The Whisper of the Axe

by Richard Condon

  “We are going to punish them and save them. You and me,” she said to Jonas.

  “Wherever you go, baby,” Jonas said, “I am your man.”

  “First lesson. You are blood of my blood and flesh of my flesh but you are your own man, not mine.”

  “You’re going to have to have some kind of a political line to lay down, baby. They all had one. Every one of them from Jesus to Lenin.”

  “Sure they did. But all that comes out afterward,” Teel said. “The people will believe anything like that if you look Like you is winnin’ for them. But they won’t believe one fuckin’ thing if you lose for them.” Teel often used street speech with Jonas—who had to listen hard to keep up with her—out of her bitterness and the balm of irony. Jonas’s speech was like a Harvard physics professor’s, unless he tried, and he did whenever his sister was in the mood, the way a man will try to look good in a tennis game with a crafty, pretty girl.

  “So we gone do what all them othuh Big Winnuhs did,” Teel said. “We gone win everything first or figure out how to make the people believe we did—then we’ll pour noble political aspirations all over them.”

  Teel was only a great natural force. When lightning strikes and chars life, the lightning has neither a political message nor is it justice sent by the gods. Lightning, and earthquakes too, exist beyond these frames of reference. Teel had no Manifestos to turn their faces to when they were in doubt. She saw political dogma, before the fact, as alibi, and it never occurred to her that she would need an alibi along the way. Her task was a simple task: to punish, then to save. What happened after that would be the problems of the people she saved through her terrible punishment. Her crusade was for herself. It had three purposes: punishment, salvation and the continuing maintenance of her own invisibility.

  5

  1963

  In the spring, Teel was invited to lunch at the Counting House Club in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza by Francis A. O’Connell, Jr., “The Elihu Root of Bronx Traction,” and offered a junior partnership in Mr. O’Connell’s discreet law firm of O’Connell, Carnaghi, Levin, Zendt & Sweeney. She laughed at him.

  O’Connell, Carnaghi, Levin, Zendt & Sweeney were the power brokers who mattered. Their practice of law was sewing together deals: bankers with hustlers; labor union leaders with industries; regulatory agencies with anybody who had the scratch; realtors with The Church; show business and underwriters; organized sports with organized crime, into one hugely profitable quilt which would always keep Frank O’Connell and his friends warm. The firm made New York mayors and governors the way a mint stamps out coins. The great movers—the fellows the voters thought shook everything—turned to O’Connell, Carnaghi, Levin, Zendt & Sweeney for instructions on how to shake it. Frank O’Connell was the unofficial leader of the permanent state and city government; a helluva living. And he could not be dislodged by crap like votes.

  “Frank, I’ve been hacking out about two hundred thousand a year. What do you pay out to your junior partners?”

  “It’s real money, Miss Teel.”

  “Give me some numbers.”

  “Say we pay you fifteen thousand a year. That doesn’t sound like much, but about once every three years, starting right now, the first year, you are going to get yourself a big closing. Maybe you don’t know about closings, but the state and the city are always getting involved in multi-million-dollar projects which are financed out of their multi-billion-dollar pension funds. I had a closing myself last year—a gorgeous big housing development in northern New Jersey. It threw off a million nine. The Governor and the Mayor are tickled to let me assign these things and every three years I’m going to assign one to you.”

  “What’s the smallest closing fee?” Teel asked.

  “I’d never let you be stuck with anything less than eight-nine hundred thousand,” O’Connell said solemnly. “That’s my personal guarantee.”

  “Well—it’s just that I can’t hold still for any junior partnership.”

  “All right. A graded senior partnership, then, with your name in alphabetical order on the senior partners’ listing on the letterhead. And listen—don’t think the occasional closing fee is the end of it. The Governor asked me just a week ago to line up a solid citizen to serve on the State Medical Care Facilities Finance Agency. You are a natural because you’ll be the first black member.”

  “Black is useful,” Teel said. “What does that agency do?”

  “Big things, Miss Teel. They are franchised to issue bonds and notes, for one thing, to provide funds to make mortgage loans to limited profit and non-profit nursing home companies and hospitals and medical corporations. I mean, it’s a delicate post. A trial lawyer as good as you are can get real loaded real fast with a firm like ours.”

  “How are you on the Federal level?”

  “Very strong.”

  “As strong as the Wall Street firms?”

  “We are not statesmen,” he said, biting off the end of his cigar and blowing it across the room to express his contempt. “We are litigators. And let me say if it takes a kick in the balls to win, we’ll win. What do you want on the Federal end?”

  “I’d just like to be appointed as a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations.”

  “You got it,”* O’Connell said. “When can you start with us?”

  Teel became senior trial lawyer for the firm. Everyone prospered, mostly Frank O’Connell. Averaging out the closings and other emoluments, in sixteen months Teel was earning four hundred and eighteen thousand dollars a year in convenient packages that didn’t shake her tax boat. She bought three connecting brownstone houses in Murray Hill, on East 38th Street She began a social expansion of greeting the elite by giving them a place to meet, to connect where she calculated she ought to connect.

  This upward social mobility was a part of the second phase in the complex score of America’s salvation through punishment that Teel was intent upon composing. Her implementation of revolution was expanding too. She had the concentration of a laser. She studied and absorbed the works of General Giap, Nasution, Marghela, Mao, Baljit Singh, Guevara and Ko-Wang Mei, slowly adapting these to fit American national character: masochism, refusal to reflect, hypnosis by self-interest, dependency upon instant gratification (as a way of life), passion to conform, and other finer points. As she began to work with increasing exhaustion on what finally became The Teel Plan, she was unable to understand that only about 2 percent of the American population, black and white, could see that they needed to be saved from their social system.

  * Agatha Teel’s appointment to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations was announced forty-seven days following her luncheon with O’Connell. She was immediately handed such agenda items as: “Status of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights”; “Measures To Be Taken Against Ideologies and Practices Based on Terror or on Incitement to Racial Discrimination or Any Other Form of Group Hatred”; “Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting Human Rights of the Population of Occupied Territories.”

  6

  May 1966

  “What have you written today?” Bart Simms asked his twin sister, Enid, kissing her ear as he entered the hotel suite after a sweaty day’s work learning the Japanese martial arts at CIA training school. It was Enid’s doting practice to begin a novel every day although she never took her novels further than their beginnings. She handed him the pages. He read them aloud.

  I CALL FREEDOM LEROY

  by

  CARLOTTA YOU

  “Dear Dad: I am living with a black guy in an illegal commune which is, well, different from Montclair. We had a baby. I gave it to some kids who wanted one. They are gone now but I named it after you even though it was a girl because I love you, Daddy.”

  Bart looked at her thoughtfully when he finished. “It won’t animate,” he said soberly. “Did you happen to notice what they had posted in the elevator for dinner?”

  Enid recited one
of the soups, three of the entrees, and two of the desserts. “What shall we have?” she asked.

  “The minestrone and the noisette of pork.”

  “And wine.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Enid Simms was in love with her twin brother because her father, the center of her life, had killed himself and her mother, the center of her psyche. She had lived in fear of being left alone ever since the April morning when she, thirteen years old, had run directly home from school and burst into a room to find the shotgun-ravaged bodies of her parents. Bart had never forgiven his father for plotting to do that to them, the survivors. He never forgave his mother for remaining with his father as the man grew more and more sorry for himself. Bart detested both of them as much as Enid loved them.

  Bart was careful never to leave Enid alone for very long. With her father’s brutal act her brother, too, had been rocketed far from the strange planet which was herself. But at the same time, he was also an introversion, incorporated within her. She had made Bart part of her soul even as she had catapulted him outside it. Bart loved her. Bart had patience with her terror and knew that they had to cling together, alone among all the millions of strangers. Six times she had tried to kill herself because she thought Bart had gone away. But she responded well to psychiatry. Happily, she permitted all of her succession of psychiatrists to make love to her because they understood her deep need to have men love her. While Bart moved from preparatory school (Lawrenceville) to college (Princeton) to university (Wharton School of Business) to law school (Harvard) Enid moved with him; they lived off campus as day students do. Enid’s psychiatrists paved the way for the ultimate understanding by the Central Intelligence Agency that Enid needed greatly to remain with Bart for the preservation of her life and sanity. To some of the finest minds of their generation, in the CIA, Enid came to be seen as the priceless hope of extraordinary opportunity; the structure of a new game plan; the remote, remoter, remotest possibility of somehow, some way getting an operative successfully inside China, the somewhat easier plan of creating, installing and controlling a future President of the United States. To achieve these things, Enid was planted as a double agent on her brother; an exquisitely functional psychological design.

  Enid entered into a contract with the agency to assist Bart, as Bart’s Desk Officer, who would travel with him and live with him when he was transferred abroad. During their two years as CIA trainees—Small Weapons use and the Martial Arts aside—their training began with light sedation followed by hypnosis, followed by debriefing and reindoctrination, always working toward one fixed goal: the impossibility of any enemy of the CIA’s de-briefing them, a common enough goal, but one which required inordinate amounts of time and care. The results obtained with the twins were the pride of the agency. A thrilling concept had been transformed into a pragmatic consequence.

  Life on a campus wherever it is varies only with the sort of campus it is. For Bart and Enid, the campus was deep within their minds. Their faculty was the Behavioral Activities Department of the Central Intelligence Agency under the Science and Technology Directorate, whose projects ranged from complex satellite systems to the development of miniature cameras to brainwashing through the use of psychological conditioning, radiation, electric shock, objective/subjective subtraction of self-esteem, harassment substances, sociology behavior-influencing drugs used for “induced reflection” by the institution of selected motion picture footage.

  The CIA’s Behavioral Activities Department, working with Bart and Enid (and others), could readily predict the likelihood of relation-change or concept-change on the basis of the nature of the cognitive structure in which an incongruous cognition is embedded (it is necessary that innovative psychologists use this phraseology in order to protect themselves from their own shame and guilt at devoting their gifts to such unexemplary mind bending. If they were to state directly that they had developed persuasion techniques which could make men voluntarily eat feces and enjoy that act they would find cumulative difficulties in living with themselves long enough to develop even greater degradations), which is only to say that it was a matter of no difficulty whatever to alter the morality of people. Morality, after all, is that which is applied by environment not something inherent: wife-swapping might be perfectly acceptable in Santa Barbara, for example, but shunned in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Bart and Enid had been raised by the ethics of their tribe-within-American-cultural-tribes and they had thusly been endowed with a massive sense of what was right and what was wrong as judged by those cultural divisions. Impersonal murder would be one of the things they would abhor reflexively but the Behavioral Activities Department competently coped with that, readily achieving, by hypnotic reversal of attitudinal effect, the amnesia for the hypnotic suggestion of affect-reversal which could be sustained, if necessary, for a period of six months, rather than the “usual” period of two hours. Furthermore this cognitive reorganization in response to hypnotic manipulation of attitudinal affect would persist until the removal of post-hypnotic amnesia.

  The agency’s Behavioral Activities Department of the Science and Technology Directorate could be said to have led the world in this most dramatic and intense form of persuasion because—as in the case of Bart and Enid—they had compliant subjects who, instead of having been conditioned for one or two months, were actually trained to a level of highest hypnotic competence over a full two-year period. All of this was achieved through a group of “deverbalization” mechanisms, enhancing the Simmses’ performance on a “learning without awareness” task in which reinforced triggers served as dependent variables.

  The platform to support all this was simplicity itself. A person whose self-esteem is deliberately lowered by the operational techniques in experimental manipulation is thus instantly rendered prone to accept information contradicting his own opinions and moralities. Enid had very little self-esteem and was therefore a model subject for manipulation. But Bart began with a higher sense of self-esteem, so the first ten months were spent—simultaneous with electric shock, radiation, harassment-substances and behavior-influencing drugs to insure the most effective hypnosis—in the most degrading forms of humiliation, placing deeply within his psyche veritable land mines of self-doubt. The degrees of deprivation, isolation, degradation, overt threat and manipulation of guilt that he underwent would have been almost inhumanly deplorable had they not been so necessary to achieve results.

  Both siblings had a rough course but were classical products of the greatest achievements in brain-washing, the “second signal system” made possible by bio-feedback concepts.

  7

  January 1971

  The Mutual Security Tower soared over Manhattan like an upthrust middle finger. It was not the home office of a large insurance company. Its name came from what had been a traditional half-joke constituting the entire business policy of Joseph D. Palladino’s late father: “Do like I tell you and we are going to have mutual security.” The intent of the words was anachronistic in today’s world. The whole concept of muscle had changed, the son thought. That gun shit was out twenty years ago.

  It was J.D. Palladino, not his father, who had built the Mutual Security Tower, which had over six hundred tenants, a high-class book store which also sold symphony records, and a restaurant where the tenants could get bitten for forty-one dollars for lunch for two. J.D. Palladino’s offices were in the tower of the Tower. It was a silent place. There were rugs on the carpets. The windows were double-glazed. The people who worked there either talked nice or they got thrown out on their ass.

  J.D. Palladino walked to the four windows that faced north, clasped his hands behind his back and looked out and down at the city, counting seven buildings that he owned. His father had worked his whole life right on the street floor of the warehouse, which had smelled all the time like provolone, canestrato, casigiolu and provatura. Great smells, but times had to change. The blacks were going crazy trying to get their hands on all the Jones and all the blow. They w
ould try to bust in if the Family worked right on the street floor. This was 1971, fahcrissake. Seven years ago the blacks had been begging for a little heroin to try to start a couple of Harlem dope houses. For fifteen years he had been making a fortune every week just by passing shit from his left hand to his right hand, then on to some spade. Now what the hell was happening here? They were driving the prices down.

  Mary, the head secretary, came in. “Senator Karp is in the main reception area, J.D.,” she said.

  Mr. Palladino looked at his watch and was pleased. “Let him wait,” he said. “When is your vacation?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Where?”

  “Florida.”

  “What am I? A dentist? Do I have to pull the facts out of your head?”

  “Near Sarasota. It’s very quiet. My father likes to see the circus winter quarters.” Whenever she mentioned her father to Mr. Palladino, she was actually referring to her boyfriend, Harry, who was Mr. Palladino’s chief collector. She knew Mr. Palladino would be shocked if he knew she was taking her vacation with a married man. “Just good food and plenty of quiet.” Actually they were going to Vegas. She smiled at him like a hospital nurse.

  “This is gonna be some upside down place when you’re not here.”

  “Everything is organized the way you like it, Mr. P. Angela has trained for three months just for these three weeks.”

  “How is your mother?” He looked at his watch again. “Well, maybe you better send the senator in.”

  It was a fairly long walk from the main reception room. It went through two impressive rooms where Dom and Dino were always hanging around and where they frisked anybody who was less than a senator.

  “Sit down, senator,” Mr. Palladino said, not rising. “You want a cigar?”

  “Too early, J.D.”

  “It cuts the appetite.” Mr. Palladino bit the end off a dark cigar and put fire to it. “What’s up?” he asked.