by W. T. Tyler
Seeing the piercing eyes, Ed Donlon had taken the chair with its back to the figure. Wilson had no such luck and found himself the target of that high-frequency radar glare, eye contact unavoidable.
Jesus Christ, he thought in despair, where do these people keep coming from?
“Maggoty thoughts weren’t unknown to me,” the man called as that initial contact was made. Wilson moved his eyes away.
“It’s interesting that you should mention the behaviorists,” Foster continued as he sat down, “since I’ve done some work on that very problem as it applies to foreign and defense policy—”
“You think I’m lying!” the man shouted.
“That’s O’Toole,” Foster whispered. His voice grew louder. “Public life is full of the breed. Behaviorists, I mean. Just about everyplace you look these days—”
Wilson was more conscious of O’Toole’s staccato bursts from the far corner. He sounded like a word-processing machine that had run amok.
“Resurrection is all right, Doc, but how much sleep do you think I’m getting? Two, three hours a night? Less these days! Sure you wanna get the truth out, but there’s a mountain of rubbish that’s gotta be moved first.…”
“As I said, most Washington policy experts are behaviorists,” Foster was saying, “but then so is most of Washington—”
“Washington’s the wrong place!” Wilson heard O’Toole call to him.
Foster’s voice grew even louder. “When you look at it closely, you realize that, conceptually considered, détente is nothing more than a primitive behaviorist system of rewards and penalties, pleasure or pain, a kernel of corn or an electric shock—the same tools the Skinnerites employ with rats and pigeons. But in the case of détente, the Soviet Union is the laboratory rat being disciplined by our white-frocked globalist psychologists, Kissinger, then Brzezinski, now Haig, from their diplomatic laboratories. ‘Linkages,’ they say, but is Soviet ideology truly as primitive as that—a brain mass which is nothing but reflex, driven by the avoidance of pain?”
“You’ve seen the ones with the beards,” O’Toole shouted, “the beards and the turbans. Maybe they’ve taken over the planet already, Doc, faking this ‘No spika the Inglesa’ you get up on Pennsy Avenue near the World Bank. World Bank! Hey, Doc, whose world?”
The surging voice crept closer and Wilson erred in moving his eyes from Foster’s face. He discovered Billy O’Toole’s manic eyes locked to his like a heat-seeking missile sensor, quite close now, just a few steps away. “So they’re faking it,” O’Toole told him, his voice dropped to a more confidential register, “all the while owning the planet already, staking out oil and minerals rights in your head. You know the old saying, don’t you? Keep the land and your skulls, give us what’s in it.” He sat down next to Haven Wilson. “I know you from somewhere. You ever been in Rochester?”
“I don’t think so,” Wilson answered, half-smiling.
“Maybe you forgot.”
“Maybe I did.”
“It’s not easy to forget Rochester,” O’Toole said.
“No, I guess not,” Wilson agreed.
Foster had lapsed into frightened silence. O’Toole glanced at him, looked at Donlon, looked at his coat and tie, and returned to Wilson.
“One night in the middle of November, nineteen hundred and forty-nine, I had an argument with my sweetie in Rochester.” He paused, searching Wilson’s face as if to assess the effect of this revelation. Then he studied Wilson’s tie.
Wilson nodded. “That’s too bad.”
“It was on the floor of the DeMolay Ballroom in Rochester that I had the argument. She was taller than I was and had signed up the last dance on her card with Ben Fitzgerald, the ‘See You in My Dreams’ number. That’s always the best. He was six one. How tall are you?” He was still studying Wilson’s tie, as if the fleur-de-lis were a hieroglyphic on a Masonic apron.
“About that,” Wilson said.
“He was six one. The ‘Dancing in the Dark’ number was mine, but the lights were out for that one, you know what I mean. In the ‘See You in My Dreams’ number, which closes the evening’s formal entertainment, the lights come on real slow like, the saxophone players stand up, and the DeMolay banner drops down from the ceiling, real slow and nice. Only this night, it got hung up on the chandelier, someone told me afterward. It comes crashing down like a line fulla wet wash, but that don’t matter. The way it’s supposed to be is that it comes floating down real easy, everybody steps back from his sweetheart, looking around at everybody else and clapping, but I was five feet seven and my sweetie was five feet nine and she can’t hide it, even with her shoes off, you know what I mean?” Wilson nodded. “I thought she was your basically pure DeMolay type, the girl of my dreams, but after she shows me her card where she’d signed up Ben Fitzgerald for the last dance, she says to me, ‘Nix on the “See You in My Dreams” number, short stuff. I’ll make it up to you later and it won’t be any dream.’ She gives me a wink and I speed off. Are you with me?”
“I think so,” Wilson said.
“What she meant was in the sack.”
“I suppose so.”
“Me, I didn’t know anything about sex at the time. I was an RC. What people did I thought they did out on the dance floor, waltzing to Wayne King. It was two years before I found out. So I’m humiliated, that’s all I’m thinking of. I speed off but I don’t come back, see? I leave her standing right there in the middle of the DeMolay Ballroom in Rochester and keep rolling, down the stairs, across the lobby, up the street. I get back to my room at the Y and throw off the rented tux, the starched shirt, the rented tie, everything right down to the underwear. I look in the mirror behind the closet door and I don’t like what I see. I get out my cashbook to find out what the evening’s cost me, and I don’t like what I see there, either. I’m burned up. I decide it’s time to make a change. On the inside cover of the cashbook, I write, ‘From now on, you’ve got to live with the facts, short stuff, and this book will tell it like it is.’ So that cheers me up. I feel like I’ve got a handle on something now, some real heavy stuff. I’d made a new beginning that night and the way I felt, I could have gone back to the DeMolay Ballroom in my underwear, the trap seat dropped, my ass hanging out, and it wouldn’t have made any difference, you know what I mean? Only it’s a hard book to keep and I’m no Edgar Allan Poe. The next night I go back to the Y and enter up the daily cash flow—no breakfast, a cup of coffee at ten, two bits for carfare, a cheese sandwich and a half pint of milk for lunch, bean soup and a cottage cheese salad for dinner, and the four dollars I’d spent for my ex-sweetie’s gardenia the night before. You see what happened, don’t you? Only twenty-four hours later and I’m already bankrupt, wiped out. There in the cashbook where I’m going to tell it like it is, the St. Thomas Aquinas of the DeMolay Ballroom, I get wiped out by a five-foot-seven runt vegetarian who bills me four dollars for a stale gardenia and a buck-fifty worth of rabbit chow. You see the problem in Rochester?”
“I think I do,” Wilson said. “You’ve got quite a memory.” Dr. Dobler stood just inside the swinging door with a worker in coveralls from the groundkeeping crew. O’Toole ignored them. Cap in hand, the groundkeeper crossed to O’Toole’s chair and took him by the arm. “Come on, Billy. We got gravel to spread.”
“I could have gotten her in the sack that night, like Ben Fitzgerald,” O’Toole said, rising obediently, “but it was two years before I knew what the shit she was talking about.”
“That happens sometimes,” said Wilson sympathetically.
“That’s been my problem all my life, someone else always standing in my shoes, someone like Ben Fitzgerald.” The crew chief led him on. O’Toole turned back. “I never caught up, either. If you’re ever in Rochester, stay away from the Y; they put saltpeter in the rice pudding.” The chief pulled him toward the door. “If you see me down on Pennsy Avenue in a Lincoln limo with two platinum blondes in the back seat, say ‘Howdy,’ right? I’ll still be here.” They dragged h
im through the door.
“Is that what’s going to wake up the White House?” Donlon asked as they left the canteen. “This vasopressin you were talking about? I can see the Pentagon juiced up on that.”
“As I said,” Foster added uncomfortably, “O’Toole’s the odd case.”
Wilson and Donlon spent another forty-five minutes at the Center, examining a list of current projects and talking with a few of the resident scholars. Wilson wasn’t impressed. It was noon as they passed through the front gate. The rain had vanished and the skies were clearing.
“Well, what do you think?” Donlon asked delicately.
“Why’d the law firm stick you with this problem?”
“They thought I might know something about it. Angus McVey’s an old client. He came to us for help and I said I’d see what I could do.”
“So you did,” Wilson said. “They let it get away from them, didn’t they? Just like Nick Straus over at the Pentagon, the same problem.”
“What’s that?”
“The monkeys are running the zoo.”
Near Donlon’s BMW, a young man passed them wearing a George Washington University sweatshirt with a few Greek letters below the logo. Red-faced and out of breath, he was returning from a campus political rally, carrying a crude, hand-lettered sign. A few letters had been partially dissolved by the rain, but they could still make out the words:
TIRED OF REAGAN, RIP-OFFS, AND REACTION?
RENT AN ANARCHIST
CALL HAL 632-8111
Wilson turned to Donlon, as if to say something, but Donlon, embarrassed, warned him off. “Don’t say it,” he advised. “Just think about it some more and we’ll talk next week. Let’s go over to the club. I need a goddamned drink.”
6.
Buster Foreman thought he knew something about Signet Security Systems and was surprised Haven Wilson was asking about the company—a rather odd coincidence. He’d made some discreet inquiries himself about the firm—not the firm but the man who owned it—the previous July after a legislative aide on the Hill had told him a bizarre story. Senator Combs was involved. Buster had always disliked Combs. What he’d heard from the legislative aide had made him suspicious as well.
It was late on a Friday afternoon and the three men sat in the incomplete front offices of a concrete-block building on a side street along a railroad spur in Arlington. Traffic was heavy on the boulevard a block away, where the falling sun glazed the windshields of the homeward-bound automobiles. Like Fuzzy Larson, sitting lazily behind his dusty desk, Buster was dressed for an evening of amateur carpentry—an old sweatshirt, wash-faded jeans that showed a few paint splatters, and ragged jogging shoes. A pair of saw horses sat at the end of the room, a carpenter’s toolbox beneath. A Skilsaw, plugged to an extension cord, leaned on its side under the table on which Buster sat. Neither man looked particularly anxious to go to work.
Buster and Fuzzy had leased the building six months earlier. They’d hired a carpenter to remodel the rear, where the working laboratories were located—a ballistics cabinet, a few kilns, a chemical and toxology lab, even a small pathology unit run by a Pakistani pathologist from a local hospital who moonlighted for them several nights a week and on weekends. They contracted lab work from county and rural police departments, but also took on assignments for a few overburdened government labs, like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms at Treasury, which they’d been helping with some demolition cases. The front offices, which they were remodeling themselves, were far from finished. The shell of wooden studding was only half covered by Driwall, and the concrete floor, as yet untiled, was powdered with a fine gypsum dust that lay over desktops, file cabinets, and chairs.
“So tell me what you know about this Signet Security,” Wilson suggested. “Tell me who’s behind it.”
“I’ll tell you, but one thing you’ve got to understand,” Buster said. “It’s not all bullshit, like you were saying the other night when Bob Combs was on the tube. This thing has been bothering me for a couple of months, since last summer when I talked to this guy on the Hill.”
“All right, but what’s it have to do with Signet Security?”
Buster had gotten a telephone call that summer from an ex-next-door neighbor in Alexandria, a staff aide to a Louisiana congressman. A Baptist, he’d discovered what he believed were controlled substances in the backseat of the family car one Sunday morning. His son had used the car the night before and he was worried, not so much about his son, but about the habits of the boy’s high school friends, one of whom had just returned from Thailand, where his father had been assigned with the Agency for International Development. He knew about the drug problems in Bangkok, particularly among the young AID and embassy dependents. He’d asked Buster to analyze the substances. The lab analysis showed the green berries to be decorations from a florist’s corsage and the pills to be a harmless medication, probably from a girl’s purse. Buster hadn’t charged him for the analysis, and the relieved father had taken him to lunch.
“He’s feeling real good about his son, but it turns out he’s down in the dumps about his job,” Buster said. “The congressman he’s working for is a hack, a Louisiana wild turkey, way back in the bayous someplace, and my friend is looking for another staff slot, up front where the action is, like with Combs. Then he tells me he had a talk with Combs about filling a staff vacancy.”
“When was this?”
“Just after the election last year. Combs’s senior aide is thinking about taking an assistant secretary’s job at State or Defense—”
“Shy Wooster,” Fuzzy interrupted. “Shyrock Wooster, the jerk that got that Greek broad into the sack in Athens, remember? Superdick.” Wilson didn’t turn. “Hey, Haven, are you listening?”
Wilson nodded. “Yeah, I know Shy Wooster.”
“Just like you knew him the other night when I couldn’t remember. How come you didn’t say?”
“Shy Wooster isn’t worth bothering about. Go ahead, Buster.”
“So anyway, he tells me that after he talked to Combs about filling this staff vacancy, a guy comes around to see him, like an FBI interview. This big guy walks into his office one day, flashes this official-looking badge, and starts banging away with the questions. My Baptist friend is a little shook up about the questions this guy is dishing out—a real body-bag third degree. It turns out this guy isn’t FBI at all, but an ex-FBI tough who’s the security adviser for Senator Combs and his right-wing money machines.…”
Wilson waited, watching Buster’s face.
“Signet Security,” Fuzzy announced. “Signet Security belongs to him.”
“His name’s Bernie Klempner,” Buster said.
“What kind of questions were they?” Wilson asked.
“You name it. Gambling habits, organizations he belongs to, sex life, any crazies in the family, does he know any homos—that kind of garbage. So my friend is a little bent out of shape. My friend thinks Bob Combs is the best thing to come down the pike since prohibition, but by the time Klempner works him over, he’s feeling like he’s been punched out with his pants down in the men’s room by some vice squad undercover team—”
“That’s what your friend said?” Wilson asked warily.
“My friend? Oh, no, this guy’s a Baptist—he’s got Listerine breath all day long. He just said he was upset—‘unclean,’ I think he said.”
“Did he get the job with Combs?”
“No, it turns out Shy Wooster doesn’t want the State or Defense slot, backs off at the last minute, and my friend is out in the cold. He gets a nice folksy letter from Senator Bob saying he’ll keep him in mind if something opens up.…”
Wilson listened silently. None of these revelations seemed significant. He was more curious about Signet Security.
“But my friend’s still a little pissed about this Klempner third degree,” Buster continued, popping the lid of a beer can from the six-pack beside him. “So one day he’s having coffee over in the Senate cafet
eria and he bumps into one of Combs’s secretaries, a blue-haired old biddy who’s been with Senator Bob yea years, ever since he had those car agencies down in South Carolina. She’s a Baptist too, takes a summer retreat down in Spartanburg or wherever it is, and has bunions on her knees to prove it. So she gets to talking about how sorry she is my friend won’t be joining Combs’s staff.”
Wilson was conscious of Fuzzy Larson’s omniscient smile from behind the desk.
“My friend asks her about Klempner,” Buster said, “and she gets real confidential all of a sudden, like she’s afraid the goddamned table is wired up. So she tells him how come Combs has to be real careful and why these foundations of his, Moral Minutemen, the New Congress Coalition, and these other peckerwood outfits have to have a security expert like Klempner to run their background checks. She tells him how many crackpots and crazies write to Combs, hate mail, a lot of it, some so bad they have to be turned over to the FBI or the executive protection service. Klempner has real tight contacts with the FBI, she says, and he handles the liaison work. But that’s not all. She says some of this mail is from wackos on the far right, the oddballs who really get juiced on this right-wing snake oil Combs is hustling and want to set up political action committees, get jobs with his foundations or even come to Washington and work free for Senator Bob and his crusade. She tells my friend Combs could really get burned that way—the crazies from the lunatic fringe, the idiot John Birchers, the old Klansmen who want to turn in their bedsheets for one of Senator Bob’s red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam suits. Crypto-Nazis, fascists, America Firsters, anti-Semites, you name it—”
