The Whisper of the Axe

by Richard Condon

  She made him drag the Plan out of her. In the weeks to come she permitted him to draw her further and further into discussions of her ideas of American revolution. When she knew he was ready, she took him through the volumes of the Teel Plan.

  Kung was startled, then horrified; then afire with admiration and enthusiasm. He told her all about himself, his cell within the organization of the Revolutionary Export Division of the People’s Republic of China; who, what, why, when, where.

  “How come you people are so big in Africa?” Teel asked him over the best Chinese meal he had ever eaten and she had ever cooked.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? What is more racist, more anti-black than the People’s Republic of China?”

  “That is traditional, not political! We are the only people we ever saw for three thousand years of absolute continuity. Naturally, it will take three or four centuries for our leaders and our people to get used to blacks. Look how long it took us to get used to whites. No, no—you are mistaken. There is nothing racist about it.”

  “Your government isn’t anti-black?”

  “My government is anti-black, yes. But my revolutionary leaders, the entire Revolutionary Export Division is absolutely most certainly not anti-black. Quite to the contrary. We are brain-washed out of it, it is impossible for us to be anti-black if we are assigned to this work or if we lead this kind of work.”

  “That’s nice. I sure do feel a whole lot better now.”

  Not that Dr. Kung was a quick study of the Teel Plan. He would protest, “It has yet to be proved that urban guerrilla fighters by themselves are capable of bringing about revolution. They are political catalysts, yes. They can break down the fabric of democracy and change the political climate within a society, as in Weimar Germany and right now in Uruguay. But urban guerrilla warfare has its severely restricted limits.”

  “War is the tool!” Teel yelled. “The irresistible political tool! We can drive the people backward, step by step, then we can drive them backward crawling on their bellies, and when they see themselves at last, their babies blown apart, their houses burned to the ground, all food gone, all help gone, they will turn on the government that failed to protect them and they will bring it down forever.”

  “Why do you hate these people?”

  “Hate? Who? The government?”

  “Not the government. The people with the dead children and the houses burned down.”

  “Hate them? Are you crazy? I’m going to save them.”

  “But they will suffer so much it might be generations before the special changes you want can really do anyone any good. What we did in China we did in—almost—one generation because we did not hurt people. The people loved us and they love us still. If we had hurt them—which is inconceivable—we could not have governed them just as Chiang and the other war lords who hurt them could not govern them.”

  “Say—Kung—what is this—a bragging session?”

  “Anyway, remember, Teel, there has never been a successful revolution in an industrial society.”

  “Will you forget those textbook theories? Never mind that. Tell me something—how can you think I hate the people?” Teel was seriously concerned. “I love the people. That is what a humanist is, Kung. A person who loves the people—and I am, first and foremost, a humanist. And if you want to know why there has never been a successful revolution in an industrial society, I’ll tell you why. No movement like mine—no war like mine—was ever properly funded before. They all tried to do on fifty thousand dollars what I’m going to do on five hundred million.”

  After she knew she had locked him in, Teel concentrated on getting Kung back to China with a copy of the Teel Plan. “Listen to Mama, Kung, this is the greatest opportunity they’ll ever have to overthrow the government of the United States and establish a prime place in this tremendous market. This is the chicken-in-every-pot shtik, baby.”

  Kung was impressed with Teel as a woman, a leader, a trial lawyer, a Washington figure, a U.N. delegate; he was impressed with her access to the White House, her wealth, her enormous social acceptance, her beauty and her intelligence. He was really hung up on Teel because he saw her as moving everything right. (“When I get the war going here, I will form two separate revolutionary groups. The big group will be the fighters. The second group—while extolling the need for change—will abhor the fighters. Yes, sir. When the fighters force the people to destroy the establishment and the government, the people will have only my second group—the reasonable group—to turn to to make things run again.”)

  For a fleeting instant he thought of asking her to fly to China with him, but he realized that would be out of the question. A respecting Chinese son could hardly bring a black woman into his father’s house. Teel was way ahead of him: she moved him around and turned him inside out until he pleaded with her (instead) to be allowed to smuggle a copy of the Teel Plan to China via Quito and Hong Kong. Graciously, when he asked, Teel did not demur too much. Her timetable had been advanced by a few years. This fortuitous accident of a Gourmet writer who was a soul-food addict having dragged Kung into her life was just that, an accident. But, a good planner allows for accidents just as he allows for rain. Now she could shorten her lead time. She wouldn’t have to spend the time at the U.N. and in Washington, discreetly sorting out the men from the boys among the agents the Chinese had paid for so long in the government. And it was possible she would have gotten nowhere there, so she might have had to follow the threads of the paths of the opium business in the Golden Triangle of Asia that would ultimately have brought her to the Chinese leaders she sought. But now this little accident might just do all that for her and take her straight into the hard-nose revolutionary councils in Peking. It had to be the Chinese. First, it took big money and only the Chinese and the Russians, among America’s enemies, had that kind of money. And the Russians were no use to her. They had crossed the line into unit capitalism, into Them and Us, designating their own people just as the owners designated the people in the United States of America. The Chinese were shits. They were the absolute totem-pole-top of all the racists in the world but—what the hell. Pull them in now and screw them later. She wasn’t in this to help the fucking Chinese. So she handed Kung the Teel Plan.

  The Plan was total in its strategic, tactical, anthropological, social and economic realizations. The mechanics of its essence would make American life untenable. The Plan would create material and psychological hardship, destroy populations, cities, the past; the face and energy of America. Teel set down one irrevocable condition: to make it work her Plan had to be underwritten by not less than $500 million a year on a rock-bottom basis for a minimum of five years (but more likely for eight and a half). The average cost per day for the shorter period would be $1,350,000. If the war were won within the minimum period, the total cost would be about $2.5 billion. If they needed to fight longer—not specified as maximum—the costs would be around $3 billion or only 37 percent of the gross sales of pornography in the United States or 25 percent of the cost of U.S. Air Force Intelligence for one year.

  Peking studied the Plan. Dr. Kung was recalled to China. He and Teel exchanged their last operatic embrace. Not the last until they would meet again, but the very last because Kung was killed in the overflow of a riot outside a San Francisco supermarket. Ironically, it was a demonstration riot, part of the graduation exercises for the senior classes of the Presbyterian Maoists Dr. Kung had been training. Too bad for Kung, she thought, in passing, when she got the news, but he did his work for all scientific socialists everywhere and no one can say better words than that over a dead helper. She made a mental note to name a street after him somewhere like in Grosse Pointe. He might be useful someday as a martyr, she thought for a minute or two; the first casualty of the second American revolution, knowing as she did that some of the best minds of the scientific socialist generation in China had ordered old Kung’s death, figuring that negotiations could proceed on a much better basis wi
th him out of the way.

  10

  January 1964–1966

  Bart and Enid’s CIA contracts were negotiated by their distinguished uncle, Herbert Ryan Willmott, to everyone’s satisfaction. In January 1960, when Bart and Enid were twenty-six years old, Bart began introductory courses at the agency’s facility in the Broyhill Building in Arlington, Virginia. After Arlington, Bart was sent to The Farm, near Williamsburg, Virginia, for his operational training. He and Enid lived at a hotel in town. At The Farm, which operated under the U.S. Army cover name of Camp Peary, Bart got his light-weapons training, his backgrounding in explosives and parachuting, and his skills in the Japanese martial arts. He was a fine karate player. Because of his superiority in one-to-one confrontations he was not sent along to Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone with the paramilitary group, which formed most of Special Operations, for heavy-weapons training and guerrilla warfare exercises. Instead he was held out from the rest of the class and drilled even more intensively with small weapons.

  Bart’s special Psy profile and his skills at face-to-face killing saved him from serving the usual year at Langley as an assistant to a Desk Officer backing up requests for information from the field. He was allowed to work on the development of his cover, which was astronomy. Bart had advanced mathematical skills. Astronomy had always fascinated him. He had a real interest in universal concepts, made possible, perhaps, by his own somewhat cold and distant objectivity. He had always enjoyed the intimacy of deep space and knowledge of the relative sizes of bunched galaxies because these seemed to discredit religious dogma so ably.

  Bart was chosen to be one of the few American CIA agents in Europe. The U.S. Army and Air Force Intelligence maintained agents there and so did the FBI, Naval Intelligence, State and Treasury. But the CIA believed in recruiting their agents in the country where they were to work since, as natives, they are always “inside” the country so that everything they do makes them that much more difficult to detect. These agents are usually run by a “Resident,” always an American, who usually lives across the border in an adjacent country and who receives his instructions from an American Case Officer usually operating from the embassy in the same country as the agent.

  However, Bart’s work was out of the ordinary. In 1966 he was assigned, with Enid, to live in Switzerland (but not to work there) on general European assassination duty. They were based in Locarno, close to the Italian frontier. His Resident was an American dentist who practiced in Milan. Bart’s Case Officer was in Langley, Virginia, because Bart’s work was supra-policy.

  Enid loved Locarno and when she was happy, Bart was happy. In 1966 Locarno was still a country town of about 11,000 people. The climate was charming. They had the chance to speak Italian and German. Their house was on the side of a mountain above the village of Monte della Trinità, 1,100 feet above the lake where, from a forty-one-yard-long balcony, they could look down to where Lieutenant Henry had rowed Catherine across the lake to her death in A Farewell to Arms. Bart was interviewed by the Zurich and the Ticino press as an amateur astronomer and became a local celebrity. Locarno schoolchildren and students from as far as Bellinzona came to see his observatory, which the agency had furnished with superlative equipment. His cover was lavish and complete in every detail, neither cent nor scruple being spared from CIA funds.

  On the long balcony Enid grew basil for making pesto and raised cannabis in three large tubs. Enid had a green thumb for growing pot. They would sit in canvas deck chairs, side by side, blowing grass and holding hands, supremely content to be together. They were and of the same pattern. They were twins in size, features, expression and projected spiritual texture. Enid was nearly a beautiful woman. Or she was beautiful except for her emotional frailty. As in photographs of Virginia Woolf, Enid always appeared to be on the very verge of imploding because of deteriorating inner structures as well as certain curses from the past. Delicately featured, ectomorphic but full-breasted, she had the sort of body that should not be required to wear anything but a tanga, that wonderful Brazilian string bikini. She had long, perfect legs—legs sculptors create, Bart said (ruling out Henry Moore and Epstein).

  The twins were tall. Bart was a cold-faced wand of a man who might have been too inwardly focused for anyone, except Enid, to be aware that he was a quite handsome man. It is said (by jockeys and film producers) that women do not care whether men are handsome or ugly but look for something else such as money or a complaisance. Although Bart knew other women, beyond Enid, he knew them only briefly, as if his life were spent in a singles bar, possibly because, looking for that something else in men, whatever it might be, no woman could find it in Bart. It could have been the quality of seeing them when he looked at them. Women like that. Bart never seemed to see people, although he looked. Bart had the permanent expression of Woodrow Wilson at his coldest, most somber: not always typical of Wilson but entirely typical of Bart.

  His heavy mouth triangulated with heavy cheekbones but, instead of accentuating his sensuality, it made capital of his wariness and preoccupation, which can add up to an extensive social error. Despite Bart’s negative façades and Enid’s signals of hopeless despair, they were copies of each other; strongly molded people of instant distinction with passionate, bony noses and good, white teeth. Most interesting, under thick, sorrel hair and tall foreheads were their well-spaced eyes: Enid’s lime-green, Bart’s distant sky-blue; all four amygdaline. Their faces had character that emerged from their self-congratulatory arrogance. They had raised themselves from earliest teens and were, therefore, their own people, beholden to no one. They knew they were beating the system even though they didn’t know what the system was. They were Willmott-Simmses. The Willmott told of a great heritage in American roofing materials. Bart had been named for Garret Hobart, his mother’s grandfather’s second cousin who had been McKinley’s vice-president at a time when the best people were chosen for that office. Bart and Enid had always felt that they were a part of an American peer group that stretched from the Bohemian Grove to Harold Pratt House, even if Uncle Herbert had all the family’s money.

  Enid said, “Bart?”

  “Mmm?”

  “I have a very, very important suggestion to make.” It was the trigger phrase she had been taught at Langley. It made Bart more rigid. At least, his languor dropped away. He stared at her.

  “I want you to run for the Senate, darling.”

  “Baby, that takes a pile of money.”

  “I bet.”

  “Where would I get that kind of money?”

  “You’ll find a way. You’re the smartest boy who ever was. And after you’re in the Senate I want you to start a run for the White House.”

  “Sweetheart, nobody can think how to get the kind of money that takes.”

  “You can.”

  Enid’s sudden suggestions, wishing to make Bart an American leader, were all phrases and in-puts that had been poured into her daily in Virginia by some of the greatest minds of their generation. For its own reasons the CIA had decided Bart could do well for them in politics and Enid was well trained to persuade him. Enid had been triggered by a phone call that afternoon. Bart responded well.

  “How?”

  “You are a highly trained business executive. You’re a Wharton honors man and a Harvard lawyer. When our two-year tour is up here, Uncle Herbert has to make sure that you are transferred to the agency’s big business operation in Thailand.” She swung her long, brown legs off the deck chair so she could stare into his face and demonstrate the seriousness of what she was saying.

  “What big business operation?”

  “Two whole airlines. One of them, the one you should be managing, they call Air Opium and, man, it’s a big deal.”

  “How come you know that?”

  “Around Langley.”

  “But—what’s the advantage?”

  “I just have an idea that’s where we can find the money to put you into the Senate.”

  “How?”

 
; “Honey, I don’t know how. You’re the one who has to figure it out.” She slid off the deck chair and knelt beside him. “Are you going to do that for me?” she asked him huskily, whispering close to his face. He could smell her. She leaned over him and covered his mouth with her mouth as his hands moved out to find her.

  11

  1968

  Late in the summer, Teel went to Geneva, thence by Swiss National Railways to Domodossola, in Italy, at the far side of the Simplon Pass, thence by mountain tram to Ascona on Lake Maggiore. On the second day she took the bus two and a half miles to Locarno and seated herself on the terrace of the Hotel du Lac café facing the Piazza Grande where, on schedule, she was greeted by a Miss Norma Engelson.

  “I’m the courier,” Engelson said.

  “I’m listening,” Teel said.

  “They want to see you.”

  “Here?”

  “Peking.”

  “Not me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there is a CIA man with a camera at every door to China.”

  “These people don’t plan things that way. They don’t want to blow the deal any more than you do.”

  “We haven’t made a deal yet. I am very, very black. I would stand out in Peking. The British or the Canadians would pass the word to Washington.”

  “Will you quit it? You’re with the wily Chinese. You book for Hong Kong. Everybody goes to Hong Kong for markdowns. You lay over for local color in Bangkok but you’ll never leave the Don Muang airport because the CIA will meet you and fly you straight into Lashio in Burma. My people will zoom you straight into Peking from there.”