Sunday, November 5
My car was parked at the curb out front. When I started it up, the engine turned bravely in the cold, dry air of an early-winter's night.
Havlicek closed his coat around him in an exaggerated plea for heat.
"Hey, I talked to your FBI friend Stevens today," he said.
"Oh, yeah? You trying to steal my sources?" I asked, jokingly.
He patted the pockets of his coat, looked at me more urgently, and said, "I forgot a tape recorder. You have one?"
"Damn, it's inside." I had started to pull the keys out of the ignition so I could get into my house when politeness once again got the better of me. Knowing I had a spare door key ingeniously stashed under a loose brick in my front garden, I let the engine run so the heat would crank up. "Hold on," I said. "I'll be right back."
I'll never forget his words: "Hurry the hell up. I'm fricking freezing."
Inside, I had hit the third step on my way up to my study, where the microcassette recorder sat on the shelf of an antique bookcase, when I heard the sound. At first, it was like a truck had backfired on the street outside. That was followed by what could have been a plane hitting my house, or an enormous clap of thunder, so strong that the resulting vibrations flung me to the ground, slamming my head against the railing, leaving me in a momentary daze tumbling down the stairs.
In that daze, I recall windows smashing in, the spray of glass, the blast of cold air. For reasons I can't explain, I recall seeing my front door, which I must have left ajar, heave open, and I half expected to see some masked man in a Ninja suit and a machine gun race inside my house. I recall seeing a wave of destruction, as if the whole thing were happening in slow motion-lamps falling off tables, pictures plummeting from walls and cracking on the floor, a chandelier that my wife's family gave us crashing down from above.
Within what must have been seconds, as the noise gave way to a grotesque silence, I understood that something had exploded, probably right out front. I picked myself up without realizing that blood was flowing from a gash in my head and raced out the front door. On the sidewalk and street, in the cold night, the various parts of my car were strewn asunder. A small fire burned in the engine, exposed by the open hood.
I scanned the area furiously, looking for Havlicek. I spotted the door of my car on the sidewalk. The hood was sitting in the middle of the street. There was singed, broken glass everywhere I looked, sparkling softly in the streetlights. Finally, my eyes were drawn to the still form of Havlicek, or at least his tattered body, slumped against my house, his legs splayed open, his head concealed by one of his arms.
I did what anyone would do: I raced over to him, rolled him over so he was facing me, and saw that his skull was cracked open. Blood and God only knows what else poured out of the hole. Half his left ear had been ripped off. He was no longer wearing any shoes, and soot or burn marks covered most of his clothing.
His eyes were closed. My first impulse was to shake him, to yell in his face, to tell him he'd be all right. I knew, though, that if he was alive, shaking him would only cause more blood to flow out of his head. I felt his throat, knowing nothing about where a pulse might be, but in hopes I would suddenly learn. I moved my hand around a couple of different ways, trying to maintain some calm. To my absolute amazement, I found a slow pulse.
"Steve, you're going to be all right," I said, softly. I yanked my coat off and laid it over his form, remembering some first aid guide I must have read somewhere that said you always keep a trauma victim warm. "Stay with me, Steve," I said, speaking gently into his whole ear. "Stay with me. Just stay with me. Hang on. Help is on the way.
Everything's going to be all right."
I glanced around the neighborhood and saw several people emerge onto their front stoops, a collective look of panic on their faces. I shattered the odd silence by yelling, "Is there a doctor around?" I got no response. You would think in the heart of Georgetown there would be at least one doctor on my block, but this being Washington, you made your money in television and in the lobbies of Congress, pushing various legislation, not helping those who needed to be nursed back to health. Someone finally opened a door and hollered back, "I've called for help." Nice of you to get involved, I thought.
I turned back to Havlicek. His neck was resting in one of my hands.
His garnet-colored blood was dripping onto my wrist and coagulating on the cold ground.
"Everything's all right," I said over and over again, talking, probably, as much to myself as to him. "We're not going to let those bastards beat us," I said. "They're not going to beat us. You're going to be all right."
All of time seemed to screech to a halt out here on the sidewalk of Twenty-eighth Street, amid the morbid ruins that were once my house and car. The silence was still deafening. At this hour, late on a Saturday night, or rather early on Sunday morning, there wasn't even any traffic. I felt myself start to panic, felt myself want to scream at someone, to assess blame, to seek revenge. Eventually, in the distance, I heard the vague sound of a siren, and over my shoulder, a voice said to me, "Here, I have a blanket and some towels."
A neighbor who I hazily recognized spread the blanket across Havlicek's form. I took the towel and pressed it gently to Havlicek's head, trying to stem the flow of blood. "He's alive," I said. "He's alive, and he's going to be all right."
And just like that, Havlicek opened one eye and looked at me. My heart was pumping so hard it almost exploded through my chest. I hadn't actually believed anything I had said about him being all right.
I looked at him in unabashed amazement and said excitedly, "You're fine, Steve. You're going to be fine. Hear that ambulance. It's about a minute away. Everything's going to be all right. Hang in there with me."
Havlicek tried to mumble something in return, but it was incoherent, the talk of someone weak and in shock. I said, "Don't speak. Save yourself. Stay with me. Stay with me. Help is on the way."
Havlicek being Havlicek, he didn't bother to listen. He continued to mumble. His one eye was open, looking at me. His second eye popped open as well. I told him again to stay quiet. When he still didn't listen, I said, "Steve, do yourself a favor and shut up."
Then, summoning what appeared to be an inordinate amount of energy, Havlicek blurted out, "My pocket."
"Your pocket?" I asked him, still speaking softly, not raising my voice, not acting panicked, although all around us were the parts of what a few minutes ago was my Honda Accord, and before me, my friend was on the doorstep of death, about to ring the bell.
He nodded his head. I fished through his pants pocket, and he looked at me with some exasperation, saying, "Coat."
In the background, the siren kept getting closer, weaving through Georgetown. In the foreground, people weren't so much staring at us as gawking, as if they never had a car bomb explode on their block before in the early hours of a Sunday morning. I reached into the inside pocket of his navy blazer and found a sheet of white paper. I put it in my pocket without looking at it. He seemed content, and closed his eyes.
"Don't go anywhere, Steve," I said. "Hang tough for me. Just hang tough, and you're going to be fine."
I didn't even realize that my hand was on his and that he had been gripping one of my fingers. I didn't realize it until I felt his grip loosen, his hand become completely slack. He gave one hard exhale, and his facial expression changed completely. When I put a finger under his nose, his breathing seemed to have stopped.
I said, louder, "No, Steve. No. You're staying with me here. I need you on this. Your wife, she needs you. Don't go anywhere." The sirens seemed to multiply and got increasingly louder. It sounded like they were only a block or so away. I had my other hand cupped on the back of his head, and despite myself, shook him a bit.
"Come on, Steve. We've come too far. We don't have that much further to go. Stay with me."
With that, I started to breathe into his mouth, to push air into his system. But the sad fact of the situation was that I didn't have a clue what I was doing. It all seemed so futile. When the ambulance pulled up and the EMT'S leaped out, I told them I thought he had just stopped breathing a few minutes ago. One of the men put an oxygen cup over his mouth. Another thumped at his chest. Two more raced over with a stretcher. I backed away, fading into the background, almost tripping over what must have been the passenger-side door to my car.
A woman in an official-looking jumpsuit approached me and asked if I was all right. I replied that I was fine, and she said, "You know you have a cut on your head?" She wiped a cloth over it and told me to come with her. I shook my head, never really diverting my eyes from Havlicek and all the men around him. She disappeared and came back in a moment, told me to stay still, and carefully placed a bandage on my temple. "You'll be all right for now," she said. Physically, yeah.
The rest, I wasn't so sure.
At that precise point, it hit me-the dog. I turned back and raced toward the house and into the front door, which was open. The inside looked, well, like a bomb had hit it. On the floor in the middle of the living room, Baker was sprawled out on the rug, the shattered chandelier pinning him to the floor. When I knelt down in the broken shards of glass, he didn't so much cry as whimper, his eyes looking at me in a pleading pursuit of relief.
They say you never approach a wounded dog, that it might even attack its master to protect itself. Screw that. I kissed his muzzle and rubbed his ear and told him he was going to be fine. I very gently pulled part of the chandelier off his back end. I gingerly pulled some shards of glass off his fur. He seemed unable to move, stuck on his side. Whenever my hand or leg went near his mouth, he licked me furiously, almost apologetically. A wounded wolf in the wild he was not.
I made a move to run outside and get help, but when I did, Baker tried to get up, found himself overcome by pain and started to give a plaintive wail. Rather than leave, I covered him with a throw from my couch, scooped him up in my arms, and took him outside into the street.
I hoped against hope that the first cop I saw would be a dog lover. A nondog person, they'd just as soon let Baker die in a pool of his own blood. A dog person would carry him on their back to the vet if they had to.
"This dog," I said to a policewoman who seemed to be working some form of crowd control, though the Georgetown crowd would prove more than tame. "He's mine, and he's injured, and he desperately needs some veterinary help. Do you have someone who could rush him to the Friendship Animal Hospital?"
She said, "Well, I'm supposed to call animal control to transport a dog. Technically, we're not allowed to."
She looked concerned, and by her words and tone, I knew I had her.
Baker licked my face. I said, "Look, ma'am, this dog desperately needs help. I'd drive him myself, but the insides of my car are scattered all over the street. Please. I'm begging. Please take him."
"Follow me," she said. She led me to a station wagon, opened the back, and I gently slid Baker inside. He kept looking at me, frightened and in pain. I borrowed the woman's cellular telephone, punched out the number for Kristen's house, and told her, in about twenty seconds, of my situation. About two minutes later, she was standing in front of me, out of breath. She slid into the back of the car beside Baker and, lights blazing, they were off.
As I turned back toward Havlicek, a pair of EMT'S were pushing his stretcher into the back of an ambulance, about to close the doors. I raced over and said, "I'm with him," and began climbing into the back cabin. One of them gave me a look like he was about to stop me, then didn't bother, which I didn't take as a particularly hopeful sign. The doors shut behind me. Inside, two EMT'S worked furiously on Havlicek's head and occasionally pounded his chest.
Within about four minutes, the ambulance slowed to a halt, the doors flung open, and I leaped out of the way. Havlicek was transferred onto a new stretcher and wheeled into the emergency room of Georgetown Hospital. As I tried to follow, a nurse blocked my path and said,
"You'll wait out here." By now, I was too dazed to argue. I slumped down in a chair in a hallway, in a situation that was too hauntingly familiar, and tried to piece together the violent puzzle that had been the last hour, and probably Havlicek's final hour.
Before I could put a single fragment of the day in its place, a doctor appeared in front of me. This time it was a man, not a woman. This time he stayed in the hallway, rather than lead me into a conference room. This time, I knew the message before the words came out.
"Your friend, Mr. Havlicek," the doctor said in a tone that seemed aloof, even clinical. "I'm afraid I must inform you that he's dead."
I'd like to report back that I was handling this spate of violence with Bond-like cool, that Havlicek's death only made me angry, and when I get angry, I get even. But save that for the movies. Sitting on that lime-green chair in the hallway of the Georgetown Hospital emergency room, it felt like my entire world had just packed up and abandoned me.
I was, admittedly, frightened. Someone had just tried to blow me up along with Havlicek, or more likely it was just me they were after, and Havlicek was the unwitting victim. Let's put aside questions over who and why for a moment to look at the results.
Havlicek's death had left me without my crucial partner on the biggest story of my life. His death would also mean that I was about to become part of the story yet again, rather than a reporter covering it, just like the week before when I was hit in the assassination attempt.
More importantly, it also left Margaret Havlicek without the husband she adored, something I can relate to. And it left their two children without a father to see them through college. This was a sadness that transcended every other, which is why I finally lifted myself up off that chair, walked slowly, heavily, to a pay telephone around the corner, and dialed the Havlicek household in Braintree, Massachusetts.
It should probably be up to some Record official to inform the widow of her husband's death. Problem was, this being two on a Sunday morning, even a newspaper can take a while to mobilize. That very moment, I strongly suspected that a CNN camera crew was standing in front of my house, some blow-dried reporter telling an anchor in Atlanta named Ashley, "All around me are the glass remnants that just a few hours ago were Boston Record reporter Jack Flynn's automobile."
Fuck the reporter, and fuck CNN. Now I know how it feels.
"Hello."
It was the unfailingly pleasant, though sleepy, voice of a middle-aged woman, namely Margaret Havlicek, picking up the telephone. She sounded calm, not panicked, meaning she didn't know yet.
"Margaret," I said. "Jack Flynn here." I spoke in the calmest, most soothing tone I could muster. "Margaret, I have some bad news. It hurts me terribly to have to tell you this. Your husband died about twenty minutes ago. We were about to drive to an interview tonight in my car, and he was alone in the front seat while I ran back into the house to get a tape recorder I had forgotten, and it exploded. It appears that someone planted a bomb."
There was silence on the other end as she processed what I had just told her. Then I heard her soft voice say to no one in particular,
"No, I just talked to him a couple of hours ago. I just heard his voice. This can't be right. He just told me he loved me." She had become almost too choked up to talk. "Oh, my God," she said, then came the sounds of sobbing, followed by "Oh, my God. Oh, my God," again and again and again.
"How?" she asked, her voice soaked in a cascade of tears. "Who? Why?
Why would someone do this?" Her sobbing descended into crying before I could hear her try to collect herself. I felt like a voyeur on my end, the unintended survivor breaking the bad news to the next of kin.
"I was with him at the end," I said. "He was alive after the explosion, then I felt him die in my arms. The EMT'S seemed to revive him, but then the doctor declared him dead in the emergency room of Georgetown Hospital."
I paused and listened to her sobs, pictured her sitting on the edge of her bed, surrounded by family mementos, knicknacks, every photograph, every vase, representing some day in their long marriage. Suddenly that house would seem so empty, the future overwhelmed by the past.
"Margaret," I said, "I work with words every day, but I could never find the right ones to tell you just how sorry I am right now." I paused and said, "And I mean this, Steve said just two hours ago how much he loved his life with you, how he wouldn't trade it for all the money in the world. He talked about you and the kids all the time."
"Thank you, Jack," she said through her tears. "Steve really enjoyed working with you."
There was a moment of silence until she asked, "Who, Jack? Who did this to Steve?"
"I don't know yet, but you can be sure we're going to find that out."
I could still hear her sobbing. She said, "I'm going to go now. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I think I should go. Thank you, Jack." And with that, she hung up the telephone to face a life alone that she never wanted or expected.
After that, the call to Peter Martin was relatively easy. He was upset to the point of being choked up, and not just over having the story delayed yet again. And as with so many other times in life, he was able to cut to the chase in a way that even the Washington police didn't seem capable, saying to me, "This means you're in grave danger.
I want you out of your house," he said. He didn't know yet that I really had no choice, not to mention doors and windows. "Check in at a hotel somewhere, then call me. I'm going to hire some security guys to watch you, whether you want the protection or not. Be in touch within a couple of hours, or you're fired."
I ambled outside into the cold, coatless, with a bandage over my right eye, dried blood on one of my arms, my hair mussed to the point of wildness. I was not a pretty picture. I flagged a taxi, and as I settled into the backseat, the driver, a man with a turban, turned around and gave me a nervous once-over. I couldn't even smile back.
"Friendship Animal Hospital," I said. He thought I was crazy, I'm sure. But he took me there nonetheless, to be with the animals.
When Kristen saw me, she rubbed her palms across her face and followed me with her enormous eyes, just kind of looking at me in mute amazement. When I sat beside her, she said, "The doctor wants to put Baker to sleep. I told her she couldn't do anything until you got here."
I was running low on emotional strength, not to mention physical strength. This news made me feel like I had been kicked in the chest by a mule.
Some sort of veterinary assistant, a kid with a pair of studs in his right ear, led me down the hallway into a visiting room. He opened the door, and I saw Baker sprawled out on top of a stainless steel examination table, tied down. Baker saw me as well. Without lifting his head, his tail whacked the table several times. I leaned over and kissed his muzzle, then gently stroked his soft ears. The kid said,
"The doctor will be right with you."
When the door shut behind him, I pulled up a stool and sat. My head was close to Baker's, and I whispered to him, "You are the best boy in the world. You really are." His tail thumped the table again, his head stayed flat. He followed me with his brown eyes. I kissed him again, and he ran his coarse tongue slowly over my soiled face, relieved, I suspect, that he had done nothing wrong to cause all this, that his pain was not some punishment. Dogs think like that, best as I know.
"You are my very best friend," I whispered into his ear. It was the truth, almost from the minute I met him. I got Baker a little under three years ago. At the time, Katherine and I had just moved into our new house in Georgetown and decked it out for the holidays. We dragged in a Christmas tree that soared ten feet. I arrived home from work on Christmas Eve to our plans for a quiet dinner alone. She was sitting in the living room, sipping a glass of red wine, wearing a red satin dress, festive, just for me.
"I'm going to give you your gift tonight," she said. "I'm going to give it to you now."
She pulled a large hatbox out from under the coffee table. I sat on the couch beside her and undid the ribbon. There was no wrapping paper. When I lifted the top, all I saw was a ball of fuzzy blond fur.
I looked back at Katherine, confused. She beamed and put her face close to mine. "Pick him up," she said.
"Oh my God," I remember exclaiming. I looked at this frightened puppy, scooped him up in one hand, and held him tight to my face. His fur mopped up a tear that Katherine never saw.
"This is like going to the driving range," she said, imitating my long-held argument for getting a dog. "Same basic swing, plenty of room for error." Baker would be our predecessor to children, our chance to step tentatively into a life of responsibility. Three years later, he is the only living, breathing remnant of our marriage, aside from me, of course. If this veterinarian thought she was about to put him to sleep, she had no idea how wrong she was.
"Mr. Flynn, hi, I'm Dr. Gabby Parins. Sorry to meet you under these conditions."
Coming through the door, she looked up from her clipboard at me for the first time, a pretty young woman with glasses and blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. "Oh, my. It appears you've been through some trauma as well."
I explained the situation, the explosion, the falling chandelier, the broken glass. She told me of the extensive injury to Baker's hips, the fractures in both his hind legs. He might never walk again, she said, and he would certainly never be able to run the same way. She could perform surgery, but it might fail, and he could easily die on the operating table, at considerable expense. Her recommendation, given the costs, the pain, the lifetime of a debilitating condition, was to put him to sleep.
"That doesn't seem very humane," I said. "Not to him, not to me."
"On the contrary, Mr. Flynn, given the extent of the injuries here, the multiple abrasions to his skin, the overwhelming possibility of infection, the likely loss of the use of his legs, I think it's the most humane thing you could do right now."
I looked down at the dog, at his profile, pleading with me to make things better, to take him home. I thought of that first night I had him, this vanilla fluffball walking on city sidewalks for the first time, people padding their way in the snowy dusk squealing as they saw him. I thought of the way he moped around the house when I came home from the hospital that awful October day without Katherine, how he sniffed at her side of the bed, waited constantly by the door. I was not about to give him up now, to say goodbye to him and all he represented.
"Doctor," I said, my voice so thick that it surprised me. "Please, perform the surgery. Perform it well. Let's take it one step at a time and decide where we should go from there."
She stood near me in a white coat, with a clipboard in her hand, looking from the dog to its owner. She nodded and said, sweetly,
"Okay. I'll do that. I'll do that this morning. We'll both keep an open mind."
While I still stood there, she shot him with a sedative. I rubbed his head until he fell sound asleep. I went out and told Kristen that Baker was going to have surgery. She shed some tears of relief and said, "I knew that's what you'd do." She asked if she could wait with the dog.
I dug into my pocket to see if I had enough money for a cab. When I did, my hand came across a crumpled piece of paper. I pulled it out, and the memory of Havlicek telling me to reach into his coat suddenly pulsed through my mind. Nerves caused me to fumble a bit as I unfolded it, then read the handwritten line: "Paul Stemple, 898 C St." SE, Washington, DC. Apt. 2."