Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  It all came down to mechanisms. Money had to be passed through bank accounts; there had to be an explanation for it. You will remember that Morgan had told Jack that she had a trust fund. This was an accurate statement as far as it went, but the trust fund did not come from her estranged parents, heartbroken Republicans who lived in discreet retirement in Arizona and never mentioned their lost daughter to the people with whom they played bridge and golf and drank martinis. It was I, Dmitri of the KGB, using a million dollars in cash provided by Peter, who set up the fund in Morgan’s name, converting Peter’s million into many small cashier’s checks, which were then invested piecemeal in bonds and equities. In approved medium-risk Wall Street style, the million was split five ways and managed by three separate brokers: One fourth was invested in good old U.S. Treasury bonds, one fourth in large company stocks, one fourth in small company stocks, and the rest in foreign equities and cash. Then the fictitious but well-documented “owner” of these equities, a recluse who had been “living” in an apartment in Manhattan, converted them into a trust in Morgan’s favor, vacated his lease, moved out his furniture, and vanished. So he was a little odd, but this was America. What he did with his money was nobody’s business but his own.

  In the early 1970s, before Jack and Morgan were joined together, the trust produced a so-so average annual yield of 12 percent, or roughly $120,000 a year. This was much more than Morgan needed to live on—she did not really give away money to the PLO and the Panthers, much as she might have wished to do so. I reinvested the surplus in good solid equities, and by the time Jack and Morgan set up housekeeping the capital amounted to a little more than $1.25 million. I was proud of my accomplishment. Morgan felt somewhat polluted by all this wealth. After all, she had divorced her parents and turned her back on her country precisely to escape from the power of money. “Maggots!” she said, expressing her opinion of dollars. I counseled her to regard our success as investors as yet another proof of Karl Marx’s famous remark about money feeding on its own body; yech. After the marriage, Morgan took over management of the fund herself and, thanks to the things she had learned at Harvard, quickly increased the yield. True as always to his instructions, Jack never touched this or any other money of ours, or even asked about it. Morgan wrote all the checks for their household and provided him with pocket money.

  As far as influence was concerned, Jack had an inexhaustible trust fund of his own: that community of right-thinkers that Peter called the Unconscious Underground. Such people manned the junction boxes of influence and opinion in America. It was only necessary to whisper in a dozen ears that a young progressive was a comer to establish his credentials as one of the elect. Once he had this toehold, Jack’s talent for ingratiation kicked in. Everyone liked him—or liked the personage Jack represented himself to be. He never gave offense. His deep dislike of confrontation of any kind was seen by many as just another sign of his inborn cowardice, but the fact is, it is a quality that he shared with most men who rose high in American politics. For example, both FDR and Nixon, nonpareils of partisanship, were famous for it. It stood Jack in good stead, and never more so than in the first week after he and Morgan returned from Majorca.

  They went immediately to Washington, where Jack was faced with a situation fraught with the possibility of serious, even career-threatening embarrassment. As you know, Peter had instructed him to go back to Ohio and establish a law practice. At once; no delay; he had only twenty years to win the White House. However, there was a complication. Jack had already accepted a position as an associate in a famous Washington law firm. The senior partner who had hired him was a famous man, a man accustomed to getting his way. A journalist with an indulgent editor had described him as “the chambered nautilus of the Washington establishment—a ninety-tentacled, night-feeding organism inside an impenetrable pearly labyrinth.” Jack’s interview had been brief. He won the old man’s heart with his usual combination of eloquence, nuanced confession, and dazzling conversational improvisation. And, of course, the haunting smile that his heredity had bestowed on him. The interviewer saw in Jack a younger version of himself and hired him on the spot at a starting salary higher than usual. “We’re going to be close, Jack,” he had said in parting. “I want you right in the huddle with me.”

  Jack had been recommended for this job by two of his law professors, and the nomination had been seconded by his senator. Jack had thanked his new boss and his mentors profusely and made promises of future hard work and fidelity. Now he had no choice but to inform the old man and his various sponsors who had put their reputations on the line for him that he had changed his mind. Another youngster might have made lifelong enemies of them all. Not Jack. He knew that all he needed was a reason based on the pretense of unselfishness that all these old men practiced as an article of political faith.

  With the utmost sincerity, in person or over the telephone, Jack told them all the same story. At the last moment at Harvard, he said, he had found love with Morgan, and in finding it he had also found the courage to do the thing he knew was right.

  First, he had to put aside the glittering prizes that his Harvard degree had won for him and go back to Ohio to start a law practice with his childhood friend Danny Miller. He told them the story of his friendship with Danny—how Danny had shared with him, stood by him, protected him, helped him since sandbox days. He described what had happened to Danny in Vietnam, described the meeting that fate had arranged at Walter Reed, described what Danny and the other horribly wounded men on the surgical floor had taught him about courage, sacrifice, and patriotism.

  “I avoided the draft,” Jack told them. “I thought the war was wrong and I thought resistance was the right thing to do and I’ll never apologize for it. But Danny went, and he lost everything for this country that we love. I’m sorry, sir, but I owe my friend a greater debt than I owe anyone else in the world, and I just can’t …” Here Jack would start to smile, then be stopped by the solemnity of his own words and thoughts, shake his head, and go on: “Sorry, but I just can’t dodge the draft on this one.”

  Listening and watching Jack’s performance, imagining a jury in Jack’s hands, the old lawyer coughed into his handkerchief with real emotion. He said, “I admire you, son. But your gifts may be a little large for Columbus, Ohio. Don’t you think you owe the rest of mankind something, too?”

  “I guess in a way, that’s part two of the story,” Jack replied. “My wife wants me to go into politics. She says I might be able to help others who think the way that we do to change things so that what happened to Danny is less likely to happen in the future. I guess it’s a forlorn hope, but what I’m giving up is nothing compared to what my friend had taken away from him. So I think I should try. I may even get elected to something.”

  The old lawyer shook Jack’s hand. “Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” he said. “Sorry to lose you.”

  “It would have been an honor, sir. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Nothing to thank me for,” the old man said. “You say your wife’s got an MBA from Harvard. Does that means she’s a Republican?”

  Now Jack did smile. “Far, far from it, sir. I’ve always tried to stay out of bed with Republicans.”

  A nod of the old white head. “Good luck to you then.” The lawyer walked Jack to the door and shook his hand. “I’ve got a friend or two in Ohio,” he said. “I’ll give ’em a call. And godspeed to you, young fellow.”

  All the others to whom Jack delivered his news said the same.

  2 Having completed law school in two calendar years by dint of attending night and summer classes in addition to the two regular academic semesters, Danny Miller had graduated from the Ohio State Law School at the same time Jack finished at Harvard. Neither he nor Jack had ever talked to each other again about the partnership Danny had proposed after Grandmother Herzog’s funeral. Nevertheless, Jack called Danny from a pay phone as soon as he had bid the old lawyer farewell. In a matter of minutes the two friends agr
eed to open the firm of Miller & Adams in downtown Columbus. Jack would handle trial work, Danny civil cases. They would study for the Ohio bar examination together, just as they had studied for the law school admission test in the hospital ward.

  Jack presented all this to Morgan as a fait accompli—and as an improvement on Peter’s plan.

  “Putting a Vietnam baby-killer between us is an improvement?” Morgan cried, heart pounding in her surprise. “It’s a disaster.”

  Jack said, “What a way you have with words, Morgan.”

  “Call him back. Call it off.”

  “No.”

  “No? I said, get rid of him. That’s final.”

  “Morgan, I need him. Danny’s the key to the whole thing.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “The answer is still no,” Jack said.

  The next day, on a park bench on the Mall in Washington, Morgan reported all this to me. It was a July day of equatorial heat. Morgan’s face was pink because of that, and because of something coming from within her which closely resembled female fury with male disobedience. Defiance was the last thing she had expected from obsequious Jack.

  “Not a word of warning, not a hint of discussion,” Morgan said. “Can you imagine?”

  Yes, I could imagine, early though it was in my life with Jack Adams. But I did not answer at once because I had my mouth full of food. I was eating one of the plump local hot dogs called a half-smoke, purchased for the occasion from a street vendor. The sausage was the all-clear signal: If I took a bite as Morgan approached, she could make contact in safety. As usual it was impossible to know if it was, indeed, safe. The Mall teemed with half-naked civil servants out for a jog in the midday sun. For all I knew, half of them were FBI agents. Many of the girls, bare-legged and sweaty in their T-shirts and shorts, were lovely. In China a naked girl, lying in a strip of golden sunlight, had quoted a line of poetry to me. There is a maid for every honest civil servant: Li Shang-yin, T’ang dynasty. It is a touching sentiment in Mandarin; not bad in English, either. For years I had thought the Chinese girl was dead, but then, by chance, I discovered that she was not, so perhaps the poet was right.

  This was not the moment—supposing there ever could be such a moment—to share poignant memories with Morgan. I said, “This partnership was a sudden idea of Jack’s?”

  “No, that’s the thing. It’s a secret he kept from us. The two of them hatched the idea three years ago, at his grandmother’s funeral. Or so he says. He didn’t report that, either.”

  “He had no one to report it to.”

  “You’re defending him.”

  “Merely pointing out the reality.”

  “Nevertheless he has blindsided us.”

  “True, but this way of life is new to him. He has no training. Tell me, what’s the real problem? Are you angry over what he did, or over the fact that he did it without asking your permission?”

  “Both.”

  “Choose the worse of the two.”

  I was stern—an actor playing the demanding father. This was necessary. Morgan was being emotional. Jack had been calculating. It was important that she understand which, in our work, was preferable.

  Morgan flushed; she knew what I was suggesting. “That he did not ask permission,” she said at last, a little short of breath.

  “Ah. He has insulted your authority. So you are angry with him.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not it.”

  “Then what is the problem?” I was demanding a confession. Fuck you, said Morgan’s eyes, before she bowed her head. But she obliged: a matter of discipline.

  “I’ve failed to control him,” she said. “I’m angry at myself. Because I’ve failed.”

  Crumpling the paper in which the half-smoke had been wrapped, I said, “Let’s look rationally at what Jack has done. And why he thought it was the proper thing to do.”

  Morgan said, “Isn’t it obvious? He’s putting an outsider between him and us. He has put the operation in danger.”

  “Is it? Has he? Yesterday Jack was a Harvard boy who dodged the draft. Today he is the partner of a wounded war hero who was one of the most admired athletes in Ohio. An American tragedy, a golden boy cut down by cruel fate, his greatest races never to be run.”

  Morgan, still the seething daughter, said, “He was a baseball player.”

  I was glad I hadn’t shared my lost love’s poetry with her. Morgan’s single-mindedness, her literalness, her need to correct, to control, were formidable obstacles to sentiment. I had often told her so.

  I said, “Morgan, try not to be so paranoid. Jack has done us a great favor.”

  “He has?” Morgan said. “I guess I must be too literal-minded to see that.”

  I said, “Comrade Captain, cut the girlish shit. React like an officer, not like a child.”

  She flinched. Then she nodded, accepting the rebuke, and awaited further correction. Unlike Jack, she knew the rules. Longed for them.

  I continued. “Let me explain. By joining up with Danny he has protected himself and therefore protected us. No one can hold his war record against him if Danny doesn’t. He has made a very clever move. Danny is the key to the situation.”

  This was hard for Morgan to take. But she was not stupid, and at length she saw my point and accepted it. “You’re right,” she said. “On all counts. Thank you for your patience.”

  “And you were right, too,” I replied. “He should have told you beforehand, consulted you. Why didn’t he do so?”

  Morgan—contrition never lasted long with her—looked me full in the face with a sarcastic smile that twisted her lips. Kindly, understanding Dmitri, the smile said, leading a promising young officer toward self-knowledge. But this was still a self-criticism session just the same.

  She said, “Because he was afraid I’d say no. That I would not understand his purpose. That I would get in his way.”

  “Very likely true,” I said. “There’s a lesson in this. As a handler, whenever you can, you must reward, not punish. You must make this asset want to please you.”

  “I understand.”

  Again the ironic smile. By making a nun of her, Peter had taken away nine tenths of her power to reward, and we both knew this. Even if he had not, the facts of this case might not have changed. Praise and reward, let alone apology, did not come easily to her. Intelligence and high energy did, and a love of results. Also anger, which was what she was feeling now despite the smiles. She was in love with anger. Even at this early stage I feared the consequences of these qualities in her more than I feared Jack’s weaknesses.

  “It is not me but Jack you must strive to understand,” I said. “Otherwise you haven’t a hope of staying ahead of him.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she said. “But you said it first. He’s essentially uncontrollable.”

  “That’s why you must understand him in every way. If you cannot control, you must anticipate.”

  Morgan said, “Forgive me, but that’s easier said than done. He doesn’t think, so how can you anticipate? This guy is one hundred percent instinct. Hungry, eat. Horny, fuck. Talk, lie.”

  “That’s what Peter likes about him—his intense humanity.”

  “Peter sees things that are invisible to ordinary mortals.”

  “Quite true,” I said. “Remember that. And remember, too, that your job is to make what Peter sees in his dreams come true.”

  “I understand. But that will be difficult.”

  “True but irrelevant,” I said. “You were chosen for this assignment for good reasons. Your strength. Your intelligence. Your loyalty. Your patience. Now go to Ohio, make friends with Danny, and carry out this mission.”

  There was nothing more to say. Morgan inhaled, exhaled, saluted again with one of her brisk nods. Then she leaped to her feet and with determined stride set out westward toward the Washington Monument, as if she were going to walk all the way to Ohio.

  3 At a used car lot in Alexandria, Morgan bought,
for cash, a two-year-old Volkswagen bus emblazoned with peace symbols and plastered with bumper stickers, the haiku of the Movement. She and Jack drove this underpowered death trap to Columbus. Within a week of arrival they had secured a mortgage on a modest bungalow near the Ohio State campus. It closely resembled the little house in which Danny and Cindy lived nearby.

  With a certain sense of dread—remember, at this time we knew nothing of the tensions between Jack and Cindy, let alone the shameful reason for them—Morgan had anticipated a social life with the Millers. What she already knew about Cindy appalled her: a cute blonde who dressed like Barbie, stood by her man, went to church, made her own clothes, was an active Republican who worked for a law firm that represented banks, insurance companies, and every other kind of capitalist mechanism for repressing the masses. Not exactly Morgan’s cup of tea. The fact that Cindy had graduated in the top 2 percent of her law school class did not impress her. Ohio State?

  However, the couples did not get together. Steeling herself, Morgan called Cindy twice at her office to suggest dinner, but on both occasions Cindy said tersely that she’d have to call her back. She never did, and when Morgan tried again, leaving word with a secretary, Cindy did not return her calls.

  Morgan asked Jack for an explanation of Cindy’s behavior. “My guess would be that she doesn’t expect to like you any more than she likes me,” Jack said. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Sleeping dogs?” Morgan said. “What’s between you two?”

  “Danny.”

  “Is that all? Jack, are you keeping something from me?”

  “On the contrary, I’m being as frank as I know how. Cindy hates me. She always has.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you—Danny. She’s a girl. She wants her man all to herself. Just one of those things, Morg.”

  He would say no more. In any case, Morgan had little time for social life. With her usual efficiency she had found a suitably seedy office on the edge of the inner city and opened her own business as a consultant to, and manager of, good causes. Through Movement contacts—nothing to do with us—she was soon deeply involved in political, feminist, and civil rights, consumer advocacy, and other activist groups. Chartering all these self-absorbed sects and orchestrating their obsessions kept Morgan busy seeing clients in the day and attending meetings at night, so Jack was left to his own devices most of the time.