Peter Kaiser was tall, black-haired, and good-looking if you liked men who wore permanent-press suits and striped ties and grinned a lot. His friends said he resembled George Hamilton. He had been a promising junior in the early days of the first Nixon administration, and it showed. He still believed that Nixon could make a comeback. Pierre Trudeau had, Mrs Indira Gandhi had – why not the most competent and misunderstood president of all time?
On Independence Avenue, Peter was known as ‘The Machine’. He was never inspired, and rarely original, but once Shearson Jones had set him a task, he went through it like something inhuman. Nobody ever saw him eat in the office, although he grudgingly permitted the rest of the staff to send out for Big Macs and shakes when they had to work through their lunch-hour; and Karen Fortunoff, one of the prettier and wittier secretaries, said she had once seen him take a covert swig from her can of typewriter oil.
The only sign of real life which Peter ever exhibited was when he touched the girls’ bottoms – always slyly, and always quasi-accidentally, so they were never absolutely sure if he meant it or not. He dated one or two of the girls occasionally, but his affairs rarely lasted. One girl had complained that he was ‘all boxed roses, Frank Sinatra mood music, and fumbles under the table.’
These days, Peter lived with his sixty-two-year-old mother in a stuffy, high-ceilinged apartment in the old Wellington Hotel. Or rather he slept there: like most of his staff, he spent most of his waking hours in the office, particularly when there was a panic project on, like the Blight Crisis Appeal.
During the morning, Peter had called Joe Dasgupta, the brilliant and expensive Indian constitutional lawyer, and Joe Dasgupta was already working on a legal structure for the fund and considering how it should be registered. Peter had also called Fred Newman, the chairman of the Kansas Wheat Growers’ Association, at his home in Palm Springs. So far, Fred Newman’s own farm had suffered little damage, and he agreed with Peter Kaiser that the financial interests of Kansas farmers would best be served by ‘soft-pedalling the blight, media-wise’. He also accepted Peter Kaiser’s invitation to act as expert adviser to the Blight Crisis Appeal, in return for ‘necessary expenses’. Shearson Jones had recognised the importance of having Fred Newman attached to the fund from the beginning, since most of the suitcase farmers who owned land in Kansas were strong Newman supporters.
Fred Newman had always argued that ‘Just because a man doesn’t actually dig the soil with his own bare hands, that doesn’t mean his heart isn’t in farming,’ and that sentiment had won him the votes of almost every wheat grower who preferred to spend fifty weeks of every year in New York or Los Angeles – in fact, anywhere except out in tedious Kansas, amongst all that tiresome wheat.
While Peter Kaiser had been making those calls, his staff of eleven girls had been canvassing major industries all over the country – particularly those industries connected with farming, farm machinery, fertilisers, and food transportation. By lunchtime, they had rustled up pledges of more than five million dollars in contributions, and by mid-afternoon, after CBS and ABC news had both run stories on the Kansas wheat blight, with serial footage of the blackened crops, they had jumped to eight million dollars, all tax deductible.
In the Senate itself, Shearson Jones spent the morning smoking a large domestic cigar and gathering support for his emergency aid bill among Republicans and Democrats alike. He ate a heavy lunch with Wallace Terry of the Washington Post, and told him that he was leaning heavily on anyone who owed him a favour, and a few people who didn’t, ‘simply to rescue those poor beleagured farmers in Kansas.’
Shearson drew so much attention to his own state during the course of the afternoon that hardly any comment was passed by the media on those scattered reports coming in from Iowa and Oregon and Washington and California that outbreaks of blight were appearing everywhere. At the Department of Agriculture, the press officer was still talking about the crisis as ‘the Kansas wheat problem’ and sidetracking any press questions about similar blights in other states as ‘alarmist’ and ‘quite usual for the time of year.’
Two of Shearson Jones’s best speech-writers were working on a draft TV statement which the senator hoped to make to the press during the evening. Peter Kaiser had seen the first outlines, and he was particularly taken by a phrase which talked about ‘those earnest, honest, caring farmers who are still living the kind of American life that Saturday Evening Post used to celebrate on its covers.’
At three-thirty, Joe Dasgupta called back. Peter Kaiser was sitting in his chilly, beige-carpeted office, dictating a memo on how contributions should be followed up, accounted for, and banked. He waved his hand to Karen Fortunoff to leave him for five minutes while he talked.
‘Okay, Joe,’ he said, once Karen had left. ‘How’s it shaping up?’
‘So far, it’s fine,’ said Joe Dasgupta, in his distinctive Delhi accent. ‘I’ve advised Shearson to set up the Blight Crisis Appeal as a private foundation, with someone entirely nondescript as manager, and himself as president.’
‘You didn’t think we should try to form it as a federal corporation under an Act of Congress? It would’ve seemed like it was a whole lot more respectable.’
‘Well – that was the choice,’ explained Joe Dasgupta. ‘Respectability or practicality. As a private foundation, you can still persuade Congress to vote you money, yet you won’t have them breathing down your neck so hard. Also, you’ll have more room to manoeuvre with the IRS.’
‘Sounds reasonable,’ nodded Peter Kaiser. ‘How soon can we start collecting money? We have close on nine million dollars pledged so far.’
‘I’ll have the papers sent around to your office. All I need now is a couple of notarised signatures from Shearson and Alan Hedges, and you’re in the Blight Crisis business.’
‘You’ve done an incredible job, Joe,’ said Peter Kaiser. ‘Remind me to take you out to dinner real soon.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Joe Dasgupta told him, with polite disdain. ‘I’ll just send my invoice around with the papers.’
Peter Kaiser put down the phone, and pressed his desk buzzer for Karen to come back in. Karen Fortunoff was a petite, dark-eyed brunette, whose smart cream suit didn’t conceal a trim figure. She had come to Washington two years ago from Duluth, intoxicated with ambition and heady ideas about working in Congress. She had left behind her two bewildered suburban parents who still kept her room made up for her, with all her dolls and her Raggedy Andy books, and who still called her ‘Baby’ on the phone. She had worked as a secretary for a magazine printing company for a while, but then she had met a girl at a party who had helped with the catering at some of Shearson Jones’s fund-raising picnics. ‘Now, Shearson Jones is power,’ the girl had said. ‘Pure, naked, disgusting, unadulterated power.’ Karen had liked the sound of that. After all, power was the very magnet which had first drawn her to Washington. She had called Peter Kaiser the next morning.
‘Where were we?’ asked Peter, as Karen sat down with her steno pad and crossed her legs.
‘We’d gotten as far as Banking Procedures (ii),’ she said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Peter. ‘Banking Procedures (ii). How to pay in corporate cheques, and the clearance of charitable funds.’
Karen said, ‘Don’t you ever take a break?’