The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  “I thought you had enough football yesterday.”

  “I did. Don’t remind me.”

  “You really sit around too much. The Players is the last place I’d expect you to be. It makes you too negative. What did Larabee want to talk about?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You mean you didn’t ask.”

  “I mean it didn’t interest me.”

  “Real estate law isn’t the answer to your restlessness. I should think you’d know that by now. In the meantime, you should take up jogging, like Dr. Mercer. Maybe that would get some of the hostility out. It’s therapeutic.”

  “So is beating your kids and yelling at the Russians, like that Air Force family down the street. What are you watching?”

  “Nothing right now; I’m waiting. Who was at The Players?”

  “A few people from the old days. I don’t think you know them.”

  “Ed Donlon called. What did he want?”

  “He wants me to talk to someone tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Good old dependable Ed,” she said. “I didn’t ask him about Jane. How old is she this time?”

  Wilson stood looking at the television set. Ed Donlon was an old friend, of whom Betsy disapproved. Separated from his wife, Donlon was living temporarily with a younger woman. “If you’re not watching it, why is it on?”

  “I told you—I’m waiting. There’s an interview coming. Nancy Reagan is going to be on.”

  “Who the hell cares.” He moved resolutely toward the set.

  “I do,” she said sharply.

  “You don’t give up on that crowd, do you?”

  “You might at least hear what she has to say.”

  “I know what she’s going to say.” He moved across the rag rug to the bookshelves next to the fireplace. In a glass case on a middle shelf were a few artifacts he’d brought back from overseas—Roman coins from Izmir, terra-cottas from Tel Aviv, fragments of a Hittite frieze from Anatolia—together with a few Civil War mementos he and his sons had picked up during their forays about the Virginia battlefields when the two boys were growing up: dumdums, a few brass buttons, fragments of an old canteen, the tip of a broken bayonet. Next to them were the burnished brevets his great-grandfather Carver Wilson had worn at Cold Harbor. Beside the glass case was a Civil War atlas, with a half dozen county road maps folded inside. For four years he’d been searching for rural property in Virginia, with the idea of buying an old farm and opening a rural law practice, like his father’s old firm in southwest Virginia. During the past eight months he’d talked with elderly lawyers in Winchester, Warrenton, and Culpeper. Betsy, the daughter of a retired professor at Sweetbriar, had grown up in small, incestuous college towns and thought she despised rural life. She was under the impression that he was revisiting the old battlefields he’d walked over with his two sons so many years ago.

  He picked up the Civil War atlas and a copy of the new Kissinger memoir, looked again at the television set, and turned back across the room. “I guess I’ll go on upstairs.”

  “What a poor loser,” she said accusingly. “It’s only Nancy Reagan. Don’t you ever stop thinking about it?”

  “That’s why I don’t want to watch. I don’t want to think about it.”

  “This work you’re doing with real estate is just an escape. You know that as well as I do. Dog in the manger. If you’re not careful, you’ll work yourself into a worse state than Nick Straus.”

  He turned in the doorway. “What about Nick?”

  “Ida called. She was worried about him. She thought he might be here.”

  “What happened?”

  “She said he disappeared just before dinner, just walked out without a word, rain and all.”

  “He was at The Players. I took him home and we talked a little.”

  “She said he’d been seeing a doctor again—secretly, she said. Did he tell you that? She hoped you might talk to him.”

  “Politics isn’t his problem.”

  “What is?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Depressed, he went upstairs and took a shower. Afterward he lay on his bed in the master bedroom, looking at the farm and rural real estate ads from the Sunday Post he kept hidden away in his dresser drawer. Finally, he put the ads aside and browsed through the Kissinger memoirs of the early Nixon presidency, reviewing his commentary on a few of those early crises he was involved with on the Hill. He read a dozen pages, but the solemn Teutonic style gave it the dignity of Thucydides. The back-channel traffic he remembered had read like the Borgias, Kissinger playing Lucrezia.

  The rain drumming lightly against the dormer window drew his mind away and he finally put the book aside on the night table, turned out the light, and crawled under the covers. He lay in the darkness, unable to sleep, the rain bringing back the memory of Chuck Larabee’s ribald face, the obscenity of his ambition, and then Nick Straus’s forlorn figure at The Players, the damp spongy feet pushed out in front of him, the shoes that didn’t belong on Nick’s feet at all. How could you tell a man you’d known for fifteen years that his socks didn’t match or that his feet were a stranger’s, not his feet at all, the trouser cuffs damp and a little ragged, like the mop man’s in an all-night cafeteria in Times Square or over on East Baltimore Street.

  What kind of city was it that would abandon a man of his gifts, his insights, and then let him rot away in the basement of the Pentagon? What kind of city was it that bred people like Charles Larabee?

  Betsy’s weight, lowered to the twin bed next to his, stirred him. “Are you asleep?” she asked.

  He was angry then, but drew in a slow, deep, silent breath to contain it. He smelled cold cream and hand lotion. “Just about.”

  “You don’t sound like it.” She lay back on the bed, pulling up the covers. She’d hurt her back playing tennis in August. An inch of plywood lay under her own thin mattress. “What were you thinking about? Your bad manners with Mr. Larabee?”

  “I didn’t do the talking, he did.”

  “Then what were you thinking about?”

  “Tonight at The Players, what we were talking about.”

  “What was that? Tell me.”

  Released by fatigue, his anger returned, more satisfying this time. “How we’re going to bury the Moral Majority.” She didn’t answer. “After that, we’re going after Reagan.”

  Her sigh was audible. “It was only fifty dollars,” she reminded him softly. “If you’d stop talking about it, maybe I’d consider giving the money back. But you’d have to promise not ever to talk about it again. Would you promise?”

  “No,” he said.

  He’d bet her fifty dollars the previous autumn that the Reagan Republicans wouldn’t win the election. They’d just returned from an evening with her music society friends, listening to a Handel opera, and the hour was late as they’d discussed it driving home; but even after they were upstairs, getting ready for bed, she still hadn’t understood why he was so convinced that Reagan would never be President.

  “It’s simple,” he’d told her finally, logic and patience exhausted. “You remember a song called ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’? You remember it? It was in everyone’s head for a few months during the war. Everyone was singing or humming it, on the radio or jukebox everyplace you went, a stupid song that didn’t make any goddamn sense to anyone, but caught on anyway. They still sang it, whistled it, hummed it. There was Europe in rubble, all bombed out, the South Pacific a bloody mess, my mother’s trying to get me to take piano lessons, and a hundred million Americans are walking around in their zoot suits humming this idiot tune that didn’t have a goddamned thing to say about anything.”

  She didn’t remember the song.

  “How about ‘Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy’? You remember that one, don’t you? The same thing.”

  She’d wondered instead how he could remember all those idiotic songs.

  “Because they’re idiotic, that’s why! Because they don’t make any godda
mn sense at all, just like Reagan—just a stupid little pop tune that’s dancing around in everyone’s head all of a sudden. That’s all he is, just two weeks on the old Hit Parade. He’s not an answer to anything. He comes out of the same consumer plastic factories that dreamed up the Hula-Hoop, the throwaway swizzle stick, and the tuna fish hot dog. Sure it’s a consumer society and maybe it’s getting worse all the time, but you can’t tell me that the people of this country don’t know the difference between TV plastic and national politics, that on election day they’re going to get into that voting booth, drop the curtain, and vote for a celluloid cowboy dashboard ornament like Ronald Reagan for a four-year American President. I just don’t believe it. It won’t happen. There are too many people in this country who won’t let it happen, and I’ll bet you fifty dollars against five that I’m right.…”

  But he’d been wrong. It had happened, the Democrats had lost, and the senior position promised him at the Department of Justice had gone to a Republican attorney from Salt Lake City.

  “It’s not the fifty dollars,” he told her now, still outraged, the rain brisk on the dormer windows. “It’s just everything else. Anyway,” he added, “we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  “Like whom?”

  His mind drifted on. He was conscious of the rain, the dark streets, and the growing drowsiness overtaking him like a reprieve. He waited until the thunder rolled away, the grim dark laughter that was overtaking them all. “After we bury Reagan, we’re going to move in our own man,” he said sleepily. “If this country is going down the tubes, we might as well go in full color, with the biggest mouth in the country in the Oval Office, calling the play-by-play.”

  “Who would that be?” she asked dubiously, sensing an ambush.

  He was silent, imagining her face. “Howard Cosell,” he said. He waited but he didn’t hear her laughter.

  With their sons gone, they’d drifted apart, living different lives. The dark laughter was gone.

  “Good night, brother Billy,” he heard her say.

  3.

  The morning was gray with intermittent drizzle, the breakfast room dark under the trees as Haven Wilson finished his coffee. Betsy had left an hour earlier for her Fairfax County junior high school, leaving behind a note attached to the refrigerator door by a magnetic holder: “If you’re seeing any Washington law firms today about a partnership, try to be civil, and don’t talk politics.” Wet maple and oak leaves lay on the hood of the old station wagon. As he rolled down the drive, he made a mental note to call Nick Straus that evening.

  On Dolley Madison near the approaches to the beltway, traffic was slow. Cars crept along at a snail’s pace through the murk, their lights on. He listened to the news on the radio, brooding out through the windshield at the submarine landscape. Near Heidelberg, two rocket-launched grenades had exploded behind the armor-plated Mercedes carrying the commander of U.S. forces in Europe. Two thousand Norwegian neutralists had demonstrated in front of the U.S. embassy in Oslo. An Armenian terrorist group had firebombed the flat of a Turkish first secretary in Brussels. In his small office on Capitol Hill a year earlier, someone from the Agency, DIA, or the Joint Chiefs might have been bustling about, eager to brief interested staffers on how these disparate incidents were related, a bunko operation from the Bulgarian Bluto squad, but on this chilly wet morning, Wilson knew only what the radio broadcaster told him, which wasn’t very much.

  A few thousand tons of assorted scrap iron were flying around the belt-way as well at that hour. Tractor-trailers and dump trucks lumbered past, drenching his windshield and dangerously reducing visibility; Volkswagens and Toyotas darted in and out, sprinting for the fast lanes from the access roads or jockeying for the next exit. Car pool sedans and vans sped by. So did oversized sedans driven by white-haired old women in bifocals. Weak wrists that couldn’t lift a four-pound sack of cat food from a supermarket checkout counter steered two tons of steel over a rain-slick four-lane highway. He slowed down as a woman with her head wrapped in a communion scarf cut abruptly in front of him and then gave a vague sort of Episcopalian wave of her hand without looking around.

  Circling down the beltway exit at Route 50, he slowed to a stop behind a line of cars waiting to merge below. A blue-and-gray Fairfax County patrol car wheeled past him on the verge, blue light spinning, but no siren audible. An instant later, a car banged him from the rear, a quick ugly jolt that moved the old station wagon a few inches forward on the wet pavement.

  Jesus Christ, he thought haplessly, unable to see through the mud-splashed rear window. The patrol car swept on down the ramp and turned up Route 50, where a pickup truck had sideswiped a small yellow private-school bus, blocking traffic in both northbound lanes. He set the hand brake and climbed out to look at the damage. The jolt had bent the Virginia license plate and jarred mud and iron scalings from the undercarriage along the line of impact. The car that had struck him had fared worse. One headlight was broken and a deep dent had been gouged in the sharklike snout. It was a silver-gray Alfa Romeo Spider that had seen better days, perhaps ten years old. Through the vector of tinted glass, he saw a blurred, watery face. The cars ahead of him were still stalled, unable to move on down the ramp and onto the blocked boulevard. No one left the Alfa. Maybe a woman, he decided charitably as he climbed toward the driver’s window, someone frightened by the rush hour madness, the obscuring rain, and the police car looming up suddenly behind her. He was prepared to be sympathetic, but as he bent to the window, a man’s face was lifted toward him, sunglasses masking the eyes, like two teardrop silver blisters.

  “You might see better if you took off the sunglasses,” Wilson called in annoyance through the closed window.

  The driver rolled down the glass aggressively. “Who are you, a beltway cop? I hardly touched you.”

  “You bounced me a couple of feet. If you don’t think so, maybe the police can bring their chalk lines up here.”

  It was an exaggeration, but so were the life styles of most Alfa owners. Any other driver would have been out in the rain by now, inspecting the damage, but this young man just sat there. He had a thin, hard face and long blondish hair that could have been fashionably cut or just long and dirty. The blade of nose was welted by a small scar high on the bridge. He needed a shave and his breath stank of fatigue, the ashes of a long sleepless night still in his mouth—too many cigarettes and too much whiskey. Spread on the seat next to him was an area road map, half unfolded to the northern Virginia suburbs. Atop it was the leather sunglass case, as if he’d just slipped the glasses on. The interior smelled queerly of rust, as if the Alfa had been closed up a long time out in the weather.

  “It was that cop car,” he said. “They nearly junked me, coming up like that.”

  The accent had a jagged metallic edge, as ugly as a South Philly scrapiron yard. South Philly, or Jersey, Wilson thought, someplace where the lace curtains and the row house steps ended.

  “You might have queered up the alignment, yours more than mine,” he said. The white shirt was gray along the open collar; the shoulders of the blue blazer were powdered with dandruff. “How about your license?”

  “You crazy? It was just a touch.”

  “I need your license,” Wilson said. The blister eyes were as blank as a mantis’s, the mouth a thin white line. Wilson had the sense of someone unwilling to give up his license, a predator caught mistakenly in the gill nets of a suburban traffic jam. “A license, a business card, anything. I may have to get in touch with you.”

  “Hey, pull it over, will you, Ichabod!” A bushy-haired kid leaned from the front window of a coffee-colored van behind the Alfa. “You’re holding up traffic, man!”

  Wilson stepped back. There were plexiglass fishbowls on the sides and star trails in gilt paint along the door. A beltway cowboy. “Keep your shirt on, sonny.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  The cars had begun to crawl forward at the foot of the ramp, merging with the northbound traffic.
A second police car had joined the first. Wilson gave the young man his card through the window and waited while he searched his jacket and trouser pockets for his wallet.

  “I lost it—I lost my fucking wallet,” he said.

  “Hey, mister! C’mon, for Christ’s sake!” the van driver pleaded. “We get the cops up here, we’ll never bust it loose!”

  “We’re trying. Hold your horses.” At the foot of the ramp, the policeman directing traffic had seen the two stalled cars and was beckoning them forward.

  “What’d he say?” The Alfa driver’s movements were less controlled now and Wilson thought he was frightened.

  “He said if we get the police up here, we’re in for a long morning.”

  The man lifted his eyes, saw the police motioning to them from the road below, and then found a business card lying on the dash just under the windshield. He passed it quickly to Wilson. “This is all I got. I swear to Christ, I can’t find my goddamned wallet!”

  The card was gritty, one corner was bent. The card was from a firm called Caltronics, with offices in downtown Washington.

  “There’s no name here,” Wilson said, lifting his eyes, “just the company.” He heard the patrolman’s whistle from the foot of the ramp. Horns had begun to wail from behind the van.

  “Davis,” the man said, head turned away toward the beckoning policeman. “Charles Davis. Hey, come on, man. Let’s get out of here.”

  Wilson couldn’t see the masked eyes, but he saw the mouth, the Adam’s apple, and the thin hand clutching the steering wheel. It was a small thing, of little consequence, one of life’s minor mysteries which break the surface of our lives for an improbable second and then just as abruptly are swept away, like the body of the small child he’d seen while floating the rapids of the Rapidan River during the spring of his junior year at the University of Virginia. The canoe was in the chutes, his paddle was lifted, and the small body had boiled to the surface, drifted for a few yards with the plunging canoe in a lifeless imitation of what as a schoolboy he knew as the dead man’s float—swollen arms, small swollen fingers, grotesquely swollen feet—and then had disappeared again. He had searched for it for two hours in the quieter pool below and then had gone to the local sheriff, to the state police, and the only local newspaper within fifty miles. No one knew anything of a missing child. The sheriff assembled a grappling crew from the police and fire departments and they dragged the river below the rapids the next day, a Sunday, but found nothing. For two weeks Wilson drove over from Charlottesville on weekends to pursue the search, joined by a young journalist from a weekly paper who telephoned communities all along the Rapidan. No missing child could be found. By the third week, the local sheriff and state police were persuaded that the young canoeist, unfamiliar with the river at spring flood, had probably seen the body of a farm animal—a shoat, a lamb, or even a heifer.