I took a seat and looked around at the reception area. It was all good, solid furniture that had a kind of W & J Sloane look to it. It was as if whoever had chosen it had decided on stolid durability and comfort rather than flash. I looked at my watch and saw that I was ten minutes early, but then I usually am, so I took out my small tin box and rolled a cigarette. I once smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, Luckies, unfiltered, but since I had started rolling my own I was down to the equivalent of a pack a day for which my lungs seemed grateful. I also saved approximately $124 a year.
I could sense the receptionist watching me so I decided to give her a thrill and rolled the cigarette with one hand. I looked up at her and grinned. “I used to be a cowpoke,” I said.
“You never,” she said, smiling. “I wish I could do that.”
“You don't smoke, do you?”
She smiled again. “Not tobacco. That is tobacco, isn't it?”
“Afraid so,” I said.
The receptionist went back to doing what she was doing when I came in, proofreading, it seemed, and I went back to smoking my roll your own. I was about halfway through it when a door opened and a tall woman with streaked blond hair came in and said, “Mr. Longmire?”
I said that I was Longmire and she said that she was Mr. Murfin's secretary and that if I would follow her she would show me to Mr. Murfin's office and even get me a cup of coffee and how did I like it. I said I liked it with sugar.
I followed the woman with the streaked hair down a carpeted hall that had five or six doors leading off of it. All of the doors were closed. She stopped at one of them and opened it, indicating that I should go in. I went in and found Murfin behind a large desk and Quane seated on a couch, his feet up on the coffee table.
We didn't shake hands this time. Quane waved at me lazily and Murfin nodded and grinned and said, “You're right on time.”
“Habit,” I said. “My only good one.”
“Ginger'll get you some coffee,” Murfin said.
“Ginger's the blonde?”
“My secretary.”
I looked around at Murfin's office and nodded. “They seem to do you well here.”
Murfin also looked around and nodded, a little possessively, I thought, at the good-sized room with its dark brown carpet, fabric covered walls, long sofa, four easy chairs, the coffee table, and what looked like a bar in one corner although it could have been a cleverly disguised filing cabinet. There were even some tasteful prints on the walls, but I was sure that Murfin hadn't selected them because Murfin had no taste.
“I've had worse,” Murfin said. “A lot worse.”
“I know.”
“Vullo's gonna be tied up for about ten minutes so I thought we'd have the coffee first and then I'd take you in and introduce you.”
“What about the money?” I said.
“No problem.”
“He means he wants it in advance,” Quane said. “Right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Jesus, Harvey,” Murfin said, “you don't hardly change at all.”
“In our changing world constancy is a treasure.”
Ginger, the secretary, came in with a tray containing three cups of coffee. There were even saucers and spoons to go with the cups. She served me first and then Quane and then Murfin. When she was done, Murfin said, “Bring that Longmire check in, will you, Ginger?”
She nodded, left, and came back a few moments later with a check which she handed to Murfin. He thanked her and when she was gone he took out a ball-point pen and signed the check and then slid it over to Quane who used the same pen to sign his name. Quane then handed the check to me. I looked at it and put it in the breast pocket of my jacket.
“You guys sign the checks around here?” I said.
Murfin nodded. “Some of them. I sign them and Quane here countersigns them.”
“That's good,” I said. “They've got the fox watching the weasel. That's very clever.”
We all took a sip of our coffee and I noticed that Murfin still slurped his after blowing on it first. I decided that he hadn't changed much since I had first met him twelve years before. He had put on a few pounds, but not many, and his dark brown hair was greying a little, but he still had his round pink face, almost unlined, his stubby nose, apple chin, wide, thin mouth with its mean smile, and eyes that were shaded a merciless blue.
Now that he was all dressed up I had nearly forgotten how awful his clothes always were, but that came back as I examined his brown and green plaid summer-weight jacket, pink shirt, and the red, white and yellow tie that dribbled down its front something like a tomato surprise.
It was Quane who had changed more. He was nearly as tall as I, almost six feet, but he looked leaner and his face had lost its chubby youthfulness and was now all planes, angles and harsh lines that were almost slashes. A couple of the lines were deep parenthetical grooves that ran down from the sides of his beaky nose to the corners of his mouth, which still looked as if it wanted to pout or maybe bitch about something.
I remembered that Quane's eyes when I had first seen them had been wide and grey and brimming over with something moist, probably innocence. They were still grey, of course, but they seemed to have narrowed and the moist innocence had all dried up and gone away. It was hard to tell what had taken its place. Probably nothing.
“Well,” I said, “then what happened? You never did tell me.”
“When?” Quane said.
“After Wilbur Mills.”
Murfin shook his head. “It was a rotten year. We hooked up with Muskie and then Humphrey and after the convention we landed a couple of advance spots with Eagleton.”
“You're right,” I said. “It was a rotten year.”
“So after the Eagleton thing,” Murfin said, “well, hell, I just went home and sat around the house and drove Marjorie and the kids crazy.”
“How is Marjorie?” I said, trying to put a little interest into my question, but not succeeding too well. Marjorie was probably as nutty as ever.
“She's a pain in the ass,” Murfin said. “She's started going to one of those consciousness-raising things twice a week. Now I don't hardly ever want to go home.”
“Well, some things never change,” I said. “That brings us up to Watergate. I heard both of you landed somewhere on the committee.”
“I did first,” Murfin said, “and then I finally got hold of Quane.”
“Where were you?”
“Mexico,” Quane said.
“Tell him about Mexico,” Murfin said.
“There's nothing to tell,” Quane said.
Murfin licked his lips and smiled one of his more terrible smiles. “They had this B-26,” he said. “Quane and a couple of other guys and this sixty-one-year-old World War Two-type pilot who claimed he could fly the goddamned thing. Or he was supposed to be able to fly it when he was sober anyhow, which was maybe every fourth day for about six hours. Well, they've got six tons of dope. Can you imagine, six tons? And they're gonna fly it into the desert somewhere in Arizona and everybody's gonna get rich. Well, they sober the old Air Corps vet up, and he finally finds his bifocals someplace and puts those on, and they've got the plane all loaded and everything's set, except there's just one little thing wrong. The goddamned engines won't start.”
“So what happened?” I said.
Quane shrugged. “The last time I looked back they were still trying to start them. I only looked back once.”
“And that's when you went on the Watergate committee?” I said.
“As consultants,” Murfin said. “We got one twenty-eight a day and an office and some pencils and some yellow pads and what we did was think up questions. We thought up some pretty good ones.”
“The tapes,” I said. “I think I heard somewhere from somebody that it was you guys who really came up with the question about the tapes.”
Murfin looked at Quane who said nothing but merely smiled a little.
“It was a pretty good question,” I said.
Quane nodded. “Not bad.”
“It only lasted till October though,” Murfin said.
“Of seventy-three?”
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
“Well,” Murfin said, “by then I'm off the payroll and I'm looking around again, you know, trying to connect somewhere, and about the only offer I get is from the Teamsters who wanta know if I'd like to go out to California and help red-dog Chavez. Well, shit, I mean, who wants to do that?”
“Besides,” I said, “it might be hard work.”
“Exactly. Well, finally I sort of stumble over this guy out in Ohio who thinks he wants to be a congressman, and his wife thinks so, too, and money's no problem because they've both got a ton of it, and about the only problem they got is that they don't quite know how to go about getting elected.”
“Musacco,” I said. “You dumped Nick Musacco.”
I was given another quick look at Murfin's awful smile. He could flick it on and off like a flashlight. “Yeah,” he said, “Nick was about due, don'tcha think?”
I shrugged. “Ten years ago,” I said, “maybe even five, Nick would have skinned you and hung you out to dry before breakfast. Or maybe lunch.”
Murfin moved his shoulders indifferently. “He got old. Old and slow and careless. So anyhow, I pulled in Quane here on that one and our new congressman and his wife got all excited and happy, especially his wife because by then I'm balling her kind of regular at the Holiday Inn just up the street on Rhode Island.” He jerked his head in the direction of the motel. “And the new congressman's begging me to stay on as his A.A.”
“But you didn't,” I said.
“Well, hell, can you see me as some freshman congressman's administrative assistant?”
“No,” I said. “I suppose not. Not really.”
“Anyway,” Murfin went on, “I set up his office for him and pointed him toward the Capitol in case he wanted to vote sometime and he's so grateful for everything that he slips me a five-thousand cash money bonus out of his own pocket, but makes me promise not to tell his wife, which I sure as shit didn't on account of she'd already slipped me two thousand herself. Cash money.”
I looked at Quane. “He split with you?”
“Kind of,” Quane said. “One third, two thirds. Guess who got the one third?”
Murfin gave us another one of his smiles and once again I didn't quite look away. “You didn't have to fuck his wife,” he told Quane. “I did.”
“And after that what'd you do?” I said.
Murfin looked at Quane. Quane only smiled. “This and that,” Murfin said.
I decided not to ask what this and that was. I decided that I really didn't want to know. “But after all the this and that Vullo came looking for you, right?”
“Right,” Murfin said. “He was looking for somebody who could organize this thing and then run it and that's what Quane and I are good at.”
They were indeed good at that, plus a few other things, so I nodded my agreement. “What do all those people out there with the colored desks do?” I said.
“That's the stuff, or most of it, except for the comptroller and his people, the computer types, the legal counsel, Vullo, me and Quane here. We got some of the ones you saw out there from the
Post
and the
Star.
We stole maybe three or four from Nader. A couple are from
The Wall Street Journal.
About a half dozen are lawyers and another two or three used to be cops. Detectives. We even got one guy from the FBI.”
“And they're going to sniff out conspiracy?” I said.
“Wherever it exists,” Quane said. “Or existed.”
“When you come up with something, what'll you do with it?”
“Well, we're gonna be sort of a clearing house and we're also gonna put out a monthly magazine,” Murfin said. “That's what they're doing out there now, putting together a dummy issue. When everything's all set it'll sell for twenty or twenty-five bucks a year and for that you also become a member of the Foundation. And the twenty or twenty-five bucks or whatever will be deductible.”
“We stole that from the
National Geographic,
” Quane said.
“What're you going to call yours?” I said.
“The Paranoia Review
?”
“Nah,” Murfin said. “I came up with the title, as a matter of fact. We're gonna call it
The Vullo Report.
”
“That's catchy.”
“Vullo likes it,” Quane said.
“I bet.”
There was a pause and then Murfin cleared his throat and said, “Harvey.”
“What?”
“Vullo thinks Quane here and me are pretty hot shit.”
“So do I.”
“I mean he doesn't knowâwell, every last detail about us.”
I smiled politely and said nothing.
“What I'm saying,” Murfin went on, “is that this is a pretty nice deal and we don't want it fucked up.”
“You should know by now that I won't dump on you.”
Murfin smiled his blackguard's smile again. “Well, hell, we know that. I just thought I'd mention it.”
“How much does Vullo know about me?”
This time Murfin frowned and it made him look serious and grave and almost guileless. But not quite. “Well, you know, we had to tell him quite a bit.”
“What's quite a bit,” I said, “everything?”
“Damn near,” Quane said.
“And what did Vullo say?”
Murfin quit frowning and started smiling. I almost wished that he had gone on frowning. “He said he thought you sounded fascinating.”
“Well, what the hell,” I said. “I am.”
CHAPTER THREE
R
OGER VULLO BIT
his fingernails. He bit them so often and so thoroughly that the quicks had moved down at least a quarter of an inch from the tips of his fingers. In fact, he had very little nail left and I concluded he must have been biting them all his life.