Echo House (28 page)

She realized that the city was much changed from the leisurely capital of the prewar and postwar years, busier, larger, and somehow more settled, certainly more aware of itself and much, much richer. Georgetown was the neighborhood of choice now, as it had been since the late nineteen-fifties, and it was easy to see why, the redbrick and clapboard Federal architecture so solemn and formal, the cobblestone streets and narrow sidewalks and stately shade trees a superb environment for the newly prosperous and very public Washingtonians. Easy to cast back in time. Someone told her he almost had a heart attack one day on N Street when he saw a forty-year-old Jack Kennedy tool by in a powder blue Pontiac convertible, his arm around a spectacular honey blonde in red sunglasses—and then he saw the truck with the cameras and realized it was a television movie.

I knew Jack Kennedy well, he said. Jack was my buddy.

God, it gave me a start. I thought it was 1960.

And everything since had been a nightmare.

Sylvia picked up the paper one morning to find a grumpy statement from Axel complaining about the moral tone of the administration, appalling and disgraceful. He compared the Nixon administration to Rome in its decadence. She almost laughed out loud; scratch Axel and you found Cotton Mather. Axel proposed that the senior staff of the White House resign over the squalid Watergate affair. She had yet to grasp the details of the crime; it seemed fundamentally French in its subtlety and complexity; but each day it grew, now a puddle, now a pool. No one could keep the details straight, but it was obvious that something somewhere was fishy, and that Nixon was responsible; and then the tapes came to light. Willy Borowy could not contain his enthusiasm.

They've got him now, Willy said. They've got his actual language, the language of a race-baiting roughneck. And that will become the issue. He's finished. Washington cannot abide the common speech, the words that people actually use, the petty evasions and nuance and exaggeration and resentment and hatred of the other. They want all Presidents to talk like Lincoln or FDR. They want words you can chisel in marble.

He's let them down, you see.

Just as they knew he always would.

Poor bastard; they'll ride him out of town on a rail.

It's a matter of revenge, Willy said.

So they can think better of themselves.

Sylvia remembered years back, the summer she left Axel, there was a scandal in the Truman White House. She couldn't remember what it was, but it, too, was appalling and disgraceful and suggestive, if not of Rome then of Kansas City. Whole evenings were devoted to worried conversations about the accidental President and his entourage, cronies from Missouri and worse. Hawaiian shirts, poker and bourbon, coarse language.
She listened one night until she thought she would lose her mind from boredom and then brought the table to a full stop with an impromptu monologue describing her hydraulic theory of gossip in the capital, the first draft of scandal tasted on the higher slopes of northwest Washington, a leak of the purest spring water, only a few drops but sufficient to inspire a mighty thirst. The source was impeccable, so the water was allowed to flow unimpeded, and as it meandered downhill it gathered force, joined here and there by other streams more agitated and less pristine, streams whose sources were obscure and therefore bewitching, the sort of fountain sought by explorers for centuries. In Washington, provenance was all; and if the provenance was suspicious or disreputable, it was at least within possibility's realm that one was tasting—nectar. Meaning: spillover into the Oval Office itself.

Axel said, Sylvia, shut up.

I like it, Ed Peralta said. It's ingenious—

People folded their napkins and rolled their eyes as she continued, leak to freshet, freshet to torrent, carving an ever-deeper channel and at last slipping its banks, muddy now and eddying, thick with debris, a furious Amazon of rumor and speculation and innuendo—and at about that point it overflowed into the newspapers. A reporter dipped his cup into the flood and shared its miscellaneous contents, by then so corrupted that it was impossible to separate the leak from the trickle and the stream from the freshet and the freshet from the torrent. All the sources were given equal weight, because they were indivisible and fungible as well, so many blue serge suits hanging on a plain pipe rack, declining to be identified by name. And at last, the scandal featured on the evening news and again and again on page one of the newspaper; people would gasp audibly and observe, "If you made that up, no one would believe it."

For the very good reason—Sylvia in full voice now as she flew into her concluding aria—that it was made up, most of it. a yarn woven from the blue serge suits. Washingtonians were the last Americans who actually believed what they read, and the more bizarre the story, the more timely and reliable it seemed; in any case, impossible to ignore. Are you still with me? Sylvia inquired mischievously as the company shifted uncomfortably and someone muttered, Gramercy Park gibberish. So they stood nervously on the beach and watched the boat sink and the sharks begin to gather.

The difference between then and now: much was withheld in the old days when there were only a hundred people in the world and they all knew one another. Inside information was similar to a precious stone; its value depended on its purity and scarcity. It was obvious that where there was smoke there was fire, and the ones at the highest elevations of the city disregarded the smoke and investigated the fire in order to extinguish it. It seemed to Sylvia thirty years later that it was the smoke that mattered, the fire be damned; and in the clumsy efforts to scatter the smoke, the fire raged out of control. As pandemonium became general she listened to people complain that they had never expected things to go so haywire. Watergate seemed such a simple matter and suddenly it wasn't simple. One scandal followed another. Courageous, brilliant reporting and disinterested, creative editing would bring down Nixon at last. The presidency itself was in the balance—yet the commotion was threatening the stability of the government, straining the fragile threads that bound the leaders to the led. This was an unintended consequence, Washington itself on trial. Someone had to put a stop to it; otherwise—

He is destroying himself, they said. Will he destroy us as well?

Nixon himself was a cancer on the community.

In early December Sylvia encountered Ed Peralta on Wisconsin Avenue. His hair was white and thin and he walked in a kind of belligerent crouch. She almost missed him in the crowd of shoppers, but something about the set of his shoulders caused her to look twice, and when he smiled at something he saw in the window of the bookstore, she knew it was Ed. She followed him as he checked his watch and continued his slow stroll. She wondered if he was meeting someone, but she decided from his manner that he was only out for a walk; strange, since it was a chilly weekday, early in the afternoon. She followed him past the jewelry store, reluctant to disturb him. Ed looked so private, hands plunged into the pockets of his Burberry, head down, hatless. She came up to touch him on the shoulder, when suddenly he wheeled to face her, his face red and contorted with rage, his blue eyes blazing, though without force. Alarmed, she took a step backward; and then she winked at him.

"You've been on my back for ten minutes and I don't like it. Get away from me. Go back where you came from. I have nothing to say to you people now or in the future, God damned vultures—"

"Ed, it's Sylvia Behl "

He blinked. "Sylvia?"

"I didn't mean to startle you."

"My God, it's you," he said, and gave a little half-laugh. "I thought you were a reporter. I thought you were one of Slyde's people."

"No, just me."

"I apologize, talking to you like that, but they're all over the place. Bastards won't let me alone."

"Ed, what's going on?"

"Sylvia, where have you been?"

"An island," she said. "I've been living on Nantucket."

Ed Peralta laughed, shaking his head. That explained it. Still, they had newspapers in Nantucket.

She said, "So? Who's Slyde?"

"Bastard newspaper columnist who thinks he's my biographer. I'll tell you about it later."

Over coffee, they caught up. Of course he had seen her name here and there over the years and congratulated her on her success. He admitted that he had no time for poetry himself but Billie had faithfully bought all her books and read them and admired them, really. I'm happy for you, he said. It's good to have recognition late in life. Better late than early, because you can take time to enjoy it. He gazed at her fondly and said she looked like a million dollars. She thought she heard insincerity. She told him about Nantucket and persuading Willy to move to Washington for a while; it had been so long, and she wanted to reacquaint herself, see what had changed and what hadn't changed. She hadn't been in touch with any of the old crowd, and Alec was away on business. She thought she might even buy a house. It's Willy who looks like a million dollars, she added.

Nothing much has changed here, Ed said.

Or I'm so close to it I haven't noticed.

When she asked him if Axel still provided lunch on Wednesdays, Ed said that he did, always the same menu, always the same crowd, Harold Grendall, André Przyborski, and Lloyd Fisher. Sometimes Red Lambardo showed up. Red was a younger fellow, in the thick of things. Harold was still working for the old outfit and naturally André continued to agitate for the liberation of Poland. Lloyd was into this and that. And Alec joined them occasionally when he was free. It was always helpful to get a younger perspective on the situation, and Alec was very well connected on the Hill and downtown. His practice was thriving now that he was doing Lloyd's heavy lifting, Lloyd so often out of town. Alec's a fine young man, Sylvia. You should be proud.

"I am," she said. "Is Axel?"

"Now, Sylvia," Ed said.

"Are they speaking?"

"Of course they're speaking. Axel has high regard for Alec, who he is, what he does."

"Huh-uh," she said.

"Axel doesn't go overboard, but that's his way."

"No kidding," she said.

"Alec represented me in the late unpleasantness," Ed said, looking at Sylvia closely for a reaction, and when there was none he concluded that she had been telling the truth moments before, when she said she did not know of his trouble. They were crowded together at a small table at Arthur's Café, only the two of them in a corner of the room. "Axel asked him to do it. He did a fine job, too, with a difficult brief. At least I'm not in jail. But I'm not employed, either. Someone had to go, and it was me. They put a bullet in the chamber, spun the chamber, and fired. The bullet missed Harold but it got me on ricochet. A lucky shot, not Alec's fault."

"What was it all about?" she asked.

Ed mumbled something and turned his head this way and that, as if to ease a stiff neck. She knew he was scrutinizing the room, assembling his thoughts, collecting bits and pieces from the various locked drawers of his mind, deciding what was worth showing and what wasn't.

"Axel's bank," he said, and that was all he said for a long moment, allowing the silence to gather. "Longfellow's bank, the one Axel bought and the government used when it was necessary that there be absolute secrecy, private transactions that were in the national interest and for the national security. When you had to get money to someone very quickly and without red tape and fifty pieces of paper." He sighed and lowered his voice, although there was no one within earshot. "Fully audited."

"Of course," Sylvia said when he paused again and she feared he would not go on, because he may have said too much. She had only the dimmest idea of what he was trying to tell her.

"The fool taxpayers didn't lose a single penny. As a matter of fact, the bank made money.
Everyone
made money, including the taxpayers. Carl Buzet ran a tight ship, and our section was more efficient than Chase Manhattan." He was looking off into the middle distance, a dreamy look on his face. "But that wasn't the way it looked to the Senate Committee. It looked to the Senate Committee as if we had set up a proprietary, stuffed it with government funds, and skimmed the profits for ourselves, all the while hiding behind the statutes that protect the national security. They accused us of profiteering with public money. And we never did, I swear it. Naturally we lost some funds; you always do. It's spillage and part of the cost of doing business with dubious characters. We're not Boy Scouts, and the people we dealt with aren't Boy Scouts. So we'd make a bad investment, put our faith and trust in the wrong man, buy long when we should have sold short. It's obvious that some of the accounts were irregular. They had to be, for Christ's sake, the people we were paying off—"

"Ed," Sylvia said, and put a finger to her lips.

"—were taking mortal risks," his voice now a whisper, "so the accounts were set up in the name of aliases, dummy corporations, and so forth."

She nodded, getting a little closer now to the heart of the matter.

"The bullet nicked me and young Alec stepped in to stop the bleeding. It was a god damned witch hunt, you want to know the truth, and it's not ended yet. We got a little careless, no question. Not with the accounts themselves but with the disbursements. Success went to our heads; we'd been doing it for twenty-five years with no headaches. It's the crumbs that'll trip you up every time, stuff you don't worry about because it's so god damned small. The residue of design, if you get my meaning. After a perfect little gem of an operation in Munich, André, another chap, and I had an evening at Kempinski's and somehow the bank picked up the tab and paid it from an open account, just a simple mistake, almost a clerical error. We decided to have a nice dinner to celebrate our success. And that was what the investigator from the Senate Committee discovered. Piddling little supper after one of the most brilliant coups in the history of our intelligence service, worthy of a night out."

"A scandal," she said.