The Art of the Devil (24 page)

The Waterbury clock was still intact on the mantle, thank goodness. She kept surveying. Upstairs she found one of the new agents, Philip Zane, seated by his window behind a door hanging ajar. They exchanged brief good mornings before the house matron moved quickly and a bit shamefacedly down the hall.

All of her girls looked green around the gills; one refused to be roused except to tell Dunbarton to stop her goddamned knocking. That girl would not keep her job for long, of course. But considering the current mess, firing was not a luxury that could be indulged. Assembling her charges in the hallway – even the slugabed came sullenly to join the line – Miss Dunbarton conveyed her immense displeasure with a toxic glare. Then she urged the girls to visit the kitchen, enjoy a quick breakfast of black coffee, and get about cleaning the mess they'd made, applying themselves first to wherever they had conducted their most sordid transgressions.

As the girls filed past, heads hung low, she noted one who seemed more alert than the rest: Elisabeth Grant, the new girl. Although Elisabeth's eyes were rimmed red with fatigue, she did not seem hung over; her chin was held up, with pride. Briefly, their eyes met, and in the girl's clear gaze Dunbarton sensed reproach for her fellows. The house matron gave a small, admiring shake of the head. A few more like that, she thought, and the farm would run in a manner befitting the President they all served.

THE TREASURY BUILDING

When the phone rang, Isherwood struggled into a sitting position.

He watched from the couch as Spooner lifted the receiver. The Chief looked even more cadaverous than usual: thinning gray hair disheveled, prominent skull clearly defined beneath. The fresh new collar had already been marred by a dusting of dandruff. In the center of the high forehead, an impression from the desk blotter suggested a flesh-colored watermark. Hanging up after half a minute, Spooner moved a thumb slowly, morosely, across his lips.

‘Something?' asked Isherwood.

‘Less than nothing. Every conductor and ticket vendor must be blind.' Spooner gave a sad, gravelly laugh.

The phone rang again. Resignedly, Spooner reached for it. Despite a tickle in his throat, Isherwood lit a cigarette. He had not been aware of falling asleep, but now he felt slightly refreshed. He tapped ash into a half-empty coffee cup on the floor by his feet.

Spooner seemed encouraged by whatever he was hearing. He sat straighter, nodding; his sallow cheeks filled with color. ‘You're sure?' he asked, and picked up a pen. ‘Spell your last name for me.' He listened again. ‘Would you swear to that in a court of law?'

After extracting a promise of silence, he hung up and addressed Isherwood in a murmur despite the fact that, with the office door closed, nobody could hear them. ‘State trooper from Charlottesville – saw the APB for Hart and recognized the face. Last year, he says, at a fund-raiser for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, Richard Hart was accompanying Senator John Bolin.'

Isherwood was suddenly wide awake. ‘John Bolin,' he repeated.

‘Part of the Bridges and Dirksen and Mundt crowd. McCarthyites.' Spooner smiled sternly. ‘The Wizard of Ooze and his tin men.'

For half a minute, both were silent, absorbing the implications.

‘So what now?' asked Isherwood. ‘Waltz into the Senate chamber with a warrant for Bolin's arrest?'

‘On hearsay from a state trooper? Fat chance.'

‘Let Eisenhower in on it, then. President trumps senator.'

‘Last resort. Remember: doctor's orders.'

Isherwood jetted smoke from each nostril. ‘We're looking for a thread to pull on. Here it is, with a bow tied around it. You want we should just sit on our hands?'

‘We need Hart.' Spooner kicked back in his chair, rubbed a palm blearily over his face. ‘He's the smoking gun – literally. Once he fingers Bolin, we've got cause. Then we lean on the good senator and roll up the whole mess.'

Again, the men looked at each other in silence. Wind moved outside the window with a numinous sigh. A girl in an office down the hall laughed loudly, stridently.

‘We've got feelers out,' said Spooner eventually. ‘High and low. I say we sit at the center of our web and wait for another strand to quiver. It's our best move.'

‘Get some eyes on Bolin, at least.'

‘Negative. We can't risk putting him on guard. We wait.'

Isherwood bit his tongue. Too many years spent behind a desk had ruined Spooner's nerve; but argument would be wasted breath.

The girl down the hall laughed again, raucously. Isherwood wished he knew what was so goddamned funny.

GETTYSBURG

As afternoon turned toward evening, Elisabeth and Josette stood shoulder-to-shoulder, cleaning dining-room windows.

‘You know,' said Josette suddenly, ‘I was pretty zozzled last night.'

‘Boy, me too.'

‘But I meant what I said. We should really do it. Go to Paris together.'

Elisabeth spritzed, wiped.

‘Libby? Why so quiet?'

‘Just thinking.'

‘About what?'

Elisabeth shrugged. ‘Sometimes,' she said slowly, ‘it's easier to plan something than to actually follow through. That's all.'

‘Sure. But we'll have each other to lean on. That'll make all the difference. It won't be easy – but that's what will make it exciting.'

Rags squealed against glass.

‘You're my best friend, Libby. There's nobody I'd rather go with.'

‘That's so sweet.' An awkward silence; Elisabeth was forced to add, ‘You're my best friend, too.'

‘Then let's do it. Let's go, right away.'

Elisabeth laughed. ‘Now?'

‘Tuesday's your day off, right? You can talk to the travel agent, find out some prices.'

Elisabeth moved on to the next window. ‘Maybe we should think about it some more.'

‘But that's what I've been doing for years: thinking. Thinking about Hollywood, or London, or Chicago – just thinking, thinking, thinking. Before I know it, I'll think myself right into being an old maid. The chance will have passed me by. I've done enough thinking.'

‘You're crazy, Josie. Anybody ever tell you that?'

Josette tapped her head, smiled craftily. ‘Crazy like a fox,' she said. ‘Promise you'll ask?'

Elisabeth stifled a sigh and nodded.

NEW YORK CITY

A young couple braved the chilly wind to enjoy a romantic stroll along the Hudson River.

When the young man suddenly stopped, took both of the girl's hands in his own, and awkwardly leaned in for a kiss, she closed her eyes, as she had been taught was proper. As the moments passed, however, she began to feel increasingly self-conscious – who knew what friends or family might be walking the river? The docks were populated not only with longshoremen and sailors, but with ordinary people who were enjoying the view and the fresh evening air and the lights on the water. And all it took to ruin a girl's reputation was a single scurrilous rumor. In spite of herself, then, she opened her eyes, even as the kiss continued, to run her gaze restively over the gray-brown water of the Hudson, lit from both shores, slopping against pilings ten feet below.

Suddenly, she gagged, tearing away and noisily vomiting.

The young man blushed, mortified; although he didn't know what he had done wrong, his girlfriend's reaction was clear. And so it came as almost a relief, moments later, when he turned and saw the human hand, messily severed from an absent body, bloodless and fish-belly white, tangled in a fishing net amongst the pilings.

THE SULGRAVE CLUB, WASHINGTON DC

As the moon rose on the evening of November 20th, Richard Nixon and a handful of reporters listened, inside a private club of yellow Roman brick and cream terracotta, as Senator Joseph McCarthy promised a blazing comeback – and not a moment too soon, the senator assured his audience, for he knew from confidential sources of a plot communist forces had been waging inside the highest echelons of the American government.

But the attention of the spectators wandered, Nixon noticed; they had heard this script too many times before. More than one toyed distractedly with a dessert fork or leaned over to whisper disrespectfully in a neighbor's ear. The Vice President also noted that McCarthy was spilling his drink as he wove his tall tales, and that, alarmingly, a trickle of slobber rode unnoticed from one corner of his broad mouth. The powerhouse Fighting Joe who had infamously slapped columnist Drew Pearson inside this same swank club five years before was no more. And unless the man changed his habits dramatically, Nixon could not help thinking, Joe McCarthy might not be long for this world.

Behind the tinted windows of a Lincoln Continental traveling down K Street one hour later, the Vice President stared out at the baubles of the capital at night, muscles in his jaw bunching fitfully. When different loyalties pulled a man in opposite directions, it was damned difficult to know how to react. He had come so very far in this game. And yet he still had so very much to learn.

But however the cards fell, Dick Nixon would land on his feet. The country to which he had promised himself demanded no less. In his own estimation he was one of the few men – perhaps the
only
man – able to keep his moral center under such perfidious conditions. Born into a house his father had built with his own two hands, a Quaker house in which drinking and dancing and swearing had been strictly forbidden, Nixon had been infused with a sense of right and wrong strong enough to survive the warping required to be effective in Washington. The trick, he realized more every day, was to bend in the proper places. One embraced smaller evils for the greater good. And so to win his first seat in Congress he had smeared his rival Jerry Vorhis by waging a vicious whispering campaign, implying Voorhis' endorsement by communists. Stumping against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, he had sunk even lower, distributing a pink flyer that simultaneously attacked her voting record and – by dint of its color – her gender. Caught maintaining a privately subscribed expense account of questionable integrity, he had taken to television airwaves, conducting a tasteless public financial striptease, opportunistically using his children and cocker spaniel puppy to sway public opinion back in his favor. Such ethical compromises were necessary, he had learned, in order to reach a height from which a man might do real good.
Uneasy lies the head which wears the crown.

Political allies were not friends. And loyalties were not black and white. He had made promises to McCarthy and to Eisenhower, to Pat and Tricia and Julie, to himself – and most of all to America – that could not all be honored. One had to pick and choose.

The trick was in making the right choice.

GETTYSBURG: NOVEMBER 21

A
t a few minutes before noon on Monday, the more conscientious of Gettysburg's teenagers sat in class on Old Harrisburg Road, listening for the bell that would signal lunch.

Joe ‘Buddy' Buchanan sat in a drugstore on the outskirts of town, nibbling on a hangnail and pressing the soda jerk to add more syrup to his Coke. When his usual charming smile failed to accomplish this goal, Buddy tried a glare, and that did the trick; the pimply jerk's head must have filled with images of switchblades and brass knuckles, for he reluctantly gave an extra few pumps. ‘Hope you like it sweet,' he mumbled as he passed over the soda.

Buddy Buchanan tossed him a pally, but not unthreatening, wink. ‘You know it, nosebleed.'

He took his time with the Coke, enjoying the jerk's squirming beneath his gaze. Wandering out to his hopped-up Bel Air a few minutes later, long legs switching beneath pegged jeans, he lit a cigarette and wondered how best to spend the long day stretching out before him. That night he had a race with a screamer over from Abbottstown, so he didn't want to get too blotto; but that meant a whole dull afternoon to be killed without the benefit of booze. He supposed he could hit the matinee at the Odeon, but he had already seen the James Dean flick playing there nine times. That left the railroad tracks, where he could peg empty cans at rats, always good for an hour or two's diversion; or maybe Carl's, where he could flirt with a roller-skated carhop wearing a too-short skirt. Either way, he was bound to run into some friends who would keep him occupied until it came time to head over to Table Rock for the race. It was a plan.

Lost in thought, he didn't notice the stranger's approach until the man addressed him. The stranger was a certified square, wearing a soiled gray suit, which after laundering would not have seemed out of place on Buddy's father. He was also a gimp, hunching his considerable frame low over a crutch. Drawing close to Buddy's car, looking around shiftily from beneath the brim of his hat, he said: ‘Hey, kid. Want to make a few bucks?'

Buddy blinked. He nearly answered,
What are you, queer?
But crutch or no, this guy looked as if he might mean business. Sometimes you found men like this, who had seen too much in a war, who would now kill you as soon as look at you. And was that the bulge of a gun, beneath the man's lapel, or just a pack of smokes?

‘You deaf?' asked the man. Rejiggering his crutch to allow more freedom of movement, he removed a pack of cigarettes from a pocket nowhere near the bulge.

‘Naw,' said Buddy, pushing off the fender and making himself stand tall. Despite the effort he still found himself looking up; the stranger, even hunched over the crutch, towered above him. ‘I ain't deaf.'

‘So I'll ask it again. You want to make a few bucks?'

‘Depends.' Buddy tried to inject a suggestion of threat into his voice. With each passing second, however, he was feeling less intimidating than intimidated. ‘What do I gotta do?'

When the square reached into another pocket, Buddy nearly flinched. But all the man withdrew was a crisp new portrait of Ulysses S. Grant. Handing it over, he explained his needs with a few simple words. Once it was done, Buddy would be rewarded with a hundred bucks on top of the fifty. Needless to say, the arrangement would remain just between them.