Chapter Two

Chapter Two

He had called Joyce – his wife, greying but still vibrant at seventy-four and always able to hold her Pimms or Grand Marniers – two days before and told her to go to New York and just shop herself ‘till she dropped. Go to Bergdorfs, go to, uh, well...those other places women like to go to shop in New York City, whatever the hell they were. She was at their official residence in Virginia and he was still on the job at the Pentagon, talking to members of Gates’s transition team, nuts and bolts things about where Navy carrier battle groups were and how many ballistic missile submarines were in port and out to sea. Rumsfeld knew these things, all of them, minutiae down to the tactical level; he was famous (or infamous) for his “5,000 mile screwdriver”, the mind-boggling attention to specifics and the grammar of military operations that left all who met Don Rumsfeld wondering how he kept all of that information straight in his head, and – some more skeptically – what a man in his position needed to know all of that detail for. He was either uniquely informed or unconscionably a meddler, Rumsfeld was, and it was left to his correspondent to make such a decision according to his own volition, jaundiced or sycophantic, wherever his sympathies may lie. More than a few generals left his company, however, wondering what could be said of a man who wallowed in the quotidian and seemingly mistook it for command.

Sending Joyce off for a few days would let him shake his cobwebs. Rumsfeld’s wife didn’t need much of an incentive to go to Manhattan and lay waste to his carefully horded credit. It didn’t much matter, anyway; now that he was back in the private sector, Don could cash in on numerous favors he’d banked from concerned suitors, and of course interest would have been accrued on these outlays of governmental largesse and the granting of the Godfather’s ear. Financial worries were to be none in the final years of Rumsfeld’s life, even though he hoped to be granted a quarter-century more of Chesapeake Bay summers and New Mexican winters. He had worked hard for his influence and his contacts, and when he died, his children and grandchildren would bless his name for the motherlode awaiting their acceptance. It would be his final triumph, and from beyond the grave as well, to let his family know just how successful their father had been. And as long as the Rumsfeld fortune existed, just a chunk of the principal, it was proof that a man named Don Rumsfeld had lived, and that his money provided a kind of immortality through bettering the lives of his progeny and the following generations. This was how ultimate success was measured in America – how much weight your name packed when you were dead.

With the wife away in Manhattan and the secret service men firmly instructed to keep scarce, Don Rumsfeld found himself in a pleasantly marooned state his first evening alone at the gorgeous and period-perfect Georgian-revival mansion known – for various yet artfully ignored reasons – as “Mount Misery”. But all in due time as to the derivation of that rather sinister moniker, and how it had been so fully earned.

The journey from the White House to this concealed and quiet abode had taken the usual forty-five minutes; he’d used the time to flip through the Columbian Orator and had found a nice passage regarding the emancipation of the Irish. The whole book was a collection of famed speeches given over the millennia and was designed to give children of the 19^th Century a guide on proper usage and stirring diction. Much of it was mired in a time of grandiose circumlocution standing in for eloquence, rife with archaisms and magniloquent phrasings; shockingly, even Lincoln’s entrant to the book was never near to the point and often pompous. The diamonds, however, were genuine. Rumsfeld had noted how a former reader had been particularly struck by passages from an anonymous fragment wherein a slave, captured for the second time after running away, argues with deftness and aplomb for his manumission; in a somewhat unlikely “ironical” turn, his master’s heart is turned by pure reason and the slave is freed. Uplifting, very much so, though Don was disappointed at all the pencil markings in the margins, which had completely ruined this grand old book’s value on the open market.

Arriving, Rumsfeld said goodbye to his driver and entered the house, it was now well after five in the evening, pitch black and windy as hell outside, a bulking draft sieving through the windows and which flowed through the deadened mansion like a sodden fog. Far from what it had been like during his most recent visit, several months before. Mount Misery had been purchased for the specific purpose of a summer weekend getaway for the Rumsfelds; the thing was shut up fully and with a lock after Labor Day, and only Don’s immediate need for a place of retirement after his public execution had allowed the doors to be unfixed and the grounds to be allowed trespass.

The fact was that Rumsfeld, in his final days on the job and waiting for Gates to take over, had begun to realize that this was, very truly, the end of his career in government. Hale, spry and fit, the mind as lucid as his heart was strong, he was still seventy-two years old and even if all of this recent bullshit hadn’t occurred there was no room in a new administration for someone of his age. The final recognition of this fact had sent him into a free-falling depression, and since there was a lot of work to do in preparing to fend off the attacks which were inevitably going to come his way, Rumsfeld simply wanted to retreat from the Pentagon and the White House and to wherever he was going as quickly as possible. The house on the Bay was just up the road, and since it was way, way off-season there, the odds of him having total silence and peace were exceptionally good. In the middle of December, there was nobody out here – in an old crabbing village on the finger of a peninsula stuck out into the Chesapeake Bay – except for townies, woodchucks and ghosts. And Don Rumsfeld didn’t believe in associating with any of them.

The heat had clicked on with no trouble; Don was satisfied the place had been taken care of in his long absence. He’d build a fire later, but simply wanted to get the place habitable as he got out of his suit and into something more rustic. His wife had taken care of that for him, too. On the kitchen table was a box from LL Bean, and inside were three brand-new sweaters of a fittingly manly style, thick wool straight from a Yorkshire sheep’s behind and solid, dark colors marking the crew-neck and rolled sleeves. Rumsfeld was almost giddy inspecting the sweaters. He’d worn suits for years, of course, had them on twenty hours out of a day sometimes, but had always secretly longed for the freedom a man has who can wear an old black sweater with reinforced elbows and a pair of jeans or workpants and boots and all of the personal sovereignty that implies. He’d still have need for suits in the years to come, at least he hoped so, but it was with great pleasure that he inspected the sweaters, picked out the autumn green one to wear first, and went upstairs to find his aged Levi’s and take a hot shower. After that, it would be simply a matter of coming downstairs and going to work on the bottle of eighteen-year Chivas “Royal Salute” Scooter Libby had given him for a going away present. It had been a long day, all days are long when you get fired, but this one was especially exhausting; with no one to answer to except that mirror upstairs, Rumsfeld smacked his palm as he thought of Libby’s foresight and resolved to do nothing but knock off some of the Scotch, build a fire, and find out what the hell the Columbian Orator was all about. He’d waited years to have a day like this, with absolutely nothing to do, and no one to bother him either. The memoirs could wait until the documents arrived. Tonight, Don Rumsfeld was going to be a normal old man for a change.

One of the curious features of Mount Misery was that it had been a bed and breakfast until a few years ago, when his wife had discovered the mansion in an on-line real estate listing and couldn’t believe how unbearably eighteenth-century the place looked. Rustic was rustic, but this was like something from a Hawthorne story, with corpses in walls and other entertaining artifacts of an impenetrable Gothic past. The bourgeois weekend-getaway was its last incarnation, however, and signs of this well-heeled palimpsest abounded.

Having been essentially a small hotel, there were showers and bedrooms all over. The couple who ran the little hotel were looking to get out, and were obviously tidying up their nest egg with the two-point-five mil asking price. Money like that always made Rumsfeld edgy, until he realized he had plenty more than that locked away and that if he didn’t buy the gorgeous old brick mansion he’d pay far more dearly in terms of scorn and bile to Joyce, who had refused to consider any other properties once she’d seen this subtle masterpiece outside the little resort town of St. Michaels. Rumsfeld had one of his financial people talk to the couple, squared them down to one-point-seven, gave a ten percent bonus to his man on the $800,000 savings, arranged a mortgage and now owned a house with five bathrooms, four fireplaces and three breakfast nooks. He loved it. He could shower anywhere he wanted, upstairs or down, and throw his clothes in a pile any goddamn place he chose. There was a princely buoyancy in this would-be slovenliness; a man is never fully in possession of a home until he can make a mess of it. Before he went upstairs, he picked out one of the breakfast nooks and put aside a fresh grapefruit and a box of coarse-grained Irish oatmeal on the little table. It was here that he would have his breakfast in the morning. Such was the extent of the planning he needed to do for the entire evening, and this was a phenomenal change for a man who had previously been directing an entire great power’s war efforts in two countries ten-thousand miles away. But he could still plan, damn them all. With the oatmeal, Rumsfeld defiantly threw down a gauntlet of banality to overcome the loss of great prestige.

Half an hour later a refreshed old man stood inspecting himself in the bathroom’s clouded-over mirror, where he had just completed a vast cleansing ritual designed to clear his head as much as anything else. He had put on a white cotton T-shirt and stared into the misted pane, looking for signs that he at last was breaking down and declining with age. Even allowing for the eye’s subjective appraisal, Rumsfeld thought he was holding up magnificently. He hadn’t smoked in years, and his teeth were white and firmly held by disease-free gums. His eyes remained clear, not rheumy, not sunken, no bulging cataracts clouding the sphere and his natural eye color – off-blue, like a swimming pool with a slight algae problem – was still discernable. He made a bicep for the mirror, and a sinewy flesh-colored rock appeared in the reflection, not much diminished from his days on the wrestling varsity at Princeton. All men face the axe, nature’s auto-da-fé is a conqueror assured, time is a bandit as well as a cudgel, and Rumsfeld would one day coalesce to a morbid pile of discolorations and glutinous flesh, tumors amok and skin rugose, a satchel of despair and age. But that time was not yet. Don was thrilled to see that despite being sent away ingloriously, he was at least still Don Rumsfeld, and not some flabby-assed epicene codger, he’d wake up tomorrow and still be whom he’d known all these years. Rumsfeld inspected his skin and decided he could use a shave, get a jump on tomorrow. The solid and equally-planted five o’clock shadow was yet another element of his still-extant vitality. Shaving was a thing that meant you were still a man.

Rumsfeld was finishing his shave, getting at that really tricky part well-defined men have right at the hinge of the jaw. He’d lost gallons of blood over the years trying to keep that patch clean, he wondered how it wasn’t completely scarred over. As he turned his face and drew the skin taught, carefully dragging the double blade over the scene of so many slices and nicks, Don looked up briefly as his eye caught something moving in the hallway behind him. It was a shadow, something like a human but maybe not quite, he couldn’t really tell, the thing was gone in an instant and probably had never really been there anyway. It had startled him enough, a small hallucination ebbing through the ether and over his shoulder, fain of the reflection and ephemeral, barely there and never more, just a blot of misfiring cells within his brain making him think he’d seen a man with a full, wild head of hair and striking, knife-edge nose like a hatchet set down across the plane of his cheek. The whole thing took a fraction of a second, hallucination or whatever it was, and had probably never been anything more than a bundle of spots collected in the periphery of an old man’s eyes.

The only lasting trace it would leave was the startled reaction of the man glimpsing the mirror who saw the event, and the deep gash of flesh he’d taken from his hide in that perilous spot of shaving so many times scourged, this time deeply, betrayed by eyes that were seeing things and making him jump like an anxious old fool, wondering what the hell he’d done to have old age hit him like a brick so quickly, literally right before his eyes.

* * *

An hour later and a full two-fingers of lovely, smoky, peat-rich whisky down his gullet and still Don Rumsfeld bled, the corner of his jaw that he’d cut away stinging in the air and seeping tiny drops of fluid that were now collected on a dozen scraps of toilet paper tossed in the wastebasket to his side. He sat downstairs at a desk with a few documents in front of him, things he’d meant to read as prep-work for the memoir writing. All of them now had little flecks of blood across their print, most now browning and crinkling the paper, Rumsfeld was disgusted with himself for slicing up his face like this, and had even given up on building a fire because every time he released pressure on the nick it started dripping again. It was that kind of day and then some, fired, bloody and alone, wounded and hallucinating – just what the hell had he seen in that mirror, anyway? It looked like some fella, he kept reminding himself – and that fella had caused him to hack half of his mandible off, an hour later and still wincing, Jesus-Christing under his breath. He’d begun the evening with no one to answer to save that mirror upstairs, and Don broiled thinking how miserably that confrontation had ended.

Rumsfeld slammed the remainder of his whisky and decided he needed some water to go with it – maybe he was dehydrated. People saw things when they were dehydrated. Your brain gave you fits. That’s life. Some aitch-two-oh might be just what he needed to up his platelet count and stop this damn facial hemorrhage he’d inflicted. Don wasn’t a doctor, he didn’t know. It was worth a try, though.

He hadn’t even reached the refrigerator when he spotted the book lying on the kitchen table, again as before completely unknown to him until this moment of sighting, just like back at the Eisenhower executive building when that other book had appeared from nowhere. Apparently, he was being stalked by a bibliophile, or random pedagogic volumes were auto-assembling from air molecules and depositing themselves on Don Rumsfeld’s tables and desks. He looked at the book and assumed he was losing his mind. He hadn’t been in the kitchen for hours, hadn’t brought any books off of his shelves, knew to meticulous detail the contents of those bookshelves and what his volumes looked like when arrayed, and this one did not fit the description of any of them. He picked the book up, another aged-yet-attractive volume, and squinted through his glasses at the title: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. A very interesting story, no doubt, but it didn’t belong in the house on Mount Misery. It wasn’t his. Some asshole was loose on the grounds and playing pranks. Rumsfeld was on his emergency cell in seconds, calling in the most trusted of his secret service men. With stunning speed, the man was at one of the side doors and letting himself in with his duplicate key. By the time he got to the kitchen, he had his pistol unholstered and ready to use. He found the ex-secretary sitting at the kitchen carving station next to a rack of expensive German knives with a book in his hands and a snifter of Armagnac in front of him. The man looked ill.

“Sir, what’s going on in here? I need a PVP.”

“A what?” Rumsfeld asked, in complete befuddlement tinged with anger.

“Personal viewing perspective, sir. The who, the what, the where. I’ve alerted backup. I need to know what you know.”

“So you mean, uh, err...you want to know what I saw?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why the hell didn’t you just ask me that? A goddamn ‘PVP’, such shenanigans,” he said, waving his hands with fulsome dismissal. Rumsfeld rose and sniffed the brandy; it wasn’t what he wanted, and he sat it down. “And can the ‘sir’ business, too – okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did I just say, goddammit?”

The agent kept quiet now, totally unwilling not to refer to this man as a “sir”, or a “Mr. Secretary.” He looked around with the gun waving, as if the intruder were right there in the kitchen.

“Are you just going to stand there and not go see who the hell is in this house? Jesus Christ, unless he’s, uh, err...invisible, he’s not in the goddamn kitchen. Go look for him! Get your ass in gear, Popeye!”

The agent knew someone was in deep “86” when Rumsfeld called them “Popeye”. It was a term of absolute derision, apparently he hated that cartoon passionately and had been forced to sit through a screening of the movie with Saddam Hussein years before as Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East. Like Hitler, Saddam craved American movies on the deep, deep sly. Real garbage like Popeye. The Führer with his Mickey Mouse and Moustache Nebuchadnezzar’s secret admiration for Bluto. All dictators were nuts.

Sometime later, the agent returned with a partner, both of them solemnly reporting that the entire breadth and width of the estate had been searched, and there was absolutely no one on board who was not authorized. Rumsfeld explained that the book lying on the counter was proof otherwise, but the agents would not be moved. The second agent stepped forward to assure the old man that all sensors had been checked and all cameras focused; there were no intruders upon Mount Misery that night.

“Mr. Secretary,” he began, and was immediately interrupted by an old man’s accusing finger and gash-lipped snarl.

“Don’t you call me that!” Rumsfeld snapped. “Don’t ever do it again. I’m not the secretary of anything anymore, I’m, uh, uh...errr, retired, goddammit!”

“Sorry, sir. It was a slip...”

“Whatever it was, don’t let it happen again, Sparky!” The old man looked his age now, when he was angry, in a paroxysm, whatever – his studious calm would segue to the most barbaric outbursts, and the agents who’d seen it could tell it was a rage born of raucous, exalted contempt. There were days it seemed as if Rumsfeld absolutely detested everyone. “Both of you two, just, uh, uh, err...get the hell out of here. Go on, go fiddle about your business, I need to be alone.”

“We can’t do that, sir,” said the second agent.

“Why the hell not?” an exasperated Rumsfeld replied.

“Sir, there has been a PBRAS...”

“English! English! From now on tonight, no more goddamn acronyms! I’ve had enough of that stuff over at the Pentagon. From now on, tonight at least, when you speak to me, you will speak in standard, identifiable English words and phrases. Comprendé, Sparky?”

“Sir, what I was saying was...”

“Then say it, and it had better be in English, goddammit.”

The agent cleared his throat and looked at the old man in front of him. For the first time he noticed the wad of toilet paper stuck on the hinge of his jaw, below the ear, it was a big piece of bunched-up Charmin totally rotted through with blood. Raging with his arms-a-flailing and his demands for simple language, the obvious wound to the ex-secretary’s chop made him look quite ridiculous and pathetic. The saddened agent tried to explain why they would need to be in the house for awhile to come. “Sir, what has occurred this evening is a Potential Breach of Restricted Area Surveiled, it’s a PBRAS,” he said, sounding it out like “Pee-brass”, and yes, it was a goddamn acronym, Rumsfeld noted, “and that is a big time security alert, sir. I’m sorry, but you’re still a high value target to certain anti-American interests, and while the area is indeed secure, you have indicated a great deal of anxiety over the presence of a foreign object.” He paused, sentinel-like, and pointed to the book now abandoned with the brandy on the cutting table. “Would you like to have that item scanned for Anthrax, sir?”

Rumsfeld glared at him. “You Neanderthals...six hours out of the goddamn job and I’ve got the goddamn Keystone Kops running around out here. It’s not an ‘item’, goddammit, it’s a book – and no I don’t want it scanned for Anthrax. I’ll take my chances, Sparky. I want to know why I can’t have some quiet in this house when I ask for it.”

“Sir, I’m sorry you feel this way, but regulations are firm. I’d feel better if you gave me the alien object for disposal...”

“Well I wouldn’t.”

“...fine, that is your right, sir, but we need to stay here for a little while and make sure you are secure. Now, please sir – just relax and we’ll take another look around upstairs.”

Rumsfeld yielded to the inevitable. He directed the two agents to the living room, and put on some music – Chopin, nocturnes, something to calm him down. The music sounded lovely through the three-thousand dollar Bose speakers. A gift from Ariel Sharon, the only (joking) stipulation being that they were never used to play Wagner.

While the agents inspected the many rooms of Mount Misery, Rumsfeld thought about what might make him relax. He didn’t need any more whisky, that was clear, the stuff had him seeing things tonight. The Armagnac smelled like lighter fluid and the only other booze in the house were two bottles of vintage Bordeaux Joyce had bought at an auction in Norway. She’d kill him if he drank $15,000 worth of wine because he thought the Armagnac had gone bad. Then, he realized what he really wanted to drink. When the agents returned, he apologized for snapping at them and made a friendly suggestion to make up for it.

“Son,” he began, speaking to the first agent, “what’s the procedure on getting an old ex-secretary of defense a beer?” He was all charm again; Don could go from antagonistic to avuncular with no cue and no warning – and precious little interval. He always kept his agents on their toes.

“I don’t follow, sir.”

“Please, Mr. Rumsfeld will do. I’d tell you to call me ‘Don’ but I know you guys are all Marines – heck, you probably call your kids ‘sir’,” Rumsfeld said, and the joke fell totally flat on these men who were still in full combat mode.

“Be that as it may...Mr. Rumsfeld...uh, what transpired tonight...”

“Can’t you guys relax for one goddamn minute and just speak English? Do you know you just used two clichés in one sentence? Lighten up! I’m trying to ask you guys if you want to go for a beer! ‘Transpired’– it’s bad usage. Pretentious, like some muckety-muck from a poetry department...uh, uh...don’t do it. Now, what about the protocol for an old man getting some suds?”

“Sir, there is a bar in town that is probably still open, but it has never been screened for security threats. It would not be a good idea...Mr. Rumsfeld. You’re a very high-value target.”

“I can’t go get a goddamn beer?”

“It wouldn’t be wise, sir.”

Rumsfeld gave up on correcting him. “Not even with you guys?”

“Too risky.”

Rumsfeld sighed and sat back on his couch. A gift from the CEO of Boeing. This couch had cost the taxpayers three billion dollars, the avionics upkeep on Rockwell’s decrepit old B-1 bomber. Armed Services had been holding up a contract in committee, and then Rummy stepped in. The couch had sealed the deal. “Good God. It’s come to this? Uh, uh...Jesus, I’m still ‘high value’, a real target, you say? What a load. Papers don’t seem to think so, I’ll tell you. But I can’t go get a beer.” He paused, the irony of his defeat crushing, bewildering. “I’ll ask again: How about some suds, boys? Bring all of your guns, I’ll bring mine, too. I have a nice nine-millimeter upstairs that Dick Armey gave me years ago. A peach of a piece. We’ll fill the bastards full of lead the moment they come through the door – IRA, al Qaeda, whoever wants a piece. Whattya say?”

Rumsfeld’s good humour was finding absolutely no takers this day. “Sir, if you would like a beer, I would be happy to go into town and procure a six-pack from one of the groceries. You can have your beer in the security of the surveiled zone, and we’ll all be a lot more relaxed.”

Rumsfeld surrendered. “If you go do that, will you sit down and have a goddamn Budweiser with me? Talk about the Redskins, that, uh, uh, hockey team or whatever – how about that?”

“Very sorry, sir. Totally contrary to all known regulations. We’re on duty, sir. Under no circumstances can we imbibe alcohol on duty.”

“But you’re always on duty, Sparky.”

“I enjoy serving my country, sir. It’s a small price to pay for doing my bit.”

Angered, Rumsfeld turned his back to them and began waving his hands. “Oh, all right, all right – you win, goddammit. Just go watch the house where I can’t see you, get the hell away from me, the both of you.”

“Sir, do you still want me to procure you a six-pack of Budweiser?”

“Sparky, for Christ’s sakes...the only reason I wanted the beer was to sit down and talk to some people for a little bit, get me away from this, uh, eh...entrapment I’m, uh, feeling out here. I wanted some air. A nice glass of suds. Can you comprehend of these small pleasures, son?”

The agents both stared at the old man, disquieted, unsure how they should respond to such a mournful plea. Angered yet again, Rumsfeld directed them to get out of his sight, waving his arms like a maddened crane.

An hour later, the agents were leaving by the front door, the first agent noticeably glum and peeved with the second.

“What’s your problem?” the second asked.

“He called you ‘Sparky’, you heard him.”

“So what. He calls everybody ‘Sparky’.”

“Not me. He got PO’ed and called me ‘Popeye’,” the first agent lamented, and winced further still as the second agent let out a long, low whistle.

Everybody knew how bad it was for Old Rummy to call you ‘Popeye’. He was one mean old man, and most of the secret service dreaded him like gangrene when assignments were being divvied out. Neither one of these two would have willingly sat down and drank a beer with him, God knows what he might do if they became too “chummy”. Keeping the man safe was a solemn duty, but duty didn’t extend to getting your head ripped off for whipping him in a game of pool.