(1976) The R Document (9 page)

‘Oh, yes,’ said Young quickly. ‘It’s an amusing story. We can use all the anecdotes we can get.’

‘Maybe you can say President Johnson said it to me,’ said Tynan, winking. ‘No one’ll know the difference. Johnson is dead. Hoover is dead. Who’s going to contradict us?’

‘LBJ could have said it to you,’ said Young. I think we should put it that way. It makes the anecdote stronger.’

‘Yeah, you put it in that way, Young. You know how to do it. And you can put in something else. It’s a dream I had about a week or so ago. I dreamt that J. Edgar up there was jealous as hell of me. He was jealous because I was getting the final big solution to crime in America - the 35th Amendment - because I’d always have that sort of as my monument and he wished he’d had that opportunity. And I told him that in a way he was as responsible as I was for the 35th because without him I couldn’t have been Bureau Director at a time like this.’ He grinned at Young. ‘That was really

my actual dream. Now, isn’t that something?’

Before Ishmael Young could say that it was, or say anything, the buzzer sounded from the Director’s desk.

Tynan appeared surprised, got quickly to’ his feet, and tramped toward the desk. ‘Now, who could that be? I guess Beth must be telling me it’s the President.’

He picked up the receiver. ‘Yeah, Beth?’ He listened. ‘Harry Adcock? Well, ask him if it can’t wait. What’s so important?’ He stood by, then listened more intently. ‘Baxter what? The Holy Trinity matter - Oh, yes, of course, of course, the Collins thing. Okay, tell Harry I’ll be ready for him in a minute.’

He placed the receiver back on the cradle, lost in some reflection. At last he slowly turned away from the desk, and then he saw Ishmael Young and was genuinely startled. ‘You - I forgot you were still here. Did you hear that conversation?’

‘What?’ said Young, pretending bewilderment as he studied his list of questions.

‘Nothing,’ said Tynan, satisfied. ‘I’m afraid some pressing business has come up. We’re still running a country, you know. Sorry to shortchange you this time, Young, but I’ll give you an extra half hour next week. Okay?’

‘Certainly. Anything you say, sir.’

As Young obediently shut off his tape recorder and hastily stuffed his papers into his briefcase, he made a mental note to replay the last of the tape the moment he returned to his bungalow. What was it that the Director had not wanted him to hear? Something about Harry Adcock’s having to see him at once concerning Baxter - that would be the former Attorney General who had been buried yesterday - and the Holy Trinity matter - that would be a code name or - or maybe - Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown - and the Collins thing. That would be Christopher Collins. What could be important about all that? He determined to file away carefully these pieces of what might be an interesting jigsaw puzzle. Maybe, with a few more pieces, they’d give him a better picture of Tynan’s activities.

How he’d like to get something on Tynan, he thought,

as he fastened the catch of his briefcase, something to

counterbalance and possibly eradicate what Tynan had on him. Something that would enable him to get out of this rotten project.

With a wheeze, he came to his feet and started across the office just as Tynan finished unlocking the second of the two doors. Tynan waited, holding the door open for his ghostwriter.

I think this wasn’t a bad session,’ Tynan said cheerfully. ‘Next week will be even better. We’ll go into what I learned from the Old Man, and we’ll talk about some of Vernon T. Tynan’s own contributions to the Bureau. How’s that?’

‘That’s great,’ said Ishmael Young. I can’t wait.’

But what, he wondered, would a dead Attorney General and a Catholic church in Georgetown and a Collins thing have to do with running a country?

Maybe, if he told Collins, Collins could tell him.

Maybe Collins would then owe him a favor.

Or maybe, Young decided, for the sake of his health he’d better forget he’d heard anything at all.

*

‘Hold any calls,’ Tynan ordered on the intercom, ‘unless they’re from the White House.’ He hung up and swiveled to face Harry Adcock, who sat in the pull-up chair across from him. ‘Okay, Harry, what is it?’

‘We ran the check on the priest, on Father Dubinski, of Holy Trinity Church. There wasn’t much. Just one item, way back. He was involved in a drug case in Trenton once, but the police dropped it. Still, we -‘

Tynan straightened in his swivel chair. ‘That’s more than enough. You go in and spring that on him, and then we’ll see -‘

‘I already have, chief,’ said Adcock quickly. ‘I went over to see him late this morning. I’ve just come back.’

‘Well, goddammit, what did he say? Did he spill Noah’s confession?’

Harry Adcock was orderly and chronological in all his narratives. He never gave answers out of sequence, the way

newsmen wrote leads, because he felt it led to distortions, omissions, misunderstandings. Tynan had learned to live with this habit, and he did so now. He drummed the fingers of his right hand on his desk and waited. ’

‘I phoned Father Dubinski early this morning, identified myself, and told him I had to make an inquiry on a matter of Government security,’ said Adcock. ‘I saw him in his rectory at exactly five after eleven. I showed him my identification, my badge, and he was satisfied. At my request, we were alone, just the two of us.’

‘What kind of man is he?’ asked Tynan.

‘Dark wavy hair, lean face, swarthy, as you know. Five feet seven. Forty-four years old. Has been at Holy Trinity about twelve years. An extremely calm and cool man.’

‘Go on, Harry.’

‘I didn’t waste any time. I told him it had come to our attention that he had been Colonel Noah Baxter’s confessor the night Baxter expired. I said we understood that Baxter had spoken to no one but him - that is, to Father Dubinski -before dying. I asked him if that was true. He said it was true.’ Adcock fished into his suit-coat pocket and extracted a folded envelope with some jottings on it. I made notes of our conversation while I was being driven back here.’ Adcock reviewed them. ‘Ah, yes, then he - Father Dubinski - he asked if I had obtained this information from Attorney General Christopher Collins. I said No.’

‘Good.’

‘Then I said, “As you must be aware, Father, Colonel Baxter was privy to some of the Government’s highest secrets. Anything he had to say to anyone outside Government, when he was ill or not in complete control of his faculties, would be of extreme interest to the Bureau. We’ve been trying to trace a leak on a matter of utmost security, and it would be useful for us to know if Colonel Baxter spoke to you about it.” Then I said, “We’d like to know his last words, the words he spoke to you”.’ Adcock looked up. ‘Father Dubinski said, “I’m sorry. His last words were his confession. The confession is privileged. As Colonel Baxter’s confessor, I can reveal his last words to no one.”’

‘The bastard,’ muttered Tynan. ‘What did you say to that?’

‘I said we didn’t expect him to reveal the contents of a confession to any individual. This was information desired by the Government. He answered right away that the Church was not beholden to the Government. He reminded me of the separation of church and state. I represented the state, he told me, and he represented the Church. One could not encroach upon the other. I saw I was getting nowhere fast, so I toughened up.’

‘Good, Harry. That’s better.’

‘I said to him, in effect - I don’t remember exactly - I said to him that despite his clerical collar, he wasn’t above the law. In fact, I said, it had come to our attention that he had once been very much involved with the law.’

‘You laid it right in there? Good, good. How did he take that?’

‘He didn’t say a word at first. Just let me go right on. I reeled off the evidence we had of charges against him for possible drug possession in Trenton fifteen years ago. He didn’t deny it, didn’t even answer, as a matter of fact. I said while he had no formal arrest record, this information -if made public - would make him look pretty bad today. I could see he was angry, all right. Ice-cold anger. He said only one thing. He said, “Mr Adcock, are you threatening me?” I was quick to tell him the FBI doesn’t threaten anyone. I told him the FBI merely collects facts. The Justice Department acts on them. I was very careful. I knew we had no real offense to hang on him. We could only cause him trouble with his parishioners.’

‘All priests are vulnerable in the public relations area,’ said Tynan sagely.

Adcock went on. ‘That’s what I was counting on. That’s all I had to go with. I tried to make it more than it was. I told him that because of his position, he may have inadvertently stumbled upon some vital security information. I told him if he withheld it, then it was inevitable that his name and his past might come up when the security lead was probed. “But if you cooperate with your Government now,”

I said, “then your past is no issue.” I strongly advised him to cooperate. He flatly refused.’

Tynan hit the desk with his fist. ‘Sonofabitch.’

‘Chief, when we deal with clergymen, we’re not dealing with the normal run of men. They don’t react like ordinary human beings. It’s because they’ve got all that God stuff for a backup. Like after he refused to cooperate, he stood up to dismiss me, and he said something to the effect, “You’ve heard me. Now you can do what you want, but I must obey my vow to a higher authority than yours, one that considers the confession sacred and inviolable.” That was it, actually. When I left, I thought I’d give him one last warning. I told him to think it over - because if he didn’t cooperate for the good of his country, we’d have to speak about him and his behavior and his past to his ecclesiastical superiors.’

‘And still he didn’t crack?’

‘Nope.’

‘Do you think he might yet?’

‘I’m afraid not, chief. My evaluation is that nothing will make him talk. Even if we aired his dirty linen, I think he’d prefer minor martyrdom to talking, betraying his vows.’ Adcock was out of breath. He shoved the folded envelope back into his pocket. ‘What do we do next, chief?’

Tynan rose, thrust his hands in his trouser pockets, and paced behind his desk for a few moments. He stopped. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘We do nothing. My judgment is this. If Father Dubinski wouldn’t talk to you, despite what you could have done to him, he won’t talk to anyone.’ Tynan exhaled. ‘Whatever he knows doesn’t matter. We’re safe.’

‘I could still go to one of his superiors, put the screws on him that way, and maybe that’ll -‘

The buzzer sounded. Tynan started for his telephone. ‘No, forget it for now, Harry. You’ve done good work. Just keep tabs on Dubinski from time to time, to keep him in line. That’ll be enough. Thanks.’

As Adcock left the room, Tynan reached for his telephone. He picked up the receiver. ‘Yes, Beth? . .. Okay, I’ll take it.’ He waited, then said, ‘Hello, Miss Ledger.’ He

listened. ‘Fine, of course. Tell the President I’ll be right over.’

*

Vernon T. Tynan did not know any foreign languages, and he knew only a few foreign words he had picked up here and there. Two of the foreign words he knew were French, and they were ‘deja vu’. He knew them because a Special Agent had once used them in a field report, and he’d gotten sore as hell and written the agent that the FBI wrote and spoke English only and to stick to English if he didn’t want to wind up in Butte, Montana. But meanwhile, he had a hazy idea of what the words meant.,

Well, whenever he visited the Oval Office in the White House, which was more and more often lately, the very minute he walked into that room he had the feeling of deja vu, of reliving an earlier experience. This was because President Wadsworth, a great admirer of President John F. Kennedy’s image if not his politics, had restored the Oval Office to the way it had been when Kennedy was Chief Executive. Director Tynan, as a young FBI agent, had on several occasions accompanied J. Edgar Hoover to the Oval Office when the Director had been summoned by Kennedy to witness the signing of some crime bill. There had been the elaborate Buchanan desk, with a green-shaded lamp holding a fluorescent light. There had been, behind the desk, the green draperies hiding the White House lawn, and the six flags - the American and Presidential flags and the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps flags. There had been two square coach lamps on the wall, and on the fireplace mantel, two model ships. The curving walls were painted antique white, and the ceiling with the Presidential seal imprinted upon it looked down on the gray-green rug with the American eagle woven into it. Across the room there had been the fireplace, the facing sofas, and the rocking chair between them. And in the tall black executive swivel chair behind the brown desk there had been President John F. Kennedy.

Now, as Appointments Secretary Nichols ushered him

into the Oval Office, Vernon T. Tynan again had that feeling of deja vu. For a half second, he thought there was President Kennedy behind the desk, speaking to someone, and there was Director Hoover beside him, and here he was a young man once more. But the moment he was announced, the past was dispelled. The man beside him, now backing away and leaving him, was Nichols, not Hoover. The man behind the desk was President Wadsworth, not President Kennedy. And the someone he was speaking to was not a Kennedy aide but Ronald Steedman, the President’s personal public-opinion pollster.

‘Glad you could make it, Vernon,’ President Wadsworth said. ‘Pull up a chair. You can take those newspapers off the chair and - in fact, you can throw them out - they belong in the garbage. Have you read any of them?’

Tynan removed the papers from the chair. He glanced at them - The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Denver Post, the San Francisco Chronicle - before folding them into the wastebasket.

Without waiting for a reply, the President went on. ‘Coast to coast, they’re ganging up on us. Like a pack of wolves, howling for our blood. We’re trying to gag the country, did you know that, Vernon? You should see the editorial page of The New York Times. They call their State Assembly a disgrace for ratifying the 35th. They write an Open Letter to California’s legislators telling them the fate of freedom is in their hands, imploring them to vote down the 35th. And someone tipped us that the next issues of Time and Newsweek carry the same defeatist sentiments.’