“Look, Paul, best thing around him is to play the robot. He’ll try and provoke you; he loves to provoke people. Or he’ll gossip with you; he loves to gossip. Or he’ll try and get you to pimp for him. Lately they say he’s really been chasing women. Any woman. At any rate, he’ll want to dominate you, to own you. That’s how he is. If he likes you, is drawn to you, he’ll destroy you. Yost says the best thing is to just smile mildly at anything he says, no matter how outrageous. Don’t try to top him, or get into it with him. He’ll chew you up, okay?”
They had turned off the busy avenue and were crawling through a Georgetown back street under densely matted trees that blocked out the sun. It felt subterranean, the coolness, the shadow in the air. The brick houses, set primly back from the street, were red and narrow and shuttered and four stories tall and had small gardens alongside.
“Nice neighborhood,” Chardy said.
“The guy’s got dough. The guy’s got more dough than you’d believe. He makes about a million a year lecturing and writing. He can knock off twenty G’s a day giving these speeches.” Lanahan spoke like the poor city boy he was, his resentment as tender and red as his acne. His face formed a snarl as he scanned the swanky Georgian facades. Chardy had seen the look a thousand times growing up; you saw it on playgrounds when a fancy car wheeled through the neighborhood, the hate, the envy.
But it was gone in an instant, and Miles turned back. “Look, Paul. Yost is parking you with a very touchy, egotistical guy who can do us a lot of harm, even now. It has to be you. Everybody wishes it could be somebody else, somebody not so controversial. Just don’t blow it for us, okay? This is very fucking important.”
Yost, nervous, handled the introductions. It was awkward: the Great Man, plumper and older, puffier, with human flaws normally invisible on television, such as a clump of hair in the crown of one nostril, a missed patch of whisker, a light spray of freckles — but still, totally and exactly and unavoidably Joseph Danzig, offering, as would any mortal, a hand. It turned out to be a weak one, smallish, with tapering fingers, and Chardy felt the delicacy of the thing and tried to avoid squashing it, though it seemed to collapse into bone fragments at his softest touch.
They sat in a downstairs study, a room that belonged in a department store window or an ad for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Chardy felt like a tourist among the shelved books, several of which must be by Danzig himself. He looked around at leather furniture, at polished wood, at muted damask curtains.
“It’s a wonderful house,” he said stupidly.
“The wages of sin, Mr. Chardy,” said Joseph Danzig.
Nervous Yost kept making patter, small phony jokes at which neither principal in this peculiar blind date would laugh. Finally he said it was time to go and excused himself. In the confusion of his leaving, Chardy stole a glimpse at his watch and saw that he had forty minutes until the caravan left for the airport. He wondered how he’d kill them. He looked out a massive paned door — hate to have to clean the son of a bitch, all those tiny panes, hundreds of them — across a veranda to a backyard garden. Gardens in G-town were not large, but Danzig had more land than most, and his garden was consequently more than ample, reaching back to the brick wall that enclosed his yard. It had not quite sprung to blossom, though Chardy could make out its outlines, its plan: it was a place of severe order, of symmetry. It balanced, neat and crisp. The plots were cut squarely into the earth and low precise hedges ran geometrically through them. Four — not five, not three — four white wooden arbors stood to the rear, bulked with vines, two on each side of a simple fountain. When filled out, the garden would be a composition of immense order.
Chardy suddenly sensed a presence. Danzig, who’d last been heard from announcing he had to run upstairs to his office, was standing next to him, holding a sherry — Chardy had been offered one earlier and had refused.
“What do you think of that garden, Mr. Chardy?”
“It’s very nice, sir,” he said lamely. Nobody had ever asked him about gardens before. Then he added, “Do you garden?”
“Of course not,” Danzig said tartly. “That is, I do not go out there with a hoe and a little set of clippers. But I designed it. The people who lived here before had a terrible Italian grotto fantasy. It looked like the sort of place where homosexuals go to meet each other. I made certain improvements. That fountain was a gift from the President of France. The trees along the left came from Israel. The trees along the right were imported from Saudi Arabia. Many of the plants and bushes come from other countries. It will never be beautiful, of course, but then, that is not its purpose. I do not care much for beauty, and having looked at your record I would say that you do not either. Perhaps on that basis we’ll get along. But back to the garden: it expresses an idea, an idea I hold in extreme importance. It stands for perfect harmony, all components kept in check by other components. Do you understand?”
Chardy understood exactly, and the point was driven home by Danzig’s sudden, wicked, facetious smile.
Just smile mildly, they’d told him; he’ll eat you up otherwise.
But Danzig had been so vastly superior, so condescending, so celestially regal that Chardy’s Hungarian blood began to steam and in his fury he came up with a rejoinder which surprised even him.
“I worked in a garden like that for a while,” he said. “From the big house, far away, it looks great. But up close it’s terrible work — sweaty, dangerous, grubby, disgusting. You might want to talk with your gardeners some hot July Saturday, Dr. Danzig. They might surprise you.”
Behind their lenses, Danzig’s eyes held him for a long moment, not quite in astonishment but at least in surprise. He considered a moment, then smiled again, wickedly.
“But, Mr. Chardy,” he said, “to do it right — to make the right decisions, the long-term decisions — demands perspective, a cool intellect. You have to see the whole plan, the final limits. Gardening, after all, is not missionary work.”
Danzig could not keep his eyes off him; the reflex surprised him and he found that charming, for there had been no surprises in his life lately.
The man kept to himself: big, somewhat sour, perhaps even shy. He was presumably under orders to keep his distance, and the beard helped, masking the features. But the eyes were lively, watchful.
You always wonder about them; all statesmen do. At the bottom of every policy, every necessary decision, there are people: infantrymen, bomber pilots, very junior consular personnel, intelligence operatives. And here was one of the last, the cutting edge of all the chatter in Washington offices, all the committee meetings, the working groups, the papers. Here was the man who had to make it happen.