The Last Virginia Gentleman

by Michael Kilian

  “Still working on it, sir, but I think I’d better concentrate on this. I don’t believe there’s any threat to the treaty here, but I don’t want to take that for granted. Someone’s going to have to deal with the Japanese, and I think it better be me.”

  The president smiled. He seemed so happy these days. “Whatever you think best, Bob.”

  Moody walked briskly along the asphalt path that led back to his own quarters, unmindful of the sweat that had begun to soak his shirt. He was certain the Spencer column was Showers’ doing—a hand grenade lobbed back into the enemy’s position. He had to admit the guy had balls. Leaking information to the press had been considered a felony in the Bush administration. In this one, it was practically a capital crime. Gentlemen, as the president liked to put it, don’t do such a thing. Maybe Showers was no gentleman. Moody wondered about that, and why he would have gone to a third-rater like Spencer.

  Maybe the leak had actually come from the Japanese, a ploy to give them an out if they meant to back away from the treaty.

  It didn’t matter. He was going to shut this story down in a big way.

  Once inside his cabin, Moody went directly to his phone. His first call was to the party national chairman, who had been reading his Sunday paper, too.

  “This is what somebody signed Napier’s name to, right?”

  “No one in the White House knows anything about this,” Moody snapped back. “Especially the president. The thing in the Post is the first he’s heard about it—and that’s exactly what we’re going to tell the world at the press briefing tomorrow. But I want you to get Napier on the next plane back here. I don’t care if you have to call every fern bar in San Francisco till you find the one he’s sipping his daiquiris in, but I want him in Washington tonight. I’ll get him a room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. He’s to go there directly and stay there until he hears from me.”

  “You must miss him a lot.”

  “Ha ha. Just take care of it.”

  His next call was to Wolfenson, who was off duty that weekend. Moody searched his memory for the name of the White House secretary the man was screwing that month, and had her roust him out of bed in a hurry. His orders were to find out everything he could about the columnist Spencer, especially everything negative. Most particularly he wanted to know who the man’s regular sources were, and if they included David Showers.

  The Washington Post he reserved for himself. He knew he’d get nowhere with the opinion page editors. Opinion was opinion. The First Amendment, riding tall. But he needed to start a backfire lest the news side decide to take Spencer’s assertions seriously. So Moody called a high-ranking editor he knew on the paper’s national desk. Speaking calmly, he told him the president was extremely upset about the Spencer column because it was dead wrong and, because it had appeared in the Post, the Japanese could take it seriously—with unpleasant consequences. As though tipping the edition to advance information, he told him the entire matter would be cleared up at a special news briefing the next morning.

  The conversation wouldn’t put out the fire, but it should help make the editor a little skeptical about the Spencer column, and skepticism that began in the Post newsroom usually spread through the entire town.

  With Spencer’s wire service, Moody was less conciliatory. He called the bureau chief names, and charged him with disseminating lies and fraud. He called Spencer the most unreliable and irresponsible journalist ever to be allowed in the White House, and said that was coming to an end. He warned the bureau chief that unless the service retracted and apologized for the column it could expect to be last in line for pool slots and seats on presidential planes for as long as the administration was in office. The bureau chief sputtered a protest. The man would sure as hell change that line after the morning briefing.

  Moody would not contact the Japanese. He’d wait until they came to him. Whether they were involved in the leak or not, he didn’t want them thinking the White House was running scared.

  Maybe there was serendipity in all this. Now he could deal with Showers. He’d already decided exactly what to do.

  Showers waited a long time before trying to call his cousin. He didn’t know what to say. The piece in the Post had left him as dumbfounded as it did furious, as curious as he was deeply hurt.

  His fraudulent conversation with Mr. Kurosawa of the Japanese embassy had been the only time in his entire career when he’d violated his own personal code of honor and ethics. He hadn’t realized punishment would come so swiftly.

  He read through the column one more time. Jack had used the phrase “reports circulating in Washington” as a cover. It was an old, time-honored device. Moody would see through it. The “leak” police would be sent into action, but Moody would know exactly where to go.

  Showers punched the buttons of Spencer’s home phone number slowly, and was almost relieved when the ringing gave way to an answering machine’s recorded greeting. He left an anxious message for his cousin to call him at once, and then was at a loss at what next to do. On impulse, he tried to reach Sadinauskas, but discovered his residence phone had been changed to an unlisted number.

  Staring at the phone, at the fine layer of dust that covered it, he felt a desperate need for a friendly human voice. Alixe had gone up to West Virginia. He’d talked to her the night before. Becky would be of no help to him. Lenore, he knew, was still in Saratoga.

  He waited an hour or so in the diminishing hope that his cousin would return his call soon, then went for a walk along the harborfront to try to calm himself. He had never before realized how laden with menace this prettified, monumental city was—even on such a sunny and cheerful day.

  Reaching the fish market at the end of the quay, he wandered among the malodorous stalls for a few minutes, then retraced his steps. Returning home, he called Spencer again, with the same result. He waited. He slept. Awakening, he read more of the newspapers, unable to concentrate his mind on much.

  Finally, he made himself a sort of meal. Once it was safely in his stomach, he mixed himself a drink, taking it out onto his balcony. He was squandering the day. As darkness gathered, he felt the need to escape his apartment again, this time to take a drive. The evening was relatively cool, and he drove the Jeep slowly along the parkway by the river, the air conditioning off and his window rolled down. The tourist season was fully under way, and there was considerable traffic. One car followed his all the way to the Memorial Bridge, and turned with him onto Independence Avenue, as though on the same perambulation. Annoyed by it, he pulled over to the side by the Education Department and let it pass—a nondescript white sedan with no one he could recognize inside, and a commonplace District of Columbia license plate. The automobile sped on down the avenue, turning at the next corner. Showers continued on, toward Capitol Hill. He’d finally decided on a destination.

  A security guard answered the bell at the Shakespeare Theatre. He was surprisingly friendly, saying he didn’t know if rehearsals for the new play had begun, but that if any work was being done by the director or cast, it would be over at a rented hall a few blocks distant at Eastern Market that the theater company used.

  It was an old and somewhat shabby-looking building. Its entrance door stood ajar. Showers stepped inside, finding himself in a long vestibule with two sets of double doors along its rear wall. He opened one, and peered in. The hall was mostly dark, but a number of people were seated in a circle of folding chairs at the far end, starkly illuminated by two standing floodlights. Their voices were very clear. They held scripts in their laps and were reciting lines. May Moody was sitting sideways to him, wearing shorts and a blouse.

  A nearer voice, just behind him, startled him.

  “Excuse me, sir. But the hall is closed.”

  He looked to see a young man wearing jeans and a Shakespeare Theatre T-shirt carrying a cardboard box full of coffee containers.

  “I wanted to speak to Miss Moody.”

  “Miss Moody? Well, you can’t. I’m so
rry. We’re doing a read-through. They’re still casting some parts.”

  Showers stepped out of the man’s way, but didn’t want to accept defeat.

  “Please,” he said, taking a State Department business card from his wallet. “If you don’t mind. Could you take her this?”

  He scrawled a quick message on the back of the card: “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”

  The young man let him drop the card into the cardboard box, then went on into the hall. The group paused in its proceedings to allow the man to distribute the coffee. Showers, moving back into the doorway, watched him lean over May and hand her the card. She studied it, then looked toward the entrance. He couldn’t make out her expression, but sought her eyes. She turned away, whispering something to the young man and shaking her head.

  He came quickly back to Showers. “Sorry, sir. But she doesn’t want to see you.” He closed the door.

  Peter Napier, weary from his long, hurried trip, sat in his hotel room in stocking feet and with shirt pulled out and unbuttoned. He’d endured a pay TV Mel Gibson movie without hearing any word from Moody, and now was watching an old British comedy series on one of the public channels. He needed sleep, but was too excited to even consider it.

  It was after midnight when the knock came at his door. He’d expected a telephone call first, and the visitor’s sudden arrival took him a little scarily by surprise.

  At least it was the person he’d been expecting. He stepped back quickly to let Robert Moody into the room.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” Moody said. “My wife expected me home an hour ago and she’s in a bad mood.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Moody went to the television set and snapped it off. Seating himself in a chair, he motioned to Napier to do the same. It made Moody uncomfortable that the young man’s bare chest was exposed.

  “I got back as soon as I could, Mr. Moody. I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  Moody stared at him for a long moment. The fate of the world always ended up in the most ridiculous hands.

  “I’ve got a job for you,” he said. “It’s important.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “We’ve run into some trouble on the treaty. I won’t go into all the details. You don’t need to know. But there’s a phony story going around that we’re threatening Japan with a trade war if they don’t ratify—”

  “I know. There was something about it on the news tonight.”

  “Shut up and listen. The story’s bullshit but it could piss off Tokyo and we’ve got to shut it down fast. You’re the man I need. You’re discreet, right? You do what you’re told. And you know a lot about politics.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Moody.”

  “I want you to tell a lie. It’s nothing illegal. It’s nothing like another Watergate, but it’s damn important. It’s a lie to help your party, your president, and your country.”

  Napier’s mouth was gaping open. Moody took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, and handed it to him.

  “Read this.”

  It was a neatly typed, official-looking memo on National Committee stationery, addressed to the party chairman. It said that the party’s candidates faced a serious problem in the next election because of fears that the treaty’s conditions might impact negatively on American jobs. The treaty would be particularly hard to defend if Japan were allowed to continue its domination of world trade and the American consumer market while refusing to go along with the same environmental restrictions the United States was imposing on itself. The memo urged the party’s National Committee to consider adopting a policy of calling for sanctions against Japan and its exports if it rejected the treaty.

  “This sounds fine to me, Mr. Moody, but you’ve got my name on the bottom. It’s dated more than a month ago. I never wrote this. Somebody at the committee said they were putting my name on a campaign letter about the treaty or something, but it wasn’t this.”

  “I want you to say it is. I want you to lie. This will get us off the hook. It’s a perfectly reasonable memo. And it’ll explain everything—put an end to all the crap. It’ll get this story off the president’s back so we can go on about our business.”

  “Who do you want me to lie to?”

  “To the whole fucking world. There’s a press briefing tomorrow and I want you to be there. We’ll distribute copies of this memo and have you take the podium and say you wrote it and this is all the whole damn thing amounts to. You won’t have to testify before anybody. You won’t have to say anything under oath. There’s no danger of perjury. It’s just politics. Political damage control.”

  Napier saw himself standing before the reporters, the presidential seal on the podium in front of him. He might be on the news that night—if not the network, probably the local.

  “This is all?” he asked.

  “Probably. But you might get pressed on how this whole thing got out into the press, how it turned into this bullshit story. If that happens, I want you to tell another lie. I want you to say you showed this memo to a man in the State Department named David Showers.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s the sonofabitch who leaked the bullshit story to the reporter who broke it. The guy’s his cousin. I just found that out today. I want you to say you showed it to him in a bar—a bar up around DuPont Circle. It’s called Wilde Thing.”

  Napier’s eyes widened. The establishment was a noted hangout for gays. “But I don’t even know this man.”

  “Yes you do. You met in the Wilde Thing.”

  “But what will that say about me?”

  “Have you ever been in that bar before?”

  “Yes. A few times.”

  “Then it won’t say anything unusual.”

  Napier set the memo down on the table in front of him. “This is really important, you say.”

  Moody was not going to repeat himself. “If you’ll do this for us, we’ll take care of you. You once asked me for a White House job. I can’t get you that—not on the president’s staff. I can’t get you anything until after we get the treaty through. But I can get you a spot on the staff of one of the presidential advisory commissions. You’ll get an office in one of those buildings next to Blair House, a White House pass and—after a while—maybe we can even extend White House mess privileges.”

  Napier took a deep breath, exhaling with much satisfaction.

  “If you can’t do this for us, then the hell with you. We’ll have no more use for you on the National Committee. I’ll see to it you never work in politics again, at least with our party. Your next job will be as a waiter in the Wilde Thing. You get my drift?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Sign it.” He handed the man a pen.

  “I want you to stay here tonight,” Moody said, as Napier carefully wrote his name. “Don’t take any phone calls and don’t make any. Someone will come by in the morning to get you over to the White House.”

  Napier stood up. Moody pocketed both pen and memo, then did the same.

  “I’m always happy to serve the president,” Napier said.

  “Yeah, right. Good night.”

  Thirteen

  Moody, Senator Reidy, and Waldemar Sadinauskas met for a very early breakfast at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Park from the White House. Each had logged the rendezvous on his schedule as a strategy meeting on the treaty—though in the Washington vernacular it might be more properly termed a CYO session—as in “cover your ass.” None of them was very hungry. Thanks to the column in the Sunday Post, mention of the mysterious Japan memo had found its way into a number of the morning papers, including the Wall Street Journal.

  “You’re sure this is going to work, Bobby?” Reidy said, picking at his scrambled eggs. “Napier is about as big a flake as you’ll find in this town.”

  “So why have you had him working for you?” Moody said. “May I remind you, Senator,
this whole fucking thing was your bright idea.”

  Sadinauskas looked troubled. “If you’re going to blame anyone, pick on me. I was the one who suggested using David Showers.”

  Moody liked Sadinauskas. He considered him his guy. “It made sense at the time, Wally,” he said. “If we were going to plant something as goddamned outrageous as the memo Senator Reidy here dreamed up, we needed a real straight arrow to look convincing to the Japanese. Showers was perfect. Though after today, he’s going to look a little bent.”

  “Does his name have to come up?”

  “I hope it doesn’t, but it probably will. Especially if the president wants to know ‘everything.’”

  “What’ll happen to him—Showers?”

  “You know how the president feels about leakers.”

  “You’re not going to fire him?” Sadinauskas said.

  “You can’t do that,” Reidy said. “Not over this. He’s not some staff assistant with a political plum job. He’s career foreign service. There are official procedures. If he appealed, there’d be a hearing. You wouldn’t want our friend Napier dancing out for a chat at one of those.”

  “I’ve no intention of trying to fire Showers,” Moody said. “Hell, the man has a first-rate record. But if push comes to shove—and today looks like it could turn into a hell of a football game—I’m just going to see to it he gets an offer he can refuse.”

  Sadinauskas glanced around the dining room. Most of the other breakfasters looked to be lawyers and lobbyists, busily engaged in their own murky matters.

  “I wish you’d leave Showers alone, Bob.”

  “Look. He’s a casualty. They happen. Let me remind you guys that we’re not a bunch of crooks. We’re not stealing money here. We’re not breaking into somebody’s campaign headquarters or trying to subvert the government. We’re trying to get our big ally Japan to go along on the biggest goodness issue since the Emancipation Proclamation. This is the fate of the earth. What’s a guy like Showers compared to that?”