The Manchurian Candidate (28 page)

Both sides had the opportunity to air their views, however indirectly. Before she left London Mrs. Iselin told the reporters who had assembled in a
large room named after a production of Richard D’Oyly Carte that she would urge her husband’s Senate committee to investigate the Labour Party of Great Britain, as she had assembled documentary proof that it was a nest of Socialists and crypto-Communists and that this political party could, if returned to power, “smash the alliance upon which the friendship of our two great nations has been based and, under the guise of honest difference of opinion, sabotage the great American purpose before the world.” It was as though the great glacier had slid down from the top of the world and enveloped the hotel. Sixty men and women stood staring at her, their chins resting comfortably on their chests, mouths wide open, eyes glazed. One gentleman of Fleet Street threw his full glass of whisky and water backward over his head in a high arc to crash in the corner of the large room rather than drink it, which is criticism indeed from a newspaperman of any country. He said, “Madame, my name is Joseph Pole of the
Daily Advocate-Journal.
I repudiate you, your husband, and your most peculiar son.” He turned to a lady journalist on his left and took the highball from her hand. “May I?” he asked. Then he threw the contents of the drink onto Mrs. Iselin’s ankles.

Raymond knocked him right through the throng. At this juncture, that portion of the journalistic group which had objected to Raymond in the first place for having attacked the profitable institution of Motherhood in his column, took this chance to strike out at him, while the group which had secretly approved Raymond’s utter public rejection of his mother now saw their chance to have at her themselves, and were led forward by female colleagues brandishing raised umbrellas. The result was a melee. Mrs. Iselin swung
chairs, water carafes, and broken whisky bottles, doing most painful damage but emerging physically unharmed. Raymond laid about him with his extraordinary strength and his natural antipathy. The news photographers present very nearly swooned with ecstasy over the turn taken, for, from every British newspaper-reader’s point of view, here was Iselinism in action with British righteousness whacking it over the head.

Beginning with the very next editions, the British press indulged in its own sort of good-natured London journalists’ fun, which could be described by the subject of their reporting as being an experience not unlike falling nude into a morass of itching powder while two sadistic dentists drilled into one’s teeth at the instant of apogee of alcoholic history’s most profligate hang-over. The ultimate end of all of these combative news stories was that when Mrs. Iselin and her son needed to journey to Southampton to embark for home, some one hundred and fifteen London policemen, whom the world knows affectionately as “bobbies” after their founder, Sir Robert Peel, needed to bludgeon a path through the howling mass of outraged citizenry to get them out of their hotel, following which a semimilitary motorcade was formed to race them to the ship. The entire incident was a stiff test of Anglo-American relations, beyond a doubt, and somewhat scored John Iselin’s own lack of popular favor in the British Isles.

While Raymond had been in Paris, in late June, a member of the French Chamber of Deputies who was co-leader of the political party having the record of greatest resistance to the government then in power, was assassinated in his
hôtel particulier
on Rue Louis David i
n the sixteenth
arrondissement,
baffling police and security agencies.

While Raymond was in London, on the evening before his mother’s famous debate with the British press, a peer who was greatly admired for having articulated a liberal, humanistic, and forward-looking life as publisher of a chain of national newspapers and periodicals, Lord Morris Croftnal, was murdered while he slept. There was not a clue as to the identity or motivation of his killer.

Seventeen

RAYMOND’S SHIP DOCKED IN NEW YORK ON A
Wednesday in late August, 1959. He reported for work at
The Daily Press
early Thursday morning. Marco called him and made a date to meet him at four o’clock in Hungarian Charlie’s, the saloon across the street from the paper, saying he would be bringing two of his side-kicks with him if Raymond wouldn’t mind. Raymond didn’t mind.

The four men sat a table far in the rear of the saloon, which was a solid, practical saloon set up to sell a maximum amount of booze and, with careful attention to unsanitary-seeming
décor
—a little dirt here, a little grease there—a minimum amount of food, which, after all, has a tendency to spoil after a week or so and can be a loss. The air was nearly gelid from the huge air-conditioning unit that looked big enough to chill an automobile assembly plant. A giant juke box, manufactured by The Giant Juke Box Company of Arcana, I
llinois, was belting everything living right over the head with a loudly lovable old standard out of Memphis, Tennessee, in which the rhyme of the proper name Betty Lou and the plural noun
shoes
were repeated, in a Kallikakian couplet, over and over again. A giant juke box is constructed to make a sound like two full-sized, decibel-pregnant juke boxes going at top volume at the same time, but two separate juke boxes each playing a different tune, each in a different tempo, and, if possible, in a different language. The joint was noisy from opening to closing because Hungarian Charlie liked noise and was, in every vocal manner, very much like a giant juke box himself.

After minimum hand-shaking and ordering a highball for Amjac and Lehner and beers for Raymond and himself, Marco went right to business by asking Raymond to tell his version of the battle action, which Raymond did forthwith and in detail, utilizing only the future tense in verb forms. Lehner carried the tape recorder in a shoulder sling.

“You sound as though you got those nightmares straightened out. In fact, you look it,” Raymond said warily, not sure whether it was proper to talk about such things in front of these house-detective types. Marco looked great. He had gained the weight back.

“All over.”

“Did you—was it—did that thing we were talking about help any?”

“The court-martial?”

“Yeah.”

“The way it worked out, it wasn’t necessary but I still have you and only you to thank for losing those nightmares. We got a different kind of an investigatio
n started, just the way you said it had to be, and the nightmares were gone. Forever. I hope.”

“Did you investigate the medal?”

“Sure. What else?”

“Any progress?”

“Slow, but good.”

“Is it working out the way we thought?”

“Yeah. Right down the line.”

“The medal is a phony?”

“It certainly looks that way.”

“I knew it.
I knew
it. Raymond looked from Amjac to Lehner, shaking his head in awed disbelief. “How about that?” he asked with mystification. “Will you tell me why a lot of Communist brass would want to steal a Medal of Honor for a complete stranger?”

Amjac didn’t answer. He seemed embarrassed about something. Raymond became aware of his silence and stared at him coldly. “It was a rhetorical question,” he said haughtily.

Amjac coughed. He said, “It scares hell out of us, if you want the truth, Mr. Shaw. We have run out of ideas and we don’t know where else to look, if that gives you some idea.” Raymond swung his gaze to Lehner, who had a head like a gourd, a small mustache, and eyes like watermelon seeds, and Lehner stared him down.

“Have you talked to Al Melvin?” Raymond said. The voice of a sick child whined out of the giant juke box behind them as though trying to escape the hateful noises behind it. “You know, Ben, Al. In Alaska.”

“Yes, sir. We have,” Amjac said grimly.

Marco said, “Raymond, there is no known area of this case which we haven’t covered in many ways. We’ve talked to every member of the patrol. We’v
e traveled maybe ninety-two hundred miles around the country. We’re sure Chunjin is here as an enemy agent, assigned to you as a body guard and assassin, if necessary. I have a unit in New York and Washington which does nothing but concentrate on this problem. There are seventeen of us, all told. Mr. Amjac is on loan from the FBI and Mr. Lehner is with us as an expert from Central Intelligence. Working on that riddle of why the enemy should go to enormous trouble to secure the Medal of Honor for you is all I do, day and night. It’s all Amjac and Lehner do. It’s all the seventeen of us do, and the White House wants to know what happened in a report every week and a copy of that report goes to the Joint Chiefs. And you want to hear something offbeat, Raymond? I mean something that will throw this out of context for a moment to let you see what a unique person you have become? A copy of the report goes to the Prime Ministers of Britain and Canada and to the President of Mexico.”

“But what the hell for?” Raymond seemed outraged at this invasion, as though he were being shared by four heads of government. “What the hell do the Mexicans and the bloody British, who tried to kill my mother, incidentally, have to do with that lousy medal?”

Lehner tapped Raymond on the forearm. Raymond looked at him, drawing his arm away. “Why don’t you listen?” Lehner said. “If you talk you can’t learn anything.”

“Don’t touch me again,” Raymond said. “If you want to remain here with us, doing your clerk’s tasks and waiting for your pension, do not touch me again.” He looked at Marco. “Continue, Ben,” he said equably.

“It is our considered opinion,” Marco said, “that we are moving into the area of action which will reveal why they wanted you to have the Medal of Hono
r. The patrol happened in 1951. Chunjin didn’t arrive to take up his duties until ’59. Eight years’ lapse. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen soon. You’re a marked man, Raymond. They’ve marked you and they guard you. We’ve marked you. Am I frightening you, Raymond?”

“Me?”
Nothing frightened Raymond. A man needs to have something to lose to become frightened. Even only one thing that is his and that he values will make it possible for threat to scare a man, but Raymond had nothing.

“That’s what I explained to our unit. And that’s what our psychiatrists had projected on you, that attitude, that—that fearlessness, you know?—but I have to frighten you, Raymond, because we need you to think of yourself as some kind of time bomb with a fuse eight years long. You walk barefooted on the edge of a razor. Only you will know when the change comes, when the mission is divulged, when your move is to be made, and it can only end one way. Your country, my country, this country will have to be in danger from you and you will be expected to do exactly as you have been told or will be told. They got inside your mind. They did. I swear before God.”

“Aaaah!” Raymond disliked this kind of talk. It sickened him. What kind of a world of fondlers had this become? Why did Marco have to say that those thick-necked pigs were
inside
his mind?

“I told you that we talked to every member of the patrol this summer. You know what they said about you, every one of them? That you were the greatest, warmest, most wonderful single guy they had ever met. They remembered you with love and affection, Raymond. Isn’t that funny?”

“Funny? It’s ludicrous.”

“How do you account for it?”

Raymond shrugged and grimaced. “I saved their lives. I mean, they thought I had saved their lives. I suppose the poor slobs were grateful.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve had to work all this out with our psychiatrists because I don’t have a very objective view, either, but my actual memory is that there was a broad chasm between you and those men before the patrol. They didn’t hate you, they seemed rather to fear your scorn, you know? You had a way of freezing their dislike and keeping them uneasy and off balance. The psychiatrists will tell you that an attitude, a group attitude as well as individual attitudes like that, can’t be changed into warm and eager interest, into such admiration and deep respect merely because of gratitude. No, no, no.”

“Life isn’t a popularity contest,” Raymond said. “I didn’t ask them to like me.”

“I’m going to start to prove right now that they have gotten inside your mind, Raymond, because you once told me, in a joking way, that you had come out of the Army with much more of an active interest in women than when you went in—and because I have to frighten you, I will have to embarrass you, too. We checked. We are experts. Experts’ experts, even. We went back over the seams of your life, looking for lint. You were twenty-two, going on twenty-three years old, when you left the Army, and you had never been laid. More than that. You had never even kissed a girl, had you, Raymond?” Marco leaned across the table, his eyes lambent with affection, and he said softly, “You never even kissed Jocie, did you, Raymond?”

“You had men talk to Jocie? In Argentina?” Raymond wasn’t outraged. Long before, he had
set all his dials so that Marco could do no wrong with him, but he was extremely impressed and for the first time. He felt elated to be in connection with anyone who had looked at Jocie, had sat beside her and had spoken to her about anything at all, and to have spoken to her about him, about that wondrous summer together and about—about kissing. He felt as though his eyes had climbed into the upper space above the earth and that he could see himself as he sat in Hungarian Charlie’s and at the same time watch sweet, sweet Jocie as she sat in a bower, under pink roses, knitting something soft and warm, in the Argentine.

“I had to know. And I had to make you understand that going ten thousand miles and back for the answer to one question is very little to do in the face of the pressure and the threat that is implied.”

“But, Ben—Jocie—well, after all, Jocie—”

“That’s why I brought these two strangers. The only reason. Do you think I would talk about such things—things which I know are sacred to you when I also know that nothing else in this whole world is sacred to you—in front of two strangers if I wasn’t desperate to get through to you?” Raymond did not answer; he was thinking about Jocie, the Jocie he had lost and would never find again.