While still in her twenties, Polly had married a fellow Hill rat named Hector, a smart, attractive, and ambitious young man who seemed destined for some kind of big role eventually in someone's presidential administration; but after
attending a lecture by Paul Ehr
lich, the overpopulation guru, he became a devotee to the cause, and quit his job on the Hill and went to work for a non
-
profit organization that distributed birth control—condoms, mainly: three hundred million a year—free throughout the Third World. He spent four-fifths of his time in the Third World. The remaining fifth he spent back home in Washington looking for cures for various exotic tropical and infectious diseases, some of which made it unpleasant to be around him. Hector was passionate about overpopulation, Nick gathered from Polly's accounts, to the point where it was pretty much all he talked about.
Returning from a long trip to West Africa, however, he announced to Polly, in rather an unromantic, businesslike way, that he wanted to start having children, lots of them, and right away. This took Polly by surprise. Whether it was guilt over all those billions and billions of thwarted Third World sperm, or simply the desire to populate his own
little
corner of the world, Polly could not say; at this point all she did know was that she had, in a moment of weakness brought on by being chased around desks by too many congressmen, married a total loser.
Hector, meanwhile, became more and more adamant. By this time his skin had turned greenish from some suspect malaria pills dispensed by the local apothecary in Brazzaville. This, combined with his monomaniacal procreative fervor, had a calamitous effect on Polly's libido. He presented her with an ultimatum, and when she refused, he announced that it was all over and he was taking his fertility stick elsewhere. The divorce would become final in the fall. He was now living in Lagos, Nigeria, organizing a massive airdrop of condoms on the crowds expected to attend the pope's mass on his upcoming visit.
Discreet as the Mod Squad was, from time to time they invited other spokespeople to lunch to promote camaraderie among the despised. Their guests had come from such groups as the Society for the Humane Treatment of Calves, representing the veal industry, the Friends of Dolphins, formerly the Pacific Tuna Fishermen's Association, the American Highway Safety Association, representing the triple-trailer truckers, the Land Enrichment Foundation, formerly the Coalition for the Responsible Disposal of Radioactive Waste; others. Sometimes they had foreign guests. The chief spokesman for the Brazilian Cattlemen's Association had come by rece
ntly
to share with them his views on rainforest management, and had entertained them with his imitation of a flock of cockatiels fleeing from bulldozers.
Their regular table was in the smoking section of Bert's, next to a fireplace with a fake electric fire that gave off a cozy, if ersatz, glow. Nick ordered his usual Cobb salad, which at Bert's came with about a quart of gloppy blue cheese dressing on top of enough bacon and chopped egg to clog an artery the size of the Holland Tunnel, and iced black coffee to wash it down and zap the thalamus for an afternoon of jousting with the media.
Bobby Jay ordered his usual: batter-fried shrimp with tasso mayonnaise. Polly, after briefly contemplating calamari, went for a trimming tossed green salad, French dressing on the side, and a glass of the house chenin blanc, crisp with a nice finish and not overpriced at $3.75 a glass.
Polly noticed that Nick was stari
ng morosely into his iced coffee.
"So," she said, "how're we doing?" This was the traditional Mod Squad gambit. The answer was always
awful,
for it was unlikely that medical science had discovered that smoking prolonged life, or that the handgun murder rate had declined, or that somewhere out there some promising young life had been saved, instead of tragically snuffed out by a teenager with a blood alcohol content of .24 percent.
"How did your Lungs thing go?" Polly said, dragging deeply on a long low-tar cigarette. Nick had told her not to bother with the low-tars, since research showed you only smoked more of them to get the same amount of nicotine, a point nowhere to be found in the voluminous literature of the Academy of Tobacco Studies.
"Oh," Nick said, "it was all right. She called for a total advertising ban.
Big
surprise."
"I caught a bit of you on C-SPAN. Liked the Murad bit."
"Uh-huh."
"You all right?"
Nick explained about his meeting with BR and how he had until six-thirty
A.M.
on Monday to come up with a plan that would reverse forty years of antismoking trends. Polly cut directly to the heart of the matter. "He wants to put Jeannette in.
That's
what this is about." She promised to try to think of something by Monday.
She changed the subject back to the surgeon general. "You know she's going after us next. Never met an excise tax she didn't love. It has
nothing
to do with financing national health. She just doesn't want anyone to drink. Period. I've got my beer wholesalers coming into town for their annual convention next week and they're ready to kill. They're threatening to drive all their trucks onto the Mall."
"That would be an interesting visual," Nick said, rallying slightly from his depression. "The Washington Monument, surrounded by Budweiser trucks."
"They're pissed off. Sixty-four cents on a six-pack? They're trying to erase the deficit on the backs of the beer industry, and they don't think that's exa
ctly
fair." The Mod Squad in ways resembled the gatherings of Hollywood comedy writers who met over coffee to bounce new jokes off one another. Only here it was sound bites de-emphasizing the lethality of their products.
Until now Bobby Jay had not joined in on the conversation, as his cellular telephone was pressed to his ear. He was in the midst of a "developing news story," which for people in their business tended to be a bad news story. Another "disgruntled postal worker," those Bad News Bears of the gun industry, had been up to the usual shenanigans again. This one had gone as usual to Sunday church in Carburetor City, Texas, and halfway through a sermon on the theme of "The Almighty's Far-Reaching Tentacles of Love" had stood up and blasted the minister clear out of the pulpit, and then trained withering fire on the choir. Here he had departed from the usual text, for he did not then, as the newspapers put it, "turn the gun on himself." He was disgruntled, but not so disgru
ntled
as to part with his
own
life. He was now the object of the most massive manhunt in Texas history. Bobby Jay told them that SAFETY was logging over two thousand calls a day.
"Pro or con?" Nick said. Bobby Jay did not rise to the bait.
"Do you know how many 'disgru
ntled
postal workers' have pulled this sort of stunt in the last twenty years?" Bobby Jay said through a large forkful of shrimp. "Seven. Do you know what I want to know? I want to know what are they so disgruntled about?
We're
the ones whose mail never comes."
"Assault rifle?" Polly asked professionally.
Bobby Jay ripped off a shrimp tail with his front teeth. "Under the circumstances I'm tempted to say, probably, yeah. 'Course, nine times out of ten what they call an 'assault rifle' isn't. But try explaining that to our friends"—he hooked a greasy thumb in the direction of the
Washington Sun
building—"over there. To them, my ten-year-old's BB gun is an 'assault rifle.' " He held up his fork. "To them,
this
could be an 'assault' weapon. What are we going to do, start outlawing forks?"
"Forks?" Nick said.
"Forks Don't Kill People, People Kill People," Polly said. "I don't know. Needs work."
"It was a Commando Mark forty-five. You could, technically, consider it a semiautomatic assault rifle."
"With a name like that, yeah," Polly said. "Maybe you should ask the manufacturers to give them less awful names? Like, 'Gentle Persuader,' or 'Housewife's Companion'?"
"What I don't get is, the son of a gun was using hollow-point Hydra-Shok loads."
"Ouch," Nick said.
"That's a military load. They use those on, on terrorists. They blow up inside you." Bobby demonstrated with his hand the action of a Hydra-Shok bullet inside the human body.
"Please," Polly said.
"What was he expecting?" asked Bobby Jay rhetorically. "That the minister and the choir were wearing Kevlar bulletproof vests underneath their robes? What gets
into
people?"
"Good question," Nick said.
"So, what are you doing?" Polly asked.
"And why is it every time some . . . nutcase postal worker shoots up a church, they come rope in hand, to hang
us?
Did we give him the piece and tell him, 'Go forth, massacre a whole congregation'? Redekamp"—a reporter for the
Sun
—"calls me up and I can
hear
him gloating. He loves massacres. Thrives on massacres, Godless swine. I said to him, 'When a plane crashes on account of pilot error do you blame the Boeing Corporation?' "
"That's good," Nick said.
"When some booze-besotten drunk goes and runs someone down, do you go banging on the door of General Motors and shout,
'J
'accuse!' "
"You didn't tell him that?" Polly winced.
"Okay," Nick said, "but how are you handling the situation?"
Bobby Jay wiped a gob of tasso mayonnaise from his lips. A glint came into his eye. "The
Lord
is handling it."
Nick knew Bobby Jay to be an upright, car-prayer-pooling citizen, who occasionally salted his language with biblical phrases like so-and-so had "sold himself for a mess of porridge, like Esau's brother," but he was not a nut. You could have a normal, secular conversation with him. But this suggestion that the Lord himself was engaged in spin control made Nick wonder if Bobby Jay was crossing the line over into the Casualties column. He stared. "What?"
Bobby Jay looked over his shoulder and leaned in toward them. He said, "It had to be. Opportunities like this can only come from above. And they happen only to the righteous."
"Bobby Jay," Polly said, looking alarmed, "are you all right?"
"Listen, O ye of little faith, then tell me if you don't think the Lord was looking out for old Bobby Jay. I'm in the car driving to work—"
"With Commuters for Christ?"
"No, Polly, and I don't see the humor in that. It was just me. I'm listening to Gordon Liddy's call-in show—" "Figures," Polly said.
"Gordon happens to be a friend of mine. Anyway, he's yakkety-yak-yakking about the shooting, his lines are lit up, and suddenly he says, 'Carburetor City, you're on the air,' and there's this woman's voice saying, 'I was
in
that church and I want to tell that last person you had on that he is just
wrong.'
I practically drove right off the road. She was saying, 'I own a pistol, but because the law in Texas says you cannot carry it on your person, you can only keep it in your car, I left it in the glove compartment. And if I had had that handgun with me there inside the church, that choir would still be singing 'Walk with Me, Jesus.' "
Nick felt a pang of jealousy. No one had ever called while he was being flayed alive on a radio talk show to say,
If I hadn't smoked five packs of cigarettes every day for forty years, I'd be dead by now.
Bobby Jay, eyes bulging, went on. "Gordon was in seventh heaven. He kept her on the line for must have been fifteen minutes. She went on and on about how what a tragedy it was she didn't have her
little
S & W .38 airweight with her in that pew, how the whole misery could have been avoided. She was
this far
away from him! She couldn't have missed him! A clean head shot." Bobby held out his arm in combat shooting stance and aimed at a person at the next table.
"Bam!"
"You're scaring the other patrons." "So what did you do?" Nick asked.
"What did I
do?"
Bobby Jay bubbled. "What did I
do?
I'll tell you what I did. I put the pedal to the metal and went straight to National Airport and got on the next plane to Carburetor City. There
is
no 'next plane to Carburetor City.' You got to go through Dallas. But I was in that
little
lady's living room before six o'clock that afternoon."
" 'Littl
e lady's'?" Polly said. "You're such a trog."
"Five-foot-four," Bobby Jay shot back. "In heels. And every inch a lady. A simple descriptive sentence, so may I continue, Ms. Sty-nem? I had our camera crew there by noon the next day. It is as we speak being edited into the sweetest
little
old video you ever saw." He spread his hands apart like a director framing the scene. "We open with . . . 'Carburetor City, Texas. A mentally unbalanced federal bureaucrat—' "
"Nice,"
Nick said.
"Gets better: '. . . attacks a church minister and choir . . .' Footage of ambulances, people on stretchers, people gnashing their teeth and rending their hair—"