“I did not think you w-w-would get m-m-married,” said Johann Kascht, who had come to Washington for this party. A long suppressed stutter had reemerged in recent years. And he had gotten fat. His face was flushed from the wine, and he was puffing on a cigar.
“Really? Why not, Jack?” said Hugh. He smiled at Kascht and folded his hands in front of him.
“Marriage suits some p-p-people, like Louis and Sarah, here, and others it s-s-seems to l-l-leave alone.” Everyone laughed. Kascht’s eyes twinkled. Sarah and Louis looked down at their hands in a gesture everyone took to be modesty.
“I choose not to be left alone,” said Hugh, and smiled at Kascht again. Ruth watched Hugh from across the table. She smiled when he looked her way.
“Who proposed?” someone asked. It was meant to be a joke.
“The secretary of state,” said someone else. The laughter was thin, and nervous.
“I made a toast,” said Louis. “All I could think to say was: ‘To the happy couple.’ The men all stood while everyone raised their glasses to the happy couple.”
After leaving the table people stood around talking. Hugh Bowes found himself by the piano. “Who plays?” he asked. “The children take lessons,” said Sarah. Hugh opened the keyboard, sat down, and, after staring at the keyboard for a few seconds, began to play a Mozart piano sonata in D major.
“It is a light, playful piece of music,” Louis explained to Renard. “One that everyone has heard,” and he hummed the melody by way of identification, waving one hand gently as he sang. “It is not an especially difficult piece. And it possesses many of Mozart’s most familiar melodic figures. So it has come to be favored by piano students for use in recitals. But, as Hugh Bowes played it, it became something other than Mozart. His fingering was perfect. But he played the piece with a brittleness that made the notes sound like shattering glass. He had divided the melody into awkward and peculiar phrases. He had all the requisite technical skill. And yet, he not only had no conception of what Mozart had in mind for his music, Hugh Bowes seemed to have only the remotest conception of what music was at all. It was as if the pianist’s principal preoccupation must be to produce a particular sequence of sonic disturbances according to a prescribed set of dynamics, now loud, now soft, but without the slightest sense that they fit together as a whole, that they were evocative, or expressive, or meaningful, or, for that matter, beautiful.
“No one had even known that Hugh Bowes could play the piano, and, being a particularly unmusical group, everyone applauded with delight and surprise. Only Johann Kascht, himself an amateur cellist, stood aghast in the back of the crowd. His eyes were open wide, his cigar was dangling, forgotten, in his hand, spilling ashes on the rug. And Ruth Chasen, the daughter of Anhold Chasen, the famous tenor, stepped from the room, with a look on her face that can only be described as horror. It was as though she had just had a terrible premonition.” A dark shadow clouded Louis’s face, as though he himself had just had a premonition of his own.
“What is it?” asked Renard, but Louis did not answer. Instead he continued with his story.
“The wedding at the Pierre came off without a hitch. It was a glamorous event. The room was filled with luminaries from across American society. We all get married too young. I remember, I said those words to the director of central intelligence as we stood in the Pierre ballroom watching the newly married couple have their first dance. Of course, I was thinking of myself and Sarah as I spoke.”
Louis and the Judge had gotten to know one another fairly well in the months since Louis had gone to work at the agency. They enjoyed a cordial, if slightly wary, relationship. The Judge seemed to regard Louis as Bowes’s inside man at the agency, which, in some sense, Louis probably was. The Judge had been married to the same woman for more than forty years, which he had accomplished by means of what he described as extracurricular diversions. His wife had discovered diversions of her own, and so each found his own happiness without imposing his lusts on the other. When, after several glasses of champagne and more conversation in the same vein about marriage and family, Louis mused aloud whether he and Sarah would stay married, despite their unhappiness, the Judge raised an eyebrow and leveled a baleful stare at Louis. “If it ain’t broke,” he said, “don’t fix it.”
Now Louis paused for a long time. To Renard he seemed to be thinking about how, or even whether, to continue. Renard sat as quietly as he could, fearing that he might somehow break the fragile spell, and Louis would retreat back into his silence.
Renard was wrong about this. Louis was thinking about what he had already said, and what came next. He was thinking about the Judge, thinking about Ruth Chasen. He was wondering, for instance, what her fearful premonition might have been.
In fact, he was on a sort of archaeological expedition begun the night before, excavating the layers of his past to unexamined depths. The story he was telling was revealing its secret truths to him even as he told it. His abrupt starts and stops came about as he was piecing together his new, darker understanding. “Murder does that to you,” he would explain to Renard much later. “Murder is unimaginably radical. It changes everything, casts everything in a different light. It makes death something other than it was before, and, therefore, it changes life too.”
“Back in Washington,” he said now, “I was unexpectedly summoned to a meeting with the secretary of state. I had no idea what the meeting was about. I arrived at the office of the secretary of state at the appointed hour to find the director of central intelligence, the secretary, two deputy secretaries, and a Marine Corps colonel attached to the national security council waiting for me. Hugh Bowes was away in Hawaii on his honeymoon.” This was a fact to which Louis now seemed to attach some significance.
“As I was shown into the room, the other men stopped talking and quickly took seats at the conference table. They did not greet me. They did not look at me. They did not smile. The secretary formally opened the meeting and quickly turned it over to one of the deputy secretaries, a man I knew only vaguely. The marine colonel took notes.”
Louis had then listened in shock while a long catalogue of charges of his ineptitude and incompetence were enumerated. The deputy secretary peered through his half glasses at the portfolio from which he was reading, as though it were some great distasteful insect. Louis’s malfeasance had begun during the Six Day War. Since then, his misperceptions and political missteps had caused severe damage to the United States’ efforts in the region. He could not have done more harm if he had been trying to, which had led some to believe that he had, indeed, been trying to somehow impede American foreign policy goals.
Every effort had been made to salvage things, but, thanks to Louis’s ineptitude—again, some in the department wondered whether it wasn’t outright treason—Israel had turned into a recalcitrant and reluctant ally, while the Arab states had drifted closer to the orbit of the Soviet Union. No one in this room wanted to believe that Louis was a traitor, though secrets to which he had access had found their way into Israeli hands. Still, he was at least a dangerous liability. His security clearance was being revoked immediately, his appointment with the State Department was being terminated immediately. He could pick up his personal effects at Gate B at CIA headquarters in Langley.
His pay was being frozen, and his personal bank accounts would be frozen until the charges that he had committed, or allowed, serious violations of national security had been thoroughly investigated. No, he could not know who had made the charges, but he could be assured that they had come from more than one knowledgeable and unimpeachable source. If and when he was cleared of all charges, his bank accounts would again be available to him, and he would receive whatever pay was owed him. “Though,” added the deputy secretary, closing the file and looking at Louis with continuing distaste, “incompetence is a kind of treachery all its own, isn’t it?”
Louis had tried to speak, but the secretary had raised his hand to stop him. “You may leave any questions you mig
ht have with my secretary outside. She will see that you are given any notice you might be entitled to. You may go now.” He knit his hands together in that perfect gesture. Louis turned to look at the Judge. The Judge met his eyes with a look that showed neither recognition nor concern. Louis left the room. A security guard escorted him to the garage where his car was parked. Then the guard took away Louis’s identification card.
“I drove home in a sort of stunned trance. I was relieved that no one was there. Sarah or the children. I sat and looked out a window. My years of study of international politics, of American politics, of political philosophy, of cybernetics, of everything else that I had read and studied, had led me to an understanding of life as something that proceeded in an orderly and predictable fashion. Not that you knew what was going to happen next, but you could be certain that what did happen next would inevitably grow out of already existing circumstances. What happened, inevitably happened because of what had happened before. There was a logic to it, wasn’t there? But this was like an accident, a truck careening suddenly onto the sidewalk and killing a pedestrian.
“Not that I regarded the end of my political career as a catastrophe. In fact, in those days, just after I was fired, when I tried to discover how I felt about what had happened, I could find anger and humiliation among the feelings that shot around in my head, but I could not find sorrow, or even anything like regret, at losing my job. Even in these very first confused and turbulent hours, I mainly felt something resembling relief. Still, there was something catastrophic about what had just happened. Not that it was important. But it was catastrophic in the sense that it had been sudden, unforeseen, and unforeseeable.
“It should not have been such a surprise. But I did not recognize that the treachery and deceit which permeate the political world had now entered my own life. Someone had set out to ruin me.”
Sitting in his chair and gazing into his own backyard, it had seemed to Louis as though he were somewhere he had never been before. He sat and watched, perhaps for the first time, as the leaves of the dogwood and the hosta moved about slowly, first here, then there. The pyracantha—firethorn: it sounded like the name for a jet bomber—rustled where a brown bird pulled at red berries. Maybe it was a thrush. A different kind of bird landed on the lawn. It carried a wriggling insect in its mouth.
The week before, he had been mowing the lawn, going back and forth across the yard thinking of something else, when he saw the mower pass over a fallen bird’s nest with three babies in it. They were under the mower before he could stop. He pushed the mower along, terrified by what he would certainly find. But after the mower had passed over them, there they were: pink, featherless, blind, and alive, their outsized beaks wide open. When he stopped the engine, he could hear their feeble sounds. Were they being fed? It was doubtful. It might have been better had the mower chopped them swiftly to pieces. But who could know such things? Louis had put the nest in the crotch of a dogwood.
After sitting a long time, he stepped through the French doors into the garden. The air was full of the sounds of an airplane passing far overhead, of dogs up the street, of birds singing, of distant traffic. Louis smelled something fragrant, then something acrid. He was still wearing his suit, but he lay down on his back in the grass. He unbuttoned his jacket and spread his arms wide, palms up. He felt the grass prickling his skin through the thin suiting. He felt something crawling on his hand. It was a tiny yellow spider, and it moved across his thumb as if it had to cross the entire world. He looked straight up through the leaves of the tree into the pale sky. A sense of freedom and terror came over him, and he watched as his eyes filled with tears.
X
NOT KNOWING WHO ELSE TO TURN TO, I WENT TO VISIT JOHANN KASCHT,” said Louis. Renard now had the sense that Louis could have been entirely alone and he would have kept talking. He seemed to Renard to be entirely lost in his own thoughts. But just at that moment, he leaned toward Renard and said, “Be patient. This all leads somewhere.”
Kascht had stood as Louis entered his office. The clutter of bookshelves stuffed with books and papers, of stacks of papers on his two tables and on nearly every available chair, was reassuring to Louis. But Kascht was not friendly. “I d-d-don’t think we have a great deal to talk about,” said the professor, sitting down again and resting his arms on his great swollen belly. He drew on a cigar until the end glowed, then blew clouds of gray smoke at Louis. “You have, by your combined ambition and incompetence, not only b-b-betrayed your country, the United States”—he named it as though reminding Louis of his country’s name would further his shame—“but you have also betrayed the university, and me, and the confidence I so m-m-mistakenly placed in you.”
“I didn’t protest my innocence. There was no point in protesting. How could I prove that I was innocent, since I still had only the vaguest idea what I was supposed to be guilty of?” Why protest, if his own professor, who knew his work and had recommended him to the State Department, could believe that he was incompetent, or worse?
Johann Kascht had always been an unswerving disciple of the scientific method. He scrupulously gathered and organized endless data when researching his books. But now he had decided on Louis’s guilt in an instant. And the entire evidence on which this meticulous scientist had based his judgment, that Louis had committed some terrible wrong, was that someone had told him so. Kascht had been astounded to learn of Louis’s failures. But he had also immediately believed what he had been told.
“What d-d-do you want of me? Why have you c-c-come? I hope you do not think, for a moment, that I will r-r-recommend you to anyone. You have betrayed your country, me, and the p-p-principles of social science. I cannot, no, I will not p-p-possibly do anything to help you.
“However,” he said, after a thoughtful pause, “I will not d-d-do anything to stand in your w-w-way. I w-w-will not withdraw my previous letter of recommend-d-dation from your f-f-file. I w-w-will not say anything n-n-negative about you. For S-S-Sarah and the children.” Louis was grateful for Kascht’s lapse of principle. As he left, he heard Kascht stammering through the closing door, “Y-y-you are a d-d-disgrace and a f-f-failure.”
“To my surprise at the time,” said Louis, “Hugh Bowes took my call. In fact, he offered to meet me for dinner. He greeted me warmly and, before saying anything else, expressed regret at what had happened. He was, he said, completely baffled—’profoundly puzzled’ were his words—as to who could have filed the charges, and why. He sat shaking his head. What is most astounding, in retrospect, is that I believed him. He flattered me. He told me my work was first rate. If he could do anything to help, please let him know. He put his arm across my shoulders.”
Hugh Bowes had written a letter for Louis’s file. It was filled with generous and extravagant praise. It recounted Louis’s successes and achievements in glowing detail. It made no mention of his appointment at the State Department having been terminated or of the reasons for the termination. The Judge, likewise, agreed to write a letter of recommendation for Louis’s file. It was brief and perfunctory and had been backdated six months.
“I found an academic position without too much difficulty, just as I had expected I would. I was hired as an associate professor of political science at George Mason University, where Sarah was teaching. The chairman of the department was a tall, gloomy man named D. William Stone. He had once been an administrator for the Marshall Plan, and then had been the American ambassador to Iran.
“Ambassador Stone, as he liked to be called, was happy to have me in the department. He saw me as the only other member with ‘hands-on’ experience. He talked to me in confidential tones about life as a diplomat, about the Department of State during the Eisenhower years and other such matters, about which I had neither knowledge nor interest.
“I taught graduate courses in policy studies and Middle Eastern politics. My students aspired to join the foreign service or the State Department, to become ‘public servants.’ Once a week they gathered around t
he seminar table and discussed their papers about arcane moments in the ongoing drama in the Middle East.
“Their papers were overly long. They were laced with references to this study or that other study and written in a style that could best be described as being without style. They believed, as I must have once believed, that, by means of this bland and soulless prose, they could somehow accomplish what no one else had been able to accomplish before them, that they could drain all passion, all murderous feeling, all despair, all desire from the world, and with simple strokes of logic—a, b, c—could solve whatever problem needed solving.
“I sometimes remembered Sarah’s unhappiness as I listened while my students read their papers aloud. What were their lives like? Some were married to hopeful spouses, some already had young children. I wondered whether any one of them had applied their intellectual skills to their own nascent unhappiness.
“After about two years, our confiscated bank accounts were unfrozen. The salary and leave payments that were due me arrived in the mail. They arrived without explanation. And I sought none.
“I stayed at the university for only five years. I had, after all, lost my faith in science. Not just in science. I had lost my faith in knowledge. Not in the value of knowledge, but in knowledge itself.” Louis suddenly stopped speaking. He did not move. He remained silent for a long moment. It happened now, from time to time, that the disorder of things appeared suddenly before him with blinding clarity. Life’s unruly and turbulent nature became simply inescapable. Then, in such moments, the utter chaos of human being, no, of all being simply overwhelmed him and swept his entire understanding of life on earth into shambles, as a great tidal wave might have done. Then he fell into silence, wherever he was, whatever he was doing. What else was there for him to do?
A French Country Murder Page 6
