and whisky; finally clear photographs of several couples making love.
'Cameras come in so many sizes these days,' said Varak. 'Microtechnology has produced them as small as buttons on a jacket or a shirt—’
'Oh, Jesus Christ!' cried Partridge in agony. 'That's my house in Arlington! And that's—'
'Congressman Bookbinder's home in Silver Springs, as well as the houses of three other members of your committee. Your work takes you out of Washington a great deal of the time.'
'Who took these?' asked Partridge, barely audible.
'I won't answer that except to give you my word that the person is thousands of miles away without the negatives and no chance of returning to this country. One could say a university exchange student in political science.'
'We've achieved so much and now it's all down the goddamned drain… Oh, God!'
'Why, Congressman?' inquired Varak sincerely. 'These young people aren't the committee. They're not your attorneys or your accountants or even senior aides. They're children who've made terrible mistakes in the headstrong environment of the most powerful capital in the world. Get rid of them; tell them their lives and careers are ruined unless they get help and straighten out, but don't stop your committee.'
'Nobody will ever believe us again,' said Partridge, staring straight ahead as if speaking to the wall. 'We're as rotten as everyone we go after. We're hypocrites.'
'Nobody has to know—’
'Shit!' exploded the congressman from Alabama, pouncing on the phone and pressing a button, holding it down beyond the point where his call was answered. 'Get in here!' he screamed. The young aide came through the door as Partridge rose from the desk. 'You fancy-school son of a bitch! I asked you to tell me the truth! You lied!'
'No, I didn't!' yelled back the young man, his eyes watering behind the tortoiseshell glasses. 'You asked me what's going on—what is going on—and I told you nothing—nothing is going on! A couple of us got busted three, four weeks ago and it scared all of us! Okay, we were dumb, stupid, we all agreed, but we didn't hurt anyone but ourselves! We quit the whole scene and a hell of a lot more than that, but you and your hotshots around here never noticed. Your snotty staff works us eighty hours a week, then calls us dumb kids while they use the stuff we feed 'em to get in front of the cameras. Well, what you never noticed is that you've got a whole new kindergarten class here now. The others all quit and you never even noticed! I'm the only one left because I couldn't get out.'
'You're out now.'
'You're gawdamned right, Emperor Jones!'
'Who?'
'The allusion would grab you,' said the young man, dashing out of the door and slamming it behind him.
'Who was that?' asked Varak.
'Arvin Partridge, Junior,' replied the congressman quietly and sat down, his eyes on the door. 'He's a third-year law student at Virginia. They were all law students and we worked their asses off around the clock for spit and little thanks. But we were giving them something, too, and they betrayed the trust we placed in them by giving it.'
'Which was?'
'Experience they'd never get anywhere else, not in the courts or in the law books, nowhere but here. My son split legal and grammatical hairs and he knows it. He lied to me about something that can destroy all of us. I'll never trust him again.'
'I'm sorry.'
'It's not your problem!' snapped Partridge, his reflective voice suddenly gone. 'All right, trash boy,' he continued harshly, 'what do you want from me to keep this committee together? You said no cover-up, but I suppose there are a couple of dozen ways of saying it without saying it. I'll have to weigh the pluses and the minuses, won't I?'
'There are no negatives for you, sir,' said Varak, taking out several folded sheets of paper, then unfolding them and placing them on the desk in front of the congressman. They comprised a resume, a small identification photograph in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. 'My clients want this man on your
