The Manchurian Candidate (30 page)

“What a doll. If she were my wife, I’d probably be Generalissimo Trujillo by now. At least.”

“At least.”

“So she thinks it might be a good idea for you and Jocie to get married?”

“That is the general feeling I am allowed to get.”

“How did Jocie’s husband die?”

“That is a good morbid question. It just so happens he was struck down by an unknown hand in a flash riot in a town called Tucumán. He was an agronomist.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“Well, I guess that’s how he happened not to be in Buenos Aires with Jocie.”

“Have you written to her?”

Raymond looked out of the window, at the snow and the night, and shook his head.

“If you think I can, I’d like to help you with the letter.”

“You’ll have to help me,” Raymond said, simply. “I can’t do it. I can’t even get started. I want to write her and tell her things but I have those eight years choking me.”

“It’s all a matter of tone, not so much words,” Marco explained, not having the faintest idea of what he was talking about but knowing he was light-years ahead of Raymond in knowledge of human communication. “Sure, wait. If that feels right. But no six months. I think we should get a letter off fairly soon. You know, a letter of condolence. That would be a natural icebreaker, then after that we’ll slide into the big letter. But don’t wait too long. You’ll have to get it over with so you’ll both know for once and for all.”

“Know what?”

“Whether—well, she should know that you want her and—you have to know whether she wants you.”

“She has to. What would I do if she didn’t?”

“You’ve been managing to get along.”

“No. No, it won’t do, Ben. Tha
t is not enough. I may not have much coming to me but I have more coming to me than I’m getting.”

“Listen, kid. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then that’s the way. Now take it easy and, please, figure on one step at a time.”

“Sure. I’m willing.”

“You’ve got to give the thing time.”

“Sure. That’s what Senator Jordan said.”

Major General Francis “Fightin’ Frank” Bollinger, a long-time admirer of John “Big John” Iselin, consented, with a great deal of pleasure, to Raymond’s mother’s suggestion that he head a committee of patriots called Ten Million Americans Mobilizing for Tomorrow. This was at a small dinner, so small that it fed only Johnny, the general, and Mrs. Iselin, at the Iselin residence in Washington in January, 1960. Bollinger pledged, with all of his big heart, that on the morning of the opening of his party’s Presidential nominating convention, to be held at Madison Square Garden in July, he would deliver one million signatures of one million patriots petitioning that John Yerkes Iselin be named the party’s candidate for the Presidency.

General Bollinger had retired from active duty to take up the helm of the largest dog-food company the world had ever known. He had often said, in one of the infrequent jokes he made (it does not matter what the other joke was), which, by reason of the favoritism he felt for it, he repeated not infrequently: “I’d sure as hell like to see the Commies try to match Musclepal, but if they ever did try it they’d probably call it Moscowpal. Get it?” (Laughter.) He had been a patriot, himself, for many years.

Marco’s unit waited out the winter and the spring without any action or any leads. In March the FBI learned that Raymond’s name appeared on the final list of possible suspects in connection with the murder of the anti-Communist deputy, François Orcel, the previous June. Later that month they also learned that Raymond’s name appeared on a similar listing prepared by Scotland Yard in conjunction with the murder of Lord Croftnal. The French listing included eight names of Americans or foreigners then in the United States who could be placed anywhere near the scene of the crime. The Scotland Yard list contained three such names. Both agencies asked for routine FBI check and comment. Raymond’s name was the only name to appear on both listings.

In late May Senator and Mrs. Iselin took a house on Long Island, anticipating the social demands of the political convention and so that, Mrs. Iselin explained, she could lend a woman’s touch in preparing for the imminent homecoming of Senator Jordan’s widowed daughter, Jocie, she and her father being old, old friends. She confided all of this to the society editor of
The Daily Press,
after asking Raymond to ask the society editor to call her. It remained for Raymond to read the news about Jocie’s homecoming as any other reader of the newspaper might and he became savage in the fury of his resentment when he reached her on the telephone. Raymond’s mother allowed him to curse and cry out at her until she was sure he had finished. He spoke for nearly four minutes without stopping, the sound of the words like a stream of bullets, his phrasing erratic and his breathing heavy. When she was sure of his pause, she invited him to a costume ball she was staging on the very day of Jocie’s return from
Buenos Aires. She said she was sure that he would accept because Jocie had already accepted and that it
had
been a dog’s age since he and Jocie had met. She maintained her control all during Raymond’s shouted obscenities and screamed vituperation; then she hung up the instrument with such vigor that she knocked it off her desk. She was drawn forward into an even blacker rage. She picked the telephone up and ripped it out of the wall and crashed it through a glass-topped table four feet away. She picked up the shattered table and flung it through the short corridor that led to the open bathroom door, disclosing warm pink tile behind the glass shower curtain. The table splintered the glass, crashed through to the tile wall, and fell noisily in the tub.

After a sleepless, tortured night, Raymond, who had decided he must get to the office at seven o’clock the following morning to do what he had to do, finally fell asleep near dawn and slept through until eleven. He nearly knocked Chunjin down, when the man said good morning, because he had not troubled to call him when he knew that Raymond never, never, never slept later than eight o’clock in the morning.

When Raymond got to the office he locked the door behind him. Utilizing the nastiest voice tone in his ample store, he told the telephone switchboard that they were not to ring his telephone no matter who called.

“Including Mr. Downey, sir?”

“Yes.”

“And Mr. O’Neil, sir?”

“Everyone! Anyone! Can you get that through your heads?”

“Heads, sir? I have one head, sir.”

“I’m sure,” Raymond snapped. “Then are you able to get it through your head? No calls. Do you understand?”

“Bet on it, sir. Everything. Bet your house, your clothes.”

“Bet? Oh. One moment, there. I will revise my orders. I
will
take any calls from Buenos Aires. You probably pronounce that Bewnose Airs. I will accept calls from there.”

“Which, sir?”

“Which what?”

“Which city?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Buenos Aires or Bewnose Airs, sir?”

“It’s the same place!”

“Very good, sir. You will accept calls from either or both. Now, would you like to revise those orders, sir?” Raymond hung up his phone as she was speaking.

“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” the operator said to the girls working on either side of her. “Am I gonna get that one someday. I wouldn’t care if I was offered four times the money on some other job which had half the hours. I would never leave this here job as long as he works here. Someday, I may be a liddul old lady sittin’ at this switchboard, but someday—the day will come—an’ oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!” She was grinding her teeth as she talked.

“Who? Shaw?” the girl on her left asked.

“What’s the use?” the girl on her right said. “If you get that offer for four times the money you take it. Nobody is ever gonna be able to do anything about Shaw.”

Dear Jocie:

This is a difficult letter to get written. It is nearly an impossible letter for a w
eak and frightened man to write, and I have surprised myself with that sentence because I have never thought that of myself and I have never said anything less than a sufficiency about myself. I will set down at the outset that I am going to open myself up to you and that it will probably be a long, long letter so that, should it hurt you to read any such things any further, you may stop now and it will all be over. To have to love you as much as I do (as I
did
was what I had started to write, so that I could plot its progression and its growth over the nine empty and useless years without you) and to feel my love for you grow and grow and grow and to have no place to store this enormous harvest within the emptiness, I have found that I must carry it ahead of me wherever I go, bundled in my arms like old clothes which no one else can use and no one wants but which have warmth in them still if someone, as bleakly cold as I have been, can be found to wear them. You will return to New York next month. I have started this letter almost thirty times but I cannot postpone writing it and mailing it for another day because if I do it may not reach you. I cannot write this letter but I must write this letter because I know that I have not got the character nor the courage, the habit of hope nor the assurance that comes from having a place in a crowded world, and I could never be able to speak to you about this long pain and bitterness which—

He stopped writing. He had smudged the paper with several genuine tears.

Nineteen

THE FIRST BREAK IN THE LONG, LONG WAIT
through dread, even though it was a totally incomprehensible break, came in May, 1960. It happened when Marco was late for a two o’clock date with Raymond at Hungarian Charlie’s booze outlet, across the street from the flash shop.

It was a fairly well-known fact to practically anyone who did not lack batteries for his hearing aid that Hungarian Charlie was one of the more stridently loquacious publicans in that not unsilent business. Only one other boniface, who operated farther north on Fifty-first Street, had a bigger mouth. Charlie talked as though Sigmund Freud himself had given permission, nay, had urged him, to tell everyone everything that came into his head, and in bad grammar, yet. Ten minutes before Marco got to the saloon, with Raymond seated at bar center staring at a glass of beer on a slow afternoon, Charlie had pinned a bookmaker at t
he entrance end of the bar, a man who would much rather have talked to his new friend, a young, dumpy blonde with a face like a bat’s and the thirst of a burning oil field. Charlie was telling them, loud and strong, hearty and healthy, about his wife’s repulsive older brother who lived with them and about how he had followed Charlie all over the apartment all day Sunday telling him what to do with his life, which was a new development brought on by the fact that he had just inherited twenty-three hundred dollars from a deceased friend whom he had been engaged to marry for fourteen years, which was a generous thing for her to have done when it was seen from the perspective, Charlie said, that this bum had never given the broad so much as a box of talcum powder for Christmas, it having been his policy always to pick a fight with her immediately preceding gift-exchanging occasions.

“Lissen,” Charlie yelled, “you inherit that kinda money and you naturally feel like you know alla answers and also it puts me in a position where I can’t exactly kick him inna ankle, you know what I mean? So, wit’ the new pernna view, I say tuh him, very patient, ‘Why don’t you pass the time by playing a liddul solitaire?’ ”

Raymond was on a bar stool twelve feet away from Charlie and had in no way been eavesdropping on the conversation, as that could have been judged suicidal. He rapped on the bar peremptorily with a half dollar. Charlie looked up, irritated. One lousy customer in the whole lousy joint and he had to be a point killer.

“What, arreddy?” Charlie inquired.

“Give me a deck of cards,” Raymond said. Charlie looked at the bookmaker, then rolled his eyes heavenward. He shrugged his shoulders like the tenor in
Tosca,
opened a drawer behind him, took out a bl
ue bicycle deck, and slid it along the polished surface to Raymond.

Raymond took the deck from its box and began to shuffle smoothly and absent-mindedly, and Charlie went back to barbering the bookmaker and the young, dumpy blonde. Raymond was laying down the second solitaire spread when Marco came in, ten minutes later. He greeted Charlie as he passed him, ordering a beer, then stood at the bar at Raymond’s elbow. “I got held up in traffic,” he said ritualistically. “And so forth.” Raymond didn’t answer.

“Are you clear for dinner, Raymond?” Marco wasn’t aware that Raymond was ignoring him. “My girl insists that the time has come to meet you, and no matter how I try to get out of it, that’s the way it’s got to be. Besides, I am about to marry the little thing, ringside one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, and we would like you to be the best man.”

The queen of diamonds showed at the twenty-third card turn. Raymond scooped the cards together, ignoring Marco. Becoming aware of the silence, Marco was studying Raymond. Raymond squared the deck, put it facedown on top of the bar, placed the queen of diamonds faceup on top of the stack, and stared at it in a detached and preoccupied manner, unaware that Marco was there. Charlie put the glass of beer in front of Marco at the rate of one hundred and thirty-seven words a minute, decibel count well above the middle register, then turned, walking back to the bookmaker and the broad to punctuate his narrative by recalling the height of the repartee with his brother-in-law: “Why don’t you take a cab quick to Central Park and jump inna lake, I says,” and his voice belted out loud and strong as though a sound engineer were riding gain on it. Raymond brushed past Ma
rco, walked rapidly past the bookmaker and the girl, and out of the saloon.