Lucky Bastard (26 page)

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.

Just the same, like the insecure and watchful bride that she was, Morgan called Jack many times a day at unpredictable times. In business hours she found him always with Danny. From nine to five, the friends studied together for the bar examination. Danny knew the law cold. He had found in it something that was almost as natural to him as sports had been. He loved the language of the law, its precision, its simplicity, its magisterial finality. Besides, memorizing codes and references had provided Danny with an escape from memories of combat.

In their bar exam study sessions, Danny was the tutor, Jack the learner. Jack, who had never wanted to be a lawyer, had learned only enough at Harvard to get him through exams that were generally graded by professors who wanted him to succeed. But Jack was nothing if not a quick study, and when the friends took the bar exam it was Jack who got the much higher mark, just as he had done on the law school admission exam and every other exam they had ever taken together. This outcome confirmed what Danny had always believed, that Jack was the smart one. And the lucky one.

He said, “Last week you didn't know shit, and now you finish in the top five percent?”

“Jes' lucky, I guess,” Jack replied. “I've already forgotten half the answers. But I've got you, pal.”

In high school, if Jack aced a math test after strenuous studying, he would forget all the theorems and equations soon afterward. There is no algebra in real life, he would tell Danny. No chemistry, no geometry. Just the green and the pink, moola and pussy, the more you had the more you got. Now, in their last hours as students, they sat around between study sessions, eating a large combo pizza for lunch and drinking Coca-Cola and Budweiser and recalling these good old jokes. Laughing. Danny had not been so happy in years.

In the evening, Morgan found Jack at home less often. He went to the movies, he told her. Walked around. Through his senator he was in touch with the local political establishment. He was getting to know them: drinks after work, gossip, skull sessions, sometimes dinner in a steak house with hundred-dollar bills flashing. But was that really all he was up to after dark? Morgan could never be sure. No sexual partners had yet been lined up for him in Columbus, and he never approached Morgan for relief. They slept in separate rooms, and he had never so much as tried the doorknob in the night—grounds for suspicion in itself, as she herself was often tempted to slip down the hall. Jack could not live without sex. Jack being Jack, that could mean only one thing: He was providing for his own needs.

Sex was not the only thing missing from their domestic life. Morgan would not cook as a matter of feminist principle and probably could not have learned how even if Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov himself had ordered her to report to the Cordon Bleu in Paris in the name of the Party to master the omelet and
tripe à la mode de Caen.
The bungalow was a shambles of unmade beds, unwashed clothes; the refrigerator was empty. When Morgan did come home, she would bring a pizza—plain cheese or with mushrooms. Then as afterward she and Jack lived on pizza except at breakfast. Jack ate jelly donuts in the morning; Morgan, nothing but coffee.

Morgan and Danny saw little of each other. Even limited to glimpses, she recognized his charm. This made her even more wary of falling into the tiger trap of an incorrect friendship. When sitting down, as she usually saw him, Danny looked quite normal. But when he stood up and reached for his crutch, gripping the edge of the table with whitened knuckles, Morgan saw him as she imagined him to have been in Vietnam, reaching for his diabolical M-16 before firing a burst of tumbling bullets designed to mutilate and dismember freedom fighters.

Cindy's name was never uttered by either of the men. In her preoccupation with a growing circle of post-Barbie women, Morgan had all but forgotten that she even existed.

4
At home, however, Danny discussed Jack with Cindy. The conversations were always marked by anger. In Cindy's mind, the partnership between Jack and Danny represented betrayal, and the way in which they had planned it, deceit.

“How could you have done this behind my back?” she demanded.

“I didn't do it behind your back,” Danny replied. “Ten minutes after his phone call, I told you the whole deal.”

“
After
the phone call, without asking my opinion. When did you two first talk about going into practice together?”

“After his grandmother's funeral.”

“That was three years ago. Why didn't you tell me then?”

“Why upset you?”

“Then you knew it would upset me?”

“Cindy, it was just talk. Why would Jack want to practice law in Ohio with me if he had a degree from Harvard? He could write his own ticket in New York or Washington. I was as surprised as you when he went through with it.”

“That I doubt,” Cindy said. “But let's just look at this for a minute. When exactly did Jack accept this offer from Whiplash, Kickback, and Backscratch?”

Cindy was not trying to be funny; this play on words was her real opinion of the practices of the famous Washington firm, run by liberals for liberals, that Jack had been invited to join. Danny did not smile. He said, “I didn't ask.”

“Recently, would you say? Like maybe in the last three or four months when the big-time firms usually visit the law schools looking for the real shits in the class?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Okay. So at the time Jack didn't want to practice law in Ohio with his old pal Danny. Is that a reasonable assumption?”

“I guess so.”

“And then he changed his mind and all of a sudden he can't wait to move to Columbus and hang out his shingle with his old high school buddy. So what happened?”