Текст книги "The Manchurian Candidate "

Автор книги: Richard Thomas Condon

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

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 digger 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 report, 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 case 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.”

Twenty

WHEN RAYMOND RETURNED HOME FROM THE Twenty-second Precinct House, wearing damp clothes and soggy shoes, it was late afternoon. He had to order Chunjin to the kitchen because the man persisted in asking ridiculous questions. They had a brisk exchange of shouts and sulks, then Raymond showered and took a two-hour dreamless nap.

He awoke thinking about Jocie. He decided that she should be clearing customs just about then. He could not think about his letter, whether she had read it or torn it up in distaste; he could not imagine what she felt or would feel. He dressed slowly and began to pack for the weekend. He removed the gaucho costume from its cardboard box and packed it carefully. He felt a flood of panic as he folded it in. Maybe this silly monkey suit would remind Jocie of her husband. Why in the name of sweet Jesus had he ordered such a costume? It couldn’t possibly resemble anything in real life, he decided. Cattle people didn’t wear silk bloomers. They were for Yul Brynner or somebody who was kidding. It was probably the kind of a suit they wore to dances or fiestas a couple of times a year. Surely neither Jocie nor her husband would have attended such dances. But what the hell was he being so literal for? You didn’t have to see a lot of people walking around in suits like these to know that they were symbolic of the Argentine. What would she think? Would she think he was being cruel or unkind or rude or insensitive? He fussed and pottered and grumbled to himself, conjecturing about the reactions of a woman he hadn’t seen since she had been a girl, but did not give a thought to having jumped out of a rowboat into a shallow lake in broad daylight in the center of a city because it embarrassed him to have to think of himself as having so lacked grace in front of all those strangers and those goddam policemen who had treated him as if he was Bellevue Hospital’s problem and not theirs. He also would not think of it because he could not afford to get angry with Joe Downey, his boss, who could have at least had the consideration to keep the story out of all the newspapers, and if not all the newspapers, surely out of his own front page.

He snapped the suitcase shut. He carried it to the bedroom door, worrying about what the hell Jocie would think of him when she saw those idiot newspapers at the airport. He flung open the door then began a tug of war over the suitcase with Chunjin as he dragged both of them toward the square, tiled foyer.

“For, cris sake, Chunjin!” It made him even angrier for having spoken to this pushy little type at all and a loud discussion started.

Chunjin did not want him to take the Long Island Railroad to his mother’s house. Opposing it bitterly, he maintained that it was not sound for a rich man to wrestle with a large bag in a crowded railroad car. Raymond said he certainly was not going to put up with this kind of insubordination and if it continued for just about two more sentences Chunjin could go in and pack his own cardboard suitcase and get the hell out for good. He felt foolish as soon as he had said it because he remembered suddenly that Chunjin did not sleep in and, of course, had no suitcase on the premises.

Chunjin said loudly that he had taken the liberty of renting an automobile and the correct, dark uniform of a proper chauffeur, the jacket of which Mr. Shaw could look upon as he was even now wearing it. Chunjin said he would drive Mr. Shaw to his mother’s house in comfort and at a level with Mr. Shaw’s dignity and position in the world.

To Raymond, all of this was an utterly new conception, perhaps as television would have been to the inventor of the wheel. Raymond had loved automobiles all his life, although he could not drive one, but he had never thought of renting one. He was transformed, enchanted.

“You rented a car?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw.”

“What kind?”

“Cadillac.”

“Well! Marvelous! What color?”

“West Point Gray. French blue seats. Leather. Genuine. Rear seat radio.”

“Wonderful!”

“Tax deductible also.”

“Is that so? How?”

“You will read the booklet in the car, Mr. Shaw.” Chunjin put on his dark chauffeur’s cap. He took the suitcase away from Raymond without a struggle. “We go now, Mr. Shaw? Seven o’clock. Two hours to drive.”

“I don’t know this house, you know. It’s a rented house. I don’t know about a place for you to stay.”

“My job find place. You not think. Ride and read reports from newspaper. Think about condition of world.”

Dressed as a costumer’s conception of a gaucho, Raymond came down his mother’s rented, winding stairs, railed in English copper, stainless steel, and Lucite, and into an entrance hall that might have been hewn by a cast of Grimm Brothers’ gnomes out of a marble mountain. It was studded with bronze zodiacal designs and purred with concealed neon light in an arrangement that pulled Raymond toward the great drawing room on the threshold of which Senator and Mrs. Iselin were receiving their guests. The older guests who shook hands with the Iselins that night had been followers of Father Coughlin; the group just younger than them had rallied around Gerald L. K. Smith; and the rest, still younger, were fringe lice who saw Johnny’s significance in a clear, white light. The clan had turned out from ten thousand yesterdays in the Middle West and neolithic Texas, and patriotism was far from being their last refuge. It was a group for anthropologists, and it seemed like very bad manners or very bad judgment on Raymond’s mother’s part to have invited Senator Jordan to walk among the likes of these.

Johnny and Ellie (as Raymond’s mother was called by most of the guests) were costumed as honest dairy-farm folk would look if honest dairy farmers had had their work clothes built by Balenciaga. Raymond’s mother had figured that the press photographs of these costumes would be viewed with great favor in the Iselin home state, where building foundations were made of butter; voters would be told that Big John never forgot where he came from. As she embraced Raymond in their mutually distasteful greeting, she whispered that Jocie’s plane had run late out of San Juan but that she was now in the house next door and she had telephoned to say that she would be over no later than midnight and had asked anxiously if Raymond would be there. He felt, for an instant, that he might faint.

“Anxiously? Why anxiously? Did she sound as though she were fearful that I might be here?”

“Oh, don’t be such a jerk, Raymond! If you weren’t here do you think for a moment that the Jordans would come here?”

“Don’t call me a jerk, Mother.”

“Go have a drink or a tranquilizer or something.” She turned to her husband. “Raymond can certainly be a pain in the ass,” she said with asperity.

“She’s kiddin’ yuh,” Johnny said. “You sure look great, kid. What are you supposed to be, one of those Dutch skaters?”

“What else?” Raymond answered. He walked through the crowds acknowledging greetings forbiddingly and feeling his heart beating as though it were trying to splinter a way out through his ribs. He walked among, but shunned contact with, the crowds on the broad lawns behind the house, all of which, excepting one section, were brilliantly illuminated with non-Communist Japanese lanterns and filled with striped tents. The dark section pulled Raymond to it. It faced the Jordan house. It was a walled-off piece of ground, as isolated as a private deck on an ocean liner. He stood there beside the wall staring across at the Jordan house without the reward of being able to observe any movement there. Frustrated, and more than usually resentful, he wandered back to the Iselin house through crowds of stout, blond Carmens and Kansas Borgias, unhorsed Godivas, unfrocked Richelieus, and many businessmen dressed as pirates. Many of the costumes were quaint American Legion uniforms so like those of the squadristi of former days in Italy, encasing various sizes of fleshy prejudice which exchanged opinions they rented that week from Mr. Sokolsky, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Pegler, and that fascinating younger fellow who had written about men and God at Yale. The three orchestras tried to avoid playing at the same time. The Iselins had provided very nearly everything but balalaikas in the way of music. There was a “society” orchestra, a three cha combo, and an inundation of gallant White Russian fiddlers who migrated across the grounds and in and out of the house en masse, sawing like locusts, and not only did they accept tips but they very nearly frisked the guests to get them. Raymond stopped at one of the four bars and drank a half glass of champagne. He refused offers to dance with three young women of different sizes. His mother found him later, far in a corner of the large salon, behind a pastel sofa, under two threats of Salvador Dalí, a Catalan.

“My God, you look as though your head will come to a point any minute,” she told him. “Raymond, will you please take a tranquilizer?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I have a revulsion for drugs.”

“You look absolutely miserable. Never mind. A half-hour more and she’ll be here. My feet hurt. Why don’t we just sneak away for a few minutes until Jocie and her father arrive. We can sit in the library and sip cold wine.”

Raymond looked right at her and, for the first time in many, many years, actually smiled at her, and she thought he looked positively beautiful. Why—why he looks like Poppa! Raymond, her own Raymond, looked exactly like her darling, darling Poppa! She clutched his hand as she led him out of the salon and along the two corridors to the library, causing one woman guest to tell another woman guest that they looked as though they were rushing off to get a little of you-know-what, Mrs. Iselin trailing a delicious scent of Jolie Madame because she had read that Lollobrigida wore it and she had always wished she could be short like that, and stopping only to get a bottle of wine and to tell the butler where they would be.

The library was a small, pleasant room and the books were real. The fourth wall was transparent glass and faced that walled deck of land and Jocie’s house. Raymond stood rubbing his hands together, so very tall and so preposterously handsome in the short, shining boots, the ballooning trousers, and the wide expanse of white silk shirt. “Do you know they got in from the airport?” he asked as he poured the lemon-yellow wine into two sherbet glasses.

“I told you,” his mother said. “She telephoned me. From that house.”

“How did she sound?”

“Like a girl.”

“Thanks.”

She leaned forward tensely in the raspberry-colored chair, splendid in pink chiffon. “Raymond?”

“What?” He handed her one of the filled glasses. She took it with her bandaged left hand. “What did you do to your hand?” he asked, seeing the bandage for the first time.

“I got careless in Washington this afternoon and got it caught in the door of a taxi.” He grunted involuntarily. “Raymond,” she said, transferring the wine to her right hand and lifting it shakily. “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”

Twenty-One

MARCO SQUEEZED THE INSIDE OF EUGÉNIE Rose’s splendid thigh, not at all sexually—well, perhaps just a little bit sexually—but mostly out of the greatest of good spirits because, after all this time of sick fear, the work seemed to be leading to the conclusion which they had dreaded they would never be able to find.

“Hey!” Eugénie Rose said.

“What?”

“Don’t stop.”

It was after midnight and it was Marco’s dinner break from the unending games of solitaire, from the examinations of Hungarian Charlie, the bookmaker, and the young, dumpy blonde, from the number systems and symbol systems, and Marco knew the end was in sight.

“This time tomorrow night, oh boy! I’ll have lunch with Raymond tomorrow, then a little solitaire, then a nice long chat about the good old days in Korea and a few Russian and Chinese friends of ours, then a few suggestions made to crumble up their systems and mechanisms forever—sort of removing the controls, ripping out the wiring—and, lady, it’s all over. All over. All done with. Done.”

“Finished.”

“Completed.”

“Through.”

“Mission accomplished.”

“Check.”

They were in an all-night restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street, and when he wasn’t clutching her hands, Rosie nibbled on cinnamon toast as daintily as a cartoon mouse. Marco was shoveling in large wedges of gooey creamed chipped beef and humming chorus after chorus of “Here Comes the Bride.”

“That’s a pretty tune you’re humming. What is it?” she asked.

“Our song.”

“Oh, Benny boy. Oh, my dear colonel!”

Twenty-Two

RAYMOND FOUND THE CARDS IN THE DESK. They were elegant rented cards that had come with the house. They had gold edges and were imprinted with the name and the grotesque crest of a hotel maintained for the expense-account set on the North Side of Chicago. He dealt out the play. The queen of diamonds did not show in the first game. As he placed the cards precisely his mother sat on the edge of her chair with her face buried in her hands. When she heard him squaring up the pack she sat up straight and her face was twisted bitterly. Raymond placed the red queen faceup on top of the deck and studied it noncommittally.

“Raymond, I must talk to you about a problem with Colonel Marco, and I must talk to you, as well, about many other things but there will be no time tonight. It seems that there is never time.” There was a brisk knocking at the door, which she had locked. “Damn!” she said and walked to the door. “Who is it?”

“It’s me, hon. Johnny. Tom Jordan is here. I need you.”

“All right, lover. I’ll be right out.”

“Who the hell are you in there with anyway?”

“Raymond.”

“Oh. Well, hurry it up whatever it is, hon. We have work out here.”

She walked back and stood behind Raymond with her hands on his shoulders. As he watched the red queen she repaired her face as best she could. Then she leaned over him and took the card. “I’ll take this with me, dear,” she said. “It might bring mischief if I leave it here.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Yes, Mother.”

She left the library, locking the door behind her. As soon as she was gone something rattled at the terrace door. Raymond looked up just as the smiling, beautiful young woman closed the door behind her. She was dressed for the masquerade party, costumed as a playing card. The rich gold and scarlet cowl fell from her crown to her shoulders. Gold incrusted jewels banded the lush black and white ruff at her throat. The kaleidoscopic complex of inlays of metallic oranges, yellows, purples, scarlets, blacks, and whites fell to her bodice and below. From the top of her head, stiffly parallel to her shoulders, then falling at right angles full down the sides of her body, was a white papier-mâché board on which was printed a regal Q, a red diamond standard directly below it at the left corner, while at the right there stared a large red diamond against the shining white background. It was the queen of diamonds, his patron and his destiny. She spoke to him.

“I saw you through my window just before we left the house,” she said huskily. “My heart almost shot out of my body. I had to see you alone. Daddy went around the front way and I slipped through that old iron door in the stone wall.”

“Jocie.” She was Jocie and she was his queen of diamonds. She was the queen of diamonds, his special lady from the stars, and she was Jocie.

“Your letter—oh, my darling.”

He moved across the room and held her by the shoulders, swaying. He looked down at her with such a force of pure love that she shivered and they were together in love forever. He kissed her. It was the first time he had ever kissed her after having possessed her completely in imaginations through nine risings of April and the deaths of eight Decembers. He pulled her down on the couch and his hands fumbled with her royal clothes and royal person while his mouth and his body sought his salvation with the only woman he would ever love, and the only woman who had ever allowed him to love her; the cardboard queen he served, and the lovely girl he had adored from the moment he had come to life beside her near a lake, near a snake, within an expanding dream.

Senator Jordan’s costume was the toga and sandals of a Roman legislator, combined with a blanked expression. He stood next to Senator Iselin, equidistant from the marble walls at the center of the foyer. The three cha combo scattered sounds over them from the bottomless fountain of its noises. When the two men spoke they spoke guardedly, like convicts in a chow line.

“I am here,” Senator Jordan said to Johnny, “because my daughter asked me to come, saying that it was extremely important to her, that is to say, important to her happiness, that I come. There is no other reason and my presence here is not to be misunderstood nor is it to be exploited by that industry of gossip which you control. I feel loathing toward you and for what you have done to weaken our country and very nearly destroy our party. Is that clear?”

“That’s all right, Tom. Glad to have you,” Johnny said. “I was tickled when Ellie told me that we were going to be next-door neighbors.”

“And I am wearing this ridiculous costume because my daughter cabled ahead for it from Puerto Rico and because she asked me to wear it, assuring me that I would be less conspicuous at this Fascist party rally if I did.”

“It looks great on you, Tom. Great. What are you supposed to be, some kind of an athlete or something?”

“An interne. Furthermore, I hope none of this lunatic fringe who are your guests tonight, and who are ringing us like hyenas to watch us chat so amiably, are getting the wrong idea about me. If they link you with me I’ll take ads to repudiate you and them.”

“Don’t give it a thought, Tom. If anything, old buddy, they’re probably getting the wrong idea about me. They are very possessive about their politics. They’re a great bunch, actually. You’d like them.”

The restless guests moved all around them. The scent of masked ambergris mixed with abstraction of carnations and musk glands, lemon rinds, and the essences of gunpowder and tobacco. Raymond’s mother came like a flung harpoon through the crowds to greet her honored guest. She shook his hand vigorously, she said again and again and again how honored they were to have him in their house, and she forgot to ask where Jocie was. She asked Johnny to represent them among their other guests because she just had to have a good old-fashioned visit with Senator Tom. Before Johnny slunk away gratefully he mumbled amenities and moved to shake hands, which Senator Jordan tactfully overlooked.

Raymond’s mother stopped a waiter and took his tray of four filled champagne glasses. She carried it off in the opposite direction from the library, followed stiffly by the senator, to the small room which was known to the domestic staff as “the Senator’s den” because Johnny liked to drink in there, unshaven.

It was a vivid room, vivid enough to make a narcoleptic sit up popeyed, with bright, white carpet, black walls, and shining brass furniture with zebrine upholstery. Raymond’s mother set the tray down upon the black desk with the shining brass drawer handles, then asked her neighbor to sit down as she closed the door.

“It was good of you to come over, Tom.”

He shrugged.

“I suppose you were surprised to learn that we had taken this house.”

“Surprised and appalled.”

“You won’t have to see much of us.”

“I am sure of that.”

“I would like to ask a question.”

“You may.”

“Will you carry this personal feeling you have for me and for Johnny over into other fields of practical politics?”

“What other fields?”

“Well—the convention, for example.”

His eyebrows shot up. “In what area of the convention?”

“Would you try to block Johnny if his name is brought forward?”

“You’re joking.”

“My dear Tom!”

“You are going to go after the nomination for Johnny?”

“We may be forced into that position. Your answer will help me to form the decision. A lot of Americans, you know, look upon Johnny as one of the few men willing to fight to the death for the preservation of our liberties.”

“Aaaaaah!”

“And I mean a lot of people. Votes. The Loyal American Underground is five million voting Americans. To say nothing of the wonderful work Frank Bollinger is doing, and with no urging from us. He says flatly that he will walk into that convention with a petition of not less than one million votes pledged for Johnny as a down payment on ten million.”

“You haven’t answered me. Are you going after the nomination for Johnny?”

“No,” she answered calmly. “We couldn’t make it. But we can make the vice-presidency.”

“The vice-presidency?” Jordan was incredulous. “Why would Johnny want the vice-presidency?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“Because he wants power and a big stage to dance on. There’s no power in the vice-presidency and the only place where there is more power than where Johnny is right now is in the White House. Why would he want the vice-presidency?”

“I answered your question, Tom, but you haven’t answered mine.”

“What question?”

“Will you block us?”

“Block you? I would spend every cent I own or could borrow to block you. I have contempt for you and fear for you, but mostly I fear for this country when I think of you. Johnny is just a low clown but you are the smiler who wraps a dagger in the flag and waits for your chance, which I pray may never come. I tell you this: if at that convention one month from now you begin to deal with the delegations to cause Johnny’s name to be put on that ticket, or if in my canvass of all delegations which will begin on my telephone tomorrow I learn that you are so acting, I am going to bring impeachment proceedings against your husband on the floor of the Senate and I will hit him with everything in my carefully documented book.”

Raymond’s mother came out of her chair, spitting langrel.