Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Arthur was sleepy-eyed but alert. He had brought me coffee in a paper cup. The sun was just coming up. We sat on a bench, sipping awful, acidic coffee while I told him what was required for Jack Adams.

  He said, “To Germany? This will be difficult.”

  “But not impossible, surely. What about a Fulbright?”

  “You’re joking. It’s May. The Fulbrights have all been awarded for next year.”

  “Can’t someone be disqualified?”

  “Not by sneaky means,” Arthur said. “The system is designed to prevent that. A committee of Americans and Germans bestows the awards, so nobody but the committee can take them away. And even if they did, they’d just award it to the applicant who came in second.”

  I said, “Then get him some other kind of scholarship, as long as it’s genuine. He must believe that it’s genuine. Do not discuss it with him.”

  “Pennies from heaven,” Arthur said. “You want him. That must mean I’ve done a good job.”

  I said, “Better than you know. Can you do the thing I’ve just asked you to do?”

  “I think so, Dmitri.”

  “You must be sure.”

  “All right, I’m sure. An idea is forming in my mind.”

  He started to elucidate. I stopped him. “No need to tell me details,” I said. “I’ll count on you. Be quick.”

  “It may take several days. This will take organizing.”

  “All right. But, Arthur, there must be no failure. Do you understand?”

  “Comrade,” Arthur said, “I do not need to understand.”

  He thought he had earned the right to address me as Comrade. And so he had. Now came the difficult part. I stood up, crumpling my coffee cup.

  “I’ll take that,” Arthur said.

  “No.”

  Fingerprints. He could not be trusted. Arthur read my thought and flushed. But it was just procedure: No one can be trusted. I put a reassuring hand on his flaccid shoulder.

  “This is our last meeting,” I said.

  He was startled. “Our last meeting? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means we are entering a new phase. We must protect you.”

  Arthur gave me a reproachful look. “And that’s the way it ends?”

  “Arthur, it never ends.”

  I held out my hand. Arthur grasped it. “It has been a pleasure,” I said. “We are very grateful. And now we must forget each other, forget everything.”

  “That will be difficult,” Arthur said.

  “For me, too, my friend.”

  I meant what I said.

  6 A few days later Arthur delivered his report, as instructed. There is no denying that he had a certain flair.

  A student of Arthur’s—not connected in any way to the Movement, in fact a member of the ROTC—had won the Hoppert Fellowship to Heidelberg University. The Hoppert, endowed by a German immigrant who made a fortune manufacturing silk with child labor in the nineteenth century, wasn’t a prestigious fellowship. But it paid all fees and travel costs and provided a stipend of five hundred dollars a month to the recipient.

  The original recipient had been disqualified. The day after our meeting in the park, he was discovered to have plagiarized a paper on the Weimar Republic written for Arthur’s honors course in political science. He had received an A for this paper—Arthur had graded it himself, but never returned it—and it had been an important factor in the award of the fellowship. Graduation was only two weeks away. The student protested his innocence, stating that his paper had been retyped by persons unknown who had erased his footnotes identifying long passages copied from an unpublished dissertation by an obscure academic named Markus Olshaker. Arthur asked the student if he really believed that he, Arthur, or anyone else could believe such a story.

  Arthur told the young man he did not want to ruin his life, but a price must be paid. If he resigned his fellowship, Arthur would say nothing about the matter to anyone else. If, however, he insisted on his cock-and-bull story about forgery after the fact, Arthur would have no choice but to bring the whole matter to the attention of the dean. In that case the young man certainly would not graduate, he might very well lose his ROTC commission, and he would carry the burden of his mistake with him for the rest of his life.

  The boy accepted Arthur’s offer.

  The vacated fellowship was awarded to a surprised Jack Adams, who graduated with high honors and won a prize for excellence in political science.

  Under his yearbook picture an editorial wag inserted the words “Ruffles and Flourishes.”

  A portent.

  7 Just after commencement, Arthur received a wake-up call from his new handler. To his delight, he was told that he was going back to Cuba for advanced training at his old secret camp in the Sierra Maestra. He would travel secretly this time, under a false passport, avoiding surveillance by the CIA and the FBI by means of a circuitous route through Santiago de Chile and Mexico City. He was instructed to tell his wife that he was going to Cuba to help with the sugar harvest once again.

  He left in June. Early in July, his wife received through the mail an envelope containing Arthur’s wedding ring and a brief note in his handwriting. He said in his letter that he had fallen deeply in love with another woman, and that he had decided to spend the rest of his life in Cuba. His decision was irrevocable. He hoped that Myra would someday know the happiness that he had found.

  Love, Arthur.

  No return address.

  His handwriting, always untidy, was even harder to read than usual, as if he had scribbled this final letter while tired, or drunk, or under the stress that facing reality always induced in him. Myra thought Arthur would soon tire of monogamy and life among the masses and come back to New York, more full of himself than ever. But she never heard from him again.

  Seductions

  One

  1 An author I admire has written that “the great loves of men’s lives are usually other men.” He was not talking about homoerotic love, which like other passions of the flesh is haunted by suspicion and shame and is likely to end suddenly and badly, but about lifelong friendship, that exalted form of love—free of doubt, jealousy, and resentment—for which the currently fashionable term is male bonding. Friendship resembles other kinds of love in one respect only: As in all other couplings, there is always the one who loves and the one who permits himself to be loved.

  In the case of Danny Miller and Jack Adams—the most extreme example of lifelong friendship I have ever encountered—it was Danny who chose Jack, and everyone who knew them as children agrees that this happened very early in life, even before the boys could talk. They met as infants living in adjoining houses. As a toddler, Danny gave Jack his toys. In grammar school he protected him from bullies. In high school, Danny, an athlete of breathtaking ability who was captain of every team, managed Jack’s campaigns for class president and saw him elected four straight years. “A vote for Jack,” said a classmate, “was a vote for Danny.” Danny was elected Most Popular Boy in the graduating class. Jack was elected Most Likely to Succeed—with a parenthesis in the yearbook that read: “(as long as he sticks with Danny!)”

  All his life, Danny had helped Jack to get girls. Half the adolescent females Jack seduced in backseats and on front porches and living room sofas began by having a crush on Danny.

  “Jack would see that look in their eyes after Danny won the game with a touchdown or a homer or a layup in the last second, but he already had a girl, so he’d suggest a double date with his best friend,” one of these girls remembered.* “As soon as Jack got her alone, he’d start talking and stroking. Jack was no Danny, but he wasn’t bad, and he always smelled great—cologne, maybe. The girl would close her eyes and think of Danny in his basketball uniform—he had this shock of black hair that kind of lifted and fell when he bounced a basketball, and smiling blue eyes and this amazing buttermilk skin that every girl in town wanted to lick the sweat off of. She’d get real dreamy, and the next thing s
he knew, Jack had it up her kazoo. The son of a bitch carried Vaseline with him. He’d grease his thing with his spare hand, move the crotch of your panties to one side—I mean he was very deft—and before you had time to say Hey! he’d be in you up to his pubic hair. Never varied—Jack just kept running the same play on every down. ‘Vaseline Jack,’ the girls called him. But not until after the sexual revolution. We finally compared notes at, like, our tenth reunion. At the time he was doing his thing, nobody said a word because nobody wanted to look like a dope. I mean, back then before the Age of Aquarius, the wisdom was it was your own fault if you got, like, outwitted. And some of the girls must have enjoyed it. Jack was not exactly teeny-weeny. Funny thing is, he never came back for more. It was wham bam thank you ma’am and on to the next one.”

  Danny knew all about this. The seductions were a running joke between the friends, a feather in both their caps each time Jack added another conquest to his total. Amazingly, Jack never impregnated any of his partners. Danny attributed this to Jack’s luck, in which he had mystical faith. He truly believed that Jack could get away with anything. So did Jack. A generation earlier or later, Jack’s technique would have been called rape, and he probably would have gone to jail for a long time at an early age. But Jack’s timing was good, as always. He ravished his maidens in a different moral epoch, after the Victorians had been overthrown and before feminist missionaries had codified the many varieties of rape that formerly were tolerated, even admired, under the heading of “all’s fair in love.”

  Likewise, Danny’s role in Jack’s sex life did not seem as perverse at the time as perhaps it will seem now. As he saw it, he was just doing his buddy a favor and the girls weren’t doing anything they didn’t want to do. Danny’s role was vicarious not because he couldn’t have had the same girls himself, but because he was a monogamist by nature. Just as he had one true friend, he had one true love. Her name was Cindy Rogers, and Danny fell in love with her—and she with him—as a high school freshman. The difference was that Cindy was the one who loved, Danny the one who permitted himself to be loved.

  Cindy was the prettiest girl in Tannery Falls, an ail-American blonde with a lovely smile and a perfect body, head cheerleader to Danny’s captain of the team. Apart from the physical match, they were an unsuitable couple. Cindy was the daughter of a local physician and therefore a member of the village aristocracy. Danny was the son of a manual laborer. Mutual passion swept away every objection. When Cindy, at fifteen, went to her father and asked for a birth-control device, he sent her to a female gynecologist in a neighboring town to be fitted with an intrauterine coil. Afterward the colleague reported to Dr. Rogers that his daughter’s hymen was intact before the procedure. Cindy was a determined girl, but level-headed.

  From sixth grade onward she despised Jack Adams. In high school she hated him. Danny told her everything, including the saga of Jack’s conquests. “You’re Jack’s pimp?” she asked. “No, just his friend,” Danny replied. But Cindy saw the arrangement as the corruption of Danny by Jack—and, in an odd way, as a case of Jack taking something that rightfully belonged to Danny, just like the class presidency. The real reason for her anger was the friendship. In effect she was Danny’s bride, and like most brides she wanted to banish her mate’s best friend. Jack was a threat to her authority; he stood between her and Danny weakening her control of the relationship. It was Jack or her, she told Danny—choose. He laughed at her. Get rid of Jack? Nothing could dislodge him from his friend, and unfortunately for Cindy, she could not live without Danny. That meant finding room in her life for Jack, too.

  When Jack went off to Columbia, Cindy thought their lives had separated at last. Although she had been accepted at Bryn Mawr and Wellesley, Cindy went to Kent State, just a few miles away from Tannery Falls, in order to be with Danny. He had been admitted on an athletic scholarship. At six-foot-one he was too short to play college basketball, but as a wide receiver in football he broke all existing school records for receptions and yardage gained. As a pitcher on the baseball team he mowed down the opposition with a 95 mph fastball and a slow curve that froze batters. He and Cindy lived together off-campus; she cooked, did the laundry, ran the errands, and helped Danny with his homework. In every sense but the legal one they were man and wife. They planned to remedy that as soon as they graduated—a big wedding in Tannery Falls, then a nice little house in Columbus while Cindy went to law school at Ohio State and Danny, who had been drafted by the Cleveland Indians, played baseball. Few doubted that he would end up pitching in the majors. In the off-season Danny would go to Ohio State, too, to work on a graduate degree in communications. He wanted to be a sportscaster when his playing days were over.

  Then, a few days after they graduated, Danny was drafted into the army. It was the last thing they expected—Danny’s number wasn’t supposed to come up. But inexplicably, it did. He passed the preinduction physical and was ordered to report for induction in a month’s time.

  “I’ve got to see Jack,” he told Cindy.

  “Why? Because he dodged the draft by starving himself down to a skeleton and you’re going in his place because your weight is normal?”

  “Cindy, I’m not going in Jack’s place. It’s the luck of the draw.”

  “Yeah? Well, don’t forget to frisk him for Vaseline.”

  Danny left almost immediately for New York.

  When he came back three days later, he called off the wedding. Cindy, controlling her anger, asked why. The church had been booked; they had bought the rings. Her parents had bought them a house in Columbus.

  “What if I’m killed?” Danny said. “What if I’m wounded and come home no damn good for anything? Do you think I’d stick you with that, Cindy?”

  “Simple,” Cindy said. “If you’re killed, I’ll live alone for the rest of my life. If you come home in a coma, I’ll sleep in the same room with you with the ball game on the radio. Anything less serious than that we can discuss when the time comes.”

  “You say that now,” Danny said, “but I won’t do it to you, Cindy. And that’s final.”

  Because she was so much more intelligent than Danny, the emotion Cindy most often felt in his company, next to love and desire, was overwhelming exasperation.

  Quietly, taking her lover’s hand, she said, “Danny, listen. Whatever Jack Adams says—”

  “Cindy, don’t start. Jack didn’t say anything.”

  Cindy retreated. “Okay, I’ll rephrase. Whatever is going on in your mind, you don’t have to go to Vietnam.”

  “Oh, really? Where should I go, Canada?”

  “Danny, you’re a college graduate. You can get a commission. You’re a world-class athlete. The army is crazy about sports. All you have to do is tell them who you are. You can play on one of their teams. It will be a lot like going to college. I can delay law school for two or three years, whatever it takes, go with you. We can have a baby. By the time you get out, the kid will be big enough to go to nursery school while I go to law school.”

  Danny wouldn’t listen. At Kent State, he had been disgusted by the antiwar protests, by the politicized kids who thought that sports were some sort of Nazi military drill, who burned flags and their draft cards.

  “You think I’d go into the army and play ball while other guys got shot at?” he asked. “You think I’d sneak out of a war? Jesus, Cindy! What do you think I am?”

  “I know what you are, Danny, and I love you for it,” Cindy replied. “But, God forgive me, at this moment I wish you were a little more like Jack.”

  A week later, Danny went off to basic training. Cindy had been right: It wasn’t so very different from football camp. He was an outstanding soldier. Cindy wrote him a letter a day, repeating her arguments. When he called collect every Sunday, she pleaded with him to tell his superiors about his athletic attainments. Danny refused to listen. He didn’t want any special consideration.

  Cindy knew that her last chance to save him from himself would come when he came home on f
urlough. Danny arrived at last—on embarkation leave. He had orders for Vietnam.

  Cindy and Danny passed the first ten days of his furlough in a daze of lovemaking and argument. Cindy had researched the facts. Danny could be commissioned. He could play ball. He could even go to Vietnam if he wanted to—but not as a combat soldier. He’d be more valuable doing what he did best. Her father was willing to call his fraternity brother, the junior senator from Ohio. The senator would call the Pentagon and put in a word.

  “I told you, Cindy,” Danny said, “the answer is no.”

  She attacked him, fists flying, tears falling. “You son of a bitch, wanting to die for nothing!”

  “For nothing? My country is nothing?”

  “Danny, for God’s sake don’t leave me!”

  “I have to.”

  “Like hell you do. Daddy will make that call whether you like it or not!”

  Danny said, “Cindy, don’t even think of it. I mean it.”

  Cindy said, “Oh Jesus, sweetheart! You’re crazy.”

  Against her every instinct, because she was desperate, Cindy called Jack and asked him to come home and help her talk some sense into Danny.

  “I have this terrible feeling, Jack,” she said. “Something’s going to happen to him over there. I know it.”

  “I’ll be there Saturday,” Jack replied.

  “That’s Danny’s last day.”

  “It’s the best I can do. I have to work.”

  Thanks to Arthur, who knew a trendy Leftist on the staff of one of New York’s U.S. senators, Jack had a summer intern’s job in the senator’s Manhattan office. It paid no salary, but the contacts were good, and Jack was, you may be sure, making the most of them.

  Cindy said, “What time can you get here?”

  “I don’t know. I’m broke. I’ll have to hitchhike.”

  “For God’s sake, Jack! I’ll buy you a plane ticket.”

  “How? You’re there. I’m here.”