by W. T. Tyler
Buster’s indignation had carried him away and Wilson broke in patiently: “Is that what she said? Combs’s own secretary? Klansmen?”
Buster reconsidered. “No. ‘Misguided patriots,’ maybe, I don’t remember exactly, maybe some kind of code word, but that’s what she meant—”
“You mean you think that’s what she meant.”
“What she was saying,” Fuzzy volunteered impatiently, “was that all of this publicity Combs has been getting is bringing a lot of weirdos out of the woodwork.”
“I understand that.”
“So Klempner checks them out,” Buster resumed, “checks them out to make sure they’re on the up-and-up, that they’re not going to give Senator Bob a bad name. But that’s not the hooker. The hooker comes at the end, when this old biddy tells my friend how Combs has to be careful, how he has to watch his step to make sure he isn’t sandbagged by someone working for him or one of his foundations—she said embarrassed, maybe, not ‘sandbagged’—the way his poor brother Dorsey almost did him in yea years ago when he went off the deep end.”
Buster had stopped, his silence pregnant with mystery. Wilson waited patiently, watching Buster get up from the table and step through the skeleton of studding into his adjacent office, where he dug through the drawer of a filing cabinet.
“Dorsey Combs,” Fuzzy said, “the senator’s half-brother. You ever heard of him?”
“No. I didn’t know he had a brother.”
Buster returned with a folder and dropped it in front of Fuzzy. “No one else knows much about him, either. That’s when we decided to take a look. Go ahead, Fuzzy, read him the story.”
Fuzzy read from the file folder on his desk, detailing a long chronicle of misdemeanors and arrests, beginning with aggravated assault and disorderly conduct in Selma, Alabama, in the late fifties and moving on to Montgomery, Birmingham, and Atlanta. The charges included assault with a deadly weapon, inciting a riot, pandering, indecent exposure, and transporting a minor across state lines for purposes of prostitution. Charges had been brought in Laurel, Mississippi, Ozark, Alabama, and Nashville, as well as in Washington, D.C., in 1968.
“That’s what Buster was talking about at The Players Monday night,” Fuzzy said, “only no one asked. The guy’s a jailbird, a record as long as your arm.”
“What’s it sound like?” Buster asked. “What’s it read like?”
“The civil rights trail,” Wilson said. “Is that what it was?”
“You’re goddamned right, all the way. Every lunch counter, bus ride, prayer meeting, sit-in, or march by the Freedom Riders, Dorsey Combs was there, lying out in the high weeds with his knuckle duster and ax handle. I’ll bet brother Bob wasn’t far behind, either. But that isn’t all. Bring him up to date, Fuzzy.”
Larson read from the folder. ‘“Inciting a riot, Spartanburg, May ’80. Charges dismissed.’ ‘Detained, Knoxville, August ’81, suspicion of transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes.’ This guy’s really got obnoxious habits, doesn’t he? ‘Charges dismissed.’” He closed the folder. “What do you think, Haven, busy or not?”
“Busier than a monkey with two peckers,” Buster said. “How about it, Haven? Are we just blowing smoke rings or have we got something?”
“Where’d you get that?”
“A friend,” Fuzzy said.
“A friend where?”
“I’ve got a buddy with the Bureau, an old skeet-shooting pal,” Buster explained. “Last September, Fuzzy and I got to talking about all this shit I’d picked up and I had this friend do an indices check for me, a name check. They’ve got those computerized indexes and he rolled the tape—”
“That’s privileged information—”
“For God’s sake, Haven,” Buster said. “He did it with his eyes closed, O.K.? Come on, that’s not the point. You notice anything funny about this Dorsey Combs?”
“You told me, the civil rights trail.”
“Nothing else? Come on, Haven, get your wig on. Think a minute.”
“The charges were dismissed,” Fuzzy said. “From the late fifties until ’72, this Dorsey Combs spent about twenty-eight months in the slammer; nothing since.”
“So?”
“So? His brother’s big-time now,” Buster said, “real big-time. He can pull strings.”
“You think that explains it? Tell me more about Signet, this man Klempner. That’s what I want to hear about.”
Klempner had started Signet Security five years earlier, specializing in industrial security and surveillance systems for a few large pharmaceutical firms protecting their research laboratories against industrial espionage. He’d expanded into similar systems for computer manufacturers. He was technical adviser to a few companies designing surveillance systems hardware, and security consultant to a number of local think tanks and private foundations, like those of Bob Combs. But his ties to the FBI were a little ambiguous. Foreman had heard that two years earlier Klempner had worked a trick with Treasury, Commerce, and Justice that had resulted in three indictments for high-technology export violations. Signet had played the middleman and the U.S. Attorney had gotten three convictions for shippers of U.S. high-tech surveillance equipment to Latin American and Middle East destinations.
“He quit the FBI after a few problems, I heard,” Buster said. “Strong-arm stuff, an illegal entry—something like that; I’m not sure. All I heard was that Klempner was working a case, steps on the wrong toes, and someone files a complaint. They put him on leave without pay and have an investigation. It turns out Klempner was bending the law, but the whiteshirts in the front office were too polite to ask. He tells them to stick it, resigns, and the Bureau gets off the hook. How about a beer?” He opened another can.
“Forget about Klempner; it’s Combs we want to talk about,” Fuzzy said.
“No beer, thanks,” Wilson said. “So maybe Signet is an FBI front?”
“I don’t think so, but it comes pretty close,” Buster continued. “This friend at the Bureau tells me Klempner can get a hunting license anytime he wants it. So I came right out and asked him. ‘You mean Signet Security is an FBI operation, a front?’ ‘Not exactly,’ he tells me. ‘O.K., how close?’ ‘Like white on rice,’ he says. ‘He can get a hunting license anytime. Anything he turns up, he lets the Bureau know, and vice versa.’ I figure that means black-bag operations. Klempner can go in and do a job without a court order, the stuff turns up on an FBI desk the next morning, they attribute it to a good source, and get an investigation started before the upstairs lawyers know what hit them.”
“It’s not that easy,” Wilson said, getting to his feet.
“Let’s get back to Combs,” Fuzzy said impatiently. “Buster’s got an idea.”
The sunlight was beginning to fade from the wooden trusses and the skylight overhead. Wilson moved across the floor to look at an oilskin map of Washington hanging on the wooden studding. A few orange-headed pins were grouped in a small pattern near an Alexandria suburb. “What are these pins for?” he asked.
“Some maniac’s loose,” Fuzzy said. “We’ve got six stiffs back in the cooler. Our Pakistani is doing the autopsies. Some really grim shit.”
Wilson turned. “What kind of maniac?”
“A suburban cat killer,” Buster said. “Let’s get back to Combs.”
“What’s he do, this Dorsey Combs?”
“Minister of the gospel,” Fuzzy said. “He’s with some Pentecostal outfit down in Knoxville, doing rehabilitation work. The Knoxville cops hung a ‘driving under the influence’ charge on him a month ago, but he got himself paroled to the custody of this local Sunday school.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Pentecostal Church of the Open Door.”
Wilson smiled. “This man’s too good to be true—a drunk, a bigot, a racist, a few morals charges, and he takes up the collection plate every Sunday.” He returned to the deskside chair and picked up his coat. “Someone’s pulling your leg. How come the
press hasn’t gotten wind of Dorsey Combs? They’d like to spike Combs’s mail order artillery as much as you would.”
“They don’t have the tapes to roll,” Buster said.
“If the press hasn’t been digging around in Bob Combs’s backyard, I doubt if anything’s there,” Wilson said. “I wish I could be more enthusiastic.”
“I told you he’d say it’s bullshit,” Buster told Fuzzy.
“I didn’t say it was bullshit; I said it sounded a little fishy.”
“What isn’t fishy if it’s not the Combs crowd?” Buster said. “Ask yourself sometimes, the way Fuzzy and I did—where did all these guys come from? What were they doing back in ’65 during the Voting Rights Act, or even before that; who were they tied in with politically? Like Fuzzy said, a lot of them are weirdos who just crawled out of the woodwork. I’d like to know more about them.”
“He’s got an idea,” Fuzzy repeated.
“Don’t tell him,” Buster said. “He’d say it’s a wild-goose chase.”
“What’s your idea?”
Buster was flying down to Atlanta the following week to attend a conference of local law-enforcement officials from the Southeast. He was considering stopping by Knoxville on his return to look up Dorsey Combs, maybe buy him a few drinks.
Wilson, looking at Buster’s doleful face, couldn’t think of anything helpful to say. Traces of white paint outlined the nails of the hand holding the beer can and were embedded in the knuckles. Weekend carpentry, a little painting, a few odd jobs around the house. They were outsiders now, their plugs had been pulled. The vast omniscient government information machine they’d once tapped into daily—a kind of heart pump or pacemaker that lifted the pulse rates and metabolism of half a million Washington civil servants every morning and lowered them with the thermostats every night—throbbed on without them. They were just ordinary citizens again. The global and domestic struggles were decided without them, like the NFL scores, and they sat on the sidelines every evening in their armchairs, waiting for Dan Rather or Roger Mudd to total up the scores.
“It might be interesting,” Wilson conceded sympathetically.
“Yeah, but maybe it’s a wild-goose chase too,” Buster said, rousing himself from the table. “Come on, Fuzzy, let’s start putting up wallboard before you get so goddamned crocked you can’t see the chalk lines.”
7.
Nick Straus had a headache from the two-hour meeting in the sixth-floor conference room at the State Department. The meeting had been convoked at the request of State’s Bureau of Political/Military Affairs to persuade the Pentagon to soften its conditions for opening arms control talks with the Soviet Union. Les Fine, the deputy Pentagon arms control strategist whose phone taps Straus had discovered, had been requested to appear, but he’d sent his assistant instead. Colonel Dillon had been asked to sit in on the Pentagon side as an intelligence adviser, available to answer any questions as to the Pentagon’s interpretation of any recent Soviet testing of their SS-18 and SS-19 multiple-warhead missiles. As Colonel Dillon left his office in the DIA special-watch section, he’d insisted that Nick Straus accompany him.
So Straus had been forced to attend, carrying Colonel Dillon’s briefing book, a stenographic notebook, and an envelope of recent satellite imagery. He was terrified that Les Fine or someone else whom he’d worked with on arms control negotiations in the past would recognize him in this reincarnation and wonder what in the hell he was doing there.
He sat at the rear of the conference room, trying to conceal himself behind the bulky figure of Colonel Dillon, dreading discovery each time the door opened and someone else arrived, not absolutely certain that Les Fine wouldn’t appear unannounced and take over the meeting himself or that some other ancient enemy from another government agency wouldn’t arrive, discover him in the back of the room, and raise the same hue and cry: what was Nick Straus, the planetary humanist, the tireless old advocate of minimal deterrence, SALT I and SALT II, doing there on the Pentagon side of the house?
The meeting began on schedule. Once it commenced, Nick’s fears were that Colonel Dillon would be called upon to explain some technical point and the colonel, slow on his feet under the best of circumstances, would turn to him in confusion for the briefing book answer. The eyes of everyone in the room would then be settled upon Nick’s dim figure seated off in the shadows. Exposure would be inevitable.
But, to his relief, no technical points were raised. Instead, the meeting addressed the central issue: the Department of State’s complaint that the Pentagon was imposing impossible conditions for commencing arms control talks with Moscow. As the price for strategic arms negotiations, the Pentagon was insisting that the Soviet Union dismantle seventy percent of its largest missiles, the SS-18s, and seventy-five percent of its multiple-warhead SS-17s and SS-19s. For the intermediate-range missiles in Europe, the Pentagon strategists were insisting upon the dismantlement of the Soviet SS-20s as the price for not deploying the U.S. Pershing IIs and the cruise missiles, “the zero-zero option.”
Totally unrealistic, the State Department critics pointed out. One State analyst complained that the Pentagon was asking the Soviet Union to return to its European nuclear posture of 1958–59, in exchange for which the U.S. would refrain from introducing a new missile force. It was as if Detroit were asking the Japanese to recall all post-1960 cars, he suggested, in return for which U.S. automakers wouldn’t put into production their own compact models still on the drawing board. As a basis for meaningful negotiations with Moscow, the Pentagon strategy was ludicrous.
One critic made the point Nick Straus would have made had he been a participant—that the Pentagon hard line was pushing the Soviet Union into escalating their strategic nuclear force just at the time they were leveling off—but no one picked it up. None of the Pentagon’s critics made the assumption Nick had made long ago, even if it was implicit in their comments: namely, that the Pentagon strategy was exactly what it appeared—a strategy for failure. The Pentagon wasn’t serious about opening arms control talks with Moscow, which would reject its demands out of hand. Soviet intransigence could then be cited as proof that Moscow was seeking the dominant power position to dictate the terms of the “peace”—Les Fine’s threat of nuclear blackmail again—and the Pentagon strategists would be free to pursue their true intent: achieving nuclear superiority and converting it into effective political power, a chilling reversal of all previous nuclear doctrine.
Yet no one said a word about that. Instead, tedium settled over the meeting as it became clear that Les Fine’s assistant had been given no flexibility. He merely listened to the arguments, made a few polite comments, explained why the Pentagon had no intention of softening its conditions, and insisted, quite rightly, that the Pentagon view would prevail at the NSC and the White House.
Pleading a sick headache, Nick Straus escaped Colonel Dillon’s suggestion that they visit with a few of their colleagues at State. He threaded his way through the standing figures, head averted, and slipped out the door. The diplomatic entrance six floors below was crowded with television reporters, cameramen, and technicians awaiting the descent of a visiting foreign minister from the Secretary’s seventh-floor suite. A group of curious onlookers had also gathered there. Crimson ropes closed off the middle doors and a gallery of klieg lights and microphones was set up near the private elevator.
He moved hurriedly through the spectators, pulling on his coat. The last shuttle to the Pentagon was due in a few minutes, and he had a neurotic fear of missing it, of being left stranded here on the far bank of the Potomac in the Friday rush hour madness. Taxis would be impossible to find; the Metro, whose entrance was five blocks away, would be sultry and packed, the vapor of white lights overhead enough to induce nausea as the underground car hurtled under the river. In the last week or so, he’d come to despise the Metro, which he’d once enjoyed, to despise it as much as the overheated morning buses from McLean, the windowless catacomb between B and C rings in the baseme
nt of the Pentagon, and the miles of dim corridor, all of which had seemed to evoke in him these last terrible days the sickly, long-suppressed claustrophobic illnesses of childhood.
As he moved through the glass doors to the side and into the gray light of the dying afternoon, a pair of sharp familiar eyes under bristling brows met his through the smudged glass of an adjacent door, held them for an angry instant, and then were swept past. Quickly he moved away but immediately collided with a tall figure striding up the pavement.
“Sorry—”
“My fault,” Nick muttered in embarrassment.
“Nick? Nick Straus?”
It was Harry Squires he’d collided with, wearing an old storm coat and a cockeyed tweed hat.
“My God! Nick! I’d never have recognized you, old boy!” Tall, imperious, and every inch a fool, Squires was a foreign service officer Nick had known for many years, and last encountered in the mid-seventies during a visit to Rome. “Where have you been all these years?”
Nick yielded a dim smile. They’d never been friends, despite the familiarity in Squires’s booming voice. From the door Nick had just left, he saw the small, energetic figure of General Gawpin emerge, the brows drawn together furiously.
“Where’d I last see you?” Squires asked. “Rome?”
Fools like Hank Squires were Nick’s fate—in grade school, at Horace Mann High School, at Columbia, and at Harvard. Had he been on the Titanic or the Lusitania, or on the Hindenburg when the dirigible erupted in flame over Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, Hank Squires would have been his lounge companion, prattling on about salmon fishing or the improvement in his backswing as the water closed over their heads or the fiery universe collapsed in upon them. If ever a 747 would be blown up by a PLO bomb in flight, with Nick aboard, or a car bomb demolish the U.S. embassy entrance in Paris just as Nick drew up in a taxi from Charles De Gaulle, Hank Squires or his facsimile would be his cabin or backseat companion. Whatever final catastrophe awaited Nick and denied him his life, his body, his mind, the last millisecond of the final moment would belong not to him but to a man like Hank Squires, to whom Nick would be politely listening as still he talked of spaniels, backswings, or haberdashery, while Nick’s own consciousness curled like a blackened leaf and drifted off into the great void, indelibly imprinted for all eternity by those final words.
