The Icarus Agenda: A Novel

  “I chose a field where having money made things much easier,” replied Winters. “I’ve occasionally felt rather guilty about that. I could always go where I wanted, gain access to archives others couldn’t, study as long as I wished. Whatever contributions I’ve made have been minor compared with the fun I’ve had. My wife used to say that.” The historian glanced at the portrait of a lovely, dark-haired woman dressed in the style of the forties; it was hung behind the desk between two huge windows overlooking Seventy-third Street. A man working could turn and gaze at it easily.

  “You miss her, don’t you?”

  “Terribly. I come up and talk with her frequently.”

  “I don’t think I could go on without Hannah, yet oddly enough, considering what she went through in Germany, I pray to God she leaves me first. I believe the death of another loved one would be too great a pain for her to bear alone. Does that sound awful of me?”

  “It sounds remarkably generous—like everything you say and do, old friend. And also because I know so well what you would face by yourself. You’d do it better than I, Jacob.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “It must be your temple—”

  “When were you last in church, Samuel?”

  “Let’s see. My son was married in Paris when I broke my leg and couldn’t attend, and my daughter eloped with that charming helium-head who makes far more money than he deserves writing those films I don’t understand—so it must have been in ’45 when I got back from the war. St. John the Divine, of course. She made me go when all I wanted to do was get her undressed.”

  “Oh, you’re outrageous! I don’t believe you for a minute.”

  “You’d be wrong.”

  “He could be dangerous,” said Mandel, suddenly changing the subject and reverting to Evan Kendrick. Winters understood; his old friend had been talking but he had also been thinking.

  “In what way? Everything we’ve learned about him—and I doubt there’s much more to know—would seem to negate any obsession for power. Without that, where’s the danger?”

  “He’s fiercely independent.”

  “All to the good. He might even make a fine President. No ties to the tub-thumpers, the yea-sayers and the sycophants. We’ve both seen him blow the first category away; the rest are easier.”

  “Then I’m not being clear,” said Mandel. “Because it’s not yet clear to me.”

  “Or I’m being stupid, Jacob. What are you trying to say?”

  “Suppose he found out about us? Suppose he learned he was code name Icarus, the product of Inver Brass?”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “That’s not the question. Leap over the impossibility. Intellectually—and the young man has an intellect—what would be his response? Remember now, he’s fiercely independent.”

  Samuel Winters brought his hand to his chin and stared out the window overlooking the street. And then his gaze shifted to the portrait of his wife. “I see,” he said, uncertain images coming into focus from his own past. “He’d be furious. He’d consider himself part of a larger corruption, irrevocably tied to it because he was manipulated. He’d be in a rage.”

  “And in that rage,” pressed Mandel, “what do you think he would do? Incidentally, exposing us in the long run is irrelevant. It would be like the rumors of the Trilateral Commission promoting Jimmy Carter because Henry Luce put an obscure governor of Georgia on the cover of Time. There was more truth than not in those rumors, but nobody cared.… What would Kendrick do?”

  Winters looked at his old friend, his eyes widening. “My God,” he said quietly. “He’d run in disgust.”

  “Does that sound familiar, Samuel?”

  “It was so many years ago … things were different—”

  “I don’t think they were that different. Far better than now, actually, not different.”

  “I wasn’t in office.”

  “It was yours for the taking. The brilliant, immensely wealthy dean from Columbia University whose advice was sought by succeeding presidents and whose appearances before the House and Senate committees altered national policies.… You were tapped for the governorship of New York, literally being swept into Albany, when you learned only weeks before the convention that a political organization unknown to you had orchestrated your nomination and your inevitable election.”

  “It was a total shock. I’d never heard of it or them.”

  “Yet you presumed—rightly or wrongly—that this silent machine expected you to do its bidding and you fled, denouncing the whole charade.”

  “In disgust. It was against every precept of an open political process I’d ever advocated.”

  “Fiercely independent,” added the stockbroker. “And what followed was a power vacuum; there was political chaos, the party in disarray. The opportunists moved in and took over, and there were six years of draconian laws and corrupt administrations from the lower to the upper Hudson.”

  “Are you blaming me for all that, Jacob?”

  “It’s related, Samuel. Thrice Caesar refused the crown and all hell broke loose.”

  “Are you saying that Kendrick might refuse to assume the office presented to him?”

  “You did. You walked away in outrage.”

  “Because people unknown to me were committing enormous sums of money, propelling me into office. Why? If they were genuinely interested in better government and not private interest, why didn’t they come forward?”

  “Why don’t we, Samuel?”

  Winters looked hard at Mandel, his eyes sad. “Because we’re playing God, Jacob. We must, for we know what others don’t know. We know what will happen if we don’t proceed our way. Suddenly the people of a great republic don’t have a president but a king, the emperor of all the states of the union. What they don’t understand is what’s behind the king. Those jackals in the background can only be ripped out by replacing him. No other way.”

  “I understand. I’m cautious because I’m afraid.”

  “Then we must be extraordinarily careful and make certain Evan Kendrick never learns about us. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Nothing’s simple,” objected Mandel. “He’s no fool. He’s going to wonder why all the attention is raining down on him. Varak will have to be a master scenarist—each sequence logically, unalterably leading to the next.”

  “I wondered, too,” admitted Winters softly, once again glancing at the portrait of his late wife. “Jennie used to say to me, ‘It’s too easy, Sam. Everyone else is out there busting his britches to get a few lines in the newspapers and you get whole editorials praising you for things we’re not even sure you did.’ It’s why I started asking questions, how I found out what had happened, not who but how.”

  “And then you walked away.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why? I mean really, why?”

  “You just answered that, Jacob. I was outraged.”

  “Despite everything you might have contributed?”

  “Well, obviously.”

  “Is it fair, Samuel, to say you were not gripped by the fever to win that office?”

  “Again, obviously. Whether admirable or not, I’ve never had to win anything. As Averell once said, ‘Fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve not had to depend on my current job to eat.’ That sums it up, I guess.”

  “The fever, Samuel. The fever you never felt, the hunger you never had must somehow grip Kendrick. In the final analysis, he has to want to win, desperately need to win.”

  “The fire in the belly,” said the historian. “We all should have thought of it first, but the rest of us simply assumed he’d leap at the opportunity. God, we were fools!”

  “Not ‘the rest of us,’ ” protested the stockbroker, holding up the palms of his hands. “I didn’t think about it until I walked into this room an hour ago. Suddenly the memories came back, memories of you and your—fierce independence. From being the bright hope, an extraordinary asset, you became a morally outraged liability
who walked away and made room for all the sleazeballs in and out of town.”

  “You’re hitting home, Jacob.… I should have stayed, I’ve known it for years. My wife in a fit of anger once called me a ‘spoiled Goody Two-Shoes.’ She claimed, like you, I think, that I could have prevented so much, if I accomplished nothing else.”

  “Yes, you could have, Samuel. Harry Truman was right, it’s the leaders who shape history. There would have been no United States without Thomas Jefferson, no Third Reich without Adolf Hitler. But no man or woman becomes a leader unless he or she wants to. They’ve got to have a burning need to get there.”

  “And you think our Kendrick lacks it?”

  “I suspect he does. What I saw on that television screen, and what I saw five days ago during the committee hearing, was an incautious man who didn’t give a damn whose bones he rattled because he was morally outraged. Brains, yes; courage, certainly; even wit and appeal—all of which we agreed had to be part of the ideal composite we sought. But I also saw a streak of my friend Samuel Winters, a man who could walk away from the system because he didn’t have the fever in him to go after the prize.”

  “Is that so bad, Jacob? Not with regard to me—I was never that important, really—but is it so healthy for all officeseekers to be on fire?”

  “You don’t turn over the store to part-time management, not if it’s your major investment. The people rightly expect a fulltime landlord, and they sense it when the call isn’t basically there, aggressively there. They want their money’s worth.”

  “Well,” said Winters, his tone mildly defensive. “I believe the people were not totally unimpressed with me, and I wasn’t burning up with fever. On the other hand, I didn’t make too many gaffes.”

  “Good Lord, you never had the chance to. Your campaign was a television blitzkrieg with some of the best photography I’ve ever seen, your handsome countenance a decided asset, of course.”

  “I had three or four debates, you know.… Three actually.…”

  “With warthogs, Samuel. They were buried by congenial class—the people love that. They never stop searching the heavens, now the television screens, for that king or that prince to come along and show them the way with comforting words.”

  “It’s a goddamned shame. Abraham Lincoln would have been considered an awkward hick and stayed in Illinois.”

  “Or worse,” said Jacob Mandel, chuckling. “Abraham the Jew in league with the anti-Christs, sacrificing Gentile infants.”

  “And when he grew the beard, absolute confirmation,” agreed Winters, smiling and getting out of his chair. “A drink?” he asked, knowing his friend’s answer and heading for the bar beneath a French tapestry on the right wall.

  “Thank you. The usual, please.”

  “Of course.” The historian poured two drinks in silence, one bourbon, one Canadian, both with ice only. He returned to their chairs and handed the bourbon to Mandel. “All right, Jacob. I think I’ve put it all together.”

  “I knew you could pour and think at the same time,” said Mandel, smiling and raising his glass. “Your health, sir.”

  “L’chaim,” replied the historian.

  “So?”

  “Somehow, some way, this fever you speak of, this need to win the prize, must be instilled in Evan Kendrick. Without it he’s not credible and without him Gideon’s mongrels—the opportunists and the fanatics—move in.”

  “I believe that, yes.”

  Winters sipped his drink, his eyes straying to a Gobelin tapestry. “Philip and the knights at Crécy weren’t defeated by the English bowmen and the Welsh long knives alone. They had to contend with what Saint-Simon described three hundred years later as a court bled by the ‘vile bourgeois corrupters.’ ”

  “Your erudition is beyond me, Samuel.”

  “How do we instill this fever in Evan Kendrick? It’s so terribly important that we do. I see it so clearly now.”

  “I think we start with Milos Varak.”

  Annie Mulcahy O’Reilly was beside herself. The standard four telephone lines in the congressional office were usually used for outgoing calls; this particular congressman did not normally receive many incoming ones. Today, however, was not only different, it was crazy. In the space of twenty-four hours, the smallest, most underworked staff on the Hill became the most frenzied. Annie had to call her two file clerks, who never came in on Monday (“Come on, Annie, it ruins a decent weekend”), to get their bouffant heads down to the office. She then reached Phillip Tobias, the bright if frustrated chief aide, and told him to forget his tennis game and drag his promotional ass downtown or she’d kill him. (“What the hell happened?” “You didn’t see the Foxley show yesterday?” “No, I was sailing. Why should I have?” “He was on it!” “What? That can’t happen without my approval!” “They must have called him at home.” “The son of a bitch never told me!” “He didn’t tell me, either, but I saw his name in the Post’s late listings.” “Jesus! Get me a tape, Annie! Please!” “Only if you come down and help us man the phones, dearie.” “Shit!” “I’m a lady, you prick. Don’t talk to me that way.” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Annie! Please. The tape!”)

  Finally, and only because she was desperate, and only because her husband, Patrick Xavier O’Reilly, had Mondays off because he worked the high-crime shift on Saturdays, she called the two-toilet Irish detective and told him that if he did not come down to help out she’d file a complaint against him for rape—which was only wishful thinking, she added. The only person she was unable to reach was the congressman from Colorado’s Ninth District.

  “I am so very, very sorry, Mrs. O’Reilly,” said the Arab husband of the couple who took care of Kendrick’s house, and who Annie suspected was probably an unemployed surgeon or an ex-university president. “The Congressman said he would be away for a few days. I have no idea where he is.”

  “That’s a lot of crap, Mr. Sahara—”

  “You flatter me with dimensions, madame.”

  “That, too! You reach that horned-toad servant of the public and tell him we’re going ape-shit down here! And it’s all because of his appearance on the Foxley show!”

  “He was remarkably effective, was he not?”

  “You know about it?”

  “I saw his name in the Washington Post’s late listings, madame. Also in the Times of New York and Los Angeles, and the Chicago Tribune.”

  “He gets all those papers?”

  “No, madame, I do. But he’s perfectly welcome to read them.”

  “Glory be to God!”

  The pandemonium in the outside office had become intolerable. Annie slammed down the phone and ran to her door; she opened it, astonished to see Evan Kendrick and her husband shoving their way through a crowd of reporters, congressional aides and various other people she did not know. “Come in here!” she yelled.

  Once inside the secretarial office and with the door closed, Mr. O’Reilly spoke. “I’m her Paddy,” he said, out of breath. “Nice to meet you, Congressman.”

  “You’re my blocking back, pal,” replied Kendrick, shaking hands and quickly studying the large broad-shouldered, redhaired man with a paunch four inches larger than his considerable height should permit, and a vaguely florid face that held a pair of knowing, intelligent green eyes. “I’m grateful we got here at the same time.”

  “In all honesty, we didn’t, sir. My crazy lady called over an hour ago and I was able to get here in maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes. I saw the brouhaha in the corridor and figured you might show up. I waited for ya.”

  “You might have let me know, you lousy mick! We’ve been going crazy in here!”

  “And be slapped with a felony charge, darlin’?”

  “He really is two-toilet Irish, Congressman—”

  “Hold it, you two,” ordered Evan, glancing at the door. “What the hell are we going to do about this? What’s happened?”

  “You went on the Foxley show,” said Mrs. O’Reilly. “We didn’t.”
r />   “I make it a point never to watch those programs,” mumbled Kendrick. “If I do, I’m expected to know something.”

  “Now a lot of people know about you.”

  “You were damn good, Congressman,” added the D.C. detective. “A couple of boys in the department called and asked me to tell Annie to thank you—I told you, Annie.”

  “First, I haven’t had the chance, and second, with all this confusion I probably would have forgotten. But I think, Evan, that your only clean way is to go out there and make some kind of statement.”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted Kendrick, looking at Patrick O’Reilly. “Why would anyone in the police department want to thank me?”

  “The way you stood up to Barrish and clobbered him.”

  “I gathered that, but what’s Barrish to them?”

  “He’s a Pentagon hustler with friends in high places. Also a ball-breaker if you’ve spent a few sleepless nights on stakeout and instead of being thanked you’re dumped on.”

  “What stakeout? What happened?”

  “Mister Kendrick,” broke in Annie. “That’s a zoo out there! You’ve got to show yourself, say something.”

  “No, I want to hear this. Go on, Mr.—may I call you Patrick, or Pat?”

  “ ‘Paddy’ fits better.” The police officer patted his stomach. “That’s what I’m called.”

  “I’m Evan. Drop the ‘Congressman’—I want to drop it completely. Please. Go on. How was Barrish involved with the police?”

  “I didn’t say that, now. He, himself, is cleaner than an Irish bagpipe, which actually isn’t too lovely inside, but he’s purer than a bleached sheet in the noonday sun.”

  “Men in your line of work don’t thank people for clobbering clean laundry—”

  “Well, it wasn’t the biggest thing that ever went down; truth be told, by itself it was minor, but something might have come out of it if we could have followed up.… The boys were tracking a mozzarella known to launder cash through Miami and points southeast like the Cayman Islands. On the fourth night of the stakeout at the Mayflower Hotel, they thought they had him. You see, one of those Bally-shoe types went to his room at one o’clock in the morning with a large briefcase. One o’clock in the morning—not exactly the start or the shank of the business day, right?”