The Sweetman Curve

by Graham Masterton

  The Monarch jounced and banged on ruined suspension and came to a halt beside the highway. The echoes of its crash re-echoed from the hills and then faded away. Umberto put down his rifle and stood by the Dangerous Curve sign, quite motionless, waiting for any signs of life.

  After a while, when there was none, he walked quickly and quietly over to the Monarch in his soft white shoes. He circled the car once, looking warily into the smashed windows, but when he saw that David Radetzky was hunched in his seat with his face smothered in blood, he rested his rifle against the side of the car and tugged open the passenger door.

  On the floor, in the welter of broken glass and bent trim, was the spool of tape. He picked it up, brushed off the fragments of glass, and put it on the car’s roof. Then he made a quick search under the seats and in the glove box to make sure there was no other incriminating evidence. He picked up the .38 revolver and stuck it in his belt.

  David Radetzky’s face was already swollen and blue, but Umberto reached across the car and thumbed back his eyelid, just to make sure. The eyeball was solid crimson.

  Umberto unhooked his radio transmitter, pulled out the aerial, and said: ‘Val, it’s all over. Come in and get me.’

  As he shut the aerial away, the helicopter rose from behind the nearby hills like a noisy conjuring trick. Umberto waved it towards him, and for a few moments it hovered over the wrecked car, blowing up billows of dust, while Val took a few photographs for Senator Chapman’s information and amusement. Then it backed off, and landed twenty-five yards away in a blizzard of grit.

  Umberto hurried over to the Bell with his head bent and his handkerchief over his mouth. He wrenched open the door, slung his rifle inside, and then climbed aboard himself. Val pulled away, and within a few minutes they were nothing more than a droning spark of silver against the clear cloudless sky. The Monarch baked under the mid-afternoon heat in silence.

  Two hours passed, and the sun dropped towards the distant blue horizon of the Nopah range. The car’s shadow lengthened. The desert air began to cool slightly, and the sheet-metal hood ticked spasmodically as it contracted. Around five o’clock, David Radetzky stirred.

  He was aware of thirst before he was aware of pain. He ran his tongue across his lips and felt the saltiness of dried blood. His head was pounding and there was a crushing sensation in his right hand. He opened his eyes.

  Everything was blurry at first, but then he slowly made out the images of a broken car windshield, a badly bent steering-wheel, and his own surprisingly crooked legs. He closed his eyes again for a little while and rested them.

  Half an hour later, he opened his eyes again. It seemed cooler now, almost chilly. He could see that the sky was growing dusky, and it occurred to him that if he stayed here until it grew dark, he was probably going to die. He wasn’t aware that Umberto’s second bullet had penetrated the trunk, the rear seats, and the back of the driver’s seat, and that his spinal column was shattered into red jelly and splinters of bone.

  A calm wind was blowing. He wondered what he was doing here and what could have happened. He knew that he was supposed to be driving to Shoshone, but he wasn’t altogether sure why. He knew that it was something to do with the Sweetman Curve, but he didn’t understand what the Sweetman Curve was. He thought about the name Sweetman, and all he could picture was a kind of gingerbread man made out of crunchy brown sugar.

  Another hour passed. He woke up feeling freezing cold, and in terrible pain. He couldn’t feel or move his legs at all. But somehow the pain had cleared his mind, and he was beginning to remember what had happened. He couldn’t recall the final moments when Umberto had actually shot him, but he remembered approaching the curve, and thinking about putting out a call on his CB.

  He looked across at the CB. It was still switched on. He stared at it for a long time, and then tried to swing his left hand across to pick up the microphone. The first and second times he tried, his fingers couldn’t close over it. But then he made a third strenuous attempt, and managed to fumble it up between his wrist and his chest. Then he worked it up into the palm of his hand, and said weakly, ‘This is Blue Eyes requesting emergency assist in Pahrump Valley. Anyone in range. I’m in Pahrump Valley. Badly need assist.’

  That was all he could say before pain gripped his back so mercilessly that his nervous system was paralysed, and the microphone dropped from his hand to the seat. He sat there with his teeth clenched and his eyes shut, and prayed that some angel would find him.

  *

  The angel was a fifty-four-year-old truck driver called Al Rippert, from Santa Barbara. He picked up David Radetzky’s distress call from only two miles away in California, on highway 178. He was driving a prefabricated chalet up to the Lee Canyon Winter Sports area, and he was running three hours late because of a burst tyre.

  He brought his massive Mack truck to a halt just a few feet away from David’s wrecked Monarch, and walked across in the glare of his headlamps, pulling his waistband up over his pot belly as he came.

  David Radetzky was barely conscious. When Al Rippert cradled his bloodied head in his arm, all David could manage to murmur was: ‘Election… it’s the election…’

  He was silent for a while, and then he mumbled ‘Road sign.’

  Four

  The phone rang, and Carl X. Chapman reached across his desk to pick it up without taking his eyes from the draft speech he was reading.

  ‘Yes? Who is this?’ he said.

  There was a crackly silence, and then a voice said, ‘Everything’s fine, Mr Chapman. Everything’s under control.’

  ‘Are you sure? What about the tapes and the films?’

  ‘All accounted for. One tape-recorder, one tape. Two movie cameras, two movies. One video machine, one videotape.’

  ‘What about Radetzky?’

  ‘Radetzky is suffering from Sweetman’s disease. Umberto saw to that. Val caught up with that wetback, Juan, and Domani’s men nailed the sound technician. Forced his car off the highway.’

  ‘Okay. Get the tape and the films back here to me, and don’t let them out of your sight. And make sure you pay off Domani. Maybe five thousand dollars or so, just for his trouble.’

  ‘With all respect, Mr Chapman, I should make it ten. Hits come expensive these days.’

  ‘Harris, don’t talk like that on the open telephone.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Chapman.’

  ‘You’d be a damned sight sorrier if this line was tapped.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir. I’ll have those tapes and films right over.’

  ‘One more thing, Harris.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘As soon as tomorrow’s meeting is over, I want to get straight down to Palm Springs. Call Adele and tell her what time we’re coming.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Chapman.’

  Carl sat down the telephone, and then ran his fingers through his wiry hair. He felt less unsettled now that David Radetzky had been caught. He had dozens of prepared contingency plans for dealing with accidental leaks of the Sweetman plan, from grandiose press statements to schemes for diverting the blame for the killings onto ‘Communist agents.’ But he felt safer if the plan stayed a secret, and the closer he came to the White House, the closer he came to keeping it a secret forever. Unknown to any of the twenty-two professional killers he was using across the breadth of the continental United States, it was Carl’s intention, once inaugurated, to dispose of them all within twenty-four hours. He had documents already drawn up which incriminated each of them for breaches of national security, and he would use the FBI, and particularly his old college pal the deputy director, to hit them swiftly and legally.

  That was when the killing would stop for good.

  Carl had known when he embarked on the Sweetman plan that hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans were going to die. It had taken him weeks of agonizing to make up his mind to do it. Although the plan had seemed theoretically scientific and controllable, Carl was enough of a practical poli
tician to know that theory and reality rarely coincide. If his scientific advisers prognosticated that they would have to kill eight hundred people to ensure a certain vote for Carl Chapman in 1980, then at the end of the day it would probably total three times as many. That didn’t include the inevitable security killings like David Radetzky and Lollie Methven, and anyone else who stumbled accidentally on the truth of the Sweetman Curve.

  But, in the final analysis, Carl had decided that it was better for America as a nation to regain her national pride than it was to consider the lives of only two or three thousand people. Why, more people died in auto accidents in a single month, and their deaths were more tragic because they were meaningless and wasted. At least the Sweetman plan had the virtue of having a political purpose. All those who were likely to threaten the American way could be weeded out, and with each weeding the strength of the country would grow.

  He pushed back his chair and stood up. He knew that the people who were dying were more than abstract lines on a demographic chart. He was tough, and sometimes bitter, but he wasn’t lacking in human sensitivity. He had seen his own father cry, and he knew that other people were crying because of what he had done, and that even more would cry in the months leading up to the primaries. But he felt no guilt. He felt instead the deep paternal sadness of a father who has to send his sons off to war. He only wished he could talk to some of them, and tell them why they had to die.

  Every day, on the demographic charts that were printed out of the Sweetman computers, more and more thin blue lines rose up to meet the thick red line that represented the Sweetman Curve. Each thin blue line was the political life of an American man or woman, and as soon as it intersected the red line, that meant that somewhere in the United States, somebody had reached a stage in their political thinking that would probably lead them to vote against Carl X. Chapman in 1980. As soon as the blue line and the red line met, orders were immediately sent out from Carl Chapman’s headquarters to erase the blue line forever.

  Carl stared out of the window of the Xanadu Hotel, down towards the Las Vegas strip. One day soon, he would be staring out of the French windows of the Oval office on to the White House lawns, and then his sadness would be appeased. He watched cars lazily driving up and down, and people crossing the street, and he felt a sense of responsible power that was greater than almost anything he had ever experienced.

  The phone rang again. He went across to the desk, and picked it up. The receptionist said, ‘Your wife is calling you from Minneapolis, Mr Chapman. Do you wish to take the call?’

  He paused, and then said, ‘Surely. Put her on.’

  Over the echoing long-distance line, he heard Elspeth saying, ‘Carl? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, dear, it’s me. How are things?’

  ‘The weather’s dreadful. We’ve had six inches of snow this morning. I’ve changed my mind about Palm Springs, and I’ve decided to come down. That’s why I’m calling.’

  ‘You’re coming down? I thought you were going to spend the weekend with the Delanceys.’

  ‘Carl, it’s really too awful here. And anyway, I’m already packed. There’s a flight to Los Angeles at nine tomorrow morning.’

  Carl bit his lip. He had been counting on Elspeth staying in Minnesota, and giving Adele Corliss’s weekend party a miss. He hadn’t seen Hilary Nestor Hunter for a month, and be hadn’t been able to spend an evening alone with her for nearly a year. He had been looking forward to reviving the acquaintanceship that had begun so spectacularly at the last Republican party convention. Hilary excited Carl. She had excited him from the moment he first walked into the cocktail party, and saw her talking in the far corner of the room, tall and striking and obviously dominating the conversation. She excited him because she was so determined and aggressive, politically and sexually; and she excited him because she stirred up almost fanatical support among women, not with middle-of-the-road liberalism or left-wing idealism, but with intense right-wing fierceness. After that first cocktail party, they had gone out to dinner, and then to bed, and in the small hours of the morning, Hilary Nestor Hunter had talked female politics of a kind which stirred him and challenged him. He had determined that, when the time came, he would choose her to play a part in his 1980 administration. Elspeth could be his First Lady, and pick the wallpaper and place settings for the White House; Hilary would be his political empress.

  He said, in a controlled voice, ‘It really isn’t worth your coming down, dear. It’s going to be deadly dull, all movie people and British tax exiles, and you won’t enjoy a moment of it.’

  ‘Carl,’ insisted Elspeth, ‘I just feel like some sun. And nothing could be duller than Minneapolis on a snowbound Sunday.’

  ‘I suppose you want to keep your eagle eye on me, too?’ he asked her.

  There was a short silence. Then Elspeth said, ‘Should I have any reason to? Apart from the usual floozies?’

  ‘You tell me. You’re the one who’s been hiring the private detectives.’

  There was another silence, longer. Elspeth said, ‘I’m not at all sure what you’re talking about.’

  Carl gave an ironic grunt. ‘Oh, come now, dear. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve had film cameras rolling for months, recording every carnal sin that I’ve committed in sound and vision and stunning Cinemascope.’

  There was no point in Elspeth denying it. She said, in a steady voice, ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘It wasn’t very difficult,’ Carl said. ‘I just happened to bump into a friend of yours called David Radetzky, and David Radetzky and his little gang were having a whole lot of fun wiring up my bedroom for sound and pictures. On your instructions, of course.’

  ‘Did they tell you why they were doing it?’

  ‘The girl did. She said you were seeking a divorce. David Radetzky wasn’t in much of a condition to talk to me himself.’

  ‘You haven’t hurt him?’

  ‘Radetzky? I haven’t laid a finger on him.’

  ‘Well, thank God for that, Carl, because I’m not seeking a divorce.’

  ‘You’re not? You’ve hired private detectives, you’ve taken full colour movies of whatever I do in bed, and you tell me you’re not seeking a divorce?’

  There was a pause. ‘I was seeking protection, if you must know,’ she said.

  ‘Protection? Protection against what?’

  ‘Protection against you, Carl. You’re dangerous. I know something of what you’re doing to get yourself elected.’

  Carl sighed. So Elspeth knew about Sweetman, too. He supposed it wasn’t much of a surprise. Elspeth was beside him most of the time, after all, and she must have picked up fragments of conversation with his aides and his secretaries, and heard him on the phone. All the same, it disturbed him, and he was anxious to find out how much she knew. Elspeth could become as much of a security risk as David Radetzky. Inviting, of course, the same kind of retaliatory action.

  ‘What have you heard?’ he asked her, more gently.

  ‘Enough,’ she said.

  ‘How much is enough?’

  ‘Enough to make me realise that you won’t let anything or anybody stand in your way, including me. Enough to make me realise that you will almost certainly be President-elect in 1980. And enough to make me realise that if I want to be First Lady, and stay First Lady, I’ve got to have some kind of reliable insurance.’

  Carl sounded pained. ‘Do you really think I’d ever hurt you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, Carl, I do. I can just imagine the political capital you’d make out of the sad and tragic death of your dear wife. I can picture you already, making your election speeches with tears in your eyes and a black armband.’

  Carl took a deep breath to steady his temper. He said, as coaxingly as he could, ‘Elspeth, it seems that you have some pretty wrong ideas about what I’m doing here. Now, do you think you could tell me what you’ve heard, and maybe who told you?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Elspeth said, decisively. ‘I’m not
that much of a pumpkinhead. I’ll tell you when it’s all over, when you’re elected and inaugurated and safe in the White House. And even then, I’ll still have my films and my tapes to keep me warm.’

  ‘What films and tapes ? I took all Radetzky’s films and tapes.’

  ‘Including the films and tapes from the Doral?’

  ‘The Doral? You didn’t—’

  He clamped his mouth shut in anger. Of all the people he hated to outsmart him, his wife came at the top of the list. Maybe it was his own fault. He always thought of her as superior and elite and elegant, but essentially dumb, and it was a constant surprise to him, a constant unpleasant surprise, that she could work things out for herself. She wasn’t all raised eyebrows and sarcasm and social graces.

  ‘Are you catching the nine o’clock plane into LAX?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t have to sound so depressed about it, dearest.’

  ‘How do you expect me to sound after finding out that you took goddamned snooping movies of me in Miami?’

  ‘Carl, how do you think I reacted when I found out that you were romping around in bed with some redheaded whore while I was in bed with a sick headache?’

  ‘All that’s ever been sick about you is your sense of wifely loyalty.’

  ‘On the contrary, Carl,’ said Elspeth evenly, ‘I think my loyalty has been my greatest virtue. Especially when you consider how often you’ve cheated on me.’

  ‘Listen!’ he yelled. ‘If you want a divorce, you can have a divorce! I don’t need to listen to you telling me how loyal you are!’

  ‘I don’t want a divorce,’ replied Elspeth. ‘I just want us to understand each other. I’ve told you before. The only difference is that this time I’m holding a far stronger hand.’

  Carl let his temper slowly simmer down. Then he said, ‘All right. Let’s talk about it in Palm Springs. Perhaps we’ll both be a little cooler by then.’

  ‘I’m perfectly cool,’ said Elspeth.

  ‘Well, good,’ snapped Carl, ‘because I’m damned if I am.’