Golden Age (25 page)

Richie was not terribly fond of his scheduler, Lucille, but she had been working as a congressional staffer since the Johnson administration, and she was an accomplished eavesdropper—in the bathroom,
in the lunchroom, in the gym, in the hallways, you name it, she had heard things everywhere. One of her strategies, she had told Richie, was to do a crossword puzzle on the can, her body movements stilled. He would not believe, she said, who was sleeping with whom, and where. Across the congressional office desk was the least of it. And now she had heard another thing, and if they got through Christmas without an explosion, they’d be lucky.

There was a girl, Lucille said. In her twenties, plain-looking, dumpy sort of girl. She had worked for Clinton in the White House. Lucille sniffed. Girls worked in the White House generation upon generation. Richie found this difficult to believe. Hadn’t girls in the nineteenth century been required to stay at home? Well, since the Kennedy administration, said Lucille. Someday, they would talk about that. What the girl had done, well, the girl had given in—either to temptation or to the president, what was the difference, said Lucille. But here was the kicker: she had decided to start talking about it. She talked and talked and talked about it. Other people talked about it, too—that was how Lucille heard the news, sitting on the can in the Capitol, quiet as a mouse, doing her puzzle. When the talkers walked along the row of stalls, looking for feet, hers were tucked in the shadows. But they would have talked anyway—everyone loved to talk. Washington ran on gossip. Here was the other thing.

“What?” said Richie.

The woman this girl talked to just happened to make hours and hours of recordings. Lucille was not a fan of Bill Clinton, but her findings were that whatever he did was the norm on Capitol Hill. And the girl was twenty-four, not nineteen.

The next person Richie heard something from was Michael, who had heard it from Loretta, who had overheard it having lunch in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. Someone at
Time
or
Newsweek
was already on it. “Everybody knows,” said Michael.

“About what, that a Democrat has balls?”

“Everyone but you,” said Michael.

“Mom wouldn’t like to hear you say that,” said Richie. “Nor would the monsignor.”

“I say nothing about Monsignor Kelly’s balls.”

“At least, not as long as he’s controlling the checkbook, right, Mike?” said Richie.

He saw that Riley had walked into his office yet again. He hung up without saying goodbye, and barked, “Where is Kenisha?” Kenisha was his press secretary.

She ignored him. “Okay, here are your notes for your speech about energy alternatives. I fixed them a little bit, since today is cold, so that they de-emphasize conservation and ramp up innovation and being ahead of the curve and all that. Just remember, natural gas is a stopgap; don’t talk about it too much. And I know nobody likes the doomsday stuff, but Kenisha was in the Chamber a few minutes ago, and she says there’s hardly anybody there, but we’ll get it into the record, anyway.”

She set the speech down on his desk, went to the coat rack, and got his coat, which she held out for him while continuing to talk. “And I have this friend. She just came to town last week.”

“What is her policy specialty?”

“She doesn’t want a job.”

He thrust his arms into the sleeves.

She handed him his gloves. “She’s willing to go out with you. I told her all about you.”

“She hasn’t seen me in the paper?”

“She has. That’s why I had to talk her into it.”

“Is she older than twenty-four?”

“She is thirty. She has a degree in engineering. She doesn’t say much.”

“I would like that,” said Richie.

“That’s what Charlie thought.” She put his speech in his briefcase, put his briefcase in his hand.

“What’s her name?”

“After the speech. I don’t want you distracted.”

Kenisha was waiting in the hall, with her coat already on. It was very important that a congressman never go to the Capitol by himself, as if he had no hangers-on, and Kenisha was good about seeming to talk without talking. Richie looked at his watch. It was after two. Kenisha was right: when he went to the Speaker’s Stand to give his speech, there were four congressmen in the Chamber, and one of them was sleeping.

1998

A
RTHUR THOUGHT
he might have been to Florida before. The air, the humidity, the light, and the smell had a strange familiarity, but, logically, he would have gone to Miami, or maybe Key West, not to an island off the coast near Fort Myers. Even so, the shelly beach felt to the soles of his feet like words barely remembered, clinging to the tip of his tongue. There was a busy solitude enveloping his almost-memories of Florida: He would not have been alone, but Lillian and the children would not have been with him. He would have been there on business, maybe having told Lillian that he was going to New York or was staying in Washington for a couple of nights. I left my heart in McLean, Virginia, he thought—that was the most benign view of why he remembered nothing.

Debbie was supporting his arm. She thought he needed the vitamin D, his bones needed it, she thought. It was very peculiar that there was no one left who would remember whether he had been in Florida, and maybe no records of his trip, either—of whom he had talked to or what he had discovered. He would have communicated it in person, not in writing. He would have traveled under an assumed name, possibly by plane, possibly, in those days, by train, though that was unlikely. As they walked, his ankles got hot; the sunlight was an alluring contrast to frozen and snowed-in Hamilton, but it was brutal. Arthur pulled the brim of his hat down, and remembered suddenly
how he always used to do that, how he had wanted to shadow his face but also to look rakish, the way his father had looked in a Panama. He had been a vain man. Lillian had egged him on in that, as in everything else.

They were not staying in a hotel. Debbie and Hugh had rented a house on stilts beside a golf course—if you were sitting in the living room or the dining room, you could sometimes hear a window break and a golf ball rattle onto the sill. Debbie had been instructed by the owner to run out to the course when this happened and hand the golfer an invoice for the amount that the window would cost to repair. Getting up and down the flight of stairs to the living quarters had to be managed carefully, but Arthur didn’t mind. He wanted to please, and also not to seem reluctant or weak.

In the center of the golf course, across from the screened porch of the house, was a water hazard—with alligators. You could see them most of the time, at least their noses, sometimes their heads. Twice they had lumbered out onto the fairway. The golfers buzzed around them in their carts, hardly slowing down. Maybe that added to Arthur’s sense that Florida was a menacing place. There were four bedrooms—Dean and Linda were to arrive for the weekend and stay until midweek. Carlie hadn’t come—she was working for a boutique furniture manufacturer in North Carolina; she’d been on the job for three months. Kevin had gone to Stowe, snowboarding with some friends.

There wasn’t much to do besides walk the beach, grocery-shop, or sit on the porch and look outward. Hugh did play golf one afternoon; Arthur watched him go by with three strangers. None of them broke a window.

Debbie took him to the beach, and once for a walk around the neighborhood. She grilled fresh fish with lemon and herbs. Hugh talked about tropical wood—teak, mahogany, Brazilian cherry, bocote, and about how, in the fall, he had invested some money in a tree farm in Costa Rica where they grew all sorts of rare (and fragrant, said Hugh) woods. He now “owned” the trees, and he would own them for as long as he wanted to. He could visit them, which always seemed appealing in Hamilton. As his first project, he was planning a coffee table, from some honey-brown striped hardwood that Arthur had never heard of. He showed his drawings each evening,
the details refined from day to day. As Hugh got older and more skilled, their house overflowed with his pieces, which he sometimes gave away but refused to sell, because he didn’t know how to price them. He had been to a crafts show, and the prices had been all over the place—no help. He was a tight-lipped fellow, equipped with hundreds of hand planes and chisels. Neither of the children seemed to have inherited his talents.

On the fourth morning, Arthur had gently refused to go for a beach walk. Debbie didn’t force him. She made sure that he had a cool glass of water on the table beside his chair, then went with Hugh across the bridge to Fort Myers to look in galleries. The funny thing about the island, Debbie thought, was that the headquarters of the grocery store was outside of Minneapolis—the west side of Florida was the southern Midwest, whereas the east side was the southern Northeast.

The car drove away, and the house fell silent. As Arthur sat on the deck, staring out over the golf course, due south, across the lower bulge of the island, two hundred miles to Havana, he could not remember every failed operation he had tried to tweak or fix or reinterpret, but he did remember sending Frank to Iran to make sure that that crook, what was his name, did not steal the funds, either for himself or his buddies. How the funds were then put to use, Arthur had no control over, but Frank was game and cheap: all Arthur had to do was put him on the plane as a sign unto the embezzlers that they were being watched. What had the fellow taken—ten grand? That would be fifty or sixty grand these days. At the time, Arthur had thought you might not be able to control stupidity, but maybe you could control dishonesty. He had since learned otherwise. Arthur had stopped using Frank after Iran, not because he wasn’t very good, but because he was good at stealth, not secrecy. Once the secrets began to proliferate, Arthur didn’t dare outsource anymore—he had to be sure of loyalties. Loyalties grew first out of patriotism, then out of fear; Stalin knew that, Nixon knew that. Frank did not know that. Arthur also remembered looking into Frank’s army records as soon as he met him. There had been lots of commendations, some rather excited remarks: “Squad escaped intact!” “Langdon seems to always bring them back. Recommend?” But even so he’d only risen to corporal; about that there was one remark, from ’43, “Keep this soldier in the
field.” Had that been an insult or a compliment? But there was also a red flag—after the travesty at Sidi Bou Zid, and everyone knew it was a travesty, from top to bottom, Frank’s disappearance called into question his loyalties. That he had managed to save himself and also to take out a tiny German outpost made no difference—he was gone for days. Where was he? Once you leave, even when you return, you are only partially forgiven. Better to be mowed down, since you can always be replaced. Arthur remembered reading it all more than once when he recommended Frank for the translation job in Dayton. And he remembered pausing before he wrote the word “trustworthy.” Even though he had not doubted that Frank was trustworthy—by then he’d known him for months—he could not commit himself without wondering if he would somehow get in trouble for recommending someone who was too smart to be fooled every single time.

It took Arthur all afternoon to think these thoughts—his mind worked so slowly now. And other fragments cropped up among them, fragments that seemed connected, although the connections were only foggily apparent to Arthur: What about Bill Casey? When was it that he had been slated to testify about Iran and North and the Contras? At the last moment, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and the operation left him unable to talk. But, thought Arthur, why so secretive about such a small thing? Secrets, thought Arthur, were the real problem. Due south two hundred miles from this porch was Havana—not as far as Manhattan was from D.C. Here we have lived with Castro now for thirty-nine years. That was the bargain Khrushchev had offered—live with him or die—and, indeed, living with him hadn’t been that hard. Living with secrets was what was hard.

And it wasn’t just because secrets led to lies and lies led to chaos; it was because secrets led to the assumption, on the part of those not in on the secrets, that there were many more secrets than there really were. Arthur had already retired when Casey was diagnosed and operated on, rendered unable to talk, but he had been instantly suspicious of the strange convenience of it all. Logical connections abounded between dangerous secrets and convenient secrets. Does the president have a mistress back in Texas? Who cares? But it has to stay a secret. Have we infiltrated the high command of our most lethal enemy? Maybe—that’s a secret, too. Has our operation gone wrong and resulted in tragic losses? It’s a secret. All secrets had a way
of connecting to one another and evening out—the mistress becomes connected to the infiltration, which becomes connected to the failed mission, and a secret has turned into a theory, which then turns into a cause, blowback, fallout. All of this leads to more secrets, since admitting a single thing requires admission of other things, and the plan, or the agency, or the government unravels.

Once upon a time, Arthur had loved secrets. He loved breaking codes in the early days, seeing a narrative unfold, peering through a pinhole and viewing the scene in sharp relief. During that war, everyone knew the consequences, and, anyway, the secrets were rather few, while the crimes were very many. But after the war, the crimes were secret, and the secrets, quite often, were crimes. The thing was, Arthur realized at some point, being secret made them seem like crimes. And keeping secrets made one feel like a criminal. These days, he didn’t remember too many specifics, but he did remember that feeling, of telling himself that the necessary had to outweigh the good, that orders had been given, that someone, surely, was in control of the larger picture (though often that person was Frank Wisner, who Arthur thought was crazy, but maybe it was Arthur who was crazy—that had been his thinking).