The Transit of Venus (39 page)

"Kennedy, that's what we're talking about—Vietnam, the sixteen thousand. The Bay of Pigs. Face it. The Bay of Pigs. Any idea if this crackpot, this Vail's gonna bring up the Bay of Pigs?"

"Remember the crackpots that used to borrow money from Ed.

Remember they used to come round his office, Ed I got this story, Ed lend me ten bucks. Well there was this one little guy, Ed said maybe there's something in it, Sam you go down to Florida with him. Sam came back, God Ed what a nut. This nut thinks Kennedy's gonna
invade
Cuba. This time you bought it Ed, Jesus what a nut."

"He didn't believe it?"

"Well he thought, God if this is true, so he couldn't believe it.

Afterwards—"

"But we couldnt've run that story anyway, it would've been treason."

"Still I always wondered, why didn't the press, they had that story, the whole Bay of Pigs bit."

"Theyd've been crucified, they couldnt've run it."

"But you know what Kennedy told them later, If you'd run it."

"Sure, if you'd run it you might have stopped me."

"Saved
me. You might've saved me. That's what he said, If you'd run it you might've saved me."

"Kennedy, that's what we're talking about. Vietnam, the sixteen thousand."

"More than that. The appointments. Dean Rusk, Mac Bundy, McNamara."

"Lyndon
Johnson"

"Johnson thought it was Korea."

"Johnson thought it was the Alamo."

"Munich is what he kept saying. Christ Munich. Where they been."

"We gonna teach them this lesson. Little brown men, this lesson.

That's what they were saying, and that's why you'd never have got them to the dacha outside Rangoon. Mac Bundy at that dacha, don't make me laugh."

"So who we gonna accuse? Who are they? The Pentagon? Would it be Westmoreland, Abrams, Walt?"

"Christ Walt. He's the one who told me, you could find yourself shot in the back. That was Cam Ne, that wasn't even My Lai, it was Cam Ne and I said where
are
these people, a whole town disappeared, where are the people. They been relocated, he said looking in his milk, they're in refugee camps, been dispersed. It turned out the U.S. army didn't go in at all, it got handed over to the South Vietnamese, they had it on their list along with other hamlets that hadn't paid their dues, oh jesus oh god. Waste them, that was the terminology, waste them. So who you gonna accuse, finally would it be Rusk and Johnson, wouldn't it be them, wouldn't that be logical? Put them in the dock? Imagine."

"At the end Rusk kept going on aspirins and alcohol."

"I didn't know about the aspirins."

"Cambodia Laos, they make Vietnam academic. Better face it.

South Vietnam's got an eastern seacoast, that's the only reason they need it now. Once they surround it, once they're in Cambodia Laos, what do they care. You can't get a story on Laos.

Well hell you get a lot of stories but it's a realm of myth situation. Who's gonna risk their neck, you can't ask correspondents to risk their neck, what American's gonna die there except a lot of pilots we're not allowed to mention. Aside from one or two of them those are second-string correspondents in Laos Cambodia anyway, there's an information gap, everyone knows it, you can't find out what goes on."

"This is bouncing it off another cushion. Are we talking about what we can't get a lead on or about what we don't have the guts to report?"

"Look I can put on thirty-three stories about a mail strike in Italy or Princess Margaret Jones easier than run one on Cambodia Laos.

Then there's risk, what about risk, it's your word against theirs, Washington comes in strong, it didn't happen. Says it didn't happen, what you gonna do?"

"Yeah look at San Jose. Nixon said worst violence he'd ever seen, holes in the car, rocks, people were throwing rocks, Agnew said it, they all said it. Worse than war. By Monday they were saying like it was mostly verbal violence. Then after the vote, maybe there wasn't any violence. No indictments, nothing. Supposing I ran a story that night, supposing I said election gimmick. Supposing I said the president is lying, is
LYING,
you want to imagine what they do to me. Nobody's gonna take that kind of risk."

"Maybe that's what's wrong. Maybe that's why television."

"Not just the government, not the government even. Can you imagine the calls, can you imagine. And not the viewers even. The calls from the ownership, from the brass."

"I'm saying maybe that's what's—"

"But if everyone ran it. Let me finish. If you got all the newscast-ers, if you got the lot. Hopefully."

"Anyway what good would—a week later, so who'd care—he lied, so he lied. Teddy lied, Henry lied, Laird lied, Helms lied, Nixon lied his ass off, George Washington swore he didn't chop down the goddamn cherry tree, so who in hell cares one week later."

"Care like hell in election year."

"Not about war. War isn't an election issue. We gave them the longest chance, Nixon'll say. Winding it down, pulling it out, not our fault. Peace is at hand, okay? Look at the kids—the frenzy died with the draft card, with the risk to their own skins. The economy, the dollar, the buck. That's what election year's about, the buck."

"Honor. If I can finish. Honor of the United States. You don't get me, I'm serious. Honor's as good a gimmick as any other. That's what Nixon could do. Put it in the lap of the public, I'm standing on principle, I'm stopping the war. Leaving. Now. Put it up to the world,
you
defend the gooks, okay? You rassle up that goddamn dacha outside Rangoon."

"No one can propose that. No one has the influence."

"The president. No one else has the influence."

"What about the influence in this room. The collective influence."

"We now pause for the underarm commercial."

"I mean it. The collective influence."

"Anyhow, here it comes, here's the picture. Altruists always have some axe to grind. Remember we needn't run this in full."

The next morning an editorial appeared in a leading newspaper: Mr. Adam Vail did a clever job in his television interview last night of depicting "serious aggression" practiced by giant American corporations in Latin America with, as he claimed, the connivance and covert support of the United States Government. He will draw enthusiastic if automatic applause from irresponsible elements in our divided society.

At times, Washington may have acted clumsily in Latin America, but Mr. Vail wielded his verbal brush far too broadly when he suggested that clandestine efforts from the United States Government would insure, as he put it, that at least one elected Latin leader would "not get through the crucial next six months." His worst distortion was his assertion that intimidation of voters had in some areas been carried out with funds from official United States sources. There was an element of dangerous misrepresentation in Mr. Vail's remarks, of which his television audience should be aware.

Adam put the paper down and said, "I never like to see government spelt with a large G."

Before his arrest, Ramon Tregear gave the remaining section of his manuscript ,to a friend who was leaving the country. When the pages were delivered to Caroline Vail, she found a note among them, addressed to herself: "If my death is spectacular, you will be able to publish these. People are inclined to rush to the scene of the crime, or accident." A young man who brought the envelope told them Tregear had been imprisoned on an island off the coast of South America, in conditions not conducive to survival. At the end of the year it was learned he had been brought back to the mainland in failing health, and had died at a prison in the capital.

It was the freckled Vicente who wrote this news to them from Mexico, adding, "He led captivity captive."

"And ascended," Adam said. "Having first descended into the lower parts of the earth."

The story of Tregear's death, when disclosed, was atrocious.

And, as he had predicted, resulted in a favourable reception for his work outside his native land, and its clandestine distribution in the city of his birth where, in former years, he had had few readers.

"Are you glad to be home?"

Margaret had never asked that question before. She stood at an open suitcase, sorting what should be hung from what must be washed, disposing of shirts and shoe-trees. She flung a dressing-gown on a bed. While Ted Tice, too, spread socks and ties about like regalia, saying, "It's not a return, it's a resurrection."

"I'm not even sure, this time, what countries you've been to."

"Nor I, at this moment." But for the decorum of unpacking, which made things proceed by stages, he would have made love to her there and then. Had she been his mistress, he would have drawn her down on the bed. In its way, marriage imposes formalities.

Ted Tice had driven through London early that morning on the top of an airport bus, skimming trees and chimneys and making top-heavy arcs round corner pubs. He had peered, like God, into backyards of hawthorn and clothes-lines; and through an attic window had glimpsed a tousled bed. At an open doorway, he had seen fresh sunlight on parquet and the tall, engrossed figure of an elderly woman reading her letters. A black cat crawled out between lace curtains to settle, loaf-shape, on a sill. A man with a cap on the back of his head and a gold watch on his wrist hosed a footpath in the Fulham Road. All this could be normality—unless what he had left, the featureless world of airports and installations, was normality now, while these rational human scenes dwindled to anachronism.

The last segment of his journey was the best: he had never enjoyed a train trip so much, taking conscious pleasure in familiar irritations of grime and delay. His very fatigue gave sensations of well-being, for he would doze, and wake over and over to the luxury of reassurance. His present greeting to his homeland was excessive, for his having undervalued it before. A note of apology ran, too, through that morning's praise of his entire domestic district.

"Listen, before I forget—"

"These are for the children, can you put them somewhere?"

"Oh yes, how sweet. Your letters are on the desk, I've done the bills."

"Anything interesting?"

"You'll have to see. I opened a telegram, but it was nothing.

There are a few newspaper clippings about the ring-road. Did you see yesterday's paper, that man you knew in America died?"

"Vendler, was it? I heard he was near the end."

"Yes, I think that's the name. We can have tea in the garden."

"Shall I carry that stuff down?"

"Thanks, I can manage."

Ted went to turn the bath on, then walked through the bathroom into his study. A congenial gloom of curtains closed, of table, chair and pencils in abeyance; the desk an altar on which paper offerings had been laid for his safe return. It was an archaeological instant, he could tell how the room was without him: the moment of living entry into a tomb.

He had got into his head a phrase of piped-in music from the plane and began to hum as he stood over his letters, his loosened tie dangling forward. The mail was divided into professional and private, there was also a pile with circulars, clippings, appeals, and a folded magazine marked in red. Long expected, the death of Vendler was still a blow. There was no telling who would win in a wretched little struggle that must now take place for that position, or how the work would meantime be carried on.

Ted remembered he had liked Vendler the man, and was conscious that this came as an afterthought. He would write the widow with particular kindness, to clear himself of any taint, or suspicion, of heartlessness.

It was not Vendler who had died.

Dies in America. Suddenly at his home after an active career marked by and culminating in, considered aloof, nevertheless loyal friends such as, recently awarded, travelled, resided, founded, collected. Married twice: first, and then to the former . . . One daughter from his first union.

Had suffered a stroke. Dead and gone, at one stroke. Peacefully.

Adam Vail lay at peace on a bed, his sword-stick at rest, or impotent, in a closet.

The scientist Vendler was alive, reprieved: still useful and lik-able. It was to Caroline Vail that Edmund Tice would write with particular kindness.

And the former Caroline Bell, where was she now? Where did one write, to express shock and sympathy? The shock real enough, he could scarcely focus on words or objects. A glass paperweight rose and fell, pounding with the dim room and the darkened self in the mirror on the open bathroom door. Ted Tice had never fainted in his life, but now supported himself with his palms on the desk.

The bath was full and had started overflowing into a chromium outlet below the taps. He went and turned it off and, in relieving that minor emergency, felt some easing in himself. When the churning and gushing stopped there was a subsiding, also, of the flow and overflow of realization. The mirror showed, merely, a glaze of feelings, not all of them shameful or shameless: he had never found a mirror, or words in the mind, to reflect the power or pain of his obsession.

He returned to his study and replaced the clipping as it had been.