Mickie sat over his second whisky-on-the-rocks in a little bar next to the funeral parlor on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Al's Little Cafe was small, dark, narrow, and filled with the mingled scent of beer, tobacco smoke, and Italian cooking.
Hanging over the bar was an oil painting of a nude Al had accepted from a student at the Corcoran Gallery who needed to eat and drink and was broke.
The nude was small and black-haired and elfin, and was called "Eloise".

This was one place where Moonan could go for a drink in a back booth without anyone noticing him, or at least coming up and hanging around and wanting to know all the low-down.
The other patrons were taxi drivers and art students and small shopkeepers.
The reporters had not yet discovered that this was his hideaway.

His friend Jane was with him.
She was wise enough to realize a man could be good company even if he did weigh too much and didn't own the mint.
She was the widow of a writer who had died in an airplane crash, and Mickie had found her a job as head of the historical section of the Treasury.
This meant sorting out press clippings and the like.

Jane sat receptive and interested.
Mickie had a pleasant glow as he said, "You see, both of them, I mean the President and Jeff Lawrence, are romantics.
A romantic is one who thinks the world is divinely inspired and all he has to do is find the right key, and then divine justice and altruism will appear.
It's like focusing a camera;
the distant ship isn't there until you get the focus.
You know what I'm talking about.
I'm sure all girls feel this way about men until they live with them.

"But when it comes to war, the Colonel knows what it is and Jeff doesn't.
Mr. Christiansen knows that a soldier will get the Distinguished Service Medal for conduct that would land him in prison for life or the electric chair as a civilian.
He had a mean, unbroken sheer bastard in his outfit, and someone invented the name Trig for him.
That's to say, he was trigger happy.
He'd shoot at anything if it was the rear end of a horse or his own sentry.
He was a wiry, inscrutable, silent country boy from the red clay of rural Alabama, and he spoke with the broad drawl that others normally make fun of.
But not in front of Trig.
I heard of some that tried it back in the States, and he'd knock them clear across the room.
There'd been a pretty bad incident back at the Marine base.
A New York kid, a refugee from one of the Harlem gangs, made fun of Trig's accent, and drew a knife.
Before the fight was over, the Harlem boy had a concussion and Trig was cut up badly.
They caught Trig stealing liquor from the officers' mess, and he got a couple of girls in trouble.
The fear of punishment just didn't bother him.
It wasn't there.
It was left out of him at birth.
This is why he made such a magnificent soldier.
He wasn't troubled with the ordinary, rank-and-file fear that overcomes and paralyzes and sends individual soldiers and whole companies under fire running in panic.
It just didn't occur to Trig that anything serious would happen to him.
Do you get the picture of the kind of fellow he was"?

Jane nodded with a pleasant smile.

"All right.
There was a sniper's nest in a mountain cave, and it was picking off our men with devilish accuracy.
The Colonel ordered that it be wiped out, and I suggested, 'You ask for volunteers, and promise each man on the patrol a quart of whisky, ten dollars and a week-end pass to Davao'.
Trig was one of the five volunteers.
The patrol snaked around in back of the cave, approached it from above and dropped in suddenly with wild howls.
You could hear them from our outpost.
There was a lot of shooting.
We knew the enemy was subdued, because a flare was fired as the signal.
So we hurried over.
Two of our men were killed, a third was wounded.
Trig and a very black colored boy from Detroit had killed or put out of action ten guerrillas by grenades and hand-to-hand fighting.
When we got there, Trig and the Negro were quarreling over possession of a gold crucifix around the neck of a wounded Filipino.
The colored boy had it, and Trig lunged at him with a knife and said, 'Give that to me, you black bastard.
We don't 'low nigras to walk on the same sidewalk with white men where I come from'.

"The Negro got a bad slice on his chest from the knife wound".

"What did the Colonel do about the men"?
Jane asked in her placid, interested way.

Mickie laughed.
"He recommended both of them for the DSM and the Detroit fellow for the Purple Heart, too, for a combat-inflicted wound.
So you see Mr. Christiansen knows what it's all about.
But not Jeff Lawrence.
When he was in the war, he was in Law or Supplies or something like that, and an old buddy of his told me he would come down on Sundays to the Pentagon and read the citations for medals -- just like the one we sent in for Trig -- and go away with a real glow.
These were heroes nine feet tall to him".

Jefferson Lawrence was alone at the small, perfectly appointed table by the window looking out over the river.
He had dinner and sat there over his coffee watching the winding pattern of traffic as it crossed the bridge and spread out like a serpent with two heads.
Beside him was Mrs. Dalloway.
He thought how this dainty, fragile older woman threading her way through the streets of Westminster on a day in June, enjoying the flowers in the shops, the greetings from old friends, but never really drawing a deep, passionate breath, was so like himself.
He, and Mrs. Dalloway, too, had never permitted themselves the luxury of joys that dug into the bone marrow of the spirit.

He had not because he was both poor and ambitious.
Poverty imposes a kind of chastity on the ambitious.
They cannot stop to grasp and embrace and sit in the back seat of cars along a dark country lane.
No, they must look the other way and climb one more painful step up the ladder.
He made the decision with his eyes open, or so he thought.
At any cost, he must leave the dreary Pennsylvania mining town where his father was a pharmacist.
And so he had, so he had.
At State College, he had no time to walk among the violets on the water's edge.
From his room he could look out in springtime and see the couples hand in hand walking slowly, deliciously, across the campus, and he could smell the sweet vernal winds.
He was not stone.
He was not unmoved.
He had to teach himself patiently that these traps were not for him.
He must mentally pull the blinds and close the window, so that all that existed was in the books before him.
At law school, the same.
More of this stamping down of human emotion as a young lawyer in New York.
By the time he was prosperous enough -- his goals were high -- he was bald and afraid of women.
The only one who would have him was his cripple, the strange unhappy woman who became his wife.
Perhaps it was right;
perhaps it was just.
He had dared to defy nature, to turn his back to the Lorelei, and he was punished.
Like Mrs. Dalloway, with her regrets about Peter Walsh, he had his moments of melancholy over a youth too well spent.
If he had had a son, he would tell him, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may This same flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying".
But then his son could afford it.

Lawrence was waiting for Bill Boxell.
The Vice President had called and asked if he could see the Secretary at his home.
He said the matter was urgent.
The Secretary was uneasy about the visit.
He did not like Boxell.
He suspected something underhanded and furtive about him.
Lawrence could not put his finger on it precisely, and this worried him.
When you disliked or distrusted a man, you should have a reason.
Human nature was not a piece of meat you could tell was bad by its smell.
Lawrence stared a minute at the lighted ribbon of traffic, hoping that a clue to his dislike of the Vice President would appear.
It did not.
Therefore, he decided he was unfair to the young man and should make an effort to understand and sympathize with his point of view.

A half hour later the Vice President arrived.
He looked very carefully at every piece of furnishing, as though hoping to store this information carefully in his mind.
He observed the Florentine vase in the hall, the Renoir painting in the library, as well as the long shelves of well-bound volumes;
the pattern of the Oriental rug, the delicate cut-glass chandelier.

He said to the Secretary, "I understand you came from a little Pennsylvania town near Wilkes-Barre.
How did you find out about this"?
He waved his arm around at the furnishings.

It was not a discourteous question, Lawrence decided.
This young man had so little time to learn he had to be curious;
he had to find out.
The Secretary did not tell him at what cost, at what loneliness, he learned these things.
He merely said, "Any good decorator these days can make you a tasteful home".

The Vice President said, "If you hear of any names that would fix me cheap in return for advertising they decorated the Vice President's home, let me know.
I can do business with that kind".

Again, Lawrence thought a little sadly, these were the fees of poverty and ambition.
Boxell did not have the chance to grow up graciously.
He had to acquire everything he was going to get in four years.

They had brandy in the library.
Boxell looked at Lawrence with a searching glance, the kind that a prosecuting attorney would give a man on trial.
What are your weaknesses?
Where will you break?
How best to destroy your peace?

The Vice President said with a slight bluster, "There isn't anyone who loves the President more than I do.
Old Chris is my ideal.
At the same time, you have to face facts and realize that a man who's been in the Marine Corps all his life doesn't understand much about politics.
What does a monk know about sex"?

Lawrence listened with the practiced, deceptive calm of the lawyer, but his face was in the shadow.

"So, we have to protect the old man for his own good.
You see what I mean.
Congress is full of politicians, and if you want to get along with them, you have to be politic.
This is why I say we just can't go ahead and disarm the Germans and pull down our own defenses.
Let me tell you what happened to me today.
A fellow came up to me, a Senator, I don't have to tell you his name, and he told me, 'I love the President like a brother, but God damn it, he's crucifying me.
I've got a quarter of a million Germans in my state, and those krautheads tune in on Father Werther every night, and if he tells them to go out and piss in the public square, that's what they do.
He's telling them now to write letters to their Congressmen opposing the disarmament of Germany'.
And another one comes to me and he says, 'Look here, there's a mill in my state employs five thousand people making uniforms for the Navy.