“Why is that?”
“Consider it yourself, Mr. Heller—what happens on Sunday night?”
I winced. “Drew Pearson’s radio show,” I said. “Don’t tell me you guys let him listen to it!”
“We don’t allow him to listen to the radio at all, Mr. Heller—but on Monday morning, if I do not give Mr. Forrestal an oral summary of the broadcast, he becomes extremely agitated.”
“I wish I could convince Pearson to back off.”
“Mr. Heller, you touch on the very reason why I want you to see Mr. Forrestal.”
“What’s that?”
“You just let slip, yourself, that you and Pearson are in contact.”
“Well, I, uh …”
“One of the perquisites of practicing psychiatry in a military hospital, Mr. Heller, is an ability to do in-depth background research on your patients … in this case, I was aided by both the FBI and Secret Service. So I’m well aware that you have a business relationship with Drew Pearson, predating that of my patient becoming your client.”
“Okay, Doc, you caught me—but I’ve never sold either one of them out for the other.”
“Still, you’re not denying the conflict of interests.”
“I always looked after both their interests, to the best of my ability, and judgment.”
“I believe you. The problem is this: for whatever reason, Mr. Forrestal thinks very highly of you. You are one of the few associates in his life, business or otherwise, who remain untainted by any of his paranoid delusions.”
“That’s nice, I guess.”
“Mr. Forrestal is progressing very well. However—I believe he is at a stage in his recovery where news of what would seem to him a betrayal, by someone he trusted implicitly—you, Mr. Heller—could be very damaging. Could set him back weeks. Months.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell him.”
“Oh, but that’s exactly what you must do.”
“What? Are you crazy, too, Doc?”
His voice took on a somber cast. “If Mr. Forrestal hears this news from anyone but you, the effect could be devastating. If you tell him yourself—not so much confess, but explain your dual loyalties, and assure him of your friendship, and that you have never betrayed him to Pearson, nor would you … that is the only chance he has of accepting, and coming to terms with, that deception on your part.”
“Christ, I don’t know, Doc—”
“Think of it as an apology. Make a gesture. Bring him a gift. You know that he loves to read. Why don’t you bring him a book of poetry? A book of poetry would be comforting.”
“I wouldn’t know what to buy.”
“A book of poetry would be comforting.”
“I heard ya the first time, doc.”
“Might I suggest Mark Van Doren’s Anthology of World Poetry.”
Which was why, the next afternoon, I’d asked Pearson to pull up in front of Jefferson Place Books to fill the doctor’s prescription. Now, that very volume in a paper bag on my lap, I resumed my meeting on wheels with the chief cause of Forrestal’s lingering illness, and perhaps the only obstacle to his return to mental health.
“D’you mind telling me why you went underground for nearly a month, Nathan?” Pearson asked pleasantly from behind the wheel. We were playing tag with streetcars on Pennsylvania Avenue at the moment, on our way for our third or fourth look at the Executive Mansion. “Little green men from outer space chasing you?”
“Worse. Big khaki men from the planet earth.”
“I don’t normally think of you as a coward, Nathan.”
“Do you normally think of me as stupid? I don’t buck the odds unless I have to.”
“This sounds like quite a story.”
“Well, I wouldn’t stop the presses just yet. I’m not sure you’re going to be able to use anything I’ve come up with.”
I started at the end, telling him how my investigation had made me so popular with the Air Force that I’d been invited for a special stay in the Walker base “guesthouse.”
“You’re going to have to go public about this,” Pearson said, his expression grave. Even his mustache seemed to have wilted.
“Why? They kidnapped me, and I got away. It’s not like I’m fleeing arrest, and nobody seems to be looking for me.”
“If I put this in my column, Nathan, it’ll be a life insurance policy: the Air Force will of course deny having done this to you, which will keep them, or any other government agency, from applying the strong-arm to you, in future.”
“No fucking way do I go public, Drew. They sent me a message, by grabbing me; I’ve sent them a message, by not reporting it. We’ll leave it at that.”
“All right …” He shook his head, in wonder. “… but you must’ve gotten close to something very big …”
“Yeah, about twenty-five feet by fifteen feet.”
I told him the rest of the story, referring to my spiral pad, which I’d brought along, not having written any of this up as a formal report. I went over every witness, from the mortician and the nurse to the insurance agent and the fireman, from the sheriff and his deputy to the radio broadcaster and the rancher, and of course Colonel Blanchard of the frat-house grin and ice-cold eyes. But it was base security chief Kaufmann’s tale of a crashed saucer, complete with outer space crew and military retrieval operation, that really got the columnist’s attention.
Or was it my matter-of-fact telling of the wild tale that really jarred him?
“Good God, man—you believe this stuff, don’t you?”
I hadn’t actually admitted that to myself, but now I heard my voice saying, out loud, to Drew Pearson yet, “Yes. I think a flying saucer crashed near Roswell—and the government has it in storage somewhere, along with the bodies of the crew.”
“And one of these … creatures might still be alive? Kept in some secret installation?”
“Yes. These are credible witnesses, Drew, although there are inconsistencies—Glenn Dennis talks about bodies being exposed in the desert sun, torn by predators, while Frank Kaufmann swears the retrieval mission took place relatively shortly after the crash, and before sunup.”
“Perhaps other bodies were found later, thrown from the craft, and …” We were stopped at a red light; hands on the wheel, he glanced over at me, wide-eyed. “My Lord, will you listen to me, taking this seriously? Do you hear yourself talking, Nathan?”
“I do. And that’s the funny thing.”
“What is?”
“I’m absolutely convinced that these creatures exist, that a saucer crashed—and yet my instinct is, you shouldn’t go with this story.”
Someone behind us honked: my chauffeur, this hot-rodder in a homburg, had been sitting through the green light.
Pearson got moving again, not driving so rapidly, now. “But we have testimony from multiple eye-witnesses—”
“None of whom will come forward. None of whom will allow themselves to be identified as anything more than a ‘source.’”
Pearson was shaking his head. “You said it yourself: this could be the biggest story of the millennium—and if it isn’t, why did the Air Force try to shut you up?”
“Me and how many others, back in Roswell? I wasn’t the first one in that ‘guesthouse.’”
“You have to talk to Forrestal about this.”
“What? Have you gone mad?”
We were rounding the spherical lawn of the temple-like Lincoln Memorial, now, and endlessly circled it for the rest of our talk, like a plane never coming in for its landing.
“No,” Pearson said emphatically, “you’re going to talk to the madman. It comes back to Majestic Twelve, the group Forrestal and Truman created after the Roswell saucer crash.”
“Do you have proof that group exists?”
“I have photostats of briefing documents, indicating it does, but I haven’t been able to verify them—they’re marked ‘Majic-12, Top Secret,’ which limits my ability to do that.”
I smirked at him.
“You mean, ’cause you could go to Leavenworth for possessing them?”
A small facial tic, in his upper lip, kicked in. “They may be forgeries. This still may all be an elaborate hoax designed to discredit me …”
“Are you important enough, Drew, even in your own mind, to imagine that all of those people in Roswell are part of a government disinformation campaign to make a sap out of you?”
He frowned, the tic jumping. “What kind of information, did you say?”
“Disinformation—government lies posing as the truth. Sort of like when you published that story about Forrestal’s cowardice in that jewel robbery.”
His eyebrows rose, and so did his homburg. “Then let’s suppose it’s not misinformation … disinformation, as you put it, black propaganda—let’s say you and your Roswell witnesses are right: a saucer crashed in the desert, with a crew consisting of beings from another planet….”
“Let’s say.”
Pearson’s voice grew hushed, like a scoutmaster telling his boys a ghost story around a campfire; he was driving slowly now, as we circled Honest Abe, as if the Buick were running out of gas—but Pearson sure wasn’t.
“Now let’s think about Jim Forrestal’s behavior,” he said, “from July 1947 until today, a frazzled individual already suffering from the civilian equivalent of battle fatigue, saddled with a wife herself ill with alcoholism and schizophrenia. Put in the hands of that ticking time bomb of a man—a man charged with the safety of his country—such momentous new information, such a consequential new responsibility …”
I laughed, once. “You mean, picture Jim Forrestal as one of the few key members of government who knows we’ve had a visit from outer space.”
He nodded emphatically; the facial tic jumped. “Yes, from creatures whose intentions are unknown to us, and, coming out of this recent devastating war as we have, wouldn’t it be natural for Secretary of Defense Forrestal to consider hostile objectives a likely possibility? Suppose … just suppose now, Nathan … that Jim Forrestal’s paranoia isn’t really directed at Mother Russia.”
“Maybe he’s spooked not by the Reds, but the Red Planet Mars, you mean?”
“Precisely. Maybe the ‘they’ he thinks are out to get him are little gray or green or silver men. Maybe the invasion he’s running in the streets announcing is not from the Soviet Union, but from beyond the stars?”
“Yeah, put that in your column. Go with that. And I’ll be visiting you at Bethesda.”
Suddenly he pulled over, almost opposite the steps up to the memorial. “Nathan, you’re going to see Forrestal today, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, never mind the poetry, man! Ask him about Roswell. Ask him about Majic-12.”
18
For all its granite grandeur, the U.S. naval hospital at Bethesda had its cramped aspects; its four wings were rather small, and the floors of its impressive, impractical tower provided limited patient space. The air-conditioned, disinfectant-scented sixteenth floor had a modest capacity of thirteen; only ten patients were currently in residence, however, as the former Secretary of Defense occupied 1618, a large, square double room from which the second bed had been removed, with the smaller adjacent room reserved for doctors and orderlies assigned twenty-four-hour watch on their important patient.
After checking in with the Navy medical corpsman who sat watch outside his door, I found Forrestal seated by the window, draped rather elegantly in a burgundy silk dressing gown with a yellow rope-style, fringed sash, legs crossed, exposing cream-color pajamas and brown leather slippers. All he lacked was an ascot. Smoking his trademark pipe, sitting back in a padded wooden chair, iron-gray hair neatly cut, clean-shaven, arms folded, entirely self-composed, he was staring out the window at a view of the hospital’s busy driveway and landscaped grounds.
The room seemed even larger than it was, due to that second bed’s absence, and conveyed a sterile emptiness; the walls were a faint peach color, and the sparse furnishings included a writing desk, a couple chairs, a nightstand and a hospital bed, cranked into upright position. A curtain gathered at the wall indicated where the double room would be divided, when not occupied by such an illustrious guest. Forrestal had been here, what? Seven weeks now? So there were no flowers, though on a small table against the right wall countless “Get Well” cards stood like little soldiers.
I’d stepped just inside the room, hat in hand. “Jim? It’s Nate.”
Still seated, the rather small man glanced my way and his Jimmy Cagney-like face, with its boxing-flattened nose, regarded me blankly for an instant, before the pencil-line mouth broke into the widest smile I’d ever seen him bestow. He almost leapt to his feet and charged over to meet me midway, where we shook hands, his grip as firm as ever.
“Nate Heller,” he said. His eyes were bright, his manner ebullient. “I’d been hoping you’d stop by, at some point, on this pleasure cruise.”
I tossed the paper bag with the poetry book in it on his nightstand, next to another book, Peace of Faith by Fulton J. Sheen.
“You look fine,” I told him. “How much more of this resting up can you stand?”
“Dr. Raines says within a month I’ll be walking out of here.” Forrestal pulled a chair up for me, opposite his, by the window, and we both sat; I noticed the window had been fitted with a heavy steel screen, the security-style that locked with a key. He noticed me noticing.
“That’s to keep me from jumping out the window,” he said cheerfully, teeth tight around the pipe stem. “That and the ’round-the-clock surveillance. Interesting way to treat a man with symptoms of paranoia, don’t you think? Watch him constantly?”
I had to smile. “I hear paranoia is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
His eyes tightened. “True enough, and I have no complaint about the medical treatment I’ve received, but I do resent, bitterly, the nonsensical extremes these restrictions have been carried to … and not entirely for my own benefit, in my opinion.”
“What do you mean, Jim?”
He gestured rather forcefully with the pipe. “This is not paranoia speaking, Nate, nor schizophrenia or any other mental disorder. These psychotherapy sessions, which were on a daily basis until recently, served to inspire me to do my own self-analysis of the feelings of persecution that brought me to this room. Do you remember, at the golf course, when we talked briefly about religion?”
“Sure, that I was a Jew but didn’t follow the faith, and you’d been raised Catholic and had rejected it.”
He sat forward, his eyes intense. “Yes. I believe I’ve long harbored a guilt, however deeply buried, for rejecting the faith my mother worked so diligently to instill within me. I’ve wondered if, perhaps, the root cause of my troubles is my break with the Church, that I’ve been punished … or have punished myself … for being a bad Catholic. Consequently, I’ve found myself working my way back to my boyhood faith.”
I nodded toward his nightstand. “I noticed the book by Monsignor Sheen.”
“I bring this up, Nate, not by way of soul-searching, but to demonstrate that, even with my thinking clear again, I’m more convinced than ever I’m being watched, controlled.”
Until he’d made this statement, I’d been feeling good about Forrestal’s condition; but now my neck was starting to tingle.
He must have sensed that and his smile was somewhat chagrined. “No, not by Russians, or Zionists, Nate—by my own government.”
Now that I could believe.
Folding his arms again, he sat back, took a few puffs of the pipe, then spoke with clarity and confidence. “My brother Henry, who’s been to visit me frequently, cherishes this rekindling of my Catholicism, and consequently has asked my doctors to allow a priest—a Father Sheehy—to visit me. And they have refused.”
“Why in hell?” What sort of doctor denied a mental patient the guidance and solace a visit by a clergyman might bring?
Forrestal arched an eyebrow. “I asked both Dr. Raines and Dr. Bernstei
n, and their answers were the same: reopening the Catholic issue, at this time, would be too ‘disquieting’ to me.”
“What do you think the real reason is?”
The thin line of a mouth formed the faintest of smiles. “Can’t you guess, Nate? I’ve always admired your shrewd, if unschooled, analytical mind.”
I thought about it for a few moments, then said, “You entering a Catholic confessional would risk disclosure of sensitive national security issues.”
“Bull’s-eye,” Forrestal said, eyes twinkling. His gaze fell upon the steel screen again, beyond which a sunny May afternoon seemed to beckon. “I could never bring myself to jump out a window, anyway—I’ve always had a mild case of vertigo. And slashing my wrists would be entirely too messy. I believe I’d opt for sleeping pills or perhaps hang myself.”
“Now you’re scaring me.”
“A master of the art not recognizing sarcasm?” he chuckled. “Disappointed in you, Nate…. They’re concerned about me attempting suicide? And yet I’m on the sixteenth floor, when most of the mental patients at Bethesda receive treatment in a one-story wing … and they are reluctant to have me rekindle my Catholic faith, a faith that would include the very rejection of suicide as a mortal sin. What do you make of that?”
“There’s no paranoia in those suspicions; you’d be nuts not to think that way.”
He gestured with the pipe again. “They had my house bugged, too, when I hired you.”
“Jim, I had it thoroughly swept …”
“The government knew you were coming, didn’t they? They knew I’d hired you?”
That was true: the Secret Service certainly did.
Forrestal shrugged. “They took them out. And they would’ve put them back again, if I hadn’t … slipped out of control, first.”
“You seem fine to me now, Jim.”
Nodding, he said, “I’ll be all right; I’m pulling out of it. And, to give the bastards credit due them, they are lessening up on the restrictions. I’m allowed to leave this room, visit with other patients, flirt with the nurses … and I have full run of the pantry, across the hall. Here, I’ll show you—let me play host.”
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