“You mean like we should have a real relationship, a commitment to each other, like love?” he said. “Like the house niggers used to make to their masters down in your dear old South?”
She sighed. “Your macho bullshit could be a problem,” she said. Then she went on: “I can make a deal for us. I’ve been a big help to the Vice President in her political career. She owes me. Now you have to see reality. Jintz and Lambertino are going to be slaughtered in the November election. Helen Du Pray is reorganizing her staff and I’m going to be one of her top advisers. I have a spot for you as my aide.”
Sal said smilingly, “That’s a demotion for me. But if you’re as good in the sack as I think you are, I’ll consider it.”
Elizabeth Stone said impatiently, “It won’t be a demotion, since you won’t have a job. And then when I go up the ladder, so do you. You’ll wind up with your own staff section as an aide to the Vice President.”
She paused for a moment. “Listen,” she said, “we were attracted to each other in the senator’s office, not love maybe, but certainly lust at first sight. And I’ve heard about you screwing your aides. But I understand it. We both work so hard, we don’t have time for a real social life or a real love life. And I’m tired of screwing guys just because I’m lonely a couple of times a month. I want a real relationship.”
“You’re going too fast,” Troyca said. “Now, if it was on the staff of the President …” He shrugged and grinned to show that he was kidding.
Elizabeth Stone gave him her smile again. It was really a hardboiled sort of grin but Troyca found it charming. “The Kennedys have always been unlucky,” she said. “The Vice President could be the President. But please be serious. Why can’t we have a partnership, if that’s what you prefer to call it? Neither one of us wants to get married. Neither of us wants children. Why can’t we sort of half live with each other, keep our own places, of course, but sort of live together? We can have companionship and sex and we can work together as a team. We can satisfy our human needs and operate at the highest point of efficiency. If it works, it could be a great arrangement. If it doesn’t, we can just call it quits. We have until November.”
They went to bed that night and Elizabeth Stone was a revelation to Troyca. Like many shy, reserved people, man or woman, she was genuinely ardent and tender in bed. And it helped that the act of consummation took place in Elizabeth Stone’s town house. Troyca had not known that she was independently wealthy. Like a true Wasp, he thought, she had concealed that fact, where he would have flaunted it. Troyca immediately saw that the town house would be a perfect place for both of them to live, much better than his just adequate flat. Here with Elizabeth Stone he could set up an office. The town house had three servants and he would be relieved of time-consuming and worrying details like sending clothes out for cleaning, shopping for food and drink.
And Elizabeth Stone, ardent feminist though she was, performed like some legendary courtesan in bed. She was a slave to his pleasure. Well, it was only the first time women were like that, Troyca thought. Like when they first came to be interviewed for a job, they never looked as good after that. But in the month that followed, she proved him wrong.
They built up an almost perfect relationship. It was wonderful for both of them after their long hours with Jintz and Lambertino to come home, go out for a late supper and then sleep together and make love. And in the morning they would go to work together. He thought for the first time in his life about marriage. But he knew instinctively that this was something Elizabeth would not want.
They lived contained lives, a cocoon of work, companionship and love, for they did come to love each other. But the best and most delicious part of their times together was their scheming on how to change the events of their world. They both agreed that Kennedy would be reelected to the presidency in November. Elizabeth was sure that the campaign being mounted against the President by Congress and the Socrates Club was doomed to failure. Troyca was not so sure. There were many cards to play.
Elizabeth hated Kennedy. It was not a personal hatred; it was that steely opposition to someone she thought of as a tyrant. “The important thing,” she said, “is that Kennedy not be allowed to have his own Congress in the next election. That should be the battleground. It’s clear from Kennedy’s statements in the campaign that he will change the structure of American democracy. And that would create a very dangerous historical situation.”
“If you are so opposed to him now, how can you accept a position on the Vice President’s staff after the election?” Sal asked her.
“We’re not policymakers,” Elizabeth said. “We’re administrators. We can work for anybody.”
• • •
So after a month of intimacy, Elizabeth was surprised when Sal asked that they meet in a restaurant rather than in the comfort of the town house they now shared. But he had insisted.
In the restaurant over their first drinks, Elizabeth said, “Why couldn’t we talk at home?”
Sal said thoughtfully, “You know, I’ve been studying a lot of documents going a long way back. Our Attorney General, Christian Klee, is a very dangerous man.”
“So?” Elizabeth said.
“He may have your house bugged,” Sal said.
Elizabeth laughed, “You are paranoid,” she said.
“Yeah,” Sal said. “Well, how about this. Christian Klee had those two kids, Gresse and Tibbot, in custody and didn’t interrogate them right away. But there’s a time gap. And the kids were tipped off and told to keep their mouths shut until their families supplied lawyers. And what about Yabril? Klee has him stashed, nobody can get to see or talk to him. Klee stonewalls and Kennedy backs him up. I think Klee is capable of anything.”
Elizabeth Stone said thoughtfully, “You can get Jintz to subpoena Klee to appear before a congressional committee. I can ask Senator Lambertino to do the same thing. We can smoke Klee out.”
“Kennedy will exercise executive privilege and forbid him to testify,” Sal said. “We can wipe our asses with those subpoenas.”
Elizabeth was usually amused by his vulgarities, especially in bed, but she was not amused now. “His exercising executive privilege will damage him,” she said. “The papers and TV will crucify him.”
“OK, we can do that,” Sal said. “But how about if just you and me go to see Oddblood Gray and try to pin him down? We can’t make him talk but maybe he will. He’s an idealist at heart, and maybe psychologically he’s horrified at the way Klee botched the atom bomb incident. Maybe he even knows something concrete.”
It was unfortunate that they picked Oddblood Gray to question. Gray was reluctant to see them, but Elizabeth’s friendship with Vice President Helen Du Pray was the deciding factor in their favor. Gray had a tremendous respect for Du Pray.
Sal Troyca opened the discussion by asking, “Isn’t it odd that the Attorney General, Christian Klee, had those two young men in custody before the explosion and never got any information out of them?”
“They stood on their Constitutional rights,” Gray said cautiously.
Troyca said dryly, “Klee has the reputation of being a rather forceful and resourceful man. Could two kids like Gresse and Tibbot stand up against him?”
Gray shrugged. “You never know about Klee,” he said.
It was Elizabeth Stone who put the question directly. “Mr. Gray,” she said, “do you have any knowledge or even have any reason to believe that the Attorney General secretly interrogated those two young men?”
Gray felt a sudden rush of anger at this question. But wait, why the hell should he protect Klee? he thought. After all, most of the people killed in New York had been black. “This is off the record,” he said, “and I will deny it under oath. Klee did conduct a secret interrogation with all the listening devices turned off. There is no record. It is possible to believe the worst. But if you do, you must believe the President had no part in it.”
CHAPTER
19
On
this Early may Morning before meeting with the President, Helen Du Pray went on a five-mile run to clear her head. She knew that not only the administration but she herself was at a very dangerous crossroad.
It was pleasant to know that at this point in time she was a hero to Kennedy and the senior staff because she had refused to sign the petition to remove Kennedy—even though that feeling sprang from a concept of male honor that she held in contempt.
There were many dangerous problems. What had Klee really done? Was it possible he could have prevented the atom bomb explosion? And had he let it explode because he knew it would save the President? She could believe that of Klee but not of Francis Kennedy. And surely that could only have been done with Kennedy’s consent?
And yet. And yet. There was in the persona of Kennedy now an aura of danger. It was clear that he would try to get a subservient Congress to do his will. And what would he make that Congress do? It was clear that Kennedy was going to press for RICO indictments against all the important members of the Socrates Club. That was an extremely dangerous use of power. Would he discard all democratic and ethical principles to further his vision of a better America? Kennedy was trying to protect Klee, and Oddblood Gray was rebelling against this. Helen Du Pray feared this dissension. A President’s staff existed to serve the President. The Vice President must follow the President. Must. Unless she resigned. And what a terrible blow that would be to Kennedy. And the end of her political career. She would be the ultimate betrayer. And poor Francis, what would he do about Yabril?
For she recognized that Kennedy could become as ruthless as his opponents: the Congress, the Socrates Club, Yabril. Oh, Francis could destroy them all—the tragedies of his life had warped his brain irreversibly.
She felt the sweat on her back, her thigh muscles ached, she dreamed of running forever and ever and never going back to the White House.
Dr. Zed Annaccone dreaded his meeting with President Kennedy and his staff. It made him slightly ill to talk science and mix it in with political and sociological targets. He would never have accepted being the President’s medical science adviser if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was the only way to ensure the proper funding of his beloved National Brain Research Institute.
It wasn’t so bad when he dealt with Francis Kennedy directly. The man was brilliant and had a flair for science, though the newspaper stories that claimed the President would have made a great scientist were simply absurd. But Kennedy certainly understood the subtle value of research and how even the most farfetched of scientific theories could have almost miraculous results. Kennedy was not the problem. It was the staff and the Congress and all the bureaucratic dragons. Plus the CIA and the FBI, who kept looking over his shoulder.
Until he began serving in Washington, Dr. Annaccone had not truly realized the awful gap between science and society in general. It was scandalous that while the human brain had made such a great leap forward in the sciences, the political and sociological disciplines had remained almost stationary.
He found it incredible that mankind still waged war, at enormous cost and to no advantage. That individual men and women still killed each other, when there were treatments that could dissipate the murderous tendencies in human beings. He found it contemptible that the science of genetic splicing was attacked by politicians and the news media as if tampering with biology were a corruption of some holy spirit. Especially when it was obvious that the human race as now genetically constituted was doomed.
Dr. Annaccone had been briefed on what the meeting would be about. There was still some doubt as to whether the exploding of the atom bomb had been part of the terrorist plot to destabilize American influence in the world—that is, whether there was a link between the two young physics professors, Gresse and Tibbot, and the terrorist leader Yabril. He would be asked whether they should use the PET brain scan to question the prisoners and determine the truth.
Which made Dr. Annaccone irritable. Why hadn’t they asked him to run the PET before the atom bomb exploded? Christian Klee claimed that he had been tied up in the hijacking crisis and that the bomb threat had not seemed that serious. Typical asshole reasoning. And President Kennedy had refused Klee’s request for the PET brain scan for humanitarian reasons. Yes, if the two young men were innocent and damage was done to their brains during the scan it would be an inhuman act. But Annaccone knew that this was a politician covering his ass. He had briefed Kennedy thoroughly on the procedure, and Kennedy understood that the PET scan was almost completely safe, and would make the subject answer truthfully. They could have located the bomb and disarmed it. There would have been time.
It was regrettable, to say the least, that so many people had been killed or injured. But Annaccone felt a sneaking admiration for the two young scientists. He wished he had their balls, for they had made a real point, a lunatic one, true, but a point. That as man in general became more knowledgeable, the probability that individuals would cause an atomic disaster increased. It was also true that the greed of the individual entrepreneur or the megalomania of a political leader could do the same. But these two kids were obviously thinking of sociological controls, not scientific ones. They were thinking of repressing science, halting its march forward. The real answer, of course, was to change the genetic structure of man so that violence would become an impossible act. To put brakes in the genes and in the brain as you put brakes on a locomotive. It was that simple.
While waiting in the Cabinet Room of the White House for the President to arrive, Annaccone dissociated himself from the rest of the people there by reading his stack of memoranda and articles. He always felt himself resistant to the President’s staff. Christian Klee kept track of the National Brain Research Institute and sometimes slapped a secrecy order on his research. Annaccone didn’t like that and used diversionary tactics when he could. He was often surprised that Klee could outwit him in such matters. The other staff members, Eugene Dazzy, Oddblood Gray and Arthur Wix, were primitives with no understanding of science who immersed themselves in the comparatively unimportant matters of sociology and statecraft.
He noted that Vice President Helen Du Pray was present, as was Theodore Tappey, the CIA chief. He was always surprised that a woman was Vice President of the United States. He felt that science ruled against something like this. In his researches on the brain he always felt he would someday come upon a fundamental difference between the male and female brains and was amused that he did not. Amused because if he found a discrepancy the fur would fly in a delightful way.
Theodore Tappey he always regarded as Neanderthal. Indulging in those futile machinations for a slight degree of advantage in foreign affairs against fellow members of the human race. So futile an endeavor in the long run.
Dr. Annaccone took some papers out of his briefcase. There was an interesting article on the hypothetical particle called the tachyon. Not one person in this room had ever heard of the word, he thought. Though his field of expertise was the brain, Dr. Annaccone had a vast knowledge of all the sciences.
So now he studied the paper on tachyons. Did tachyons really exist? Physicists had been quarreling about that for the last twenty years. Tachyons, if they existed, would fracture Einstein’s theories; tachyons would travel faster than the speed of light, which Einstein had said was impossible. Sure, there was the apology that tachyons were already moving faster than light from the beginning, but what the hell was that? Also the mass of a tachyon is a negative number. Which supposedly was impossible. But the impossible in real life could be possible in the spooky world of mathematics. And then what could happen? Who knew? Who cared? Certainly nobody in this room, which held some of the most powerful men on the planet. An irony in itself. Tachyons might change human life more than anything these men could conceive.
Finally the President made his entrance and the people in the room stood up. Dr. Annaccone put away his papers. He might enjoy this meeting if he kept alert and counted the eye blinks in the room. Research showed
that eye blinks could reveal whether a person was lying or not. There was going to be a lot of blinking.
Francis Kennedy came to the meeting dressed comfortably in slacks and a white shirt covered by a sleeveless blue cashmere sweater, and with a good humor extraordinary in a man beset by so many difficulties.
After greeting them he said, “We have Dr. Annaccone with us today so that we can settle the problem of whether the terrorist Yabril was in any way connected with the atom bomb explosion. Also to respond to the charges that have been made in the newspapers and on television that we in the administration could have found the bomb before it exploded.”
Helen Du Pray felt she must ask the question. “Mr. President, in your speech to Congress you said Yabril was part of the atom bomb conspiracy. You were emphatic. Was that based on hard evidence?”
Kennedy was prepared for this question and answered with calm precision. “I believed it was true then, I believe it is true now.”
“But on what hard evidence?” Oddblood Gray pressed.
Kennedy’s eyes met Klee’s for an instant before he turned to Annaccone and broke into a friendly grin. “That’s why we’re here. To find out. Dr. Annaccone, what are your thoughts on this subject? Maybe you can help us. And as a favor to me, stop figuring out the secrets of the universe on that pad of yours. You’ve discovered enough to get us into trouble.”
Dr. Annaccone had been scribbling mathematical equations on the memo pad in front of him. He realized that this was a rebuke in the guise of a compliment. He said, “I still don’t understand why you didn’t sign the order for the PET scan before the nuclear device exploded. You already had the two young men in custody. You had the authority under the Atomic Weapons Control Act.”
Christian said quickly, “We were in the middle of what we thought was a far more important crisis, if you remember. I thought it could wait another day. Gresse and Tibbot claimed they were innocent and we had only enough evidence to grab them. We didn’t have enough to indict. Then Tibbot’s father got tipped off and we had a bunch of very expensive lawyers threatening a lot of trouble. So we figured we’d wait until the other crisis was over and maybe we had a little more evidence.”