Primrose has conditioned me to murder, but nothing I’ve ever known has conditioned me to the incredible speed with which the merest and most private whisper leaks into public amplifiers these last few years in Washington. There’s a sonic osmosis in Washington walls that makes a paralyzed deaf mute the only absolute security risk here any more. And what Ham Vair could do with a calm statement that Rufus Brent was going to kill him, I shuddered to think.
But there was no time for me to tell Mrs. Brent what a ghastly thing she’d done. My luncheon guests were arriving and the man who helps Lilac when we have people in was already on his way up the basement stairs to answer the doorbell. I only hoped he was as blank as he looked, because there’s a great deal of loose money around Washington for loose-tongued servants. I think even Mrs. Brent was startled at seeing him. She was certainly startled at the idea of meeting other people in the hall, and anybody who knew who she was must have been very startled a minute later, if they’d seen her plodding up the area steps among the garbage cans, to get out without having to speak to the front door arrivals.
All through cocktails and lunch I found myself quaking all over again at the monstrous indiscretion I’d just been a party to. Fortunately the guests were friends of friends from out of town, and one of them was a man who had a simple if long-winded solution for the world’s bumble-headed ills. Just drop a load of atomic bombs, he said, with infinite variation. All I had to do was sit with a fixed smile, thinking of the one Mrs. Brent had dropped, that the slightest leak would detonate to the lasting glory of Hamilton Vair and the ruinous embarrassment of her husband, who might just as well resign from ITC and close Brentool, Taber City, that instant for all the Chinaman’s chance he had to survive it. In a city where the Capitol Dome, perforated like a kitchen colander, is the symbol of how secrets are kept, it was a shocking piece of information she’d made me responsible for. Creeping out through the garbage cans wasn’t going to help anything if Vair’s spies were on P Street at the moment.
It was the only meal I’d eaten for some time that Rufus Brent’s name wasn’t even mentioned at, except as it kept shouting itself in my own inner ear. I’d have called Colonel Primrose when my guests left, except that it was some kind of hush-hush job he was on and I’d have to work an involved relay system through the Treasury. I also didn’t dare risk a leak of my own. So I did nothing, except keep my mouth shut. I didn’t mention the Brents’ name to anyone, and I even shut my eyes when I saw in the next morning’s paper that Ham Vair had made a rip-roaring speech on the floor of the House daring Rufus Brent to make good his dastardly threat to close down Brentool, Taber City and starve the women and children—I don’t know why they’re always the ones to starve, but presumably their husbands and fathers eat out on those occasions. I wanted nothing at all to do with any dastardly threat Rufus Brent might make, even to speaking the five letters of his name. Until I went over to Wisconsin Avenue to go to the bank the next morning.
I was passing the service station on the corner of Beall Street when I heard a rap on the window glass of the flower shop next door to it. Inside, her white-gloved gyrations indicating she’d come out and would I wait, was the friend who was giving the garden party.
“—You’re coming this afternoon, darling, aren’t you?”
“Why didn’t you say it was for the Rufus Brents?” My tongue got out before I could stop it.
“Oh, sssh . . . sssh, my dear!” She looked hastily around at the baskets of daffodils and lilacs banking the steps behind her. “Whoever told you? But it must have been Marge Seaton, I’ve only told her and one other. And I only told her so she’d get that wretched brother-in-law of hers back in town today. Is he back, do you know? I’ve promised at least half a dozen girls I’d have him there. What they see in him I’ve no idea, except his money, and he’s not as rich as all that.”
It is a problem. Sandy-red-haired, with a face nobody could call handsome except a chimpanzee interested in the evolutionary process in reverse, Tom Seaton’s younger brother Archie certainly has something the young female of the species can’t resist. His own resistance approaches the magnificent. He has a finesse in evading natural and social consequences that makes Sergeant Buck’s efforts on his Colonel’s behalf look like mere inept blundering. He’s an older friend of my older son—he’s twenty-eight—and I’ve been putting up with his engaging deviltries for a long time now.
“I don’t know whether he’s back or not,” I said. I didn’t know he was out of town for that matter, and since he also has a real gift for finding the most likely girls in the most unlikely places, he was the last person I knew to hurry back to a party anywhere. “And it wasn’t Marge who told me anyway,” I said.
“Well, don’t breathe it. And that woman, my dear . . . have you seen her? She’s ominous, truly. Every prominent man who married the girl next door ought to be allowed one tablet of cyanide in case he comes to Washington some day. And Rufus Brent’s ravishing.”
“I thought she was nice,” I said.
“I’ve never heard you so malicious, Grace. I’m ashamed of you.”
“Are her sons coming?” I asked. “They look better than Archie Seaton to me.”
That was deliberate. You may recall from the beauty shop what a couple of presentable sons will do to make their mother worth knowing in Washington.
She brightened instantly. “Darling, I didn’t know they had any sons. The daughter’s all I’ve heard about.” She raised her brows. No doubt she’d seen the picture too. “Ham Vair says she’s really quite shocking.”
“Ham Vair?”
She looked at me quickly. “Grace, you know I wouldn’t have asked him if I hadn’t had to. I just couldn’t leave him out, dear. And he’s the only other person I told the party was for the Brents . . . so it has to be him or Marge or the Brents themselves who told you. I told him so he wouldn’t have to be embarrassed——”
“Did you tell the Brents? Or is it all right to embarrass them?”
She did have the grace to laugh a little. “How could I, darling? No, I’m afraid his name never got on the list I sent them.” She looked worried nevertheless. “Do help me, won’t you? I’m afraid he’s coming, . . . he really hasn’t any manners, you know. I do hope he wears a coat and tie—you should have seen him in the newsreel the other day. But he’ll be in the Senate next year as sure as you’re born. That’s why I had to ask him. My husband’s livid, he thinks Ham’s a real menace.”
“So do I,” I said.
“So does everybody, darling, but it’s better to have a menace for a friend than for a menace.” She laughed at that, as she’d done before, I gathered. “It’s simply a fact of life, dear. You’d be surprised the people who think he’s going a lot farther than the Senate. You’d be appalled at the support he’s gathering even among the kind of people we know.—Do help me, won’t you? Old Washington impresses the pants off him, just now. Unless he decides to be homespun and very rude. . . .”
I hadn’t realized up to that point what a successful menace Ham Vair had become so quick. Congressmen are socially a dime a dozen in Washington. A senator is something else again, especially a young and handsome senator who isn’t married. If this woman, with the ex-Wall Street husband she had, felt Vair had to be stayed with flagons of Scotch and placated with martinis and shrimp on toothpicks, it meant a great deal. Especially if after the jockeying she must have done to snare the Brents for their first social appearance, she’d risk offending them not to offend Ham Vair. It was disturbing. I wondered whether I shouldn’t call Mrs. Brent up and warn her Vair was going to be there, or get Marjorie Seaton to do it for me. Still, Mr. Brent would hardly choose a garden party to kill off a rattlesnake—or would he?—and anyway, I decided there was no use for Mrs. Brent to worry herself into a state of collapse before the ordeal began. It was going to be ordeal enough even without Vair. Too many people feel that way about cyanide and great men’s wives in Washington.
And if Congressman Vair felt any embarrassment about coming to the party for the man he’d accused