“Fred—”
“Please don’t remind me I ought to be glad of a chance to serve my country. It isn’t my country any more.”
“I won’t. We’re a little too mature for all that. I won’t even tell you we’ve been seduced by decadent bourgeois values—leave all that to Rams, he’s the only one who still believes in slogans even if he’s the one who puts them down. I’m sure we’ve been seduced by it all but I’m sure they never expected otherwise. They only expected one thing of us—that we never forget who they are, or what they’re capable of. We’re never out of their reach. Your brothers and sisters and mother, and my parents and nieces and nephews. Even Alec and Barbara.”
“That’s what Nicole said. I wonder if she knew about Dangerfield.”
“Nicole?”
“She gave me a peptalk this afternoon.”
“Then she probably knows. Rams would have told her before he told us. They’re two of a kind.” She turned and began walking again. “They’ve got us on a leash. They wouldn’t have sent us if they couldn’t be sure of controlling us for our whole lifetimes—they wouldn’t have taken the chance of one of us defecting. How many times have we walked up this street and had this conversation before? There aren’t any loopholes. All we can do is to be thankful we’ve had the past twenty years.”
“And Alec and Barbara?”
“Whatever happens they’ll survive it or they won’t.”
“Do you get any real comfort from that kind of asinine fatalism?”
“Fred, what’s the point of agonizing over things that are beyond our power to decide?”
There were clouds over the moon and between street lights it was quite dark; Winslow took his wife’s arm. She said, “I was the one who was full of idealism when we volunteered to come over here. Sometimes I thought you came simply to be with me. I couldn’t tell if it was what you wanted for yourself or not. But then I told myself I was flattering myself—no woman could force you to do a thing you didn’t really want to do.”
He stopped. His grip on her arm turned her and he felt heat in his cheeks; he said in an odd voice, “It could have been a lot worse, after all, couldn’t it?”
“We’ve had twenty-three years together and we didn’t end up hating each other. That’s a great deal.”
“We’re both talking as if it’s over.”
A car came into the street preceded by its lights. They turned and began to walk home. Winslow said, “What are they going to want us to do? What are we going to have to do?”
She gripped his hand; it was the only answer she gave.
Chapter Six
Early Wednesday morning Alan Forrester drove down from the ranch and racked the 200SL in a FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY parking slot beside the courthouse. He walked by the open door of a Superior Court room where people were lined up in rows of chairs waiting to be heard—prostitutes with cheap wigs and rickety legs and the absurdly fur-dressed pimps who had come to ransom them.
The Pima County Courthouse had been built in the Moorish style, hollowed out with a square central courtyard and a veranda-covered balcony in lieu of a hallway. The balcony teemed with civil servants in shirtsleeves and cotton dresses, complacent as eunuchs. Forrester, towering and striking, made a center of attention as he progressed. He shook hands and spoke greetings by name and signed a few autographs, and took note of the number of passersby who made a point of pretending not to see him. The battle lines of public opinion were being drawn up.
He went into his private office by the side door and found Jaime Spode asprawl on the couch. A babble of voices came through the closed door of the outer office and a newspaper lay on the desk, TORNADOES KILL 17 IN TEXAS PANHANDLE. There was a small two-column head halfway down the page:
SOVIET DENIES AIM TO SURPASS U.S. IN MIRVS.
Washington, April 2 (UPI)—The Soviet press agency Tass issued the first official statement on the growing tempest over the alleged U.S. plan to deploy the Phaeton MIRV system of missile warheads. The Soviet Union asserted it was not seeking to add a further spiral to the arms race by seeking nuclear MIRV superiority over the United States.
The Soviet report seemed clearly a reaction to the disclosures last week by Senator Alan Forrester (R-Ariz) that combined Pentagon-House forces planned to rush official authorization of Phaeton Three through both houses of Congress before the issue could be debated in public. The Phaeton Three multiple-warhead system is (Cont. on p. 7)
Forrester opened the paper to read the continuation and when he glanced up he caught Spode watching him. “With friends like the Reds, who needs enemies in Congress?”
Forrester grunted.
“Old man Shattuck still avoiding you?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t wonder. I checked around and it seems Shattuck Industries gave a hundred-thousand-dollar check to Congressman Webb Breckenyear’s campaign fund two years ago.”
“I might have expected that.” Forrester reached for the intercom switch. “Ronnie?”
The speaker crackled. “Yes, Mr. Spode?”
It was a clear enough signal: there was someone in the outer office who wasn’t to know Forrester was in.
“Come in when you’re free, will you?”
On the speaker behind Ronnie’s “Yes, sir,” he heard a woman’s harsh acrimony: “Every seven puking seconds another puking mouth to feed with six tons of meat and five tons of wheat and twenty-six million tons of water and God knows what-all—I am going to camp in this puking chair until hell freezes over or I get in to see the puking Senator, whichever comes first. If I don’t get his signature we’ll all get crowded off the God damn puking planet.”
Ronnie had left the intercom turned up long enough for them to hear what she was up against and it made Spode laugh with a hard bray. “Out to save the puking world all by herself—what’ll you bet if I go out there and tell her to fuck off she’ll be horrified?”
“I don’t mean to seem rude but what are you doing here, Top?”
“Resting my feet.”
“Is that your gentle way of telling me you can’t crack Ross Trumble’s nut?”
“No, it’s my gentle way of telling you my feet are sore because I’ve been standing in doorways for forty-eight hours keeping a tail on him. Every place he goes he takes that fucking briefcase with him. I think he sleeps with it under his pillow. But I’ve got a girl down here today from Orozco’s agency and maybe she’ll be able to pry him loose of it.”
“I need those figures, Top. I postponed the inspection tour of the base as long as I could but we’ve got to go through with it Friday morning and I’ve got to have those figures before that. You’ve got less than forty-eight hours.”
“Yeah, I know.” Spode stretched. “Listen, it’s all right this time because I just spent an hour checking this room out, but you really ought to be more careful what you say to me. Breckenyear and Trumble have got FBI buddies and you want to look out for bugs.”
Forrester was impatient with it but it was true enough. The ones who saw Communists under every rock were capable of doing almost anything in the name of national security and that included spying on a United States Senator.
He said, “I haven’t time to fool with that woman now, but I need Ronnie in here. You’d better do it—be as gentle as you can.”
“I’ll just wave my tommyhawk.” Spode squeezed through the door and disappeared.
Forrester finished reading the newspaper item. There was a quote attributed to Senator Woodrow Guest: “Our liberal brethren seem to be looking for a scapegoat. First it was the draft, then Dow Chemical, then white racists. Now it’s the defense industry.” It was easy to hear the tone of biting scorn in Guest’s silver voice.
Ronnie came in miming exhaustion. “I thought that woman was going to shout my ears off.”
Spode trailed in and ambled back to the couch. “On her way out she was still talking to herself—heading for the Mayor’s puking office.” He sat down and clasped his hands on top of h
is head, spread-eagling his elbows.
Ronnie had her notebook. “Senator Guest’s office phoned. He’s flying into Phoenix tonight and he asked if you’ll be available for a conference Thursday morning—tomorrow—at ten. Congressman Trumble will be there. And Ramsey Douglass of Matthewson-Ward.”
“Where?”
“Senator Guest’s house. Scottsdale.”
Spode said, “If Woody Guest’s willing to fly all the way out here to meet you maybe it means he’s ready to knuckle under and hold hearings.”
“I think he is,” Forrester said. “He’s got quite a few enemies panting around for a crack at his throne and some of them are up for reelection this year. If he refused to hold public hearings it would be an unpopular move and some of the moderate conservatives in the Senate would feel forced to dissociate themselves from him—especially in an election year. No, he’ll come out foursquare in favor of open hearings, but when they’re held he’ll do his best to cloud the issues. So we’ve still got to whip up public concern and work on the swing voters in the Senate. For openers, that Shattuck Industries contribution to Breckenyear’s campaign will do—Shattuck doesn’t even have a plant in Breckenyear’s state. I want to make that contribution public. Can you document it?”
“That’s what you pay me for.”
“Fine. It’ll cast a shadow over Breckenyear and maybe even his redneck supporters will be embarrassed by it. But if I’m going to put pressure on the Senate we’re going to need more ammunition like that. I want to know every campaign contribution that came out of the defense industry’s checkbook, because when my friends get up to make speeches supporting their good American buddies in the hardware industry I want to show facts and figures that will discredit their motives.”
Ronnie sucked in her breath and the sound couldn’t be mistaken for anything but disapproval. He looked at her. “You don’t like it, do you?”
“It has a smell of blackmail—extortion. You’re playing dirty pool.”
“Do you think this is a game? The hardware lobby has too many of my honorable colleagues in its pocket—bought and paid for. I can’t outbid the giants but I’ve got to equalize the pressure somehow. The Pentagon has a hundred billion dollars a year to sling around and how many Congressmen are going to bite a hand that feeds them that well? Don’t you think I have a right to offset that pressure? We’ve got one hundred Senators and fourteen of them are officers in the military reserves; we’ve got more than five hundred Congressmen and almost a hundred and thirty of them are reservists. Including Webb Breckenyear and Ross Trumble and two dozen other key members of Congressional committees that handle foreign policy and appropriations and defense.”
Spode said to Ronnie, “I hope you took that down, it’s a nice campaign speech.”
She said, “I still don’t like it, Alan.”
It was the first time she had done that in the office and he noticed Spode’s quick glance of interest. A spot of color showed at Ronnie’s cheek and she hurried on: “Have you thought about what will happen if it backfires? They’ll resent being exposed.”
“Let them. I want the public stirred up—I want the Senate flooded with mail. That’s what pressure’s for.”
Spode said, “You’ll likely get just as much mail against as for.”
“Doesn’t matter, Top. The pressure on Lyndon Johnson didn’t come from the majority but it was enough to reverse his Vietnam policy and that happened only because the peace movement drove everything else off the front pages. I want to make Phaeton the number-one headline issue—the point where we draw the line on this hardware cancer. If we have to drag a few skeletons out of closets then let’s drag them out.”
Spode pulled the side of his mouth back with a click as if he were dislodging something from his back teeth. “You’re a lot more politician than you look.” It wasn’t clear whether he meant it as compliment or rebuke.
“Just get me the Phaeton figures from Trumble’s file, Top. Let me make the policy decisions.”
“I always do, don’t I?”
He took Ronnie to dinner at Cliff House and they sat at a corner-window table with Tucson on the plain below them, three hundred square miles of incandescent lights. Half a dozen tablehoppers made ritual pilgrimages to their table and Forrester gave them all a smile and a handshake and a few words, and when the last of them departed Ronnie said, “Do you have to put up with that all the time?”
“You have to tolerate them—it’s no job for an introvert.”
“You must get sick of it.”
“I usually have Les Suffield around to remind me I need their votes.”
She searched his face with an odd intensity. “How important is it to you?”
“Let me quote Grover Cleveland: ‘What’s the use of being elected unless you stand for something?’ I’d turn it around: ‘What’s the use of standing for something unless you can get elected?’”
“You meant it the first way around. You’re a poor liar.”
A piece of a smile shaped his mouth. “You’re a hard girl to lie to.”
“Then why try? If you meant that cynical-sounding remark you wouldn’t have involved yourself in this Phaeton mess. It’s likely to destroy your political career.”
“Evidently you don’t believe my opponents when they claim I’m trying to feather my political nest.”
“Don’t you stand to lose more votes than you could possibly gain? The whole state of Arizona lives on Pentagon money. But then that column in Time did accuse you of turning your back on your own constituents to woo the votes of the big liberal states and I haven’t heard you deny that. Are you really running for the Presidency, Alan?”
“If I can jump from Cleveland to John Kennedy, every woman wants her man to become President but no woman wants her man to become a politician in the process. Or in the words of our good friend Woody Guest, that’s a bridge I’ll double-cross when I get to it.”
“What about speaking for yourself?”
“What’ll you have for dessert, Ronnie?”
“In other words, let’s change the subject.”
She was cross with him. She buried herself in the menu—he watched the way her dark hair swayed with silken weight when she tipped her head down to read, and swung back when she straightened. “You know what really annoys me? You’re trying so desperately hard to be a nasty ruthless son of a bitch. It just doesn’t fit you.”
She was so earnest he had to laugh at her and his laugh was the kind that demanded one in return, but afterward Ronnie said, “I’m serious—you’ve got so much going for you, why throw it over? You’re everybody’s picture of the American political messiah—big, good-looking, sincere, involved with people’s problems.… Am I making you blush? It’s true, you know—you’re genuine, under all that grade-B tough talk you’ve been spouting. Don’t you see you’re only going to hurt yourself if you try to make yourself over into an ordinary conniving politician, using people, greasing squeaky axles, making cheap deals? Why degrade yourself?”
“Aren’t you asking me when I stopped beating my wife?”
“It wasn’t a loaded question and you know it.”
He had to organize it in his mind and when he spoke it was slowly and in a low tone to make her see it was important. “I suppose I’ve been all those things, Ronnie. Big, dumb, honest, painfully sincere. And immature and totally useless. Following the trends and beating the right dead horses and plodding dutifully along in the tracks of the groundbreakers. God knows I’m no hysterical revolutionary, but a little while ago I woke up to the fact that I’ve been elected to a position that calls for responsible leadership and all I’ve done is to be a follower.”
“And when did this great revelation come to you?”
“Don’t be sarcastic, it doesn’t suit you.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I just wondered if your wife’s death had anything to do with the change in your thinking.”
He thought about that. “I supp
ose it did. I’m not sure. It’s true I made up my mind after Angie died—you always go through a stage of introspection and reappraisal when something changes your whole life in a moment that way. But I’m not sure you could trace it to cause and effect. To tell the truth I never knew how insanely trivial death could be until I lost Angie—all the stupefying casual life-must-go-on business, the petty everyday details of funeral arrangements and insurance and that whole mountain of impersonal rubbish, it’s all so stupid and irrelevant but in a way it’s exactly what you need at a time like that because it gives you things to do and worry about. I didn’t just sit down and bawl and think everything out deliberately and decide to change the course of my life then and there. There was never any time for that kind of thing. But you must know all this—you lost your husband.”
“That was a long time ago and you’ve changed the subject again. It’s taken me all day to work up the nerve to talk to you this way and I want to finish before I run out of steam. I’m worried because I think possibly this Phaeton thing popped up at just the right time for you to clutch it to your breast. Something to occupy your attention—you’re compulsive that way, you need an obsession, you’re not the kind of man who can be at loose ends for long. It might just as well have been a woman—it happens to everybody, doesn’t it? Don’t you think it’s possible you dived into this Phaeton fight without even stopping to see if there was water in the pool? And when you found out what a desperate chance you were taking you panicked and decided you had to use every dirty weapon you could lay your hands on because if you can’t have Angie maybe you’ll take the Presidency of the United States as a consolation prize?”
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