The Shadow Cabinet Read Free

blue-and-white engineer’s hats. ‘World’s Greatest Grandma,’ that’s what she had stenciled on her forklift. When the snack bar vending machines were pulled out by the concessionaire, she started bringing in homemade cookies to sell to the day shift. They caught on big; just a cottage industry, you know, but she kept at it, still driving her forklift. She didn’t think about going public, but her kids franchised her. ‘The World’s Greatest Grandma.’ Just like that. Now they’ve got vending concessions all over. It’s a great success story—a four-million-dollar account for our L.A. office.”
    A gray Ford LTD moved up the ramp, stopped, and the two men climbed in. Stupidly, still holding Larabee’s envelope, Wilson watched them drive off.
    â€œThis yours?” a black youth called from across the ramp, leaving the front door of the old Chevrolet station wagon. On the rear window was a Georgetown University logo and on the bumper below, a tattered I Don’t Brake for Republicans sticker. The vehicle had belonged to Haven Wilson’s younger son during his final two years at Georgetown but was too old and too undependable to take him across country to Oregon, where he’d taken a job with a newspaper after graduation. Wilson had bought it from him for the price of a plane ticket to Portland.
    â€œYeah, it’s mine.” He tore up Larabee’s envelope and dropped it into the trash barrel on the ticket booth island. Thunder boomed across the rooftops.
    â€œSay what?” the black youth asked. A wooden African comb was stuck in the back of his woolly hair.
    â€œWashington,” Wilson said, digging fifty cents from his pocket. “The world’s greatest grandpa and they’re franchising him.”
    2.
    At the rear of a McLean shopping mall and only a few miles from Washington in the Virginia suburbs, The Players still drew a regular luncheon crowd from the nearby beltway consulting firms, from assorted federal agencies, and from CIA headquarters at Langley, but the evening trade in the back room had moved elsewhere after the tavern was bought by an enterprising Vietnamese who’d changed the menu and the decor. Bamboo and tropical plants had replaced the gin-and-bitters English pub atmosphere. The dark oak, the sporting prints, and the polished brass were gone; so were the obscure photographs, the foreign maps, and the tattered red-and-blue Vietcong flag that had once hung, under glass, next to the WC—all packed away by the former owner for a new nautical fish and steak house in Boca Raton. One more casualty of the post-Iran withdrawal syndrome, some said, taking their memories elsewhere.
    On Monday nights in autumn and winter, a few diehards from the old days still gathered in the back room to drink, grouse, and watch Monday night football. With the decline of the Redskins, the economy, and the dignity of federal service, now challenged by that spirit of feckless amateurism that had overrun Washington with the Reagan victory, the back room gatherings were often as churlish as a last poker game in a condemned firehouse.
    Haven Wilson was an occasional member of the back room chin and chowder society. It was a morose group he found assembled there this Monday night, watching a public television documentary on the Moral Majority. Senator Bob Combs was on the tube, his performance videotaped during a recent Senate hearing.
    â€œSomeone ought to burn his ass,” he heard Buster Foreman say. “Burn him big, bigger than Nixon.” Foreman was a large man, an ex-CIA rowdy with a large man’s bullying contempt, his voice burdened by twenty years of bureaucratic grievances.
    Someone had turned down the sound on his way to the bar in front, wearied of Combs’s courtly South Carolina drawl as he chastised a trio of regulatory bureaucrats. Now they sat looking at the pink pubescent face. Without the sound, the cherubic