Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

“It’s usually good to keep things well hidden,” said Tim to Hawkins. He realized that his level of inebriation had caught up to that of the reporters at the railing. And being out in the open with Hawk, in a setting so much more public than even the Charlottesville restaurant, was making him giddy. Maybe he shouldn’t have said what he just did, but Hawk seemed to get his meaning and laughed over it: “There are all kinds of things hidden here.” Fuller pointed to the figure of G. David Schine, who had entered with an attractive girl Tim recognized as Iris Flores, one of the private’s regular girlfriends; she had been interviewed in executive session but never called upon to testify in public. In the closed hearing she had described herself as an “inventor” trying to market her latest brainstorm, a new-and-improved nylon brassiere strap. Joe and Jean McCarthy might be home tending their wounds, while Cohn burnt the midnight oil back in the office, but here, Tim thought, was Schine, smiling—in uniform, no less—and being mobbed, followed around by Dorothy Kilgallen, Hearst’s gossip writer, who took down his every word. “Mr. Fuller.” Tommy McIntyre, full of vigor and vim, gleaming with a hard nonalcoholic brightness, approached Hawkins and shook his hand. He displayed a certainty—apparent from the way he nodded at both of them—that the connection between Mr. Fuller and “Master Laughlin,” as he sometimes called him, was hardly casual. Hawkins did nothing to disabuse him of the idea.