by W. T. Tyler
“I think so,” Wilson said. “Caltronics is in on the skim.”
“In on the siphoning, in on the skim, and doing a lot of churning of its own. That was the deal when Caltronics got the original contracts. This shyster that started Caltronics was a big accountant for these West Coast unions—”
“Strykker’s his name.”
“They didn’t tell me his name,” Buster said. “Just that it was his ties to these unions that got the Labor investigation unit suspicious, that and the cash problems this insurance company was having. They started nosing around.”
The waitress returned and Wilson sat in silence until she’d left again.
“So what I’m saying,” Buster said, “is that Caltronics was in on a multimillion-dollar siphoning scheme draining assets from a couple of union-backed insurance companies.”
“How far did the investigation go?”
“Not very far. They hardly got their nose under the goddamn tent. The FBI stepped in and took over after some Caltronics agent was accused of bribing a government contracting officer. That’s when they stomped all over the Labor unit’s investigation. Because of this bribery charge, the U.S. Attorney’s office got a court-approved wiretap, but what they’re really looking for is more stuff on this multimillion-dollar siphoning scheme. After a couple of months, a district judge gets wise. He’s looking at the transcripts and he finally figures it out. They’re trolling for evidence unrelated to the bribery investigation and he denies the wiretap extension.”
“A screw-up,” Wilson said.
“A royal bureaucratic fuck-up, take my word. The investigation leaks and now everyone’s running for cover—Caltronics, these insurance companies, the West Coast unions behind them. All of them.”
“But not Pete Rathbone,” Wilson said. “Caltronics has all these problems and Rathbone gets tapped to take over—a little political muscle.”
“That’s the way it works,” Buster said.
“So what’s left of the government case?”
Buster laughed. “Who do you think?”
“Fred Merkle?”
“Just Fred Merkle over at Justice, trying to keep his project alive.”
“Someone from upstairs puts a little pressure on him, they’ll blow him away. No wonder he wouldn’t give me anything.”
“It’s a political wash,” Buster said.
“It wouldn’t happen that one of these West Coast unions came out for the Republicans last November, would it?”
“Oh, shit, yes,” Buster said happily. “What do you think? Private initiative—that’s the big ticket these days. What the hell else? That’s the dominant social force, isn’t that what Bob Combs said? They’re gonna sell off the fucking National Weather Service, sell NASA to McDonnell-Douglas, Yosemite to Pacific Cascade.” He raised his arm for the waitress and then pushed aside the beer glass with his folded arms as he leaned against the table. “Forget about this Caltronics mess. Let’s go talk to your pal Bernie Klempner. He’s the bastard I want to nail.”
Wilson watched the waitress approaching. “We’ll get to Klempner,” he said. “It may take a little time, but we’ll get there.”
9.
Wilson was surprised to see Chuck Larabee that evening among the academics, former government officials, and businessmen attending a national security issues forum held by a Washington public policy association at its building on M Street. Wilson had come to hear two of the speakers, who had been recommended to him for the directorship of the Center. He’d arrived late. During the refreshment break, he’d been intercepted by Larabee, cornered near the high draped windows overlooking the street. A briefcase was in one muscular hand, a canapé in the other.
“Sour grapes, that’s all it is,” Larabee told him, short-breathed, his voice creaking like an overloaded elevator. “These guys are all on the outs, crying on each other’s shoulder.”
“What brings you here?”
Larabee’s dark jacket was rumpled, cigarette ashes were spilled down the lapels and dark tie, and one hand still clutched the heavy briefcase.
“Minerals. I wanted to hear this one expert, only he doesn’t show.” Larabee held the briefcase awkwardly under one arm while he consulted his program. “The rest of these guys are just the old Kennedy or Carter crowd; they couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. Hey, did you hear about the F-16 sale to Venezuela? Those pals of mine I was telling you about got a piece of it.” He stuffed the program into his jacket and brought a cigarette from his shirt pocket, grappling now with the lighter and the heavy briefcase, beads of moisture bright on the tanned forehead. “I told you things would be loosening up, didn’t I? Morocco’s looking good too, Maverick missiles maybe. C’mon, let’s move over there.” A few conversational groups had gathered nearby, waiting to be recalled inside, but Larabee led Wilson to the far corner. “Minerals are the stuff these days, lemme tell you,” he continued. “That’s the guy I came to hear, only they write him off the program.”
“Minerals?”
“We’re in a minerals war—strategic minerals, strategic reserves. You hear anyone talking about that inside? They’re way behind the power curve. We’re being targeted—it’s a resource war against us and our allies. South Africa, the Philippines, you name it. Cobalt, chromium, manganese, copper. That’s why you’ve got this new stockpile policy—a hundred million in strategic reserves, but that’s only half of it. We’ve got to change the antitrust laws, change the depreciation on stockpiles. We need tax incentives, financial incentives. It won’t be long before you get the small investor putting his money into strategic minerals, a whole new growth industry. So I’m looking into it, me and a couple of friends. It’s national security too, otherwise they’ll have us by the throats.…”
“So military hardware isn’t your only interest,” Wilson said.
“You gotta diversify. I’m spread all over, Wilson; I go with the flow. Maybe things will get pretty rough one place, you move over into another. I’m a market man, Wilson, same as you. You gotta keep yourself recession-proof, not so much tied to these recession cycles we’ve been going through. When I heard you took this job with this metals tycoon, McVey, that’s what I figure. You and me, we think in the same groove. You’re making yourself recession-proof. McVey, he’s minerals, I hear. Maybe timber, maybe shipping, Nova Scotia coal, but minerals are his big ticket item.…”
Across the room, the policy association secretary was summoning the guests for the final hour of the program.
“I talk to a man I know, an investment counselor, big Wall Street connections. Cosmos Club, Metropolitan Club, he’s right up there. So after we talk about minerals, I ask myself, Who’s handling McVey’s interests, who’s doing his work up on the Hill?”
Wilson moved forward slowly, following the crowd that was reassembling. Larabee trailed after him with his cardiac rasp:
“Lawyers I can get, Wilson, like CPAs, secretaries, or bookkeepers. They all come cheap these days. Every time the Pentagon knocks out a promotion list and they put a few more bird colonels or four-stripers out to pasture, I get ’em pounding on my door. I get résumés, I get people from the Hill, I get ex-staffers, I get the guys that marked up the bill and know a whole lot more about the loopholes than the fucking congressmen that got their name on it. They all think they got something to sell. Sure they do—for twenty dollars a day. Do you wanna work for twenty dollars a day, Wilson? Fifty? A hundred? That’s twenty-five thou a year. I pay my secretaries thirty.”
They’d reached the last canapé table.
“What I’m looking for is the big account,” he continued. “They don’t come easy. Someone who walks in the front door and brings the big bucks with him.”
“McVey manages his corporate interests out of New York,” Wilson said. “It’s not something I know anything about.”
Larabee seemed not to have heard. “What if I was to throw a little business into that little hobby shop McVey is bankrolling over there in Foggy Bottom. You do a
few studies for me: Latin America; the Middle East. Security studies. Hey, did I tell you the Arab Emirates package is gonna fly? Hawk missiles, it looks like. Some friends I know got a piece of it. This Awacs sale has busted everything loose. So I give you a little business, research studies, maybe three, four grand worth. What’s the chance McVey would move a little corporate business my way? Let’s say I was to handle some of his mineral work, you’re in for ten percent. That’s off the top. I keep it in escrow, and if we go partners, it’s more. You gotta think long-term, Wilson, the big score.…”
The lecture had begun and the doors were being closed.
“Are you going in?” Wilson asked. Nothing he had said had made the slightest impression upon Larabee.
“No, I gotta run. Think about what I said. We’ll talk some more one of these days.”
Wilson followed his hurried retreat across the room. He watched him pause, grab a canapé from the table and put it in his pocket, take another, pull his coat and hat from a chair inside the door, and continue on down the staircase, briefcase in hand, hat on the back of his head, coat flying, munching on his early dinner.
You poor bastard, he thought. Still standing in front of the closed door, he discovered that he’d lost all interest in the conference going on inside. He turned away to find his own coat and leave.
Betsy and Haven Wilson were sitting in the rear study after dinner, she with her afghan, he with a few project proposals he’d brought from the Center. At her suggestion, he’d built a fire in the fireplace and now, papers slipped aside, he watched the flames in silence.
“Those are the logs I cut at Ed Donlon’s place last spring,” he recalled sleepily, breaking the silence. “It’s funny how you remember things like that.”
“You have a special feeling for that place, don’t you?”
“I used to. I suppose I still do. I don’t like to think about it. Ed never goes out there anymore.”
“What about the old farm we looked at that day?” she asked, putting the afghan aside. “How do you feel about that?”
“It interests me. A lot could be done with it.” He reached to his side and turned off the table lamp.
“I was thinking about it today,” she said, her hands still idle, her head back against the couch. “If you’re really serious, we should talk about it.”
“You never showed much interest. I didn’t want to push you before, not with everything else.”
“Why would I have shown any interest? I always thought of it as a kind of escape for you, talking about moving to the country. Being a Washington widow was bad enough, but being left by myself a hundred miles out in the country would have been worse. Your life was too much centered in Washington. You only talked about moving when you were annoyed or frustrated. Even the boys noticed that.”
“The boys did?”
“All the time. It was a sort of joke among us. They knew you’d never leave Washington, not really. You and Nick are the same. You simply can’t let go. Ida and I were talking about it today.”
He sat watching Betsy’s silhouette in dismay. “It wasn’t just restlessness—it never was. Is that what they thought?”
“Children see things, much more than you think they do.”
The phone rang and he got up slowly. “How do you feel about it now? The idea of a country place? We wouldn’t have to give up this house—not right away.”
“I was thinking about it today. It intrigues me, what you said that day, having a country place where the family could get together—children, grandchildren, whatever.…”
Wilson took the call in the hall, still looking back through the doorway toward Betsy. Impatient to resume their conversation, he was annoyed by the interruption. Someone was calling from a public telephone. He could hear the sounds of traffic in the background.
“Who is this?”
“Oh, shit yes, man, you know me,” came the cryptic reply. “Agent Orange, friend. You’ve been chasing me down, so get this address and get it good. I’ll only go around once, man.…”
“Come to my office, then—”
“Listen, fucker, I got this big wound between the ears and it’s not getting any better. You’ve been nosing around looking for me and I figure I owe you one, so take down this address and bring me money—you listening?”
Wilson was listening. An address on U.S. Route 1 between Arlington and Crystal City—a bar, a service station on the corner and a phone booth in between. He was to wait there for a call the following night at ten o’clock.
10.
Dr. Foster was drifting haplessly through the exit chute of his congressional testimony, white water now growing more stormy as salvos of derision lifted from both sides of the congressional dais facing him. Intimidated by those booming public voices, he was sweating shamelessly, his collar damp and wilted, his hand shaking so terribly that he hadn’t the courage to lift the chrome-plated carafe on the table to his right to refill his empty water glass. His mouth was as dry as cotton. As he was answering the last question, his swollen tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth like a lump of toffee, and he’d been unable to disengage it to finish the sentence.
“What you’re sayin’ here, as I understand it,” rumbled the Republican from Oklahoma, “is that we ought not be he’ping some of these South American military regimes, as you call ’em, never mind what the Russians and Mr. Castro are doin’.…”
He paused to let Foster resume.
“What I wath thaying—” Foster’s tongue stuck again and he had no choice but to fill the glass from the carafe, very sloppily too. His trembling hands spilled more water to the table as he drank. A pool of water gathered at the base of the microphone. Conscious suddenly of death by electrocution, he moved his hands back, but that quick end to his humiliation seemed more charitable than the growing fear that he would faint dead away, his gaseous head now emptied of that burden of scholarly freight he’d rehearsed so carefully over the weekend. His mind was filled instead with the hot dry chaff of the family corn crib back in Iowa, to which he used to escape when a hog or a beef was butchered.
Tom Foster’s son a history perfessor? Well, I be. I knowed he was cut out to do something had to do with readin’ an’ writin’.…
The chairman’s deep voice revived him. “Try moving the microphone a little closer, Dr. Foster. We’re almost done now.…”
Four congressmen flanked him along the raised bench of the hearing room, which seemed to Foster less a court of chancery than a tribunal of the inquisition. The paneled committee room was horribly bright from the television lights that were just being turned on. The spectator chairs had only been half-occupied until just three minutes earlier, when the next witness had entered, the senior State Department spokesman for Latin America, accompanied by his legal adviser, two deputy assistant secretaries, and an aide carrying a voluminous briefing book. This entourage was followed by a score of journalists, television reporters, interested congressional aides, and foreign diplomats, all avidly awaiting the administration’s latest policy utterance on El Salvador and Latin America.
Dr. Foster had heard the bustle, the murmuring voices and the scraping chairs, and knew that what he feared most had come to pass. The klieg lights came on. A moment later, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the overflow of spectators, now spilling along the walls and into the chairs immediately behind him. The committee chairman banged his gavel. In the time it took for the commotion to dim and the room to settle into silence, Foster was sickeningly aware of how enormous his audience had become.
At the end of the second row, Dr. Foster’s roommate—a slight wispy research librarian from the National Archives—was overcome by the same sudden vertigo that had stricken Foster. He slipped from his chair and fled up the aisle. With that alacrity for which he was noted, Shy Wooster quickly left the wall near the door to occupy the vacated seat, forcing a matronly reporter from a Midwestern news service who’d moved toward the same seat to retreat to the rear.
As the din subsided, Foster felt the blush rise from his armpits, ascend to his neck and cheeks, and begin to ring in his ears. Naked before the tribunal, he was aware of the enormous hole in the toe of his right sock, the gaping cavity in his right rear molar, and the frayed elastic band of his drooping shorts, pressing against his chubby back. Quite suddenly he saw himself not as a scholar, a psychohistorian, or a Soviet expert at all but as a fraud—a plump, frightened, middle-aged homosexual sitting in his yeasty underwear before this hoary inquisitional court, these black-suited heterosexual parsons from the hinterlands, sitting in sanctimonious judgment over all that gave substance and passion to his life. Could John Donne ever get a sonnet read here? William Byrd perform a motet? Jefferson engage in philosophical discourse, Tillich discuss his tormented sexual life, Niebuhr publish an essay? No, these were the same canting philistines who’d pursued him all his life, who had driven him out of Iowa, out of graduate school, out of government, and out of teaching … these same dull, sanctimonious, coarse-faced bigots—
“Dr. Foster, are you gonna answer the question?” the congressman drawled with a trace of impatience.
Foster’s mind teetered backward, his damp eyes swooned back in his skull, his shoulders swayed, and he was on the brink of fainting dead away when a sudden angel of deliverance danced across his hot eyelids—a plump, pink-clad coquette in tights, tiptoeing seductively across the stage of the rapt State Department press room; and behind the Spanish fan and false eyelashes he recognized Henry Kissinger as Carmen, doing his Waltz of the Toreadors for a lovesick Washington press corps.
“That’s not precisely what I meant,” Foster found himself saying, miraculously revived.