Official Privilege Page 10

  Army, Retired, had already been in the business when Malachi got out of the Army, and he had showed him the ropes.

  “You go for the horse-holders, Malachi—the executive assistants, executive secretaries, administrative aides—guys like that. These are the guys who take care of problems for the big guns. Sometimes the problems have to be worked offline, if you know what I mean.

  Some of the problems don’t smell so good, you get close to the situation. In Washington, people don’t want problems, see? Shit, everybody’s got enough problems, and the movers and the shakers in the government, they got the problems of the whole frigging world to deal with, see? That’s where guys like you and me can do a nice little job of work.”

  Monroney had put him on his own payroll and showed him how things were handled.

  “You don’t want to do piecework, see—you wanna be on retainer. That’s the secret to real money in this town. They pay you for the privilege of calling you when they need you. Now, you gotta understand something here: They call, you frigging well gotta come, see? But since they almost never get themselves in the shit all at the same time, you go get eight, ten, twelve permanent clients, and take a retainer from each one of them. It adds up, man.”

  And so it had. Because of his physical size, Malachi had specialized in what Monroney euphemistically called “offline personal liaison work.”

  Malachi thought Monroney was a hot shit, always using these two-and three-word phrases to describe what was a simple job of strong-arm. But his years in the military police had somewhat diluted his none-too-strong sense of right and wrong. He had done a good bit of strong-arm in the MPs, and the system on the outside was no different.

  Some guy is giving a great man gas pains, you go around and see the guy, share your thinking with him, convince him that there’s another way to get ahead in life than the one he is currently pursuing. “Washington is the city of opportunity, the land of alternative choices,” Monroney would say. “Alternative choices,” —Malachi loved it.

  Malachi had been an Army brat himself; his father had been a sergeant all the way through World War II, rising to the rank of master sergeant.

  After the war, he had ended up assigned in Washington at the Arlington Hall station, an Army Intelligence organization. His mother had been a mousy little woman who kept her own counsel for the duration of her marriage to his father, who finally drank himself to death two years after retiring on thirty from the Army. Malachi later realized that the big war had probably been the highlight of his father’s life. His old man had been an equal-opportunity hater: He had hated blacks, Jews, Catholics, foreigners, officers, lawyers, and just about any other recognizable ethnic or professional group. Malachi had soaked up more than a few of these notions along the way.

  Life on a succession of Army posts as a kid had taught Malachi that there were two very clearly denned strata of people in the army: the officers and the enlisted.

  To hear his father talk about it over the sixth or seventh beer of the evening, the officers were the root of all the Army’s problems. And while the adults had been clearly grounded in the differences, enlisted kids living on the base had to learn the hard way that officers’ kids were better than the kids of the enlisted, just like officers’ housing was much better than housing for the enlisted. The officers’ club was a brick mansion at the end of the post’s parade ground; it had a big fenced-in swimming pool that was reserved for officers and their dependents only. The enlisted club was a glorified beer hall, with a smaller, not so terrific pool, and something made it against the rules for the enlisted people’s kids to use the officers’ swimming pool. And about the only lesson his mother had taken the time to impart to him was that the underlying difference among all these people was what happened to them after high school: Officers’ kids went to college and became officers, or lawyers, or bankers, and enlisted people’s kids went into the Army and became troops.

  After his father died at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center of liver failure, his mother decided to go back to Arkansas. Malachi, an only child, was given the option of moving in with an Army warrant’s family to finish high school in Northwest Washington. The warrant, a crusty signals officer assigned to the Navy’s security group command on Western Avenue, reinforced what Malachi’s mother had told him: that a high school education would condemn him to second-rate status in just about anything he tried. With the warrant’s help, he had plugged himself into the Army’s enlisted education network and found out that there were college scholarships available to Army enlistees who had a high school diploma—scholarships that could lead to a commission.

  It involved taking a chance, because he would have to enlist first, then apply. If he didn’t get it, he would do a four-year hitch in the barracks. But Malachi, with no other prospects, had enlisted in the Army Reserves one month after graduating from Wilson High in Northwest D. C., and he applied for the college-bound program after half a year of going to monthly Reserve meetings.

  He had gained a place at the University of Maryland three months later.

  Although not part of the ROTC program, he had been assigned to the Army ROTC unit for administrative purposes, and he surreptitiously competed with the more privileged cadets, even though he was technically an E-2 in the Army Reserves and they were already officer candidates.

  Malachi had been a big, bruising kid when he went in, and he grew even bigger in the summers of basic and then midlevel infantry training required by the program.

  He found out that he was smart, or at least smarter than most of the cadets who were drinking their way through the ROTC program in the very early sixties. But in a way, it was the Army base all over again: There were a lot of officers’ kids in the ROTC program. Unlike them, he had no money for fraternities or a car, and he worked two jobs all year long to pay his expenses, living with three other enlisted guys who were in similar straits. He majored in criminology after seeing a training film produced by the military police corps when they came on the campus recruiting, and he graduated in 1961 with a full bachelor’s degree.

  After OCS, he had spent the obligatory eighteen months with the ground-pounders before being accepted for the military police corps in

  1963.

  Everything changed in 1965 when he was sent off to Vietnam and the brave new world of LBJ’s counterinsurgency program, where the U.S. Army was bravely grappling with the mysteries of winning over the hearts and minds of unruly Asian Communists. As a first lieutenant, he had been assigned to run an MP shift out of the military police headquarters on the sprawling Tan Son Nhut air base outside of Saigon. Becoming bored with being a glorified police desk sergeant, he had taken to cruising the base in an MP jeep after dark, mostly to get out of the office and away from all the Vr, y>.

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  paperwork, and also to see what he might see. He had heard some interesting stories about a black market that was supposedly operating on the base, right beneath the Army’s nose. None of the senior officers in the provost marshal office could understand how it could be going on when only the Americans had control and access to the goodies. Malachi, never having really graduated mentally from his enlisted background and upbringing, thought he might know how it was being done. One night he had apprehended three men who were loading up a deuce and a half with treasures from the back of the main exchange warehouse. One of them turned out to be a sergeant first class by the name of Monroney, a noncom Malachi had known back in the States when he was going through basic. Monroney had invited Malachi to take a little walk away from the warehouse, then had shown him five thousand American dollars in cash.

  Since the Army in Vietnam was using military scrip currency at the time, all that real cash was a mesmerizing sight.

  “This is walking-around money for the guys who’ve playing the game right, Lieutenant,” Monroney had said. “You want in, we can always find a use for a right thinking provost marshal guy who knows the score.”

  Malachi had just stared at
all that money.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” he had asked finally.

  “A buncha us sergeants. No slopes, okay? Just regular Army GIs, guys like you and me—grew up in the outfit all our lives—who’ve figured out this ain’t no real war. So we’re gonna make a buck or two out of it.

  Everybody knows this Vietnamese counterinsurgency stuff is all bullshit, so why the hell not? You been here awhile, you look around. The slope generals and colonels are all putting all that American AID money in their Swiss bank accounts. The American senior officers, the lifers, are all out here for the medals and the career shit. The only guys getting their asses kicked are the troops, as usual, hunh? But this is still Asia, see? Somebody’s gonna run a black market. The big war, it was the civilians. Korea, there wasn’t one until after the armistice. This time, it’s gonna be the good guys, the sergeants.”

  Monroney had shuffled through the stack of bills and then invited Malachi to take a quick count, allowing him to discover what a wonderful sound money could make when it came in such quantities.

  “Whaddaya say, Lieutenant?” Monroney purred.

  “Guy like you, inside the military police: You can name your price. And you don’t hafta do bad-guy shit—you just hafta not do certain good-guy shit at the right time.

  You follow me?”

  Malachi had made up his mind right there and then.

  His commission was not much more than skin-deep, anyway. He was a reserve, and all his superiors were regulars from West Point and the ROTC program. The ROTC guys had been given their commissions upon graduation; Malachi and his roommates had all had to go through OCS to get theirs. The real officers couldn’t figure out who had to be running the black market scam right under their high-and-mighty noses. What this Monroney guy was offering was the first sensible proposition Malachi had seen since coming to this crazy country, an dover the next two and a half years, Malachi made more money than he had ever dreamed of making in ten careers in the Army—in cash, nice, green, untaxable cash, complete with accommodating Chinese bankers in Cholon who could move things around a network of extremely discreet banks all over the world.

  The sergeants’ network had expanded to Germany as the Vietnam War dragged on, and Malachi, after two and half years in Saigon, had been part of it there, too.

  So it had been only natural that he migrated to Tommy’s business when he got out, especially with Monroney right there in D.C. with yet another growing concern on his hands. Considering how Malachi’s tour in Germany, and effectively his career in the Army, had ended, Malachi had been very fortunate indeed that Tommy Monroney was waiting outside the gates. And when Monroney had “retired” three years ago, Malachi had picked up some of his business, which gave him a sprinkling of clients across the spectrum of unofficial Washington. All of his business was on low-level monthly retainers, retainers that were sweetened from time to time when the great men and their horse-holders recognized that Malachi, given some of the things he knew about, had proved himself capable of exceptional discretion.

  Two nights later he was on the second floor of the Army and Navy Town Club, sitting in a chair in one corner of the bar. He was dressed in a subdued dark business suit.

  The captain had booked one of the suites on the third floor in his own name. The great man was supposedly attending a Defense intelligence association reception in the main dining room that evening. The plan was for the principal to break away from the reception to come upstairs to meet It. (jg) Hardin in the captain’s suite for fifteen minutes. Once the great man had gone to the suite, the captain would come back downstairs, walk by the lounge, and give Malachi the signal, at which point he had been instructed to move from the lounge to the third-floor library and sit at the far end of the main library table, where he would have a clear view of the elevators. The idea was for Malachi to get a good look at this Lieutenant (jg) Hardin when the captain brought him up to the meeting. Once Malachi had had his look at Hardin, he was to return to the lounge on the second floor so that neither the principal nor Hardin would see him when they left the suite. After the meeting, the captain would back-brief him with new instructions, if any.

  Sitting in an ancient leather chair that was beginning to hurt his legs, Malachi sipped a Harper hundred and watched the denizens of Geezer Gulch as they went through their martinis and cackled about the latest administration outrage. He was mildly amused at all the maneuvers laid out by the captain. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know who the captain’s principal was. But maybe it was for the best—the old deniability rule: What you never saw, and so on.

  The captain appeared from the second-floor elevators and walked by the entrance to the cocktail lounge.

  He looked in as if casually surveying the room, then turned around and headed for the double stairway that led back down to the main reception area. Malachi finished his drink, got up, and took the elevator to the third floor. He went into the library and did a quick tour. The offices were closed and there was no one in the library. He pulled a chair over to the end of the main table, the one farthest from the entrance, and then went over to the panel of light switches and turned off half the lights in the library, casting the main room into shadow. He settled back in his chair, popped out a book from the stack on the table, put it on his chest, folded his arms, and appeared to go to sleep. To anyone going by the double-door entrance to the library, he should look like all the rest of the old fuds who came up here to read the papers and fall asleep in their chairs.

  Five minutes passed, and then the elevator doors chimed and the captain came out, leading a young black officer in uniform. The captain stopped near the entrance to the library to ask the lieutenant a question.

  Good moves, Captain, Malachi thought as he looked the kid over through slitted eyes; the kid was paying attention to the captain and never once looked into the library. He was young, very young—maybe twenty three, twenty-four; not very tall, kind of thin, in fact, his double-breasted uniform coat with its one and a half stripes looked like it would wrap right around him. He had a narrow, intense face, close-cropped hair, and he was clearly agitated. His hands moved around a lot when he talked.

  Probably speaking in jive, Malachi thought unkindly. He doesn’t look like an officer, Malachi thought. More like a kid in costume.

  Finally, the captain led the lieutenant out of sight down the hall.

  Malachi listened for the sound of a door, waited another minute, and then got up and went down the hall. He had asked the front desk when he had arrived where the suites were on the third floor. There were two, all the way at the far end of the hall, overlooking 17th Street. He walked down the carpeted hall until he came to a pair of partially opened fire doors that led to the executive suite hallway. He could hear voices coming from one of the suites, and he crept closer to that door.

  But the voices remained indistinct; the club was an old building, and all these big oak doors were real. He listened for a few minutes, keeping one eye on the hallway, until he heard the voices starting to rise. Somebody was losing his temper. He still could not make out what they were saying, but the tone and the volume were pretty much self-explanatory. The lieutenant was not there for a social call—which meant he did know something.

  Malachi backed away from the doors and went back to the elevators, taking one down to the second floor and returning to his corner seat in the lounge. His empty glass was still right where he had left it, sitting in a pool of condensation. Really alert service in here, he thought. The waitress saw him come in. She looked puzzled, but when he raised the glass, she smiled and went to get him a refill. While he waited for the captain to return, he considered the problem. He began to rummage around in his mind for contacts in Philadelphia while he waited for the captain to escort the kid out of there. Angelo Fiori, he thought. I’ll bet old Angelo can help me out with this little problem.

  Angelo owes me one from our Saigon days.

  The captain came back ten minutes after escorting the lieutenant downstairs. H
e found Malachi and pulled up a chair.

  “Well, this thing gets more complicated by the hour.”

  “What does the kid want?”

  “He came steaming in there, would not sit down, would not shake hands, big chip on his shoulder.”

  “What does he want?” Malachi repeated.

  “He came right out with it—he confirmed that the girl had called him in Philadelphia, told him that she had been having an affair with the principal, that she had shut it off, and how things had started getting nasty.

  She told him about your little seance, and that you threatened her. She also told him she ran you out of there with a knife. Did that really happen, by the way?”

  The captain was looking at Malachi’s right hand with its four bandaged fingers. Malachi ignored the question and leaned toward the captain, his eyes intent, staring at him until the captain was forced to stop looking at his hand.

  “Cut to the chase,” Malachi said. “What does he want?”

  “Want. Well, he wants … satisfaction. Unless my principal can prove that his sister’s accident wasn’t intentional, our lieutenant will go to the media and expose the story of this very senior, married white naval officer having an illicit affair with a black woman who also happened to be a junior officer.”

  Malachi sat back in his chair. “And what did your principal say to that?”

  “He did the adulterer’s dance. Denied everything.

  Denied that there had been an affair. He said that he had met the girl socially, in the course of official business, and had had drinks with her twice, both times in the context of official functions where they were both required to be. He made it out to be a father confessor sort of thing, that he’d been giving the girl career advice.

  Hinted that the girl had perhaps been indulging her imagination in thinking that there was more to it than that. Said that the notion of it being a sexual thing was ridiculous—he was more than twice her age, and he certainly knew better than to fool around with a junior officer. He added that she was a good-looking black woman who would necessarily prefer any attractive black male to some elderly white man—that seemed to hit home, by the way. It seemed to reinforce the kid’s own notions of how things ought to be—I could see it in his face. Anyhow, he went on that he had never sent anyone around, because there was nothing going on in the first place. Said the girl had sought his advice because she had been having some problems adapting to a very white Navy headquarters staff job and had taken the opportunity to talk to someone about it, someone not directly in her own organization. He was good— very good.