by W. T. Tyler
“Well, I’ll be,” Wooster declared, sniffing the glass himself. “I reckon it is. Someone musta switched glasses with me. How do you like that.”
“I’ll bet.” But her expression wasn’t one of disapproval or even disappointment. She seemed to understand.
“Better finish it off before someone notices,” he said. He drained the glass quickly. “Sure went down like cranberry juice, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, it sure did.” She opened her purse and now was sorting among its contents. “Tell you what,” she proposed. “People like us have got to stick together. Especially overweight people like us. You give me your card where I can get in touch with you and I’ll give you mine. Someone like you has got to have the right connections in this town.”
“You can never tell,” he said, searching for his card case. “Like they say around here, ‘The opera’s never over until the fat lady sings.’ What hotel are you staying at, little lady?”
Fifty feet away, Senator Combs droned on in his deep but not always audible voice. Of medium height, with a smooth face and wide blue eyes, he wasn’t an imposing figure and was in fact rather ordinary-looking. There was little hint of intelligence in the wide blue eyes. They were usually expressionless, sometimes vacuous, as lifeless as the stiff neck and shoulders, or the wooden face in which only the small cherub’s mouth moved, as pink and wet as a baby’s. His detractors said he had no style, no wit, and no grace, and they were right. In the South Carolina legislature, where he’d begun his career, he was referred to in private by his critics as “The Sunfish” because of the goggle-eyed stare and the fixed rapacity of his ugly little mouth—a small-pond fry too limited for the oceanic prizes for which he hungered. Even to his sympathizers he was often as dull as a Methodist vestryman standing at the back of the church, lips moving unconsciously not in devotion but in phansaical calculation as he counted the house. Only when he was demeaning his opponents did the eyes become animated, but the gray glint was not amusement but sullen malice, like the churn of a brackish old pond filled with alligator gar. Because he steadfastly refused to compromise with his Senate colleagues on legislation of high principle, he was ineffective as a lawmaker, not so much a politician as a moralist, not so much a man as a set of rigid, inflexible attitudes, as familiar as the pasteboard figures in a child’s card game. Sophisticated analysts of government, perplexed by his popularity, were usually the victims of their own techniques. There was no mystery to Combs’s appeal among the people who voted for him. The confusion existed only in Washington or in those other insular communities of expertise where government and its study was a way of life and even the barbers in the federal office basements were on the government payroll. For the country beyond, Bob Combs was the spokesman of those who knew nothing about politics or politicians but their abiding contempt for both. Bob Combs, the antipolitician, was the exception who proved the rule.
Most of those listening to him that evening had voted for him and would vote for him again. They were average people, decent, law-abiding, and hard-working for the most part, people for whom politics was not a way of life but an unwelcome intrusion. For them, the fundamental reality was the one they faced every day in their jobs, their office or plant communities, in the cars and buses that took them there, in the house or apartment to which they returned, as well as in the locations where they spent their leisure hours and their children spent their classroom days. For them, attempts to make other kinds of reality more a part of their daily lives seldom succeeded. Distant or complex events, like Washington political chicanery, the London gold market, some popular uprising in Nicaragua, astrophysics, or the efficacy of the MX missile, had only an abstract relation to their livelihoods and intruded only randomly upon the burdens that crowded their lives to the limit. Most of them were skeptical of the plea that government was the guarantor of their individual liberties or that politicians were necessary for their preservation. For them, the reverse was true. Government intruded to make their lives more complicated, not less; and politicians, like government bureaucrats, lived a kind of parasitic existence battened upon their own lives, dignity, and income.
One of the earliest jottings in Shyrock Wooster’s political notebook was an entry made following a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, after Bob Combs’s election to the state legislature. Combs had been invited to inspect a port authority project, but at the luncheon afterward had been treated contemptuously by the lawyers and businessmen, who saw him as just another political pumpkin from the state capital, with the red clay from the hill country on his tan shoes and the white sidewalls of a county seat haircut on his rube head. In the dog-eared spiral notebook that was to become a kind of Poor Richard’s Almanac for Combs’s political ambitions, Shy Wooster, sensitive to such slights to his patron, wrote:
Americans are, by & large, contemptuous of politicians. There are few cabdrivers, barbers, small-town hardware clerks, city editors, fancy-pants industrialists, or ambulance-chasing lawyers who can’t edify you about the basic crookedness of American politics and who don’t spend a lot of time sneering, making jokes, and looking down their noses at politicians.
They don’t raise their sons to be politicians. They want them to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, or baseball players. Ask a farmer what a politician is and he’ll tell you it’s what’s left in the corncrib or the silo after everything else has been busheled out.
To this was added these observations made a few months later, after he had observed the South Carolina legislature in action:
Any fool knows that someone who spends all his time talking about something isn’t doing anything about it. In the factory, the garage, the office, and the classroom, the fellow with the biggest mouth is the one quickest to get fired or thrown out when hard times come.
So if you’re going to be a successful politician with the people, don’t talk like one. If you’re going to talk, talk about things there isn’t any doubt about—God, or country or patriotism or all those things people know in their hearts are true.
Also, when you talk to the folks back home, don’t get too fancy or talk like an expert. It’s plain old common sense folks will listen to when they won’t listen to anything else.
When he wrote those words, Shy Wooster had in mind audiences like the one now listening to Bob Combs. Decent, proud, practical people, they didn’t have the time or the leisure to reflect often or deeply upon the larger problems confronting the country, and when they did they didn’t address those problems in the same way as the intellectuals, journalists, historians, or professional politicians who lived on the peripheries of the American office or workshop experience—unlike those who made up Bob Combs’s constituency—and whose sole justification for existence was the words they wrote and the expertise to which they pretended. That déclassé group of rationalists and libertarians so atomized the metal of hard fact by their infinitesimal questions and answers that they succeeded only in dissipating the national will.
As practical men and women, those listening to Senator Combs that evening weren’t indifferent to distant or complex problems, but unless these intruded upon their private lives in some immediate way, their consciousness of them was occasional rather than systematic—a marginal awareness of national uncertainties and foreign events less as imminent dangers than as lurking threats. Like a bothersome tooth that one day might require a trip to the dentist’s office, remote problems had a kind of nagging claim on their daily attention, but until a crisis was immediately at hand, they would hope that the discomfort would heal naturally, whether in Poland or in El Salvador, the nagging pain relieved by whatever natural remedies were inherent in the mysterious international anatomy itself and in those hidden subcutaneous processes that keep presidential aides scurrying, soldiers alert, and the historical engine noisy but intact. But until that time came, they were prepared to live with the uncertainty. In the meantime, they would turn away from the headlines and the editorial pages, where nothing is ever settled, and find relie
f in the Dow Jones averages or the sports pages, where doubt is eliminated, victories are affirmable, tactics relished, and heroes identifiable.
During Bob Combs’s campaign for the U.S. Senate, Shy Wooster wrote in his notebook:
Intellectuals have doubts, leaders have answers, voters have jobs to keep, mortgages to pay, troubles all day long.
Never add to a voter’s problems. When you tell your voters about a problem, tell the answer too, and make it simple enough so they can understand it on the spot.
Spot answers were Bob Combs’s stock-in-trade. By the time he’d taken his seat in the South Carolina legislature, he’d had considerable experience in product merchandising. He’d put together his savings-and-loan and automobile empires in South Carolina through effective radio and television advertising, promoting quick answers to daily problems: “Five Minutes for Five Hundred Dollars! That’s a Bob Combs Signature Loan!” “Credit Risks No Problem at Bob Combs’ Auto Mart!” “Trade In! Trade Up! Bob Combs’ Chevrolet!”
The fine print on car liens, second mortgages, and home improvement loans, as well as his usorious interest rates, might have required something more than five minutes, even for a Federal Trade Commission lawyer, but these details, like the more technical language of some of his subsequent Senate legislation, didn’t dim popular enthusiasm. Similar techniques were used in his first campaign for the South Carolina legislature, during which he demonstrated how timely was his grasp of those complicated social issues that left many South Carolinians of good conscience troubled and uneasy.
He found his opportunity in the social and political turbulence of the early sixties, when his speeches on the hustings were invariably directed against the same targets: those outside agitators attempting to organize the Carolina textile mills, and the civil rights carpetbaggers sowing sedition among South Carolina blacks. His appeal was that of a righteous man in a society under siege, defending its institutions and its birthright, which were also its privileges, against out-of-state subversion aided and abetted by Washington’s meddlesome bureaucrats and jurists and those rootless liberals whose intellectualism had led them to the same treachery as liberals everywhere—the betrayal of their origins. As rationalists, they’d first separated themselves from God; as liberal reformists, tinkerers, and politicians, they had now separated themselves from community and country.
Once elected a U.S. senator, he found the same opportunity. The uncertainty, disillusionment, and fear which he’d preyed upon in his first campaign appearances before crowds of lower-and middle-class white Carolinians in the sixties now had a national constituency. South Carolina’s parochial confusion now seemed the nation’s. Despite the new vocabulary which his better-educated foundation ideologues had invented to give gloss and respectability to its jingoism—“pointy-headed intellectuals,” Combs’s redneck epithet of the sixties, had become, in the mahogany-paneled suites of his foundation board rooms and the slick paper essays of his national conservative journals, “secular humanists”—the message was the same. The nation was now under siege, corrupted from within by those same liberals who had once betrayed South Carolina and who still dominated the media, the Eastern banking and foreign policy establishment, the halls of Congress, and Washington executive councils; and threatened from without by those same agents of international subversion, centered in Moscow but now spread throughout the third world, that had once infiltrated the NAACP, the cotton fields, the textile mills, the bus counters, and the rural tabernacles of South Carolina.
So Bob Combs’s political revivalism was little more than South Carolina chauvinism brought to Washington, the same fears and uncertainties now writ large across the map of the United States, a nation that, like South and North Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama twenty years ago, was defending its institutions and its birthright, which were also its privileges, against the conspiracies of the political levelers from within and without.
Those gathered there in the reception room of the New Congress Coalition were not fully aware of this, nor would they have fully endorsed divine principle as a policy guide in these times of uncertainty—with an obsolete economy, an overvalued dollar, crime and drugs in the streets, and a sinister, armed-to-the-teeth Soviet Union, whether or not it was the Antichrist. They were interested in answers, not doubts or ambiguities, searching for the same practical solutions they sought in their offices or workshops. In the middle-class South Carolina communities from which they came, they clerked in the stores, managed the banks, sold the real estate, paid the taxes, and elected the officeholders. Someone from their ranks returning home slightly intoxicated from a neighborhood bar or a country club dance had little to fear from the town constable, if stopped, or the judge, if tried. They were of the same community, where the freedoms they enjoyed, like their immunities, didn’t count as privileges but as rights. They would have been perplexed, perhaps even offended, if someone from outside that community had told them that simply by their status they were secure from fear, that simply in their indifference they wielded political and economic power. Yet this was exactly what they wielded, and the reassurance they heard in Bob Combs’s political nostrums was the promise of how that privilege could be maintained.
“All I can say is what common sense tells me,” Senator Combs was saying now, talking about the defense budget. “If your worst enemy gets himself a gun, get yourself a bigger one. Get yourself ten of ’em. Don’t go talking about parity or equivalence or any other of these fancy words for surrender. So we’ve got to be bigger and stronger than they are, that’s what this defense budget is all about. That’s the bottom line. Anyone who tells you different is just trying to pull the wool over your eyes.…”
The remarks got no response from the audience, and Shy Wooster waited, disappointed, hoping that Combs would read the signs and conclude with the remarks Wooster had prepared for him for the Moral Minutemen reception a week earlier.
Combs hesitated, then began again. “’Course you hear a lot these days about this nuclear freeze business, people saying we’ve got to have a freeze. They’re saying Moscow wants peace too, as bad as they do. I reckon they do—a piece here, a piece there, a piece yonder.…”
The laughter came first, then the sprinkling of applause, which gathered strength as it swept on toward where Wooster was standing.
“That’s an old joke,” the frazzle-haired young woman said disdainfully.
“It’s not the joke, sugar, it’s the timing,” Wooster told her. “Did you hear the one about the Arkansas farmer looking for a new rooster?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Come on over here,” he said, taking her arm. “I’ll tell it to you.”
And so saying, he led her off to a solitary corner to submit her to the Shy Wooster obscenity test, which separated the cacklers from the layers.
4.
The pale morning sunshine shimmered in a slight haze over the city. Haven Wilson parked his station wagon in a two-hour parking zone, locked it, and dropped a quarter in the parking meter. He was thirty minutes early for his appointment with Rita Kramer and he turned away from her hotel, crossed the street, and headed north. In his coat pocket was the dog-eared business card given to him on the beltway ramp a few days earlier. Clipped to it was the cashier’s check for three hundred dollars.
Potomac Towers was an eight-story office and residential building only a few years old, an L-shaped angle of structural concrete and ugly glazed tile that towered over the neighborhood of detached and semidetached Federal and Victorian residences of Foggy Bottom. A ladder of metal-railed balconies climbed to the garden apartments on the upper floors, where potted plants, deck chairs, and an occasional barbecue smoker were visible through the railings. A small circular drive led to the double glass doors under the overhang. No doorman was in sight, not even a security guard. Cheaply built and cheaply maintained, the building smelled of uncured concrete. He crossed the foyer and walked down the carpeted steps to a small shopping arcade.
The small glass-fronted shops selling imported rugs and Indian brass, women’s scarves and overpriced haberdashery, weren’t open yet. A gray-haired building carpenter with sawdust on his bifocals was rehanging a glass door to a narrow cubicle with the name Embassy Car Rentals painted on the glass. The arcade curved in a dogleg to a poorly ventilated coffee shop that held a handful of customers, hunched at the counter over their coffee cups and morning newspapers.
The building directory between the stainless-steel elevator doors listed Caltronics in a fourth-floor suite. Lush FM music was piped into the upholstered elevator, which whispered its way upward. “Dentist office music,” his younger son used to say contemptuously. Wilson felt as if he were on his way there now. The silent fourth-floor corridor was carpeted in bright orange. As he searched for directions, a thin strawberry blonde in custom jeans and spiked heels passed him carrying an automatic coffeemaker. He trailed after her and found the Caltronics suite just around the corner, the raised vermilion lettering on the door identical to the print on the card the man called Charles Davis had given him on the beltway ramp. The carpeted office within was empty, the door propped open by an aluminum freight dolly. He continued down the corridor, pausing at two other doors marked Caltronics, but both were locked. The next door down the corridor was marked by another name, Signet Security Systems, but it was also locked. He’d just turned away when a voice called to him, “Looking for someone?” A tall, heavyset man in a beige coat and a black astrakhan hat shambled up the corridor, carrying a briefcase.
“Caltronics.”
