Echo House (30 page)

"You were in the witness chair while he was on a yacht?"

"Be realistic, Sylvia. He couldn't've done anything if he was here. Everyone thought it best that he get out of town, though there was some discussion that in the unlikely event that they'd subpoena him, he could show up with Paulina in her sunglasses and minidress to distract the committee. They're easily distracted, believe me. Paulina was all for it. I think she thought she'd win an Academy Award." Ed laughed, remembering that Alec hadn't thought it funny. And from the look on her face, Sylvia didn't either. "He telephoned every day."

"That was big of him."

"It wasn't his fight," Ed said.

"So they never touched him," Sylvia said

"Axel," he said patiently. "Axel's a force of nature. No one laid a glove on Axel. They never do. Axel's always way, way back in the woodwork, wearing his usual camouflage. That's where he lives, heard but not seen. Axel's bulletproof. The bullet hasn't been invented that could wound Axel Behl. You know that, Sylvia. You know that better than anyone. Axel's the one who makes things happen, never takes credit, never shares blame. He's my oldest friend."

She looked at him in disbelief, opening her mouth to reply; and then she noticed that his hands were trembling.

"We've been through the mill together."

"Yes," she said.

"Here and overseas. More than forty years now."

"Yes," she said.

"I don't know what I'd do without him," Ed said.

"But it's Axel's bank," she said softly. "Doesn't that mean he's responsible, too?"

Ed Peralta smiled. Something was nagging at his memory. Sylvia Behl had an unpredictable effect on him. In her company he always had an urge to perform. He had told her things—hinted at them, anyway—that he had not even told Billie. That was because Sylvia was a subtle woman who liked to listen for the thing unsaid. You didn't have to cross every
t
and dot every
i
with Sylvia, even though in the old days she had been an outsider in their community, distrusted by the other women. Everyone wanted to protect Axel, so beaten up in the war. The community's sympathy went to Axel; and that was true today.

"He owns Longfellow's," she added. "It's
his.
"

"Yes, of course," Ed said patiently. "Up to a point, it is. His idea, his man in overall charge. He owns the majority stock. He's chairman. There's no question that Axel made a bundle of money—but why not? Axel doesn't care anything about money, never did, so it's not greed, only a natural consequence of foresight and good management."

She looked at her fingers, listening for sarcasm and not finding it.

Ed shook his head. "You know what I'm saying is true. It's one of Axel's great strengths. Not caring about money."

"There's more to greed than money," she said, knowing that in some abstract way Ed was correct.

"The bank had several divisions," he explained. "In fact it had two divisions, each distinct from the other. One of the divisions was ours even though the bank was Axel's. They could never connect Axel personally to us, not that they tried very hard. They were on a treasure hunt and Axel didn't figure in the treasure. He was not a target. The idea was, Axel was doing his friends in the government a favor and the way the favor was managed was the government's responsibility. Axel's umbrella, our leak. No one wanted Axel to get burned. When Lambardo pressed the matter, the chairman told him to forget it and move along. And that testimony, what testimony there was, was in closed session and so sensitive that it never leaked. An aura surrounds these affairs. There's a specific context, the inquiry is pointed in a certain direction, and it does not waver, unless someone makes a childish mistake, goes beyond his brief, gets too cute..." That had happened more than once, to everyone's disadvantage and embarrassment. You had to keep the thing within a closed circle, the action as stylized as a bullfight. He said to her, "The fact that Axel was involved at ali gave the operation a sweeter smell than it otherwise might've. I mean legitimacy. Axel's reputation is true blue, and he never refuses a man a favor. He's as close to untouchable as you can get in Washington, unless they change the rules of the bullfight. Maybe some day they'll put the
toro
in the
traje de luces
and make the man fight naked, without a sword." Ed chuckled at that thought, the bull done up like a Madrid grandee and the man bare as the day he was born, the critics cheering the bull, the critics having the final say, the president of the arena as helpless as an usher.

"So there has to be a story," he concluded. "A narrative. They have to connect the dots in order to satisfy—"

"Repressed infantile longings," she said.

"What?"

"Something Freud said."

"That's good," Ed said. '"Repressed infantile longings.' That about sums it up, except there's nothing infantile about the satisfaction. That's grown-up stuff."

"I know, Ed." She reached across the table and touched his hand to reassure him that she was not being cute, devaluing his account. He had not touched his coffee, and now he lit another cigarette with the brass lighter, running his thumb across the inscription. She said, "I was only thinking about connecting the dots and who gets satisfied and who doesn't. It's a child's game, after all."

"Not this game," he said. "They had to have a story for themselves, something plausible. Since no one would ever know the truth of the matter, they had to have something that sounded right, something that fit, something you can pass around to the critics on background. Doesn't the Mad Hatter seem perfectly believable in Alice's world? So they decided that there were a few Agency renegades led by me, the rotten crabapple in the barrel of Golden Delicious. Nothing wrong with the orchard, nothing
systemic.
The renegades went out of control, an appalling example of havoc when discipline breaks down, together with a regrettable lack of oversight on the part of Highest Levels, preoccupied as they were with the shooting war, the one in Southeast Asia, where brave American boys were being killed and wounded. The superb procedures malfunction, the random world taking its usual revenge. The second law of thermodynamics. Heisenberg's law. The law of unintended consequences. Murphy's Law. All heading in the general direction of the criminal law. Mistakes were made, owing to the human factor, and the in-house review will surely result in fresh procedures, even more superb than the procedures that failed, because the same men were putting them in place and everyone knew that experience was the best teacher, no? Can you hear the wagons circling, darling Sylvia? I could, so I fell on my sword."

"Oh, Ed," she said. "Those bastards."

"There was a script and we were all reading from it. And that's where we come to Wilson Slyde. The story broke in Slyde's column, the one he writes with that poolhall Marxist from Boston, the Irishman who went to Harvard and can't forget it and won't let you forget it, either."

"Cowards," she said. Sylvia was still back somewhere between Heisenberg and the law of unintended consequences.

He did not know how much to tell her about Wilson Slyde and Teddy O'Banion. The column was called "Our Side." They were nihilists, read daily in three hundred newspapers. O'Banion drove a Jaguar, so in the privacy of one's own home or office the column was known as the Jig and the Jag. Quite an ambitious piece of work was Wilson Slyde, scholarship boy at Milton, at Yale, at MIT, where he'd graduated with honors, thence to the Defense Department, then Langley, working for Harold Grendall. Hard not to root for Wilson, so bright, so unlikable, son of an army sergeant who served in Bradley's command during the big war and became fascinated with infantry tactics. When he came home he bought every book he could find on the Civil War, building a giant sandtable in his basement, where he re-fought Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. He advanced through the Franco-Prussian War and World War One, imparting all his knowledge and enthusiasm to his son. Wilson wrote his thesis at MIT on the tactical uses of nuclear weapons. When he went to work at Defense, and later at Langley, he wanted to parse the nuclear triad and the electronic battlefield as it applied to NATO and Eastern Europe. But his bosses dealt him the equal opportunity account and sent him around the country talking to the NAACP and the Urban League about what a superb job the administration was doing integrating the armed forces and the security services. He was holding the race card when the card he wanted was the strategy card. So he quit and started "Our Side" with Teddy O'Banion.

"And the first two deal with NATO's eastern flank and Soviet military preparedness and the syndicate people call him to say that while of course he could write anything he damn pleased and the syndicate would never, ever seek to censor him in any way, he could look carefully at his contract and understand that NATO and Soviet Threat were not what newspaper editors had in mind when they bought 'Our Side' by Wilson W. Slyde, Jr., and Edward O'Banion three times a week. Next time, perhaps—Crisis in the NAACP, or What Huey and Eldridge Really Want."

He expected Sylvia to laugh, but instead she shook her head. "That's a sad story."

"Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas."

"It's still a sad story."

"The Jig and the Jag have resentments enough to fill an abyss. So two weeks after my hearing ends and I'm hoping that the affair has blown over and I can return quietly to work, if not in my old job then in another job—you know that no tree crashes in Washington unless it's reported in the newspapers—Slyde commences a series on corruption in the security services, complete with quotes from the transcript. Odd thing is, I come out all right. But Langley is savaged and my cover, what's left of it, is blown. Question is, where did Wilson Slyde get his information?"

"Beats me," she said. "Where?"

He said, "Hard to say. End of story." Of course it could have come from any of the senators in attendance. It could have come from Red Lambardo. But Ed knew that it came from Alec Behl, because Alec was nowhere mentioned until the last piece, and then in sentences so respectful that Slyde might have been writing about Louis Brandeis. Those sentences, so admiring, so without Slyde's usual sarcasm, had the effect of making Alec an instant Visible. Slyde had the subtlety to omit any mention of Axel, and Red Lambardo was mentioned only in passing, "doing the best he could with a bad brief." The Slyde columns were picked up everywhere, even
Time.

"What do you think?" she said. "Was it Alec?"

"What did he stand to gain?"

"You're right," she said. "He had nothing to gain."

Ed Peralta raised his hands, stretching, looking over her shoulder out the window.

"I wish he hadn't gotten involved."

Ed shrugged.

"Cowards," she said again. "It's Axel's fault."

He did not reply to that; she was off the point, and he had already said too much. The light was failing fast on Wisconsin Avenue; it was close on five o'clock. In his office he never noticed the weather, even the change of seasons. He had lived in an indoor paper world—estimates, proposals, memoranda, situation reports. Newspapers, magazines, an occasional book of current affairs or history, mostly European and New England history. He was horn in Rhode Island but had not been back for many years. His family was gone. As a boy he had been a keen sailor and now he could not remember the last time he had been on a boat. His father had owned a Hinckley with teak decks and a set of red sails. A Wampanoag who lived at the boatyard in Jamestown taught him to sail, all the time spinning tales of the tribal lands up near Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard. Much later, Ed thought of his life in the government as similar to an Indian's on a reservation. You hunted on government land and bought your goods at the government store but you maintained your own rituals and worshiped your own gods. You stayed inconspicuous and encouraged your family to stay inconspicuous as well. When your children grew up, they went away. He knew the government's limitations but never wanted any other kind of life. He lived in a government within the government, and was accountable to that government. He liked knowing and not being able to tell what he knew. That, and the satisfaction that came from knowing a job and doing it well, and the many friendships here and abroad.

"Anyone stand up for you, Ed? Anyone at all?"

"Jesus Christ, Sylvia." He sighed, exasperated now. He had done everything but draw her a blueprint. She had been away from Washington for too long, had forgotten how things worked, how they had to work for the government to function. Sometimes you needed to sacrifice; that was the way it was set up. You could not believe the incoherence of the government until you had been inside it, attended the meetings and read the memoranda, the way things rocked and rolled on their own motion; you practiced damage control and then one day the fire was too big to contain and someone had to stand up. Someone had to say, "It's me, I'm responsible," particularly if he wasn't. Confession in hand, the arsonists agreed to take their gasoline and go home. They had to have a trophy, something to show for all the hard work they d done.

"That was the point," he said patiently. "Keep everyone else away, far from the hea: and the glare. Give them enough smoke and they'll forget about the fire. No character witnesses in my trade except sotto voce, over drinks at a party or in someone's office. Listen, Ed Peralta's a good man, got his cock caught in the wringer, maybe there's more here than meets the eye, maybe less, but Ed's okay, been with us a long time, don't crucify him. That's why your Alec was a godsend. Alec and his quiet manner. Alec and his friendships. Alec, his smoke and his mirrors. Best of all. Alec son of Axel."

She closed her eyes and did not speak. She remembered telling Alec years ago that she had never felt competent as a mother. Part of what she said was her usual exaggeration, but there was truth there, too, when she confided that she knew plenty but didn't think that what she knew had value for a child. She should have thought again, because her timidity had thrust her son into Axel's orbit as surely as if she had sent him aloft on a rocket. Now he was too far away to be seen by the naked eye.