Watergate (6 page)

Howard Hunt parked his Pontiac Firebird on Seventeenth Street, across from the EOB and White House. For over an hour he’d been driving around what passed for the capital’s downtown—worse than Newark. He was pondering a number of what-might-have-beens, and one of them was automotive. Liddy had run a yellow light Friday evening on his way to the Watergate. If he had mouthed off when he got pulled over—hardly an improbability with Gordon—the cop might have run him in and thereby scuttled the whole operation.

Sixty hours had passed since the botch. Getting out of the Firebird, Hunt looked across Pennsylvania Avenue to number 1701, where the Committee to Re-Elect had its headquarters. He tried to imagine how the news had hit Mitchell and Magruder and all the expense-account boys out in California for that fundraiser. Hunt could have told them that
he
was the one who’d wanted to abort the operation. At a Friday dinner meeting, beforehand, when McCord reported something funny—the disappearance of the masking tape that kept the jimmied door to the DNC unlocked—it was Howard Hunt alone who had said they should scrub the mission. It was Gordon who’d said no, we go ahead, that the tape had more likely been removed by some fastidious mailman than a suspicious security guard. And since Gordon was head of the operation—and needed something to show for his fat quarter-of-a-million-dollar budget—that was that. Bernie and the rest of the boys went in, as planned.

Hunt showed his identification to the EOB guard and took an elevator to the third story, whose big black-and-white floor tiles suggested an infinitely extending chessboard, one whose alternating colors represented not the players’ pathways but the players themselves. He himself played for black. The opposition white was monolithic, totalitarian,
fixed; but the black squares, his team, hid within themselves an abundance of different colors, all the shades of faction and party whose intramural conflicts could be as deadly as the larger battle. His world, the Free World, was seething with dissent and treachery; he needed to keep his eyes fixed on its black tiles, to detect and avoid all its obscure hues of sickness and appeasement, to steer clear of sinkholes and traps.

He entered room 338, though it was room 214, the room at the Watergate Hotel, that remained on his mind. Saturday had become Sunday, and now Monday, and Bernie and the boys were still in the District jail. Hunt sighed as he lifted the telephone receiver and asked the White House operator to get Mrs. Hunt at her hotel in London. The phone here was more secure than the one at home, and there wasn’t much point in worrying about an overseas personal call showing up on the office’s monthly printout. He doubted he’d ever be returning to the EOB after today.

Dorothy had just gotten back from an early dinner. She said she was going to stay in tonight: one could have too much theater, even in London. The two children she had with her would go out to a movie by themselves. “No, Howard, they won’t slip off to
Oh! Calcutta!
They could have done that in New York.”

He tried to get on with what he had to tell her, but he couldn’t make himself get to the point. When he finally got near it, all he managed to say was “We had some trouble with the Watergate job.”

“Wasn’t that a month ago?”

With a deep breath, he launched into a concise, not-quite-complete explanation of how the listening devices they’d installed in May had malfunctioned and been yielding more or less useless information ever since. “So we had to go back in Friday night.” He didn’t tell Dorothy that they’d attached one of the bugs to the wrong phone. He also didn’t tell her that he’d been nervous the moment they arrived, returning to the scene of an inadequately committed crime.

He could hear Dorothy managing her own breath, struggling not to interrupt, as he went through the story of the evening. He told her how McCord’s man, Baldwin, had waited and waited at the lookout-and-listening post across the street inside the Howard Johnson’s, until
he was able to radio word to the Watergate Hotel that the lights had finally gone out in the Democrats’ offices. He explained how it was past midnight before the boys went into the office building next door. He and Gordon had stayed behind in the hotel, room 214, watching a late movie, waiting to hear Bernie come in over the radio and say that they’d finished.

“Was Gordon arrested?” asked Dorothy.

Hunt knew she was already worrying about Frances, Liddy’s wife, who was always so timid and baffled around her husband’s Horst-Wesseling hijinx.

“No, neither one of us.” McCord had been the cops’ only white-collar capture. Yesterday’s
Post
had linked him to the CIA (retired); today’s edition had connected him to the Committee to Re-Elect, as its security consultant.

“They got us!”
He imitated Bernie’s voice for Dorothy, explaining how the words had shocked him and Gordon to life once they came over the walkie-talkie. He and Liddy had managed to pack up the hotel room in less than a minute. The last thing he himself snatched up was the wire hanger, a supplementary antenna for the radio, taped to the balcony. He’d then raced across the street with it inside his pants leg, like one of his mother’s old washday stretchers. Once inside the Howard Johnson’s, he’d helped Baldwin to pack up the listening post.

And that had been just the beginning of a long night, one that wore on through his visit to the pansy lawyer he knew from his job at the PR firm, where he might still be working in full-time peaceful misery had it not been for Colson’s offer of exciting opportunities at the White House. The lawyer was a nice enough fellow and a good enough attorney, but he wasn’t a criminal lawyer, and that’s what they needed—especially the boys. The night’s worst moment had come, he now explained to Dorothy, when he’d had to call Miami and tell Clarita, Bernie’s wife, that her husband was in the D.C. jail along with the police department’s regular nighttime yield of jacked-up dealers and murdering pimps. Her cries had been so anguished and baroque that even Sturgis would not have been able to repeat them
en español
.

When he got home to Potomac, not much before dawn, he had drunk most of a quart of milk. His ulcer had been killing him, just as it was
now. He looked over at the safe beside the file cabinet and wished it were a little refrigerator, like the one in room 214.

“Honey,” he said to Dorothy, steeling himself. “I had a call from a reporter a little while ago. A fellow named Bob Woodward.”

“Bob Woodward! From Montevideo?”

“No, same name.”

Robert Woodward, a career prick, had been Eisenhower’s last ambassador to Uruguay a dozen years before, when Hunt had been station chief in the capital with an embassy job for his cover. The chief diplomat had disliked the disguised operative from the moment they met. Woodward had known of Hunt’s involvement in the Guatemala coup of ’54 and didn’t want that kind of zealotry kicking over the hors d’oeuvre trays in Montevideo. The ambassador couldn’t bring himself to admit that the Uruguayan capital was crawling with Soviet agents, and it galled him that Hunt’s local contacts exceeded his own. Woodward had been afraid, in short, that Howard Hunt might actually do his job, and so he’d kicked him home to Washington as soon as he could.

Should he be grateful, or furious, that the reposting had led him to the Bay of Pigs? To this day, even in the fix he now found himself, he didn’t really know.

“How did this other Woodward connect you to what happened Friday night?” asked Dorothy. “Howard, you
weren’t
arrested, were you?”

“My name and White House phone number were in Bernie’s address book.”

“Why would Bernie write them there!”

“Well, he did. Now listen, sweetheart, and try not to worry. My name hasn’t been in the papers yet—so far it’s just McCord—but I expect it will be soon. Maybe even in the papers where you are—”

“Oh, my God!” cried Dorothy.

He knew she didn’t need more troubles. Her woes and worries had already, several months ago, sent her to a shrink, who’d then gone and disappeared in a boating accident. Her nerves were so bad that he himself had suggested she get away, take a couple of the kids with her on a vacation to Europe, even though they could hardly afford it—not with the school expenses and the continuing medical bills from the car accident that had blighted the life of one of their daughters. Not when he
was paying for the maid in Potomac as well as the horse and the country club. Years ago a deskmate had teased him about all the spending:
Howard
,
those old OSS guys were living off family money—not their salaries!
But the bills had always stayed high. Even in Montevideo there’d been the Jockey Club.

He now found himself staring at the phone in his hand, unable to remember whether he and Dorothy had said goodbye or been cut off.

He went over to the safe and spun the combination just as he had in the middle of Friday night, when he’d stopped here before rousting the lawyer out of bed. Inside the little vault, behind the State Department cables and the pistol, stood the pile of cash, from which he now took another handful. Should he take the Browning as well? He’d brought it here a few months ago, not for his own protection but to reassure a couple of secretaries who were nervous about a rape that had occurred in the building across the street.

No, he would leave the gun behind. What would be the point in carrying it? Would he really let himself become a fugitive, or resist arrest when the moment came? He wouldn’t. After all, on Friday night, once Gordon insisted they go ahead, hadn’t he himself told Bernie to make sure he had the White House number, to call him on it once he got home to Miami;
to put it in his book so he wouldn’t forget?

He’d even watched him write it down.

Moreover, hadn’t he given Bernie the key to room 214 before the boys went into the office building? And once the radio rasped—
They got us!
—hadn’t he, even while grabbing the antenna from the balcony and scooping up everything from the room, left behind on the dresser a check that was waiting to be mailed?
Pay to the Order of Lakewood Country Club
,
$6.36
,
E. Howard Hunt
.

Now, back out in the EOB’s third-floor corridor, he walked toward the elevator and regarded the black squares hiding all the factional colors of his side. He wondered which part of his own mind was really paymaster to the other. There was a part that had wanted to abort the operation; was there another that had wanted to get caught?

“Have one,” said John Mitchell. He waved the Mexican lady with the tray of canapés toward John Dean, who sat on a couch with Fred LaRue and Jeb Magruder.

“I’d better not,” said Dean, whose stomach had yet to recover from some octopus and pigeon he’d eaten over the weekend in the Philippines. He’d gotten word of the burglary on his way home, while changing planes in San Francisco, and had barely managed to make it into the White House this morning.

“No one should have to go through two Mondays in one week,” he told the room.

Magruder’s handsome, youthful face showed puzzlement.

“The international dateline,” Dean explained.

Robert Mardian, sitting beside Mitchell, snorted over Magruder’s ignorance. A Nixon man since the vice-presidential days, he’d lost out on the campaign deputy directorship to this collegiate dope and had had to settle for the vaguely construed post of “political coordinator.”

LaRue watched Mitchell light his first pipe of the evening. The two of them had returned from California, without Martha, only an hour ago, but the General—as they still liked to call him four months after he’d left Justice to run the Committee—had decided that the five of them ought to meet here in his curved living room without any delay.

“Where can we stuff them?” he asked. “Liddy and Hunt both.”

“Maybe with Howard Hughes? Is he still out in Vegas?” Dean suggested, provoking laughter from everyone but Mardian.

“Fred,” asked Mitchell, “do you still own that hotel out there?”

“The Castaways?” LaRue responded, lighting his own pipe. “No, sir. We unloaded that years ago—one hell of a flop. And one more reason I should be back out makin’ money instead of workin’ for you guys.”

Mardian gave him a quizzical look; no one but Mitchell knew exactly what work LaRue did. Magruder patted him on the back. “Maybe we could stash them in one of those houses you own down in Jackson, Fred—the ‘Cornpone Compound.’ ”

LaRue was so benign a figure that even the younger men had no worries teasing him. But he knew the laughter in the room wouldn’t last much longer; they’d all soon be looking as miserable as Mardian. For a moment he allowed himself to think of his five children in Jackson; it would probably be weeks before he went down there to see them and Joyce.

Dean supplied the last of the gallows humor: “I see, by the way, that this morning our friends on the High Court ruled that warrants are required for all bugging done in internal-security investigations.”