He was his old self at the dinner table that night. He joshed Chinky about her ever-phoning girl friends, kept both Chinky and Martha laughing with wry comments on the afternoon press conference, and asked Martha for a second helping of the beef Stroganoff, clear proof that he was in good spirits, for he privately detested the dish.
After dinner he and Chinky listened to the entire album of Porky Jones on the drums. They turned up the sound on the stereo set, and the living room became a pandemonium of drums and raucous yells. Chinky screamed ecstatically, while Jim beat the floor with a fly swatter. Martha appeared at the kitchen door, holding her ears and imploring them to dampen the uproar. They ignored her, Jim turning his back and leaping up to do a wild jig that shook the walls. Chinky began to weave in a spell of euphoria, somewhat like a kitten after a saucer of rum. When the album at last concluded on a heady, savage beat, father and daughter collapsed on the carpet in a spasm of laughter.
“Pops, you’re a swingin’ cat,” said Chinky, and then she giggled helplessly.
Later, after Chinky had gone to bed, protesting as ever, Jim and Martha sat in his upstairs den. Jim closed the door and tried to temper his ebullient mood for the serious business at hand.
“Marty,” he said, “this is going to hurt, but it’s got to be said. On Thursday night I have to escort Mrs.—well, the woman in Georgetown—”
“You mean Mrs. Krasicki?”
“All right, Mrs. Krasicki.” He couldn’t look at his wife, and the name dragged on his lips. “I’ve got to take her to a meeting. I can’t tell you what it’s about, but it has to do with the security of the country. The…the thing…with her is all over and buried. This is something else. I’ve just got to do it, but I wanted you to know.”
“You want me to trust you, Jim?” she asked softly.
“You’ve got to, Marty.”
“I do, Jim, I do.” Her face clouded and her little nose wrinkled in annoyance. “But I can’t understand why you can’t tell me what it’s all about. You’ve never held anything back before. Have I ever once let out one of your secrets since we got into politics?”
“No, you haven’t.” They held each other’s eyes, each searching for understanding.
“Well, then, why can’t you tell me?”
Why not, indeed? thought Jim. It was different now. Now there were no longer any doubts. Jessica Tate Byerson, that fey little bundle with the enchanted flower, had erased the last of the misgivings. That alone gave him strength to make the fantastic seem credible to Martha. And with the vice-presidency cast aside, for Martha’s sake, she believed, she would be in a mood to credit his lurid discovery. But, above all, his Thursday night mission with Rita had to be explained, somehow. Suddenly Jim could withhold the story of President Hollenbach no longer.
“Martha, this is the most frightening thing that’s happened in this country in a long while,” he said. “I’m going to try to tell you everything I know.”
And he almost did. He told the story in great detail, but when he came to Rita’s conversation with Hollenbach about Davidge, he saw Martha wince at the mention of Rita’s name and he could not bring himself to tell the exact truth. He said that she had told him of the incident back in January, and that it had made no impression on him until after his session with the President at Camp David. Then, he said, he’d had to consult Rita to hear the story again. Also, when he told of the Secret Service and FBI investigations, Jim did not mention the fact that agents called on Rita as well.
Throughout the recital, Martha busied herself removing pale-red lacquer from her fingernails. Her snub nose twitched with the sharp fumes of the polish remover, and she raised her head only occasionally to look at her husband. Then she applied a new coat and held up her fingers to let the lacquer dry. When Jim finished, Martha spread her fingers, fanwise, and inspected them thoughtfully. How to explain women, thought Jim. The country faced the worst crisis he’d known, and she sat admiring her nails. Then she rose slowly and came to the arm of his easy chair. She clasped his head to her bosom and caressed his hair.
“Dearest Jim,” she whispered, “forgive me for making you tell me. But I’m glad, darling. I understand. You need help so badly.”
“I’ve just got to make Nicholson and Odium believe me,” he said, his voice muffled by her breasts.
She tilted his head upward and kissed the cleft of his chin.
“Of course, dear,” she said. “Of course you do.”
Then he saw a questioning, pitying look in her eyes, and he wondered why the miseries of President Hollenbach should touch the woman of her so deeply, why her affection should flow because she’d learned the mind of the President was unsound. The mystery of woman, he thought, was boundless.
In bed, she covered his face with small kisses and then she held him tightly as though he might leave.
“Jim,” she said suddenly, “I’m going to drive you to work tomorrow and prove to you that nobody—Secret Service or anybody else—is following you.”
He hoisted himself on an elbow and stared down at her face in the dark. “Marty, for God’s sake,” he began, but she pulled him down beside her and stroked the nape of his neck.
The transient ebullience of the afternoon and evening was all gone now, and loneliness struck deep in his being. He did not have the will to argue with her. If Martha thought his mind was disturbed, there was nothing he could do about it tonight. He kissed her tenderly, trying to make the senses reassure where words could not, and soon, silently and somewhat sadly, they were making love.
14.
St. Leonard’s Creek
All his years Jim MacVeagh would remember these two days, Wednesday and Thursday, as the longest of his life. He felt he was alone, a prisoner in a jail of glass, high on a hill, watching helplessly as the valley crumbled beneath him. Mark Hollenbach made his feverish plans to meet Zuchek in Stockholm, and only Senator MacVeagh, from his lonely vantage point, knew that it was a psychotic president who would fly to Sweden. If James MacVeagh yelled, none would hear him. If he warned, they would turn away, for the senator himself was suspected of aberrations—by Griscom, the lawyer, by Arnold Brothers, the Secret Service chief, and now by his own wife.
The hovering FBI agents were gone, but it was no consolation, for the surveillance by the Secret Service seemed to have tightened. Jim felt the presence of the Service everywhere. At a committee session he recognized a face in the rear row. It was an agent from the West Coast whom he’d seen briefly during the Hollenbach campaign. On Wednesday morning, when he stopped at a gas station in McLean, MacVeagh saw Luther Smith sitting in a car across the street. The agent was averting his head when Jim looked, but Jim caught a glimpse of the swarthy face. At his office Jim looked up Smith’s address in the phone book. Smith lived in Silver Spring in Maryland, a 40-minute drive in traffic from McLean.
Vexed and harried, MacVeagh called Arnold Brothers at Secret Service headquarters. He accused the chief of assigning agents to shadow him and demanded to know by what right or authority in law the Secret Service placed a net of surveillance about a United States senator. Brothers expressed shock at the charge, but Jim thought his voice too bland to be convincing. It was almost as though Brothers had anticipated such a call. Senator MacVeagh, said Brothers, certainly must be imagining things, for no detail had been assigned to trail him. The Service had merely checked on a call two weeks ago from La Belle, Florida, had found that Roger Carlson had made some inquiries there on MacVeagh’s instructions, and that was the end of that. Purely routine. Why would the Service go further? No, no. The Service had agents all over town. MacVeagh must have seen men on other missions. If the senator had been given cause for worry, the Service was sorry. Brothers was insistent, sympathetic and reassuring, but MacVeagh hung up feeling again the noose being drawn about him. If he had been a smoking man, he would have consumed a pack.
At home Martha was solicitous, almost
cloying in her maternal attention. She did not again hint that his mind was fraying, but she questioned him frequently about his experiences with Hollenbach, and he found her pursing her lips in disbelief when he described the nights of Camp David. In the retelling Jim found the ghostly, frightening quality had worn off. He could no longer be sure, in memory, that Mark acted and talked like a madman. The scenes were blurring, and doubts again began to nag him. Only the recent episode with fat Mrs. Byerson, innocently revealing that she too had heard of Hollenbach’s grand concept for a super-union, remained vivid. Simpering, pathetic Mrs. Byerson, he thought, what a waxy reed to lean on.
Wednesday afternoon the Washington Evening Star printed a story by Cousins and King, the nation’s leading political gossip columnists. The story said that the real reason Senator James F. MacVeagh bowed out of the vice-presidential contest was because there was a mark on his private life which he feared would be revealed had he continued. The writers did not hint at the nature of the blemish, but they stated their accusation as though it were a fact well documented. They seemed to relish the use of words as provocative as possible, as though daring MacVeagh to sue them for libel.
The story uncapped a geyser of rumors and gossip. MacVeagh’s office switchboard was flooded with calls. The Democratic state chairman phoned from Iowa, pleading with MacVeagh to issue a denial. Deny what? retorted MacVeagh. He hadn’t been charged with anything. Then sue for libel, he was urged. Senseless, replied MacVeagh. Libel litigation only opened a man’s whole life for ruthless lawyers to poke and prod about in. The state chairman wasn’t satisfied. MacVeagh had to run again two years from now. People remembered things like this. Then Craig Spence came to see MacVeagh, enraged for his friend and anxious to write a column excoriating Cousins and King for trafficking in baseless innuendo. MacVeagh urged him to write nothing on the matter, argued that further words would only prolong a brief tempest into a wind that would howl about him for months. Spence bristled and left the office in ill humor. Nothing, Jim thought, sours charity so quickly as an unwilling recipient. But while MacVeagh managed to weather his friends and political associates, the scene with Chinky hurt.
Chinky greeted him that evening with a brushing kiss, then planted her feet wide apart in a bellicose stance, pointed to the Star which was open to the Cousins and King column.
“That’s the rottenest thing I’ve ever seen in a newspaper,” she said. “Pops, aren’t there laws or something to prevent lies like that?”
“That’s just politics, honey. It doesn’t mean a thing. You’ve got to get used to it.”
“I’m going to write a letter to the Star,” she said. She blinked rapidly as she often did when angry. “I’m going to dare them to say just what they mean, or shut up.”
MacVeagh patted her cheek. “None of that, Chinky. That will just make a mountain out of a molehill. Let it lie.”
“A molehill?” she shrieked. “Why, every filthy little sneak at school will be gossiping about it. I’ll hate to show my face.”
“Now, Chinky,” he consoled her, “who’s the story about, you or me? If I can take it, you can. It’s a low blow, but that’s the way politics is.”
She stepped quickly to him and hugged him. “Aw, gee, Pops, you’re the straightest guy on earth.” She rubbed her cheek against his coat sleeve, and Martha, who had been standing in a corner of the room, stepped quickly through the swinging door to the kitchen.
The two days seemed to stretch interminably, with MacVeagh abrasively on the defensive, with his friends, with newspapermen, with his family, and with his own shuddering doubts. When Thursday evening finally came, Jim faced it with a sense of inadequacy and almost futility. Why, of all the thousands of public officials, had he appointed himself the guardian of the nation? But something thrust him onward, like a small unseen hand at the back.
By prearrangement he met Rita on the street beside the Supreme Court Building. She came by taxi, and he waited in a rented car which he had obtained at the Hertz garage on L Street after making sure that his own cab was not being followed. Rita wore a fog coat with flaring collar, and she jiggled a pair of smoked glasses at him as she got in the car.
“As long as we’ve got all this mystery,” she said, her voice low, “I thought I’d go as Mata Hari.”
She squared the glasses on her nose and lit a cigarette. Her lips were crimson against her delicate olive skin, a shake of black hair fell over one eye, and a faint aroma of perfume began to fill the car. Jim shifted uneasily in his seat.
They drove in silence over the South Capitol Street bridge, out the Suitland Parkway, past Andrews Air Force Base.
“Remember this road, Jims?” she asked. “The time we borrowed your friend’s sailboat? What a heavenly weekend.”
“Yeah,” he said, but he pushed from his mind the picture of the gently rocking boat and its deck checkered with moonlight.
“Jims, why did you give up on the vice-presidency?”
“I’m not the caliber,” he bantered. “Remember? I’m sweet and kind and usually on the side of the angels, but I don’t use half the brains God gave me. Besides, I’m lazy.”
She touched his chin. “Don’t forget the cleft when listing your assets. Seriously, why did you quit?”
“As I told you Tuesday,” he said, “once the FBI knew about us, it was bound to get out, and Hollenbach was sure to hear, since he apparently ordered the security check in the first place. And when he read the report, he’d have thrown me off the ticket head first. Our President doesn’t tolerate—how shall we put it?—indiscretions of the flesh. So I just beat him to the punch.”
“You mean the President is going to read about us?” She turned to him, her face tight and reddening.
“Of course, Rita. You must have figured that out.”
“No, I didn’t.” Her voice had lost its warmth. “Why, that’s detestable—the President reading that kind of thing. He’ll think I’m some kind of cheap pushover.”
“Baby!” He reached over and squeezed her hand, but she snatched it away. She sat staring out the car window, her dark glasses oddly reflecting the lights from the dashboard. It was several minutes before she spoke again.
“Damn it, Jim. What’s this all about? Where are you taking me?”
“To a house on St. Leonard’s Creek,” he said. “It’s a little way this side of Solomon’s.”
“That’s too spooky for me.” She lit another cigarette, but mashed it out in the dashboard tray after a few puffs. “Jim, turn this car around. I want to go home.”
“You promised, Rita,” he pleaded. “We’ll be there in half an hour. I’ll tell you everything as soon as I can. But, believe me, it’s all tied in to national security.”
“Security!” she blazed. “I’ve had enough of that word for a lifetime.”
But she protested no more, and they drove on, speeding through southern Maryland under a night sky that was shrouded with cloud. At the hamlet of Lusby, Jim turned right on a gravel road, then turned right again at a swinging, wooden sign which read “Grady Cavanaugh.”
“Is that the Supreme Court justice?” asked Rita. Jim nodded. “You could at least have told me that,” she said reproachfully.
The road wound through thick woods, and the car’s headlights played on the new buds of the maples, oaks and dogwoods. Then they traversed an open field, newly plowed, and mounted toward a great, white frame house which crowned a hill overlooking the dark waters of St. Leonard’s Creek. Several cars were parked in the pebbled roadway behind the barn.
A long low wing ran from the side of the house, and by prearrangement with Cavanaugh, MacVeagh escorted Rita to a guest room nearest the back entrance. The room was simply decorated in early American style, with cherry furniture and an oval, hooked rug on the floor. A floor lamp burned beside a slipcovered easy chair, and magazines were spread over an end table.
“Make yourse
lf comfortable,” said Jim. “I’ll come for you in half an hour or so.”
She sniffed as she took off her fog coat. “Prisoner Krasicki, No. 87114. Take your time, Senator. I wouldn’t walk back along that lonely road for a million dollars.”
Jim made his way to the living room of the main house. A log fire was crackling in the wide stone fireplace, and the shadowed sweep of pasture through the front windows reminded Jim of Camp David. The walls were paneled in antiqued oak and rough beams supported the cathedral ceiling.
Five men were ranged in a semicircle about the fire. A sixth vacant chair awaited MacVeagh. The men rose as he entered, and Jim took in their faces at a glance. There was Associate Justice Grady Cavanaugh, a cheerful, even-tempered man with a habit of arching his black eyebrows, as he did now, when greeting a friend. Speaker of the House William Nicholson, fourth generation of one of America’s proudest political families, stood stolid, austere and heavy. Old Senator Frederick Odium of Louisiana, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, short and squat, followed MacVeagh with roving, cynical eyes. Vice-President Patrick O’Malley rolled a cigar above his drooping jowls. Jim was surprised to see the fifth man, a Negro, Senator Sterling Gullion of Illinois. He had large, moist brown eyes and skin the color of tanbark. As always, he was dressed immaculately. MacVeagh shook hands with each man, registering his reactions as he did so. With Cavanaugh, O’Malley and Gullion he felt at ease, but Nicholson was too forbidding of mien and stance, and Jim feared the first question from Odium’s waspish tongue.
Night of Camp David Page 22