Echo House (34 page)

"If you mean my father, forget it."

"He's part of the remarkable story."

"He's never given an interview in his life."

"Wrong," she said. "There was an interview in a British paper about the time of Desert One."

"Taken from a speech he gave, private speech, but the hack had somehow gotten himself invited. Printed the speech as if it were an interview. Axel spoke to someone and the little bastard was out of work before close of business next day. That's off the record."

Virginia sighed. They were stopped at a traffic light, wet leaves flying here and there. She was hoping for some help from Wilson, but Wilson was giving none, staring straight ahead and humming some dirge. She said, "It's so difficult when things are off the record. The chats we'd have, some of them can be on background only. I'm flexible on that point. But it's tragic when important material, anecdotes and quotes, are off the record. It makes my job impossible. I do take your point about Axel. Not that I won't make an attempt."

Alec was irritated by her voice, a schoolmarm's bray as irony had turned to sarcasm. She was almost as tall as he was and walked in a kind of lope, blinking behind her aviator glasses. When she gestured, Alec noticed that her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

"I'd like to start very soon, try to seize the march on the cannibals and the commissars. You see, we're bringing a new kind of coverage to Washington. We're interested in texture and nuance. We're interested in the faces behind the masks. We're interested in where the power really is as opposed to where it's supposed to be, and that's why we're interested in Alec Behl."

Wilson suddenly raised his hand to wave at someone across the street.

"Who's that?" Virginia Spears demanded.

"Biggs," Wilson said.

"Who's Biggs?"

"New man at the National Security Council."

"Never heard of him," Virginia said.

"You'd like him," Wilson said. "He's full of nuance."

"So," Alec said. "Give me an idea of the texture of the piece you want to write about me, your cover story."

She described two lines in the air as she spoke. "Attorney Alec Behl. The Man to See in Washington."

"The man to see about what?" Alec asked.

"Dey comes to you," Wilson said, jiving now on the sidewalk. "Dey comes to you wit de words, Nobody knows de trouble I's seen."

"Shut up, Wilson," Virginia said. "This is serious."

"An ole Alec, he lays on de hands, gives dem his blessing an washes dey feet, an sends dem away wiser an poorer."

Alec began to laugh. "I think you're ahead of things, Virginia."

"We are. That's the point, you see. We're ahead of the news."

"I'm not the man to see," Alec said. He named three lawyers, Visibles, looking all the while at the reporter and trying to discover where she was headed and what she wanted really, and how much she knew as opposed to what she would pretend to know.

"True enough," she said. "They're fine lawyers. They've been around this town for many years and they've had distinguished clients. They've rendered service to their country, when called. And they're old news, Alec. They're old frontier. They're on the downside of their careers while you're still marching toward the summit. And when they're gone, there'll only be you. You're asking about texture. That's the texture."

Alec looked sideways at Wilson, who now laid his forefinger on his right nostril.

"It's a new day," she went on, "and I'm not certain they understand the new day the way you do. Those many years ago, when Peralta landed in the deep shit, could they have handled Red Lambardo the way you did? No way. That was the key that unlocked the door for you, wasn't it?"

So she had done some homework.

"Of course I understand the sanctity of the attorney-client relationship. There are places I can't go. I appreciate that. A story of this kind, it's a partnership. I think you'll agree, it's got tremendous potential. By the way, you'd be dealing with me alone. This isn't a team effort. This is my idea and my story and if it's the kind of success I intend it to be, then there'll be others like it and those will be mine, too. You see, I'm part of this new day as well. The sun shines on us both, doesn't it?" Alec was listening hard now as she went through her multiplication tables. "I suppose in a certain sense you're my Ed Peralta. And my readers, why, they're Red Lambardo and the senators who snoozed through the hearing until they heard the texture of things. And then they sat up straight didn't they? Ramrods in their sorry spines because they were
interested,
isn't that so? They were interested in a well-prepared and subtle brief. And with interest comes conviction."

"Faith," Wilson amended.

They were hurrying now in the rain, traffic stalled on Connecticut Avenue, exhaust fumes caught in the heavy air. This part of the city always seemed to Alec like the main street of a state capital, Springfield or Indianapolis, with its small bookstores and boutiques, the buildings low and unconvincing. Then suddenly you came upon a general on horseback, but he was a municipal general, his horse rearing against the background of a travel agency and a jewelry store. This part of Washington was without aspiration or focus. For that you had to walk to Lafayette Park, the White House and the Treasury, the Washington Monument in the distance.

"Virginia thinks you're misunderstood, Alec." Wilson smiled winningly.

"Everyone needs a translator," Virginia said. "I want to be yours."

Wilson had paused to give money to a panhandler rattling his tin cup.

"Hard for me to know how I come out in all this," Alec said. "The wrong kind of story could be very damaging. We operate on trust and the perception of trust. If the facts are misinterpreted. If errors creep in. Well, then, your cover story could be a calamity."

Virginia Spears sighed heavily. Alec had misunderstood, as civilians had a way of doing, even worldly civilians who supposedly knew the score. So she tried again, speaking now in her reasonable corporate voice, the one she used with her editors in New York. She said, We inhabit a world of facts. At best the reporter has a supervisory role. You had supervision over the facts. They were in your care and you could release some and detain others. You could polish the shoes of this fact and comb the hair of that one and slash the throat of yet another. But you could not create them. They were conceived elsewhere and put in your charge, like children enrolled in a nursery. You had them on loan and when you released them they were gone; any mischief they created was their own responsibility. It was true that ancestry was often an issue, the source of understandable confusion and resentment. Not every fact came with a family tree. Some were aristocrats, others mongrels. Still others were orphans, parents and place of birth unknown. You were always careful with the orphans; some of them had unstable personalities leading to violent tendencies. They were unreliable, yet they too were often victims and deserving of sympathy. On certain specific occasions the reporter was encouraged to give approval or to withhold it, forcing the children to take responsibility for their own actions. So it was a question of the gene pool.

"Provenance," Virginia concluded.

Alec stared into the window of the travel agency while he listened to the reporter's fandango. He remembered that her father had been something in the Ford administration. Arms control or Angola, one of those two.

"A dirty business," Wilson said, clucking and shaking his head. "You have to change their diapers, too. Wipe the snot from their noses. Listen to their excuses such as the dog ate the homework. Give them baths and tuck them in at night and read them a nice nursery rhyme—"

"Be quiet, Wilson," she said.

"Call me next week," Alec said. "I'll think about it."

"I'll call tomorrow." Virginia hesitated, her hand resting lightly on Alec's arm. "I could give you the usual la-di-da, how I'll do the story whether you cooperate or not. But I'm not interested in that kind of outside-in story. I'm interested in the inside-out story, the one that can only come from you. Your story in your own words." She turned Alec's wrist to look at his watch, frowning, hastily shaking hands, explaining that she had to get back to the office, a conference call concerning the week's cover story, the destruction of the ozone layer and the catastrophic consequences of global warming. Our subscribers won't be disappointed, she said. We're going to scare the shit out of them, outside-in. She waved goodbye and loped away up M Street.

Alec watched her go, dodging raindrops.

"Get her while you can, Alec," Wilson said. "She's one of a kind."

"Is she going somewhere?"

"Television; she's made for it. Those legs! That voice!"

"A fingernail across a blackboard."

"She's Ms. Inside-out, doesn't even need to wear a wristwatch. She'll know someone who can tell her the time. And she loves her facts, particularly the orphans, the ones with the unstable personalities."

"Can she deliver?"

"I think she can. What's to lose?"

"Plenty," Alec said glumly, but that was for Wilson's benefit. There wasn't anything to lose. Virginia Spears only wanted in. She wanted a place at the table. She wanted to be part of it, faithful Boswell listening to Dr. Johnson put the fix in. Virginia Spears was avid for a peek behind the mask, thinking that she was staring into a man's soul when she was only looking at a second mask, the one that was even more untrustworthy than the first.

She would be interested in both dance and dancer, and it would be important to keep her focused on the first, where the feet go when you're preparing a pirouette, not the spin itself, not the actual doing of it, but the preparation for it, the process. Alec decided he would try to talk Axel into giving her thirty minutes, tea in the garden room at Echo House, let's see, on that occasion so long ago the President was seated
there,
and Tommy and Ben on the couch, and when Eleanor called I was instructed to say they'd already left, an urgent matter at the War Department, ha-ha, when all they were doing was drinking martinis. Some danger there, that Axel would take over the story. Virginia Spears would think she was sitting with Mr. Oracle himself, and if she phrased her questions properly, equal parts charm, tact, and bluff, she'd learn who really killed Kennedy. Of course Axel wasn't the real problem. Neither was Red Lambardo nor Harold Grendall nor Lloyd Fisher nor the others the reporter would seek out, to give her yarn the usual sweet-and-sour balance, the suggestive anecdote and the quote with the sneer behind it. The real problem was Sylvia.

That afternoon Alec called his travel agent and arranged for two seats on the Concorde to London and a third-floor suite at the Connaught, theater tickets, and a car and driver to take his mother and that bastard Willy Borowy to Sissinghurst or Blenheim or Henry James's cottage at Rye or any other place they wanted to visit in the glorious English countryside. Her birthday was in two weeks and she had been talking about a vacation in England, just she and Willy revisiting some of the old haunts. Alec told the travel agent to send the tickets and the other reservations to his mother by Federal Express. Add two dozen roses, he told the travel agent, and bill everything to the firm's account.

Alec and Virginia met the following Tuesday for an hour and had dinner the following evening. They met for three hours on Saturday morning and spent the afternoon at Pimlico. Virginia won on a six-to-one longshot called Mr. Duck. Alec thought the interviews had gone well; any time the reporter got close to the heart of things, he pleaded lawyer-client privilege. Virginia was understanding but at one point lowered her pencil to inquire, almost plaintively, What is it exactly that you do, Alec? It isn't exactly law. It isn't exactly lobbying. Is it public relations? I think what you do is take people off the hook. There's a hook that they're on and you somehow move the hook or lift them off the hook or cause the hook to disappear or legislate it out of existence or, depending on the client, let it grow until it's the size of Alcatraz. I'm thinking that you're the neighborhood locksmith who hangs a brass key outside his shop, except with you it's a big black hook. Tell me this. Do you keep in touch with Old Man Nixon?

The clubhouse at Pimlico was not crowded. Alec and Virginia took a table near the window, watching the horses troop from the paddock to the starting gate. The jockeys looked tiny as toys atop the thoroughbreds, whose breath was steaming in the chilly spring air. After ordering drinks the reporter cleared her throat, took out her notebook, and said she would have to ask some questions about Alec's personal life, not all the gory details but the basic information. Most of the biopers would not be used, but they had to have it, in order to fill in the blank spaces and so forth and so on. The dossier was surprisingly slender, nothing of a personal nature published in the papers. It was obvious that he enjoyed a day at the races, betting modestly, losing the same way, and obvious also from the way he was staring at the travel agent's window the other day that he liked to get away from things. From the look of his office wall he didn't care much for contemporary art. Virginia admitted that she had made inquiries and, truth to tell, Alec wasn't often seen around town. Not at the usual embassy parties nor at the usual restaurants. Was occasionally observed at the symphony, as often as not with Axel. Was seen once or twice a season in the owner's box at the Redskins games, but people think that's a business afternoon, that you don't care much for the organized violence of the National Football League. They say you don't care figs for professional sports. Virginia smiled pleasantly and allowed the silence to lengthen. So what happened with Leila Berggren? And why are you living at Echo House with your father?

"I have two children," Alec said. "And they read the newspapers and magazines. So I'm not getting into any details about Leila and me and if you discover them yourself and publish them, I'll resent the hell out of it."

"I don't need chapter and verse."

"You're not getting chapter and verse."