The Manchurian Candidate

by Richard Condon

  “The wrong man died, Mrs. Mavole,” Raymond sobbed. “How I wish it could have been me. Not Eddie. Me. Me.” He hid his face in her large, motherly breasts as she lay back on the pillows of the bed.

  Through arrangements beyond his control, Raymond had developed into a man who sagged fearfully within a suit of stifling armor, imprisoned for the length of his life from casque to solleret. It was heavy, immovable armor, this thick defense, which had been constructed mainly at his mother’s forge, hammered under his stepfather’s noise, tempered by the bitter tears of his father’s betrayal. Raymond also distrusted all other living people because they had not warned his father of his mother.

  Raymond had been shown too early that if he smiled his stepfather was encouraged to bray laughter; if he spoke, his mother felt compelled to reply in the only way she knew how to reply, which was to urge him to seek popularity and power with all life-force. So he had deliberately developed the ability to be shunned instantly no matter where he went and notwithstanding extraneous conditions. He had achieved this state consciously after year upon year of unconscious rehearsal of the manifest paraphernalia of arrogance and contempt, then exceeded it. The shell of armor that encased Raymond, by the horrid tracery of its design, presented him as one of the least likeable men of his century. He knew that to be a fact, and yet he did not know it because he thought the armor was all one with himself, as is a turtle’s shell.

  He had been told who he was only by his whimpering unconscious mind: a motherless (by choice), fatherless (by treachery), friendless (by circumstance), and joyless (by consequence) man who would continue to refuse emphatically to live and who, autocratically and unequivocally, did not intend to die. He was a marooned balloonist, supported by nothing visible, looking down on everybody and everything, but yearning to be seen so that, at least, he could be given some credit for an otherwise profitless ascension.

  That was what Raymond’s ambivalence was like. He was held in a paradox of callousness and feeling: the armor, which he told the world he was, and the feeling, which was what he did not know he was, and blind to both in a darkness of despair which could neither be seen nor see itself.

  He had been able to weep with Mr. and Mrs. Mavole because the door had been closed and because he knew he would be careful never to be seen by those two slobs again.

  At seven-twenty on the morning after he had reached St. Louis, there was a discreet but firm knocking at Raymond’s hotel room door. These peremptory sounds just happened to come at a moment when Raymond was exchanging intense joy with the young newspaper-woman he had met the day before. When the knocking had first hit the door, Raymond had heard it clearly enough but he was just busy enough to be determined to ignore it, but the young woman had gone rigid, not in any attitude of idiosyncratic orgasm, but as any healthy, respectable young woman would have done under similar circumstances in a hotel room in any city smaller than Tokyo.

  Lights of rage and resentment exploded in Raymond’s head. He stared down at the sweet, frightened face under him as though he hated her for not being as defiant as a drunken whore in a night court, then he threw himself off her, nearly falling out of bed. He regained his balance, slowly pulled on the dark blue dressing gown, and walking very close to the door of the room, said into the crack, “Who is it?”

  “Sergeant Shaw?”

  “Yes.”

  “Federal Bureau of Investigation.” It was a calm, sane, tenor voice.

  “What?” Raymond said. “Come on!” His voice was low and angry.

  “Open up.”

  Raymond looked over his shoulder, registering amazement, either to see whether Mardell had heard what he had heard or to find out if she looked like a fugitive. She was chalk-white and solemn.

  “What do you want?” Raymond asked.

  “We want Sergeant Raymond Shaw.” Raymond stared at the door. His face began to fill with a claret flush that clashed unpleasantly with the Nile-green wallpaper directly beside him. “Open up!” the voice said.

  “I will like hell open up,” Raymond said. “How dare you pound on this door at this time of the morning and issue your country constable’s orders? There are telephones in the lobby if you needed to make some kind of urgent inquiry. I said, how dare you?” The hauteur in Raymond’s voice held no bluster and its threat of implicit punishment startled the girl on the bed even more than the FBI’s arrival. “What the hell do you want from Sergeant Raymond Shaw?” he snarled.

  “Well—uh—we have been asked—”

  “Asked? Asked?”

  “—we have been asked to see that you meet the Army plane which is being sent to pick you up at the Lambert Airport in an hour and fifteen minutes. At eight forty-five.”

  “You couldn’t have called me from your home, or some law-school telephone booth?”

  There was a strained silence, then: “We will not continue to discuss this with you from behind a door.” Raymond walked quickly to the telephone. He was stiff with anger, as though it had rusted his joints. He picked up the receiver and rattled the bar. He told the operator to please get him the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.

  “Sergeant,” the voice said distinctly through the door, “we have orders to put you on that plane. Our orders are just as mandatory as any you ever got in the Army.”

  “Listen to what I’m going to say on this phone, then we’ll talk about orders,” Raymond said nastily. “I don’t take any orders from the FBI or the Bureau of Printing and Engraving or the Division of Conservation and Wild Life, and if you have any written orders for me from the United States Army, slide them under the door. Then you can wait for me in the lobby, if you still think you have to, and the Air Force can wait for me at the airport until I make my mind up.”

  “Now, just one minute here, son—” The voice had turned ominous.

  “Did they tell you I am being flown to Washington to get a Medal of Honor at the White House?” Maybe that silly hunk of iron he had never asked for would be useful for something just once. This kind of a square bought that stuff. A Medal of Honor was like a lot of money; it was very hard to get, so it took on a lot of magic powers.

  “Are you that Sergeant Shaw?”

  “That’s me.” He spoke to the phone. “Right. I’ll hold on.”

  “I’ll wait in the lobby,” the FBI man said. “I’ll be standing near the desk when you come down. Sorry.”

  Holding the telephone and waiting for the call, Raymond sat down on the edge of the bed, then leaned over and kissed the girl very softly at a soft place right under her rigid right nipple, but he didn’t smile at her because he was preoccupied with the call. “Hello, Mayflower? This is St. Louis, Missouri, calling Senator John Iselin. Sergeant Raymond Shaw.” There was a short wait. “Hello, Mother. Put your husband on. It’s Raymond. I said put your husband on!” He waited.

  “Johnny? Raymond. There’s an FBI man outside my hotel room door in St. Louis to say that they are holding an Army plane for me. Did you tell the Army to request FBI cooperation, and did you have that plane sent here?” He listened. “You did. Well, I knew damn well you did. But why? What the hell did you decide to do a thing like that for?” He listened. “How could I be late? It’s Wednesday morning and I don’t have to be at the White House until Friday afternoon.” He listened. He went totally pale. “A parade? A par—ade?” He stared at the details offered by his imagination. “Why—you cheap, flag-rubbing bastard!”

  Mardell had slipped out of bed and was starting to get dressed, but she didn’t seem to be able to find anything and she looked frightened. He signaled her with his free hand, caught her attention, and smiled at her so warmingly and so reassuringly that she sat down on the edge of the bed. Then she leaned back slowly and stretched out. He reached over and took her hand, kissed it softly, then placed it on top of her flat smooth stomach, while the telephone squawked in his ear. She reached up and just barely allowed her hand to caress the length of his right cheek, unshaven. Suddenly his face went hard again and he ba
rked into the telephone, “No, don’t put my mother on again! I know I haven’t spoken to her in two years! I’ll talk to her when I’m good and ready to talk to her. Aaah, for Christ’s sake!” He gritted his teeth and stared at the ceiling.

  “Hello, Mother.” His voice was flat.

  “Raymond, what the hell is this?” his mother asked solicitously. “What’s the matter with you? If we were in the mining business and you struck gold you’d call us, wouldn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it just so happens that you’re a Medal of Honor winner—incidentally, congratulations—I meant to write but we’ve been jammed up. Johnny is a public figure, Raymond. He represents the people of your state just the same as the President represents the people of the United States, and I notice you aren’t making any fuss about going to the White House. Is there something so slimy and so terrible about having your picture taken with your father—”

  “He is not my father!”

  “—who represents the pride the people of this nation feel for what you have sacrificed for them on the field of battle?”

  “Aaah, fuh crissakes, Mother, will you please—”

  “You didn’t mind having your picture taken with that stranger in St. Louis yesterday. Incidentally, what happened? Did the Army PRO send you in there to slobber over the Gold Star Mother?”

  “It was my own idea.”

  “Don’t tell me that, Raymond darling. I just happen to know you.”

  “It was my own idea.”

  “Well, wonderful. It was a wonderful idea. All the papers carried it here yesterday and, of course, everywhere this morning. Marty Webber called in time so we were able to work in a little expression from Johnny about how he’d do anything to help that dead boy’s folks and so forth, so we tied everything up from this end. It was great, so you certainly can’t stand there and tell me that you won’t have your picture taken with the man who is not only your own family but who happens to have been the governor and is now the senator from your own state.”

  “Since when do you have to get the Army to ask the FBI to set up a picture for Johnny? And that’s not what we’re arguing about, anyway. He just told me about a filthy idea for a parade to commemorate a medal on which you and I might not place any particular value but which the rest of this country thinks is a nice little thing—for a few lousy votes for him, and I am not going to hold still for any cheap, goddam parade!”

  “A parade? That’s ridiculous!”

  “Ask your flag-simple husband.”

  Raymond’s mother seemed to be talking across the mouthpiece in an aside to Johnny, but Johnny had left the apartment some four minutes before to get a haircut. “Johnny,” she said to nobody at all, “where did you get the idea that they could embarrass Raymond with a parade? No wonder he’s so sore.” Into the telephone she said, “It’s not a parade! A few cars were going out to the airport to meet you. No marching men. No color guard. No big bands. You know you are a very peculiar boy, Raymond. I haven’t seen you for almost two years—your mother—but you go right on mewing about some parade and Johnny and the FBI and some Army plane, but when it comes to—”

  “What else is going to happen in Washington?”

  “I had planned a little luncheon.”

  “With whom?”

  “With some very important key press and television people.”

  “And Johnny?”

  “Of course.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t do it.”

  There was a long pause. Waiting, staring down at the girl, he became aware that she had violet eyes. His mind began to spin off the fine silk thread of his resentment in furious moulinage. For almost two years he had been free of his obsessed mother, this brassy bugler, this puss-in-boots to her boorish Marquis de Carrabas, the woman who could think but who could not feel. He had had three letters from her in two years. (1) She had arranged for a life-sized cutout of Johnny to be forwarded to Seoul. General MacArthur was in the area. Could Johnny arrange for a picture of the two of them with arms around the photographic cutout of Johnny, as she could guarantee that this would get the widest kind of coverage? (2) Would he arrange for a canvass of fighting men from their state to sign a scroll of Christmas greetings, on behalf of all Johnny’s fighting buddies everywhere, to Johnny and the people of his great state? And (3) she was deeply disappointed and not a little bit shocked to find out that he would not lift one little finger to carry out a few simple requests for his mother who worked day and night for both of her men so that there might be a better and more secure place for each of them.

  He had been two years away from her but he could feel his defiance of her buckling under the weight of her silence. He had never been able to cope with her silence. At last her voice came through the telephone again. It was changed. It was rough and sinister. It was murderous and frightening and threatening. “If you don’t do this, Raymond,” she said, “I will promise you on my father’s grave right now that you will be very, very sorry.”

  “All right, Mother,” he said. “I’ll do it.” He shuddered. He hung up the telephone from a foot and a half above the receiver. It fell off, but he must have felt he had made his point because he picked it up from the bed where it had bounced and put it gently into its cradle.

  “That was my mother,” he explained to Mardell. “I wish I knew what else I could say to describe her in front of a nice girl like you.”

  He walked to the locked door. He leaned against the crack in despair and said, “I’ll be in the lobby in about an hour.” There was no answer. He turned toward the bed, untying the belt of his new blue robe, as a massive column of smoke began to spiral upward inside his head, filling the eyes of his memory and opaquing his expression from behind his eyes. Mardell was spilled out softly across the bed. The sheets were blue. She was blond-and-ivory, tipped with pink; lined with pink. It came to him that he had never seen another girl, named Jocie, this way. The thought of Jocie lying before him like this lovely moaning girl excited him as though a chemical abrasive had been poured into his urethra and she was assaulted by him in the most attritive manner, to her greater glory and with her effulgent consent, and though she lived to be an old, old woman she never forgot that morning and could summon it back to her in its richest violence whenever she was frightened and alone, never knowing that she was not only the first woman Raymond had ever possessed, but the first he had ever kissed in passion, or that he had been given his start toward relaxing his inhibitions against the uses of sex not quite one year before, in Manchuria.

  Two

  A CHINESE ARMY CONSTRUCTION BATTALION arrived at Tunghwa, forty-three miles inside the Korean frontier, on July 4, 1951, to set under way the housing for events, planned in 1936, that were to reach their conclusion in the United States of America in 1960. The major in charge of the detail, a Ssu Ma Sung, is now a civilian lawyer in Kunming.

  Manchuria is in the subarctic zone, but the summers are hot and humid. Tunghwa handles industry, such as sawmilling and food processing with hydroelectric power. It is a city of approximately ninety thousand, about the size of Terre Haute, Indiana, but lacking a public health appropriation.

  The Chinese construction battalion set up the job near a military airfield nearly three miles out of town. Everything they put up was prefabricated, the sections keyed by different colors; this, when the pieces were scattered around the terrain, made the men seem like toy figures walking among the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. When these were assembled into a building, they were sprayed with barn-red lead paint to banish the quilted effect. By July 6, at seventeen-nineteen, the battalion had completed a two-story, twenty-two-room structure with a small auditorium. The building was called the Research Pavilion and had some one-way transparent glass walls. It also had a few comfortably furnished guest rooms without glass walls on the first floor; these had been reserved for the brass from Moscow and Peiping.

  Each floor held different-colored
, varipatterned asphalt tile as a guide for furniture and equipment placement. Each wall, as it was erected, had decorations riveted into it. The windows, cut through each outer wall, had curtains and drapes fastened to them. The thousand pieces of that house gave the impression that it was a traveling billet for political representatives of the allied People’s Governments: a structure forever being built, struck, then sent on ahead to be built again for the next series of meetings and discussions. All of the furniture was made of blond wood in mutated, modern Scandinavian design. All of the interior coloring, except the bright yellow rattan carpeting on the second floor, was the same green and apricot utilized by new brides during their first three years of marriage.

  The second floor of the building held one large corner suite of rooms and ten other compact cubicles that had three solid walls each and one building-long common wall of one-way transparent glass facing a catwalk that was patrolled day and night by two Soviet Army riflemen. Each cubicle contained a cot, a chair, a closet, and a mirror for reassurance that the soul had not fled. The large apartment had similar fittings, plus a bathroom, a large living room, and an additional bedroom. All of the walls here were opaque. The invigorating scent of pine-tree incense pervaded the upper floors, subtly and pleasantly.

  The marvelous part of what they were doing several hundred miles to the south of Tunghwa was that every time Mavole moved, the girl moved, and every time Mavole bleated, the girl bleated. It was really a money’s worth and after Mavole came downstairs he told the guys that the classy part about the joint was that when he took the broad upstairs in the first place, there had been no jeers or catcalls. Mavole’s co-mover and bleater was a young Korean girl who had adapted to prostitution a variation of the Rochdale principle on which had been based the first cooperative store in 1844, in that she extended absolutely no credit but distributed part of the profits in the form of free beer. Her name was Gertrude.