by Ward Just
"And that wasn't the only time you dined lavishly at the expense of the taxpayers, was it?"
Hard to keep a straight face now, but he answered in the same monotone. No, it wasn't. And he gave the opposite answer when asked if the open account at Longfellow's was for the exclusive use of senior officers on duty in Europe, the question that went to the heart of the matter, though its phrasing was clumsy.
"What was the nature of the relationship between your agency and the Longfellow bank?"
And he had replied, "The usual relationship. It was reciprocal."
"You mean, between a bank and its customer?"
"That's correct," he'd said.
"So your agency had an interest in Longfellow's bank."
This was statement, not question, and he had paused again, looking at Lambardo, remembering Alec's observation that verbs were not always the weak links in the enemy order of battle; nouns were cowardly as well, and now he focused on the noun interest, a word that could mean either curiosity or stake, and chose a Schweik-word of his own in reply.
"Certainly," he'd said.
Lambardo spoke softly into the microphone. "Isn't it true then that, strictly speaking, your agency was operating outside its own guidelines in"—and here Lambardo hesitated, having become mired in his own trench—"maintaining this unusual interest, wouldn't you agree?"
"Strictly speaking," he replied. "Yes."
"And you were the responsible officer?"
Now the answer that he had rehearsed with Alec, an answer that was both true and false. The senators were alert, Ohio and Michigan lighting fresh cigarettes, Idaho tapping his pencil impatiently, the three of them frowning at him from their great height; he remembered the American flag hanging limply from its standard behind them. Lambardo waited.
He said, "I was the responsible officer, yes," adding, as if to ensure precision in the effort to be entirely candid, "at that time."
Lambardo said quickly, "And could this be characterized as a rogue operation?" Perhaps he did not realize that there was no antecedent to "this." "This" what? But Ed was able to answer no. It was perhaps unwise. Certainly mistakes had been made. But, no, it was not a rogue operation. He would give them most of what they wanted, but he would not give them that. And when Lambardo asked him whether he was aware of the penalties for perjury, he replied that he was.
"Would you then reconsider your answer?"
Alec nudged him again but he was calm in his answer, a simple no.
Ed realized now that he had been silent. What had she said to him? It was something about Axel.
He smiled. "So when you enter the swamp, you need a friendly guide. Not that every little bit of quicksand is marked. Sometimes the guide knows only one trail in a swamp of many trails."
Sylvia smiled back, nodding as if she understood. She was trying to pick her way through the thicket of water levels, shared pasts, fault lines, and swamps. Ed had quite a way with a metaphor, except that his metaphors tended to cancel each other out. But he was talking to her as an equal or near-equal, and she knew that if she listened carefully, somewhere beneath the fleshy folds of his language she would hear a heartbeat, the soul of some living thing. She said mildly, "So it was Axel's idea to bring my son into it, for his friendships, and for his smoke and his mirrors."
Ed nodded. "I was of two minds," he said.
"And what was the other one?"
"I thought it would be better to have someone more visible, someone who'd make the senators sit up a little straighter, pay attention to the proceedings, treat you with respect, because maybe, sometime in the future, they'd need help from Mr. Visible. A dubious campaign contribution, sexual mischief, a grand jury summons, malfeasance or misconduct, the usual petty blackmail or extortion. At that time it's mighty handy to have Mr. Clifford or Mr. Williams on your side, explaining things. I thought I could use someone of that distinction and weight. But Axel argued that that was precisely the wrong approach, because the Washington Visibles come with a reputation and an entourage. Word gets around that they've been retained; it's a bullhorn to the god damned press. Wait a minute, this is serious, there's something nasty afoot, something embarrassing to the government, perhaps to the President. Clifford or Williams guarantees publicity and sometimes that's what the client needs. Sometimes you want to try the case in the press because you sure as hell don't want to try it in front of a jury or judge, or the Select Committee on Intelligence. But that wasn't what we wanted. Axel didn't want it and I guess I didn't want it, either. My superiors didn't want it. The habits of a lifetime die hard, Sylvia. People in my business live comfortably in the shadows. We do not care for daylight. Moreover, it was obvious that Lambardo was the key. He was running the investigation. So when Axel pointed out that he and Alec had the kind of relationship where they didn't have to use verbs in their sentences, et cetera, I went along. We put the case in Alec's hands."
"Yes," she said slowly. "I see."
"And the truth is, you can always rent a Visible for an hour to make a telephone call and explain what the situation really is as opposed to what it appears to be. These proceedings are always political and therefore it's a question of point of view. It has nothing to do with law and nothing to do with ethics. It has to do with optics. The lawyer's job is to make absolutely certain that everyone understands that there's more than one point of view, each with its own primary colors. The Visibles are experts at building up one and tearing down the other. My Botticelli is superior to your Picasso, that figure with two noses and three eyes and a hole in her stomach. They aren't lawyers, really. They're opticians, each with his own eye chart."
She said, "I suppose Alec wouldn't be good at that."
He looked at her strangely. "He's very good at it. And he'll be better still when he has some age, gray in his hair, and can stand with them on an equal footing. Washington's a hierarchy; everyone knows that. He needs a shared past with Senator X or Congressman Y, so he can call them on the telephone and invite them to the Metropolitan Club and say, Bill, let me tell you what this is about really. Let me show you the skeletons in these closets. When he can do that, he'll become a Visible. Until then he has Lambardo and I suppose other Lambardos here and there. And pretty soon he'll move on from Red Lambardo to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. When he has that, he can expect calls from the White House asking his advice on matters of some sensitivity."
"In all this," she said hurriedly, "the hearing and the preparation for the hearing and so forth and so on"—she caught herself, realizing suddenly that she was beginning to sound like him—"where was Axel?"
Ed leaned across the table and laughed his half-laugh, more grunt than laugh. "Where was Harold Grendall?"
"No, really," she said.
"Yes, really," he mimicked, not unkindly but amused that he was obliged to explain Axel to Sylvia, of all people. Sylvia had the usual female blind spots, but she wrote the book on Axel. "When the hearing began, Axel was out of town. He was in Spezia with La Bella Figura. She was filming."
"You were in the witness chair while he was on a yacht?"
"Be realistic, Sylvia. He couldn't've done anything if he was here. Everyone thought it best that he get out of town, though there was some discussion that in the unlikely event that they'd subpoena him, he could show up with Paulina in her sunglasses and minidress to distract the committee. They're easily distracted, believe me. Paulina was all for it. I think she thought she'd win an Academy Award." Ed laughed, remembering that Alec hadn't thought it funny. And from the look on her face, Sylvia didn't either. "He telephoned every day."
"That was big of him."
"It wasn't his fight," Ed said.
"So they never touched him," Sylvia said
"Axel," he said patiently. "Axel's a force of nature. No one laid a glove on Axel. They never do. Axel's always way, way back in the woodwork, wearing his usual camouflage. That's where he lives, heard but not seen. Axel's bulletproof. The bullet hasn't been invented that could
wound Axel Behl. You know that, Sylvia. You know that better than anyone. Axel's the one who makes things happen, never takes credit, never shares blame. He's my oldest friend."
She looked at him in disbelief, opening her mouth to reply; and then she noticed that his hands were trembling.
"We've been through the mill together."
"Yes," she said.
"Here and overseas. More than forty years now."
"Yes," she said.
"I don't know what I'd do without him," Ed said.
"But it's Axel's bank," she said softly. "Doesn't that mean he's responsible, too?"
Ed Peralta smiled. Something was nagging at his memory. Sylvia Behl had an unpredictable effect on him. In her company he always had an urge to perform. He had told her things—hinted at them, anyway—that he had not even told Billie. That was because Sylvia was a subtle woman who liked to listen for the thing unsaid. You didn't have to cross every t and dot every i with Sylvia, even though in the old days she had been an outsider in their community, distrusted by the other women. Everyone wanted to protect Axel, so beaten up in the war. The community's sympathy went to Axel; and that was true today.
"He owns Longfellow's," she added. "It's his."
"Yes, of course," Ed said patiently. "Up to a point, it is. His idea, his man in overall charge. He owns the majority stock. He's chairman. There's no question that Axel made a bundle of money—but why not? Axel doesn't care anything about money, never did, so it's not greed, only a natural consequence of foresight and good management."
She looked at her fingers, listening for sarcasm and not finding it.
Ed shook his head. "You know what I'm saying is true. It's one of Axel's great strengths. Not caring about money."
"There's more to greed than money," she said, knowing that in some abstract way Ed was correct.
"The bank had several divisions," he explained. "In fact it had two divisions, each distinct from the other. One of the divisions was ours even though the bank was Axel's. They could never connect Axel personally to us, not that they tried very hard. They were on a treasure hunt and Axel didn't figure in the treasure. He was not a target. The idea was, Axel was doing his friends in the government a favor and the way the favor was managed was the government's responsibility. Axel's umbrella, our leak. No one wanted Axel to get burned. When Lambardo pressed the matter, the chairman told him to forget it and move along. And that testimony, what testimony there was, was in closed session and so sensitive that it never leaked. An aura surrounds these affairs. There's a specific context, the inquiry is pointed in a certain direction, and it does not waver, unless someone makes a childish mistake, goes beyond his brief, gets too cute..." That had happened more than once, to everyone's disadvantage and embarrassment. You had to keep the thing within a closed circle, the action as stylized as a bullfight. He said to her, "The fact that Axel was involved at ali gave the operation a sweeter smell than it otherwise might've. I mean legitimacy. Axel's reputation is true blue, and he never refuses a man a favor. He's as close to untouchable as you can get in Washington, unless they change the rules of the bullfight. Maybe some day they'll put the toro in the traje de luces and make the man fight naked, without a sword." Ed chuckled at that thought, the bull done up like a Madrid grandee and the man bare as the day he was born, the critics cheering the bull, the critics having the final say, the president of the arena as helpless as an usher.
"So there has to be a story," he concluded. "A narrative. They have to connect the dots in order to satisfy—"
"Repressed infantile longings," she said.
"What?"
"Something Freud said."
"That's good," Ed said. '"Repressed infantile longings.' That about sums it up, except there's nothing infantile about the satisfaction. That's grown-up stuff."
"I know, Ed." She reached across the table and touched his hand to reassure him that she was not being cute, devaluing his account. He had not touched his coffee, and now he lit another cigarette with the brass lighter, running his thumb across the inscription. She said, "I was only thinking about connecting the dots and who gets satisfied and who doesn't. It's a child's game, after all."
"Not this game," he said. "They had to have a story for themselves, something plausible. Since no one would ever know the truth of the matter, they had to have something that sounded right, something that fit, something you can pass around to the critics on background. Doesn't the Mad Hatter seem perfectly believable in Alice's world? So they decided that there were a few Agency renegades led by me, the rotten crabapple in the barrel of Golden Delicious. Nothing wrong with the orchard, nothing systemic. The renegades went out of control, an appalling example of havoc when discipline breaks down, together with a regrettable lack of oversight on the part of Highest Levels, preoccupied as they were with the shooting war, the one in Southeast Asia, where brave American boys were being killed and wounded. The superb procedures malfunction, the random world taking its usual revenge. The second law of thermodynamics. Heisenberg's law. The law of unintended consequences. Murphy's Law. All heading in the general direction of the criminal law. Mistakes were made, owing to the human factor, and the in-house review will surely result in fresh procedures, even more superb than the procedures that failed, because the same men were putting them in place and everyone knew that experience was the best teacher, no? Can you hear the wagons circling, darling Sylvia? I could, so I fell on my sword."
"Oh, Ed," she said. "Those bastards."
"There was a script and we were all reading from it. And that's where we come to Wilson Slyde. The story broke in Slyde's column, the one he writes with that poolhall Marxist from Boston, the Irishman who went to Harvard and can't forget it and won't let you forget it, either."
"Cowards," she said. Sylvia was still back somewhere between Heisenberg and the law of unintended consequences.
He did not know how much to tell her about Wilson Slyde and Teddy O'Banion. The column was called "Our Side." They were nihilists, read daily in three hundred newspapers. O'Banion drove a Jaguar, so in the privacy of one's own home or office the column was known as the Jig and the Jag. Quite an ambitious piece of work was Wilson Slyde, scholarship boy at Milton, at Yale, at MIT, where he'd graduated with honors, thence to the Defense Department, then Langley, working for Harold Grendall. Hard not to root for Wilson, so bright, so unlikable, son of an army sergeant who served in Bradley's command during the big war and became fascinated with infantry tactics. When he came home he bought every book he could find on the Civil War, building a giant sandtable in his basement, where he re-fought Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. He advanced through the Franco-Prussian War and World War One, imparting all his knowledge and enthusiasm to his son. Wilson wrote his thesis at MIT on the tactical uses of nuclear weapons. When he went to work at Defense, and later at Langley, he wanted to parse the nuclear triad and the electronic battlefield as it applied to NATO and Eastern Europe. But his bosses dealt him the equal opportunity account and sent him around the country talking to the NAACP and the Urban League about what a superb job the administration was doing integrating the armed forces and the security services. He was holding the race card when the card he wanted was the strategy card. So he quit and started "Our Side" with Teddy O'Banion.
"And the first two deal with NATO's eastern flank and Soviet military preparedness and the syndicate people call him to say that while of course he could write anything he damn pleased and the syndicate would never, ever seek to censor him in any way, he could look carefully at his contract and understand that NATO and Soviet Threat were not what newspaper editors had in mind when they bought 'Our Side' by Wilson W. Slyde, Jr., and Edward O'Banion three times a week. Next time, perhaps—Crisis in the NAACP, or What Huey and Eldridge Really Want."
He expected Sylvia to laugh, but instead she shook her head. "That's a sad story."
"Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas."
"It's still a sad story."