A Clear and Present Danger

by Buck Sanders

  He took a few unconscious steps in a remembered direction, and suddenly saw her. She waved to him with unrestrained enthusiasm. He ran toward her. She leaned out of her box and nearly fell to the tarmac. A man caught her just in time—her father, as it happened.

  Slayton could say nothing. She shouted something like congratulations to him. Dazed and smiling, he moved as close to her as the confines of her spectator’s box would allow. She pecked his damp cheek. And then he found his voice.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I’d like to meet you after.”

  “Well, the boy speaks!” the older man with her remarked.

  “I’ll be here,” she promised.

  And she was.

  It was an awkward first hour. Slayton found it difficult to lurch into conversation with Jean Marie, though with her father the talk was a breeze. He was a race fan, and Slayton found himself discoursing on the finer points of racing cams and splinter carbs, all of which the woman he loved found less than enthralling.

  But finally her father left, a private sort of laughter trailing behind him as he walked away, and Ben and Jean were alone. He began compulsively telling her about himself, as if there was not a moment to lose.

  … Did he know even then, that first time he spoke with her?

  He told her of his wartime experiences, how he had grown sick and ashamed of the profiteering he saw all about him, by the immorality of the war itself, by the tragedy he could see that the war would bring to the lives of its veterans; he told her about his father, a police captain in Ann Arbor who had died of a heart attack while he was somewhere over Vietnam dropping a payload of destruction in the name of democracy, how he had loved the man, how they had built an impressive collection of Hudson automobiles and vintage Packards and Cadillacs. He told her how his prize possession was an ivory 1952 Nash-Healey two-seater designed by Pinin Farina; how he had joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War when he returned home to Michigan, then dropped out when he realized that his radical friends seemed to have no vision beyond their next television appearance; how he had amassed a huge collection of literate mystery novels during the time he studied langauge, diplomacy, and politics at the University of Michigan.

  She told him less about herself. But enough. She was a serious student of music, a substitute flautist with the National Symphony in Washington, a College of William and Mary fine arts major, and the grateful beneficiary of a rich father.

  The two of them were inseparable from that first meeting. Within sixty days, they were married. Again, it seemed to Slayton that there was no time to lose.

  Jean Marie’s father presented the pair with the gift of fifty acres of rolling woods and field near Mount Vernon—ancestral land. He had enjoyed hearing Ben’s talk of building a self-sufficient home on acreage somewhere outside Washington, where he was seeking federal law enforcement work with the help of a Michigan Congressman who had been a friend of his late father.

  There could have been no happier couple.

  Slayton built on the land his father-in-law had given them. The house was first to go up, a large, rambling affair built of logs and stone and surrounded by verandas and decks. The south side was entirely glass, a system of solar heating panels over the greenhouse.

  He built a windmill and managed to generate nearly one-third of his own electricity. Then he added a hangar, to house a single-engine Cessna he had managed to win in a poker game in Thailand. Adjacent to the hangar, he built a sixteen-stall garage for his cars.

  Jean Marie worked on arranging a gourmet kitchen for the house, saw to the growing of herbs and spices, vegetables, and even a few citrus plants in the greenhouse, and set off a generous part of the house for Ben’s library, to which her father added a considerable number of rare leather-bound editions, oak floor-to-ceiling bookshelves to line the room, a pair of Persian rugs, and a ceiling of embossed goat skin.

  Slayton won appointment to the Treasury Department as a provisional agent, subject to his successfully completing the academy training. On the eve of his graduation day, Slayton received word from Michigan that his mother had died.

  … Time is all we have.

  The thought reverberated in his head as he attended the funeral, his wife at his side. She became overwhelmingly precious to him.

  When they returned to Virginia, Jean Marie’s father had one further lavish gift for the couple, a gift requiring a great deal of Ben’s increasingly valuable time. Between the work on the “farm,” as he and Jean called their place, and his work in Washington for Treasury, Slayton was a very active man. But Jean’s father insisted. The two were to sit for an oil portrait. And sit they did.

  Ten days after the portrait was hung above the library fireplace, Jean Marie died in her sleep.

  “I wanted to tell you all along,” her father told Ben as the two men drank together through the first shattering night of grief, “but Jean made me keep it to myself.

  “She’s been sick a long time, Ben, since when she was a girl. It meant there were a lot of things she couldn’t have, a lot of times she couldn’t share with other girls her age. She met you and she fell in love and she wanted the time together, however brief it would be. I wouldn’t deny her that wish, or endanger it, by telling you.”

  The older man finished his brandy and then looked at his son-in-law with a nearly helpless plea in his eyes.

  “You understand, Ben?”

  He did. “I wanted the time, too. I could have known.”

  Now, alone in the surroundings that he and Jean Marie had created, he would be reminded of her always. It had been a good time in his life, providing him strong memories with which to go forward.

  He found progress in his life, in his work. Slayton had compiled an impressive record of achievement at Treasury, a record that could not be denied him in spite of his occasional contentiousness. He had been good at whatever he had done, in whatever division he served. He would be noticed by someone, at some time.

  Slayton believed himself not simply slated for career promotion; he believed himself at a strange and exciting starting point of a new life. He knew he was uniquely fit, by qualification and circumstance. He had been strengthened by love and support in his past, so much so that he understood the power of his complete personal freedom for the future. He was ready and capable of making a blind leap into the dark.

  He was neither humbled nor mystified by his fateful conclusion. Slayton merely deduced. He had been waiting for the time, ever since first meeting Hamilton Winship. That early impression, the impression of a man biding his time in a role, had reminded Slayton of a piece of dialogue from R. Wright Campbell’s finely textured novel of political intrigue, The Spy Who Sat and Waited:

  “… ‘I will survive. You see, I am a patient man and easily overlooked.’”

  Slayton’s own discreet investigation of Winship had only strengthened initial impressions. And tonight, by the ritual of the Washington party, the two men would perform for one another; they would test one another; they would seal some desperate destiny.

  Ten

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 9 p.m. St. Valentine’s Day, 1981

  Slayton eased the Nash-Healey around the tight corner leading off the avenue to the Winship residence in Washington’s exclusive Georgetown district.

  He had been chilly the entire twelve-mile trip in from Mount Vernon, despite the wheezing of the tiny gasoline-powered heater below the dashboard. It was, Slayton reasoned, quaking with the cold in the tiny canvas-topped passenger compartment, a small price to pay, this discomfort. The car was an absolute classic, as underappreciated as it was even in its day.

  The Nash-Healey was one of the few true sports cars made in the United States, the happy attempt by the late Nash Corporation to spruce up its line. Even the most biased Nash executive had to know that the Nash selection resembled a display of bathtubs more than an array of fine cars.

  So in 1952, the Italian designer Pinan Farina was brought to Detroit to rescue the Nash. And what a job he di
d of it.

  Slayton’s was one of the very first Nash-Healeys off the factory assembly line. It had a sleek ivory body, sloped downward at the front of its long hood, was notched with tiny tailfins in back. An oval chrome grille with hooded headlights, the sparest of chrome bumpers fore and aft, and balloon tires set around gleaming convex hub caps gave the ship its European dash.

  Under the protracted hood was a powerful, mostly aluminum-cast six-cylinder V-block engine, quite a forward-looking plant in its day. It still ran like a dream. In the dry months of October and November, Slayton would run the Nash-Healey full-out, and the machine would respond as if it were a greyhound dog aching for the relief of a race track.

  The engine purred as Slayton wheeled the car to the curb front outside the Winship home. A liveried black man opened the door for him and announced that he was to park the guests’ cars. Slayton tried to give him a pair of dollar bills for his trouble.

  “No way,” the porter said. “This is a privilege. Can this be a Nash-Healey?”

  “The very one,” Slayton answered. There was a bond between the men. Few could identify the car properly. Only the most discriminating.

  “A rare beauty,” the porter said.

  “And a rare night.”

  Slayton turned and walked to the front stoop of Winship’s house, an ivy-covered red brick townhouse at mid-block with a fine green-and-gold Georgian door.

  A butler took his coat and gloves, and before he was spotted by his hosts, Slayton had a chance to take in the scene.

  It was a typical Georgetown gathering, minus only the posturing of Presidential Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointees, as it was too early in the new regime for that sort of thing. Slayton missed most especially the antics of Hamilton Jordan from the Carter administration. He had been in a home much like the one he now stood in when Jordan, it had been rumored and fiercely denied by Hamilton the next day, ogled the decolletage of the Egyptian ambassador’s wife and remarked. “I do believe I see the great pyramids.”

  The Congressional representation was mostly Democratic, reflecting the Winships’ personal political affiliations, though a few Republican curiosities were milling about. Slayton couldn’t take his eyes off Alfonse D’Amato, the new Senator from New York. He was trying to decide the merits of a description of D’Amato he had heard somewhere, that the Senator closely resembled a ferret.

  Diplomats were in great abundance, of course. The biggest delegation were elegant Third Worlders whose capitals couldn’t provide food and drink that matched the quality and quantity of that offered at the simplest American diner. Often this bunch was purely hungry, Slayton had learned.

  The women were uniformly horselike. The doughy matrons who had by some mysterious means laid claim to their husbands decades earlier and were now resting on their plump laurels, content to allow the menfolk their cheap distractions while they quietly kept the books.

  The exception, Slayton quickly saw, was the wife of the French ambassador, a Monsieur LaRoque. LaRoque had recently married a twenty-seven-year-old star of the French cinema, known in Paris simply as Adrienne. LaRoque himself was an aging debauchee. The flesh sagged off his face like a cake that had been left out in the rain. The only icing was a little Hitleresque mustache. His eyes were tired, as if he’d been up all night before sweating it out with a pair of fourteen-year-old boys.

  LaRoque’s wife, on the other hand, was a wondrously beautiful creature. It was as if this couple were the gender opposites of Senator John Warner and his new wife, the corpulent Elizabeth Taylor, both of whom were standing nearby the LaRoques.

  Adrienne LaRoque was a tall and graceful woman, perhaps four inches taller than her squat husband; she had dark brown hair and almond-colored eyes; and a voice that Slayton cocked his ear to hear, a familiar husky-feminine voice. He had seen one of her films and had been reminded, though she looked nothing like her, of Lauren Bacall in her early days.

  Slayton began moving toward the LaRoques. Senator Warner and Elizabeth Taylor waved to him, signaling him to join their circle, thinking he had seen their gesture.

  He was stopped by Edith Winship.

  “So, you must be Benjamin Justin Slayton,” she said.

  “The same.” He took her hand and kissed it in the continental manner. She blushed—slightly, girlishly. He liked her immediately.

  “Hamilton pointed you out to me when you entered,” she explained. She pointed now across the room, to her husband, who tipped his glass toward them. He was busy speaking to Jim Brady, the President’s press secretary.

  “Come and I’ll introduce you to whoever you may not know,” she said, draping her arm in his.

  “The French ambassador,” Slayton said. “I’ve never had the pleasure.”

  Edith Winship arched her brows at this and whispered to Slayton, “Pity that old goat has the pleasure. My guess is that you’d know how better to use it.”

  They reached the LaRoques. Slayton extended his hand in greeting to LaRoque, but didn’t look at him. He and Adrienne locked gazes.

  “I’ll leave you all now,” Edirh Winship said, fluttering off toward the Warners. Elizabeth Taylor looked miffed.

  LaRoque muttered something, and continued a conversation with a man to his right, an Austrian who looked every bit as debauched and as wearied by it as LaRoque.

  “Shall we have a moment’s time together?” Slayton asked Adrienne.

  “Of course,” she said.

  All eyes in the room followed the handsome couple as they glided toward a bar and helped themselves to champagne.

  They talked for ten minutes. Adrienne favored him with a few bits of Parisian film gossip, indicated her boredom for Washington and most things American, and said she wished she were home in France, basking in the warm sun of Nice. Slayton imagined himself in bed with her, with her long legs wrapped around his back.

  She noticed that he wasn’t listening to her words. She smiled and covered his hand with hers.

  “I can read your thoughts,” she said, her voice heavy with its French accent. “Can you read mine?”

  “I believe I can. You just thought, ‘Yes, I’d love to have a private drink with this man.’”

  “Then let’s go,” she said, “but not far.”

  Slayton looked around the room. The only escape was a stairway. She watched him look at it.

  “I’ll go up, to the powder room. You follow in a few minutes. We’ll meet somewhere up there.”

  It was just as she said. When Slayton made his way up the stairs, he heard her whisper, from a doorway off the corridor.

  He entered a large bedroom, tastefully furnished and equipped, as most of Georgetown’s elegant homes were, with a small fireplace.

  “Now, we’re alone,” she said, smiling, somewhat shyly.

  Slayton took her shoulders in his hands and pulled her toward him. She did not resist.

  They moved together quickly, hungrily, embracing with parted lips. Slayton slipped his fingers beneath the wispy strands of her gown and pulled the top slowly over her breasts, baring them.

  He held her breasts in his hands, then leaned down to kiss them. Adrienne locked her fingers behind his head, urging him on, then urging him downward.

  Slayton dropped his hands to her hips and grasped the lower portion of her gown, raised it up over her knees, then her smooth thighs, to her waist. She was naked beneath the gown.

  He caressed her gently, wetting her, causing her to tremble and growl something wicked in French. Then he rose to face her. He could see the helplessness in her face. She was his.

  She bent to undo his trousers, pleasuring him with her touch and her taste. Slayton steadied himself as she worked on him, playfully, expertly.

  When she had tired, Slayton guided her to the edge of a canopied bed. Standing at the side, Slayton lifted her right leg at the knee, propping it up on the bed. He stood behind her, raised her gown and moved in close.

  Behind them, at the door, they heard the sound of a throat clearing i
tself.

  It was Hamilton Winship, wearing an expression of simultaneous disapproval and mischievous envy.

  Adrienne let out a small scream that sounded like an injured forest animal. She pulled furiously at her gown, smoothing it down over her bared buttocks. Her face was very red and her breathing was that of a drowning victim.

  She gave Slayton a vicious stare and walked quickly away from him. Her heel caught on an edge of a rug, and she nearly fell flat on her face. Winship caught her and struggled with her, finally righting the lady.

  “I am sorry,” she said, stiffly.

  “But it’s Valentine’s Day,” Winship said, chortling at his own joke.

  Slayton calmly zipped up his trousers and straightened his coat and tie. A rare night indeed, he thought.

  “Now, my boy,” Winship said, approaching Slayton, “I’ve been meaning to speak to you tonight.” He ignored the little assignation he had just witnessed. Interrupted, to be exact.

  “Come with me.”

  Slayton followed Winship’s lead, down the opposite end of the second-floor corridor to a back stairway. The two men clattered down the bare wood steps. At the bottom, a door led into the kitchen, where a chef and his charges were about to serve the evening buffet as soon as they stopped throwing knives at one another. A second door led to Winship’s study.

  It was a dark and heavy room, though it could be much lighter during the day, Slayton could see, with a pair of large glass doors leading out into the garden area of the house. Slayton examined the paintings, grouped above yet another fireplace in the Winship household.

  Slayton was invited to rest in the striped Regency chair, one of two at either side of Winship’s burnished teakwood desk. Winship flicked on the Tiffany lamp at the edge of his desk.

  “The Marthés,” Slayton said, “are excellent. I wish I had one myself.”

  Winship smiled. He looked toward the painting unconsciously when Slayton mentioned it.