“I knew him long ago when I lived in Paris.”
“But you were both speaking Russian.”
He smiled. “He is Russian. Or he was, he’s American now.”
“Is he on your side?”
He shrugged. “He was once but not any more.” He smiled. “About like you. On nobody’s side.”
“What does he do now?”
Aarons shook his head. “Don’t ask.”
“Right,” she said, yawning. “Can I bring you a few things to brighten up this room?”
He looked as if he was surprised that the room needed brightening up, and then he said, “That would be very kind of you.”
She laughed, shaking her head. “You idiot. You don’t have to thank me. I’m a friend.”
CHAPTER 35
Abe Karney was ex-US Marines, ex-Harvard Law School and ex-two wives. A large man with a large face and a belly that was beginning to look like a beer drinker’s gut. A stranger could have taken him for a retired wrestler or an ex-pro football player and Karney did nothing to dispel that image. But, in fact, he was one of the shrewdest minds in the White House. And what was more important he was one of the very few men whom the President trusted.
Karney had no axes to grind, he was financially successful and backed by old family money. He had no yearning for power or status and had no official title in the White House administration. When the media referred to him as merely “one of Truman’s cronies” he made no attempt to deny it or justify his relationship with the President. In commerce and industry they were beginning to call men with his talents “trouble-shooters.” He received no stipend from any government source but the running costs of his three-man staff were paid for from a small fund made available to the President for “Research and Evaluation.” His staff consisted of a secretary, a young woman researcher and an ex-journalist.
With no authority of any kind beyond the knowledge that he was the President’s eyes and ears he put out political fires between the top echelons of departments with a mixture of amiability and commonsense that made warring parties remember his interventions as both impartial and just. Those who resented the outsider found that their careers were not as secure as they had imagined. The interventions were not frequent because sometimes an invitation to a game of golf or to a White House dinner was hint enough without the problem subject ever being mentioned. A smile from Abe Karney could seem like a warning if your conscience was troubling you.
As the car edged its way into the short drive in front of the house Karney closed the outer doors and walked to where the driver was getting out of the car. He held out his hand to his visitor. “Glad you could make it, Jake. Bella’s out at some charity thing but she’s left us some cold-cuts and stuff. Let’s go inside.”
His visitor looked at the house. “This is beautiful, Abe.”
“My old man bought it direct from Robert Simon when he was trying to turn Renton into a garden suburb. Before he went broke and had to sell out to Gulf Oil.”
“How is Bella?”
“Go up the steps. Bella? Has her good days and her bad days. They’re trying new drugs on her. She’ll be OK. Just takes time.”
Jake Hancox and Abe Karney had been friends when they were boys in a small town near Lake Champlain in Vermont.
As they helped themselves to food from the dishes on the sideboard Hancox said, “That last book your Bella wrote—Always Tomorrow—I tried to work out which of those guys was you.”
Karney laughed. “None of them was me. She never writes that sort of novel—by the way d’you know what they call those damn things when the characters are based on real people—they call ’em romans à clef. But she always puts at least one real son of a bitch in the story and everybody swears it’s me.”
When they were seated and stabbing into the food with their forks Karney said, “You come up with any ideas on this thing, Jake?”
“I get ideas on the hour every hour and each one’s crazier than the previous one. What about you?”
“Well, the problem is that we don’t even know what the problem is. We don’t know if this guy will go along with the idea. We don’t know what would convince him that it’s for everybody’s good. His people as well as us. And there’s a dozen little peripheral problems. We’re walking around in the dark.”
“What do you see as the peripheral problems?”
“Most important is who’s going to handle him. Can’t be the FBI. They’d have a fit if they knew that we’re even talking about such a thing. The CIA is too new. And it isn’t secure enough. If something leaked out then our guy would end up in the morgue. Either here or in Moscow. And let’s say we get it going, who’s going to be privy to the information? As far as I can see it’s got to be direct to the President. So only three people know what’s going on. Truman, your guy and whoever handles him.”
“What does the President think?”
“No problem. Wants all the dope on Moscow he can get.”
“And willing to cut out the FBI and the CIA?”
“Yeah. No problem.” Karney smiled ruefully. “I guess that’s what he likes most about it.”
“What do you think about it from an intelligence point of view?”
“Well, its great advantage is that the President himself can specify what he wants to know about. It may not always be possible to oblige, but the rest of the material he gets from all sources is about what the agencies have happened to find out and that ain’t necessarily what the little man wants to know about.”
“Say we make the approach and the guy turns us down flat. What then?”
Karney shrugged his big shoulders. “I don’t see that it matters. OK, he tells Moscow. So what?”
“And how do we know that he’s not
