by W. T. Tyler
“They simply feel you’d be more useful in the daily summary shop,” Leyton Fischer said cautiously, still fingering the document he’d been reading as Nick sat down. A diminutive man in a gray suit, Fischer seemed dwarfed by the huge desk and the huge carpeted suite.
“Which daily summary shop?”
“DIA’s,” Fischer said, hiding his contempt for most of DIA’s institutions by not looking at Nick Straus. He was a deputy to Les Fine, whose office was next door. “It’s in terrible shape, apparently, and they think you’re the man who might help improve it.”
“You mean I’d be chief of the DIA daily intelligence summary?”
The DIA daily Top Secret summary circulated every morning among senior policy and intelligence officials scattered throughout Washington. Its format was New York tabloid—vulgar headlines and grainy intel photos. The prose, summarizing the DIA intelligence coups of the hour, was intended to be epigrammatic but was usually execrable; yet the summary was widely read in the Washington intelligence community and at the White House, particularly by those overburdened senior officials who hadn’t the time or the knowledge to wade through those detailed, highly classified reports from which the DIA summary was collated. The tabloid was often misleading, not simply in condensing the abstruse or the complex to a few sensational paragraphs but in the inclusion of great quantities of raw intelligence, often uncorroborated and unanalyzed. Used this way, the DIA daily brief was the tool of the most hawkish elements of DIA, who exploited the morning tabloid to get their bellicose warnings to the senior policy ranks at the Pentagon, the White House, State, the National Security Council, and a few Senate and House committees, without having them watered down by the interagency clearance process.
“No, not as chief,” said Leyton Fischer. “I’m told they couldn’t quite manage that.”
“As what? Soviet or East European reports officer?”
“To be honest with you, I’m not quite sure,” Fischer replied with a trace of annoyance. His principal adversaries that autumn afternoon weren’t Chairman Brezhnev, Fidel Castro, an Atlantic Community in turmoil, or an undervalued yen, but an amateurish White House staff. During a meeting that morning in the White House situation room, the national security adviser had so consistently confused Laos with Cambodia and Honduras with Guatemala that the minutes were totally nonsensical, a comic opera farce, betrayed by the document now in Fischer’s restless fingers.
“Did anyone tell you whose idea it was?” Straus asked quietly.
“I really don’t get into DIA personnel decisions, Nick. It’s not my shop, not my turf at all.”
“But it was you who recommended my name to DIA.”
“That’s right, but it was DIA that made the decision to bring you aboard. I gave you the highest recommendation, that’s all.”
“Whose hit list am I on, Leyton?” Nick asked. “First the SALT delegation, then Geneva, later the Agency, now this. Who’s behind it?”
“That’s ridiculous, Nick. I’m surprised—I really am. They had to reduce the staff by one, and since you’re the most recent on board, it’s your position they’re eliminating.…”
Nick Straus listened, disappointed. Close to sixty, Leyton Fischer had begun on the Hill, moved to State, to the National Security Council, back to State, and then on to Defense. Others his age had long exhausted their political or intellectual capital over shorter periods, like Nick Straus, but not Leyton Fischer, who’d served Democrats and Republicans alike with an unerring sense of self-preservation. Nick had always thought of him as an ideal staff aide, shrewder than the mediocre minds he often served, but now he heard the voice of the sycophant, quick in the advocacy of fashionable causes—détente when it had originated, an honorable exodus from Vietnam but too late, the MX missile system, and now a trillion-dollar defense budget.
If there was a hidden core of originality to the man, Nick thought sadly, watching the slim, fluid fingers, its evidence must lie in the Georgetown house he’d owned for thirty years, in the antiques he and his wealthy wife once collected, in the books he accumulated as a relentless bibliophile prowling the back-street bookshops of Europe, or in the fussy little gourmet dinners he prepared in his Georgetown house before a Kennedy opening for a few select friends or the wealthy intimates of his now dead wife.
He was a mandarin, nothing more.
“It’s really the best they could do,” Leyton Fischer was saying. “I think you should go along and talk to them. I think you should, Nick, really. For Ida’s sake.”
Embarrassed for Leyton Fischer, Nick had looked away toward the yellow drapes and out through the tall windows overlooking the Potomac. At this distance, the monuments and the skyline dominated by the Capitol looked so small, so tidy, that they seemed artificial, like a Japanese garden. Ida? Why Ida? He’d only met her twice. Was Leyton Fischer saying he felt sorry for him? Leyton Fischer wasn’t being honest with him. He knew he must decline. He no longer belonged in this building. Haven Wilson was right; he should leave. But that’s not what he heard himself saying.
“I’ll do that, Leyton,” he heard a voice saying as he got to his feet. “I’ll go along and talk to them.”
“Thanks, Nick, I appreciate it. It would make all of us feel a lot better. I’m sure it will all work out.”
This is incredible, he thought as he reached the corridor. Whose voice had he heard? His voice, of course, like that time he’d agreed to go up in the Ferris wheel with Roy McCormick. They had denied him his livelihood for the fifth time, denied him his substance; yet he’d replied as if he had no existence at all. He had said yes so many times that there was nothing left now but these pale, transparent affirmatives. Even a Xerox machine could order him about. That night he and Haven Wilson had gotten drunk together, the resolve had returned, but what had happened since?
He was only a ghost, he decided, nothing more than a ghost. His existence was only what theirs would allow him and since they would allow him nothing, he was simply a piece of amiable bureaucratic ectoplasm, encased in a drip-dry suit and ripple soles that whispered him along these ugly Kafkaesque corridors, like ten thousand of his kind, as if there were no one there at all.
The suite occupied by the staff of the DIA daily intelligence summary was large and well-lighted, located on an outer ring near the cafeterias and the shopping arcade. A half dozen secretaries were busy at their electric typewriters and word processors, typing away at the drafts prepared by the six DIA geographical reports officers who sat in the seclusion of their glass-and-steel cubicles, only their heads visible. The suite resembled the copy room of a middle-size mail order house, readying its winter catalogue for its subscribers.
The section chief and editor was a cadaverous civil servant in his early sixties with yellow-white hair, very long over his collar, an eczematous face and hands, and bitter breath. A product of some moribund prairie normal school, he’d taken graduate degrees at a Midwestern university, but hanging on the walls of his office were certificates of summer seminars he’d attended at Harvard and Columbia. The former’s imprimatur hung conspicuously on a panel just to the left of his littered desk, attesting to his enrollment at some national security seminar. Nearby hung neatly framed certificates from the National War College and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, institutions of clerical ordination, as well as scores of photographs taken by official photographers at U.S. installations around the globe during his annual “orientation” tours. In a much-enlarged recent photograph, he sat in the cushioned captain’s chair of an American aircraft carrier on station in the Indian Ocean, a camera about his neck, an admiral’s blue baseball cap on his head, a manic gleam in his eye.
The gleam was there during his conversation with Nick Straus. Long in the tooth, he was also long-winded. He knew little about Nick except that he had a diploma from Harvard and wrote well. He’d been shown examples of his drafting by DIA personnel and had been impressed. Mirabile dictu, Straus was a wordsmith, a classicist of the three Cs—con
cision, clarity, and completeness—a talent woefully lacking among those military officers in their cubicles outside, whose drafts were as innocent of style as an orderly room bulletin board. He needed a deputy with a keen eye and a quick pen to help in the editing of their summaries of cables, memoranda, intelligence reports, and intercepts gathered from the four corners of the globe. As an instrument of policy, the daily intelligence summary had no equal. Imperat aut servit! Rule or serve! The daily summary ruled, read by senior policymakers before the Washington Post or the New York Times.
Nick Straus listened uneasily. The section chief’s speech was pedantically florid, ornate with Latin incrustations and Teutonic barbarisms. He saw before him a normal-school Carlyle from the great prairie, a bureaucratic fossil left behind by the glacial moraines of the cold war’s coldest days, but living on here in this underground crypt. He watched the long spatulate fingers prowl the desktop, lifting a paper here, an intercept there, sometimes moving self-consciously to the mouth to hide the crooked teeth. He remembered how the DIA daily summary was viewed at the Agency, where it was circulated with the warning that this was a DIA “in-house” product. It was read by senior officials there, like Pravda, not for its information but for the pathogenic clues it supplied as to DIA’s tactical priorities and the Pentagon’s obsessions of the moment.
From the box on his desk the old civil servant brought forth the DIA tabloid for that morning. The red banner headlines read SOVIETS GIVE CASTRO NEW MIG-25 SQUADRON. The sensationalism was characteristic, the bias obvious. The Soviet MIG-25s had been on the ground in Cuba for almost six months and didn’t comprise a full squadron at all. The aircraft were new only in the sense that DIA had just decided to publicize them. In fact, they were old aircraft, a few intended originally for Somalia, others for Syria. Two submarines and a Koni-class surface ship were also reported to be on station in Cuba, so a lead item announced, but they had been in Cuban waters for many months. Publication of both items coincided with the new arms package for El Salvador now being aggressively peddled by the Pentagon.
The lower half of the front page proclaimed: SOVIETS SUCCESSFULLY TEST-FIRE ss-16 ICBM. This was also misleading. The special-watch group had monitored the testing for DIA. The SS-16 was the Soviet SS-20 medium-range rocket with a third stage attached, and the Strategic Rocket Forces had experienced all kinds of difficulties in the modification. Testing had resumed after five initial failures. The sixth attempt had been moderately successful, although the various intelligence agencies had disagreed on the extent of the success, but this sixth effort was followed by three more failures. The readership at the White House or on the Hill wouldn’t look too closely at these ambiguities.
Looking at that headline, Nick Straus decided, queerly enough, that he might accept the position being offered him after all. He knew, too, why the position was being offered. They were shutting him away, still vowed to silence, like a Trappist in this pontifical ritual-ridden monastery.
4.
The Center seemed curiously active that week, the lights from Haven Wilson’s rear office visible through the early November darkness long after the other buildings were deserted. Buster Foreman was often there, returned from South Carolina with a bizarre tale about Bob Combs, Wooster, and Bernie Klempner.
“Klempner’s the guy,” Buster told him. “He’s got something on Bob Combs; that’s why he’s so tight with his foundations. Combs is paying him off. Maybe he’s got something on Caltronics too. He hears you’ve been asking around about Caltronics, so he drops around to warn you off, afraid you’re muscling in on his scam.”
“What’s the scam?”
“That’s what we’ll have to dig out. If you can’t get by Fred Merkle, I’ll go talk to some of the boys in the back room.”
Wilson invariably returned to the accident on the beltway ramp, the key, somehow, to much of the recent confusion. Foreman attached little importance to it.
“It could have been anything,” he said. “Some guy bangs into you from the back, cops all around, and he gets a little shook. You ask for some identification and he snatches up this card and hands it to you, anything to get the hell out. He’s got problems—maybe a suspended license, maybe no insurance. So a couple of hours later, he gets a little worried because of this trouble he’s got. He figures you might come snooping around and he’s worried you might find out something. So he pays off—three hundred bucks to keep you from getting nosy.”
Wilson’s logic had led him that far, but beyond that his suspicions had quickly evaporated. Now he heard them being revived in Buster’s meandering voice. “Find out what?”
“Could be anything. That he doesn’t have a license. That maybe it’s not his car. If it’s not his car, it’s not his card. A hot car, maybe?”
“I don’t think so,” Wilson said. “If it’s a hot car, all he cares about is not getting nailed on the spot. He’s going to ditch it after he rolls away, or get the hell out of town. He’s not going to hang around long enough to drop off the three hundred. So that means he’s still hanging around.”
“So you think he’s still around town somewhere.”
“Probably.”
Buster held out his hand. “O.K., let’s have the license number. I’ll see what I can find out.”
Dr. Foster had been in the front office some of those evenings, toiling away on his testimony for his appearance before the House subcommittee, scheduled for the coming week. Angus McVey’s granddaughter, Jennifer, had also dropped by, escorting a young man in a long leather coat through the complex. She introduced him as a former college classmate, now a producer of television documentaries, planning a series on Washington policy institutes and think tanks. She’d volunteered the Center’s cooperation, but Wilson wasn’t sure Angus McVey had approved.
Nick Straus’s office was curiously empty.
5.
It was a cold, raw morning and Wilson was wearing a crushed felt hat and a lined raincoat, both taken from the rear closet in the expectation of freezing rain, possibly snow. The commuter rush had eased by the time he reached the industrial zone north of Alexandria. Behind the ribbon of commercial buildings along the boulevard lay a wasteland of razed lots, railroad yards, an occasional warehouse and gasoline storage tank, and weedy or cindered acres behind chain-link fences. It was ten-thirty as he parked his car on the potholed side street in front of a wooden building painted bright yellow. A neon beer sign glowed in the dark window of the bar in front; a padlocked metal grille protected the front door. Next to it stood a clapboard house, isolated on a grassless lot. An old Ford truck rested next to the mesh fence of a diesel fuel depot. A line of drab wash whipped in the wind. A small girl was pulling a rusty wagon along the path to the wooden steps. Seeing Wilson pass along the deserted street, she dropped the handle and called out to him. He watched her pull a bedraggled doll from the wagon and skip toward him, holding the doll out. She hung over the fence. “See,” she said. On the doll’s cracked pink cheeks were the same plum-colored jelly smears that daubed her own face.
“No school today?” he asked.
“Benny’s took sick.” She held toward him the heel of toast spread with jelly, but just as quickly took it back to hold in her teeth, as she continued to hang over the fence. The blue vein in her neck stood out; her face was pinched with the cold. No other houses were in sight. A fuel depot, a utility substation, a line of boxcars. A rusty West Virginia license plate hung from the front bumper of the immobilized Ford truck, a derelict from the West Virginia mountains, like the child.
The cold had settled in his feet and stung his face as he crossed the street toward the Embassy Car Rentals reserve and maintenance lot. He went in through the open gate. The office building was off to the side, an aluminum-paneled portable structure mounted on a concrete-block foundation, reached by a set of recently painted wooden steps. He ignored the building, hoping no one would appear, and inspected the dozen foreign cars lined up on the opposite side of the lot. Most were Fiats and S
ubarus, bright new economy models, recently waxed. The rear of the lot was formed by the high wall of an abandoned brick warehouse and the corrugated steel maintenance garage. Through the high windows he saw the bluish-white glare of an arc welder’s torch. An old Ford and a Chevrolet were parked in front.
Buster Foreman had been unable to trace the Alfa, and Wilson didn’t really expect to discover it here, but then, beyond the weeds to the side, he saw three old foreign cars resting on blocks, their paint faded, their engines gone, their hulks awaiting the claw of a lifting crane. The hood of one was raised and as he moved beyond it he saw the gray Alfa Romeo convertible. It had recently been in an accident. The hood was deeply pleated and the windshield and driver’s window were smashed. Only as he peered in through the broken glass and saw the road maps lying in the bucket seat was he convinced it was the same car. A few business cards were scattered along the dashboard shelf. He reached in gingerly through the smashed glass and retrieved the three he could reach. Two were Caltronics cards, like the one passed to him that morning on the beltway ramp.
He stood up. Below the gray belly of overcast, a 727 was lifting from National Airport in the distance and the fierce horneting sound carried his eyes with it. He should have felt satisfaction but discovered only annoyance, a fatalism as cheerless as the windswept lot beyond. He didn’t know what he’d discovered. He didn’t even know what he was doing there.
The short, balding mechanic at the metalshop bench in the garage wasn’t too cooperative. He was fingering a grimy master cylinder as Wilson asked him about the Alfa. A gangling, dark-haired apprentice was more forthcoming.
“Used to be a rental, but not no more,” he said.
