Nightwork

'Oh, Jack,' Mrs Coates said, 'the true believer. The voice of the Pentagon. What crap! '

'If you saw what passed over my desk day after day,' the lawyer said, 'you wouldn't call it crap.'

'Mr. Grimes...' She turned toward me, a little cool smile on her lips. 'You're not in the mess here in Washington. You represent the pure, undefiled American public here tonight. Let's hear the simple wisdom of the masses....'

'Evelyn,' Hale said warningly. I half-expected to hear him say, 'Remember, he's our guest.' But he let it go with the 'Evelyn'.

I looked at her, annoyed with her for taunting me, feeling that she was testing me somehow, for some not quite innocent purpose of her own. 'The pure, undefiled representative of the American public here tonight,' I said, 'thinks it's all bullshit.' I remembered the speech she had made to me, naked, a glass of whiskey in her hand, sitting on the side of the big soft bed in the darkened room, about everybody in Washington being an actor. 'You people aren't serious,' I said. 'It's all a game for you. It's not a game for me, the pure, undefiled etcetera, it's life and death and taxes, and other little things like that for me, but it's just a pennant race for you. You depend upon each other to have different opinions, just the way baseball teams depend upon other teams to have different color uniforms. Otherwise, nobody would know who was leading the league. In the end, though, you're all playing the same game.' I was surprised at myself even as I spoke. I didn't even know that I had ever thought like this before. 'If you get traded to another team, you'll just take off the old suit and put on another one and you'll go out there and try to boost your batting average so you can ask for a raise the next year.'

'Let me ask you something. Grimes.’ the lawyer said affably. 'Did you vote in the last election?'

'I did,' I said. 'I got fooled. The papers printed the sports news on the editorial pages. I don't intend to vote again. It's an undignified occupation for a grown man.' I didn't tell them that, where I expected I'd be by the time of the next elections, there wouldn't be a chance I'd be able to vote.

'Forgive me, folks,' Evelyn Coates said, 'I didn't realize I had introduced a homespun political philosopher into our midst.'

'I'm not absolutely against what he said,' the lawyer said. 'I don't see where it's so wrong to be loyal to the team. If the team's winning, of course.' He chuckled softly at his own joke.

The congressman looked up from his accounts. If he had heard a word of the discussion, or any discussion for the last ten years, for that matter, he didn't show it. 'Okay,' he said, 'it all comes out even. Evelyn, you won three hundred and fifty-five dollars and fifty cents. Mr. Grimes, you won twelve hundred and seven dollars. Everybody else get out their checkbooks.'

While the losers were finding out how much they owed, there were the usual jokes, directed at Hale, for bringing a ringer, me, into the game. Evelyn Coates made no jokes. There was no hint in the way anyone else talked that anything like an argument had just taken place.

I tried to look offhand as I put the checks into my wallet. Luckily, they were all on Hale's Washington bank. He endorsed them for me so that I wouldn't have any trouble cashing them.

We all left together, and there was a jumble of good-byes as the congressman and the columnist got into a taxi together. The lawyer took Evelyn by the arm, saying, 'You're on my way, Evelyn, I'll drop you.' Hale was inside getting a pack of cigarettes from the machine, and I stood alone for a moment watching the lawyer and Evelyn Coates walk off into the darkness of the parking lot. I heard her low laugh at something he had said as they disappeared.

* * *

Hale drove silently for a little while. 'How long do you plan to stay in town?' he asked, as we were stopped for a light

'Just until I get my passport. Monday, Tuesday...'

'Then where?'

"Then I'll look at a map. Somewhere in Europe.'

He started the car with a jerk as the light changed. 'God I wish I was coming along with you. Wherever you're going.' The intensity in his voice was disturbing. He sounded like a prisoner speaking to a man who was about to be freed in the morning. This town,' he said. 'Total swamp.' He turned a comer recklessly, the tires squealing. 'That miserable, smooth, molasses-talking Benson bastard ... It's a lucky thing you're not in the government....'

'What're you talking about?' I was really honestly puzzled.

'If you were - in the government, I mean - by Monday night, somebody in your department - higher in your department - would get a little poison in his ear about you.'

'You mean because of what I said about voting and changing uniforms, that stuff?' I tried not to sound incredulous, as though I were really taking him seriously. 'Actually, I hardly meant it. I was joking, or, anyway, half-joking.'

'You don't joke in this town, friend,' Hale said somberly. 'At least not in front of guys like him. I've been trying to get him out of the game for six months and nobody's got the guts to do the job. Including me. You may have been joking, but he for sure wasn't.'

'At one point in the evening,' I said, 'I was on the point of saying I'd hang around till next Saturday.'

'Don't. Blow. Blow as fast as you can. I wish to hell I could.'

I don't know how it works in your department,' I said, 'but can't you ask for an assignment someplace else?'

'I can ask,' Hale said. 'That's about as far as it would go.' He fumbled at a cigarette. 'They have me pegged as unreliable in the service, and they're making sure they can keep an eye on me twenty-four hours a day....'

'You? Unreliable?' It was the last thing I'd ever guess 'anybody would think about him.

I was in Thailand for two years. I sent you a letter. Remember?'

I never got it, I've been moving around a lot....'

'I wrote a couple of reports that didn't exactly go through channels.' He laughed bitterly. 'Channels ! Sewers. Well, they yanked me - politely - and gave me a nice office with a beautiful secretary and a raise in salary and some memos to shuffle that you might just as well paper the walls with. And the only reason they're being so kind to me is because of my goddamn father-in-law. But the message was clear - and I got it. Be a good boy or else ... God! ' He laughed again, a harsh, croaking sound. 'When I think that I celebrated when I found out I passed the Foreign Service exam! And it's all so senseless - those reports I wrote ... I was patting myself on the back - the intrepid truth-seeker, the brave little old truth-announcer. Christ, there wasn't anything in those pages that hasn't been spread over every newspaper in the country since then.' He scraped his cigarette out savagely in the ashtray on the dashboard. 'We live in the age of the Bensons, the smooth poison-droppers, who know from birth that the way up is through the sewer. I'll tell you something peculiar - a physiological phenomenon - somebody ought to write it up in a medical journal - I have days when I have the taste of shit in my mouth all day. I wash my teeth, I gargle, I get my secretary to put a bowl of narcissus on my desk - nothing helps....'

'Jesus,' I said. 'I thought you were doing great.'

'I put on a good act,' Hale said lifelessly. 'I have to. I'm a dandy little old liar. It's a government of liars and you get plenty of practice. Happy civil servant, happy husband, happy son-in-law, happy father of two.... Ah, Christ, why am I letting it all out on you? I imagine you have troubles enough of your own.'

'Not at the moment,' I said. 'If it's so bad, why don't you quit? Go into something else?'

'Into what?' he said. 'Selling neckties?'