Watergate (2 page)

Fred LaRue looked out his apartment window at the blinking red light atop the Washington Monument—
on
,
off
,
on
,
off
—and thought about George Wallace’s newly recovered ability to wiggle his toes. “First time anybody ever got on page one for doin’ that,” he’d said to the boy who came around the Committee offices this afternoon with the
Star
.

But never mind the toes: Would the governor, shot last week by a kid with short hair, ever get back up on his
feet
? It was doubtful, the doctors still seemed to think.

And it was not to be wished, thought LaRue; not if that meant the governor might get back into the race for the Democratic nomination or, much worse, get set for the kind of third-party run he’d made four years ago.

If Wallace stayed out, lying on some beach and wiggling his toes to his heart’s content, then the Old Man should do a wing-tipped cakewalk toward a second term. LaRue couldn’t imagine how they’d gotten this lucky, with McGiveup looking like the guy they’d be running against. The “peace” candidate—oh, yeah? When it was Richard Nixon over in Moscow tonight rubbin’ noses with the Reds?

LaRue fished a last pinch of tobacco out of his pouch and managed to fill only half the bowl of his pipe. Hell, he thought, putting it down; he’d already puffed himself into a stupor while on the couch, watching that movie. He went back to watching the Monument blink, and to thinking about the gov’s tootsies.

If it weren’t for George Corley Wallace, Fred LaRue wouldn’t even be here in Washington working for the Old Man. God, it had been fun in ’68, lining up those radio endorsements from Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl, doing everything they could to bite into Wallace’s southern vote and keep a couple of border states in the Nixon column. “Fred LaRue,”
he’d been told by Minnie Pearl—very much a lady and very much Mrs. Henry Cannon when she was out of that hat with the dangling price tag—“you’ve got the sweetest-soundin’ voice. We could make you into the next Eddy Arnold.”

He laughed every time he thought about it. Hell, he might be skinny like Hank Williams, but he didn’t look like anybody you’d want to put on an album cover. Dean, the little fellow in the Counsel’s office, had teased him about resembling a basset hound, and he had a point when it came to the ears, but up top Fred LaRue was losing his hair so fast he couldn’t support a tag team of fleas.

He looked over to the TV, still waiting for the ten o’clock news to come on. The pictures of the Old Man landing in Russia were supposed to be excellent; at least that was the word that had reached the CRP this afternoon. LaRue sometimes wished he were back inside the White House as an unpaid consultant to the president, even though he’d spent most of his time there working for Mitchell, shuttling between the Justice Department and the southerners on the Hill. But when John decided he needed him, again at no dollars a year, down at the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, he could hardly say no, since it had been John—the campaign manager last time out, too—who’d put him in the White House in the first place.

He had nothing apparent in common with Mitchell, except for their bald heads and pipes, but inside both had the same sort of basic faith in the Old Man, along with a serene skepticism about most everything else.

Mitchell knew how much money he had laid on Goldwater in ’64, and then on the Old Man four years later, and naturally enough suspected there was a lot more left than there was. Hell, if Fred LaRue were still as rich as people thought, he would be living on the other side of this crazy, round, Italian-made apartment building, facing the courtyard or the Potomac instead of Virginia Avenue and the blinking old Washington Monument.

God knows there’d been plenty of money to inherit back in ’57. “Christ, that’s not, you know, is it?” Mitchell had once asked, in this very room, when he saw the elegant bird gun mounted on the wall. Nope, that was not the gun with which Fred LaRue had managed to
shoot Daddy instead of a duck; it was the gun old Ike Parsons LaRue, worth thirty million dollars, had been holding when he dropped to the ground during their ill-fated hunting trip.

Daddy had made his money fast, and his son was now losing it slowly. Back home in Mississippi, the oil-and-gas business was starting to sputter out. There were no more big strikes to be made, and the idea that Fred LaRue’s being inside the White House would redound to the benefit of I. P. LaRue Oil and Minerals was just that, an idea—one that others, though not Fred LaRue himself, entertained.

He preferred the business of politics to the business of business. He liked the way he got to operate without so much as a business card or a line in the staff directory—same at the Committee as it had been at the White House. If this year he’d pretty much be “giving at the office” instead of from his wallet, the campaign was going to be such a slam dunk that nobody would even notice. Every day McGovern was finding something nice to say on behalf of amnesty or abortion, and all the while the troops kept coming home from Vietnam by the hundred thousand, thanks to the Old Man. The demonstration over at the Pentagon this afternoon had featured the usual moth-eaten old peaceniks, like that ginny priest openly rooting for the Vietcong, but the whole passel of them—he had seen them marching across Memorial Bridge—hadn’t required a single canister of tear gas or made it as far up the front page as Wallace’s wiggly toes.

The joke, of course, when it came to all these Wallace votes they were about to inherit, was that Mitchell had desegregated ten times more schools than Bobby Kennedy and Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark put together.
Watch what we do
,
not what we say
, Mitchell liked to whisper into the ears of the party moderates, but folks back home in Mississippi listened to the words, as if they were music. They’d soon fall in line behind the Old Man, whose administration, they scarcely realized, was putting all those colored kids at desks beside their own white offspring.

With Wallace out of the way, there’d be less need for TV and radio spots and everything else down South, including nice old Minnie Pearl.
How-DEEE!
They had the chance for a real blowout, and it was beyond LaRue why they were waiting so much as another week to shift the money they’d planned to spend down home out to California instead.
They ought to make the switch before other operations, like the ones being run by that weirdo Liddy, started laying claim to it.

Project Gemstone, my ass, thought LaRue, who looked up at the clock over the television and wondered if it was too late to call Mitchell at his apartment across the courtyard.

Hell, he’d wait until he saw him at the office in the morning. Martha was so cranked up these days that if he called now she’d probably not only listen in on the extension but burst out with some tirade about “Her,” the only name she seemed able to find these days for poor Mrs. Nixon.

God, he’d loved Martha when he’d first met her in ’68. She’d felt
familiar
, like the girls he’d known in Jackson and Biloxi, even if she came from all the way over in Arkansas. “Pleased to meet you,” he’d said, when Mitchell presented her. “Well, I hope you’ll never La
Rue
it, honey,” she’d responded, just like that. But she was beyond control now, drinking more than ever, and wearing out John, who let her drink until she passed straight through agitation into something like calm, or until she just passed out, period.

No, he’d wait until morning, when he’d also call his wife and children back home in Mississippi. He decided to skip the ten o’clock news, which was mostly local anyway and would probably lead with whatever colored guy had just killed another one over in southeast Washington. He’d go down to the People’s Drugstore instead—below the fancy bridal shop and past the Chinese restaurant and the barbershop and the Safeway and all the other stores that made the Watergate a whole damned world unto itself—and he’d get himself another pouch of tobacco.

“Still nothing?” asked Howard Hunt.

“No, sir, I’m afraid not,” replied the Watergate Hotel’s desk clerk.

“All right. I thought I’d check.”

“We might have increased availability within a few days.”

Hunt left without even nodding.
Increased availability
. When had people started talking this way? It irritated him profoundly, if profound irritation wasn’t a contradiction in terms. These days he might only be writing his spy novels, but he’d once had a Guggenheim and published
a short story in the
New Yorker
, and it offended his ears to hear this sort of abstract claptrap coming out of hotel clerks and thirty-year-old White House special assistants with more status in the administration than he had.

After exiting the hotel, he looked up at the adjacent Watergate office building. Eighteen years ago he’d been overthrowing a government in Guatemala, and here he was now, overmanned and overfinanced for an operation to bug the phone of a party hack.

Barker opened the driver’s door of the car, which was idling on Virginia Avenue.

“
No hay lugar en el mesón
, Bernie,” said Hunt, getting in behind the wheel. “But I’ve got a backup plan.”

“Any place will be fine, Eduardo,” replied Bernard Barker, who always preferred English.

Hunt turned toward the backseat and looked at three of the men he’d just collected at the airport. Two of them were Cubans recruited by Bernie. They merely nodded. He’d heard of Sturgis, the American, but not met him. It was with Barker that he felt well acquainted and
simpático
, going back as they did all the way to Operation Zapata. He hated dragging him into this penny-ante crap, the same way he’d dragged him into the break-in last year in L.A. Now, like then, he’d be deluding Bernie—and himself!—into believing this burglary had some purpose and importance outside of whatever was in Liddy’s head, and Colson’s.

“Bernie,” he said, as he drove the car down Virginia, “this will be a nice little piece of revenge.” He pointed to the letters, aglow with moonlight and fluorescence, affixed to the boxy white building beyond the Watergate:
JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
.

From the backseat, Sturgis followed Hunt’s pointing finger before raising a fist and shouting, too loudly for a closed car full of people,
“Brigada Dos Cinco Cero Seis!”

Barker pursed his lips, needing no further reminder of Kennedy’s failure to support Brigade 2506 with adequate arms, air cover, or even a decent place to come ashore. More than a decade had passed since the Bay of Pigs, and even more time than that since Barker had first met Everette Howard Hunt. “Eduardo”—Barker still used the old code
name—had been trying to organize a Cuban government-in-exile in Coconut Grove.

“Coño!”
cried Sturgis from the backseat, in his Americano’s Spanish.
“Sólo ocho aviones!”

“Yes,” Barker replied in a soothing near whisper. “We know. Only eight fucking planes.” That’s all they’d been given—plus a zero hour that fell during darkness instead of light. As Eduardo used to put it, dryly, “They apparently wanted the populace to rise in support of an invasion that wouldn’t attract any notice.”

The car angled eastward, and Hunt continued his motivational tour. “The architecture gets even worse,” he said, pointing to the right. He was indicating, Barker realized, the State Department.

Hunt decided to say nothing more; he was starting to feel guilty about stoking Bernie’s long grief and confusion over his adopted country’s half-hearted anti-Castroism. He was also trying to conceal the fact that he was slightly lost, unsure how to find Pennsylvania Avenue.

He’d been lost for ten years, really, as unmoored as Bernie since the April of the invasion, his career shot down like the unsupported freedom fighters. It had been the same for anyone in the Agency associated with Operation Zapata. In his own case, what had followed were too many deskbound days at Langley writing Fodor’s travel guides for East Bloc tourism, and too many nights at home composing his Peter Ward novels, into which he displaced the derring-do that might have kept filling his own career had there been more than those eight planes in the air.

It had been two years since he left the CIA, and God knew how many more would pass before the Agency let him publish
Give Us This Day
, his impassioned manuscript about the invasion’s promise and betrayal. Like Bernie, he had real grievances, ones that burned off stomach lining, not the pseudo-resentments of the preposterous, swaggering Liddy, who was plenty of fun when he told his tall tales amidst the carelessly stacked and more-or-less useless top-secret documents in room 16 of the EOB but who increasingly got on Hunt’s nerves. There was a screw loose in the guy, the way he would rush over to the Hunts’ house in Potomac to play a just-acquired recording of Hitler seducing some hysterical crowd. His lips were even looser than whatever screw was about
to fall out of his head. On the way home from Los Angeles, having accomplished the magnificent feat of messing up a few papers in the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, he had gotten half-loaded on the plane and started talking to a stewardess who, under her jaunty cap, looked as if she might be able to put two and two together.