by Allen Drury
And at which Senator August, talking worriedly to Senator Danta, said, “You don’t suppose he was really offended with us, do you?”
And Senator Fry, running into Senator Anderson soon after midnight, said, “By God, I’m not sure I like the way this is going,” and Senator Anderson replied quietly, “I’m worried, Hal.”
And Senator Knox, threading his way through the seated, eating couples on the great staircase, passed Senator Cooley and murmured, “Something to tell you tomorrow that may have some bearing.”
And Krishna Khaleel, driving grandly off in his chauffeured limousine at 1 a.m. and heading straight for his Embassy, routed his secretary out of bed, and dictated an immediate cable to New Delhi hailing the start of a new rapprochement between Russia and the West.
And Vasily Tashikov, leaving with his lady a few moments after, went to his Embassy and told his government to prepare another démarche because the United States was softening again.
And Bob Munson, thinking of the implications of that talk in the study and all its ramifications and what they meant for his country and the world, suddenly said, “Oh, God damn it to hell!” in a loud voice that startled two admirals, a general, and the head of the National Science Foundation, all of whom had thought he was paying close attention to their rambling explanation of the latest missile failure.
And it was also the party at which the Majority Leader had a brief conversation with Lafe Smith which he remembered rather fondly later because it served to bring him closer to that rising young colleague, concerned nothing more earth-shaking or profound or terribly worrisome than Lafe’s own private specialty, and served to precipitate a decision for later in the night which proved to be, as always, most enjoyable.
“You see that girl in green over there?” the Senator from Iowa asked him shortly after 2 a.m., appearing at his elbow from nowhere with a glass in his hand. “She’s looking. I think I’ll let her find me before the evening is over.”
“Well, be careful,” Senator Munson said. Senator Smith smiled.
“Oh, I will,” he said. “Morals are a professional matter in Washington, you know, and I’m good at my profession.”
“What do you get out of it, really?” Bob Munson asked curiously. “Anything you really give a damn about?”
Lafe Smith stopped smiling and gave him an oblique glance.
“No,” he said soberly; and then, with a grin, “but you wouldn’t want me to play with myself, would you?”
“Don’t you ever want anything better?” Senator Munson asked, and a curious expression came into his young friend’s eyes; haunted, Bob Munson thought.
“Of course I want something better, Bob,” he said softly, “but it’s too late for me. I’ve never had a chance. It started too early and it came too easy. People have been at me since I was eleven years old, all shapes, sizes, and sexes. I never had the opportunity to get started on the right track about sex. They all made it so simple for me. Everybody was so helpful. It’s too late now.”
“Maybe not,” Bob Munson said gently.
“I think so,” Lafe said, “though God knows why I’m telling you about it all of a sudden. Except that you’re the great Earth Father of us all.” His voice, already low, went abruptly lower. He smiled, but his voice remained serious. “You watch yourself with Dolly, buddy. There’s beginning to be talk.”
“Is there?” Senator Munson said. “Maybe I’ll marry the girl and fool them all.”
“I wish you would, Bob,” Lafe Smith said seriously. “I’d like to see you settle down.”
After which he had the grace to join in Bob Munson’s delighted whoop of laughter before he clapped him on the back, murmured, “So goes the lemming once more to the sea,” and began his casual, aimless, indirect and rather frighteningly determined stalk of the girl in green.
And so it was that still later, sometime around three, after the last guest had said a fuzzy good-by and begun the slow, ticklish drive home through the deepening snow, one of Washington’s most prominent hostesses did leave her back door unlocked, after all, and she and the Majority Leader of the United States Senate did forget their sense of the ridiculous, and it was all very pleasant. And the snow came down quietly, softly, steadily, persistently on the wide deserted streets and lonely stone monuments and great gray buildings of the beautiful city of Bob Munson and Bob Leffingwell and Tom August and Stanley Danta and Brigham Anderson and Seab Cooley and Orrin Knox and Harley Hudson and the President and Vasily Tashikov and Raoul Barre and Claude Maudulayne and Krishna Khaleel and Tom Jefferson standing by the Tidal Basin and Old Abe enshrined forever in his temple by the Potomac.
***
Chapter 7
Eight hours later, of course, everybody was back in business and the joint was jumping. Tom August had called the special Saturday meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee for 11 a.m., and when Bob Munson arrived at the door of the Caucus Room at ten forty-five it was to be greeted by the usual uproar of a major hearing in that fabled setting where so many of American history’s most dramatic productions have been presented. All around the great marble room with its Corinthian pillars and its great windows on the east side opening on the sky there was the hectic turmoil of getting ready, the television technicians fussing with their machines off to one side, the news photographers taking their light readings at the witness chair, committee clerks moving in and out around the long committee table, an overflow audience filling every chair and standing along the walls and at the back, the news reporters moving in easily to take their seats at the long press tables amid many jokes and wisecracks and the customary exchanges of friends gathering for a job they have done many times before and know they will do many times again. How much of all their lives, Senator Munson thought, had been spent in the Senate Caucus Room; how many, many hours of testimony and investigation, high tragedy and tinpot comedy, frequently hectic and shabby, as America is hectic and shabby, but sometimes moving and noble, as America is moving and noble. The raw stuff of the government and the country came to the Caucus Room month in, month out, year in, year out, an unending pageant of idealism, veniality, astuteness, stupidity, selfishness, selflessness, failure, and achievement; and this time, he knew, the only difference was that extra excitement, that little edge of extra electric tension that came when participants and audience knew that something of really major import was under way.
The cop at the door waved him through with a cordial, “Good morning, Senator,” and he started along the aisle past the press tables toward the committee table. The Providence Journal and the Dallas News hailed him at once, and immediately the wire services, the Times, the Herald Tribune, the Star, and the Chicago Tribune crowded around. He found himself holding an impromptu press conference before he knew it, a fact which he noted did not particularly please Tom August, already sitting rather forlornly in his chair at the center of the committee table. For some reason the press didn’t seem to have much respect for Tom, and he was sure Tom didn’t have the slightest inkling why.
“What’s the truth of this, Senator?” the Times asked, holding out a copy of the Herald Tribune and pointing somewhat accusingly to a story at the top of the page. Under the headline SECRET CONCLAVE OKAYS LEFFINGWELL NOMINATION; RUSS, INDIANS, ALLIES GIVE GO-AHEAD ON NEW SECRETARY, it disclosed that something mighty fishy had gone on at Mrs. Phelps Harrison’s party last night. The author of the story obviously didn’t know exactly what, but by keeping his eyes open and his intuition untrammeled, by mixing a scrap of information with a hunk of conjecture and building twenty bricks with two pieces of straw, he had managed to come up with a good, sound, typical piece of informed Washington correspondence. The import was that “Russ, Indians, Allies” had given a ringing endorsement to Bob Leffingwell and therefore “it was believed” that this made his immediate confirmation by the Senate a foregone conclusion. Bob Munson glanced at it with a skeptical smile.
“Yes, I saw it,” he said. “Very enterprising, I thought.”
“Is it true, Senator?” the Baltimore Sun demanded. Senator Munson smiled.
“It’s very interesting,” he said.
“Well, we know you were at Mrs. Harrison’s,” the Times remarked, “and we know all the diplomatic crowd was, too. It could have happened.”
“So were several people from the New York Times,” Senator Munson said blandly. “Don’t you know whether it happened or not?”
“We’re asking you, Bob,” the AP said in a heavy-handed way, determined not to be diverted. The Majority Leader smiled again.
“I really couldn’t say,” he said. “I remember seeing one or two of the people mentioned there at the party, but that piece draws quite a few conclusions I wouldn’t want to draw.”
“That’s all right,” the Providence Journal assured him. “We can get it from the embassies.”
“Let me know what you think it adds up to, if you do,” Bob Munson said pleasantly and turned to greet Winthrop of Massachusetts, coming along the aisle in quick-humored dignity behind him.
“Win,” he said, “tell these boys the real inside story of what went on at Dolly’s, will you?”
“Lots of drinkin’ and lots of talkin’,” John Winthrop said with amiable crispness. “Don’t know what kind of a story you can get out of that, boys.”
“That’s what I told ’em,” Bob Munson said. “We’d better stop blocking the aisle.”
“We’ll ask the embassies,” the Baltimore Sun called after them as they turned away and moved toward the committee table.
“Ask them,” Bob Munson tossed back over his shoulder. “And be damned to you,” he added under his breath. Senator Winthrop chuckled.
“Ah, ah, ah, Bobby,” he said. “You didn’t really think you could keep anything like that quiet, did you?”
“I thought we might try,” the Majority Leader said as he took his seat next to the chairman and Senator Winthrop started to move along to the minority side.
“I suppose K.K. will spill the whole thing when they get to him,” he added, “but at least they’ll have to work for it. Good morning, Tom.”
“Good morning, Bob,” Senator August said in his gentle way. “I hope you’re feeling better this morning.”
“I wasn’t aware I was feeling poorly,” the Majority Leader said. The senior Senator from Minnesota gave him a sidelong glance.
“I meant, I hope your mood is better,” he said. Senator Munson snorted.
“Perfectly fine,” he said, “perfectly fine. I hope you didn’t think I was too harsh with anybody.”
Senator August shifted uneasily in his chair.
“I did think,” he said in a tone of soft reproach, “that you were a little harsh with both Mr. Khaleel and Mr. Tashikov. I did feel it might tend to make things a little more difficult—”
“More difficult, hell,” Bob Munson said shortly. “Sometimes I think that’s the way we ought to talk to them all the time.”
“Oh, now, Bob,” Tom August said in a genuinely shocked tone, “I don’t think that’s a wise way to feel at all. I really don’t. If they get the feeling that we mistrust them all the time and won’t accept their word when they want to negotiate—”
“Thomas,” Senator Munson said, “sometimes you amaze me. That’s all I can say, you amaze me.”
“But Bob—” Senator August protested. Senator Munson looked firm.
“I don’t want to discuss it,” he said aloofly. “I have troubles enough.”
“But, Bob,” Tom August said apologetically, “I only meant—”
“I know what you meant, Tom,” the Majority Leader said, unyielding. “I know very well what you meant. Next thing I know, you’ll be calling me a warmonger. I believe that’s the jargon word, isn’t it?”
“Oh, but, Bob,” Tom August tried again, “I only meant that you should be a little more diplomatic with them. They don’t understand our way of dealing sometimes and—”
“They understand that way a damned sight better than they do being wishy-washy, I can tell you that,” Senator Munson said. “Anyway, we’ll talk about it some other time. There comes Arly, and I suppose that means trouble.”
“Oh, I hope not,” Tom August said in an alarmed tone. “I have troubles enough.”
“That’s what I just said,” Bob Munson reminded him. He could see that the long, lean, and sardonic senior Senator from Arkansas had been stopped by the press and had just uttered something that had positively killed them all. At that moment Arly’s eye fell on the Majority Leader and with a happy wave he called across the twenty feet separating them, “Say, Bobby, I hear you had quite a row with Tashikov last night?”
Senator Munson waved back blandly.
“Thanks, pal,” he said. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“Not in this town,” Arly said, coming forward to take his seat on the majority side of the committee table while the press crowded up to listen and the photographers gathered around on the off-chance that this long standing and famous feud might produce some unexpected action. “Not in this town. They tell me it was pretty hot and heavy, though. The Indian Ambassador, too.” He stretched out an arm and gave Bob Munson a clap on the back. “What were you doing, anyway, straightening things out with the whole UN?”
“Somebody has to put things in proper perspective,” Bob Munson said, smiling in a noncommittal way at the eagerly attentive press. “God knows they’re plenty confused.”
Arly Richardson chuckled.
“Run along, boys,” he advised with his lantern-jawed smile. “Run along. You can see he isn’t going to confirm or deny. That’s our Bob.”
“That was pretty cute,” The Majority Leader told him as the reporters went back to their tables. “Thanks so much, pal.”
“I was just curious,” Senator Richardson said blandly. “I heard all these things and I wanted to know, Robert. That’s all.”
“Yeah,” Bob Munson said dryly. “Where were you yesterday? We missed you.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Arly Richardson said. “I saw that you had quite a rumpus. Unfortunately I got tied up at the Federal Trade Commission. One of my constituents has gotten himself into a hassle with them and I had to be there to give him moral support. Nothing I could do, of course, but he felt better with me holding his hand.”
“Do they ever realize how much they demand of us?” Bob Munson asked with a sigh. “Decide high policy, legislate for the good of the country, run the government, and play nursemaid to them too? How do they expect us to do any of it well?”
“They don’t realize,” Senator Richardson said with the wry knowledge of one who had held national office for twenty years. “All they realize is that if we don’t want to do it there are plenty of people who will.”
“You are so right,” Senator Munson said. “Did you get it straightened out?”
“One of those damned things where the Commission decided to hold hearings,” Arly said, “and you know what that means. It will probably take months.”
“A damned shame,” Bob Munson said sympathetically.
“But life,” Senator Richardson said, and then added, with a capital, “Life....By the way,” he remarked, as there came a little bustle at the door and Johnny DeWilton, looking stately and white-topped and every inch the United States Senator, came in with Verne Cramer, looking rather small and inconspicuous and just on the verge, as always, of saying something disrespectful and/or subversive to overpompous authority, “somebody was telling me that Bob Leffingwell wouldn’t appear today. What’s the matter?”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Bob Munson said ominously, “but he’d damned well better.”
“Yes, he should,” Senator Richardson said thoughtfully. “I have a few things to ask.”
“Friendly, I hope,” Bob Munson said, and Arly Richardson smiled in his sardonic way.
“I’ll bet you hope,” he said. “No, Bobby, I’m not so sure they will be friendly.”
“I thought I could count on you, at leas
t,” Senator Munson said with a sardonic expression of his own, and Senator Richardson looked genuinely amused for a second.
“Maybe you can and maybe you can’t,” he said, “but in any event, there are some things I want to know from our great and distinguished nominee, and I intend to find out. Then maybe I’ll be for him. I got a couple of strange complaints in my mail and telegrams this morning.”
“Cranks,” Bob Munson said.
“Maybe,” Arly said. “Maybe not. One thing I do want to know, though, is what you actually did say to Tashikov and K.K.”
“Nothing they didn’t deserve,” Senator Munson said shortly. “Good morning, Johnny. Hi, Verne.”
“Good morning, Bob,” Senator DeWilton said, stopping by his chair. “This is a hell of a situation.”
“What’s the matter?” Senator Munson asked. “Don’t you like these little surprises from the White House?”
Senator DeWilton snorted and Verne Cramer put a friendly hand on Bob Munson’s shoulder.
“You know Johnny,” he said, “always getting upset. Now I thought it was double extra peachy, myself.”
“It’s good to know I can count on you,” Senator Munson said, reaching back suddenly and poking him in the solar plexus. “Good boy!”
“God damn!” Verne Cramer said, doubling over on a burst of laughter. “Don’t do that. What will the tourists think?”
“That’s Bobby’s way of smoothing your feelings and getting your vote,” Arly Richardson offered. “It’s supposed to make you think we’re all big buddies and nobody’s really going to get mad at anybody.”
“Everybody’s going to get mad at everybody this time,” Senator DeWilton said abruptly. “Come on, Verne. Let’s go sit down.”
“Please do,” Bob Munson said. “The chairman looks a little nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” Tom August protested. “I just wonder where everybody is.”