“Just sign your name,” Harmes told each man. When he had passed out all the money and collected all of the receipts he moved back to the front of the room and stood once again before the blackboard.
“Now that five hundred bucks you just got is the down payment. We’re gonna have about six more sessions up here and you’d better not miss any of them because it’s gonna be just like school except there ain’t no excuse for being absent. I’m gonna be your principal and your teacher. I’m also gonna give you your final report card and if you pass your final test, then you’re gonna get a report card that’ll consist of five more pictures of Mr. Benjamin Franklin like you just received. Any questions?”
A large black in the rear held up a bare, hard-muscled arm. “The money’s fine, Marv, but who we gonna have to kill to get the rest of it?”
That brought a laugh, but not much of a one. “You’re not gonna have to kill anyone.”
“Then what we gonna learn how t’do?”
“You,” Marvin Harmes said, turning to the blackboard, “are gonna learn how to steal an election. And you’re gonna start learning right now.”
That Sunday had been a day off for Donald Cubbin. He had gone to bed fairly drunk the night before, but he had slept late that morning and when he awoke he felt better than usual. Not well, but not sick. He had had only two double Bloody Marys before breakfast, a meal that for him had been surprisingly sizable.
Glancing through the Tribune he had seen an advertisement for a film he had missed in Washington that starred James Coburn, an actor who Cubbin thought to be seriously underrated. There was a show beginning at five o’clock so Cubbin decided to make it a family outing and invited his wife, his son, and Fred Mure to go along. Fred had already seen the film, but he didn’t say anything.
In the theater lobby, Sadie and Kelly Cubbin waited while Fred Mure and Cubbin ducked into the men’s room so that Cubbin could have a quick one from a half-pint of Ancient Age. The four of them found good seats together in the theater itself and Cubbin enjoyed himself immensely as he always did at films.
After the motion picture they went to an Italian restaurant for dinner where the proprietor turned out to be a personal friend of Fred Mure’s and both the service and the food were exceptionally good. During the dinner, Cubbin drank a little too much red wine, but not enough to really bother him, and he told some amusing stories and anecdotes, some of which even Fred Mure hadn’t heard before.
It was a pleasant evening and Cubbin was in fine spirits when they arrived back at the Sheraton and waited in the car for Fred Mure to go in and arrange for the elevator. Mure sent a bellhop out to tell the Cubbins that the elevator was ready and while he waited he scanned the lobby as he always did. They were the usual bunch, he decided. People who’re stuck in a hotel on Sunday night, but who don’t want to spend it by themselves in their rooms alone so they come down and bunch up together in the lobby. Like sheep. Mure was thinking that they all looked like sheep until he saw the lean, young man with the pinched features and the bitter eyes who sat motionless in one of the chairs, watching the revolving door. He’s no sheep, Mure thought, he’s the weasel among the sheep, if that’s where weasels hang out. The lean, young man seemed to feel Mure’s eyes because he glanced that way and for a moment their eyes met and Mure decided that he didn’t like what he had seen. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t like it, but he kept his own eyes on the man as Cubbin swept into the lobby trailed by his wife and son.
Cubbin’s glance roved around the lobby, on the prowl for anyone he should speak to. Finding none, he waved at the desk clerk who waved back. Then Cubbin saw the lean young man staring at him, so as he went past, he said, “Hi yah, pal.”
“Hi,” Truman Goff replied.
22
The building was one of the newer temples of labor in Washington, built in the middle sixties on a prime corner just off Sixteenth Street within easy walking distance of AFL–CIO headquarters and the White House, and only a seventy-five-cent cab ride from the Department of Labor.
The building was not named after the union that it headquartered, but after the man who had been its president since 1940 and who was now only sixty-one years old, but who some of the more venerable officials of other unions still thought of as “the kid.”
He had been a genuine boy wonder in the labor movement, first elected president of his union when he was only twenty-eight. He had remained a boy wonder for nearly twenty years after that and even now his face was strangely unlined and his hair was still a wavy, coppery brown except for two handsome gray streaks at the temples. His body was trim, his movements quick, and his teeth were his own. Even his pale gray-blue eyes, chilly and remote and intelligent, were unaided by glasses except for a plain-lensed pair of the Ben Franklin type that he sometimes wore down on the end of his nose for effect.
Because of his looks, some of his colleagues referred to Jack Barnett as the Ronnie Reagan of the labor movement, which didn’t bother Barnett because he found his appearance to be a useful political tool, especially since nearly half of the members in his union were women. Most of his detractors, and there was no lack of them, claimed that he had screwed his way into his job, but that had never lost him any votes either.
He had a few fetishes. He lived on fruits and nuts and raw vegetables and refused to eat meat. He did sixty-five push-ups every morning followed by one hundred sit-ups. When in Washington, he ran two miles to his office in a gray track suit. He had quit smoking and drinking on his fortieth birthday, although he had never done very much of either. He would not ride in a car manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. He bought all of his clothes from Sears, sometimes ordering them from the catalog by phone at three o’clock in the morning. He believed that someone was trying to kill him and always traveled with a bodyguard, even on his morning runs. He was a convinced socialist and a bitter anti-Communist. He liked children and had nine of his own although he wasn’t a Catholic. And he hated Donald Cubbin and sometimes wished that he would get hit by a truck.
They had been friends once back in the early days of the CIO when they had both been young, handsome, and still a little awed by how far they had come so fast. There was no one incident that had caused the rift. As they both had acquired power and prestige, they gradually grew suspicious of each other’s maneuverings and jealous of each other’s triumphs. They were simply natural rivals for some never defined prize.
On September 12, a Tuesday, at three minutes till eleven, Donald Cubbin, accompanied by his son and chauffeured by Fred Mure, arrived in a black Cadillac limousine at the front entrance of the Barnett Building.
Cubbin got out first followed by Kelly. “You got everything?” he asked.
“It’s all in here,” Kelly said, indicating the attaché case that he was carrying.
“I mean everything.”
“I’ve got that, too.”
“Okay, Fred, you wait for us.”
“You sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“No, I don’t want you to come with me; I want you to wait right here.”
“Okay, Don, okay,” Mure said.
In the lobby of the Barnett Building was a mural that portrayed some hard-hatted workers doing something or other with cables and wires and gigantic wrenches, although one couldn’t be sure whether they were building a bridge or stringing a highline. There were some women in the mural, too, and about the only thing that distinguished them from the men was that they wore no hard hats. Kelly thought the mural was awful; his father didn’t even notice it.
After making their way past a tough-looking blond female receptionist with a deep, stern voice, father and son rode the elevator up through the layers of union bureaucracy, past the floor where the computerized membership records were kept, past the department of research and economics, past the education department and the public relations section, past the bookkeeping division where they counted the dues money, past the publications section and the department of organization, past personnel, pensions and welfare, past the legal department, and past all the sections where the union’s hard work was done and up to the twelfth floor, as high as the building went, where all the decisions were made.