The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  “I figured you were annoyed.”

  “I was,” Klempner said sarcastically. “Maybe I still am. That’s why I wanna talk. You got a few minutes?”

  “I was going back to my office. We can talk there.”

  “We’ll grab a cab, next block over.” He pulled a package of gum from his pocket, removed a stick, peeled it, stuck it in his mouth and began to chew, the bulge of muscle flexing like a bicep. Below the dark overcoat his trousers were short at the cuffs, and an inch of dark stocking showed. Metal taps were nailed to the thick heels and they rang out along the pavement like Percheron iron.

  “I heard you been asking around,” Klempner said, studying the crowded street ahead of them, “asking questions, looking up a few old friends. I figure I better find out why. You’re a Democrat, someone told me, headed for big things until the Reagan crowd short-sheeted you. Broke your toes off at the ankles. Criminal division, I heard. Was that it?”

  “A possibility. Who told you?”

  “This town doesn’t keep any secrets, not from me, anyway. I did a little checking after you blew in my back door. I heard some lawyer from Salt Lake City got your job. That’s tough shit, man, my heart really bleeds. I was fifteen years with the FBI and I quit cold turkey, like you did. Maybe you heard. I don’t bleed easy. Who set you up for this big job at Justice—your pals on the Hill?

  “Some old friends.”

  “You were gonna put things straight, I heard. That’s the trouble with all these goddamn political appointees—they’ve all got big ideas, all of ’em wanna make it big. Me, I don’t give a shit—high road, low road, I go either way. You guys that are all gonna make it big are just the same, white on black, black on white. You tell me the difference.”

  He watched Wilson’s face as they walked, but Wilson didn’t reply, head down, wondering how accidental their meeting had been.

  “They’re all gonna put things straight their way,” Klempner continued, head back again, eyes restlessly roaming the street ahead of them. “Like Fred Merkle back there, who’s as dull as bay oyster and just as honest. Or they roll into town after election day, think they own it and are gonna rip it off, like your pals over at the Watergate or those dude ranch cowboys over at the White House. Me, I like Washington the way it is, my way—just the way you see it. C’mon, there’s a cab.”

  He bounced across the pavement into the crowded street, grabbed the taxi’s rear door handle, and pulled the door open before the driver could speed away.

  The driver, a Nigerian, protested: “Hey, mon—I’m on call—”

  “Like shit you are. You’re cruising for brothers. Lemme see your green card.” Klempner hovered over him, huge, shaggy, and intimidating. The thin driver conceded and they drove off.

  “My car’s in the shop,” Klempner continued randomly, settling back on a seat covered with dull plastic, very worn. On the dashboard was a display of personal items—tinted photographs, toilet articles, religious medals, and a radio—like a barbershop shelf. “I can take the Metro, catch a cab, either one, I don’t care. You a sports fan?” The pale-green eyes showed only conversational interest.

  “I follow the Redskins, that’s about all.”

  “I watch them sometimes, but I wouldn’t give six bits to watch them play. Hey, who do the Redskins play this weekend?” he called to the driver.

  “Giants, mon. New York.”

  “See what I mean,” Klempner said, moving his eyes again to the pavement crowds. “These Afros from overseas try to blend in, jive you like that boogie crowd over in Southeast and think you don’t know the difference. Washington’s a spectator sport, Wilson, that’s all it is. A goddamn spectator sport, and I’m not just talking about that hot-air circus up on the Hill. Who wants to pay twenty, thirty bucks a shot to go out to RFK and watch twenty-two millionaires punching a leather ball on Sunday afternoon, when you’ve got all this sideshow on the pavement? To a lot of people, Washington stinks, just like the government stinks, but it’s my air and I breathe it. Me, I’m right here all the time, the same way, what you see one year to the next. I don’t blow away when a new crowd of shysters move in.”

  He lowered his head to follow someone walking jauntily along the pavement, shoulders bouncing in a brown leather coat. He turned to follow him through the back window. “See that black dude in the high-heel shoes? Carver Mack, from over at Fourteenth and U, the candy man for that crowd over there, a drug dealer.”

  Wilson looked indifferently out the rear window.

  “He used to carry this thirty-eight with a speed loader. They picked him up in Rock Creek Park a couple of years back on a bust, but all they could find was this thirty-eight in his armpit. He told them he was hunting squirrels.” Klempner laughed softly. “Talking about squirrels, TV on Sunday afternoon doesn’t have a goddamned thing to do with football, just like this California crowd over on Pennsylvania Avenue doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with politics. The way this country is, Sunday afternoon comes and CBS could put two kangaroos in boxing gloves on the tube, and all these armchair jocks around the country would still hustle out to the icebox between rounds like they were going to miss something.” He prodded the front seat with his knee. “Isn’t that right, sonny?” he called to the driver.

  “Yeah, mon, yeah.”

  “See what I mean?”

  “Still an Agency front?” Klempner asked as they climbed the steps to the Center. The brick masons and ironworkers who had been erecting the new front fence were putting away their tools for the day. Once it was complete, the high-palinged iron fence would limit access to the front and rear gates. “Still cooking up reptile poison for Castro and some other weird shit, or have you cleaned that up too?”

  “What do your friends tell you?” Wilson asked, a little deadened by Klempner’s unremitting cynicism.

  “They tell me you can pump up a flat economy with hot air, same as the Sisters used to tell us you can get a virgin pregnant with little green bananas.” He stood in the reception room, gazing about curiously. It was empty and silent at that hour of the afternoon.

  Wilson led him into the director’s office, shut the front and rear doors, and paused to look at the telephone messages waiting on the desk. Rita Kramer had called and asked that he telephone before six. Buster Foreman had called twice, wanting to know if he’d made up his mind about going down to South Carolina with him. They could drive down over the weekend. Wilson had forgotten all about it.

  Klempner peeled off his overcoat as he stood at the bay window looking out over the quadrangle. “It’s a pretty big layout,” he said. “Who does your security?”

  Wilson said he wasn’t sure, still looking at the telephone messages. Then he crossed the room to join Klempner, who offered to do a security survey. Business was slow and he could give him a good price. A complete package: survey, hardware, and installation.

  They sat in the leather chairs at the end of the room. “So you’re looking for new business, is that it? That’s what you want to talk about?”

  “I’m always looking for new business. I drive by this place maybe three, four times a week. I see what’s happening. I get curious.” He smiled, as if savoring Wilson’s uncertainty. “It’s not hard to figure. Me, I’m like the old dog on the block. Someone new moves in on my sidewalk, I walk around sniffing assholes. Only in your case, it doesn’t figure—a guy like you with your background and a pair of clowns like this Strykker and Artie Kramer. What’s the connection? They got you on a retainer?”

  Wilson lifted his feet to the coffee table and sat back. “I have an interest in a small brokerage out in Virginia,” he said. “It handled a house out on the Potomac and Kramer’s wife was interested. It didn’t work out.”

  Klempner didn’t seem convinced. “Like I say, this is my town and I know it. I see things happening.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Whatever. Maybe I couldn’t get a front table over at Sans Souci or wherever the fast crowd hangs out these days, but I
know who does. Maybe I couldn’t find the hat room at the Cosmos Club, either, like some of your friends, but I know who’s dicking who over on the Hill, same as you do, who’s getting coked up or juiced blind, who’s hanging out at the gay night spots after the Georgetown dinner parties shut down.…”

  “Maybe we ought to swap stories,” Wilson said.

  “Instant replay, Wilson. I’ve seen it too many times, like you have. Only you don’t know these two clowns, these out-of-town cheapies, like I do. So I figured maybe I’d better fill you in, put you wise.”

  “Artie Kramer, you mean, Kramer and Strykker.”

  “Artie Kramer’s nothing, Wilson,” Klempner said. “Real small but he thinks he’s big-time. He’s nothing. You think he’s got connections, that he’s smart? He’s got an IQ about ten pounds lighter than a rock, nothing heavier, that’s what he’s got.”

  “He raised a little money for the Republicans. He’s got a piece of this Caltronics, I hear, a few other things.”

  “So he made a little money out there; so have a lot of dumdums. Only how many of them decide to go big-time, set himself up in Washington with a federal job, like a Bel Air millionaire—maybe a clearinghouse for favors, a little respectability? So he kicks in a few thousand to a couple of congressional campaigns, gets a few of his companies to kick in too, like this Caltronics outfit. He gives a lotta bucks to this one Nevada congressman—a real dull family-type guy; O.K., so what if he is a Mormon turkey?—and he thinks he owns him. Same with a couple of campaign types out there he’s mixed up with, one he cut into a real estate deal near Palmdale, where you’ve got all these Defense contractors and the B-l bomber crowd picking up options. He thinks he owns them too. But that’s Kramer’s mentality. The creep doesn’t give, he buys.”

  “To do what?” Wilson asked after a minute. “Just for a political appointment?”

  “You figure it out. When all these rube politicians come riding in on Reagan’s coattails, Kramer sends them letters here in Washington, trying to pick his slot. Something big, he tells them. He tries to put the heat on the transition committee, but Kramer doesn’t exactly come across as a Harvard Law type, does he? Not if you’re one of those PR smoothies working over there on Pennsylvania Avenue. So maybe they try to brush him off—some dinky job with the Small Business Administration, the Commission on Maritime, maybe GSA. But Kramer doesn’t go for it. He wants to be up front, box seats all the way, like four years of the inaugural ball. Kramer wants to impress people, Wilson—impress them big.”

  Footsteps passed along the corridor and Klempner paused to listen, eyes moving to the door. Dusk was falling across the quadrangle beyond the old bay window. The footsteps were those of his temporary secretary, going home. He got up to turn on the lamp, intrigued by Klempner’s vehemence.

  “Impress which people?” he asked as he sat back down.

  “The big shots out in California and Nevada,” Klempner said, “the movie crowd, the Malibu society bums who never took him seriously—not him, not that Las Vegas hooker he married, not that houseful of lap dogs he keeps hanging around. You wanna know the kind of guy Artie Kramer is, Wilson? I’ll tell you. He’s the kind of guy who gives movie screening parties out at his place in L.A. and no one comes except his crummy pals. He’s the kind of guy whose wife gives alfresco lunches at his beach house and no one shows except his crummy friends. What kind of guy are you these days if the only bums you can get to your fancy parties are your crummy friends, your gin rummy pals? You’re nothing, Wilson, and that’s what Artie Kramer is—a nothing social-climbing punk with nothing friends.”

  “How do you know all this?” Wilson asked.

  Klempner shrugged, stood up, and crossed the floor to drop his chewing gum in the wastebasket next to Dr. Foster’s old desk. “I was three years in L.A. and I’ve got an acid-proof memory. It doesn’t wash out. I know a guy who’s still out there—the FBI office in L.A. We keep in touch. A couple of years back, Strykker and his buddy Kramer were dicking around trying to get a piece of a casino in Vegas and they made a book on them.” He smiled as he returned to the chair. “You wanna hear something funny, you should hear those wacko transcripts—a Marx Brothers movie.” He looked at his watch, took out a cigarette, and sat down, searching his pockets for a match. “You ever met Strykker?”

  “Once. He was with Mrs. Kramer when she signed the contract on the house.”

  “What’d you think?”

  “I didn’t talk to him much.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. Strykker’s smart as a shithouse rat, take my word.” He lit the cigarette, filled his lungs, and sat back, gratified. “He used to be the brains, an accountant. A CPA, a ledgerbook magician, now he’s out of his class. That’s why they brought Pete Rathbone in. Strykker started out as a taxman after the war, a one-horse operation with a sign in his front yard, a desk in the parlor, and his first wife licking the stamps. All he wanted was an orange grove somewhere. Now he’s got this big accounting firm, a securities company, and a piece of a couple of insurance outfits. He’s spread coast to coast, but so is his paper. He can’t catch up. Yeah, he’s smart all right, big time, but they’ll nail him one of these days. He’s been cooking the books for so many of those companies of his for so long, he’s got half the CPAs in California cross-eyed. You think I’m kidding?”

  “I don’t know Strykker. I’ve heard Caltronics belongs pretty much to him. How’d it get started?”

  “Strykker. Ten years ago it was a two-man operation, going broke—two young computer engineers designing software systems out of their garage. Strykker was doing their tax work, saw a good idea going nowhere because these kids didn’t have any business smarts, so he raised some money and bought into it. A couple of years later, he took control, bought them out, and the company started to roll. Maybe two hundred million last year. Yeah, Strykker’s smart all right, a real hustler, only he’s a heavy loser at the tables, real heavy—heavy enough so he doesn’t watch it, it’s going to bury him, nothing but lead in his pockets. He’s been lucky so far; Caltronics is his gold mine.”

  Slouched deep in his chair, Klempner gazed sleepily at Wilson, studying his reaction.

  “You’ve been keeping your eye on them,” Wilson said. “I hear you’ve got a hunting license these days, working for your old friends.”

  “Me?” Klempner smiled, like a man who didn’t want to be believed. “Someone’s been pulling your leg. Can I use your phone?”

  “Go ahead. You’ve got an office next door to Caltronics. If you had a hunting license, that would be pretty convenient, wouldn’t it?” He watched him cross the floor to the desk.

  Klempner was still grinning. “I was next door because they wanted me there—security work. They got some hot new software designs—algorithms, they call them. A whole new breakthrough, they say. I had a contract.”

  Wilson listened as Klempner called a downtown garage and asked about his car. It wasn’t ready. He called a local cab company, but the dispatcher told him he wouldn’t have anything for thirty minutes.

  “Why did Caltronics close that office at Potomac Towers?” Wilson asked as Klempner wandered back to the bay window. The winter darkness had settled over the grounds outside and the lights had been extinguished in most of the offices.

  “It wasn’t working out,” Klempner said, hands in his hip pockets, rocking slowly on his heels. “It was supposed to handle government contracts, government relations, but the people running it didn’t know what they were doing. It was just a place where Strykker and a few other of the higher-ups could hang their hats, keep their appointment books—a goddamn valet service.” He went back to the chair and sat down. “So they turned the account over to this big law firm over on K Street. It cost them a bundle—a hundred and fifty grand a year, someone told me. They shipped the staff back to California—all but one, anyway. That was another reason they closed that office. He cleaned out the local bank accounts and disappeared; almost a hundred grand, I heard. Did Merkle tell you about t
hat?”

  Wilson hesitated, unwilling to concede an advantage.

  “A guy named Morris,” Klempner continued, taking out a package of cigarettes, but then he refrained and put the package back. “He disappeared. Did Merkle tell you about this court order?”

  Again Wilson hesitated, wondering if Klempner was more interested in learning what Fred Merkle had told him or in identifying Wilson’s own interest in Caltronics.

  “He said a district judge had refused the extension of the legal surveillance—closed down the wiretaps.”

  Klempner sat forward, shoulders hunched. “Sure he did. They were trolling for big stuff, a fishing expedition—don’t let Fred kid you they were just setting it up with this bribery rap, but the goddamn judge smelled a rat.” His voice had dropped and now, conscious of it, he sat back again. “This is sensitive stuff and this place is too quiet, Wilson. I can hear the fucking walls listening.”

  “It’s me,” Wilson said, “trying to figure out what this is all about.”

  “You shouldn’t worry; it’s not your problem. Me, I’m buttoned up. If it leaks, it’s my ass. I’m just trying to do you a favor, keep you from getting burned.” He reached for his hat and coat. “Hey, which way do you go home—out Chain Bridge Road?”

  Driving out Whitehurst Freeway, the two men discovered they had something in common. Klempner was from Philadelphia. His mother ran the lunchroom for a parochial school and he’d gotten an accounting degree from St. Joseph’s. He was drafted in 1954 and after basic training sent to the army criminal investigation school at Fort Holabird in Baltimore.

  Wilson told him that he’d gone to counterintelligence corps school at Fort Holabird.