The Manchurian Candidate (29 page)

“They are inside your mind. Deep. Now. For eight years. One of their guys with a big sense of humor thought it would be a great gag to throw you a bone for all of the trouble they were going to put you to, and fix it up inside your head so that, all of a sudden, you’d get interested in girls, see? It meant nothing to them. It was only a gratuitous gesture, a quarter tip to the men’s-room attendant, considering all the other things they were going to do inside your head and have already done from inside your head.”

“Stop it! Stop it, goddammit, Ben. I will not listen to this. You nauseate me. Stop saying that people and things and a lot of outside filth are inside my head. Just say it some other way if you have to talk to me. Just say it some other way, and what the hell are you talking about—what they have already done from inside my head?”

“Don’t shout,” Lehner said. “Take it easy.” However, he did not touch Raymond this time.

The giant juke box had found a giant guitar. It was being strummed insanely, alternating between two of the most simply constructed chords while a farmer’s voice bellowed cretinous rhymes above it.

Marco stared at Raymond compassionately and held his gaze for a long moment before he said, “You murdered Mavole and Bobby Lembeck, kid.”

“What? Whaaaat?” Raymond pushed at the table but his back was against the wall, literally as well as figuratively, so that he could not move backward to escape the words. His glaucous eyes in the long, bony face held some of the terror seen in the eyes of a horse falling on ice. He was incredulous but Marco and Amjac and Lehner knew that Marco was getting through because they knew Raymond the way a marine knows his own rifle, because they had been drilled on Raymond, his reactions and inhibitions, for hours of day and hours of night.

“You killed them. Not your fault. They just used your body the way they would use any other machine. You strangled Mavole and you shot Bobby.”

“In the dream?”

“Yes.”

Raymond was unutterably relieved. He had been greatly startled but at last things ha
d been returned to reality. These men with Marco were captives of their belief in that unfortunate man’s delusion which had almost cost him his sanity late the year before. Everything fell into place for Raymond as he understood the motivation of all of this fantasy. Ben was his friend and Raymond would not let him down. He would go right along as he was supposed to, becoming agitated now and then if necessary, because Ben looked as though he had regained his health and his ability to sleep and Raymond would have fought off an army to preserve that.

“The dream happened again and again in my sleep because it had happened so indelibly in my life. I have to frighten you, Raymond. If you can live in continuous fear perhaps we can force you to see what we aren’t able to discover. Whenever it happens—this thing that has been set to happen—we have to find some way to reach you, to give you new reflexes so that you will do whatever we will tell you to do—even kill yourself if that has to be—the instant that you know what it is they have built you to do. They made you into a killer. They are inside your mind now, Raymond, and you are helpless. You are a host body and they are feeding on you, but because of the way we live we can’t execute you or lock you up to stop you.”

Raymond did not need to simulate alarm. Every time Marco told him of the invasion of his person by those people it made him wince, and to think of himself as a host body on which they were feeding almost made him cry out or stand up and run out of the saloon. His voice became different. It was not the flat, undeigning drawl. It was a voice he might have borrowed from an Errol Flynn movie in which the actor faced immolation with hopeless resigned gallantry. It was a new voice for
him, one he created specifically to help his friend through the maze of his fantasy, and it was most convincing. “What do you want?” the hoarsened new voice said.

Marco’s voice attacked. It moved like a starving rodent which gnaws at flaws behind the doors, mad to get through to an unknown trove of crazing scent on the other side.

“Will you submit voluntarily to a brainwashing?” that voice asked.

“Yes,” Raymond answered.

The giant juke box spat the sounds out as though trying to break the rows upon rows of shining bottles behind the bar.

Friday morning, just before noon, a psychiatric and biochemical task force began to work Raymond over on the fourth floor of the large house in the Turtle Bay district. The total effort exhausted and frustrated both the scientists and the policemen. The effect of the narcotics, techniques, and suggestions, which resulted in deep hypnosis for Raymond, achieved a result that approximated the impact an entire twenty-five-cent jar of F. W. Woolworth vanishing cream might have on vanishing an aircraft carrier of the
Forrestal
class when rubbed into the armor plate. They were unable to dredge up one mote of information. Under the deep hypnosis, loaded to the eyes with a cocktail of truth serums, Raymond demonstrated that he could not remember his name, his color, his sex, his age, or his existence. Before he had been put under he had been willing to divulge anything within his power. In catalepsy, his mind seemed to have been sealed off as an atomic reactor is separated from the rest of a submarine. It all served to confirm what they already
knew. Raymond had been brainwashed by a master of exalted skill. The valiant, long-cherished hope that they would be able to counterplant suggestion within Raymond’s already dominated unconscious mind never had a chance of being put into work.

When it was over, the medical staff wanted to tell Raymond that the explorations had been entirely successful, on the grounds that he was able to accept suggestion with his conscious mind, but Marco overruled that. He said he would tell Raymond that he was beyond their reach, that he was going to be directed entirely by the enemy, that they could not help him but that they had to stop him and that they would stop him. Marco wanted Raymond to stay scared, as much as he disbelieved that Raymond could sustain any feeling.

After that first afternoon when Marco had poured it on him in Hungarian Charlie’s, Raymond had dug in to what he was determined to maintain as a fixed position. He was a lucid man. He knew he was in excellent health, mental and physical. He knew Marco’s health was a long way from what it had once been. He knew it was Marco who had been having the nightmares and breakdowns and that for unknown reasons, probably relative to the phrase “the Army takes care of its own,” his commanders had decided to humor Marco. Well, Raymond decided, I will outhumor and outbless them. Marco is closer to me than any one or all of those uniformed clots. Raymond accordingly formed his policy. It deployed his imagination like the feelers of an insect, advancing it ahead of him wherever his mind, which moved on thousands of tiny feelers of prejudice, took him in its circuitous detour that would allow him to avoid exposing himself to himself as a murderer, a sexual neutral, an
d a man despised and scorned by his comrades. He put his back into the performance. He used all the tricks of the counterfeiter’s art he could summon to project all of the surface emotions which their little playlets seemed to require of him. He bent, or seemed to bend, into their intentions to halt what he saw as a comic-book plot in which a sinister foreign power, out to destroy America, would achieve its ends by using him as an instrument. They wanted him to be scared. He would seem, when under observation, to be scared, and he worked hard for an effect of seeming as distressed and as aware as game running ahead of guns.

Fortunately, he remembered that the vegetable substitute for benzedrine, which he had taken at one time to lose weight, always gave him hand tremors, so that helped. He knew that a double dose or more of it could produce an authentic crying jag in him, with uncontrollable tears and generally distraught conduct, so that helped.

Marco’s surveillance teams duly reported his purchases of this drug and the unit’s psychological specialists confirmed the side-effects they would produce, so Marco was not deceived by Raymond’s somewhat piteous conduct from time to time. He was very proud of Raymond, however, because he could see that Raymond was going to intolerable trouble, for Raymond, to meet Marco’s urgent requirements, but the discouraging and depressing fact remained that all of them were armless in their attempt to stave off shapeless disaster.

However, there was one relentless, inexorable strength on Marco’s side: in combination or singly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Army Intelligence, and the Central Intelligence Agency represented maximum police efficiency. Such efficiency suspends the law of averages and flattens defeat with patience.

Eighteen

EUGÉNIE ROSE WAS IN BOSTON WITH JUSTIN’S
new musical show, which, secretly, had been based upon a map of the heavens issued by the National Geographic Society two years before. Marco planned to join her the next day. She and Marco talked on the telephone at odd hours. They were still dedicated to an early marriage and seemed more than ever convinced that, in a world apparently so populated, no one else existed.

It was Christmas Eve. Raymond had invited Marco for dinner, telephoning him from the office to say that he had given Chunjin the night off and that Chunjin had resisted. Marco said that was because Chunjin was undoubtedly a Buddhist and not a celebrant at Christmas. Raymond said he was sure Chunjin was not a Buddhist because he left books by Mary Baker Eddy around the pantry and kitchen and was forever smiling. Marco said he felt a sense of disappointment at that news because he had figured if he sent Chunjin a Christma
s card, Chunjin would then be obligated to send him a card on Buddha’s birthday, or lose face.

Marco arrived at Raymond’s apartment at seven o’clock and brought two bottles of cold champagne with him. Unfortunately for the hang-overs the following day, Raymond had also put two quarts of champagne in the refrigerator. They decided they would sidle toward food a little later and settled down in Raymond’s office behind the big window, and with commendable seasonal cooperation it began to snow large goose feathers, a present from the Birthday Boy himself, in lieu of peace on earth.

After two goblets of the golden bubbles, Raymond reached under his chair and, stiffly, handed Marco a large, gift-wrapped package.

“Merry Christmas,” he said. “It has been good to know you.” Raymond, saying those words, sounded more touching than anyone else who could have said them because, while Raymond had been marooned in time and on earth and in all the pit-black darkness of interstellar space, Marco was the only other being, except Jocie, who had acknowledged he was there.

Marco ripped away the elegant gold and blue paper, revealing the three volumes of Fuller’s
A Military History of the Western World
re-bound in limp morocco leather. Marco held onto the books with one hand and pounded the embarrassed, grinning Raymond with the other. Then he put the books upon the desk and reached into his pocket. “And a merry, merry Christmas to you, too, young man,” he sang out, handing Raymond a long flat envelope. Raymond started to open the envelope, slowly and with wonderment.

“Wait, wait!” Marco said. He hurried to the record-player, shuffled through some albums, and slid
out a twelve-inch record of Christmas carols. The machine conferred silvered voices upon them singing “We Three Kings of Orient Are.”

“O.K., proceed,” Marco said.

Raymond opened the envelope and found a gift certificate in the amount of fifty dollars to be drawn on
Les Pyramides
of middle Broadway, the Gitlitz Delicatessen. The frosty carol swelled around them as Raymond smiled his always touching smile at the gift in his hands.

“We three Rings of Orient are,

Bearing gifts we traverse afar,

Field and fountain, moor and mountain,

Following yonder star.

O, Star of wonder, star of night,

Star with royal beauty bright,

Westward leading, still proceeding,

Guide us to the perfect light.”

Marco thought of their own three kings of Orient: Gomel, Berezovo, and that old, old Chinese who had handed Raymond the gun to kill Bobby Lembeck. Raymond said, “What a wonderful present. I mean, who else in the world but you could even think of such a wonderful present? This—well—well, it’s simply great, that’s what it is.” They sat down again, fulfilled by giving. They watched the snow, listened to the
Männergesangsverein,
finished the first bottle of wine, and overflowed with Christmas spirit. Raymond was opening the second bottle when he said, steadily, “Jocie’s husband died.”

“Yeah?” Marco sat straight up. “When?”

“Last week.”

“How’d you find out?”

“Mother told me. She had told the embassy to keep an eye on Jocie. They told her.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I saw Senator Jordan. We’re pretty good friends. At first it was hard because Mother had told him I was a pervert and that they would have to save Jocie from me, but, in a way, he had to see me because he’s in politics and I’m a newspaperman. After a while, when we reached an understanding about what a monster my mother is, we were able to get to be pretty good friends. I asked him if I could help in any way. The paper has an office there. He said no. He said the best thing I could do would be to wait and give Jocie a chance to recover; then, if she doesn’t start for home in six months, say, he thinks maybe I should go down there and get her. At least go down there and ask her. You know.”

“I take it your mother isn’t against Jocie any more.”

“No.”

“Some switch.”

“Try not to laugh and so will I, but that is exactly the case. Some switch. Jocie’s father has become very big in his party, particularly in the Senate. Mother saw it coming before anyone else and she’s done everything she can to be fast friends with him, but he isn’t having any, so I guess she decided if she couldn’t get him on their side positively she could cancel him out by marrying me off to his daughter, little knowing that I incite Senator Jordan against her and Johnny more than any other one agency excepting their own lovable personalities.”