Palace Council (12 page)

The pastor's eyes flamed behind the comical lenses, and Eddie knew that, liberal or not, this man was every bit as fervent in his beliefs as Wesley Senior was in his. Searching for a way to slow the tumult, Eddie said, “She was speaking metaphorically, of course.”

This the young pastor did not deign to answer. He was toying with one of the drawers. “You are not yet a believer, Eddie. I can tell. Sitting in the church made you uneasy. Sitting here and listening to talk of God and the devil makes you more so. But you do not have to believe in the devil for him to get to you.”

Eddie looked at him. “Do you have to believe in God for Him to get to you?”

“When God wants you, you cannot keep Him at bay.”

“And what does God want of me right now? That I go back to New York and forget about what happened?” A thought occurred to him. “And why did Mrs. Castle mention my sister? How did she know anything happened to Junie?”

The pastor opened the drawer and pulled out an envelope.

A pink envelope.

While Eddie stared, the pastor talked. “This has been in my possession for three years, Mr. Wesley. Leona found it before she left New York. She entrusted it to me to keep it away from prying eyes.” He smiled. “There has been a lot of prying, Eddie. Not just what Dave Witter mentioned. Three break-ins at her home. And a couple of visitors, like you, asking questions. All of this in addition to the FBI, of course.”

Eddie was staring at the envelope. “She lied to the FBI?”

The pastor shook his head—not in rejection but in refusal. Whether Leona had lied was no business of Eddie's.

Eddie acknowledged the point. “So, why me? If Mrs. Castle would not turn over this envelope to the federal government or any of the other visitors, and if she knew enough not to keep it at home, where it might be stolen, why give it to me?”

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Wesley, I am not entirely sure. All I can tell you is that when she received your note, Mrs. Castle wanted to make sure that you are the same Edward Wesley who lives in Harlem and writes novels.”

Bewildered, Eddie accepted the envelope from the pastor's outstretched hand. “Do you know what's in here?”

The pastor shook his head. “I haven't opened it. I cannot say whether Leona has.”

Back at the rooming house, Eddie set the envelope on the dresser and tried to decide whether to open it. He already knew what he would find, and the knowledge depressed him. Photographs, just as Goldfus/Abel had said. They would be gobbledygook that would translate to equations and technical diagrams he could not have fathomed on his best day. The pink envelope was numbered seventeen, and Eddie was willing to bet that there were sixteen before it. Sixteen what? Well, interpreting the diagrams might require a genius, but a baby could work out the logistics. Joseph Belt, enticed by Phil Castle, stole the information from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He slipped it to Castle, who somehow transferred it in bits and pieces to Emil Goldfus.

What kind of information? From what Eddie had ascertained, the scientists at Los Alamos had one major purpose.

Building hydrogen bombs.

Eddie stood up and strode around the threadbare carpet. He imagined Junie marching beside him, whispering, laughing, counseling. He explained the problem. The contents of the envelope would prove that J. Edgar Hoover had been right that eerie night in Washington, and that Bernard Stilwell had been right that foggy afternoon in Harlem: that Joseph Belt, rigid, disdainful Joseph Belt, the only Negro physicist in Los Alamos, had been a traitor.

“I don't want to know,” he said.

Junie said that was too bad. He had no choice.

“That's easy for you to say. You're not really here.”

Junie said what she always said, that he was a little brat.

Eddie stopped pacing. His face was warm. He might have burned the envelope, contents unread, but for the memory of Stilwell, asking what he could offer in return for the Bureau's interest in Junie's disappearance. He needed a chip to stay in the game, and Philmont Castle's legacy was the only chip he had left.

So he opened the envelope and drew out the contents and knew at once that everybody had been had—the Bureau, Colonel Abel, everybody.

The contents had nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

First Eddie withdrew a note card and, pinned to it, what appeared to be a seed pod, the kind of cockle that used to prickle his legs when, as a child, he would wander the high grass along the dunes of Martha's Vineyard. On the card were four words, in block capitals:

         

HIS WIFE HAS IT

         

Eddie put the pod aside. His wife. Whose wife? Castle's? But he held in his hands what her husband had left. And the rest of what? Meaning eluded him, no matter how he tried to conjure it.

Eddie pulled out a second card, similar to the first, with more words in block capitals, written in a slightly different hand:

         

NOT AS IN A TRAGIC AGE

         

Curioser and curioser. The cards surely constituted a message, but Eddie doubted that he was the intended recipient. Were they to be read together? If so, in what order? Were the references to the Bible, perhaps? To a play he should recognize? He studied the cards as if hoping to unlock the secrets of the universe.

But in another sense, sitting in the colored rooming house in Charleston, fiddling with the seed pod as dusk drew in the day, Eddie Wesley was only teasing himself. The treasure trove was the cache of letters snuggling just beneath, all but one undated. He picked up the first:

Dear P:

You were right. I had a wonderful time. I knew it was important, but I had no idea it would be so much fun. Thank you so much for inviting me. I hope you-know-who doesn't find out.

A second:

Dear P:

Maybe what you say is true. Maybe there is a way to do it without getting caught. But do you know what I have realized? Not all of us are meant to be happy. Sometimes we are drawn into things we never expected, and we enter them with joy, but continue them out of ennui. Do not misunderstand. I am not ready to quit. Not even close. But I get the feeling that you are.

A third:

Dear P:

Of course I understand your position. You have a wife and a family. But it seems to me that what you are proposing requires a commitment. I see no reason that I should be the one who stays true while you flit back and forth between one commitment and the other. You have to choose, P. Or else the choice might be made for you.

And the last, the only one with a date—late January of 1955, three weeks before Philmont Castle was killed:

Dear P:

You have made your decision. Now I must make mine. You say that you are acting out of love. So am I. The difference is that you are willing to long and lament. I am not. I have always been a woman of action. Probably you will not see me again. Never make the mistake of believing that giving a gift entitles you to anything.

An affair, Eddie realized dully, flipping back to the start. Nothing more. Whatever the meaning of the cards or the seed pod, this much was clear: the late Philmont Castle had been having an extramarital affair, and Leona wanted Eddie to have the proof. Eddie and only Eddie. He supposed he should examine the letters again, in case he had missed anything, but could not bear the pain. He considered burning them in the grate. Instead, he refolded them, returned them to their envelope, and consigned the envelope to his briefcase. He left the next morning for the long drive north, having slept poorly, peering into the gray darkness, conjuring possibilities, explanations, theories—wondering about the lies. He could never share the envelope with Stilwell. He possessed no bargaining chip after all.

The letters were from Junie.

PART II

New York/Washington
1958–1959

CHAPTER
19

On the Difficulty of Progress Without Aurelia

(I)

A
ND SO THE TWO MYSTERIES,
the murder of Phil Castle and the disappearance of June Cranch Wesley, were linked. Driving north, Eddie admitted to himself that he had been wrong. If his vanished sister and the late investor had been having an affair, he might indeed need to know what had happened to the one in order to figure out what had happened to the other. The lawyer had been involved with nineteen other men—the Twenty—in something called the Project. If he found the Project, perhaps he would find his sister. Upon his return to Harlem, he would apologize to Aurelia, and ask what she had learned about the Cross of Saint Peter, and why Kevin Garland possessed one.

Except that Aurelia refused to see him.

There was, Eddie supposed, nothing surprising in this. She was twice a mother, and married—to a Garland, no less—and dallying with a former lover could only risk upsetting the life she had been raised to lead. Besides, the last time they had been together, when Aurie, at what cost he could only guess, had walked with him in the clear light of day, he had been rude to her. No. No. He refused to fool himself. He had been not rude, but mean. He had hurt the woman he loved, and now had to woo her afresh, but lacked the means to do so. He could not send flowers or even flowery notes to the Garland apartment at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, and Aurie was currently on leave from the
Sentinel,
ruling out the possibility of his hanging around the entrance and hoping for his chance, a course that would in any case very likely force to public attention that which she needed most to hide.

Very well. He would bide his time.

He returned to the salons, and everybody remarked on the changes. The wit was back, the flattery, the charm, the fire, the almost ferocious willingness to suffer disagreement, to argue into the night over marvelously abstruse questions—all the qualities that made him a sought-after guest. In the fall of 1958, his second novel was published,
Blandishment,
the story of a black youth who is radicalized as he works his way through a New England college as a waiter, the semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel that editors used to say everybody published second, after working out, in the first novel, fantasies of lives unlived. The critics liked it less than
Field's Unified Theory,
but the public liked it more, perhaps because the reader was not required to wade through all that physics, or, for that matter, to admit that a book by a Negro author might challenge not just the conscience but the intellect. Eddie accepted the accolades and the sudden fortune with a quietly impressive grace. As one of his biographers would later note, it was as though he was trying, through force of will, to be the man Harlem expected him to be. He wrote speeches for politicians, chief among them Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts: a favor for the Ambassador. It never occurred to the Czarinas that the Kennedy people had come to Eddie. They were unaware that Eddie owed the Ambassador any favors. They assumed that Wesley Senior, known to be close to the Kennedys, had finagled his son the job. Nevertheless, the connection opened the doors of still more salons. At Harlem parties, asked about Kennedy's chances to win the presidency the year after next, Eddie frowned importantly. And he attended parties aplenty, downtown as well as in Harlem. He spoke on college campuses. He even dated, for a little while, the suitable daughter of one of the senior clans, a blushing, virginal creature called Cynda, who even after their breakup extolled, starry-eyed, his gentleness. He used to recite medieval love poems for her, said Cynda, not mentioning whether the recitations occurred in bed. And yet she sensed in him, Cynda told her girlfriends, a secret and quite different self beneath the happy surface. An angry self? they asked. A jealous self? For they had heard all the rumors. Not angry, said Cynda, marveling. Determined. Devoted.

But devoted to
what
? the girlfriends asked, unable to restrain themselves. Devoted to
whom
? To
Aurelia
?

To a larger cause, sniffed Cynda, very satisfied. To love. To his sister.

But his sister's
dead,
cried the girlfriends, thrilling to the notion of a morbid obsession at the famous writer's secret center. (After all, it was not as if he had dated one of
them.
)

He doesn't believe it, Cynda answered. He thinks she's alive. He has all these notebooks and files and thingies. He sits up half the night going through them. He's always calling people on the phone about her and writing on his yellow pads.

And how do
you
know what he does half the night? the girlfriends demanded. Shame on you! they giggled, swooning.

He's a good man, was all Cynda would say, smiling complacently. I wish I had a brother like him. She did not mention how he would spend hours at his desk, neither working nor relaxing, but frowning at a tiny seed pod in the middle of his blotter.

(II)

A
S FOR
E
DDIE,
he found himself suddenly short of confidants. Aurelia was inaccessible. Gary was busy balancing protest marches, visits to Erebeth at Quonset Point to be trained for his new role in life, and visits to Mona in Chicago to keep in touch with his old one. Craving forward motion, Eddie dropped in on the Columbia philologist he had met at the party two years ago on Central Park South. The philologist introduced him to a biologist, who in turn referred him to a specialist in deciduous trees, who examined Castle's prickly seed pod and told Eddie at a glance that it had fallen from a London plane tree, a variety, unfortunately, as common as cheese in the New York area, and, indeed, all across North America. It was an unusually sturdy tree, she explained, able to resist many forms of blight, a feature that helped explain its popularity. Eddie decided that it was the fact of the seed pod, not its species, that carried whatever message the lawyer had been trying to convey. At such a moment he craved Aurelia, not only because she lifted his spirit but because she served as so excellent a foil for his ideas, and was always buzzing with ideas of her own. And because she worked crossword puzzles. It was at this time that Cynda observed him sitting up in his apartment, twisting the pod this way and that, hoping to work out its meaning.

If you need to find her, then find her.

Eddie had another thought. Hoover had shown him a photograph of Langston Hughes. Just routine harassment, or did the Bureau know something? Eddie dropped in on the great man at his townhouse on 127th Street. Hughes, as it happened, was rather busy, trying to persuade the National Institute of Arts and Letters to deny William Faulkner its Gold Medal for Literature. Over drinks, Hughes gave Eddie an earful about the man he called “the leading Southern cracker novelist.” When Eddie had the chance to get a word in edgewise, he explained, shading his sources a bit, that he now believed his sister's disappearance might be related to the murder of Phil Castle.

Hughes was amused. “Do you think Junie killed him?”

No, no, said Eddie, coloring, that was not the point at all. He thought there might have been a connection between the two while the lawyer was still alive.

“You're saying they had a fling?”

“I'm saying they had a connection.”

Hughes thought this over. They were sitting in his upstairs office. The place was a mess: file cabinets and bookshelves heaped with manuscript pages. Hughes always seemed to have about twelve projects going. He was a round, solid, encouraging man, who had helped an entire generation of Negro writers get their start before anybody had heard of Eddie Wesley. He drank, he smoked, he told stories, he was widely loved, and the writing was all he had. No one ever discovered what social life, if any, Hughes enjoyed. Perhaps the books and stories and plays were his true love. His books and his plays—and Harlem. Langston Hughes, who could have lived wherever he liked, had actually moved from Sugar Hill to the Valley. The Czarinas had never heard of such a thing.

“I knew Phil Castle a bit,” Hughes said finally. “Have I mentioned that? Just the last six months of his life. We met at Matty Garland's place up in Westchester. This would have been the summer of 1954, because
Brown
had just been decided. He turned out to be a huge fan of serious literature. We got to talking about this and that, and, well, he asked if we could get together sometime. He said he had an idea I might be able to help with.” The writer smiled. “Usually that means somebody wants a political endorsement. I don't do many of those, as you know. I started to hem and haw, and Castle seemed to read my mind. He did not want anything public from me. He wanted my advice. That was all. I admit I was intrigued, this big white Wall Streeter asking my advice. We had lunch a few weeks later. And another lunch a couple of weeks after that, and—well, let me make a long story short. Castle was involved in something he had started to think might be dangerous. He wanted my advice on how to get out of it.”

Eddie wondered if he meant the affair.

Hughes poured freshly for them both. “Even now, I'm not exactly sure what Castle was talking about. He said he was part of a group of men who were in the process of doing what they thought was great work, but which he had decided was bound to end in disaster. He called what they were doing the Project, but refused to provide any details. I asked why he came to me. He said because I knew all the Negro leaders. He said that this group came largely out of our community—your darker nation—and he thought it was up to us to stop the Project. I suppose I gave him a hard time over how conveniently he managed to exclude his own responsibility. Probably I didn't believe him anyway. I thought he must be exaggerating some perfectly reasonable scheme.”

Hughes was fiddling with his glasses. He had a wide face, set low on his broad body. Eddie waited silently, remembering the garrote.

“I told Castle to go to the authorities,” Hughes resumed. “That was how one prevented disaster. He said he could not. The defeat of the Project had to be handled quietly, or the disaster he worried about would come to pass. Disaster for our people, he said. I must admit, by this time I had begun to wonder whether he was entirely sane. But there was a seriousness about him, and—well, let's just say, if he was indeed delusional, he believed his delusion fully. I decided to test him. I told him that I was a writer, not an activist. I gave him names of people to see. He refused. He said he did not want to take any more risks. That was what he said, Eddie. Take any more risks. He wanted me to serve as intermediary. I pointed out that, unless he told me more, I had nothing with which to intermediate. Since he was uncomfortable talking about whatever was on his mind, I proposed a writer's solution. I suggested that he put it all down on paper, and then we would look at it together, and decide what to do next. That way, I could see just how crazy he was. Let's fill you up.”

Eddie held out his glass, marveling. Hughes poured, and lit a fresh cigar.

“Did he put it down on paper?”

“I don't know what he did, Eddie. Somebody strangled him before our next meeting.”

Eddie needed a moment to collect his thoughts. Again he sensed a malign intelligence behind all that had occurred. He remembered his father's note about devil worship, and shuddered. “Did you tell this to—to the authorities?”

“Of course. I called the police the same day I heard the news.”

“And?”

“And they did what they always do. They wrote it down in their notebooks, and that was the last I saw of them.”

Riding home on the A, Eddie saw his sister's letters to the lawyer in a fresh light. Maybe she was writing about an affair, yes. But maybe she was writing about whatever Castle had wanted Hughes to share with the Negro leadership.

The conspiracy that portended disaster for the darker nation.

Maybe Junie had been a part of it.

Back in his apartment, Eddie looked over his notes. He kept coming back to the same two points: the information from Joseph Kennedy, and the report in the Negro newspaper in Nashville.

Somebody had paid a “substantial fee” to move Junie—if it was Junie—to Nashville. And an “incendiary device” had destroyed the house where Junie—if it was Junie—had lived while she was there.

This did not sound like a couple of young women off on a lark. This sounded like somebody who had access to both money and bombs.

Disaster,
the lawyer had warned Langston Hughes.

An idea was forming in Eddie's head, an idea with its roots in Eddie's own experiences when Junie was still a cheap train ride or an expensive phone call away: an idea he wanted to reject but suspected, more and more, might be the truth. Two days later, Eddie drove over to New Jersey, to look for the umpteenth time at the rest stop where Junie and her friend had vanished. He parked where the car had been found. The trees were brown and leafless. In the winter, the nearly empty lot seemed bleak and sorrowful, but it felt that way in every season, and not even the bright-orange snappiness of the Howard Johnson's restaurant could—

Wait.

The rest stop was along the New Jersey Turnpike, and the Turnpike ran from north to south. At this time in America's history, the network of interstate highways was far from complete, but the Turnpike was nevertheless a peculiar way to get to Chicago. This variation from more obvious westward routes had been discussed to death, both by the police and in the family, and the consensus was that the two women had come this way because the Turnpike was finished, and decent food was cheerily available from an integrated restaurant.

But that would not be Junie. Junie would have driven to Chicago in a simple straight line, and Heaven help the owner of any roadside grill who tried to keep her out.

The girls were headed south from the start. Maybe they had chosen this spot to meet up with the friends of Joseph Kennedy's friends, who had transported them the rest of the way, or maybe that was some other girl, and there had indeed been foul play. But even if Junie and her girlfriend had been snatched against their will, they were not headed for Chicago.