He looked over at his nurse in the shade of a nearby tree next to the ever-present golf cart. She was one of the round-the-clock females who accompanied him everywhere, and he wondered what she would do if he propositioned her while leaning casually against the boulder. Such potential responses had always intrigued him but generally the reality merely amused him.
‘Beautiful day, isn’t it?’ he called out.
‘Simply gorgeous,’ was the reply.
‘What do you say we take all our clothes off and really enjoy it?’
The nurse’s expression did not change for an instant. Her response was calm, deliberate, even gentle. ‘Mr. Weingrass, I’m here to look after you, not give you cardiac arrest.’
‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’
The radio telephone on the golf cart hummed; the woman walked over to it and snapped it out of its recess. After a brief conversation capped with quiet laughter, she turned to Manny. ‘The congressman’s calling you, Mr. Weingrass.’
‘You don’t laugh like that with a congressman,’ said
Manny, pushing himself away from the rock. ‘Five’ll get you twenty it’s Annie Glocamorra telling lies about me.’
‘She did ask if I’d strangled you yet.’ The nurse handed the phone to Weingrass.
‘Annie, this woman’s a letch!’
‘We try to be of service,’ said Evan Kendrick.
‘Boy, that girl of yours gets off the phone pretty damned quick.’
‘Forewarned, forearmed, Manny. You called. Is everything all right?’
‘I should only call in a crisis?’
‘You rarely call, period. That privilege is almost exclusively mine. What is it?’
‘You got any money left?’
‘I can’t spend the interest. Sure. Why?’
‘You know the addition we built on the west porch so you got a view?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ve been playing with some sketches. I think you should have a terrace on top. Two steel beams would carry the load; maybe a third if you went for a glass-blocked steam bath by the wall.’
‘Glass-blocked…? Hey, that sounds terrific. Go ahead.’
‘Good. I’ve got the plumbers coming out in the morning. But when it’s done, then I go back to Paris.’
‘Whatever you say, Manny. However, you said you’d work up some plans for a gazebo down by the streams, where they merge.’
‘You said you didn’t want to walk that far.’
‘I’ve changed my mind. It would be a good place for a person to get away and think.’
‘That excludes the owner of this establishment.’
‘You’re all heart. I’m coming back next week for a few days.’
‘I can’t wait,’ said Weingrass, raising his voice and looking over at the nurse. ‘When you get here, you can take these heavy-breathing sex maniacs off my hands!’
It was shortly past 10:00 pm when Milos Varak walked down the deserted hallway in the House Office Building. He had been admitted by pre-arrangement, a late night visitor of one Congressman Arvin Partridge of Alabama. Varak reached the heavy wooden door with the brass plate centred in the sculptured panel and knocked. Within seconds it was opened by a slender man in his early twenties whose eyes looked out anxiously from large tortoiseshell glasses. Whoever he was, he was not the gruff, savvy chairman of the Partridge ‘Gang’, that investigative committee determined to find out why the armed services were getting so little for so much. Not in terms of $1,200 toilet seats and $700 pipe wrenches; those were too blatant to be taken seriously and might even be correctable diversions. What concerned the ‘Birds’—another sobriquet—were the 500 per cent overruns and the restricted degree of competitive bidding in defence contracts. What they had only begun to uncover, of course, was a river of corruption with so many tributaries there weren’t enough scouts to pursue them in the canoes available.
‘I’m here to see Congressman Partridge,’ said the blond man, his Czech accent not lost on but conceivably misconstrued by the slender young man at the door.
‘Did you…?’ began the apparent congressional aide awkwardly. ‘I mean when you saw the guards downstairs—’
‘If you’re asking me whether or not I was checked for firearms, of course I was, and you should know it. They called you from Security. The congressman, please. He’s expecting me.’
‘Certainly, sir. He’s in his office. This way, sir.’ The nervous aide led Milos to a second large, dark door. The younger man knocked. ‘Congressman—’
‘Tell him to come in!’ ordered the loud Southern voice from inside. ‘And you stay out there and take any calls. I don’t care if it’s the Speaker or the President, I’m not here!’
‘Go right in,’ said the aide, opening the door.
Varak was tempted to tell the agitated young man that he was a friendly liaison from the KGB, but decided against it. The aide was there for a reason; few phone calls came to the House Office Building at this hour. Milos stepped inside the large ornate room with the profusion of photographs on the desk, walls and tables, all in one way or another attesting to Partridge’s influence, patriotism, and power. The man himself, standing by a curtained window, was not as impressive as he appeared in the photographs. He was short and overweight, with a puffed, angry face below a large head of thinning dyed hair.
‘Ah don’t know what you’re sellin’, Blondie,’ said the congressman walking forward like an enraged pigeon, ‘but if it’s what I think it is, I’ll take you down so fast you’ll wish you had a parachute.’
‘I’m not selling anything, sir, I’m giving something away. Something of considerable value, in fact.’
‘Muleshit! You want some kind of fuckin’ cover-up and I’m not givin’ it!’
‘My clients seek no cover-up and certainly I don’t. But I submit, Congressman, you may.’
‘Bull! I listened to you on the phone—you heard something, somebody mentioned drugs and I’d better listen—so I made some damn clear inquiries and found out what I had to know, what I knew was the truth! We’re clean here, clean as a ‘Bama stream! Now, I want to find out who sent you, what thief in what larcenous boardroom thought he could scare me with this kind of crap?’
‘I don’t think you’d want this kind of “crap” made public, sir. The information is devastating.’
‘Information? Words! Innuendo! Rumours, gossip! Like that black kid who tried to indict the whole gawdamned Congress with his lies!’
‘No rumours, no gossip,’ said Milos Varak, reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘Only photographs.’ The Czech from Inver Brass threw the white envelope on the desk.
‘What?’ Partridge went instantly to the envelope; he sat down and tore it open, pulling the photographs out one by one and holding them under the green-shaded desk lamp. His eyes widened as his face went white, then blood-red in fury.
What he saw was beyond anything he might have imagined. There were various couples, trios and quartets of partly and fully naked young people using straws with white powder strewn on tables; hastily taken blurred shots of syringes, pills and bottles of beer and whisky; finally clear photographs of several couples making love.
‘Cameras come in so many sizes these days,’ said Varak. ‘Microtechnology has produced them as small as buttons on a jacket or a shirt—’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ cried Partridge in agony. ‘That’s my house in Arlington! And that’s—’
‘Congressman Bookbinder’s home in Silver Springs, as well as the houses of three other members of your committee. Your work takes you out of Washington a great deal of the time.’
‘Who took these?’ asked Partridge, barely audible.
‘I won’t answer that except to give you my word that the person is thousands of miles away without the negatives and no chance of returning to this country. One could say a university exchange student in political science.’
‘We’ve achieved so much and now it’s all down the goddamned drain… Oh, God!’
‘Why, Congressman?’ inquired Varak sincerely. ‘These young people aren’t the committee. They’re not your attorneys or your accountants or even senior aides. They’re children who’ve made terrible mistakes in the headstrong environment of the most powerful capital in the world. Get rid of them; tell them their lives and careers are ruined unless they get help and straighten out, but don’t stop your committee.’
‘Nobody will ever believe us again,’ said Partridge, staring straight ahead as if speaking to the wall. ‘We’re as rotten as everyone we go after. We’re hypocrites.’
‘Nobody has to know—’
‘Shit!’ exploded the congressman from Alabama, pouncing on the phone and pressing a button, holding it down beyond the point where his call was answered. ‘Get in here!’ he screamed. The young aide came through the door as Partridge rose from the desk. ‘You fancy-school son of a bitch! I asked you to tell me the truth! You lied!’
‘No, I didn’t!’ yelled back the young man, his eyes watering behind the tortoiseshell glasses. ‘You asked me what’s going on—what is going on—and I told you nothing—nothing is going on! A couple of us got busted three, four weeks ago and it scared all of us! Okay, we were dumb, stupid, we all agreed, but we didn’t hurt anyone but ourselves! We quit the whole scene and a hell of a lot more than that, but you and your hotshots around here never noticed. Your snotty staff works us eighty hours a week, then calls us dumb kids while they use the stuff we feed ’em to get in front of the cameras. Well, what you never noticed is that you’ve got a whole new kindergarten class here now. The others all quit and you never even noticed! I’m the only one left because I couldn’t get out.’