The Intern: Chasing Murderers, Hookers, and Senators Across DC Wasn't In The Job Description

“A
re you going to kill me?”

Worry lines deepened into furrows as he stared at the short,
silver barrel pointed at his forehead. When I didn’t respond, he struggled to
break free from the handcuffs chaining him to the bed.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, and he
froze. His eyes darted around the room, and his mouth opened.

Waving the gun, I regained his attention. “I wouldn’t if I
were you.”

He blanched until the color of his face matched the white
hair on his head, and beads of sweat popped out on his brow.

To be perfectly honest, he could have yelled his head off
and no one would have come. Fancy hotels, with rooms the size of a bus depot,
thick yellow drapes and deep pile carpet designed to suck every sound out of
the air, along with the constant air conditioning hum, ensured cries of passion
or lover’s quarrels went unheard.

And since he thought I was a killer, he wasn’t going to
scream. He didn’t have to know there were no bullets in the gun. After all my
misadventures, I didn’t carry a loaded gun when killing wasn’t on the menu.

I didn’t like pointing a gun at anyone, even an empty one.
It didn’t make me feel strong. It didn’t give me a rush of power. It almost
reinforced the futility of my position. But I wanted the illusion of power. He
needed to be still and listen to me.

Because I needed his help.

I let him squirm for a moment, the trembling of his lips
getting lost in the scruff of his beard, before I shook my head.

He breathed long and slow, easing down from panic into fear.
After checking the wrist shackled behind him by the tight-clamped cuffs, he
looked at me, eyes wide, trying for sympathy, and asked, “Then, why am I here?
What do you want?”

Relief shuddered through me. The question I had been waiting
for.

“That’s simple,” I said. I set the gun on the dresser and
leaned against it. My eyes bore into his. “I want to tell you my story.”

Monday

One

A
lmost everything in Washington was
big and gray and ugly. I’m talking about the buildings, but a good number of
the residents would also fall into the same category. The architects made
everything look Roman and Greek, which might be all right if you were in Rome
or Athens, but in DC the main part of the city looked like a bunch of poorly
decorated wedding cakes.

The tourists, the players, and the street people, all
converged uneasily every morning as I walked from my apartment on Capitol Hill
to the Eastern Market Metro station. We all descended together beneath the
Washington cement, waited impatiently for the next train, grabbed smooth steel
bars, and held on as we rocketed in plastic cars through the belly of the town
toward our jobs—to turn the wheels of bureaucracy in the most powerful city in
the world. Some of the people clutched their seats and stared angrily, but most
looked more like robots, reading the morning paper as they rumbled and shook
toward another in a long line of work days. They were important people, the
kind mothers and uncles in Poughkeepsie and Omaha and Boca Raton bragged on
like crazy.

And I wasn’t one of them. Well, not exactly. I worked for
the government, but I had no desire to climb the DC ladder. To the contrary, I
had already begun to plot my escape. To get away from the traffic, the lines,
and the endless stream of silly, boring people: Capitol Hill pages slouching in
ill-fitting department store suits; straw-haired society types covered in beige
blouses and adorned with pearls; scowling, powerful white men who scared me for
no good reason. I paid ungodly money for my half of an apartment, smaller than
some closets, and thanks to my location in one of the city’s “developing”
neighborhoods, my car got broken into almost daily. I was tired of all that. I
was tired of parking tickets. I was tired of humidity. I was tired of DC.

I worked for the NEA. No, not the education one—the artsy,
standard-bearer of the Apocalypse, dirty-minded, potty-mouthed, slightly fruity
one. A lightning rod to the closed-minded and a place for lovers of the
perverse, the National Endowment for the Arts was different than most work
places in DC—or so I thought.

I had worked at the Endowment for almost two months, and I
wouldn’t have been so excited to take the internship had I known how
depressingly normal it was to work there. Despite all the rhetoric and
name-calling, there were no Roman baths, no noon-time orgies, not even a poorly
covered nipple.

But there were some advantages. The dress code wasn’t as
stringent as on Capitol Hill, so I got to wear jeans. Most of the people I
encountered were smart, cool, funny, interesting, and enjoyed what they were doing.
Maybe it wasn’t quite like other places in Washington, but it was a lot more
like them than most people thought.

When I walked through the door, I expected everyone to be in
grant panel mode. Hundreds of grant applications, which had been handled with
such care by those who had written them, would be scrutinized by a dozen or so
arts professionals. Panel mode meant a great deal of running around and
shouting, but there were clusters of people talking quietly, which was somehow
unsettling.

The head mofo in charge in our office, Joe, calmly talked to
Kurt, the office manager. Joe, with his beard, barrel chest, and brassy
baritone voice, reminded me of a young, svelte, Jewish Santa Claus. Kurt was
young, blond, extremely handsome, and extremely gay, the kind of guy women
spend their whole lives wanting to convert. He was always full of expensive
coffee and owned a taste in clothes I envied greatly.

“Just the man we’re looking for,” said Kurt, motioning me to
follow him and Joe.

We walked around the maze of dividers, the tiny cubbyholes
of bureaucracy, toward Joe’s office, past a stack of used copy paper which was
supposed to be recycled weeks ago. Joe had the only divider with a door, a sign
of his status, and it was my favorite office, with lots of great posters and
buttons and pictures of him when he was working in the theater. He sat down and
shook his head, and I wondered what I could’ve possibly done.

“This thing is becoming such a headache.” He spat the word
“thing” out.

When Kurt both nodded and shook his head, almost at the same
time, I was willing to bet Joe was talking about all the furor surrounding
Regionarts.

“The Chairman told me before she left for the art mecca
known as Las Vegas we are still supporting the program.” The sarcasm dripped
off Joe’s tongue.  “I don’t think anyone believes it.”

The Chairman reminded me of a mother-in-law in a TV sitcom:
she was over fifty, wore long dresses she thought were hip, and had pretty
brown hair, but if she were carrying a large purse, I would’ve been very afraid
of her. The reason for Vegas? She had vowed to visit arts institutions in all
fifty states during her reign—nice work if you can get it.

“We’re supposed to have a teleconference next week, and we
need you to gather all of the information on the project up to this point, make
some sort of outline, send it to everyone involved, and set up the conference
call.”

To be put in charge of hand-holding and conference calling
actually sounded halfway interesting; it was better than stacking and filing,
anyway. Regionarts was a good program that gave gobs of money to regional
groups who divided it among lesser-known artists. Some of the artists did
really bizarre things with their money—like decorating a gallery space with
used condoms—and “bizarre” was not our Chairman’s favorite word.

“Want me to start now?”

Joe shook his head. “Nah. Go in and listen to some of the
panel. You know most of the stuff, so it won’t take too long.”

I nodded and headed out of Joe’s office and down the hall
toward the panel room.

The actual granting took place in the panel, where someone’s
year of hard work was determined in a matter of minutes. Creative arts types
mixed with those who handled the business side of things for the panel makeup.
I had worked a couple of panels earlier, easy work from an intern’s point of
view—I sat and listened—but it was still rather nerve-wracking because people’s
livelihoods depended on what we were doing.

Walking into the room, I knew immediately who the artists
were—the steel-sculpted black man with the blond dreadlocks, the Indian woman
wearing a large scarf and larger glasses, poring over her grants book, and the
robust black man in native African dress with a fatherly expression. The tables
were arranged in a rectangle with everyone facing the middle. I took a seat on
a corner, next to the tape recorder absorbing all of the madness, and smiled at
the woman sitting next to me.