Washington Deceased (4 page)

“How long will that take?”

“About thirty seconds. You just unplug it, find another outlet a little farther away, and there you are.”

“I mean the mirror, Stepanski.”

“Sure. The mirror. Well, if we can get it down yet today, I don't see any reason why we can't have it cleaned and back up by the close of work detail tomorrow afternoon.”

“Do it.”

“Yessir.”

“And Stepanski—one more thing.”

“Yessir.”

“Make damn good and sure you protect that mirror properly if it's gonna be in the Supply Room overnight. There's caustics and paint and cleanser and God knows what all else down there, and I do not, repeat, do not want this thing coming back looking worse than it is now.”

“Yessir.”

***

Squires went into the kitchen. He leaned against the counter and breathed shallowly, in and out. He looked over at the door. He took a palm-sized fragment of tile out of his pocket and examined it. It looked like the piece for Oklahoma on a puzzle map of the United States. The panhandle was a bit elongated and came to an emphatic point. He tested the point and the edge. They were satisfyingly sharp. He wrapped the fragment in his handkerchief and put it carefully in the breast pocket of his shirt.

***

Banich went down the back stairs to the basement. He was mildly surprised to see Stepanski and Lanier lugging a six-foot long, three-foot wide mirror and frame down the corridor. At Stepanski's instruction, he put down his own things and fished the hard plastic, computer hole-punched card from Stepanski's shirt pocket. He inserted the card into a slot on the box mounted above the handle on the Supply Room door, waited for the distinctive click, and opened the door.

Stepanski and Lanier carried the mirror into the room and over to the far corner, diagonally across from the door. They set it upright. Stepanski looked over the shelves of miscellaneous supplies and equipment. He examined a sheet and rejected it as too dirty. Then he shook open a large, cream-colored tarpaulin. He looked at both sides, nodded, and threw the tarp over the mirror and frame. It was more than large enough for the purpose, covering the awkward equipment and falling in generous folds at its base.

“You know something?” Stepanski asked the other two as he completed this task. “CO-2 Smith is dumber than a box of rocks.”

Chapter Five

It was with a sense of exhilaration that, from his modest office at the Brookings Institution, Michaelson called the direct dial number of M. Jerome Casper, Counsel for Hemispheric Affairs in the State Department's Office of Legal Advisor. He was very good at the centerpiece tasks expected of foreign service officers: observation, analysis, reporting. He enjoyed them. What he really loved, however, and what he had really missed since his retirement, was operations: making things happen, getting the treaty signed, talking the drunken and obnoxious American businessman out of jail, engineering transfers for excessively uncongenial CIA station chiefs.

That was what he was doing now. He found himself grateful to Wendy Gardner for giving him a concrete problem he could really get his teeth into again.

He reached a secretary who said that Mr. Casper was engaged and asked if she could have him return Mr. Michaelson's call. Michaelson said that she could.

Mr. Casper was in fact not engaged in anything more demanding than skimming a summary of a dense report on the Commerce Department's chronic inability to grasp the relationship between foreign trade and foreign policy. He had his calls screened because if you don't have your calls screened in Washington you never do anything but talk on the phone. When he saw the neat little pink slip with Michaelson's message on it, and imagined the phone log on his secretary's desk documenting the call for bureaucratic eternity, his own acutely sensitive antennae quivered.

It would be unjust to M. Jerome Casper to suggest that he wouldn't have returned Michaelson's call had Michaelson been just an ordinary citizen. (Of course if Michaelson had been just an ordinary citizen there probably wouldn't have been a call for Casper to return, because an ordinary citizen wouldn't have known Casper's direct dial number or for that matter the fact that Casper or his title existed.) Had such a hypothetical citizen overcome these barriers and called Casper, however, Casper would probably have returned the call, or at least had it returned by somebody else. It might have taken him two or three days to get around to it, but it would've happened.

And it would be equally unjust to M. Jerome Casper to suggest that, had Michaelson been merely a State Department alumnus with whom Casper had been on a first-name basis, he would have greeted the message with only slightly less indifference. In that case, he probably would have called Michaelson back the next morning.

What moved Michaelson higher on Casper's priority list was Casper's knowledge that Michaelson was angling ferociously for a major appointment in the next administration, with at least a ten percent chance that he'd get it. There was a small but real possibility—or risk—that in the foreseeable future he'd be working for Michaelson. He returned Michaelson's call within five minutes.

“Jerry,” Michaelson said when Casper came on the line. “Thank you so much for calling back.”

“Happy to do it, Dick,” Casper said. “What can I do for you?”

“Blaze a trail. I have a call in to a chap at Justice who according to the directory for that department has responsibilities in the white collar crime area. I'm going to try to see him to talk over a problem involving former Senator Gardner.”

“What's Gardner's problem, apart from being a guest of the taxpayers?”

“I don't really know yet. I'm supposed to find that out from Gardner tomorrow morning.”

“The lawyer at Justice is being difficult?”

“I haven't talked to him yet. I'm assuming that an appointment to see him won't be a problem. But I need to come out of that meeting with more than a handshake and ten minutes of generalities, and it occurs to me that since he has no idea who I am he might be a bit tight-lipped.”

“I doubt he has any idea who I am either. I'm not sure I'm the best trailblazer for your purposes.”

“Don't underestimate yourself,” Michaelson said. “I would find it very useful if you could see your way clear to calling the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division to tell him how harmless and patriotic I am.”

“Can I just conceal material information or do I have to out-and-out lie?” Casper chuckled.

“Use your own judgment,” Michaelson answered, politely returning the chuckle.

“You know,” Casper said then, “that proposal to turn all responsibility for drug interdiction over to a single super agency that would take over for the FBI, the INS, the DEA and two or three other outfits has reared its head again.”

“I think I did read something about that in the
Post
a week or so ago.”

“DOJ”—bureaucratese for the Department of Justice—“is very anxious not to get dealt out of the action on that.”

“I can imagine.”

“Because of the role Colombia and some other Latin American countries play in the drug-smuggling problems, DOJ has the idea that my office's opinion on the super agency plan could have considerable influence.”

“I suspect they're right about that, don't you?” Michaelson asked.

“The thing is,” Casper said, “if I call the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division, with both of us knowing how anxious he is for me to make helpful noises on this super agency idea, he might think that I was trying to extract a favor for you in exchange for adopting DOJ's line on the drug thing.”

“I doubt that he has such a devious turn of mind. In any event, I'm sure you'll make it clear to him that there's no connection whatever between the two matters.”

“Tell me, Dick, if I said that to him—there's no connection, et cetera—do you think that might only tend to emphasize the very possibility of such a connection?”

“You may well be right,” Michaelson commented. “Perhaps it's better not to mention it at all.”

There was silence on the line for about three seconds. Casper thought it over. Ten percent at least.

“What's your time frame for this meeting?” Casper asked finally.

“Early Friday morning, day after tomorrow,” Michaelson said crisply. “Thank you, Jerry.”

***

Wendy Gardner stuck with her assignment for almost forty-five minutes after she got to the Library of Congress. Then, two things happened almost simultaneously. First, she began to realize how unspeakably tedious it was going to be to keep paging through dusty reports for the three or four hours it would take to compile the information Michaelson had asked for. Second, she came as if providentially across Randy Cox's name.

Cox had been one of her father's key aides, going clear back to when she still lived in Washington. She had known him pretty well. He was one of the people she was supposed to put on her list for Michaelson. So she checked the Congressional Staff Directory to see where he had gone once her father no longer had a staff for him to be on. And she found that he had gone on to the staff of the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Trade of the Senate International Commerce Committee.

So that was simple, she told herself. No need to plow through a stack of dreary documents from the Government Printing Office. All she had to do was hike a single marble block to the Dirksen Building and have a talk with Randy.

The interiors of congressional office buildings all present the same rather striking contrast. The public areas—hallways, corridors, hearing rooms—are so richly appointed and so far beyond human scale as to seem inappropriate for what is after all a republic. If you penetrate into actual working space, such as staff offices, on the other hand, this impression of opulence vanishes. There you see the people who actually write the first drafts of the nation's laws laboring at unadorned, gray metal desks, squeezed in between bulging file cabinets, buried under mounds of green-covered hearing records, staple-bound reports, and untidy typescript.

Wendy felt at home in these precincts. She had visited them often while she lived in Washington, and less often but still not infrequently during the years between her exile back to the midwest and her father's conviction. She found the office of the subcommittee staff without difficulty and asked the first harried secretary she came to—the staff didn't have a receptionist—if she could see Randy Cox.

The secretary wasn't at all sure she could and seemed in no particular hurry to find out. Cox short-circuited the rather promising confrontation by recognizing Wendy from across the room.

“I'll be with you as soon as I kill an amendment,” he bellowed.

Cox disappeared for a moment behind three stacks of papers tottering precariously on the front edge of a desk. He bobbed back up, dropped a printed page with KILL written across it into a wire basket, and strode across the room. Shaking Wendy's hand warmly, he escorted her toward the tiny cubicle alotted to him.

Cox was in his mid-thirties. Wendy realized that during much of the time he had served her father he must have been about as young as the wonks she'd seen listening to Michaelson that morning. He had seemed much older to her—but of course she'd been younger then herself. Cox had dark, flat hair that he wore just barely long enough to comb. His face was smooth, round and tan. He was about four inches taller than she was, and about sixty pounds heavier. She remembered him as always having his suit coat off with his tie loosened and the top button on his shirt unfastened, and he looked the same way now.

They reached his desk, separated by a shoulder-high, aluminum and particle board partition from desks on either side. Motioning her toward a chair, he circled behind the desk, sat down, joined his hands behind his head, and put his feet on the desk over a massive clutter of paper.

“So,” he said, “how's the senator handling it?”

“As well as could be expected, I suppose.”

“He should be getting out soon, shouldn't he?”

“We're hoping.”

“Just hoping? Is there trouble?”

“There may be,” Wendy allowed. “It's really too early to tell.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Well, actually—”

“You knew he got me this job, didn't you?” Cox interjected. “He took care of everyone on his staff. When he knew he was in trouble and there wasn't any way out, he made sure all his staffers had something else to go to.”

“I didn't actually know that. It doesn't surprise me, though. Listen, you asked if there was anything you could do to help.”

“Right. Anything.”

“I need some information.”

“Uh, information. You mean like Committee information?”

“Yes, committee information.”

“Um, well, yes. That is, ah, Wendy, you realize that much of the information that, uh, comes to the Committee is very, ah, sensitive, and—”

“Excuse me?” Wendy said sharply, her eyes flaring at Cox's indecently hasty retreat from his promise to do anything he could to help.

“Well, Wendy, you said you want Committee information and I can't just hand out Committee information to everyone who'd like to have it.”

“Randy, I want information
about
committees.”

“I'm sorry. Maybe I spoke too quickly. What specifically do you need?”

Wendy told him.

“Oh,” Cox said. “That I can do. I thought you were looking for something else.”

Cox swung his feet off his desk, sat upright behind it and picked up his phone. He punched three buttons and then spoke into it.

“Listen, Cheryl, I need rosters, last six years, this subcommittee and the same one on the House side, members and members' staffs and subcommittee staffs….Yes, Cheryl, I know you're working on something right now. You're working on a bodice ripper and a Virginia Slim. So why don't you just get up off your lazy butt and get me the goddamn rosters, because I need 'em, okay?”

Wendy could readily imagine that the vehemence with which Cox slammed the receiver down wasn't just irritation affected for her benefit. The power that Cox and people like him enjoy comes at a price. A twenty-four-year-old kid fresh out of law school could go to any firm on Connecticut Avenue and get twice what Cox was making and a secretary who'd do what she was told without talking back.

“What did you think I was asking for?” Wendy asked.

“I don't know,” Cox said, shrugging. “You know.”

Wendy didn't know.

“There's lots of confidential stuff around here,” Cox said. “We've got estimates of Chilean copper production for the next twelve months, computer projections of next season's Peruvian cocoa yield and fourteen other things that the average futures market broker would sell his mother to get. We have to be careful.”

“Oh.”

“What's the senator need the rosters for?”

“I'm not sure,” Wendy answered. “Actually, he wasn't the one who asked me to get them. It was somebody else.”

“Who, if you don't mind my asking?”

“You don't know him. An old guy from State named Michaelson that dad asked me to get in touch with.”

“Not Richard Michaelson?”

“Yeah, that's the one.”

“Okay,” Cox said, looking away.

Cheryl came in at this point and ungently dumped a half inch of paper in front of Cox. In apparent defiance of Newton's Second Law of Motion, she seemed to begin moving away from Cox's desk the same instant, without ever having reached a full stop during her journey toward the desk.

“Hey, Cheryl,” Cox called to her as he thumbed the papers.

“Yeah?” She half-turned and looked over her shoulder at him.

“The law against sex discrimination doesn't apply to Congress. Did you know that, Cheryl?”

“What—”

“And the Civil Service Act doesn't apply to Congress either. Did you know that?”

“
You
wanna know something, Randy?” Cheryl said, turning around to face him and displaying complete indifference to the information that she could be fired at will without any recourse. “You've got a real elitist attitude.”