Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“I got a call that my old EMT squad needed every available hand. I got to the airport just before the crash and saw it happen. We went out in the cornfields to find anybody left alive. At first, I didn’t see anything but dead, broken-up bodies. Then I found this unit of three seats from the coach compartment torn out of the airplane intact. Three seats, three people sitting there, still strapped in, in a cornfield a hundred yards from the crash. The seats were in perfect condition, but the people weren’t. A man in one end seat was decapitated. In the other outside seat, a body had been cut clean in half. There was a woman in the middle seat, so torn up she should have been dead. She was missing an arm and the lower part of one leg, and there was a piece of metal embedded in her skull, but she was alive, and—God knows how—she was conscious. I was trying to get her out of her seatbelt, and she kept repeating, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ She died in my arms. To this day, I still see the question in her eyes and hear the disbelief in her voice.

“Seems to me when we build these huge airplanes, we ought to be able to forecast anything that could go wrong with them. I’m willing to stipulate that the aerospace industry in general tries to do that. But sometimes they make design mistakes and learn about them the hard way. The idea that people, including our colleague from Ohio, would risk countless more lives to cover up a problem is wholly unacceptable to me. I suppose my two colleagues here feel I’m being disloyal in taking this position so strongly, but I won’t have any more Iowa cornfields on my conscience.”

For nearly two minutes, nobody in the room said anything. Frank Hopper sat with his fists pressed against his chin, staring at the table before him, seeing nothing actually there but, instead, ghosts and bad dreams from a bad day. His two Republican colleagues studied him, trying to set aside the emotions he’d evoked. Jack Alogato, a hardnose from Long Island, was more successful than Eleanor Justica of Indiana. She found herself deeply moved by Hopper’s story, and her views abruptly changed on the Marshall investigation. Hopper had convinced her it must go forward.

Green and Adams exchanged a glance. They knew they had one GOP member on their side. It was of their own colleague they were unsure. While they agreed initially to stay united, it wouldn’t break any law for Harley to back away; he sat staring into space, nodding slightly.

Green seized the moment. “We vote,” he said. “The question before us is whether to convene an investigation of the dealings between Senator Harold Marshall and the Converse Corporation, and if we so decide, whether to hear, at the earliest possible date, the testimony of Senator Harold Marshall of Ohio at his request. I think a show of hands will be sufficient on the question. All those in favor—”

Green glanced to his Democratic colleagues first and was happily surprised to see Stinson joining Adams in voting aye. Then he glanced to his left and was stunned. Both Frank Hopper and Eleanor Justica had their hands raised.

“Those opposed—”

Jack Alogato raised his hand.

“The chair records that Senators Stinson, Adams, Justica, and Hopper vote aye; Senator Alogato votes nay. The chair votes aye. The vote is five to one in favor. The chair proposes that committee staff undertake an immediate investigation and that the committee itself hear from Senator Marshall on Friday, June 6th, at 10 A.M. Objection?”

He looked to both sides and saw no movement.

The Hart Building hearing room could seat a 160 people comfortably if they were all small children. The staff of the Senate Ethics Committee crammed in 236 chairs to accommodate the enormous demand for seats.

John Ingersoll, the Ethics Committee’s chief of staff, had to scrounge up a place in which to hold this session because the committee had no hearing room of its own. Usually its work was done behind closed doors in a small library/conference room or in the private office of a member senator. It was not the best of situations, but it was an improvement over the old years, after the committee was created by the Ninety-fifth Congress in 1977, when the staff was housed in what was euphemistically called the Senate Annex. In its previous incarnation, the annex was the old Carroll Arms Hotel, a genteel, slightly seedy place during its heyday. It became less genteel and more seedy when it closed as a hotel and opened as spillover offices for Senate staff who couldn’t be shoehorned into the two existing Senate office buildings. When the new Hart Building was completed during the eighties, the Ethics Committee staff and the other poor cousins from the Carroll Arms found themselves back in the mainstream of congressional business.

Ingersoll preferred the old quarters, when the staff worked in what had been the Carroll Arms bar. “It was the perfect symbolic place,” Ingersoll said. “Take any Senator who’s ever gotten himself into trouble, trace it back far enough, and you’ll find it started in a bar someplace.”

The general public would have access to one back row of seats. Each shift of public spectators would sit in for twenty minutes, then new spectators would take their places. It was time enough to get the flavor of the day’s events. Senate staff had two rows. Every other seat in the room was reserved for newspaper, magazine, television, and radio reporters. Still, demand for media seats far exceeded supply. Reporters could cover the hearing from their offices or from the Senate Press Gallery by way of C-Span II, but there was a compulsion to be in the room, to watch the reactions of the principals, which the television cameras couldn’t always pick up.

Steve Pace didn’t have to worry about getting a seat. The Washington Chronicle had a reserved spot at a press table, although the chairs were packed so closely that no one had much elbow room.

Television crews were set up in a balcony above the outside edges of the press seats and at each end of the bench at which the committee members would sit. The arrangement gave each network the opportunity to show senators asking questions and Marshall answering them. Most of the still photographers were assigned sitting positions on the floor below the committee bench, facing the witness table. They would sit there through the hearing with their lenses trained on Marshall, waiting for the gesture or the facial expression that would give them their shot of the day. The hearing would be punctuated by the click of shutters and the whir of motor drives.

Steve Pace was in the room fifteen minutes early, but it was so jammed he had to pick his way through human limbs to reach his press table. Once there, he found that another reporter had put a huge briefcase right behind his chair, leaving him no room to pull out the chair so he could sit down.

“You mind moving that?” he asked.

“And where do you propose I put it?” the other reporter asked indignantly.

“I have a suggestion, but I wouldn’t make it in polite company,” Pace growled. “I don’t give a damn where you stow it, just get it away from this chair so I can sit down.”

The other reporter muttered an obscenity loud enough for Pace to hear as he wrestled the case to a spot between his feet. The fellow looked uncomfortable sitting that way, but it wasn’t Pace’s problem. The man should have known better than to bring the case into the hearing room.

“Star reporter gets prime seat but has to wrestle for it,” said a voice to Pace’s right. He turned his head to see the grinning face of Jeff Hines of the L.A. Times.

“Hey, Jeff,” Pace said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I’ve been behind you on this story every day,” said Hines. “My editors thought I should continue to hold down that position.”