“With my randy reputation? And she was the one running around.”
“Hell of a thing.”
“Piece of advice for you, Frank-never screw around on a divorce dick.”
“Yeah?”
“Got pictures of her and that married jerk…. Gave ’em to his wife.”
We were passing the shade trees of Farragut Square.
Wilson sat caught in the awkward moment for a while, then asked, “How’s your boy doing?”
“Fine. His mom treats
“What’s his name?”
“Nate, Jr. Want to see a picture?”
Wilson said sure and I got my wallet out and showed him.
“Mine are grown,” he said. “But I got grandkid pictures.”
He got his wallet out and showed me.
Then the limo slowed and pulled up in front of the huge Mayflower Hotel, on the southeast corner of De Sales Street and Connecticut; only it turned out we were going to the nearby Harvey’s, one of the city’s best-known, most popular restaurants, seafood a specialty. Wilson led me through the nondescript but packed dining room-where it didn’t seem likely we’d be seated until maybe next Wednesday-toward a teensy elevator behind a velvet rope guarded by a massive colored samurai of a headwaiter.
“Evening, Mr. Wilson,” the burly headwaiter said with a wide, white smile that made him no less menacing. “Been some time, sir.”
“Yes it has, Pooch. We’re expected on the third floor.”
“So I understand, sir,” Pooch said, and unclipped the velvet rope for us. We stepped aboard and there was just room enough for the two of us and the ancient colored elevator operator, who said, “Evening, Mr. Wilson.”
“Evening, James.”
As the elevator groaned and wheezed its way up, Wilson said, “You’re lucky, Nate-J. Edgar’s out of town this weekend.”
“Why, is this a favorite spot of his?”
“The third floor is; he and Tolson have a regular table.”
When the elevator door slid open, even an uninformed oaf like me was able to recognize a good share of the faces seated in the spare, simple dining room with its old tables and chairs and black-and-white tile floor: my late client Huey Long’s son, Russell; Estes Kefauver, who’d got his picture in the national press by campaigning in a coonskin cap (he was bareheaded tonight); the radio and TV commentator Edward R. Murrow.
While there were wives sprinkled here and there, it was mostly men, eating in groups, and the air was laughter-filled and as smoky as those legendary political smoke-filled rooms, though the aroma was only partly cigarette and cigar smoke, the scent of sizzling meat and barbecue sauce mixed pleasantly in. Wilson led me past an open charcoal grill, where a Negro chef prepared steak, fish and ribs (Baughman in his Hawaiian shirt might have fit in at that). Diners were selecting their own lobsters from a tank, or steaks from a butcher-shop-style counter, and helping themselves to gumbo and oyster crackers at a huge cast-iron cauldron in the middle of the room.
We were headed toward the back, past some tables that had been left empty, to a table near the wall where a small compact man in his sixties sat with three younger men, another man standing behind the older man, in the same manner that bodyguards used to watch Frank Nitti eat.
No one at this table seemed to be dining except the older man, who was dunking into the butter the last bits of what must have been a two-pound lobster, the shell and various other remnants of which were on a platter; also on the table was a basket of sliced white bread with butter pads, a pitcher of water and a bottle of Old Fitzgerald and a glass.
The older man’s hair and double-breasted suit were neat and gray, though a snappy red bow tie enlivened his ensemble, set off by a perfectly folded five-pointed handkerchief in his breast pocket; his gray-framed glasses magnified his gray-hazel eyes, slightly. Thin-lipped but with a ready smile, pleasant features dominated by a prominent, almost hooking nose in an egg-shaped face, he sat as erect as if a steel rod had been implanted in his spine. His jaunty manner had a birdlike, almost roosterish quality, and the younger men around him said little, hanging on his every word and movement, possibly because they were Secret Service and he was President Harry S. Truman.
This man had been (in this order) a farmer, an artillery battalion commander, a bankrupt haberdasher, an obscure county judge, the chief patronage man in the U.S. Senate for the corrupt Kansas City Pendergast machine, and Franklin Roosevelt’s final-and largely ignored-vice president. Dismissed as an inept, stodgy mediocrity by not just his enemies, Harry Truman was fooling everybody as a strong-willed, decisive president.
I felt butterflies gathering in my stomach as Wilson led me to the leader of the free world, who jumped to his feet and thrust a hand toward me to shake, like a javelin.
“You must be this Heller fella I been hearing about,” he said in that familiar dry Missouri twang, as he pump- handled my hand.
“I’m Nathan Heller, Mr. President,” someone’s voice said. Mine, presumably.
“Sit, sit,” he said, gesturing to the open chair beside him, and I did, and so did he. “I meant to wait for you, but the hunger got the best of me. I have never gotten accustomed to eating at such an ungodly goddamn hour-six o’clock still seems late to me, but then I’m a Midwestern boy like you. Do you eat lobster? I know some Jewish fellas abstain from shellfish, but my partner back in Kansas City, he’s a Jewish fella, and he’d eat the asshole out of a pig, so you never know, do you?”
He said all this in about three seconds. The machine guns at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre had nothing on Harry.
“I like lobster,” I allowed.
“Boy!” Truman called out, and a colored waiter-a “boy” of probably fifty-plus years-hustled over. Truman said to him, “Cut up a two-pound lobster for my friend Mr. Heller, here.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Truman turned his magnified gaze on me; the bug eyes made a cartoon of him. “May I call you ‘Nathan’ or possibly ‘Nate’?”
“‘Nate’ is fine, sir.”
“Nate, I’d ask you to call me ‘Harry,’ but the one ceremony I stand on is respect for the presidency. So you’ll have to refer to me in a proper manner, and that may seem like horseshit to a Chicago boy like you, but so be it.”
“Not a problem, Mr. President.”
Suddenly Truman noticed that Wilson had assumed a position against the wall, and said, “Frank, what the hell are you standing there for? Join us. You want a lobster?”
Wilson sat next to me. “I’ve eaten, sir, thank you.”
Truman grinned at me; it was infectious. “I ran the fanny off Frank and his boys, you know. FDR spoiled ’em; how the hell hard is it to keep up with a fella in a wheelchair? I put ’em back to work, didn’t I, Frank?”
“You certainly did, sir,” Wilson said with a small smile.
“I understand you’re a combat veteran,” Truman said to me.
“Yes, sir.”
“Guadalcanal-rough damn action you saw. I’m a veteran myself.” He flicked a finger toward the World War One service pin in his lapel. “How’s your friend Barney Ross?”
Barney had been wounded on Guadalcanal and his treatment had led to an addiction to morphine.
“Completely clean, sir. He went through the government program at Lexington, Kentucky.”
“I’m pleased to hear that.” His concern seemed genuine; if this was political bull, it was a variety I’d never encountered. “What a great boxer that boy was. Do you know who the Secretary of Defense is?”
Was the sudden shift of subjects meant to blindside and throw me off guard? Or did this amazing man’s mind just move that fast?
“Certainly, sir. It’s James Forrestal.”
“You’re wrong.” He speared some lobster, dipped it in butter, nibbled it from his fork and said,
