DC By the Book

Excerpt: Viktor Vaganian was sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle, polishing his gold-rimmed glasses with a cheap cotton handkerchief. At a low stone table nearby, two old men were playing chess. Viktor slipped his glasses back on and watched the game as he fed the pigeons the remains of his sandwich. He marveled at the amount of food the Americans wasted. They were awash in luxury, and yet always wanted more....It was lunch hour. He watched the men and women streaming through the park and wondered whether Marx was right, that in some peculiar way America might prove immune from the socialist tide that was bound to sweep the world--and if Lenin was right that, in time, the proper form of industrial relations would have to be forced upon them.

Excerpt: On Tuesday, October 23, just past seven in the evening, Margo Jensen stood in a bleak urban rain waiting miserably for the D.C Transit bus. The stop was on Fourth Street in Southwest Washington, just north of G. Her red Cornell umbrella shielded her from the downpour but not from the autumn night that chilled her bones; although the weather was not the cause of her trembling. Twenty-four hours ago, President Kennedy had told the nation that the Soviet Union had placed missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba. ... Everybody in the city seemed jangly. In her apartment building after Kennedy's speech last night, people were thronging the hallways, arguing and shouting, talking about where they were from, and where they had friends, and where they intended to go with their families once the station wagon was packed. The two propositions on which they all agreed were that Washington, D.C., was Ground Zero, and that Ground Zero might not be the best place to be.

Excerpt: She was on the bus now, headed north on Fourth Street. Every few blocks, the bus bumped over the tracks of the city's vanished streetcars. The apartment they'd found for her was in a development of townhouses and residential towers known popularly as "the new Southwest." In the morning, the bus would have been crowded with bureaucrats heading to work, but this time of night, the clientele was harder, and darker, and angrier. As the bus crossed the Mall, the Capitol dome shimmered murkily through the night rain. Soon she was passing thickly clustered federal office buildings.

Excerpt: The Labor Department was housed in a granite monstrosity, occupying two blocks north of Constitution Avenue, fronting on Fourteenth Street. Its somber gray walls were decorated with enough pillars and pilasters for half a dozen government buildings of more ordinary dimensions. It was constructed in the 1930s, an era when size and elaboration were often mistaken for importance. On Tuesday, Margo lunched with a brace of fellow interns: the one who worked for Torie, and four or five others from around her floor. The group had taken the newcomer to the basement cafeteria, to lay out what they called the rules of the road. The linoleum was colorless with age. The vast room smelled vaguely of cat. As Margo struggled with her overdone chicken breast, they peppered her with advice: Never let Mr. Baldwin get you alone in his office, or anywhere else. Don't talk about civil rights. And don't mind what anybody says about you: They're just jealous. Jealous of what? Margo asked. "Of your obvious friends in high places," they said, scarcely bothering to hide their snickers.

Excerpt: Margo stepped off the bus at last, on Commecticut Avenue at Macomb Street. The public library was directly across the street. The Yenching Palace, a Chinese restaurant, was two blocks north of the library. She wanted the two blocks, hoping the walk might calm her. The neighborhood was called Cleveland Park, and Margo knew it well. During high school, she had spent a couple of weeks in Cleveland Park each summer, because one of her white girlfriends was the daughter of a congressman who had houses both here and in Westchester County. Margo wondered whether Fomin, in choosing the restaurant, was aware of her familiarity, and decided arbitrarily that he must have been. Trudging north, leaning into the wind, Margo cinched her coat more tightly around her neck. The umbrella was inside out and useless. She felt the same way. Instincts honed over the past month led her eyes into alleys and doorways, but she didn't know what she was looking for. Bundy had told her that no American agencies would have surveillance on her. Margo wasn't sure whether to believe him; or, for that matter, whether he meant his words in warning or reassurance. Connecticut Avenue in this part of the city was nearly all commercial, but the leafy lanes crisscrossing it were filled with the large lelgant homes of the city's well-to-do. No Negroes lived in Cleveland Park. She wondered how long that change would be in coming. Both Congress and the white House were in the hands of the Democratic Party, but the chances of passing an open-housing law were near zero. These were the pressing matters on which Margo Jensen focused as she continued across Newark Street. She was determined to think about anything except what was really happening: Kennedy's speech, and her own role in preventing what the people thronging the hallway of her building were worried would happen next.

Excerpt: Margo stopped beside Engine Company 28. The roll-up door was open, and a couple of firefighters watched her as she stood in the rain. Next door, the Yenching Palace announced itself in bright neon letters, yellow rimmed with red. The outer wall was an odd shiny bluish-green. Behind a low wrought-iron fence, a scattering of tables stood outside, but in this weather nobody was seated at them.

Excerpt: Ten minutes later, she was back on Connecticut Avenue. She walked south along the wet pavement, low heels clopping loudly in the empty darkness. The rain had stopped during her meeting with Fomin. Traffic was thin. At the public library, she turned right and proceeded uphill on Macomb, a tree-lined street of quiet homes. On her left was Tregaron, the fabled estate of Marjorie Merriwether Post. Behind a high fence, trees rose in darkly beautiful ranks. No cars passed. No other pedestrians climbed the twisted cobbles. ... Just below Thirty-Third Place, a car flashed its lights twice, and the double flash was the signal. Margo climbed into the front seat. Behind the wheel sat Warren, the Secret Service agent who had driven her from Harrington's townhouse. "All set?" he asked, but Margo had barely closed her door before the car was barreling up the empty street. At Thirty-fourth they turned left. A few minutes later, they passed the floodlit Gothic splendor of the unfinished National Cathedral, then turned left again onto Massachusetts Avenue, cruising southeast past the embassies. "Where are we going?" Margo finally asked. "Not the White House, if that's what you mean." She supposed that she might well have meant exactly that. She didn't know what she was supposed to say. As far as the agent knew, she was a young woman on her way to an assignation with the President of the United States.

Excerpt: The Soviet Embassy was located in an ornate mansion at 1125 Sixteenth Street, just blocks from the White House. Half a century earlier, before the Russian Revolution, the house had been considered the fanciest in the city. Nowadays, it was a cramped rabbit warren of subdivided rooms, especially on the fourth floor, given over entirely to the activities of the Committee on State Security. It was there on the fourth floor that same night that Viktor Vaganian knocked on the door of Aleksandr Fomin's long, narrow office, then stepped inside without waiting to be admitted.

Excerpt: On Thursday, October 25, Margo went to lunch with a gaggle of girls from the office. The autumn weather had turned fine, so they walked the several blocks to the National Gallery of Art to eat in the basement cafeteria. A lot of the FBI guys ate there, one of the girls said confidently. Margo was distracted. She kept looking over her shoulder. There was no way she could have spotted a follower in the thronging midday crowds along the Mall, but the prickling hair at the nape of her neck told her things weren't right. At the museum, Margo paid seventy-five cents for meatloaf and vegetables and joined the other girls at a long table. They were chattering about a new record somebody's cousin had brought back from England, "Love Me Do," by some group Margo had never heard of. She was frustrated, and puzzled. Three days ago, the President had announced the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. She had been waiting ever since for any sign that her co-workers were bothered by the news. But the one time she had raised the topic, they had all but engaged in a collective shrug, assuring her that there was no reason to worry, because JFK, as they familiarly called him, would fix it. But Margo had noticed an unspoken change. She had started work on Monday, and Kennedy's speech had been Monday night. Here it was Thursday, and people were leaving the city. Grocery stores were sold out of canned goods. Of the six interns on her floor, three had left the city. The girls who had stayed might not want to talk about the crisis, but they could hardly ignore the rising swirl of panic. As her luncheon partners chattered on about music and men, Margo could not help wondering whether this desperate gabble was simply their way of coping: sticking to the mundane to cover the fears- She sat up very straight. A tubby little middle-aged man was waddling toward her across the cafeteria. He had a camera in his hand.

Excerpt: Doris Harrington, too, was out that night. She had dined with a prominent journalistic couple who lived two blocks away. She had tested carefully for relevant rumors, and found none. Now, walking home through the misty Washington night, she could almost imagine that the years were rolling away, and the cobbles of Georgetown were the pavements of Vienna during the war. The teenagers making out in an alley were Gestapo informants; the bus trundling northward on Wisconsin Avenue was the stinking, belching tram; the White Castle restaurant on M Street was a Viennese cafe where the habitues stayed up half the night playing chess and murmuring revolutionary slogans and state secrets. What sparked the overlap of memory and reality was a silent scream that told her she was being followed, not just tonight but all the time now.

Excerpt: The D.C. Transit bus crawled through the Monday-morning traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was rush hour, and the bus was packed. The white people who thought they ran Washington were leaving the city in droves, but the Negroes who kept things running were on their way to work. Margo felt restless, hemmed in, needing to move. The effort of standing still--there were no seats--was making her half crazy. But even in her impatience and frustration, she saw the genius of Agatha's idea. Ziegler's people, the Russians--whoever was trying to stop her would be counting on her to rush to the White House as swiftly as she could. They would be watching cars, taxis, pedestrians. The notion that she would take her chances with the capital's aging and unreliable buses might never occur to them.