Lucky Bastard (18 page)

Peter held up his index finger. “Second, go home.”

Jack said, “To the States?”

“Yes, where else? Third, withdraw from the antiwar movement. Isolate yourself from radicals. Their day is over. But do not alienate them. Someday you will need them. They will always be activists, so they will always be useful.”

Jack nodded, as if Peter had provided him with a profound insight. In fact, he had. Jack was beginning to see a pattern.

“Fourth,” Peter said, raising his ring finger, “do some sort of military service.”

Jack cried, “Military service? Go to
Vietnam?
”

“Of course not Vietnam,” Peter replied. “Join the reserves, the National Guard. The war will soon be over. Go to drill, wear a uniform once a week.”

“What if the unit is called to active service?”

“It won't be. America has lost the war. Fifth, get a temporary job with your senator. Write to him from Heidelberg. He'll be glad to have you back.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes,” Peter said. “I'm sure.” He lifted his other thumb. “Sixth, apply to law school.”

This astonished Jack. The last thing he wanted to be was a lawyer. He said, “Law school? Wait a minute. I can't afford it even if I wanted to go, and I don't.”

Peter said, “All that is irrelevant. The U.S. government is run by lawyers. You must be their equal; it is a matter of credentials. Study. Take the exam. You will do well. Apply to Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Georgetown. Not to Columbia. You will be accepted by one of those schools with a full grant.”

“Which one?”

“You'll know when it happens.”

“And then what?”

“Then, obviously, you go to law school,” Peter said.

“For three years?”

“Yes. Just like a normal person,” Peter said. “One more thing. At a certain moment—this may happen any day or it may not happen for years, but it will happen—a person chosen by me and your other friends will come to you. That person will speak the following words: ‘Welcome to the country of the blind.'”

Jack said, “Ouch.”

“
Yes
, I realize that phrase has certain personal associations,” Peter said. “But that's why it was chosen, to ring a bell. When you hear those words you will know that the person who speaks them comes directly from me. This person will be your friend, and you must do as he or she suggests as if it were I myself who made the suggestion. You must comply, cooperate with this person always, without fail, no matter what the suggestion is. This is the price of friendship.”

Jack, himself a born actor, recognized Peter's behavior for what it was, a performance. He (or so he said later) was offended by it. He himself, after all, was a virtuoso of untruth. Suffering through Peter's deceptions was, for Jack, what watching a spy movie would have been for Peter—a confection that was laughable in its technique, preposterous in its assumptions. To Jack, this spelled weakness.

Peter said, “Do you understand?”

Jack thought,
Better than you know.
He said, “I understand everything you've said to me, Peter, and I appreciate everything you're trying to do for me.”

“‘Try' has nothing to do with it. We will succeed, not try.”

“I believe you. But you left things out. Who exactly are these friends you keep talking about? The KGB?”

Peter's handsome face darkened. He was silent for several heartbeats—eight; Jack counted them.

“That's a stupid and insulting question,” he said at last. “You know what I am, who I am, and what I stand for. I have explained everything. You have accepted.”

“Yes, I have,” Jack said. “It's a deal. On the terms stated. But I'm not sure you're telling me everything, Peter. You can see how difficult that makes things for me. Whatever my opinion of the United States may be, and I told you truly what it is, I'm an American citizen, subject to American laws. My whole future is at stake. I hardly know you. We're in Moscow. And you've made it obvious that I'm at your mercy. All I'm asking is the truth.”

Peter folded his fingers into a fist and gazed at it for a long moment. Then he opened his hand again and said, “Jack, listen carefully. I never lie. The KGB has a name. But what I am, what you are, what we all are together, has no name. It will never have a name. But together, in our lifetimes, we will change the name of everything. Are you now telling me you don't want to be part of that?”

Jack was just as unsmiling as Peter. This was serious business. There was no spark of sympathy in Peter's eye. Jack felt a chill. He
was
in Moscow, under a false identity. All he had with him to prove who he was were his fingerprints. He realized that he could die—now, quickly, in this room, or, if Peter chose to make it slow, elsewhere. But he also realized that he had something that Peter wanted, and wanted badly, or all this would not be happening. Otherwise, Peter would not be dangling carrots and asking him for promises.

Jack said, “I'm not saying I don't want to be part of what you describe. What I want to do, Peter, is trust you. Bear with me. This is a new experience for me.”

“I know that,” Peter said. “As you say, we are in Moscow. I could be shot for talking to you as I have done. But I have talked to you anyway. That was an act of trust. Do you agree?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“I'm glad to hear you say that. Now the question is, Will you reciprocate? For your own good as well as for the good of the work we can do together?”

Jack locked eyes with Peter. After a long moment he said, “Yes. I will.”

“In that case you'll have a wonderful life,” said Peter.

Jack knew that his answer was the equivalent of taking a final vow before joining this secret order that Peter kept talking about but never actually described. The answer had pleased Peter and he let Jack see this. But he did not let Jack see what had pleased him even more: Jack's behavior under stress. It was not only appetite that drove Jack. He had the courage of a lion and the cunning of a Jesuit when his own interests were at stake. He had just forced Peter to admit that he needed Jack more than Jack needed him.

Peter stood up. “Now I'll say goodbye. Your train leaves in two hours. Igor will drive you to the station. KGB flatfoots will follow you. This will be obvious. You are intended to see them. Don't be concerned.”

Peter opened his attaché case and removed Jack's Canadian passport. He handed it to him.

“Use this to leave the Soviet Union and to enter Sweden and Germany. Do not alter it in any way.”

He gave Jack a meaningful look. He gripped his hand. “Jack. We
will
meet again.”

“I hope so,” Jack said.

“In happier circumstances,” Peter said.

He tapped a story on the front page of the
Herald-Tribune.
Jack glanced at it. Manfred's bespectacled face, harshly lit, gazed out of the identity-card photo that accompanied the article. Jack scanned the text: The corpse of a lecturer at Heidelberg University had been found floating in the Neckar River. Police said that there were one hundred bullet wounds in the victim's body, apparently inflicted by a nine-millimeter machine pistol used as a weapon of torture. Every joint of bone had been shattered before a fatal burst was fired into the heart. The Red Army Faction claimed responsibility for what it called the execution of a traitor. Police were investigating possible links between the murder and last week's attempted robbery of a Heidelberg bank by terrorists connected to the Red Army Faction.

By the time Jack finished reading and lifted his eyes, Peter had vanished. The house was deeply silent. Jack thought about Heidelberg, thought about America. He could not picture them; they were things he had read in a book that he had outgrown.

But this! The silence, the absence of clocks, the cold that no furnace could heat, the absence of sensations. He smelled the hand that had held the American money Peter had given him. It was the only thing in this room that had aroma. He breathed the dead air, which seemed incapable of transporting odor, sound, even light.

He rose to his feet and took the first soundless step of his return journey to America.

Peter's Gift

One

1
Just as Peter had promised, doors began opening for Jack Adams soon after he got back to America. Following instructions to the letter, he landed a menial but paying job on the staff of a subcommittee chaired by his senator. Soon afterward, with help of the same sympathetic staff director who had recommended his reemployment, Jack joined a field hospital unit of the U.S. Army reserves as a laboratory technician trainee. Next to leading the riderless horse in a dead president's funeral, this military occupational specialty was the least likely job in the army to require his presence on a battlefield. The only combat soldiers he would ever see would already be wounded and evacuated back to America.

It was summer, and ordinarily Jack would have gone off to an army camp for an abbreviated period of basic training, but because his senator was an important member of committees that approved the Pentagon's budget, this formality was waived. Instead, Jack reported every other Thursday night to Walter Reed Army Hospital, just outside Washington. There he changed out of the jungle-camouflage fatigues he had been issued, put on the pastel pajamas of a technician, and learned how to draw blood and prepare it for laboratory analysis. Most of his teachers were female soldiers who knew exactly why Jack was in the reserves. They treated him coolly, and he quickly understood that sleeping with a draft dodger was, in their culture, as loathsome an act as servicing a GI would be for a Movement chick. Jack regretted this exceedingly. These were working-class girls looking for love. They reminded him of his high school dates, and he felt that, given the opportunity, his old methods would work well with them.

To everyone's surprise, including his own, it turned out that Jack was good at drawing blood. The sequence—sterilizing the skin, wrapping the rubber tourniquet, finding the vein, inserting the needle—required total concentration combined with a deft touch and the ability to regard the arm from which the blood was being drawn as an abstract object rather than a living limb attached to a human being. Jack possessed all of these qualifications, especially the last, in abundance. At first he worked on outpatients who came into the lab, but his natural skill was soon noticed, and he was sent into the wards with a long list of patients who needed blood tests.

Walter Reed was the army's top hospital, where its best doctors worked on its worst cases. Most of the surgical patients were soldiers who had been wounded in particularly dreadful ways. Jack's superiors had not told him what to expect; the horrifying shock of walking into a room filled with amputees, burn cases, blind men, and men whose faces had been obliterated was a rite of initiation. Jack took one look at this gallery of suffering and fled.

Back in the lab, the man in charge of the night shift was depositing drops of blood from a pipette into a tray of tiny glass receptacles.

Jack said, “Motley, I'm sorry, but I can't do this.”

Motley went on with what he was doing. Without looking up, he said, “Can't do what?”

“Draw blood from those guys.”

“What guys?”

“The ones on the surgical floor.”

“Really? Why not?”

“I can't look at them.”

Motley—a kind of sergeant, Jack thought—continued to work steadily with his tray of blood. He did not look at Jack. He said, “I'm not surprised, you yellow-bellied, draft-dodging piece of shit.” Motley had a slight lisp, so the sibilants were quite noticeable.

Jack said, “
What?
”

“You heard me.”

“Okay. But why are you talking to me like this?”

“You want to know why? I'll tell you why. Those men are the way they are because they defended the United States of America against its enemies foreign and domestic and whatsoever. They paid the price you would not pay. They bled for the country while you pissed on the flag. Is that not the situation, Private?”