The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  Mike Carter trained as an actor at the RADA and has worked extensively in films, television and on stage in the West End, the National Theatre and on Broadway, the Moscow Arts, the Rustavelli Theatre in Tbilisi, and the ancient theatre of Epidaurus in Greece.

  He played Bib Fortuna in The Return of the Jedi (Episode 6 of the Star Wars series) and has consequently been immortalised as a series of dolls ranging from one inch to two feet high.

  Other jobs have included white van driver, Spike Milligan’s gardener, barman, stage crew member, stage set builder, university lecturer and training video writer.

  Carter deviated from acting unemployment later in life to gain a masters degree in psychology and trained as a counsellor.

  He co-wrote a film, which starred Anthony Hopkins just before he became a mega star, and has returned to screenwriting (and counselling).

  He is married, has two adult children, a grandson, and lives in London with his Californian wife and a black Labrador.

  The UnAmericans is his first novel.

  The UnAmericans

  Michael Carter

  Published by nthposition press, 38 Allcroft Road, London NW5 4NE

  © Michael Carter 2013

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Subject Headings

  Cold War – Fiction; Spy stories; Noir fiction

  BIC Subject Categories

  FHD (espionage and spy thriller); FA (modern and contemporary

  fiction, post c.1945)

  Once, when I worked at the New York bureau I tried to get through a day without lying. I got up, had breakfast, caught the train to Grand Central, walked to the bureau, dumped my coat and case – so far so good. Apart from a ‘good morning’ or two, I hadn’t spoken to anybody. I was standing at the coffee machine watching my cup fill when someone asked me a question and I lied.

  Plano, Texas – 8 December 1962

  What Tomas has lost with the Batista days burns in him. The Havana bars and beaches, the honey girls in the crimped bathing suits that decked out his younger virility, ghost in his slipstream across the cheap room in Plano.

  “Papa and Mafia put him the White House. He is a bought man with no fucking balls!”

  “His balls are a Federal concern,” says Peter and we Americans laugh to defuse things.

  Since breakfast Tomas and the other Cubans have presented their case with an Hispanic dignity that highlights our gracelessness. We have nothing for them but the news that there will be no second season for their show and the circularity of the debates degenerates into hostility. Tomas is left pacing and turning, an old caged leopard with power to do nothing but buffet anger into the winter evening.

  “Eisenhower! A soldier! Now you pick an Irish horse thief! A nigger lover! What’s wrong with you people? The going gets tough and the tough get fucking going! Over there outa fuckin’ sight!” His finger jabs at the purple clouds and the scar of light in the west.

  “Tomas, we are skinning this cat differently.” Jerry plays the reassuring card, Pete presides, and Henry can get heavy when necessary. My job is to suggest I’m sitting on a pile of information, but of course what I’m really sitting on is information I can give no one in this room.

  “Castro’s lost his missiles, Tomas. All he’s got is sugar cane and propaganda.”

  No one delivers a hard message as sweetly as Pete. Cuban exiles have booed and hissed our unwillingness to remount an invasion after the missile crisis panned out okay. We know a deal has been struck – they don’t, but there is mucho Hispanic indignation at the reduction in funds for the struggle against Castro. That money made them big men in their Miami ghettos. Now they’re just Joe Schmos with sideburns.

  Tomas scans the infinite space of the Texan twilight and continues his invective against the horse thief filling the White House with Guinness and dung. Frustration has broken into bitterness and for counter revolutionaries like Tommy and his coxcomb cohorts, the liberator’s garland has been withdrawn forever. Calls are not returned and they feel the same chill as all the other objects of Kennedy’s affections – feted, fondled, fucked and finally forgotten. So the office dispatches us with flowers and Kleenex down to this backwater to assess if the Mambo Band are likely to fade into their own kind in the Florida ghettos, or continue defining themselves by their old island’s rape and become a pain in the White House ass.

  I remain on the touchline observing the night gather on two contradictory cultures: one sensuous, full of false pride and easy indignation, intolerant of those who do not play the game by their arcane rules; the other conformist, repressed, and intolerant of anyone who does not play by their mercantile rules. Both are bound by the urge to cleanse all heresies so’s a man can walk free down the street, buy a Frigidaire and ignore Darwin.

  I once observed my father’s spleen at a female neighbour who regretted John Garfield got in trouble with McCarthy, because she liked him so much. Witnessing the intensity of Dad’s patriotic rant across the fence as he set her right on a couple of things shocked me. I reassured our neighbour later that I liked John Garfield, but she blanched and moved away. The Un-American message was getting across. Ten years down the line we have a Catholic President and coloureds calling themselves American, but Dad stuck to his prediction that no Catholic would enter the White House while he was alive by dying two days before inauguration. “That man – the catholic – killed him,” my mother declared to the grim family. Maybe he did.

  The cluster of bottles on the table catch my eye. Bright labels conjure palm beaches and ochre missions: rums and daiquiris, Hawaiian shirt drinks winking in the darkness which I – as junior member of Corporation USA – had been sent out to buy for our guests. I could do with one now.

  I watch brother-in-law Henry. Do you know what your beloved little sister and I get up to Henry? Do you know she loves having the bacon brought home to her on all fours across the kitchen table?

  “Tomas,” I start from the back of class, “Washington coordinated more than fifty million dollars in food and medicine as ransom for the twelve hundred captured at Bahia de Cochinos.” I reason with quiet cadences that contrast Tomas’s barrio melodramatics and remind him he is not dealing with the local bookmaker. I tell him about the billion dollars in assets expropriated by the revolutionary government, how we have good cause to take issue with Castro, but that President Kennedy has reasons for examining options other than the military, options which will have a powerful impact on Cuba.

  “You banned cigars. That’ll bring the fucker down.”

  I move on before his rage finds a toehold and reveal one of the things the administration is examining is a way to secure permission to leave for Cuban nationals who wish to come to the United States.

  Tomas has heard the same stuff twelve different ways but I know the permission to leave is new to him. His daughter is in Havana. He wants her in Miami but knows – and of course, we know – that she hates him and will cleave to Castro rather than join the animal who left her mother rigid with fear every time the front door opened and rigid with rejection all through the nights it didn’t.

  He slides the window and spits. The sudden noise of fat tires on the highway startles us and
we watch his string of spit cartwheel across the Denny neon. Tomas watches an old pick-up struggle along the highway with a hump of Christmas trees lashed down in the back, then pulls at the window to shut it, but it won’t shift. The runners are clogged. Henry moves to help when under the force of Tomas’s anger it slides like a toboggan, and sends him into a small stumble. Tommy was probably the kind of guy who slipped on a lot of banana skins in his Chief Tom Cat existence.

  “Maybe we need to change options. There are other guys.”

  It’s nothing more than a codicil to his window rage. Peter casually looks across to me and crosses his eyes. Henry hears the choked-off giggle and it’s round the room in milliseconds, affecting only the sober-suited Americans. The whole class is about to fall out of order. I dredge up a solemn expression that just makes everything worse.

  The coup de grâce comes from my loving brother-in-law, Henry, who pulls his Jack Benny look. I keep my mouth tight shut, but Jack Benny does as Jack Benny does, just stares till I’m like a twig holding a logjam. Something whinnies through my nose. I bluff it into coughs. Tommy glares, Jerry’s looking down covering his mouth with his hands, Henry is turned to face the wall and I see the muscles on the back of the bastard’s neck twitching. The dam is about to burst big time.

  “Go get a drink of water,” says Peter. I propel into the bathroom and spend the next five minutes running taps, flushing the toilet and keeping my fist in my mouth to prevent another Cuban uprising.

  Then I sit on the toilet and catch my reflection in the mirror and a sensation of complete solitariness grips me again, a feeling that’s plagued me as long as I remember. As a kid I felt a stranger in my own house and was convinced my parents weren’t my real parents and that one day a limo would draw up in the street, the door would open, I would graciously forgive the dumbos who had masqueraded as dad and mom, wave the neighbourhood goodbye, and step into the limo to be taken off to my real inheritance. I gave up waiting around eight.

  I don’t want to go back into that room. I can’t take any more of Tomas and the Cubans grief about Castro and his nickel and dime pin-up Che, and the vitriol about the Hollywood President with more mouth than guts and how everybody is betraying them.

  There is another betrayal none of them know about. It is buried in me, embracing not just Tomas and the other friends of Batiste, but also my boss Peter, my brother in law and colleague Henry, little Jerry who’s queer as a coot and thinks no one knows, the Hollywood President, and finally, the whole American road show. Everything that goes on in this nicotined room in bum fuck Plano, chosen that its cheapness might convey to our Cuban guests that the trust fund is no longer paying out, will pass across a Kremlin desk in the next few days. Alone in the bathroom I hold this secret in me, deep and guarded, a gem of power and magic, that sometimes terrorises and sometimes nourishes me, that lets me walk down the street past faces that know nothing of what I have, and gives me a sublime sense of difference.

  The irony is that my adolescent discontent crystallised into clandestine communism at Harvard where it might have remained a harmless intellectual anomaly had not the CIA come looking for bright law graduates and dropped temptation in my lap. I was led to the treasure trove of classified files with promises of improved pension deals and generous expense accounts. My communist attitudes were hardened by many of the hardened attitudes I found in the Agency I pretended to serve. My hesitation was dissolved by many of the things I knew we were doing in those foreign states that would not kneel at the corporate altar. As I handed over confidential information to my Russian contacts I felt no hatred for my own people, just a sense that I was balancing the excess. The poignancy is that I like most of my American colleagues. I am genuinely fond of the team I work in, particularly Henry; he is as good a brother in law as a man could want.

  Usually I swim in the morning to rinse out my hangovers, but in the remote fastness of Texas there are no wives to limit the after-work martinis, so I swim when work’s finished; the later I get to the bar, the longer I remain un-drunk. When the others shuffle up the little wooden hill, a couple of strong ones usually get the click and float me to bed at peace with the world. I can go without the stuff for months, but if I lift just one drink it takes off like an un-braked truck. Peter, educated in England and never missing an opportunity to bring his European literacy to bear on any vacant moment, compares my drinking to that of Dr Johnson: “often abstinent but never temperate.” At least I’m in good company. The other he levels at me is the one about the chains of habit being “too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken”, and that quote leaves me wondering if Peter has an insight into me that might one day lead to the denim suit and the body harness. These fears around Peter come like storms and leave me exhausted. Something about the man, something beneath the affection, the words, looks and gestures of friendship leave me wary and vigilant. Then it passes and I indulge a nephew like love for him. I pinball between fear and love, suspicion and trust; my life is a racket of motion, strikes, ricochets and flippers. I sit and think sometimes is there a moment when I am truly relaxed, when something in me is not firing around the walls? And there isn’t. I am constantly whirring. Time doesn’t pass; it stretches me. I hate time. Stalking me. Always there. I don’t know why I have this odd fear of it. I only wear a watch because they would ask if I didn’t. I would have no clocks in my house if I could – I have a feeling they’re going to play a dirty trick on me. But the clocks stop for JD. That’s it, the bottle of peace, the Jack Daniels that soothes where the restless nature cannot and dampens down the background whine that tears a hole in space-time and lets you breathe. It may be an imperfect meditative state, but it’s one I can switch on at will, as long as the bar is open.

  The hotel is new and the pool at the back open to the flat Texan landscape. The underwater lamps and blue bottom create a sapphire in the velvet night. I cut up and down, fifteen-yard lengths in a couple of strokes. I aim for a hundred lengths in these little pools but usually lose count around sixty. Nevertheless, the rhythm sucks me into a kind of Zen nothingness, till some natural message says enough, get out.

  Peter sits by a lamp working and whisking away drizzles of winter insects drawn to the blue pool and the solitary cliff of lights in the Texan night. Jerry and Henry will be in the bar mocking the absent Cubans.

  I arch out onto my butt. The effort has swollen the muscle into slabs. I’m still a strong boy and I like it. My chest is heaving as I towel myself, I can feel the stuffiness of that room with Cuba’s fate in it slowly clear from my body. The moon tears through flying clouds. Suddenly they’re gone like smoke and the sky is sprayed with stars. There is a billion acres of silence.

  “They say there’s no sound in space.”

  “What a pleasant place that must be.”

  Moonlight spreads like pale paint to the horizon. I comment on how flat this country is, more to myself than Pete, but he responds with a quote about the flat lands of Cisthene from some Greek tragedy about Prometheus he thinks I know nothing about. Put a penny in him and he’s off. I enjoy pandering to Peter’s orotund classicism by playing the blue collar monosyllabic. I know more about this stuff than I let on, but I keep all my candles under the bushel on principle. For example, I have a minor musical talent and after a few drinks I might get on the piano, but always play bar taste: Liberace, never Liszt. So, I sit there, lug-like by the pool, while he pronounces on the ancient world.

  A figure in a gown at a high window closes the drapes and checks me out. I vector the floors and windows to her bedroom to Peter’s riff about the ancient Greeks’ fascination with the movement from chaos to rational compromise.

  “Somewhat akin to our salaried obsessions, though I sometimes feel we move in the reverse direction.”

  “It’s a living.”

  The moon has laid a silver thread on the horizon. I am lounging in my chair and I hear the snick
of Peter capping his fountain pen. He declares softly that fountain pens don’t work in planes, and time begins to bend.

  ‘Fountain pens don’t work in planes’ is one of my code phrases. These phrases can crop up innocently, so it’s important to assess the moment. In a Texan night the Sphinx’s riddle smacks me by a blue pool. Get it right I live, get it wrong, I die. Reason advocates that Peter has led me to my Gethsemane and the Judas kiss is being applied with regret. He waits, the admired old hand, the patrician with the extraordinary war record who has laboured at the heart of his country’s security since the trials at Nuremberg. I feel ashamed to have let him down.

  Surface patterns whisper across the pool. A curtain draws behind soundproof windows. I can hear a moth breathe or grass grow; all the Texan night sounds crowd in to my private ear.

  “They’ve found your snow prints.”

  What are you talking about I ask. When we’re afraid we speak in clichés.

  “Don’t be naïve. They’re following. It’s only a matter of time.”

  I try to remember if they electrocute spies or hang them, and determine to go to the bathroom before execution in case my corpse shits my prison issue pants.

  “Your reply is ‘I use a pencil’.”

  That was the best they could come up with, pencils and pens.

  “Why didn’t you use the reply?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Fountain pens and pencils.”

  “I’m not getting through. Ring Yura for confirmation. I’m all you’ve got.”

  Yura is my contact from the Russian Embassy in Washington. So, Peter knows. I have been hooked. Peter is playing me into his part of the shallows and the waiting gaff. I know he has always seen me as the overgrown adolescent who can’t lose face, replete with the pride that leads to lives of small and larger disasters. I look at him. His face is haggard with worry and I know in that second, for some indefinable reason, that I am safe. Of all people, Peter is my angel. I am no longer alone.