by W. T. Tyler
“No, I don’t,” Wilson said, still remembering Caltronics. The business card given to him that rainy morning on the beltway was still in his wallet, together with the cashier’s check for three hundred dollars.
“Fourteen grand. Would you believe it? I took in fourteen grand that night, I shit you not. I’m a goddamn one-man political action committee, right? So I say to Rita the next morning after we added it up, ‘What the shit am I gonna do with this?’ I was thinking about this one congressman I was going to help, but we can’t give him more than a thousand on account of the law. So I get someone to help me spread it around, and that’s when someone asked me if he could put my name up, a political appointment.”
“Who helped you spread the money around?” Wilson asked.
“I got in touch with a few people—Pete Rathbone, mostly. He was doing some big fund-raising for the Republicans out there. He’s got a piece of Caltronics now, helping to get it reorganized, go public.”
“What is this Caltronics, what’s it do?”
“Artie’s got a small piece of it,” Rita Kramer said, “a small piece. Nat Strykker used to own most of it, but it’s being all changed since Rathbone took over—”
“That’s not what he asked,” Artie said. “He doesn’t know Strykker. He wanted to know about Caltronics.”
“I met Strykker,” Wilson recalled, “that day we signed the contract on the house.”
“Don’t remind me,” Rita said.
“Computer software,” Artie said, “that’s Caltronics. Software management systems, inventory control, purchasing, you name it. They design the systems, sell them, teach them, then walk away—lock-and-key jobs. They grossed maybe a hundred million last year.”
“Big business, then.”
The phone rang and Rita crossed the room to answer it.
“That’s just the skin off the banana,” Kramer said. “It’s gonna take off. This new management team Pete Rathbone is bringing in has got some computer whiz kids they’re bringing aboard. We’re gonna go public, get new financing. The sky’s the limit, Wilson, I shit you not. Who was that?”
“Your call from L.A.,” Rita said, returning to her chair. “I told them to call back in five minutes.”
“I’ll be on my way, then,” Wilson said.
Kramer leaned over to pull on his shoes. “It’s not an ego trip, like I said, being here in Washington, but I can’t get any answers. I don’t understand what the shit’s going on.”
“You mean about this political appointment.”
“He’s getting the runaround,” Rita said.
“You got good contacts, I heard,” Artie continued. “If I’m stepping out of line, people don’t want me here, O.K., I understand. I’m a sport about it.” He stood up. “Only let them tell me straight out, not all this runaround I’ve been getting. It’s been four, five months now. A guy like you should know—right, Wilson? Someone that’s been around this town as long as you, one of those invisible guys that don’t ever change. You’re not like these amateurs that have been giving me the stall. Hey, I gotta tell you about this fella I knew in Vegas, went down to Cuba back in the sixties, doing some work for the CIA—” His face had brightened, but his wife cut him off.
“Save it for next time. I’ll go down and get a table. Don’t be too long. You might change your shirt while you’re at it.”
“Just between the two of us,” Artie Kramer told Wilson as they stood at the door. “We’ll keep in touch; you and Rita when I’m not here, how’s that? We can play this game same as they can.…”
Rita was silent as they went down together in the elevator. Wilson was troubled that her husband may have misunderstood his reasons for coming. They stood together near the street entrance as he pulled on his coat. “Street wise, not Washington wise,” she said. “You see what I mean?”
“These things always take time. If you’re impatient, the way your husband seems to be, you’re bound to worry—”
“You sound like Edelman.”
“I don’t know Edelman.”
“He’s like all these Humpty Dumpties around here, afraid to stick his neck out. None of them will come right out and say what’s taking so long. I don’t care for myself, I’m ready to leave this town anytime. It’s Artie I’m thinking about. He raised all this money, told all his friends back in California he was going to take a job with this administration, and now they’re leaving him high and dry. They’ll tear his heart out back there.…”
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Wilson said. “Do you know how a background investigation works?”
“No, not really.”
“It can get complicated,” he said, watching her eyes.
“What’s that mean?”
“Has he ever had any trouble, any arrests or convictions?”
“You’ve got some nerve.”
He pulled on his gloves. “That’s what I meant. If you can’t give me a straight answer, why do you expect anyone else to?”
“If he found out I ever mentioned it, he’d break my neck.”
“Don’t, then.”
“It was in Brooklyn, he and his uncle. Receiving stolen property. Some furs his uncle bought.”
They were standing in the corridor of traffic and he moved her to the side. “How long ago was this?”
“When he was twenty, twenty-one. Thirty years ago. You think that might explain it?”
“Was he convicted?”
She nodded. “A suspended sentence.”
“I doubt if that’s the problem. Anything since?”
“Not that I know of. If someone wanted to hold this over his head, could they?”
“It depends upon the position the White House has in mind.”
“He’s afraid maybe that’s it.”
They stood in silence as she searched her memory for something to add, but there was nothing more.
“I can’t promise anything, but I’ll see what I can find out,” he told her. “It probably won’t be very much. If he’s impatient about a few months’ delay, Washington isn’t his town. You ought to tell him that.”
“I have. You don’t know Artie. Thanks for coming.”
The faint, cold rain that had fallen at dusk had stopped now, but hovered in the mist lifted from the wet pavement by the passing cars. Outside the hotel, Wilson took a cab to Ed Donlon’s detached Federal-style house in Georgetown. Cars lined the curbs on both sides of the narrow street. Ivy shimmered with rainwater under the brass coach lamps and a note was stuck through the door handle. Donlon had gone to put in an appearance at a cocktail party down the street and Wilson should wait inside. Wilson found the door unlocked. A single lamp was lit in the living room, a log burned in the grate, and two drinks had been abandoned on the mantel, half-finished, their ice cubes dissolving. On the rim of one was a trace of lipstick, probably that of Mary Sifton, Donlon’s off-again, on-again companion these recent months.
Wilson took off his coat, called Betsy and told her what time to expect him, and returned to the wing chair near the fireplace. As he opened his briefcase, he saw a hand-blocked card leaning against the lamp base:
POTTERY AND CERAMIC EXHIBIT
JANE BODLEY-DONLON
THE OLD KILN CONN.
Below the invitation Jane had printed a few sentences, but without a salutation: “Emil, Greta, and I are excited about this, especially the new glazes, which are an absolute miracle. Positively delirious about their possibilities. As for everything else, much the same. As for my intentions, am tired of thinking of us, us, us, and am entirely in metamorphosis. Must wait and see what exotic new creature emerges.…”
Wilson read no more, turning away uncomfortably to the typed notes from the Center, prepared that morning, warning of a budget crisis. He didn’t know who Greta was, but Emil was the Austrian-born painter, potter, and sculptor to whom Jane Donlon had apprenticed herself after the separation. Wilson was still sitting there, reading the notes on his lap, when he heard the front door open and
shut. He got up mechanically, still reading, moving in front of the fire, expecting Donlon and Mary Sifton to emerge from the hall, but then heard a soft tread on the stairs, climbing toward the second floor. Puzzled, he put aside the notes and crossed to the doorway. Hovering above the cold air of the street that greeted him he detected a fine, light fragrance that somehow seemed familiar.
He called out but no one answered. The footsteps moved higher. He went to the staircase and looked up through the spindled banisters toward the second floor. The steps had moved on, though, climbing lightly toward the third floor, where Brian’s old room and the guest bedroom were. Wilson climbed a few steps, hesitated, called out, and then climbed again. The fine scent still hovered on the air, as mysterious as before. He called a third time, but there was no answer. Standing halfway up the final staircase, he saw through the third-floor banister a seam of light under the paneled door of the guest room.
Was it Jane Donlon, unexpectedly returned? Mary Sifton? “Ed’s not here,” he called, deciding on neutrality. “He’s down the street. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”
There was no answer. It wasn’t his business, he decided, turning back down the staircase, just as the seam of light was broken by a shadow moving inside. He thought whoever it was would open the door, but a moment later he heard the sounds of horns, pipes, and flutes from a radio or record player and recognized, without knowing its name, a saraband from those Baroque archives so popular with Betsy during her stereophonc séances these long autumn evenings.
He was again sitting in the living room when Ed Donlon and Mary Sifton returned. They came in stealthily, like a pair of thieves—Donlon on tiptoes, Mary Sifton, the Treasury lawyer, carrying her shoes. Donlon didn’t realize he’d had too much to drink; neither did she. Wilson thought they looked foolish. Donlon, too, climbed the staircase to peer through the spindles of the third-floor banister, and then returned to the living room, still smiling secretively. Seeing his face, Wilson recognized what he might have looked like thirty years earlier during that wild escapade Donlon had once described to him—a summer weekend during his Princeton years when he was working at a New York brokerage and had returned to Trenton with a secretary he’d met there. The family—sisters, grandmothers, spinster aunts, and father—were at the Jersey shore in the old gingerbread cottage they occupied every August, and Donlon had the old Victorian residence in Trenton to himself, he and a nubile young secretary from Queens whose usual weekend excursion was an afternoon at Coney Island. Twenty-four hours of nude, faunlike chases and nonstop fucking, Donlon had said, in a performance never to be repeated in that corner of Christendom, not even on the dusty replica of a Grecian urn within the curved glass front of his father’s bookcase.
Rattling the martini shaker for another round—but not too loudly—Donlon had no idea of how he looked, Wilson thought. He said he could stay for one drink, no more. Donlon was in no condition to talk about the Center, although he tried, keeping his voice low. The occupant of the third floor, he told Wilson, was Grace Ramsey, come to find refuge again in the Georgetown house after six months of aimless, inconsolable wandering.
4.
The criminal division at the Justice Department was much the same as Wilson remembered it—dark woodwork, dark hall, dark desks, and a wintry, forbidding look on that dark wintry afternoon. On his way to his four o’clock appointment with Fred Merkle, an old colleague from his Justice days, he’d looked in his former office just down the corridor from Merkle’s suite. The smell of duplicating fluid was gone from the outer office and a Xerox cabinet stood in the alcove where the old duplicator had been. He recognized none of the secretaries, who all seemed much younger. The room he and Ed Donlon had once shared was now divided into cubicles by metal partitions. The entire suite and its occupants seemed to have shrunk. Standing in the old doorway, Wilson felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
Fred Merkle was reluctant to talk about the case at first, but did admit that he was handling it. His bony face was as passionless as an old woman’s, but it was a face without gender. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, his high forehead was touched with liver spots, and his thin hair, silver now, was carefully combed over a bald spot. His hands were small and white, freshly scrubbed, like a dentist’s.
It was the hushed voice Wilson found most familiar, still as irritating as ever after all those years, the vehicle of Merkle’s agonizing circumspection. During their five-year association years earlier, Merkle had discussed his personal life on only two occasions, both times over a rainy-day lunch in the cafeteria, where Merkle had described in embarrassingly trivial detail National Geographic films he’d seen at the Society auditorium. He had no personal life to speak of. His wife was an invalid, confined to a wheelchair. Over the years, his speaking voice had become an infirmary whisper. His own life was here, in this gloomy office where he received Wilson like an old friend but was reluctant to share the Justice Department’s case against Caltronics.
He admitted that they had a case. Caltronics had been under investigation for bribery and corruption after a Caltronics sales agent was suspected of bribing a government contracting officer for the award of a twenty-million-dollar computer time-sharing contract on the West Coast. Wilson, after a week of cautious probing, had learned as much from a friend at the Security and Exchange Commission, who’d given him Merkle’s name. He didn’t know that Justice had been working on a second case involving the same Caltronics salesman and a Navy procurement officer handling the award of a sixty-million-dollar computer software contract for naval ordnance inventories.
“Ready for the grand jury?” Wilson asked.
“Hardly,” Merkle said with an ambiguous smile.
“So you really haven’t made either case.”
“Right now, that’s hard to say. What we had initially looked very good.” He hesitated, removed his glasses to draw a small finger across his eyelid, and then looked at Wilson silently. Without the glasses, the face was one Wilson didn’t know. “Here it gets a little sticky,” he continued, almost apologetically.
The U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles had had sufficient evidence to obtain a court-authorized wiretap—legal surveillance—but only for two months. A California district judge had refused to authorize the extension.
“Before you could complete the case,” Wilson said.
“We thought by then we’d found a material witness willing to cooperate,” Merkle replied, looking over Wilson’s shoulder at the closed door. “It didn’t work out, unfortunately.” His eyes moved back to Wilson and he put his glasses on.
“What happened to the witness?”
Merkle smiled faintly. “He disappeared.”
“In Los Angeles?”
“No, here. In Washington, as a matter of fact.”
“A Caltronics employee?”
Merkle didn’t answer. The smile may have been intended to answer for him.
Wilson mentioned a few names—Artie Kramer, Nat Strykker, and finally Peter Rathbone. Only the latter’s name evoked Merkle’s nod of recognition.
“He’s new to Caltronics—just took over, I understand,” he said. “I know Peter. He was on the transition committee.”
“The Reagan committee?”
Merkle was surprised Wilson didn’t know. “Oh, yes, he was here until February, I believe, when he went back to California. I thought he might have taken a subcabinet post, but apparently Caltronics made an offer he couldn’t refuse. You didn’t know that?” Merkle was amused.
“I knew he worked in the Nixon White House but not Reagan’s,” Wilson said.
“Peter’s an old hand at it, one of the best. We’d heard you might be coming over here had the elections proved otherwise. I’m sorry, sorry it didn’t work out. A lot of us are, I think.”
“You’ve felt the political heat?” Wilson asked.
“In what way?”
“The Caltronics case.”
“Not at all,” Merkle said. “Peter Rathbone’s too smart for that. We�
��re just not ready to make the case.”
“You know who Artie Kramer is and what he’s doing in town?”
“We had a wiretap and we have a lot of names,” Merkle said. “Kramer’s may be one of them, but I can tell you quite frankly that it means nothing to me. That’s as much as I can say right now.”
That was as far as Merkle was willing to go, whatever his feelings about the current administration.
“Old loyalties do come back, don’t they, Haven?” he offered blandly as he accompanied Wilson past his secretary’s desk to the outer door. “Do you remember Carl Dowdy, from antitrust? He dropped by the other day too, in to renew old acquaintances. He has a law firm in Chicago. Seems to be doing very well.”
But Wilson’s visit paid a cryptic dividend. Two days later, he received a call from Fred Merkle, asking him to drop by. When he arrived, the secretary told him Merkle had been summoned upstairs.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wilson, but he’ll probably be gone for an hour at least. Would you like to reschedule for tomorrow?”
“No, I’ll give him a call at home tonight.”
A large man in an overcoat sat at the end of the table in the alcove, reading a newspaper in the gray light of the high windows. Hearing Wilson’s name, he got up, dropping the newspaper aside. His hair was long and curly, a thick mustache grew down the corners of his mouth to his chin, and his rough cheeks were pitted with scars.
Wilson recognized him and waited in the hall as the man followed him out.
“Bernie Klempner,” he said, sticking out a huge hand. “You’re Wilson. I was gonna ask Fred to get us together sometime. You saved me a trip.”
They left by the side door. “I figured you for someone from Labor,” Klempner said as they turned up the street. “That day at Potomac Towers and you came busting in my back door like that, I figure you for someone from the Labor Department, maybe the old special investigations section, one of those fucking dimwits over there who blew the Central States pension scam.” He laughed raucously and pulled on a cheap furry Tyrolean hat made in some Hong Kong or Korean sweatshop. Settled atop his shaggy head, it looked like a stuffed animal sitting on a bedroom pillow. “What’d you figure?”