Watergate (50 page)

Crossing the street now, he pulled the lapels of his jacket a little closer, even as he continued to enjoy the cold air. In fact, he wondered at this moment how he could ever have been angry enough at the White House, or even at the Wop, to pull that ruse and thus tip over the whole china cabinet. Right now he was suffused with goodwill toward everyone—Jim McCord, Chuck Colson, and Richard Nixon included!

Was it perhaps time to jump back onto the black squares?

He stood still on the sidewalk for several seconds: How
had
it all begun? Why had Liddy asked them to go into the DNC? The radio had this morning mentioned that Brezhnev would be visiting Cuba this week. Détente or no détente, the fundamentals still applied. Maybe there
had
been Cuban money going to the DNC. For the first time, standing here by a curb, Hunt asked himself: Had Manuel Artime—wasn’t he a friend of Rebozo’s?—somehow been connected to the burglary? Perhaps even been its prime mover? Had Manuel
asked
him to do it?

He was certain of nothing. While outlining his memoirs, he had noticed how speculations kept getting tangled in actualities, how he sometimes disappeared into several narratives concurrently and ended up unsure of which one he’d really lived.

He resumed walking.

“You’ve never before thought it might be Manuel, have you?”

He moved along without answering. The questioner was Dorothy, and until he reached his car he felt quite sure she was actually there.

An hour later, Fred LaRue was sitting in the courtyard of the Old French House in Biloxi, his bulky knit sweater more than enough protection against the Gulf Coast’s January weather. Mary Mahoney, the restaurant’s proprietor, had just brought him a plate of fried catfish to go along with his glass of bourbon.

“Thanks, darlin’,” said LaRue.

“That bottle back there’s got your name on it. So don’t drink it all up, or there’ll be nothin’ left when you come out.”

She meant out of jail, and LaRue laughed softly. He was still more at home with this kind of humor, directed at oneself and one’s friends, than he was with the sort that prevailed in Washington, where jokes generally required the vivisection of people one disliked or didn’t even know.

“Mary,” said Fred, pointing to his food, “with all the testifyin’ I’ve got to do first, by the time they even send me away this catfish is gonna have evolved into a dolphin.” The grand jury hadn’t yet even indicted Mitchell, and nobody knew exactly when the former AG and the rest of the higher-ups would come to trial.

Mary retreated inside, laughing as she went, and as LaRue watched her he felt the desire to come home for good from his long, peculiar sojourn in the District of Columbia. His love of the political game had long since faded, though he sometimes toyed with the notion that once he’d done his prison stint Eastland might find something for him to do down here.

He took a bite of the catfish and sat back in his chair, letting the oak tree that dominated this eighteenth-century courtyard shield his sparse head of hair from the sun. In some ways, he’d come to realize, his reinvolvement with Clarine was connected with this wish to turn back the clock and come home; it was, he suspected, the same with Clarine herself, notwithstanding her sympathies for the Negro race and George McGovern. Of course, if he truly wanted to be home he’d be back in Jackson, not here in Biloxi, trying to do an oil deal; and Clarine’s nature,
more restless than his, would again soon enough lead her away from both him
and
home, should she even come back at all. But right now he had a sharp desire to be down here
with
her, to take more complete advantage of whatever in her had decided, after ten feckless years, to find safe harbor in his hangdog face.

Neither one of them was on a normal timeline or path in life. He was forty-five and looked sixty, running on another clock and compass altogether from the ones he should be using. And yet these peculiar instruments of his somehow synchronized with Larrie’s, by way of an old magnetism he was disinclined to question. Something in her was newly drawn to his burden of doubt, which he carried like original sin, no matter that it had fallen upon him seventeen years ago and not at birth. And something in
him
was once again beseeching her for absolution, or damnation. Or just asking to be held in a kind of wild abeyance, what the two of them had always floated through during their nights of lovemaking—amidst the old breezes of Gulf Hills and, more lately, inside the small, curved perimeter of his Watergate apartment.

The Watergate centrifuge—the swirling building and the churning scandal—would soon enough stop spinning. Both he and Larrie would be thrown from it, and they would land in different places. She would get right to her feet, and he, bruised and broken, would rise more slowly, or not at all.

One of Mary’s pretty waitresses now came out to the courtyard carrying some tartar sauce. “I’m so sorry! I should’ve brought this out before!” She put down the little dish as if it were a more urgent matter than the message she was also bearing. “And, Mr. LaRue, there’s a telephone call for you at the bar—long distance, I think.”

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

LaRue left the catfish to cool and carried his bourbon inside, passing under the high old ceiling on his way toward a stool near the phone. Had somebody on Jaworski’s staff found him here? To summon him back, earlier than planned, for yet one more session in front of the grand jurors?

But it was someone else entirely.

“I just had a call,” said Clarine.

“Oh?” asked LaRue, suddenly alert and uncomfortable. “Who
from?” Aside from the people in Eastland’s office, there wasn’t a single acquaintance the two of them shared.

“An old client of yours.”

LaRue knew she was not teasing him into a game of twenty questions. Clarine was smart enough not to trust the phone.

“Oh?” he asked.

“The client found that envelope I thought he might have.”

LaRue let out a long low whistle and said, “Jesus Christ Almighty.” He picked up a short pencil from the bar and nervously wrote “MOOT” on a cocktail napkin.

“Has he got any plans to get this envelope to you?” he asked Clarine.

“We didn’t get that far,” she answered.

LaRue laughed. “Well, he’s got a history of askin’ for lots of money. Did he ask for any in exchange for this?”

“No,” said Clarine. “He doesn’t know
what
he wants. So, Hound, you’ve got to stay in limbo for at least a little while more.”

“Where exactly is he?” asked LaRue.

“He’s fallen into one of his own books. But someone’s shuffled the chapters. He doesn’t know where he is—let alone who.”

Mrs. Longworth had instructed the waiters and Janie that no one was to be admitted without a present—not even Richard Nixon, who arrived at 5:20 p.m. to help Alice celebrate her ninetieth birthday with about two hundred other guests.

The president, in fact, showed up with two presents. The first one that he handed Mrs. L was a tiny music box sporting an enamel presidential seal, one of several choice items the Nixons had acquired for special gift giving from Don Carnevale, before the jeweler’s death fourteen months ago. Mrs. Longworth opened the little mechanism and was relieved to hear it begin playing a Strauss waltz instead of “Alice Blue Gown,” which she’d been putting up with for too many decades. Still, there seemed something cruel, not just crass, in having that presidential seal affixed to the box’s tiny lid—like a jewel embedded into the shell of a turtle.

“Our other present,” said Nixon, as the crowd in the entrance hall pressed close to hear him, “is from the Shah to Pat and from Pat to you.” He handed Alice a big silver spoon with a ribbon on it and, after taking them from the Secret Service, placed two large jars of caviar atop the hall table. “Use that spoon with these—not one of those little forks!”

“How thoughtful,” said Alice, giving Pat a kiss before the president and first lady ascended to the second-floor drawing room. Once they were gone, she lifted the jars one by one and handed them to Janie, as if they were Christmas fruitcakes. “Passalongs,” she said.

Senator Percy, next in line to shake her hand, informed Mrs. Longworth that he’d passed up a home-state Lincoln’s Birthday celebration in Springfield in order to be with her. Having to share February 12 with the Railsplitter had always rather annoyed Alice. “When
I
reach
one hundred and sixty-five, you can ignore me and go to Illinois,” she responded.

Margaret Truman Daniel gave her a very gentle hug and pointed to the press photographer who wanted a picture of the two presidential daughters. “Shall we oblige him?”

“Yes, right away, otherwise he’ll ask us to wait while he goes off to find Tricia and Lynda Bird, and I don’t know which of them is worse. Do you?”

Standing in the crowded hallway, Mrs. Daniel, the wife of a newspaperman, declined to comment. After the momentary silence, Alice mused upon the way no one ever seemed to ask
children
to do much when their politician fathers suddenly died; it was another story with the wives. “When Nick croaked, a lot of people wanted me to take his seat in Congress.”

Mary McGrory, the liberal columnist who’d watched Nixon pass through the hallway as if he were a bad smell, asked, “Why didn’t you?”

“An awful idea,” said Mrs. Longworth.

“Margaret Chase Smith?” offered Miss McGrory, by way of gentle contradiction.

“I rest my case,” said Alice.

She pointed Mrs. Daniel’s attention toward Julie and David Eisenhower. “
More
progeny. Not a very exclusive club we’re in.”

Janie then reminded her that it was time to go upstairs, according to the schedule that Alice herself, generally punctual, had drawn up. The butler took Mrs. L’s arm and led her to the second floor, where she again saw Pat, who looked both tense and peculiarly exhilarated.

The first lady was talking with Susan Mary Alsop, now separated from Joe by a whole neighborhood within the city and at least twenty-five feet within this room.

“I’ve been decorating an apartment,” said Mrs. Alsop, though she didn’t say it was her own.

“Oh, that’s loads of fun,” responded Pat.

“It’s tricky figuring out what to do with a curved wall.”

“Hmm,” said the first lady. “Let me guess where it is.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Alsop, with a slightly horrified look. “I—” Mrs. Nixon laughed. “It’s all right.”

Strange, Pat thought, that she herself had never been in the Watergate, not to see the Mitchells’ place, or even Rose’s, though Rose of course understood the three-ring circus of presidential logistics and didn’t feel slighted; Martha had always held it against her.

While Mrs. Alsop said some things about bamboo and chintz, the first lady gripped her purse a little tighter, thinking about the stapled, three-page schedule inside it, wondering what logistical finesse might be required to accomplish one item on the itinerary. A lot more than going to the Watergate would entail.

Alice was busy ignoring a foreign-service officer peppering her with questions. She allowed her eyes to move back and forth between a picture of Bill Borah and the preoccupied first lady. Suddenly, thanks to Bill, it occurred to her: Could Pat—no, surely not; but
why
not?—have a lover? Or could she have
had
one, somewhere? All at once Alice left her interlocutor—“You won’t excuse me, will you?”—to go over to Mrs. Nixon and Susan Mary. “Congratulations,” she said to the latter.

“Congratulations?
You’re
the birthday girl.”

“On being rid of Joe. He’s impossible.”

She turned to Pat. “How are you, my dear? I didn’t really get a chance to say hello when you came in with all that fish.” She looked at the first lady’s powder-blue suit and noted her extreme slenderness. “Are they feeding you enough in that awful house?”

Mrs. Alsop gently touched Alice’s sparrow-like frame. “That’s the pot calling the kettle thin,” she said, protectively.

“Oh, I’m fine,” said the first lady. Even these days she never told anyone anything different. “
Dick’s
the one going in for a physical tomorrow. And he’ll be fine, too. After that we’re off to Key Biscayne.”

Her current anxiety had nothing to do with health, or even politics. It centered, as did a furtive happiness, on that item in her purse, the draft itinerary for next month’s trip to South America, where without Dick she would lead a U.S. delegation to two different presidential inaugurations. There on the third page, “Brasília Events,” beside “Hospital/Charity Visit—Location TBD,” she had inked in a suggestion: the Tom Thumb Home for children of tubercular parents. The choice would catch Dick’s approving eye and allow her to hide in plain sight: she knew, if the little American-funded facility got on the schedule, that news of its
designation would draw Tom Garahan, the charity’s mainstay, down to the Brazilian capital.

She hadn’t yet given her suggestion to the staff. So far, full of excitement, and ambivalence, she was just carrying around the list like an unsent love letter. Would she have the nerve to act on her own idea? She was lost in thoughts of the possibility when the pop of a guest’s flashbulb reminded her that she was still in conversation with Mrs. Alsop and Alice, who was now giving the offending picture-taker an especially hard look.