by James Philip
Harvey Fleischer waved to the maître d’.
The man, immaculate in the club livery glided across to the table.
“It is good to see Mrs Fleischer and yourself again, sir,” the head waiter nodded at the Sullivan’s guests. He was a man in his forties with thinning, slicked back hair and a thickening waistline. His eyes were blue grey, intent and his posture made an unequivocal statement that he was listening with immense care and attention to every word that was said to him.
“Thank you, Jose,” Fleischer grimaced. “A naval officer and his wife dined here earlier this afternoon?”
“Yes, sir.”
Harvey Fleischer waited patiently.
“Forgive me,” Jose the maître d' apologised. He leaned closer so nobody beyond the table could hear what he was about to communicate. “Admiral Braithwaite and his good lady wife enjoyed a luncheon together earlier this afternoon.”
Jose backed away.
Around the table the four old friends were thoughtful.
“Bad business,” Ben Sullivan sighed. He and his wife travelled with at least one armed bodyguard lately. One heard such awful stories; everything from being robbed at gunpoint on the street to loved ones being kidnapped for ransom. One never knew how apocryphal most of the worst stories were but it made sense to take precautions. Some of the stories sounded a little implausible; especially the ones about bands of survivalists and brigands in the hills overlooking the Bay Area; or outlaws holed up in the Sierra Madre; marauding motorcycle gangs terrorising country roads and the streets of the suburbs; and neighbourhoods taken over by the Mafia. Notwithstanding, being rich was a big advantage at times like this. It insulated one from the realities of everyday life in the big cities of the West Coast, and enabled one to afford the inflated costs of living in gated and increasingly fortified enclaves.
The process and the price of conducting ‘business as normal’ had got to be a somewhat dirtier affair in recent months. Everybody wanted a piece of the action, and fat ‘commissions’ for just doing their jobs. It was getting more expensive to keep city and county officials on the payroll, and a lot harder to maintain the fiction of seeming visibly ‘clean’. Anybody who did business on the West Coast accepted that things were different; that folks out West did things differently to folks back East. California was a long way from DC, in many ways it really was another country.
Nothing good had happened in California in the last year. The graft was getting out of control; it was so bad that most ‘businessmen’ like Ben Sullivan and Harvey Fleischer took it for granted that nothing got done without the right palm getting greased. It did not matter that the Governor ran a fairly clean Administration out of Sacramento, or that the Mayors of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego had all mounted determined crack downs on corruption in the last six months, things just kept getting worse.
Within the last month the Sequoyah Country Club had had to employ armed ‘wardens’ to patrol the golf course and surrounding woods to deter grafters and hobos from bothering players out on the course!
It was outrageous!
“Miranda said she might be passing through tomorrow night,” Molly Fleischer announced, deciding that the woes of the World ought to be banished for a couple of hours. “We haven’t seen much of her since she went up to Sacramento.”
“She tells us nothing,” Margaret Sullivan smiled. “The boys are just as bad.” By the time she had stopped having babies Margaret Sullivan’s movie career was over. She had produced four babies in just under six years because in those days that was what you did when you got married; it was not a thing she had agonised over, and besides, she had actually wanted to have Ben Sullivan’s babies but if she had her time again she would probably have stopped after she had David, her second child. She used to worry that something of her angst; her ambivalence must have communicated itself to her youngest offspring. David, the most brilliant of her children had put his siblings to shame from a young age, setting the bar intolerably high for his younger brother Gregory, and for Miranda, who would forever be her baby daughter. David’s elder brother, Ben junior – whom everybody in the family always called Benjamin because ‘Ben’ was confusing when there were two ‘Bens’ in the house, and Benjamin loathed the soubriquet ‘junior’ – was an associate at a downtown LA law firm. Gregory was high school teacher in Marin County, Sausalito. David wanted to be a ‘rocket scientist’ and for all his parents knew, he already was even if his day job was as a post doctoral associate in the Applied Aeronautics Department of Rice University in Houston. The kids were all still in their twenties so the fact none of them had married had only lately started to give her cause for concern. As for Miranda, well, Margaret would have despaired of her beautiful headstrong maddening daughter years ago but for Molly Fleischer. A better mother would have resented another woman supplanting – in some respects – her maternal rights. The truth was that she was wise enough to know that without Molly she would have lost Miranda long ago.
“Miranda said David was in Texas,” the other woman remarked.
“That’s the place to be if the President is serious about this Moon nonsense!” Harvey Fleischer added sarcastically.
There were smiles and guffaws around the table as the first drinks arrived.
It was odd how quickly the friends completely forgot about the shooting less than a mile from where they sat. Sipping Mojitos and Cuban highballs they relaxed, watching the players hacking their way up the eighteenth fairway in the middle distance. It was not from any particular callousness that they so quickly switched their thoughts to other matters; simply that dreadful things had become so commonplace in the brave new post-October War World that there was an unspoken recognition between them that dwelling on the bad things was futile. No amount of worrying was going to make those bad things go away.
It was better by far to carry on as best as possible and to make the most of one’s personal good fortune for so long as it lasted.
Chapter 11
Monday 25th November 1963
Ristorante La Maria, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC
They stepped out of their cabs within moments of each other, exchanged platonic, pecking kisses and stood back one from the other on the pavement outside the Ristorante La Maria.
“I didn’t think you’d take my call,” Dan Brenckmann confessed, grinning in that little boy lost, no hard feelings way of his that despite herself, Gretchen Betancourt half fell for every time.
“I said for you to call if ever you were in DC, didn’t I?”
“Oh, yes,” the man agreed. He was twenty-seven years old and he had been infatuated with Gretchen Betancourt for most of the last two years. This despite the fact that he had known from the start that the youngest daughter of the great Claude Betancourt, the long time lieutenant of old Joe Kennedy and the one man any East Coast Democrat had to keep sweet, was way out of his league. Nevertheless, he was in Gretchen’s thrall and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He had dated a lot of girls before he met her; but none since. Nobody compared to Gretchen and he was not about to pretend that he was anything other than delighted to be escorting her into a plush DC restaurant. “You definitely said that! Actually, you sounded it a little distracted when we spoke?”
“No, it is nothing,” Gretchen assured him quickly. For her part she knew Dan Brenckmann was a lot more than just attracted to her; if she was not careful he would probably follow her around Washington like a faithful puppy dog. Despite her coolness towards him in the past she did actually like Dan. They had, after all, spent that awful night of the war together and those sort of shared memories stayed with one forever. But there was liking a man, and really liking a man and she just did not like Dan like that. Dan was a friend and that was all. “It was just something that came up at work this morning.”
“Ah, working for the United States Deputy Attorney General!” Dan chuckled. “Now isn’t that a thing!”
It was Gretchen’s turn to be wry.
>
“Yes, it is,” she agreed. She looked over her shoulder at the front of the Ristorante La Maria, brightly illuminated in the cold early evening darkness of the city. “This place is very expensive, if you...”
“I’m in DC running an errand for one of your father’s old clients,” Dan Brenckmann shot back. “When I found out how much he was going to pay me for a week’s work I felt like a gangster!”
“Which one?” She asked.
“Al Capone, Jimmy Hoffa,” the man smiled. “Take your pick.”
Gretchen had been caught unawares by Dan’s phone call early that afternoon. It was not until she had put the phone down that she realised how nice it was going to be to see him again. There was nothing between them, they had held hands for a while when it had seemed like the World might end thirteen months ago, otherwise they had never laid so much as a finger on each other; and yet the thought of meeting Dan face to face had brightened her whole afternoon. Obviously, she was still going to have to get herself out to Andrews Air Force Base in the middle of the night if she wanted five minutes of her boss’s time but she would worry about that later, and it was not as if she was going to have sex with Dan. One night stands seemed to be all the rage for a lot of women of her age, and older, in this city; but she was not about to become a creature of every passing fad or fashion. No, the trick was to keep one’s head above the water, resist going with the flow unless it was one, inevitable; or two, extremely profitable. No attachments; that was the ticket. Nevertheless, a nice evening spent with a nice man was a pleasantly agreeable interlude in her somewhat drab social diary in the District of Columbia.
Getting a table at a plush DC restaurant was not the arm wrestle it was before the war. The couple were quickly ushered to a table for two near the window, not that there was anything to be seen outside.
Few of the other diners were smoking and there were big, whirling overhead fans so the air was reasonably clear. Gretchen hated it when she walked into an eatery and the atmosphere was as opaque as the sky downwind of the Bethlehem Steel Works. The waiters were mostly men in their thirties and forties, each darkly Italian in that way that convinced her they were probably related, and polite with accented voices that they had worked hard to keep sounding authentically Latin.
In no time she relaxed and over cocktails began to gush about her first few weeks working at Justice. It was not long before – both being attorneys who had spent no little time in their student days discussing such ephemera – they fell into an arcane debate about the Department of Justice’s much trammelled and derided motto.
Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur.
“Who pursues for Lady Justice,” Dan offered, sipping his cocktail. The drink was something with fruit juice in it and a big shot of white rum which Gretchen had recommended. “Very sloppy Latin. Latin is supposed to be the most precise language ever invented so a motto that expects a fellow to infer that it refers to the person of the Attorney General and by implication the rest of his department and assumes that justice itself is exclusively feminine is pretty lame...”
“Granted,” Gretchen laughed, before trying to put him straight on a few things. “The problem is that the motto was something picked up by one of the early Attorney Generals and the theory is he probably stole it from Lord Burleigh, who was Queen Elizabeth the first’s ‘Chancellor’ way back in the sixteenth century in England. In those days in England all legal matters were discussed, settled and documented in Latin, but almost always in really bad, sort of semi-bastardised Latin, and that’s where the trouble with the motto comes from now because we, as a better educated and more erudite modern civilization speak and write Latin a lot better than people did in the late middle ages in Europe.”
“Yeah,” Dan agreed sardonically, “we’ve got the answers to everything these days.”
Gretchen frowned and he shrugged apologetically.
He quirked a rueful smile. This was not an evening to be serious or to commune with the ghosts of the October War.
“The thing is, I was about to say,” she went on imperiously, “is, or was, that the correct original, incomplete quotation was probably more like ‘qui pro domina regina sequitur’, meaning that a more literal translation might be, ‘he’ the Attorney General, obviously, ‘sues’, because as we both know our contemporary English word ‘sue’ comes from the Latin root sequor, ‘on behalf of our Lady the Queen’.
“Okay,” Dan conceded. When Gretchen was in full flow she was a thing to behold and to marvel at...
“You are humouring me,” she decided accusingly.
“Allow me my foibles,” he countered. Leaning forward he added: “So what you are really telling me is that nobody at the Department of Justice has the remotest idea what the motto on its flag and set in stone in every court means?”
Gretchen thought about it.
“Yes.” Her hair looked jet black not raven brown in the subdued lighting of the Ristorante La Maria and her eyes sparkled with bright optimism. She was wearing a dark jacket over a cream blouse, a calf-length pleated Navy blue skirt and shoes with perhaps half a heel. A slim gold chain encircled her neck. Everything was understated, businesslike, picture perfect.
Dan Brenckmann felt a little crumpled and worn in Gretchen’s company, as he suspected most people did.
“So, what’s your boss like?” He asked presently as they investigated their starters. His was a light salad with anchovies; Gretchen’s something with delicate pasta and tomatoes.
“He’s not the sort of guy who goes around putting his hand up a girl’s skirt or looking to feel a piece of the action,” Gretchen replied, misunderstanding Dan’s question.
“Oh, right,” the man muttered. “Does that sort of thing go on a lot at Justice?”
“No, of course not!”
They focused on their starters for a few seconds.
“Actually, it goes on more than you’d think,” Gretchen admitted. “But not to me, that’s all. Katzenbach is the real thing. Sure, he’s political, I mean he has to be holding down a job just one step below Cabinet level, but he’s more,” she paused, searching for the right word, ‘pragmatic about things than the Attorney General. More the sort of guy who actually gets things done, if you know what I mean?”
“Like that business down in Alabama last June?” Dan put to her, wholly rhetorical in his query.
“Yes. I think that but for the war the Administration would have been more openly committed to the Civil Rights thing. The way things are at the moment everybody’s trying to keep too many balls in the air at once.”
“What’s going on in Washington State sounds kind of scary,” Dan said. He eyed Gretchen’s cocktail, which she had been nursing while he downed his.
She ignored his unvoiced comment and acknowledged where his eyes had been focused.
“I have another date tonight,” she said coyly.
“Oh?”
“Work, not pleasure,” she giggled.
Dan Brenckmann was momentarily entranced. When Gretchen giggled – which was not often, or at least not often when he was around – it was like being briefly enraptured, drugged, and in that altered state of awareness the ills of the age were as nothing.
“Oh,” he murmured like an idiot.
“I have to go out to Andrews Air Force base to meet the Deputy Attorney General.” Her lips became a pale line, her mind turning fast on a new and troubling thought. “Do you think I can persuade a cab driver to take me all the way out to Andrews Field at that time of night?”
“I’ve got a rental car from Hertz parked up at my hotel,” Dan offered, desperate to be of service. “I’ve got to visit one or two VIPs out in the country while I’m in DC. Out of hours; as it were. Why don’t you let me be your cab driver?”
Gretchen opened her mouth to object.
However, the words that actually came out of her lips were: “That would be marvellous. Thank you.”
Chapter 12
Tuesday 26th November 1963
&
nbsp; Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
Nicholas Katzenbach, United States Deputy Attorney General hardly noticed the frost in the night air as he trudged down the steps to the frigid tarmac of Andrews Field to where a car was waiting to transport him to the VIP Centre. Only the President and the Vice-President were met by armoured Cadillacs ready to sweep them straight into the heart of Washington DC. Other senior members of the Administration had to be cleared through the VIP Centre and assigned a security detail prior to departing the base. Before the October War he would have been able to walk around DC, ‘free-birding’ as some Secret Service men called it, but nowadays that was out of the question. Quite apart from the fact that there were parts of the capital that were effectively no-go areas where the Washington Police Department rarely, if ever ventured, street crime, attacks and robberies outside the more heavily guarded districts of the city were a fact of everyday life. Some nights DC echoed with distant gunshots, and the constant wail of the sirens of the police cars, fire wagons and ambulances quartering the metropolis.
Thus far members of the House of Representatives and the Administration had only been subjected to an increasingly vitriolic, sinister litany of verbal and written threats without there having been an actual fatality. There had been botched assassination attempts, shots had been fired at both the White House and the Capitol Building without injuring anybody. Within the Washington elite there was an unsettling recognition that ‘they had all been lucky so far’. In any event, the United States Deputy Attorney General was going nowhere in a hurry tonight until the Secret Service had organised his security.