“Sorry, sir. Have to search your briefcase.”
Edith was waiting for me back at the hotel. She had spent the day at the Washington Zoo and had become friendly with the keeper in charge of the white-cheeked gibbons. He had promised to let her into the cage with him one day during feeding time. “When all this is over,” she said enthusiastically, “I want two white-cheeked gibbons. And a South American toad. And maybe a flamingo or two.”
Her lack of interest in the problems I faced in digging up material on Howard Hughes had not waned. “You know,” I said, “Hughes’s testimony in that Senate hearing …”
“How would you feel about the white-cheeked gibbons? They have lovely faces and arms that come down to the floor, like this.” She demonstrated, as best she could, the gait of the white-cheeked gibbon.
“The gibbons are okay. The testimony is great, and the best thing is that it gives me a key to Hughes’s speech patterns. Mind you, it was in front of a Senate subcommittee, so he’s a little stiff, but …”
“The South American toads sing when a full moon comes out, you know.”
“The gibbons are okay. Forget the toads. Who the hell wants a toad croaking all night when you’re trying to sleep?”
“You don’t wake up even when a jet flies over the house. I want a toad. And they don’t croak — they sing.”
“I’ll never be able to tape all that testimony,” I muttered. “But it’s all good stuff. And there’s some great material in the Appendix — a report on the crash of the F-11, the whole bit.”
“Oh, darling, I’m so sick of hearing about Howard Hughes. Will you have to talk about him all the time in Nassau, too?”
“I’ll try to shut up.”
“Let me tell you about the flamingos. They just need a little pond to float around in, and the toad could live in there, too …”
The next morning was flawless, warmer, with a sky that reminded us instantly of Ibiza. We drove through Georgetown and then to the Lincoln Memorial, which I had remembered as the most impressive of Washington’s sights. It had moved me when I had first been there in 1960, and I wanted Edith to see it. Climbing the steep flight of steps, we wandered round Abraham’s temple, read the Gettysburg Address, then strolled back toward the car along the perimeter of a softball field. Two teams of teen-agers were playing — no uniforms, just a pick-up game, with cheering and shouting and a few girls watching from behind the batting cage. Edith and I found a patch of soft grass and sat with our backs against the trunk of a tree, while I explained the rules of baseball. One of the batters slapped a foul down the third base line. The ball came to rest in Edith’s lap. Delightedly, she picked it up and flung it back toward the playing field. She was happy in Washington. And when she was happy, I was, too.
That afternoon I spent sequestered in my corner among the stacks of the annex to the Library of Congress. I dictated wearily into the tape recorder, but by the end of the day I had done some simple arithmetic: It would take me five more days to tape all the testimony I wanted, and even that omitted the time and drudgery necessary to transcribe the tapes. Each time I had gone in and out of the annex, I realized, the same young guard had been there in front of the revolving door. He knew me now. He no longer bothered to search my briefcase, just said, “How’s it going?” to which I would reply, “All right so far.”
Volume 40 was a thick book, three inches I reckoned, impossible to slide into my thin leather briefcase — but not impossible to stick in my waistband. I had to have the material. In five more days of taping, which meant at least two or three more visits to the zoo for Edith, I might be committed to two white-cheeked gibbons, a pondful of South American toads, a brace of flamingos, a sloth, a chimpanzee, and a herd of wildebeest. Edith was restless, dreaming of Bahamian beaches and long siestas with the shutters drawn against the Caribbean sun. My back hurt and the sound of my voice droning Howard Hughes’s testimony was putting me to sleep. I loosened my belt and stuffed Volume 40 into my waistband in the small of my back. It was uncomfortable, but the book stayed put: a hard, uncompromising bulge. With my jacket buttoned, I doubted that it could be seen. Once I was out of the stacks, past the attendants, I would have no problem with the guard — a casual wave and I would be gone. They’ve got another copy here, I thought, and I can always mail this one back to them anonymously when I’m finished with it.
I tucked my briefcase under one arm and walked slowly down the corridor toward the staircase. I felt as if the book was bulging behind me like a carton of beer. Grasping my belt buckle with my free hand, I pulled it tight. The library attendants were bent to their desks or busy replacing books in the stacks. This was Topkapi. This was Alec Guinness, head of the Lavender Hill Mob — me, swiping the crown jewels of Afghanistan, or a ton of gold from the heavily guarded vaults of the Bank of England.
“Agent 008 reporting in, sir. I have The Book. Doctor Yes has been foiled again …”
A new guard stood at the desk. I had never seen him before. He was a man in his sixties, with a veined neck and cold, watery blue eyes. Clutching my belt, I tried to smile. He didn’t smile back. He wasn’t my friend. He had the most unfriendly face I had ever seen. He was The Law, and he knew. I knew he knew. I fluttered my briefcase toward him, hesitating, not knowing whether to stop or move on. To return to the stacks was out of the question. The one thing I couldn’t afford to do was turn my back to him. He indicated the briefcase.
“Let’s see it.”
I spread it open on the desk and he extracted the various notes and pamphlets, then slid them back. A cold eye regarded my tape recorder, but it was obviously nothing more than that; it concealed no priceless documents such as the original Declaration of Independence. I finally worked up a smile and an innocuous remark. “Are you open on Saturdays?”
“Hours are posted on the wall over there.” That fishy eye bored into me. “Turn around.”
I had always known that in moments of true crisis, the worn-out cliches of the language spring full-blown to life. I knew it then, because I had the sensation of my heart rising through my chest and into my mouth. I turned, a full turn, like a man in a trance, clutching the briefcase in one hand and the tape recorder in the other. I was afraid to turn too quickly for fear the book would slip from my waistband; I was afraid to turn too slowly for fear the telltale bulge would reveal itself. That eye, I knew, would miss nothing. I have no idea how long it took me to complete that turn, but I felt Volume 40 begin to slide. Facing the guard again, he stepped toward me and raised his hands, bringing them down the sides of my jacket toward my belt. I felt my mouth go bone-dry and my lips were instantly parched.
Just as the guard’s hands reached my belt and began to move around toward my back, Volume 40 slipped quietly down into the seat of my pants. A moment later and the guard’s hands touched the spot where it had lain against my spine.
“Did you say,” I croaked, “open or closed on Saturday? I didn’t catch it.”
“I said take a look at the sign on the wall.” The guard turned his back. I shuffled toward the revolving door, the weight of Volume 40 in my pants. I whispered: “Thanks, have a good day,” then shoved my way out into the street.
Waddling down the block, I turned the corner and sank down on a bench near the bus stop. My heart had dropped down from my mouth and was now skipping around my chest, looking for a resting place. Fingers trembling, I lit a cigarette. I felt Volume 40 snug under my buttocks.
Edith was in the hotel room, writing giant-sized postcards to her daughters in Germany, when I arrived. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked when she saw my face and I fell flat on the bed.
I told her the story — I had got my voice back but it was still shaky. “If that guy had caught me at the door I would have gone to jail. That’s government property, and I stole it. Oh, wow.” I shook my head. “You know, I don’t think I’m cut out for this kind of work. If this were a caper, I’d never make it.”
I had been shot at on the Israeli-Egyptian
border, I had been on a leaky schooner chased by a hurricane in the middle of the Atlantic, I had swum among barracuda, I had skidded and turned three full circles on an icy mountain road — but the words I spoke then were the truth. “That guard … that book. You know, that was one of the most frightening moments of my life. If I’d been caught I would have been arrested. This whole Hughes project would have gone right down the drain.” I wiped my forehead. “My God, I was lucky.”
“Well, you learned your lesson. You won’t ever do it again.”
“Never,” I swore. “That’s the beginning and the end of my criminal career.”
Miami was next, a planned one-day stopover so that I could visit the Hughes Medical Institute. I had considered drafting a handwritten letter from Howard to the director: “Give this man a free checkup and access to the books …” but in the end had settled for a typed letter on the stationery of my London publishers, William Heinemann, Ltd., introducing myself and claiming that I was embarked on a study of American medical foundations. I signed the letter in my own handwriting: A. Dwye Evans, Chairman of the Board. It seemed an innocent and plausible method of gaining entry, but the Medical Institute was tougher to penetrate than the Pentagon. The director was away and the woman who deigned to see me was as friendly as though I had come bearing a letter of introduction from the Internal Revenue Service. I browsed through the Institute’s library, which contained magnificent sets of leatherbound volumes in three languages on various esoteric medical subjects. Their pristine condition, and the fact that the library had an atmosphere of permanent vacancy, made me feel that I was the first person who had ever so much as opened a book in there. No one would talk to me except the receptionist, a young girl who apparently had nothing else to do.
“Seen the boss lately?” I asked.
“Mr. Hughes? We call him ‘the invisible man.’ He’s never even been here.”
I left and walked down the block to where Edith waited for me in a coffee shop. She was shivering from the air-conditioning and I was beaded with sweat from the street. It was a hot, muggy April day and the sky was piled high with clouds.
“Let’s get over to Nassau,” I said. “I’ve had Miami.”
By seven o’clock that evening we were sitting in the bar of the Pilot House Club, across the bay from Paradise Island, sipping a second pair of rum punches. I leaned across the bamboo table and whispered in Edith’s ear.
“Keep an eye peeled for a man about six-foot-three, very thin, 65 years of age. He’ll probably be wearing tennis sneakers and drinking mineral water. Might have a mustache and a false beard, too. When you spot him …”
“If I hear any more,” Edith said, “I scream. You can take Howard Hughes and fold him into small pieces and shove him up your ass. This is our holiday. I want lobster and a bottle of cold white wine and then we go to bed and you seduce your wife and we sleep until noon. Or I scream.”
“Don’t scream,” I said. “It’s you I love. Howard’s just a passing fancy.”
It was good in Nassau between us. There were siestas in the afternoons and rum punches in the evenings, and in the mornings we loafed on the beach and I even enticed Edith into the water, despite her theory that man had struggled for a million years to drag himself out of the sea and evolve into a creature of the land. “To go back into the sea,” she maintained, “is to throw away everything what humanity stands for.” But with surprising skill for a nonbeliever, she swam with me to the end of the pier. Beyond that she refused to go. “Sharks,” she cried, and nothing would deter her from the belief that they lurked in the dark blue water beyond her depth. We had moved after the second night to the Montagu Beach Hotel, about a mile out of town, a huge candy-pink structure that had seen better days but was still spacious and comfortable and cool. It was also, I thought, the kind of place that Howard would visit. The Pilot House Club was crowded, with the only entrance through the bar and narrow lobby, while the Montagu Beach had a back door, service entrances, and sprawling gardens. I took a large room on the first floor. “He couldn’t climb too many steps,” I explained to Edith.
“Will they check things like that?”
“You never know.”
“Why can’t you just visit him at the Britannia Beach?”
“I can see him anywhere I want. But it would be more logical if he sneaked out to see me. Otherwise I’d have to fight my way through that gang of Mormons.” This was the pattern I wanted to build: that Hughes always ventured out in the dead of night to meet me in my hotel, that he was mobile and, more to the point, that I had no idea where he was staying and therefore no means of contacting him. My first thought, to stay at the Britannia Beach Hotel myself, I had vetoed only because of the room rates: it was $50 a day and I refused to spend that kind of money to stay in what looked to me like a displaced part of Miami Beach.
By the end of the weekend we were brown and we had spent long hours in bed and Edith was happy. And so was I. The last true holiday in the sun we had taken had been five years ago, in Tobago and then Grenada.
“You see?” We were in the water in front of Montagu Beach and she was hanging on my shoulders, one eye peeled for sharks and barracuda. “It was a good idea.”
“It was my idea,” I pointed out.
“Only because I twisted your arm. You’re a funny man. You work so hard at writing and other things but you don’t see that you have to work at you and me, at your marriage, what is the most important thing you’ve got, you claim. There you’re just a lazy slob.”
“You’re right. When this is over we’ll take a long trip. Anywhere you like. Where would you like to go?”
“Venice,” Edith said. “To the Hotel Dannieli, what is the most beautiful hotel on the Grand Canal. I went there with my mother and father when I was a girl, and I always thought there was a place I would want to go back to with a man I loved.”
“I’ve been to Venice. How about Budapest?”
“I want to go to Venice,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk now about what we’re going to do when this is over. We’re here now. Talk to me. Be with me.”
“I am.” We splashed around in the water while I indicated various floating pieces of driftwood and clumps of seaweed as sharks, sting rays, and piranhas, and finally, with Edith clinging to me and threatening to pull down my trunks if I kept frightening her, I gave a tug to the bottom half of her bikini and had it nearly to the thigh before she could clamp my wrists. “No one will notice,” I whispered. “Just don’t thrash around.”
“I’ll scream, you fool.”
“You’re always threatening to scream.”
I kept tugging and then Edith screamed. “Help! Rape!” A dozen heads popped up from beach chairs on the sand. She grinned at me, showing big teeth. “Now you’re in trouble. I warned you.”
“You can’t be accused of raping your own wife.”
“You can rape me, but not in the ocean.”
“Is that an invitation?”
Freeing herself, she began dogpaddling toward the beach. She stood up when the water was knee-high; primly adjusted her bikini, and beckoned me to follow her.
On the Monday following our arrival I began what little research needed to be accomplished in Nassau. I went to the offices of the local newspapers, the Guardian and Tribune, skimmed through their files and dictated anything pertinent into the tape recorder. A Guardian reporter, Connie Jo Justice, had covered Hughes’s arrival for the paper and we took her twice to dinner and I gave her $100 as a retainer; she was to send me any news about the billionaire and dig into the lives of his Mormon guard. One day I had lunch with the U.S. Vice-Consul, Lew Crosson, the man who had officially welcomed Hughes to the Bahamas the previous Thanksgiving. We ate pastrami sandwiches in a tree-house in the tropical garden of an abandoned hotel. The newspapers had quoted Crosson as saying that he hadn’t known who was arriving; he had just been told to go out to the airport in the middle of the night to meet “a very important man.”
“Which
wasn’t true,” he admitted. “I knew who it was. He was supposed to come out here the same time last year, in ‘69, but it was canceled.”
“And did you meet him?”
“I waited at the damn airport for two hours until that jet landed. It just stood at the end of the runway and no one got out except a couple of men who were too young to be Hughes. We hung around and finally I said, ‘Look, would it help if I turned my back?’ They said it would, and so I turned around, and fifteen minutes later one of them said, ‘Okay, you can go now.’ And that was it.”
“You never saw Hughes get off the plane?”
“No one did.”
“Has anyone ever seen him over at the Britannia Beach?”
“No one’s ever seen him anywhere.”
“Could this be him?”
I showed him a photograph that Ralph Graves had mailed to me for identification; it had been sent to Life by a freelance photographer. A middle-aged man leaned out on a hotel balcony with what looked like a closed-circuit TV camera attached to the wall beside him. The features were fuzzy but clear enough for identification. “No,” Crosson said. “I know that man. He’s one of the Resorts International people.”
The Hoax Page 10
