Truth Like the Sun (13 page)

“What do you make of this city, Mr. Murrow?”

“She’s provincial and puritanical and insecure.”

Roger smiles. “She’s not all that puritanical, sir.”

“You’re all trying so desperately to prove you’re first-rate,” Murrow says. “Can’t you just not care what everyone else thinks?”

Roger can’t resist any longer. He asks for a Camel, lights it and exhales through his nose exactly as the broadcast legend does. “And the fair?”

“Well, this cheerful glimpse into the future is a disservice to clear thinking, isn’t it?” Murrow asks. “From where I’m sitting, it looks like we’re closer to Armageddon than any efficient paradise you or any other dreamer can come up with.”

Roger’s own ashes fall in his lap as he studies the man’s brooding eyes and ghostly pallor. Perhaps, now that he’s charged with explaining America to the world as the new head of the United States Information Agency, he knows too much. Or maybe he’s just beaten down by the doomsday gravity of his own voice.

“So you think Linus Pauling is right?” Roger asks, matching his exhale. “Is there any reason to think the fair could be a target?”

Murrow frowns and snorts. “The fair? Boeing makes you a bull’s-eye, of course, but you already know that, right? The unvarnished truth is, the world’s a whole lot more dangerous than people want to know.” He sucks hard and squints. “Reasons to be afraid? Good God, yes. Fact is, I’m astonished something hasn’t happened already.”

“Something?”
Roger feels dizzy.

“Khrushchev,” Murrow says, his somber eyes pulling Roger in, “is neither predictable nor
stable
.”

Afterward, Roger wanders the grounds in a deepening funk, now seeing the expo as little more than a cheesy roadside attraction. He drifts into the Fashion Pavilion, where models pirouette on carpeted lily pads above a perfumed pool; he then visits the Bell exhibit and winces at its assertion that satellites one day will bring us live television
from Africa and Asia, which fits perfectly with all the other false hopes emanating from his operation. Back outside, he watches kids frolic by clinging to balloons stuffed with pink rabbits while their parents slouch in line, drinking Orange Juliuses or waiting for rental cars,
$5 a day, 5 cents a mile
. Suddenly this overflow crowd seems like a single collective organism, an enormous, gullible beast.

Aides find him wherever he goes and pass along more requests, demands and snafus. He puts them all off and cuts in line at Boeing’s Spacearium exhibit. Clearing his sore throat, he settles into a seat and waits in the nose of this imaginary rocket as a deep voice counts down the seconds. Blasting off now, he swiftly circles the earth before shooting toward the moon and beyond, planets whirling across the screens, causing him to duck. He actually loses himself in this experience, a spaceman among spacemen, until the lights return and he again sees everything through the aperture of Murrow’s harsh lens. He hears a kid squealing because his parents won’t buy him
the bullet that killed Jesse James
! He watches people slouching in line after line, alone with the tumble of their thoughts, chewing gum, doing their slaughterhouse shuffle. He buys a pack of Camels, lights up and gazes at another poster:
Don’t miss the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Western Show!
He feels like the mastermind of the ultimate farce.

Retreating to headquarters, he’s greeted with the front of the afternoon
Times
and its confusing blend of silliness and seriousness—a photo of a fat Kentucky man who won more than a hundred stuffed animals next to an article about the U.S. attorney’s announcement that he’s investigating allegations of illegal gambling and police payoffs in Seattle.

Rummaging through messages, he finds one from the senator’s secretary, but it’s too late to reach anyone back East. Jenny Sunshine pokes her head in and says Malcolm Turner’s waiting outside for him. He groans as the developer scurries in and immediately starts talking about the six parcels he’s on the brink of cobbling together for the Hilton near Forty-fifth.

“Sorry,” Roger interrupts him, “I’ve got lots going on here now.”

“You don’t look right. You sick?”

“Tired,” he says, realizing he’s no longer comfortable around this man.

“Heard anything from the senator?” Malcolm asks abruptly.

Roger hesitates.

“What’s he say about this stupid gambling investigation?”

Roger shrugs. “Beats me.”

“The chamber’s asking about it all the time. We need this thing to go away, least for a while …”

We
? Roger detects something in Malcolm’s eyes—a flicker of desperation? He wants to ask him to be more specific, but more than anything he wants him to leave. Stalling, he takes Teddy’s approach. “If a few crooked cops get busted, it’s not the end of the world.”

“Hey,” Malcolm says, shifting his weight from foot to foot, “if Dave Beck can go to jail, anyone can.”

Roger reads his pink face for a moment, then says, “Beck invested in your apartment project too, didn’t he?”

Malcolm stares at him impersonally. “Lots of people are.”

Roger flinches as the door swings and Teddy leads three flush-faced men toward his desk.

“Let me guess, Murrow opened right up for you!” Teddy begins loudly.

“He talked quite a bit,” Roger admits, forcing a smile. Then, to Malcolm: “I’ll give you a call.”

“Kills me!” Teddy regales the others. “These big shots tell me next to nothing, then they tell Roger anything and everything like he’s their shrink or something.”

As the door shuts behind Malcolm, Teddy introduces him to these Dallas businessmen who seem trapped between a three-martini lunch and a nap. “So what’d Murrow have to say?”

“The fair’s a joke. The city’s insecure. Armageddon is coming. All sorts of cheerful stuff.”

They laugh in unison. Teddy loosens his tie and pours five small glasses of bourbon without ice or water. “Do your LBJ for ’em, Rog.”

“Teddy.”

“C’mon, been talkin’ you up, boy.”

“You just got done telling me they’re from Texas.”

“All the more reason. Just a sentence or two.”

The Texans goad him too, and as the office quiets Roger clears
his mind until he can conjure the vice president. “Tol’ my tailor to gimme a couple more inches down here between the zipper and my
bung
hole, see.”

The men lose it.

“Encore!” Teddy barks. “Ed Sullivan. Or John Glenn working the crowd.”

An hour later, Roger abandons his to-do list and rushes to the stadium to introduce a lanky preacher named Billy Graham. When he’d asked Roger yesterday if he was a man of science or faith, he waited a beat before saying, “Just a man, Reverend.” He shuts his eyes now and listens to the voice of a sensible zealot.

“As the sands of our age are falling in the hourglass, our hope and confidence should not rest alone in our mighty scientific achievement, or in space exploration, but in God.” It seems to Roger that Graham’s taking shots at the fair too, and moments later he sounds as grim as Murrow or Pauling. “Since the advent of the atomic bomb, man has at his disposal the weapons to bring all these prophetic things about. Man realizes we live in the shadow of the bomb and realizes how fragile man really is.”

This day feels like ten crammed into one as he checks his watch and strides from the stadium, Graham’s amplified sermon blending with the clunk and whir of the rides and the arcades. He stops into the club to thank Nat King Cole for coming and to glad-hand the city planner and the chamber boys, never stopping long enough to converse with anyone. Finally, he tells Teddy he’s going to catch a few winks, then steps back into the illuminated fairgrounds—yellow, purple and gold geysers spouting from the fountain and the girly shows lit up with the word PEEP flashing white. He finds himself glancing overhead, wondering if we’ll actually be able to see the incoming missiles before they strike.

CHARLIE MCDANIEL
is sitting in the corner booth where he said he’d be, his back to the wall so he can see everyone who enters the Frontier.

Built like a bouncer with a dented nose and whiskered cheeks
beneath a filthy Yankees ball cap, he’s sipping burnt coffee and looks to be recuperating from an illness or a hangover. “You the professor?” he says after Roger sits down. “So-ci-ol-o-gy?” he says, as if for the first time, reading from the business card in his hand.

Roger in fact feels like a prissy academic in this man’s bloodshot glare. “I try to teach kids how things really are, how they really work,” he says, awkwardly paraphrasing his grandfather. “I try to get at the truth.”

McDaniel’s giggle makes him sound like a street-corner lunatic, but then he shifts into a low mumble. “What makes you think anybody’s interested in that?”

Roger offers him a cigarette. McDaniel shakes his head, sips his coffee and giggles again. “Now how’m I supposed to know you’re not setting me up?”

Roger sets the pack on the table between them. “For what?”

“People want me to go away. Lots of people.” He glances around the bar. “How ’bout some ID?”

Roger wishes he hadn’t come. There’s an underlying stench beyond stale beer and ammonia, a sharper odor no cleaning solution can conceal, and much of it, he slowly realizes, is McDaniel’s BO.

“Well, you can’t know,” he says, recalling that the best way to reason with paranoids is to admit they might be right. “And you obviously don’t have to talk to me, but I thought the note you posted in your tavern deserved more attention than it got. And from what I can see, you were actually stating the obvious.”

McDaniel lowers his head as three hefty men settle in a nearby booth, talking simultaneously.

Roger leans closer, despite the odor. “The chamber brags about what a wholesome city this is. A good-government city’s what they call it.”

McDaniel holds the business card up to the light as if checking for counterfeit. “How ’bout a driver’s license?”

Roger plucks the card from his hand. “Everybody says you’re a crackpot. If you don’t want to help, I’m pretty sure I can find somebody who knows what you know and more.”

McDaniel reaches for the Camels. “In a little less than half an
hour,” he says, tapping one out, “Officer Winston Blair will walk up to the left side of this bar in plainclothes, throw back a free shot, pick up a sack of money and walk out.”

He yaks for the next fifteen minutes, fast and animated in that same low mumble, smoking aggressively, twirling keys on his callused fingers. A year and a half ago, his story goes, he sold a restaurant in Everett and bought the Shipwreck on First. He knew about its card room, but not its cigar-shop bookie. It took him less than a week, he says, to learn that the city’s “tolerance laws” weren’t what they seemed.

Roger overhears some loud woman a couple booths away. “They’re tearing it down after the fair, that’s what I hear.… No? Well, they should. It’s not architecture, it’s
gimmicktecture
.”

When he tunes back in, McDaniel’s explaining that he had to pay off the cops or close his card room. Claimed he paid two different bagmen $250 for each of the first three months, then refused to let the beat cop handpick his next card-room manager. Suddenly Teamsters started fights in his bar, health inspectors showed up during the dinner hour and a state liquor man framed him for selling to minors. “I’m selling to kids? Go to the Turf or Merchant’s. They serve twelve-year-olds. And my kitchen was spotless, okay? Cooks complained all the time that I cared more about cleanliness than taste, which is true. People’ll eat anything.” By then, though, he was losing money so fast he had to pay off the cops or sell at a huge loss to the only willing buyer—the same crook who’d sold him the place. So he hired a young attorney to help him expose the shakedown. “The kid backed out in less than a week. Couldn’t even interest the papers. I really don’t know where it all begins and ends.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like I said, for all I know you’re in on it.” Now he looked more desperate than tough.

“You probably know this, Charlie, but saying things like that makes you sound paranoid.”

McDaniel lights another cigarette and studies him.

“Let’s stick with what you know for sure,” Roger says gently. “The patrolman collects the money, but where does it go from
there?” He feels his pulse throbbing in his neck. “If you were getting jerked around by Teamsters and health and liquor inspectors, they’re getting paid too, right? What about higher up in the police?”

McDaniel takes a long inhale, glances at the door, blows smoke at the ceiling. “One of the few honest cops I met told me there’s one sergeant who figures out exactly who gets what, but that he’s the only one who knows.”

Roger sweats through another ten minutes as McDaniel grows even more cryptic and indecipherable. He’s whispering now that the high-dollar games have moved to the New Caledonia Bridge Club on Union. “Bridge in the front,” he says, “poker in the back.”

Roger’s attention wanders. He overhears more people talking about the fair. Somebody heard Billy Graham tonight, others rattle on about their friends’ kids getting lost or all the goddamn lines. He notices two women staring at him, trying to place his face, and realizes he can’t get away with much more of this. At the bottom of the hour, McDaniel points with a pinky at the bar where a strapping hatted man sidles up to a shot of whiskey. He turns it once in his fingertips, as if assessing its quality, before tossing it back and grabbing a paper bag, then strolling out like he’d just picked up his sack lunch.

Hours later, Roger’s in his third different game of the night and losing again. Compared with the others, the New Caledonia is almost tasteful, with cedar paneling and dozens of nudes that suggested the owner was a collector, not a pervert. Of the six men hunched around the table, Roger is the only one under sixty. And he’s had enough liquor to feel sober, so he’s talking about the weather, the fair, even the bagman he’d seen taking cash right off the bar top, working it all in between hands like he was sharing, not asking. “The U.S. attorney wants to be a congressman,” he suddenly volunteers. “Thinks he can make his name indicting cops.”