'You're all heart. I'm coming back next week for a few days.'
'I can't wait,' said Weingrass, raising his voice and looking over at the nurse. 'When you get here, you can take these heavy-breathing sex maniacs off my hands!'
It was shortly past 10:00 pm when Milos Varak walked down the deserted hallway in the House Office Building. He had been admitted by pre-arrangement, a late night visitor of one Congressman Arvin Partridge of Alabama. Varak reached the heavy wooden door with the brass plate centred in the sculptured panel and knocked. Within seconds it was opened by a slender man in his early twenties whose eyes looked out anxiously from large tortoiseshell glasses. Whoever he was, he was not the gruff, savvy chairman of the Partridge 'Gang', that investigative committee determined to find out why the armed services were getting so little for so much. Not in terms of $1,200 toilet seats and $700 pipe wrenches; those were too blatant to be taken seriously and might even be correctable diversions. What concerned the 'Birds'—another sobriquet—were the 500 per cent overruns and the restricted degree of competitive bidding in defence contracts. What they had only begun to uncover, of course, was a river of corruption with so many tributaries there weren't enough scouts to pursue them in the canoes available.
'I'm here to see Congressman Partridge,' said the blond man, his Czech accent not lost on but conceivably misconstrued by the slender young man at the door.
'Did you…?' began the apparent congressional aide awkwardly. 'I mean when you saw the guards downstairs—'
'If you're asking me whether or not I was checked for firearms, of course I was, and you should know it. They called you from Security. The congressman, please. He's expecting me.'
'Certainly, sir. He's in his office. This way, sir.' The nervous aide led Milos to a second large, dark door. The younger man knocked. 'Congressman—'
'Tell him to come in!' ordered the loud Southern voice from inside. 'And you stay out there and take any calls. I don't care if it's the Speaker or the President, I'm not here!'
'Go right in,' said the aide, opening the door.
Varak was tempted to tell the agitated young man that he was a friendly liaison from the KGB, but decided against it. The aide was there for a reason; few phone calls came to the House Office Building at this hour. Milos stepped inside the large ornate room with the profusion of photographs on the desk, walls and tables, all in one way or another attesting to Partridge's influence, patriotism, and power. The man himself, standing by a curtained window, was not as impressive as he appeared in the photographs. He was short and overweight, with a puffed, angry face below a large head of thinning dyed hair.
'Ah don't know what you're sellin', Blondie,' said the congressman walking forward like an enraged pigeon, 'but if it's what I think it is, I'll take you down so fast you'll wish you had a parachute.'
'I'm not selling anything, sir, I'm giving something away. Something of considerable value, in fact.'
'Muleshit! You want some kind of fuckin' cover-up and I'm not givin' it!'
'My clients seek no cover-up and certainly I don't. But I submit, Congressman, you may.'
'Bull! I listened to you on the phone—you heard something, somebody mentioned drugs and I'd better listen—so I made some damn clear inquiries and found out what I had to know, what I knew was the truth! We're clean here, clean as a 'Bama stream! Now, I want to find out who sent you, what thief in what larcenous boardroom thought he could scare me with this kind of crap?'
'I don't think you'd want this kind of “crap” made public, sir. The information is devastating.'
'Information? Words! Innuendo! Rumours, gossip! Like that black kid who tried to indict the whole gawdamned Congress with his lies!'
'No rumours, no gossip,' said Milos Varak, reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket. 'Only photographs.' The Czech from Inver Brass threw the white envelope on the desk.
'What?' Partridge went instantly to the envelope; he sat down and tore it open, pulling the photographs out one by one and holding them under the green-shaded desk lamp. His eyes widened as his face went white, then blood-red in fury.
What he saw was beyond anything he might have imagined. There were various couples, trios and quartets of partly and fully naked young people using straws with white powder strewn on tables; hastily taken blurred shots of syringes, pills and bottles of beer
