Текст книги "The Manchurian Candidate "

Автор книги: Richard Thomas Condon

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

“When? How long have I been here?”

“Eight days. Nine days. I don’t know.”

“And you just got here?”

“Do you hate me, Raymond?”

“No, Mother.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes, Mother.” He looked at her with genuine anxiety. Had she run out of arm sauce? Had she broken the arm-banging machine? Or was she just a very clever impersonator sent over to play the mother while my true mommy tries to sober up the Great Statesman?

“My little boy. My darling, little boy.” She went into a paroxysm of silent weeping, working her shoulders up and down in a horrible manner and shaking the chair she sat in. There was nothing faked about this, he knew. She must have hit some real trouble along the line. It simply could not possibly be that she was weeping over him being stretched out in a hospital. Mucus slid from the tiny handkerchief and rested on her left cheekbone. Raymond closed his eyes for a moment, but he would not tell her what had happened and felt a deep satisfaction that ultimately she would look in some mirror after she had left him and see this mess on her face.

“You are such a fraud, Mother. My God, I feel as well as I have ever felt and I know that you have been all over this with whatever doctors there are out there on the telephone days ago, and now you’re at the hospital because there is probably a sale at Bloomingdale’s or you’re having a few radio actors blacklisted and you make a production out of it like I was involved somehow in your life.” His voice was bitter. His eyes were hard and dry.

“I have to be a fraud,” she said, straightening her back and slipping several lengths of steel into her voice like whalebone into a corset. “And I have to be the truth, too. And a shield and the courage for all the men I have ever known, yourself included, excepting my father. There is so much fraud in this world and it needs to be turned away with fraud, the way steel is turned with steel and the way a soft answer does not turneth away wrath.” She had emerged, dripping with acid, from her grief. Her face was a mass of ravaged colors and textures, her hair was like an old lamp shade fringe and that glob of mucus still rested on her left cheekbone disgustingly, but she was herself again, and Raymond felt greatly relieved.

“How’s Johnny?”

“Fine. He’d be here, but that committee just finished working him over—ah, wait until that one is up for re-election.” She sniffed noisily. “So I told him he must stay there and stare them down. You have no use for him anyway so I don’t know why you bother to ask for him unless you feel guilt about something.”

“I do feel guilt about something.”

“About what?” She leaned forward slightly because information is the prime increment of power.

“About Jocie.”

“Who’s Jocie?”

“Jocie Jordan. The senator’s daughter.”

“Oh. Yes. Why do you feel guilt?” his mother asked.

“Why? Because she thinks I deserted her.”

“Raymond! Why do you dramatize everything so? You were babies!”

“I thought that since we’re having our first meeting since I got the medal, since I got back from Korea, and I was in Korea for two years, I thought since you’ve been pretending to be two other people—you know, honest and maternal and wistfully remorseful about how we had let our lives go along—coldly and separately—and I thought that before we got any more honest and hated ourselves in the morning, that we might just pay Jocie the respect of asking for her—you know, mentioning her name in passing the way they do about the dead?” His voice was choked. His eyes were not dry.

As though he had reminded her of what had triggered her in the first place, she began unexpectedly to weep. The lemon sunlight was reflected from the bright white blank wall outside the window at her back and it lingered like St. Elmo’s fire around the ridiculously small green hat she was wearing, a suspicion of a hat that had been assembled for seventy dollars by an aesthetic leader for whom millinery signified the foundation stone of culture.

“What is the matter with you, Mother?”

She sobbed.”

“You aren’t crying about me?”

She sobbed and nodded.

“But, I’m all right. I don’t have a pain or an ache. I am absolutely fine.”

“Oh, Raymond, what can I say to you? There has been so much to get done. We have so far to go. Johnny is going to lead the people of our country to the heights of their history. But I have to lead Johnny, Raymond. You know that. I know you know that. I have given my life and many, many significant things for all of this. My life. Simply that and I can see that if I were to ransack my strength—remembered strength or future strength—I could not give more to this holy crusade than I have given. Now I have come face to face with my life where it has failed to cross your own. I can’t tell you how a mother feels about that, because you wouldn’t understand. It made me weep for a little bit. That’s all. What’s that? Anybody and everybody recovers from tears, but I’m not sad and I don’t have regrets because I know that what I did and what I do is for the greatest possible good for all of us.” Raymond watched her, then made the small despising gesture with his right hand, brushing her world out of his way as it came too close to him.

“I don’t understand one word of what you are saying,” he told her.

“I am saying this. Some terrible, terrible changes are going to come to this country.”

He flicked at the air with his hand violently, unaware of the movement, and he closed his eyes.

“This country is going to go through a fire like it has never seen,” she said in a low and earnest voice. “And I know what I am saying because the signs are there to read and I understand politics, which is the art of reading them. Time is going to roar and flash lightning in the streets, Raymond. Blood will gush behind the noise and stones will fall and fools and mockers will be brought down. The smugness and complacency of this country will be dragged through the blood and the noise in the streets until it becomes a country purged and purified back to original purity, which it once possessed so long ago when the founding fathers of this republic—the blessed, blessed fathers—brought it into life. And when that day comes—and we have been cleansed of the slime of oblivion and saved from the wasteful, wrong, sinful, criminal, selfish, rottenness which Johnny, and only Johnny is going to save us from, you will kneel beside me and thank me and kiss my hands and my skirt and give only me your love as will the rest of the great people of this confused and blinded land.”

He put his hand over hers on the bed, then lifted it to his lips. Suddenly, he felt himself being made soft with pity for both of them. He could not comprehend that his mother had any feelings, and it shocked him deeply.

Two days later, immediately after Raymond ate dinner in the room at Swardon with his leg still in a cast, Zilkov and the American operator came to the room with a package of playing cards and subsequently gave him detailed instructions as to how he was to kill Holborn Gaines. The time they set was three forty-five the following morning. Gaines lived in an apartment house, alone. The house maintained a self-service elevator after one A.M. when the night man went off duty. There was no doorman. Zilkov had had a key made to fit the front door of the building and to Mr. Gaines’s apartment, which was one of four on the ninth floor. The security man went over the pencil-sketched, then photostatted floor plan of Gaines’s small unit of three rooms and a bath, indicating where the bedroom was and suggesting that Raymond strangle him, as it was the quietest and least complicated method and, considering the close quarters in which he would have to work, the neatest. He added that Raymond must accept it as a rule, then and forever, that in the event that anyone, repeat anyone, ever discovered him on the scene of the assignment, this other person or persons must be killed. Was that clear? Zilkov may have reconsidered the risk he had decided to have Raymond run, for, to make sure this condition was understood, he asked the American operator to repeat the admonition.

As it worked out, Mr. Gaines was alone but he was not asleep as he should have been to save Raymond considerable embarrassment. He was reading in bed, a four-poster feather bed, with nine soft pillows all around behind him and a shocking-pink maribou bed jacket around his shoulders; chuckling over a few pounds of confidential reports from bureau chiefs in Washington, Rome, London, Madrid, and Moscow. The windows were closed tight and, as in the office at all times, an electric heater was beaming up at him from the floor nearby: in July.

As Raymond opened the door to the apartment he knocked over the tall paper screen that Mr. Gaines kept in front of the opened door in the summer time. As it fell it dislodged a picture hanging on the wall; it hit the floor with a crash. There could be no doubt that someone had come to call, and Raymond cursed himself as a blunderer because he knew well that Mr. Gaines would be tart about the visit, in any event.

“What the hell is that?” Mr. Gaines yelled shrilly.

Raymond flushed with embarrassment. It was an entirely new feeling for him and Mr. Gaines was the only living person who could have made him feel that way, because Mr. Gaines made him feel helpless, gawky, and grateful all at the same time. “It’s me, Mr. Gaines,” he said. “Raymond.”

“Raymond? Raymond?” Mr. Gaines was bewildered. “My assistant? Raymond Shaw?”

Raymond appeared in the bedroom doorway at that moment. He was wearing a neat black suit, a dark gray shirt, a black tie, and black gloves. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I—I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Gaines.”

Mr. Gaines fingered the maribou bed jacket. “Don’t get any ideas about this silly-looking bed jacket,” he said irritably. “It was my wife’s. It’s the warmest thing I have. Perfect for reading in bed at night.”

“I didn’t know you were married, Mr. Gaines.”

“She died nearly six years ago,” Mr. Gaines said gruffly, then he remembered. “But—but, what the hell are you doing here at—” Mr. Gaines looked over at the alarm clock on the night table. “At ten minutes to four in the morning.”

“Well—I—uh—”

“My God, Raymond, don’t tell me you’ve come here to talk something over? I mean, surely you aren’t going to pour out your heart with the details of some sordid love affair or anything like that?”

“No, sir, you see—”

“Raymond, if you feel you must resign for any reason—a circumstance which I would regret, of course—surely you could leave a little note on my desk in the morning. I hate chattering like this! I thought I had explained to you that I loathe having to talk to people, Raymond.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, Mr. Gaines.”

Mr. Gaines suddenly seemed to remember something significant. He lifted his left hand and pointed vaguely toward the door, looking, because of the fluffy feathers all around his white hair, something like the ancient Mrs. Santa R. Claus. “How did you get in here? When I close that door, it locks.”

“They gave me a key.”

“Who did?”

“The people at the hospital.”

“What hospital? But—why? Why did they give you a key?”

Raymond had been moving slowly around the bed. At last he stood at Mr. Gaines’s side, looking down at him sunk into the feather bed. He felt sheepish.

“Raymond! Answer me, my boy! Why are you here?”

It was a relatively effortless job because Mr. Gaines, being such an old man, did not have much strength and Raymond, because of feelings of affection and gratitude for Mr. Gaines did everything he could, with his great strength, to terminate his friend’s life as quickly as possible. He thought of extinguishing the bed light as he left, but turned it on again, remembering that he wouldn’t be able to find his way out to the front door if he left the room in darkness.

He walked four blocks west before taking a cab north on Lexington Avenue; he left it three blocks away from Swardon. He entered the sanitarium through the basement door, off the back areaway, showing his pass to the Soviet Army corporal in overalls who had taken him under the throat with the left forearm without speaking and held until Raymond tapped his third finger twice, then showed the pass. When Raymond got to his room the American operator was waiting for him.

“Still up?” Raymond said conversationally. “It’s almost four-thirty.”

“I wanted to make sure you were all right,” the operator said. “Good night, Raymond. I’ll send the nurses in to rig you up again.”

“Do I have to have those casts put on again?”

“Those casts must stay on until you are discharged. How do you know who’ll show up here as a visitor now that Mr. Gaines is dead?” The operator left the room. The nurses had Raymond undressed and bandaged in no time at all.

Raymond, as it turned out, did have two more visitors before he left the hospital. Joe Downey, the managing editor of The Daily Press, stopped by after Mr. Gaines’s funeral and offered Raymond the job of writing the column, which meant a two-hundred-dollar-a-week raise in pay and a net saving of three hundred dollars a week to the paper because, naturally, they didn’t figure to start Raymond at the figure Mr. Gaines had finished at, and Mr. Gaines had been political columnist for the paper for twenty-six years. They also offered Raymond fifty per cent of the syndication money, a net increase of one hundred per cent to the paper because under the prior arrangement Mr. Gaines had kept it all, excepting the sales and distribution and promotion percentage. To the paper’s owners, Mr. Downey allowed that Raymond was new and had such an unpleasant personality that it was better than five to one that no one would ever get around to telling him that he rated all the syndication money. It was fair. The reports from the bureau chiefs made up most of the column, and the paper, not Raymond, had to pay the bureau chiefs. Besides, one half of the syndication money came to five hundred and six dollars per week, which lifted Raymond’s take-home pay by seven hundred and six dollars per week; Mr. Downey estimated this as being a bargain because the paper would have the only Medal of Honor columnist in the business, which certainly should open the doors to information at the Pentagon, and he had that crazy stepfather who could scare people into talking to Raymond, and that mother who could get him in anywhere, even to share a double bed with the President if he felt like it, and he had had five solid years of learning his job from Holborn Gaines. Seven hundred and six dollars a week is a nice raise for a young fellow, particularly if he likes money.

Actually, the increased income took the edge off the promotion for Raymond but, the way he would handle it, he figured the money would be the bank’s problem, not his.

Raymond was distraught over the murder. He had had great regard for the old man and a fondness that was unusual inasmuch as he felt fondness for only two other people in the world, Marco and Jocie, and Jocie should not be included in the category because the feeling for her was vastly different again. He just could not get it through his head that anyone would want to murder Mr. Gaines. He had been a kind and gentle and helpless old man, and how could anyone do such a thing? Mr. Downey expressed the police opinion that it must have been some mentally unstable political crank. “Holly was one of the oldest friends I had left,” Mr. Downey said sadly, mourning for himself.

“Is the paper going to post a reward?”

Mr. Downey rubbed his chin. “Hm. I guess we should, at that. We certainly should. Can charge it to promotion if we ever have to pay it.”

“I want to pledge five thousand dollars of that reward,” Raymond said hotly.

“You don’t need to do that, Raymond.”

“Well, I want to, goddammit.”

“Well, O.K. You pledge five and we’ll pledge ten, although the board’ll have to O.K. it of course, and I’ll call Centre Street soon as I get back to the office so they can send out paper on it. By God, we’ll pay for a general alarm, too. The dirty bastard.” Downey was doubly upset because he hated to spend the paper’s money and he knew damned well that Holly Gaines, wherever he was, wouldn’t approve of a goddam, boyscout, grandstand play like that, but, what the hell, there were certain things you pretended you had to do.

Marco came in to see Raymond the same afternoon. “Jesus, you look like hell,” Raymond said from under his head bandage and traction equipment. “What happened?”

Marco looked worse than that. The old sayings are the best, and Marco looked like death warmed over. “What do you mean, what happened?’ he said. “I’m not in a hospital bed, am I?”

“I just mean I never saw you look so lousy.”

“Well, thanks.”

“What happened?”

Marco ran his hand across his face. “I can’t sleep.”

“Can’t you get some pills?” Raymond said tentatively—having a narcotics addict for a mother, he had developed an aversion to drugs. Also, it was difficult for him to understand any kind of a sleeping problem, since he himself could have fallen asleep hanging by one ankle in a high wind.

“It’s not so much that I can’t sleep. It’s more that I’d rather not sleep. I’m walking around punchy because I’m scared. I keep having the same nightmare.” Raymond, lying flat on his back, made the flicking gesture with his right hand.

“Is it a nightmare about a Soviet general and a lot of Chinese and me and the guys who were on the patrol?” Marco came out of the chair like a tiger. He stood over Raymond, gripping the cloth of his pajama jacket in both fists, staring down at him with wild eyes. “How did you know that? How did you know that?” His voice went up and up like an eccentric stairs in front of a hilltop summer beach house.

“Take—your—hands—off—me.” With that sentence Raymond’s voice fell back into his horrid drawling manner; into his repulsive, inciting, objectionable voice that he used to keep the rest of the world on the other side of the moat surrounding the castle where he had always lain under the spell of the wicked witch. It was curdlingly unfriendly, and so actively repellent that it drove Marco backward into the chair, which was a good thing because Marco had gone into a sick yellow-ivory color, his breathing was shallow, and his eyes shone with an ever so slight sheen of insanity as he had reached out to take the shape of his oppression into the muscles of his fingers and hands and punish it for what it had been doing to his dignity, which is man’s own inner image of himself.

“I’m sorry, Raymond.”

Raymond became Marco’s friend again instantly, as though there had been no lapse.

“Please tell me how you knew about my nightmare, Raymond.”

“Well, you see, I didn’t really. I mean, it’s just that Melvin—you know: Al Melvin, the corporal on the patrol—he wrote me a long letter about a week ago. I was naturally surprised to hear from him because—well—as you know, I was never much one for fraternizing, but he said in the letter that I was the only one he knew how to reach—he sent the letter to Johnny because everybody certainly knows how to reach him—because he had to tell somebody in the patrol about this nightmare or he was afraid he would lose his mind and—”

“Please tell me about the nightmare, Raymond.”

“Well, he dreams that the patrol is all sitting together. He says he dreams about a lot of Soviet officers and some Chinese brass and us being on the patrol. What is such a nightmare about that?”

“Where’s the letter? Do you have the letter?”

“Well, no. I mean, I never keep letters.”

“Is that all he wrote? Is that all about the nightmare?’

“Yeah.”

“It just stops right there?”

“I guess so.”

“Man!”

“Is it like your nightmare?”

“Yeah. As a matter of fact, mine is a lot like that.”

“You guys ought to get together.”

“Right away. You don’t know what this means to me. I just can’t explain to you what this means to me, Raymond.”

“Well, you can’t see him right away, though, Ben. He lives in Wainwright, Alaska.”

“Alaska? Alaska?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus. Wainwright, Alaska. You have to be kidding!”

“No. I wish I was, Ben. I’m not. But, so what? What’s the difference?”

“What’s the difference? I told you I can’t sleep. You told me I look like hell. Well, I feel like hell and I’m shaking all to pieces and I think sometimes I should kill myself because I’m afraid of going insane, and then you tell me like you were talking about the weather that another man who was on the patrol is having the same delusions that I was afraid were driving me crazy, and you tell me he lives in some place called Wainwright, Alaska, where I can’t sit down and talk to him and find out if he’s cracking up like I am and how we can help each other, and you say what’s the difference.”

Marco began to laugh hysterically, then he put his face forward into his large hands and wept into them, squeezing tightly at his cheekbones, his heavy shoulders moving grotesquely and causing the four rows of his decorations to jump up and down. He made such tearing sounds that the two Soviet Army nurses on the floor came running in. After six or seven minutes of Marco’s reckless, unrelieved, and shocking sobbing, at which Raymond stared helplessly, they hit him with a hypo to calm him down and get him the hell out of there.

All in all, Raymond had had a most ironic hospital stay, what with a visit from the wife of America’s most gallant and noisy anti-Communist to a hospital operated by the Soviet secret police, what with a U.S. Army Intelligence officer breaking down and embarrassing the staff of the same place, what with contributing five thousand dollars to a reward for his own capture, and what with learning that two grown men were capable of behaving like children over a perfectly harmless, if repetitious, dream.