“Right away?”
“All right. Where?”
“Why don’t you come by here and pick me up. He’s got a borrowed hidey-hole out in Cleveland Park that he thinks nobody knows about. They wouldn’t either, if it weren’t for the swarm of Secret Service and press types that have to dog him.”
I looked at my watch. “I’m out at Dulles. I can pick you up outside in an hour.”
“Fine. I’ll call and tell him we’ll be there in an hour and a half.”
After Corsing hung up I called Roger Vullo’s office and talked to his secretary who said Vullo was out, but had left a message. The message was that it was imperative that I see him at his office at two.
“Did he say imperative?” I said.
“Yes, sir. He was quite explicit about the phrasing,” Vullo’s secretary said.
“Tell him I’ll be there at two-thirty.”
Corsing was waiting for me on the steps of the Dirksen Senate Office Building but I had to honk four times and even wave a little before he could bring himself to believe that he was going to have to ride in a pickup.
When he climbed in I said, “What’d you expect, the Bentley?”
“No, just something with a back seat maybe.” He looked around the cab of the pickup and said, “Where’s your gun rack? I didn’t think any of you hoot and holler West, by God, Virginia-type ridge runners would be caught dead in their pickups without a gun rack.”
“I live in Virginia, not West Virginia. We’re more sedate over there. More cultivated, too.”
“Where’d I get the idea that your farm was in West Virginia?”
“Probably from my sly country ways.”
“Probably,” the Senator said. “Well, did you see Freddie Koontz?”
“I saw him.”
“How was he?”
“Pissed off. Embittered. Dispirited. And perhaps a bit bemused by fate. He was just a few months away from his pension when they dumped him.”
“Well, maybe I can find him something.”
“I don’t think he’ll settle for something. He wants his old job back.”
“Do you think he has a chance?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t look that way.”
The hidey-hole that the man who wanted to be president had found for himself was a big, ugly, faintly Norman house down back of the Shoreham Hotel and just across the street from Rock Creek Park on Creek Drive. Corsing showed some identification proving that he was a U.S. senator to one of the Secret Service men who were hanging about outside and who, after giving the pickup a stare of disbelief, directed us to a place where we could park.
We had to make our way past a gaggle of newsmen, or persons, I suppose, since there were a couple of cold-eyed women among them. All of them knew the Senator and several of them knew me and it was easier to stop and lie to them than it was to brush them off.
Three reporters from the television networks stuck their microphones into Corsing’s face. He stopped and the rest of the newsmen gathered around on the off chance that he would say something that they could record or write about.
The ABC reporter was first off the mark with, “Senator, some people say that this campaign is foundering. You’ve got the reputation of being one of the most astute politicians in the country. Are you here to help try to put the campaign back on the track?”
Corsing grinned and brushed back his floppy shock of greying hair. It was a familiar gesture, almost his trademark. He stopped grinning and tried to look grave and perhaps statesman-like, but there was too much twinkle in his eyes to bring it off.
“First of all, I’d like to go on record here and now as being firmly opposed to mixed metaphors. If this campaign were foundering, which it certainly is not, one might man the pumps or throw out a towline, but one most assuredly would not put it back on the track. Actually, Mr. Longmire and I are here not to give advice, but for another highly important reason.”
“What reason, Senator?” CBS asked.
“Lunch.”
“Aw shit.”
They made one more try, this time with me. “Hey, Harvey,” the Baltimore Sun man asked, “are you being asked to jump into this thing?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Would you, if you were asked?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I’m trying to quit,” I said.
“Who’s he?” I heard a young female reporter ask one of the greybeards.
“Longmire. Harvey. He used to be a hotshot campaign manager.”
“I think he’s kinda cute,” she said.
“He’s married.”
“Who gives a shit?”
Inside the house we were met by a pale young man who wore a slightly harassed expression plus the rather glazed look of someone who’s trying to think of three dozen things at once. He probably was.
“This way, Senator, and Mr... uh... Longmire, isn’t it?”
“Longmire,” I said.
“We’ll go right in,” he said and started off down the center hall that was lined with some highly polished antiques and a number of quite interesting paintings. I thought I spotted a Miró, but I wasn’t sure.
“Who owns this place?” I asked Corsing as we followed the young man down the hall.
“It belongs to our former ambassador to Italy who very much hopes that he’ll be our next ambassador to England.”
“His wife’s got the money, right?”
“Right.”
The man who wanted to be president was seated in his shirt-sleeves behind a large carved desk in a book-lined room that must have been the library. “Hello, Bill,” he said as he got up and stretched out his hand. The Senator shook it and half-turned toward me. “You know Harvey, of course.”
“Harvey,” the Candidate said, “it’s good to see you again.”
“My pleasure,” I said.
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” he said. “Six years?”
“Eight, I think. In Chicago.”
“Yeah,” he said, “Chicago. Wasn’t that a fucking mess.
“Wasn’t it though.”
The Candidate turned toward the pale young man who was scribbling something into a notebook. He scribbled furiously as if he were afraid that he would forget it before he got it written down. “Jack, have they delivered that lunch we ordered yet?”
“Yes, sir, it just got here.”
“Can you have somebody serve it in here?”
“Right away,” the young man said and turned to go.
“Wait a minute,” the Candidate said. He looked at Corsing and me. “We’ve got a no-booze rule around here, but I think we could scare up a couple of bottles of beer seeing that it’s August and you gentlemen look thirsty.”
“A beer would be fine — since it’s August,” Corsing said.
“Harvey?” the Candidate said.
I nodded. “Sure.”
He turned back to the pale young man. “You got that, Jack?”
Jack nodded. “Two beers and one Tab,” he said and left.
The Candidate gave his stomach a gentle whack. “I’ve got to keep it down.” He moved over to a burnished oval table and said, “Let’s sit down over here. We’ll eat while we talk.”
He sat at one end of the table and Corsing and I sat on either side of him. I took out my tin box and started to roll a cigarette. The Candidate got up, went over to his desk, and came back with an ashtray that he slid across the table to me. I thanked him.
“Okay,” he said, “let me tell you what I’ve got and how I got it and then we’ll see whether it fits in with what you guys have.”
I nodded and so did Corsing.
“There’s this very bright kid on our staff,” the Candidate went on, “who’s helping handle the labor side of things. About two or three weeks ago he started to get some strange reports — except that they didn’t look strange at the time, not until he put them all together. Analyzed them. Then he wrote up a report and tried to get it to me, but you know how campaigns work.”