Washington Deceased (2 page)

Chapter Three

“Looks like something's going on up there,” Wendy said, nodding toward DuPont Circle a hundred yards away. She and Michaelson were walking along Massachusetts Avenue toward the circle. In paper bags they carried delicatessen sandwiches and half pint cartons of milk.

“They have demonstrations there all the time,” Michaelson remarked. “Often some fellows with orange turbans. The Indian Embassy is fairly close, and the chaps with the turbans seem to be cranky about something or other that the Indian government has done.”

“This looks like it must be a different group.”

“I believe you're right. I don't see any turbans.”

The demonstration was taking place primarily on the other side of the non-functional fountain in the middle, and so it was only when Wendy and Michaelson had crossed the street and actually entered DuPont Circle that they were able to determine the nature of the demonstrators' cause.

“Animal rights,” Wendy said.

Michaelson could read picket signs agitated by two of the demonstrators. One said, “Carnivores Are Cannibals.” The other said, “Meat Is for Meatheads.” A young woman hustled around the circle and thrust a handbill toward them.

“Thank you
very
much,” Michaelson said, accepting it enthusiastically.

Picking their way past three sets of chess players and a greasy-tressed youth playing a guitar, Wendy and Michaelson found their way to a concrete bench on the perimeter of the circle. Michaelson laid the handbill face down on the bench and invited Wendy to sit on it. As soon as she did, he straddled the bench, about a yard away from her.

“Tell me more about what I can do for your father,” he said as he opened his sack.

“Like I said, he's afraid he's getting squeezed for information he doesn't have.”

“Why is he afraid of that?”

“The U.S. Attorney from back home sent someone out to see him about a month ago. The guy who came out implied that dad must know something about a big corruption thing that supposedly happened a couple of years ago or so. Dad's served almost seventeen months of his sentence. He's up for parole in two months. The guy who came out said that if dad didn't cooperate in this further investigation, the U.S. Attorney would oppose his parole application.”

“I see. What's the nature of the information he's supposed to have?”

“They wouldn't tell him. The guy just said something like, ‘Think about sugar and see if your memory comes back.' ”

“Sounds like a script from a bad movie.”

“There's something more,” Wendy said.

“What's that?”

“He thinks he may be in danger.”

“You mentioned that. Why does he think so?”

“He said he couldn't tell me.” Wendy looked away from Michaelson. Her cheeks flushed. “He asked me to see if I could get you to come out and talk to him. Not on the phone, he said. Face to face.”

Michaelson nodded.

“Could we do it this afternoon?” he asked.

Wendy looked back at him, startled. She had thought that, if everything went perfectly,
maybe
she could get Michaelson out to see her father in a week.

“No visiting in the afternoon,” she said. “Tomorrow morning would be the earliest.”

“Tomorrow morning, then. Where are you staying?”

“Hartnett Hall.”

“I know it. I'll pick you up out front at 7:15. That should get us there comfortably by 9:00.”

“Great. I mean, thank you.”

“You're welcome. Before we go out there, there's something you could do yet today. Go to the Library of Congress and see if you can put together a list of the members of Congress who were on the Subcommittees on Western Hemisphere Trade of the International Commerce Committees in the House and Senate for the period from two to five years ago. Also everyone on the staffs of each member.”

“Okay,” Wendy said. “But what makes you think those names will be useful? You don't even know what the problem is yet.”

“True enough,” Michaelson agreed. “But we know that it involves sugar, and we know it involves Congress. Those subcommittees seem like a good place to start.”

Wendy glanced over at the demonstration as she began to attack her sandwich. A short man with wiry black hair was using a bullhorn to address the sign-waving throng. He had already harangued them and led them in antiphonal chants. Now he gestured over to a U-Haul trailer parked illegally at the edge of the circle and eyed skeptically by a brace of D.C. motorcycle officers. Over the bullhorn he promised the sign wavers that soon—
soon
—they would all expose graphically the agony to which innocent animals were subjected in order to satisfy the human species' unhealthy craving for meat.

“I wonder what the problem is,” Wendy said, referring to the demonstration. “It looks like they've run out of steam and are improvising.”

“I've been wondering the same thing,” Michaelson commented. “They probably have something visual planned for the climax, but they can't do it until the TV cameras arrive.”

The man with the bullhorn began slowly to circle the fountain, looking for something new to rev up the demonstrators' flagging enthusiasm.

Wendy shrugged and turned back to face Michaelson.

“You were in the Foreign Service for quite a while,” she said, trying to make conversation.

“Thirty-five years,” he confirmed.

“Why did you leave?”

“Good question.” Michaelson squinted toward Georgetown. He was used to making quick tactical decisions, and he decided now on tactical grounds to tell Wendy Gardner the truth. He reasoned that if Desmond Gardner's problem was half as serious as it sounded, Wendy would be hearing the truth about Michaelson from someone before long. “It was sort of a gamble.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“When I finished my tour as Area Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs, I sat back and looked at what I had still available to me in the Service. It boiled down to a rather vague hope that if things broke just the right way I might be able to exchange the handful of political chits I had for a promotion one or two rungs up from the regular civil service.”

“You have political chits?”

“A few.”

“How did you get those?”

“The usual ways. A couple of once and future presidential candidates sounded marginally less moronic on several foreign policy questions during the last campaign than they would have without my discreet contributions. I saw to it that one or two senators on the Intelligence Oversight Committee knew they were being lied to twelve hours before the
Washington Post
did.”

“And you thought you might be able to cash in on that?”

“I had at least a prospect of doing so. If I'd stayed with the Service I could not unreasonably have hoped for an ambassadorship to one of the countries traditionally reserved for professionals rather than political appointees, or perhaps a senior administrative post—AID Director, that kind of thing. If I were very, very lucky, I could get Deputy Under Secretary of State, or even Under Secretary. Failing any of those, however, I'd just be a Senior Counselor until retirement.”

“That idea didn't appeal to you?”

He shrugged noncommittally. “I decided to go for the gold ring, so to speak.”

“By retiring?”

“By retiring. Getting a sinecure at Brookings. Writing a little book for the cognoscenti. Giving talks to insiders. Having chats over lunch with syndicated columnists. Writing an op ed piece every now and then. Consulting with promising campaigns. Engaging generally in shameless self-promotion.”

“The idea being what?”

“To see if, when administrations change, I could obtain one of the top three foreign policy-making positions available to an unelected American citizen: National Security Adviser, Secretary of Defense or Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Wendy blinked. “Not Secretary of State?”

“It's no use being Secretary of State unless you've made your mark already in one of the three posts I just named. Absent that, the United States Secretary of State has less functional authority than a bird colonel in the White House basement.”

“Is your plan working?”

Michaelson smiled.

“Time will tell,” he said.

“There's something I think I should tell you,” Wendy said. “You've been very kind to agree to help and everything, but—” She hesitated.

“If you think you should tell me something, then by all means do.”

Wendy sat back and forced herself to make eye contact with him.

“I thought that what you were saying back at Brookings about apartheid was appalling.”

“I agree. The truth often is.”

Before they could pursue this topic, the young man with the bullhorn interrupted them. He had noticed defections from the rear ranks of his followers, and there still wasn't a minicam in sight. He was casting about desperately for something to hold the demonstration together for a few more minutes, and when he saw what Wendy and Michaelson were eating he decided he'd found it.

“Do you know how much suffering went into that veal you're eating?” he demanded of Wendy.

“It's chicken,” she said mildly.

“It's still meat,” the man asserted.

“I beg your pardon,” Michaelson interjected, “but it's not, you know.”

“What?” the man squeaked, turning toward Michaelson.

“Meat is the flesh of a mammal,” Michaelson explained. “Like this.” He flourished what remained of his roast beef sandwich. “Chickens aren't mammals. Therefore, chicken isn't meat. You were mistaken.”

“Then what about what you're eating? Do you realize that to produce that sandwich a helpless calf had to suffer unspeakably….”

“Oh, no doubt,” Michaelson shrugged. “But of course it is only my enjoyment of this sandwich that gives meaning to that creature's suffering. If I weren't eating this sandwich, the steer whose fate you bemoan would have lived, suffered and died for nothing.”

To this outrageous proposition the wiry-haired man could conceive only one rebuttal. This was to put his bullhorn as close to Michaelson's ear as he could manage and scream “Cannibal!” at him.

He raised the bullhorn for this purpose, but that was as far as he got. Irritated at the intrusion and furious at the impending incivility, Wendy bobbed up and stuffed the remains of her chicken sandwich into the bullhorn's muzzle. She did this with considerable vigor, so that she not only reduced the roar from the instrument to a pathetic, tinny bleat, but also forced the mouthpiece brusquely against the aggressor's lips and teeth, cutting the former and chipping the latter.

It wasn't clear what turn the confrontation would have taken had a policeman not intervened by tapping the man with the bullhorn on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” the policeman said. “Are you the one in charge of that trailer over there?” He pointed toward the U-Haul.

“Yes,” the man said, rather happy to shift his defiance from the blazing-eyed young woman to the armed cop.

“I'm going to have to give you a citation.”

“What for?” the man sneered. He began to hope that this disaster might be salvaged yet. He raised his voice. “What pretext have you invented for interfering with our peaceful assembly? Disturbing the peace? Inciting to riot?”

The demonstrators hooted appreciatively at these absurd possibilities.

“No,” the policeman explained as he began to fill out the ticket. “Cruelty to animals.”

“What?”

The man looked over his shoulder in time to see two other policemen snap the lock on the trailer and rescue from its steamy inside a calf in a simulated holding pen that the man had been saving to impress the media. Unfortunately, the media chose only now to appear, and began videotaping the heroic efforts of the police officers to save the wobbly-legged calf from the nearly fatal effects of dehydration and overheating it had suffered at the hands of the animal rights activists.

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” Wendy said when she and Michaelson had finished viewing the spectacle.

“Go ahead.”

“What happened to the little finger on your left hand?”

“I lost most of it in an accident,” Michaelson said dismissively. “What you did with the sandwich just now was marvelous, by the way.”

Wendy blushed and shrugged.

“Is that what you meant when you said the use of force is a form of negotiation?” she asked.

“Yes,” Michaelson said reflectively. “As a matter of fact it is.”

***

Michaelson's interest in becoming CIA Director would have surprised those of his former colleagues who had known him only by reputation. The Foreign Service looks on the Central Intelligence Agency in much the same way that an old money, East Coast family might look on a ne'er-do-well nephew who had gone to Hollywood and made a fortune producing pornographic films: that is, with a mixture of embarrassment, contempt—and envy.

Henry L. Stimson captured the Foreign Service attitude perfectly when he explained that he had closed the State Department's code-breaking office because gentlemen didn't read each other's mail. Even today, most old school FSO's still try to ignore the colleagues with titles like Water Hygiene Expert or Attaché for Science and Technology Affairs who pass themselves off as embassy staff but who everybody knows are spooks. The FSOs disapprove of supposed subordinates whom the locals believe (often correctly) to have more real power than the U.S. ambassador, and who have their own private communications link—the back channel—for sending Washington messages that the ambassador not only hasn't cleared but doesn't even know about.

Michaelson never shared this attitude. His view was that gentlemen neither read each other's mail nor launched sneak attacks on each other's naval bases, but that this was no excuse for confusing nation states with gentlemen. He thought that espionage was important, he observed that the CIA was good at it, and he was therefore glad that the spooks were there.