The Mandarin Club

by Gerald Felix Warburg

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?” Both the FBI agents leaned forward now, looking for a crack in the wall.

  “He called me looking for confirmation. Some time in early June. You’ve got his phone records, so you can probably tell me exactly what day and time. I told him I couldn’t help him. Probably you got that on tape, too.”

  “Let me disabuse you, sir,” Albertson said. “Federal judges don’t like us to tap reporters’ phones, even phones of guys who like to harm U.S. security by passing around classified stuff.”

  They fenced on, parry and riposte. Booth got better at it as he went. The FBI couple became increasingly terse; both agents seemed convinced Booth was trying to cover up a politically charged matter for his boss. He was determined not to give them anything that might embarrass Smithson. Situational ethics, or no, he owed it to the senator to keep mum.

  Booth cruised to the finish, breathing strong with his second wind, even as he grew more and more disgusted with himself. But then, just at the threshold of a successful exit, he was leveled by one final blow.

  “Dr. Booth, that’s all we have for you today,” Agent Albertson said as he snapped his notebook closed. He looked up, eyes seeking their target. “At least, that is until we receive the final Committee authorization on fluttering.”

  “Fluttering?” Booth did not understand at first.

  “Polygraphs,” he elaborated. “Lie detector tests. Senator Landle has requested them for all interviewees in the second round. I’m going to recommend we start with you. Then maybe we’ll learn a little more about which reporters Senator Smithson has been unburdening himself to.”

  Booth’s affected smile flattened. Struggling to suppress his horror, he got out of there as quickly as he could.

  He walked in a daze back up the Hill toward the Capitol plaza. Throngs of tourists were suffering in the mid-afternoon heat, shuffling slowly up the incline towards the towering white dome. The sky was heavy with dark gray cumulus clouds, thickening for a thunder and lightning strike.

  Booth turned left just before he passed the Senate steps, skirting under the marble stairs to the VIP entrance, then strode down the hallway in search of Jake Smithson.

  Sure enough, he found the senator in his hideaway. Smithson would sit in the small room—just down the hall from the Committee’s ceremonial meeting space in the Capitol—puttering about with old family photos, and fiddling with the velvet, ceiling-to-floor drapes. It was, Booth believed, one of Smithson’s safer sources of relaxation.

  The office seemed ageless, an intensely personal clubhouse suspended somewhere in another time. Smithson had filled the musty room with memories of family, not politics. It was almost devoid of the typical Washington-wallpaper that consisted of old head shots of grand personages. The exception was an autographed NASA photo of Smithson with Richard Nixon, of all people. The balance of the frames contained decades-old candids of his relatives. Smithson would walk about the room, tinkering with mementos as he meditated on the issues of the day. He might even sit at his desk, feet up, and take a power nap—a skill, he claimed, he learned in flight school.

  “Yes?” said the senator with a hint of irritation at Booth’s knock. “Oh, it’s you, Martin. What’s up?”

  Booth did not immediately respond, instead sitting without being asked. He eyed a can of Sprite on the Senator’s desk and suddenly felt parched.

  “You OK?” the senator asked. “You look shook up.”

  Booth still didn’t know how to begin. He didn’t have any plan here, any grand design.

  “I, uh, I guess I’m having trouble living with contradictions.”

  “Contradictions?”

  “Yeah. Not sure what to do when competing values clash.”

  “Whose values?” The phone rang, but Smithson ignored it, continuing the conversation. “You’re speaking in riddles, my friend. Who’ve you been talking with, the White House?”

  “No,” Booth said, looking up to catch the concerned Chairman’s eye this time. “The FBI.”

  “Oh. OK. So, you got ‘contradictions’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They can be a pain in the ass.”

  “But you’re better at them. Always were.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’re better at balancing—dodging—whatever is the polite way to put it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Why were you ‘dodging’ with the FBI?”

  “I mean, maybe it comes with the territory, being a politician in the public eye and all.” Booth was stumbling. “I. . . I just don’t understand how you do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Juggle the ethical conflicts. Professional. Personal. Marital, whatever. I don’t know how you balance it all and walk about day and night as if you’re all there, one coherent whole.”

  Smithson observed with horror the strange transformation affecting his aide.

  “It’s the contradictions, Jake. I just don’t understand how you balance them.”

  Smithson stared at his aide, then slowly began to shake his head in bewilderment. “I really don’t know what to say. I mean, you go see the FBI, and now you want me to defend myself? Were they quizzing you about my private life?”

  “No. But by the way, what are you going to do when the subject comes up in the primaries?”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I have to. I mean, a man’s got to live the life he’s made. God doesn’t expect us to walk around miserable if we’re trying to do His works.”

  “Sorry, senator. They weren’t asking about your private life. See, the thing is, the FBI thinks you’re the one who leaked the satellite photos to the newspapers, to Alexander Bonner.”

  “Me? Well, with all due respect, fuck ’em. Let ’em come after me with their lie detector crap. I just want to see them wire up Tom Landle and his boys, too. I’ll pay the price of admission for that.”

  “You still don’t see it, do you?” Booth said, shaking his head slowly.

  The phone rang again, but Smithson was intent upon him. “You still don’t get it.”

  “About my personal life?” the senator asked.

  “No, Jake.” He’d never called him Jake twice in a day. “I mean about the FBI. The satellite photos. The leak.”

  “Screw the FBI. It’s just some partisan crap the White House has put Landle up to. To have me slimed as a guy who can’t be trusted with sensitive stuff. Well, you know what? They can’t pin this one on ol’ Jake.”

  “It’s not you.”

  “I know it’s not me.”

  “It’s me, Jake. I gave Alexander Bonner the stuff.”

  Senator Smithson took a last swallow of the soda as he sized up his long-time aide, seeing him now in a new light. “You?”

  “Me.”

  “Oh-kaaaaay. So. . .”

  “So?”

  “So, what exactly is the problem? How can they ever prove it was you? I mean, did they catch you doing it on tape?” said Smithson. “Did you say anything stupid to them today?”

  “Sir, I’m afraid I did a very good job of dodging,” said Booth, who stood and began to pace, touching a photo here and there as he gathered himself in an unconscious mimic of his mentor.

  “Afraid?”

  “I looked two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the eye and lied under oath for over an hour. It’s a felony, I believe.”

  “Really?” Smithson followed Booth closely with his eyes. “Can I. . . I mean. . . Martin, do you mind if I ask why?”

  “Oh, man, that’s what I don’t know.” Booth’s shoulders were sagging. “At first, I thought—I convinced myself—I was covering for you. I owe you that, at least. To not get you in hot water for something I did.”

  “I see. I appreciate that.”

  “But in retrospect,” Booth continued, “I see more clearly. I see a lot of things more clearly. It was about me, about my own attraction to power. I perjured myself to save my own neck, to save my own care
er.”

  “Actually, I meant, why did you leak the photos?”

  “Because they’re lying to us—the Chinese, the State Department, the White House. They’re all goddamn liars. If we tolerate it, it subverts our whole system of government.”

  “So you got back at them. Shit,” Smithson said, heaving a sigh of disgust. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  “Don’t you see? I got back at them by stooping to their level. By lying right back.”

  “Damn it, Martin, you can’t put it that way. They are the bad guys here. You can’t give in to bullies like that.”

  Booth had a vacant look.

  “They’ll own you,” said Smithson. “You know, I grew up in a pretty tough neighborhood. Navy docks down on the Oakland waterfront. Guys would come after you and shake you down all the time, just for your lunch money. You had to fight ’em—you just had to—even if you took a beating. Try to hurt ’em back. Make ’em bleed, too. That’s the only way they’d know to respect you and know not to mess with you next time.”

  “Right.”

  “This ain’t Debate Club. This isn’t a Stanford tutorial with some honor code you gotta sign.”

  “Senator, I’m sorry. It’s just. . . that’s how I was brought up. Don’t go into the gutter with your enemies. Try to make this a kinder, gentler world.”

  “Robert Kennedy?”

  “Yep. The night Martin Luther King was killed. Speech in Indianapolis.”

  “Great speech.”

  “Made me cry when my dad read it to me—and I was just a kid then, a kid whose heroes were dying.”

  No words passed between them for a time. Booth had always admired Smithson’s tolerance for silence—a politician who actually liked to think.

  “What now?” the senator finally asked.

  “It’s not fair, you know.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “They lie to us, but we feel the heat.”

  “Martin, if Reverend Booth were here, I’m sure he would remind you that God didn’t promise perfect justice on earth. Can’t you see there’s no moral equivalence here? Their wrongs are far more egregious than yours. ‘Fight injustice,’ he’d say. ‘And remember, God helps those who help themselves.’”

  “It’s not that simple, Senator. I can’t compartmentalize things like you. I get sick of the endless compromises of basic principle that politics requires you to—”

  “Will you stop being so hard on me?” said Smithson, almost shouting now. “And on yourself, for that matter.”

  “Senator, it’s just that—”

  They were interrupted again by buzzers, loud as a fire drill. They waited through a series of five rings—a vote on the Senate floor.

  Just as Smithson began to speak again, there was a firm knocking at the hideaway door.

  “Jesus Christ,” Smithson grumbled before barking: “Yes?!”

  “Mr. Chairman, I tried to call you, but—”

  It was Senator Landle bursting in. He stalled mid-sentence when he saw Smithson was not alone.

  “Oh, sorry. Mr. Chairman, I, uh, just wanted—I felt obliged to inform you that I have an Ethics Committee letter. It was signed just now. For subpoenas on the leak inquiry. It authorizes lie detectors.”

  Smithson’s brows narrowed as he took the papers Landle handed him.

  “We’ll put it to a vote in the full Senate, if necessary. But Mr. Chairman, I, uh. . . we’d prefer to have your support.”

  “You work quick,” Smithson snapped.

  “Well, we have to protect the integrity of the institution,” Landle replied. “Even if this is uncomfortable.”

  Smithson looked at the committee letter casually, perusing the signatures. “We’ve been pals a long time, Tom. I really kinda like you, you should know.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Chairman. I feel the same way about you.”

  “It’s not just good politics. You always used to disagree agreeably. I never felt better than when we were on the same side.” Smithson turned his head now, rising in his seat as he jabbed at the papers in his fist. “But this, this is the lowest piece of—”

  “This is different, Mr. Chairman!”

  “It isn’t different! It’s the same bullshit your caucus has been putting out for thirty years—ever since we brought Nixon down. The partisan cheap shots just get nastier and nastier—on both sides, I’ll grant you. I mean, we block poor old Judge Bork, then you guys spend the last eight years of the twentieth century—a hundred million bucks—going through the fucking president’s garbage because you couldn’t knock him off in a fair election. No, Tom, this isn’t different. It’s the exact same bullshit you’ve—”

  “I’m not going to stand here and listen to a stream of your barnyard obscenities, Jake. I’m really very sorry you make it come to that.”

  “You’re the one who marches into my office with some asinine subpoena. But you know what really pisses me off, Tom? It’s that you don’t see how they’re using you.”

  “Nobody uses me!”

  “Of course, they are. China lies to Washington. The White House and State Department lie to Congress. And who do you go after? The Senate staff! You want us to have an orgy of self-flagellation up here over some newspaper story? Well, sorry, friend. I’m not going to be a party to it.”

  “I totally reject your characterization of—”

  “Tom! You’re too smart not to see it!”

  “It’s about defending the integrity of the process, Jake. If you have something to hide, it’s your own darn fault.”

  The two men glared at each other, calculating next moves until Landle’s discomfort became so great, he snatched back the committee letter and turned to leave.

  “That won’t be necessary, Senator,” Booth heard himself remark, as if he was watching from afar.

  “What?”

  They had almost forgotten about Booth. The staff man had remained seated, observing as the scene played itself out like a familiar Greek tragedy. He already knew the inevitable denouement.

  “The subpoenas.” The two legislators stared at him, uncomprehending, even as he continued, “They won’t be necessary.”

  “What?”

  Calmly, Booth stepped off the cliff. “It was me,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Senator Smithson didn’t leak the missile story to the newspaper,” Booth explained, turning to Landle now. “I did.”

  “You?! Jake!” Landle’s eyes darted back and forth between Booth and Smithson, who were regarding each other intently. “Did you know about this?”

  “I leaked it,” Booth said matter-of-factly as he stood and began to walk toward the door. “I leaked the photos because I thought it was the right thing to do. Because we shouldn’t let them lie to us. Because we shouldn’t let the Chinese and the White House get away with it.”

  His confession silenced the senators. They waited, confused as to what they should say, as Booth concluded: “I just came over to tell all this to Chairman Smithson. And to submit my resignation.”

  Booth regarded them both for a moment longer as he stood at the threshold. They were cringing as they watched him depart.

  Booth turned the brass knob and opened the hideaway door. He gently pushed it shut until it clicked behind him, then headed down the tiled Capitol hallway one last time. He walked out through the heavy revolving door under the Senate steps, stepping into a warm spring rain. The first thick drops splotched his gray suit. Soon, they began to penetrate.

  He was surprised to notice that, as the moisture soaked through to his skin, he felt cleansed.

  JULY

  THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE

  Mickey Dooley discovered the comfort of prayer late in life. The free fall of faith yielded a wondrous consolation. As he let go, trusting in the Lord to cushion him, he conjured visions of deliverance. He could see himself surviving the gauntlet ahead, breaking loose, back home in America with his children.

  Faith was the perfect antidote to overcome year
s of swaggering bravado, the false empowerment of the playboy’s hustle. Things would work out, he grew confident, because an omniscient God intended them to. Huckster Mickey could no longer will them to.

  The prospect of failure was too grim to imagine, and he preferred the idea of some glorious death—martyrdom in the streets of Beijing—to the repugnant alternatives he tried to bar from his mind. As he flew into China on this final trip, he was full of hope. He could pull this off. He could rescue both his children and Lee from a bleak future and redeem himself in the doing.

  It seemed too easy at first. The U.S. Air Force plane ferrying the official delegation into the Communist capital took a smooth glide path, cumulus clouds parting over the Pacific shore. Quite soon, the road-ringed capital loomed ahead, arid mountains barely discernible on the far northwest horizon. After all the recent tensions between Washington and Beijing, Mickey found the placid scene unnerving. Could this be a tease?

  It was just a twenty minute descent from the coastline to the capital as the Smithson delegation savored the steak and Merlot served en route by the pursers on the plane they called “Air Force Three.” Up front, many of the senators on board were dozing, an odd bipartisan mixture of legislators whom Smithson had roped in for cover or comfort. The corporate hitchhikers rode in the rear.

  After the comforts of Tokyo and Seoul, China promised to be tense. The furor over the Chinese missile build-up had almost led Smithson to bail on the Beijing leg. As they had left Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland, the Chinese leadership and the White House were still deep into the media spin cycle, suspicious of each other’s every move and looking to exact revenge. It was an odd game of diplomatic chicken; neither side wanted to take the blame for axing the summit. So with the pretense of business as usual, the Congressional delegation anxiously proceeded with the China portion of their itinerary.

  The Smithson entourage had an agenda as internally contradictory as it was familiar. The chairman was eager to lecture the Chinese about human rights and nuclear nonproliferation, to debate the responsibilities of a twenty-first century superpower. At the same time, he would encourage them, thank you very much, to buy American—commercial aircraft, computer software, bridges, and dams. As always, there was no consensus among his senior colleagues on how to deal with China. Some wanted to talk grain and citrus sales. Others were more interested in arguing about the missiles deployed against Taiwan, proselytizing about religious freedom, or encouraging uncensored Internet access.