Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Lucky Bastard

  Charles McCarry

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media ebook

  To the memory of Richard Condon

  Contents

  1: The Talent Spotter

  One

  1

  2

  3

  Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  2: Seductions

  One

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  3

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  5

  6

  Two

  1

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  6

  7

  Three

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  2

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  5

  3: Peter’s Gift

  One

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  Two

  1

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  4

  5

  6

  7

  Three

  1

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  4

  4: The Cover Mechanism

  One

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  6

  Two

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  6

  7

  8

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  11

  12

  Three

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  8

  5: Morgan’s Room

  One

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  Two

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  6: Lady Luck

  One

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  Two

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  Three

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  Four

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  Five

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  5

  The Talent Spotter

  One

  1 The professor thought that I looked like Lenin. He often said so; he had said so the first time we met, years before in Cuba. Now, in a Chinese restaurant in Harlem, he was saying so again.

  “The faintly—forgive me—Mephistophelean regard,” he said. “The cheekbones, the forehead. Have you ever considered growing a beard?”

  “No.”

  Unlike the professor, who cultivated the Che Guevara look—chestnut beard, green fatigues, romantic pallor—I was not trying to impersonate a terrorist. My goal was to look like a bourgeois intellectual who bought his clothes at Brooks Brothers, ate lunch in mid-town restaurants where the headwaiters knew him by name, and lived on the Upper West Side with a highly intelligent wife and two cats. My speech was Eastern Establishment in tone and word choice. My personal English tutor, Princeton ’31, a ruined asset who had fled to Moscow in 1956 after the arrest of his handler, the great Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, had even taught me to write by the Palmer method.

  Studying me, the professor said, “It’s the eyes, the epicanthic fold. Really, Dmitri, it’s uncanny! You and Vladimir Ilyich could have a common ancestor.”

  Yes, I thought, a rapist on horseback, absentee father of Holy Russia.

  The professor was babbling. Our meetings always excited him, but tonight he had other anxieties. He was a member of the underground, a spotter of talent at Columbia University. The last time we met, three months before—an eternity for an agent—I had reprimanded him. The young men and women he had recommended to me so far were of no possible interest—bourgeois neurotics who marched in demonstrations, thought in bumper stickers, took LSD, and spoke in tongues. Next time, I had said, bring me the real thing. Besides, he was not comfortable in these surroundings. The restaurant was noisy, smoke-filled, hot. We were the only whites in the place.

  I will call him Arthur. From Arthur’s point of view, this neighborhood was the heart of darkness. The truth was, my choice of meeting place was a punishment and a warning, and he understood this. He was afraid. He was ashamed of being afraid. He was a man of the Left. In the abstract he loved these loud, merry, downtrodden people. But in reality he was what he was, a nice bourgeois boy from the suburbs, and they terrified him.

  The waiter, a dark-skinned Cantonese with wary eyes, gave us menus. In tone-deaf Mandarin (he had memorized one thousand ideograms as an undergraduate), Arthur quizzed him about the specialties of the house. The waiter clearly had no idea that Arthur was speaking Chinese. “Numbah six very spicy; Numbah five very good,” he replied.

  Arthur asked me what I preferred. I told him to choose whatever he liked. He smiled approvingly, thinking no doubt that I was too much the Soviet man to eat for pleasure. He ordered Number five, mu shu pork with extra hoisin sauce, and Number six, whole grilled fish in chili sauce, with fried rice. And Chinese beer.

  Arthur chattered on about Lenin. He had written his doctoral dissertation on the great man’s private life, so he knew many out-of-the-way details. Was I aware that Vladimir Ilyich may have had Kalmyk blood? That he sang baritone in family musicales? Arthur pronounced the Russian forename and patronymic perfectly, with easy familiarity, as if in some earlier life he had sung folk songs with Lenin on that sealed train to the Finland Station, as if he had been entrusted to deliver secret messages for the revolution: Hang fifty kulaks a day as a demonstration to the peasants. The real Lenin, hater of romantics, would have added a postscript: Shoot the bearer.

  The food came. Arthur asked for chopsticks. The waiter handed them over and stayed for a moment to watch him take his first mouthfuls. Arthur nodded and spoke the Mandarin word for delicious. The waiter smiled; I wondered if he had spat into the food. I drank my beer, ate a little plain rice.

  “Are you sure you don’t want anything else?” Arthur asked.

  “The MSG keeps me awake,” I replied.

  Actually I was afraid of diarrhea, the spy’s complaint; I had had a lot of that in Shanghai, my last post, although bad food was not the only reason for loose bowels during the Cultural Revolution. My assignment in China had been to penetrate the Red Guards and baptize a few converts for the future, and also to make certain assurances to old friends who were being taunted and whipped through the streets and exiled to hard labor in mines and farming communes. I gave them what help I could—which is to say, none—and promised them that the true cause would be waiting for them after the madness passed or (same thing) Mao died. Not many of them lived that long, or ever wanted to see another Russian if they did. But some did, as we shall see.

  After that, my target in America, the campus antiwar movement, should have been easy. It was a soft target, in no way frightening or difficult, but I had made little progress. After a year of close observation I had concluded that the coun
terculture was not composed of serious people. Their rallies were just another form of entertainment, their slogans another kind of cheerleading. Their movement had no ideological core, no vanguard elite, no discipline. It was make-believe, a game, a holiday, a new kind of fraternity party. Combat boots instead of white bucks, drugs instead of beer, but the objectives were the same—sex and intoxication. The true revolutionary makes revolution to escape from the inescapable. In America, nothing is inescapable. These children knew they could escape any time they wished simply by going home again, by acknowledging the reality of money and choosing it. American capitalism would roll over them like the irresistible ocean that it is. We, the real Left, the eternal Left, would be left holding a second mortgage on their idealism. They could not make revolution, but they could enable it when its moment came, when its leader emerged.

  What I required, what I was looking for, was the leader. Once I had found him, history would make the moment. But first, the man. Revolutions almost always begin with one man. One man is all I ever hoped for. Arthur’s job was to find him for me. He was not the only talent spotter we had recruited, of course; there were others like him on other campuses. But he was mine, and he was the one whose failures were freshest in my mind.

  Arthur finished his food. He put down his chopsticks and said, “I think I’ve found someone for you.”

  I said, “Name?”

  This was not the question Arthur expected. He had been trained never to utter names in the presence of strangers. I repeated the question. He cleared his throat and murmured a reply. Music played very loud—a woman saying goodbye to lust. The people at the next table were making a lot of jovial noise. Arthur’s voice was weak. I could not hear him. I made an impatient gesture: Louder.

  He paused, looking left and right for secret policemen.

  “Speak up,” I said in a loud voice. “It’s quite safe. The FBI has very few black agents. That’s why we’re here.”

  Arthur leaned across the table and whispered a name.

  I said, “Arthur, I can’t hear you.”

  He tried again. His voice broke; the words came out as a squeak. I shook my head, made a disgusted face.

  At the next table a beautiful fat woman in a low-cut dress—large sarcastic eyes, skin the color of aubergine—turned and gazed at us, head to one side like some huge curious bird.

  His voice breaking with the effort, Arthur shouted, “Jack Adams!”

  I said, “Jack Adams? How long have you known this Jack Adams?”

  “Two years,” Arthur replied.

  “Two years? Two years? And this is the first time I hear his name?”

  Arthur cleared his throat. “Sorry,” he said. He was deeply agitated now—averted eyes, trembling voice.

  The fat beauty, bright-eyed and knowing, stared harder at Arthur. What were we? It was plain to see what she thought we were. We are taught in the craft that sometimes the best way to divert attention is to draw attention. I lifted Arthur’s inert hand from the table and kissed it.

  The woman guffawed. Now she knew everything about us that she needed to know. She lost interest and turned back to her friends.

  Arthur was sorely in need of reassurance. I poured him the last of the beer. “My dear comrade,” I said, using a word I seldom speak even in a whisper, “tell me about this Jack Adams.”

  2 “First of all,” Arthur said, “Jack is that rara avis among Ivy League radicals, a birthright member of the proletariat.”

  I said, “Meaning what?”

  “He’s poor. Working-class. Alone. No family, no connections, no influence. No future.”

  “So far, so good,” I said. “Go on.”

  “He’s an Ohio boy,” Arthur said. “Alone in the world.”

  Jack Adams came from a long line of Ohio steelworkers. His forebears and their friends had been killed in fiery accidents in the mill or died of diseases caused by the superheated air they breathed. They had won World War II with prodigies of productivity and then been thrown onto the streets when the capitalists discovered they could buy steel cheaper from the defeated Japanese. Jack was an orphan, raised by his maternal grandparents in Tannery Falls, Ohio. He remembered the old days before the mills closed, the horizon glowing in the night from the blast furnaces, the smell of scorched air coming in the open windows of their little house, and the soft coal dust clinging to the wallpaper as it clung to the lining of the workers’ lungs. His grandfather had lost his job like all the others, then died of drink. Jack was a child of the welfare system—social workers had bought his clothes, he had bought groceries with food stamps, the postman had delivered the monthly check with which his grandmother paid the endless mortgage on a house that had no market value. He had eaten free lunches at school, received free medical care. These details of lower-class life—the idea of losing everything, of having no recourse, of being glued to a certain fate, of being at the mercy of bureaucrats—fascinated Arthur, the son of a plastic surgeon, grandson of a banker. For at least four generations his family had lost nothing, had never considered it possible to do so.

  In high school, Jack had been an honor student. His teachers loved him for his charming smile, for his eagerness to learn, and for his evident desire to grow up to be just like them. They had pushed him toward college, giving him better marks and better recommendations than perhaps he deserved. After making a high score on the standard college exams—Jack had an aptitude for aptitude tests, an aspect, no doubt, of his larger talent for giving answers that pleased his betters—he had been accepted at Columbia University with full financial aid. He was just as much of a success at Columbia as he had been at Tannery Falls High School, and for the same reasons. He paid rapt attention in class, he memorized, he regurgitated lectures without lapse or mistake. He was the best political science student Arthur had ever had—nimble in class, a good writer.

  “There’s more,” Arthur said. “Jack is popular, very political—but a backstage person, not an up-front guy. He doesn’t march with the troops. I think demonstrations scare him, actually—”

  “Scare him?” I said.

  “The unpredictability of the crowd, the idea of being arrested and handcuffed and dragged into the paddy wagon—”

  “But it’s all a game. Who has ever been injured at one of these things?”

  “Lots of people,” Arthur said. “That’s beside the point. He’s not a marcher, he’s a thinker. He’s close to the leaders of the movement. They listen to him. Most of the victories they get credit for are his ideas—defenestrating deans from first-floor windows, the defense of Harlem against callous capitalist exploitation by the university. A lot of the slogans. He’s the invisible man of the Movement.”

  Arthur showed me a snapshot. Jack was quite presentable. An American boy. Curly hair, doughy young face, a brilliant smile: large square flashing teeth, eyes swimming with sincerity.

  I said, “I am interested in his timidity.”

  “That may not be the right word for it,” Arthur said. “Jack may not march on the Pentagon, but he’s put his body on the line in other ways.” He showed me another picture of Jack. In this one he was barely recognizable—an unsmiling near skeleton with unshaven cheeks. “This was taken on the last day of a forty-day water-only fast,” Arthur said. “He lost seventy pounds.”

  “Why?”

  “To beat the draft,” Arthur replied. “An act of conscience. He refused to serve in an unjust war.”

  I said, “You mean he’s a coward?”

  Arthur flinched. This was not a word much used in the circles in which he traveled. He said, “Isn’t everyone a coward in one way or another?”

  “No. And cowards are always dangerous.”

  “Surely,” Arthur said, “the truth is more complicated than that.”

  Was it really? I did not press the point. Arthur was a Freudian as well as a Marxist-Leninist. He did not wish to admit, ever, that things are what they seem. In his system of thought, the truth was always hidden, but discoverable
by the enlightened, using approved methods of thought.

  I said, “A question: What exactly is so special about this fellow?”

  Arthur hesitated. “This will sound strange, coming from a good Marxist-Leninist like myself who believes so deeply in historical inevitability,” he said at last. “But the answer is, Jack is lucky. In fact, he’s the luckiest bastard I’ve ever met.”

  “Be serious.”

  Arthur said, “Dmitri, believe me, I’ve never been more serious in my life. He has a gift. Jack’s a born politician. He’s marginal in many other ways—IQ of 119, just like JFK—”

  “Wait,” I said. “How do you know what Kennedy’s IQ was?”

  Arthur blinked. “I taught at Choate for a year. That was Kennedy’s school. It’s in the files. The point is, it’s a highly significant coincidence in Jack’s mind.”

  “You told him about this coincidence?”

  “Yes.”

  “An IQ of 119 says he is neither smart nor stupid. Surely he was not glad to know this.”

  “The coincidence made up for it. I mean, look where Kennedy ended up.”

  “Kennedy’s father was not a steelworker.”

  “In Jack’s opinion, neither was his, but we’ll get to that,” Arthur said.

  “The fact remains, his is not an impressive score.”

  “You’re right,” Arthur conceded. “Jack’s general intelligence is only a little better than average—not good enough, in theory, to get him into Columbia, even though he did well on the SATs. But I would like to suggest to you that this lack of a first-class mind is actually an advantage.”

  I said, “That you must explain to me.”

  “It makes him seem average to others when in fact he is not average at all,” Arthur replied. “As I’ve said, he’s extremely personable. People tend to think he’s getting by on charm. They made the same mistake about Kennedy.”

  “In his case, money played a role.”

  “Okay, but for most of his life—right up to the day he died, if truth be told—his detractors thought they were smarter than him. Same thing with Jack Adams. That gives him a fantastic advantage. In the one respect that matters, political smarts, Jack is a brilliant, maybe even a unique, natural talent.”

  “How can you say this about a boy of twenty-one?”

  Arthur was enjoying himself now. His IQ was much higher than 119, and he loved to show it.