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THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

Chapter 10

Johnny had become chairman of the Committee on Federal Operations and chairman of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, with a budget of two hundred thousand dollars a year and an inculcating staff of investigators. He grew sly, in the way he worked that staff. He would sidle up to a fellow senator or another member of the government placed as high and mention the name and habits of some young lady for whom the senator might be paying the necessities, or perhaps an abortion here, or a folly-of-youth police record there. It worked wonders. He had only to drop this kind of talk upon five or six of them and at once they became his missionaries to intimidate others who might seek to block his ways in government.

There were a few groups and individuals who were able to find the courage to assail him. One of the most astute political analysts of the national scene wrote: "Iselinism has developed a process for compounding a lie, then squaring it, which is a modern miracle of dishonesty far exceeding the claims of filter cigarettes. Iselin's lies seem to have atomic motors within them, tiny reactors of such power and such complexity as to confound and baffle all with direct, and even slightly honest, turns of mind. He has bellowed out so many accusations about so many different people (and for all the public knows these names he brandishes may have been attached to people of entirely questionable existence) that no one can keep the records of these horrendous charges straight. Iselin is a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts."

The American Association of Scientists asked that this statement be published: "Senator Iselin puts the finishing touches on his sabotage of the morale of American scientists to the enormous net gain of those who work against the interests of the United States."

Johnny was doing great. From a semi-hangdog country governor, Raymond's mother said, utterly unknown outside domestic politics on a state level in 1956, he had transformed himself into a global figure in 1957. He had a lot going for him beyond Raymond's mother. His very looks: that meaty nose, the nearly total absence of forehead, the perpetual unshavenness, the piggish eyes, red from being dipped in bourbon, the sickeningly monotonous voice, whining and grating, -- all of it together made Johnny one of the greatest demagogues in American history, even if, as Raymond's mother often said to friends, he was essentially a lighthearted and unserious one. Nonetheless, her Johnny had become the only American in the country's history of political villains, studding folk song and story, to inspire concomitant fear and hatred in foreigners, resident in their native countries. He blew his nose in the Constitution, he thumbed his nose at the party system or any other version of governmental chain of command. He personally charted the zigs and zags of American foreign policy at a time when the American policy was a monstrously heavy weight upon world history. To the people of Iceland, Peru, France, and Pitcairn Island the label of Iselinism stood for anything and everything that was dirty, backward, ignorant, repressive, offensive, anti-progressive, or rotten, and all of those adjectives must ultimately be seen as sincere tributes to any demagogue of any country on any planet.

After Raymond's mother had written the scriptures and set the tone of the sermons Johnny was to make along the line to glory, she left him bellowing and pointing his finger while she organized, for nearly fifteen months, the cells of the Iselin national organization she called the Loyal American Underground. This organization enrolled, during that first period of her work, two million three-hundred thousand members, all militantly for Johnny and what he stood for, and most deeply grateful for his wanting to "give our friends a place from which they may partake of a sense of history through adventure and real participation in the cause of fanatic good government, cleansed of the stain of communism."

Raymond's mother and her husband held their mighty political analysis and strategy-planning sessions at their place, which was out toward Georgetown. They would talk and drink bourbon and ginger ale and Johnny would fool around with his scrapbook. He always had it in his mind that cold winter nights would be the best time to paste up the bundles of clippings about his work into individual books, with the intent of someday providing the vast resources for a John Yerkes Iselin Memorial Library. The analyses of the day's or the week's battles were always informal and usually productive of really constructive action for the immediate future.

"Hon," Raymond's mother said, "aren't there times when you're up there at the committee table when you have to go to the john?"

"Of course. Whatta you think I'm made of -- blotting paper or something?"

"Well, what do you do about it?"

"Do? I get up and I go."

"See? That's exactly what I mean. Now tomorrow when you have to go I want you to try it my way and see what happens. Will you?"

He grinned horribly. "Right up there in front of all those TV cameras?"

"Never mind. Tomorrow when you have to go I want you to throw yourself into a rage -- making sure you are on camera -- wait for a tight shot if you can -- and bang on the desk and scream for the chairman and yell 'Point of order! Point of order!' Then stand up and say you will not put up with this farce and that you will not dignify it with your presence for one moment longer."

"Why do I do that?"

"You have to start making the right kind of exits for yourself, Johnny, so that the American people will know that you have left so they can sit nervously and wait for you to come back."

"Gee, hon. That's a hell of an idea. Oh, say, I like that idea!"

She threw him a kiss. "What an innocent you are," she said, smiling at him dotingly. "Sometimes I don't think you give a damn what you're talking about or who you're talking about."

"Well, why the hell should I?"

"You're right. Of course."

"You're damn right, I'm right. What the hell, hon, this is a business with me. Suppose we were lawyers, I often say to myself. I mean actual practicing lawyers. I'd be the trial lawyer working out in front, rigging the juries and feeding the stuff to the newspaper boys, and you'd be the brief man back in the law library who has the research job of writing up the case." He finished the highball in his hand and gave the empty glass to his wife. She got up to make him another drink and said, "Oh, I agree with that, honey, but just the same I wish you would try a little bit more to feel the sacredness of your own mission."

"The hell with that. What's with you tonight, baby? I'm like a doctor, in a way. Am I supposed to die with every patient I lose? Life's too short." He accepted the highball. "Thank you, honey."

"You're welcome, sweetheart."

"What is this stuff? Applejack?"

"Applejack? It's twelve-year-old bourbon."

"That's funny. It tastes like applejack."

"Maybe it's the ginger ale."

"The ginger ale? I always drink my bourbon with ginger ale. How could it taste like applejack because of the ginger ale. It never tasted like applejack before."

"I can't understand it." she said.

"Ah, what's the difference? I happen to like applejack."

"You're so sweet it isn't even funny."

"Not so sweet as you."

"Johnny. have you noticed that some of the newspaper idiots are getting a little nasty with their typewriters?"

"Don't pay any attention." He waved a careless hand. "It's a business with them just like our business. You start getting sensitive and you just confuse everybody. The boys who are assigned to cover me may call themselves the Goon Squad but I don't notice that any of them have ever asked to be transferred. It's a game with them. They spend their time trying to catch me in lies, then printing that I said a lie. They like me. They try to knife me but they like me. I try to knife them but we drink together and we're friends. What the hell, hon. All we're all trying to do is to get a day's work done. Take it from me, never get sensitive."

"Johnny, baby?"

"Yes, hon?"

"Do me a favor and tomorrow at the lunch break please make it a point to go into that Senate barbershop for a shave. You can stand two shaves a day. I swear to God sometimes I think you can grow a beard in twenty minutes. You look like a badger in a Disney cartoon on that TV screen."

"Don't worry about it, hon. I have my own ways and I look my own way, but I'm very goddam American and they all know it out there."

"Just the same, hon, will you promise to get a shave tomorrow at the lunch break?"

"Certainly. Why not? Gimme another drink. I got a big day coming up tomorrow."

***

John Yerkes Iselin was re-elected to his second six-year term on November 4, 1958, by the biggest plurality in the history of elections in his state. Two hundred and thirty-six fist fights went unreported the following evening in the pubs, cafes, bodegas, cantinas, trattorias, and sundry brasseries of western Europe between the glum American residents and the outraged, consternated natives of the larger cities.

***

Early one Monday morning in his office at The Daily Press (for he had taken to arriving at work at seven-thirty rather than at ten o'clock now that he was the department head, just as had Mr. Gaines before him) Raymond looked up and saw, with no little irritation at the interruption, the figure of Chunjin standing in the doorway. Raymond did not remember ever having seen him before. The man was slight and dark with alert, liquid eyes and a most intelligent expression; he stared with wistful hopefulness mixed with ascending regard, but these subtleties did not transport Raymond to remembering the man.

"Yes?" he drawled in his calculatedly horrid way.

"I am Chunjin, Mr. Shaw, sir. I was interpreter attached to Cholly Company, Fifty-second Regiment --"

Raymond pointed his outstretched finger right at Chunjin's nose. "You were interpreter for the patrol," he said.

"Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw."

Other men might have allowed their camaraderie to foam over in the warming glow of the good old days, but Raymond said, "What do you want?" Chunjin blinked.

"I mean to say, what are you doing here?" Raymond said, not backing away from his bluntness but attempting to cope with this apparent stupidity through clearer syntax.

"Your father did not say to you?"

"My father?"

"Senator Iselin? I write to --"

"Senator Iselin is not my father. Repeat. He is not my father. If you learn nothing else on your visit to this country memorize that fact."

"I write to Senator Iselin. I tell him how I interpret your outfit. I tell him I want to come to America. He get me visa. Now I need job."

"A job?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw."

"My dear fellow, we don't use interpreters here. We all speak the same language."

"I am tailor and mender. I am cook. I am driver of car. 1 am cleaner and scrubber. I fix anything. I take message. I sleep at house of my cousin and not eat much food. I ask for job with you because you are great man who save my life. I need for pay only ten dollars a week."

"Ten dollars? For all that?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw."

"Well, look here, Chunjin. I couldn't pay you only ten dollars a week."

"Yes, sir. Only ten dollars a week."

"I can use a valet. I would like having a cook, I think. A good cook, I mean. And I dislike washing dishes. I had been thinking about getting a car, but the parking thing sort of has me stopped. I go to Washington twice a week and there is no reason why I shouldn't have the money the airlines are getting from this newspaper for those trips and I'd rather not fly that crowded corridor anyway. I would prefer it if you didn't sleep in, as a matter of fact, but I'm sorry, ten dollars a week just isn't enough money." Raymond said that flatly, as though it were he who had applied for the job and was turning it down for good and sufficient reasons.

"I work for fifteen, sir."

"How can you live on fifteen dollars a week In New York?"

"I live with the cousins, sir."

"How much do the cousins earn?"

"I do not know, sir."

"Well, I'm sorry, Chunjin, but it is out of the question." Raymond who had still not greeted his old wartime buddy, turned away to return to his work. From his expression he had dismissed the conversation, and he was anxious to return to the bureau reports and to some very helpful information his mother had managed to send along to him.

"Is not good for you to pay less, Mr. Shaw?"

Raymond turned slowly, forcing his attention back to the Korean and realizing impatiently that he had not made it clear that the meeting was over. "Perhaps I should have clarified my position in the matter, as follows," Raymond said frostily. "It strikes me that there is something basically dishonest about an arrangement by which a man insists upon working for less money than he can possibly live on."

"You think I steal, Mr. Shaw?"

Raymond flushed. "I had not considered any specific category of such theoretical dishonesty."

"I live on two dollars a week in Mokpo. I think ten dollars many times better."

"How long have you been here?"

Chunjin looked at his watch. "Two hours."

"I mean, in New York."

"Two hours."

"All right. I will instruct the bank to pay you a salary of twenty-five dollars a week."

"Thank you, Mr. Shaw, sir."

"I will supply the uniforms."

"Yes, sir."

Raymond leaned over the desk and wrote the bank's address on a slip of paper, adding Mr. Rothenberg's name. "Go to this address. My bank. Ask for this man. I'll call him. He'll give you the key to my place and some instructions for stocking food. He'll tell you where to buy it. We don't use money. Please have dinner ready to serve at seven-fifteen next Monday. I'll be in Washington for the weekend, where I may be reached at the Willard Hotel. I am thinking in terms of roast veal -- a boned rump of veal -- with green beans, no potato -- please, Chunjin, never serve me a potato --"

"No, sir, Mr. Shaw."

"-- some canned, not fresh, spinach; pan gravy, I think some stewed fruit, and two cups of hot black coffee."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw. Just like in United States Army."

"Jesus, I hope not," Raymond said.

Chapter 11

On April 15, 1959, the very same day on which Chunjin got his job with Raymond on transfer from the Soviet Army, another military transfer occurred. Major Marco was placed on indefinite sick leave and detached from duty.

Marco had undergone two series of psychiatric treatments at Army hospitals. As the recurring nightmare had grown more vivid, the pathological fatigue had gotten more severe. No therapy had been successful. Marco had weighed two hundred and eight pounds when he had come into New York from Korea. At the time he went on indefinite sick leave he weighed in at one hundred and sixty-three and he looked a little nuts. Every nerve end in his body had grown a small ticklish mustache, and they sidled along under his skin like eager touts, screaming on tiptoe. He had the illusion that he could see and hear everything at once and had lost all of his ability to edit either sight or sound. Sound particularly detonated his reflexes. He tried desperately not to listen when people talked because an open A sound repeated several times within a sentence could make him weep uncontrollably. He didn't know why, so he concentrated on remembering the cause, when he could, so that he would not listen so attentively, but it didn't work. It was an A sound that must have been somewhat like a sound he had heard many, many years before, in utter peace and safety, which through its loss or through his indifference to it over the years could now cause him to weep bitterly. If he heard the sound occur once, he quickly hummed "La Seine," to push the A sound off to the side. His hand tremors were pronounced when his arm was extended unsupported. Sometimes his teeth would chatter as though he had entered a chill. Once in a while, after four or five unrelieved nights of nightmare, he developed a bad facial tic, and it wasn't pretty. Marco was being rubbed into sand by the grinding stones of two fealties. He was being slowly rubbed away by two faiths he lived by, far beyond his control; the first was his degree of holy reverence for the Medal of Honor, one of the most positive prejudices of his life because his life, principally, was the Army; and the second was the abnormal degree of his friendship for Raymond Shaw, which has been placed upon his mind, as coffee will leave a stain upon a fresh, snowy tablecloth, by the deepest psychological conditioning.

When Marco completed, for the want of any other word, the second course of treatment and was ordered to rest, they knew he was through and he knew they knew it. He headed for New York to talk to Raymond. He had never been able to tell the doctors the part of the dream where Raymond killed Mavole and Lembeck, on a continuous-performance basis, and he had not allowed himself to mention every phase of the four variations on the drill that had been used to win Raymond the Medal of Honor. He had written to Al Melvin and, between them, he and Melvin had spent over three hundred dollars talking to each other on the long-distance telephone, and it had brought considerable relief to each to know that the other was suffering as deeply from the same malady, but it did not stop the nightmares. Marco knew that he must talk to Raymond. He must, absolutely must. He knew that if he did not talk to Raymond about most of the details in his dreams he would die from them. Ironically, as Marco was riding one train to New York, Raymond was riding another to Washington.

Marco sat like a stone in the train chair, riding sideways in the club car. The car was about half filled. Almost all of the seats were occupied at one end, Marco's end, by businessmen, or what seemed to be businessmen but were actually an abortionist, an orchestra leader, a low-church clergyman, an astrologer, a Boy Scout executive, a horticulturist, and a cinematographer, because, no matter how much they would like the world to think so, the planet is not populated entirely by businessmen no matter how banal the quality of conversation everywhere has become. Some women were present; their dresses gave the car the only embarrassing touch of color, excepting the garish decorations on the upper left side of Marco's blouse.

Marco had a rye old-fashioned placed on the round, metal stand in front of him, but he hadn't tasted it. He kept wishing he had ordered beer not to taste and he was careful not to look at anybody, because he had stopped doing that several weeks before. He sweated continuously. His face had very little color. His palms drenched his trousers at the tops of his knees. He was battling to make a decision as to whether he wanted to smoke a cigar or not. His eyes burned. He felt an agony of weariness. His stomach hurt. He concentrated for an instant on not clenching his teeth but he could not retain the thought. His jaws were tired and some doctor had told him that he would grind the dentine off his molars if he didn't concentrate on not clenching his jaws. He turned his body slightly, but not his head, toward the person sitting beside him, a woman.

"Do you mind cigar smoke," he mumbled.

"Not at all," she murmured. He turned away from her but made no move to find a cigar.

"Go ahead," she said. "As a matter of fact, I wish you'd smoke two cigars at the same time."

"You must really like cigar smoke."

"Not especially, but I think two cigars going at the same time would look awfully amusing."

He turned his body again toward the woman sitting beside him. He lifted his eyes slowly, hesitantly, beyond the long, scarlet-tipped fingers at repose in her lap, past a shining silver belt buckle shaped as Quetzalcoatl, an urbane feathered serpent; past uptilted, high-setting, pronounced breasts that stared back at him eyelessly through dark blue wool; past the high neckline and the discreet seed pearls around a long throat of white Carrara marble, to a mouth whose shape he had yearned to see in living flesh since he had seen its counterpart within a photograph he had found in a German magazine twenty-three years before, rolled up in his father's effects in the trunk of a command car. In abstract, it was a sexual object. It was a witty mouth. It looked insatiable. It told him about lust which had been lost far back in mythology, lust which could endow its tasters with eternal serenity, and it was the mouth of many varieties of varying kinds of woman. He regretted having to leave off his concentration on the sight of it; with difficulty he moved his eyes upward to the questing horn of a most passionate nose; a large, formed, aquiline, and Semitic nose, the nose of a seeker and a finder of glories, and it made him remember that every Moslem who attains heaven is allotted seventy-two women who must look exactly like this between the eyes and the mouth, and he thought across the vast, vast distance of the huanacauri rock of Incan puberty to the words of the black, black, black song that keened: "If she on earth no more I see, my life will quickly fade away." Then at last his eyes came to the level of the eyes of a Tuareg woman and he rushed past a random questioning as to whether the Berlitz Schools taught Temajegh, and he thought of the god of love who was called bodiless by the Hindus because he was consumed by the fire of Siva's eyes, then he closed his own eyes and tried to help himself, to stop himself, to -- SWEET GOD IN HEAVEN! -- he could not. He began to weep. He stumbled to his feet. The passengers across the aisle stared at him hostilely. He knocked his drink over, and the metal stand over. He turned blindly and noisily to the left, unable to stop weeping, and made it, from behind the wet opaqueness, to the train door and the vestibule. He stood alone in the vestibule and put his head against the window and waited for time to pass, feeling confident that it would pass, when his motor would run down and this sobbing would slowly subside. Trying to analyze what had happened, as though to fill his mind, he was forced into the conclusion that the woman must have looked the way that open A sounded to him: an open, effortless, problemless, safe, and blessed look. What color had her hair been? he wondered as he wept. He concentrated upon the words by which angels had been known: yaztas, fravashi, and Amesha Spentas; seraphim and cherubim; hayyot, ofanim, arelim, and Harut and Marut who had said: "We are only a temptation. Be not then an unbeliever." He decided that the woman could only be one of the fravashi, that army of angels that has existed in heaven before the birth of man, that protects him during his life, and is united to his soul at death. He sobbed while he conjectured about the color of her hair. At last, he was permitted to stop weeping. He leaned against the train wall in exhaustion, riding backward. He took a handkerchief slowly from his trousers pocket and, with an effort of strength which he could not replenish with sleep, slowly dried his face, then blew his nose. He thought, only fleetingly, that he could not go back into that club car again, but that there would be plenty of other seats in the other direction, toward the rear of the train. When he got to New York, he decided, he would pull on a pair of gray slacks and a red woolen shirt and he'd sit all day on the rim of the map of the United States behind Raymond's big window, looking out at the Hudson River and that state, whatever its name was, on the other shore and think about the states beyond that state and drink beer.

When he turned to find another seat in another car, she was standing there. Her hair was the color of birch bark, prematurely white, and he stared at her as though her thyroid were showing its excessive activity and her hypereroticism. She stood smoking a new cigarette, leaning back, riding forward, and looking out of the window.

"Maryland is a beautiful state," she said.

"This is Delaware."

"I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid track on this stretch, but nonetheless Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter."

"I guess so. Columbus is a tremendous football town. You in the railroad business?" He felt dizzy. He wanted to keep talking.

"Not any more," she told him. "However, if you will permit me to point it out, when you ask someone that, you really should say: 'Are you in the railroad line?' Where is your home?"

"I've been in the Army all my life," Marco said. "We keep moving. I was born in New Hampshire."

"I went to a girls' camp once on Lake Francis."

"Well. That's away north. What's your name?"

"Eugenie."

"Pardon?"

"No kidding. I really mean it. And with that crazy French pronunciation."

"It's pretty."

"Thank you."

"Your friends call you Jenny?"

"Not yet they haven't."

"I think it's a nice name."

"You may call me Jenny."

"But what do your friends call you?"

"Rosie."

"Why?"

"My full name -- the first name -- is Eugenie Rose. I have always favored Rosie, of the two names, because it smells like brown soap and beer. It's the kind of a name that is always worn by the barmaid who always gets whacked across the behind by draymen. My father used to say it was a portly kind of a name, and with me being five feet nine he always figured I had a better chance of turning out portly than fragile, which is really and truly the way a girl using the name Eugenie would have to be."

"Still, when I asked you your name, you said Eugenie."

"It is quite possible that I was feeling more or less fragile at that instant."

"I never could figure out what more or less meant."

"Nobody can."

"Are you Arabic?"

"No."

He held out his hand to be taken in formal greeting. "My name is Ben. It's really Bennet. I was named after Arnold Bennet."

"The writer?"

"No. A lieutenant colonel. He was my father's commanding officer at the time."

"What's your last name?"

"Marco."

"Major Marco. Are you Arabic?"

"No, but no kidding, I was sure you were Arabic. I would have placed your daddy's tents within twelve miles of the Hoggar range in the central Sahara. There's a town called Janet in there and a tiny little place with a very rude name that I couldn't possibly repeat even if you had a doctorate in geography. When the sun goes down and the rocks, which have been heated so tremendously all day, are chilled suddenly by the night, which comes across the desert like flung, cold, black stout, it makes a salvo like a hundred rifles going off in rapid fire. The wind is called the khamseen, and after a flood throws a lot of power down a mountainside the desert is reborn and millions and millions of white and yellow flowers come to bloom all across the empty desolation. The trees, when there are trees, have roots a hundred feet long. There are catfish in the waterholes. Think of that. Did you know that? Sure. Some of them run ten, twelve inches. Everywhere else in the Arab world the woman is a beast of burden. Among the Tuareg, the woman is queen, and the Hoggar are the purest of the Tuareg. They have a ceremony called aha I, a sort of court of love where the woman reigns with her beauty, her wit, or the quality of her blood. They have enormous chivalry, the Tuareg. If a man wants to say 'I love!' he will say 'I am dying of love.' I have dreamed many times of a woman I have never seen and will never see because she died in 1935, and to this day the Tuareg recall her in their poetry, in their ahals, telling of her beauty, intelligence, and her wit. Her name was Dassine ouIt Yemma, and her great life was deeply punctuated by widely known love affairs with the great warriors of her time. I thought you were she. For just an instant, back there in that car a little while ago, I thought you were she."

His voice had gotten more and more rapid and his eyes were feverish. She had held his hand tightly in both of hers as he had spoken, ever since he had introduced himself. They stared at each other.

"Thank you," she said.

"You became one of my best and bravest thoughts," he told her. "I thank you." The taut, taut band around his head had loosened. "Are you married?"

"No. You?"

"No. What's your last name?"

"Cheyney. I am a production assistant for a man named Justin who had two hits last season. I live on Fifty-fourth Street, a few doors from the Museum of Modern Art, of which I am a tea-privileges member, no cream. I live at Fifty-three "Vest Fifty-fourth Street, Three B. Can you remember that?"

"Yes."

"Eldorado nine, two six three two. Can you remember that?"

"Yes."

"You look so tired. Apartment Three B. Are you stationed in New York? Is stationed the right word? Fifty-three West Fifty-fourth Street."

''I'm not exactly stationed in New York. I have been stationed in Washington but I got sick and I have a long leave now and I'm going to spend it in New York."

"Eldorado nine, two six three two."

"I stay with a friend of mine, a newspaperman. We were in Korea together." Marco ran a wet hand over his face and began to hum "La Seine." He had found the source of the sound of the open A. It was far inside this girl and it was in the sound of the name Dassine oult Yemma. He couldn't get the back of his hand away from his mouth. He had had to shut his eyes. He was so tired. He was so tired. She took his hand gently away from his mouth. "Let's sit down," she said. "I want you to put your head on my shoulder." The train lurched and he almost fell, but she caught and held him, then she led the way into the other car where there were plenty of seats.

***

Raymond's apartment was on the extreme west coast of the island where firemen had heavy bags under their eyes from piling out four and five times a night to push sirens to brownstone houses where nobody had any time to do anything about too many bone-weary Puerto Ricans living in one room. It was a strip of city too dishonest to admit it was a slum, or rather, in all of the vastness of the five boroughs of metropolis there was a strip of city, very tiny, which was not a slum, and this was the thin strip that was photographed and its pictures sent out across the world until all the world and the minuscule few who lived in that sliver of city thought that was New York, and neither knew or cared about the remainder of the six hundred square miles of flesh and brick. Here was the ripe slum of the West Side where the city had turned so bad that at last thirteen square blocks of it had had to be torn down before the rats carried off the babies. New York, New York! It's a wonderful town! The west side of the island was rich in facades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis. Central Park West was all front and faced a glorious park betrayed only now and then by bands of chattering faggots auctioning bodies and by an excessive population of emotion-caparisoned people in the somewhat temporary-looking sanitariums on so many of its side streets. Columbus and Amsterdam avenues were the streets of the drunks, where the murders were done in the darkest morning hours, where there were an excessive number of saloons and hardware stores. They were connected by trains of brownstone houses whose fronts were riotously colored morning and evening and all day on Sunday by bursts and bouquets of Puerto Ricans, and beyond Amsterdam was Broadway, the bawling, flash street, the fleshy, pig-eyed part of the city that wore lesions of neon and incandescent scabs, pustules of lights and color in suggestively luetic lycopods, illuminating littered streets, filth-clogged streets that could never be cleansed because when one thousand hands cleaned, one million hands threw dirt upon the streets again. Broadway was patrolled by strange-looking pedestrians, people who had grabbed the wrong face in the dark when someone had shouted "Fire!" and were now out roaming the streets, desperate to find their own. For city block after city block on Broadway it seemed that only food was sold. Beyond that was West End Avenue, a misplaced street bitter on its own memories, lost and bewildered, seeking some Shaker Heights, desperately genteel behind an apron of shabby bricks. Here was the limbo of the lower middle class where God the Father, in the form of sunlight, never showed His face. Raymond lived beyond that, on Riverside Drive, another front street of large, grand apartments that had become cabbage-sour furnished rooms which faced the river and an excessive amount of squalor on the Jersey shore. All together, the avenues and streets proved by their decay that the time of the city was long past, if it had ever existed, and the tall buildings, end upon end upon end, were so many extended fingers beckoning the Bomb.

***

Marco paid the cab off in front of Raymond's building. On an April day the city was colder than Labrador, and the wind had found teeth which tore at his face.

Marco felt like a giant. He had slept three hours on the train without dreaming and he had awakened in Rosie Cheyney's arms. He would have a very delicious therapy to tell those pate doctors about when this was all over. When it was all over but the sobbing. Big joke. All over but the sobbing, he thought, giving the driver a quarter tip. He got into the elevator feeling confident that behind Raymond's mustard-colored eyes there was an almost human understanding, not that Raymond was any monotreme but he seemed pretty much like a Martian sometimes. Fifty-three West Fifty-fourth, apartment Three B. He just wanted to hear Raymond tell how he had gotten the Medal of Honor. He just wanted to talk about blackboards and pointers and Chinese and that crude animated cartoon with the blue spot. Eldorado nine, two six three two. He wouldn't talk to Raymond about the murders in the nightmares. Rosie. Eugenie Rose. My Wild Arab Nose. Oh, What a Gorgeous Nose! Cyrano: Act 1, Scene 1: Pedantic: Does not Aristophanes mention a mythologic monster called Hippocampelephantocamelos? That projection room and the American voice on the sound track and the fiat, empty, half film cans like pie plates used as ash trays. Suddenly, he could taste the yak-dung cigarettes again and it was marvelous. If he could only remember the name of that brand, he thought, but somehow he never could. He thought about the movement of the many red dots on the screen, then of Raymond, symbolized by the blue dot, and the canned voice telling them that they were seeing the battle action in which Raymond had been willing to sacrifice his life, again and again, to save them all.

The elevator operator indicated the doorway directly across the hall. Marco rang the door bell while the operator waited. Chun jin answered the door. He stood clearly under good light wearing black trousers, a white shirt, a black bow tie, and a white jacket, looking blankly at Marco, waiting for an inquiry, not having time to recognize the major, and most certainly not expecting him. To Marco he was a djinn who had stepped into flesh out of that torment which was giving him lyssophobia. Not more than four fifths of a second passed before Marco hit Chunjin high in the chest, having thrown the desperate punch for the center of the man's face, but the Korean had stepped backward reflexively and had saved himself, partially, from the unexpectedness of Marco's assault. Because he had not thought of himself as being on duty while Raymond was out of the city, Chunjin was unarmed. However, he was a trained agent and a good one. He held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Soviet security forces and he had been assigned to Raymond on a crash basis. He had recognized Marco too late. He was entirely current on Marco's dossier because the major was Raymond's only friend.

The elevator operator, a sturdy twenty-eight-year-old, watched the Korean carried backward and the door flung inward to bang against the pink plaster wall. He rushed in fast behind Marco and tried to pull him back. Marco held Chunjin off with his left hand and cooled the elevator man with his right. Chunjin took that left arm and drew Marco into a prime judo catch and threw him high across the room so he could get at Marco's neck, coming down on it hard enough to break it in the follow-up, but Marco rolled and kept rolling when he hit the floor and slipped locks on hard when Chunjin came down, missing him.

They were both Black Belts, which is the highest judo rank there is, this side of a Dan. Marco had weight on his man, but Marco was in a run-down condition. However, he had been lifted into a murderous exhilaration and was filled to his hairline with adrenalin because he had at last been permitted to take those nightmares and one of the people in them into the fingers of his hands to beat and to torture until he found out why they had happened and where they had happened and how they could be made to stop. What worked the best was the twenty-nine extra pounds of weight and, as four neighbors watched with studious curiosity from the safer side of the doorsill, he broke Chunjin's forearm. The Korean almost took the side of his face and his neck off, not losing a beat of his rhythm during the fracture and appalling Marco that such a slight man could be so tough. Then Marco dislocated the man's hip joint as he leaped to jab his foot into Marco's larynx, and it was that second catch which brought out the great scream of agony.

He was pounding the back of Chunjin's head into the floor and asking him a series of what he thought were deliberative questions when the youngest squad-car cop came into the room first and fast, hitting him behind the head with a sap, and the entire, wonderful opportunity passed.

***

At St. Luke's Hospital, Chunjin was adamant about two things: (1) he was emphatic in his refusal to press charges against his former commanding officer whom he had served long and intimately as orderly and interpreter, and who had most obviously mistaken him for an intruder in Mr. Shaw's apartment, knowing that Mr. Shaw had never employed a servant before, and (2) it would be most necessary for the hospital staff to get him out of the place not later than noon on Monday so he could shop for food, then cook the first meal on his job for Mr. Shaw, because if they did not get him out he could lose his job and it was the only job he wanted in the United States of America. He could not, of course, explain that he would be shot if he lost it.

At the Twenty-fourth Precinct House at 100th Street and Central Park West, after riding the uniformed, half-conscious Marco from Raymond's apartment in the squad car, they went through his effects, found his AGO card, made his branch, and called the Military Service Bureau downtown at the Police Academy, which maintained liaison between the New York police and branches of the armed forces. The bureau reached the duty officer at Army Intelligence, Washington, early in the evening. Marco was identified. The police were told with a very special sort of a voice, effectually a pleader's voice, that Marco was one of the best men they had and that he had been having a very hard time. The voice explained, with great attention to their credulity, that Marco had picked up a sort of infection in his imagination while in the forward area in Korea, that he had run two hospital courses which had proved that he was as sane as anybody else but, well, Marco had had a hard time and anything the New York police could do that would tend to pull him together and send him on his way would be greatly appreciated by the U.S. Army.

Under proper conditions, there is no more cooperative institution than the New York Police Department, but they had had so much experience with top-blowers they insisted that Marco leave the station house in some custody which could be certified as being equable. Marco's head still wasn't very clear. He had been slugged. He had been in a rough fight and the adrenalin had turned to curds and whey in his veins. He was exhausted and he hadn't been eating very much, but he knew enough to ask them to call Eldorado nine, two six three two and ask for Miss Eugenie Rose Cheyney.

They left him in a cell while they made the call and before the cell door had closed he was asleep. Rosie got to the station house in thirty-seven minutes. Unfortunately, just as she and the two detectives came along the cell-block corridor, he had been sleeping just long enough to have reached the auditorium at Tunghwa where Raymond was strangling Mavole with a silk scarf. As they stared into his cell, motionless for an instant, even the two cops were stricken with fright at the piteousness of his sounds and the imploring motions he succeeded in shaping with his hands. One detective got the door open. Eugenie Rose had gone chalk-white and was gripping her whole lower lip in her teeth to keep from yelling. She slid into the cell ahead of the second cop and got on her knees beside Marco's bunk and shook him by the shoulders, talking steadily; then, desperate to get him out of the trap he was in, she whacked him with the full strength of her splendid arm across the left cheek and he came out of it, shaking. She held him in her arms. "It's O.K., sweetheart," she said. "It's Rosie. It's all right now. The dream is over. It's Jennie." And stuff like that.

She signed out for him at the desk as though he was a ripped purse some cannon had torn off her arm. He swayed slightly as he waited for her. She shook hands like a fight manager with the desk lieutenant, the two detectives, and a patrolman who happened to be passing through, and she told them if she could ever line up any hard-to-get theater seats for them they were to call her at Job Justin's office and she would handle it with joy. She took Marco out into the air of that freak night; a cold, cold night in mid-April that was just one of the vagaries that made New York such an interesting place to die in.

He was wearing a uniform overcoat and an overseas cap. He did not look so bad in the half light. Everything was pressed. There was just a little blood on his right sleeve from Chunjin's face from when he had overshot with the second right-hand punch. Eugenie Rose called a taxi as if it were her own hound dog: it came to heel with a hand signal. She put Marco in first, then she got in and closed the door. "Just drive through the park," she said to the driver, "and discard the conversation you've been hoarding up since the last fare."

"I don't talk to passengers, lady," the driver said. "I hate people until they tip me and then it's too late."

"I think you should eat something," she said to Marco.

"I love food," he answered. "I always have but I can't swallow very well any more."

"We'll try, anyway," she told him and leaned forward to tell the driver to take them to the Absinthe House, a calorie and beverage bourse catering to some of the craftiest minds this side of the owl and the pussycat, on West Forty-eighth. She leaned back on the seat and looped her arm through his. She was wearing a dark blue polo coat, some firm, dark skin, some white, white teeth, egg-sized dark eyes, and white hair.

"It was very original of you to have the Police Department call so shyly and ask for our first date," she said softly.

"They asked me who I would-who would be willing, and I just -- I --"

"Thank you. Very much." She decided they needed more air and started to open all windows, telling the driver, "Sorry about all this air, but it's very important. Take my word."

"Lissen, lady, while the meter is going it's your cab arreddy. Go ahead take the doors off it gets stuffy." Marco's teeth began to chatter. He tried to hold them clamped shut because he wanted her to feel efficient about opening the windows, but he sounded like a stage full of castanets. She closed the windows.

"Let's pick up a can of soup and go to your place."

"Sure." She gave the driver the changed destination.

"You think they'll let me visit that fellow at St. Luke's tonight?"

"Maybe first thing in the morning."

"Would you come with me? It would keep me calm. I wouldn't want to hit him lying down like that."

"Sure."

"I have to find out where Raymond is."

"The newspaperman you told me about? Why not call his newspaper?"

"Yeah. You're right. Well, sure. So let's go to the Absinthe House if you'd rather do that. I feel better."

"You know what I was doing when you had the police call me?"

"I could guess, if I wasn't so tired. I give up."

"Well, after you dropped me off and I got upstairs, and before I took my coat off, I telephoned Lou Amjac, my fiance --" Marco came forward, alert and alarmed. "-- and he came over as soon as he could, which was instantly, and I told him I had just met you and I gave him his ring back." She held up her naked, long fingers of the left hand, and wriggled them. "I tried to convey my regrets for whatever pain I might be causing him. Then, just then, you had the police call me with the invitation to go into the tank at the Twenty-fourth Precinct. I grabbed this coat. I kissed Lou on the cheek for the last time in our lives that I would ever kiss Urn and I ran. At the station house they told me you had beaten up a very skinny little man but that you were a solid type yourself, according to Washington, so I figured that if they were willing to go to the trouble to get a comment on you out of George Washington, you all must have had a really successful seance while you were in the poky, and I must say it was real sweet of General Washington with you only a major, and I hadn't even known you two had met, but if those policemen were the tiniest bit puzzled about you, they could have asked me. Oh, indeed yes, my darling Ben -- I would have told them."

He glared at her fiercely and possessively, clapped an arm about her shoulders, and pulled her evocative mouth into his while the driver, intent upon estimating within two per cent the amount of the tip he would be paid, cleared one more stop light just as it changed, heading east on Fifty-fourth Street.

Chapter 12

After days of wonderful, dreamless sleep upon the bed and breast of Miss Cheyney, Marco called The Daily Press early Monday morning and learned that Raymond was in Washington. He reached Raymond at the Press office in Washington a few minutes later. When he told Raymond he wanted very much to see him, Raymond invited him to dinner in New York that evening to help him rate a new cook, then, remembering, babbled the news. "I just remembered. Your own orderly. Yeah. Remember your orderly in Korea, the little guy who was interpreter on the patrol -- Chunjin? That's my new cook! Hah? I mean, would you ever have been able to anticipate that?" Marco stated that he would not have been able to so anticipate, and inquired as to what time Raymond would arrive from Washington for the tasting.

"Estimating the traveling time from Penn Station -- and I believe you'll find I won't be more than five minutes off either way -- I should arrive at the apartment at -- say -- six twenty-two."

"Even if you have to wait out on the corner to do it."

"I wonder if you'd mind calling Chunjin and telling him there'll be an extra place for dinner? You're probably dying to talk to him anyway. I know you old Army guys."

"I'll take care of everything, Raymond," Marco said, and they both hung up.

***

Raymond opened the door.

"Chunjin isn't here," he said. "There's no dinner to offer you."

"Or you."

"But I did find a note. It's from him and it says you beat him up and that he's now in St. Luke's Hospital."

"One thing is for sure," Marco said. "There are plenty of sensational delicatessens in this neighborhood."

"Why, that's a marvelous idea!" Raymond said. He walked away from the door, allowing Marco to close it or not close it as he chose, and flipped open a telephone book across the square foyer. "I never seem to be able to think of it myself. And I love it. Pastrami and those pickles and that crazy rye bread with the aphrodisiacal seeds and maybe a little marinated herring and some pot cheese with a little smoked salmon and some of that indigestible sauerkraut they make out of electric bulb filaments and some boiled beef." He began to dial. "On account of this I am absolutely grateful to you for getting Chunjin out of the way."

"Ah, that's all right," Marco said. "Glad to do it."

"The elevator man was singing the blues so I gave him five."

"He sure can keep a secret. He just sang a second chorus for me and I gave him five."

"What did you hit him for?"

"He was determined to play peacemaker."

"What did you whack Chunjin for?"

"That's all part of what I came to tell you about."

"Hello -- Gitlitz? This is Shaw. Right. Now hear this." Raymond ordered food for ten, as one does when one calls a delicatessen situated anywhere on Broadway in New York between Thirty-fourth and Ninety-sixth streets, and told them where to send it.

"I've been in the hospital off and on quite a bit over the past two years."

"Hospital? What was the matter with you?" Raymond opened a can of beer. The room was fragrant with the smell of furniture polish from Chunjin's working weekend. Marco looked very thin, but no longer drawn. The Cheyney method of soul massage had elements of greatness. He was dressed in civilian clothes, and his face had a distant, inactive look such as a man about to practice a banquet speech alone in a hotel room might have. Eugenie Rose had him coked to the gills on tranquilizers.

The authority which had come with writing a successful column on national affairs had settled Raymond considerably, Marco thought, and had made him seem taller and broader. Raymond was thirty years old. He could not have moved up the scale to a better tailor because he had always used the best. He could not have worn whiter linen. His fingernails gleamed. His shoe tips glowed. His color shone. His teeth sparkled. The only fault with the lighting circuit was behind his eyes. Raymond may have believed that his eyes did light up, but unfortunately they could shine only within the extent of his art as a counterfeiter of emotions. Raymond did not feel emotion, and that could not be changed. When he was content he would try to remember how other people had looked when they had manifested happiness or pleasure or satisfaction, and he would attempt to counterfeit the appearance. It was not effective. Raymond's ability to feel anything resembling either sympathy or empathy was minimal and that was that.

As Raymond listened to Marco's story with all of his attention he could only understand that an all-out attack had been mounted against his friend and that it had almost destroyed him. He supposed he would be expected to be upset as they went on to talk about that lousy medal which had always been a lot of gas to him -- tin-soldier-boy stuff: he had never asked for it, had never wanted it, and if there was some strange way that medal could keep his friend in the Army and get him his health back, then they had to make sure that he found out exactly what that was, and, if necessary to straighten this out and keep Ben safe, why, for crissake, he'd even call in Johnny Iselin. He did not say any of this to Marco. He concentrated on trying to counterfeit some of the reactions he felt Marco must expect.

"If what you've been dreaming actually happened, Ben," he said slowly, "then it happened to me and it happened to everyone else on the patrol."

"Such as Chunjin," Marco replied.

"How about an investigation?" Raymond said. "That ought to do it."

"Ought to do what?"

"Uncover what happened that made you dream all that."

"What kind of an investigation?"

"Well, my mother can always get Johnny Iselin's committee in the Senate to --"

"Johnny Iselin?" Marco was utterly horrified. "This is Army!"

"What has that got to do with --"

"All right, Raymond. I won't explain that part. But what happened is inside my head and Melvin's head and the best head doctors in this country haven't been able to shake it out and don't have even the first suspicion of what could be causing it. What could a Senate committee do? And Iselin! Jesus, Raymond, let's make an agreement never to mention that son-of-a-bitch ever again."

"It was just an idea. To get started. I know Johnny is a swine better than you do."

"Then why bring it up?"

"Because we have to dump a thing like this on the specialists. What the hell, Ben, you said so yourself -- the Army can't cope with this. What there has to be, if we're going to get anywhere with it, is a big, full-scale investigation. You know -- somebody has to make people talk."

"Make who talk?"

"Well -- uh -- I --"

"Yeah."

"Well, the patrol. If my Medal of Honor is a fake, and believe me I don't see how it could be anything else because it doesn't figure that I'm going to stand up in front of a lot of bullets and be a big hero for that passel of slobs, then somebody has to remember and somebody else has to make the rest of those guys remember that we've all been had. That's all. We've been had. If you can't stand the idea of Johnny Iselin, and I don't blame you, then I guess you'll just have to demand your own court-martial."

"How? What do you mean? What are you talking about?" Marco looked as though he was just beginning to understand what Raymond was talking about, almost but not quite.

"You have to charge yourself with falsifying your report that led to me getting the Medal of Honor and you'll have to demand that the Army investigate whether or not that was done in collusion with the men of the patrol. That's all there is to it."

"They wouldn't be able to comprehend such a thing. A Medal of Honor -- why, a Medal of Honor is a sacred thing to the Army, Raymond. I mean -- I -- Jesus, the roof would come off the Pentagon."

"Sure! That's what I'm saying! Throw it wide open! If the Army can't understand, then, what the hell, believe me, Iselin'll understand. He'll get you off the hook."

"No. No, never."

"It's got to be done the sensational way just to make sure it's done and that the Army doesn't get to sit on another ridiculous mistake and let you stay sick like this. What would they care? You're expendable. But they made a hero out of me so I'm not expendable. They couldn't take back a mistake as big as this one."

"Raymond, listen. If it wasn't for those Soviet generals and those Chinese in that dream, I'd be willing to be expendable."

"All right. That's your problem."

"But with the chance, just the sick chance that there may be such an enormous security risk involved I have to make them dig into this thing. You're right, Raymond. I have to. I have to."

"Why should I have gotten a Medal of Honor? I can't even remember being in the action. I remember the facts about the action, sure. But I don't remember the action."

"Talk about it. Keep talking about it. Please."

"Well, look. Let's reconstruct. We're on the patrol. You'll be at the center of that line and I'll be off on their right flank. You know? It will be dark. I'll yell out to you, 'Captain! Captain Marco! Get me some light twenty yards ahead at two o'clock!' And you'll yell back, 'You got it, kid,' and very soon a flare will break open and I'll pour on some enfilade fire on their column and, as everyone who reads comic books knows, I am a very good shooter. I'll start to move in on them and I'll take up one of their own heavy machine guns as I go and I'll move eight of their own grenades up ahead of me as I move along."

"Yeah, yeah," Marco said. "But you don't remember doing all those things."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," Raymond answered irritably and impatiently. "Every time I'm directed to think about the action I always know what will happen exactly, but I never get to the place where it actually happens."

"Do you remember anything about a blackboard? Chinese instructors?"

"No."

"Memory drills? Anything about a movie projection room and animated cartoons with a sound track in English and a lot of Chinese guys standing around?"

"No."

"You must have gotten a better brainwashing than I did. Or Melvin."

"Brainwashing?" Raymond did not like that note. He could not abide the thought of anybody tampering with his person so he rejected the entire business then and there. Others, told the same set of conjectures, might had been fired into action or challenged, but not Raymond. The disgust it made Raymond feel acted like a boathook that pushed the solid shore away from him to allow him to drift away from it on the strong-flowing current of self. It did not mean that he had instantly closed his mind to Marco's problem. He most earnestly wanted to be able to help Ben find relief, to help to change his friend's broken mechanism, to find him sleep and rest and health, but his own participation in what he had started out to make a flaming patriotic crusade when he had first started to speak had been muted by his fastidiousness: he shrank from what he could only consider the rancid vulgarity of brainwashing.

"It has to be a brainwash," Marco said intensely. "In my case it slipped. In Melvin's case it slipped. It's the only possible explanation, Raymond. The only, only explanation."

"Why?" Raymond answered coldly. "Why would the Communists want me to get a Medal of Honor?"

"I don't know. But we have to find out." Marco stood up. "Before I take this first step, before I leave here, I'd like to hear you say that you understand that I'm going to explode this whole thing with a court-martial, not because -- not to save myself from those dreams --"

"Ah, fuh crissake, Ben! Whose idea was it! Who gives a goddam about that?"

"Let me finish. This is an official statement because, believe me, pal, I know. Once I get that court-martial started -- my own court-martial -- it can get pretty rough on both of us." He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. "My father -- well, it's a good thing my father is dead-with me starting out to make a public bum out of a Medal of Honor man. Shuddup! But I have to do it. Security. What a lousy word. I look right into the horrible face of something that might kill my country and the only word for the danger is a word that means the absolute opposite. Security. Well, as you said -- with stakes like that I'm expendable. And so are you, Raymond pal. So are you."

"Will you stop? Who thought it up? Me. Who practically made you agree to do it? Me. And you can shove that patriotic jive about saving our great country. I want to know why a bunch of filthy Soviet peasants and degraded Chinese coolies would dare to confer the Medal of Honor on me."

"Raymond. Do me a favor? Tell me about the action again. Please."

"What action?"

"Come on! Come on!"

"You mean go on from where I was?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"Well -- you will throw up another flare but you'll throw it about twenty yards ahead of me at maybe twelve o'clock, at maybe dead center of the line, because you will figure I'll be moving across the terrain up that ridge so --"

"Man, oh man, this is something."

"What?"

"Each time you talk about the action you even tell it as though it hadn't happened yet."

"That's what I'm saying! That's the way I always think about it! I mean, when some horrible square comes out of nowhere at a banquet, the paper makes me go too, and he starts asking me about it. Come on, Ben. You made your point. Let's go meet your girl."

Marco ran his fingers through his thick hair on both sides of his head. He put his elbows on his knees and covered his face with his hands. Raymond stared down at him, almost tenderly. "Don't be embarrassed if you feel like you're going to cry, Ben," Raymond said gently.

Marco shook his head. Raymond opened another can of beer.

"I swear to sweet, sweet God I think I am going to be able to sleep," Marco said. "I can feel it. There isn't anything about those crazy voices and those fast, blurring colors and the eyes of that terrible audience that frightens me any more." He took his hands away from his face and reflexively reached over to take Raymond's can of beer out of his hand. Raymond reached down and opened another. Marco fell asleep, sitting up. Raymond stretched him out on the sofa, brought him a blanket, put out the lights, and went into his office to listen to the river wind and to read a slim book with the highly improbable title of Liquor, the Servant of Man.

***

Marco was still asleep when Raymond left the apartment the next morning. Eugenie Rose Cheyney called him soon after he reached his office. She asked if Marco had been sleeping quietly. Raymond said he had. She said, "Oh, Mr. Shaw, that's just wonderful!" and hung up.

Chapter 13

Raymond's mother called him from the Idlewild Airport. She wanted him to have lunch with her. He tried to think quickly of somebody whom he could say he had to have lunch with but she said he was not to stall her, that she was well aware that he disliked people too much to be stuck for an hour or more at a luncheon table with one, so he could damn well show up wherever they let ladies eat luncheon at the Plaza Hotel at one o'clock. He said he would be there. Beyond having acknowledged that his name was Raymond when she had first spoken, it was all he said to his mother.

She was hard at work making a scene by bossing the maitre d' hotel, a table captain, and two waiters at a table that faced the park in the big corner room when he arrived at the Plaza at ten seconds before one o'clock. She motioned him to stand beside her chair until she finished her oration about exactly how they were to stuff the oysters into a carpetbag steak and that she would not tolerate more than eleven minutes of broiling on each side, in a preheated grill, at four hundred degrees. The waiters bowed and left. Raymond's mother gave the maitre d' the full glare of her contempt for an instant, then spoke to Raymond. "I ask you to imagine a restaurant," she said, "which does not list Clos de Lambrays or a Cuvee Docteur Peste!" She waved the man away, with bitterness. She permitted Raymond to kiss her on the right cheek, ever so lightly, then motioned him to his chair at the table for four, not at her right or directly across from her, but at her left, which made it impossible for either of them to look out of the window at the park.

"How have you been?" she asked.

"Fine."

"As am 1. Not that you asked."

"When I heard you ordering a steak stuffed with oysters I had a clue."

"The steak will be mainly for you."

"Sure."

"Johnny is fine."

"You mean his physical health, I presume?"

"I do. And everything else."

"Is he in a jam?"

"Of course not."

"Then why are we here?"

"Why are we here?"

"Why are we having our annual meeting?"

"I am your mother, which is a sufficient reason. Why did you ask if Johnny is in a jam?"

"It occurred to me that you might have decided that you would have use for my column, which has so carefully disqualified itself from ever printing Johnny's name despite the fact that he is an assassin, pure and simple. An assassin of character and the soul. He reeks of death, you know?" Raymond exceeded his own gifts for being obnoxious and impossible when he was with his mother. His brushing gesture worked for him almost all the time, punctuating his haughtiness and scorn. His posture was as attenuated as liquid being drawn up through a drinking straw.

His mother closed her eyes tightly as she answered him. "My dear boy, one more column of type in this weltered world spelling out Johnny's name would not be much noticed."

"I'll remember that."

She opened her eyes. "What for?"

Raymond, when he was with his mother, always felt a nagging fear that he was gaping at her beauty. As they spoke, whenever they met, his eyes searched each millimeter of her skin for a flaw and weighed each of her gestures, anxious that he might discover some loss of grace, but to no avail. He was dismayed and gratified to fall back upon the mockery of her pretense at disappointment because there had been no Clos de Lambrays or Cuvee Docteur Peste, which so failed to find harmony with the fact that Johnny Iselin drank bourbon with his meals.

"Mother, in God's name, where did you ever hear of a thing like a carpetbag steak? Johnny found it, didn't he? Johnny had to find it, because in the world's literature of food there couldn't be a dish which expresses his vulgarity better than a thick, contemptuously expensive piece of meat pregnant with viscous, slippery, sensual oysters."

"Raymond, please I Watch your language." She leered at him.

"It's disgusting and he's disgusting."

"The reason I asked you to lunch today, Raymond," his mother said smoothly, "is that I have not, actually been entirely well and my doctor has suggested a trip to Europe this summer."

"What's the matter with you?" He stretched out the diphthongs of the drawl until its sounds reverberated nasally into his soft palate, thinking: Has there ever on God's earth been a liar like this woman? Does she at any square inch of her mountainous vanity, conceive that I can be had through the delicate health appeal? Will she produce a forged electrocardiogram? Will a malpracticing doctor with an even gaze suddenly happen to discover that we are lunching here? She would never pull anything as crude as a faint, but she could play a great scene with any given kindly old physician who had been coached in his lines.

"The doctor was a fool, of course," his mother said. "I went to the Leahy Clinic and to the Mayos for two separate checkups. I am as sound as a Swiss franc."

Raymond's resentment of her made him feel as though steel burrs were forming everywhere under his skin. I am going to lose this, he thought, just as I lose them all with her. I am being blindfolded as I sit here and she will win if I cannot anticipate where she is leading me. Oh, what a woman! What a beauty she is and what a dirty fighter. She is where the world should spit when they seek to spit upon Johnny Iselin. How can I forget that? How can I look into those serenely lovely eyes, how can I be so deeply thrilled by the carriage of her exquisitely wholesome body and grow so faint at the set, the royal set of that beautiful head and not remember, not always and always and always remember that it encases a cesspool of betrayal, a poisoned well of love, and a city of deadly snakes? Why am I here? Why did I come here?

"I am glad to hear it," he said. "But I distinctly remember you telling me that you had not, actually, been entirely well. Just a few seconds ago. In fact, that was exactly the way you phrased it."

She smiled at him with forbearance, showing rows of perfect white teeth. "I said -- oh, Raymond! For heaven's sake, what does it matter what I said?"

"I'd like a drink."

"At lunch?"

"Yes."

"You generally sulk if people drink at lunch."

She tilted her head back and made a repulsive kissing sound with her pursed lips. A waiter sprinted toward her so rapidly that Raymond thought the man had decided to kill her, but that was not the case. He came to a point beside her and stared at her abjectly as though pleading for the knout. Raymond's mother had that effect upon many people.

"Speak up, Raymond."

"I would like to have some beer. Served in the can,"

"Served in the can, sir?" the waiter asked softly. Raymond's mother snarled and the man shrilled "Yes, sir!" and was off.

"And who is the more vulgar now?" she asked in a kindly tone. "How about a can of beans, opened with a hatchet, with the can of beer?"

"Mother, for crissake, will you please tell me how come we are having lunch today?"

"Oh. Well, this fool of a doctor whom I shall expose as an alarmist, I assure you, told me that I should go to Europe for a change and whether it was from the wrong reason or not, it did plant the idea. So, since I can't go alone and since it would present too many security difficulties for Johnny to go with me, I wondered ... and I most certainly expect you to accept for professional reasons as I will be traveling as a full, accredited representative of the Appropriations, Foreign Relations, and Finance Committees -- I will be representing the Senate, you might say -- and I will be there to remind the forgetful rulers of Europe and England that the United States was established not as a democracy but as a Federal Union and Republic that is controlled by the United States Senate, at this moment in our history, through a state-equality composition designed to maintain this establishment and that it exists, in the present moment of our history, to protect minorities from the precipitate and emotional tyranny of majorities. That means, of course, that I will be able to get you into places and cause you to be adjacent to people which neither your newspaper nor your column could reach in a decade of Sundays. I assure you, before you answer as to whether or not you will consent to accompany me, your own mother, on a tour of Europe at no cost whatever to you, that there is no one in the British Isles or on that entire subcontinent of Europe whom you might decide that you would like to meet -- and for reasons of publication should you so choose -- that I cannot deliver to you. Should you also decide that you would enjoy extending the already influential syndication of your daily writings to other languages and to foreign newspapers and opinion-molding periodicals, I should think that could be arranged. Furthermore --" Raymond's mother was wooing him as she had wooed Johnny Iselin. Raymond's own father must have been a dreamer, indeed, to have lost her point so far back in the thickening fullness of her youth.

"I would love to go to Europe with you this summer, Mother."

"Good. We will sail from West Forty-sixth Street on June 15, at noon, on the United States. My office will mail you the itinerary and hotels and indicate the shape of appointments and meetings, business and social. Would you like to see the Pope?"

"No."

"I'll do that alone then."

"What else?"

"Isn't this carpetbag steak absolutely delicious? Eating it is an absolute sexual experience! What a marvelous conception -- steak and oysters, I mean. Johnny eats it all the time, you know."

"It figures."

"Is there anything I can get done for you in Washington, dear heart?"

"No. Thank you. Yes. Yes, there is something. I have a friend --"

"A friend? You have a friend?" She stopped chewing for a moment and put her fork down.

"Sarcasm is the cheapest kind of a crutch to humor, Mother."

"Please forgive me, Raymond. I was not attempting sarcasm. You must believe that. I was startled. I had never heard you mention a friend in your entire life before. I am very, very happy that you do have a friend and you may be sure, darling, that if I may help your friend I most certainly will be overjoyed to do so. Who is he?"

"He's a major in Army Intelligence in Washington." Raymond's mother had whipped out an efficient-looking looseleaf notebook.

"His name?"

He told her.

"Academy?" He said yes.

"Would full colonel be what you had in mind?"

"That would be fine, I guess. I hope there is some way it can be done without PI being stamped all over his personnel file."

"What is PI?"

"Political influence."

"Of course they'll stamp PI all over his personnel file! Are you out of your mind? What's wrong with letting the Board know that he happens to have a little muscle in the right places? Sweet Jesus, Raymond, if it weren't for PI some of the brass we call our leaders would be the oldest crop of second lieutenants in military history. I swear to God, Raymond," his mother said in extreme exasperation, chopping savagely at a large gooseberry tart that glistened with custard filling, "sometimes I think you are the most naive of young men, and when I read your column, I am sure."

"What's wrong with my column?"

She held up her hand. "Not now. We will reorganize your column aboard ship in June. Right now let's make your friend a chicken colonel." She looked at her notes. "Now, is there anything -- well, anything negative I should know about this one?"

"No. He's a great officer. His father and grandfather and great-grandfather were great officers."

"You know him from Korea?"

"Yes. He -- he led the patrol." Raymond hesitated because mentioning the patrol made him think of that filthy medal again and of how much his mother had made that medal mean to Johnny Iselin and what a fool she had made of herself at the White House and later what a fool Johnny had made of himself in front of the TV cameras and press cameras at that goddam, cheap, rotten, contemptuous luncheon where he had been humiliated, and all of a sudden he saw that it would be possible, too, for him to take a little bit of her skin off painfully and to kick Johnny right between the eyes with the medal nailed to the toe of his boot so that he, Raymond, would finally have a little pleasure out of that goddam medal himself, finally and at last. He was patiently quiet until she sensed the meaning of his hesitation and took it up.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Well, there is one thing which the Army might figure as negative. In the past. I think it's all right now."

"He's a fairy?"

"Hah!"

"This little negative thing. You say you think it's all right now?"

"Yes."

"You don't think you should tell me what it is?"

"Mother, are you going to put Johnny up for the Presidency at the convention next year?"

"Raymond, shall we make your friend a colonel or not? I don't think Johnny can make it for the Presidency. I may go after the number-two spot."

"Will you enter him in the primaries next spring?"

"I don't think so. He has too much strength for that. I don't think I need any popularity contests for Johnny. Now -- about the negative side of the major." Raymond folded his hands neatly before him on the table. "He's been in Army psychiatric hospitals twice in the past year."

"Oh, that's all," she drawled sarcastically and shrugged. "And all the time I thought it might have been something which could present a problem. My God, Raymond! A psycho! Have you ever seen what that looks like when it's stamped across a personnel file?"

"It's not what you might think, Mother. You see, due to an experience in Korea, a very vivid experience, he has been suffering from recurring nightmares."

"Is that right?"

"What happened to him could give anyone nightmares. In fact, it might even give you a nightmare or two after you hear it."

"Why?"

"Because it's quite a story and I'm involved in it up to my ears."

Her voice picked up a cutting edge. "How are you involved?" she asked.

He told her. When he had finished explaining that Marco had decided to demand his own court-martial to prove falsification and collusion in conjunction with the conferment of that Medal of Honor, savoring each word and each shocked look on his mother's face with great and deep satisfaction, she was the color of milk and her hand trembled.

"How dare he?"

"Why, Mother, it is his duty. Surely you can see that?"

"How dare the contemptible, psychoneurotic, useless, filthy little military servant of a --?" She choked on it.

Raymond was startled at the intensity of her attack. She brought her fist down on the table top with full force from two feet above it, in full tantrum, and the glasses, plates, and silver jumped and a full water pitcher leaped into the air to crash to the floor. Everyone in the dining room turned to stare and some stood up to look. A waiter dashed toward the table and went to his hands and knees, fussing with the sopping carpet and the fragments of heavy glass. She kicked him in the thigh as she sat, with vicious vigor. "Get out of here, you miserable flunky," she said. The waiter stood up slowly, staring at her, breathing shallowly. Then he left abruptly. She stood up, breathing heavily, with sweat shining on her upper lip. "I'll help your friend, Raymond," she said with violence in her voice. "I'll help him to defame and destroy an American hero. I'll cheer him as he spits upon our flag." She left him there, striding rapidly through knots of people and attendants, shouldering some. Raymond stared after her, knowing he had lost again but not knowing what he had lost. But he was not dismayed, because losing was Raymond's most constant feeling.

She went to the manager's office in the hotel. She brushed past his secretary and slammed the door behind her. She said she was the wife of Senator John Yerkes Iselin and that the two people then meeting with the manager, two barber-pinked businessmen each wearing a florid carnation, would oblige her by leaving the room. They excused themselves and left immediately, vaguely fearful of being proved Communists. She told the manager that it would be necessary to use his office and his telephone and that it would be necessary for her to have utter privacy as she would be talking about an emergency matter with the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, and that she would greatly appreciate it, in fact she would regard it as a patriotic service, as would indeed her husband, Senator Iselin, if he were to go to the telephone switchboard in person and direct the placement of the call to the Secretary, reversing the charges, and standing by at the operator's shoulder to make sure there was no eavesdropping on the call, a natural and human tendency under the circumstances.

Raymond paid the check and wandered about the lobby looking for his mother. He concluded that she had left so he went out of the hotel on the Fifth Avenue side, deciding to walk back to his office. When he reached the office he found a message to call Army Intelligence in New York. He called. They asked if he could help them locate Major Bennett Marco. Raymond said he believed Major Marco was presently at his apartment, as he was visiting him in New York. They asked for the telephone number. He gave it to them, explaining that they were not to give it to anyone else, then felt silly having said such a thing to professional investigators. He got busy after that on a call from the governor's press secretary and the three check-up calls that were made necessary by that call. When he called Ben at the apartment there was no answer. He forgot about it. That night, when he got home at six twenty-two, he found a note from Ben thanking him and saying that his indefinite sick leave had been canceled and that he had been recalled to Washington. The note also urged Raymond not to question Chunjin in any way after he came out of the hospital.

In Naples, in the summer of 1958, in discussing the most powerful men in the world with Leonard Lyons, the expatriate Charles Luciano had said: "A U.S. Senator can make more trouble, day in and day out, than anyone else." The condition as stated then had not changed perceptibly a year later.

Chapter 14

When Lieutenant General Nils Jorgenson had awakened that morning, a celebrant of his fortieth anniversary in the United States Army, he had been euphoric. When he left the office of the Secretary and the further presence of the Army's Congressional liaison officer, he was dismayed, cholerically angry, but mostly horrified. The general was a good man and a brave man. He locked the doors when he and Marco were alone in his office, then demanded that Marco confirm or deny that Marco had planned to request a court-martial of himself to enforce a public investigation of circumstances involving a Medal of Honor man. Marco confirmed it. The general felt it necessary to tell Marco that he had known Marco's father and grandfather. He asked Marco what he had to say.

"Sir, there is only one person in the world with whom I have discussed this course and that was Raymond Shaw himself, at his apartment last night, and it was Shaw, sir, who urged the course and originated the conception. May I ask who has made this accusation to the Secretary, sir? I cannot understand how --"

"Senator John Yerkes Iselin made the accusation, Major. Now -- I offer you this because of your record and the record of your family. I offer you the opportunity to resign from the Army."

"I cannot resign, sir. It is my belief, sir, that the Medal of Honor is being used as an enemy weapon. I -- if the general will understand -- I see this as my duty, sir."

The general walked to the window. He looked out at the river for a long time. He went to a casual chair and sat down and he leaned far, far forward, almost bent double, staring at the floor for a long time. He went to his desk and took a chewed and battered-looking pipe from its top drawer, plugged tobacco into it, lighted it, and smoked furiously, staring out of the window again. Then he went back to the desk and sat down to stare across at Marco.

"You not only will not get the court-martial but I am advising you that you will have no rights of any kind." He snorted with disgust. "On my fortieth anniversary in the Army I find myself telling an American officer that he will have no rights of any kind."

"Sir?"

"Senator Iselin is the kind of a man who would work day and night to block the entire defense appropriation if he were crossed on a matter as close to him as this. Senator Iselin is capable of wrecking the entire military establishment if an investigation of his stepson's glorious heroism were permitted to go through. He would undertake a war upon the United States Army which would be far more punishing and ruinous than any ever inflicted by any enemy force of arms in our history. To convey to you the enormity of the responsibility you carry, I have been ordered to tell you this, and it violates everything I stand for. Under orders, I will now threaten you." His voice trembled. "If you persist in urging your own court-martial for the purpose of examining Raymond Shaw's right to wear the Medal of Honor, you will be placed in solitary confinement."

Marco stared at the general.

"Have you ever had to threaten a private to force him to police a yard, Major? The Army, as we have known it, has heretofore functioned under a system utilizing orders. Do you remember? I must now tell you that I have not been permitted to consider this conversation a travesty on both our lives. I have been ordered not to halt at merely threatening you. Senator Iselin has decided that I was to be ordered to bribe you. If you will agree to ignore your honor as an officer and will sign a paper which has been prepared by Senator Iselin's legal counsel which guarantees that you will not press for the investigation of this matter, I am to advise you that you will be advanced in rank to lieutenant colonel, then effective instantly, to the rank of full colonel."

The nausea rose in Marco like the foam in a narrow beer glass. He could not speak even to acknowledge that he had heard. The general took a paper from his blouse and placed it on the desk, on the far side of it, in front of Marco. "So much for Iselin," he said. "I order you to sign it." Marco took up the desk pen and signed the paper.

"Thank you, Major. Dismiss," the general said. Marco left the office at four twenty-one in the afternoon. General Jorgenson shot himself to death at four fifty-five.

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