Текст книги "The Manchurian Candidate "

Автор книги: Richard Thomas Condon

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Fifteen

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.

Eugénie 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.

Eugénie 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 I get married, we have to stay married because I might turn into a drunk or a religieuse or a crypto-Republican if we ever failed, so let’s wait a week.”

“A week.

“Please.”

“Well, all right. There is such a thing as being over-mature 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 Blücher 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 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 Eugénie 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 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 Eugénie 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, Eugénie 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?” Eugénie 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 Wainwright, 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 Eugénie 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 added, “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, Eugénie 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 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, Austrian 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 nights.

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, faceup, 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 Gomel’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 Cha. “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 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 Bay shore, Long Island. Marco and Melvin had been the only two men on the patrol who had ever dreamed of it.