The asshole went on and on saying everything but also saying nothing, never once addressing the issues of escalation and containment.
Why me? shouted Kendrick to himself. Why me? To hell with it! With everything! He shut off the television set, reached for the phone and called Colorado. “Hi, Manny,” he said, hearing Weingrass’s abrupt hello.
“Boy, are you something!” yelled the old man into the phone. “I brought you up right, after all!”
“Stow it, Manny, I want out of this shit.”
“You want what? Did you see yourself on TV?”
“That’s why I want out. Forget the glassed-in steam bath and the gazebo down by the streams. We’ll do it later. Let’s you and I head back to the Emirates—by way of Paris, naturally—maybe a couple of months in Paris, if you like. Okay?”
“Not okay, you meshugenah clown! You got something to say, you say it! I taught you always—whether we lost a contract or not—to say what you believed was right.… Okay, okay, maybe we fudged a little on time, but we delivered! And we never charged for extensions even when we had to pay!”
“Manny, that has nothing to do with what’s going on here—”
“It’s got everything! You’re building something.… And speaking of building, guess what, my goy boy?”
“What?”
“I’ve started the terrace steam bath and I’ve given the plans for the gazebo down by the streams. Nobody interrupts Emmanuel Weingrass until his designs are completed to his satisfaction!”
“Manny, you’re impossible!”
“I may have heard that before.”
Milos Varak walked down a graveled path in Rock Creek Park toward a bench that overlooked a ravine where offshoot waters of the Potomac rushed below. It was a remote, peaceful area, away from the concrete pavements above, favored by the summer tourists wishing to get away from the heat and hustle of the streets. As the Czech expected, the Speaker of the House of Representatives was already there, sitting on the bench, his thatch of white hair concealed by an Irish walking cap, the visor half over his face, his long, painfully thin frame covered by an unnecessary raincoat in the sweltering humidity of an August afternoon in Washington. The Speaker wanted no one to notice him; it was not his normal proclivity. Varak approached and spoke.
“Mr. Speaker, I’m honored to meet you, sir.”
“Son of a bitch, you are a foreigner!” The gaunt face with the dark eyes and arched white brows was an angry face, angry and yet defensive, the latter trait obviously repulsive to him. “If you’re some fucking Communist errand boy, you can pack it in right now, Ivan! I’m not running for another term. I’m out, finished, kaput come January, and what happened thirty or forty years ago doesn’t mean doodlely shit! You read me, Boris?”
“You’ve had an outstanding career and have been a positive force for your country, sir—also my country now. As to my being a Russian or an agent from the Eastern bloc, I’ve fought both for the past ten years, as a number of people in this government know.”
The granite-eyed politician studied Varak. “You wouldn’t have the guts or the stupidity to say that to me unless you could back it up,” he intoned in the pungent accent of a northern New Englander. “Still, you threatened me!”
“Only to get your attention, to convince you to see me. May I sit down?”
“Sit,” said the Speaker, as if addressing a dog he expected to obey him. Varak did so, maintaining ample space between them. “What do you know about the events that may or may not have taken place sometime back in the fifties?”
“It was the seventeenth of March, 1951, to be exact,” replied the Czech. “On that day a male child was born in Belfast’s Lady of Mercy Hospital to a young woman who had emigrated to America several years previously. She had returned to Ireland, her explanation indeed a sad one. Her husband had died and in her bereavement she wanted to have their child at home, among her family.”
His gaze cold and unflinching, the Speaker said, “So?”
“I think you know, sir. There was no husband over here, but there was a man who must have loved her very much. A rising young politician trapped in an unhappy marriage from which he could not escape because of the laws of the Church and his constituents’ blind adherence to them. For years this man, who was also an attorney, sent money to the woman and visited her and the child in Ireland as often as he could … as an American uncle, of course—”
“You can prove who these people were?” interrupted the aging Speaker curtly. “Not hearsay or rumor or questionable eyewitness identification, but written proof?”
“I can.”
“With what? How?”
“Letters were exchanged.”
“Liar!” snapped the septuagenarian. “She burned every damned one before she died!”
“I’m afraid she burned all but one,” said Varak softly. “I believe she had every intention of destroying it, too, but death came earlier than she expected. Her husband found it buried under several articles in her bedside table. Of course, he doesn’t know who E is, nor does he care to know. He’s only grateful that his wife declined your offer and stayed with him these past twenty years.”
The old man turned away, the hint of tears welling in his eyes, sniffed away in self-discipline. “My wife had left me then,” he said, barely audible. “Our daughter and son were in college and there was no reason to keep up the rotten pretense any longer. Things had changed, outlooks changed, and I was as secure as a Kennedy in Boston. Even the la-di-das in the archdiocese kept their mouths shut—of course, I let a few of those sanctimonious bastards know that if there was any Church interference during the election, I’d encourage the black radicals and the Jews to raise hell in the House over their holy tax-exempt status. The bishop damn near threw up in apoplexy, screaming all kinds of damnation at me for setting a hellfire public example but I settled his hash. I told him my departing wife had probably slept with him, too.” The white-haired Speaker with the deeply lined face fell silent. “Mother of God,” he cried to himself, the tears now apparent. “I wanted that girl back!”
“I’m sure you’re not referring to your wife.”
“You know exactly whom I mean, Mr. No-name! But she couldn’t do it. A decent man had given her a home and our son a name for nearly fifteen years. She couldn’t leave him—even for me. I’ll tell you the truth, I kept her last letter, too. Both letters were our last to each other. ‘We’ll be joined in the hereafter heaven,’ she wrote me. ‘But no further on this earth, my darling.’ What kind of crap was that? We could have had a life, a goddamned good part of life!”
“If I may, sir, I think it was the expression of a loving woman who had as much respect for you as she did for herself and her son. You had children of your own, and explanations from the past can destroy the future. You had a future, Mr. Speaker.”
“I would have chucked it all in—”
“She couldn’t let you do that, any more than she could destroy the man who had given her and the child a home and a name.”
The old man pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes, his voice suddenly reverting to its harsh delivery. “How the hell do you know about all this?”
“It wasn’t difficult. You’re the leader of the House of Representatives, the second in line for the presidency, and I wanted to know more about you. Forgive me, but older people speak more freely than younger ones do—much of it is due to their unrecognized sense of importance where so-called secrets are concerned—and, of course, I knew that you and your wife, both Catholics, had divorced. Considering your political stature at the time and the power of your Church, that had to be a momentous decision.”
“Hell, I can’t fault you there. So you looked for the older people who were around at the time.”
“I found them. I learned that your wife, the daughter of a wealthy real estate developer who wanted political influence and literally financed your early campaigns, had a less than enviable reputation.”
“Before and after
, Mr. No-name. Only, I was the last to find out.”
“But you did find out,” said Varak firmly. “And in your anger and embarrassment you sought other companionship. At the time you were convinced you couldn’t do anything about your marriage, so you looked for surrogate comfort.”
“Is that what it’s called? I looked for someone who could be mine.”
“And you found her in a hospital where you went to give blood during a campaign. She was a certified nurse from Ireland who was studying for her registry in the United States.”
“How the hell—”
“Old people talk.”
“Pee Wee Mangecavallo,” whispered the Speaker, his eyes suddenly bright, as if the memory brought back a rush of happiness. “He had a little Italian place, a bar with good Sicilian food, about four blocks from the hospital. No one ever bothered me there—I don’t think they knew who I was. That guinea bastard, he remembered.”
“Mr. Mangecavallo is over ninety now, but he does indeed remember. You would take your lovely nurse there and he would close up his bar at one o’clock in the morning and leave you both inside, asking only that you kept the tarantellas on the jukebox at the lowest levels.”
“A beautiful person.”
“With an extraordinary memory for one of his age but without, I’m afraid, the control he had as a younger man. He reminisces at length—rambles, actually—saying things over his Chianti that perhaps he would never have said even a few years ago.”
“At his age he’s entitled—”
“And you did confide in him, Mr. Speaker,” interrupted Varak.
“No, not really,” disagreed the old politician. “But Pee Wee put things together; it wasn’t hard. After she left for Ireland, I used to go back there, for a couple of years quite frequently. I’d drink more than I usually did because nobody, like I said, knew me or gave a damn and Pee Wee always got me home without incident, as they say. I guess maybe I talked too much.”
“You went back to Mr. Mangecavallo’s establishment when she married—”
“Oh, yes, that I did! I remember it as if it were yesterday—remember going inside, no memory at all of coming out.”
“Mr. Mangecavallo is quite lucid about that day. Names, a country, a city … a date—of severance, you called it. I went to Ireland.”
The Speaker snapped his head toward Varak, his unblinking eyes angry and questioning. “What do you want from me? It’s all over, all in the past, and you can’t hurt me. What do you want?”
“Nothing that you would ever regret or be ashamed of, sir. The most stringent background examination could be made and you could only applaud my clients’ recommendation.”
“Your … clients? Recommendation …? Some kind of House assignment?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The horseshit aside, why would I agree to whatever the hell you’re talking about?”
“Because of a detail in Ireland you are not aware of.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ve heard of the killer who calls himself Tam O’Shanter, the provisional ‘wing commander’ of the Irish Republican Army?”
“A pig! A blot on every Irish clan’s escutcheon!”
“He’s your son.”
A week had passed and for Kendrick it was further proof of the quick passage of fame in Washington. The Partridge Committee’s televised hearings were suspended at the request of the Pentagon, who issued dual statements that it was revising certain financial “in-depth” records, as well as the fact that Colonel Robert Barrish had been promoted to brigadier general and posted to the island of Guam to oversee that most vital outpost of freedom.
One Joseph Smith of 70 Cedar Street in Clinton, New Jersey, whose father had been with the 27th in Guam, roared with laughter as he poked his wife’s left breast in front of the television screen. “He’s been hosed, babe! And that what’s-his-face did it! He’s my buddy!”
But as all brief periods of euphoria must come to an abrupt end, so did the temporary relief felt by the representative of the Ninth Congressional District of Colorado.
“Jesus Christ!” yelled Phil Tobias, chief aide to the Congressman, as he held his hand over the telephone. “It’s the Speaker of the House himself! No aide, no secretary, but him!”
“Maybe you should let the other ‘himself’ know about it,” said Annie O’Reilly. “He called on your line, not mine. Don’t talk, sweetie. Just push the button and announce. It’s out of your league.”
“But it isn’t right! His people should have called me—”
“Do it!”
Tobias did it.
“Kendrick?”
“Yes, Mr. Speaker?”
“You got a few minutes to spare?” asked the New Englander, the word “spare” emerging as “spay-yah.”
“Well, of course, Mr. Speaker, if you think it’s important.”
“I don’t call a shithead freshman direct if I didn’t think it was important.”
“Then I can only hope that a shithead Speaker has a vital issue to discuss,” replied Kendrick. “If he doesn’t, I’ll charge my hourly consultation rate to his state. Is that understood, Mr. Speaker?”
“I like your style, boy. We’re on different sides but I like your style.”
“You may not when I’m in your office.”
“I like that even better.”
Astonished, Kendrick stood in front of the desk staring in silence at the evasive eyes of the gaunt-faced, white-haired Speaker of the House. The old Irishman had just made an extraordinary statement, which should have been, at the very least, a proposal but was, instead, a bombshell in Evan’s path of retreat from Washington, D.C. “The Subcommittee on Oversight and Evaluation?” said Kendrick in quiet anger. “Of Intelligence?”
“That’s it,” answered the Speaker, glancing down at his papers.
“How dare you? You can’t do that!”
“It’s done. Your appointment’s announced.”
“Without my consent?”
“I don’t need it. I don’t say you had the clearest sailing with your own party leaders—you’re not the most popular fella on your side of the fence—but with a little convincing, they agreed. You’re kind of a symbol of independent bipartisanship.”
“Symbol? What symbol? I’m no symbol!”
“You got a tape of the Foxley show?”
“It’s nonhistory. It’s forgotten!”
“Or that little rhubarb you pulled in your office the next morning? That fella from the New York Times did a hell of a column on you, made you out like some kind of—what was it? I reread it yesterday—‘a reasoned voice among the babel of mad crows.’ ”
“All that was weeks ago and nobody’s mentioned anything of substance since then. I’ve faded.”
“You just sprang back to full flower.”
“I refuse the appointment! I don’t care to be burdened by secrets involving national security. I’m not staying in government and I consider it an untenable position to be placed in—a dangerous situation, to put it bluntly.”
“You publicly refuse and your party will wash you out of its hair—publicly. They’ll call you a few names, like a rich mistake and irresponsible, and revive that jackass you buried with your money. He and his little machine are missed around here.” The Speaker paused, chuckling. “They gophered for everybody with nice little perks like private jets and fancy suites from Hawaii to the South of France owned by the mining boys. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference what party you were with, they just wanted a few addenda on legislation—couldn’t care less where they came from. Hell, Congressman, you refuse, you could be doing all of us a favor.”
“You really are a shithead, Mr. Speaker.”
“I’m pragmatic, son.”
“But you’ve done so many decent things—”
“They came from being practical,” interrupted the old pol. “They don’t get done with buckets of vinegar, they go down easier with pitchers of warm syrup, like sweet Vermont
syrup, get my drift?”
“Do you realize that with one statement you just condoned political corruption?”
“The hell I did! I just condoned the acceptance of minor greed as part of the human condition in exchange for major legislation that helps the people who really need it! I got those things through, shithead, by blinking my eyes to incidental indulgences when those who got ’em knew my eyes weren’t closed. You rich son of a bitch, you wouldn’t understand. Sure, we got a few millionaires around here, but most aren’t. They live on yearly salaries that you’d piss away in a month. They leave office because they can’t put their two or three kids through college on what they make, forget vacations. So you’re goddamned right, I blink.”
“All right!” shouted Kendrick. “I can understand that, but what I can’t understand is your appointing me to Oversight! There’s nothing in my background that qualifies me for such an assignment. I could name you thirty or forty others who know a lot more than I do—which isn’t hard because I don’t know anything. They follow these things, they love being on the inside of that dumb business—I repeat, I think it’s a dumb business! Call on one of them. They’re all salivating at the chance.”
“That kind of appetite isn’t what we’re lookin’ for, son,” said the Speaker in his now heavily pronounced down-home, Down East accent that belied decades of sophisticated political negotiations in the nation’s capital. “Good healthy skepticism, like what you showed that double-talking colonel on the Foxley show, that’s the ticket. You’ll make a real contribution.”
“You’re wrong, Mr. Speaker, because I have nothing to contribute, not even the slightest interest. Barrish was using and abusing generalities, arrogantly refusing to talk straight, only talking down. It was entirely different. I repeat, I have no interest in Oversight.”
“Well, now, my young friend, interests change with conditions, like in the banks. Somethin’ happens and the rates go up or down accordingly. And some of us are more familiar than others with certain troubled areas of the world—you certainly qualify in that regard. As that beautiful book says, talents buried in the ground don’t do anybody a cow dung’s worth of good, but if they’re brought up into the light, they can flourish. Like your new flowering.”