Hollywood (20 page)

“You’re right there!” This was the real thing all right. Mr. Mahoney could have stepped off the page of a Nick Carter story.

“Look, Mr. Mahoney,” Roxy was now waving to the waiter for the check, “Mrs. Phillips is a vulture for German culture, and that’s it. She works for the Red Cross, like every patriotic little lady in these parts, and there’s nothing for her to spy on anywhere around here.”

“But what about Washington?”

“What about Washington?” Roxy looked blankly at the Secret Service man. “I don’t think she’s been there in years. Has she, Jess?”

Jess shook his head. “No occasion to. She doesn’t even go to New York except to sail for—”

Roxy kicked him under the table. Fortunately, Mr. Mahoney could not write and listen. He had missed the dangerous verb. “But then, I guess, Washington comes to her, when Senator Harding is back home in Marion.”

An alarm sounded in Jess’s head. Fortunately, he was able to subdue his nerves by pretending that he was a counter-agent, a master detective, who knew far more than this insignificant cog in the vast Pinkertonian machine. He was guileful. “The Senator and Mrs. Harding are close friends of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips. Fact, they went to Europe together a few years ago …”

“To visit Germany, wasn’t it?”

“No. It wasn’t.” Jess was suave, like Raymond Griffith, his favorite film star, elegant, unflappable, and seldom out of a tuxedo. “France and Italy mostly, looking for works of art.” W.G. had come home with two marble statues of naked women, while the Duchess had bought a fully clothed lady called Prudence the Puritan.

“I see,” said Mr. Mahoney, who, Jess had noticed, could not both think and speak either, which eased Jess’s task. “They often make trips together …”

“They did. But that was in younger days. Now the Senator is busy in Washington or out on Chautauqua, and Mr. Phillips’s health is not so good, and she’s so busy with the Red Cross …”

“Why do you think she said what she said about General Pershing?”

This was a surprise, to which Roxy rose. “So you were listening in—”

“That’s my job, Miss Stinson … Mrs. Smith.”

“I think she thought it a good joke that our commanding general against the Germans is a German. I think it’s pretty funny, too.” Roxy was on her feet. “We don’t want to miss the feature,” she murmured. Jess helped her into her coat.

“I’d like to know,” Mr. Mahoney doggedly began.

Roxy cut him short. “If you want to know whether or not General Pershing is a German spy, I suggest you go to France and ask him. Anyway,” she added with true Roxy zest, “a well-set-up young man like you ought to be in France, anyway, fighting for his country, instead of bothering Ohio ladies.”

That took care of Mr. Mahoney, Jess could see. But if there was to be a real investigation of Carrie, then the affair with W.G. would come to light; and if that happened, all was lost. Even as Jess complimented Roxy on her cool handling of the detective, he was wondering just what he dared tell
Daugherty over the telephone, which might very well be tapped into by the government. Suddenly the whole country had become very exciting and dangerous, and Jess was both thrilled and terrified as his dreams of spies and detectives and ghosts in the broom closet were now all starting to come true.

Burden Day congratulated the President on his recent birthday. Wilson’s thin face looked more bleak than ever. “Thank you, Senator. Sixty-one is a riotous age. You have it to look forward to. Meanwhile, tell Senator Reed of Missouri that I really do celebrate my birthday on December twenty-eighth and not, as he thinks, on December twenty-fifth.” Burden sat on a sofa beside the fire while the President sat in a straight chair opposite. Comment was no longer made on why it was that the President chose to conduct his business from a small upstairs study rather than from the presidential office in the new west wing. Doubtless he liked the proximity of Lincoln’s ghost or, more likely, Edith’s ample presence.

Although the Senate was in a brief recess for the Christmas holidays, few of the Westerners had gone home. Burden and Kitty had sent for relatives; and like a kaleidoscope, the Senate continued to turn, rearranging its component pieces in ever new combinations. Last week’s ally was this week’s enemy. Only the politicians’ code of a favor for a favor gave any shape to the very odd club that had made for itself so powerful a place in the scheme of things that even the President, with all his war-time powers, was often at the mercy of the savage-tongued Jim Reed—a member of his own party—not to mention the more or less crazed Henry Cabot Lodge of the opposition.

On this, the last day of 1917, the President had asked Burden to come see him in the late afternoon and together they would go over some of the points that the President would make to the new Congress on the progress of the war and, most important, on the peace that would follow. Burden had long since discovered that Wilson did not crave advice; consequently, he tended to nod his head and hum agreement, grateful for the room’s fire. Half of the White House had been shut off to conserve heat; or so Tumulty had piously informed the press. Certainly the downstairs hall had been somewhat colder than the portico outside.

As the beautiful voice droned on, Burden did his best to keep awake. If Wilson did not want advice, Burden did not want to be read to. Finally, the President put down the pages, typed by himself, Burden noticed, recognizing
the characteristic blue of Wilson’s typewriter ribbon. “You get my thrust. I have a group working on the details. A sort of inquiry, you might say, on what to do after. Because there is—was—no point to our joining in this war if at the end we cannot find some way to stop these wasteful bloody enterprises.”

“You agree with Mr. Taft, which should impress the Regular Republicans.” Burden decided to advise. “If I may say so, I think it a bit too soon to speak as if we had already won the war when the Germans have been smashing the British to pieces, and we haven’t done much of anything yet—in the field, that is.”

To Burden’s surprise, Wilson took this well. “I agree,” he said. “I don’t plan to make a speech tomorrow, but I’m trying to sort out what should be our position when it comes time to …” He stopped.

Burden finished, in his own way, the master of eloquence’s thought. “… to justify a war so unpopular with so many people, particularly those in my part of the country, who are your main supporters.”

A dull red spot formed atop each presidential cheekbone. “I was under the impression that the war is now more popular with the average American than it ever was with me. And in spite of all the bad news from France.”

“Will there be a coal shortage?” Burden had been persuaded to ask this question by several senators from the mining states. “And will you—take action?”

Wilson looked glum. On the day after Christmas, the President had seized the railroads; and placed them under McAdoo.

“Will you nationalize coal, too?” The object of Burden’s visit, if not of Wilson’s invitation.

“There are … imperatives, yes. New York City is close to a real shortage; and tonight the temperature is below zero up there. We’ve made them cut down on electricity …”

“ ‘No lights on Broadway.’ ” The theaters had been furious in their response; the President adamant in his.

“It will be worse than that.” Wilson stood up. In the firelight he seemed like a scarecrow, ill-defined and not physically coherent. He shuffled to his desk and opened a drawer, which Burden by now knew was known as The Drawer, where the red-tagged important messages were piled. Wilson removed several documents. “Russia is now out of the war. The Bolsheviks have accepted Germany’s terms, not that they ever had any choice. I’d hoped we could keep the new Russian government as an ally, but now their whole country is falling apart.” Wilson glanced at one of the messages. “From our
consul at Harbin. He says Irkutsk—which is in Siberia, I think—is in flames. The Bolsheviks have killed a number of their own people, as well as various French and English officials.”

“Do you think this is true?”

“I don’t
think
, Senator. I read what I am told is an account of what happens when extremists seize a country the size of Russia, the size,” Wilson sat again in his straight chair, “of the United States. I believe we have done everything possible to keep a line of communication open to those people. I have no choice. If Russia leaves the war, that will free an entire German army to reinforce the Western Front. Then what?” Wilson sighed. “We have had such bad news.” The President took off his pince-nez; rubbed the two small red marks on either side of his nose that matched, in miniature, the now fading ones on his cheeks. “There is England, too. We’re being drawn into their net. I have never seen anything like their ‘propaganda,’ as George Creel likes to call it. How can we convince the world that we are truly disinterested—asking for no territory, nothing—when England makes us look like a partner in imperialism rather than what we are, a republic that wants only peace …”

Wilson could do this sort of thing by the hour, and although Burden admired the President’s genuine high-mindedness, he himself tended to the literal, the objective, the useful. As if sensing Burden’s distraction, Wilson replaced one red-tagged document with another. “This came yesterday. It’s from Brest Litovsk, an appeal from the Bolshevik Trotsky. He’s an American, I gather—at one time anyway. Now he’s in charge of the Russian delegation. He rejects, thank God, the substance of the German agreement, but then he requests that the Allies make peace, which certainly pleases me, but then he adds this intolerable rubbish.” Wilson read from Trotsky’s statement: “ ‘If the Allied governments in blind obstinacy, which characterizes the falling and perishing classes …’ ”

“Us?”

Wilson nodded. “ ‘… again refuse to participate in the negotiations, then the working class will be confronted with the iron necessity of tearing the power out of the hands of those who cannot or will not give peace to the nation.’ ” Wilson put down the paper. “There is great mischief here. Should these Bolsheviks prevail, what effect might they have on our own people, on all our home-grown Communists and radicals and labor agitators?”

Burden was not impressed by Wilson’s alarm, if it was true alarm and not simply political play-acting. “Since we never imitated Russia when they had
a highly colorful czar, I doubt if Mr. Trotsky of New York City, or wherever he is from, will have much effect either. But I thought,” Burden shifted to the real politics of the matter, “that Mr. Root had made a deal with the provisional government last summer.”

Elihu Root, the most brilliant as well as the most conservative of American statesmen, had been sent by the President to Petrograd to keep the Russians in the war. As counterweight, Wilson had sent with him two colleagues, of whom one was a genuine American Socialist. At the same time, to complicate matters, a World Socialist Congress was meeting in Stockholm. After much public agonizing, Wilson had refused to issue passports to the American delegates, citing their “almost treasonable utterances.” Deeper and deeper, thought Burden; but then he knew that as he himself was entirely of his place and time and class and so both isolationist and populist, the President was now as one with the, to Burden, un-American Eastern ruling class, always more prone than not to foreign adventures in collegial tandem with regimes that Burden would have only politely tolerated.

“I’m not sure ‘deal’ is the word to use.” Wilson’s nose twitched fastidiously. “In May their government agreed to continue the war with Germany while we extended to them over three hundred million dollars’ worth of credit at a very low rate of interest.”

“They were bought.”

“They were bought.” Wilson was equally flat. “But, as Mr. Frick said of Colonel Roosevelt, they did not stay bought.” He waved the red-tagged paper like a flag. “That was May when they loved us. Now it is December and … they do not. They encourage the worst elements of our labor movement. Read this … No. I just read Mr. Trotsky to you. He proposes that our workers overthrow us.” Wilson got up and replaced the documents in The Drawer. “By next year, according to all projections, our labor unions will have increased their membership by four and a half million.”

“Good news for the Democratic Party.”

“Let’s hope not for Mr. Trotsky. He’s trying to make capital—surely the wrong word—out of Thomas Mooney, who is innocent, he tells us, of the San Francisco bombings …”

“I’ve always thought he was.” Someone, in July of 1916, had interrupted a Preparedness Day parade with bombs. Nine people had died, and the labor radical Mooney had been arrested, found guilty of murder and condemned to death.

“I was not at the trial.” Wilson was legalistic. “But our ambassador in
Russia wants me to commute the sentence, which I don’t think I can do, as the whole matter is under the governor of California. Colonel House thinks I should intervene, or
seem
to. So I’m setting up a mediation committee, and should they find new evidence, as such commissions tend to do, I shall ask the governor, most respectfully, to refrain from his auto-da-fé until there is a new trial, and so on, and so forth. They blackmail us!” Wilson rubbed his forehead. He looked ill. One of Burden’s friends, a doctor, had assured him that Wilson was prematurely arteriosclerotic, with a long and secret history of strokes. Like all doctors, sworn to secrecy, this one could not bear to remain silent on a matter so exciting. But then he was not the President’s physician, who was, suspiciously, in constant attendance. Also, it was well known that Grayson allowed his patient no more than three or four hours of office-work a day, broken by numerous automobile and horseback rides and golf. In frantic war-time Washington, the White House was the most tranquil place to be. Yet no one could say that this president was not entirely master of the nation’s politics and, probably, of its war-time allies as well. Burden had never known a mind so capable of swiftly relating one fact to another in order to achieve as large a view as possible of what was necessary to itself. But Wilson’s necessity might not be that of Leon Trotsky, of Lloyd George in England, of Clemenceau in France, while even to many senators in his own party, the President’s world-view was eccentric. There were still quite a few old-fashioned populists in the Congress who believed implicitly Trotsky’s charge that the United States had gone to war to protect J. P. Morgan’s loans to the Allies. Burden himself, on demagogic days, inclined to that bright simple view.