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THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE |
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There is an immutable phrase at large in the languages of the world that places fabulous ransom on every word in it: The love of a good woman. It means what it says and no matter what the perspective or stains of the person who speaks it, the phrase defies devaluing. The bitter and the kind can chase each other around it, this mulberry bush of truth and consequence, and the kind may convert the bitter and the bitter may emasculate the kind but neither can change its meaning because the love of a good woman does not give way to arbitrage. The phrase may be used in sarcasm or irony to underscore the ludicrous result of the lack of such love, as in the wrecks left behind by bad women or silly women, but such usage serves to mark the changeless value. The six words shine neither with sentiment nor sentimentality. They are truth; a light of its own; unchanging. Eugenie Rose Cheyney was a good woman and she loved Marco. That fact gave Marco a large edge, tantamount to wiping out the house percentage in banker's craps. No matter what the action, that is a lot of vigorish to have going for anybody. Eugenie Rose had had her office route all business to her home that day, because she knew Marco would call whenever he woke up at Raymond Shaw's apartment. Her boss, Justin, was overdrawn at the bank, and it irritated her that they would seek to bother him about such a thing. He was overdrawn for a tiny period every sixty days or so, at which time he always managed to make an apple-cheeked deposit that kept the bank not only honest but richer. The set construction company had called at about eleven o'clock about some bills that the general manager had questioned. She had all of his questions ready and a set of the only answers in Christendom so she was able to cut four hundred and eleven dollars and sixty-three cents from the construction of a fireplace for the main room of the castle. After that call sixteen persons of every stripe, meaning from quarter-unit investors in the next show down to press agents for health food restaurants, called to try to get house seats for specific performances, and she had to invent a new theatrical superstition to fit the problem, which was how the others had come into being, by saying that surely they knew it was bad luck to distribute seat locations for the New York run until the out-of-town notices were in. And so chaos was postponed again. When she hadn't heard from Marco by seven-ten that evening she decided that he must have tried and tried to call her while all those other calls had been coming through, so she called Raymond at home, reading Marco's handwriting as he had written the number down as though it had the relative value of the sound of his voice at her very ear. Before Raymond answered, as the instrument purred the signal, she heard the elevator door open, pause, then close in the hallway just outside her door. She decided she knew it must be Marco. She slammed the phone down and rushed to the door worrying about her hair, so that she could hold it open in welcome before he could have a chance to ring the bell. He looked terrible. He said, "Let's get married, Rosie." He stepped over the threshold and grabbed her as though she were the rock of the ages. He kissed her. She kicked the door shut. She started to kiss him in return and it turned his knees to water. "When?" she inquired. "How long does it take in this state? That's how long." She kissed him again and massaged his middle with her pelvis. "I want to marry you, Ben, more than I want to go on eating Italian food, which will give you a slight idea, but we can't get married so quickly," she breathed on him. "Why?" "Ben, you're thirty-nine years old. We met three days ago and that's not enough time to get a bird's-eye view or a microscopic view of anyone. When we get married, Ben, and please notice how I said when we get married, not when 1 get married, we have to stay married because I might turn into a drunk or a religieuse or a cryto-Republican if we ever failed, so let's wait a week." "A week." "Please." "Well, all right. There is such a thing as being overmature about decisions like this but we won't get married for a week. But we'll get the papers and take the blood tests and post the banns and plan the children's names and buy the ring and rent the rice and call the folks --" "Folks?" He stared at her for a moment. "You neither?" "No." "An orphan?" "I used to be convinced that, as a baby, I had been the only survivor of a space ship which had overshot Mars." "Very sexy stuff." "You look a different kind of awful from yesterday. Mr. Shaw told me you slept all night. Quietly." "Ah. You talked to Raymond." "This morning. He is very formal about you." "Poor Raymond. I'm the only one he has. Not that he needs anybody. Old Raymond has only enough soul to be able to tolerate two or three people in his life. I'm one of them. There's a girl I think he weeps over after he locks the doors. There's room for just about one more and he'll be full up. I hope it's you because having Raymond on your side is not unlike being backed up by the First Army." "Did you have a bad time today?" "Yeah. Well, yes and no." He sat down as suddenly as though his legs had broken. She descended like a great dancer to rest on the floor beside his chair. He rubbed the back of her neck with his right hand, absent-mindedly, but with sensual facility. "You are the holiest object I have in the world," he said slowly and with a thick voice, "so I swear upon you that I am going to get even with Senator John Iselin for what happened today. I don't know how yet. But how I will do it will always be somewhere in my mind from today on. From today on I'll always be thinking about how I, Marco, am going to make him pay for what he did today. I probably won't kill him. I found out today that I will probably never make a murderer." She stared up at him. His face glistened with sweat and his eyes were sad instead of being vengeful. Her own eyes, the Tuareg eyes, were black almonds with blue centers; a changing blue, like mist over far snow. They were the eyes of a lady left over from an army of crusaders who had taken the wrong turning, moving left toward Jarabub in Africa, instead of right, toward London, after Walter the Penniless had sent them to loot the Holy Land in 1096, to settle forever in the deep Sahara, to continue the customs of the lists, knight errantry, and the wooing of ladies fair for whose warm glances the warriors sang their songs. She stared at him steadily, then rested her head on the side of his leg and sat quietly. "Iselin is Raymond's stepfather," Marco told her. "He sits right there in his office on the Hill. He's the most accessible, available senator we have, you know, because most of our newspapers are published right in his office nowadays. Senator Iselin is really fond of Raymond because Johnny is a terrific salesman. Raymond has no use for him, and a lack of buyer feeling about the product has always been a tremendous challenge to a salesman. All I needed to do was to call Johnny, tell him Raymond sent me, be shown right into his office, lock the door, and shoot him through the head. Or maybe beat him to death with a steel chair." Marco was talking quietly, through his teeth. He thought about his lost opportunity for a moment. "Did you know Raymond was a Medal of Honor man, Rosie?" he asked almost rhetorically. She shook her gray-white head without answering. "I wish I could explain to you what that means. But I'd have to find a way to send you back to grow up on Army posts and put you through the Academy and find you a couple of wars and a taste for Georgie Patton and Caesar's Commentaries and Blucher and Ney and Moltke, but thank God we can't do any of that. Just believe it because I say it, that a Medal of Honor man is the best man any soldier can think of because he has achieved the most of what every soldier was meant to do. Anyway, after Raymond got the medal, I began to have nightmares. They were pretty bad. I had come to the worst of them when I found you, thank God. The nightmares were always the same for five years and they took a lot of trouble to suggest that Raymond had not won the medal rightfully after I had sworn he had won it and the men of my patrol had sworn to it. In the end, the dreams have convinced me that we were wrong. I am sure now that the Russians wanted Raymond to have the medal so he got it. I don't know why. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I never will know why. But I'm an officer trained in intelligence work. I filled a notebook with details about furniture and clothing and complexions and speech defects and floor coverings. I talked everything over with Raymond. He got the idea that I should request my own court-martial for falsifying the report and explode a public investigation so that the enemy, at the very least, would think we knew more than we knew. That idea ended this afternoon with a lieutenant general putting a bullet into his head because it was the only possible thing he could have done to make Iselin hear the Army's protest against what Iselin had done to us. I knew that general. He liked living and he had a big time at it but he saw that protest as being an important Army job and he had been trained to accept responsibility." Marco's voice got bleak. "So I swear on you, on my Eugenie Rose, that the day will come that I, Marco, will make Senator John Iselin pay for that, and if he has to be killed, and I can't kill him, I'll have someone kill him for me." He closed his eyes for a few beats. "We got any beer in the house?" he asked her. She got some. She drank plain warm gin. Marco drank a can of the beer before he spoke again. "Anyway I was stopped," he said at last. "Before he shot himself the general ordered me to forget the court-martial, so that is that. I'm frozen with my terrible dreams inside of a big cake of ice and I'll never get out." "You'll get out." "No." "Yes you will." "How?" "Do you remember that thing I told you which no girl in her right mind would ever tell a man she had gone limp over, about how I called up the man I was engaged to and resigned from the whole idea because you happened to smell so crazy?" "I thought you just said that to get me to kiss you." "His name was Lou Amjac and you happen to be right." "You know, you weren't attracted to me irrevocably only because I smell this way. Don't forget I cried like a little, lost tyke the instant I first looked at you. Stuff like that is a steam roller for a potential mother." "Have you ever done that with another woman? The smell you can't help, but I don't think I could stand sharing your sniveling with another woman." "Never mind. That's the kind of stuff that'll come out after we're married. What about Lou Amjac?" "He's an FBI agent. They are good at their work. I have a whole intuitive thing about how they can help you with that notebook -- The Gallant Major's Gypsy Dream Book." ''I'm Army Intelligence, baby. We don't take our laundry to the FBI. Macy's definitely does not tell Gimbel's." "The way you told it to me, you were Army Intelligence. If the FBI can prove you have something worth going on with, then your side will take you back and you can run the whole thing down yourself." "Jesus." "Isn't it worth trying?" "Well, yeah, but still, I don't see Lou Amjac going out of his way to help me. After all, you were his girl." "He might not be pleasant about it, that's true, but he's an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and if you've got something in his line, you're not going to be able to shake him." *** Amjac wasn't entirely pleasant about Marco. In fact, he was particularly surly. Amjac was a skinny man with watery eyes and when Marco saw them for the first time he had a hot flash of jealousy go through him, feeling that maybe Eugenie Rose was nearsighted and that perhaps when she had first seen this guy she had thought he was crying. Amjac was tall. He had florid skin and sandy hair, freckles all over the backs of his hands, and looked as though he had a tendency to boils on the back of his neck. His hair was fine lanugo and he couldn't have grown a mustache if he had stayed in bed for a year. He had a jaw like a crocodile and as he sat in Rosie's small, warm, golden-draped room, which had horrible, large cabbage roses woven into the carpets and ancient northern European brewery posters on all walls, separated by mountain goat heads mounted on stained ash, he looked as though he would be happy to be invited to bite Marco's right arm off. When he entered the apartment and had stood staring down, repelled, at Marco, Eugenie Rose had said serenely, "This is Bonny Benny Marco, the chap I was telling you about, Lou. Benny boy, this here is a typical, old-time shamus right out of Black Mask Magazine name of Lou Amjac." "Did you bring me all the way over here in the rain just to meet this?" Amjac inquired. "Is it raining? Yes, I did." "What am I supposed to do? Arrest him for impersonating an officer?" Marco figured it would be better just to let the two old friends chat together. "Would you like a nice plebeian rye highball, Lou?" "Plebeian? Your friend is drinking beer right out of the can." "Wow, you FBI guys don't miss a trick, do you?" Eugenie Rose said. "Do you want a rye highball or don't you?" "Yeah." "Yeah, what?" "Yeah, yeah." "That's better. Give me your coat. How is your elbow with the weather changing like this? Now sit down. No. Walk with me to the kitchen whilst I decant. Did your mother get back from Montreal?" Amjac took off his coat. "You know, I think if I was right-handed I would have had to quit the Bureau, Rose. I could hardly bend my elbow this afternoon, believe it or not. This Dr. Weiler -- you met Abe Weiler, the specialist, didn't you, Rose? -- he may be a good man at certain things -- you know what I mean -- but I don't think he even knows where to grope when it comes to arthritis." He followed her into the tiny kitchen and Marco watched them go, goggle-eyed. "My mother decided to stay over another week," he could hear Amjac say. "They sell very strong ale up there and since my sister's husband won't be home from the road until Monday, why not?" "Of course, why not?" Rosie's voice said. "Just make sure she's out before he's home, is all. He'd love to punch her right on her sweet little old-lady nose, he told me." "Aaaah, that's a lot of talk," Amjac said petulantly. "Thanks." He accepted the stiff highball. "Are your lads still interested in this and that about the Soviet lads? Spy stuff?" Amjac jerked his head back toward Marco. "Him?" "He knows a couple," she said. They walked back into the living room with Rosie carrying four beer cans at stomach level. "Can he talk?" Amjac asked. "He talks beautifully. And, oh Lou, I wish you could smell him!" Amjac grunted and stared hard at Marco who seemed considerably embarrassed. "Just the same I'd like to tell you the story," Rosie said, "because you are gradually making Major Marco believe that after eleven years of rooming with you at the Academy he has stolen your wife, and as you know the very best in the world that just isn't the case." "So tell!" Amjac snarled. She told it. From the patrol forward. She went from the Medal of Honor to the nightmares, to Melvin in Wainright, to the Army hospitals, to Chunjin and Raymond, to Raymond's mother and Senator Iselin, to Marco's court-martial project and General Jorgenson's suicide. They were all quiet after she had finished. Amjac finished his highball in slow sips. "Where's the notebook?" he asked harshly. Marco spoke for the first time. "It's with my gear. At Raymond's." "You think you can remember any of the faces of the men in your dreams?" "Every man, every face. One woman." "And one lieutenant general?" "With Security service markings." "And this Melvin dreamed the same thing?" "He did. And that man who was sitting beside the lieutenant general is now Raymond Shaw's house man." Amjac stood up. He put his coat on with deliberate movement. "I'll talk it over with the special agent in charge," he said. "Where can I reach you?" Marco started to answer but Eugenie Rose interrupted him. "Right here, Louis," she said brightly. "Any time at all." "I live at Raymond Shaw's," Marco said quickly, coloring deeply. "Trafalgar eight, eight-eight-eight-one." "I cannot believe it," Amjac said to Rosie. "I simply cannot believe that you could ever turn out to be this kind of hard, cruel girl." He turned to go. "You never gave a damn about me." "Lou!" He got to the door but he had to turn around. She was staring at him levelly, without much expression. "You know I cared," she said. "I know that you know exactly how much I cared." He couldn't hold her stare. He looked away, then looked at the floor. "With all the girls there are in the world," she asked, "do you think a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor who has been batting around the world most of his life wants to get married? Well, he does, Lou. And so do I. Maybe if you had been able to make up your mind between me and your elbow and your mother, you and I would have been married by now. We've been together four years, Lou. Four years. And you can say that I never cared about you and I can only answer that the cold-turkey cure is the only way for you because I have to make sure that you understand that there is only Ben; that it is as clear as daylight that Ben is the only man for me. Someday, if you keep playing the delaying game, and I guess you will, some girl may pay you out on a slow rope, then cast you adrift miles and miles away from shore and you'll know that my way -- this hard, cruel way you called it -- is the way that leaves the fewest scars. Now stop sulking and tell me. Are you going to help us or not?" "I want to help him, Rosie," Amjac said slowly, "but somebody else has to decide that, so I'll let you know tomorrow. Good night and good luck." "Night, Lou. My best to your mother when she calls later." Amjac closed the door behind him. "You don't just fool around, do you, Eugenie Rose?" Marco asked reverently. *** Amjac was one of the four men in the large room in the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation toward noon the next morning. Another man was the special agent in charge. Another man was a courier who had just come in from Washington. The fourth man was Marco. The courier had brought one hundred and sixty-eight close-up photographs from one of the Bureau's special files. The close-ups included shots of male models, Mexican circus performers, Czech research chemists, Indiana oil men, Canadian athletes, Australian outdoor showmen, Japanese criminals, Asturian miners, French head waiters, Turkish wrestlers, pastoral psychiatrists, marine lawyers, English publishers, and various officials of the U.S.S.R., the People's Republic of China, and the Soviet Army. Some shots were sharp, some were murky. Marco made Mikhail Gomel and Giorgi Berezovo the first time through. No one spoke. The second time through he made Pa Cha, the older Chinese dignitary. He pulled no stiffs, such as North Carolinian literary agents or Basque sheep brokers, because he had done so much studying so well through five years of night. The courier and the special agent took the three photographs which Marco had chosen and left the room with them to check their classifications against information on file. Marco and Amjac were left in the room. "You go ahead," Marco said to Amjac. "You must have plenty to do. I'll wait." "Ah, shut up," Amjac suggested. Marco sat down at the long polished table, unfolded The New York Times and was able to complete two-thirds of the crossword puzzle before the special agent and the courier returned. "What else do you remember about these men?" the special agent asked right off, before sitting down, which caused Amjac to sit up much straighter and appear as though a dull plastic film had been peeled off his eyes. The courier slid the three photographs, face up, across the table to Marco. "Take your time," the special agent said. Marco didn't need extra time. He picked up the top photograph, which was Gamel's. "This one wears stainless-steel false teeth and he smells like a goat. His voice is loud and it grates. He's about five feet six, I'd figure. Heavy. He wears civilian clothes but his staff is uniformed, ranging from a full colonel to a first lieutenant. They wear political markings." Marco picked up the shot of the Chinese civilian, Pa Chao "This one has a comical, high-pitched giggle and killer's eyes. He had the authority. Made no attempt to conceal his distaste and contempt for the Russians. They deferred to him." He picked up Berezovo's picture, a shot that had been taken while the man was in silk pajamas with a glass in his hand and a big, silly grin across his face. "This is the lieutenant general. The staff he carried was in civilian clothes and one of the staff was a woman." Marco grinned. "They looked like FBI men. He speaks with a bilateral emission lisp and has a very high color like -- uh -- like Mr. Amjac here." A new man came into the room with a note for the special agent who read it and said, "Your friend Mr. Melvin has been cooperating with us in Wainwright, Alaska. He's made one of these men, Mikhail Gomel, who is a member of the Central Committee." Marco beamed at Amjac over this development, but Amjac wouldn't look at him. "Can you return to Washington today, Colonel? We'll have a crew of specialists waiting for you." "Any time you say, sir. I'm on indefinite leave. But the rank is major." "You have been a full colonel since sunrise this morning. They just told me on the phone from Washington." "No!" Marco yelled. He leaped to his feet and gripped the table and kept shouting, "No, no, no!" He pounded and pounded on the shining table with rage and frustration. "That filthy, filthy, filthy son-of-a-bitch. He'll pay us for this! He'll pay us someday for this! No, no, no!" Potentially, Marco might have been a hysteroid personality. *** Colonel Marco worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and his own unit of Army Intelligence (into which he had been honorably and instantly reinstated upon the recommendation of the FBI's director and the Plans Board of the Central Intelligence Agency). There was no longer any question of a need for a court-martial to institute a full investigation. A full unit was set up, with headquarters in New York and conference space at the Pentagon, and unaccountable funds from the White House were provided to maintain housing, laboratories, and personnel, including three psychiatrists, the country's leading Pavlovian practitioner, six espionage technicians (including three librarians), a mnemonicist, an Orientalist, and an expert on Soviet internal affairs. The rest were cops and assistant cops. Marco was in charge. His aide, assistant, and constant companion was Louis Amjac. The other side-kick was a round type, with the nerves of a Chicago bellhop, named Jim Lehner. He was there representing the CIA. They worked out of a capacious, many chambered house in the Turtle Bay district of New York, right through the summer of 1959 but they did not get one step further than the alarming conclusions which had been reached originally by Marco. It is questionable whether any definitive conclusions beyond those reached could have been attained if Marco had been able to allow himself to tell the part of his dreams having to do with Raymond's murders, but he could see no connection, he didn't think the time had come, he couldn't keep the thought in his mind, and so on and on into many splinters of reasons why he did not divulge the information. Thousands of man-hours were put in on the project and as time went on the pressure from exalted sources grew and grew. A three-platoon system of surveillance was put around Raymond. The total cost of the project which the doctrinaire romantics in the service classified as Operation Enigma has been estimated at, or in excess of, $634,217 and some change, for travel, salaries, equipment, lease, and leasehold improvements, maintenance and miscellaneous expense -- and not a quarter of it was stolen beyond a few hundred rolls of Tri-X and Hydropan film, but even accountants don't recognize such losses because all photographers everywhere are helpless about film stocks to the point where it is not even considered stealing but is called testing. The Army flew Alan Melvin, the former corporal turned civilian plumber, from Alaska to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, then to the house in Turtle Bay in New York, but the interviews with him revealed no more than what had been gleaned from Marco. However, the call to Operation Enigma seemed to have come in time to have saved Melvin's sanity -- even his life. The nightmares had caused a weight loss of seventy-one pounds. He weighed one hundred and three pounds when picked up at Wainwright. He could not be moved for seventeen days, while he received high-caloric feeding, but by that time he had talked to Marco. When he learned that what he had dreamed had reached such a point of credibility that it had become one more terrible anxiety for the President of the United States, it seemed as though all dread was removed instantly, enabling Melvin to sleep and eat, dissolving the concretion of his fears. Upon his restoration to active duty Colonel Marco requested, and was granted, an informal meeting with representative officers of the Board. They explained that it would not be possible for Colonel Marco to refuse advancement to the rank he held but that it was to his great credit that he felt so strongly about the matter. They explained that such an action could disturb legislative relationships in the present climate, so extraordinary that it had to be considered the far, far better part of valor for government establishments to run with the tide. Colonel Marco asked that he be permitted to register his vociferous distaste for Senator Iselin and be allowed to demonstrate that he rejected any and all implied sponsorship of himself by such an infamous source; he wished the condition to be viewed by the Board as being and having been untenable to him as well as having been unsolicited by him and undesirable in every and any way. He added other stern officialese. He asked that he be allowed to express, in an official manner, his innermost fears that this promotion to the rank of full colonel would inconsiderately prejudice the future against his favor for an optimum Army career. The Board explained to him, informally and in a most friendly manner, that whereas it was true that it would be necessary that his personnel file forever retain Senator Iselin's stain to explain Colonel Marco's -- uh -- unusual -- uh -- advancement, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, with his own hand, had appended an explanation of the attendant circumstances, absolving the colonel of any threat of shadow. All in all, because he was human to extreme dimension, Marco secretly felt he had done pretty well out of the Iselin brush, which in no way forgave Iselin or diminished Colonel Marco's prayers for vengeance. The single negative factor connected with the mess had been the death of General Jorgenson, but that was another matter entirely and one not pertinent to his promotion. Someday, he thought fervently, he would like to see the notation made by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs upon the personnel file of General Jorgenson before it was permitted to pass into Army history. As a soldier, Colonel Marco knew that the general's death had been a hero's death, in the sense that a Hindu priest would believe deeply in the right of a widow to burn herself upon her husband's funeral pyre, becoming a saint and joining Sati. So saved are all those who enable themselves to believe, and therefore was the military mind called a juvenile mind. It was constant; it observed a code of honor in a world where any element of devotion to a rationale summoned scorn; but the world itself knew itself was sick. Colonel Marco puzzled his past nightmares and decided they could make him a full general yet. While Raymond toured Europe with his mother, Marco toured the United States with Amjac and Lehner and completed a formal canvass of the survivors of the patrol. This yielded nothing. Nightly, in the manner of a lonely drummer distracted by the boredom of the road, Marco telephoned his girl whom he had not yet had either the time or the opportunity to marry. She comforted him. The three men moved through seven cities from La Jolla, California, to Bayshore, Long Island. Marco and Melvin had been the only two men on the patrol who had ever dreamed of it. Mrs. John Iselin's tour of Europe in the summer of 1959 with her son developed into the most shocking string of occasions, as redolent of that decade as a string of garlic pearls. Mrs. Iselin achieved more for sustained anti-Americanism and drove infected wedges more deeply between America and her allies than any other action by any individual or agency, excepting her husband, of the twentieth century. It would seem that wherever Mrs. Iselin set down with her personable, strangely expressed son, she gave a different account of why she was traveling. In Paris, she was looking for inefficiency in United States Government offices overseas. In Bonn, she said she was looking for subversives in United States Government offices overseas. In Munich, she said she was looking, actually, for both, because "any concept of efficiency in government must include complete political responsibility. If anyone should favor the Communists, then he cannot be efficient," Mrs. Iselin explained to the German (and world) press. Mrs. Iselin's only brother was, at the time of her visit to Rome in late July, the American ambassador to Italy. He extended an invitation to his sister and his nephew to stay with him and his family, which Mrs. Iselin accepted via the Associated Press. "My brother is so dear to me," she said for publication in many languages, "and I do so ache to see him again after a long separation, listen to his wisdom, and rejoice in his embrace. Pressure of work for our country has kept us apart too long. We are out of touch." It was not told that what had put them in direct touch again was a specific coded order from the Secretary of State ordering his ambassador to invite his sister to be his house guest. Mrs. Iselin moved out of the ambassador's residence to the Grand Hotel on the afternoon of the second day she had been her brother's guest and immediately called a press conference to explain her action, saying, according to the transcript which was printed in full in The New York Times for July 29, 1959, "In every sense of that melodramatic word I am standing before you as a torn woman. I love my brother but I must love my country more. My loyalty as a sister of a beloved brother must be moved to serve a greater loyalty to the unborn of the West. My brother's embassy is wholly directed by American Communists under direct manipulation by the Kremlin, and I pray before you today that this is a result of my brother's ineptness and ignorance and not of his villainy." After the press had left, Raymond languidly asked his mother what in the world had ever possessed her to do such an unbelievably malicious thing. "Raymond, dear," his mother said, "in this life one can turn the other cheek in a Christian manner only so many times. A long, long time ago I told that brother of mine that I would see him nailed to the floor and today he knows that I kidded him not. I kidded him not, Raymond, dear." *** Mrs. Iselin's brother resigned at once as ambassador to Italy and his resignation was at once accepted by the State Department and refused by the White House because Foster had not cleared through Jim or Jim had not cleared through Foster. For thirty-six hours thereafter the matter remained in this exquisite state of balance until, on return from the greenest kind of rolling countryside in Georgia, the President's will prevailed and the ambassadorship of Raymond's mother's brother was restored, the wisdom of the President's decision being based upon the choleric rages into which the mention of Johnny Iselin's name could throw him. As his wife succeeded with such consistency in gaining so much space in the press of the world, Senator Iselin found it necessary to issue his own directive as to his wife's mission in Europe, from Washington. In close-up on television during his formal investigation of atheism in the Department of Agriculture he said to the millions of devoted viewers throughout the country, "My wife, a brilliant woman, an American who has suffered deeply before this, long before this, in the name of her great and abiding patriotism, was sent abroad as unofficial emissary of the United States Senate to bring back a report on the amount of money that this Administration has spent to further the cause of communism in the Western World. It is my holy hope that this will answer the question of certain elements in this country for once and for all with regard to this matter." Alas, the statement did not settle the matter for once and for all, as the President insisted that his Minority Leader in the Senate make a policy answer to settle Senator Iselin's statement for once and for all. The President, being of the Executive Branch, overlooked the fact that the Minority Leader was first a member of the Senate, an establishment which has always taken a dim view of any directives from the Executive. The Minority Leader's text was a model of political compromise. As Senate spokesman the leader denied, in a sense, that Mrs. Iselin was an "official" emissary of the United States Senate although he conceded that the Senate would indeed feel honored to think of her as its "unofficial" emissary at any time. "Mrs. Iselin is a beautiful and gracious lady," this courtly gentleman said, deeply pleased that the White House was so discomfited, "a delightful woman whose charm and grace are only exceeded by her outstanding intelligence, but I do not feel that either she or her distinguished husband would want it said that anyone not actually elected by the great people of the states of the United States to the sacred trust of the United States Senate could be said to represent that body. Say, rather, that Mrs. Iselin represents America wherever she may be." (Applause.) The gentleman received a written citation from the Daughters of the American Struggles for Liberty for his gallantry to American womanhood. Citations from the presses of Europe, mainly those of a conservative stripe, took a different tack. In Stockholm, Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest and most influential daily wrote: "What the wife of Senator John Iselin possibly might have discovered, she has already spoiled by foolishness and arrogance. She has introduced anti-American feeling far more effective than any that could possibly have been initiated by the Committee and their paid agents. The unanimous opinion of Europe is that Iselin symbolizes exactly the reverse of what America stands for and what we have learned to appreciate. Iselinism is the archenemy of liberty and a disgrace to the name of America." Throughout the tour, until its closing days in England, Raymond had not so much as acknowledged the existence of his mother or his stepfather in the newspaper column that he wrote daily and transmitted by cable as he covered, with considerable cogency, a startlingly intimate view of the European political scene. The Daily Press, his employer in New York, was said to have had to resort to threats to force Raymond into writing and publishing a statement regarding his own position. This was the sheerest nonsense: the kind stimulated by the need of metropolitan people who feel that they simply must be seen as having inside information on everything. The fact of the matter was that Raymond's publisher, Charles O'Neil, was a more that ordinarily perceptive man. He telephoned Raymond at the Savoy Hotel in London and, after an exchange of information on the prevailing weather conditions in each country, a report of past weather phenomena, and a foretelling of what might be expected from the weather on either side of the Atlantic, O'Neil, who was paying for the call, broke in saying that he felt Raymond could have no conception of the extent of the publicity his mother's European tour had been producing all over the country, nor could he have any way of realizing how closely he, Raymond Shaw, had been allied with Iselin's actions and purposes. He read from a few articles, shuddering at the cost of the telephone tolls. Raymond was aghast. He asked what O'Neil thought he should do. The publisher said he saw no reason why the cost of the entire call could not be charged to the syndicate -- uh -- he meant, rather, that he felt both the paper and Raymond should relent from their fixed position on the matter of Raymond's family being mentioned in his writings, and that Raymond should at once file at least one column of opinion on Iselinism and the present tour. Raymond complied that day and the column was reprinted more than any other single piece the paper had ever caused to be syndicated and the toll charges for the call to London were absorbed by the syndicate without the slightest demurral. The column read, in part: "I have known John Yerkes Iselin to be an assassin and a blackguard since my boyhood. He lives by attacking. He is the cowardly assassin in politics who strikes from the dark and evil alley of his opportunism. With no exceptions, the justifications for these attacks have been so flimsy as to have no standing either in courts of law or in the minds of individuals capable of differentiating repeated accusation from even a reasonable presumption of guilt. The ultimate result is a threat to national security. Iselin is laying a foundation for the agencies of American government to serve totalitarian ends rather than the Government of the United States as we have hitherto known it." Raymond insisted upon reading the dispatch to his mother before he sent it off. He read it in a monotone with a stony face, fearful of the response it would bring. "Oh, for crissake, Raymond," his mother said, "what do you suppose I'm going to do -- sue you? I know you aren't asking me, but send the silly thing. Who the hell reads beyond the headlines anyway?" She waved him away contemptuously. "Please! Go cable your copy. I'm busy." *** Raymond was unaware of being in an anomalous position in London after his column on Johnny and his mother appeared in the States. It was reprinted in the English newspapers at once. Writing of his mother's part in what he termed their "conspiracy of contempt for man," Raymond had described her as "a caricature of the valiant pioneer women of America who loaded the guns while their husbands fought off the encircling savages" in that he saw his mother and Johnny as the savages and "if a nation's blood is its honor and its dignity before the world, then that blood covered their hands." This appeared to be in direct opposition to basic policies of some British newspapers that had made a pretty pound indeed out of that steely treacle of Home and Mother, so that at least a portion of the press that attended Raymond's mother's farewell conference at the Savoy Hotel viewed Raymond not at all enthusiastically. Had they been able to measure how Raymond viewed them, as he viewed all the world, the shooting would have started, straight off. On the other hand, another section of the British press so detested Senator and Mrs. Iselin that it quite approved of Raymond's attack upon his mother, although it would not, of course, ever permit itself to print that view. Both sides had the opportunity to air their views, however indirectly. Before she left London Mrs. Iselin told the reporters who had assembled in a large room named after a production of Richard D'Oyly Carte that she would urge her husband's Senate committee to investigate the Labour Party of Great Britain, as she had assembled documentary proof that it was a nest of Socialists and crypto-Communists and that this political party could, if returned to power, "smash the alliance upon which the friendship of our two great nations has been based and, under the guise of honest difference of opinion, sabotage the great American purpose before the world." It was as though the great glacier had slid down from the top of the world and enveloped the hotel. Sixty men and women stood staring at her, their chins resting comfortably on their chests, mouths wide open, eyes glazed. One gentleman of Fleet Street threw his full glass of whisky and water backward over his head in a high arc to crash in the corner of the large room rather than drink it, which is criticism indeed from a newspaperman of any country. He said, "Madame, my name is Joseph Pole of the Daily Advocate-Journal. I repudiate you, your husband, and your most peculiar son." He turned to a lady journalist on his left and took the highball from her hand. "May I?" he asked. Then he threw the contents of the drink into Mrs. Iselin"s ankles. Raymond knocked him right through the throng. At this juncture, that portion of the journalistic group which had objected to Raymond in the first place for having attacked the profitable institution of Motherhood in his column, took this chance to strike out at him, while the group which had secretly approved Raymond's utter public rejection of his mother now saw their chance to have at her themselves, and were led forward by female colleagues brandishing raised umbrellas. The result was a melee. Mrs. Iselin swung chairs, water carafes, and broken whisky bottles, doing most painful damage but emerging physically unharmed. Raymond lay about him with his extraordinary strength and his natural antipathy. The news photographers present very nearly swooned with ecstasy over the turn taken, for, from every British newspaper-reader's point of view, here was Iselinism in action with British righteousness whacking it over the head. Beginning with the very next editions, the British press indulged in its own sort of good-natured London journalists' fun, which could be described by the subject of their reporting as being an experience not unlike falling nude into a morass of itching powder while two sadistic dentists drilled into one's teeth at the instant of apogee of alcoholic history's most profligate hang-over. The ultimate end of all of these combative news stories was that when Mrs. Iselin and her son needed to journey to Southampton to embark for home, some one hundred and fifteen London policemen, whom the world knows affectionately as "bobbies" after their founder, Sir Robert Peel, needed to bludgeon a path through the howling mass of outraged citizenry to get them out of their hotel, following which a semi-military motorcade was formed to race them to the ship. The entire incident was a stiff test of Anglo-American relations, beyond a doubt, and somewhat scored John Iselin's own lack of popular favor in the British Isles. *** While Raymond had been in Paris, in late June, a member of the French Chamber of Deputies who was co-leader of the political party having the record of greatest resistance to the government then in power, was assassinated in his hotel particulier on Rue Louis David in the sixteenth arrondissement, baffling police and security agencies. While Raymond was in London, on the evening before his mother's famous debate with the British press, a peer who was greatly admired for having articulated a liberal, humanistic, and forward-looking life as publisher of a chain of national newspapers and periodicals, Lord Morris Croftnal, was murdered while he slept. There was not a clue as to the identity or motivation of his killer. Raymond's ship docked in New York on a Wednesday in late August, 1959. He reported for work at The Daily Press early Thursday morning. Marco called him and made a date to meet him at four o'clock in Hungarian Charlie's, the saloon across the street from the paper, saying he would be bringing two of his side-kicks with him if Raymond wouldn't mind. Raymond didn't mind. The four men sat at a table far in the rear of the saloon, which was a solid, practical saloon set up to sell a maximum amount of booze and, with careful attention to unsanitary-seeming decor -- a little dirt here, a little grease there -- a minimum amount of food, which, after all, has a tendency to spoil after a week or so and can be a loss. The air was nearly gelid from the huge air-conditioning unit that looked big enough to chill an automobile assembly plant. A giant juke box, manufactured by The Giant Juke Box Company of Arcana, Illinois, was belting everything living right over the head with a loudly lovable old standard out of Memphis, Tennessee, in which the rhyme of the proper name Betty Lou and the plural noun shoes were repeated, in a Kallikakian couplet, over and over again. A giant juke box is constructed to make a sound like two full-sized, decibel-pregnant juke boxes going at top volume at the same time, but two separate juke boxes each playing a different tune, each in a different tempo, and, if possible, in a different language. The joint was noisy from opening to closing because Hungarian Charlie liked noise and was, in every vocal manner, very much like a giant juke box himself. After minimum hand-shaking and ordering a highball for Amjac and Lehner and beers for Raymond and himself, Marco went right to business by asking Raymond to tell his version of the battle action, which Raymond did forthwith and in detail, utilizing only the future tense in verb forms. Lehner carried the tape recorder in a shoulder sling. "You sound as though you got those nightmares straightened out. In fact, you look it," Raymond said warily, not sure whether it was proper to talk about such things in front of these house-detective types. Marco looked great. He had gained the weight back. "All over." "Did you -- was it -- did that thing we were talking about help any?" "The court-martial?" "Yeah." "The way it worked out, it wasn't necessary but I still have you and only you to thank for losing those nightmares. We got a different kind of an investigation started, just the way you said it had to be, and the nightmares were gone. Forever. I hope." "Did you investigate the medal?" "Sure. What else?" "Any progress?" "Slow, but good." "Is it working out the way we thought?" "Yeah. Right down the line." "The medal is a phony?" "It certainly looks that way." "I knew it. I knew it." Raymond looked from Amjac to Lehner, shaking his head in awed disbelief. "How about that?" he asked with mystification. "Will you tell me why a lot of Communist brass would want to steal a Medal of Honor for a complete stranger?" Amjac didn't answer. He seemed embarrassed about something. Raymond became aware of his silence and stared at him coldly. "It was a rhetorical question," he said haughtily. Amjac coughed. He said, "It scares hell out of us, if you want the truth, Mr. Shaw. We have run out of ideas and we don't know where else to look, if that gives you some idea." Raymond swung his gaze to Lehner, who had a head like a gourd, a small mustache, and eyes like watermelon seeds, and Lehner stared him down. "Have you talked to Al Melvin?" Raymond said. The voice of a sick child whined out of the giant juke box behind them as though trying to escape the hateful noises behind it. "You know, Ben, Al. In Alaska." "Yes, sir. We have," Amjac said grimly. Marco said, "Raymond, there is no known area of this case which we haven't covered in many ways. We've talked to every member of the patrol. We've traveled maybe ninety-two hundred miles around the country. We're sure Chunjin is here as an enemy agent, assigned to you as a body guard and assassin, if necessary. I have a unit in New York and Washington which does nothing but concentrate on this problem. There are seventeen of us, all told. Mr. Amjac is on loan from the FBI and Mr. Lehner is with us as an expert from Central Intelligence. Working on that riddle of why the enemy should go to enormous trouble to secure the Medal of Honor for you is all I do, day and night. It's all Amjac and Lehner do. It's all the seventeen of us do, and the White House wants to know what happened in a report every week and a copy of that report goes to the Joint Chiefs. And you want to hear something off-beat, Raymond? I mean something that will throw this out of context for a moment to let you see what a unique person you have become? A copy of the report goes to the Prime Ministers of Britain and Canada and to the President of Mexico." "But what the hell for?" Raymond seemed outraged at this invasion, as though he were being shared by four heads of government. "What the hell do the Mexicans and the bloody British, who tried to kill my mother, incidentally, have to do with that lousy medal?" Lehner tapped Raymond on the forearm. Raymond looked at him, drawing his arm away. "Why don't you listen?" Lehner said. "If you talk you can't learn anything." "Don't touch me again," Raymond said. "If you want to remain here with us, doing your clerk's tasks and waiting for your pension, do not touch me again." He looked at Marco. "Continue, Ben," he said equably. "It is our considered opinion," Marco said, "that we are moving into the area of action which will reveal why they wanted you to have the Medal of Honor. The patrol happened in 1951. Chunjin didn't arrive to take up his duties until '59. Eight years' lapse. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen soon. You're a marked man, Raymond. They've marked you and they guard you. We've marked you. Am I frightening you, Raymond?" "Me?" Nothing frightened Raymond. A man needs to have something to lose to become frightened. Even only one thing that is his and that he values will make it possible for threat to scare a man, but Raymond had nothing. "That's what I explained to our unit. And that's what our psychiatrists had projected on you, that attitude, that -- that fearlessness, you know? -- but I have to frighten you, Raymond, because we need you to think of yourself as some kind of time bomb with a fuse eight years long. You walk barefooted on the edge of a razor. Only you will know when the change comes, when the mission is divulged, when your move is to be made, and it can only end one way. Your country, my country, this country will have to be in danger from you and you will be expected to do exactly as you have been told or will be told. They got inside your mind. They did. I swear before God." "Aaaah!" Raymond disliked this kind of talk. It sickened him. What kind of a world of fondlers had this become? Why did Marco have to say that those thick-necked pigs were inside his mind? "I told you that we talked to every member of the patrol this summer. You know what they said about you, everyone of them? That you were the greatest, warmest, most wonderful single guy they had ever met. They remembered you with love and affection, Raymond. Isn't that funny?" "Funny? It's ludicrous." "How do you account for it?" Raymond shrugged and grimaced. "I saved their lives. I mean, they thought I had saved their lives. I suppose the poor slobs were grateful." "I don't think so. I've had to work all this out with our psychiatrists because I don't have a very objective view, either, but my actual memory is that there was a broad chasm between you and those men before the patrol. They didn't hate you, they seemed rather to fear your scorn, you know? You had a way of freezing their dislike and keeping them uneasy and off balance. The psychiatrists will tell you that an attitude, a group attitude as well as individual attitudes like that, can't be changed into warm and eager interest, into such admiration and deep respect merely because of gratitude. No, no, no." "Life isn't a popularity contest," Raymond said. "I didn't ask them to like me." ''I'm going to start to prove right now that they have gotten inside your mind, Raymond, because you once told me, in a joking way, that you had come out of the Army with much more of an active interest in women than when you went in -- and because I have to frighten you, I will have to embarrass you, too. We checked. We are experts. Experts' experts, even. We went back over the seams of your life, looking for lint. You were twenty-two, going on twenty-three years old, when you left the Army, and you had never been laid. More than that. You had never even kissed a girl, had you, Raymond?" Marco leaned across the table, his eyes lambent with affection, and he said softly, "You never even kissed Jocie, did you, Raymond?" "You had men talk to Jocie? In Argentina?" Raymond wasn't outraged. Long before, he had set all his dials so that Marco could do no wrong with him, but he was extremely impressed and for the first time. He felt elated to be in connection with anyone who had looked at Jocie, had sat beside her and had spoken to her about anything at all, and to have spoken to her about him, about that wondrous summer together and about -- about kissing. He felt as though his eyes had climbed into the upper space above the earth and that he could see himself as he sat in Hungarian Charlie's and at the same time watch sweet, sweet Jocie as she sat in a bower, under pink roses, knitting something soft and warm, in the Argentine. "I had to know. And I had to make you understand that going ten thousand miles and back for the answer to one question is very little to do in the face of the pressure and the threat that is implied." "But, Ben -- Jocie -- well, after all, Jocie --" "That's why I brought these two strangers. The only reason. Do you think I would talk about such things-things which I know are sacred to you when I also know that nothing else in this whole world is sacred to you -- in front of two strangers if I wasn't desperate to get through to you?" Raymond did not answer; he was thinking about Jocie, the Jocie he had lost and would never find again. "They are inside your mind. Deep. Now. For eight years. One of their guys with a big sense of humor thought it would be a great gag to throw you a bone for all of the trouble they were going to put you to, and fix it up inside your head so that, all of a sudden, you'd get interested in girls, see? It meant nothing to them. It was only a gratuitous gesture, a quarter tip to the men's-room attendant, considering all the other things they were going to do inside your head and have already done from inside your head." "Stop it! Stop it, goddamit, Ben. I will not listen to this. You nauseate me. Stop saying that people and things and a lot of outside filth are inside my head. lust say it some other way if you have to talk to me. Just say it some other way, and what the hell are you talking about -- what they have already done from inside my head?" "Don't shout," Lehner said. "Take it easy." However, he did not touch Raymond this time. The giant juke box had found a giant guitar. It was being strummed insanely, alternating between two of the most simply constructed chords while a farmer's voice bellowed cretinous rhymes above it. Marco stared at Raymond compassionately and held his gaze for a long moment before he said, "You murdered Mavole and Bobby Lembeck, kid." "What? Whaaaat?" Raymond pushed at the table but his back was against the wall, literally as well as figuratively, so that he could not move backward to escape the words. His glaucous eyes in the long, bony face held some of the terror seen in the eyes of a horse falling on ice. He was incredulous but Marco and Amjac and Lehner knew that Marco was getting through because they knew Raymond the way a marine knows his own rifle, because they had been drilled on Raymond, his reactions and inhibitions, for hours of day and hours of night. "You killed them. Not your fault. They just used your body the way they would use any other machine. You strangled Mavole and you shot Bobby." "In the dream?" "Yes." Raymond was unutterably relieved. He had been greatly startled but at last things had been returned to reality. These men with Marco were captives of their belief in that unfortunate man's delusion which had almost cost him his sanity late the year before. Everything fell into place for Raymond as he understood the motivation of all of this fantasy. Ben was his friend and Raymond would not let him down. He would go right along as he was supposed to, becoming agitated now and then if necessary, because Ben looked as though he had regained his health and his ability to sleep and Raymond would have fought off an army to preserve that. "The dream happened again and again in my sleep because it had happened so indelibly in my life. I have to frighten you, Raymond. If you can live in continuous fear perhaps we can force you to see what we aren't able to discover. Whenever it happens -- this thing that has been set to happen -- we have to find some way to reach you, to give you new reflexes so that you will do whatever we will tell you to do -- even kill yourself if that has to be -- the instant that you know what it is they have built you to do. They made you into a killer. They are inside your mind now, Raymond, and you are helpless. You are a host body and they are feeding on you, but because of the way we live we can't execute you or lock you up to stop you." Raymond did not need to simulate alarm. Every time Marco told him of the invasion of his person by those people it made him wince, and to think of himself as a host body on which they were feeding almost made him cry out or stand up and run out of the saloon. His voice became different. It was not the flat, undeigning drawl. It was a voice he might have borrowed from an Errol Flynn movie in which the actor faced immolation with hopeless resigned gallantry. It was a new voice for him, one he created specifically to help his friend through the maze of his fantasy, and it was most convincing. "What do you want?" the hoarsened new voice said. Marco's voice attacked. It moved like a starving rodent which gnaws at flaws behind the doors, mad to get through to an unknown trove of crazing scent on the other side. "Will you submit voluntarily to a brainwashing?" that voice asked. "Yes," Raymond answered. The giant juke box spat the sounds out as though trying to break the rows upon rows of shining bottles behind the bar. *** Friday morning, just before noon, a psychiatric and biochemical task force began to work Raymond over on the fourth floor of the large house in the Turtle Bay district. The total effort exhausted and frustrated both the scientists and the policemen. The effect of the narcotics, techniques, and suggestions, which resulted in deep hypnosis for Raymond, achieved a result that approximated the impact an entire twenty-five-cent jar of F. W. Woolworth vanishing cream might have on vanishing an aircraft carrier of the Forrestal class when rubbed into the armor plate. They were unable to dredge up one mote of information. Under the deep hypnosis, loaded to the eyes with a cocktail of truth serums, Raymond demonstrated that he could not remember his name, his color, his sex, his age, or his existence. Before he had been put under he had been willing to divulge anything within his power. In catalepsy, his mind seemed to have been sealed off as an atomic reactor is separated from the rest of a submarine. It all served to confirm what they already knew. Raymond had been brainwashed by a master of exalted skill. The valiant, long-cherished hope that they would be able to counterplant suggestion within Raymond's already dominated unconscious mind never had a chance of being put into work. When it was over, the medical staff wanted to tell Raymond that the explorations had been entirely successful, on the grounds that he was able to accept suggestion with his conscious mind, but Marco overruled that. He said he would tell Raymond that he was beyond their reach, that he was going to be directed entirely by the enemy, that they could not help him but that they had to stop him and that they would stop him. Marco wanted Raymond to stay scared, as much as he disbelieved that Raymond could sustain any feeling. After that first afternoon when Marco had poured it on him in Hungarian Charlie's, Raymond had dug in to what he was determined to maintain as a fixed position. He was a lucid man. He knew he was in excellent health, mental and physical. He knew Marco's health was a long way from what it had once been. He knew it was Marco who had been having the nightmares and breakdowns and that for unknown reasons, probably relative to the phrase "the Army takes care of its own," his commanders had decided to humor Marco. Well, Raymond decided, I will outhumor and outbless them. Marco is closer to me than anyone or all of those uniformed clots. Raymond accordingly formed his policy. It deployed his imagination like the feelers of an insect, advancing it ahead of him wherever his mind, which moved on thousands of tiny feelers of prejudice, took him in its circuitous detour that would allow him to avoid exposing himself to himself as a murderer, a sexual neutral, and a man despised and scorned by his comrades. He put his back into the performance. He used all the tricks of the counterfeiter's art he could summon to project all of the surface emotions which their little playlets seemed to require of him. He bent, or seemed to bend, into their intentions to halt what he saw as a comic-book plot in which a sinister foreign power, out to destroy America, would achieve its ends by using him as an instrument. They wanted him to be scared. He would seem, when under observation, to be scared, and he worked hard for an effect of seeming as distressed and as aware as game running ahead of guns. Fortunately, he remembered that the vegetable substitute for benzedrine, which he had taken at one time to lose weight, always gave him hand tremors, so that helped. He knew that a double dose or more of it could produce an authentic crying jag in him, with uncontrollable tears and generally distraught conduct, so that helped. Marco's surveillance teams duly reported his purchases of this drug and the unit's psychological specialists confirmed the side-effects they would produce, so Marco was not deceived by Raymond's somewhat piteous conduct from time to time. He was very proud of Raymond, however, because he could see that Raymond was going to intolerable trouble, for Raymond, to meet Marco's urgent requirements, but the discouraging and depressing fact remained that all of them were armless in their attempt to stave off shapeless disaster. However, there was one relentless, inexorable strength on Marco's side: in combination or singly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Army Intelligence, and the Central Intelligence Agency represented maximum police efficiency. Such efficiency suspends the law of averages and flattens defeat with patience. Eugenie Rose was in Boston with Justin's new musical show, which, secretly, had been based upon a map of the heavens issued by the National Geographic Society two years before. Marco planned to join her the next day. She and Marco talked on the telephone at odd hours. They were still dedicated to an early marriage and seemed more than ever convinced that, in a world apparently so populated, no one else existed. It was Christmas Eve. Raymond had invited Marco for dinner, telephoning him from the office to say that he had given Chunjin the night off and that Chunjin had resisted. Marco said that was because Chunjin was undoubtedly a Buddhist and not a celebrant at Christmas. Raymond said he was sure Chunjin was not a Buddhist because he left books by Mary Baker Eddy around the pantry and kitchen and was forever smiling. Marco said he felt a sense of disappointment at that news because he had figured that if he sent Chunjin a Christmas card, Chunjin would then be obligated to send him a card on Buddha's birthday, or lose face. Marco arrived at Raymond's apartment at seven o'clock and brought two bottles of cold champagne with him. Unfortunately for the hang-overs the following day, Raymond had also put two quarts of champagne in the refrigerator. They decided they would sidle toward food a little later and settled down in Raymond's office behind the big window, and with commendable seasonal cooperation it began to snow large goose feathers, a present from the Birthday Boy himself, in lieu of peace on earth. After two goblets of the golden bubbles, Raymond reached under his chair and, stiffly, handed Marco a large, gift-wrapped package. "Merry Christmas," he said. "It has been good to know you." Raymond, saying those words, sounded more touching than anyone else who could have said them because, while Raymond had been marooned in time and on earth and in all the pit-black darkness of interstellar space, Marco was the only other being, except Jocie, who had acknowledged he was there. Marco ripped away the elegant gold and blue paper, revealing the three volumes of Fuller's A Military History of the Western World re-bound in limp morocco leather. Marco held onto the books with one hand and pounded the embarrassed, grinning Raymond with the other. Then he put the books upon the desk and reached into his pocket. "And a merry, merry Christmas to you, too, young man," he sang out, handing Raymond a long flat envelope. Raymond started to open the envelope, slowly and with wonderment. "Wait, wait!" Marco said. He hurried to the record-player, shuffled through some albums, and slid out a twelve-inch record of Christmas carols. The machine conferred silvered voices upon them singing "We Three Kings of Orient Are." "O.K., proceed," Marco said. Raymond opened the envelope and found a gift certificate in the amount of fifty dollars to be drawn on Les Pyramides of middle Broadway, the Gitlitz Delicatessen. The frosty carol swelled around them as Raymond smiled his always touching smile at the gift in his hands.
Marco thought of their own three kings of Orient: Gomel, Berezovo and that old, old Chinese who had handed Raymond the gun to kill Bobby Lembeck. Raymond said, "What a wonderful present. I mean, who else in the world but you could even think of such a wonderful present? This -- well -- well, it's simply great, that's what it is." They sat down again, fulfilled by giving. They watched the snow, listened to the Mannergesangsverein, finished the first bottle of wine, and overflowed with Christmas spirit. Raymond was opening the second bottle when he said, steadily, "Jocie's husband died." "Yeah?" Marco sat straight up. "When?" "Last week." "How'd you find out?" "Mother told me. She had told the embassy to keep an eye on Jocie. They told her." "What are you going to do?" "I saw Senator Jordan. We're pretty good friends. At first it was hard because Mother had told him I was a pervert and that they would have to save Jocie from me, but, in a way, he had to see me because he's in politics and I'm a newspaperman. After a while, when we reached an understanding about what a monster my mother is, we were able to get to be pretty good friends. I asked him if I could help in any way. The paper has an office there. He said no. He said the best thing I could do would be to wait and give Jocie a chance to recover; then, if she doesn't start for home in six months, say, he thinks maybe I should go down there and get her. At least go down there and ask her. You know." "I take it your mother isn't against Jocie any more." "No." "Some switch." "Try not to laugh and so will I, but that is exactly the case. Some switch. Jocie's father has become very big in his party, particularly in the Senate. Mother saw it coming before anyone else and she's done everything she can to be fast friends with him, but he isn't having any, so I guess she decided if she couldn't get him on their side positively she could cancel him out by marrying me off to his daughter, little knowing that I incite Senator Jordan against her and Johnny more than any other one agency excepting their own lovable personalities." "What a doll. If she were my wife, I'd probably be Generalissimo Trujillo by now. At least." "At least." "So she thinks it might be a good idea for you and Jocie to get married?" "That is the general feeling I am allowed to get." "How did Jocie's husband die?" "That is a good morbid question. It just so happens he was struck down by an unknown hand in a flash riot in a town called Tucuman. He was an agronomist." "What has that got to do with it?" "Well, I guess that's how he happened not to be in Buenos Aires with Jocie." "Have you written to her?" Raymond looked out of the window, at the snow and the night, and shook his head. "If you think I can, I'd like to help you with the letter." "You'll have to help me," Raymond said, simply. "I can't do it. I can't even get started. I want to write her and tell her things but I have those eight years choking me." "It's all a matter of tone, not so much words," Marco explained, not having the faintest idea of what he was talking about but knowing he was light-years ahead of Raymond in knowledge of human communication. "Sure, wait. If that feels right. But no six months. I think we should get a letter off fairly soon. You know, a letter of condolence. That would be a natural ice-breaker, then after that we'll slide into the big letter. But don't wait too long. You'll have to get it over with so you'll both know for once and for all." "Know what?" "Whether -- well, she should know that you want her and -- you have to know whether she wants you." "She has to. What would I do if she didn't?" "You've been managing to get along." "No. No, it won't do, Ben. That is not enough. I may not have much coming to me but I have more coming to me than I'm getting." "Listen, kid. If that's the way it's going to be, then that's the way. Now take it easy and, please, figure on one step at a time." "Sure. I'm willing." "You've got to give the thing time." "Sure. That's what Senator Jordan said." *** Major General Francis "Fightin' Frank" Bollinger, a longtime admirer of John "Big John" Iselin, consented, with a great deal of pleasure, to Raymond's mother's suggestion that he head a committee of patriots called Ten Million Americans Mobilizing for Tomorrow. This was at a small dinner, so small that it fed only Johnny, the general, and Mrs. Iselin, at the Iselin residence in Washington in January, 1960. Bollinger pledged, with all of his big heart, that on the morning of the opening of his party's Presidential nominating convention, to be held at Madison Square Garden in July, he would deliver one million signatures of one million patriots petitioning that John Yerkes Iselin be named the party's candidate for the Presidency. General Bollinger had retired from active duty to take up the helm of the largest dog-food company the world had ever known. He had often said, in one of the infrequent jokes he made (it does not matter what the other joke was), which, by reason of the favoritism he felt for it, he repeated not infrequently: "I'd sure as hell like to see the Commies try to match Musclepal, but if they ever did try it they'd probably call it Moscowpal. Get it?" (Laughter.) He had been a patriot, himself, for many years. *** Marco's unit waited out the winter and the spring without any action or any leads. In March the FBI learned that Raymond's name appeared on the final list of possible suspects in connection with the murder of the anti-Communist deputy, Francsois Orcel, the previous June. Later that month they also learned that Raymond's name appeared on a similar listing prepared by Scotland Yard in conjunction with the murder of Lord Croftnal. The French listing included eight names of Americans or foreigners then in the United States who could be placed anywhere near the scene of the crime. The Scotland Yard list contained three such names. Both agencies asked for routine FBI check and comment. Raymond's name was the only name to appear on both listings. In late May Senator and Mrs. Iselin took a house on Long Island, anticipating the social demands of the political convention and so that, Mrs. Iselin explained, she could lend a woman's touch in preparing for the imminent homecoming of Senator Jordan's widowed daughter, Jocie, she and her father being old, old friends. She confided all of this to the society editor of The Daily Press, after asking Raymond to ask the society editor to call her. It remained for Raymond to read the news about Jocie's homecoming as any other reader of the newspaper might and he became savage in the fury of his resentment when he reached her on the telephone. Raymond's mother allowed him to curse and cry out at her until she was sure he had finished. He spoke for nearly four minutes without stopping, the sound of the words like a stream of bullets, his phrasing erratic and his breathing heavy. When she was sure of his pause, she invited him to a costume ball she was staging on the very day of Jocie's return from Buenos Aires. She said she was sure that he would accept because J ocie had already accepted and that it had been a dog's age since he and Jocie had met. She maintained her control all during Raymond's shouted obscenities and screamed vituperation; then she hung up the instrument with such vigor that she knocked it off her desk. She was drawn forward into an even blacker rage. She picked the telephone up and ripped it out of the wall and crashed it through a glass-topped table four feet away. She picked up the shattered table and flung it through the short corridor that led to the open bathroom door, disclosing warm pink tile behind the glass shower curtain. The table splintered the glass, crashed through to the tile wall, and fell noisily in the tub. After a sleepless, tortured night, Raymond, who had decided he must get to the office at seven o'clock the following morning to do what he had to do, finally fell asleep near dawn and slept through until eleven. He nearly knocked Chunjin down, when the man said good morning, because he had not troubled to call him when he knew that Raymond never, never, never slept later than eight o'clock in the morning. When Raymond got to the office he locked the door behind him. Utilizing the nastiest voice tone in his ample store, he told the telephone switchboard that they were not to ring his telephone no matter who called. "Including Mr. Downey, sir?" "Yes." "And Mr. O'Neil, sir?" "Everyone! Anyone! Can you get that through your heads?" "Heads, sir? I have one head, sir." ''I'm sure," Raymond snapped. "Then are you able to get it through your head? No calls. Do you understand?" "Bet on it, sir. Everything. Bet your house, your clothes." "Bet? Oh. One moment, there. I will revise my orders. I will take any calls from Buenos Aires. You probably pronounce that Bewnose Airs. I will accept calls from there." "Which, sir?" "Which what?" "Which city?" "I don't understand." "Buenos Aires or Bewnose Airs, sir?" "It's the same place!" "Very good, sir. You will accept calls from either or both. Now, would you like to revise those orders, sir?" Raymond hung up his phone as she was speaking. "Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy," the operator said to the girls working on either side of her. "Am I gonna get that one someday. I wouldn't care if I was offered four times the money on some other job which had half the hours. I would never leave this here job as long as he works here. Someday, I may be a liddul old lady sittin' at this switchboard, but someday -- the day will come -- an' oh, boy, oh boy, oh boy!" She was grinding her teeth as she talked. "Who? Shaw?" the girl on her left asked. "What's the use?" the girl on her right said. "If you get that offer for four times the money you take it. Nobody is ever gonna be able to do anything about Shaw." ***
*** He stopped writing. He had smudged the paper with several genuine tears. The first break in the long, long wait through dread, even though it was a totally incomprehensible break, came in May, 1960. It happened when Marco was late for a two o'clock date with Raymond at Hungarian Charlie's booze outlet, across the street from the flash shop. It was a fairly well-known fact to practically anyone who did not lack batteries for his hearing aid that Hungarian Charlie was one of the more stridently loquacious publicans in that not unsilent business. Only one other boniface, who operated farther north on Fifty-first Street, had a bigger mouth. Charlie talked as though Sigmund Freud himself had given permission, nay, had urged him, to tell everyone everything that came into his head, and in bad grammar, yet. Ten minutes before Marco got to the saloon, with Raymond seated at bar center staring at a glass of beer on a slow afternoon, Charlie had pinned a bookmaker at the entrance end of the bar, a man who would much rather have talked to his new friend, a young, dumpy blonde with a face like a bat's and the thirst of a burning oil field. Charlie was telling them, loud and strong, hearty and healthy, about his wife's repulsive older brother who lived with them and about how he had followed Charlie all over the apartment all day Sunday telling him what to do with his life, which was a new development brought on by the fact that he had just inherited twenty-three hundred dollars from a deceased friend whom he had been engaged to marry for fourteen years, which was a generous thing for her to have done when it was seen from the perspective, Charlie said, that this bum had never given the broad so much as a box of talcum powder for Christmas, it having been his policy always to pick a fight with her immediately preceding gift-exchanging occasions. "Lissen," Charlie yelled, "you inherit that kinda money and you naturally feel like you know alla answers and also it puts me in a position where 1 can't exactly kick him inna ankle, you know what 1 mean? So, wit' the new pernna view, 1 say tuh him, very patient, 'Why don't you pass the time by playing a liddul solitaire?'" Raymond was on a bar stool twelve feet away from Charlie and had in no way been eavesdropping on the conversation, as that could have been judged suicidal. He rapped on the bar peremptorily with a half dollar. Charlie looked up, irritated. One lousy customer in the whole lousy joint and he had to be a point killer. "What arreddy?" Charlie inquired. "Give me a deck of cards," Raymond said. Charlie looked at the bookmaker, then rolled his eyes heavenward. He shrugged his shoulders like the tenor in Tosca, opened a drawer behind him, took out a blue bicycle deck, and slid it along the polished surface to Raymond. Raymond took the deck from its box and began to shuffle smoothly and absent-mindedly, and Charlie went back to barbering the bookmaker and the young, dumpy blonde. Raymond was laying down the second solitaire spread when Marco came in, ten minutes later. He greeted Charlie as he passed him, ordering a beer, then stood at the bar at Raymond's elbow. "I got held up in traffic," he said ritualistically. "And so forth." Raymond didn't answer. "Are you clear for dinner, Raymond?" Marco wasn't aware that Raymond was ignoring him. "My girl insists that the time has come to meet you, and no matter how I try to get out of it, that's the way it's got to be. Besides, I am about to marry the little thing, ringside one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, and we would like you to be the best man." The queen of diamonds showed at the twenty-third card turn. Raymond scooped the cards together, ignoring Marco. Become aware of the silence, Marco was studying Raymond. Raymond squared the deck, put it face down on top of the bar, placed the queen of diamonds face up on top of the stack, and stared at it in a detached and preoccupied manner, unaware that Marco was there. Charlie put the glass of beer in front of Marco at the rate of one hundred and thirty-seven words a minute, decibel count well above the middle register, then turned, walking back to the bookmaker and the broad to punctuate his narrative by recalling the height of the repartee with his brother-in-law: "Why don't you take a cab quick to Central Park and jump inna lake, I says," and his voice belted it loud and strong as though a sound engineer were riding gain on it. Raymond brushed past Marco, walked rapidly past the bookmaker and the girl, and out of the saloon. "Hey! Hey, Raymond!" Marco yelled. "Where you going?" Raymond was gone. By the time Marco got to the street he saw Raymond slamming the door of a cab. The taxi took off fast, disappearing around the corner, going uptown. Marco returned to the saloon. He sipped at his beer with growing anxiety. The action of the game of solitaire nagged at him until he placed it in the dreams. It was one of the factors in the dreams that he had placed no meaning upon because he had come to regard the game as aberration that had wriggled into the fantasy. He had discussed it because it had been there, but after one particularly bright young doctor said that Raymond had undoubtedly been doing something with his hands which had looked as though he were playing solitaire, Marco had gradually allowed the presence of the game in the dream to dim and fade. He now felt the conviction that something momentous had just happened before his eyes but he did not know what it was. "Hey, Charlie." Business of rolling eyes heavenward, business of slow turn, exaggerating the forbearance of an extremely patient man. "Yeah, arreddy." "Does Mr. Shaw play solitaire in here much?" "Whatta you mean -- much?" "Did he ever play solitaire in here before?" "No." "Give me another beer." Marco went to the telephone booth, digging for change. He called Lou Amjac. Amjac sounded sourer than ever. "What the hell happened to you?" "Come on, save time. What happened?" "Raymond is at the Twenty-second Precinct in the middle of the park on the Eighty-sixth Street transverse." "What did he do? What the hell is the matter with you?" "He rented a rowboat and he jumped in the lake." "If you're kidding me, Lou --" "I'm not kidding you!" "I'll meet you there in ten minutes." "Colonel Marco!" "What?" "Did it finally break?" "I think so. I -- yeah, I think so." *** At first, Raymond flatly denied he had done such a thing but when the shock and embarrassment had worn off and he was forced to agree that his clothes were sopping wet, he was more nearly ready to admit that something which tended toward the unusual had happened. He, Amjac, and Marco sat in a squad room, at Marco's request. When Raymond seemed to have done with sputtering and expostulating, Marco spoke to him in a low, earnest voice, like a dog trainer, in a manner too direct to be evaded. "We've been kidding each other for a long time, Raymond, and I put up with it because I had no other choice. You didn't believe me. You decided I was sick and that you had to go along with the gag to help me. Didn't you, Raymond?" Raymond stared at his sodden shoes. "Raymond! Am I right?" "Yes." "Now hear this. You stood beside me at Hungarian Charlie's and you didn't know I was there. You played a game of solitaire. Do you remember that?" Raymond shook his head. Marco and Amjac exchanged glances. "You took a cab to Central Park. You rented a rowboat. You rowed to the middle of the lake, then you jumped overboard. You have always been as stubborn as a dachshund, Raymond, but we can produce maybe thirty eye-witnesses who saw you go over the side, then walk to shore, so don't tell me again that you never did such a thing -- and stop kidding yourself that they are not inside your head. We can't help you if you won't help us." "But I don't remember," Raymond said. Something had happened to permit him to feel fear. Jocie was coming home. He might have something to lose. The creeping paralysis of fright was so new to him that his joints seemed to have rusted. *** The capacious house in the Turtle Bay district jumped with activity that evening and it went on all through the night. A board review agreed to accept the game of solitaire as Raymond's trigger; and once they had made the connection they were filled with admiration for the technician who had conceived of it. Three separate teams worked with Hungarian Charlie, the talker's talker, the bookmaker, and the young, dumpy blonde. At first, the blonde refused to talk, as she had every reason to believe that she had been picked up on an utterly nonpolitical charge. She said, "I refuse to answer on the grounds. It might intend to incriminate." They had to bring Marco in to bail her attitude out of that stubborn durance. She knew Marco from around Charlie's place and she liked the way he smelled so much that she was dizzy with the hope of cooperating with him. He held her hand for a short time and explained in a feeling voice that she had not been arrested and that she was cooperating mainly as a big favor to him, and who knew? the whole thing could turn out to be pretty exciting. "I dig," she said, and everything was straightened out although she seemed purposely to misunderstand his solicitude by trying to climb into his lap as they discussed the various areas, but everybody was too busy to notice, and he was gone about two seconds after she had said, listen, she'd love to cooperate but why did they have to cooperate in different rooms? The bookmaker was even more wary. He was a veritable model of shiftiness, which was heightened by the fact that he was carrying over twenty-nine thousand dollars worth of action on the sixth race at Jamaica, so he couldn't possibly keep his mind on what these young men were talking to him about. They persuaded him to take a mild sedative, then a particularly sympathetic young fellow walked with him along the main corridor and, in a highly confidential manner, asked him to feel free to discuss what had him so disturbed. The bookmaker knew (1) that these were not the type police which booked gamblers, and (2) he had always responded to highly confidential, whispering treatment. He explained about his business worries, stating, for insurance, that a friend of his -- not he himself -- was carrying all that action. Amjac made a call and got the race result. It was Pepper Dog, Wendy's Own, and Italian Mae, in that order. Not one client had run in the money. The bookmaker was opened up like a hydrant. Hungarian Charlie, natch, was with it from the word go. *** Marco played through one hundred and twenty-five solitaire layouts until the technicians were sure, time after time and averaging off, where Raymond had stopped his play in Hungarian Charlie's saloon. They tested number systems as possible triggers, then they settled down to a symbol system and began to work with face cards because of the colors and their identification with human beings. They threw out the male face cards, kings and knaves, based on Raymond's psychiatric pattern. They started Marco working with the four queens. He discarded the queens of spades and clubs, right off. They stacked decks with different red queens at the twenty-third position, which fell as the fifth card on the fifth stack, and Marco dealt out solitaire strips. He made it the queen of diamonds, for sure. They kept him at it, but he connected the queen of diamonds with the face-up card on the squared deck on the bar, then all at once, as it is said to happen to saints and alcoholics, a voice he had heard in nightmares perhaps seven hundred times came to him. It was Yen Lo's voice saying: "The queen of diamonds, in so many ways reminiscent of Raymond's dearly loved and hated mother, is the second key that will clear his mechanism for any assignments." They had it made. Marco knew they had it made. Hungarian Charlie, the bookmaker and the young, dumpy blonde filled in the background of minor confirmations. The FBI called Cincinnati and arranged to have one dozen factory-sealed force-packs flown to New York by Army plane. The cards reached the Turtle Bay house at 9:40 A.M. A force pack is an item usually made up for magic shops and novelty stores for party types who fan out cards before their helpless quarries saying, "Take a card, any card." Force packs contain fifty-two copies of the same card to make it easier for the forcer to guess which card has been picked; the dozen packs from Cincinnati were made up exclusively of queens of diamonds. Marco figured the time would come to try Raymond out as player of the ancient game of solitaire that very morning, and he didn't want to have to waste any time waiting for the queen of diamonds to show up in the play. *** An hour after Chunjin had made his report to the Soviet security drop from the red telephone booth at the Fifty-ninth Street exit from Central Park, a meeting was called between Raymond's American operator and a District of Columbia taxi driver who also served as chief of Soviet security for the region. As they drove around downtown Washington, with Raymond's operator as passenger, the conversation seemed disputatious. Raymond's operator told the hackman emphatically that they would be foolish to panic because of what was obviously a ten thousand to one happenstance by which some idiot had unknowingly stumbled upon the right combination of words in Raymond's presence. "If you please." "What?" "This is a professional thing on which I cannot be fooled. Cannot. They have been working over him. He has broken. They have chosen this contemptuous and insulting way of telling us that he has cracked and is useless to us." "You people are really insecure. God knows I have always felt that the British overdo that paternal talk about this being a young country but, my God, you really are a young country. You just haven't been at it long enough. Please understand that if our security people knew what Raymond had been designed to do they would not let you know they knew. Once they find out what Raymond is up to, which is virtually impossible, they'll want to nail whoever is moving him. Me. Then, through me, you. Certainly you people do enough of this kind of thing in your own country, so why can't you understand it here?" "But why should such a conservative man jump in a lake?" "Because the phrase 'go jump in the lake' is an ancient slang wheeze in this country and some boob happened on the trigger accidentally, that's how." "I am actually sick with anxiety." "So are they," Raymond's operator said blandly, enjoying the bustle of traffic all around them and thinking what a hick town this so-called world capital was. "But how can you be so calm?" "I took a tranquilizer." "A what?" "A pill." "Oh. But how can you be so sure that is what happened?" "Because I'm smart. I'm not a stupid Russian. Because Raymond is at large. They allow him to move about. Marco is tense and frightened. Read the Korean's reports, for Christ's sake, and get a hold of yourself." "We have so little time and this is wholly my responsibility as far as my people are concerned." "Heller," Raymond's operator said, reading the name from the identification card which said that the driver's name was Frank Heller, "suppose I prove to you that Raymond is ours, not theirs." "How?" The Soviet policeman had to swerve the cab to avoid a small foreign car that hurtled across from a side street at his left; he screamed out the window in richly accented, Ukrainian-kissed English. "Why dawn't you loo quare you are gung, gew tsilly tson-of-a bitch?" "We certainly have a severe case of nerves today, don't we?" Raymond's operator murmured. "Never mind my nerves. To be on the right of an approaching vehicle is to have the right of way! He broke the law! How can you prove Raymond is not theirs?" "I'll have him kill Marco." "Aaaaah." It was a long, soft, satisfaction-stuffed expletive having a zibeline texture. It suggested the end of a perfect day, a cause well served, a race well run. "Marco is in charge of this particular element of counterespionage," Raymond's operator said. "Marco is Raymond's only friend. So? Proof?" "Yes." "Good." "When?" "Tonight, I think. Let me off here." The cab stopped at the corner of Nineteenth and Y. Raymond's operator got out and slammed the door -- too quickly. It closed on flesh. The operator screamed like a lunch whistle. Zilkov stopped the cab. He leaped out, ran around behind it, and stood, wincing with sympathetic pains, while the operator held the mashed hand in the other hand and bent over double. "It's terrible," Zilkov said. "Terrible. Oh, my God! Get into the cab and I'll get you to a hospital. Will you lose the nails? Oh, my God, what pain you must feel."
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