by W. T. Tyler
Haven Wilson was an occasional member of the back room chin and chowder society. It was a morose group he found assembled there this Monday night, watching a public television documentary on the Moral Majority. Senator Bob Combs was on the tube, his performance videotaped during a recent Senate hearing.
“Someone ought to burn his ass,” he heard Buster Foreman say. “Burn him big, bigger than Nixon.” Foreman was a large man, an ex-CIA rowdy with a large man’s bullying contempt, his voice burdened by twenty years of bureaucratic grievances.
Someone had turned down the sound on his way to the bar in front, wearied of Combs’s courtly South Carolina drawl as he chastised a trio of regulatory bureaucrats. Now they sat looking at the pink pubescent face. Without the sound, the cherubic head ballooned larger than life, the bubble-gum kiss on the Moral Majority valentine PBS was blowing the nation’s capital on a rainy night following another Redskins loss.
“He’s an airhead,” said Cyril Crofton, a thin, dyspeptic CIA analyst.
“Pure celluloid,” Buster Foreman said, “a Baptist shyster—Genesis, grits, and shit. Ask Murphy when you see him, ask him about Senator Combs. He was at the embassy in Athens when Combs came through. Ask him what kind of shyster Combs is.”
“Where is Murphy these days?” asked Nick Straus, his gray head still damp from the rain. Haven Wilson was surprised to see him there. He’d come wandering in a few minutes before Wilson, like a stray cat, arriving on foot from his house a few miles away. Small, fiftyish, with mouse-gray hair and mild brown eyes, he’d worked twenty-five years at the Agency as a Soviet analyst and arms control technician, but had been retired during the housekeeping sweep of the late seventies. He’d hired on with a beltway defense firm, lost his job, been treated for acute depression, but six months earlier had been hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon.
Improbably, thought Wilson, who couldn’t explain it. The Nick Straus who sat next to him now was only the ghost of the man he’d known for fifteen years. He’d attended his retirement luncheon at Langley, when Straus had received the career intelligence medal. Wilson thought he’d deserved better. He remembered the luncheon now, looking at Nick’s shoes. His socks didn’t match, the shoes were shapeless black oxfords with worn ripple soles, and the feet didn’t look like Nick Straus’s feet at all.
“Murphy’s selling commo systems out of a place out in Rockville,” Buster Foreman said. Fuzzy Larson came back from the bar in front. “A letch,” Foreman continued, still watching Senator Combs. “He doesn’t sweat much, either, you notice that? It must be a hundred and five under those lights and he’s not cooking, not even sweating.”
“The guy’s a jerk,” Fuzzy Larson said loudly. He was short and blond, the dome of his head covered with a fine feathery down, like an Easter chick. A former FBI and CIA technician, he’d left Langley a year earlier to open a forensics crime lab with Buster Foreman and a retired FBI lab man. “Look at that mouth, how wet it is. Always working too, you notice that. All juiced up.”
“Tell them the story about Combs in Athens,” Buster suggested, “the story Murphy told us.”
“Oh, yeah,” Larson recalled. “It was one of Combs’s staff aides. I forgot all about it. Do you know who I’m talking about, Combs’s number one aide, what’s his name?” He appealed to Haven Wilson, who knew the name but only shook his head. “Anyway, Combs comes through Athens with this staff aide, who gets some Greek broad in the rack and tries some funny business with her, the way he thinks the Greeks do. So she yelled her head off and someone had to shut her up quick. This aide is drunk, the control room crowd at the hotel in Athens is running around like crazy, doing the funky chicken, and so the station did it, deuces wild. Three o’clock in the morning and they get the goddamned station chief out of bed to buy off a ten-dollar hooker. Combs was sleeping right there in the next room, so you know he’s gotta know what kind of meatball his staff aide is. What do you think of that?”
“They’re all meatballs,” Buster Foreman said, his eyes still lifted to the television screen. “Look at that idiot. I’ll bet he diddled his way through Bible school down in South Carolina or wherever it was. I’ll bet he’s still diddling.”
“So what did Murphy have to do with it?” Cyril Crofton asked.
“He had to come up with the dollars to buy her off,” Fuzzy said. “The next day this jerkwater staff aide says he doesn’t remember anything about any Greek girl, the station chief was out of pocket, and so Murph paid him back out of some operational account. Then a week later in Rome, super-dick gets into the same kind of jam again, and the station had to pull his pants back on there too.”
“Which proves what I said,” Buster Foreman drawled. “Which proves it right there. The guy’s a hypocrite. Look at that goddamned prissy little mouth.”
“It’s the holier-than-thou crud that gets me,” Cyril Crofton said. Cyril knew Congress only at a distance, Haven Wilson remembered, unlike Buster Foreman, who’d spent some time in secret testimony on the Hill after the Angolan debacle. “How the hell do they get away with it?”
“Money,” Buster said. “Big dollars. He talks like that, roasting those bureaucrats, and the bucks come rolling in. Look at his face. He’s blowing every right-winger in town with that spiel, blowing ’em big, right on the tube. What do you think, Haven? Are these guys for real or not?”
“I’d say so,” Wilson replied. It was time to go but he didn’t move, curious as to what Combs might be saying. “But there are plenty of screwballs around these days, not just Bob Combs. A lot of other people think they’ve got a piece of this administration.” He was thinking of Chuck Larabee. Their conversation still made no sense to him.
“Like who?” Cyril Crofton asked, turning.
“The big chili-and-taco crowd from Texas, the funny-money millionaires from the West Coast, the tightwad burial insurance tycoons in between. Who’ve I left out?” he asked Nick Straus, smiling.
“The committee for the coming deluge,” Straus said.
“You think he’s kidding?” Buster Foreman broke in. “See what he’s saying now.”
“The same old crap.” Fuzzy Larson got up to adjust the volume.
“… an’ what you burr-o-crats have to unnerstan’ is that the good folks o’ this country who’re paying for all these reg-u-lations have had enough. Y’all think you can jes’ set there, set here in Wash’n’ton the way you been a-doing since the Great Society giveaway an’ mandate social mor-ees by reg-u-lation an’ fee-at. Well, lemme tell y’all—it’s not a-gonna happen anymore. Those good folks out yonder have had enough. They’ve given us a man-date.…”
“What kind of mandate is that clown talking about?” Buster Foreman broke in irascibly.
“The one the White House keeps telling you about,” said Haven Wilson. “A Republican landslide.”
“A bullshit landslide,” Buster said. “It didn’t happen.”
“Hell, no, it didn’t happen,” Larson joined in. He turned the dial to the Monday night football game and they watched a Dallas Cowboy corner-back strip the ball from an opposing tight end. The Dallas free safety scooped up the ball on a lucky bounce and carried it out of bounds to stop the clock, hands lifted to take a few high fives from his teammates as he joined them on the sidelines.
“The receiver was down, for Christ’s sake!” Fuzzy shouted. “Did you see that! He was down! Where the hell was the whistle!”
“Dallas has already got them by four touchdowns,” Buster Foreman complained. “What the hell are they stopping the clock for?”
“The killer instinct,” Haven Wilson offered. “What the Redskins don’t have. Democrats either.”
“We don’t wanna see Dallas score another touch,” said Buster, “not those crybabies. Always trying to rub it in. Turn it, why don’t you?”
“No one’s blowing the whistle,” Fuzzy said. “That’s the whole goddamned problem.” He turned back to the public television special on the Moral Majority. The screen, disso
lving into shades of Easter egg pastel as a late jet from National Airport passed over, wobbled briefly toward a psychedelic smear, then Senator Bob Combs’s face came throbbing back. “… an’ I can tell you the way we’re gonna go,” he was saying. “I can tell you right now. We’re gonna create an America where private initiative is the dominant social force—you unnerstan’ what I’m a-saying.…”
Larson turned down the volume. Foreman sat slumped in his chair, gazing vindictively at the irradiated pink face. “Look at that face,” Cyril Crofton muttered. “The man’s an airball, a bubble-gum airball.”
“It’s about time this country woke up,” Fuzzy declared.
Haven Wilson laughed. “What do you think’s happened? Where have you been, anyway? They did wake up. Why do you think we’ve got that TV cowboy in the White House?”
“He didn’t win it,” Fuzzy insisted. “That goddamned Carter blew it.”
“That’s right,” Wilson said. “Like the Redskins blew it yesterday, like the Cowboys aren’t winning it tonight—just the other team blowing it.”
“I still think someone ought to bounce that meatball around,” Buster Foreman suggested, eyes narrowed on Senator Bob Combs’s simpering face. “Just the way he’s dumping on those bureaucrats. What do you think, Haven?”
“Sure, dump on him big,” Wilson replied, searching for his most authentic Players’ voice, the same one he had sometimes employed with his two sons, sitting wet and cold in a Maryland duck blind, listening to their complaints about undergraduate inconstancy and the ubiquitous grunginess of the world, most of it centered in suburban shopping malls on a Saturday afternoon. “Another Abscam. Break out the sheets and the dark glasses, get yourself a Halloween beard and a rubber nose. Only that kind of freak show won’t play twice in this town, not with a Sunday school teacher like Bob Combs.”
“The guy’s a phony,” Fuzzy insisted.
“So are a lot of politicians.”
They sat in silence, listening to the rain come down.
“The rage of Caliban at seeing his own face in the glass,” Nick Straus offered mildly. “Someone once said that explained our contempt for politicians. I think he was right.”
“Combs is special,” Buster said.
“How special?” Haven Wilson was looking beyond Buster toward the door to the bar, where someone stood shaking the rain from a mackintosh, face hidden beneath his hat brim. “You’d better keep your voices down,” he suggested.
“Who the hell’s that?” asked Fuzzy.
It was only Herschel Kinkaid, a deputy division chief from Langley on his way home after a long evening at his desk. “What’s happened to this place?” he asked as he approached the table, pulling off his coat. “What is it—Saigon east?”
“The old soldiers’ home,” Buster said.
“What happened to the old sign out front?”
“It was sold last summer,” Fuzzy explained. “The new guy’s going to change the name, but he hasn’t decided yet. Get yourself a chair. We don’t get waitress service back here anymore.”
Kinkaid brought a chair from one of the empty tables. “Still the same old wrecking crew. These guys recruited you, Haven? You, Nick? What’s happening? How come you’re watching Senator Combs?”
“Ask the Klan here,” Wilson said. “They’re cooking up a tar and feather job.”
“Fuzzy wants to do a number on him,” Cyril said. “Fuzzy and Buster both—a big number.”
“How come?”
“Because he’s a meatball,” said Buster. “It’s no joke about the Klan, either. Sometime I’ll tell you what I’ve heard about Bob Combs. Anyway, he’s a goddamned hypocrite. You know how much those outfits of his have grossed this year? Citizens Washington, Moral Minutemen, the New Congress Coalition. You know how much dough they’ve raked in?”
“I know it’s a lot.”
“Seven million,” Buster announced. “Megabucks. They had to file with the Federal Election Commission, and I read it in the Post. The Democrats are flat busted, which is maybe what they deserve, and these turkeys raise seven million just pinching open envelopes, nickel and dime stuff, old widows’ carfare. It keeps rolling in.”
“That’s too big a goddamned slush fund,” said Cyril.
“Hell, yes,” Fuzzy agreed. “All the more reason someone ought to bust him. It wouldn’t be hard, either. Maybe Murph remembers the dates Combs and this staff aide were in Athens. Something like that would leave an audit trail.”
“Something like what?” Kinkaid asked.
“Combs’s staffie got some hooker into the sack in Athens,” Cyril said, “and the station chief had to buy her off.”
Nick Straus smiled suddenly, looking at Haven Wilson, who shook his head in sad recollection. The conversation was beginning to sound like one of Brzezinski’s covert scenarios for diddling the Soviets in Afghanistan or South Yemen—a few hundred pounds of sugar in the Russian advisers’ gas tanks.
“Murph wouldn’t have left an audit trail,” Buster was saying. “He would have buried it good.”
“Sure, but GAO could find it, couldn’t they, Haven?” Fuzzy asked. “Those CPA bird dogs could find a decimal point in a barrel of sawdust. What you do, see, is you get it all down—names, dates, everything. Then you stick it in an envelope and mail it to Jack Anderson. That’s the way to get it started.”
Haven Wilson grimaced painfully, emptying his glass.
“What’s wrong with that?” Cyril asked.
“That’s not the way it works,” Wilson said.
“That’s too chickenshit anyway,” Buster Foreman said. “If you’re going to bust this shithead, do it big, wide open, something that’s got a little class to it, like the way they nailed Agnew.”
“That’s just for openers,” Fuzzy continued. “You start with Jack Anderson, see, but that’s just the beginning. A few people read about it, remember something else, and then leak it the same way. It snowballs, like Watergate. Pretty soon the Post or Sixty Minutes get a handle on it.”
“Sure,” Wilson put in, lapsing again into the vernacular. “Sixty Minutes. Why not bring Cronkite back too? You want to grab a few headlines? Why don’t you just stick a pipe bomb up his fundament and blow him that way. Get yourself thirty years in the Lewisburg slammer and a lifetime membership in the ACLU, like the Berrigan boys.”
“What’s a fundament?” Cyril asked softly.
Nick Straus cleared his throat. “Anus,” he whispered.
“Come on, Haven,” Fuzzy protested. “The guy’s a crook, a corn pone sitting there, a natural setup for a lawyer like you. You could burn him big and you wouldn’t have to break any laws doing it.”
“That’s what you think,” Wilson said. “Combs may talk slow, like all those Carolina country boys, but he’s sneaky fast. The only way you’re going to burn someone like that is right out in the open, him doing it without even knowing it.”
“Like what?”
“Like always, something stupid. Like Nixon.”
“Hey, like Wilbur Mills,” Cyril Crofton said brightly. “Sure. You get him skinny-dipping in the Reflecting Pool with some Fourteenth Street stripper, like Fanny Frost or whatever her name was. How about that?”
The table was silent. Cyril worked in the Agency’s collection evaluation shop, handling satellite imagery, but he had a tabloid imagination. No one could think of anything to say.
“He doesn’t drink,” Foreman remembered finally.
“So what if he did,” Wilson said. “Do you think that would slow up a squeaky-shoes preacher like Combs? I know him. He’d just tell those Carolina turnipseeds back home he was checking out her skivvies to make sure it was home-grown cotton. Bob Combs always has an answer.”
“So how do we do it?”
“Get him laid by one of those freaked-out congressional wives,” Cyril continued. “The wiggy Playboy bunny, remember? What was her name?” Embarrassed, they were again silent.
Haven Wilson stood up. “You people are ruining
my evening. This place sounds like the old Kappa Alpha house at Charlottesville.” He went across the room and into the front bar. Only a few customers were there, watching the football game on the television set in the corner. The nearby dining room held a handful of diners. He called home from the telephone booth near the front door, but there was no answer. Betsy wasn’t yet home from her teachers meeting. When he returned to the table in the back room, they were still talking about Bob Combs.
“You want to know how to get rid of Combs and all that crowd,” he volunteered after a minute. “You don’t need anything fancy, not all this clandestine nonsense. It’s simple. Cyril was talking about Fourteenth Street a little while ago. I could go down to Fourteenth Street right now, Fourteenth and U, we all could, and in ten seconds get the answer, and in ten more have the crowd ready to do it, that’s how bad things are. It’s that simple.”
“Do what?” Fuzzy asked.
“Blow up Capitol Hill.”
Nick Straus smiled, but Fuzzy was hurt. “Come on, Haven, stop cracking wise, for Christ’s sake. I told you, we’re serious. Open up your bag of tricks for a change, give us something to work on. We’re not thinking about any black bag job, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Haven’s right,” Herschel Kinkaid said. “It’d take something bigger than Abscam to nail Combs and his crowd. Isn’t there a game on?” He looked at his watch and got up to cross to the television set.
“We got fed up,” Fuzzy said. “Dallas is stomping all over them.”
Kinkaid turned to the football game, but it was halftime. Howard Cosell was interviewing a black heavyweight fighter about an upcoming fight and doing all the talking. The boxer was just grunting along after him, like a life-termer from Lorton or Sing Sing reporting in to the screw after a day on the rock pile.
“Come on, Herschel,” Buster Foreman complained. “That goddamned dip’s worse than the Cowboys.”
“What’s the score?”
