The setting sun shone almost directly into the living room of the 3rd Floor apartment as Claude Betancourt greeted his daughter and son-in-law. Gretchen hugged her father and exchanged pecking kisses. Dan Brenckmann shook the old man’s hand.
“So, now you tell me you hate that old pile out at Cherry Hill?” The patriarch demanded testily.
“Hate is putting it a little bit strongly, sir,” Dan rejoined diplomatically. “It’s just that it’s a little bit big for us and it’s quite a long way out in the sticks for our work in the city.”
“Is that right?”
“Daddy,” Gretchen interjected. “It’s not that we don’t appreciate all that you’ve done for us but you know full well that Dan and I intend to stand on our own feet.”
The old man scowled half-heartedly at the apple of his eye.
“Um… ” Even if he had been remotely upset that his daughter and her husband were so keen to sever the generous financial umbilical cord he had extended to them so soon, his mood would have been hugely uplifted to discover Gretchen looking so much like her former self. She had been unsteady and pained on her wedding day, today, only a few short weeks later she was positively blooming. It was an impression enhanced by the fact she was wearing a new, very elegant dress rather than the androgynous trouser suits she had been hiding inside most of the last couple of months.
He glanced to his new son-in-law; struck by how much the boy was the spitting image of his father at his age. So many of the people who worked for him — well, depended on him if he was being honest — were literally in his pocket but Walter Brenckmann had never been that, he had always been his own man and he recognized exactly the same, rare but admirable, trait in his son. Betancourt’s own sons had been brought up too softly, everything had come too easily to them and none of them had inherited his drive, his ambition or to be frank, his native gumption. Gretchen was different to her brothers, and Dan Brenckmann, well Claude Betancourt recognized in Dan the same steely, incorruptible streak he had stumbled across in the father all those years ago.
Walter Brenckmann had been an invaluable friend over the years; sometimes he regretted the fact that for reasons of politics their friendship had been of necessity, out of the public eye.
“Well, McDermott’s Open is in your names. Do whatever you want with it. If I were you I’d rent it out to the Government or some such, the way real estate prices in this end of Philly are these days you won’t be able to afford a place like,” he sniffed, waved about himself, “this on your junior counsels’ pay checks in a year or two.”
While the relatively modest Walnut Street apartment might not be to his liking it had been Gretchen’s and Dan’s decision to rent it, and secretly, nothing gave him so much pleasure as the knowledge that he had been right all along to assume the young couple would want to start making their own way in the World as soon as possible.
He would always be there in the background; and when he was gone a substantial part of his fortune — leastways, whatever his ex-wives’ and his under-achieving sons’ lawyers failed to get their hands on — would mostly be Gretchen’s. It was not that he loved his sons, or his elder daughter’s younger sister, Kathleen, any less than Gretchen; it was just that he had always believed that money, wealth as such, ought to be used. Moreover, used not simply for personal or dynastic aggrandizement, frittered away on indulgences but for some higher purpose. Basically, if a rich man did not know what to do with his fortune he ought to give it away; and he viewed every cent he ‘invested’ in Gretchen — and now in Dan Brenckmann — as a copper-bottomed down payment on a sure fire thing.
“I’ll talk to some people downtown,” the old man guffawed, looking around the as yet sparsely furnished reception room in which they were standing. “The Government can afford top dollar for a place like McDermott’s Open. If you get involved they’ll try to get smart.”
The apartment had two bedrooms, a modern bathroom, a moderately ‘large’ reception room overlooking the street below and was situated in a block accommodating at least three members of the House, which meant it had round the clock security. It would do the young people just fine for the moment; they would move up in the world soon enough.
The two young attorneys went straight from their meeting with Gretchen’s father to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Field office in Philadelphia on Arch Street. Evening had drawn in and in the darkness the red brick building next to the city’s main court house looked a lot less threatening than it did during daylight hours. Inside it was like stepping back into the 1930s; and both Dan and Gretchen half-expected to be confronted with Tommy gun totting special agents at every turn.
J. Edgar Hoover kept them waiting twenty minutes.
He did this not just because he was a mean old man; but because he could.
It was the second time Gretchen had met the infamous Director of the FBI; for her husband it was a first. Clyde Tolson stood by his master’s desk, and in total there were four other black-suited, white-shirted, black-tied agents in the commandeered office on the block’s fourth floor. It was like walking in on a funeral party.
J. Edgar Hoover did not get up.
Other than to point — jabbing a stubby finger — at two hard chairs placed before his desk he did not acknowledge the arrival of the two attorneys.
Seven months ago on the occasion of her first meeting with Hoover Gretchen had still been a little starry-eyed about such encounters but that was then and this was now. The Director of the FBI looked today exactly as he had back in November; somewhat like an over-sized toad dressed up in a morning suit, his hair slicked back and unnaturally black, and his face oddly young-old as if he was wearing makeup.
She had warned Dan that the sixty-nine year old Director often spoke really fast, so fast that words sometimes fell over each other. It was a technique he had developed to combat a stutter in his younger days which he now used to routinely to cow subordinates and opponents.
“We meet again, Director,” Gretchen smiled. While fluttering her eyes at the old faggot was a waste of time; civility cost her nothing.
‘This is one time you really need to leave the talking to me, honey,’ she had suggested to Dan in the cab on the way over. ‘Oh, and Daddy will respect you even more for having stood up to him today. But you already knew that, so forget I just said that… ’
Her husband had chortled softly, and patted her knee fondly.
J. Edgar Hoover stirred, leaned menacingly towards the young people.
“Allowing Christie to go free is out of the question, Ms Betancourt.”
“Of course,” Gretchen concurred reasonably. “You must understand that Dan and I are humble attorneys; we are messengers, no more. No man in America knows his business better than you, Mister Director. If you don’t know how to hunt down this monster Galen Cheney, nobody does.”
She went on smiling a gallingly seraphic smile at the old man.
“However,” she went on, “given that Mr Christie has confided to us, and briefed the FBI — exhaustively — on the matter of the heinous plans Galen Cheney and his son,” Gretchen paused, “Isaac, may be hatching… ”
Hoover fulminated, his jaw muscles threatened to work yet no sound emerged from his thin, pale lips.
“To attempt to assassinate Dr King and other others, including the President on the steps of City Hall at the conclusion of the Civil Right’s Movement’s March on Philadelphia on Independence Day,” Gretchen continued, “it seems to me that the sooner he is freed to ‘go after’ Cheney the better.”
The Director of the FBI made a growling noise.