Yellow Dog Contract (4 page)

I probably had read somewhere why people bite their fingernails, but I couldn't recall it so I resolved to look it up. I also decided that while I was at it I would see whether I could find out something about another bad habit, which was the one that Mary Jane Wynne had had in the fourth grade, although hers may have been unique.

Mary Jane picked her nose and saved the treasures in a penny matchbox. She took them home after school, put sugar on them, and ate them. It should have been a secret vice, but Mary Jane bragged about it, and all of us in the fourth grade were very much in awe of her.

I was noticing Vullo's fingernails and thinking about Mary Jane so I didn't pay much attention to what Vullo and Murfin were saying because they were discussing some administrative problem. I perked up only when Vullo said, “That's all, Murfin. Out.”

It was a peremptory dismissal, rude in its curtness, arrogant in its phrasing, and delivered in a tone that is usually reserved for dismissing army privates, indentured servants, and maybe even rotten little kids.

Murfin had brought me into Vullo's office, introduced us, and I had sat down in a chair although nobody had invited me to. Murfin had remained standing while he and Vullo discussed their problem and I had admired Vullo's fingernails and remembered Mary Jane.

Now Murfin had been abruptly dismissed and I thought I saw his back stiffen. But when he turned to leave he winked and grinned at me so I assumed that Vullo spoke to all the help like that and probably had since he was five.

I decided that Roger Vullo had treated himself to either the fifth or sixth largest office in Washington, possibly even the fourth. It also looked as though the decorator had been admonished to fill the room with an air of rich, permanent grandeur and hang the cost. Vullo ran things from behind a huge, gleaming desk that was at least two centuries old. During all those years it must have been waxed daily. Perhaps even twice daily. Jutting out from the desk was a narrow refectory table, long enough for two dozen Spanish monks to have dined around once, possibly five hundred years ago. I assumed that it was now used for staff conferences.

The rest of the furniture was mostly solid, leather stuff, including the chair that I sat in, the sixteen chairs around the refectory table, the divan against one wall, and the three wing-backed chairs that went with it. The place had the pleasant, mildly pungent smell of a shoe repair shop.

On the floor was a thick beige carpet and covering the walls was something that looked like pale burlap, but probably wasn't because burlap would have been too cheap. One wall was lined with old leatherbound books, but I was too far away to read their titles. The wall opposite the books was hung with a series of Daumier drawings, six in all, and for all I knew they may have been the originals. Vullo could probably afford them. I rapidly was becoming convinced that he could afford almost anything.

The only thing that clashed with the decor was Vullo himself and, now that I think about it, me. After Murfin had gone Vullo sat slumped in his chair behind the immense desk staring at me coolly, maybe even coldly, with narrowed hazel eyes that seemed shrewd, clever, and possibly even brilliant. He quit staring only when he remembered that it was time to bite his fingernails.

He gave his right thumb a couple of fierce nips, admired the results, and said, “You live on a farm now.” It was an accusation the way he said it.

I decided that I might as well confess, so I said, “That's right.”

“Near Harpers Ferry.”

“Yes.”

“John Brown.”

“Lee, too.”

“Lee?”

“Robert E. Lee,” I said. “He was a U.S. colonel then and he led the detachment of marines that wounded Brown and then captured him.”

“I didn't remember that it was Lee.”

“Not everybody does.”

“They hanged him, didn't they?”

“Brown? They hanged him all right. They captured him on October eighteenth and hanged him on December second.”

“What year was that?”

“1859.”

“He was quite mad, wasn't he? Brown.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Everybody says so, but I'm not so sure. He was a fanatic anyway and maybe all fanatics are a little nuts. Crazy or not, they hanged him.”

Vullo abruptly lost interest in John Brown. He went back to me. “What do you grow on your farm?”

“Vegetables, clover, goats, honey, and Christmas trees.”

Vullo nodded as if all that were perfectly logical. But he needed more details. He would probably always need more details and that may have been why he had hired Murfin. They were two kindred spirits who could feast on a handful of details.

Suddenly Vullo frowned and it made him appear dubious and even a bit petulant. He looked as if he had just found out that I had lied to him. He had a lean, hollowed-out face with a bony chin and a nose so sharp and thin that I wondered if he had trouble breathing through it. His cheekbones seemed to be straining to be let out and his mouth was a small, pale, tight line about an inch long. It was a sullen, pinched-in face, wary and bitter, the kind that is sometimes worn either by slum kids or very rich old men.

“You don't raise honey,” he said, catching me out in my lie.

“No,” I said, “you keep bees. We have four hives.”

“What kind of honey do they make?”

“Clover honey with a little goldenrod mixed in. It's light colored and mild although the goldenrod adds a bit of tang.”

“Do they sting you?”

“Sometimes.”

“I've never been stung by a bee. Does it hurt?”

I shrugged. “You get used to it. You build up an immunity and after a while they don't bother you. The stings, I mean. The first thing you learn is not to wear blue jeans. Bees hate blue jeans.”

Now that was a detail he really liked. He liked it so much that he jotted it down on a pad. While he was making his note, he said, “How many goats do you keep?”

“Two.”

“How much milk can you get from two goats?”

“About four hundred gallons a year,” I said. “A little over a gallon a day.”

“You don't drink that much, do you?”

“No. We make our own cheese and butter. The butter's good, but the cheese isn't so hot. It's supposed to be a Brie, but it's not turning out quite right, probably because I can't keep the cellar at a steady fifty-five degrees.”

“And the rest of the milk?”

“We feed it to our cats and dogs. They're crazy about it.”

“You milk the goats yourself?”

“Sure.”

“How often?”

“Twice a day. Once about eight and again about seven or seven-thirty.”

“Chickens? You raise chickens?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“My wife thinks chickens are dumb. There's a man down the road who raises them. He trades us dressed hens and eggs for honey and butter and trout, but we make him catch his own. Trout, I mean.”

“How long have you been living on your farm?”

“Four years. Since 1972.”

“That was when you dropped out, wasn't it?”

“I didn't drop out.”

“Retired.”

“I didn't retire.”

“What would you call it?”

“I don't have to call it anything.”

Vullo had been leaning toward me, his elbows on the desk. He was wearing a suit, a cheap grey one that fitted him poorly and might have come from Penney's or even Robert Hall's. Its elbows were shiny, or at least shinier than the rest of the suit whose synthetic fibers had a glisten all of their own. Beneath the coat was a white shirt with a collar whose points went this way and that. The collar was plugged by the small knot of a narrow green and yellow tie that had some interesting spots on it. Catsup, I decided, and maybe a little dried cottage cheese.

Vullo stared at me some more, then ran his fingers through his thick brown hair that he wore the way most men wore their hair in 1959. After that he slumped back in his chair and flung his yellow pencil on the desk. It was a child's gesture. A peevish child.

“Tell me about you and the CIA,” he said.

I reached inside my jacket pocket, touched the thousand-dollar check, and decided to tell him about my Uncle Slick.

His name wasn't really Uncle Slick, of course, it was Jean-Jacques Le Gouis and he was my mother's younger brother. The Le Gouis family had moved to the States from Dijon in 1929 when my mother was eighteen and my uncle was nine. By 1941 my uncle was twenty-one and a senior at Yale, a fact that my father always found impossible to believe. It was my old man who first called Jean-Jacques “Slick” and the nickname had stuck, because that's what my uncle was. Slick. Some people have remarked that I look very much like him and I've never been quite sure how to take it.

My uncle had a very pleasant war with the OSS in England and France and afterward he stayed on with the CIA. In 1964 he showed up unexpectedly in Berlin where I was working for something called the Morningside Network. We did a nightly radio world news wrapup and sold it to independent stations in the States. I had left the
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to join it in 1959 and I worked sometimes out of Bonn and sometimes Berlin.

In 1961 I had been in the Congo for a while, about the time that Patrice Lumumba was getting his, and that had been the last time I had seen Uncle Slick, which was, I thought, a bit more than coincidental. I never was sure what Slick did for the CIA. Something nasty probably.

In Berlin he had taken me out to dinner, an expensive spot just off the Kurfürstendamm, as I recall, made his usual fuss about ordering the wine, and then said that my mother had written him that I was thinking of returning to the States. I told him that I was only thinking about it, mostly because five years abroad seemed about enough. My only problem was a job. I didn't have one lined up mostly, I liked to think, because I really hadn't tried.

Uncle Slick said that he had just happened to have heard of one in Washington that would last at least six months and might well turn out to be permanent. Not only that but it also paid eighteen thousand a year, which was six thousand more than I was making then. I said that I was mildly interested and asked what I would have to do. He said that all I needed to do was write a letter, setting forth my qualifications and experience, and he had some old friends who would put in a word for me. That's how these things work, he assured me.

I told him that I was pretty well up on how things work. What I was really interested in was what I would be doing for whom. My uncle made me a very pretty little speech about how I would be helping keep a labor statesman in office. He was speaking English now and using his Louis Jourdan accent, which he always used when he was selling something, although he could, when he wanted to, speak in the mellow tones of Yale. When he wanted to be snotty he spoke English very much like Basil Rathbone.

The labor statesman, it turned out, was one Stacey Hundermark, who was president of something called the Public Employees Union (AFL-CIO), which Hundermark had helped found back in Minneapolis in 1932 and had since nurtured to a respectable membership of around 250,000. Now, it seemed, some young upstart wanted to take Hundermark's job away from him. The upstart was one Arch Mix who, my uncle had hastened to assure me, was no relation to Tom.

“Hundermark,” Vullo said. “He's dead now, isn't he?”

“He died the year after Mix defeated him.”

“That was when?”

“Mix beat him in 1964.”

“You went to work for Hundermark when?”

“That same year. Sixty-four. Early sixty-four.”

“What happened?”

“Mix squeaked in by eight votes at the convention. I could have bought the votes, if I had known they were up for sale, which I should have, but didn't.”

“You had plenty of money.”

“More than plenty.”

“Didn't you ever wonder where it came from?”

I shrugged.

“It came from the CIA.”

“So it would seem.”

“Some people thought you were with the CIA,” Vullo said. “Mix said so.”

“He was wrong.”

“You were what—a dupe?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “A dupe.”

Vullo nodded dubiously as if he wanted me to know that he thought I was lying. I touched the check again for solace and then brought out my tin box and rolled a cigarette. I took my time and looked up at Vullo once. He was watching me with an expression of faint disapproval. I wasn't sure whether he disapproved of my smoking or of the fact that I rolled my own. After I lit the cigarette he reached into a drawer and produced a small glass ashtray, the kind that you can buy in a drugstore for twenty-nine cents. He shoved it across the desk to me.

“The CIA's real interest in Hundermark was that international thing he set up—what was it called?”

“The PWI,” I said. “Public Workers International.”

“It was sort of a loose confederation of all the public-employee unions in the world, wasn't it?”

“The free world,” I said. “I think they were still calling it the free world back in the sixties.”

“And the CIA financed that, too, didn't they?” Vullo said. “The PWI, I mean.”

“A lot of it. They staffed it, too.” I put my cigarette out in the ashtray. “There were two co-directors. One was a nice guy from Kilgore, Texas. The other was a Harvard type with six kids. They were always jumping off to someplace like Lagos or Singapore or Mauritius.”

“And that was why the CIA wanted to make sure that Hundermark was re-elected,” Vullo said. “So that they could keep on using the PWI.”

“That's right,” I said.

“They didn't think that Mix would go along with it if he got elected and found out?”

“They were right, too. The second thing that Mix did when he won the presidency was to dissolve the PWI, or at least dissolve the union's ties with it.”