Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  (III)

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Eddie had lunch with Torie Elden, who now worked as a deputy to John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s chief domestic policy adviser. She cautioned before they so much as sat down that she was seeing somebody, and Eddie said how wonderful that was.

  Then he got down to business.

  “No,” said Torie, when she was sure she had the question right. “I’m sorry, Eddie. Nobody in the White House has ever mentioned you. Not in my hearing, and I’m in a lot of meetings. I don’t think the President is the least bit worried about you. I’m not sure he’s ever heard of you.” She was working herself into a fury. “People have other things on their minds, Eddie. Not everything is about you.”

  CHAPTER 56

  Conversation in a Library

  (I)

  ON THE FIRST FRIDAY in March of 1970, a bomb exploded at a New York apartment house, killing three members of Weatherman, who evidently planned to blow up a military dance in New Jersey. The bomb was filled with nails, intended as shrapnel. The evening news did not have enough room for all the Washington figures competing for condemnatory airtime. The networks led with the President, and two of the three followed with Senator Lanning Frost. On Monday morning, Eddie telephone a surprised Aurelia at her office, to assure her, and perhaps himself, that Junie had not been present.

  “You know Agony has folded into Weatherman,” he said.

  No, said Aurelia. She had missed that bit of news.

  “Junie’s not with them any more.”

  Yes, she had heard that.

  “Aurie, look,” he said. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?” she asked, because a Garland never forgot a slight, but also never acknowledged one. She was gathering together books and papers for the class she had to teach in ten minutes.

  “We should get together sometime. Just to talk,” he added hastily.

  “Talk about what?”

  “Things.” He seemed about to say more, then leaped to a new subject. “Lanning and Margot want me to help them against Nixon.”

  “I thought she was part of your conspiracy.”

  Instead of a joke, an eerie pause. “It’s complicated,” he said.

  After hanging up, Aurelia tried to work him out. Was Eddie calling to say he loved her, or to say he didn’t? Was Margot Frost one of the bad guys, or wasn’t she? And what about Gary’s warning to stay away? She wished she could talk to Eddie about what she had learned. And yet there was the matter of her long-ago promise to her late husband: You don’t know anything, Kevin had warned her. If anything happens to me…your job is to raise the children, spend the money, and enjoy your life. And of course there was the matter of his legacy, which she would not, without more evidence, besmirch.

  No matter what he had been involved in.

  Somebody was killing off the Palace Council. When she knew who, she would know what had really happened to her husband.

  On her desk was a photo of Kevin. Aurelia lifted it, and kissed it, and went to class.

  The following weekend, Perry Mount married Chamonix Bing at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The bride was radiant. The ceremony was grand. Aurelia and her children sat with Mona and hers, beside a federal judge and behind Lanning and Margot Frost. Everyone was there.

  Everyone but Eddie Wesley.

  (II)

  TWO DAYS AFTER HER RETURN to Ithaca, Tris Hadley called during dinner. “Any more quotes need translation?”

  “No.” The telephone, bright yellow, hung on the kitchen wall. Talking to him in front of the children, she felt naked.

  “We could get together tonight if you want. Megan’s out of town.”

  “No.” Locke and Zora, eating burgers at the kitchen table, watched her curiously.

  “I have more information for you. Really important information.”

  “Um—”

  “Meet me for a drink.”

  “I can’t,” she said, adding, stupidly, “Not tonight.” The children grinned at each other. They were persuaded absolutely that Mommy had a boyfriend, even though they had not yet figured out who it was.

  “Call me, okay? When you’re free. Believe me, Aurie, you’ll be interested. This one is big.”

  “All right,” she said, hating her dependency on him. If only she had come up with a way to talk to Megan directly. Now it was too late.

  “All right, what?”

  “All right, I will.”

  She hung up.

  That night she called Mona, but reached only the machine.

  (III)

  SHE MET TRISTAN HADLEY on Friday afternoon. She crossed the campus in the shadow of Willard Straight Hall, the student union, recently the site of a famous occupation by black radicals. Magazine photographers had begged the radicals to hold up their rifles. Editors saw photos of young black men bearing arms and turned them into scary covers. The stories failed to mention that the shots were posed.

  The meeting place was the second subbasement of the Olin Library, near the microfiche storage area, in a long alcove of gunmetal shelves, holding mostly pamphlets in painstakingly indexed boxes. Nobody ever came down here, except the occasional librarian, whose approach was usually signaled by the clopping of tired shoes.

  Descending the steel staircase, Aurelia kept looking around, wondering if anybody was in the vicinity. She had not noticed either of her familiar shadows, Streisand or Sharif, since last summer. Still, she felt watched. She was as nervous as a woman rushing to an assignation. She stepped into the alcove and thought she heard a sound behind her, but when she turned there was only the soft rumble of water in the overhead pipes, and the steady ticking of some unrepaired mechanical device in the wall.

  “Tris?” she said, softly.

  “Over here.” An excited whisper.

  She found him around the corner. “I thought you weren’t coming,” he said, trying to slip an arm around her shoulders and lead her. She shrugged it off. He hesitated, then moved toward an ancient wooden carrel. He had several volumes open on the top shelf, along with a notepad on the desk. “Cover,” he said. “In case we’re caught.”

  “What do you want, Tristan? What’s the big discovery?”

  Boyish hurt. “Hey, don’t I get a cheery hello? Maybe a hug?”

  “Hello,” she said, and kept her hands to herself.

  “Fine,” he said, pouting as he drew Paradise Lost from the middle of the stack of books. “Let’s do business.”

  “What’s that?” she said, head whipping around.

  He stood beside her, gazing into the shadowy rows of gray shelving. “There’s nothing, honey,” he said, touching her arm lightly. “It’s just nerves.”

  “If I’m nervous, it’s because of all this skulduggery.”

  “Do you have a better way for us to meet?”

  Aurie almost said—it was a near thing—that she did not want to meet him at all. Instead, she shrugged and shook her head. “Okay,” she said. “Show me.”

  He glanced at her. His aplomb had been shattered. He had planned a big presentation, no doubt with plenty of gratitude on Aurelia’s end when he was done, and her attitude had thrown him off his stride.

  “I was thinking about the two other phrases that you wrote down,” he said. “From wherever the others came from.” A forced grin to show he did not mind being denied her confidence, although of course he did. “One was ‘unlimited might.’ The other was ‘Day 20.’ You’ll remember I told you neither one appears anywhere in the poem.”

  “I remember, Tris.”

  “I still haven’t worked out Day 20. But, in the case of the first phrase, we didn’t find it because we were looking for the wrong words.” His excitement was growing again. “Look here. Book VI, where Milton describes the actual war between the legions of Hell, led by Satan, and the legions of Heaven, led by the Archangel Michael. They fight hard, but neither side can gain an advantage. There’s a stalemate.”

  “I’ve read it,” she said, tiredly, and
it was true: she had read every stanza of Paradise Lost at least half a dozen times. “There’s a stalemate until Satan manages to break through Michael’s lines with some kind of weapon. Michael gains the advantage again, and then God sends His Son to end the battle.”

  Tristan nodded, impatient as any academic at the demonstration by others of their knowledge when he was itching to display his own. “But turn back,” he said. “Right at the beginning of the battle. Around line 227. The reason for the stalemate. See here?”

  He pointed. Aurelia heard the sound again, glanced over her shoulder into the darkness, then turned back and followed his finger.

  Had not th’Eternal King Omnipotent

  From his strong hold of Heav’n high over-rul’d

  And limited their might…

  “See?” Tristan’s voice was eager. “Either side might have won, except that the Eternal King limited how much force each could bring to bear. ‘Limited their might.’ See?”

  She nodded, impressed. He had given this a lot of thought. “So when—ah—somebody speaks of ‘unlimited might’—”

  “They have to be speaking of removing those limits, so that their side can prevail.”

  “Right. But the limits are placed by God—” Aurelia got his point, and spoke more softly. “Meaning that you would have to be God in order to remove them.”

  “Right.”

  “God in this case meaning—”

  Tristan gave her a long look, and in his fair eyes she read his long forbearance. Somewhere along the way she had forgotten his intelligence. Tris knew. It was as simple as that. Tris had always known. “Whoever they’re trying to overthrow,” he said.

  “Overthrow,” Aurelia echoed. Now at last she understood what they wanted. And why they had blown up her husband: because he was in the way. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, meaning it as a prayer.

  She burst into tears.

  Tristan stood his ground for a moment, then slipped his arms around her. She let him. He patted her shoulder and whispered to her. She let him. He kissed her forehead—

  “Hey!” he said, shoving her away.

  Aurie tumbled against the carrel, confused, and saw Tristan sprinting along the metal corridor, yelling at someone to stop. She hesitated, then followed. Their feet clanged. So did the feet of whomever he was chasing. “Hey!” he shouted again. “Stop!”

  Tristan disappeared around a corner into an alcove. An instant later, she heard him cry out, this time in pain. Aurelia arrived at the alcove in time to collide with another man, hurrying out. He was carrying something small and dark, and for a moment she thought it must be a gun. She had armed herself with a fire extinguisher, and now swung it at his chest. Aurelia was not strong—despite Mona’s entreaties, she still did not work out—but she slowed him down. He grunted and swayed. He swung at her, catching her in the arm. It hurt like blazes. Then Tristan jumped on his back and Aurelia kicked him in the balls.

  He crumpled.

  They rolled him over. Not blond hair. Not Mr. Collier. She was not surprised. She suspected that Mr. Collier could have taken them both down with his left pinky.

  “Who are you?” Tristan demanded, but the man was too busy moaning, so Aurelia delved inside his windbreaker and pulled out his wallet. She flipped it open and, wordless, handed it to Tristan. The man was a private detective, and the black box, which he had dropped, was a camera, loaded with very fast film to take pictures in the basement without a flash.

  “Private detective,” sneered Tristan, delighted to have a physical advantage over another man. “And who are you working for?”

  Aurelia said, “Let him up.”

  The anthropologist looked at her. “But he—oh. Yes. I see.”

  (IV)

  HUMILIATED, she called Mona, who listened for five minutes, then told her she was talking to the wrong woman and hung up. So she dutifully phoned Megan, hoping somehow to explain that what was obviously true was actually false, but Megan hung up, too. Feeling a fool, she packed the kids into the station wagon and drove over to Megan’s house, determined to make her see that there was no affair.

  Megan stood in the doorway, listened grimly, then said, “My husband is in love with you, Aurelia.”

  “I never—”

  “He says he wants a divorce. Fine with me. You’re welcome to him.”

  The children were still in the car, faces pressed against the window. “It was just a research project,” Aurie said.

  “And you never noticed his feelings toward you? He never mentioned them? You never decided it was time to stop doing research together? Your research was so important you were willing to encourage him? I have photos, Aurelia. Photos of all those cutesy little meetings in the diner and the library and—”

  She shut the door.

  Back home, Aurelia tried to put the matter out of her mind. At least for a little while. She had tried to do her duty to Megan, and had done it too late. She could not make up for her error. She had to get back to work. To call Eddie, to tell him that Tristan Hadley, of all people, had worked out what seemed to be the goal of the Project.

  They wanted to replace the man in charge.

  And there was something else, an idea that had occurred to her once Tristan began talking about chronology. “Day 20.” Paradise Lost was broken up into books, not days. But she had read her copy so often now, she could make a chart. She sat at the kitchen table, drawing red lines across the stanzas at the beginning and end of each day. She counted twenty.

  And saw it all.

  On the twentieth day of the poem, Satan gives up his idea of fighting against the forces of Heaven directly and decides instead to attack God’s creation. He will befoul the earth.

  That was the point. The Palace Council was not planning to do battle any longer. The plan was to subvert from within, by replacing the man in charge. What Eddie had feared was true.

  The Council—whoever was left—was electing a President.

  CHAPTER 57

  Conversation over Breakfast

  (I)

  IN MAY of 1970, soldiers of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four student demonstrators at Kent State University. The deadly rounds came from M-1 rifles, stripped-down versions of the weapon being used by American troops in Vietnam. The soldiers claimed self-defense; perhaps they were worried about being burned to death, for many of the demonstrators carried lighted candles. Responding to the news of the shootings, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its largest single-day decline since the assassination of President Kennedy. Wall Street was betting on chaos. And for a time chaos seemed to reign. President Nixon warned solemnly that tragedies happen “when dissent turns to violence.” Perhaps it was the Guardsmen who were dissenting, said the wags. Across the country, some two million college students went on strike. There were marches, formal and less so, in large cities and small towns. There was vandalism. There were battles. In New York, hard-hatted construction workers clashed with antiwar protesters, beating them with pipes and boards, putting many students into the hospital, formally dissolving the glorious student-worker solidarity still worshiped in many a campus coffeehouse. The hard hats waved a banner proclaiming GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT, and, in the spirit of the moment, tried to take over City Hall. Troops of the National Guard were mobilized nationwide, occupying dozens of campuses. And not just the campuses. Personnel carriers showed up on city streets. Army units were held in reserve around the country in case the revolt got out of hand.

  Four days after the Kent State shootings, protesters descended upon the Mall. Buses came from everywhere. The night before the demonstration, the students held a prayer vigil. William Sloane Coffin delivered a homily. Judy Collins sang. The group walked quietly to the White House to leave candles on the wall beneath the wrought-iron fence, in memory of the dead at Kent State. The city was prepared for the worst. Heavily armed soldiers had taken up positions to protect government buildings. An inventive variety of barriers, from sawhorses to barbed wire to bu
ses, augmented walls, and fences.

  Afterward, many of the students camped out on the Mall. Eddie was a featured speaker at the rally, but the night before, he trolled the crowd. Silly though it might have seemed, he thought perhaps Junie would be there. He thought he spotted her in the throng once or twice, but he was wrong. Eddie had a tent of his own, and helped others set theirs up: not for nothing those enforced years in the Boy Scouts. He had decided not to spend the nights before or after the demonstration at his own home. He did not want to fight the traffic to the Mall. He wanted to be nearby, just in case things got hairy. In addition to the tent, he arranged alternative accommodations through Gary Fatek, who called in a favor at the overbooked Marriott.

  But Eddie preferred the Mall.

  The feds, of course, were out in force, most of them no doubt dressed to look like students—he searched for white crew socks as a clue—and the protesters passed around stories of cars slipping past the encampment filled with men in suits, snapping photographs as they went.

  Shortly before five, he heard a ruckus. He pulled on sweater and sneakers and left the tent, following the few who were awake and on the move. He carried his notebook. Marijuana smoke hung in the heavy air like morning fog. A knot of kids had gathered on the steps of the Memorial. Crewcut men stood uneasily around. Maybe somebody was being arrested. He slipped out his notebook, hoping to record some grit. Then he reached the front and found the President of the United States chatting nervously with the students in the predawn mist.

  (II)

  EDDIE WAS ASTONISHED.

  He remembered the Nixon of the fifties, somewhere in Latin America, plunging into a crowd of jeering demonstrators and being spat upon. Voters had loved him for that. Now here he was again, in the belly of the beast. Not just talking but listening. Aurelia’s friend. The man on whom Lanning was gathering dirt. Eddie crept closer. A respectfully angry young man was telling the President that he was willing to die for what he believed in. Nixon assured the group that he understood, adding that his generation was trying to build a world in which it would not be necessary for people to die for what they believed in. The students looked skeptical, but seemed impressed that he was there. Nixon told them to go ahead and shout their slogans tomorrow, that was what America was about, just keep it peaceful.