They arrived at the appointed hour and were told to wait in an anteroom. Karp looked around with interest. He had never been in a congressman's office before. On the walls, posters showed the Dallas skyline and a rodeo. There was a Lone Star flag on display and a Remington knockoff of a buckaroo on a side table, which also held a selection of magazines devoted to Texas, Dallas, government, and Mexican-Americans, several in Spanish. The walls of the waiting area were paneled in dark wood and there was a rug on the floor emblazoned with the congressional seal.
A head-high wall of frosted glass ran across the width of the room, and looking over it Karp observed that it was crowded with cubicles so small that it seemed incredible that any normal human beings could work in them.
He observed as much to Crane, who chuckled. "Those are congressional staff, not human beings. Congressional staff have the worst working conditions and longest hours of anybody in the country. The whole place is one huge sweatshop. The laws of this great nation are written by twenty-five-year-olds in the last stages of exhaustion, breathing the farts of their neighbors. That's why the government works so well."
He glanced at his watch and then at a clock embedded in a bronze longhorn on the receptionist's desk. "George is showing he's a congressman and we work for him. If we were voters, he'd've been out here ten minutes ago."
Flores made them wait for fifteen minutes. When he emerged it was behind a group of elderly ladies chattering in drawls, patently voters all. The congressman pumped schmaltz without stopping in a thick Texas drawl until the last of the ladies had cleared the outer door, at which time the broad smile, very white against his tan face, faded to mere cordiality.
He shook hands with Crane and turned to be introduced to Karp. The smile lost a few watts as he shook hands. The congressman was only five feet five. Karp had observed this before, the reflexive pugnacity of the short when confronting someone of Karp's size. Flores squeezed a little harder than necessary; Karp pretended to flinch, conscious of being on his best behavior and not wanting to screw things up for Crane.
Flores ushered them into his office. Whatever constraints applied to staff space obviously did not apply to the elected representatives of the people. The private office was large, darkly paneled, and supplied with broad windows looking out across Independence Avenue. Flores sat behind a large mahogany desk, flanked by the flags of his state and nation. Karp and Crane arranged themselves in comfortable chairs facing the desk, which was covered with papers and the sort of knickknacks that public figures accumulate over the years.
There was a side table with various awards and plaques on it, and the usual wall full of framed photographs showing Flores with people even more prominent than he, that or doing something notable, like posing in a hard hat digging a spadeful of earth with a silvery shovel. The three men exchanged pleasantries. Karp thought that he had already discovered one difference between New York and Washington: the social bullshit segment of meetings seemed to go on longer down here. Flores and Crane chatted on about some people Karp did not know and he felt his attention wander.
On the surface of the desk in front of Karp, amid the commemorative medals, flag stands, and objects embedded in Lucite was a rough-looking tool, a dark, mattocklike blade attached to a stumpy handle. Flores caught him looking at it and smiled. "You know what that is?" he asked.
Karp did not.
"It's a short hoe. La cortita. The backbreaker. My grandfather used one of those all his life, migrant labor; when he was an old man he was bent over like a question mark. And my father, before he got out of it. And me too, a summer. I keep the goddamn thing there to remind me where I come from."
There did not seem to be anything to say to this revelation, so Karp smiled politely and waited for what would come. In any case, the social preamble seemed to be over.
Flores leaned back in his high-backed leather chair and laced his fingers. He had a large square face the color and texture of worn leather, set off by extravagant gray-shot sideburns and a thick Villista mustache. His hair was dark and swept back, and he had black, shiny eyes that seemed to be all pupil. These now bored in on Karp.
"I've heard a lot about you," Flores began. "Bert here's filled me in and I've asked around. Y'all have quite a record. You seem to be a hard charger." He paused. "And that concerns me. I've already mentioned this to Bert when he brought up your name, and I'm going to have to say it to you. This investigation is not the same kind of thing as a New York street shooting. The whole country'll be looking at what you do. Every move you make'll be raked over by the press and squeezed to see if it's got any political juice in it. Not only that, y'all're working for the Congress now. It's a whole different branch of government. It has… different ways of doing things. Political ways. You following me?"
The word "sure" formed on Karp's tongue, but he could not bring it into the air. There were limits, after all. He said instead, "No, as a matter of fact, I don't follow you at all. I'm a homicide investigator and prosecutor. I look at the evidence and shape a case. I don't see what politics has to do with it."
Flores smiled at this statement as he might have at the burbling of a small child. "Son, this is Washington, D.C. Ain't nothing happens here doesn't have some political angle. You might think it don't when you do it, but there's sons-of-bitches make it their whole life's work to find some politics in it and beat you over the head with it." He paused to let this wisdom settle.
"Now, the reason I'm telling you this is that if you want to work for me we got to get one thing straight from the get-go. Y'all work for Bert Crane here, and Bert Crane works for me. Not only do I expect to be kept informed about what you're doing, but I expect that you and the professional staff of the Select Committee will be, let's say, guided, by me in all of your work. That means one thing's more important than anything else: no surprises. Your chairman does not want to get a call one evening from the Post or CBS asking me what I think of the latest thing y'all've done and me not know what the hell they're talking about. You following me now?"
Karp nodded. "Right. No surprises."
The conversation then turned to the details of staffing and logistics. There was some confusion here and Karp could tell that Crane and Flores were fencing. Neither said anything solid about how much staff he could expect and what his budget was going to be. This was something of a shocker; Karp had supposed that it was all greased and ready to go.
The two men got into an argument about parking spaces and then one about how the letterhead of the investigation staff was going to read. Karp felt he had nothing to contribute to this discussion and remained silent, growing ever more bored and irritated, and thinking that working with a short hoe was probably good preparation for this sort of work, although perhaps more stimulating.
After twenty minutes of palaver over trivialities, a call came through and the congressman picked up the phone and snapped at the operator. Then he cradled the phone in his neck and said, smiling, "I got to take this one, boys." He extended a hand to each of them in turn, and Karp noted that this time Flores did not feel obliged to squeeze hard.
"What the hell was that all about?" asked Karp when they were in the hallway again.
Crane placed a hand on Karp's shoulder. "Welcome to Washington."
"No, really. Did he mean that shit about running everything through him?"
Crane laughed, the booming sound echoing in the hallway, drawing stares. "Oh, God, no! Let me translate. What he meant was, if things go well and we don't raise any flak, he gets the credit. If we raise any flak, we're on our own. There's no conceivable way he can oversee our investigation. He's got way too much on his plate, like all these jokers. Matter of fact, any involvement with government at all takes him away from his real occupation, which is getting elected every two years. That's the full-time job. He didn't really bear down on the staff issues, for which you can be grateful. That's why I kept him on the stationery and the rest of the horse puckey."