by Ward Just
I knew Jack Kennedy well, he said. Jack was my buddy.
God, it gave me a start. I thought it was 1960.
And everything since had been a nightmare.
Sylvia picked up the paper one morning to find a grumpy statement from Axel complaining about the moral tone of the administration, appalling and disgraceful. He compared the Nixon administration to Rome in its decadence. She almost laughed out loud; scratch Axel and you found Cotton Mather. Axel proposed that the senior staff of the White House resign over the squalid Watergate affair. She had yet to grasp the details of the crime; it seemed fundamentally French in its subtlety and complexity; but each day it grew, now a puddle, now a pool. No one could keep the details straight, but it was obvious that something somewhere was fishy, and that Nixon was responsible; and then the tapes came to light. Willy Borowy could not contain his enthusiasm.
They've got him now, Willy said. They've got his actual language, the language of a race-baiting roughneck. And that will become the issue. He's finished. Washington cannot abide the common speech, the words that people actually use, the petty evasions and nuance and exaggeration and resentment and hatred of the other. They want all Presidents to talk like Lincoln or FDR. They want words you can chisel in marble.
He's let them down, you see.
Just as they knew he always would.
Poor bastard; they'll ride him out of town on a rail.
It's a matter of revenge, Willy said.
So they can think better of themselves.
Sylvia remembered years back, the summer she left Axel, there was a scandal in the Truman White House. She couldn't remember what it was, but it, too, was appalling and disgraceful and suggestive, if not of Rome then of Kansas City. Whole evenings were devoted to worried conversations about the accidental President and his entourage, cronies from Missouri and worse. Hawaiian shirts, poker and bourbon, coarse language. She listened one night until she thought she would lose her mind from boredom and then brought the table to a full stop with an impromptu monologue describing her hydraulic theory of gossip in the capital, the first draft of scandal tasted on the higher slopes of northwest Washington, a leak of the purest spring water, only a few drops but sufficient to inspire a mighty thirst. The source was impeccable, so the water was allowed to flow unimpeded, and as it meandered downhill it gathered force, joined here and there by other streams more agitated and less pristine, streams whose sources were obscure and therefore bewitching, the sort of fountain sought by explorers for centuries. In Washington, provenance was all; and if the provenance was suspicious or disreputable, it was at least within possibility's realm that one was tasting—nectar. Meaning: spillover into the Oval Office itself.
Axel said, Sylvia, shut up.
I like it, Ed Peralta said. It's ingenious—
People folded their napkins and rolled their eyes as she continued, leak to freshet, freshet to torrent, carving an ever-deeper channel and at last slipping its banks, muddy now and eddying, thick with debris, a furious Amazon of rumor and speculation and innuendo—and at about that point it overflowed into the newspapers. A reporter dipped his cup into the flood and shared its miscellaneous contents, by then so corrupted that it was impossible to separate the leak from the trickle and the stream from the freshet and the freshet from the torrent. All the sources were given equal weight, because they were indivisible and fungible as well, so many blue serge suits hanging on a plain pipe rack, declining to be identified by name. And at last, the scandal featured on the evening news and again and again on page one of the newspaper; people would gasp audibly and observe, "If you made that up, no one would believe it."
For the very good reason—Sylvia in full voice now as she flew into her concluding aria—that it was made up, most of it. a yarn woven from the blue serge suits. Washingtonians were the last Americans who actually believed what they read, and the more bizarre the story, the more timely and reliable it seemed; in any case, impossible to ignore. Are you still with me? Sylvia inquired mischievously as the company shifted uncomfortably and someone muttered, Gramercy Park gibberish. So they stood nervously on the beach and watched the boat sink and the sharks begin to gather.
The difference between then and now: much was withheld in the old days when there were only a hundred people in the world and they all knew one another. Inside information was similar to a precious stone; its value depended on its purity and scarcity. It was obvious that where there was smoke there was fire, and the ones at the highest elevations of the city disregarded the smoke and investigated the fire in order to extinguish it. It seemed to Sylvia thirty years later that it was the smoke that mattered, the fire be damned; and in the clumsy efforts to scatter the smoke, the fire raged out of control. As pandemonium became general she listened to people complain that they had never expected things to go so haywire. Watergate seemed such a simple matter and suddenly it wasn't simple. One scandal followed another. Courageous, brilliant reporting and disinterested, creative editing would bring down Nixon at last. The presidency itself was in the balance—yet the commotion was threatening the stability of the government, straining the fragile threads that bound the leaders to the led. This was an unintended consequence, Washington itself on trial. Someone had to put a stop to it; otherwise—
He is destroying himself, they said. Will he destroy us as well?
Nixon himself was a cancer on the community.
In early December Sylvia encountered Ed Peralta on Wisconsin Avenue. His hair was white and thin and he walked in a kind of belligerent crouch. She almost missed him in the crowd of shoppers, but something about the set of his shoulders caused her to look twice, and when he smiled at something he saw in the window of the bookstore, she knew it was Ed. She followed him as he checked his watch and continued his slow stroll. She wondered if he was meeting someone, but she decided from his manner that he was only out for a walk; strange, since it was a chilly weekday, early in the afternoon. She followed him past the jewelry store, reluctant to disturb him. Ed looked so private, hands plunged into the pockets of his Burberry, head down, hatless. She came up to touch him on the shoulder, when suddenly he wheeled to face her, his face red and contorted with rage, his blue eyes blazing, though without force. Alarmed, she took a step backward; and then she winked at him.
"You've been on my back for ten minutes and I don't like it. Get away from me. Go back where you came from. I have nothing to say to you people now or in the future, God damned vultures—"
"Ed, it's Sylvia Behl "
He blinked. "Sylvia?"
"I didn't mean to startle you."
"My God, it's you," he said, and gave a little half-laugh. "I thought you were a reporter. I thought you were one of Slyde's people."
"No, just me."
"I apologize, talking to you like that, but they're all over the place. Bastards won't let me alone."
"Ed, what's going on?"
"Sylvia, where have you been?"
"An island," she said. "I've been living on Nantucket."
Ed Peralta laughed, shaking his head. That explained it. Still, they had newspapers in Nantucket.
She said, "So? Who's Slyde?"
"Bastard newspaper columnist who thinks he's my biographer. I'll tell you about it later."
Over coffee, they caught up. Of course he had seen her name here and there over the years and congratulated her on her success. He admitted that he had no time for poetry himself but Billie had faithfully bought all her books and read them and admired them, really. I'm happy for you, he said. It's good to have recognition late in life. Better late than early, because you can take time to enjoy it. He gazed at her fondly and said she looked like a million dollars. She thought she heard insincerity. She told him about Nantucket and persuading Willy to move to Washington for a while; it had been so long, and she wanted to reacquaint herself, see what had changed and what hadn't changed. She hadn't been in touch with any of the old crowd, and Alec was away on business. She thought she might even buy
a house. It's Willy who looks like a million dollars, she added.
Nothing much has changed here, Ed said.
Or I'm so close to it I haven't noticed.
When she asked him if Axel still provided lunch on Wednesdays, Ed said that he did, always the same menu, always the same crowd, Harold Grendall, André Przyborski, and Lloyd Fisher. Sometimes Red Lambardo showed up. Red was a younger fellow, in the thick of things. Harold was still working for the old outfit and naturally André continued to agitate for the liberation of Poland. Lloyd was into this and that. And Alec joined them occasionally when he was free. It was always helpful to get a younger perspective on the situation, and Alec was very well connected on the Hill and downtown. His practice was thriving now that he was doing Lloyd's heavy lifting, Lloyd so often out of town. Alec's a fine young man, Sylvia. You should be proud.
"I am," she said. "Is Axel?"
"Now, Sylvia," Ed said.
"Are they speaking?"
"Of course they're speaking. Axel has high regard for Alec, who he is, what he does."
"Huh-uh," she said.
"Axel doesn't go overboard, but that's his way."
"No kidding," she said.
"Alec represented me in the late unpleasantness," Ed said, looking at Sylvia closely for a reaction, and when there was none he concluded that she had been telling the truth moments before, when she said she did not know of his trouble. They were crowded together at a small table at Arthur's Café, only the two of them in a corner of the room. "Axel asked him to do it. He did a fine job, too, with a difficult brief. At least I'm not in jail. But I'm not employed, either. Someone had to go, and it was me. They put a bullet in the chamber, spun the chamber, and fired. The bullet missed Harold but it got me on ricochet. A lucky shot, not Alec's fault."
"What was it all about?" she asked.
Ed mumbled something and turned his head this way and that, as if to ease a stiff neck. She knew he was scrutinizing the room, assembling his thoughts, collecting bits and pieces from the various locked drawers of his mind, deciding what was worth showing and what wasn't.
"Axel's bank," he said, and that was all he said for a long moment, allowing the silence to gather. "Longfellow's bank, the one Axel bought and the government used when it was necessary that there be absolute secrecy, private transactions that were in the national interest and for the national security. When you had to get money to someone very quickly and without red tape and fifty pieces of paper." He sighed and lowered his voice, although there was no one within earshot. "Fully audited."
"Of course," Sylvia said when he paused again and she feared he would not go on, because he may have said too much. She had only the dimmest idea of what he was trying to tell her.
"The fool taxpayers didn't lose a single penny. As a matter of fact, the bank made money. Everyone made money, including the taxpayers. Carl Buzet ran a tight ship, and our section was more efficient than Chase Manhattan." He was looking off into the middle distance, a dreamy look on his face. "But that wasn't the way it looked to the Senate Committee. It looked to the Senate Committee as if we had set up a proprietary, stuffed it with government funds, and skimmed the profits for ourselves, all the while hiding behind the statutes that protect the national security. They accused us of profiteering with public money. And we never did, I swear it. Naturally we lost some funds; you always do. It's spillage and part of the cost of doing business with dubious characters. We're not Boy Scouts, and the people we dealt with aren't Boy Scouts. So we'd make a bad investment, put our faith and trust in the wrong man, buy long when we should have sold short. It's obvious that some of the accounts were irregular. They had to be, for Christ's sake, the people we were paying off—"
"Ed," Sylvia said, and put a finger to her lips.
"—were taking mortal risks," his voice now a whisper, "so the accounts were set up in the name of aliases, dummy corporations, and so forth."
She nodded, getting a little closer now to the heart of the matter.
"The bullet nicked me and young Alec stepped in to stop the bleeding. It was a god damned witch hunt, you want to know the truth, and it's not ended yet. We got a little careless, no question. Not with the accounts themselves but with the disbursements. Success went to our heads; we'd been doing it for twenty-five years with no headaches. It's the crumbs that'll trip you up every time, stuff you don't worry about because it's so god damned small. The residue of design, if you get my meaning. After a perfect little gem of an operation in Munich, André, another chap, and I had an evening at Kempinski's and somehow the bank picked up the tab and paid it from an open account, just a simple mistake, almost a clerical error. We decided to have a nice dinner to celebrate our success. And that was what the investigator from the Senate Committee discovered. Piddling little supper after one of the most brilliant coups in the history of our intelligence service, worthy of a night out."
"A scandal," she said.
"Big scandal," Ed said. "Red Lambardo's work. Alec's known him for years. He moonlights here and there, always free lance, always per diem, you know the type; sweeps up more dirt than a vacuum cleaner, doesn't care who he works for. Lambardo somehow got the itemized bill from Kempinski's, the cocktails, the caviar, the sea bass, the Sacher tortes, the Mumm's, the Cognac and the cigars, and of course the car and driver we hired. Spies' Night Out, he called it and leaked the memo to one of the papers, and I go up to the Hill to testify because the director asks me to. 'Explain to them what you were doing but not why you were doing it,' the director said, and I replied, 'Aye, aye,' and did what I was told. And I got hung out to dry." He drummed his fingers on the table and took out a cigarette, holding it lengthwise under his nose. "It was a good thing that Alec knew this Lambardo, because the affair could have been much, much worse than it turned out to be."
"What did Alec do?"
"Probably there was something that Lambardo wanted, and Alec got it for him."
Sylvia said, "Was it money?"
Ed said, "Probably not. It would lead to money but it wouldn't be money. Maybe it would lead to something else, and the something else would lead to money."
Sylvia was silent a moment. Then she said, "Is that what Alec does? Get things for people?"
"He's a lawyer. That's what lawyers do."
Sylvia managed a smile and shook her head. "Elizabeth Bishop says that this is our worst century so far, and I think I agree with her."
"Bishop. Isn't she over at the Democratic National Committee?"
"She's a poet, Ed."
"And she doesn't know squat. You think this century is bad, try the fourteenth."
"Isn't it great how things have improved?"
"Alec and Lambardo were friends back in the Kennedy administration. That was quite a bond for people who were in government for the first time; they never forgot it. The friendships were forever and they took the assassination personally, like a death in the family, and never forgave poor Lyndon. It was like being comrades in the war except that the war ended in triumph and the Kennedy administration didn't and later when they thought about it—I think it gave them an excuse for their own inattention. And it was all so public, you see, on television day and night, their grief so palpable and exposed." Ed lit his cigarette with a brass lighter, then slid the lighter across the table to Sylvia. It bore an unfamiliar insignia and the inscription To E.P. from A.B., the letters almost effaced now from years of use. "Maybe it gave them a regard for publicity that the rest of us don't have."
"Alec was never in the government," Sylvia said.
"When you live in Washington, you're in the government."
"He's a lawyer," Sylvia said.
"A lawyer who charged me a hell of a fee."
"Well," she said, and began to laugh.
"I didn't have to pay it. Others paid it and God knows he earned it, but, Jesus, it was a hell of a fee." He looked away, and then back at her. "Actually it was Axel's idea to get Alec involved, because Alec and Lambardo knew each other and co
uld talk without finishing their sentences, as Axel put it. It's a kind of code they have. You know how these things work."
Sylvia turned the lighter over, the brass soft beneath her fingers. She murmured, "Not really."
"I have a code in my business, too. We all do in this city, and each code's different so you need all the ciphers."
"Axel," she began.
"Was quite insistent," he said. "And no question, it's always better if there's a relationship between adversaries, some sort of shared past. Water seeks its own level. The point's to reach an agreement without breaking too much crockery. You have to know where the fault lines are and when to use smoke and when to use mirrors, and when a simple yes or no suffices, and what those words mean beyond what they say. Meaning: what they lead to. Alec calls it the art of testimony, and you need as many colors on your paintboard as Sandro Botticelli. Believe me, Sylvia, you concentrate and you concentrate hard."
Ed remembered the immense near-empty hearing room, with its high ceilings and wainscot paneling, indirect lighting too dim to read by, Lambardo at one end of the curved dais, speaking quietly into the microphone, staring all the while at Alec even though his questions were not directed at Alec, speaking through a little curl of a smile. He felt an oppressive sense of occasion, something momentous, as if the ghosts from hearings past had begun to gather round, McCarthy and Welch, Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy, vicious little indoor duels conducted under klieg lights. He thought he could hear them whispering in the corners of the room, a sound like the rustle of leaves; and then he understood that it was only the hum of the air conditioner. Lambardo was superbly relaxed, wearing a red tie and red suspenders and speaking in an unidentifiable drawl, part Bronx, part Boston, with Richmond there somewhere. He habitually dropped his g's. Five senators, three from the majority and two from the minority, lounged back in their chairs while Lambardo interrogated. Occasionally they shook their heads or lit a cigarette but said nothing, because the hearing was closed, no press and no spectators, and Lambardo was the designated inquisitor. It was his investigation. He was following the paper trail piece by piece, and when he approached the bank itself and the use the government had made of it, his questions became longer and vaguer and—off the point. Lambardo concentrated on the one open account, and the committee members drifted away. Ohio began to doze, and Michigan and Idaho to read documents from their briefcases. No aides were allowed, because the hearing was operating under the strictest security procedures. He remembered receiving a nudge from Alec, the signal to enter into the yes and no phase of the dialogue, the moment of maximum danger, each answer leading him farther into the swamp. He concentrated fiercely, considering each question for a few moments before replying, often adding "to my knowledge" or "to the best of my recollection." That was the art of testimony, crafting simple answers to complex questions; you had to decide which part of the question you were answering. As the questions became increasingly ambiguous, he felt Alec relax. All the time he sat at the long table, sweat dribbling down his back, leaning forward to speak clearly and to give an impression of forthrightness, although his memory was necessarily limited owing to the passage of time. He thought of himself hanging from a limb, the noose tightening, the stallion beneath him rearing. And abruptly they were back in the pleasant ambiance of Kempinski's, the banquettes and the chandeliers, the Champagne, the Brunnenkresse Salat mit Kalbsbries und Trüffel, the Seebarsch mit Sauerampfer, the Kaffee, and Cognac later.
