Echo House (37 page)

Alec found him in the Adirondack chair, tapping his canes on the toes of his shoes. Axel was muttering to himself, but that was normal. What wasn't normal was his request for a glass of red wine, the good Burgundy in the sideboard. The sun was almost down but it was still warm enough to sit outside.

Alec brought the glasses and they sat quietly a moment in the gathering darkness, Axel fussing with his cigar, finally managing to light it. He said, "How did it go with that idiot?"

"Lost every race but one."

"You or her?"

"Her. But she kept filling her notebook. I'm damned if I know with what."

"That's what they do. It keeps you off balance."

"And she had a chat with Leila."

"Naturally," Axel said. "I told you the interview was a bad idea. You wouldn't listen."

"She didn't care for Leila's Twomblys. Didn't care much for Leila's weight. And when Leila told her that an argument about Nixon broke up the marriage, she didn't care much for that either. But she'll use it because it's too droll not to use."

Axel blew a smoke ring and smiled. "Is it true?"

"We fought about everything, the defense budget, the women's movement, the designated hitter, OPEC, Wounded Knee, Patty Hearst,
Chinatown,
and the legacy of Al Capone. Of course we fought about Nixon. She thought I was the one who got him off."

Axel began to laugh. "You never told me exactly what you did."

"Nothing," Alec said. "Spoke to a few people. Supplied some metaphors and scenarios that might have been useful, might not have been."

"People thought so," Axel said. "That's what counts."

"I'm going to ask you a favor."

"No," Axel said.

"You don't know what it is yet."

"You're going to ask me to talk to her."

"That's right, I am."

"I have given only three interviews in my lifetime. They were off-the-record interviews." He thought a moment and added, "I value my reputation."

"It would help me out," Alec said. "I'm asking you to see her for thirty minutes, here at Echo House. It would take some of the heat off."

"Off you. And put it on me."

"Don't be ridiculous. She'll be star-struck. She'll be the rookie reporter at the hometown newspaper who gets the interview with Elizabeth Taylor. Gosh, you have beautiful eyes. And such skin! You're as slender as a teenager. Do you mind if I call you Liz?"

"What if you're underestimating her?"

"I'm not."

"I'll think about it."

"I'd appreciate it."

"But I don't like it." Axel blew another smoke ring, sipping his wine carefully, glaring at his son. Alec always had a taste for the limelight, a mistake for anyone who wanted to exercise real influence. FDR never stood for it. These youngsters, perhaps it was different with them; but Alec had made his own bad bargain with the devil, so be it. Axel cleared his throat and told Alec about his ruined hopes for D-Day. He wanted to be there. Lloyd Fisher and Harold Grendall were already in Europe, bound for Warsaw to see André Przyborski, who seemed to be living very stylishly in a neighborhood near the Jewish cemetery, the one where if you looked hard enough you could find a Jew who died of natural causes. They were going to Normandy for the ceremonies. "I'd give my useless left; leg to be there when they're there, but the journey's too difficult."

"I didn't know you wanted to go to D-Day," Alec said.

"I damn well do. But I can't."

"Why not? Car to Dulles, Concorde to Paris, car to Arromanches. That isn't difficult."

Axel shot a hard look at his son, who pretended to know so much but understood so little. "It is for me."

Alec thought a moment, swirling the wine in his glass, feeling his father's seething anger. Then he excused himself and walked back into the house. In the study he dialed one number and got an answering machine, dialed another and got Red Lambardo's soft voice, sounding as if he had just been awakened. They talked a moment of the current scandal, who was likely to suffer and why. Alec had some advice for Red on his own testimony the following week, and he had good news as well. The committee would treat him respectfully, mostly because they were trolling for sharks and they knew that in the present scheme of things Red was a minnow. He knew what the committee wanted to know but he did not know it firsthand. The counsel was a son of a bitch, though, and had to be watched carefully at all times. Alec lowered his voice and spoke in the usual code. He had one piece of information that might be helpful, both to Red and to Red's principals. Red was free to pass it on, under no circumstances revealing its source. As he spoke he could hear Red furiously making notes; and when he was finished, a low, satisfied chuckle.

When the pause came, Alec said he was calling to ask a favor, not a huge favor, perhaps not even a difficult favor, but one he wanted and needed to have. He told Red that his father was in a nostalgic frame of mind, as he almost always was these days, and wanted to go to the D-Day ceremonies—

"Don't worry about it," Red said. "That's an easy one. I'll get him a seat in the front row, but you've got to promise me he won't shoot Reagan."

"Well, thanks," Alec said. "More complicated than that."

"Tell me about it," Red said, his voice cooler now.

"He doesn't feel like traveling, even by Concorde. His back hurts all the time and he's using two canes and generally feels punk and complains all the time, you understand?"

Red Lambardo thought a moment. "If he can get to England, my guy can get him on the
Britannia
with all the other supremos. He probably knows half of them anyway. But I'd have to get on it right away. "

"That isn't what I have in mind, Red."

There was a pause, and then Red Lambardo began to laugh. "You bastard. I know what you want. You want him taken care of tee to green."

"That's right, Red."

"You want him on Air Force One."

The call took longer than expected, and when Alec finished the old man was still sitting in his Adirondack chair, tapping his canes on the toes of his shoes, the wine glass empty now. He was staring into the middle distance, a sour expression on his face. He looked like a hawk at rest, alert but weary from the day's flight. Alec stood in the doorway watching him, trying as always to read his mind and failing, remembering when it seemed to him that his father could do anything, the ticket to Wimbledon and all the rest, and then his long absence. So much of his life was wrapped up in France, his Rubicon, a mighty Rubicon; and now he wanted to see it again. Alec wondered how often Axel thought of Nadège; he had not mentioned her name in years. But of course he thought about her all the time, Nadège and Sandrine were the ghosts of Echo House, present everywhere and visible nowhere, like Constance. Probably they had their own conversations late at night when he and Axel were asleep, dead to the world. No doubt Capitaine de Barquin put in an appearance also. It was almost dark now, but the old man seemed not to notice.

Alec brought the bottle of wine and refilled their glasses.

He said, "It's fixed. I fixed it."

Axel looked up, eyebrows raised.

"You're going with the President on Air Force One."

His father stared at him a long moment and then began to laugh, a deep sputtering rumble that caused him to spill his wine. He said, "What did you have to do to arrange this?"

"I spoke to a man who spoke to another man. They're thrilled at the White House. They're delighted."

"I'll bet they are. I'll be they're turning cartwheels. May I know the identities of these individuals?"

"You may not."

"If that son of a bitch expects me to contribute to his campaign—"

"That wasn't mentioned. That's not part of the deal."

"What is the deal, Alec?"

"A man owed me a favor. And as I said, they're thrilled."

"So they remember me over there."

"Of course," Alec said, surprised.

"What did you have to give them?"

"I didn't give them anything. A man was in my debt. He repaid the debt."

Axel sipped his wine and then he said sharply, "You're a lucky man, to know people who repay their debts."

"I didn't have to break anyone's arm. They were happy to do it. I think they're honored. As they should be."

"I'll have to buy a new suit," Axel said.

In the event, Virginia Spears's story was a triumph, the cover a photograph of Alec in his office on the telephone, the skin around his eyes crinkling with worldly amusement. Perhaps someone was telling him a joke, or the latest sexual peccadillo of Wilson Slyde, the price of beef in the Argentine, or the roughhouse that got out of hand in the Senate cloakroom the previous week. Alec was in his shirtsleeves, his feet resting on the bottom drawer of his desk, a yellow legal pad in his lap. He looked as handsome as a movie star, one of the old breed, with undeniable sex appeal along with obvious authority, Richard Widmark, say, or Jean-Louis Trintignant. One of Alfred Munnings's fox-hunting scenes was on the wall behind him surrounded by personal photographs—Alec with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Alec with the French ambassador, with Neil Armstrong, with Leonard Bernstein, with Dean Acheson, as a young man with John Steinbeck, as a very young boy with FDR in the Oval Office, as an infant in Senator Adolph Behl's lap in his Senate office, Behlbaver roses in the background. On the credenza behind his desk, peeping over his left shoulder, was a photograph of a much younger and very debonair Axel Behl, leaning on a cane under the porte-cochere of Echo House, his ruined face half in shadows but his bearing calling to mind a European grandee—and the photograph had pride of place, unless you counted the one in the silver frame face-down in the desk drawer, put there moments before the photographer arrived, Sandrine Huet in her Georgetown garden, Alec standing next to her, smiling openly in a way that turned him into a different man altogether from the one on the magazine's cover.

Alec Behl, the Man to See in Washington.
Congratulations showered upon Virginia Spears, whose picture appeared alongside the by-line, the first time that had been done in the magazine's history. Everyone talked about the cover story, a masterpiece of the journalist's art, the inside-out account of a legal warrior who sought nothing more than simple justice from Washington's pig-stubborn bureaucracy and image-addicted political class. When the lambs were thrown to the wolves it was Alec Behl who defended the lambs, with no sanctimonious hocus-pocus, only a belief that leaders were accountable before their followers; and nothing was as it seemed in the federal city. When the Nixon scandals threatened to undermine the very legitimacy of the government itself, Alec Behl shuttled from one office to another, offering, as he said, metaphors and scenarios to bring the disgrace to an end and restore the people's faith. His efforts on behalf of the government—for it could be fairly said that he was representing Washington itself, pro bono—had a mighty effect on his own personal life, a painful and bitter divorce. Such were the realities of domestic life in the capital city. Moreover, at a time when American families were falling to pieces willy-nilly, Behl
père
and Behl fils lived together in the same family mansion that had been bought by Senator Behl in the last year of the first Wilson administration, a Washington landmark, for decades the venue of the capital's most sought-after dinner invitations. Axel Behl—agreeing to an on-the-record interview for the very first time in his long and conspicuous life—had been severely crippled for forty years as the result of harrowing wartime exploits so clandestine they could not be revealed even today—and when he expressed a wish to attend the D-Day celebration, it was his influential son who secured the invitation to ride aboard Air Force One with the President and his staff, who generously put aside partisan differences to recognize that American heroes belonged to no particular political faith. That, too, was in the finest Washington tradition of bipartisanship, and a reminder that in World War Two the nation had stood together, one diverse family—

Axel read the piece in disbelief.

"I guess I'm your father now," he said.

O
N THE FIFTH DAY
of the heat wave there was no one about in Soldiers Cemetery. Even the mosquitoes had given up. The leafy crowns of the trees hung limp, exhausted, shading the gravel path, which undulated with the terrain. The path was uneven and overgrown, weeds tumbling here and there among the litter of gum wrappers and cigarette ends. The gravestones were warm to the touch and sticky as candy, yet the parched earth yielded a bright, fresh smell—unless that was the Cologne of the two old women in sun hats and light summer dresses who walked companionably arm in arm, following the path that was descending now but soon to rise. The women knew they would have difficulty rising with it. They were alert to the ragged roots of the great elms and the furnace of the afternoon sun, still high in the August sky. From time to time one of the women would rest a moment, her hand on a gravestone, idly noting the name and dates, and epitaph if there was one; and then she would move on.

They had not seen each other in many years and had met only by chance an hour before in the dress shop on Wisconsin Avenue, each recognizing the other at once with a sharp cry and an embrace. The salesgirls nudged each other and giggled because it was rare seeing two old parties so animated, delighted would be the word, thrilled to meet once again. They walked out of the shop and down the street until they came to the cemetery, not thinking of it as a cemetery but as a pleasant place to walk undisturbed in the shade. Now they were busy catching up, accounting for the many missing decades. They were both widows, husbands recently passed away, the events a blessing because the end was very painful and difficult though the men were brave. One was grimly elated because he had outlived Nixon, and the other—well, the other couldn't think about much of anything. They talked about their children and grandchildren, where they were living and how they had turned out; the grandchildren of one were estranged from their father and saw him only rarely, a common situation in the capital, where lives were so public and the hierarchy so rigid. Their grandfather frightened them and for good reason. Divorce always cast a long shadow, and it ran in families. And then their own medical bulletins, the arthritis and other complaints that came with great age, bad hips and failing eyesight and the rest. But, knock on wood, nothing major. Nothing threatening.