*
It was a week to the day since Cathy had entertained the team with the public sacking of her boyfriend. The editor of New Horizons magazine yelled across the chaotic floor space from his even more chaotic office. ‘Cathy, can you take line two? Pauli’s chief of staff returning your call.’
‘Sure, send it over.’ She picked up the phone – this wasn’t going to be easy.
‘Hi, Cathy, it’s Vince Novak from Senator Pauli’s office. I picked up your message and passed it on to the Senator. He was just boarding a flight, but insisted I call you right back to offer his condolences to you and to all Lisa’s former colleagues. He’d also like to write her family if you wouldn’t mind e-mailing me the address.’
‘Sure. Be glad to.’ Cathy sat with the phone to her ear only half listening to Novak’s words. She nodded to no one in particular as he spoke and then made a note of the date and time of what would be her first meeting with the great man. As the litany of caring platitudes rambled on she fiddled with the taped plastic food bag, turning it over and over in her hands. Lisa’s note, scrawled in obvious haste, was still attached to it. “V. IMPORTANT: PAULI. Pse keep safe and don’t open. Will explain. Lisa xxx” it read. The true meaning of the message coming from the other end of the phone line was much clearer – “bummer your colleague died and here’s hoping you’ll mistake my obligatory few minutes of stock clichés for genuine sympathy so we can get all this crap out of the way and move on to stuff that matters. My senator needs good publicity, your magazine needs to sell copies so let’s get back to business”.
Cathy mumbled her thanks and began composing an e-mail to Novak as he dictated the address to her. They agreed a date and a time for a meeting with the senator, and after another brief exchange of platitudes, the call was over.
In New England, Vince Novak put down the phone, got up from his chair and walked over to the glass wall of the office building from where he gazed out over the river towards the leafless trees beyond. Far from being on an aircraft, Senator Eric Pauli was in the same room.
‘You were lucky, Eric, damn lucky,’ said Novak. ‘You do of course realise where Greenberg was the day when she blew off that meeting with you?’
The senator shook his head. ‘No I don’t. And I know it gets us out of a hole but I’d hesitate to describe the death of a fellow human being as “lucky”.’
Novak ignored the reproach. ‘I found out this morning. When I heard about the drowning I called in a few favours, got a couple of questions answered. Get this: she went to Cunningham to talk to a Mr and Mrs Hillman about some new mall putting their general store out of business. Name ring any bells?’
‘Don’t be crass, of course it does.’
‘And doesn’t it strike you as odd that a magazine like New Horizons would suddenly take interest in a story that wouldn’t make the inside pages of the Tumbleweed Gazette? And of all the mom and pop stores in the country, that particular one? Come on.’
‘Yeah, yeah, OK. Don’t labour the point,’ said Pauli.
Novak paused, recognising the mounting irritation in Pauli’s voice, telling him loud and clear to back off. He continued, anyway. ‘I’m sorry, Eric, but you got careless and from now on we’ve got to keep things tighter, you do know that?’
Pauli sighed. ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ he said. ‘I screwed up – I don’t need you to tell me. What worries me is how she got on to the story.’
‘Me too,’ said Novak. ‘We need to find out before it reaches someone who’s a stronger swimmer. By the way, what the press release didn’t say is that when they found the body, she was three times over the drink-drive limit, let alone the screwing-around-with-inflatable-boats-in-the-dark limit. They say she was a recovering alcoholic and she’d been clean for five years. We’re not going to get that lucky twice.’
Pauli ran a hand through his mane of thick, unnaturally dark hair and ignored his chief of staff’s cynicism. ‘So who are “they”, these people who just happen to be so remarkably well informed about every goddam accidental death in Virginia?’
Novak shrugged the question off. ‘Like I said, just contacts who owed me a couple. Anyway, I thought that’s what you hired me for – details, details, details, you said. Listen, we need New Horizons, Time, The Economist and the rest of the quality press on-side, but from now on we need to make sure that Miss Stenmark and her buddies get the information they need and nothing more. Oh, and one more thing. I nearly forgot.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Make damn sure you turn off your cell-phone for the next hour. You’re supposed to be on a plane.’
Vince Novak turned away to hide his self-satisfied smile from the senator. Things were moving in just the direction he’d nudged them. A creature of few convictions, political or otherwise, he could almost taste the success that was so close. In his forties now, some fifteen years younger than Pauli who’d hired him as a junior trader when he was fresh out of grad school, Novak had a rare talent: he was good at recognising his own shortcomings. He reasoned that however you defined the quality that propelled people like Pauli to the top, he just didn’t have a big enough helping of it to make it on his own. So, instead he used his finely-tuned political antennae to detect those stimuli, normally beyond the range of human perception, which told him whose star was in the ascendancy and whose was bouncing off the glass ceiling or about to hit the floor. And once he’d identified the star, then he’d hitch his wagon to it, but only for as long as it continued to carry him in the right direction. So far as Novak could see, Eric Pauli would take him all the way.
***
Eric Pauli – his first name was Erich, but he’d anglicised it long ago – was born in 1950 to naturalised American parents, Anton and Emma Pauli, a German couple of whom he knew remarkably little, save the few facts he’d been able to prise out of his mother. They’d been anti-Nazis, imprisoned in a series of camps before being liberated by the allies in 1945 and fleeing to the US. Every time he tried to press her for details she would shudder and change the subject, claiming their past was too hideous to talk about, and she preferred to remember the Germany she’d once loved. His father, who was considerably older than Eric’s mother, died three months after his only son was born and then, when she was killed at the age of fifty-one, in a road accident during the snowy January of 1963, Eric was left totally alone.
***
Pauli looked out at the winter landscape beyond the office window. A family of ducks was squabbling noisily by the water’s edge. The memory came unbidden as it always did. He had been only twelve when it happened, but the events were etched on his mind as if it were yesterday. The sound of a car slithering to a halt outside in the street. Footsteps scrunching in the frozen snow and muffled voices on the porch. But instead of Mr and Mrs Higgs dropping his mother off after the weekly shop, he opened the door to four strangers; two policemen, one of their neighbours and an unknown clergyman, all with the look on their faces that adults have when things are badly wrong.
They tried to be kind. They told him she hadn’t suffered – either Mr Higgs or the truck driver had lost control on the ice, they couldn’t say for sure, but there’d been a head-on collision and no one in the car had survived. He remembered thinking straight away that this same conversation must be going on with his classmates, Johnny Higgs and his sister just a few blocks away. He thought of them – probably sitting next to their Christmas tree, just like he was, with the mocking lights winking merrily away as though nothing had happened, and the pair of them trying to make sense of what a group of embarrassed and awkward grown-ups was trying to tell them.
Straight after the accident came the rush and panic. At the time he assumed such things were normal, but in years to come he wondered whether the shock of his mother’s death had caused him to remember things that hadn’t happened. But it was all so vivid, even down to the grease stain on the fat policeman’s tie.
There were at least twenty of them, all pretending to be his best friends,
but to Eric they just sounded like policemen even though most of them didn’t wear uniforms. And they asked him the same questions time and again: about people he’d never heard of, whether his mother ever dug in the back yard – one glance at the brown stems of the waist-high weeds showing through the snow would’ve answered that for them – about his mother’s friends and family, her pictures, the family keepsakes. Things that normal families had in abundance and whose almost total absence he’d considered completely normal until he grew older. As for friends, she spoke very little English and apart from Mr and Mrs Higgs who persevered, even those who had once made the effort to converse with her gradually lost interest and drifted away.
Then the strange people went through his things too: his schoolbooks, his few meagre toys that he kept in a cheap, plywood trunk, his cardboard boxes of outgrown clothes in the attic, everything. Then he had to move out to stay with a family across town who claimed to be friends of his mother but clearly were no such thing. And when he was allowed back, the house looked totally different: it had been cleaned from top to bottom. He noticed that some of the furniture had gone – only rented they told him when he asked; the store wanted it back, they said – yet bizarrely, some of it had been replaced with new items. The wallpaper had been stripped off and replaced, and the yard had been cleared of weeds, dug over and raked smooth. At the time, it made little sense to him, and for most of his adult life it made none at all.
***
News of Emma Pauli’s accident was heard in high places. It was early February 1963, and in the Residency of the White House, the Attorney General who had personally ordered the search of the Pauli home, was seated opposite the President. Between them on the low table sat a thin buff file marked “Operation Faustus”: in faded red ink it was stamped “Most Secret”. The two men were alone and sat in silence, deep in thought. Finally, and as though reluctant to touch the object, Bobby Kennedy pushed it towards his older brother. ‘So then there was one. Are you sure you want to go through with this?’
JKF picked up the file and opened it at the relevant page. Incongruously for the gravity of the moment, it was bookmarked by a menu from some long-forgotten official White House dinner. ‘Who else apart from Reiss knows?’ he asked.
Bobby ticked the names off on his fingers. ‘Oppenheimer, Groves, Truman, Ike, Churchill. That’s it. The Pauli kid definitely doesn’t know anything. If Reiss or any of the others had told anyone it would’ve broken by now. If he does decide to say something, without that file there’s not one scrap of evidence to back him up. Also, he knows what’ll happen to him if he does.’
‘And you’re sure about Switzerland?’
‘The CIA are.’
The president snorted at this. ‘Yeah, like they were sure Castro was going to fold.’
‘I think they’re right this time. Shit, it’s been nearly twenty years. If anything was going to show up in Switzerland it would’ve happened by now.’
JFK scratched his chin, deep in thought. ‘Reiss worries me. Oppenheimer too – he’s a commie bastard. I say we lose the pair of them.’
‘Very bad idea,’ said Bobby, wagging a finger at his brother. ‘Oppenheimer’s name stinks. After the AEC hearing, nobody’s going to believe a word he says. If he comes out with a story like Faustus he’s on a one-way ride to a padded cell.’
‘And there’s General Groves, don’t forget. He’s a Republican. What if he decides to screw us over?’
‘He won’t. The man perjured himself at Oppenheimer’s hearing just to save his own ass. Sonofabitch is too busy getting rich these days – he’s not a threat. Without documentary evidence, none of them are.’
The president picked up the Faustus file from the table. ‘OK, then in that case we need to lose this. It’s just that though… Do we have the right to destroy history? It doesn’t feel right, morally, I mean.’
‘Screw morality, Jack, of course we should. Truman and Groves aren’t going to make waves. They were part of the cover-up. Eisenhower too. But next time there’s a Republican in the White House, God forbid, d’you really think they’d be so scrupulous? Even if it is under seal, they’d yell it from the damn rooftops if it suited them.’
JFK handed the file back to his brother. ‘And what about Churchill?’ he asked.
‘Churchill’s dying. And according to the notes on page twelve, we’re clear. Written by FDR. Listen.’ Bobby opened the file and read aloud. ‘“Churchill confirms no documentary evidence of Faustus to be kept”. And like Ike, he’s sat on it for eighteen years, why’s he going to start making waves now? And imagine how Khrushchev would react if he found out. I say we do it.’
The president nodded. At his signal Bobby Kennedy began tearing the file into tiny pieces and feeding them onto the logs that blazed in the grate of the sitting room. In ten minutes Faustus had been consumed by fire.
***
After his mother’s death, Eric Pauli’s upbringing was a series of moves and uncertainties. He was taken in and then passed on by a series of well-meaning families of school friends, none with any spare cash to lavish on their own children let alone a very intense, solitary, dark-haired little orphan boy who didn’t like baseball, couldn’t catch a football and was afraid of the water.
‘Eric’s got to go, we can’t keep him.’
‘I told you it was a bad idea.’
‘No you didn’t.’
‘And he’s been here three whole months.’
The pattern repeated itself time and again. Money would get tight; the children would start by growing bored with his company, then fighting with him and then quietly, persistently asking their parents when he was leaving. And so Eric, who was supposed to be asleep on his camp-bed in the box room, would listen late into the night as yet another set of grown-ups rowed about him. How they should never have taken him on in the first place, how he kept upsetting the kids and surely it was someone else’s turn to look after him. He learned to see through the fake smiles, recognise the joy and relief hidden behind the protestations of how sorry they were to see him go as he loaded the small wooden trunk containing his few meagre belongings into yet another car belonging to the next family who’d offered to step in “just until something more permanent can be sorted out”.
They were good people, all of them, and so every move served to confirm in his mind that there was something wrong with him, something which made people want to turn their backs on him and shut their doors against his presence.
As the years of high school went by, the realisation dawned that he was his only resource. So after graduating, and through hard work, long hours and taking any menial jobs that were going – sometimes three at a time – he paid his way through college, doing well enough to obtain a scholarship to law school. Along the way he made friends – not many, but his brooding intellect had a magnetic charisma of its own – but not one of them did he permit to come too close, just in case they should ever hurt him by leaving or turning their back on him. Even the crippling shyness with girls which came as part of the baggage train hitched to the locomotive of his self-hatred was overcome. Thus, at the age of twenty-one – positively ancient, even by the standard of the early 1970s – he lost his virginity at a party during a drunken, fumbling encounter of which he remembered very little the next morning other than it had all been over very quickly and he’d forgotten to ask her name.
The long, bloody struggle in Vietnam barely touched his life beyond what he saw on TV or read in the papers. As a full-time student he was given a Draft deferral and although he saw the war as a waste of money and lives, equally he saw that throwing rocks at the National Guard wasn’t going to bring his former high-school classmates home any quicker. However, Vietnam reinforced his belief that the world was an unjust place and that he would do what he could to assist in the struggle to give the little guy a chance to help himself. If the guy wasn’t willing to grasp it firmly enough, then that was tough luck. And gradually, as he became more politically aware, he started to t
hink of himself as one of his country’s natural Democrats. From an early age, what people were now calling the hard right, particularly the religious right, scared him to death.
And now he was sitting nervously at a very expensive and equally exclusive table at a Democratic Party fundraising dinner; waiting for his turn to speak, waiting to take the long walk up to the lectern and to make the announcement everyone was hoping for – that he was going to run for President of the United States.
Chapter Seven
Roosevelt’s funeral broadcast on radio. Understood nothing so tried to find music but same on all channels. Now that R. and S. have gone, A. dejected and will hardly speak to me. Visit in afternoon from German-speaking Captain. Brought news that we will be moving on to South Dakota next week, wherever that may be.
*
Leaving his uncle in the wood-panelled sitting room, James found his way through to the kitchen and stood on a chair, searching the higher cupboards for the tea.
‘Can I help you?’
The woman’s voice made him jump and he almost dropped the packet of tea on the floor. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, turning unsteadily round to face her and almost falling. ‘I was looking for this. Bill’s in a bit of a state and I thought a cup would do him good.’
Bill Todd’s housekeeper was in her seventies and almost as wide as she was high. She stared suspiciously up at James through small, boot-button eyes that gave her an air of Mrs Tiggywinkle. ‘So you must be his nephew, then?’ she said. The Devon accent was unmistakable. ‘He said you were coming. I saw the car outside.’
Under her gaze he felt like a small boy caught with his hand in the biscuit jar. He blushed and said, ‘That’s right. I’m James, James Atkinson. I only got here an hour or so ago.’
The Manhattan Deception Page 6
