The Shadow Cabinet (25 page)

“It's on at four,” Franconi said.

“Yeah, go watch and see. I wanna talk to Wilson. You too, Edelman.”

“I've got an appointment,” Wilson said. “I'll take a raincheck if you don't mind. Some other time.”

“I thought you had balls, Wilson,” Kramer said. “C'mon, relax. Have a little bubbly and let's talk.…”

But Wilson left him sitting there, with Chuckie Savant and Franconi standing nearby, no longer knowing what was expected of them.

Edelman followed at Wilson's heels. “It's a little confusing for you, I suppose,” he offered as they emerged from the walk and climbed the steps in front. “Artie Kramer is a self-made man,” he continued as they reached the station wagon. “He's jealous of what he has and not particularly at ease with those he doesn't know, particularly government people.” Wilson nodded, watching Rita Kramer leave the front door. “I can't always explain his logic,” Edelman continued with a sigh of self-absolution. “His contacts with the government have generally been confrontational. By some instinct of self-preservation, he measures others purely in—” he hesitated, as if conscious of violating a client's confidence—“in adversarial terms.”

“You mean he's a paranoid,” Wilson said, as Rita Kramer approached. “Who told him I used to work at Justice?”

“He did some inquiring, I'm not sure how. Any interpretation he gave was purely his own.…”

Rita Kramer joined them. “I'm sorry,” Wilson said.

“I could have handled it,” she said. “If you hadn't given back the check, I could have talked him out of it—all those goddamn crackpot conspiracy theories of his, all those crummy reasons he dreams up for everything that happens, and him the first to know.” She was still annoyed. “Sometimes I think he ought to be locked up.”

Surprised, Edelman discreetly moved his eyes away, studying the blue spruces.

“It seemed the best thing to do.”

“Maybe it was,” she said. “I'm the one who's got to listen to him all day long. If what he said today didn't make any sense, wait till you get him talking about the Kennedy assassination—Oswald, Jack Ruby, and Castro, even the KGB. Or the Bay of Pigs. Or Iran. You want to see a volcano about to erupt, ask him about Iran.” She paused, dismayed by her own voice. “Anyway, he thinks everything in this town is wired up by the CIA, the FBI, or the White House. If it wasn't so pathetic, it'd be funny, but that's the way he grew up, a street-wise kid from Brooklyn who's never really made it out of the tenth grade. He's still reading comic books, but now he makes them up as he goes along. He thinks being street-wise can explain everything. He's patriotic, that's no joke, and maybe that's what makes it so pathetic. Can you see him on a White House appointment list?” She looked at Wilson, who didn't answer. “Neither can I. That's what makes me think something funny's going on.…”

Franconi emerged from the terrace and came up the steps toward them. Seeing him, Edelman displayed a lawyer's prudence and moved discreetly away. They watched him disappear into the house.

“So now you know why I wanted this thing nailed down before Artie came,” Rita continued as she watched Franconi open the rear door of the Cadillac and rummage about in the back seat. “The worst part is he makes me suspicious sometimes. That's what hurts.”

“Suspicious in what way?”

“Raising all that fuss back there was just the excuse. I picked out the house; it was my idea, not his. For someone like Artie, he decides, no one else. When he doesn't get his own way, he cheats on you until he does. Now he's got his own way. What are you looking for?” she called impatiently to Franconi, who remained at the rear door, his movements very deliberate.

“The doctor bag. Artie feels a migraine coming on.”

“It's in the front seat on the floor.”

“That's just the way it is,” she said. “I was in analysis once and I thought it might help him. It didn't.” Franconi had lifted the bag from the front seat and was searching through it. She watched him suspiciously. “Did you find it?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Then get out of here, you creep.”

They watched Franconi go down the steps and onto the terrace.

“It must all seem pretty infantile to you, doesn't it?” she said.

“Not particularly. I'm sorry it worked out for you this way. I know how much you liked this place. It's too bad. If he changes his mind, give Matthews a call.”

“He won't change his mind. We've got a hotel suite downtown now; we can have it as long as we need it.” She turned to look at him. “Do I get to keep the roses or should I send them back?”

“No, I think Grace Ramsey would want you to keep them.”

“Grace Ramsey?” She gave a small laugh. “You're a goddamned liar, honey, but thanks anyway.”

Betsy was sitting on the rear couch in the study as he came in the door. She was wearing a set of foam rubber earphones as she listened to a new Bach recording brought by Dr. Mercer, also wearing earphones, who sat on the ottoman nearby. He was wearing jogging togs. He was slim and spare, a nonsmoker, nondrinker, and vegetarian, an ascetic gray-haired bachelor who taught community college physics and astronomy. Wilson had seen his ten-speed bicycle propped against the breezeway post. Lanky arm lifted, Mercer gave him a friendly wave. Betsy lifted her head in a delighted smile. Silently, he retrieved the
Post
and the
New York Times
from the table and went downstairs to the game room. The Redskins were playing the Cardinals in St. Louis, but he didn't turn the television set on. He read through the first sections of both papers, sitting in the leather armchair, but finally, out of curiosity, turned on the game to hear the score.

The Cardinals were up by nine, but the Redskins were driving late in the fourth quarter. He feigned disinterest, fiddling with the tuning knobs. On the third play after he'd adjusted the picture, the Redskins wide receiver caught the Cardinal secondary changing coverage, broke free on a fly pattern, took the deep pass over his left shoulder, and loped into the end zone without breaking stride, not a Cardinal defensive back within five yards.

He sat there in astonishment. “Did you see that goddamned pass?” he heard himself say.

There was no one, of course—just himself in the sun-filled game room. Over the stereo behind him hung his sons' pennants, travel posters, beer signs, and high school letters. Nearby was a map of the world suspended from a narrow wooden box—they'd found it in a secondhand store—racks of long-playing records, and a covered pool table. Upstairs, Bach was playing. Outside, the bright sun lay on the patio, not a California synapse but a magnificent autumn afternoon along the Atlantic seaboard, yet the leaves were still unraked and the sack of pine mulch was still unopened near the garden shed.

The moment had lived for him, miraculous in a way few others had been these recent autumn days. He sat on his heels in front of the television set, awaiting another miracle.

Ten minutes later the phone rang upstairs, but he ignored it. Betsy was halfway down the stairs, calling to him. “Didn't you hear the phone?”

“I heard.”

“It was Ida Straus calling, looking for Nick. She thought he might be here. Have you seen him?”

“Not recently.” The Cardinals had moved the ball twenty-five yards in three plays, keeping to the ground as they ran out the clock.

“She sounds very worried.”

A blitzing Redskins linebacker was trapped inside; the Cardinal ball carrier broke two arm tackles and rambled for nine more yards.

“I really don't want to get involved in their arguments, Betsy,” he said, “not just now.”

He stood up, the spell broken. He turned toward the stairs, but she'd disappeared without a word. Looking back at the television screen, he hesitated and then switched it off.

Betsy heard the basement door slam and waited for the car to start, but the sound didn't come. Curious, she moved to the study window to look down onto the terrace and saw her husband standing below, wearing an old corduroy yard jacket, holding a fifty-pound sack of pine-bark mulch. He was as motionless as a garden statue, holding the heavy bag in his arms as he looked toward the woods. He didn't move, still looking down into the woods. Then he dropped the bag to the flagstones. It split open, but he had already turned away. A few minutes later, she heard the car start.

Thank God, she thought.

10.

Although the inner courtyard of the Pentagon was now in full shadow, in the windowless warren of offices between B and C rings the sterile white lights burned on, day and night interchangeable, the air within as unchanging as a tomb.

Nick Straus sat at Colonel Roscoe Dillon's desk in the inner office, exploring his chief's pending file, a folder crammed with staff studies and policy recommendations forwarded for comment by other Pentagon offices or bootlegged to Dillon by his network of cronies scattered about the building. Leaning against the wall behind the door was a new poster, prepared that week by someone in DIA graphics for inclusion in the Gallery but removed by Colonel Dillon, who had once been assigned to NATO headquarters in Brussels, and thought it a slur against his former commander in chief.

The caption on the poster read:
MAFIOSO MOUTHPIECE PLEADS FIFTH AMENDMENT
in banner headline fashion, but the picture below, enlarged tenfold, hadn't been taken at a recent Senate hearing on labor racketeering but at testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It showed a taut, seething Alexander Haig in a dark pin-striped suit, head thrust forward belligerently as he ranted about El Salvador.

The poster had drawn no smile from Nick Straus, who had turned his attention that day to the review of current Pentagon projects, his old obsession put aside. It was a race against time. On Colonel Dillon's desk that afternoon he'd found two telephone call slips left for him by his secretary on Friday afternoon, requesting him to call General Gawpin on an urgent matter. He had no doubt what Gawpin wanted to discuss.

The documents he'd found in Dillon's file had been much more troubling, raising doubts that went far beyond his own welfare. One was a Top Secret options paper proposing that U.S. line officers in Europe be given “pre-clearance” for the battlefield use of tactical weapons in Europe—in effect, the yielding of that gravest of presidential responsibilities, the launching of a nuclear attack, to field-grade officers in Europe. A second document was equally frightening. A CIA study passed to DIA for comment concluded that Soviet strategic rocket forces were in the process of changing their readiness posture and would shortly be prepared to launch their missiles at the first sign of hostile intentions, a new “launch on alert” policy that would leave no margin for error. Each side would only reinforce the other's paranoia. Much of the world would be delivered to nuclear terror by the electronic glitches of technology or the brutish muscular spasms of a few front-line field commanders, as primitive as that nameless Berlin battle group colonel Haven Wilson had recently described to him.

The final document that had drawn Straus's notice was a faded Xerox copy of the most recent additions to the U.S. nuclear warhead strike list of Soviet targets. Each nuclear warhead in the U.S. strategic inventory was assigned a military or industrial target in the U.S.S.R. or Eastern Europe. Since the nuclear warheads had by now far exceeded the legitimate targets available, the National Strategic Target List Division had begun to show considerable ingenuity in assigning targets to the newest additions to the U.S. strategic warhead inventory. Nick Straus recognized the Russian place names. They were no longer identifying targets; they were inventing them.

He carried Colonel Dillon's folder to the Xerox machine and began copying those documents that most frightened him. Four pages had been copied when the operating light went out and the machine stopped. Straus pushed the start and reset button, but the machine didn't light up. He reset the plug in the receptacle and pressed the button, but the circuits didn't respond. For months the machine had been his accomplice, sharing his solitude, its voice the only one he trusted, that soft secretive whir-and-whisk that so cleverly flipped the documents out. Its mind had been his mind, a perfect analogue, but now it was dead. Why?

Lifting the cover again, he peered down into the glass but saw only a dim repellent face peering out, eyes as exhausted as his own, lacerated with cowardice and guilt. The hands on the cold gray cabinet had a strange pallor—the transparency of those eyeless fish from an underground grotto—but they moved as he moved.

“
Traitor,
” the machine said. “
Judas and thief.
”

He left the office, his briefcase empty. The corridor he passed through led him by a half dozen deserted DIA offices, where the lights burned and the desks sat empty, their in boxes turned on their sides. At the DIA guard desk, the blue-uniformed security officer was talking to a sweeper from the weekend utility crew, who leaned against a trolley strapped with canvas bags full of unclassified waste.

Straus signed the register and disappeared up the ramp toward the river entrance. A watch officer from the Joint Chiefs passed him on the escalator. “Hey, Straus!” he called. “I thought you guys didn't come in on Sunday!” He wore dress blues. Nick looked at him as if he'd never seen him before in his life. Outside the mall entrance, he paused in the gathering dusk and stood at the top of the steps as if waiting for an official sedan from the motor pool. Then, remembering how he had arrived, he went down the stairs, crossed the road, and found his Ford, parked in a reserved area, a parking summons on the windshield.

“Nick? Is that you?” Ida called to him from the living room as he entered the house. He didn't answer, standing in front of the hall closet as he returned the briefcase to the top shelf. “Nick?”