The Shadow Cabinet (3 page)

“I still think someone ought to bounce that meatball around,” Buster Foreman suggested, eyes narrowed on Senator Bob Combs's simpering face. “Just the way he's dumping on those bureaucrats. What do you think, Haven?”

“Sure, dump on him big,” Wilson replied, searching for his most authentic Players' voice, the same one he had sometimes employed with his two sons, sitting wet and cold in a Maryland duck blind, listening to their complaints about undergraduate inconstancy and the ubiquitous grunginess of the world, most of it centered in suburban shopping malls on a Saturday afternoon. “Another Abscam. Break out the sheets and the dark glasses, get yourself a Halloween beard and a rubber nose. Only that kind of freak show won't play twice in this town, not with a Sunday school teacher like Bob Combs.”

“The guy's a phony,” Fuzzy insisted.

“So are a lot of politicians.”

They sat in silence, listening to the rain come down.

“The rage of Caliban at seeing his own face in the glass,” Nick Straus offered mildly. “Someone once said that explained our contempt for politicians. I think he was right.”

“Combs is special,” Buster said.

“How special?” Haven Wilson was looking beyond Buster toward the door to the bar, where someone stood shaking the rain from a mackintosh, face hidden beneath his hat brim. “You'd better keep your voices down,” he suggested.

“Who the hell's that?” asked Fuzzy.

It was only Herschel Kinkaid, a deputy division chief from Langley on his way home after a long evening at his desk. “What's happened to this place?” he asked as he approached the table, pulling off his coat. “What is it—Saigon east?”

“The old soldiers' home,” Buster said.

“What happened to the old sign out front?”

“It was sold last summer,” Fuzzy explained. “The new guy's going to change the name, but he hasn't decided yet. Get yourself a chair. We don't get waitress service back here anymore.”

Kinkaid brought a chair from one of the empty tables. “Still the same old wrecking crew. These guys recruited you, Haven? You, Nick? What's happening? How come you're watching Senator Combs?”

“Ask the Klan here,” Wilson said. “They're cooking up a tar and feather job.”

“Fuzzy wants to do a number on him,” Cyril said. “Fuzzy and Buster both—a big number.”

“How come?”

“Because he's a meatball,” said Buster. “It's no joke about the Klan, either. Sometime I'll tell you what I've heard about Bob Combs. Anyway, he's a goddamned hypocrite. You know how much those outfits of his have grossed this year? Citizens Washington, Moral Minutemen, the New Congress Coalition. You know how much dough they've raked in?”

“I know it's a lot.”

“Seven million,” Buster announced. “Megabucks. They had to file with the Federal Election Commission, and I read it in the
Post
. The Democrats are flat busted, which is maybe what they deserve, and these turkeys raise seven million just pinching open envelopes, nickel and dime stuff, old widows' carfare. It keeps rolling in.”

“That's too big a goddamned slush fund,” said Cyril.

“Hell, yes,” Fuzzy agreed. “All the more reason someone ought to bust him. It wouldn't be hard, either. Maybe Murph remembers the dates Combs and this staff aide were in Athens. Something like that would leave an audit trail.”

“Something like what?” Kinkaid asked.

“Combs's staffie got some hooker into the sack in Athens,” Cyril said, “and the station chief had to buy her off.”

Nick Straus smiled suddenly, looking at Haven Wilson, who shook his head in sad recollection. The conversation was beginning to sound like one of Brzezinski's covert scenarios for diddling the Soviets in Afghanistan or South Yemen—a few hundred pounds of sugar in the Russian advisers' gas tanks.

“Murph wouldn't have left an audit trail,” Buster was saying. “He would have buried it good.”

“Sure, but GAO could find it, couldn't they, Haven?” Fuzzy asked. “Those CPA bird dogs could find a decimal point in a barrel of sawdust. What you do, see, is you get it all down—names, dates, everything. Then you stick it in an envelope and mail it to Jack Anderson. That's the way to get it started.”

Haven Wilson grimaced painfully, emptying his glass.

“What's wrong with that?” Cyril asked.

“That's not the way it works,” Wilson said.

“That's too chickenshit anyway,” Buster Foreman said. “If you're going to bust this shithead, do it big, wide open, something that's got a little class to it, like the way they nailed Agnew.”

“That's just for openers,” Fuzzy continued. “You start with Jack Anderson, see, but that's just the beginning. A few people read about it, remember something else, and then leak it the same way. It snowballs, like Watergate. Pretty soon the
Post
or
Sixty Minutes
get a handle on it.”

“Sure,” Wilson put in, lapsing again into the vernacular. “
Sixty Minutes
. Why not bring Cronkite back too? You want to grab a few headlines? Why don't you just stick a pipe bomb up his fundament and blow him that way. Get yourself thirty years in the Lewisburg slammer and a lifetime membership in the ACLU, like the Berrigan boys.”

“What's a fundament?” Cyril asked softly.

Nick Straus cleared his throat. “Anus,” he whispered.

“Come on, Haven,” Fuzzy protested. “The guy's a crook, a corn pone sitting there, a natural setup for a lawyer like you. You could burn him big and you wouldn't have to break any laws doing it.”

“That's what you think,” Wilson said. “Combs may talk slow, like all those Carolina country boys, but he's sneaky fast. The only way you're going to burn someone like that is right out in the open, him doing it without even knowing it.”

“Like what?”

“Like always, something stupid. Like Nixon.”

“Hey, like Wilbur Mills,” Cyril Crofton said brightly. “Sure. You get him skinny-dipping in the Reflecting Pool with some Fourteenth Street stripper, like Fanny Frost or whatever her name was. How about that?”

The table was silent. Cyril worked in the Agency's collection evaluation shop, handling satellite imagery, but he had a tabloid imagination. No one could think of anything to say.

“He doesn't drink,” Foreman remembered finally.

“So what if he did,” Wilson said. “Do you think that would slow up a squeaky-shoes preacher like Combs? I know him. He'd just tell those Carolina turnipseeds back home he was checking out her skivvies to make sure it was home-grown cotton. Bob Combs always has an answer.”

“So how do we do it?”

“Get him laid by one of those freaked-out congressional wives,” Cyril continued. “The wiggy Playboy bunny, remember? What was her name?” Embarrassed, they were again silent.

Haven Wilson stood up. “You people are ruining my evening. This place sounds like the old Kappa Alpha house at Charlottesville.” He went across the room and into the front bar. Only a few customers were there, watching the football game on the television set in the corner. The nearby dining room held a handful of diners. He called home from the telephone booth near the front door, but there was no answer. Betsy wasn't yet home from her teachers meeting. When he returned to the table in the back room, they were still talking about Bob Combs.

“You want to know how to get rid of Combs and all that crowd,” he volunteered after a minute. “You don't need anything fancy, not all this clandestine nonsense. It's simple. Cyril was talking about Fourteenth Street a little while ago. I could go down to Fourteenth Street right now, Fourteenth and U, we all could, and in ten seconds get the answer, and in ten more have the crowd ready to do it, that's how bad things are. It's that simple.”

“Do what?” Fuzzy asked.

“Blow up Capitol Hill.”

Nick Straus smiled, but Fuzzy was hurt. “Come on, Haven, stop cracking wise, for Christ's sake. I told you, we're serious. Open up your bag of tricks for a change, give us something to work on. We're not thinking about any black bag job, if that's what you're worried about.”

“Haven's right,” Herschel Kinkaid said. “It'd take something bigger than Abscam to nail Combs and his crowd. Isn't there a game on?” He looked at his watch and got up to cross to the television set.

“We got fed up,” Fuzzy said. “Dallas is stomping all over them.”

Kinkaid turned to the football game, but it was halftime. Howard Cosell was interviewing a black heavyweight fighter about an upcoming fight and doing all the talking. The boxer was just grunting along after him, like a life-termer from Lorton or Sing Sing reporting in to the screw after a day on the rock pile.

“Come on, Herschel,” Buster Foreman complained. “That goddamned dip's worse than the Cowboys.”

“What's the score?”

“Cowboys, thirty-four to seven.”

Kinkaid turned off the set and returned to the table. The rain was still coming down, sluicing from the shed roof in the rear; the sounds from the front room had grown fainter. They drank in silence. The Vietnamese waiter from the dining room stuck his head in the door.

“Telephone,” he called in a thin soprano. “Is there a Mr. Chen with you gentlemen?”

“Sorry,” Wilson answered, looking up at the thin face and the thatch of glossy violet-black hair. “Not here.”

“Try Chinatown,” Cyril sang out without turning his head. The waiter disappeared. Guiltily, Nick Straus put down his glass without drinking.

“This place stinks,” Fuzzy announced to no one in particular.

“It's the fish paste,” Kinkaid said. “It reminds me of the Camel Bar in Nha Trang.”

Haven Wilson knew it was time to go.

“So what have we decided?” Buster Foreman asked, lighting a cigarette. “What are we gonna do to this grade A Carolina turkey?”

“Fry him,” Fuzzy said. “Barbecue him the same way he's been roasting Washington and the federal bureaucracy.”

“Deep fry,” Wilson suggested, reaching behind him for his raincoat. “Deep fat, maybe pork rind—like what you've been chewing for the last hour. Only it's not going to solve anything. Chew it all you want, but you're not going to swallow it. You're just blowing your ears after a day in the pits.”

“We're serious,” Buster Foreman insisted. “Come on, get your wig on—give us an idea to work with.”

“How come you're so hacked off about Combs? He's been around for a few years. He's no worse than a few other senators I could name. He didn't invent Capitol Hill hypocrisy. So why is it Combs you're so bothered about? The Senate's always been filled with small-time chauvinists like Bob Combs.”

“Because he's a goddamned self-righteous hypocrite with seven million bucks in his war chest, that's why,” said Buster.

“Hell, yes,” Cyril agreed.

“You see?” Fuzzy put in quickly. “Cyril's as sore as the rest of us. Nick's mad too, aren't you, Nick?”

Nick Straus frowned, recalled suddenly from reflections which had nothing to do with Senator Bob Combs or the back room at The Players. “Frustrated, I suppose.…”

“What's that got to do with it?” Wilson asked, still looking at Fuzzy. “Sore at what? Because Combs isn't cherry and the rest of the Senate is? They're all the same. I know these people. You're the ones who are cherry.”

“So how come everyone's hacked off the way they are?” Buster asked. “Not just us, but everyone?”

“It's the way things are,” Wilson offered. “Ask Nick—he's the historian. Ask him, he'll tell you.” But Nick Straus faltered, unable to say anything at all. “Everyone's fed up,” Wilson said. “Not just here. Look at France. Now they've got Mitterrand, but no one's happy. Look at Norway, look at Sweden. It'll be Schmidt's turn next in West Germany, then Thatcher's. Revolving-door presidents and prime ministers, that's what's happening. Everyone's fed up.”

“So how come?”

“Because that's what government has grown to—too small for the problems, too big for the people. Now it's amateur night in Washington—four years of it. But no one has any answers, just the same old bullshit. In a couple of years, that'll wash Reagan out too.” He pulled his raincoat across his knees and brought out his car keys. “But that's not why you guys are talking this way. Do you know why you're so pissed off, why you're fed up with Combs, with Reagan, with the Democrats, who're so dead in the water no one's even turned the body over yet? Because it's Monday night and the Redskins lost yesterday. It's raining cats and dogs and half a million Redskin fans who're also Washington bureaucrats in their spare time are sitting around the tube, dying again, just like yesterday, watching the Dallas Cowboys kick the hell out of a team that was twenty points better than the Redskins two weeks ago.” He looked at Buster Foreman, beginning to smile. “So while that's happening, Bob Combs is sitting there on TV kicking the hell out of a few GS-18s who make more money than you do. That's the problem. The Dallas Cowboys are winners, like Bob Combs and his seven-million-dollar political war chest. The Moral Majority, that's America's team, like the Cowboys, like that California sing-along crew in the White House.”

“Now I've heard everything,” Fuzzy said.

“So have I,” Wilson added, “and that's why we're sitting here chewing the fat, the Monday night losers. If you really wanted to get serious, you wouldn't screw around with Bob Combs. Combs is nothing, just flat beer like they used to have down at Fort Bragg. In a couple of years no one is going to remember Combs any better than Wayne Morse, Dirksen, or the Dixiecrats. If you want to burn someone, go after Reagan—he's the man you want. It's easy. I mean, he's a natural nitwit, a puddinghead, a stand-up comedian. You want to do something, show him up for the idiot he is? I'll tell you how to do it.”