Getting a table at a plush DC restaurant was not the arm wrestle it was before the war. The couple were quickly ushered to a table for two near the window, not that there was anything to be seen outside.
Few of the other diners were smoking and there were big, whirling overhead fans so the air was reasonably clear. Gretchen hated it when she walked into an eatery and the atmosphere was as opaque as the sky downwind of the Bethlehem Steel Works. The waiters were mostly men in their thirties and forties, each darkly Italian in that way that convinced her they were probably related, and polite with accented voices that they had worked hard to keep sounding authentically Latin.
In no time she relaxed and over cocktails began to gush about her first few weeks working at Justice. It was not long before — both being attorneys who had spent no little time in their student days discussing such ephemera — they fell into an arcane debate about the Department of Justice’s much trammelled and derided motto.
Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur.
“Who pursues for Lady Justice,” Dan offered, sipping his cocktail. The drink was something with fruit juice in it and a big shot of white rum which Gretchen had recommended. “Very sloppy Latin. Latin is supposed to be the most precise language ever invented so a motto that expects a fellow to infer that it refers to the person of the Attorney General and by implication the rest of his department and assumes that justice itself is exclusively feminine is pretty lame…”
“Granted,” Gretchen laughed, before trying to put him straight on a few things. “The problem is that the motto was something picked up by one of the early Attorney Generals and the theory is he probably stole it from Lord Burleigh, who was Queen Elizabeth the first’s ‘Chancellor’ way back in the sixteenth century in England. In those days in England all legal matters were discussed, settled and documented in Latin, but almost always in really bad, sort of semi-bastardised Latin, and that’s where the trouble with the motto comes from now because we, as a better educated and more erudite modern civilization speak and write Latin a lot better than people did in the late middle ages in Europe.”
“Yeah,” Dan agreed sardonically, “we’ve got the answers to everything these days.”
Gretchen frowned and he shrugged apologetically.
He quirked a rueful smile. This was not an evening to be serious or to commune with the ghosts of the October War.
“The thing is, I was about to say,” she went on imperiously, “is, or was, that the correct original, incomplete quotation was probably more like ‘qui pro domina regina sequitur’, meaning that a more literal translation might be, ‘he’ the Attorney General, obviously, ‘sues’, because as we both know our contemporary English word ‘sue’ comes from the Latin root sequor, ‘on behalf of our Lady the Queen’.
“Okay,” Dan conceded. When Gretchen was in full flow she was a thing to behold and to marvel at…
“You are humouring me,” she decided accusingly.
“Allow me my foibles,” he countered. Leaning forward he added: “So what you are really telling me is that nobody at the Department of Justice has the remotest idea what the motto on its flag and set in stone in every court means?”
Gretchen thought about it.
“Yes.” Her hair looked jet black not raven brown in the subdued lighting of the Ristorante La Maria and her eyes sparkled with bright optimism. She was wearing a dark jacket over a cream blouse, a calf-length pleated Navy blue skirt and shoes with perhaps half a heel. A slim gold chain encircled her neck. Everything was understated, businesslike, picture perfect.
Dan Brenckmann felt a little crumpled and worn in Gretchen’s company, as he suspected most people did.
“So, what’s your boss like?” He asked presently as they investigated their starters. His was a light salad with anchovies; Gretchen’s something with delicate pasta and tomatoes.
“He’s not the sort of guy who goes around putting his hand up a girl’s skirt or looking to feel a piece of the action,” Gretchen replied, misunderstanding Dan’s question.
“Oh, right,” the man muttered. “Does that sort of thing go on a lot at Justice?”
“No, of course not!”
They focused on their starters for a few seconds.
“Actually, it goes on more than you’d think,” Gretchen admitted. “But not to me, that’s all. Katzenbach is the real thing. Sure, he’s political, I mean he has to be holding down a job just one step below Cabinet level, but he’s more,” she paused, searching for the right word, ‘pragmatic about things than the Attorney General. More the sort of guy who actually gets things done, if you know what I mean?”
“Like that business down in Alabama last June?” Dan put to her, wholly rhetorical in his query.
“Yes. I think that but for the war the Administration would have been more openly committed to the Civil Rights thing. The way things are at the moment everybody’s trying to keep too many balls in the air at once.”
“What’s going on in Washington State sounds kind of scary,” Dan said. He eyed Gretchen’s cocktail, which she had been nursing while he downed his.
She ignored his unvoiced comment and acknowledged where his eyes had been focused.
“I have another date tonight,” she said coyly.
“Oh?”
“Work, not pleasure,” she giggled.
Dan Brenckmann was momentarily entranced. When Gretchen giggled — which was not often, or at least not often when he was around — it was like being briefly enraptured, drugged, and in that altered state of awareness the ills of the age were as nothing.
“Oh,” he murmured like an idiot.
“I have to go out to Andrews Air Force base to meet the Deputy Attorney General.” Her lips became a pale line, her mind turning fast on a new and troubling thought. “Do you think I can persuade a cab driver to take me all the way out to Andrews Field at that time of night?”
“I’ve got a rental car from Hertz parked up at my hotel,” Dan offered, desperate to be of service. “I’ve got to visit one or two VIPs out in the country while I’m in DC. Out of hours; as it were. Why don’t you let me be your cab driver?”
Gretchen opened her mouth to object.
However, the words that actually came out of her lips were: “That would be marvellous. Thank you.”
Chapter 12
Nicholas Katzenbach, United States Deputy Attorney General hardly noticed the frost in the night air as he trudged down the steps to the frigid tarmac of Andrews Field to where a car was waiting to transport him to the VIP Centre. Only the President and the Vice-President were met by armoured Cadillacs ready to sweep them straight into the heart of Washington DC. Other senior members of the Administration had to be cleared through the VIP Centre and assigned a security detail prior to departing the base. Before the October War he would have been able to walk around DC, ‘free-birding’ as some Secret Service men called it, but nowadays that was out of the question. Quite apart from the fact that there were parts of the capital that were effectively no-go areas where the Washington Police Department rarely, if ever ventured, street crime, attacks and robberies outside the more heavily guarded districts of the city were a fact of everyday life. Some nights DC echoed with distant gunshots, and the constant wail of the sirens of the police cars, fire wagons and ambulances quartering the metropolis.