Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

When the friendly green playback light gave way to the red ready light, and one long tone indicated the machine was reset, Pace hit the play button impatiently, demanding the messages be given again. But the machine only spooled up and back, the green light winking flirtatiously, as though seeking business. But no calls came, and gabby green gave way again to ready red.

“Kathy!” He almost hit the play button again, but he was desperately concerned that he hadn’t done what was necessary to preserve the messages. “Kathy!” She was the mechanical one. She would know. Dear God, let it not have been erased.

The bedroom door opened and Kathy rushed in, obviously concerned about the urgency in his voice. He didn’t even look up.

“The messages. I played them through, and the tape rewound. How do I get them to play again?”

Kathy started to ask why, but his anxiety made her push aside her curiosity and turn her attention to the machine. “Did you get five beeps?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding furiously. “And then it respooled. And I hit the play button, but the messages didn’t play back again.”

Kathy sighed. “Then they’re gone. If you want to save them, you have to hit the stop button as soon as you get the five beeps. Rewinding is the erase mode.”

When Glenn Brennan showed up at the front door with two six-packs of Guinness and a broad Irish smile, Pace was ready for the relief. He’d spent the day alternately sleeping, reading, brooding, and talking on the phone to friends and associates.

Only Glenn showed up with a drink in his hand.

Kathy and Melissa went out after dinner to do some shopping. They left Pace lying on the couch, propped up with pillows so he could sift through two local newscasts, three network news reports, and the MacNeill/Lehrer Report on WETA. He urged them to go, sick to death of Melissa’s fawning and chilled by Kathy’s sincere, if distant, concern.

After coming to terms with the fact that he would never retrieve the telephone messages on his machine, he returned Joan’s calls. Yes, he assured her, Sissy was fine. No, he said, she was not in any immediate danger. Yes, he agreed, if he thought there could be any problems for their daughter, he would put her on the first plane back to San Diego. No, thank you, he did not need her to fly east to take care of him. Care wasn’t what he lacked. What he needed, damn it, was for somebody to listen to him.

Chapman Davis pulled into the driveway at Harold Marshall’s Chevy Chase, Maryland, home precisely on time. He and Marshall were scheduled to inspect the remains of the wrecked Sexton 811 and get a personal briefing from Vernon Lund at 9:30. The last thing Marshall told Davis before leaving the office the previous evening was to pick him up early because the normal morning rush around Washington would make the drive to Dulles a test of endurance. The trip took an hour from Chevy Chase in off-peak hours. It would take ninety minutes in the early morning, even going against the heaviest traffic.

So Davis left his townhouse shortly after 7:30, unsettled at the prospect of driving from his racially-mixed Silver Spring neighborhood to predominantly white Chevy Chase, an old, wealthy community on the Maryland side of the northern District of Columbia border. To say minorities weren’t welcome was an overstatement; there were high-ranking, dark-skinned diplomats from Asia, Africa, Central and South America. They lent an international flavor to the neighborhood. African-Americans who wanted to live in Chevy Chase, assuming they could afford it, were consigned primarily to those quarter-million-dollar homes of less than 1,500 square feet tucked back on narrow side streets off the main roads. In Youngstown, Ohio, a quarter-million dollars bought a mansion. In Chevy Chase, it bought a tiny plot and three bedrooms in an affluent ghetto.

Early in his manhood, Davis abandoned the doctrine of the liberal conscience. When he returned to school after his brush with the law, he chose a political-science major and an economics minor, deliberately donning the cloak of conservatism, not so much out of moral certitude as personal conviction that the Republican Party was where the money lived. He believed the truism that one becomes more conservative as one acquires more to conserve. It’s righteously easy to sanction expensive, tax-paid human-services programs when you’re the servee and pay no taxes; it’s much harder when it means cutting back on country-club extravagances. At least that was the simplistic way it looked to a basketball-player-turned-killer-turned-student whose father and older brother still tried to make a living as steelworkers in a town abandoned by big steel years earlier. Grubbing from job to job, barely staying off welfare and above the poverty line was no way to live.

That perception had driven Davis into the arms of the game-fixers at Ohio State. They paid him handsome sums to take bad shots, to miss key plays down the stretch, not actually losing games, but keeping the scores under the spread at which Ohio State was favored by the bookies to win. Once he was discovered and banished from the team, the same perception drove him to the streets. He left the life only because Harold Marshall’s formula for success was less dangerous. Marshall’s financial largesse generated no special loyalty in Davis, no feeling of kinship, or even of friendship. Davis’s decision to live life Marshall’s way was a dollars-and-cents matter. Nothing more or less.

Marshall got his money’s worth. Davis lied for him and intimidated people on his behalf. He solicited and accepted campaign contributions from those with whom Marshall wouldn’t want to be associated publicly, gave the donors false identities for the Federal Election Commission’s records, and saw to the fulfillment of political promises that generated those contributions.

Though Marshall’s darkest demands were few, their audacity more than compensated for their infrequency. The Converse mess went well beyond the audacious.

Davis turned off Connecticut Avenue onto East-West Highway, prime real estate territory directly opposite the pricey and exclusive Columbia Country Club. He might have imagined it, but his black face seemed to draw attention from passing drivers. His new Ford Thunderbird seemed inadequate among the fancier domestic models and imports indigenous to the neighborhood, and he somehow felt the need to apologize for threatening local property values by driving a mere $26,000 car onto these streets.

“Don’t ya’all fret none. Ize here to pick up Massa,” Davis whispered to the wind blowing past his open window. He turned into the driveway of Marshall’s five-bedroom home, hoping the senator didn’t expect him to jump out of the car and hold open the passenger door. He was grateful he had a two-door car, certain if he’d brought a four-door model, Marshall would have gotten in the back, turning Davis into a chauffeur. As it was, Marshall slid into the front beside Davis. If he expected his aide to jump out and hold the door for him, he did nothing to indicate it.

“Morning, Chappy. How’s traffic? The radio said the Cabin John Bridge is a mess.”

Davis groaned. The bridge over the Potomac River linking Maryland and Virginia was in a perpetual state of construction. It was built originally with fewer lanes than the Capital Beltway that feeds it from both directions. Each time the bridge was widened, the Beltway was widened, too, creating a permanent bottleneck of cars and trucks during both morning and evening rush hours.

Still, he would rather face a jam on the highway than spend another half-hour visiting suburban Maryland’s emerald corridor. He wondered what the neighborhood would think if this black boy showed up with a two-million-dollar cash down payment and bought a house smack in the middle of all this arrogance. He supposed the men in their thousand-dollar suits and the women planning social strategies beside their private pools and on their private tennis courts would overlook his skin color when they saw the color of his money. He smiled at the prospect. That was, after all, what this was all about.