“ ‘Calm down’?” Hammett said. “That’s your response to what happened?”
“Archimedes, nothing happened. Zarah just sat there like the rest of us. The séance was a parlor game.”
“Like hell it was. It was a provocation. You don’t want to admit that anything is going on, that’s all.”
Julian took two or three deep breaths before answering. “Archimedes,” he said at last. “Anything is possible. But this is no time to get into a tizzy about the sanctity of the Shelley Society. You have more important things to think about.”
“Nothing is more important.”
“Not many men in your position would say that.”
Hammett said, “Then maybe I should withdraw my name. I’m telling you for the last time, there’s a connection between what happened tonight and what will happen to my nomination.”
Julian stopped walking and turned to face his friend. He said, “Archimedes, get serious. Come on.”
Hammett stopped in his tracks. “You come on,” he said. “You’re the guy who got me into this… in the name of the Poet, no less.”
They were standing in ordinary street light now, and the play of emotion on Hammett’s face was easier to read. He was afraid; he wanted reassurance. Fuck him, Julian thought, forming in his exhausted mind a word he would never have spoken aloud. He was too tired to continue the conversation; had he been talking to almost anyone else, he would have ended it minutes ago. He signaled the trailing Secret Service car, and its driver pulled forward to the spot where they stood. “Get in the car,” he said.
His voice rising, Hammett said, “Why?”
“Because it’s bedtime.”
“But it isn’t even midnight yet.”
“Get in the car,” Julian repeated. “They’ll take you to your hotel.”
Julian had invited Hammett to stay with them—the children were on a cruise to Antarctica with their mother and her new husband—but Emily had refused to have him in the house. Julian thought, God bless Emily. They lived in a Georgetown row house, low and dark, originally built as quarters for slaves. Already too small for the Empire furniture and other heirlooms that filled it, the house offered no escape from guests, even those who behaved rationally. Holding open the car door, he said, “Don’t forget breakfast with Senator Clark. These same agents will pick you up in the morning and drive you to the Capitol.”
With one last sour look of accusation, Hammett said, “Something’s going on. Mark my words.” Then, with exaggerated huffiness, he turned away and got into the backseat.
10
Julian found Emily in bed, reading. He lay down beside her and put a hand on her stomach.
“How’s the book?” he asked.
Emily turned a page and held up a finger for patience. She lay between him and the lamp, and while she read, concentrating deeply, he studied her profile, so lovely and young and unguarded. Now she slid down between the sheets and fitted her small soft body to the curve of his long, bony one.
“So tomorrow is Archimedes’ big day,” she said. “You must be looking forward to it.”
“On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”
Emily drew back, propping herself on one elbow in the dim light coming in from the street. “My father was always saying that,” she said. “What does it mean?”
Julian was often surprised at what his wife did not know, but of course she was not old enough to remember W. C. Fields. He said, “Those are the words W. C. Fields said he wanted on his gravestone. Where he is, it’s even deader than it is in Philadelphia. Get it?”
“Oh. Is Philadelphia dead?” Emily’s family came from there.
“There are lots of jokes that say so.”
“Tell me another.”
“All right, but just one. When Edward the Seventh was Prince of Wales, he visited there and was wined and dined by the local upper crust. Afterward he said, ‘Philadelphia is full of Scrapples, and they all eat Biddle for breakfast.’ ”
Emily received this story with exaggerated solemnity. “Gee,” she said, “do you know any more?”
She was in an excellent mood after the party. She loved company; she had talked to her dead grandmother in pig Latin; Hammett had been discomfited by Zarah; and seeing Zarah always made her happy. Now that she had finished her chapter, she wanted to talk for a while—put the party to bed, too—before she slept. “Anyway,” she said, “Manal made a believer of him tonight.”
Longing for sleep and knowing that he would have none if he started thinking about Hammett, Julian patted her warm bare bottom. “Nobody has to make a believer out of Archimedes,” he said. “He’s the original of the type. Now go to sleep.”
11
Hammett, who lived by night because he preferred to be alone, spent the hours between midnight and dawn on the telephone. Those who knew him were accustomed to being awakened in the small hours of the morning by a collect call from “Professor Good,” his telephone name. Because most such people were former students of his, they were flattered to hear from him and glad to pay the reversed charges, even though he sometimes talked for hours if the issue was important to him.
On this night, all his calls were brief. He told everyone the same thing, in the same words: “Hello,———? Please listen to what I’m going to say, then just hang up. I can’t chat or answer any questions tonight. I’m calling to tell you something you ought to know before the rest of the world finds out about it. Tomorrow morning the President is going to announce my appointment to replace Maxson Goodrich on the Supreme Court. I’ve agreed to drink this spongeful of vinegar even though I know it means going through hell. The other side is going to go crazy when they hear this. They’ll come after me like they’ve never come after anyone before. I’m not worried because I have nothing to worry about, but I just wanted to call before I jump into the fishbowl with the sharks. Your friendship means a lot to me. I just wanted you to know that. So do the things we both believe in. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this—and neither would Frosty. He’s taking a fantastic risk for the Cause on this one, not to mention his own fate and the future of the whole Cause.”
Beginning with the preeminent Patrick Graham, whom he had known at Yale as a fellow undergraduate, Hammett rang journalists first, then a long list of lawyers who worked for federal agencies and congressional committees, and finally the large network of Yale Law School graduates who labored as lobbyists or legal advisers for law firms and the dozens of Washington-based pressure groups that were devoted to promoting progressive causes. These were Hammett’s shock troops, a network of fighters bound to him by his teachings and by a carefully designed system of irresistible rewards.
Hammett was a believer in B. F. Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning, which holds that any organism will naturally repeat behavior when it is reinforced by properly designed rewards. By “organism” Skinner meant any sentient being, from pigeons to members of the I.Q. Elite. Pigeons, for example, were conditioned by his methods to guide nuclear missiles to a target by inducing them to peck an electronic switch in response to a certain radar picture. The bird was instantaneously rewarded with something to eat every time its beak struck the right button in response to the correct image. The objective of operant conditioning is not to “cure” or “correct” negative behavior or to instill unnatural behavior, nor does punishment play any part in the system. Its objective, rather, is to reinforce an already existing tendency or instinct to behave in a certain way by rewarding the organism in such a way that it associates the reward with the behavior. Soon the organism develops such a craving for the reward that it will invariably behave in the way that produces it.
Men and women, though capable of far more complex behavior than pigeons in response to much more subtle stimuli, will nevertheless behave in the same predictable fashion in response to a well-designed program of stimulus and reward. Hammett was interested in reinforcing a certain kind of political behavior, based on a system of beliefs that had already been instilled in hi
s subjects by earlier teachers. His predecessors had created a tribe of young believers by bestowing such irresistible rewards as personal encouragement and praise, higher grades than were strictly deserved, honors, prizes, scholarships, recommendations for graduate school, and so on. Hammett built on this foundation by offering a higher order of rewards. These included knowledge of secrets and the trust this implies, praise, recognition, power, and the psychic support of a like-minded tribe—and, of course, side benefits in which Hammett himself was not interested, chiefly sex and money. By his teaching he gave his pupils a purpose in life: the reinvention of society, and, by exercising his influence to get them jobs in the right places, he made it possible for them to fulfill that life purpose—or at least to have the illusion that they were doing so. In short, he taught them to want a certain reward, self-esteem, and then gave it to them in return for Shelleyan good works. This was the ultimate Skinnerian result.
From an early age Hammett had wanted to change the world, and he had always realized that it could only be changed piecemeal, according to a systematic plan. A frontal assault on the Establishment could never succeed. It must be conquered camp by camp—first academia, where minds were formed; then the news media, the churches, and the arts, which transmitted the orthodoxy to lesser minds; then a whole new apparatus of special interest groups to bring irresistible pressure on the government in concert with all of the above; then, in the Year Z, the whole world.
Above all, this required endurance. From his grandfather Hammett had learned to think like a man surrounded by enemies, and to believe in the treachery of all who ruled over others with money and laws. These were infinitely stimulating habits of the mind. Gika Mavromikháli had told him how Romans, Franks, Venetians, Turks, and their slaves the Albanians had all tried to subdue the Maniátes in their mountain fastness and had all failed in their turn, the Turks after nearly five hundred years of occupation. He told the boy how Christian hated Muslim, how family hated family, how brother hated brother and cousin cousin; how compáre, as people who had the same godfather were called, hated compáre, and how families and parts of families would declare war on one another by proclaiming it in the streets, and would then kill one another from ambush, or in clashes in the streets, or kill women by gunfire or torture and be killed by them by the same means, and when they won the war, how the victors would pull down the houses of the vanquished enemy, scattering the stones, burning the roof beams, and turning those who survived the massacre into the hills to plot revenge, for the balance of death was never perfect. Any means of killing an enemy for revenge was acceptable. A man waiting to avenge the death of a relative would not eat meat or shave until he had killed his man; by the time Hammett knew Gika, the patriarch’s magnificent white mustakia hung down to his breastbone.
“They tried for two thousand years to starve us out, so we learned to live without eating, they tried to turn families into spies and traitors, so we learned to live without trust, they corrupted the priests, so we learned to live without prayer,” said Gika. Archimedes was Gika’s only hope for the continuation of the struggle of the Maniátes to overcome the outsiders who had been trying to wipe them out for so many centuries. “Remember, three things make a Maniáte strong: hatred, fasting, and revenge,” the old man told Archimedes. “When I die, you will be alone. Trust no one. Make the world safe for yourself, just one Maniáte among all the thousands who have been oppressed. Rise above our enemies, who are everyone and everywhere, and I will be with you at the head of an army of ghosts.”
Later on, as an undergraduate at Yale, Archimedes had come into contact with the driving political idea of the twentieth century, that everything is personal and that nothing in the visible world is what it seems to be. He understood that the world’s greatest minds—Pasteur in medicine, Einstein in physics, Freud in psychology, Marx in economics, Mao in warfare and politics—had validated his grandfather’s teachings, though the old man had known nothing of books. It was because of his grandfather that Hammett was sympathetic to terrorists even though most of them were Muslims and therefore the ancient enemies of the Maniátes. He understood their impatience—which was in reality an inchoate rage produced by centuries of being lied to, starved, and punished for nothing—as no one but the child of many generations of the oppressed, conquered, and humiliated can understand it. “Every fighter must find his own replacement or else the war will end when he dies,” Gika told the boy on his deathbed. “You are the me that I was when I was young, and you must someday be the me they would not let me be.”
To achieve this forbidden personhood, to pay back his grandfather’s oppressors, was Hammett’s purpose in life, and though he concealed it from the world, there was nothing subconscious about his ambition. Never a day went by that he did not remember the lessons his grandfather had taught him. After the old man died, he had studied under some of the finest teachers in America, but in Hammett’s mind the wisest man he had ever known was Gika Mavromikháli, who could neither read nor write nor count to any number above twelve, the largest sum that could be reckoned by touching the joints of the fingers of one hand with the tip of the thumb.
The first prophetic proof of the soundness of what Hammett called “the theory of nakedness,” which was the key to all his grandfather’s teachings, was his own election to the Shelley Society. Six-Eight, the senior who tapped him, had made friends with him the year before, and Hammett had poured out his heart to him. The other man, born to wealth, was greatly impressed by Hammett’s hatred of injustice, by his disillusion with the established order, and by his apparent intelligence. Actually his I.Q. as recorded in his admissions file was only 115, barely higher than normal, but his verbal brilliance, his passion, and a peculiar mental gift that enabled him to store and recall verbatim great swatches of everything that he read or heard made him seem much smarter than was indicated by the usual standards of measurement. Of course, there are many different kinds of intelligence, and Hammett’s, formed and perfected by centuries of interbreeding among the Maniates, who depended on memory for everything, probably could not be measured by any test developed by oppressors.
Six-Eight made it plain to Hammett that he had been chosen for what he was, because the Shelleyans thought it was essential to have people like him inside the perimeter of the privileged classes. “You must be our conscience,” Six-Eight had said. “Never be tempted to be like us; we’re the ones who should try to be like you.”
Listening to this unmanly speech by a rich man’s spoiled son, Hammett had thought, Grandfather, they are so weak! But he knew that Gika Mavromikháli, killer of Turks, would have replied, “No, they are just washing your feet for the sake of their own souls. Beware the enemy when he pretends to be humble.”
And of course the old man would have been quite right. The Shelleyans might treat him like a compáre—after all, they were motivated by some romantic high-minded idea of being the godsons of Shelley. But Hammett knew that in the eyes of Six-Eight and the others, he was in reality a talking animal, an exotic pet, a trophy, no more. But he was inside the tent of the enemy, and he knew himself to be better loved, in a way, by all who lived inside those walls than they loved their own kind.
12
By morning, as he arrived on the dot of seven forty-five for his breakfast with Sam Clark and the progressive members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hammett was once again in good spirits.
“Ready to go into the lion’s den?” Clark asked him.
Beneath a miasma of shaving lotion and toothpaste, the Majority Leader’s breath smelled of last night’s bourbon and cigar smoke. As a vegetarian and teetotaler, Hammett was sensitive to such aromas. He knew from his reading that Baluba tribesmen had thought that the first American missionaries to arrive in Katanga were the awakened dead because they bathed every day with soap and did not smell of sweat and the other pungent odors given off by people living in a natural state. In his own time and place, Hammett had the opposite problem; most people smelled too strong
ly of life for his comfort.
“You haven’t got a hell of a lot to worry about from this crowd,” Clark was saying. “They all know and love you.”
Hammett was not amused. What Clark said was true up to a point. Hammett had often testified before the Judiciary Committee on questions of terrorism and the legal rights of people who committed atrocities as an expression of political or religious faith—or, as was often the case, a combination of both. But, as was true of everything that involved televised proceedings, there was a strong element of playacting in all this. Neither Hammett nor the senators could behave before the American public in an entirely natural way.
“Just the same, I’m a little nervous,” Hammett said. “The President made me that way last night.”
“Forget Frosty; he’s just an old jock who likes to see people squirm,” Clark said. “You’ve always been a good witness.”
“Any advice on how to be a better one?”
Clark looked at him tiredly. “Just do what you’ve always done, Archimedes. Take the Constitution as your text and make like Portia about how mercy is a gentle rain from heaven. We like that kind of bullshit up here, especially the part about it falling on the just and the unjust.”
Hammett detected a note of ridicule. “You suspect me of hypocrisy?”
“Of course not,” Clark said. “Everyone knows you mean every word you say.”
Again Hammett recognized that Clark did not like him or trust him, but he also knew that there was truth in what he said. Despite Lockwood’s dire warnings, he had little to fear from the confirmation process. Fair-minded members, and especially the committee chairman, Baxter T. “Buzzer” Busby, an Old Blue windmill guard who was so called because his last-second set shot from the centerline had beaten Harvard in the long-ago 1950s, had always treated him gently. There were reasons for this that only Hammett knew. Five of the calls he had made the night before had been to lawyers on the committee staff who were former students of his. These included the chief counsel, a brilliant graduate of Yale Law School whom Hammett had recommended for his job through the good offices of the Shelley Society. He did not know the details of how the appointment had been engineered; he had simply made a call in the name of the Poet and it had happened.
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