by Ward Just
“Did you ever have days when everything stood still, no forward motion? Those are the days when the past catches up with you. You have to stand still to let it come alongside, and then you have to wait and listen to what it has to say. It’s never what you expect. You start to walk again and it puts its dead hand on your arm. It’s not finished. You damn well wait until it is finished. You’re captive. Until it’s ended, you can’t move. It’s all familiar; the thing has total recall. You try to jerk your arm away, but it won’t let you go. More you fight, the stronger it gets. You ever have days like that, Elly?”
She said, “I just had one.”
He smiled. “Don’t tell me about it.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“You’ve got to keep fighting it, though.”
She thought suddenly that he was talking about something else. “Yes,” she said sharply. “Yes, you do.”
He leaned forward. “I’m happy with what I’ve done.”
“Working for the government.”
“Working for the government,” he said.
“I don’t much care for the past tense in that sentence, Bill.”
He dipped his head, embarrassed. “Too much introspection today. Too much Carruthers. Forget I said it.” He looked at her. “You get any work done?”
She said, “Some.” She was angry with him.
“What was it today, hands? Eyes?”
“Bill Jr.,” she said. “His forehead.” She began to explain about the forehead, its planes and shadows. Then she described the girl with the umbrella, the image still stuck fast in her memory. In a moment they were laughing about the psychiatrist across the street. He seemed to have an inordinate number of female patients, so many of them young. He himself was not young but he had a pointed beard, very Viennese.
He said, “What else did Prowler have to say?”
“He thinks you don’t like him.”
“How could he ever have that idea?”
“It hurts him. He’s pretty busted up about it.”
“I’ll have to watch my step, then.”
“And he’s worried that you don’t feel good about yourself.”
“Poor Prowler.”
“You’ve got to watch it with the tranquilizers. When you refused the Valium, he took it as a slap in the face.”
“Listen. You tell him I feel terrific about myself. I feel good about myself all day long, and him, too.”
“He’s an awful horse’s ass, Bill.”
“He’s comic relief. I thought you liked him.”
“I don’t like him. He’s a horse’s ass. I think he dyes his hair.”
“He does, definitely,” Nodding agreement, smiling broadly. “It must be hard as hell to do, salt-and-pepper hair. Maybe he gets Julia Child to do it for him.”
“He has a young wife.”
“Maybe she does it. Maybe it’s sexy, her dying his hair.”
“I doubt it. I’ll bet he keeps it a secret. Everyone has a secret, I’ll bet that’s his secret.”
“I’ve known him a long time.” He smiled. “This is one of those days I think I’ve known everyone a long time. But I’m not certain he wears well. I think I liked him better twenty years ago, when he was on the prowl. When he was physician-in-residence at Langley, a boy debutante, fresh out of Harvard Medical School via Yale, Exeter, and the North Shore.”
She said, “Bill.”
“What else did he say about the operation?”
“He says you’ll feel better when it’s over.”
He wagged his left hand at her. “Restored to good use?”
“I didn’t ask him, specifically.”
“Say anything about convalescence?”
“He’s coming by later tonight, give you all the details.”
“I’d rather hear them from you.”
“Bill, I’m sorry. I was upset.”
“Look, Elly.” He poured fresh drinks into both their cups. She thought his color was returning. That would be the vivifying qualities of gin. Gin and laughter. Droll stories. He looked at her and smiled sadly, and she knew that he had shifted direction. But when he spoke it was only to say “Thanks for the drinks.”
“I bought you some cigarettes and magazines and Billiards at Half-past Nine.”
“Do you know what I’d like? One of those cassette players, with earphones, so that I could listen to music at night, in bed. Some Brahms, and Wagner. Do you think you could find Tannhäuser on tape?”
She smiled. “Tannhäuser at half-past nine? Funny music to go to sleep to, Bill. It’s not exactly a lullabye.”
He said, “It’s patriotic music. It’s their version of a Sousa march. I figured that out the other day. I’ve been thinking a lot about patriotism lately. There hasn’t been a hell of a lot else to think about so I’ve been thinking about that.”
She was alert now. She thought of him as a pitcher in the ritual fidget before the delivery of the ball, scuffing the dirt, hitching his pants, correcting the bill of his cap, juggling the ball, looking in for the sign. It was up to her to give him the sign. She said, “I was going to bring Sports Illustrated to your roommate, and then I remembered that he can’t see. So I didn’t bring it.” She told him about the ball game, Ripken Jr.’s homer in the bottom of the tenth. She was giving him time to get together whatever it was he had to get together. It was not good news. Carruthers and Hartnett, god damn them. She should have walked into the solarium straightaway. But he had not seemed to want that. “The convalescence can’t be too long, Bill. You’ll get out of here, and we’ll go back down to the Vineyard, hang out on the Vineyard until Thanksgiving.” She looked at him closely. His eyes were closed. She took a deep breath. “Fowler said something else. He said that you seemed worried. He asked if you were worried about Bill Jr.”
His eyes popped open. “Fowler said that?”
“I asked him where he got that idea, but he didn’t answer. He said maybe he’d heard it somewhere or assumed it. He was very cagy. Said that everyone’s worried about their children. I didn’t like hearing it, especially from him. It made me think that maybe he knows something that I don’t know.”
“He still works for Langley, you know. Free lance, odd jobs, this and that.” A ghost of a smile. “He’s a character in Tannhäuser, too. One of the spear carriers, a second-rate baritone. But definitely part of the action.”
“Well, no one ever leaves that place. You sign on, you’re in for keeps.”
“He likes it. It suits him.”
“I know.”
He looked at her. “So he’s heard something, El. Word’s around.”
“What has he heard, Bill?”
He toyed with his cup, then took her hand. His eyes were bloodshot. She could feel his trembling and leaned closer, across the table. She kissed him. Rising, he shuffled over to the window. “You remember Warren Winston? They’re worried about him, he and his committee have a fix on Bill Jr. and me. They know about Kleust, and what the Germans have, and when we saw him in Hamburg. It’s part of Winston’s committee’s investigation, international terrorism and so forth and so on, ja-da, ja-da, jing-jing-jing. I suppose he thinks he’s on the trail of Carlos or Abu Nidal, the trail that ends at Qaddafi’s tent or a bomb in the nursery.” He paused, noting that she had declined to smile at his sarcasm. He said, “Probably the committee has a line into the West Germans as well as the Department.” He turned, his back to the window now. “I’ll probably be called to testify. Maybe you, too. It’d be executive session, probably. But you never know with those pricks.”
She said, “Do they know where he is now?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “But Carruthers didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”
“You should’ve asked, Bill.” She took his arm. He seemed suddenly fragile in his pajamas and robe.
“Carruthers was cagy, but there’s something new. They’ve got some fresh intelligence. He wouldn’t say what it was. Maybe he didn’t know. But he’s a worried so
n of a bitch, because it could be bad for the Department.”
She took her husband’s dead hand, and squeezed it. She turned so that she was facing him. His face had gone slack, the color drained from it. His eyes were gray and dry as dust, infinitely serious. She said, “We have to find him. Us. We do. Before they do.” She searched his face, and he nodded wordlessly. Yes, he was saying. Yes, we did. But she wanted him to know absolutely what she believed, and how she intended to behave. She said fiercely, “He’s ours, he’s our son, our responsibility.”
“Well,” he said, “it’s gone beyond that.”
“Not for me it hasn’t.”
“It’s gone way beyond that, Elly. And they’re going to want to talk to you.”
She stared into his eyes. “Who is?”
“Carruthers. Maybe the committee will want you, when they’ve finished with me. If it ever gets that far. It may not. Carruthers is very clever.”
“I don’t know any more than you do.”
“Tell them that,” he said.
“I will tell them nothing.” Then, softening, watching him as he turned from her to look out the window, she said wryly, “I’ll plead the Fifth Amendment. No testimony, on grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.”
He did not smile, but said in the same serious tone, “I want you to talk to Hartnett.”
“Why?”
“He’s a lawyer,” Bill said, his voice sharp and exasperated. “Elly, for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t need a lawyer for this. Do you?”
He said, “They think he’s coming up from underground.”
So she would have to make herself understood clearly. She did not need a lawyer’s advice. She did not intend to be cute or coy, modifying her statements, “to my knowledge,” or “to the best of my recollection.” She said, “Bill? Did you hear what I said? I said I will tell them nothing. I will remain silent.” When he did not reply, she asked softly, “What will you tell them?”
“He’s a dangerous boy, Elly.”
“They already know that.”
“I think they think he’s going to try to kill someone.”
She watched him carefully now. This was what it came down to, the two of them and their son, and the American government, and the loyalties each to each. The government was a personal thing to him. What had he said? It could be bad for the Department. Bad for everyone, bad all around, bad all day long. At that moment he did not much look like an ambassador. He looked sick and weary, and if she did not know him so well, frightened. A frightened old man who needed a haircut and a shave. And, apparently, a lawyer. His own wits were not good enough, he was walking through a minefield. But she could not believe that. She tried to imagine him at the witness table, Hartnett at his side, whispering into his ear, Hartnett’s thick palm covering the microphone. It was the image of Hoffa or a crooked defense contractor, or the Watergate gang. But she knew how relentless the government could be, once its machinery was engaged, helped along by the sanctimonious boys and girls of the news business. The mediators. Avenging angels, they liked to think of themselves.
He said, “An American.”
She put her hand on his arm.
“But it wouldn’t matter, would it? A death, of whatever nationality. Is a death, after all.”
“He’s ours,” she said.
“Do we protect him?”
“We don’t give him up,” she said.
“We let him do what he’s going to do?”
“We don’t put his neck. On the guillotine.”
“But as you said, he’s ours.” He was silent a moment, looking out the window at the gray government buildings. “You’re right about Hartnett,” he said. “We don’t need a mouthpiece.”
She nodded.
“It isn’t a question of avoiding anything. Or putting the best face on something. I think it’s pretty much down the drain, anyway.”
She tightened her grip on his arm. She did not understand what was down the drain.
She said, “It’s us. We have to find him.”
“We won’t like what we’ll find.”
“No, we won’t.”
“But that isn’t the issue. It never was. The issue is what we know, and what they don’t know. What they need to know. We don’t know very much about him, where he is and how he thinks. But it’s more than they know.”
She drew him to her. She was talking directly at him now. He did not blink or flinch. “It’s a big government, Bill. They have resources. They don’t need us. We can’t do it. We mustn’t. It would be a terrible thing, he’s ours. We would be haunted always. We would be ashamed. We would be cursed.” But even as she spoke, speaking with all the passion she could muster, speaking from the bottom of the thirty years they had loved each other, she knew she had lost. He felt, she knew, that he had a duty.
2
THE OPERATION was concluded. He knew that, in some accessible region of his mind. He remembered being wheeled into the operating room, a captive, already lightheaded, the bright lights above, nurses here and there, the odor of electricity, and Fowler’s wink. Fowler’s mouth and jaw hidden behind an aqua mask, but the heavy Rolex on his wrist and the wink unmistakable. Fowler had leaned down and said a muffled few words, something about Africa and the long migration of the fragment of a hand grenade. He was lying on his stomach and Fowler had to bend his knees to get close to his ear. He said, “Your misspent youth,” as if Africa had been a pool hall. He looked straight at Fowler and was surprised to see contact lenses swimming on his irises. He smelled a leathery cologne, and noticed Fowler’s immaculate manicure, a complement to the Rolex. Fowler turned and a nurse offered rubber gloves. Fowler winked at her, too. What could be worse than a vain surgeon? Except they were all vain. Why would a license to cut be an entitlement to egomania? What was their supposed pledge? Do no harm. Too modest a goal in the age of medical miracles. It would be just right for the Foreign Service, though. The chief surgeon put his hand on Bill’s shoulder and said two words. We’re ready. Then he nodded at the anaesthesiologist. Someone in the room was humming Mozart. He hoped to Christ that they had the anaesthesia right, that it wasn’t someone’s urine or meningitis virus or stale Coca-Cola. He smiled at the anaesthesiologist, wanting her to like him. All prisoners wanted to be loved by their jailers. He said, “What a swell job you have, putting people to sleep.” She was looking at something and did not reply. He felt let down. The humming stopped. Curtly, she told him to count back from ten and at six it was lights out.
He felt no pain, nor any sensation. By the pale look of the sunlight he reckoned it was late afternoon. In the next bed he heard the boy sigh loudly, and shift position. Someone turned the pages of a magazine, fingernails on slick paper: Elinor. He listened without moving. He wanted to stay within himself a while longer, holding himself in comfortable suspension; he did not want to admit to anything. Inside, he was safe and without fear. He wanted to do nothing to draw attention to himself, and in that way remain invisible, yet sentient. He thought that if he opened his mouth his spirit would fly away out the window, out of control, perhaps lost forever. He was tempted to do this, there were so many spirits round and about. They were out of sight beyond the open window, but beckoning him. If he said anything his words would take wing, lost to him forever. His open eyes would provide an exit for his many important and individual thoughts and these, too, released, would vanish. Better to remain still, immobile in clean white sheets, listening to the rustle of the pages of a magazine.
He closed his eyes but still he could see the window and the light outside. He saw it in his mind’s eye, so clearly that he could not swear to God that his eyes were closed, as he knew them absolutely to be; he had closed them himself and now was inside himself, safe. It was like being the man, the mirror, and the image in the mirror, all at once. The sky was very bright and the window was open. He could see the crowns of trees and a brilliant milky sky, of the sort observed only in the Southern Hemisphere. It seemed
to press down upon the civilized earth like a great lid. In the Southern Hemisphere, of course, things were upside down; the seasons, the very sky itself, and the angle of vision to the rest of the world. When you looked north, it was as if you were looking down. The Cape of Good Hope was the top of the world; that was how it seemed, and that therefore was how it was, a continental perspective, the practical reality in Africa, and no great surprise because after all he had grown up in Boston, hub of the universe.
The breeze was hot, like an animal's breath, but light on his skin. It did not burn, it consoled. It was an African breeze, aromatic, redolent of the earth and its dense vegetation, its rot and exotic fauna: whydah birds, mountain apes, lowland crocodiles. It had come a long way, from southern Africa across the Atlantic. But it had maintained its integrity, collecting nothing from the sea; it was a pure land breeze. He was greatly comforted, for it brought with it the spirit of the continent, geologic time. All the emotions of Africa, his and the Africans’, were carried with it. In Africa you were at ease with mystery, was that not so?
He knew that what he felt was miraculous, and not quite credible; but he did not let it go. He was awake and asleep at the same time, an ambiguous consciousness. He felt a sudden surge of ecstasy, as if all his African emotions were concentrated in a single place, a passionate kiss, a teardrop, an unexpected sighting, anything momentous.
He and Kleust in the overloaded boat, chased by a storm boiling up out of Zaire. Except it was not Zaire then, it was the Congo. It was Conrad’s country. They had been hunting crocodiles. Kleust had a friend with a license from the government. The government permitted him to take five hundred crocodiles a year from the lake, transport the skins to the capital, and transship them to Paris and Rome for handbags and shoes. Everyone got a cut. Kleust’s friend was on the run, there were references to a wife, and a police matter. The friend lived in a tent surrounded by ammunition cases, heavy steel boxes filled with paperback books, Gothic romances. On the covers of the books were English country houses, rearing stallions, women in deshabille, men in fox-hunting clothes. The steel cases were to protect the books from jungle rot. There were crocodiles everywhere. They hunted at night, shooting the crocs at will, eight, ten, in a single night. Kleust held the light, and the crocs’ eyes lit up like the taillights of cars. The bay looked like a parking lot. They would bring them back to camp for the skinners to strip. They sat up late, drinking whiskey and talking. Kleust’s friend said very little about the present, and nothing at all about the past. He and Kleust stayed for four days, then left; they were tired of killing. Early in the morning they departed from the camp. One of the skinners drove the boat, the sky above them wide and blue, and behind them great thunderheads, heavy with summer rain, black as hell; the bolts of lightning reminded him of the evil tendrils of a jellyfish, thick and white as milk.
