Now that he was all dressed up I had nearly forgotten how awful his clothes always were, but that came back as I examined his brown and green plaid summer-weight jacket, pink shirt, and the red, white and yellow tie that dribbled down its front something like a tomato surprise.
It was Quane who had changed more. He was nearly as tall as I, almost six feet, but he looked leaner and his face had lost its chubby youthfulness and was now all planes, angles and harsh lines that were almost slashes. A couple of the lines were deep parenthetical grooves that ran down from the sides of his beaky nose to the corners of his mouth, which still looked as if it wanted to pout or maybe bitch about something.
I remembered that Quane’s eyes when I had first seen them had been wide and grey and brimming over with something moist, probably innocence. They were still grey, of course, but they seemed to have narrowed and the moist innocence had all dried up and gone away. It was hard to tell what had taken its place. Probably nothing.
“Well,” I said, “then what happened? You never did tell me.”
“When?” Quane said.
“After Wilbur Mills.”
Murfin shook his head. “It was a rotten year. We hooked up with Muskie and then Humphrey and after the convention we landed a couple of advance spots with Eagleton.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It was a rotten year.”
“So after the Eagleton thing,” Murfin said, “well, hell, I just went home and sat around the house and drove Marjorie and the kids crazy.”
“How is Marjorie?” I said, trying to put a little interest into my question, but not succeeding too well. Marjorie was probably as nutty as ever.
“She’s a pain in the ass,” Murfin said. “She’s started going to one of those consciousness-raising things twice a week. Now I don’t hardly ever want to go home.”
“Well, some things never change,” I said. “That brings us up to Watergate. I heard both of you landed somewhere on the committee.”
“I did first,” Murfin said, “and then I finally got hold of Quane.”
“Where were you?”
“Mexico,” Quane said.
“Tell him about Mexico,” Murfin said.
“There’s nothing to tell,” Quane said.
Murfin licked his lips and smiled one of his more terrible smiles. “They had this B-26,” he said. “Quane and a couple of other guys and this sixty-one-year-old World War Two-type pilot who claimed he could fly the goddamned thing. Or he was supposed to be able to fly it when he was sober anyhow, which was maybe every fourth day for about six hours. Well, they’ve got six tons of dope. Can you imagine, six tons? And they’re gonna fly it into the desert somewhere in Arizona and everybody’s gonna get rich. Well, they sober the old Air Corps vet up, and he finally finds his bifocals someplace and puts those on, and they’ve got the plane all loaded and everything’s set, except there’s just one little thing wrong. The goddamned engines won’t start.”
“So what happened?” I said.
Quane shrugged. “The last time I looked back they were still trying to start them. I only looked back once.”
“And that’s when you went on the Watergate committee?” I said.
“As consultants,” Murfin said. “We got one twenty-eight a day and an office and some pencils and some yellow pads and what we did was think up questions. We thought up some pretty good ones.”
“The tapes,” I said. “I think I heard somewhere from somebody that it was you guys who really came up with the question about the tapes.”
Murfin looked at Quane who said nothing but merely smiled a little.
“It was a pretty good question,” I said.
Quane nodded. “Not bad.”
“It only lasted till October though,” Murfin said.
“Of seventy-three?”
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
“Well,” Murfin said, “by then I’m off the payroll and I’m looking around again, you know, trying to connect somewhere, and about the only offer I get is from the Teamsters who wanta know if I’d like to go out to California and help red-dog Chavez. Well, shit, I mean, who wants to do that?”
“Besides,” I said, “it might be hard work.”
“Exactly. Well, finally I sort of stumble over this guy out in Ohio who thinks he wants to be a congressman, and his wife thinks so, too, and money’s no problem because they’ve both got a ton of it, and about the only problem they got is that they don’t quite know how to go about getting elected.”
“Musacco,” I said. “You dumped Nick Musacco.”
I was given another quick look at Murfin’s awful smile. He could flick it on and off like a flashlight. “Yeah,” he said, “Nick was about due, don’tcha think?”
I shrugged. “Ten years ago,” I said, “maybe even five, Nick would have skinned you and hung you out to dry before breakfast. Or maybe lunch.”
Murfin moved his shoulders indifferently. “He got old. Old and slow and careless. So anyhow, I pulled in Quane here on that one and our new congressman and his wife got all excited and happy, especially his wife because by then I’m balling her kind of regular at the Holiday Inn just up the street on Rhode Island.” He jerked his head in the direction of the motel. “And the new congressman’s begging me to stay on as his A.A.”
“But you didn’t,” I said.
“Well, hell, can you see me as some freshman congressman’s administrative assistant?”
“No,” I said. “I suppose not. Not really.”
“Anyway,” Murfin went on, “I set up his office for him and pointed him toward the Capitol in case he wanted to vote sometime and he’s so grateful for everything that he slips me a five-thousand cash money bonus out of his own pocket, but makes me promise not to tell his wife, which I sure as shit didn’t on account of she’d already slipped me two thousand herself. Cash money.”
I looked at Quane. “He split with you?”
“Kind of,” Quane said. “One third, two thirds. Guess who got the one third?”
Murfin gave us another one of his smiles and once again I didn’t quite look away. “You didn’t have to fuck his wife,” he told Quane. “I did.”
“And after that what’d you do?” I said.
Murfin looked at Quane. Quane only smiled. “This and that,” Murfin said.
I decided not to ask what this and that was. I decided that I really didn’t want to know. “But after all the this and that Vullo came looking for you, right?”
“Right,” Murfin said. “He was looking for somebody who could organize this thing and then run it and that’s what Quane and I are good at.”
They were indeed good at that, plus a few other things, so I nodded my agreement. “What do all those people out there with the colored desks do?” I said.
“That’s the stuff, or most of it, except for the comptroller and his people, the computer types, the legal counsel, Vullo, me and Quane here. We got some of the ones you saw out there from the Post and the Star. We stole maybe three or four from Nader. A couple are from The Wall Street Journal. About a half dozen are lawyers and another two or three used to be cops. Detectives. We even got one guy from the FBI.”
“And they’re going to sniff out conspiracy?” I said.
“Wherever it exists,” Quane said. “Or existed.”
“When you come up with something, what’ll you do with it?”
“Well, we’re gonna be sort of a clearing house and we’re also gonna put out a monthly magazine,” Murfin said. “That’s what they’re doing out there now, putting together a dummy issue. When everything’s all set it’ll sell for twenty or twenty-five bucks a year and for that you also become a member of the Foundation. And the twenty or twenty-five bucks or whatever will be deductible.”