Edsel (21 page)

“Yes.” Not a question, but tentative acknowledgment that someone was sharing her oxygen. The nameplate on the desk read MISS HEIMDALL.

“Connie Minor. I called yesterday for an appointment.”

She glanced at the clock, a Regulator, on the wall opposite the desk. It and the piece of furniture she was seated behind, hand-rubbed with a beveled top, were the only objects in the room with character, and I was including Miss Heimdall. “Yes. You’re right on time. Unfortunately, Mr. Leadbeater is detained. He said for you to go in and wait.”

My more devious instincts did a quick roller-coaster loop. I was reporter enough to embrace the time alone in my subject’s private office, but familiar enough with politicians to know that if there was anything in there worth looking at it would be under lock and key. I thanked her and let myself through the door. The clittering had started again before I got it closed.

The room wasn’t large by contemporary standards—smaller than my part of the Glass House—but would have been considered spacious at the time the building went up. The original ten-foot ceiling had been brought down to contemporary dimensions with suspended panels, and new plasterwork had gone in over the wiring to the switches and fixtures; but someone with taste beyond the purely functional considerations of the usual bureaucratic remodeling had taken pains to preserve the atmosphere of late Victorian society set adrift in the swelling torrent of the Industrial Revolution. The shoulder-high tongue-and-groove wainscoting had been stripped and refinished recently by someone who knew what he was doing, leaving a surface that gleamed softly rather than glistened, butterscotch-colored and still smelling faintly of turpentine. The floor, somewhat darker and made of two-inch-wide boards fitted so tightly you could have rolled a piece of buckshot across the room without a bump, were left exposed for two feet around a deep red Oriental rug and still showed a couple of charred depressions from an old fire, lovingly maintained lest-we-forget. The overhead light was a milk-glass bowl suspended from a five-bladed fan with a seven-foot sweep and a dangling brass chain ending in a tassel. Shelves had been erected inside two arched windows, bricked in during an intervening era when coal was more precious than light, and supported mustard-spined law books and unmatched silver pieces of meticulous workmanship brought together by a collector of some knowledge. The third, left open, looked north as far as the goldleafed dome of the Fisher Building.

After all this attention to detail, the furnishings themselves were a disappointment. From the overcarved ebony of the Regency desk to the burgundy tufted leather of a sofa that no one had ever stretched out on or ever would, it was a business cliché of a type not far enough removed from the present to be anything but rancid. The heavy gold frames on the requisite portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and Eisenhower, the horsehair pens standing erect in their brass stand on the desk, and the square cut-glass decanters of coppery whiskey and oxblood wine gathered cruetlike in their wire rack on a drum table with lion’s-head pulls on the drawers stank of masculinity in an aggressive and uncompromising way that made me question whether the occupant of the office wouldn’t rather be sharing a flouncy four-poster with the boy who emptied the wastebaskets. The very air was layered with a pungent leathery, worksweat, rotting-oak odor, as if Paul Bunyan had paused there to lean on his axe on his way to clear the Pacific Northwest.

“Hideous, isn’t it? I made the mistake of hiring an office decorator. She looked up my family tree, found a couple of railroad barons and I suppose no small number of horse thieves, and ordered everything straight from Abercrombie and Fitch. I had to restrain her physically from mounting a boar’s head over my Revere ware. I’m Stuart Leadbeater. You needn’t introduce yourself, Mr. Minor. When I came out here I made a point to look up the city’s recent history. That included a complete run of the
Banner
.”

He spoke rapidly—half the inundation had spent itself before I turned from a cast-iron celestial globe on its own stand to face the man in the doorway—but with all his consonants bitten clean through by some kind of eastern-school accent that was to become quite familiar to me, and to America itself, throughout the next political period. He looked younger than the thirty-eight years I knew him to be and a good deal less formal than his background suggested. His skinny tie was knotted crookedly, his three-button coat unfastened to expose a braided-leather belt, and his hair needed combing. It fell in a bunch over one side of his forehead like a strawberry blonde carnation, softening the effect of a lantern jaw and long upper lip that if it weren’t smiling might have belonged to a grave cardinal in something painted by Caravaggio. I’d have bet my two weeks’ vacation that when he was a few years younger he had flirted with a moustache to cover it up, then decided to live with it shorn after Tom Dewey’s defeat.

All very open and casual. But his eyes were tiny and close-set; and although I was no fan of physiognomy, repeated experience had taught me that the condition was caused by the collapse of the skull where the faculties of conscience and mercy were normally located.

“You’re a politician, all right.” I grasped the hand he presented, well-tended with a practiced grip. My father might have found fault with the lack of calluses, but I had known at least as many black hearts in bib overalls as I had honorable intentions in silk shirts. “For a Republican you have a generous idea of what’s recent history and what went out with Alley Oop.”

“Surely not. I was in tenth grade when Repeal came. There are young men studying for the bar who never knew another President but FDR until they were old enough to shave. Just the other day my nephew asked me what television programs I watched as a boy. I had to explain radio to him. Yet the leaders of our country, this state, this city, were all born in another century. Time is relative, Mr. Minor. Women mark it with hemlines; men with headlines. Just for now I’ll overlook your scurrilous reference to my political affiliation. Truth to tell, I’m not that impressed with some of its more visible representatives. To a man they’re bovinely unaware of the cancer spreading through our society. Won’t you sit down? That chair’s the least uncomfortable of the bunch. I had it reupholstered with foam rubber. Even our hearty ancestors preferred to have a saddle and blanket between themselves and the hair of the horse.”

I sat, blasted off my feet by the hurricane of his vocabulary. I’d violated the first rule of survival in the information-gathering business by coming in with a preconceived notion of the sort of man I was dealing with. Now I had lost the first advantage while I sought time to frame a fresh plan of attack.

Stuart Freemantle Ingram Leadbeater had been born in a snowbound hamlet named St. Agatha on a frozen lake in Maine in 1918, taken a degree in contract law from the University of Maine in 1940, passed the bar on the second try, and languished in the legal department at the Kennebec Paper Company in Augusta until Pearl Harbor. He had joined the navy and received a nasty paper cut from a copy of Davis’
Naval Courts and Boards
, for which he was promoted to lieutenant junior grade and stationed in Point Barrow, Alaska, where it may be noted no successful invasion by Imperial Japan took place from the date of his arrival through the end of the war. Having drunk in the sophistication of Prudhoe Bay, he was understandably disenchanted with a future with the pulp paper industry, and after his release from service he assembled a résumé and floated it to prestigious law firms across the country. When the anticipated flood of requests for interviews failed to occur, he downsized his aspirations, eventually consenting to fill the void left in the Detroit city attorney’s office by the sudden death of a twenty-three-year-old Michigan Bar hopeful due to congenital heart disease. There he parlayed an ability to spend twelve hours at a stretch tracking down arcane precedents in the stacks of the law library at Wayne State University into a research assignment with the Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce.

In that capacity, on loan from the city in return for a promise of federal funding for various municipal construction projects, Leadbeater had distinguished himself so far as to prompt a special commendation signed by Senator Kefauver, which went into his jacket at City Hall. Of greater significance were the five seconds of national fame that came his way when he appeared on camera handing a slip of paper containing pertinent facts to Rudolph Halley, the committee’s chief counsel. The gesture happened to take place during a dramatic moment in the testimony of Leo Bustamente, bodyguard and sometime leg-breaker in the employ of Frankie Orr, and the footage was repeated during the six and eleven o’clock news broadcasts. I’d noted the presence in the office of a framed blow-up from the
Free Press’s
front-page coverage in which the photographer had captured Leadbeater leaning over the counsel’s shoulder. It’s not every day you get to study the precise moment when the direction of a man’s life changed. Some pursued public office with an earnest desire to improve the world, some for wealth, many for power. The rest just liked to read their names in print.

From this information, delivered to my door by special messenger from Agnes DeFilippo’s desk at Slauson & Nichols, and from the pale, slick-haired image in the newspaper photo, I had constructed a repressed, stoop-shouldered fanatic who like so many others before him had turned to politics as an escape from his own mediocrity. The Redbaiting that had drawn him toward the lighted ring of professional wrestling, and into the life of Anthony Battle, was both an opportunity and a deep faith. In the ice-locked reaches of northern Maine it was probably easier to imagine the tread of an invading Soviet Army in Arctic boots and Astrakhan hats than in the comparatively temperate climate of southeastern Michigan, and those long changeless months spent defending a skeleton post on the threshold of Siberia might have skewed anyone’s opinions about which group posed the greatest threat to our way of life, the Nazi enemy or our Soviet allies. True to the type, the wife he had acquired after leaving the navy and before the move to Detroit would be a mouse-faced woman in a cloth coat with a monkey collar who volunteered to serve turkey at the Salvation Army mission on Thanksgiving Day; their seven-year-old daughter would wear yellow party dresses and hair bows and dream of serving charity turkey for her future Republican husband.

This was the animal I had come prepared to tame. I had brought nothing with which to handle this sparking wire whose casually unkempt appearance and icon-smashing charm ran counter to everything I had experienced in the greasy half-light of the political arena. It had been too long. I hadn’t returned; I had merely been disinterred, and my petrified bones were crumbling in the indifferent atmosphere of an age I was never intended to see.

“Are you a drinking man, Mr. Minor?” He lifted the wire rack and studied the decanters’ contents against the light, as if searching for impurities.

“Not any more. I thought members of your party never drank before sundown.”

“Yes. I’m somewhat disenchanted with the party of Lincoln. They forget they repudiated Honest Abe in 1864, forcing him to win re-election as an independent. I think sometimes of changing my affiliation, but mugwumps aren’t to be trusted. They’re like journalists who take it into their heads to run for office. No offense.”

I waved it away. I’d known a few, W. R. Hearst included, and wouldn’t have voted for one on a bet. Anyone who spent as much time with politicians as reporters were forced to and wanted to become one was unfit to lead.

Leadbeater poured a stiff jolt into a rock glass from the bottle marked BOURBON. “What brings you to city hall? I was under the impression you were no longer with the Fourth Estate.”

“It’s the right one. I’m with promotion at Ford.” In the absence of ammunition I was moving slowly, seeing how much I could salvage of what I’d brought. “Some of us in the Glass House think you’ve got a real shot at becoming county prosecutor.”

If I was looking for a spark of campaign-contribution avarice, he disappointed me. He leaned a hip against the corner of his desk, swirling the liquid in his glass and frowning down at it. “I can’t do much for the auto industry in the prosecutor’s office. Surely Mr. Ford knows that.”

“Mr. Ford doesn’t live in the present. He already considers it the past. Tom Dewey started as a special prosecutor, went on to become Governor of New York State, and nearly stole the presidency out from under Give ’em Hell Harry.”

“‘Nearly’ being the operative word. The great tragedy of politics is you’re never remembered for your early successes, only for your most recent failure. What are you proposing, Mr. Minor?”

“You’re backing a dead horse in this anti-Communism crusade. It would be a greater tragedy if you were to be sucked down the same hole with Joe McCarthy.”

“The nation didn’t turn its back on Senator McCarthy because he opposed Communism. It simply decided he wasn’t the champion it wanted to carry the banner. His mistake was to take on the United States Army with a former general in the White House.”

I couldn’t resist. “The prospects of a professional wrestler being elected to high office appear somewhat less likely.”

He set his glass on the desk without drinking from it. The small close-set eyes reflected no light. Doll’s eyes. “Who told you I had an interest in professional wrestling?”

The temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees, and with it my opinion of myself. The second rule of survival in the information-gathering business was never to give up more than you got, and I had shattered it. In a moment I had done what Ivan Kohloff, the Beast of Borodino, had been unable to do in ten minutes of brute athletics. Anthony Battle was down for the count.

K
ICK UP DUST
.

“Detroit’s a small town for its size,” I said. “The ring sports find their most enthusiastic audience here. When someone stirs them up it gets talked about. Actually, I’m surprised you think it’s such a secret. Isn’t publicity the main reason to go looking for Communists in an unlikely place like the wrestling arena?”