by W. T. Tyler
A new administration, he told her—new people, new priorities, and new opportunities. Rathbone had served in the White House once under Nixon and knew how it worked. When he was offered the presidency of Caltronics and an attractive stock option late the previous year, he also intended to resolve two embarrassing cases, one a bribery investigation and the other fraudulent practices involving two large insurance companies, perhaps labor racketeering. Both investigations were incomplete.
When Rathbone learned that Artie Kramer was eager for a government job, he encouraged him. If Rathbone had used direct political pressure to get both investigations closed down, he would have failed. The White House would have reacted and so would the Justice Department. He’d approached the problem more obliquely—a low-risk gamble, using Artie Kramer as his stalking horse.
“Washington is a big place,” Wilson told her, “and on any given day there’s an awful lot going on. When you try to interfere too directly, you send up red flags and people react. That’s not what Rathbone was after. Sending your husband here was very low-key, I suppose you’d say. He was just one name among many.”
“Go for it, little man,” she broke in indignantly, “and if you fall on your face, no skin off my nose.”
“To know what Rathbone was after,” he continued, “you have to know how a name check works, what they call an indices check. When you have a political appointee, the FBI and Justice run an indices check. They tap into these computerized indexes that tell them what they have on an individual, positive or negative. Here it gets a little complicated.”
“Go ahead.”
“When you have a court-authorized wiretap, like the one that the U.S. Attorney in L.A. got on Caltronics, every name you pick up has to be logged. On a big case, that can mean twenty or thirty thousand references. So that’s what happened: they ran an indices check on your husband and they tapped into these two investigations, both incomplete. That was the second step.”
“What was the first?”
“Sending Artie to Washington. So now, two steps and the White House knows about these two investigations. They’re brought to official attention over there. Rathbone hasn’t done a thing—hasn’t lifted the phone, hasn’t called anyone asking for a political favor, hasn’t used any muscle at all—just sent your husband to Washington and let the machinery grind away.”
She was confused. “So they say no dice?”
“No, the investigations aren’t finished. Your husband isn’t a principal but he’s tied to Caltronics, a vice-president. The White House would look a little silly if it ignored the Justice Department indices check, made the political appointment, and two weeks later the U.S. Attorney brings criminal charges against Caltronics. So the White House doesn’t know what to do. It’s a hot potato. Maybe they ask Justice to give them more information. Justice can’t give them more; they don’t have it. So no one does anything. The machinery has broken down. But now Rathbone has his opportunity. The political pressure starts—a few letters from congressmen Artie had helped, letters from a few campaign types out in California, all asking the same question: What happened to Artie Kramer’s political appointment? They don’t ask about Caltronics, just your husband. Here’s a big Republican fund-raiser, our friend, the White House’s friend, his name has been sitting there for months. What’s happening? Do something. Just make a decision one way or another.”
“It’s the squeaky wheel that gets greased,” Rita said. “Artie was just Rathbone’s squeaky wheel.…”
“Pretty much. So that’s it. The White House decides to do something. They don’t want to offend their political supporters, but they also don’t want to get the Justice Department bureaucracy or the U.S. Attorney’s office on their backs.” She’d been drawn to the edge of the leather chair, sitting forward, the fur coat shed behind her, her elbows on her knees. “Are you sure this interests you?”
“It does, absolutely.”
“No one told you?”
“Who, for Christ’s sake? Go on, tell me.”
“So it’s decision time. It’s a small problem, nothing that needs top-level attention. Some small White House gofer will do. He’s told to come up with a solution. And here you have to take something else into account—the Washington multiplier effect.”
“The what?”
“You know what it is—you see it all the time. Multiplier effect … money or status index … the flunky syndrome.”
“Make it simple.”
“The next time you’re in a crowded restaurant, give your waiter ten dollars and tell him you want two aspirin. For as long as it takes to get the two aspirin, he’ll be deaf to everyone else. It works in this town every day. When a senator’s secretary makes travel reservations, a late flight to Dallas that’s already overbooked, she’ll come up with the tickets. When some White House flunky calls up a federal agency and asks for a staff study, maybe some paper someone has casually mentioned in a meeting that might be useful, it’s got to be handed over by the close of business. That’s the multiplier effect, the flunky syndrome. The flunky always wears the big man’s shoes. If he’s a White House flunky, he rules by right of the President of the United States. So when he goes over to the Justice Department to resolve a problem involving two ongoing investigations, people are going to bend over backwards to try to find a solution.”
“I think I’m beginning to get it.”
“That’s the third step. Maybe this Justice Department official he talks to is a political appointee himself. If he isn’t, the White House gofer will find one who is, someone who’s sympathetic. So our senior bureaucrat over at Justice asks the people downstairs to show him the two cases that are causing this minor problem. He gets a staff counsel to look at them. He gets someone else to review them. They think alike, these three, problem-solvers. On any issue in which the interests of the given agency aren’t overriding, then the White House interest will prevail. In this case, the investigations are incomplete, nothing has happened in eight to ten months, and the government still can’t make the cases. So the solution is obvious. Justice is wasting its time. The downstairs civil servants are told to suspend the investigations, put their assets to better use, and get on with something productive. Stop spinning your wheels, get yourself in gear, go for something that will pay off, not those old hangovers from a former administration. So they close the investigations. The White House problem is solved.”
“And that’s all there is to it?”
“Until someone comes walking in the door with new evidence, something they’re not going out to look for. It’s a political decision, but that’s not the way it looks on the books—a bureaucratic decision too. It’s a political wash. The past is scrubbed clean. Caltronics can forget about its old problems. Perfectly legal, no laws broken, just the usual partisan politics, grinding away.…”
“And that’s what Rathbone was after until Strykker screwed it up.”
“Strykker does things the old-fashioned way. Crude, no finesse. He was out of his class, like you said. He was probably confused about what Rathbone intended. He doesn’t know this city.”
“He was dead set against Artie coming.” She sat back at last, crossing her legs. “It’s goddamn depressing.”
Wilson shrugged, amused. “Hoffa said the same thing when the Kennedys were elected.”
“And you’re hooked on it.”
“Washington? I don’t know.” He looked out the bay window. “My friends are here.”
He walked back with her toward the hotel, by way of the Potomac. The gulls were flying and the wind from the river smelled of the sea.
“Poor Artie,” she said, her hands deep in her pockets as she looked out across the tide. “It all seems so simple for him.”
“For a lot of us.”
“Not you.” She glanced at him, cheeks drawn in, her gaze as fragile as porcelain. She seemed about to say something, but then turned away and they started back. “You think you’ll ever break away?” she asked finally.
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br /> “Maybe. I’ve been thinking about opening a rural law practice, like the one my father had.”
“Where?”
“Out in Virginia someplace, small-town Virginia.”
“You couldn’t live out there any more than I could.” She stopped to watch him, smiling. “Stop kidding yourself. It’s just a middle-aged pipe dream, like me living in that Grace Ramsey house. Nice but no dice. We’re not the type, you and me. Some dreamers we are.”
“Maybe.” They walked on.
“What would your wife say about it?”
“She wouldn’t be enthusiastic, not yet. Maybe in time.”
“She’s just being realistic. Artie wouldn’t go for my life style either, not what I really want. What’s her name?”
“Betsy.”
She’d stopped again. “Betsy,” she repeated. “I’ll bet I know what she’s like. You don’t talk about her much, do you?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“‘Still waters run deep,’ that’s what my grandmother used to say. It was so trite it drove me batty. Now I think she’s right. It’s that way with you and Betsy, is it? I kinda figured it was—especially that weekend you didn’t call, that Saturday you said you might. Maybe you’ve forgotten.”
“No, I remember.”
They walked on in silence. “So do I,” she said finally.
They stopped in front of the glass doors to her hotel.
“I guess this is it,” he said. He was no longer conscious of the rough cheeks, the careful make-up, or the dancer in Baltimore she’d once reminded him of.
“I guess so.”
“I enjoyed it,” he said. “Maybe that sounds a little trite too, but it’s true. I’ll miss seeing you.”
“Maybe I’ll remember that when I’m down and out.” She watched a taxi that was just arriving. “I hate goodbyes, I always have. They’re like funerals. I’d rather break out the champagne.”
“Then we won’t say goodbye.”
“Maybe one day we can celebrate, just the two of us. I think they owe us one.” She looked away again. “Anyway, if you ever get to California, think about giving me a call.”
“I’ll do that.” He moved aside awkwardly to let someone pass.
“We could break out a bottle at the beach house,” she said, smiling. “Just the two of us. By the time you got back here, it’d all be ancient history.”
“If I get out that way, I’ll call you.”
“Sure,” she said. “You’re a goddamned liar, honey, but thanks anyway. You don’t go back, never—not even a look. Like me with Artie, you have to be that way, too dependable. What’d it ever get us? You think I don’t know you by now? If I didn’t, things might have been a little different for both of us.…”
“If you ever get too confused about what’s going on in Washington, give me a call.”
“I will. Thanks for everything, sweetie.”
She kissed him quickly on the cheek, and turned away through the glass doors, leaving only that unmistakable fragrance behind.
It followed him back to the Center, and as he lifted his head at the front gate, it was still there. It was, at that moment, as if something had been taken from him, something found as well, and he stood holding the gate open, looking back down the street.
“Sorry …”
A deliveryman from a local parcel service confronted him awkwardly, unable to enter. He moved aside, then remembered his four o’clock appointment and followed the man up the walk.
3.
Birdie Jackson arrived in Washington in mid-January.
By then, a great deal had happened at the Center and elsewhere, although the quality of public life in Washington remained much the same.
A small theater group was holding tryouts for a play called Inessa, by a former political scientist and Soviet scholar named Pauline Rankin, now turned playwright. She was a tweedy type, a chain smoker, and she supervised the tryouts herself, aided by her friend and factotum, William O’Toole, who was possessed of remarkable powers in his own right, including an astonishing memory. The bond between them was difficult to define, but genuine. On several occasions, when searching for a word or an expression not immediately on the tip of her tongue, she would turn to him and he would supply it, as he had supplied, several months earlier, the name of the town and the lake where she had spent her summers as a child, too small to know the names of either, but terrorized for years afterward by that infinite body of water stretching away from the foot of the cliffs. Whether she thought he had psychic powers or had suffered his youth as she had suffered hers and thus could speak from a common memory wasn’t clear. What was clear, however, was that their lives had somehow merged.
Pauline Rankin wasn’t the only associate at the Center to step out on her own. Dr. Foster had also become a public personality of sorts, familiar on the lecture circuit, on panel discussions, and on an occasional late night TV talk show. By then he’d discovered his public voice, which proved to be similar to the one Haven Wilson had encountered on his first trip to the Center—elusive, sly, shifting constantly in and out of false registers, of somewhat ambiguous gender. It was a voice perfect for television talk programs. He wrote several articles on behaviorism and foreign policy, but “ratomorphic” was now so widely used by the nuclear freeze advocates and the unilateral disarmers that its authorship was forgotten. “If it had been a mouthwash, I’d have made a million dollars,” he said, smiling sadly over sherry at a League of Women Voters reception in Bethesda following yet another lecture. A TV host on a late night program discovered by accident Foster’s gift for unmasking the historical pretender in contemporary public figures—Alexander Haig as St. Ignatius de Loyola, Brzezinski as Count Casimir Pulaski, Senator Jesse Helms as Cromwell, and George Will as Tom Sawyer’s bookish cousin, Sidney, the immaculate boy in the front row who could always define the long words in the geography book the dissolute boys in the back row couldn’t even pronounce.
The success led to a contract with a New York publisher for a book to be called Impersonations, which would describe the extent to which public life was dominated by masquerades of one kind or another—movie actors as presidents, senators as generals, generals as statesmen, Wall Street bankers rolling over Arab petrodollars as third world humanitarians, neurotic poets and essayists of exquisite sensitivity as the urchin street conscience of the Latin American barrios, Marxist-Leninist despots as libertarians, and a pluralist nation of private pursuits impersonating a crusading, evangelical world power.
Would anything ever again be what it seemed? Dr. Foster would ask at the end of these televised performances, smiling wistfully. But nothing had ever been what it seemed—not Greece to the Romans, not Rome to eighteenth-century England, not England to the colonies, not the colonies to the Indians, not the Indians to Rousseau, Jean Jacques or Henri. So Dr. Foster was saying nothing new, but TV hosts are impresarios of the moment, not the past. Aware they had a popular commodity on their hands, they sighed in puzzled respect and tried to look profound.
Even Angus McVey was persuaded, against his will, to make a public appearance, in the documentary film Jennifer’s friend was making on Washington policy centers and think tanks. Nick Straus had become director of the Center by then and Angus McVey had reclaimed the old office once held for him. In that room lined by some of his favorite books brought from Boxhill Farm—Tacitus, Locke, Macaulay, Burckhardt, and Jefferson—fixed in the glare of the strobe lights, and confronted by a single cameraman and a single director, his granddaughter looking on, he had rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, in a thin, quavering voice:
“I should think it’s perfectly obvious. During the past thirty years, we’ve seen the Holocaust, a world war, the hydrogen bomb, a man on the moon, the assassination of one President and the resignation in disgrace of another, a futile, monstrous war in Southeast Asia undertaken by the most decent country in the world with the most rational of justifications. We’ve seen millions die of starvation while ou
r own granaries were filled to overflowing, small genocidal racial wars of unparalleled brutality occur throughout the third world while the U.N. Secretariat in New York employs ten thousand civil servants to denigrate the West, all this and then you ask me why I’m pessimistic about the probability of nuclear devastation—”
“Cut! Let’s back up again. There’s a shadow there.”
“Yeah, I see it,” said the cameraman.
“There’s a shadow on your face, Granddad,” Jennifer apologized.
“Let’s take it again,” called the young director. “From where he said it was perfectly obvious. O.K., let’s take it from there. Ready? Let’s go—roll it.”
Angus McVey had no script. He looked at them in astonishment. The moment was gone, swept past, and he with it. Repeat it? What sort of debased specie was this? Words repeated, coarsened and worn until they lost all identifiable moral content? Couldn’t they understand what those words had cost him? Twenty, thirty years of his own life. Were they to be repeated like parts in a television commercial? No, of course they didn’t understand. And recognizing too late the truth of this latest medium, he unfastened the microphone with trembling fingers. Then he rose with silent dignity, straightened his jacket, and vanished through the door, like some lonely centennial comet, his rendezvous with this modern generation of celluloid illusions and contrived spontaneity now kept but concluded, sub specie temporis.
He continued his solitary trek through space, moving painfully on his stiff joints. He would send for his car, but got no farther than the half-closed door of Nick Straus’s office. He hesitated, knocked at the casing, and then peeked in. Nick was sitting in front of the gas fire, a manuscript on his lap. He put it aside and invited Angus in, grateful for the opportunity to resume that dialogue they’d been carrying on these past weeks, sub specie aeternitatis.
