“We’re going to build a wall,” said Khrushchev.

CHAPTER NINE

George Jakes took Verena Marquand to the Jockey Club for lunch. It was not a club, but a swanky new restaurant in the Fairfax Hotel that had found favor with the Kennedy crowd. George and Verena were the best-dressed couple in the room, she ravishing in a gingham check frock with a wide red belt, he in a tailored dark-blue linen blazer with a striped tie. Nevertheless, they were given a table by the kitchen door. Washington was integrated, but not unprejudiced. George did not let it get to him.

Verena was in town with her parents. They had been invited to the White House later today for a cocktail party being given to thank high-profile supporters such as the Marquands—and, George knew, to keep their goodwill for the next campaign.

Verena looked around appreciatively. “It’s a long time since I was in a decent restaurant,” she said. “Atlanta is a desert.” With parents who were Hollywood stars, she had been raised to think lavish was normal.

“You should move here,” George told her, looking into her startling green eyes. The sleeveless dress showed off the perfection of her café-au-lait skin, and she surely knew it. If she were to move to Washington, he would ask her for a date.

George was trying to forget Maria Summers. He was dating Norine Latimer, a history graduate who worked as a secretary at the National Museum of American History. She was attractive and intelligent, but it was not working: he still thought about Maria all the time. Perhaps Verena might be a more effective cure.

He kept all that to himself, naturally. “You’re out of the swim, all the way down there in Georgia,” he said.

“Don’t be so sure,” she said. “I’m working for Martin Luther King. He’s going to change America more than John F. Kennedy.”

“That’s because Dr. King has only one issue, civil rights. The president has a hundred. He’s the defender of the free world. Right now his major worry is Berlin.”

“Curious, isn’t it?” she said. “He believes in freedom and democracy for German people in East Berlin, but not for American Negroes in the South.”

George smiled. She was always combative. “It’s not just about what he believes,” he said. “It’s what he can achieve.”

She shrugged. “So how much difference can you make?”

“The Justice Department employs nine hundred and fifty lawyers. Before I arrived, only ten were black. Already I’m a ten percent improvement.”

“So what have you achieved?”

“Justice is taking a tough line with the Interstate Commerce Commission. Bobby has asked them to ban segregation in the bus service.”

“And what makes you think this ruling will be enforced any better than all the previous ones?”

“Not much, so far.” George was frustrated, but he wanted to hide the full extent of that from Verena. “There’s a guy called Dennis Wilson, a young white lawyer on Bobby’s personal team, who sees me as a threat, and keeps me out of the really important meetings.”