Most walks led to the White House: down Connecticut Avenue or Sixteenth Street, past the Jefferson Hotel—where Dick Morris had sucked the prostitute’s toes—the old Russian embassy and the Hilton Hotel, the clusters of homeless men in the entryway of the Episcopal church, into Lafayette Square, where the only person was usually the woman who lived in a pup tent on its south side protesting nuclear weapons. Often at night a group of Japanese tourists was getting out of a bus taking them on a nocturnal tour of Washington, but they quickly got their pictures and vanished. That evening not even a skateboarder intervened on the dead, blocked-off stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, however; the enormous lantern under the portico of the White House beamed brightly, and beyond the windows of the East Room, the twinkling chandeliers gave off an amber glow that was the color of a glass of expensive scorch. Five minutes after I arrived the floodlights flicked off, and the mansion was plunged into shadow, and looked suddenly sad, as if, at Lights Out, everyone inside had been sent to bed with milk and cookies. Then a policeman approached and said, “Good evening,” to me, at which point I realized I’d acquired the profile of a presidential assassin, and I moved on.
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