Thomas Mallon - Finale - A Novel of the Reagan Years

Strauss, in his courtly fashion, settled the two women on a couch in the study from which all his Christmas cards had finally gone out. He handed Mrs. Harriman her drink. “So, Pammy, what’s got your knickers in a twist?” Urgency and annoyance were all over her face, but he laughed at having managed to fetch up the right Britishism.

“I want to know if you’re planning to take Donald Regan’s job.”

Strauss laughed again. He hadn’t even leaked the Thursday meeting yet. “Who’s been tellin’ you that?”

“Nancy Reagan. Not quite telling, but broadly suggesting.”

“She’s a feistier broad than I thought!”

“You can not entertain such an idea. We have the blade in; it’s time to turn it.”

Mrs. Hart winced. Strauss ignored her and looked, evenly, at Mrs. Harriman. “Darlin’, that’s not the way we do things.”

“Maybe that’s why we’ve lost the White House four times out of the last five.”

“And we’ll lose it again if we overplay our hand. You need to relax a bit. If there’s more to this Nicaragua-and-Iran thing, the drip-drip-drip will wash the Republicans away.”

No one knew what to call it. As soon as the papers tried one coinage — Iranscam, Iranagua — they dropped it for another that didn’t sound quite right either.

“More to this?” cried Pamela. “You don’t think there’s enough already ?”

Strauss tried to soothe her. “Give stuff a chance to come out. You know, I talked to my old pal John Connally this afternoon.”

Connally, Pamela knew, was more than an old pal. He and Strauss went all the way back to law school, and Bob had been rewarded with a seat on the Texas Banking Commission after helping to elect Connally governor.

Pamela groaned. “Was he giving you advice on how to change from Democrat to Republican?” She wondered if, stopping short of Connally’s full conversion, Strauss had concluded that the best chance of attaining his heart’s desire — a big ambassadorship, the same as she longed for — lay with a grateful Republican president rather than one who might still come from the Democratic Party he’d once chaired.

Strauss ignored her provocation. “Connally was telling me he went to say goodbye to an old friend today — a deathbed visit, really. A fella named Katz, or Cox; I can’t remember. But this fella, who used to do work for John, got to talkin’, and John says you would’ve thought he was taking truth serum with the rest of his medications. It seems the same guys raising money and running weapons to Nicaragua have also been hiding money with this fella — who talked to Connally like he was proud of it. Makes you wonder exactly where that money comes from and where it’s going, doesn’t it? John sure wonders.”

He didn’t have to say that Connally was enough acquainted with illegal fund-raising to have once handled some campaign cash with rubber gloves.

Pamela, interested but not mollified, made a jotting inside the little notebook she took from her purse.

“Let that kind of stuff come out,” Strauss again advised her. “If you go after Reagan too hard, on your own, they’ll come after you . They’ll start wonderin’, on the Sunday shows and in Meese’s office, if you maybe violated PAC rules by talking certain strategic details with some of the fellas you funded, whether it was Cranston or Bob Graham. Now, I know you wouldn’t do such a thing, but that won’t stop them from suggestin’ it. Like I say, don’t overplay your hand.”

Pamela watched him rest his drink on an end table that was less convenient for the purpose than the coffee table right in front of him. He had set down the glass, she noticed, on the latest issue of Vanity Fair . And only when he saw that she’d taken this in, did Strauss turn his attention to Mrs. Hart. “It’s just ages since I’ve seen you, Miss Kitty-Kat.”

PROFLIGATE, Hitchens wrote on a napkin. Perhaps that was the right name for the interlocking scandals. He took out his notebook to work up a definition for this coinage that he might put into his next piece: After boring us for years about “big government” and the need for “less government,” they have landed us with a big-spending invisible government.

Patsy Cline, brought back from the musical dead by a recent movie, sang “Crazy” through the speakers here at Afterwords, the Kramerbooks café. Hitchens looked toward the magazine section near the register to see a stack of the latest Vanity Fair that purchasers had satisfyingly diminished by half. He had spent the morning trying to get an apparatchik at the Soviet embassy’s nearby chancellery to give him a mockable quote about the workings of party justice now that Sakharov’s release from “internal exile” in Gorky was believed to be imminent.

The café’s TV was showing an instance of liberation already accomplished. Irina Ratushinskaya, two months out of prison, had arrived at Heathrow — for medical treatment in England, her husband explained. Her heart had been damaged by her stay in the gulag. Nonetheless, she was retaining her Soviet citizenship, intent on returning someday to a democratized Russia whose birth pangs Mr. Gorbachev still couldn’t decide whether to induce or stop. CNN split the screen to show another airport arrival, this one in Wisconsin, where Eugene Hasenfus, the captured supply kicker, had just returned home, courtesy of Daniel Ortega.

Why, Hitchens wondered with a trace of irritation, was this filthily corrupt administration receiving such Christmas presents from the worldwide Communist conspiracy rather than another lump of coal to swell its stocking? Why, at least at moments, did it seem to have its foreign enemies nervous, when domestically the regime appeared to be on the run? He wondered if all the effort that Reagan’s nasty lieutenants put into figuring out his nullity — and perhaps projecting something onto it — didn’t give his government a peculiar centripetal energy. Did this grinning, infirm film star, himself so entropic and gaseous, actually keep accruing might and gravity, a sort of unconscious creativity, from all the cogitation by the courtiers in his orbit? Did their various hypotheses about the president’s nature somehow supply him with consequentiality, a kind of superreality — whereas by himself he lacked any reality at all?

These large thoughts gave way to personal concerns when, as arranged, Kelly Proctor, on her lunch break from Hill & Knowlton, brightly entered the bookstore café.

“Hey, you,” she said, kissing Hitchens’s cheek and sitting down.

For a moment it seemed a shame that his goal for this luncheon was valedictory.

“So,” he said, taking note of her expression, “I take it the bloom has not gone off the rose? ‘Job-wise,’ that is?” he added in flat-voweled Americanese.

“Loving it!” Kelly proclaimed. “But I’m starved. What’s the drill here? Does somebody come by, or do you go to the counter?”

Hitchens pointed out a waiter, and while Kelly flagged him down he reached into his pocket for his key to her place — which she had given him with such premature exuberance. She frowned, slightly, when it appeared on the table.

“I know this must be a disappointment,” said Hitchens.

“Huh?” she asked, with an absence of surprise. “It’s a little bit of a disappointment, ’cause so long as you had it I didn’t have to think about giving it to this guy I’m working with and sort of seeing. He’s adorable, but a little too temporary for a key, I think.”

“I see,” said Hitchens. “I’m sorry I proved so temporary myself, but I do believe—”