Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

He went to the window that looked out across the city.

“You bastards,” he said. “Sleep well tonight. I’m coming for you in the morning.”

There is something very special about Washington, D.C. in the spring. Life blossoms in a frenzy of dazzling color, a gigantic, delicate floral celebration of the wonder of rebirth and renewal. It is a fragile, transitory thing, a sharp counterpoint to the permanence of the stone, granite, and marble housing the heart and history of the Republic.

Spring begins with the blooming of the very old Japanese cherry trees ringing the Tidal Basin of the Potomac River at the center of the city’s monuments area. So welcome is the event that the community created in its honor a festival that, regardless of its date, is never quite coordinated with the trees. An extra week or two of winter can keep the blossoms in bud, just as the early arrival of warm weather can coax them forth before they’re due. So fragile are the pale pink flowers that any blustery early-spring day will destroy them, and even in the best of years, they survive all too briefly. This year the warm weather arrived several weeks early. The blossoms were a memory by festival weekend.

As the cherry blossoms succumb, tulip magnolias, jonquils, daffodils, dogwood, and redbud throw yellow, white, pink and purple hues over the Capital, soon joined by acres of multihued tulips, lilac, flowering crab, weeping cherry, apple trees, and an array of azaleas.

From the organized gardens of the federal district, the eruption of color and fragrance snakes its way through the residential sections of the city and out the asphalt arteries into the most distant suburbs. On Massachusetts Avenue—known everywhere as Embassy Row—where the word “spring” is different in every tongue, it is the same in every garden, from that which graces the stunning modern architecture of the Brazilian Embassy to those that surround the staid old stone of the British and Vatican official residences. It washes through the postage-stamp yards of Georgetown and reaches onto the more spacious lawns of the quiet neighborhoods straddling Reno Road, where old azalea bushes are cared for with as much love as the old homes. They respond by blooming into a patchwork of red, yellow, coral, orange, lavender, purple, pink and white, drawing thousands of locals who come to admire this tutti-frutti treat for the eyes.

On this day, nearly everywhere in the city and its suburbs, redbud and the graceful, tiered branches of both wild and cultivated dogwood trees reached their peaks, making every patch of natural woodland seem a carefully tended Japanese garden.

Even in parts of northeast Washington and Anacostia, the city’s poorest neighborhoods, azaleas sprouted under crumbling brick and flowered amid the garbage. On streets frayed by age and apathy, for a short, post-equinox period in the spring, there was beauty.

It was a time when the pace slowed, when the populace abandoned good restaurants for brown bags and noontime places in the sun, when the city’s parks filled with softball games, Frisbees, footballs, soccer balls and lacrosse sticks, when carefully-creased pant legs were rolled to the knees and bare feet dipped into the Reflecting Pool, when yearning started for the days the Washington Senators played at old Griffith Stadium, when the air was filled with the rich fragrance of the new-mown grass, when every once in a while, if the wind was right, one could smell the salt water surging up the Potomac River from a random high tide in Chesapeake Bay.

It was a time to marvel at the splendor and savor it. It would not soon come again.

Chapman Davis had no time to consider the beauty as he bypassed a crowded escalator and leaped up steps two at a time from the subway stop deep beneath Capitol Hill. Davis had counted the steps once, ten years earlier, when he’d considered making them part of his daily workout. He gave up the idea when he realized his colleagues wouldn’t tolerate spending the day with someone who’d worked up a good sweat without benefit of a post-workout shower.

This day there was no time for such accommodation. Davis felt like the Dutch boy plugging holes in the dike. You don’t worry about a shower with an ocean coming in on you.

The day had started routinely. Davis got out of bed at his Silver Spring, Maryland, townhouse at 5:30, dressed, stretched, and went out to run his daily five miles. He was four blocks away, hitting his 6.5-minute-a-mile stride, when the morning edition of the Washington Chronicle hit his front porch. When he returned, the trouble rose off the front page to assault him like a bad odor.

On the end table in his living room, the red light was blinking impatiently on the telephone-answering machine. The message was from Senator Harold Marshall. It was terse: “Read Pace’s story on the front page of the Chronicle and meet me at my office as soon as you can get here.” “Here” was the operative word. Apparently, Pace’s story had jolted Marshall to his office before seven, a full two hours earlier than his usual show-up. Davis showered, dressed, and found his subway train by rote, thinking of little but how to handle the senator from Ohio. There was too much going down to risk an intemperate reaction to a story that was merely a montage of coincidence and supposition. That it hit close to the mark was annoying but not disastrous—unless somebody overreacted.

Davis could hear the tightness in Marshall’s voice on the answering machine. A small snit was not in the senator’s repertoire. Marshall was about to cloud up and storm, and his aide’s most visceral fear was that the squall would be directed at the Chronicle. Davis didn’t even want to think about the results. To rage at the newspaper would only deepen its conviction and harden its resolve. If Davis didn’t get a lid on it, the volatile politician could blow everything.

The receptionist in the front room of Marshall’s suite cocked her head toward his private office when Davis arrived at 8:30. “He’s waiting for you,” she said. “He’s probably paced a new rut in the carpet by now.”

Actually, Marshall was standing still before the window behind his desk. When Davis let himself through the eight-foot doorway, the senator turned, picked up a copy of the Chronicle and tossed it across his desk, Pace’s story face-up.

“How the hell did this happen?” he demanded, his voice barely controlled.

“I don’t know,” Davis replied, scarcely glancing at the report he’d read twice already. “I don’t know where they’re going with this, but it would be a mistake to get involved.”

“Damn it to hell, man, we don’t need this!” Marshall exploded. “We’re almost there. We don’t need some crusading reporter turning over rocks to keep a damned story alive.”

“What’s the difference?” Davis tried to toss the subject aside. “The NTSB is satisfied with its findings, and I don’t think this—this coincidence—is going to change minds.”

Marshall leaned over his desk, his weight resting on his closed fists. Above his half-glasses, his blue eyes were cold and hard.

“You get with Lund today and make certain it doesn’t,” he ordered.

“What can Lund do?” Davis asked in genuine surprise. “This is way outta his realm.”

“He can reel it in,” Marshall insisted. “He can call a press briefing and question out loud whether the Chronicle is trying to throw a red herring into the investigation. He can reaffirm the NTSB’s confidence that it has found the reason for the accident. Furthermore, he can render the judgment that the deaths of two investigators, tragic though they are, are strictly coincidental.”