The Capital of Shadows
by Clay Risen

In August 1998, a woman's body was found violated and savagely beaten on a wooded hillside just below Georgetown University. Her name was Christine Mirzayan, and she had been living in university housing while doing post-doctoral work at the National Resource Council. Her killer was never found.

I was attending the university at the time, and as a reporter for the Georgetown Hoya I was assigned to the story. I expected a drawn-out process, capped by an arrest. But after the initial investigation, the trail went cold. No leads, no clues made public, no suspects. The incident stayed in the headlines for a few days, then faded away in the summer haze. The police, so I was told, had all but concluded that she had been attacked by an unknown vagrant camping in the woods as she walked home from a dinner.

Two years ago the body of Joyce Chang, a 28-year-old attorney, was found along the Virginia shore of the Potomac; not only did police fail to come up with major clues or a suspect; they were unable even to determine the cause of death. D.C., a city filled with tourists, is also a city filled with the mysterious and the macabre.

These days, though, the Washington headlines are dominated by a different woman, Chandra Levy, whose affair with California Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif., and subsequent disappearance have all the makings of the Next Insanely Great Political Scandal. Reading about it, I am struck by a sense of foreboding, a recollection of the dread that hung over me that entire fall after Mirzayan's murder. The realization that sometimes heinous crimes occur without any hope of justice, that sometimes young and vibrant people disappear without a trace.

Washington, as I experienced it, was always a dark and brooding place, forever autumnal, cast in a pale twilight of Edward Gorey-like hedges and walled gardens and vast gated cemeteries, each a repository of some stage in the vast world of American political power. That Mirzayan's body was found in the woods will seem oddly appropriate to anyone who has spent time in Rock Creek or Garfield Park; the trees and underbrush are alive with shadows. Washington is a small city, but it turns in on itself multiple times, so that histories and tragedies and poverty and power intersect in an almost visible patina spread out over the town's sloping geography.

What is fascinating about the Levy case is not the biography of the young woman, or the details of her affair with Condit, but rather the way it bespeaks a different side of Washington, where women are grabbed by the woods in the middle of the night, where bodies are found with no explicable cause for being there. Such things happen in other cities, but that they occur in Washington at all seems less a fact of big-city life than an expression of that particular, Gothic emotion that cloaks the capital.

It is hard to escape the expression of political power in Washington. Motorcades race around the streets at all hours, senators live around every corner, silent trysts between famous faces take place in low-lit windows, old men with money and clout mingle in smoky restaurants. Walk down any street and you feel as if the future of the world were being planned on that very block.

Is it any wonder, then, if this power has given birth to its anathema, if this enormous inertia toward a bright and prosperous future has spawned an irrational darkness? This is not to suggest that Mirzayan, Chang or Levy was actually taken by some mystical force; surely there are rational explanations and real culprits in each case. But the unknown nature of the cases, the truth that may never be known, reinforces the hushed pangs of dread that permeate the city.

What lies beneath the interest in the Levy case is not the details of her affair, but rather that her disappearance is such a fitting expression of the city's duality. On the one hand, the power of Condit, his haughtiness in thinking he could get away with an affair, could use his political power to transgress his marital vows. On the other, the restitution, the consequence, the balancing out of that power by the unfathomable darkness.

Perhaps Levy will never be found, perhaps her body will be unearthed in a far-off corner of a park, perhaps she will be discovered, years from now, living in a trailer park outside Houston. For now, though, as we watch the case unfold, we must put her, if only temporarily, in the same category as Mirzayan and Chang, and as we watch Condit fight for his political life we can only wonder when the darkness of our capital city will strike again.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.