The Manchurian Candidate

by Richard Condon

  Raymond’s boss, Holborn Gaines, dropped everything (a beer bottle and a report from the Manila office) and rushed to the hospital to see if there was anything he could do to help. The desk attendant, a Soviet Army lieutenant, upon studying his credentials and checking them against a list of Raymond’s probable and therefore accredited visitors, sent him to the fifth floor just as though it were not a sealed floor. He was met at the elevator by a rugged Army nurse who was wearing the traditional cap worn by graduates of the Mother Cabrini Hospital of Winsted, Connecticut, where she had never studied but which gave the establishment a certain amount of professional verisimilitude. Mr. Gaines was permitted to look in on Raymond, unconscious though he was, in traction and in presumed travail, and was told the running wheeze of the profession everywhere, that Raymond was doing as well as could be expected. Gaines left a bottle of Scotch for Raymond with the pretty young nurse (five feet tall, 173 pounds, mustache, warts). He also passed the word along that Raymond was to take it easy and not worry about anything, which the nurse was careful not to tell Raymond, in the event of possible prearranged code use. Technicians who worked directly under Yen Lo, albeit also possessing a political rating or classification, were flown in on embassy quota from the Pavlov Institute in the Ukraine. They went to work on Raymond between visiting hours, checking his conditioned apparatus from top to bottom. Five years had elapsed from the time the controls had first been installed at Tunghwa. All linkages were found perfect.

  A courier took the detailed lab reports to the embassy in Washington; from there they were transmitted by diplomatic pouch to the project supervisors, who were ostensibly Gomel, Berezovo, and Yen Lo, but Berezovo had been deemed insufficiently worthy, following the disappointment that Lavrenti Beria had been to the Kremlin, and he was dead, and Yen Lo refused to look at the reports, saying with a mild smile that they could not do otherwise than certify the excellence of Raymond’s conditioned reflexive mechanism, so only Gomel pored over the reports. He was mightily pleased.

  Following the transmittal of the reports overseas, Raymond met his American operator who was to become his sole manager from that moment on, and whom he would never remember as having seen and whom he would never be able to recognize as his operator no matter where or when they met, because it had been designed that way. They were introduced, as it were, then the American asked to be alone in the room with Raymond. They conferred together for nearly two hours before Zilkov interrupted them. The two visitors in Raymond’s room got into a heated argument, with Raymond watching them like a tennis spectator. Zilkov was a militant, bright young man. He maintained emphatically that Raymond must carry out a test assassination in order to complete the reflex check-out in a conclusive manner. The American operator opposed the suggestion violently and pointed out that it was both surprising and shocking that a security officer, with responsibility such as he held, would seek to risk a mechanism as valuable as Raymond.

  Raymond listened gravely, then turned his eyes to hear Zilkov’s rebuttal, which, of course, pointed out that the mechanism had been designed for assassination, that it had been five years since it had been tested, that conditions offering minimum risk for police reprisal could be designed, and that as far as he was concerned the test must be made before he would sign any certification that the mechanism was in perfect working order. The American operator said, very well, if that was how Zilkov felt about it then Raymond should be instructed to kill an employee of the hospital on one of the sealed floors. Zilkov said he would order nothing of the sort, that the table of organization in the area was under acceptable strength as it was, as far as he was concerned, and that Raymond could damned well kill some non-productive woman or child on the outside. The American operator said there was no reason for Raymond to kill anyone unproductive—that there might as well be some feeling of gain out of this since Zilkov was insisting on the risk—and recommended that Raymond’s position at the newspaper and therefore his general value to the party might be considerably strengthened if he were to kill his immediate superior, Holborn Gaines, as it was possible that, after five years as Gaines’s assistant, Raymond would be given his job, which, in turn, would bring him wider influence within the inner chambers of the American government. Zilkov said he had no interest in whom Raymond assassinated so long as he worked efficiently and obediently. It was decided that Mr. Gaines should die two nights hence. Subsequently, the American operator complained bitterly through channels that Zilkov had been reckless and foolhardy with one of the Party’s most valuable pieces of apparatus in the United States, and most entirely needlessly because Raymond had been checked out by Pavlov technicians. Unfortunately the complaint was not made in time to save Mr. Gaines, but within two weeks Zilkov was recalled and severely reprimanded. On his return to the United States, he could not have been more careful, both with Raymond and Raymond’s operator, than if they had been his own department heads.

  On the morning of the ninth day at Swardon, less than two days before he murdered Mr. Gaines, Raymond awoke as from a deep sleep, surprised to find himself in a strange bed and in traction, but even more shocked to find himself staring directly into, and on a level with, the grief-ravaged face of his mother. Raymond had never seen his mother’s face as being anything but smoothly held, enforced, carefully supported, arranged, and used to help her get what she wanted as a Cadillac was used to get her where she wanted to go. The skin on his mother’s face had always been flawless; the eyes were exquisitely placed and entirely clear, the whites unflecked by tiny blood vessels, merely suggesting, malevolence and insane impatience. Her mouth had always been held well in, as the mouths of city saddle horses, and the perfect blond hair had always framed all of this and had always softened it.

  To open his eyes and find himself looking into a wracked caricature of that other vision made Raymond cry out, and made his mother aware that he was conscious. Her hair was ragged and awry. Her eyes were rabbit-red from weeping. Her cheeks shone with wet, washing away the cosmetic that always masked the wrinkles. Her mouth was twisted in ugly self-pity, while she sobbed noisily and blew her nose into too small a handkerchief. She drew back instantly at his sound and attempted to compose her face, but it could not be done convincingly on such short order, and unconsciously she wanted to gain a credit for the fear she knew would be unbelievable to him: her tears because of him.

  “Raymond, oh, my Raymond.”

  “Whassa matter?”

  “Oh—”

  “Is Johnny dead?”

  “What?”

  “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “I came here as soon as I could. I flew here the instant I was able to leave.”

  “Where? Pardon the cliché, but where am I?”

  “The Swardon Sanitarium.”

  “The Swardon Sanitarium where?”

  “New York. You were hit by a hit-and-run driver. Oh, I was so frightened. I came as soon as I could.”

  “When? How long have I been here?”

  “Eight days. Nine days. I don’t know.”

  “And you just got here?”

  “Do you hate me, Raymond?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yes, Mother.” He looked at her with genuine anxiety. Had she run out of arm sauce? Had she broken the arm-banging machine? Or was she just a very clever impersonator sent over to play the mother while my true mommy tries to sober up the Great Statesman?

  “My little boy. My darling, little boy.” She went into a paroxysm of silent weeping, working her shoulders up and down in a horrible manner and shaking the chair she sat in. There was nothing faked about this, he knew. She must have hit some real trouble along the line. It simply could not possibly be that she was weeping over him being stretched out in a hospital. Mucus slid from the tiny handkerchief and rested on her left cheekbone. Raymond closed his eyes for a moment, but he would not tell her what had happened and felt a deep satisfaction that ultimately she would look in some m
irror after she had left him and see this mess on her face.

  “You are such a fraud, Mother. My God, I feel as well as I have ever felt and I know that you have been all over this with whatever doctors there are out there on the telephone days ago, and now you’re at the hospital because there is probably a sale at Bloomingdale’s or you’re having a few radio actors blacklisted and you make a production out of it like I was involved somehow in your life.” His voice was bitter. His eyes were hard and dry.

  “I have to be a fraud,” she said, straightening her back and slipping several lengths of steel into her voice like whalebone into a corset. “And I have to be the truth, too. And a shield and the courage for all the men I have ever known, yourself included, excepting my father. There is so much fraud in this world and it needs to be turned away with fraud, the way steel is turned with steel and the way a soft answer does not turneth away wrath.” She had emerged, dripping with acid, from her grief. Her face was a mass of ravaged colors and textures, her hair was like an old lamp shade fringe and that glob of mucus still rested on her left cheekbone disgustingly, but she was herself again, and Raymond felt greatly relieved.

  “How’s Johnny?”

  “Fine. He’d be here, but that committee just finished working him over—ah, wait until that one is up for re-election.” She sniffed noisily. “So I told him he must stay there and stare them down. You have no use for him anyway so I don’t know why you bother to ask for him unless you feel guilt about something.”

  “I do feel guilt about something.”

  “About what?” She leaned forward slightly because information is the prime increment of power.

  “About Jocie.”

  “Who’s Jocie?”

  “Jocie Jordan. The senator’s daughter.”

  “Oh. Yes. Why do you feel guilt?” his mother asked.

  “Why? Because she thinks I deserted her.”

  “Raymond! Why do you dramatize everything so? You were babies!”

  “I thought that since we’re having our first meeting since I got the medal, since I got back from Korea, and I was in Korea for two years, I thought since you’ve been pretending to be two other people—you know, honest and maternal and wistfully remorseful about how we had let our lives go along—coldly and separately—and I thought that before we got any more honest and hated ourselves in the morning, that we might just pay Jocie the respect of asking for her—you know, mentioning her name in passing the way they do about the dead?” His voice was choked. His eyes were not dry.

  As though he had reminded her of what had triggered her in the first place, she began unexpectedly to weep. The lemon sunlight was reflected from the bright white blank wall outside the window at her back and it lingered like St. Elmo’s fire around the ridiculously small green hat she was wearing, a suspicion of a hat that had been assembled for seventy dollars by an aesthetic leader for whom millinery signified the foundation stone of culture.

  “What is the matter with you, Mother?”

  She sobbed.”

  “You aren’t crying about me?”

  She sobbed and nodded.

  “But, I’m all right. I don’t have a pain or an ache. I am absolutely fine.”

  “Oh, Raymond, what can I say to you? There has been so much to get done. We have so far to go. Johnny is going to lead the people of our country to the heights of their history. But I have to lead Johnny, Raymond. You know that. I know you know that. I have given my life and many, many significant things for all of this. My life. Simply that and I can see that if I were to ransack my strength—remembered strength or future strength—I could not give more to this holy crusade than I have given. Now I have come face to face with my life where it has failed to cross your own. I can’t tell you how a mother feels about that, because you wouldn’t understand. It made me weep for a little bit. That’s all. What’s that? Anybody and everybody recovers from tears, but I’m not sad and I don’t have regrets because I know that what I did and what I do is for the greatest possible good for all of us.” Raymond watched her, then made the small despising gesture with his right hand, brushing her world out of his way as it came too close to him.

  “I don’t understand one word of what you are saying,” he told her.

  “I am saying this. Some terrible, terrible changes are going to come to this country.”

  He flicked at the air with his hand violently, unaware of the movement, and he closed his eyes.

  “This country is going to go through a fire like it has never seen,” she said in a low and earnest voice. “And I know what I am saying because the signs are there to read and I understand politics, which is the art of reading them. Time is going to roar and flash lightning in the streets, Raymond. Blood will gush behind the noise and stones will fall and fools and mockers will be brought down. The smugness and complacency of this country will be dragged through the blood and the noise in the streets until it becomes a country purged and purified back to original purity, which it once possessed so long ago when the founding fathers of this republic—the blessed, blessed fathers—brought it into life. And when that day comes—and we have been cleansed of the slime of oblivion and saved from the wasteful, wrong, sinful, criminal, selfish, rottenness which Johnny, and only Johnny is going to save us from, you will kneel beside me and thank me and kiss my hands and my skirt and give only me your love as will the rest of the great people of this confused and blinded land.”

  He put his hand over hers on the bed, then lifted it to his lips. Suddenly, he felt himself being made soft with pity for both of them. He could not comprehend that his mother had any feelings, and it shocked him deeply.

  Two days later, immediately after Raymond ate dinner in the room at Swardon with his leg still in a cast, Zilkov and the American operator came to the room with a package of playing cards and subsequently gave him detailed instructions as to how he was to kill Holborn Gaines. The time they set was three forty-five the following morning. Gaines lived in an apartment house, alone. The house maintained a self-service elevator after one A.M. when the night man went off duty. There was no doorman. Zilkov had had a key made to fit the front door of the building and to Mr. Gaines’s apartment, which was one of four on the ninth floor. The security man went over the pencil-sketched, then photostatted floor plan of Gaines’s small unit of three rooms and a bath, indicating where the bedroom was and suggesting that Raymond strangle him, as it was the quietest and least complicated method and, considering the close quarters in which he would have to work, the neatest. He added that Raymond must accept it as a rule, then and forever, that in the event that anyone, repeat anyone, ever discovered him on the scene of the assignment, this other person or persons must be killed. Was that clear? Zilkov may have reconsidered the risk he had decided to have Raymond run, for, to make sure this condition was understood, he asked the American operator to repeat the admonition.

  As it worked out, Mr. Gaines was alone but he was not asleep as he should have been to save Raymond considerable embarrassment. He was reading in bed, a four-poster feather bed, with nine soft pillows all around behind him and a shocking-pink maribou bed jacket around his shoulders; chuckling over a few pounds of confidential reports from bureau chiefs in Washington, Rome, London, Madrid, and Moscow. The windows were closed tight and, as in the office at all times, an electric heater was beaming up at him from the floor nearby: in July.

  As Raymond opened the door to the apartment he knocked over the tall paper screen that Mr. Gaines kept in front of the opened door in the summer time. As it fell it dislodged a picture hanging on the wall; it hit the floor with a crash. There could be no doubt that someone had come to call, and Raymond cursed himself as a blunderer because he knew well that Mr. Gaines would be tart about the visit, in any event.

  “What the hell is that?” Mr. Gaines yelled shrilly.

  Raymond flushed with embarrassment. It was an entirely new feeling for him and Mr. Gaines was the only living person who could have made him feel that way
, because Mr. Gaines made him feel helpless, gawky, and grateful all at the same time. “It’s me, Mr. Gaines,” he said. “Raymond.”

  “Raymond? Raymond?” Mr. Gaines was bewildered. “My assistant? Raymond Shaw?”

  Raymond appeared in the bedroom doorway at that moment. He was wearing a neat black suit, a dark gray shirt, a black tie, and black gloves. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I—I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Gaines.”

  Mr. Gaines fingered the maribou bed jacket. “Don’t get any ideas about this silly-looking bed jacket,” he said irritably. “It was my wife’s. It’s the warmest thing I have. Perfect for reading in bed at night.”

  “I didn’t know you were married, Mr. Gaines.”

  “She died nearly six years ago,” Mr. Gaines said gruffly, then he remembered. “But—but, what the hell are you doing here at—” Mr. Gaines looked over at the alarm clock on the night table. “At ten minutes to four in the morning.”

  “Well—I—uh—”

  “My God, Raymond, don’t tell me you’ve come here to talk something over? I mean, surely you aren’t going to pour out your heart with the details of some sordid love affair or anything like that?”

  “No, sir, you see—”

  “Raymond, if you feel you must resign for any reason—a circumstance which I would regret, of course—surely you could leave a little note on my desk in the morning. I hate chattering like this! I thought I had explained to you that I loathe having to talk to people, Raymond.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, Mr. Gaines.”

  Mr. Gaines suddenly seemed to remember something significant. He lifted his left hand and pointed vaguely toward the door, looking, because of the fluffy feathers all around his white hair, something like the ancient Mrs. Santa R. Claus. “How did you get in here? When I close that door, it locks.”

  “They gave me a key.”

  “Who did?”

  “The people at the hospital.”

  “What hospital? But—why? Why did they give you a key?”