The Shadow Cabinet (2 page)

“I'll do that,” Wilson said, hoping to bring the conversation to an end.

“Like I said, these are fast-moving times,” Larabee said, signaling for the waitress. “Historically, over the last couple of years they've been moving like Gangbusters, but you factor in Reagan and that's what you'd expect, right? A cloud-buster, right out the fucking roof. Now's the time to go for it, Wilson.” Larabee paid the check.

Outside, the rain had stopped momentarily. A taxi was waiting for Larabee at the curb.

“Thanks for the drink,” Wilson said. “Glad to hear you're doing so well.”

“Anytime. It's Chuck, remember. Sorry I have to run.” He crossed the pavement, but turned back at the door of the taxi. “You're ready to roll, right? Nothing you're working on except this real estate deal. I can tell my pals that, right?”

Wilson watched the cab drive away and turned back toward Farragut Square. Traffic was lighter. With the rain gone, a fine mist hovered in the air. At the parking garage two blocks away, he stood under the overhang, waiting for his car. He was still puzzled. If Larabee had been trying to hustle him, he was very confused about something. Confused or uncertain, perhaps both. He'd been trolling for information.

A pair of young businessmen in beige car coats and Irish hats waited nearby. “The world's greatest grandma and they franchised her,” he heard one say. “She didn't think much of the idea at first, but it went over like Rubik's cube.”

Wilson lifted his eyes, depressed.

“What, the franchise?” asked the other. Both looked to Wilson like advertising or public relations executives. Their Italian shoes and calfskin briefcases were identical, like their Irish hats.

“Yeah, the Pacific Northwest,” said his companion. “She drove a fork-lift for Boeing, I think it was. Sixty-eight years old, with a red bandanna around her neck and one of those blue-and-white engineer's hats. ‘World's Greatest Grandma,' that's what she had stenciled on her forklift. When the snack bar vending machines were pulled out by the concessionaire, she started bringing in homemade cookies to sell to the day shift. They caught on big; just a cottage industry, you know, but she kept at it, still driving her forklift. She didn't think about going public, but her kids franchised her. ‘The World's Greatest Grandma.' Just like that. Now they've got vending concessions all over. It's a great success story—a four-million-dollar account for our L.A. office.”

A gray Ford LTD moved up the ramp, stopped, and the two men climbed in. Stupidly, still holding Larabee's envelope, Wilson watched them drive off.

“This yours?” a black youth called from across the ramp, leaving the front door of the old Chevrolet station wagon. On the rear window was a Georgetown University logo and on the bumper below, a tattered
I
Don't Brake for Republicans
sticker. The vehicle had belonged to Haven Wilson's younger son during his final two years at Georgetown but was too old and too undependable to take him across country to Oregon, where he'd taken a job with a newspaper after graduation. Wilson had bought it from him for the price of a plane ticket to Portland.

“Yeah, it's mine.” He tore up Larabee's envelope and dropped it into the trash barrel on the ticket booth island. Thunder boomed across the rooftops.

“Say what?” the black youth asked. A wooden African comb was stuck in the back of his woolly hair.

“Washington,” Wilson said, digging fifty cents from his pocket. “The world's greatest grandpa and they're franchising him.”

2.

At the rear of a McLean shopping mall and only a few miles from Washington in the Virginia suburbs, The Players still drew a regular luncheon crowd from the nearby beltway consulting firms, from assorted federal agencies, and from CIA headquarters at Langley, but the evening trade in the back room had moved elsewhere after the tavern was bought by an enterprising Vietnamese who'd changed the menu and the decor. Bamboo and tropical plants had replaced the gin-and-bitters English pub atmosphere. The dark oak, the sporting prints, and the polished brass were gone; so were the obscure photographs, the foreign maps, and the tattered red-and-blue Vietcong flag that had once hung, under glass, next to the WC—all packed away by the former owner for a new nautical fish and steak house in Boca Raton. One more casualty of the post-Iran withdrawal syndrome, some said, taking their memories elsewhere.

On Monday nights in autumn and winter, a few diehards from the old days still gathered in the back room to drink, grouse, and watch Monday night football. With the decline of the Redskins, the economy, and the dignity of federal service, now challenged by that spirit of feckless amateurism that had overrun Washington with the Reagan victory, the back room gatherings were often as churlish as a last poker game in a condemned firehouse.

Haven Wilson was an occasional member of the back room chin and chowder society. It was a morose group he found assembled there this Monday night, watching a public television documentary on the Moral Majority. Senator Bob Combs was on the tube, his performance videotaped during a recent Senate hearing.

“Someone ought to burn his ass,” he heard Buster Foreman say. “Burn him big, bigger than Nixon.” Foreman was a large man, an ex-CIA rowdy with a large man's bullying contempt, his voice burdened by twenty years of bureaucratic grievances.

Someone had turned down the sound on his way to the bar in front, wearied of Combs's courtly South Carolina drawl as he chastised a trio of regulatory bureaucrats. Now they sat looking at the pink pubescent face. Without the sound, the cherubic head ballooned larger than life, the bubble-gum kiss on the Moral Majority valentine PBS was blowing the nation's capital on a rainy night following another Redskins loss.

“He's an airhead,” said Cyril Crofton, a thin, dyspeptic CIA analyst.

“Pure celluloid,” Buster Foreman said, “a Baptist shyster—Genesis, grits, and shit. Ask Murphy when you see him, ask him about Senator Combs. He was at the embassy in Athens when Combs came through. Ask him what kind of shyster Combs is.”

“Where is Murphy these days?” asked Nick Straus, his gray head still damp from the rain. Haven Wilson was surprised to see him there. He'd come wandering in a few minutes before Wilson, like a stray cat, arriving on foot from his house a few miles away. Small, fiftyish, with mouse-gray hair and mild brown eyes, he'd worked twenty-five years at the Agency as a Soviet analyst and arms control technician, but had been retired during the housekeeping sweep of the late seventies. He'd hired on with a beltway defense firm, lost his job, been treated for acute depression, but six months earlier had been hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon.

Improbably, thought Wilson, who couldn't explain it. The Nick Straus who sat next to him now was only the ghost of the man he'd known for fifteen years. He'd attended his retirement luncheon at Langley, when Straus had received the career intelligence medal. Wilson thought he'd deserved better. He remembered the luncheon now, looking at Nick's shoes. His socks didn't match, the shoes were shapeless black oxfords with worn ripple soles, and the feet didn't look like Nick Straus's feet at all.

“Murphy's selling commo systems out of a place out in Rockville,” Buster Foreman said. Fuzzy Larson came back from the bar in front. “A letch,” Foreman continued, still watching Senator Combs. “He doesn't sweat much, either, you notice that? It must be a hundred and five under those lights and he's not cooking, not even sweating.”

“The guy's a jerk,” Fuzzy Larson said loudly. He was short and blond, the dome of his head covered with a fine feathery down, like an Easter chick. A former FBI and CIA technician, he'd left Langley a year earlier to open a forensics crime lab with Buster Foreman and a retired FBI lab man. “Look at that mouth, how wet it is. Always working too, you notice that. All juiced up.”

“Tell them the story about Combs in Athens,” Buster suggested, “the story Murphy told us.”

“Oh, yeah,” Larson recalled. “It was one of Combs's staff aides. I forgot all about it. Do you know who I'm talking about, Combs's number one aide, what's his name?” He appealed to Haven Wilson, who knew the name but only shook his head. “Anyway, Combs comes through Athens with this staff aide, who gets some Greek broad in the rack and tries some funny business with her, the way he thinks the Greeks do. So she yelled her head off and someone had to shut her up quick. This aide is drunk, the control room crowd at the hotel in Athens is running around like crazy, doing the funky chicken, and so the station did it, deuces wild. Three o'clock in the morning and they get the goddamned station chief out of bed to buy off a ten-dollar hooker. Combs was sleeping right there in the next room, so you know he's gotta know what kind of meatball his staff aide is. What do you think of that?”

“They're all meatballs,” Buster Foreman said, his eyes still lifted to the television screen. “Look at that idiot. I'll bet he diddled his way through Bible school down in South Carolina or wherever it was. I'll bet he's still diddling.”

“So what did Murphy have to do with it?” Cyril Crofton asked.

“He had to come up with the dollars to buy her off,” Fuzzy said. “The next day this jerkwater staff aide says he doesn't remember anything about any Greek girl, the station chief was out of pocket, and so Murph paid him back out of some operational account. Then a week later in Rome, super-dick gets into the same kind of jam again, and the station had to pull his pants back on there too.”

“Which proves what I said,” Buster Foreman drawled. “Which proves it right there. The guy's a hypocrite. Look at that goddamned prissy little mouth.”

“It's the holier-than-thou crud that gets me,” Cyril Crofton said. Cyril knew Congress only at a distance, Haven Wilson remembered, unlike Buster Foreman, who'd spent some time in secret testimony on the Hill after the Angolan debacle. “How the hell do they get away with it?”

“Money,” Buster said. “Big dollars. He talks like that, roasting those bureaucrats, and the bucks come rolling in. Look at his face. He's blowing every right-winger in town with that spiel, blowing 'em big, right on the tube. What do you think, Haven? Are these guys for real or not?”

“I'd say so,” Wilson replied. It was time to go but he didn't move, curious as to what Combs might be saying. “But there are plenty of screwballs around these days, not just Bob Combs. A lot of other people think they've got a piece of this administration.” He was thinking of Chuck Larabee. Their conversation still made no sense to him.

“Like who?” Cyril Crofton asked, turning.

“The big chili-and-taco crowd from Texas, the funny-money millionaires from the West Coast, the tightwad burial insurance tycoons in between. Who've I left out?” he asked Nick Straus, smiling.

“The committee for the coming deluge,” Straus said.

“You think he's kidding?” Buster Foreman broke in. “See what he's saying now.”

“The same old crap.” Fuzzy Larson got up to adjust the volume.

“… an' what you burr-o-crats have to unnerstan' is that the good folks o' this country who're paying for all these reg-u-lations have had enough. Y'all think you can jes' set there, set here in Wash'n'ton the way you been a-doing since the Great Society giveaway an' mandate social mor
-ees
by reg-u-lation an'
fee-
at
. Well, lemme tell y'all—it's not a-gonna happen anymore. Those good folks out yonder have had enough. They've given us a man-date.…”

“What kind of mandate is that clown talking about?” Buster Foreman broke in irascibly.

“The one the White House keeps telling you about,” said Haven Wilson. “A Republican landslide.”

“A bullshit landslide,” Buster said. “It didn't happen.”

“Hell, no, it didn't happen,” Larson joined in. He turned the dial to the Monday night football game and they watched a Dallas Cowboy corner-back strip the ball from an opposing tight end. The Dallas free safety scooped up the ball on a lucky bounce and carried it out of bounds to stop the clock, hands lifted to take a few high fives from his teammates as he joined them on the sidelines.

“The receiver was down, for Christ's sake!” Fuzzy shouted. “Did you see that! He was down! Where the hell was the whistle!”

“Dallas has already got them by four touchdowns,” Buster Foreman complained. “What the hell are they stopping the clock for?”

“The killer instinct,” Haven Wilson offered. “What the Redskins don't have. Democrats either.”

“We don't wanna see Dallas score another touch,” said Buster, “not those crybabies. Always trying to rub it in. Turn it, why don't you?”

“No one's blowing the whistle,” Fuzzy said. “That's the whole goddamned problem.” He turned back to the public television special on the Moral Majority. The screen, dissolving into shades of Easter egg pastel as a late jet from National Airport passed over, wobbled briefly toward a psychedelic smear, then Senator Bob Combs's face came throbbing back. “… an' I can tell you the way we're gonna go,” he was saying. “I can tell you right now. We're gonna create an America where private initiative is the dominant social force—you unnerstan' what I'm a-saying.…”

Larson turned down the volume. Foreman sat slumped in his chair, gazing vindictively at the irradiated pink face. “Look at that face,” Cyril Crofton muttered. “The man's an airball, a bubble-gum airball.”

“It's about time this country woke up,” Fuzzy declared.

Haven Wilson laughed. “What do you think's happened? Where have you been, anyway? They did wake up. Why do you think we've got that TV cowboy in the White House?”

“He didn't win it,” Fuzzy insisted. “That goddamned Carter blew it.”

“That's right,” Wilson said. “Like the Redskins blew it yesterday, like the Cowboys aren't winning it tonight—just the other team blowing it.”