Raymond had been moving slowly around the bed. At last he stood at Mr. Gaines’s side, looking down at him sunk into the feather bed. He felt sheepish.
“Raymond! Answer me, my boy! Why are you here?”
It was a relatively effortless job because Mr. Gaines, being such an old man, did not have much strength and Raymond, because of feelings of affection and gratitude for Mr. Gaines did everything he could, with his great strength, to terminate his friend’s life as quickly as possible. He thought of extinguishing the bed light as he left, but turned it on again, remembering that he wouldn’t be able to find his way out to the front door if he left the room in darkness.
He walked four blocks west before taking a cab north on Lexington Avenue; he left it three blocks away from Swardon. He entered the sanitarium through the basement door, off the back areaway, showing his pass to the Soviet Army corporal in overalls who had taken him under the throat with the left forearm without speaking and held until Raymond tapped his third finger twice, then showed the pass. When Raymond got to his room the American operator was waiting for him.
“Still up?” Raymond said conversationally. “It’s almost four-thirty.”
“I wanted to make sure you were all right,” the operator said. “Good night, Raymond. I’ll send the nurses in to rig you up again.”
“Do I have to have those casts put on again?”
“Those casts must stay on until you are discharged. How do you know who’ll show up here as a visitor now that Mr. Gaines is dead?” The operator left the room. The nurses had Raymond undressed and bandaged in no time at all.
Raymond, as it turned out, did have two more visitors before he left the hospital. Joe Downey, the managing editor of The Daily Press, stopped by after Mr. Gaines’s funeral and offered Raymond the job of writing the column, which meant a two-hundred-dollar-a-week raise in pay and a net saving of three hundred dollars a week to the paper because, naturally, they didn’t figure to start Raymond at the figure Mr. Gaines had finished at, and Mr. Gaines had been political columnist for the paper for twenty-six years. They also offered Raymond fifty per cent of the syndication money, a net increase of one hundred per cent to the paper because under the prior arrangement Mr. Gaines had kept it all, excepting the sales and distribution and promotion percentage. To the paper’s owners, Mr. Downey allowed that Raymond was new and had such an unpleasant personality that it was better than five to one that no one would ever get around to telling him that he rated all the syndication money. It was fair. The reports from the bureau chiefs made up most of the column, and the paper, not Raymond, had to pay the bureau chiefs. Besides, one half of the syndication money came to five hundred and six dollars per week, which lifted Raymond’s take-home pay by seven hundred and six dollars per week; Mr. Downey estimated this as being a bargain because the paper would have the only Medal of Honor columnist in the business, which certainly should open the doors to information at the Pentagon, and he had that crazy stepfather who could scare people into talking to Raymond, and that mother who could get him in anywhere, even to share a double bed with the President if he felt like it, and he had had five solid years of learning his job from Holborn Gaines. Seven hundred and six dollars a week is a nice raise for a young fellow, particularly if he likes money.
Actually, the increased income took the edge off the promotion for Raymond but, the way he would handle it, he figured the money would be the bank’s problem, not his.
Raymond was distraught over the murder. He had had great regard for the old man and a fondness that was unusual inasmuch as he felt fondness for only two other people in the world, Marco and Jocie, and Jocie should not be included in the category because the feeling for her was vastly different again. He just could not get it through his head that anyone would want to murder Mr. Gaines. He had been a kind and gentle and helpless old man, and how could anyone do such a thing? Mr. Downey expressed the police opinion that it must have been some mentally unstable political crank. “Holly was one of the oldest friends I had left,” Mr. Downey said sadly, mourning for himself.
“Is the paper going to post a reward?”
Mr. Downey rubbed his chin. “Hm. I guess we should, at that. We certainly should. Can charge it to promotion if we ever have to pay it.”
“I want to pledge five thousand dollars of that reward,” Raymond said hotly.
“You don’t need to do that, Raymond.”
“Well, I want to, goddammit.”
“Well, O.K. You pledge five and we’ll pledge ten, although the board’ll have to O.K. it of course, and I’ll call Centre Street soon as I get back to the office so they can send out paper on it. By God, we’ll pay for a general alarm, too. The dirty bastard.” Downey was doubly upset because he hated to spend the paper’s money and he knew damned well that Holly Gaines, wherever he was, wouldn’t approve of a goddam, boyscout, grandstand play like that, but, what the hell, there were certain things you pretended you had to do.
Marco came in to see Raymond the same afternoon. “Jesus, you look like hell,” Raymond said from under his head bandage and traction equipment. “What happened?”
Marco looked worse than that. The old sayings are the best, and Marco looked like death warmed over. “What do you mean, what happened?’ he said. “I’m not in a hospital bed, am I?”
“I just mean I never saw you look so lousy.”
“Well, thanks.”
“What happened?”
Marco ran his hand across his face. “I can’t sleep.”
“Can’t you get some pills?” Raymond said tentatively—having a narcotics addict for a mother, he had developed an aversion to drugs. Also, it was difficult for him to understand any kind of a sleeping problem, since he himself could have fallen asleep hanging by one ankle in a high wind.
“It’s not so much that I can’t sleep. It’s more that I’d rather not sleep. I’m walking around punchy because I’m scared. I keep having the same nightmare.” Raymond, lying flat on his back, made the flicking gesture with his right hand.
“Is it a nightmare about a Soviet general and a lot of Chinese and me and the guys who were on the patrol?” Marco came out of the chair like a tiger. He stood over Raymond, gripping the cloth of his pajama jacket in both fists, staring down at him with wild eyes. “How did you know that? How did you know that?” His voice went up and up like an eccentric stairs in front of a hilltop summer beach house.
“Take—your—hands—off—me.” With that sentence Raymond’s voice fell back into his horrid drawling manner; into his repulsive, inciting, objectionable voice that he used to keep the rest of the world on the other side of the moat surrounding the castle where he had always lain under the spell of the wicked witch. It was curdlingly unfriendly, and so actively repellent that it drove Marco backward into the chair, which was a good thing because Marco had gone into a sick yellow-ivory color, his breathing was shallow, and his eyes shone with an ever so slight sheen of insanity as he had reached out to take the shape of his oppression into the muscles of his fingers and hands and punish it for what it had been doing to his dignity, which is man’s own inner image of himself.
“I’m sorry, Raymond.”
Raymond became Marco’s friend again instantly, as though there had been no lapse.
“Please tell me how you knew about my nightmare, Raymond.”
“Well, you see, I didn’t really. I mean, it’s just that Melvin—you know: Al Melvin, the corporal on the patrol—he wrote me a long letter about a week ago. I was naturally surprised to hear from him because—well—as you know, I was never much one for fraternizing, but he said in the letter that I was the only one he knew how to reach—he sent the letter to Johnny because everybody certainly knows how to reach him—because he had to tell somebody in the patrol about this nightmare or he was afraid he would lose his mind and—”
“Please tell me about the nightmare, Raymond.”
“Well, he dreams that the patrol is all sitting together. He says he dream
s about a lot of Soviet officers and some Chinese brass and us being on the patrol. What is such a nightmare about that?”
“Where’s the letter? Do you have the letter?”
“Well, no. I mean, I never keep letters.”
“Is that all he wrote? Is that all about the nightmare?’
“Yeah.”
“It just stops right there?”
“I guess so.”
“Man!”
“Is it like your nightmare?”
“Yeah. As a matter of fact, mine is a lot like that.”
“You guys ought to get together.”
“Right away. You don’t know what this means to me. I just can’t explain to you what this means to me, Raymond.”
“Well, you can’t see him right away, though, Ben. He lives in Wainwright, Alaska.”
“Alaska? Alaska?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. Wainwright, Alaska. You have to be kidding!”
“No. I wish I was, Ben. I’m not. But, so what? What’s the difference?”
“What’s the difference? I told you I can’t sleep. You told me I look like hell. Well, I feel like hell and I’m shaking all to pieces and I think sometimes I should kill myself because I’m afraid of going insane, and then you tell me like you were talking about the weather that another man who was on the patrol is having the same delusions that I was afraid were driving me crazy, and you tell me he lives in some place called Wainwright, Alaska, where I can’t sit down and talk to him and find out if he’s cracking up like I am and how we can help each other, and you say what’s the difference.”
Marco began to laugh hysterically, then he put his face forward into his large hands and wept into them, squeezing tightly at his cheekbones, his heavy shoulders moving grotesquely and causing the four rows of his decorations to jump up and down. He made such tearing sounds that the two Soviet Army nurses on the floor came running in. After six or seven minutes of Marco’s reckless, unrelieved, and shocking sobbing, at which Raymond stared helplessly, they hit him with a hypo to calm him down and get him the hell out of there.
All in all, Raymond had had a most ironic hospital stay, what with a visit from the wife of America’s most gallant and noisy anti-Communist to a hospital operated by the Soviet secret police, what with a U.S. Army Intelligence officer breaking down and embarrassing the staff of the same place, what with contributing five thousand dollars to a reward for his own capture, and what with learning that two grown men were capable of behaving like children over a perfectly harmless, if repetitious, dream.
Ten
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, antiprogressive, 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.”
The Manchurian Candidate Page 15
