A Hole in Texas, page 18
“Sure, I’ll come to your office.”
“Stay put. I’ll come to you.”
Carkin and Myra Kadane exchanged surprised glances. Mountain coming to Mohammed? Carkin shrugged, not venturing a comment.
“That’s all, Earle. Thanks.” She scribbled a note as he left.
Aaron,
Re Carpenter, very worrisome.
She clipped it to the Wirtz letter, and buzzed. “Pam, send this by messenger to Professor Kadane, marked urgent, personal.”
Conway R. Hurtle of Illinois came striding in. Full head of graying hair, red face plump but not jowly, heavy body of a onetime athlete, relaxed confident air of the Chairman of a committee controlling several hundred billion dollars, such was Bob Hurtle. Myra Kadane was not afraid of Hurtle, but wary of him. A Republican leaning to the liberal side of social issues, he had led the fight to kill the Superconducting Super Collider, and now he was out to regain the face he had lost. This visit must be to that purpose, Myra guessed.
He stopped to peer at a picture of Walter over the couch. It was a favorite of hers, a blown-up snapshot of him after a hard tennis game, perspiring, laughing, waving the racket. “Now there was a good Congressman, Myra, a real comer. Great picture. Walter to the life. He took care of himself, didn’t he?” Hurtle sat down, sighing. “I don’t get to the gym or the pool regularly enough. How do you stay in such beautiful shape?”
“Why, thank you, Bob. Most mornings I jog two miles on the towpath, that’s all.”
“Towpath?” Hurtle looked concerned. “Don’t you risk being mugged or worse, attractive lady like you?”
“Oh, come on, Bob. There are forty respectable bruisers like you out jogging at that hour. My only risk is being trampled.”
Hurtle laughed hard, then sobered. “I appreciated your vote on the Osprey amendment.”
“Well, I didn’t see canceling a multi-billion-dollar aircraft that’s still being tested.”
“You’re dead right, and on that point my position on the Super Collider has always been misunderstood.” A glance at the window. “The rain’s letting up. Maybe it’ll cool things off a bit.” Hurtle hesitated and took a different tone. “Myra, our two committees are investigating one and the same thing, the Chinese beating us to the Higgs boson. You know, I’ve been thinking. Why not combine our efforts in a joint hearing? Save time, money, staff work, focus on what matters to the American people. The facts.”
Myra was no veteran in the House, but she was a veteran of Hollywood. Her guess was correct. Wen Mei Li would command a huge TV audience, and Hurtle was not about to be left out of the limelight if he could help it. “What about Dr. Wen Mei Li, Bob? She turned you down.”
“Ah, that’s just it. You’ve put your finger on it, Myra. You know, I don’t see this process going on more than three or four days. The issue is basically about science, so it’s Horace’s show, isn’t it? Now, my idea is to leave the gavel in Horace’s hands throughout. Why not? National security is at stake. I’ll not stand on seniority. Get the job done, that’s what matters.”
Measurable pause, Hurtle smiling at her with downright flirtatious charm. This was Hurtle the former football player, former big man on campus, working over the pretty little Congresswoman. “What do you think, Myra?”
“Well, why don’t I just mention this to Horace? I have to see him now, anyway.”
“Oh, do you? Fine.” Hurtle stood up. Brisk change of tone. “If we go that route, there isn’t much time, so let me know.”
Myra had no appointment with Horace Wesley, the white lie was routine. Hurtle was avoiding the humiliation of going hat in hand to a lesser Chairman with a risk of being turned down, hence this approach through her. She hurried along the corridor to Wesley’s office. Quite a turn! As for Guy Carpenter, the poor dear man immured in that shabby downtown hotel, this might be a lucky break if it came off, in view of that evil Jerome Wirtz letter.
“Well, hello, Myra.” Wesley rose to greet her with a little hug, then dropped into his swivel chair. “There’s a floor vote coming up on the national parks funding. I’m waiting for the bell.”
“Horace, Bob Hurtle just came to my office, and we had quite a chat.”
“Bob came to you?”
“He did.”
“Tell me more.”
At first Wesley looked puzzled as she talked, then astonished, then more and more pleased—and no wonder! Hurtle’s offer to leave the gavel in his hands was an extraordinary obeisance. Grinning broadly when she finished, he put his feet up on the desk and clasped his hands behind his head. “Well, well, well. So Bob wants in, does he? That’ll take some doing, and first and foremost, there’s the question of Wen Mei Li.”
“That’s what I said at once.”
“This is serious business.” He buzzed his secretary. “Get me Mr. Zhang Zhui . . . He’s the cultural attaché at the embassy, Myra. He’s handling her itinerary. I don’t think there’s a chance, myself. The Chinese don’t like changes, especially a major one like this. It’ll have to go back up to the Beijing mandarins, and then there’s the lady herself . . . Hello? Mr. Zhang Zhui? Good to talk to you. We’ve had an important development here. Let me tell you about it.” Wesley repeated Hurtle’s proposal, strongly emphasizing that as head of the Science Committee, he would chair the hearings throughout. He listened in silence to a lengthy reply, and near the end burst out laughing. “I see. Well, sir, I’ll do that, and I appreciate it.” He hung up. “They’ll surprise you every time. He wants me to fax him the exact proposal, and he added, ‘On one sheet of paper, if you please. I learned that from Mr. Winston Churchill’s memoirs.’ He’s all right, that Zhang Zhui.”
The trees were still dripping, the slant afternoon sunlight sparkling in the falling drops, as Aaron Kadane and Jules Berkovits strolled the Georgetown campus, where myriad yellow chairs for the bygone commencement still lined the grass. Students roamed the walks, mostly paired off boy and girl, and some stared at the TV legal celebrity with the long gray hair. “Lots of Asians,” Berkovits said, puffing at a big cigar.
“More and more every year,” said Kadane. “And they get the top marks. Especially the Koreans, they know how to work.”
Berkovits said, “In law school too?”
“Not yet, but that’s coming. They’ve gone for the sciences first. How did your meeting work out with Sturdevant and Fineman?”
“Fineman opened my eyes about Hurtle. Knowledgeable guy, Fineman. Turns out that way back when Hurtle visited the Super Collider, Carpenter got under his skin. They went down into the tunnel together, Hurtle insisted on it, but he’s claustrophobic, and he had to beg and plead to get out of there fast. Carpenter was a witness to his discomfiture and wasn’t sympathetic enough, or maybe even showed amusement. Could be it was all in Hurtle’s mind —”
“This bench looks dry,” said Kadane.
They sat down on a stone bench in the sun, far from the rows of damp folding seats. Berkovits went on, “Hurtle was against the Collider anyway, unlike most Republicans, and Carpenter drove the nail to the board. Hurtle’s never forgotten and is out to get him. That’s according to Fineman.”
“Not unlikely, but marginal,” said Kadane.
“How’s that, marginal?”
“Hurtle is out to justify killing the SSC, Jules, that’s item one on his agenda. Making a monkey of just one leading Collider scientist can do that, and the Deep Throat Physicist is a target like the side of a barn. That’s Hurtle’s idea.”
“Very good point.” Berkovits was silent for a while, smoking his cigar with relish. They had left Kadane’s office to take the prohibited fumes outside. “Commencements make me melancholy,” he said. “All those bright-eyed kids sailing out year after year, eager to break open life’s fancy box of bonbons . . . You say you know this Jerome Wirtz?”
“Well, he took my course the second year I gave it. What I remember is that he got straight As. Seemed a quiet fellow.”
“Quiet, are you kidding? That’s a Roy Cohn letter.”
“He was young then. He’s blossomed out, I guess.”
“Grown saber teeth, that is.”
“Give him a break, Jules. Hurtle asked him for ways to carve up Carpenter.”
“True enough.” Berkovits puffed at the cigar. “And he’s right on the money. Subpoena the records of the post office Carpenter used, subpoena the science editor who saw them together in Shanghai, embarrass the bejesus out of poor Carpenter on world TV about those letters, and about his wife, and Wen Mei Li, and Shanghai. Then, when he’s thoroughly shaken up, move in for the kill with the aperture fiasco. That should finish him off, and with him, the SSC. Maybe wreck his marriage too, though for Hurtle that’s neither here nor there.”
“Jules, I haven’t the foggiest what that aperture business is all about. Do you?”
“Yep, after a hard day at the Library of Congress, I do indeed.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ll send you some stuff I got at the Library. You must inform yourself about it, Aaron. It’s crucial. In a word, the heart of the Super Collider was just a pipe, a very thin pipe, mind you, fifty-four miles long and less than two inches in diameter, can you imagine? All the rest—tunnel, giant detectors, ten thousand superconducting magnets, everything—was built around that fifty-mile strand of metal spaghetti, for protons to race around in and crash into each other.
“Well, when the construction was about two years along, guess what, the physicists got cold feet! Weren’t quite sure that a diameter of four centimeters—it was all metric system—would deliver the Higgs boson. Might just fall a bit short. Add one centimeter to the aperture, and detecting the Higgs, if it existed, would be a sure thing. So after much soul-searching, with a billion bucks already spent, they did change the aperture. In Hurtle’s view that showed up the physicists once and for all as spendthrift ditherers, and it alone justified killing the Super Collider. Now whether Carpenter defends enlarging the aperture or admits it was a fiasco doesn’t matter. By the time Hurtle’s through badgering him about it, he’ll be a bloody mess, a basket case.”
“How do we counter that?”
“Well, Wirtz exaggerates the aperture story, but it’s pretty bad.” He puffed at the cigar and flipped it into a trash can. “Enough of the filthy weed. Let’s go back to your office and make some notes.”
“Jules, you’re being generous with your time and smarts.”
“Forget it, and later let’s talk about my will and estate. I’ve got a little property, and two ex-wives, two kids, and a girlfriend I care a lot about. And these days planes do go down.”
Under the door of his small book-crammed office, Professor Kadane found a message. “I’m to call Myra urgently.”
“Your sister-in-law goes in for urgency.”
“There’s usually a reason.”
On the scratchy speakerphone Myra’s voice was distorted yet clearly excited. “Aaron, something’s doing. You and Mr. Berkovits should know about it.”
“Jules is right here.”
“He is? Great. Listen, both of you.” She ran through a swift account of Hurtle’s visit and her meeting with Wesley. “Horace doesn’t believe the Chinese will buy into the joint hearing, nor do I. What say?”
Kadane shrugged at Berkovits, who called across the desk, “They’ll do it, Congresswoman.”
“Is that you, Jules? Why?”
“Same reason I talk to any moronic interviewer on TV. Wen Mei Li has won the Olympic gold in brains. Beijing is all for this ticker-tape parade for her in the halls of the United States Congress, the more prestigious the committee, the better. They’ll go.”
“If so, Carpenter’s in somewhat better shape,” said Kadane.
Myra’s voice: “Is he, Jules?”
The lawyer ran a hand through his gray locks without answering.
Myra: “Jules?”
“Even-stephen. Packed caucus room, banks of TV cameras, and Bob Hurtle. Unstable mixture, could detonate. Then again, Wesley would have the gavel. If it happens, should be fun.”
Myra: “What about that Jerome Wirtz letter? You’ve read it?”
“We have,” said Kadane. “Not good.”
“No fun,” said Berkovits, “but we’ll handle it.”
23. THE CRUNCH
Penny was going out of her mind in her mother’s home. A lifelong devourer of novels, she was rereading mildewed copies of girlhood favorites she found in her old room, for there was little else to do. At the moment she was halfway through Thomas Wolfe’s huge last book, You Can’t Go Home Again, and thinking that Wolfe should have lived to write a sequel, Who the Hell Wants To?
This dreary cramped old house woke too many dormant cheerless memories. Her hometown had hardly changed, and in no way for the better. Mom doted on Dinah, but the baby was given to hostile squirming in her arms, and pushing away her hand at feeding time. Change of air and water, Mom said, but Dinah was just not the same baby since those eleven nightmarish hours of wailing and puking in airplanes. As for Penny’s angry fantasy of looking into Reba Wasserman’s offer of a job, with the notion of leaving the baby with Mom while she commuted to the University of Vermont, it was a popped bubble. Reba had turned vague when Penny had telephoned and pressed her for a definite proposal, and anyway Mom couldn’t really care for Dinah. In a way, Penny was as trapped as Guy.
And Sweeney was gone! Gone for days, vanished the very first morning when Mom left a door open. Penny’s anguished search had only started all the neighborhood dogs, fearsome mongrels every one, barking their heads off at the strange woman. What would they do to a disoriented little cat? Animal shelter, lost-and-found advertisements, posters on telephone poles—no luck. Alas, poor Sweeney! And all this was as nothing to the real gnaw at Penny’s heart. Wasn’t she letting Guy down, however much the son of a bitch deserved it? What was a wife for, if not for the kind of crunch he was in? Yet how could she have anticipated the impact of Quentin Rossiter’s awful story? Sunk in her mother’s sagging old morris chair, waiting for the evening news to come on, Penny was not enjoying her martini much.
“Penny, dear, why are you making such a face?” Mom was dragging a kitchen chair to the TV.
“This drink tastes funny.”
“I have some Cherry Heering I won in a raffle, if you prefer —”
“God no! Guy and I just have a martini every night with the news, Mom, I’m used to it.”
“Maybe that’s why it tastes funny. He’s not here.” Another sly poke at her for crossing the country and moving in with a baby and a cat, no explanation. Peter Jennings came on and forestalled a prickly comeback.
“Tonight, Capitol Hill is abuzz,” he began, “over Conway Hurtle’s extraordinary proposal to Horace Wesley for joint hearings into the alarming Chinese discovery of the Higgs boson and the cancellation in 1993 of America’s Superconducting Super Collider. Dr. Wen Mei Li, who has been dubbed the Mother of the Bomb, refused to appear before Chairman Hurtle. Will she relent now?” (Pictures of Hurtle and Wen Mei Li.)
“You know, dear,” Penny’s mother said, “I saw that Chinese lady on TV when she landed in Honolulu. Not my idea of a scientist, she’s so pretty, sort of like Anna Mae Wong, isn’t she? Though she’s surely no spring chicken.”
Penny swallowed her martini and her response, splashing a refill into her glass.
“In other news, the President today began conferring with G8 world leaders in Ulaanbaatar, Outer Mongolia, on urgent measures to save Antarctica from melting away, and whales from Japanese cuisine.” (Pictures of President and ministers amiably chatting on a balcony with a spectacular view of mountains and lakes.) “This is the first G8 conference undisturbed so far by protest marches in the streets, because the protesters are having trouble getting to Outer Mongolia.” (Picture of streets outside the hotel, empty except for oxcarts. Picture of angry shouting activists with placards at a China Airlines counter.)
Jennings turned to interviewing stock analysts about a six-hundred-point drop that day in the market. A cheery expert was urging investors to grab the once-in-a-lifetime bargains when the broadcaster cut him off in midsentence.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir. Breaking news.”
Jennings put his hand to his earpiece, and after a moment spoke with a new note of drama.
“This just in! ABC can now confirm that Dr. Wen Mei Li . . . WILL APPEAR . . . at the joint hearings proposed by Congressman Hurtle! This dramatic turn of events creates a new situation —”
The telephone rang. No doubt a neighborhood gossip of Mom’s, still Penny leaped for it.
“Penny, how are you?”
God in heaven, it’s him. HIM! Easy now, not too friendly. Not too mean, either, poor Deep Throat Physicist . . .
“Oh, I guess I’m okay. Where are you?”
“San Francisco airport. Great to hear your voice —”
“San Francisco? What the devil are you doing in San Francisco?”
“Mother, this is John!”
Now she could hear the different timbre. “John! For goodness sake! You’re back from Samoa? Why?”
“You and Dad had a bit of a tiff, I gather. I’ve been meaning to come home anyway, I want to tell you both all about Siva—say, isn’t Father in quite a jam? We talked on the phone once. Since then he doesn’t answer my e-mails.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
“Not a clue, except that he’s not at home.”
“Who is this Siva, John?”
“Most beautiful girl alive, and as smart as she’s lovely.”
“Is, ah—is she a Samoan?”
“Is she? Descended from chiefs and princesses for seven generations . . . Oops, last call for my flight. See you tomorrow, Mater.”
Professor Herman Rocovsky, architect of the defunct Superconducting Super Collider, was at his computer, groping for something generous to say about the Chinese accomplishment in a lecture he would soon give at the institute of technology in Delhi. In truth—though he spoke of this to no one—Rocovsky was decidedly irked that a graduate student of his had rocketed into fame by achieving the missed goal of his greatest project and greatest failure. Moreover, in the long-gone Cornell days he had twice invited Wen Mei Li to dinner, which to any other student would have been a rare accolade; and twice she had brushed him off with exquisite Chinese manners, while openly bestowing her favors (whatever they were) on Guy Carpenter.
