Echo House (39 page)

Wilson Slyde was eavesdropping from a safe distance, aware that Bud was making a mistake talking to the Venerables. Harold and Lloyd and their
salon des refusés
had been out of step with every administration since Eisenhower's. They were as long-lived as the French impressionist painters and in later years came to resemble them, with their out-of-date clothes, long hair, irregular habits, and singular insights. Harold Grendall was Monet's double, as wide as a barge with cheeks as smooth and pink as a lily pad. Lloyd Fisher was as bent and shrunken and saturnine as Toulouse-Lautrec and as mischievous. Washington honored the Venerables but didn't know what to do with them and their sarcastic sermons of reproach. And from the look of things, that was what Harold was getting into now, his heavy finger wagging at Bud Weinberg's chest, Lloyd at his side nodding vigorously. Easy to imagine Harold's complaint; it had not varied in twenty-five years: the cowardice and ignorance of the young, their disloyalty and carelessness, their twenty-second attention spans, their arrogance and self-absorption. When they quit the battlefield they didn't have the courtesy to shoot the wounded. You couldn't even call them cynics, since they knew neither price nor value.

They're going to hang you out to dry, Bud.

They're turds. They're creatures of television. They don't care about government, they care about elections. They live by image. Die by image, too. That's why they care so much about "perception." They don't believe in anything.

They're 'fraidy cats.

Bud Weinberg was attentive but stepped back, as if to distance himself from Harold's tirade. Harold's voice had risen so that those in the vicinity could hear him easily. There was some nervous laughter and one or two of the younger men had turned their backs. Wilson Slyde edged closer so as to miss nothing.

They had come to the capital's generational fault line. It was an argument over the inheritance. The old men seemed to exist as a rebuke, relics of the empire that had mastered the Depression and fought a two-front war, in which all able-bodied men participated, as opposed to departing for Sweden or declaring themselves homosexual or sheltering in law school or faking murmurs of the heart, and still had resources left over to rehabilitate the nations of Europe and Asia while defending them against the Stalinist scourge; and at that critical moment managed to assemble the most talented cohort of public servants since the Founding Fathers, men who were poor when they entered government and poor when they left it, often with damaged reputations, owing to the recklessness of Senator McCarthy.

And the Venerables were not shy about reminding everyone what Washington had been and what it had become, a self-infatuated money-grubbing iron triangle of stupefying vulgarity, vainglory, egoism, and greed, worse than Rome because at least in Rome there was lively sexual license, orgies and the like. These people wouldn't know an orgy if it patted them on the ass and said, Please. The present-day crowd along with their unspeakable arrogance were intolerant. They were sanctimonious. They were puritans. They were budget-cutters, cheap Charlies. In his mountainous contempt for contemporary Washington, Harold was fond of repeating Mandelstam's epitaph for St. Petersburg: "Like sleeping in a velvet coffin."

This estimate of the nation's capital at the turn of the millennium did not go unchallenged. To younger Washingtonians the opinions of the old men seemed anecdotal, dated, nostalgic, and partial, a loud fart from another time altogether, more unreliable Cold War propaganda. They not only had their own stories about what Stalin had :old Chip and what Chip had told George and what George had said to Tommy and what Tommy had told the President; they had their fathers' stories about what the President had told Cohen and what Cohen had told Corcoran and what Corcoran had said to Frankfurter and what Frankfurter did. All very well and good, but weren't these more ghosts from the past come to terrorize the present? There was another way to look at it, and that was that these most talented public servants since the Founding Fathers, with their admirable modesty and high intelligence, had bankrupted the nation fighting foolish unwinnable wars and encouraging dubious insurgencies, all because of what Stalin had told Chip and what Chip had said to George, et cetera. And they had declined to levy the taxes needed to pay for the installation of the New Enlightenment, their American century. And when the Russian empire had reached its megalomaniacal limit, it collapsed. Even so feckless an operator as Mikhail Gorbachev had brought it to its knees; and now it existed as a collection of impoverished semifeudal states, with grotesque arsenals of nuclear weapons, wholly dependent on the forbearance and generosity of the West, and all thanks to the paranoia of Chip, Tommy, and George, and to that list you could add Harry, Ike, Joe, Edgar, Foster, Jack, Bobby, Dean, Allen, Bob, Mac, Lyndon, Hubert, and Behl, Grendall, Fisher, Peralta, and that Polish agent provocateur Przyborksi, not to mention the unindicted co-conspirator Richard Milhous Nixon, who had poisoned the well for a generation, nearly destroying the nation's fragile faith in its political processes. Hell, yes, the country was in a sorry way and Washington sorrier still. The Treasury was empty. And as for 'Nam—could it not be humanely said that the true victims were those obliged to dodge and weave to save their skins, nobly refusing to be led like lambs to the killing fields? Victims, yes—and heroes, too, answering a higher call.

But these complaints went unsaid. In the amiable setting of Axel's birthday party there was no point refighting the generational quarrel over the size and value of the inheritance; certainly it would be churlish to do so.

The young lawyer turned away, leaving the old warriors to circulate as loud-mouthed curiosities, publicly congratulated and privately despised, the oldest creatures in the zoo and the most troublesome.

The room was brilliantly lit, flowers everywhere along the walls. A barrel-shaped glass vase of red, white, and blue roses, arranged in the French tricolor, rested in the fireplace, pride of place which the ambassador duly noted. Everyone knew that the old man was a great friend of France and that Charles de Gaulle himself had fixed the rosette of the Legion d'Honneur on his lapel, for his wartime exploits and other services to the nation. There had been so many stories about Axel Behl's moment in Aquitaine that Paris sent a team to investigate and establish the truth once and for all. They discovered a hospital record in Poitiers and the report of the gendarme who had found the mangled Jeep. And there the trail ended. No one could account for the twenty-four hours before the accident. The agents ventured deep into the countryside and learned nothing, the peasants so suspicious and closed-mouthed, unwilling to say anything beyond a muttered
comment?
The agents searched for a château, which according to the rumors had been occupied by the two Americans the night before, a château with a vineyard, it was said; but there were dozens of châteaux, and all of them had vineyards. The owners were polite but uninformative. Of a massacre in August 1944, all those questioned were adamant: there had been no massacre because the Germans had gone, routed by Patton. When the investigators inquired into a massacre of French civilians, they were turned away with a shrug and a sigh. So the mystery remained a mystery, though the chief of French intelligence was convinced that everyone was lying and that something most untoward had occurred. One always liked to tie loose ends, but in the meantime Monsieur Behl had performed a number of very valuable services; and his son was no less helpful. Of course the government had a dossier on Alec Behl, courtesy of Avril Raye.

The pianist was playing Jerome Kern but no one was listening. The crowd pulled and surged through the front door, swirling, spilling into the foyer, pausing to greet and be greeted, commencing animated conversations, only to abandon them at the sight of a new arrival The current was interrupted here and there by eddies of countercurrent, guests stepping out of the way to talk privately or to inspect the artworks, the Hopper over the fireplace and the Caleb Bingham next to the grandfather clock, and the Homer and the Hassan looking oddly out of place, their frames suggesting a cottage on the Maine coast or Cape Cod. Conversation ascended in a crescendo to the ceiling, where it collapsed, crashing to earth. The glass chandeliers trembled in the din.

Weinberg's here; did you see him?

He's an embarrassment—

God, it's warm. Why can't they open the windows? Someone should say something to them.

It's the Secret Service. Damned Gestapo.

Waiters were perspiring as they moved with trays laden with glasses of Perrier and flutes of Champagne, many more of the former than of the latter. On the sideboard the tub of caviar sat in a puddle of melted ice and the foie gras had started to run, not a pleasant sight at all, and at that moment Mrs. Hardenburg seized a waiter by the arm and told him to replenish the ice at once and to place the foie gras on a cold platter before her reputation as caterer and social organizer was ruined. And fetch another bottle of Stolichnaya while you're at it, she told the waiter, because on this warm night people wanted something cold in their hands. The strange fact was that while the young and middle-aged sipped Perrier or Champagne, the old people were assembled three-deep at the bar, demanding a gin martini or vodka and tonic or Scotch over ice, in some cases their fingers so bent by arthritis and beset by nervous tremor that they had difficulty holding the glass, and indeed it often clicked against the rings on their fingers.

Everyone had arrived except the President and his wife and the White House chief of staff. A few of the guests were from Europe and the West Coast, a few more from Boston and New York, but mostly they were Washingtonians, each now with his or her little white envelope indicating the table for dinner. There were ten tables of ten, visible now through the double doors, crystal and silver glittering in candlelight; a full moon was rising over the lawn. Envelopes were already being compared, because it was no secret who would be at the head table with the guest of honor. Yet, if one looked around at the distinguished gathering, a bad seat would be hard to imagine. Well, Harold Grendall would be a bad seat. Lloyd Fisher would be worse. André Przyborski would have his hands all over you like a teenager in heat; of course André was gone but his spirit was present. They should be sent to the children's table, where they belonged.

"Lovely party."

"Thanks so much for having us."

"Hello, Alec."

"Virginia," Alec said. He kissed her on the cheek, avoiding the aviator glasses; he noticed she was wearing a tiny gold Carrier wristwatch, the watch peeping out under Armani's creamy silk sleeve. Her voice was newly modulated, the better to butter up a microphone. She had begun to look like Katharine Hepburn. Alec said, "Do you know Avril Raye?"

Virginia Spears nodded at Avril and turned back to Alec. "Is that Bud Weinberg, the one talking to old man Grendall and Lloyd Fisher?" She pointed at the three of them still standing in the wide archway leading to the living room. Harold was talking and the others were laughing. When Alec nodded, she said, "Will you introduce me?"

"Sure," Alec said. "Why?"

"I hear things."

"It's all right," Alec said. "You can talk in front of Avril."

"He has a son, doesn't he?"

"So I've heard."

"Well," Virginia said. "His nomination's kaput."

"Planning on doing some filming?" When she smiled enigmatically, Alec added, "Quite a campaign against Bud."

"The usual," she said with a shrug. "No surprises. Bud Weinberg's put the White House in a mighty bind, and while that doesn't bother me, it bothers them. And that makes a story for me." While she spoke she watched the three in the archway. "I heard he's a nice guy but's got shit for brains. Some after-hours irregularity, too, I hear. Never mind. I'll introduce myself." She swept a glass of Champagne from the tray of a passing waiter and hurried to the side of Harold Grendall, who stopped talking at once.

"Watch out for her, Avril," Alec said.

"I know who she is."

"She was fine when she needed you but she stopped needing people a long time ago When you talk to her, have your own record."

"I never talked to reporters," Avril said. "Iron rule, no exceptions. I'd leave instructions that I was not in, ever. And then—I don't know when this happened but it seems like yesterday—the only way I could get a message to your government was through people like Virginia Spears. No one reads their mail in this city, and if you get to see someone he's so anxious to explain how difficult his position is and how numerous his burdens that he can't listen to you. I tried to cultivate them, including that one," she said, nodding at Virginia Spears, who had her arm on Harold Grendall's arm and was looking at him as if he were the thirty-year-old Spencer Tracy, "because I had a very important message to send to your national security adviser, the usual NATO trash but it was important to us. And I thought, quite frankly, that with her there might be some female solidarity. That's what I kept reading and hearing in your glorious free press, women helping women because you never get a break with the men. And then I discovered that my time was past. I discovered that they don't want to talk to me. They won't waste their valuable time talking to me because France is not high enough on their food chain and my name hasn't been in the papers so I couldn't possibly know anything and, for me, it was simply too infra dig to tell her plainly—listen, chérie, I'm the resident SDECE here and I have some information to trade so answer your telephone and let's make the bouillabaisse."

Alec began to laugh.

"Virginia Spears, she's disgusting. She probably thinks I'm the embassy sommelier or the ambassador's mistress, though come to think of it, if I were the ambassador's mistress I'd be a reliable source, a middle-aged French bimbo who reads the old man's mail. And I'll tell you something else, Alec. Remember what Monsieur Jefferson said, that if he had the choice of a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter? He got his wish."