Dwayne very nearly jumped out of his skin when the police siren blared right next to his shoulder and the blue and white SFPD cruiser squealed to a halt beside him.
The big man stuck his hands in the air without having to wait to be told ‘let me see you hands, boy’ even before he saw the two dudes in the tell tale badly tailored mid-1950s dark suits and funeral ties, white shirts and lovingly buffed black shoes clambering out of the 1959 Lincoln parked further down the street.
Dwayne John found himself reflecting that it was no coincidence that God had chosen a moment when he was beset by guilt over how badly he had let down Darlene, to remind how him how easily pride went before a man’s fall.
Chapter 7
Gretchen Betancourt had learned three things about the Department of Justice in the five months she had been a junior assistant counsel to the Office of the United States Deputy Attorney General.
Firstly, that Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, the Attorney General, was too busy ‘counselling’ his big brother, the President, and too often on the road on campaigning and other ill-defined ‘non-departmental missions’ to be able to do his job properly.
Secondly, that the motto of the Department of Justice — Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur — was very bad Latin and nobody could agree what it meant, or was supposed to mean.
Thirdly, that the man that she actually worked for — forty-one year old Nicholas deBelleville ‘Nick’ Katzenbach — was actually the very real power behind the throne at the Department of Justice.
Gretchen had come to Washington in the spring intending to seek an internship on the senatorial staff of one of her mother’s uncles; but soon realised that a job on Capitol Hill was simply an exercise in picking off the lowest hanging fruit. Rather than rush into a decision she had started going to the right parties, getting herself invited to the right receptions, being seen in the right circles, and cultivated a number of new and potentially very useful acquaintances around the fringes of the Democratic National Committee. There was never any shortage of self-important middle-aged and elder men in DC yearning to have their egos massaged and to be seen in public with a well-connected attractive younger woman. Especially, when that well-connected attractive younger woman in question was Claude Betancourt’s daughter; and famously, known to be the singular apple of the old rogue’s eye.
Sure enough, after a few weeks the offers of interviews for various positions had materialised. Once she had sorted the wheat from the chaff, and worked out which posts were only available if she slept with somebody she did not want to sleep with, the opportunity at the Department of Justice had seemed perfect. In fact it had seemed far too good to be true. If the offer had come from Bobby Kennedy’s Office she would probably have politely declined it; her father had warned her that there ‘were always strings’ when you made a contract with ‘the Kennedy boys’. Her father was old-fashioned, and although something of a snob, it had not stopped him becoming an indispensible litigator and key associate of his contemporary old Joe Kennedy, the scion of the Kennedy clan who had passed away last December within weeks of the October War. Notwithstanding his closeness to the father, he had always kept the Kennedy sons at arm’s length as if he was unable to make up his mind what they stood for. It was not that he disliked either Jack or Bobby, just that he did not understand them and therefore, he honestly did not know what a deal with either of them was worth. Besides, a few years ago he had had his fingers burned when a case involving one of the ‘old bootlegger’s’ former confederates had come out of the woodwork and cost him, and several of his best clients a lot of money. Gretchen’s father was not the sort of man who forgot a slight or a setback even though he had remained on friendly terms with Joe Kennedy until his death; and at the funeral of his old friend Gretchen could have sworn she had seen a tear in her father’s eye.
‘There is no such thing as just business in real life,’ he would prognosticate at the dinner table, ‘if it isn’t personal one obviously isn’t taking it seriously enough!’
All that morning Gretchen had been reading, with meticulous attention to detail, the three files delivered to her second floor office by a pair of Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agents at nine o’clock on the dot. Before the G-men departed she had signed several reams of receipts, non-disclosure undertakings and brutally unambiguous statements detailing what she could expect to happen to her if she spoke or alluded to — inadvertently or otherwise — the contents of the files outside the walls of the Department of Justice.
Gretchen had acquired a secretary whom she shared with an earnest young attorney called Barry Samsom — he was actually a small, bespectacled one hundred and twenty pound weakling likely to blow away in a strong wind rather than a reincarnation of any kind of re-incarnated Biblical strongman — but by sheer power of personality, she had quickly appropriated their shared secretary to work for her full time.
Gretchen’s secretary, a petite blond college girl engaged to a staffer at the Main Navy and Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue, had brought her a mid-morning coffee, black and strong the way she liked it, about half-an-hour ago. Her coffee had grown cold by the time she finally put down the file she was re-reading and got around to sipping her drink.
Given that she was the daughter of an old and very wealthy New England family, and that she belonged to the sixth or seventh generation of the family to ply its fortunes in the practice of law, Gretchen was, unsurprisingly, a political and social conservative inherently committed to the ongoing smooth functioning of the organs of the State responsible for the safety of civil society. She belonged to that particular section of the populous who had never been in trouble with the police, did not know anybody who had been and basically, mainly because she had never had any serious contact with them, she tended to place an innate trust in the people judicially authorised to keep that peace. This meant that she had come to the Department of Justice pre-disposed to trust in the integrity of pillars of the State like the Secret Service and the FBI in upholding the law and to invariably, mostly infallibly, to act in the best interests of, when it came down to the bottom line, people exactly like her. The trouble was that every time files like the ones in front of her now came across her desk a fresh canker of doubt stirred, and like an onion, grew another skin. In recent weeks the canker had grown from the dimensions of a tiny acorn to those of a fully inflated basket ball.
Gretchen put down her cup and rose from her chair to stretch her legs. Her window overlooked Pennsylvania Avenue and although she had never attempted it — dignity permitted of no such schoolgirl excess — she suspected that if she leaned far enough out of the window she could see all the way up the street to Capitol Hill.
Whenever she stared out across Washington, seemingly wholly unsullied by the October War, she felt a little guilty. Sometimes, she even thought about the night of the war and the morning after the war that she had spent with Dan Brenckmann at her parents’ hideaway at Wethersfield, Connecticut. They had tried to get back to Boston but it was impossible, all the roads were closed or jammed with traffic. Eventually, they had gone their separate ways. She had not got back to half-wrecked Boston until a fortnight later.