Watergate by Thomas Mallon Read Free Book Online Page A

inside his pants leg, like one of his mother’s old washday stretchers. Once inside the Howard Johnson’s, he’d helped Baldwin to pack up the listening post.
    And that had been just the beginning of a long night, one that wore on through his visit to the pansy lawyer he knew from his job at the PR firm, where he might still be working in full-time peaceful misery had it not been for Colson’s offer of exciting opportunities at the White House. The lawyer was a nice enough fellow and a good enough attorney, but he wasn’t a criminal lawyer, and that’s what they needed—especially the boys. The night’s worst moment had come, he now explained to Dorothy, when he’d had to call Miami and tell Clarita, Bernie’s wife, that her husband was in the D.C. jail along with the police department’s regular nighttime yield of jacked-up dealers and murdering pimps. Her cries had been so anguished and baroque that even Sturgis would not have been able to repeat them
en español
.
    When he got home to Potomac, not much before dawn, he had drunk most of a quart of milk. His ulcer had been killing him, just as it wasnow. He looked over at the safe beside the file cabinet and wished it were a little refrigerator, like the one in room 214.
    “Honey,” he said to Dorothy, steeling himself. “I had a call from a reporter a little while ago. A fellow named Bob Woodward.”
    “Bob Woodward! From Montevideo?”
    “No, same name.”
    Robert Woodward, a career prick, had been Eisenhower’s last ambassador to Uruguay a dozen years before, when Hunt had been station chief in the capital with an embassy job for his cover. The chief diplomat had disliked the disguised operative from the moment they met. Woodward had known of Hunt’s involvement in the Guatemala coup of ’54 and didn’t want that kind of zealotry kicking over the hors d’oeuvre trays in Montevideo. The ambassador couldn’t bring himself to admit that the Uruguayan capital was crawling with Soviet agents, and it galled him that Hunt’s local contacts exceeded his own. Woodward had been afraid, in short, that Howard Hunt might actually do his job, and so he’d kicked him home to Washington as soon as he could.
    Should he be grateful, or furious, that the reposting had led him to the Bay of Pigs? To this day, even in the fix he now found himself, he didn’t really know.
    “How did this other Woodward connect you to what happened Friday night?” asked Dorothy. “Howard, you
weren’t
arrested, were you?”
    “My name and White House phone number were in Bernie’s address book.”
    “Why would Bernie write them there!”
    “Well, he did. Now listen, sweetheart, and try not to worry. My name hasn’t been in the papers yet—so far it’s just McCord—but I expect it will be soon. Maybe even in the papers where you are—”
    “Oh, my God!” cried Dorothy.
    He knew she didn’t need more troubles. Her woes and worries had already, several months ago, sent her to a shrink, who’d then gone and disappeared in a boating accident. Her nerves were so bad that he himself had suggested she get away, take a couple of the kids with her on a vacation to Europe, even though they could hardly afford it—not with the school expenses and the continuing medical bills from the car accident that had blighted the life of one of their daughters. Not when hewas paying for the maid in Potomac as well as the horse and the country club. Years ago a deskmate had teased him about all the spending:
Howard
,
those old OSS guys were living off family money—not their salaries!
But the bills had always stayed high. Even in Montevideo there’d been the Jockey Club.
    He now found himself staring at the phone in his hand, unable to remember whether he and Dorothy had said goodbye or been cut off.
    He went over to the safe and spun the combination just as he had in the middle of Friday night, when he’d stopped here before rousting the lawyer out of bed. Inside the little vault, behind