The Manchurian Candidate

by Richard Condon

  “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, cafés, 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. I 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.

  Eleven

  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. Som
etimes 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 had 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 you
r 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?”

  “Eugénie.”

  “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 Eugénie Rose. I 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 Eugénie would have to be.”

  “Still, when I asked you your name, you said Eugénie.”

  “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.”