Lucky Bastard (34 page)

Morgan clapped a hand over her mouth in the closest thing she could manage to girlish confusion. “Oh dear!” she cried. “What have I said?”

“Don't worry, Morgan,” said the old lady. “Believe me, you've done your husband no harm with the voters.”

3
As attorney general, Jack traveled to every corner of Ohio, speaking at bar association meetings, police conventions, Kiwanis and Rotary and Knights of Columbus luncheons, union conventions, high school assemblies, college audiences—any platform would do, as long as it gave him exposure to an audience, a chance to charm civic leaders, and a cameo appearance on the local news. At first his public affairs assistant, a hefty and very plain middle-aged woman handpicked by Morgan (as was all the rest of his female staff), spent nearly every minute of every day offering his services as a public speaker. But soon his reputation as a spellbinding performer and charming dinner guest spread throughout the state, and he began to receive more invitations than he could accept. A Columbus station offered him a weekly call-in show, then a novelty in broadcasting. Jack loved to talk to strangers, loved to give advice, and his delight in being on the air was obvious to all. The bizarre personal lives of the callers soon attracted a large audience, and the show's time slot was switched to late afternoon so that commuters could listen to it on their way home from work. Jack's program was soon syndicated all over Ohio, and later in much of the Midwest.

Meanwhile, as he had promised, Jack pounded on his signature issue: organized crime. Soon his remorseless pursuit of mafiosi encompassed the entire state. A coordinated police raid in fifteen cities, organized by Jack, swooped down on mobsters. Arrests were made, indictments were brought, a few more minor Mafia soldiers, and even a capo or two, were imprisoned.

For all his passion to stamp out crime and evil, Jack almost never mentioned illegal drugs, even though these were available to almost every schoolchild in the state. In part this was because illegal drugs were the eucharist of his core constituency, the radical left, which regarded any attack on mind-altering substances as a fascist attack on their constitutional rights of privacy and free expression. Mostly, however, Jack left drugs alone because Peter had given strict and specific orders that Jack was to stay away from this issue.

Morgan asked for Peter's rationale. I told her, accurately as far as it
went, that our chief believed that the traffic in drugs was an important weapon against
capitalism—perhaps even the decisive weapon. Drugs weakened the workforce, undermined the
moral order, demonstrated the inefficiency and corruptibility of the police apparatus, and drained
money out of the economy. These funds—stolen, in effect, from the U.S. Treasury—went
straight back to the suffering masses of the Third World, in many cases in the form of arms and
ammunition for wars of liberation and terrorism. Money spent for drugs by Americans should be
regarded as taxes voluntarily paid to the world revolution.

Needless to say, all this made perfect sense to Morgan, as it did to most of her friends when she passed it on as revealed truth. And in fact, the issue of “taxation” was, as we know, Peter's chief reason for wishing to leave the drug runners in peace. It gave him a way to pay for operations without necessarily letting the Moscow bureaucracy know what those operations were all about. Or what his own true purposes were. As we will see, he also had other reasons that only his own exquisite mind could have conceived. These reasons, imaginative and farseeing even by Peter's standards, he did not confide to me, even when they directly affected the operations with which he entrusted me.

Jack followed orders and laid off drugs without demur and, when questioned about the omission, nimbly defended it in his most sincere altar-boy manner. “Drugs are part of a pattern of crime that includes every other kind of vice and viciousness,” he would say to skeptics who pointed out his silence on an issue that was becoming more serious by the day. “Our objective must be to attack and defeat crime as a whole—cut the head off the snake and kill it, not chop off little chunks of the tail until we get to the head. Because if we do that we'll never get there. It can grow a new tail faster than we can snip it off.”

Audiences, especially young ones and progressive ones, applauded this vivid metaphor, although—or maybe because—it was, like all metaphors, a way of describing something by calling it something that it was not.

If Jack was careful about coming out too openly for the issues closest to the interests and collective emotions of his most loyal friends, the radicals—well, they understood that he could not reveal his true opinions in a bourgeois democracy and hope to be elected to the higher offices where he would really be able to do them some good. So they bided their time.

By the end of his first term Jack was so popular a public figure, and had been so effective in cutting the state's revenues without resorting to such irksome democratic procedures as legislative debate and decision, that he had begun to frighten friends of the governor—contributors to the party, pillars of the establishment who were made nervous by an activist as the chief law enforcement officer of the state. The governor drew him aside and asked whether he might be available, at the end of his term, for the relatively powerless and harmless post of lieutenant governor.

“You're asking me to step back again?” Jack said.

“No,” said the governor, who had learned his lesson on that one. “I'm inviting you to move up. Succeed me. Be the next governor of this state.”

Jack saw through this clumsy ploy. But on the other hand, the governorship was exactly the launching platform he needed for his run for the presidency. He said yes to the governor without even consulting us. For once, Morgan approved of his impetuosity. She thought that the attorney generalship was dangerous. Jack was exposing himself too recklessly, making too many enemies, inviting too much curiosity. The lieutenant governorship was a good place to hide in plain sight, and that was the essence of the plan for Jack. Besides, approving of Jack's faits accomplis was becoming routine.

4
Morgan had decided that it was time for her and Jack to have a child. Jack himself believed this to be a good idea, and he and Peter had agreed at the outset that fatherhood must someday be arranged for him. American politicians were expected to have children, to be photographed with their little ones, to speak of the future in terms of the safety and well-being and happiness of their own flesh and blood. If Jack was going to move on the governorship, then he must have children too. “One touch of snot makes the whole world kin,” said Morgan, who was in an antic mood. Briefly, looking into her slightly flushed features, which at moments of extreme cunning swelled in a subtle, almost coital way, I wondered if she was not merely suggesting a plausible reason to resume with Jack the active sex life that I believed she strongly missed.

But no. Her plan was far more complex, conspiratorial, and perverse than that—so much so that I knew, the moment I heard it, that it would be irresistible to Peter.

Morgan's entire contribution to the project would be the donation of ova. One of her clients and fellow militants, a medical researcher at Ohio State, was working in an experimental program of in vitro fertilization. An egg was removed from the prospective mother's womb, then mixed with sperm in a petri dish. The resulting embryo was then implanted in the uterus of the mother, who carried it to term and delivered the baby in the usual way. This method of sexless conception, commonplace today, was in its early laboratory stages then, and it was regarded—at least by Morgan and her feminist friends—as a revolutionary advance in female empowerment because it offered women the possibility of conception without admitting actual living sperm into their bodies.

What appealed to Morgan was this: The donor of the ovum did not even have to gestate her own child. The embryo could be implanted in any woman healthy enough to carry the fetus to term and then be delivered of a living baby. The newborn would be handed over immediately to the biological mother, who for the previous nine months had gone on with the more important activities of her life without the inconveniences and discomforts of pregnancy.

“So what we need,” Morgan told me, “is a healthy young woman who will carry the child, under discipline of course—”

I was amused. “Of course. What sort of discipline?”

“She'll have to eat a proper diet and avoid drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and sex for nine months. And be willing to bear the child without meeting its actual parents or, above all, knowing who they are. And then she must disappear forever.”

I said, “What do you mean by disappear?”

“Go away,” Morgan said. “Far away, back to where she came from. Go on with her life.”

I said nothing.

Morgan went on, “Secrecy is assured at our end. My friend, who is a physician and therefore bound by an unbreachable oath of secrecy in regard to her patients, will retrieve the ovum and mix in the other ingredient. She herself will implant them in the child-bearer—”

I guffawed.

She interrupted herself. “What's so funny?”

I shook my head, wiped my eyes. The lunacy of it. The
solemnity
of it, the invention of an arcane vocabulary understood only by the priestesses of the cult, the treatment of the essentially monstrous as a god-pleasing action—it was all so familiar, yet also so novel. Then I stopped. These little games, these tangled webs, are terribly amusing in the abstract. But oh so different in their human reality, and so incalculable in their consequences.

“Nothing,” I said. “Sometimes you forget that I am merely a peasant, a stranger in this strange land. Go on. I am most interested.”

“You, a peasant? You're ridiculing me.”

“No. Far from it. Continue.”

Morgan examined me in moody, disappointed silence. The worst thing a handler can do is step out of character, reveal that the person the agent knows—infinitely patient, infinitely sympathetic, infinitely stern in the name of the agent's own happiness and success—may not be the whole person.

Fearing that she might not tell me the rest (and then what would I tell Peter?), I said, “Morgan, this is one of your most intriguing ideas. Really Go on.”

Somewhat less confidently, but with her usual concision and nicety of detail, she told me the rest of the plan. It was complex but feasible, as almost any lunacy is feasible if tightly controlled from start to finish.

I said, “One question. The world will assume that you, not the anonymous girl, bore the child?”

“Yes. That's the whole point.”

“How are you going to fake a pregnancy?”

“Quite simple. Put on a little weight, not too much. Get my exercise. Not show too much—lots of women don't. I know one in New York whose best friends never guessed. Near the end, wear a preggie.”

“A what?” I inquired again.

“A preggie. It's a cushion you tuck in your pants. It makes you look pregnant. Actually, a series of cushions, you keep adding padding. It's a sort of post-Pill fad. Everybody fucks, nobody conceives, it's a way to experience the thing, get the look, without actually going through it.”

“American women actually wear these things?”

“Some do. It's like meditation or deep analysis or projecting your consciousness onto Mars. Imagining is being.”

“Are you actually going to imagine you're pregnant or just wear the pillow?”

“What do you think? I'm a Marxist-Leninist, for God's sake, Dmitri.”

“I will consult Peter.”

“Good,” Morgan said. “I've prepared a budget and a rough operational plan.”

To repeat, no project could have been better calculated to appeal to Peter's sense of the outrageous. He provided a nice English-speaking Circassian girl, a Swallow of course, who resembled Morgan enough to deceive the casual eye as long as the two were never seen together. We also provided a midwife to keep an eye on her, a stalwart American Party member long under discipline.

In due course, just as Morgan had described, the Circassian girl was impregnated with one of Morgan's ova, fertilized by one of Jack's sperm. The very first implantation was a success, an omen. After the Circassian missed her second period, the pregnancy was confirmed by a busy Columbus obstetrician, who cared for her—she was using Morgan's original name, Eleanor M. Weatherby—until the end of the eighth month, when she informed him over the phone that she intended to have the child at home. He refused to cooperate. She then went to a female obstetrician who specialized in home deliveries and who had no interest in politics below the abstract level and therefore had no idea who the Adamses were. When the Circassian's labor pains began late one night, she was rushed by the midwife to the Adamses' bungalow. Jack called the doctor, who arrived minutes later.

Jack, attired in surgical gown and mask, assisted at the delivery, holding the Circassian Swallow's hand, helping her breathe and whispering encouragement in her ear as she gasped out the Russian names for the Trinity and howled in the agony that God had promised Eve after the incident of the apple. A child was born.

A son. Followed an instant later by an identical twin who looked as much like Jack as the first comer did. When their eyes were cleaned out, these two little Jacks gazed curiously into the overflowing eyes of their masked and sobbing father, who had never before understood that such unbounded joy was possible to the human heart.

Against all Morgan's instructions, Jack ripped off his mask, revealing himself to the Swallow as his sons suckled for the first and last time at her breasts. Kneeling by the bed, Jack kissed the girl on the lips as if she were, in fact, a beloved wife to whom he owed the ecstasy that gripped him. In a voice broken by emotion, he murmured over and over again, “Thank you.”