Текст книги "The Manchurian Candidate "

Автор книги: Richard Thomas Condon

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

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 any one 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.

Eighteen

EUGÉNIE 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 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.

“We three Rings of Orient are,

Bearing gifts we traverse afar,

Field and fountain, moor and mountain,

Following yonder star.

O, Star of wonder, star of night,

Star with royal beauty bright,

Westward leading, still proceeding,

Guide us to the perfect light.”

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 Männergesangsverein, 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 Tucumán. 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 icebreaker, 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 long-time 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, François 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 Jocie 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.”

Dear Jocie:

This is a difficult letter to get written. It is nearly an impossible letter for a w

eak and frightened man to write, and I have surprised myself with that sentence because I have never thought that of myself and I have never said anything less than a sufficiency about myself. I will set down at the outset that I am going to open myself up to you and that it will probably be a long, long letter so that, should it hurt you to read any such things any further, you may stop now and it will all be over. To have to love you as much as I do (as I

did

was what I had started to write, so that I could plot its progression and its growth over the nine empty and useless years without you) and to feel my love for you grow and grow and grow and to have no place to store this enormous harvest within the emptiness, I have found that I must carry it ahead of me wherever I go, bundled in my arms like old clothes which no one else can use and no one wants but which have warmth in them still if someone, as bleakly cold as I have been, can be found to wear them. You will return to New York next month. I have started this letter almost thirty times but I cannot postpone writing it and mailing it for another day because if I do it may not reach you. I cannot write this letter but I must write this letter because I know that I have not got the character nor the courage, the habit of hope nor the assurance that comes from having a place in a crowded world, and I could never be able to speak to you about this long pain and bitterness which—

He stopped writing. He had smudged the paper with several genuine tears.

Nineteen

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 I can’t exactly kick him inna ankle, you know what I mean? So, wit’ the new pernna view, I 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. Becoming aware of the silence, Marco was studying Raymond. Raymond squared the deck, put it facedown on top of the bar, placed the queen of diamonds faceup 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 out 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 an 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 eyewitnesses 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 of 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 faceup 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.