Goodbye California - Alistair [114]
‘He’s just scared of the big bad wolves,’ Jeff said.
Like all such rooms designed to give its occupants a proper sense of their own importance, the conference room was suitably impressive. It had the only mahogany-panelled walls in the building, behung with pictures of individuals who looked like the Ten Most Wanted Men but were, in fact, past and present directors and senior administrators of the FBI. It held the only mahogany oval table in the building, one that gleamed with that refulgent splendour rarely found among tables that had seen an honest day’s work. Round it were grouped the only twelve leather- and brass-studded chairs in the building. Before each chair was a leather-cornered blotter, indispensable for doodling but otherwise wholly superfluous, a brass tray for pens and pencils, a water-jug and glass: the comprehensively stocked bar lay behind a sliding wooden panel. The overall effect was slightly dimmed by the two stenographers’ chairs that faced a battery of red, white and black telephones: the chairs were covered in plastic leather. There were no stenographers there that afternoon; this was a top-secret meeting of the gravest national importance, and the faces of most of the twelve seated men accurately reflected their awareness of this.
Nobody occupied the rounded head of the table: Barrow and Mitchell each sat an equidistant foot from the centre line so that there could be no claimant for the chairman’s position. The heavens might be falling in but that would have to wait until protocol had been served. Each had three senior aides at the table – none of the six had been introduced – and all of them had briefcases and important-looking papers on the blotters before them. The fact that it had been deemed necessary to call the meeting clearly indicated that the contents of those papers were worthless: but, at the conference table, one has to have papers to shuffle or one is nothing. Mitchell opened the meeting: a toss of a coin had decided that.
He said: ‘To begin with, I must request, in the politest possible way, that Sergeant Parker and Patrolman Ryder withdraw.’
Ryder said: ‘Why?’
Nobody queried Mitchell’s orders. He bent a cold eye on Ryder. ‘Given the opportunity, Sergeant, I was about to explain. This meeting is on the highest level of national security, and those are not sworn men. Moreover, they are junior police officers both of whom have resigned their positions and therefore have no official capacity: they have not even been assigned to this investigation. That, I think, is a reasonable attitude.’
Ryder considered Mitchell for a few moments, then looked across at Dunne, who sat opposite him. He said, in a tone of exaggerated disbelief: ‘You brought me all the way up here just to listen to this pompous and arrogant rubbish?’
Dunne looked at his fingernails. Jeff looked at the roof. Barrow looked at the roof. Mitchell looked mad. His tone would have frozen mercury.
‘I don’t think I can be hearing properly, Sergeant.’
‘Then why don’t you vacate your position to someone who can? I spoke clearly enough. I didn’t want to come here. I know your reputation. I don’t give a damn about it. If you throw Mr Parker and my son out then, by the same token, you have to throw me out. You say they have no official capacity: neither have you. You just muscled your way in. They have as much right to order you out as you have to order them out: you have no official jurisdiction inside the United States. If you can’t understand that and stop antagonizing people who are doing an honest job of work then it’s time you yielded your chair to someone who can.’
Ryder looked leisurely round the table. No one appeared disposed to make any comment. Mitchell’s face was frozen. Barrow’s was set in an expression of calmly judicial impartiality, a remarkable tribute to the man’s self-control: had he been eavesdropping and alone he would unquestionably have been falling about and holding his sides.
‘So, having established the fact that there are no fewer than