Night of Camp David Page 16

  An article about his declination appeared in the Washington Post, and President Hollenbach phoned MacVeagh as soon as he read the story, calling Jim away from the breakfast table.

  “You did exactly right, Jim,” said Hollenbach. His heartiness at eight in the morning was dismaying. “You don’t need the exposure of a national TV show. Things are off to a booming start as it is. I’m very pleased the way things are going.”

  “Thanks, Mr. President,” Jim answered, “but I must say I don’t like this dissembling. I don’t like to twist the truth.”

  “But you’re not tampering with the truth,” Hollenbach chided. “Have you been nominated for vice-president?”

  “No, sir. I haven’t.”

  “Neither have you been selected finally by me. I told you that as of now you’re my preference and that we need to build you up. And that’s exactly what we’re doing, Jim.”

  The President was toying with him. Lord, how he enjoys this cat-and-mouse game, thought MacVeagh. “I realize that, Mr. President. But it’s difficult to pretend that I’m not receiving White House support.”

  “This part is just the mechanics, Jim. You let me worry about it. What I want you to do is to begin giving some serious consideration to the grand concept.” The President’s voice took on a lilt and an eagerness. “We’re going to need another good long talk about that soon. Some new ideas are percolating that I want to try out on you.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jim. “I’m anxious to hear them.”

  The phone call cracked the layer of normality which had formed like a crust over Jim’s profound misgivings. For several days he’d felt remarkably like his old self. The excitement of the political maneuvering, the parry and thrust at sessions with the press, the phone calls from wondering politicians around the country, the ballooning requests for speeches—some with quite fancy fees—all combined to make him forget his suspicions. The ugly thought which led him to Griscom’s sleek offices in the World Center Building had been smothered by the bustle of activity, the clamoring reporters, the telephones which jangled far into the night. The flurry and bounce of a campaign year clattered about him, and Jim felt almost normal again. He was too busy to reflect.

  But the President’s phone call, with its pointed reference to “the grand concept,” plunged him into a quick, brooding depression. If Hollenbach’s state was a temporary one, as Griscom had suggested, why this prolongation of the super-union fantasy? Life was not the same, after all. There was this other world, sinister, baffling, unreal, the shadowy world of Aspen lodge, and its banks of clicking computers recording every telephone call, its lurid spectacle of a consolidation of nations, and its petty, frightening rages against O’Malley, Davidge and Spence, three good men who meant no harm.

  Jim left his McLean house absent-mindedly, forgetting the usual kiss for Martha and neglecting to pull down the garage door, a daily habit as ingrained as brushing his teeth.

  Driving his convertible over the George Washington Parkway, he turned the windows down. The sharp morning breeze, bearing the scent of budding springtime, whipped through the car and plucked at the fabric top. His doubts about Mark Hollenbach refused to drift away. They lay heavy on his mind again, shutting out the fragrance of this new day of late March. He felt obstructed and thwarted, as though penned by a slowly rising fence. Paul Griscom had been no help at all. Instead, the lawyer thought that MacVeagh himself needed psychiatric aid. And that curious visit from Luther Smith. Why would a Secret Service agent question a United States senator, unless…Could it be that Smith actually suspected that he, MacVeagh, had harmful designs on the President? No, that was preposterous. Nobody could get such a wacky idea. Still, why the visit then? And why was he the only one who wondered about Mark Hollenbach? He’d asked around the Hill, cautiously, probing with questions tucked innocently into the flow of conversation. But not a single person had indicated that he’d noted anything strange about the President’s behavior. Were those nights at Camp David only a dream, after all? Jim laughed derisively at himself. As an investigator, he’d make a good dump truck operator. About all that he’d accomplished so far was to make at least two people, Griscom and Smith, suspicious of Senator MacVeagh.

  Glancing in the rear view mirror before making the loop to cross Memorial Bridge, MacVeagh’s eyes held a moment on a gray sedan behind him. It resembled a hundred other cars, but something about it seemed vaguely familiar. He glanced again while curving around the Lincoln Memorial and again when he turned into Constitution Avenue. The gray sedan was still behind, driven by an apparently youngish man in a snap-brim felt hat. Of course. Now he realized. He had seen that same automobile behind him a number of mornings recently, but until now the fact had failed to register. He could not see the driver’s full face, but the outline of the head and features triggered his memory. Was he being followed? MacVeagh turned left, just beyond the old Navy Building, and drove along 17th Street toward Pennsylvania Avenue. He eyed the rear-view mirror. The gray sedan also turned left into 17th. When MacVeagh turned right on Pennsylvania, so did the gray sedan with the snap-brimmed driver. Both cars passed the White House, bright in the morning sun. Why, damn it, he was being followed!

  Suddenly a mental shape materialized as though the last pieces of a jigsaw puzzle had transformed meaningless bits into a logical whole. He thought he’d seen the same man near him a number of times recently, a tall, young man in snap-brim hat, his face blank and unconcerned. The man had been near him at a drugstore counter in McLean, again on Connecticut Avenue near DuPont Circle, where he’d stopped to buy flowers for Martha, and once again when he took Chinky to the movies. Now he was sure. Also, at a Senate hearing, he’d seen another face that seemed familiar, a youthful face. Hadn’t he seen those features on a campaign trip somewhere? Oregon, California? It began to fit together now, all of it. He, Senator James F. MacVeagh of Iowa, was being tracked. He was under surveillance by persons who knew their business.

  Now he kept shifting his eyes constantly to the rear-view mirror. The gray sedan clung there, never more than one or two cars behind him. When he turned into the Senate Office Building’s underground garage, he could see the sedan continue on down the street, slackening its speed.

  The certainty that he was being watched, probably by federal agents, deepened his mood of dejection. He knew he should be either outraged or laughing out loud. The idea of a vice-presidential candidate being trailed by federal sleuths was either sinister beyond belief or it was utterly ridiculous. But Jim couldn’t shake the black mood. He felt forlorn and vacant, as though slowly spiraling downward in an unknown void. Even a morning of more than ordinary activity failed to dispel his despondency. He dictated letters to prominent constituents, talked about the ever-inflating vice-presidential balloon with Flip Carlson, took a dozen phone calls, and received three sets of callers, including a group of 4-H youngsters from Iowa who filled his office with wholesome, rosy-cheeked exuberance. There was even a farcical episode that diverted Jim’s mind for a few minutes. Mrs. Jessica Byerson, a dumpy, saccharine woman who had lobbied for years to get Congress to proclaim the white chrysanthemum as the national flower, waddled past the staffers in the outer office and flowed, unannounced, into Jim’s sanctuary. He cringed at the sight of her, for Mrs. Byerson, the “mum’s mum,” was famous on Capitol Hill for her sudden ambushes of legislators. He shoved her out into the corridor through his private door by grasping both her elbows and trundling her ahead of him like a loaded cart. She wheezed a protest as Jim locked the door behind her. But even this interlude of heave-ho-manship failed to dispel his dark mood. The thought quickly returned and would not be erased: he was being shadowed by specialists at the trade of surveillance.

  When the bell rang for the Senate session, he walked warily to the subway car, occasionally glancing over his shoulder. At his desk on the Senate floor, he found it difficult to concentrate on the debate, even though it involved a phase of defense poli
cy on which he had specialized. Instead, he looked about the galleries, inspecting the faces, wondering which one, if any, was there to watch him. MacVeagh realized that he’d never been followed before—or tailed, as they termed it in the paperback mysteries. It unnerved him. Who, for instance, would believe him if he stated such surveillance as a fact? He saw plump, aging Fred Odium sitting in the second row. Odium, a shrewd, sardonic septuagenarian, whose eyes still darted covetously toward a swaying rump, was the senior senator from Louisiana, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, probably the most powerful man in the Senate. Suppose he were to ease over to Fred and whisper that he, MacVeagh, was being followed? Old Fred would fix him with those pale-gray hawk’s eyes and tell him he ought to lay off the bottle until at least sundown.

  MacVeagh sat for perhaps an hour, his thoughts moving fitfully from Camp David to Pat O’Malley to young men in snap-brim hats, his ear catching only fragments of debate. Then a page appeared respectfully at his elbow. The boy whispered his name and handed him a slip of paper: “Please call Briarwood 9-8877 at once. Urgent.”

  Rita’s number. Rita, who had threatened to summon the police and the Associated Press simultaneously if he ever telephoned her again, now wanted him to call. He walked from the chamber, avoiding the telephones in the Democratic cloakroom. Instead, he dialed from a pay booth in the corridor.

  “I have to see you immediately,” she said. It was the voice of a stranger, crisp, commanding.

  “The Senate’s in session, Rita,” he said. “We’ll be here until late.”

  “This won’t wait. You’d better come right now.”

  “What are you doing home this time of day?”

  “I’m not feeling well,” she said. Her tone was flat, did not beseech sympathy. “Something very distasteful has happened that involves both of us. I can’t discuss it over the phone.”

  A thought hit MacVeagh like a clap of thunder. Oh, my God, she’s pregnant. His hands became quickly clammy and he felt water in his legs.

  “I’m supposed to be following this debate,” he said, “but I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  “All right.” She hung up without saying good-by.

  It was after three o’clock when MacVeagh mounted the four brick steps on O Street after parking his car in a new place near Georgetown University. Leaving the Senate Office Building, he’d glimpsed the gray sedan again, but he had headed toward the Baltimore expressway, then doubled back and lost the sedan after several swift turns in the residential section of northeast Washington, far from Georgetown. The three blocks’ walk from his parking space to Rita’s apartment had seemed like ten miles, but he saw no snap-brim hat behind him.

  Rita was wearing a prim black dress with a lace collar snug about her neck. She had on her thong sandals, but Jim noted her toenails had no crimson tint. The usual wide slash of matching lipstick was missing too. She motioned him to a straight-backed wooden chair in the small living room. In all his times in this apartment, Jim never before had sat in the parlor. The room had a formal, unused air, and he could see dust on the China knickknacks on a wall shelf. Rita seated herself on a small sofa facing him. She did not smile.

  “This is as disagreeable for me as it is for you,” she said. “I’ll get to the point right away.”

  “Rita.” Compassion tugged at him, fighting to surmount his worry. “I’ll do anything. You know that. The first thing we have to do is to get you examined by the best specialist we can find.”

  “Specialist?” Her black brows arched. “I’m not that sick. I don’t need a doctor.”

  “Of course you do. How long has it been?…When did you first notice?”

  “Notice what?” she asked coldly. “Would you mind speaking some semblance of English?”

  “All right. How long has it been since you learned you were pregnant?”

  “Pregnant!” She stared at him. Then she threw back her head and laughed, a loud, convulsive laugh that shook her mass of wavy black hair and filled the room like an explosion. She ended on a thin, high-pitched note which trailed into a dry giggle.

  “That’s rich,” she said. “So you came scurrying over here, thinking I was—how do we say it stylishly? Enceinte? Did it scare you, MacVeagh?”

  The use of his last name cut. He nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “At least something concerning me has managed to get under your skin. No, Mr. Senator, I’m not with child—yours or anybody else’s. That problem I could handle. The one we’re faced with I can’t.”

  Jim hoped he hid his enormous relief. Nothing that he could imagine would be quite as bad, right at this time, as a pregnant Rita Krasicki. Absolutely nothing. It was hard to keep from smiling, but inwardly the tension broke and fled.

  “This, my friend, is worse than fatherless babies,” she said. “Last night and again this morning I was visited by federal agents. The one last night was from the FBI. This morning, while I nursed this repulsive case of flu, my caller was a Secret Service agent. They both wanted to know approximately the same things.”

  “What, for God’s sake?” asked MacVeagh, but he sensed the answer already. The gray sedan. The young men in the snap-brim hats.

  “They wanted to know about you and me. The FBI man, very polite and circuitous, said this was just a routine field investigation. He beat around the bush for a while, then asked me pointblank whether you had ever visited me here. I hesitated for a minute, but then I realized it was useless to lie to the FBI. They have ways of checking—and I have my job to think about. So I said yes. He wanted to know how many times. I said maybe a dozen. Then he asked me, after apologizing for asking, whether we were intimate. I told him it was none of his damn business. That, I presume, is one thing still beyond the powers of the invincible FBI to find out.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “Nothing. He didn’t even smile. He asked a few more questions about us, how long we’d known each other, that kind of thing, and then he left. Now, MacVeagh, I want to ask you a question. I haven’t mentioned my—uh—friendship with you to a soul. Have you?”

  “Never,” said Jim promptly. Then he thought of Paul Griscom and his nonchalant disclosure of seeing a man on O Street who resembled a senator.

  “Then how could the FBI have learned about us?” she asked, holding his eyes with hers.

  “Paul Griscom lives across the street from you,” he said. “I heard the other day that he thinks he’s seen me entering and leaving your apartment.”

  “Isn’t that just ducky?” She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “And so the FBI has been talking to Griscom about us, huh? Why? Just why, I’d like to ask.”

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” said Jim. The feeling returned, the feeling of being hemmed in by a slowly rising fence. They were silent a moment while she continued to stare at him. “I’ve only got one possible answer,” he said. “It could be that Hollenbach has ordered a routine field check on all the men under consideration for vice-president.”

  “That would be highly unusual,” she said. “No president has ever done a thing like that.”

  “Mark’s a very unusual man,” he said, “as we both know. If it’s true, he’s got one hell of a nerve, investigating a member of the United States Senate.”

  And, he added to himself, a man whom Hollenbach personally picked out of the crowd. His ire rose. He hadn’t asked for this vice-presidential business. It was all Hollenbach’s idea. And yet, apparently, the President distrusted him so much he put a tail on him as though he were a common crook. MacVeagh forgot Rita in his mounting anger.

  “That doesn’t add up,” she said sharply. “The FBI, maybe yes. But how do you explain the call from the Secret Service? They don’t have anything to do with security investigations.”

  “What did the Secret Service man want?”

  “No,” she said. “You tell me first. Why am I being questioned b
y the Secret Service?”

  “I don’t know, baby.” The word slipped out by force of habit.

  “Don’t you dare ‘baby’ me. I want an answer.”

  “Honestly, Rita,” he pleaded, “I don’t know. How am I going to make a guess unless you tell me what happened?”

  She glared at him. “He wanted to know the same things as the FBI man. How long had we known each other? Was it an affair? Did you stay here overnight? The whole thing was absolutely disgusting and degrading. I felt undressed. And it was especially humiliating because I know the agent.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. His name is Luther Smith. I’ve known him awhile and I’ve always liked him. But now he must think I’m a cheap whore.”

  “Rita, please.”

  “Oh, it’s all nice and proper for you, safe family man. Nothing ever touches the great, secret lover. But I feel filthy and common. Everybody in town will be talking about me.”

  “That’s just not true, Rita. You know perfectly well that neither of those agents will ever say a word to anybody.”

  “They make reports, don’t they?” she flared. “And how about your gabby friend, Paul Griscom? After talking to the FBI, he’ll probably tell all his friends at Burning Tree—in the locker room. Need a girl in a hurry? Call Briarwood 9-8877 and ask for Rita.” Her voice had an edge of fury, and her black eyes flashed. “Damn you, MacVeagh. I wish to God I’d never seen you.”

  Suddenly she began to cry, uncontrollably. Her broad shoulders heaved and she bunched into a corner of the sofa, rubbing at her tears with the back of a hand. Jim went to her side and touched her gently on the shoulder, but she wrenched away.