Lucky Bastard (55 page)

I am a far less impressive specimen. Besides, I could have come from Morgan. As an assassin. Partial as her knowledge was, such a thing was not beyond Cindy's imagining. Naturally Cindy was suspicious, wary. She did not hide this. She met me herself at the outer door of the office; her secretary had left. We were alone. Nevertheless she seemed perfectly at ease, perfectly unafraid. With another woman I might have suspected a trap: a body wire, a camera in the clock, FBI agents in the next room.

It didn't matter. She led me into the book-lined conference room—neutral ground. We sat across the table from each other. She offered nothing to drink, no small talk.

She said, “Shall we get right down to it?”

“Yes,” I replied. “You will find what I am going to tell you strange. Even unbelievable. I ask you to keep an open mind, to hear me out to the end. Please do not interrupt. When I have finished, I will be glad to answer any question you care to put to me. Is that agreeable?”

“All right,” Cindy said. “But on the condition that I may ask you to leave at any point and you will do so.”

“Agreed.”

I then told her, in short form, everything that I have told you in this memoir. As we went along, I showed her the corroborating evidence I had brought in a large sample case: The Heidelberg photos of Jack, from the first chilly coupling in the rain to the bank robbery. Tapes both audio and video of everything that had ever transpired in Morgan's room, including her assignations with Danny. Tapes of our motel meetings, and of Morgan's trysts with the Georgian. When she saw this man's face, Cindy gasped, her only lapse from detached professional behavior. I presented various other proofs: Photocopies of twenty years of reports by Morgan, receipts for operating funds signed and thumbprinted by both Jack and Morgan. Videos of Jack and Mr. Gee together, taken from far away and therefore silent, but with a transcript provided by a lip-reader.

Through it all, as she watched me undress the monster, she remained a lawyer: unruffled, calm, detached. At the end of it, she did nothing that could be regarded as punctuation, let alone response. No exchange of glances, no outlet of breath, not the slightest shake of the head to indicate incredulity or the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

With steady gaze she said, “Why are you doing this?”

The whole point was to tell her the truth and hope that she could understand it. I said, “Because they have betrayed communism.”

“By selling out to the Chinese?”

“Yes.”

“The Chinese aren't Communists?”

“Not these Chinese.”

Cindy examined me for many moments. Again, no flicker of expression.

At last Cindy said, “All right. Let's go.”

“Where?”

“To the U.S. attorney. Isn't that what you have in mind?”

“Yes. He has a motive to believe all this.”

“Good point,” Cindy said. “But if I were you, I'd think twice before telling Merriwether Street that you're giving up Jack Adams to the legal system in order to save communism.”

2
Although it was nine in the evening, F. Merriwether Street was still at his office, pondering the outcome of the election. It had been a heavy blow to him. He had seen Jack win before with smoke and mirrors. But now the American people in their mystical wisdom had lifted up this sociopath, this liar, this rapist, this hollow man beloved by lunatics and traitors, and made him the most powerful human being in the world. The outcome contradicted everything he had ever believed about the nature of democracy. Jack Adams had perceived what F. Merriwether Street was not even willing to consider, that you did not
have
to fool all of the people all of the time. If you were lucky, you only had to fool 40 percent of the ones who voted. And you only had to do so once.

Street was not the only workaholic still at his post in the federal courthouse. I shivered to walk again down dim odorless corridorspast numbered squares of frosted glass lighted from behind. Who worked behind these opaque windowpanes, at what tasks, with what human consequences? F. Merriwether Street, a minor functionary in a minor city, must have had hundreds of underlings, more than the arch-prosecutor Vyshinsky had needed to carry out the Great Purge for Stalin. Vyshinsky had taught us what could be done with an apparatus like this one. That Americans had made this particular bureaucracy was irrelevant. It was what it was: a blind thing, designed to suspect, to investigate, to operate in secret, to seize, to prosecute, to punish. To divert its attention from criminals to enemies of the leader required only the simplest change in instructions.

After a long walk we came to F. Merriwether Street's large and imposing office. It was decorated with steel engravings of warships, with photographs of Street with every Republican president of his lifetime. He was a child in some of these pictures. The presidents had been friends of his father, his grandfathers. I did not expect to find a happy man behind the U.S. attorney's massive oak desk. I expected agitation, anger; I found numbness.

Street gave me hardly a glance. Without waiting for Cindy to introduce me, he said, “So he won.”

Cindy said, “He sure did.”

“And dumped Danny. Threw him to the wolves.”

“Yes.”

“It's all over. Jack's home free. Danny will be indicted, you know. They'll get him after I go. They'll destroy him to protect Jack. They have to. I've lost the power to help you.”

“We'll see about that,” Cindy said. “Merriwether, this man has something to tell you.”

“About what?”

“About Jack. About Morgan.”

“Why tell me?” Street asked. “I'm a lame duck. No matter what your friend has or thinks he has—and I don't want to see it no matter what it is—I'll be out on the street in three months, and one of Morgan's twisted pinkos will be sitting in this chair. So thank you very much. Save your time.”

“This is now. You're still in that chair. You should take a look at what we have.”

“Why?”

“You'll have to see it to believe it.”

“Ah, a copy of the contract with Mephistopheles?”

A joke? No, not from Merriwether Street.

Cindy said, “As a matter of fact, that's exactly what it is.”

“Really?” said Street. “Then he's brought it to the one place where it's certain to be destroyed if it gets into the files. I won't touch it.” He looked at me for the first time. “Take it away, sir—whatever it is, whoever you are.”

His speech was slurred, his manner derisive. His eyes were red. Had he been weeping, actually weeping? He was not drunk; clearly not. But I was beginning to suspect tranquilizers. He had a certain self-mocking recklessness that comes with the loss of illusions. There was about him the aroma of a priest who has just lost his faith.

Cindy said, “Merriwether, listen to me. This man is a colonel in the Soviet KGB. He was Jack's case officer for twenty years. Morgan's, too. That's the evidence you won't look at.”

“Jack is a traitor?”

“As defined by the Constitution,” Cindy replied. She then showed him everything, item by item, whether he wanted to see it or not.

At the end, F. Merriwether Street raised bushy eyebrows, not in incredulity but as if to say,
Of course.
This was no surprise to him. Nevertheless, he shook his great equine head, emphatically. “Sorry,” he said. “It's still out of the question.”

“Out of the question?” Cindy said. “Please explain why.”

“Gladly,” Street said. “I'm sure that what you tell me is true. It explains everything. Jack was born to sell out America.”

“That's exactly right,” Cindy said. “So why is it out of the question to expose him?”

Street pointed a huge forefinger. “I'll tell you why. No prosecutor ever born in the United States of America would act on this information. No one could. You want me to accuse the president-elect of the United States of being a lifelong secret agent of a foreign power? With a turncoat KGB man as my main witness? And adult videos as evidence? Are you crazy?”

Cindy said, “But Jack and Morgan
are
lifelong traitors. And they've just changed masters in return for a thirty-million-dollar bribe and a plot to destroy the American dollar. That's no adult video. There's a paper trail. There has to be. They've sold the country to the Chinese Communists. We've got the transaction on tape. For God's sake, Merriweather, don't you see what's at stake?”

“God moves in mysterious ways,” Street replied.

Cindy said, “What does God have to do with it?”

“I believe that democracy is God's work,” Street said. “Jack Adams may be exactly what you say he is. But he was elected president by the people, and the people is always right. It's up to them to decide his fate.”

Cindy said, “Merriwether, I want to be sure I understand. You believe it's your patriotic duty to let a traitor, an agent in the pay of a hostile foreign power, become president of the United States even though you have the power to prevent that from happening. Is that what you just told me?”

“You could put it that way,” Street replied. He smiled beatifically, eyes only, like a stunned peasant in the background of an Adoration tableau.

Cindy said, “Do you want to know what I really think? I think you're afraid that all this is just another one of Jack's tricks, and afraid of looking like a fool again.”

“I can't help what you think,” he said. “Of course you could always take what you have to the media. Maybe they'd like an opportunity to catch Jack Adams by the toe.”

Cindy said, “You must be joking.”

He shrugged. “I think God is the one who's joking,” he said.

3
Riding down in the elevator with a stunned and silent Cindy, I felt utterly alone. A matter of choice, I must confess. I felt the cell phone in my pocket. My mind fluttered back to Shanghai—to the old Shanghai of the maid and the civil servant, and to the new one in which they had met as grown-ups. I saw my friend's face again, so greatly changed by suffering and time. Yet after the first moment it seemed unchanged to me, like the face of a beloved wife one has awakened to every day for the lifetime we had, in fact, been apart. Suppose, instead of asking the questions I had asked this woman, I had said, “Will we ever be together again?”

But I did not ask this question, nor would she have known the answer if I had. There was no answer; it had died, like so many youthful secrets before it, in one of Mr. Gee's many interrogation rooms. It was my friend's young beauty, gone but still present, that I saw in Cindy's perfect face.

She said, “Poor Merriwether. The moral is pure Marxist prophecy. In the end the capitalists did sell you people the rope to hang us with.”

I said, “Do you actually think so?”

Her voice was toneless. “Okay, you supply the moral.”

I said, “Okay. ‘It ain't over till it's over.' Yogi Berra.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Cindy said.

But it was a straw to grasp at, so she listened to what I had to say next. In the open air—standing in perfect safety on the sidewalk in front of a building full of federal agents—I told her, in minute detail, about Morgan's brilliant operation against the Latin American guerrilla leader a quarter of a century before.

She listened in calm and unsurprised silence, then said, “You can provide what I would need?”

“Yes, but I'd have to consult a technician,” I said. “It will take roughly twenty-four hours.”

4
On Friday, Jack received Cindy at midnight, in his hideaway office in the governor's mansion.

“This is a surprise,” he said. He took her coat, a mink.

Cindy said, “I wasn't sure you'd be interested.”

“I've always been interested. But why, after all these years?”

Cindy said, “Let's just say power corrupts. You're the alpha male now. Availability is a given.”

Jack was grinning. “I like the way you think.”

Cindy said, “And then, too, I think we owe Morgan and Danny one for the road.”

“Those two really surprised me.”

“Me, too,” Cindy said. “But revenge isn't my only motive. I was more or less unconscious the last time—”

“You mean all that noise was just delirium?”

“That's what I want to check out,” Cindy said.

Jack, never one to delay sweet moments, lifted the short skirt of her clinging dress. She was naked beneath it. He put his hands on the skin of her waist and said, “Hey, you're serious.”

With one hand he dropped his pants, with the other reached into his coat pocket. He slid his hands to her buttocks, thrust his knee between hers, and started to lift.

Cindy felt the Vaseline on his right hand. She resisted. “None of that,” she said. “Last time it was really, really uncomfortable. This time we take off our clothes and do it in bed.”

“I'm putty in your hands,” Jack said.

“I hope not,” Cindy replied, grasping his slippery member.

He pulled up his pants, tucked himself in with some difficulty, and led her upstairs. He had dismissed the Secret Service agents—by now he had made confederates of a few, and embarrassed accomplices of the rest. The mansion seemed to be deserted. At the top of the stairs, Cindy stripped off her dress and shook out her hair. She was wearing nothing but high-heel pumps and a ring on her left hand.

In the governor's bedroom, in the great canopied bed, Cindy took the tube of Vaseline from his hand and said, “Let me.” She was quick about it. As before there was no foreplay, which may have accounted in part for Jack's exceptional endurance. And as before, Cindy's autonomic nervous system took control and delivered pleasures she did not want but could not prevent.

“Wow!” said Jack when it was over. “I think we just set a record.”