I said about golf. . . . When are you coming back?”
    “Another ten days or two weeks.”
    “Miss you,” she said. “We could have a good time in Palm Springs.”
    California dreaming . . .
    >>> THEN one evening, the twenty-second of September, as I sat on a rickety motel chair among the fumes of the oil sketches drying against the wall, I got a note from Bobby. The note came into one of my alarmed dump sites. When I opened it, it scared the shit out of me—I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck, and I thought, Carp.
    But it wasn’t. It was Bobby:
Kidd:
    As you probably know by now, I’m gone. I’ve waited this long to send the note just to be sure. I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed working with you. Hell, it was a short life, but an interesting one, hey?
    You’re worried about my files, but you don’t need to be. I didn’t keep anything that could come back on any of my friends. Not a thing, encrypted or otherwise. That’s all in my dead head.
    I’m sorry I’m dead, because now I won’t know how the world comes out.