Watergate (10 page)

Her dark complexion could not hide a flush, and she was slightly out of breath, as if she were carrying grocery bags instead of just her black patent-leather purse.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve talked to ‘Mr. Rivers.’ ”

Her husband nodded, welcoming this pseudonymous newcomer to the company of cutouts and code names with whom he’d transacted so much of his life.

“What’s he like?” Hunt asked Dorothy, knowing she had made the man’s acquaintance only over the shopping-center pay phone that Mr. Rivers had said he would call.

“He’s like one of the Dead End Kids.”

“Was he faking the voice? ‘Dese, dem, and dose’?”

“No,” said Dorothy. “The accent was too real, and it never varied. He’s a genuine meatball.”

Hunt nodded.

“I agreed to be the conduit,” she said.

Her husband looked at her admiringly, aware of the pressures she would now be under.

“I’ve got to get a pad and pencil,” said Dorothy, walking toward the kitchen counter. “I’m going to draw up a budget. For us; for Bernie and Clarita; for everybody else.”

“I’ll get Bernie on board,” said Hunt, as if offering to wash the dishes while she dried. “And he can figure out the numbers for the boys.”

“If you call him from Potomac Village, try to find a different
phone booth from the one I used near Montgomery Ward. It’s got no door.”

She went off to the kitchen to start calculating the Hunts’ share of the payments. Her husband continued looking at her for a few moments, trying to decide whether she was newly energized or ready to crack.

Back upstairs, he resumed drafting the letter he intended to send Chuck Colson, recounting all that had happened in the three weeks since his own name had first appeared in the
Post
, a paper he never read regularly. He would try to avoid any allusions to
The Odyssey
(he doubted Chuck had done as well as he had in classics at Brown), but he’d been peripatetic to say the least.

After leaving Washington on June 19, he’d spent a single night in New York before heading to Los Angeles, where he lay low at the house of his old war buddy, Anthony Jackson. But his presence soon made Jackson nervous, and as the days passed with no word about money or legal representation, Hunt himself had started feeling hopeless. Then, unexpectedly, Liddy—who even
now
wasn’t publicly connected to the break-in—had arrived, with cheering assurances that John Mitchell would take care of everyone, even though the administration appeared to be going along with the police investigation. In fact, Hunt could not get over the degree of their cooperation: in more than twenty years, the only element of the government ever to acknowledge his connection to the CIA had turned out to be the White House.

Before June was over, he’d flown to Miami, hoping to see Bernie, who was at last out on bail. But the vans and cameras of the local news stations were all around the Barkers’ house, so he’d given up and gotten the next plane back to L.A. As July Fourth approached, weary of imposing on Jackson, he’d gone to Chicago to stay with Dorothy’s cousins. It was from there that he’d finally made arrangements with a lawyer, William Bittman, a connection of Jackson’s who, conveniently enough, lived and worked here in Potomac.

At that point he’d flown home under a false name and been picked up by Dorothy, who had returned from England. They went straight from the airport to Bittman’s office and paid him the first thousand dollars of his retainer with money from the EOB safe. Considerably more, twenty-five grand, soon arrived from somewhere—Mitchell, presumably,
if Liddy could be believed. And then “Mr. Rivers” was calling Bittman and asking to speak to “the writer’s wife.”

Involving Dorothy had been their idea, whoever “they” were; presumably her movements would attract less notice than Hunt’s own. Either way, she was perfectly willing. Today at lunch, as she made herself memorize what she would tell Mr. Rivers over the pay phone, she had been febrile with purpose and determination.

Through the study’s open door, he could now hear her downstairs, talking to their daughter Kevan, who was on her way back to Smith in a couple of months. (Would John Mitchell be picking up the tuition, too? Along with his other daughter’s medical bills?) Hunt rose from his desk and went to listen at the landing, hoping to make certain Dorothy wasn’t telling Kevan anything she shouldn’t. He also hoped to convince himself that his wife really felt as content with everything as she claimed to be.

He did not like what he heard. He’d almost rather they be discussing “Mr. Rivers” than the subject they were on: some pamphlet sent by the Smith College health services that seemed to be practically an advertisement for the availability of contraception.

His only disagreements with Dorothy involved the grubby new world in which their children were coming of age. It angered him that his wife took the same relaxed view of sex and pot that he would expect from some hip divorcée or social worker. She and Kevan were scandalizing the Guatemalan maid by reading aloud passages from the pamphlet.

To avoid hearing any more laughter from the whole feminine trio downstairs, he closed the study door and turned on the portable television near his desk. There was no escape: live from the Democratic convention that would nominate McGovern tonight, some harridan in blue jeans was complaining about how the party’s platform committee had been insufficiently deferential to “welfare mothers.” The term was proving even more detestable to his ears for the way it somehow seemed to encompass Dorothy, who’d now be living a life of envelopes and handouts.

She had stood by him through every secret turn his life had taken for more than twenty years, even when that meant living over a whorehouse, as they’d done while he was station chief in Mexico City—where
on top of everything else he’d been extortively accused of hit-and-run. They’d met only a couple of years before all that, in Paris, after her French divorce from her first husband, when they were both on the staff of Averell Harriman’s Economic Cooperation Administration—the only two non-left-wingers in the Paris office.

He was getting nowhere with this letter in front of him. What he’d really like to do is
call
Colson, but that, of course, was impossible. As he looked at the unusable phone, it, too, seemed one more conveyance toward yesteryear, reminding him of the weeks he’d spent in Vienna, in 1948, while Dorothy remained in Paris. Each time he’d tried to call her, all the taps on the line between the two capitals would siphon the current and sever the connection.

They’d get away from here in a few weeks. Bittman, thank God, had managed to keep him free on bail. In a week or so he’d have to be fingerprinted, and give a handwriting sample at the courthouse downtown, but after that there’d be a brief judicial lull, when he and Dorothy could go down to Florida. He pictured it now: fishing off a dock in the Keys with Bernie, neither of them saying much, though Bernie would be saying it in English, and he would be saying it in Spanish.

By that point, phone or no phone, Colson should have things fixed for good.

“Tony,” LaRue asked softly, “what can I get you?”

“Just a cuppa coffee, Mr. LaRue. Just a cuppa coffee. I’m not stayin’ long. You’re busy, for one thing.” He pointed to LaRue’s little oven, whose timer was clicking as his dinner cooked.

“I’m happy to meet you, Tony.” LaRue fetched some milk and sugar for his unexpected guest. “I’ve been hearing from Herb Kalmbach about how enterprising you’ve been. Still,” he added, with as much of his natural politeness as he could, “I didn’t really have this in mind.” By “this” he meant a personal visit, and he could see that Ulasewicz, rough around the edges but no dope, got his drift.

“You’re right, Mr. LaRue. It’s irregular. It’s not what anybody had in mind.”

“So how worrisome is what you’re bringing me? We’ve got worries enough already.”

LaRue turned his head, reflexively, in the direction of the Mitchells’ apartment far across the complex. The General had resigned as head of the CRP on July 1, pleading personal difficulties, which everyone took to mean Martha. This amounted to more truth than a Washington letter of resignation typically contained, but it was still less than half of it. The Mitchells were mostly in New York these days, but even now LaRue checked in with his old boss every afternoon.

“I’m worried myself, Mr. LaRue,” said Ulasewicz.

“So Herb tells me.” Kalmbach, the president’s personal attorney, was quietly raising money for the burglars and their lawyers. LaRue, through Ulasewicz, had been helping to distribute what was already on hand at the Committee or available inside the White House.

“I told Mr. Kalmbach—more than once, Mr. LaRue—that something’s not kosher here.”

LaRue wasn’t sure if Ulasewicz was Jewish, but he was certainly New
York. You would take him for a guy out of the squad room in
Naked City
even if he hadn’t once actually been a cop. The two of them had never met before now, but he knew that Tony had been doing stuff for the White House as far back as Chappaquiddick, nosing around for dirt on Teddy Kennedy. It was more or less inevitable that Ulasewicz would become “Mr. Rivers,” shuttling between the money men and “the writer’s wife.”

“I’m sure you’ve got another word for it in your part of the country,” said Ulasewicz.

LaRue realized that he’d been lost in thought. “I’m sorry. You mean ‘kosher’?”

“Let’s just say it’s not right. Let’s just say it don’t smell like no magnolias.”

LaRue paused, before asking. “Why have you come to me, Tony?”

“Because I can’t get through to Mr. Kalmbach. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a very nice gentleman. But he’s the president’s lawyer. He’s used to dealing with people who sign contracts and even stick by them. This whole thing’s a different kettle of fish.”

“What specifically is the problem?” asked LaRue.

“I’d say the problem is that this ain’t all about legal fees and grocery bills. I’d say this money ain’t all for ‘humanitarian purposes,’ as Mr. Kalmbach likes to say.”

“What would you say it’s about?”

“I’d say it’s blackmail. You can dress it up, but that ain’t gonna change it.”

“Quid pro quo?”
LaRue suggested.

“Yeah,” said Ulasewicz. “That’s the term Mr. Kalmbach uses when he thinks he’s being
realistic
. But all that Latin don’t manage to call a spade a spade.” He hesitated for a moment. “I can tell you who don’t mince
any
words.”

“Who?”

“The writer’s wife.”

“Miz Hunt?”

“Yeah, Dorothy. By now we’re practically buddies. And let me tell you, Mr. LaRue, this is one tough cookie. This ain’t a lady making ‘humanitarian’ collections for the Community Chest.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I’m sure of that. Never even met the lady face-to-face, but I’ve
watched her from a distance, stood by the Eastern Airlines counter at National and seen her take the money from the locker I told her to go to.”

“What’s she like?”

“Good-looking, tall. Ladylike. Dark skin. Part Sioux Indian, she tells me. We get to ramblin’ a little on the phone.”

“So how do you know she’s so tough?”

“The proof is in the pudding, Mr. LaRue. And there’s the pudding.” He pointed to the shopping bag on the other side of the coffee table. His host looked at it quizzically.

“I’m no technical genius, Mr. LaRue—though, truth is, the boys you employed for that job next door, including the writer’s wife’s husband, don’t seem to have been, either. In any case, I know how to record a conversation off a pay phone, well enough to pick up what I’m saying into the mouthpiece along with what I’m hearin’ out the receiver.” He extracted a little rubber-sided microphone from the pocket of his jacket. “It clips on just below your ear, right onto the handset.”

LaRue was unsure what to say. Ulasewicz got up, went to the shopping bag, and pulled out a portable tape recorder, no thicker than a book.

“This’ll play it for you,” he said. “I bought it myself, and I don’t even care if Mr. Kalmbach approves the expense. The tape’s already sittin’ on the spindles.”

“You want me to play it now?”

“No, I’m going to leave the whole kit and caboodle with you. I shouldn’t be here in the first place. I’m going to leave and let you work things out with Mr. Kalmbach and with Dean.”

LaRue was surprised that Ulasewicz even knew John Dean’s name. Hearing it made him want to end this meeting even more.

“Well, Tony, I appreciate it.”

“You won’t like what you hear, but better you should know.” Ulasewicz tugged on his narrow-brimmed fedora. “I hope we never meet again, Mr. LaRue. And I trust you’ll take that the right way.”

“Understood, Tony. Thank you.”

They shook hands and he was gone. LaRue sat down, noting that his dinner had ten minutes left to cook. Too little time to return a phone call from one of his teenaged children in Jackson, which was fine: if
he put it off long enough, maybe their mother would handle whatever the situation was. He took two sips of his drink, put his glasses on, and wondered if ten minutes would be enough for him to listen to the tape, which had the diameter of a small doughnut.