Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  Stiffening in his arms. “I told you, he is not a dummy.”

  “Please, Margot. I just want to know about that one speech. Did Lanning write it himself?”

  She sighed, relaxed a bit. “Oh, Eddie, I don’t remember. Probably his staff wrote it. That’s what staff does. Maybe I contributed a line or two. It was two or three hundred speeches ago.” A glance at her watch, a theatrical rolling of dark, teasing eyes. “You did it to me again, Eddie. Just like ten years ago. Made me stay when I was all set to leave.” She sat up, smiling, shaking her head. “I told you then, I’ll tell you again. You’re a dangerous man.” He watched her climb to her feet. A floor-length mirror adorned the back of the door, and Margot stood before it, twisting this way and that, sweeping wrinkles out of her skirt and sweater so nobody would guess she had been lying down. “I’m a mess,” Margot muttered, but she looked just fine, so maybe she was not talking about her physical appearance. “It was so great seeing you, Eddie,” she said, opening the door and peering out to make sure that the hall was unoccupied. “I’m sorry it had to be an occasion like this.”

  “Thanks for coming,” he said tonelessly from the sofa.

  “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  “Margot?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Tell them I got the message. I’ll leave it alone.”

  “Eddie,” she began, and then, as if disciplining an untamed emotion, stuck her fist in her mouth, slipped into the hall, and shut the door.

  PART V

  Ithaca/Oak Bluffs/Washington

  1969–1972

  CHAPTER 47

  The Project

  (I)

  “DO YOU THINK HE DID IT?” said Megan Hadley.

  Aurelia, cutting into her veal, looked up in confusion. “Do I think who did what?”

  They were seated in a small Italian restaurant on a downtown side street. Megan pointed at the television screen above the bar, where the announcer was reporting James Earl Ray’s guilty plea in the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was March of 1969, and King had been dead eleven months.

  “I think it was a conspiracy,” said Megan, for whom everything was. Although Aurie was now an assistant professor and Megan was still an instructor, they continued to steal time for evenings out like this. “Ray pleads guilty this week. Sirhan Sirhan pled guilty last week.” Sirhan being the man who killed Robert Kennedy in the midst of his presidential campaign. Three assassinations in five years.

  “So what?” said Aurie, uneasily.

  “So, it seems a little convenient. Everything wrapped up nicely for us like that.” Megan sipped her water. “I’m surprised your boyfriend doesn’t write one of his essays.”

  It took Aurelia a painful moment to understand that Megan was referring to Eddie.

  “You should tell him,” said Megan, waving her glass. “And tell him I loved his book. Not the novels. The new one.”

  Everybody loved the new book. Everybody on the left. Entitled Report to Military Headquarters, it consisted of essays against the war crafted for a general readership. The PHOENIX article, expanded and more deliberate, was included. So was the story of his week at the front, along with several other tales of morally shaky activities undertaken by the American government in the name of the holy struggle against Communism. Report had been published during Eddie’s time abroad, and sold astonishingly well, but was condemned on the floor of Congress as the work of a traitor. On college campuses Eddie was in demand as a lecturer. He was seen in the company of famous radicals. Perhaps only Aurelia suspected that Eddie’s sudden infatuation with the left he had always mocked was a last-ditch effort to ingratiate himself with the people who might help him find his sister.

  “It should be required reading,” said Megan firmly. “The President and Congress should especially be required to read it.”

  Aurelia smiled with difficulty, and promised to pass on the praise. The trouble was, she did not know how. Since his return from abroad, Eddie had called her only once, and had not visited Ithaca. He had traveled instead to a number of speaking engagements. That little bitch Mindy, who had waited patiently for the twenty months of his exile, was traveling with him. So Sherilyn said, anyway, and Sherilyn was hardly ever wrong.

  Most of the time.

  Aurie needed to talk to him. Urgently. But she could not commit her worries to paper, and there was no way she would tell Mindy what was on her mind. Instead, knowing how it would sound, she told the girl only that it was important, and that Eddie should contact her as soon as possible. His single call in response was to tell Aurie he was on the road, and busy, and would talk to her later.

  His voice had been icy.

  “Did they ever find his sister?” Megan asked. “The bomber?”

  Aurelia spilled her wine.

  “Not that I know of,” she managed, coughing hard.

  “Good,” said Megan. “I’m such a fan of hers.”

  (II)

  AFTER DINNER, Aurelia called home. Locke was ten. Zora was twelve. Neither believed a sitter was necessary, but, as their mother often told them, their votes didn’t count. She ascertained that they had not killed each other, or the teen from next door. Then she walked with Megan to the Strand, Ithaca’s only movie theater. The building was a palace in the old style. The lobby floor was terrazzo. There were marble accents everywhere. The main stage could have held an army brigade. The Strand had been built for live spectaculars. Tonight’s showing was almost empty, as Aurelia would have predicted. The film was about the first black President. Going to see it had been Megan’s idea.

  Something about solidarity.

  On the way home, the two women talked, vaguely, politics: which was less likely, Megan wondered, that a black man would become President, or that Richard Nixon would? Aurelia laughed this off. Dick Nixon, her old family friend, had been sworn in two months ago. Aurelia had gone to Washington for the inaugural ball, escorted by a black congressman named Dennison, who was trying to get the other black members to join in creating a formal congressional caucus. Representative Byron Dennison, Bay to his many friends, chaired an important House committee and was a power broker. At fifty-one, he had never been married. There was nothing romantic between them. Bay Dennison escorted everybody. They had met years ago through Matty, and kept in touch ever since. Bay was the first man she had dated since Kevin who actually knew how to dance. At the ball, people watched them twirl around the room. Afterward, as the Congressman’s driver held the door for her outside her hotel, Aurie was surprised to find Dennison’s hand on her arm.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “This has been fun,” he said. “You need more nights like this. More fun.”

  “Maybe so,” she said, cautiously, now terrified that Dennison would invite her back to his townhouse. She clutched her sequined purse tightly, just in case she needed to swat him with it.

  “That’s how you should spend the rest of your life, Aurelia. Having fun. You deserve it.”

  All right, so maybe he was proposing marriage. “I don’t understand.”

  “I understand your friend Eddie Wesley is coming home soon.”

  “Next month. At least, that’s what he wrote me.”

  Byron Dennison nodded. “Here’s the thing, Aurelia. You’re raising the Garland heir. That’s an important responsibility. And your wonderful little girl, too.” He had released her arm but was holding her with his words. “Maybe it’s time to stop the other nonsense, Aurie. Stop worrying about things so much. It seems to me that you should spend your life raising your kids and having fun. You and Eddie, even. He’d marry you in a shot. You know that.”

  “Bay—”

  “You should marry him. That’s what I think. Marry him, the two of you ride into the sunset together.”

  “What other nonsense? What is it you want me to stop?”

  “Not me.” He splayed his fingers on his chest to prove his innocence. “I’m just delivering
a message. From good people, Aurie. People who want you to be happy.”

  Bewildered, she shook her head. “I can’t marry Eddie. I just—I can’t.”

  The smile vanished, as if the Congressman had put it away until next time. “No? Well, that’s your call, of course, but it’s really too bad. Still, you know best.”

  He bade her good night.

  (III)

  SHE WOULD HAVE TOLD EDDIE, but their paths stubbornly refused to cross. She called him several times at home, but only Mindy ever answered. She tried his office—he still held his part-time appointment at Georgetown—but she only reached the departmental secretary. She even tried through his literary agent, who promised to pass on her message. By the time of her dinner with Megan Hadley, Aurie supposed that the entire darker nation must know that the widow of Kevin Garland was shamelessly throwing herself at her old boyfriend.

  At night, she still studied the notebooks where she continued the hard work of deciphering Kevin’s codes, and, thrice, she even went hat in hand to Tristan Hadley, sitting nervously in his office, even flirting a bit in order to get him to pass on questions, surreptitiously, to his wife. Each time, Tris dutifully turned up on her doorstep with the answers, and Aurie gave him coffee to be polite. On the third occasion, he brought her roses, a gift she knew she should refuse. Instead, she accepted them, to keep the pipeline open. She supposed people would say she was using him. A university could be like a small town. If she wanted to keep the information flowing and the gossipy tongues silent, her meetings with Tris had to be surreptitious. Once, they grabbed lunch at a greasy diner in the far corner of Trumansburg, a working-class suburb. Another time they managed a really clever encounter in the stacks of the Olin Library, and when Tristan took her by surprise, stealing a kiss, she finally had the satisfaction of slapping his face.

  Tristan only grinned, and, for the next few days, whenever Aurelia ran into Megan, she cringed with shame.

  Still, by now, with Tristan’s help, she was getting a detailed picture. Two or three nights each week, after the children were in bed, she locked her bedroom door and took out the notebooks. She knew that Kevin had been part of a group that called itself the Palace Council—a modern-day analogue to the council of demons and fallen angels who, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, assisted Satan in his rebellion against God. The leader of the Palace Council was referred to as the Paramount, or the Author. Some years ago—what she had translated so far had yielded no dates—the Council had been formed to implement a plan, called the Project, that would “shake the throne.” In Milton’s tale, shaking the throne referred to Satan’s plot to spoil God’s creation, given that God Himself was beyond reach. At first Aurie had thought the matter one of simple substitution—the members of the Palace Council were black, and the throne they planned to shake was the seat of white power. But she soon realized this was untrue, and not only because of the note she had found in Kevin’s safe, scrawled during the fifties in a lily-white Florida hotel. There was also internal evidence, in her remembered jottings, of a great variety of members of the Council, just as Milton numbered among the demons the gods worshiped by many non-Christian cultures.

  She still did not know exactly what the Project was. She did know that it was meant to be implemented over a long period, that shaking the throne was meant to encompass several generations, and that the plan involved battle. She was not sure whether the war was metaphorical or not, but at least some of the violence was real. Everything Eddie had told her suggested that Phil Castle was a member of the Council. Maybe his friend the physicist, whose death in Los Alamos was ruled a suicide. Probably poor Matty.

  And very likely Kevin.

  And there was something else—the reason she had been certain, whether rationally or not, that Eddie would be killed in Vietnam. When she lined up the deaths—Phil Castle, Joseph Belt, Matty, Kevin—it seemed to her that the other members of the Council were being systematically killed off. As if everyone with direct knowledge of the Project had to go.

  The Catholic in her wanted to do the right thing. Take it to the authorities. Call the FBI. Call Nixon. Call somebody. But what was she going to say? That someone whose identity she did not know was methodically killing off everyone who knew about a plot she could not describe? A plot with its roots in Eddie’s darker nation? She imagined the repercussions in her community and shivered. The ensuing investigation, the explosion of mistrust between the races, would shake the throne all right—the wrong throne.

  And so she kept it to herself, patiently husbanding her information, hoping to avenge her husband, waiting for—well, she did not know exactly what she was waiting for. She just knew it hadn’t happened yet.

  Proof, maybe. That was the thing. She needed hard evidence instead of a theory.

  She needed Castle’s testament.

  (IV)

  IN LATE MARCH, Dwight Eisenhower died. Aurelia went to Washington, because the President said she should attend the funeral. She sat at the National Cathedral alongside other Garlands: Oliver and his wife, Claire; Kevin’s mother, Wanda; and Cerinda from Chicago. Nixon invited her to have breakfast with him and Pat the following morning in the White House residence. The President was upset. Students at Harvard had seized the main administration building. “I thought we were past this kind of thing,” he said.

  “They’re upset about the war,” said Pat.

  “It’s not my war. It’s Johnson’s war. It’s Kennedy’s war. People elected me to bring our boys home, and now these bums won’t even give me two months—”

  He raved on. Pat looked at Aurelia, who carefully did not smile until the First Lady smiled first.

  The President, meanwhile, had finished his speech. He tossed his napkin onto the table. “Tell you why you’re here. You have to tell your friend Eddie to stop.”

  “Stop what?” said Aurelia, very surprised.

  “Making trouble. Turning over stones.” From a side table he pulled a copy of Report to Military Headquarters. “He’s not giving us a chance.”

  “I believe he wrote the book during the previous Administration,” said Aurelia, trying to keep things calm.

  Nixon nodded. “Well, tell him to come see me. Set him straight. Help each other. There are plans in the works. This term, we do foreign policy. Spheres of influence. Next term—well, next term, we go domestic. Tell him.”

  Aurelia said that she would. She wondered if the President knew how much he sounded like Eddie himself, back when he used to defend Kennedy.

  “Did he ever find his sister?” asked the President, escorting her to the elevator, where an aide waited to lead her out. “Your friend Eddie. Does he think she’s alive?”

  Surprised, Aurie hesitated. “Is there some reason to think she isn’t?”

  “No idea. No idea. Just wondering.” The awkward smile. “Listen. Tell him to come see me. Have to have a talk. It’s important.”

  Alas, she had no way to reach Eddie. And so she did the next-best thing.

  CHAPTER 48

  The Other Heir

  (I)

  GARY FATEK SWEPT into the Finger Lakes region aboard a private jet, landing at Tompkins County Airport, where he instructed his pilot to wait. His aide and his bodyguard were surprised when he told them to wait, too. Outside the terminal, Aurelia sat in the station wagon. Gary had suggested that she not get out. No point in letting anyone snap a photo of the two of them hugging. She knew what he meant. There had always been these stories that the Hilliman heir preferred black women. Some people even whispered that he was the man Mona had married in Chicago in 1959 and divorced a year or two later, the unnamed father of her twins. A gossip reporter had once made it as far as the Cook County clerk’s office but found no records—a clear case of conspiracy! Meanwhile, Gary had married a famous actress, fathered a quick child, and divorced her. It was as if he was establishing a role. He was forty, and filthy rich, and intended, he had told Mona—who had told Aurie—never to marry again.

  If Gary Fatek had a
current sex life, nobody knew about it. Aurelia had given up trying to figure him out. His politics had whirled 180 degrees. The radical Harlem organizer had become a supporter of every conservative cause under the sun, along with a few that existed only because he funded them. The Republicans hardly made a move without consulting him. He and Nixon were said to be bosom buddies. One story said Gary had provided major support for George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor whose third-party presidential campaign had helped send Nixon to the White House. The foundation Gary now controlled had lately issued a report, signed by scholars from major universities, concluding that “the so-called liberation of women” would destroy the nuclear family, “the very bedrock on which civilization rests.” The late Erebeth Hilliman would have been proud.

  And yet he always took Mona’s calls, and telephoned Aurelia the day after she had asked Mona to set up the contact. When Aurie asked if there was a time it would be convenient for him to see her, he said, tomorrow. When she explained that she unfortunately could not drop everything and fly to New York, he said that would not be a problem.

  He would come to her.

  During the drive from the airport, Gary asked Aurelia all the right questions about her children and her career. He understood that she had a novel of her own coming out. A romance—was that right? He looked forward to reading it. And, yes, he did see his daughter as often as he could, but, in truth, the girl’s mother was better suited to raise her. It was in their genes, Gary explained. Mammals were like that. Females cared for the young. That was nature’s plan, he said. But when Aurelia, biting her tongue, hazarded a glance his way, she saw Gary grinning like a schoolboy who has lied successfully about the dog’s eating his homework.

  (II)

  THEY SAT in the diner in Trumansburg, because Gary did not want to come to the campus. It would cause talk, he said, and, besides, the president would hear about it, track him down, and hit him up for money.

  “The president of the university,” Gary explained, in case she had trouble figuring out which president he meant. “Although that might not be a bad idea,” he added, and told her about his nephew Jock, who had no particular talent but wanted to attend an Ivy League college. Now that Gary ran the family trusts, he was supposed to fix problems of that kind. “I’ll probably have to give somebody half a million,” he concluded gloomily.