The Shadow Cabinet (19 page)

“Too much?”

“That can happen too. In the eccentric cases, like O'Toole's, the vasopressin seems to combine with some other neuropeptide, so far unidentified, to form a quite powerful neurotransmitter, activating massive numbers of brain cells previously dormant, something like Sodium Pentothal. It's prodigious in its effects, virtually uncontrollable, as in Billy's case—so much so that it seems to create a secondary character disorder or neurosis.”

“You're pretty up to date on all this medical jargon,” Donlon said acidly. “What ever happened to the historian's simple behaviorism?”

“Oh, we have that too,” Foster quickly replied, “but not so much here. The last citadels of behaviorism are here in Washington, of course—the White House, the State Department, Defense, Congress, the whole ball of wax.”

The false note echoed in Haven Wilson's head like a gong. Foster continued: “There's no doubt about it. They're all primitive behaviorists, from Reagan on down. So was Carter, so was Nixon. The higher you go in bureaucratic hierarchy, the more primitive it becomes. Have you ever seen a presidential option memo? I came across one the other day in a Freedom of Information case. Professor Skinner himself might have written it. General LeMay expressed the syndrome best. ‘Nuke the Chinks.' Here we are.”

Foster held open an enameled swinging door and they entered a brightly lit canteen crowded with Formica-covered tables. A stainless-steel counter and steam table stood at the far end. In the far corner, a solitary figure sat at a table with his back to the wall, hunched over a coffee cup, mumbling to a black woman in a pink nylon dress who was clearing the nearby table.

“What use could vasopressin have?” asked Wilson as they crossed to the coffee urn.

“A number of uses. We know athletes use anabolic steroids to build muscle mass. Thinkers might call upon vasopressin to expand efficient brain mass—figuratively speaking, of course.” They drew coffee from the urn. “So it might have any number of practical uses. It would improve court performance, political leadership, competence in Congress, wisdom in the White House.”

Foster led them to a table in the center of the canteen, but left his coffee cup there and crossed to the hunched solitary figure. Wilson heard him tell the man to report to the groundkeeper. The man nodded without comment. He was a slight man with brownish-gray hair and a face weathered and cracked by the outdoors, as puckered as a winter crab apple. The blue eyes had the steady fixed resolve of an addict of some kind, distant yet near, veiled yet piercing. His collarless white shirt was wrinkled under a faded serge coat, held together at the throat by a safety pin. Attached to the lapels of the jacket was a chain of paper clips, something like inverted campaign ribbons, traveling down to the first buttonhole.

Seeing the piercing eyes, Ed Donlon had taken the chair with its back to the figure. Wilson had no such luck and found himself the target of that high-frequency radar glare, eye contact unavoidable.

Jesus Christ, he thought in despair, where do these people keep coming from?

“Maggoty thoughts weren't unknown to me,” the man called as that initial contact was made. Wilson moved his eyes away.

“It's interesting that you should mention the behaviorists,” Foster continued as he sat down, “since I've done some work on that very problem as it applies to foreign and defense policy—”

“You think I'm lying!” the man shouted.

“That's O'Toole,” Foster whispered. His voice grew louder. “Public life is full of the breed. Behaviorists, I mean. Just about everyplace you look these days—”

Wilson was more conscious of O'Toole's staccato bursts from the far corner. He sounded like a word-processing machine that had run amok.

“Resurrection is all right, Doc, but how much sleep do you think I'm getting? Two, three hours a night? Less these days! Sure you wanna get the truth out, but there's a mountain of rubbish that's gotta be moved first.…”

“As I said, most Washington policy experts are behaviorists,” Foster was saying, “but then so is most of Washington—”

“Washington's the wrong place!” Wilson heard O'Toole call to him.

Foster's voice grew even louder. “When you look at it closely, you realize that, conceptually considered, détente is nothing more than a primitive behaviorist system of rewards and penalties, pleasure or pain, a kernel of corn or an electric shock—the same tools the Skinnerites employ with rats and pigeons. But in the case of détente, the Soviet Union is the laboratory rat being disciplined by our white-frocked globalist psychologists, Kissinger, then Brzezinski, now Haig, from their diplomatic laboratories. ‘Linkages,' they say, but is Soviet ideology truly as primitive as that—a brain mass which is nothing but reflex, driven by the avoidance of pain?”

“You've seen the ones with the beards,” O'Toole shouted, “the beards and the turbans. Maybe they've taken over the planet already, Doc, faking this ‘No spika the Inglesa' you get up on Pennsy Avenue near the World Bank. World Bank! Hey, Doc, whose world?”

The surging voice crept closer and Wilson erred in moving his eyes from Foster's face. He discovered Billy O'Toole's manic eyes locked to his like a heat-seeking missile sensor, quite close now, just a few steps away. “So they're faking it,” O'Toole told him, his voice dropped to a more confidential register, “all the while owning the planet already, staking out oil and minerals rights in your head. You know the old saying, don't you? Keep the land and your skulls, give us what's in it.” He sat down next to Haven Wilson. “I know you from somewhere. You ever been in Rochester?”

“I don't think so,” Wilson answered, half-smiling.

“Maybe you forgot.”

“Maybe I did.”

“It's not easy to forget Rochester,” O'Toole said.

“No, I guess not,” Wilson agreed.

Foster had lapsed into frightened silence. O'Toole glanced at him, looked at Donlon, looked at his coat and tie, and returned to Wilson.

“One night in the middle of November, nineteen hundred and forty-nine, I had an argument with my sweetie in Rochester.” He paused, searching Wilson's face as if to assess the effect of this revelation. Then he studied Wilson's tie.

Wilson nodded. “That's too bad.”

“It was on the floor of the DeMolay Ballroom in Rochester that I had the argument. She was taller than I was and had signed up the last dance on her card with Ben Fitzgerald, the ‘See You in My Dreams' number. That's always the best. He was six one. How tall are you?” He was still studying Wilson's tie, as if the fleur-de-lis were a hieroglyphic on a Masonic apron.

“About that,” Wilson said.

“He was six one. The ‘Dancing in the Dark' number was mine, but the lights were out for that one, you know what I mean. In the ‘See You in My Dreams' number, which closes the evening's formal entertainment, the lights come on real slow like, the saxophone players stand up, and the DeMolay banner drops down from the ceiling, real slow and nice. Only this night, it got hung up on the chandelier, someone told me afterward. It comes crashing down like a line fulla wet wash, but that don't matter. The way it's supposed to be is that it comes floating down real easy, everybody steps back from his sweetheart, looking around at everybody else and clapping, but I was five feet seven and my sweetie was five feet nine and she can't hide it, even with her shoes off, you know what I mean?” Wilson nodded. “I thought she was your basically pure DeMolay type, the girl of my dreams, but after she shows me her card where she'd signed up Ben Fitzgerald for the last dance, she says to me, ‘Nix on the “See You in My Dreams” number, short stuff. I'll make it up to you later and it won't be any dream.' She gives me a wink and I speed off. Are you with me?”

“I think so,” Wilson said.

“What she meant was in the sack.”

“I suppose so.”

“Me, I didn't know anything about sex at the time. I was an RC. What people did I thought they did out on the dance floor, waltzing to Wayne King. It was two years before I found out. So I'm humiliated, that's all I'm thinking of. I speed off but I don't come back, see? I leave her standing right there in the middle of the DeMolay Ballroom in Rochester and keep rolling, down the stairs, across the lobby, up the street. I get back to my room at the Y and throw off the rented tux, the starched shirt, the rented tie, everything right down to the underwear. I look in the mirror behind the closet door and I don't like what I see. I get out my cashbook to find out what the evening's cost me, and I don't like what I see there, either. I'm burned up. I decide it's time to make a change. On the inside cover of the cashbook, I write, ‘From now on, you've got to live with the facts, short stuff, and this book will tell it like it is.' So that cheers me up. I feel like I've got a handle on something now, some real heavy stuff. I'd made a new beginning that night and the way I felt, I could have gone back to the DeMolay Ballroom in my underwear, the trap seat dropped, my ass hanging out, and it wouldn't have made any difference, you know what I mean? Only it's a hard book to keep and I'm no Edgar Allan Poe. The next night I go back to the Y and enter up the daily cash flow—no breakfast, a cup of coffee at ten, two bits for carfare, a cheese sandwich and a half pint of milk for lunch, bean soup and a cottage cheese salad for dinner, and the four dollars I'd spent for my ex-sweetie's gardenia the night before. You see what happened, don't you? Only twenty-four hours later and I'm already bankrupt, wiped out. There in the cashbook where I'm going to tell it like it is, the St. Thomas Aquinas of the DeMolay Ballroom, I get wiped out by a five-foot-seven runt vegetarian who bills me four dollars for a stale gardenia and a buck-fifty worth of rabbit chow. You see the problem in Rochester?”

“I think I do,” Wilson said. “You've got quite a memory.” Dr. Dobler stood just inside the swinging door with a worker in coveralls from the groundkeeping crew. O'Toole ignored them. Cap in hand, the groundkeeper crossed to O'Toole's chair and took him by the arm. “Come on, Billy. We got gravel to spread.”

“I could have gotten her in the sack that night, like Ben Fitzgerald,” O'Toole said, rising obediently, “but it was two years before I knew what the shit she was talking about.”

“That happens sometimes,” said Wilson sympathetically.

“That's been my problem all my life, someone else always standing in my shoes, someone like Ben Fitzgerald.” The crew chief led him on. O'Toole turned back. “I never caught up, either. If you're ever in Rochester, stay away from the Y; they put saltpeter in the rice pudding.” The chief pulled him toward the door. “If you see me down on Pennsy Avenue in a Lincoln limo with two platinum blondes in the back seat, say ‘Howdy,' right? I'll still be here.” They dragged him through the door.

“Is that what's going to wake up the White House?” Donlon asked as they left the canteen. “This vasopressin you were talking about? I can see the Pentagon juiced up on that.”

“As I said,” Foster added uncomfortably, “O'Toole's the odd case.”

Wilson and Donlon spent another forty-five minutes at the Center, examining a list of current projects and talking with a few of the resident scholars. Wilson wasn't impressed. It was noon as they passed through the front gate. The rain had vanished and the skies were clearing.

“Well, what do you think?” Donlon asked delicately.

“Why'd the law firm stick you with this problem?”

“They thought I might know something about it. Angus McVey's an old client. He came to us for help and I said I'd see what I could do.”

“So you did,” Wilson said. “They let it get away from them, didn't they? Just like Nick Straus over at the Pentagon, the same problem.”

“What's that?”

“The monkeys are running the zoo.”

Near Donlon's BMW, a young man passed them wearing a George Washington University sweatshirt with a few Greek letters below the logo. Red-faced and out of breath, he was returning from a campus political rally, carrying a crude, hand-lettered sign. A few letters had been partially dissolved by the rain, but they could still make out the words:

TIRED OF REAGAN
,
RIP
-
OFFS
,
AND REACTION?

RENT AN ANARCHIST

CALL HAL 632-8111

Wilson turned to Donlon, as if to say something, but Donlon, embarrassed, warned him off. “Don't say it,” he advised. “Just think about it some more and we'll talk next week. Let's go over to the club. I need a goddamned drink.”

6.

Buster Foreman thought he knew something about Signet Security Systems and was surprised Haven Wilson was asking about the company—a rather odd coincidence. He'd made some discreet inquiries himself about the firm—not the firm but the man who owned it—the previous July after a legislative aide on the Hill had told him a bizarre story. Senator Combs was involved. Buster had always disliked Combs. What he'd heard from the legislative aide had made him suspicious as well.

It was late on a Friday afternoon and the three men sat in the incomplete front offices of a concrete-block building on a side street along a railroad spur in Arlington. Traffic was heavy on the boulevard a block away, where the falling sun glazed the windshields of the homeward-bound automobiles. Like Fuzzy Larson, sitting lazily behind his dusty desk, Buster was dressed for an evening of amateur carpentry—an old sweatshirt, wash-faded jeans that showed a few paint splatters, and ragged jogging shoes. A pair of saw horses sat at the end of the room, a carpenter's toolbox beneath. A Skilsaw, plugged to an extension cord, leaned on its side under the table on which Buster sat. Neither man looked particularly anxious to go to work.