by W. T. Tyler
“We’re going to be late for our dinner reservations,” Rita said. “It’s after eight now.”
“Who cares?” He watched Edelman putting on his coat.
“Yeah, who cares? Artie’s a biggie now,” said Chuckie Savant.
“I care. I made the reservations,” Rita said.
“Pardon us for living,” Artie said.
Edelman went out, softly shutting the door behind him.
“He didn’t know shit,” Artie said after he’d gone. “He’s a very unethical guy, Edelman. He takes my money and he doesn’t know shit. This Wilson didn’t know shit, either.”
“You can say that again,” Chuckie said.
“Pete Rathbone tells me, O.K., try to get close to him, find out what he knows, but he doesn’t know diddly, does he, babe?”
“When did Rathbone tell you that?” she asked.
“When we were playing golf that day at Palm Springs, that Sunday I sent the telex. I forgot to tell you. What time is it?”
“Eight-fifteen,” Chuckie said.
“I’d heard about guys like that, guys like this Wilson. Most of ’em you can’t tell from a bookkeeper or a CPA. In Vegas you see ’em walk into a place, sit with the crowd, buy a drink or two, and then walk out again. Next day you read where someone takes a hit in a back alley someplace and the guy that put out the contract was sitting there too.”
“It’s a small world those guys live in,” Chuckie said.
“You’d better believe it,” Kramer said. “There was this guy I knew in Vegas, a Mex; a real sleazebag, lemme tell you. This was fifteen years ago, maybe more. I see him sitting one day at a table there talking to this CPA with glasses on, a real invisible guy, you know what I mean. Next thing I hear, this animal is down in Florida, Biscayne Bay, working for the feds after the Cuban screw-up, the Bay of Pigs.”
“That wasn’t fifteen years ago,” Rita said.
Her husband ignored her. “His old lady lived in L.A., I heard. Maybe six months later they ship this casket to her from Miami, a closed casket with this affidavit about how he died for his country, and these two CPAs in gray suits bring it to her. They say in the undertaker’s letter from Miami how the body was all mangled up from this underwater explosion and how it’d been in the water a long time, even the barracudas chewing on him. But the old woman wants to see this animal son of hers for the last time, fish bait or not, it don’t matter. So after these feds leave, she has them cut off the top of the casket with an acetylene torch and there it is—in this sharkskin suit and a face like a choirboy, not a mark on it, except it isn’t her son. But she don’t say a word, just has them dump it in another coffin, and has it buried.”
“So what happened to him?” Chuckie asked.
“What do you think? This animal got himself a new life—living someplace else under the federal witness program, I figure, cutting his grass every day, drinking beer with the boys down at the bowling alley, only he’s got a couple of million stashed away in some Bermuda bank. You feeling any better, Nat?”
“A little better. Maybe we better go on down. Irene will be waiting.”
Artie got up. The others followed.
“What were you expecting Wilson to tell you?” Rita said as she took her coat from the closet.
“Just what he knew,” Artie said. “Like what Pete Rathbone said.”
“What was he supposed to know?”
“You never can tell.”
“So what were you hiding?”
“Nothing. Get off my back. But you never can tell when these guys start asking around.”
“Artie’s right,” Strykker said.
“Sure I’m right, but the way it turned out, Wilson didn’t know shit.”
“I met him once, this Wilson,” Strykker said. “He never owned a two-hundred-dollar suit in his life.” He opened the door.
“Maybe he didn’t have to,” Rita said. Strykker and Chuckie went ahead into the hall.
“Got you there,” Artie said. “Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? Don’t end a sentence with a proposition.”
“Maybe he didn’t have to, asshole,” she called after Strykker, but Artie had slammed the door shut.
“You listen to me—”
“You touch me and I’ll break your arm,” she said coldly.
“Touch you? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. Just leave me alone. I’m not going down to dinner with those schmoes.”
She turned and went back toward the bedroom.
“O.K., see if I care! It’s our big night and you have to get touchy all of a sudden—”
The door slammed as he went out, but she knew he’d be back.
She went into her bedroom, stood there for a moment, still furious, looking around the room. She saw her face and shoulders in the dressing table mirror, turned away to the window, but then came back to the dressing table and took out a pair of scissors. She unwound her hair, drawn to the back of her head, and stood at the mirror in the bathroom, cutting away at the long auburn strands, cropping them silently in a jagged fringe just below her ears.
4.
“You have some new information,” Fred Merkle asked dryly from behind his desk, “or is this another fishing expedition?” The gray afternoon light from Constitution Avenue flooded through the window behind Fred’s chair, fracturing Haven Wilson’s concentration and dissolving Merkle’s bony face in a haze of silver grays, like the glare from a sun-glazed pond. Conscious of the annoyance, which gave Wilson a sleepy, puzzled look, Merkle turned to rotate the blinds and turn on his desk lamp.
“Both,” Wilson said from the brown leather chair in front of the desk. “A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a name to you. Artie Kramer, a Caltronics officer. I just heard he’s been given a political appointment.”
“So I heard. The announcement was made yesterday.”
“You’re not pleased.”
Merkle shrugged indifferently. “Not my bailiwick. Is that what you wanted to talk about?” His face seemed tired.
“I suppose that means the case against Caltronics is now closed.”
“You could interpret it that way.”
“And if it’s closed, maybe you can answer a question that’s been bothering me. A loose end that won’t go away.”
“What’s the question?”
“It’s about Morris, the Caltronics salesman who managed the Washington office, the guy that disappeared. Was he the bribery suspect?”
Merkle looked away, rolling an old-fashioned barrel pen between his white fingers. “I seem to recall that he was,” he said, frowning as if recalling a fragment of ancient history.
“A possible witness too?” Merkle didn’t answer, but Wilson hadn’t expected him to. “I understand that when he disappeared he had a hundred thousand dollars with him.”
Merkle considered the question thoughtfully and finally nodded, still looking away toward the far window. “He made some substantial withdrawals the week before he left. Whether he had the money with him when he disappeared isn’t clear.”
“Has Caltronics brought charges?”
“They say they intend to. Embezzlement, conversion, I’m not sure. The auditors disagree on how much money’s missing, and that seems to be holding up legal action.”
“Tell me something about Bernie Klempner,” Wilson continued. He watched Merkle turn to him, surprised. “Where does he fit in?”
“I’d rather not get into that, Haven.”
“You got us together once. You arranged that meeting outside.”
“Call it poor judgment,” Merkle acknowledged with a weak smile. “We were getting no place officially. I thought by going out of channels, I could make things happen. They didn’t.”
“I hear Klempner’s got a hunting license. What he bags, you’ll look at, and vice versa. An informal arrangement.”
Merkle got up from the desk, opened the blinds again, looked down into the street, and then joined Wilson in an adjacent leather
chair in front of the desk. “Bernie can sometimes be very useful. He has a special talent for operating in those gray areas—those gray areas where the law leaves off and litigation begins.” He smiled suddenly. “That’s a sure sign of old age. More and more when I dictate these days, I have a queer feeling that I’m quoting someone. Most often I am. Myself, twenty years ago. The euphemist of the criminal division subculture.” He smiled again in self-deprecation.
“You mean Bernie can break the law and you can’t.”
“That’s well put too,” he acknowledged. “Cynicism is the cross we all bear these days.”
“Has Bernie ever taken a dive?”
Merkle looked sharply at Wilson. “Bernie? Oh, Lord, no. Never.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. He’s one of the few people I trust without reservation. That’s not to say he doesn’t always look or act above suspicion, but that’s been his advantage. The wrong kind do trust him—always. Why do you ask?”
“Morris disappears with all this money in his briefcase. Klempner has him staked out from next door and doesn’t know a thing. That’s a little odd, isn’t it?”
“Not odd at all. That can be explained.”
“So how useful was he on this Caltronics case?”
“Nothing has quite worked out on this Caltronics case,” Merkle said, rising restlessly. “But Bernie’s no more to blame than anyone else.” He moved again to the window.
“So Klempner does have a hunting license.”
“Does that look like snow? I haven’t put on my snow tires yet. I think it does look like snow. Awfully early, isn’t it?” He turned back to his desk, still standing as he sorted through the memos on his blotter. “Caltronics just dried up, Haven. It happens all the time. Investigations go nowhere and you move on to more important things. We could never get the Nixon administration to move on organized crime, remember? Every administration brings in its own priorities. These days it’s drugs and they’re borrowing from our budget to get it moving. That’s something people don’t think about. The budget problem.”
Wilson stood up. “I understand.”
“When you’ve got a budget crisis, you put your assets to work where you can get the best results—cost efficiency, you see.” He lifted a memo from his desk and pondered it with mock seriousness. “The fact is we’ve got too small a staff and too many investigations, too big a backlog. Supply-side investigations, you might say. The cost-efficient wash.”
“You mean you had a little political heat from upstairs,” Wilson said. “Do me a favor, Fred.”
“I’ll do what I can, but don’t misunderstand, Haven. We didn’t make that Caltronics case. Nothing we could take to a grand jury.”
“Do me a favor anyway. Call Klempner and tell him about our talk today. Everything. Even my suspicions about his taking a dive. Tell him that worried you a little—”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m serious. Just do it and then maybe we can roll this thing up the right way. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Chuck Larabee’s office was on the third floor of an old building on K Street. The three small rooms behind the pebbled-glass door were dim with the imperfect light leaking in through unwashed windows overlooking the building’s center well. The smell of boiled coffee from a morning percolator still stained the air.
Larabee was out and his elderly secretary thought it doubtful that he would return—it was then after five. But Wilson was curious about his office and accepted her invitation to wait in a leather chair just inside Larabee’s office door. She was nearly seventy. Her hair was as thin and dry as milkweed, tinted a curious color that might have been a powder-puff peach or tangerine; her face was soft and downy, and she wore nursing home shoes. She had that air of sweet fatuity and senile incompetence that he associated with long-retired government secretaries of a long-vanished era, brought out of a tiny apartment at the far edge of Connecticut Avenue for some small salary to complement a smaller pension.
She had been busy as he arrived, standing at the side of her desk as she painstakingly copied names from an aerospace industry catalogue onto three-by-five cards. She had no idea what purpose it served, except that Mr. Larabee wanted it done, and her uncertainty only increased her ineptitude. She gossiped through the door as she worked, something no efficient secretary could have managed, and she managed very poorly. During the fifteen minutes he was there she managed to complete only three cards. She lost her place in the catalogue, forgot the page number, misplaced her glasses, which she removed every time she pursued a new train of thought, couldn’t locate the cards she’d already filled out, and dropped her pen on the floor. When Wilson retrieved it from under the desk, she told him his shoes needed resoling.
She talked to him of the old Agriculture Department, romaine lettuce at the supermarket, pets in apartments, and dark muggers in darker hallways. As he listened, he left the chair to study the plaques, citations, and framed pictures that decorated the walls of Larabee’s small office. Painted plaster of paris or wooden ship medallions hung there, the kind passed out by U.S. naval vessels in foreign ports. There were framed CINCPAC citations, letters of appreciation from South Korean officials, a testimonial from a Thai general, warm messages from congressmen and senators he’d escorted through the souvenir shops of Seoul or Hong Kong, a certificate of attendance at a Vandenberg AFB missile launch, and a diploma from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.
Larabee’s deserted desk was stacked high with Congressional Records and old Early Birds, the Pentagon morning news sheet. Behind the desk was a typing table, and behind that, a small telex.
The other wall was covered with photographs, most of them group photographs, taken at a number of installations abroad or aboard U.S. vessels in foreign waters. Some were signed, many weren’t; the majority had been taken by U.S. Navy or government photographers. There was Larabee with various congressmen on the flight decks of U.S. aircraft carriers, with touring senators, on the steps of American embassies, Larabee on the tarmac of foreign airfields in front of Air Force 707s ferrying junketing groups from the Armed Services or Foreign Relations Committee.
“I just don’t know if he’s coming back or not, Mr. Wilson,” the secretary informed him from the door as she pinned on her hat. “He’s probably gone to the health club across the street, the way he does.” She gave him the name.
“Do you happen to know his telex number?” he asked as he opened the office door.
She didn’t know. He seldom used it and kept the key locked up.
But it was the memory of those photographs that Wilson carried with him as he stood outside, looking for a cab. He’d never understood it, even recognized it, until that afternoon as he stood in Chuck Larabee’s office. Perhaps this was because he’d been so much a part of it himself. It was all there, a chronicle of these past three decades—of this city that sent its emissaries out year after year, session after session, sent out its mercantilists of arms, aid, goodwill, and evangelism, all fanning out across the globe like circuit riders or drummers, these self-proclaimed experts who were once small-town pharmacists, lawyers, oilmen, staff aides, or astronauts, their briefing books filled with facts, their heads swollen with sanctimonious self-importance, small-town virtue, and courthouse democracy, Chautauqua-circuit busybodies and pettifogs carrying their instruction to Malaysians, Arabs, Turks, Chinese, Koreans, Afghans, blacks, and Indians, and on behalf of whom? For an American people whose deepest instincts were not for politics but the escape from politics.
5.
The headline of the Top Secret DIA daily intelligence summary appearing that morning stunned its readership and shocked the higher echelons of the Pentagon, who thought the innermost mysteries of their sanctum sanctorum secure from the laity. Staff aides and secretaries scurried for cover. The switchboards in the executive offices in the A ring lit up as subordinates called in, seeking guidance. Phones jangled through B, C, and D rings as the news spread. C
ries of recrimination vibrated through the closed doors of the highest offices, and for a few hours that morning the building oscillated like some sedate old Italian opera house rung by a cacophonous twelve-tone premiere.
“Well, just how in the goddamned hell did he get there?” cried a deputy secretary to his senior aide after one such meeting. “Whoever’s responsible, get him up here!”
“Do you realize what was on the President’s desk this morning?” a livid White House counselor asked a senior Defense official at nine-twelve. “Do you have any idea what was waiting on his desk? Now that he’s got it in his mind, how do you expect us to get it out? He’s got a press conference tomorrow!”
The White House had received twenty copies; so had the National Security Council, State, CIA, a handful of House and Senate committees, OMB, and Treasury.
“Damage control, that’s the main thing,” counseled a nervous Pentagon press spokesman, perplexed by the tumult about him, but his bafflement was characteristic. He had a smooth voice and a pleasant delivery, but he knew little about arms control issues. Before his appointment he’d been a publicist for a Houston mobile home manufacturer.
On the floor below, Leyton Fischer had taken his copy of the DIA daily intelligence summary from his in box, preparing to cast it aside immediately, as he usually did, when a lurid banner headline, New York Post style, caught his eye. He blinked, paused for a minute, moved his eyes to the window, blinked again, and let his eyes creep back to the bold red type. No, it was still there. The headline read:
32,159TH NUCLEAR WARHEAD OPTION TARGETED!
PENTAGON POINTILLISTS PAINT OUT PEVEK!
HERRING CANNERY IS 32,159TH!
The text of the story identified the Soviet target just assigned the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal by the Strategic Target Planning Staff. Pevek was an isolated Russian community on the Kamchatka peninsula in the Bering Sea. The small herring plant on the Shelekhov Gulf employed thirty-five workers, but because some of the tinned product was supplied to the Soviet Navy, the Strategic Target Planning Staff had assigned the 32,159th nuclear target option to the antiquated Pevek herring works and the nearby Pevek boat repair shed, which employed twelve workers.
