The American Ambassador

by Ward Just

  Paul Carruthers would understand none of that, however.

  Carruthers said, “I suppose it’s hard to know where it all began.” You suppose right. Maybe it was when the kid down the street gave him a bloody nose, and North was not sympathetic enough. Or sympathetic in the wrong way. Or not around, “not there for him.” North shrugged and cleared his throat. Yes, it was hard to know.

  “And I gather his views . . .” Carruthers’s voice changed key, and he sighed. Views was not the correct word, and he knew it. “Ideals. Objectives. Have not changed?”

  North laughed harshly. Right again, Paulie. In Hamburg he came on as a nasty Marxist thug, hard as nails, pitiless, a mean piece of work, waving his bloody shirt, probably a killer, though that had yet to be definitely established. Yet the boy did say, in caustic German: We will hunt you down like game. We will stalk you. We will make mistakes, but you must be constantly alert. You will know no peace. And we have to be lucky only once.

  “You have the report,” North said. “I made a full report to the Department and filed it, along with my resignation. The report was accepted. The resignation wasn’t.” And how he had hesitated before signing the letter, signing his career away, more than twenty years in the Foreign Service, his entire working life. He was certain they would accept it, it would give them one more ambassadorship to offer an amateur; though central Africa was not Switzerland or Scandinavia, or Bonn. He thought they would accept it, regarding it as damage control when the news leaked. However, the news hadn’t leaked; and it still hadn’t, amazingly enough, though it would not be long now with Winston and Dunphy and the gumshoe on the scene. He’d sat at his desk in the embassy, pen poised above the paper, and wondered, What will I do now? There would be various opportunities. He could become a consultant to an oil company or investment banking house or multinational corporation, or an exporter—or an importer! He knew people, heads of state, foreign ministers, ministers of the interior, police chiefs, and their sons and sons-in-law and brothers and dear friends and wives, and their friends and family. It was lucrative work. He had signed the paper and sent it up through channels, but they did not accept it. Word came back from the under secretary. Stay at your post. They kept his letter, however. And his report, which was immediately classified Top Secret. It had never occurred to him to withhold the report. He wrote it as he would write any confidential memorandum of conversation, supplying the salient facts, and using direct quotations, and including an “appreciation” of the tone of the exchange. Editing the cable, he cut his appreciation to the bare bones; a few sentences. It was the report of a professional diplomat, an experienced man with an excellent memory. Looking at the completed cable, he recalled that the root of the word diplomacy was the Greek diploma, meaning a folded letter; a letter folded so that its contents were concealed. He typed his resignation, two sentences to the President of the United States, as required. Then he wrote in longhand a covering note, personal to the under secretary, and sent both to the under secretary at the Department. He was a security risk.

  He felt very tired suddenly. Two patients shuffled into the room and, seeing the three men in the corner, shuffled out again. Carruthers and Hartnett in their blue shirts and drawn indoor faces looked like doctors. North thought of Richard, so silent and alone in the bed down the hall. Shit, all of it was shit. Lawyers and their secret rooms, and the mumbo-jumbo inside.

  “As the report stated, we talked to him for an hour.” He was about to add “and then they let us go,” but didn’t. Carruthers could figure that out for himself. He said instead, “We left, Elinor and I, after the harangue. I suppose that’s what it was, a harangue. The usual stuff, nothing original. It’s all in the report. A few fancy German phrases from Marx and, I think, Spengler. His German is excellent, he speaks it like a native. He sounds like a Hamburg businessman.”

  “Explain that,” Carruthers said.

  He explained about Bill Jr. speaking German and then English. His English had a slight German accent. The intention, successful, was to put more distance between them. As if more distance were needed. He explained at length, remembering how, afterward, he and Elinor had gone to a cafe, ordering coffee and Cognac, and Elinor looking at him and saying, He looks so thin. And different. His appearance is altered, she said. She’d said, His hair grows in a different way. He did not understand what she meant, and said so. She touched her own hair, pulling at it and making a face. It isn’t the haircut, she said. It’s something else.

  He remembered her drinking her Cognac, and leaning across the table. Her eyes were so bright. She said, Maybe he dyed his hair. The color wasn’t right, it wasn’t his color. What I mean is: His hair had been dyed. I think he had been dyed blond. Do you think that’s possible?

  It’s very possible, he said.

  She said, Oh, God, Bill.

  He ordered more Cognac and they sat in silence a moment.

  She said, What I wonder about all the time is whether I’m responsible.

  He said, You aren’t. I’m not, either.

  She looked at him and said, Oh?

  I’m not responsible for him any more than my father was responsible for me.

  Bill, she said.

  He said, I’ll give him the successes but not the mistakes.

  She said, He’s so different.

  Damnedest thing, he said. My mother always said we were alike, two peas in a pod. Same pod, same peas.

  She looked at him wanly. I mean Bill Jr. Bill Jr.’s so different.

  Yes, he said stupidly.

  And if we aren’t responsible, who is? God?

  He’s like a ghost you meet on the staircase.

  Yes, she said. But who made him?

  It was so painful, He wanted to deflect her. He did not want to consider responsibility. He said, Even Charles Manson had a mommy and a daddy.

  He is not Charles Manson, she said fiercely.

  No, he wasn’t Charles Manson. He remembered Manson’s eyes, and the young women who surrounded him. He said, I don’t believe in theoretical responsibility. Those who are guilty are guilty. Those who are innocent are not guilty.

  They were silent a moment, and then she began to talk, aimlessly at first, circling. She felt part of him, she couldn’t help it. She knew he was hers, a part of her in a way that even her husband wasn’t and she thought that they, she and Bill, were as close as it was possible for two adults to be. And she didn’t mean only that he was of her flesh; it was more than that. She said, I feel there is this—wonderful boy there somewhere behind the mask. Masks: he seemed to have at least two. I try to look behind the surface, but I can’t. It's like a secret place you loved as a child, a place entirely natural, a beach or a held, ruined now with hot dog stands and a gas station, leaking sewage, a place with the sign of the skull and crossbones. It’s like America, you can barely remember what it was like back then, before the atmosphere was poisoned, before the selfishness and megalomania, cant, rant, and thirty-second updates. . . . Listening to him is like listening to a commercial. What offends me is the slovenly logic, and the slogans, and the absence of anything human. And the absence of doubt. And the absence of motive. How can he be ours? How can he be mine? I don’t understand what it is. What is it all for? Or is it just theater?

  She had taken a sip of coffee and another long swallow of Cognac and excused herself to go to the Damen to be sick. He had watched her go, her words still in his head. He did not want to think about responsibility. But if he did not take responsibility, who would? They had gotten good and drunk in Hamburg, the end of the evening a blur, a bad boiled dinner somewhere, wine, more Cognac, and then a long meandering walk back to the hotel. He thought they were being followed but every time he wheeled around the street was empty. He could imagine the little superior smile of the man or woman watching their Spenglerian progress to the hotel, whose architecture was reminiscent of one of Ludwig’s castles. How had it survived the war? He went to the window and looked into the street, drawing the curtain to
one side, like a man on the run in a spy movie. There was nothing suspicious. They were drunk, but not so drunk that they couldn’t make love. Elinor had said, Let’s go to bed. And do it with a minimum of inelegance.

  Falling asleep, the ambassador had a vision of his father in the Brahms-brown study on Marlborough Street, examining his texts. The nature of sin, the nature of righteousness, the nature of justice. Man and God, God and man. Or, as he wrote it, G-d. The essence of the faith: scholarship, inquiry, contradiction, and a long memory. What a strange trio they were, his father, himself, his son. What linked them, other than nationality? His father and his son were parentheses, enclosing him as surely as the oceans. His father was of the Old World as surely as his son was of the New, the past and the future enclosing the present, pressing in on it, mocking it. North had always thought of himself as an outsider banging on the gates, to the Gentiles he was a Jew and to the Jews a Gentile; to his son he was a puppet, evil as Pahlevi. To his colleagues, a man who knew the score. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps I assimilated—too much? Too soon? Too readily? Too eagerly? He had wanted to join the club. The truth was that he was not Jew nor Gentile nor shah. He was a diplomat, with a diplomatic immunity. A black passport, thick as a paperback book; government paycheck, government pension. And his duty to have a say in matters of the greatest consequence. His right to be heard. His obligation to speak, to quarrel with the government as he had quarreled with his father, and as his father quarreled with God. He was very different now, he doubted that he would recognize himself, a man who had spent a lifetime inside the government. From time to time, he had defended the indefensible. No doubt some of his uncertainty, his belligerence, his hostility, his refusal to withdraw, his indulgence, his cynicism, his frequent despair, his good intentions, his work, had crippled his boy. Perhaps it had left Bill Jr. with nothing to hold on to, nothing that would last from today to tomorrow, a humane faith. Instead, there were unredeemed promises. . . . The house on Marlborough Street, so still, thick curtains drawn against the sun or the cold, had been his Valley Forge. He remembered its heavy silence, and its library. Then he fell asleep in his wife’s arms.

  “Just you, your wife, and son at this visit,” Carruthers said.

  North looked up. “In the room, yes. He had friends in the building because once there was a knock on the door and a conversation. I didn’t see who it was outside. I assume one of his colleagues. Or confederates, whatever you want to call them. And we didn’t hear the conversation, except I believe they were speaking in German.”

  “And you haven’t heard from him since, or seen him.”

  “No, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Bill.” Disappointed again.

  North said evenly, “He has no reason to get in touch with us. and he hasn’t. And won’t.”

  “He did before.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s smart,” Carruthers said.

  “Right again.”

  “And tough.”

  “Plenty tough.”

  “No known loyalties.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  “He’s determined, he won’t give up.”

  “He’s very determined.”

  “He takes after you, then.”

  “I wouldn’t say so,” North said.

  “He doesn’t resemble you. I mean physically.”

  “No.”

  “We’ve done quite a lot of checking,” Carruthers said. North nodded, waiting. “We’ve run him in and out of every computer in town. And that’s what everyone says, that he’s tough, determined, resourceful. And subtle.” North nodded again, weary; his attention was beginning to wander. “Do you love your son?” Carruthers asked softly.

  Hartnett said, “Jesus Christ, Paul.”

  The gray had turned to drizzle and the drizzle to rain. Outside the light was failing. North sat expressionless, looking out the window at the rain. From somewhere he heard music, a popular tune, adolescent voices. Could you love the idea of a thing, and not the thing itself? Or a thing as it was, and not as it had become? Could you love a memory, the substance of it, not the soft silhouette—or was it the reverse? Did he love his son? Or was he only nostalgic for a childhood shadow, a supple sentimentality as airy as a daydream? But of course that was not Paul Carruthers’s real question. That was not what he was asking. What he required was an affirmation of loyalty—to the state, no less. He wanted to know whose side the ambassador was on, push came to shove. Love was where you began. It was none of Carruthers’s business by which process North arrived at his answer, if he chose to give one. He was not interested, anyhow. He wanted a loyalty oath. Carruthers would like to see him in the position of Colonel Moscardo, defender of the Alcazar in Toledo in 1936. The commander of the people’s militia, laying siege to the city, put the colonel’s son on the telephone and told him that unless he surrendered, the boy would die. Moscardo told his son, “Put your trust in God, my boy, and die like a man.” “A big hug, Daddy.” “A very big hug, my son.” The boy was twenty-three and so not technically a boy but a week later he was put to death, as promised. Later, the Alcazar fell, and later still Moscardo became a general in Franco’s army, and the story part of the passionate fabric of the Spanish Civil War. Everyone knew the Spanish had a fondness for the dramatic act, and a strict sense of honor. Perhaps the key words were “Put your faith in God.” It was not good enough to say that no man should have to make such a choice, because there it was. Was it courageous to betray your country in order to save your child, or your friend? Betray your country in order to save yourself? No, definitely not. That would be an act of cowardice, though perhaps unavoidable if your enemy was determined. Cowardice seemed too harsh a word, too laden. It would not be one’s finest hour, however, It would not be a very fine hour either way, but he thought that of the two men he admired the colonel more than the commander. Was life, living, the most precious thing of all? Perhaps it was, but North did not think he could betray his country, which also, in its way, was a living thing; and he had taken an oath. He said to Carruthers, “Of course.” Not entirely responsive, and he watched Carruthers for a reaction.

  Carruthers said softly, “That was a question prepared by the under secretary.”

  “Is that right?” North said. “I would have thought Dunphy. It’s Dunphy’s kind of question.”

  “But not Dunphy’s kind of answer, Bill. Actually, it was the under secretary who wanted to know.” He glanced at the little pile of papers in front of him. “Dunphy doesn’t have anything to do with this conversation. He’s on the other team, he’s offense; we’re defense. It’s something to keep in mind, Bill.”

  “I’m glad you set me straight,” North said. “The under secretary has always been great at defense. And isn’t that the essence of football?”

  Carruthers said, “I just wanted you to know whose question it was.” He shifted in his chair, irritated. “The under secretary likes things tidy, shipshape. No surprises. In case the matter should ever get to a hearing room, all those lights and cameras. Everybody sweating.”