The Last Virginia Gentleman

by Michael Kilian

  “With salubrious effect, I gather.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Very good. I don’t know how this place could run without you.”

  Moody started for the door, then halted again.

  “Sir, do you want Undersecretary Richmond to sit in for Secretary Hollis this morning? You have a cabinet meeting at ten. I presume you want Richmond to run things at State until you name a successor.”

  “I don’t even want to think about a successor just now.”

  “But you do want Richmond at the cabinet meeting.”

  “Cancel the meeting, Bob. Cancel everything. I’ve got to write a letter to Skip’s wife. Wonderful girl. I knew her when she was at Smith.”

  Returning to his office, Moody stopped at his secretary’s desk, planting his hands hard on its surface and leaning over to glower into her pale, apprehensive eyes.

  “Anne,” he said quietly, “why didn’t you tell me immediately that Hollis had been killed?”

  “You were with Senator Reidy, Mr. Moody. You said—”

  “Didn’t it occur to you that I might want to know?”

  “Yes, sir, but I didn’t think—”

  “You didn’t think? Then why are you here?”

  He slammed his office door behind him.

  Hollis’s death had thrown the State Department into chaos, the secretary’s now vacant office the calm eye of a hurricane of frantic telephone calls, hastily called meetings, and useless bustling about. A stranger looking upon the scene would have thought war had been declared or that the president had been shot. In the labyrinthian corridors of the lower floors, department bureaucrats stopped for hushed conversations, most addressing the same concerns: Who would be the next secretary? Would there be a major shake-up? If the deputy secretary got the job, would everyone move up the ladder? Would more ambassadorships be opened to career diplomats?

  Showers, arriving just before lunchtime, tried to ignore all this. He had heard the news of the secretary’s fatal accident on his car radio. It had startled him, but he knew very well there was nothing he could do to affect the rush of events that would follow, not even those that might personally affect him. He doubted there would be much impact on the Earth Treaty. Hollis had been the least effective secretary Showers had ever served under. All the policy decisions concerning the treaty had been made in the White House.

  His limp was still painful, but he was managing with a cane. To those who asked him about his injury, he simply responded that he’d had a riding accident. That he had lost or won a major steeplechase race out in Virginia meant nothing to these people. His equestrian life was just another hobby, like the late secretary’s mountain climbing or Showers’ secretary’s aerobics classes.

  She gave him a brave little smile as he entered. “Awful news about Mr. Hollis.”

  “Yes. Terrible thing.”

  “Are you all right?”

  He glanced at his leg. “I’m fine. Just getting too old to be jumping horses.”

  “Your two meetings this afternoon have been canceled. The energy secretary called. He wants to have lunch with you. At Duke Zeibert’s. One o’clock.”

  “Today.”

  “Yes.”

  Showers had been planning to eat at his desk. “All right. Fine.”

  “I’ll call his secretary.”

  He nodded his thanks, then limped on into his office. It was midsized, and had a view of the Mall, the top of the Lincoln Memorial visible just above the trees. The walls were mostly decorated with Currier & Ives prints of fox hunting scenes. In his long foreign service career, Showers had worked mostly with maritime and oceanographic matters, yet had never had much interest in boats or sailing. His mother’s people in Rhode Island had been sailors. His cousin Jack Spencer had won as many small boat races in his youth as Showers had steeplechase events. If he hadn’t become a newspaperman, and such a heavy drinker, Spencer might have competed in the Olympics, or the around the world Whitbread race, or even the America’s Cup.

  Trophies. Medals. Prizes for games. They were such sacred totems in his family. But who else cared?

  The principal decoration in Showers’ office had nothing to do with games. It was a large, floor-mounted globe, set in an antique wooden frame. He kept it positioned upside down—something he had learned from Elliot Richardson when the former cabinet secretary had served as U.S. ambassador to the Law of the Sea Conference and Showers was a young diplomat just assigned to his staff.

  Richardson had sat on his couch, doodling owls on a notepad as he talked on and on about the importance of the conference, then he’d unexpectedly gotten up and gone to his globe—one much like Showers’.

  “I keep it like this so that people will understand,” he’d said.

  Viewed from beneath, the earth was nearly all ocean, with smidgens of continent appearing at the edges, like unimportant islands.

  Globes, of course, bore no representation of the earth’s atmosphere, and thus could not depict the quite frightening hole eaten in the protective ozone layer by the seasonal polar accumulation of man’s aerial poisons. This year, the hole had reached dimensions exceeding the area of the Antarctic land mass.

  Showers went quickly through his mail, extracting two thick reports that he’d been expecting from the Environmental Protection Agency. He’d already seen summaries of their findings, but needed the voluminous data they contained for reference during the week’s briefings and staff meetings.

  The conclusions were as frightening as the current degree of ozone depletion. One report was an estimate of the annual accumulation of solid waste in the United States. Back in 1989, there had been dire predictions that the nation would be generating more than 216 million tons of useless and noxious garbage annually by the year 2000. The turn of the millennium was still a few years away, but that tonnage had already been reached. Beaches were being closed that summer from Lewes, Delaware, to Block Island.

  The other report contained a highly technical survey of pH levels produced by acid rain in upstate New York lakes. It sadly reminded Showers of a time more than a decade before when he had visited a Canadian counterpart in his office in Ottawa. The man was seriously ill and was being made to take a medical retirement from his job. He despaired over this, because he had accomplished so little and such a monstrous lot remained to be done. Showers recalled him standing at his window, a frail, forlorn figure staring out at the vastness of Canadian wilderness stretching away to the north.

  “It’s all dying,” he said. “You may not believe this, but one day your own Lake Champlain will be dead.”

  According to the pH-level report, Lake Champlain was now terminally ill.

  Showers placed the reports in the large wooden file box of official horror stories he kept on the top of his desk. He and his assistants called it their “hell box.” It was getting very full.

  He was due at lunch. His date wasn’t merely with a cabinet officer, but an old friend.

  The government of the United States could no more function without its Washington restaurants and watering holes than a garden could bloom without the commerce of bees.

  As had been true since the earliest days of the republic, when Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had supped with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton at the table of their common boarding house, the discreet and convivial atmosphere of the capital’s bars and dining rooms allowed for a freedom of discourse and candor impossible in formal, recorded meetings or monitorable telephone conversations. It was in these places, not offices and hearing rooms, that alliances were cemented, enemies wooed, plots hatched, and secrets shared.

  The restaurant was a great leveler. Seated across a table, cabinet secretary and reporter, ambassador and committee staffer, four-star general and White House aide, could abandon protocol and speak as equals. Usually, each needed something from the other. Occasionally, they met simply as friends. It was on this basis that Energy Secretary Waldemar Sadinauskas and foreign service officer David Sh
owers shared a warm handshake and sat down at a quiet corner table at Duke Zeibert’s, a New York-style steak and gravy eatery that had probably given birth or administered death to more legislation than any committee room in the Capitol.

  Sadinauskas was a big, unpretentious, rough-mannered and disarmingly amiable former congressman whose occasional crudeness and proletarian tastes masked a keen intellect and expansive knowledge of world affairs. Many an old-school Washington Brahmin had underestimated this man at his consequent peril. A Lithuanian-American from one of the coal valleys of Pennsylvania, he had never graduated from college but had richly educated himself through voracious and highly eclectic reading. He had served seven terms in the House, rising to chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and second-ranking member of House Foreign Affairs. He’d been snapped up by the president for this cabinet post.

  Sadinauskas and Showers had met back in the 1970s during the rancorous “cod war” between Iceland and Great Britain. Despite the sporadic violence the conflict had engendered at sea, the State Department had dismissed the dispute as a “Mouse That Roared” fish fight beneath its concern at a time of increasing cold war tensions and continuing crises in the Mideast. Showers, then a very junior diplomat assigned to the U.S. embassy in Reykjavik, was firmly convinced that little Iceland was clearly in the right in its fight with its big, imperious neighbor, and further, that it was desperate enough to throw the U.S. Navy out of its key air base at Keflavik if NATO ally Britain did not relent in its fishing depredations. He also felt that Iceland’s declaration of a two-hundred-mile territorial sea would become the world’s norm, as swiftly proved to be the case.

  Sadinauskas, stopping in Iceland in the course of a fact-finding tour of northern Europe, was impressed with the young foreign service officer and his arguments, and, returning to Washington, he’d pressed Iceland’s case and his own concerns with his colleagues on House Foreign Affairs and with a friend of his who then happened to be secretary of defense. For the sake of NATO unity, Britain was persuaded to give up. Sadinauskas became what politicians would call Showers’ “Chinaman.”

  “So, what do you think, Dave? Is Hollis’s death going to change anything for you?” said Sadinauskas, after ordering braised ribs and dumplings.

  Showers smiled. He hated being called “Dave,” but accepted it from his old friend. It was preferable to being called “Spencer,” as the more pretentious of his State Department colleagues insisted on doing.

  “I’m too far down the greasy pole for it to make any difference. Hollis wasn’t a bad sort. Would have made a good ambassador, I guess.”

  “To a country with no mountains.” Sadinauskas sipped from his martini, then leaned back in his chair, settling his weight like a sack of something that had been set down.

  “Last time we got together,” he said, getting down to business, “you told me you hoped you’d get something important to do in this treaty thing.”

  “You know my career. The Earth Treaty is the only really meaningful project I’ve worked on since I joined the foreign service. Hell, it’s the fate of the world. We’re on the brink of killing more people than we did at Hiroshima.”

  “You got yourself assigned to the intergovernmental council Moody put together on the treaty.”

  Showers smiled again, ruefully. “I carry other people’s reports to meetings at the White House and read from them when called upon. On rare occasions, I’m asked my opinion of other people’s ideas. I also testify at Senate hearings, telling committee members things their staffs already know. Though sometimes I wonder. Last week I was asked why the tides are always twelve hours apart.”

  “How does it look? For the treaty.”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’m interested in what you think.”

  “I still think it’s rather a long shot. I wish it were otherwise, but I can’t believe the treaty’s something the United States Congress will easily accept. In the short run, it means the loss of too many jobs. The Hill never worries about the long run.”

  Showers reached for his drink—a Diet Coca-Cola.

  “What if they cut the treaty loose from the implementing legislation and push for ratification now?” Sadinauskas said.

  “The treaty’s worthless without the implementing legislation.”

  “The whole thing’s worthless if it stays tied up in committee. Anyway, that’s what the White House is going to do. The chief of staff put out the word this morning. The treaty now. The Earth Bill in the fall.”

  “I suppose Mr. Moody knows what he’s doing. I ran into him this weekend, out in Dandytown. He’s not what you’d call a courteous man.”

  “No, but he’s a smart sonofabitch.”

  “Do you trust him? He has some rather strange friends.”

  “Moody’s loyal to the president. The most loyal guy he’s got, after you and me.”

  Showers flushed. “I do my duty.”

  “I know you do. That’s why I’ve come to you with this.” Sadinauskas took another gulp of his martini and then reached into his coat pocket, taking out an envelope. He set it on the table.

  “What do you think the chances are of the Japanese signing the treaty?”

  “I think they’d sooner stop selling us cars.”

  “But it would really sew things up, if they signed.”

  “Certainly the other Asian exporting countries, Taiwan, Korea, they’d have to go along. And it would certainly help with Congress. But it’s not likely. I’ve dealt with the Japanese in at least a dozen fishing disputes. And on the International Whaling Commission. They’re not amenable to diplomatic persuasion. It’s against their code. I don’t know how you’d budge them.”

  Sadinauskas pulled a piece of paper from the envelope, unfolded it, and slid it across to Showers.

  “There’s always something, Dave. There’s always something.”

  It was a photocopy of a Democratic National Committee memorandum, from an aide identified as Peter Napier. It said the White House was considering punitive measures to be taken against Japan if that country refused to support the Earth Treaty. The list was very long. It included a proposal to subject Japanese autos to the same painfully thorough port of entry inspections that American cars were put through before allowed into Japan. There was another, calling for sale-for-sale trade parity on all goods. Yet another suggested an outright ban on all Japanese fishing within two hundred miles of all United States territories and protectorates, including every island flying a U.S. flag in the Pacific. There was even a proposed international boycott in retaliation for Japanese whaling depredations.

  “It wouldn’t work, Waldemar. This would be Pearl Harbor in reverse.”

  “You’re right. If the president came out and announced it as an ultimatum, it would backfire. They’d lose too much face. They still haven’t gotten over having to humble themselves in front of General MacArthur on the Missouri. But if we were subtle about it—had some other way to get the message across to them—not so directly.”

  “Obliquely.”

  “Yeah, obliquely. You know, the Korean War didn’t end just because Eisenhower gave in on the prisoner of war issue, allowing the Chinese and North Koreans to take all their POWs back, whether they wanted to go or not. He played the atomic card. Not out in the open, but ‘obliquely.’ He rolled out some of those atomic cannons in Korea, where Chinese spies could see them. He stockpiled some nuclear shells for them, and let the Chinese spies see that, too. He never said a word, but the Chinese got the idea.”

  “You want the Japanese to get the idea, without coming out and telling them.”

  Sadinauskas nodded, looking as wise and clever as an ancient Oriental sage.

  “Is the president serious—about this?”

  “He must be. I’m not supposed to tell you this, but it came to me from Moody himself.”

  “All very diabolical,” Showers said.

  Sadinauskas nodded again. “We need a way for them to find out about this me
mo on the quiet, so it comes to them, not as an official threat, but as a piece of prime intelligence.”

  “Have the CIA leak it to them?”

  “The CIA hasn’t the credibility.”

  “So what then?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Haven’t you got some Japanese counterpart you’ve been working with for a while, someone you like and trust, someone who trusts you?”

  “Yes. Of course. At my level, we’re all fairly much committed to what we’re doing.”

  “Pick a good candidate and find a way to show him that.”

  Showers studied the paper again. “Under what pretext?”

  “Your concern. This could knock Japanese-American relations into the toilet, undo all your good work.”

  “Isn’t this more than a little duplicitous?”

  “For crying out loud, Dave, you work for the State Department.”

  Showers stared at the paper as though it were a soiled thing.

  “Look,” Sadinauskas said. “The U.S. has never gotten anywhere in this world trying to appeal to other countries’ better nature. The Germans and French are with us on this thing only because, with all the Green parties in their domestic politics, they have no choice. Their people are fed up with all the trees dying. The Japanese just don’t give a shit. It’s not like they were Russia or the Chinese, with all those mouths to feed. They’re like the goddamned English. They think they’re special. They see no more reason to go along with this than they have with trade agreements or fishing limitations. We have to provide a reason for them to give a shit.”

  Showers started to push the paper back toward his friend. “I think this is much too subtle for them.”

  Sadinauskas pushed it right back. “Nothing is too subtle for the people who got America’s kids addicted to Nintendo games,” he said.

  The waiter brought their food. Showers had ordered only a salad, but his plate was as abundantly heaped with it as the meat, gravy, and dumplings dish Sadinauskas had chosen.

  “Tell you what,” Sadinauskas said, taking the memo and refolding it. “You just hang on to this for a week or so. Think about it. I won’t ask you to do something you don’t want to do. But we’re not going to get this treaty adopted just by climbing onto a horse and shouting ‘charge!’ If you want a little recognition after this is over, well, as far as I’m concerned, you’re long overdue for an ambassadorial appointment, and I’ve got friends all over the place who can make that happen—especially if the White House is in your debt.”