Read Washington Deceased Online
Authors: Michael Bowen
“Let me guess, New Orleans, Louisiana.”
“How did you know that?”
“As I said,” Michaelson smiled as he stood up, “I'm a big picture man. Good day.”
“Carrie,” Marjorie said as she bustled past the central counter, straightening books on a remainder table as she went, “I hate to leave early, particularly on a night when you have an engagement yourself, but I really do barely have time to get home and get ready before Richard is supposed to pick me up.”
Carrie offered her employer the gently mocking, tolerantly affectionate look that newly confident youth reserves for anxious middle age.
“This is the third time in the last twenty minutes that you've told me you don't have a minute to spare and must leave instanter. Please go. Kathy will be in by 5:30 and I'll have ample time to keep my appointment with McRobert Pond.”
“You're right, of course.” Marjorie stopped in her tracks. “I've been stalling because I'm rather puzzled and I guess a bit vexed at Wendy Gardner's sudden disappearance and continuing absence. I've been hoping that if I stalled long enough she'd find her way back in here.”
“She's a big girl. She can take care of herself.”
“In Washington, that is perhaps the epitome of
non sequitur
. You're certain that you didn't notice her leave?”
“Quite certain. Sorry. I just wasn't paying any attention to her.”
“No reason you should have been.” Marjorie walked back up to the serving platform and looked at the table where Wendy had been sitting. The only remaining evidence of her presence was the copy of
D.C. After Dark
she had been reading. “She was sitting here. I went to take Richard's phone call. I had my back turned for three minutes at most and in that interval she left in a very big hurry. Well, nothing to be done about it now.”
Perhaps because it was the one remaining tangible link with Wendy that she had, Marjorie stuffed the newspaper into her purse and left in something of a hurry herself.
***
Although she was carrying three Woodward & Lothrop boxes in a generous plastic sack, Wendy strode toward the public phone with the natural grace of a born shopper. Reaching the phone, she set her purchases at her feet and then straddled them to deter the sneak thieves that her midwestern paranoia told her might be lurking nearby. The contents represented her clothing budget for roughly four months, and she didn't want somebody to make off with them.
She dialed the number and waited through a ring-and-a-half.
“Staff,” a male voice said. “Randy Cox speaking.”
“Hello, Randy,” she said. “This is Wendy Gardner. What are you doing after work?”
Jennifer Blair had once read a Washington novel in which a set piece Washington party given by a famous Washington hostess had played a key role. This novel had attributed the famous hostess' legendary success with Washington parties to her consummate skill in balancing guest lists: several important members of the congressional leadership, two or three big names from the cabinet, a representation from the Supreme Court and a sprinkling of diplomatsâas if a Washington party was supposed to be a
tableau vivant
depicting The Separation of Powers. This had cured Jennifer Blair of reading Washington novels.
Jennifer Blair's intimate dinner partiesâthese days, only embassies and trade associations still had the time and resources to give grand parties in the traditional, thundering herd styleâwere intended to achieve particular objects. The object might be to improve the prospects of a bill pending in Congress, to speed the confirmation of a troublesome appointment, to win a coveted position for someone, to get a potential Presidential candidate taken seriously by the media or any of a variety of other desiderata that a State Department lobbyist like Charles Blair might have. Whatever the purpose, however, Ms. Blair knew that it was essential to focus on that object, to the exclusion of other concerns. This meant, among other things, that one of Jennifer Blair's dinner parties would never be confused with a pageant of the three branches of government.
The point of tonight's party, for example, was to see to it that an individual whom she detested on both political and personal grounds would be excluded from consideration for a major foreign policy post in the next administration. To accomplish this, her guest list had to include five elements:
Jennifer Blair had counted on McRobert Pond as the alternative candidate, and had therefore viewed his last-minute cancellation as a decidedly annoying development. Having Richard Michaelson fall into her lap in the nick of time was a godsend that left Jennifer Blair feeling extremely pleased with herself. The more she thought about it, in fact, the more convinced she became that Michaelson would have been a better choice than Pond in the first place, and she wondered for a moment why she hadn't invited Michaelson to start with. Then, with a twinge of irritation, she remembered: because inviting him meant having that ass of a Marjorie Randolph tag along.
Oh well. One does what one must.
It was ten minutes until dinner. The columnist, the foil and the conduit were all in place, the first two with spouses and the third with a significant other. Ms. Blair had just slipped into the kitchen to check on the food and found that it was proceeding on schedule. She walked back into the living room and passed a little knot where the columnist, the conduit and the foil's spouse were conversing.
“Secretary of State?” the conduit said. “Do you think he'd take it?”
“I don't know,” the columnist replied, nodding toward the door. “Let's ask him.”
At this the conduit, the foil's spouse and Jennifer Blair all turned to watch Richard Michaelson and Marjorie Randolph walk into the room.
“What about it, Richard?” the columnist asked, loudly enough to be heard across the expanse of federal blue and Williamsburg green decor separating them. “If you were offered State in the next administration, would it be yes or no?”
Michaelson smiled at the columnist to acknowledge the question and stepped forward to greet Jennifer Blair and verify that she and Marjorie were acquainted. The columnist threw his head back to try to make his black, horn rimmed glasses scoot toward the bridge of his nose. Michaelson turned back toward the columnist-conduit-spouse knot.
“I make it a practice not to turn down jobs I haven't been offered yet,” he said.
“Richard,” the conduit remonstrated, “you're turning into a politician on us.”
“It's contagious,” Michaelson nodded.
Tallyho, Jennifer thought to herself, with considerable relief. Let the games begin.
***
“â¦a risk that seems to me considerably overrated,” the foil was saying while everybody else squirted lemon juice onto broiled swordfish. Detachment of western Europe from the Atlantic Alliance was the topic under discussion. “Wasn't it DeGaulle who said that the issue confronting France was whether it would remain France or become Poland?”
“Raymond Aron,” the resource person said.
“Was that in his memoirs?” a significant other asked.
“
Le Spectateur Engagé
,” the resource person answered, shaking his head.
“And if I'm remembering the reference correctly,” Michaelson said, “he didn't suggest that the desirable answer to that question was the inevitable one.”
“Let's come back down to earth,” the foil said.
“Now that is in his memoirs,” the significant other interjected. “Aron's, I mean. I remember it.”
“To return to NATO,” the foil persisted. “The United States has a conventional force in western Europe that isâwhat, a quarter-million men?”
“Three-hundred-five thousand, give or take the odd platoon,” the resource person said. “That'll come down to two-hundred-twenty-five thousand if the Two-plus-Four agreement is ratified.”
“At any rate, too large to be cheap but not nearly large enough to have a prayer of stopping the Red Army. What is its mission?”
“I think he's asking you,” the columnist said to Michaelson.
“Its mission is to die trying,” Michaelson said.
“Hello?” the foil responded. “Can you run that one by me again?”
“To be somewhat more precise,” Michaelson continued, “the mission of the American troops stationed in Europe is to guarantee that the Red Army cannot advance without killing a significant number of U.S. soldiers.”
“Thereby accomplishing what?”
“Thereby reassuring the Europeans that they are protected not only by U.S. troops but by U.S. missilesâthe theory being that while we can't be counted on to put New York at risk to save Hamburg, we'd certainly do so to protect hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.”
“Do you really think the Europeans believe that?” the foil asked. “Is there even a Soviet-Marxist threat for them to be concerned about any more?”
“The Russians have long since stopped being Marxists, and they may soon stop being Soviets. But they're not going to stop being Russiansâand no one knows that better than the Europeans.”
“That's the conventional wisdom, certainly,” the foil said, by now clearly bluffing. “But ought we to rethink it? Especially now that the Berlin wall is a speed bump? It caught us flat-footed when it came down.”
“As I recall,” Michaelson said, “it also caught us flat-footed when it went up.”
“So you seriously imagine that the Red Army will cross the Elbe if we withdraw our troops from Europe?”
“No, I don't,” Michaelson said. “I don't think it will have to.”
“As Napoleon once advised,” the columnist remarked, “never try to kill someone who is in the process of committing suicide.” He glanced at the foil as he said this, and the foil knew that he wasn't talking about western Europe.
***
Michaelson and Charles Blair hadn't exchanged a word during the meal, which had proceeded through appetizers, soup, salad and entree and was now careening recklessly toward dessert. Michaelson had given considerable thought to whether he should excuse himself before or after the strawberry schaum torte. Not without a pang, for he was very fond of German pastry, he concluded that it should be before.
He murmured an apology and rose from the table. He knew where the bathroom was. He walked upstairs, entered the bathroom, flushed the toilet, turned the cold water faucet on for three seconds, turned it off, and waited.
He had to wait four minutes before he heard Charles Blair's wary tread on the stairs. He listened as Blair reached the top of the stairs and walked down the hallway. He imagined Blair standing a few feet away from the bathroom door, gazing at it, wondering.
He heard Blair walk past the bathroom, then toward the bedrooms and the study at the end of the hall. Michaelson opened the bathroom door and stepped into the hallway himself. Blair turned around.
“I think we should talk right now, Charlie,” Michaelson said. “I really do have to see them.”
***
“How did you know I was the one who'd leaked them?” Blair asked. They were standing on either side of a desk in his study, looking at photocopies of a ship's manifest, a set of demurrage certificates, a bill of lading, a letter of credit, a warehouse receipt, and an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of a ship.
“I don't claim to be expert in the field,” Michaelson answered, “but I have some notion of how lawyers write. As a class, they aren't given to specificity. When they serve a formal request for an array of precisely specified documents, one naturally suspects that they've gotten a hint beforehand about what to ask for.”
“But they could have gotten the hint from anyone.”
“Well, not just anyone. It had to be someone stationed in Washington at the time of the leak and who had some involvement with the subject matter of the leak.”
“But that could have been a dozen people.”
“It could have been five the way I calculated it,” Michaelson said. “All five were waryâproperly so, I might add. All five were reluctant to talk with me at all. All five took careful measures to cover themselves. Several of the five pretended that they didn't in fact know anything about the topic. But out of the five possibilities, only you went out of your way to steer me onto somebody else. Infallible evidence. Right out of the form book.”
“Bravo.” Blair beamed at Michaelson with professional appreciation. “Well done.”
“Thanks and all that, butâ¦.”
“It was the first time I'd ever done it. An unauthorized leak. I mean to another department of the government of course. You go to the press all the time with things, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“It was just that I couldn't get over my disgust at the thing. It was soâso seedy, so pathetically tawdry. I passed it up the line in my own shop and when nothing happened I went ahead and let the cat out of the bag.”
“Dropping a broad hint, if I'm not mistaken, not only to the Justice Department in Washington but to a U.S. Attorney out in the hinterlands.”
“Right again. I knew that one might get squelched, but I thought there was no way they could kill two.”
“Well, time will tell, I suppose,” Michaelson said briskly. “Let's get to work, shall we?”
“You mean you don't see it?”
“A provocative question. Let's see: The merchant vessel
Cracow
sets sail from the Baltic with a cargo of golf carts, foodstuffs and lightweight clothing. After several stops it reaches the Caribbean, where it pays a call on Cuba. While at Cuba, it unburdens itself of the lightweight clothing and proceeds to Tampico, Mexico. There, it takes on two hundred thousand metric tons of raw sugar, sold by Tracomex, the Trading Company of Mexico, through normal commercial facilities to a company identified as GUMCO, located in New Orleans. How am I doing so far?”
“I would say you're quite warm.”
“GUMCO is of course the Gunderson Union Merchant Company.”
“Correct.”
“And so we come to the photograph.” Michaelson studied the eight-by-ten glossy for several seconds. “In which we see the merchant vessel
Cracow
riding at anchor off Tampico.”
“Right.”
“Ah, I see. Riding rather low in the water.”
“Quite low for a ship that was previously supposed to have unloaded all of its cargo, and was waiting to take on some sugar.”
“Mm hmm. In other words, the United States of America unwittingly allowed the importation of two hundred thousand tons of Cuban sugar, upon the representation that it was actually Mexican sugar. The Mexican trading company didn't give the
Cracow
any sugar. All it gave the
Cracow
was a phony bill of lading to match a phony warehouse receipt.”
“Both of which were specified in a quite real and perfectly negotiable letter of credit.”
“And to accommodate this comic operaish and potentially rather embarrassing accidental subsidy of a hostile government, the Mexican sugar quota had to be raised substantially above the amount of sugar Mexico actually had available to sell to the United States.”
“That is correct,” Blair said.
“Which was done in Congress, I take it, and presumably done in exchange for valuable consideration of some kind.”
“I know that it was done. The consideration you'll have to figure out for yourself.”
“In other words, someone in a position of trust and confidence in the Congress of the United States sold out his country.”
“So it would appear.”
Michaelson looked up. The joviality had faded from his face and there was no suggestion of banter left in his voice.