Nightwork (12 page)

When Evelyn Coates brought up the subject of the Watergate break-in and said it meant grave trouble for the President ahead, the columnist said, “Nonsense. He’s too smart for that. It’ll all just be kicked under the rug. Mark my words. By May, if you ask anybody about it, they’ll say, Watergate? What’s that? I’ll tell you,” said the columnist, his deep voice and meticulous speech resonant with the assurance of a man who was accustomed to being listened to attentively at all times, “I tell you we’re witnessing the opening moves toward Fascism.”

As he spoke, he munched on a corned beef sandwich, washed down with Scotch. “The skinheads are preparing the ground. I won’t be surprised if they’re not called in to run the whole show. One morning we’ll wake up and the tanks will be rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue and the machine guns will be on every roof.”
That
hadn’t been in any of his columns that I had read. Come to Washington and get the real, authentic, scary dope.

The lawyer didn’t seem to be at all ruffled by the charges. He had the calm, good-natured imperturbability of the pliant Company Man. “Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea,” he said. “The press is irresponsible. It lost the war in Asia for us. It churns up the public against the President, the Vice President, it holds up all authority to scorn, it’s making it more and more impossible to govern the country. Maybe putting the skinheads, as you call them, in control for a few years might be the best thing that happened to this country since Alf Landon.”

“Oh, Jack,” Mrs. Coates said. “The true believer. The voice of the Pentagon. What crap!”

“If you saw what passed over my desk day after day,” the lawyer said, “you wouldn’t call it crap.”

“Mr. Grimes …” She turned toward me, a little cool smile on her lips. “You’re not in the mess here in Washington. You represent the pure, undefiled American public here tonight. Let’s hear the simple wisdom of the masses. …”

“Evelyn,” Hale said warningly. I half-expected to hear him say, Remember, he’s our guest. But he let it go with the Evelyn.

I looked at her, annoyed with her for taunting me, feeling that she was testing me somehow, for some not quite innocent purpose of her own. “The pure, undefiled representative of the American public here tonight,” I said, “thinks it’s all bullshit.” I remembered the speech she had made to me, naked, a glass of whiskey in her hand, sitting on the side of the big soft bed in the darkened room, about everybody in Washington being an actor. “You people aren’t serious,” I said. “It’s all a game for you. It’s not a game for me, the pure, undefiled etcetera, it’s life and death and taxes, and other little things like that for me, but it’s just a pennant race for you. You depend upon each other to have different opinions, just the way baseball teams depend upon other teams to have different color uniforms. Otherwise, nobody would know who was leading the league. In the end, though, you’re all playing the same game.” I was surprised at myself even as I spoke. I didn’t even know that I had ever thought like this before. “If you get traded to another team, you’ll just take off the old suit and put on another one and you’ll go out there and try to boost your batting average so you can ask for a raise the next year.”

“Let me ask you something, Grimes,” the lawyer said affably. “Did you vote in the last election?”

“I did,” I said. “I got fooled. The papers printed the sports news on the editorial pages. I don’t intend to vote again. It’s an undignified occupation for a grown man.” I didn’t tell them that where I expected I’d be by the time of the next elections, there wouldn’t be a chance I’d be able to vote.

“Forgive me, folks,” Evelyn Coates said, “I didn’t realize I had introduced a homespun political philosopher into our midst.”

“I’m not absolutely against what he said,” the lawyer said. “I don’t see where it’s so wrong to be loyal to the team. If the team’s winning, of course.” He chuckled softly at his own joke.

The Congressman looked up from his accounts. If he had heard a word of the discussion, or any discussion for the last ten years, for that matter, he didn’t show it. “Okay,” he said, “it all comes out even. Evelyn, you won three hundred and fifty-five dollars and fifty cents. Mr. Grimes, you won twelve hundred and seven dollars. Everybody else get out their checkbooks.”

While the losers were finding out how much they owed, there were the usual jokes, directed at Hale, for bringing a ringer, me, into the game. Evelyn Coates made no jokes. There was no hint in the way anyone else talked that anything like an argument had just taken place.

I tried to look offhand as I put the checks into my wallet. Luckily, they were all on Hale’s Washington bank. He endorsed them for me so that I wouldn’t have any trouble cashing them.

We all left together, and there was a jumble of good-byes as the Congressman and the columnist got into a taxi together. The lawyer took Evelyn by the arm, saying, “You’re on my way, Evelyn, I’ll drop you.” Hale was inside getting a pack of cigarettes from the machine, and I stood alone for a moment watching the lawyer and Evelyn Coates walk off into the darkness of the parking lot. I heard her low laugh at something he had said as they disappeared.

Hale drove silently for a little while. “How long do you plan to stay in town?” he asked, as we were stopped for a light.

“Just until I get my passport. Monday, Tuesday …”

“Then where?”

“Then I’ll look at a map. Somewhere in Europe.”

He started the car with a jerk as the light changed. “God, I wish I was coming along with you. Wherever you’re going.” The intensity in his voice was disturbing. He sounded like a prisoner speaking to a man who was about to be freed in the morning. “This town,” he said. “Total swamp.” He turned a corner recklessly, the tires squealing. “That miserable, smooth molasses-talking Benson bastard …It’s a lucky thing you’re not in the government. …”

“What’re you talking about?” I was really honestly puzzled.

“If you were—in the government, I mean—by Monday night, somebody in your department—somebody
higher
in your department—would get a little poison in his ear about you.”

“You mean because of what I said about voting and changing uniforms, that stuff?” I tried not to sound incredulous, as though I were really taking him seriously. “Actually, I hardly meant it. I was joking, or anyway, half-joking.”

“You don’t joke in this town, friend,” Hale said somberly. “At least not in front of guys like him. I’ve been trying to get him out of the game for six months and nobody’s got the guts to do the job. Including me. You may have been joking, but he for sure wasn’t.”

“At one point in the evening,” I said, “I was on the point of saying I’d hang around till next Saturday.”

“Don’t. Blow. Blow as fast as you can. I wish to hell I could.”

“I don’t know how it works in your department,” I said, “but can’t you ask for an assignment someplace else?”

“I can ask,” Hale said. “That’s about as far as it would go.” He fumbled at a cigarette. “They have me pegged as unreliable in the service, and they’re making sure they can keep an eye on me twenty-four hours a day. …”

“You? Unreliable?” It was the last thing I’d ever guess anybody would think about him.

“I was in Thailand for two years. I sent you a letter. Remember?”

“I never got it, I’ve been moving around a lot. …”

“I wrote a couple of reports that didn’t exactly go through channels.” He laughed bitterly. “Channels! Sewers. Well, they yanked me—politely—and gave me a nice office with a beautiful secretary and a raise in salary and some memos to shuffle that you might just as well paper the walls with. And the only reason they’re being so kind to me is because of my goddamn father-in-law. But the message was clear—and I got it. Be a good boy or else. …God!” He laughed again, a harsh, croaking sound. “When I think that I celebrated when I found out I passed the Foreign Service exam! And it’s all so senseless—those reports I wrote …I was patting myself on the back—the intrepid truth-seeker, the brave little old truth-announcer. Christ, there wasn’t anything in those pages that hasn’t been spread over every newspaper in the country since then.” He scraped his cigarette out savagely in the ashtray on the dashboard. “We live in the age of the Bensons, the smooth poison-droppers, who know from birth that the way up is through the sewer. I’ll tell you something peculiar—a physiological phenomenon—somebody ought to write it up in a medical journal—I have days when I have the taste of shit in my mouth all day. I wash my teeth, I gargle, I get my secretary to put a bowl of narcissus on my desk—nothing helps. …”

“Jesus,” I said, “I thought you were doing great.”

“I put on a good act,” Hale said lifelessly. “I have to. I’m a dandy little old liar. It’s a government of liars and you get plenty of practice. Happy civil servant, happy husband, happy son-in-law, happy father of two. …Ah, Christ, why am I letting it all out on you? I imagine you have troubles enough of your own.”

“Not at the moment,” I said. “If it’s so bad, why don’t you quit? Go into something else?”

“Into what?” he said. “Selling neckties?”

“Something would be bound to turn up.” I didn’t tell him that there might be a job open as a night clerk in New York. “Take a few months off and look around and …”

“On what?” He made a derisive sound. “I haven’t a penny. You saw how we live. My salary’s just about half of it. My sainted father-in-law kicks in the rest. He nearly had apoplexy when I got sent home from Asia. He’d burn the house down over my head if I told him I was quitting. He’d have my wife and the kids back living with him in two months after I went out the door. …Ah, forget it, forget it, I don’t know why I suddenly went off the handle like this. That sonofabitch Benson. I see him multiplied by a thousand every time I come to work in the morning. What the hell—I don’t
have
to play in that poker game anymore. At least that’ll be
one
Benson I won’t have to talk to.” He laughed softly. “Maybe if I’d won tonight, I’d be telling you what a great life it is right this minute in this dandy little old town of Washington.” He was driving more and more slowly, as though he didn’t want to be left alone or have to go home and face the concrete facts of his wife, his children, his career, his father-in-law. I wasn’t so anxious to get to my hotel room either. I didn’t want to put on the light and look at the telephone on the bedside table and fight down the temptation to pick it up and ask for Evelyn Coates’s number.

“I wonder if you’d do me a favor, Doug?” he said, as we neared my hotel.

“Of course.” But even as I said it, I made strong mental reservations. After the conversation in the car, I didn’t have any inclination to get mixed up more than was absolutely necessary with the life and problems of my old college buddy, Jeremy Hale.

“Come out to dinner tomorrow night,” he said, “and somehow get onto the subject of skiing and say you’re thinking of going skiing in Vermont the first two weeks next month and why don’t I join you?”

“I don’t think I’ll even be in the country by then,” I said.

“That makes no difference,” he said calmly. “Just say it. Where my wife can hear it. I have some time coming to me and I can get away then.”

“You mean you have to make excuses to your wife if you want to …?”

“Not really.” He sighed, at the wheel. “It’s more complicated than that. There’s a girl …”

“Oh.”

“That’s it.” He laughed uneasily. “Oh. That doesn’t sound like me either, does it?” He said it pugnaciously, as though somehow he was accusing me of something.

“Frankly, no,” I said.

“It
isn’t
like me. This is the first time since I’ve been married …I never thought it would happen. But it
did
happen and it’s driving me crazy. We’ve just had a few times … a few minutes, an hour, here and there. Sneaking around. It’s killing both of us. In a town like this, with people snooping around like bird dogs after everybody. We need some time together—
real
time. God knows what my wife would do if anybody ever said anything to her. I didn’t want it to happen, I swear to God, but it happened. I feel as though the top of my head is going to blow off. I can’t talk to anyone in this town. It’s like living with a stone on my chest, day in, day out. I never knew I could feel like this about any woman. … You might as well know who it is. …”

I waited. I had the terrible feeling that the name he was going to come out with would be Evelyn Coates.

“It’s that girl in my office,” he said, whispering. “Miss Schwartz. Miss Melanie Schwartz. God, what a name!”

“Name or no name,” I said, “I can understand. She’s beautiful.”

“She’s a lot more than that. I’m going to tell you something, Doug—if it keeps going on the way it’s been going—I don’t know what I’m liable to do. We’ve got to get out of this town together … a week, two weeks, a night …But we’ve got to …I don’t want a divorce. I’ve been married ten years, I don’t want …Oh, hell, I don’t know why I should drag you into it.”

“I’ll come to dinner tomorrow night,” I said.

Hale didn’t say anything. He stopped in front of the hotel. “I’ll expect you around seven,” he said calmly, as I got out of the car.

In the elevator on the way up to my floor, I thought, Scranton isn’t all that far from Washington after all.

As I got ready for bed I kept away from the telephone in my room. I took a long time getting to sleep. I guess I was waiting for the phone to ring. It didn’t ring.

I couldn’t tell whether it was the telephone that awoke me or if I had opened my eyes just before it began to ring. I had had a nasty, jumbled dream in which I was hiding out, running, from unseen and unknown pursuers, though dark, forested country, then suddenly in glaring sunlight between rows of ruined houses. I was glad to be awake and I reached over gratefully for the telephone.

It was Hale. “I didn’t get you up, did I?” he asked.

“No.”

“Listen,” he said, “I’m afraid I have to cancel the dinner tonight. My wife says we’re invited out.” He sounded offhand and untroubled.

“That’s okay,” I said, trying not to let my relief show in my voice.

“Besides,” he said, “I talked to the lady in question and—” The rest of the sentence was muffled by a deep crescendo of sound.