by W. T. Tyler
Wilson left the luncheon more concerned about Ed Donlon and his midday drinking habits than about the future of the Center.
He also discussed his initial recommendations with Angus McVey, who’d begun to appear more regularly at the Center now that Dr. Foster had moved back to his old office. Wilson didn’t give McVey his draft, but instead talked in a general way about his findings and mentioned a few names. McVey seemed uneasy. Although it was a foregone conclusion that Dr. Foster was not the man for the directorship, he thought that Foster had made a place for himself. His testimony before the House subcommittee had attracted a good deal of notice, not only in the Washington press and the wire services, but in a flood of requests for copies of his testimony and dozens of invitations from various organizations around the country, inviting him to lecture. A handful of congressmen had been impressed and a New York Democrat had introduced his statements into the Congressional Record with the observation that Dr. Foster’s characterization of U.S. attitudes toward the Soviet Union as “ratomorphic” would become part of the currency of “nuclearspeak.”
The fact that Dr. Foster’s comments on behaviorism and foreign policy had attracted so much notice owed much to their apparent novelty, but some credit was also given to two stories that appeared coincidentally in the Washington Post on the day following his testimony.
One described the misfortune of a nuclear missile mechanic at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. Enrolled in a Minuteman missile class, he’d been shocked to discover that U.S. nuclear targeting policy included a first-strike option. According to Jack Anderson, the Air Force instructor had told his class that turning the missile ignition key should become a “Pavlovian reflex,” and those so trained “should salivate at the very thought of such an opportunity.” By the end of the second week of instruction, the Air Force was aware of the young man’s reservations about the first-strike option. Asked by an instructor whether he had any reservations about turning the missile ignition switch—the Pavlovian reflex—the young mechanic admitted he did. He was immediately dismissed from the class, sent to a psychiatrist, and assigned other duties, principally at the base golf course, retrieving from the high grass errant golf balls, dispatched there by off-duty Air Force officers whose enthusiasm overpowered their aim, like those who’d targeted the Pevek herring factory.
In the Post headlines the same day appeared the following announcement:
HAIG SAYS U.S. PUT LIBYAN LEADER QADDAFI
“BACK IN HIS BOX”
Rereading the quotations from his testimony in the Washington Post, Dr. Foster was amazed at his remarks. In retrospect, he had little recollection of what he had said or how he had said it: only the primal drive for self-expression was recalled. He remembered more vividly his profound physical discomfort—his dry mouth, his drooping shorts, and his flushed, burning face—yet there it was:
We’ve become the pathological prisoners of these stockpiles. We’ve finally succeeded as a nation in conditioning ourselves to that same primitive, unreflective, ratomorphic psychology we once assigned the Soviet leadership.
How was it possible? He had said that? A man was able to speak the truth once or twice in his lifetime, and he supposed, almost sadly, that his time had come. The fact that the media, too, seemed to vibrate mysteriously with these same hidden truths about the national psyche seemed to confirm it. Reading the stories about the Minuteman missile mechanic at Grand Forks Air Force Base and the return of the Libyan leader to his behaviorist box by the global psychologist Dr. Haig, Foster decided that these emanations weren’t so coincidental after all, but were ghostly percolations from some deep underground source. He was, he decided, much more Jungian than Freudian in his psychohistorical research.
But neither psychological pioneer told him which persona to choose in facing his future—a loud, bold, occasionally vulgar public voice, like that he’d heard on the steps of the Rayburn Building, or a faint, dim, shrinking private one? As guest lecturer and opinionmaker, he would have to choose.
Angus McVey had been equally elusive about Pauline Rankin’s future. The fact that the Lenin letters were forgeries didn’t bother him in the slightest. “Oh, yes,” he told Wilson. “I was very suspicious of the Lenin letters at first and was even warned against them by a few scholars, but even so, they intrigued me. The fact that they might be forgeries seems beside the point. It’s not so much what was intended but what was created, isn’t it? They exist, don’t they? I mean, someone created them. The universe itself might have been created in such a way, mightn’t it?—a poor joke, you see—but so long ago that we’re now spared from thinking about it. Other interpretations have come along since, in any case. At this point, the question of their authenticity is beside the point—like Pauline’s relationship to these letters. I don’t suppose it matters to me in the slightest that they’re forgeries. Do you see?”
Wilson didn’t see—he’d never before heard McVey speak in quite this way—but he conceded the point, aware for the first time that Angus McVey’s version of the Center differed fundamentally from his own.
“Besides,” McVey had added wearily, “I rather prefer those patchily educated in some ways, indifferent to the daily headlines. Where else could they go?”
Pauline Rankin’s reaction was much more dramatic. Wilson had shown her the analysis by the Soviet specialist at the Library of Congress and they’d talked about it. He suggested that since the Lenin letters were probably forgeries she might take a fresh look at her project—Feminism as the Font of Bolshevism—and recast it in another form. Dr. Foster, for example, had recommended that rather than a historical work, funded by the Center, she think in terms of something more liberal, say a project financed by the National Endowment for the Arts.
She’d lost her temper.
“For what? A ballet, something in blank verse! What are you talking about?” Tears of indignation shone in her usually calm eyes. “Why do you believe these so-called Soviet experts? Do you know who they are? They’re all Poles, Middle Europeans, Russian émigrés, Slavic chauvinists! Of course they’d claim the letters are forged—what would you expect them to say! It’s a closed male society, like the Center!”
She’d gone out, slamming the door.
Billy O’Toole was another Center employee Wilson had worried about, although his work was with the ground crew. After Pauline Rankin’s arrival, he seemed to spend a great deal of time in and around her office—painting, waxing, washing windows, sweeping, running errands for her. But Billy, as if forewarned, had disappeared a few weeks later, after handing in his resignation.
A few weeks after that, the receptionist at the front desk had reported seeing him in a supermarket out on Connecticut Avenue near Pauline Rankin’s apartment, pushing a shopping cart through the aisles. He seemed quite preoccupied with his new domestic tasks, buying groceries for two from a penciled list, wearing a white houseman’s jacket.
7.
A light snow had begun falling that Friday afternoon, swept from the roadbeds by the passing cars like white dust. A faint accumulation was visible on the sidewalks and the circular drive as Wilson and Buster Foreman entered Potomac Towers.
“What the hell is it with you, Wilson?” Klempner asked softly, rising from behind his metal desk, where he’d been waiting since three. He’d been to see Fred Merkle that morning and had twice called Wilson, who had been meeting with Nick Straus and unable to see him. “Why all this poking around? You on some kind of crusade because some shithead lawyer from Utah got your job over at Justice? What are you trying to prove? What the hell’s going on?”
Wilson introduced Buster Foreman. The strawberry blonde who’d shown them in went out, got her coat and purse, and left by the front door.
“What did Merkle tell you?” Wilson asked. An electric heater was plugged in on the floor near the desk. The large room beyond was gray with afternoon shadow.
“He said you were asking about Morris, asking about me. He said maybe I’d better tal
k to you, that you were onto something.”
Wilson sat looking at the calendar that hung on the wall behind a file cabinet. Two FBI achievement awards were framed nearby. “You were in the FBI Atlanta field office, I remember.”
“Yeah, twice. So what?”
“You ever get up to South Carolina?”
“A couple of times. Why?”
“You knew the Combs crowd back in those days—Combs, Shy Wooster?” Wilson was still studying the calendar.
“I heard about them, everyone did. How come you’re asking?”
“Did you ever run into someone named Smooter Davis? A black man, used to hang around Bob Combs’s car lot.”
Wilson could hear the traffic passing on the boulevard below, a door slamming someplace, then the steady creak of Bernie Klempner’s leather-upholstered chair as he sat slowly forward. “What the shit is it with you two?” he asked softly. “What the hell are you after? Smooter Davis? What the hell you come in here talking about Smooter Davis for?”
“You knew him?”
“Yeah, I knew him. So what? What are you asking?”
“If you knew Smooter Davis,” Buster said.
“Yeah, I knew him, I told you. He worked for me in South Carolina—under cover. An informant. What the hell business is it of yours?”
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing happened, nothing except he blew it. They scared him off. I got him a job in Tucson, working for the office out there. What’s this all about?”
“Where is he now?”
“How the hell do I know? Last time I heard, he had this big beer distributorship in Oakland, a couple of bars. Doing real well. Why?”
“You ever hear him talk about a Birdie Jackson down in South Carolina?” Buster asked.
“Birdie Jackson? No.” Klempner glanced at Buster suspiciously, then back at Wilson. “Why? Should I?”
“A black lady, had a little house next to the Combs lot. It burned down.”
“So why are you asking me?”
“She thought Combs and Shy Wooster burned it,” Buster said. “She said Smooter Davis saw them do it.”
“What are you two up to, anyway?” Klempner demanded. “You get Fred Merkle all hot and bothered about this eighty thousand Morris disappeared with, like he’s beginning to think maybe I got a cut of it, and then you show up here asking me about Smooter Davis. I got a reputation to protect, a business. What the hell are you trying to do—make me look bad?”
“We’re interested in Bob Combs,” Buster said. “We heard you used to keep tabs on Combs when you were with the FBI.”
“Sure I did. I kept tabs on a lot of people.”
“Smooter Davis was your informant—”
“I told you that—”
“Only he sees Combs and Wooster burn down this house in South Carolina back in ’59 and you don’t remember anything about it. That figures. Combs is your client now.”
“Are you crazy!” Klempner cried. “In South Carolina back in ’59! People telling us we’re going to have to get the national guard out, get troops in the streets to handle South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and you’re asking me if I know anything about some colored woman’s house that got burned down! Where have you been for the last thirty years!”
“With Bob Combs and Shy Wooster lighting the torch and your informant standing there watching them—”
“So what!” Klempner stood up, almost turning over his chair, one arm pointing off angrily in what Wilson assumed to be the direction of South Carolina. “You’ve got all this trouble, all these redneck troublemakers, the Klan even, you’ve got interstate traffic in guns and dynamite, dozens of informants out, and you want me to roll up a whole informant network to nail two shysters for burning down a colored woman’s house! What’s wrong with you, Foreman? That’s not even a goddamn federal case you’re talking about, even if I knew anything about it!”
“So Smooter Davis never told you about it.”
“Not that I remember, no. And if he had, what did you want me to do about it? Go talk to the county sheriff! If the local cops up there had been willing to talk to us, Smooter Davis wouldn’t have been there in the first place. For God’s sake give me a little credit. You guys have your head up your ass.” He sat back down, still glaring at Buster Foreman.
“So you never got anything on Combs?” Wilson asked.
“Combs? Shit, no. Some of that bunch over at the used-car lot, yeah. Two indictments, I think. But what we were after was the bigger picture, the Klan’s organization, how all these groups tied together. Conspiracy. For when the lid blew off.…”
“What about Wooster?” Foreman asked.
“Shy Wooster? Shy Wooster’s just a dimple on Bob Combs’s ruby-red ass. Nothing to him. How’d you get hold of all this?”
“Buster did some checking,” Wilson said.
“Maybe you could put us in touch with Smooter Davis,” Buster suggested.
Klempner looked from Foreman back to Wilson. “Sure I could get in touch with him. He’d laugh you guys right out the fucking door.”
“How reliable was he?” Wilson asked.
“Not bad at first. Real good. Then he fell apart. He hated those bastards down there. He couldn’t handle it the last six months. It was eating him up. If he wasn’t on the sauce, he was in the sack with someone. When he was on the sauce, he used to tell us the Rotary and Lions clubs up there were organizing a militia, had an armory out in the woods, trained every Tuesday night. Crazy stuff. He called me back in the late sixties, when we had the riots up here, when they were burning up Fourteenth Street. He saw it on TV, was even watching it out in Oakland when he called. ‘Hey, baby. Burn, baby—burn.’ That’s all he said. Yeah, I can put you in touch with him. He’d chew you two honkies up like peanut brittle.”
Wilson sat in silence for a minute, looking again at the FBI certificates. “We were going to suggest a deal,” he said finally. “A trade-off. Something helpful to both of us.”
“What kind of deal?”
“You tell us what you’ve got on Combs, we tell you what we know about Caltronics, how maybe you can dish them, these hustlers you don’t like. Maybe get Fred Merkle to reopen the case.”
But Klempner had shifted forward indignantly. “You bastards were gonna squeeze me!”
Buster Foreman looked at Wilson, who couldn’t think of anything to say. “I suppose,” he conceded at last.
“You’ve got some goddamn nerve, Wilson. Some goddamn nerve, that’s all I can say. A guy with your reputation. That really burns me. That really burns the shit out of me, Wilson, trying to squeeze me. Getting Fred Merkle a little sweaty under the collar about me taking a dive and then coming around here to cut a deal. I ought to throw you out of my fucking office.”
“I suppose so,” Wilson said. “High road, low road, like you said.”
“I’m really disappointed.”
Buster Foreman, who’d been leaning back in his chair, balanced on two legs, brought it emphatically to the floor. “Yeah. Now that we understand each other, let’s cut out the horseshit.”
“What horseshit?” Klempner said. “I still ought to throw you guys outta here.”
“Chuck Larabee,” Wilson replied. Klempner turned in surprise. “You know him, don’t you? I’ll tell you about a funny conversation I had with him a month or so back, when he was fishing for information about what I was doing those days; then you tell me what you know. How about it?”
“It better be good,” Klempner said grudgingly.
“You’re right. Larabee’s a small-time hustler, not too bright,” Klempner began, finally satisfied. “Ex-Navy, like you said. A couple of years ago he comes to see me after I open the office upstairs. He’s got a shopping list, surveillance gear he’s trying to buy, claims he’s doing the security work for a couple of California firms. He says he’s got some close ties to some Navy lab people at China Lake out in California, the Navy testing center. He wants to get his hands on
some underwater detection systems, protecting some kind of salvage operation off San Diego. He wants some other stuff too—radio-controlled fuses, low-light TV monitoring gear, some other systems he says they’re developing out at China Lake. He claims this salvage operation is real sensitive, hush-hush cargo. He’s gotta protect the operation. It sounds fishy, so we run a tracer on him and find out he’s got some ties to an outfit that’s peddling stuff on the embargo list to the Middle East and Latin America. We figure the end-user certificates will be phony, like the export licenses, and we can get an indictment. So I set it all up, working with Justice and Treasury, but he never shows his face again. Not until a few months ago.”
“You think he was warned off?” Wilson said.
“I think so,” Klempner said. “Maybe someone told him I still had some buddies over at Justice, at the Bureau. But I don’t follow up. I hear his name around town, a small-time blowhard always trying to cut a big deal but’s never made it. Then early this year, who should come walking in my office upstairs but Chuck Larabee. It’s the same old shit—hush-hush, real sensitive, big security problem, real big contract, eighty grand up front, only he can’t handle it alone.…”
The phone rang and Klempner switched the automatic answering lever and sat back.
“He says he’s into security assistance programs now, everything opening up—Middle East, Latin America—all this military crud he’s got a piece of. He asks me how business is and I tell him it’s crummy, just me in the office and a couple of guys in the field, everybody cutting back. I had to lay off four of my old staff. So he says maybe he could move this big security contract my way. He’s not set up to handle it. He says he can put me in touch with this California firm, a big computer software outfit that’s getting bigger all the time. Big government contracts, some hot new algorithms they’ve designed for the Triton submarine fire-control systems. But they’ve gotten too big too fast. They’re looking for a security consultant. All he wants from me is ten grand if I sign the contract, a finder’s fee.”