The Manchurian Candidate (3 page)

“Johnny? Raymond. There’s an FBI man outside my hotel room door in St. Louis to say that they are holding an Army plane for me. Did you tell the Army to request FBI cooperation, and did you have that plane sent here?” He listened. “You did. Well, I knew damn well you did. But why? What the hell did you decide to do a thing like that for?” He listened. “How could I be late? It’s Wednesday morning and I don’t have to be at the White House until Friday afternoon.” He listened. He went totally pale. “A parade?
A par—ade?”
He stared at the details offered by his imagination. “Why—you cheap, flag-rubbing bastard!”

Mardell had slipped out of bed and was sta
rting to get dressed, but she didn’t seem to be able to find anything and she looked frightened. He signaled her with his free hand, caught her attention, and smiled at her so warmingly and so reassuringly that she sat down on the edge of the bed. Then she leaned back slowly and stretched out. He reached over and took her hand, kissed it softly, then placed it on top of her flat smooth stomach, while the telephone squawked in his ear. She reached up and just barely allowed her hand to caress the length of his right cheek, unshaven. Suddenly his face went hard again and he barked into the telephone, “No, don’t put my mother on again! I know I haven’t spoken to her in two years! I’ll talk to her when I’m good and ready to talk to her. Aaah, for Christ’s sake!” He gritted his teeth and stared at the ceiling.

“Hello, Mother.” His voice was flat.

“Raymond, what the hell is this?” his mother asked solicitously. “What’s the matter with you? If we were in the mining business and you struck gold you’d call us, wouldn’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, it just so happens that you’re a Medal of Honor winner—incidentally, congratulations—I meant to write but we’ve been jammed up. Johnny is a public figure, Raymond. He represents the people of your state just the same as the President represents the people of the United States, and I notice you aren’t making any fuss about going to the White House. Is there something so slimy and so terrible about having your picture taken with your father—”

“He is
not my father!”

“—who represents the pride the people of this nation feel for what you have sacrificed for them on the field of battle?”

“Aaah, fuh crissakes, Mother, will you please—”

“You didn’t mind having your picture taken with that stranger in St. Louis yesterday. Incidentally, what happened? Did the Army PRO send you in there to slobber over the Gold Star Mother?”

“It was my own idea.”

“Don’t tell me that, Raymond darling. I just happen to know you.”

“It was my own idea.”

“Well, wonderful. It was a wonderful idea. All the papers carried it here yesterday and, of course, everywhere this morning. Marty Webber called in time so we were able to work in a little expression from Johnny about how he’d do anything to help that dead boy’s folks and so forth, so we tied everything up from this end. It was great, so you certainly can’t stand there and tell me that you won’t have your picture taken with the man who is not only your own family but who happens to have been the governor and is now the senator from your own state.”

“Since when do you have to get the Army to ask the FBI to set up a picture for Johnny? And that’s not what we’re arguing about, anyway. He just told me about a filthy idea for a parade to commemorate a medal on which you and I might not place any particular value but which the rest of this country thinks is a nice little thing—for a few lousy votes for him, and I am not going to hold still for any cheap, goddam parade!”

“A parade? That’s ridiculous!”

“Ask your flag-simple husband.”

Raymond’s mother seemed to be talking across the mouthpiece in an aside to Johnny, but Johnny had left the apartment some four minutes before
to get a haircut. “Johnny,” she said to nobody at all, “where did you get the idea that they could embarrass Raymond with a parade? No wonder he’s so sore.” Into the telephone she said, “It’s not a parade! A few cars were going out to the airport to meet you. No marching men. No color guard. No big bands. You know you are a very peculiar boy, Raymond. I haven’t seen you for almost two years—your mother—but you go right on mewing about some parade and Johnny and the FBI and some Army plane, but when it comes to—”

“What else is going to happen in Washington?”

“I had planned a little luncheon.”

“With whom?”

“With some very important key press and television people.”

“And Johnny?”

“Of course.”

“No.”

“What?”

“I won’t do it.”

There was a long pause. Waiting, staring down at the girl, he became aware that she had violet eyes. His mind began to spin off the fine silk thread of his resentment in furious
moulinage.
For almost two years he had been free of his obsessed mother, this brassy bugler, this puss-in-boots to her boorish Marquis de Carrabas, the woman who could think but who could not feel. He had had three letters from her in two years. (1) She had arranged for a life-sized cutout of Johnny to be forwarded to Seoul. General MacArthur was in the area. Could Johnny arrange for a picture of the two of them with arms around the photographic cutout of Johnny, as she could guarantee that this would get the
widest kind of coverage? (2) Would he arrange for a canvass of fighting men from their state to sign a scroll of Christmas greetings, on behalf of all Johnny’s fighting buddies everywhere, to Johnny and the people of his great state? And (3) she was deeply disappointed and not a little bit shocked to find out that he would not lift one little finger to carry out a few simple requests for his mother who worked day and night for both of her men so that there might be a better and more secure place for each of them.

He had been two years away from her but he could feel his defiance of her buckling under the weight of her silence. He had never been able to cope with her silence. At last her voice came through the telephone again. It was changed. It was rough and sinister. It was murderous and frightening and threatening. “If you don’t do this, Raymond,” she said, “I will promise you on my father’s grave right now that you will be very, very sorry.”

“All right, Mother,” he said. “I’ll do it.” He shuddered. He hung up the telephone from a foot and a half above the receiver. It fell off, but he must have felt he had made his point because he picked it up from the bed where it had bounced and put it gently into its cradle.

“That was my mother,” he explained to Mardell. “I wish I knew what else I could say to describe her in front of a nice girl like you.”

He walked to the locked door. He leaned against the crack in despair and said, “I’ll be in the lobby in about an hour.” There was no answer. He turned toward the bed, untying the belt of his new blue robe, as a massive column of smoke began to spiral upward inside his head, filling the eyes of his memory and opaquing his expression from behind his eyes. Mardell was spilled out softly across the bed. The sheets were blue. She was blond-and-ivo
ry, tipped with pink; lined with pink. It came to him that he had never seen another girl, named Jocie, this way. The thought of Jocie lying before him like this lovely moaning girl excited him as though a chemical abrasive had been poured into his urethra and she was assaulted by him in the most attritive manner, to her greater glory and with her effulgent consent, and though she lived to be an old, old woman she never forgot that morning and could summon it back to her in its richest violence whenever she was frightened and alone, never knowing that she was not only the first woman Raymond had ever possessed, but the first he had ever kissed in passion, or that he had been given his start toward relaxing his inhibitions against the uses of sex not quite one year before, in Manchuria.

Two

A CHINESE ARMY CONSTRUCTION BATTALION
arrived at Tunghwa, forty-three miles inside the Korean frontier, on July 4, 1951, to set under way the housing for events, planned in 1936, that were to reach their conclusion in the United States of America in 1960. The major in charge of the detail, a Ssu Ma Sung, is now a civilian lawyer in Kunming.

Manchuria is in the subarctic zone, but the summers are hot and humid. Tunghwa handles industry, such as sawmilling and food processing with hydroelectric power. It is a city of approximately ninety thousand, about the size of Terre Haute, Indiana, but lacking a public health appropriation.

The Chinese construction battalion set up the job near a military airfield nearly three miles out of town. Everything they put up was prefabricated, the sections keyed by different colors; this, when the pieces were scattered around the terrain, made t
he men seem like toy figures walking among the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. When these were assembled into a building, they were sprayed with barn-red lead paint to banish the quilted effect. By July 6, at seventeen-nineteen, the battalion had completed a two-story, twenty-two-room structure with a small auditorium. The building was called the Research Pavilion and had some one-way transparent glass walls. It also had a few comfortably furnished guest rooms without glass walls on the first floor; these had been reserved for the brass from Moscow and Peiping.

Each floor held different-colored, varipatterned asphalt tile as a guide for furniture and equipment placement. Each wall, as it was erected, had decorations riveted into it. The windows, cut through each outer wall, had curtains and drapes fastened to them. The thousand pieces of that house gave the impression that it was a traveling billet for political representatives of the allied People’s Governments: a structure forever being built, struck, then sent on ahead to be built again for the next series of meetings and discussions. All of the furniture was made of blond wood in mutated, modern Scandinavian design. All of the interior coloring, except the bright yellow rattan carpeting on the second floor, was the same green and apricot utilized by new brides during their first three years of marriage.

The second floor of the building held one large corner suite of rooms and ten other compact cubicles that had three solid walls each and one building-long common wall of one-way transparent glass facing a catwalk that was patrolled day and night by two Soviet Army riflemen. Each cubicle contained a cot, a chair, a closet, and a mirror for reassurance that the soul had not fled. The large apartment had similar fitting
s, plus a bathroom, a large living room, and an additional bedroom. All of the walls here were opaque. The invigorating scent of pine-tree incense pervaded the upper floors, subtly and pleasantly.

The marvelous part of what they were doing several hundred miles to the south of Tunghwa was that every time Mavole moved, the girl moved, and every time Mavole bleated, the girl bleated. It was really a money’s worth and after Mavole came downstairs he told the guys that the classy part about the joint was that when he took the broad upstairs in the first place, there had been no jeers or catcalls. Mavole’s co-mover and bleater was a young Korean girl who had adapted to prostitution a variation of the Rochdale principle on which had been based the first cooperative store in 1844, in that she extended absolutely no credit but distributed part of the profits in the form of free beer. Her name was Gertrude.

Freeman had left to check gear, but Mavole and Bobby Lembeck sat around and drank a few more beers while they waited for the corporal to get finished upstairs. They tried to explain to the two little broads that it was not necessary to smile so hard but they couldn’t speak Korean, except for a few words, and the girls couldn’t speak American, so Bobby Lembeck put his two forefingers at the corners of his mouth and pulled an inane prop smile down. The girls caught on but it looked so funny the way he did it that Bobby and Mavole started laughing like crazy, which started the girls laughing again so that when they stopped laughing they were still smiling.

To the extent that wartime zymurgists imperil the norm, the Korean beer was about as
good as local Mississippi beer or Nebraska beer, which is pretty lousy, but it was hot. That was one thing you could say about it, Mavole pointed out.

“Eddie, why do we have to spend all of our time off in a whorehouse?” Bobby asked.

“Yeah. Rough, ain’t it?”

“I don’t mean it’s hard to take, but my hobby is birds. There are a lot of new birds around this part of the world.”

“We spend our time off here because it’s the only place on the entire Korean peninsula that Sergeant Raymond Shaw doesn’t walk into.”

“You think he’s a fairy, or very religious?”

“What?”

“Or both?”

“Sergeant Shaw? Our Raymond?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you? Out of your mind? It’s just that Raymond doesn’t give to anybody. And it’s a common vulgar thing—sex—to Raymond.”

“He happens to be right,” Bobby Lembeck said. “It sure is. I’m only a beginner but that’s one of the things I like about it.”

Mavole looked at him, nodding his head in a kind of awe. “It’s a very funny thing,” he said slowly, “but every now and then I think about you coming all the way to Korea from New Jersey to get your first piece of poontang and it makes me feel like I’m sort of a monument—part of your life. You know? And Marie Louise too. Of course.” He nodded equably to indicate the small Japanese girl who was sitting beside Bobby Lembeck, holding his right wrist like a falcon.

“She certainly is,” Bobby agreed. “What a monument.”

“It’s kind of a very touching thing to me that you have never had a fat broad or a tall broad, say.”

“It’s different?”

“Well—yes and no. It’s hard to explain. These little broads, while very nice and with lovely dispositions and with beer included, which is very unusual, they
are
very little—spinners, we used to call them—and although I hate to say this even though I know they can’t understand me, they are very, very skinny.”

“Just the same,” Bobby said.

“Yeah. You’re right.”

Melvin, the corporal, came rushing down the stairs. He was combing his hair rapidly, head tilted to one side, like a commuter who had overslept. “Great!” he said briskly. “Great, great, great!” he repeated, running the words together. “The greatest.”