Unpunished

by William Peter Grasso

  Finally, the colonel asked, in that grating, incorrect intonation: “Are you A-ware of any AC-tivity by any member of your crew during IN-ternment that would bring DIS-credit upon the government of the U-nited States or its armed forces?”

  Someone in that arched little room answered, No, I was aware of no such activity. Joe was not sure that he had actually uttered those words; it was as if he was standing beside a man who looked and sounded quite like himself, watching him speak this blatant untruth.

  He had experienced that feeling of watching himself once before, as he descended the steps from that Malmö apartment after Pola had allowed him to plunder her one last time before casting him out forever. His spectator-self imagined that this broken man stumbling toward the streets of Malmö was now perfectly free to reveal Pilcher as a murderer, Pola’s life and career be damned. He had nothing left to lose. And it would be a fitting gesture of revenge against Pola for discarding him, would it not? But the cold night air became the slap in the face that pulled him back from his fantasies of justice and revenge. His spectator-self dissipated; his corporeal-self realized that such an accusation would be a fool’s game. She would simply deny she had been with him—ever—or that she knew anything about David’s death. She would say he was just trying to discredit her as revenge for being reassigned to that godawful camp in Stockholm. Pilcher, of course, would deny any wrongdoing. And nobody in the Army of the U-nited States would give a rat’s ass about anything that had happened in Sweden, anyway, as the manner of this debriefing was amply demonstrating.

  But in reality, despite Pola’s rejection of him, he harbored no ill will toward her and had no interest at all in revenge, no matter how many delicious impulses the id might generate. Quite the opposite; he would sell his soul again if only she would take him back.

  And Pilcher would still get away with murder.

  The groundling colonel slid a document before him with ceremonial flourish. It listed the three questions he had just been asked, with a block to indicate his response and another to affix his signature after each question. The colonel impatiently tapped the document three times with the tip of his pen, once in each signature block. Joe Gelardi began to sign.

  When he reached the third and final signature block—Are you aware of any activity by any member of your crew during internment that would bring discredit...—his hand trembled as if being shaken by God himself. Yet, he managed to affix a jittery scrawl that passed for his signature.

  The colonel, fastidiously straightening stacks of folders on the desk, had taken no notice of Joe’s tremors. As far as he was concerned, these proceedings were already finished—and with outstanding military efficiency. It was time to move on to the next returnees, shuffling about outside, nervously awaiting their turn, still unaware that this interview they dreaded was little more than a rubber stamp affair.

  Joe Gelardi felt physically sick. As he laid down the pen, he blanched as the burning discharge rose in his throat, threatening to hurl the remains of breakfast all over the neatly stacked folders on the fat colonel’s desk. When dismissed a moment later, he quickly fled the Quonset Hut to gulp the cool, refreshing air of springtime in the English countryside. When one of the men waiting outside asked, with trepidation, what the debriefing had been like, Joe mumbled, “No big deal.” Then he walked away, the briskness of his stride masking the fact that he was wandering with no destination in mind. He felt hollow inside, an empty shell draped in khaki. The lies he carried were eating away his very soul like so many maggots.

  A great sliding of desks brought Joe Gelardi back to the present once again. Students were rising uncertainly, spindling their quiz booklets nervously and gathering their belongings, knowing full well the class had reached its scheduled end but not possessing the courage to walk out on their preoccupied—and quite possibly disturbed—professor.

  Embarrassed, Joe said, “I’m sorry, people. I seem to have lost track of time.” The students fled the classroom quickly. His only female student lingered, a curious smile on her bespectacled, ordinary face.

  “Doctor Gelardi, are you feeling all right?” Meredith Salinger asked.

  “I’m fine, Miss Salinger. I just…I just have something on my mind.”

  “Oh…I’ll bet it’s that talk you’ll be giving at the AMS meeting later, isn’t it? I can’t wait! You’re such an inspiration to all of us!”

  The AMS: American Mathematical Society. He was scheduled to deliver an informal speech, detailing his work in the mathematics of data processing and its military/industrial applications, in a few hours. He had completely forgotten about it.

  “Ahh, yes, Miss Salinger. I’ll be there with bells on. How did you find the quiz?”

  Her face broke into a beaming smile, delighted that he had played the straight man so perfectly. “Oh, it was easy to find. It was right on my desk!”

  It took a moment for Joe to return the smile but when he did, it was as bright and genuine as Meredith’s. In more than a decade of teaching at the college level, he rarely experienced humor from the terrified, overburdened first-year students. How refreshing that this brilliant young woman of 18, subject to the intense pressure of a highly competitive university—populated almost exclusively by males—could be relaxed enough to make a joke to her professor, no matter how childish that joke sounded. Her drive and keen intellect reminded Joe so much of his 13-year-old daughter, Diane.

  “No, really,” she continued, still beaming. “The quiz was no problem. I’ll see you at the meeting!”

  She breezed to the door, the rustling of her full skirt as it swayed making a sound most appealing and unfamiliar in these environs. Still relishing this opportunity to command his attention, she stopped to deliver her parting quip. “You may think I’m silly, Doctor Gelardi, but I’m still just a freshman. Next year, I’ll be sophomoric!”

  As the sound of her saddle shoes faded in the hallway, Joe Gelardi found himself chuckling. Not at Meredith Salinger’s little joke but the basic truth her commanding presence had just exposed: he had always been a sucker for brainy girls. Never mind the empty-headed beauties; leave them to politicians and ballplayers. He’d take the determined, intelligent woman every time.

  And in Joe Gelardi’s life, there had never been a woman more determined or more intelligent than Pola Nilsson-MacLeish. Or one who had devastated him so thoroughly. But that was such a long, long time ago. All that remained of that relationship was the cruel memory of their cowardly collusion that let a murderer go free.

  He gathered the quiz booklets into his briefcase and began the walk back to his office in another building across campus. The informal speech he was obligated to deliver in just a few hours would be no problem to put together over lunch. After all, how difficult is it to talk about your life’s work? Especially to an audience who knows just enough to superficially understand what you are talking about but not well enough to challenge any of your assumptions or conclusions? Besides, he liked the young students and enjoyed mentoring them like a wise older brother, much like he had done when thrust into leading the boys of The Lady M after Leonard Pilcher had so willfully discarded that role. He would leave being the harsh taskmaster and academic gatekeeper to his faculty mates.

  None of the students in attendance at the meeting would realize that this work of which he spoke—the mathematical foundations of electronic data processing—might well take him from MIT. There had been offers from private industry: IBM, Bell Labs, Honeywell, Sperry, and UNIVAC were all interested in employing Joe Gelardi and offered much more money than the university ever could. But you would never get rich from pure mathematics or science, regardless of your employer. While the prospect and challenges of the private sector seemed exciting on the surface, they had one great failing: a scientist in private industry did not own his work; the corporation did. Only the world of academia allowed you to publicly possess your legacy. Your theories, discoveries, and applications belonged to you and you alone forever. Einstein’s work was
always his, never Princeton’s; Berkeley was never credited with Robert Oppenheimer’s work; and MIT could not take credit for the genius of Joe’s schizophrenic colleague, John Forbes Nash.

  MIT must have had some inkling of Joe Gelardi’s imminent poaching. Just a few months ago—after a decade of the institute’s equivocation, habitual moving of the bar, and frequent, indifferent silences—Joe Gelardi’s name had finally been proposed for elevation to associate professor and tenure. The security and academic freedom that tenure would bring could not be ignored. No matter which path he chose, his career would, at long last, be moving forward again.

  He had time to decide, though—until the end of the semester, still three months away. That decision would hinge on what was best for his daughter. She was his only personal consideration, for Joe Gelardi was a single parent.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  He sat much like a woman would, his slender legs tightly crossed, the top leg swinging freely from the knee, as if unencumbered by attachment to bone and sinew. Like the two Pilcher men—father Max and son Leonard—verbally sparring before him, he wore an expensive three-piece suit, crisp white shirt, and striped school tie that announced his East Coast aristocratic breeding. His hair—dark blond, somewhat longer than what you might expect for a businessman—was carefully cut, combed, and smoothly plastered in place. One could visualize that the current boardroom styling of that long, sleek hair was only one possible arrangement. A more relaxed styling, without the copious application of hair tonic, could transform him from buttoned-down corporate moth to androgynous, liberated butterfly. But at the moment, this gaunt man, Tad Matthews, was hardly a butterfly. He was legal counsel, political advisor, and loyal company man to the Pilcher family.

  The conversation to this point had confused Leonard Pilcher. He asked his father, “Who the fuck is Henry Cabot Lodge, anyway? An ambassador or something?”

  Max Pilcher frowned, tossing the Wall Street Journal on to his dreadnought of a desk. Was there no limit to his son’s arrogance…or his ignorance? He thought: You can dress them up, buy them a place in a prestigious university, an Air Corps commission, even a seat in Congress, but even after 40 years on God’s green earth, the boy was still nothing but a damn fool. But perhaps a useful one…for damn fools sometimes make convenient presidents.

  The elder Pilcher was in his 80s, yet he still cast that aura of total dominance and command. A captain of industry. Made of stone. Filthy rich. His every pronouncement infallible, expecting no challenge. In his icy stare, you felt your well-being in jeopardy should you displease him, maybe even your very life.

  If Max Pilcher possessed any qualities of human compassion and forgiveness, he reserved them for his only son. Otherwise, you might suppose someone as impertinent and inauspicious as Leonard Pilcher—this unique example of American entitlement, this inadvertent parasite of his father’s creation—would have perished in his father’s glacial stare long ago.

  “Pay attention, Lenny,” the elder Pilcher said. “Cabot Lodge is the ambassador to the U.N.”

  Leonard Pilcher smirked at the mention of the U.N., as if that organization was hardly worth a moment of his thoughts. “Yeah? So what?” he said. “This is 1960. Nobody matters except us, the Russians, and the Chinks.”

  Scowling, the elder Pilcher replied, “The ambassador is the only serious challenger to Nixon for the nomination at the moment. Forget Goldwater…too loony for even the mouth-breathing wing of the Republican Party. We can take care of Cabot Lodge. We’ll publish a couple of those photos of him hugging Khrushchev…that should do the trick. We tag him as too soft, too liberal. He’s making it easy…he’s even been sucking up to the coloreds lately. Finish him off and we can focus all our resources on knocking out Nixon and getting you nominated. It’ll be simpler…and cheaper…than fighting them both at once.”

  Max Pilcher paused a moment, trying to gauge if his comments were making the proper impression on his vacant son. As usual, it appeared they were not. Looking for reinforcement, he turned to Tad Matthews and said, “Hell…even Ike thinks Nixon’s a fucking idiot.”

  With a flutter of his smooth, manicured hands, Tad Matthews began to speak. “So true, sir. President Eisenhower has stated several times in public that he is unable to think of a single thing Nixon has accomplished as vice president. Even though he pretends to be joking, the meaning is very clear.”

  “See? How hard could it be to knock that bum out of the race?” Max Pilcher asked of his son, whose thoughts still seemed to be elsewhere.

  “Hey, Matthews,” Leonard Pilcher said with a smirk, “how come you always smell like some French whore? That shit in your hair…”

  Matthews responded only with a thinly disguised look of revulsion, well practiced. Leonard Pilcher was not improving with age or experience. It had been hard enough getting the idiot elected to Congress, where contests were narrow affairs, quickly and simply decided by finding the lie that would somehow stick to your opponent and sink him while dodging the lies hurled at you. And now he was working to make this ignorant, uncouth man President of the United States. A far more daunting task.

  It was almost more than Matthews could stomach. But, if nothing else, he was loyal. He owed a great deal to Max Pilcher. He would serve him in whatever capacity required, whether it involved covering the tracks of his son’s frequent drunken sprees and extra-marital liaisons. Or worse.

  Max Pilcher tried to steer the conversation back on topic, asking, “Do you even appreciate what’s being offered to you, Lenny?”

  Leonard Pilcher just smirked. Of course he appreciated what was being offered, what it meant to be president—it meant calling the shots. All of them. And being able to piss on anyone who would not kiss the ring. “Sure I do,” he replied, all the while thinking, Do I deserve any less?

  Tad Matthews jumped into the uneasy lull that followed. “Marketing you is going to be a real challenge, Len. It’s not like you’ve got a bushel basket full of accomplishments to point to…”

  “What the hell are you talking about, numbnuts? I’ve been a congressman almost four years now…”

  “With not one piece of legislation to your name,” his father interjected. “Hardly even show up, most days.”

  “I do what I’ve gotta do, Pop. You get your fucking government contracts.”

  The elder Pilcher fumed. “Is that so, Lenny? Just like the Randolph bid?”

  “Hey, that was a lost cause.”

  “Only because you fucked it up, son. All you had to do was smile, shake some hands, and keep your mouth shut…and you couldn’t even get that right.”

  Matthews could not bear to listen to another father-son mud-slinging contest. He had witnessed too many of them over the years. He desperately tried to steer the conversation back on track with this question: “So, sir…what kind of image would you like Leonard’s campaign to present?”

  A few thoughts raced through Max Pilcher’s mind. None of them would have contributed anything of worth to the conversation. Somehow, the slogan Elect Leonard Pilcher, the dumbshit puppet did not fit the tone. Instead, he offered a caustic response: “That’s what I pay you for, Matthews.”

  “Of course, sir…of course,” Matthews stammered, wishing he had never uttered that naïve-sounding question. “We’ll want to create an image of wisdom, strength, and good judgment, in contrast to the public perception of Nixon as someone devious, untrustworthy, and weak. Take that picture of him poking his finger in Khrushchev’s chest and tell the whole story of that kitchen conference fiasco…that Khrushchev was wiping the floor with him and that finger-poking was nothing more than Nixon’s ineffectual, pathetic response. We’ll hold up Leonard as one who will never be bested by Khrushchev…or any other Russian.”

  Tad paused for a moment before continuing. “Unfortunately, we have little in the way of actual examples on which to base this. Perhaps his wartime exploits can be reworked into a tale of courage and heroism…although that’s quite a tall order. It’s goin
g to be difficult to make much out of only three missions…and then ending up in Sweden.”

  “Doesn’t matter worth a shit,” Max Pilcher proclaimed. “The public only needs to know what we tell the papers to print. One man’s fuck-up is another man’s heroics. What do you think Joe Kennedy’s doing for his kid? The Japs cut his goddamn boat in half, for cryin’ out loud!”

  “True, sir…but Kennedy, or any other Democrat, is not our immediate concern. We’ve got to get the nomination first.”

  Max Pilcher harrumphed and impatiently signaled for Matthews to continue.

  “Policy toward Latin America will be a prominent…perhaps the prominent issue. Especially Cuba. One must project that he will confront and thwart Soviet influence in this hemisphere…and without raising the specter of nuclear war.”

  Max Pilcher glowered. “That’s your political assessment? Worrying about atom bombs over some shitheel spic? I’ve got news for you, Matthews…Castro doesn’t want the Russians’ help. He wants to be the big cheese in Latin America, not just Moscow’s flunky. But he doesn’t realize yet that he hasn’t got the pesos for that.”

  Leonard Pilcher decided it was time to jump back into the discussion. “That cigar-chomping clown, Castro? I’m glad we weren’t doing any business with that shit-hole of an island when he kicked out the other little spic…what’s his name?”

  “Battista,” Matthews mumbled. “Fulgencio Battista.” It could be torturous, dealing with this willfully ignorant yet obscenely rich fool. “And actually,” Matthews added, “Cuba was a lovely place to visit…hardly a shithole.”

  Leonard Pilcher had no reply, other than his usual, arrogant smirk.

  Max Pilcher had a reply, though. “Yeah…you and your little pal liked going down there,” he said, wielding the power of intimate knowledge like a club. But the elder Pilcher would have loved to phrase little pal another way: Your queer boyfriend. Asshole buddy. The love that dare not speak its name. Or as they like to say in polite circles, “confirmed bachelor.” You make it so damned easy to keep you in line, Matthews.