He had known Della McIntosh for just four days. He had seen her before, of course, because she was the Washington bureau chief for the Kansas City Herald-Examiner, and whenever he held a press conference or handed out prizes or opened his mouth in the Senate, Della McIntosh would have to be there. She had even interviewed his wife Margaret once, for a piece that had run under the headline ‘Living With The Stomach Of The Senate.’
But four days ago, Margaret had been fortuitously out of town, visiting her diabetic sister in San Diego. And when Shearson and Della had found themselves together on the balcony of Senator Karl Leiderman’s elegant Georgetown house, both taking an oxygen break during a seven o’clock cocktail crush, it had been animal attraction at first sight, with nothing to hold it back.
Della was petite – snub-nosed, green-eyed, with vivid red hair in a shaggy Farrah bob. Although she was small, her breasts were enormous – Playboy playmate size – and Shearson had taken one look at her and felt an almost irresistible urge to dig his podgy fingers into them. Della had been wearing a low-cut cocktail dress in electric blue, with a small sapphire cross dangling in her cleavage, and Shearson had walked across the balcony in his huge black tuxedo and loomed over her like Mount Baldy on a dark night.
‘That cross,’ he had rumbled, ‘is resting in the most desirable spot in the whole of the District of Columbia.’
They had left the cocktail party separately. There was no way in which Shearson could ever slip out from anywhere unnoticed. They had met up an hour later at Le Faisan Restaurant, where he had treated her to dinner, and to the unparalleled spectacle of an average Shearson Jones repast. He had steadily eaten his way through turtle soup, fresh trout, roasted quails, rack of lamb, boeuf en croûte, salad, cheese, and a heaped plateful of profiteroles, smothered with hot chocolate and cream.
They had toasted each other wordlessly in Hospices de Beaune.
Now, over by the African-style cocktail cabinet – stained oak topped by minarets and pierced with mirrors – Della mixed them two vodka tonics. Shearson opened a brass-inlaid box and took out a telephone.
‘Are you sure you can trust me?’ asked Della, squeezing the limes.
Shearson punched out a number. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure at all. But if I see one single word of this in the Kansas City Herald-Examiner, I’ll have the whole damned paper closed down.’
‘You and whose army?’
‘Me and Mr Wendeil Oliver, the chairman of Western States Communications, who happens to control a majority shareholding in your newspaper, and who comes around here for dinner twice a month.’
She glanced at him. He plainly wasn’t joking at all. She said, ‘Oh,’ and brought him his drink. Then she sat on the edge of the ottoman, her wrap slightly parted to reveal her breasts, while he puffed and popped away at his cigar and waited for his number to ring.
‘Alan?’ he said, at last.
A wary voice said, ‘Who is this?’
‘Alan, this is Shearson. That’s right. Well, I know it’s kind of a strange time to be calling you, Alan, but as it happens something pretty interesting has come up.’
‘What do you mean by “interesting”?’ asked the voice. It was a rich voice, fruity, with a strong Georgia accent.
Shearson pulled a face. ‘All kinds of interesting, Alan. Politically interesting – the kind of thing that would show a fellow up in a favourable light when it came to election time – and financially interesting, too. In fact, the very best kind of interesting.’
‘Go on.’
‘You’ve heard about this crop blight they’ve been experiencing in Kansas and North Dakota? The wheat disease?’
‘Sure. It was on the news tonight. I’ve already asked Wilkins to get together a dossier on it’
Shearson nodded. ‘That’s good. You’ve told the media what you’re doing, have you? Good. Because from what I hear, this blight’s pretty serious. Hundreds of acres gone to rot, and nothing the farmers can do about it.’
‘Spreading all the time, too,’ put in Alan. ‘So far they’re projecting the worst wheat harvest for ten years, even if they can bring it under control by mid-week.’
‘Well, that’s what I hear, too,’ said Shearson. ‘Not that it’s really going to hit our grain reserves too badly. We’ve got more damned grain stored up than we know what to do with – especially after we stopped selling it to the Soviets. And if you ask me, it won’t do the farmers much harm, either. It’s about time Mother Nature slapped them down a bit, and gave them a genuine reason to be grateful for all those subsidies we give them.’
Alan said cautiously, ‘I still don’t quite get your drift, Shearson.’
The drift is this,’ Shearson explained, with a smug smile. ‘This blight is spectacular, and damaging, and right now it’s newsworthy. That means that the situation’s just getting ripe for some strong emotional rhetoric. You know what I mean. How the honest farmers risk their whole livelihood just to fill the nation’s bread-basket; how this strange and terrifying blight is going to drive countless small farmers to the wall; how they’re going to need more than their usual guaranteed floor prices to stay in business.’
‘I’m not sure you’re making sense,’ said Alan.
‘Oh, I’m making sense all right,’ said Shearson. ‘Because out of all this stirring talk, we’re going to propose a special emergency rescue fund – maybe call it the Blight Crisis Appeal. We’ll swing a vote in the House for some modest starting donation from the federal government – say ten million dollars – and then we’ll ask private industry to donate as well. As an acknowledgement, we’ll take out whole page advertisements in Fortune, with headings like ‘The grateful farmers of Kansas thank the following for their donations…’ All good heartwarming commercial stuff. The public will like it, the government will like it, industry will like it, and even farmers will like it.’
‘I’ll buy that,’ Alan said. ‘But where’s your angle?’ Shearson grunted in amusement. ‘You’re being slow tonight, Alan. The angle is that you and I will administer the fund, and that we’ll have total and legal control over the distribution of the money. Naturally, we’ll have to be paid a modest salary by the fund for the work we put in, and then we’ll have expenses to cover, and it might even be necessary for the fund to purchase extensive tracts of farmland for research purposes. You’ve always fancied a nice stud farm for your retirement, haven’t you, Alan? Well, you could have that, and serve the American people, too.’
There was a long silence on the other end of the telephone. Then Alan said, ‘Legal? You sure?’
‘I’ll have Joe Dasgupta set up the framework. He may cost a little more, but he’ll make it watertight.’
‘What if the laboratories find out what’s causing the blight, and what if they manage to arrest it before it does too much damage? What happens then?’
‘Alan, my friend, you’re being naïve. The federal agricultural research laboratories are under our jurisdiction.’
‘You mean – even if they do find out what it is – we don’t have to accept their findings?’
That’s right. We can keep this blight going just as long as we need to. Apart from our own laboratories, the only other people working on any kind of analysis are the local yokels in Wichita, and you know how limited their facilities are. They couldn’t analyse a cow flop.’
‘Well,’ said Alan, thoughtfully, ‘it seems like you’ve thought of all the possible wrinkles. What are you going to do now?’