Watergate (58 page)

She probably loved LaRue, but had not imagined that her visit to him in April of last year would turn into a fifteen-month adventure. She’d been held by the soft voice and the squint; by the gentleness he’d evidently sustained amidst all the pseudo-rough characters he’d worked with; and by the way he was always more alive in the dark than the light. She was held, as it were, by the clinging.

She wanted to see him through, to get him the envelope and then fortify him for jail. But her capacity for doing either seemed to be waning.

Not only Hound’s fate, but maybe even Nixon’s, continued to depend on Howard Hunt. The town’s pundits and mandarins now regarded the president’s March 21 meeting with Dean—
You could get a million dollars
—as the most crucial one of all: Had the President authorized blackmail? On this score LaRue had done one last favor for the Old Man (Clarine detested the epithet) before wrapping up his testimony to the Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago: he’d said that Dean had called him on the twenty-first, with instructions to advance the last big payment to Hunt,
before
Dean had talked with Nixon, which meant that the blackmail had gone ahead without the president’s specific authorization. When he’d testified to Sam Ervin a year before, Hound hadn’t been so sure of the chronology.

Clarine put some Mozart on the stereo and sipped her sweet tea for twenty peaceful minutes, until the intercom sounded.

“Robert Dietrich,” said the voice from the lobby.

She should have been excited, yet Clarine couldn’t keep from rolling her eyes: Hunt’s pseudonyms had begun to seem silly. But she went ahead and buzzed him in, and flipped over the LP as he came up in the elevator.

He had driven in from Potomac wearing a white suit that looked as
if it might be left over from his Cuban days. She poured him a drink and pitched her affect, as she had during his two or three other visits, toward something Ava Gardner–ish. She knew from his novels that this would speak to his idealized sense of himself, what he projected through all those chiseled cold-warring protagonists.

He sat down on her couch and explained how peculiar it felt to be out of jail, if only pending appeal, now that Colson and Magruder had been put away like Liddy. Ehrlichman, too, would soon be going: he’d been convicted twelve days ago, partly through Hunt’s testimony.

Clarine listened, acting the way Ava might when the script called for a “Sphinx-like” expression.

Hunt informed her, solemnly: “The decision made me come over this afternoon.”

“The decision?”

“Eight to zero. Against Nixon. Didn’t you hear it on the radio?”

Clarine calmly explained that the Mozart was coming from a record player. This
was
the first she’d heard of it. The end was approaching and she ought to be calling Hound. But then she noticed the bent, legal-sized envelope sticking out of Hunt’s torn suit pocket.

She pointed to the tear in his jacket and did what any southern girl, even Ava Gardner, would do: she offered to mend it.

Hunt declined, but added, “I do miss a woman’s touch.”

Clarine knew he meant it in the domestic sense, but she still cringed. “Your wife took good care of you.”

“Yes,” said Hunt. “She had exceptionally good judgment. Same as Jacobo Arbenz’s wife. A much smarter character than her husband.”

Clarine had become familiar with the odd frame of reference he wobbled inside. He had told her twice before, apropos of nothing, about the Guatemalan coup he’d once engineered against Arbenz.

“We wound up living two streets from them, the Arbenzes, in Montevideo, some years after the event, while he was in exile. I was under cover at the embassy.”

“Yes, I’ve seen the picture of you shaking hands with Eisenhower when he came through Uruguay. Strange, the things that connect people. I wonder what old Ike would make of all that’s going on with his former protégé these days?”

Hunt showed no interest in talking about Eisenhower; his mind was still on his wife. “Dorothy was a very strong woman. She knew how to keep things to herself. She never even told me the dollar figures she was dealing with during those months. And I never asked.”

Clarine nodded, recalling Dean on the tapes—
Mrs. Hunt was the savviest woman in the world
. She also remembered what LaRue said Dorothy had told him at the airport:
If the plane crashes
,
I’ll still be thirty grand behind
.

“The figures must have been awfully high,” said Clarine.
You could get a million dollars
.

“There were others’ needs involved besides our own,” Hunt replied.

“Yes.”

“Lawyers’ fees. Living expenses. Even bills for a child psychiatrist.” He was talking about his youngest boy.

“They say it will all come down to March twenty-first,” Clarine ventured.

“Unless,” said Hunt, “there’s something big on these new tapes that they’ve just forced out of him.”

“Yes,” replied Clarine, who assumed there must be—otherwise Nixon’s team wouldn’t have fought so hard to keep them secret. “Either way, nothing can save him now.”

“Nothing?” Hunt protested. “I could come forward and say I
told
Richard Nixon the break-in was my idea. And that he covered up to protect the Agency and national security—the same way he fought to protect presidential privacy by not surrendering the tapes.”

The CIA man who’d followed her a few weeks ago, whose name she still didn’t know, had clearly started talking to Hunt once it was clear she had no interest in cooperating with whatever he and his friends in the Agency wanted.

“Why would you do that?” she asked. She didn’t give him a chance to answer before adding, “This morning I
did
have the radio on, and it said that this president you worked for is about to sign a bill creating a new legal services corporation, a pet project of all the left-wingers you despise. He’ll do
anything
for the votes in Congress that can save him.”

“It’s all part of the game,” said Hunt, as if she were now some naïf instead of Ava Gardner.

“Richard Nixon called you a blackmailer on national television.”

“I never blackmailed the president.”

She had been noting his swings between literalness and grandiosity, wondering how wide they had been before Dorothy Hunt’s flight to Chicago, before Watergate itself. “He says that you did,” she retorted. “That you threatened to expose Ehrlichman’s ‘seamy’ activities.”

“I only
mentioned
such activities to Dean. He’s the one who drew a conclusion from that.”

“I heard another thing on the radio this morning,” said Clarine. “Elliot Richardson is in Moscow telling them that détente will continue even after Nixon is ousted.”

Hunt shrugged.

“Didn’t you want
victory
over the Soviets? Instead of this truce that Nixon has more or less brought about?”

“I didn’t want George McGovern. Or Teddy Kennedy.”

“Richard Nixon calls you an idiot on the tapes.”

“ ‘Idiot’ is Dean’s word, actually.”

“Nixon doesn’t disagree when he hears it.”

“The idiocy referred to,” Hunt retorted, “could be the botched operation itself, not the
idea
for it. Bill Buckley has suggested just such an interpretation.”

Clarine went over to the stereo and lifted the needle from the Mozart record. From the table next to it she picked up a paperback copy of
The White House Transcripts
. She brought it back to the couch and read from page 118:

“I think that refutes Mr. Buckley’s interpretation,” said Clarine.

She could see that Hunt was upset, and she decided to let up on him, for reasons both human and strategic. “What were you doing before you came here today?” she asked.

“I was working on my book,” said Hunt, with an effort at dignity. “We’ll probably call it
The Road to Watergate
.”

“Don’t,” Clarine advised. “It will make you and Liddy sound like Hope and Crosby.”

He laughed, but Clarine could see that the dignity he’d summoned a few seconds ago was making him consider a change of title.

“Why did you break into the DNC?” she asked.

“Foreign money. We heard that they’d been getting secret contributions from Castro.”

“But who told you to?”

“Jeb Magruder. He told Liddy, and Liddy told me.”

Clarine could see it rankled him that Liddy, younger than himself and stranger—at least on the surface—had been the operation’s head man.

“Who told Magruder?” she asked.

“People were always pushing him.”

“Which people?”

Clarine could see Hunt trying to look as if he shouldn’t tell. But it was evident that he simply didn’t know, and that the question baffled, even scared, him. His expression again showed a sudden change. He now looked as if he were coming up for air, finding himself in a different place from where he’d last disappeared below the surface. “How did you get my wife’s pin?” he asked.

This was the question Clarine had anticipated since she’d given it to him last September. On that day, he’d never persisted in asking it—probably because not asking seemed to restore an appearance of being in control. And maybe, up until this moment, he’d preferred whatever scenarios and explanations he thought up himself.

She began to tell the story she had prepared. “Your wife gave it to me.”

“That’s not possible. She was wearing it the day she died. She had it on when I drove her to the airport.”

“Your memory is playing tricks on you. I got in touch with her, met her on one of her trips into the District that fall. That’s when I got the pin.”

She knew he would believe the sentences she’d just spoken. She could
see his awareness of his own mental fragility; he could scarcely doubt that he was sometimes imagining things. And as for her knowing Dorothy? Well, Clarine reasoned, if he’d not asked his wife to tell him the size of the payments, he would certainly believe that Dorothy had kept this little secret, too.

“Why did you contact her?” asked Hunt.

“For the same reason I later approached you. I wanted to get that envelope back.” She pointed to his pocket. “Have you read what’s inside it?”

“Yes.”

Fear—the least familiar of Clarine’s emotions—now clutched her. Suddenly she was not ready to hear what the letter contained.

“It’s a report about some shooting from the 1950s,” explained Hunt, obviously frustrated by its irrelevance to himself. “People are referred to by letters instead of names. ‘Mr. X’ and so forth. Doesn’t even mention a place.”

“Yes,” Clarine said evenly, hoping he would go no further.

“It has nothing to do with Watergate.”

“I never said it did.”

Hunt bristled. “You tried to suggest otherwise in every possible way.”
Think of the Rosetta Stone
.

Clarine pointed to the envelope. “What’s in there is only about someone’s old private torment.”

“You deceived me.”

“Of course I did. I didn’t think you’d help me any other way.”

Hunt said nothing.

“I tried to act as intelligently as she would have,” Clarine added.

“Who?” asked Hunt.

“Your wife.”

From the time she was a girl, long before LaRue ever walked into the law office in Jackson, Clarine could always spot heartbreak. She knew that she was looking at it now.

“Why did she give you the pin?” Hunt asked.

“I admired it.”

“And she just gave it to you.”

“Yes, she was touched by the story I told her, about that person’s
private agony. You already know what it was about if you’ve read the contents.”

Hunt’s eyes moistened. He was imagining this conversation that she and Dorothy had never had. Dorothy would have listened to Miss Lander’s tale of a lover’s woe and given her the little piece of jewelry she’d remarked upon a moment earlier. He could see it happening.

He handed Clarine the envelope, as if under the circumstances he himself could do no less.

“Did my wife speak of me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Did she love me?”

“Very much.”

Lie upon lie upon lie. But Clarine felt even less guilty than she imagined Richard Nixon had while piling up the stack of falsehoods now toppling over on him.

Hunt picked up his sunglasses and rose to leave. Clarine quietly followed him to the front door. “Thank you,” she said at last, simply, as if he were a neighbor who’d dropped in to bring her a piece of mail that had been delivered to the wrong apartment.

He nodded and headed off toward the elevator. She could hear him murmuring, as if talking to someone he imagined walking beside him. She realized that he would drift among three or four different realities in the time it took him to get down to the lobby.