The Shadow Cabinet (16 page)

He found his opportunity in the social and political turbulence of the early sixties, when his speeches on the hustings were invariably directed against the same targets: those outside agitators attempting to organize the Carolina textile mills, and the civil rights carpetbaggers sowing sedition among South Carolina blacks. His appeal was that of a righteous man in a society under siege, defending its institutions and its birthright, which were also its privileges, against out-of-state subversion aided and abetted by Washington's meddlesome bureaucrats and jurists and those rootless liberals whose intellectualism had led them to the same treachery as liberals everywhere—the betrayal of their origins. As rationalists, they'd first separated themselves from God; as liberal reformists, tinkerers, and politicians, they had now separated themselves from community and country.

Once elected a U.S. senator, he found the same opportunity. The uncertainty, disillusionment, and fear which he'd preyed upon in his first campaign appearances before crowds of lower-and middle-class white Carolinians in the sixties now had a national constituency. South Carolina's parochial confusion now seemed the nation's. Despite the new vocabulary which his better-educated foundation ideologues had invented to give gloss and respectability to its jingoism—“pointy-headed intellectuals,” Combs's redneck epithet of the sixties, had become, in the mahogany-paneled suites of his foundation board rooms and the slick paper essays of his national conservative journals, “secular humanists”—the message was the same. The nation was now under siege, corrupted from within by those same liberals who had once betrayed South Carolina and who still dominated the media, the Eastern banking and foreign policy establishment, the halls of Congress, and Washington executive councils; and threatened from without by those same agents of international subversion, centered in Moscow but now spread throughout the third world, that had once infiltrated the NAACP, the cotton fields, the textile mills, the bus counters, and the rural tabernacles of South Carolina.

So Bob Combs's political revivalism was little more than South Carolina chauvinism brought to Washington, the same fears and uncertainties now writ large across the map of the United States, a nation that, like South and North Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama twenty years ago, was defending its institutions and its birthright, which were also its privileges, against the conspiracies of the political levelers from within and without.

Those gathered there in the reception room of the New Congress Coalition were not fully aware of this, nor would they have fully endorsed divine principle as a policy guide in these times of uncertainty—with an obsolete economy, an overvalued dollar, crime and drugs in the streets, and a sinister, armed-to-the-teeth Soviet Union, whether or not it was the Antichrist. They were interested in answers, not doubts or ambiguities, searching for the same practical solutions they sought in their offices or workshops. In the middle-class South Carolina communities from which they came, they clerked in the stores, managed the banks, sold the real estate, paid the taxes, and elected the officeholders. Someone from their ranks returning home slightly intoxicated from a neighborhood bar or a country club dance had little to fear from the town constable, if stopped, or the judge, if tried. They were of the same community, where the freedoms they enjoyed, like their immunities, didn't count as privileges but as rights. They would have been perplexed, perhaps even offended, if someone from outside that community had told them that simply by their status they were secure from fear, that simply in their indifference they wielded political and economic power. Yet this was exactly what they wielded, and the reassurance they heard in Bob Combs's political nostrums was the promise of how that privilege could be maintained.

“All I can say is what common sense tells me,” Senator Combs was saying now, talking about the defense budget. “If your worst enemy gets himself a gun, get yourself a bigger one. Get yourself ten of 'em. Don't go talking about parity or equivalence or any other of these fancy words for surrender. So we've got to be bigger and stronger than they are, that's what this defense budget is all about. That's the bottom line. Anyone who tells you different is just trying to pull the wool over your eyes.…”

The remarks got no response from the audience, and Shy Wooster waited, disappointed, hoping that Combs would read the signs and conclude with the remarks Wooster had prepared for him for the Moral Minutemen reception a week earlier.

Combs hesitated, then began again. “'Course you hear a lot these days about this nuclear freeze business, people saying we've got to have a freeze. They're saying Moscow wants peace too, as bad as they do. I reckon they do—a piece here, a piece there, a piece yonder.…”

The laughter came first, then the sprinkling of applause, which gathered strength as it swept on toward where Wooster was standing.

“That's an old joke,” the frazzle-haired young woman said disdainfully.

“It's not the joke, sugar, it's the timing,” Wooster told her. “Did you hear the one about the Arkansas farmer looking for a new rooster?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Come on over here,” he said, taking her arm. “I'll tell it to you.”

And so saying, he led her off to a solitary corner to submit her to the Shy Wooster obscenity test, which separated the cacklers from the layers.

4.

The pale morning sunshine shimmered in a slight haze over the city. Haven Wilson parked his station wagon in a two-hour parking zone, locked it, and dropped a quarter in the parking meter. He was thirty minutes early for his appointment with Rita Kramer and he turned away from her hotel, crossed the street, and headed north. In his coat pocket was the dog-eared business card given to him on the beltway ramp a few days earlier. Clipped to it was the cashier's check for three hundred dollars.

Potomac Towers was an eight-story office and residential building only a few years old, an L-shaped angle of structural concrete and ugly glazed tile that towered over the neighborhood of detached and semidetached Federal and Victorian residences of Foggy Bottom. A ladder of metal-railed balconies climbed to the garden apartments on the upper floors, where potted plants, deck chairs, and an occasional barbecue smoker were visible through the railings. A small circular drive led to the double glass doors under the overhang. No doorman was in sight, not even a security guard. Cheaply built and cheaply maintained, the building smelled of uncured concrete. He crossed the foyer and walked down the carpeted steps to a small shopping arcade. The small glass-fronted shops selling imported rugs and Indian brass, women's scarves and overpriced haberdashery, weren't open yet. A gray-haired building carpenter with sawdust on his bifocals was rehanging a glass door to a narrow cubicle with the name
Embassy Car Rentals
painted on the glass. The arcade curved in a dogleg to a poorly ventilated coffee shop that held a handful of customers, hunched at the counter over their coffee cups and morning newspapers.

The building directory between the stainless-steel elevator doors listed
Caltronics
in a fourth-floor suite. Lush FM music was piped into the upholstered elevator, which whispered its way upward. “Dentist office music,” his younger son used to say contemptuously. Wilson felt as if he were on his way there now. The silent fourth-floor corridor was carpeted in bright orange. As he searched for directions, a thin strawberry blonde in custom jeans and spiked heels passed him carrying an automatic coffeemaker. He trailed after her and found the Caltronics suite just around the corner, the raised vermilion lettering on the door identical to the print on the card the man called Charles Davis had given him on the beltway ramp. The carpeted office within was empty, the door propped open by an aluminum freight dolly. He continued down the corridor, pausing at two other doors marked
Caltronics
, but both were locked. The next door down the corridor was marked by another name,
Signet Security Systems
, but it was also locked. He'd just turned away when a voice called to him, “Looking for someone?” A tall, heavyset man in a beige coat and a black astrakhan hat shambled up the corridor, carrying a briefcase.

“Caltronics.”

“Back the hall.”

“I thought they might be moving.”

“Not this way they're not; back there.” The voice wasn't friendly and neither were the suspicious green eyes directing him back down the corridor. His brown hair was thick and curly under the ludicrous wool cap, his cheeks were scarred, and his heavy mustache was flecked with gray.

In the Caltronics suite he found two black movers in gray overalls pulling drawers from file cabinets and stacking them on an aluminum lift cart. The name of a Washington office equipment firm was stitched in red thread across their backs.

“Is anyone around?” he asked.

They told him that there were just the two of them, come to pick up the furniture. They didn't know where Caltronics had moved. The other offices were also empty. In the inner corridor that joined the three private offices, a copying machine stood against the wall; taped to the front was a notice from the firm from which it had been rented, warning that it wasn't to be removed. Behind the machine was an interior door. He opened it, squeezed between the wall and the copier, and peered into a dim interior reeking of silver nitrates and photographic emulsions. He flicked on the light switch to his right and in the red glow of the unmasked bulb saw a photographic workbench, a wall of steel shelves holding a few empty film boxes, and a rack of empty videotape spools.

Another door stood at the end of the corridor. On the wall nearby was a hand-lettered admonition: “Don't Tamper with Telex,” but the carpet below was empty; all that remained of the telex machine was the rectangular depression left by its weight. He opened the door and looked into a large, bright room illuminated by a haze of sunlight flooding through the bank of windows along one wall. At a long table against the far partition, a man half-sat, half-leaned, a set of headphones on, his head turned toward the strawberry blonde Wilson had seen outside, and who was now seated at a word-processing console, earphones on as she transcribed on the keyboard the tape to which both were listening.

The man turned, saw Wilson, and stood up, jerking off the headset. Wilson recognized the same burly man he'd spoken to in the corridor.

“Sorry,” he called. “Wrong door.”

He stepped back, but the man wasn't mollified. “Hey, Mac,” he called angrily. “Hey, Mac! Wait a minute!”

“Sorry.”

The strawberry blonde had turned too, looking at Wilson in surprise.

“Hey, Mac, what are you doing, huh? You walk in the fucking door like that, into someone's private office, and you just say, ‘Wrong door' and walk out. What the fuck are you doing? I mean, who the shit do you think you are?” His mood was ugly, his voice growing uglier as he crossed the cluttered office, pushing his way angrily through boxes of electronic gear that blocked the aisle in front of a long workbench overhung with fluorescent lights, where a TV monitoring camera lay disassembled. Over the door to the outside corridor Wilson saw a bracketed camera, cocked downward, like the one over his head. A small table to the side held a curious-looking camera and two night optical devices.

“I opened the door, Bernie,” the blonde called. Her eyes were darkly fringed by artificial eyelashes.

“You opened the door?” He turned brusquely. “What the fuck for?”

“I unlocked it when they took the telex out this way. The movers asked me after they checked out our telex and I said O.K. I guess I forgot to lock it.”

Just inside the door next to Wilson stood a teletype machine, connected by metal conduit to the same feeder line that had powered the machine on the other side of the partition.

“So what? The movers are gone. It's not our problem.” He turned to Wilson again, no longer moving forward. “Who are you—the fucking telex man?”

“I was looking for someone from Caltronics.”

“So you come nosing around here. I told you already, didn't I tell you already? You got the wrong door. What the hell are you nosing around here for? Hey, Mac, wait a minute—”

“Wait for what?” Wilson said, annoyed himself. “I got in the wrong door, like the lady said. You want to make a federal case of it?” He stepped back and pulled the door closed behind him.

“Yeah, well, just stay the hell out, then. O.K.?” He heard the man's voice from just beyond the door; a moment later a set of heavy tumblers fell into place as the security lock was set.

Wilson meandered through the suite a final time, still annoyed with himself, and went out the front door. The movers were dragging their handcart down the hall toward the freight elevator. Wilson went back to the public elevators, but as he stood waiting, eyes lifted to the illuminated number of the floor indicator, he changed his mind, pushed through a nearby exit door, and skipped down the concrete steps to the basement parking garage.

The office equipment firm's truck was backed to the loading dock. A few desks, cabinets, and chairs stood in the shadows, awaiting transfer. Among them were an executive desk and a heavy combination safe/filing cabinet. The safe drawers had been swept clean, but the desk drawers still held the rubbish of office routine, including a handful of business cards. A truck door slammed closed as he searched through the side drawers.

“Hey, watcha doing, man?” a sleepy voice called from the garage floor. A black truckdriver stood looking up at Wilson as he pulled on his work gloves.

At the back of the middle drawer, a few pleated pages were caught, hung up between the middle and bottom drawers. “Looking for an address,” said Wilson as he removed the drawer. The truckdriver lifted himself to the freight dock, and Wilson pulled out the caught pages. “You know where Caltronics is moving?” he asked as he put the pages in his pocket.