First, the popping sound had drawn my attention down to the orating Senator; then, far across in the visitors’ gallery, there came a flash of movement—and then it was as though the letter had caught flame in my hands. Then, for some reason the photographic image of the elegant magnesium-bodied sports car which ignited and burned during the recent running of the Le Mans Grand Prix—that awe-inspiring sabre of flame and destruction—flashed through my mind just as I was looking out past the great chandelier of the chamber to see an elegantly dressed man lean over the visitors’- gallery rail and point down to where, gripping the sides of the lectern and tossing his head, Senator Sunraider was speaking. Then things seemed to reel out of phase.
Directly below me, on the floor of the chamber, the Senator’s colleagues sat calmly engrossed in his argument, while along the curving rail to either side of the pointing man I could see visitors leaping to their feet and away, scattering. Then something thudded against the lectern, and somewhere above me I could hear a gay, erratic ringing, like the musical jangling of a huge bunch of keys.
Then, as the sound and the rising of the man’s arm flew together in my mind, my nerves snapped like a window shade: He was firing a pistol at the Senator. Oh, no, I thought, OH, NO! We were only betting, it was all in fun. This can’t be happening!
Yet, with the swiftness of glass ornaments sent bursting from a Christmas tree by the fire of a circus sharpshooter, arrows of prismatic light were flying from the swaying chandelier. And above the furious action below me there sounded a ringing as of a thousand crystal bells, the hysterical cries of women. From somewhere in the distance came the angry shrilling of a whistle, the harsh staccato of commands.
On the floor directly below me I now could see the Senator staggering backwards, and around in a narrow circle, a spot of blood blooming on his face. Then he seemed to look up to where the gunman, crouching now, his elbows resting on the railing, gripped the pistol with both hands and got off a final shot.
This time the Senator was sent lurching sideways, turning to his left, and I could hear him calling out in a strangely transformed voice and going over to land on his back. Then, “My God! My God!” some man was calling, and it was bedlam.
Behind Senator Sunraider, members of the Senate were scattering and dodging, hitting the floor and yelling, making for the exits. A pair of eyeglasses glittered near the leg of an overturned chair, while across the vast space of the chamber, past the swaying chandelier, I could see three guards fighting their way through the milling spectators—several of them Negro women—trying to get to the gunman who, standing erect now, turned to look behind him, his movements oddly like those of one intentionally deaf to all sounds of external confusion. He seemed absolutely calm, as now, immediately behind him, I could see, looming up like a bear suddenly cresting a hill, a huge old whiteheaded Negro. This man yells something which I can’t grasp as he rushed toward the gunman, stepping over a bench and down like a bear hurdling a stone fence, his arms outstretched as he calls out once more.
The effect is electric. Suddenly the gunman throws down his weapon and seems to freeze, waiting. Then, as the old Negro comes on down the aisle, the gunman swivels suddenly and throws his leg over the railing, resting there a moment, his arms rigid as he grips the railing with both hands, calmly contemplating the approaching man.
“Wait, boy! Wait!” I hear. Then above the turbulent heads I see a pistol waving, and a uniformed guard bursts into view behind the old Negro who turns, suddenly enfolding the helpless guard in his great arms, yells out once more, “Wait!”
Seizing the incongruous images of the man on the rail, the old Negro, and the struggling guard, my mind leaps ahead on a wave of heat and nausea, lifting me from my chair. For a moment the gunman stares straight at the old Negro, then, violently shaking his head, he was gone, plunged calmly over the railing.
The nausea shook me then, and I went over—carefully avoiding the railing and the floor below—even as the sound of a crunching impact, the splintering of wood, filled the great room.
There followed a shattering silence which whimpered and gasped, sideslipping and quavering, welling up thunderously in a reverberation that struck the chamber in great tremulous waves. These seemed to last for endless minutes, for vast suspensions of breath. And then, as though what was still in anguished progress wasn’t frightening enough, outrageous enough, terrible enough, the old Negro, who is now grasping the gallery rail and looking down at the fallen Senator, suddenly calls out in a voice like a roughly amplified horn and begins to relieve himself of an inarticulate combination of prayer, sermon, prophesy, and song!
It was absolutely confounding! A projection so resonant with anguish, bitterness, yes, and with indictment—that for a brief moment that entire frenzied, stampeding body broke its flight to whirl around and stand looking up to where he holds forth, white head thrown back, arms outstretched—caught up in the confounding and full-throated anguish of his cry.
And in that place what an awe-inspiring sound! Yes, and what confounding conduct. A terrible calamity strikes the nation and this character out of nowhere—Hickman is his name—he converts it with a blast of his own voice into an occasion for condemning the entire United States Senate! What a state of affairs—one break in the wall of decorum, one fissure in this pattern of orderly events, and a Negro, a Negro, is crying in the gap like blackest chaos! And it was as though he had been waiting for years, prepared and ready. It was, there’s no other word, absolutely scandalous!
What’s more, for some time afterwards I had the unshakable impression that even his big whah-whah Negro voice, sounding with its wildly misdirected note of doom, was still reverberating there beneath the dome, beating like the wings of some dark bird trapped in a steeple. Yes, and it would continue to do so until the mystery of the occurrence is explained, for even now there is much mystery. One thinks of ghosts crying in clear summer sunlight, of obscene guests at a wedding, of lewd behavior at a funeral, of a crowd of drunken lunatics howling and tearing up the room beyond where, lonely and sleepless, I lay long ago on a hot night in Paris.
And all of this over Senator Sunraider! I was convinced that it all began as an act to confuse us. And more likely than not this man Hickman is a charlatan, a flunky hired by Sunraider himself in one of his endless tricks of political showmanship which, through some unfortunate miscalculation, blew up in his face.
Otherwise, it’s as though the High Chief Rabbi of Minsk were to have stood in front of the Pentagon and broken into loud lamentations over the death of Adolf Hitler—completely illogical, a scandalous affront to our sense of order. A slap in the face! Indeed, for me this man Hickman’s conduct is more upsetting than the shooting. Sunraider is not, after all, the first politician to get himself shot.
Nevertheless, I was almost out of my mind over having failed to observe the tragedy from its beginning. For just at the split second when a simple outcry might have alerted the Senator and frustrated the gunman’s aim, I was flagrantly inattentive. I failed, I soiled the morality of my craft. Instead of working, instead of being objectively observant of fact and process, I had been reading (and enjoying) M. Vannec’s letter. And the fact that it was an unexpected relief from a series of dull speeches gives me no comfort whatsoever. For I painfully perceive that the source of my failure was not boredom but vanity. A vanity springing from the simple fact, I must confess, that I’m so far from the top of my profession that I possess not one solitary autographed photograph—those emblems of a certain journalistic success—from a president, cabinet member, or leader of Congress. True, I often come near these great figures, but I’ve never reached the proximity which conveys status. Nor have I complained, for I have long cherished the uses of relative anonymity. Hence my secret pride in having received a piece of correspondence from such a distinguished figure as M. Vannec. I’ve long admired M. Vannec (though from a great distance), who counts in my estimation of the scheme of things for far more than does the Senator. Thus the very un
expectedness of his letter gave me a sense of plunging suddenly into more important areas of life, of being in contact with one possessing a higher consciousness of the complexity of culture. Yes, and I felt somehow in touch with the darker, mysterious areas of events. The questions he asked had left me with the notion that I understood many grave and complex matters. But more about his letter later.
Then, as I say, completely without warning, while I had been enjoying this most tenuous contact with one considered a leading figure of our time, the Earth seemed to slip its orbit; the Senator was being fired upon, the Senate was in panic. And with all hell erupting around us, this Negro Hickman was singing!
CHAPTER 2
THEN IT WAS ABSOLUTE CHAOS. When I left the elevator and tried to get onto the main floor of the chamber, guards and security people were all over the place, blocking the exits and challenging reporters and legislators indiscriminately. Looking past the clustered heads of a group guarding the door through which I had tried to enter, I could see the gunman’s form, sprawled near a shattered bench; a whiff of gunpowder lingered in the air. The shot-up chandelier hung in sad, damaged glitter above, while three Secret Ser vice agents with pistols exposed at the hip stood underneath, looking up to the gradually emptying visitors’ gallery with alert eyes. It was hot, and an air of shocked depression hung over all.
Backing away, I moved along the hall, elbowing a path through the crowd as I listened to rapid, hysteria-edged discussions of the shooting. I learned that during the brief interval when I was blocked on the stairs leading from the press gallery, the Senator had been rushed off to the hospital, that the Negro Hickman, and his followers, had been rounded up and placed under arrest, and that now the visitors’ gallery was being searched for a possible second gunman, and, some said, for bombs—news which heightened our tension.
I was kept moving by the crowd, which milled slowly about in its frustrations for explanations and its desire to get a closer look at the assassin. And now, with my eyes watering from the cigarette of some inconsiderate smoker, I found myself pressing against the wall near another entrance to the chamber where a group was speculating as to the nature of the Negroes’ involvement in the shooting. One man was quite certain that he had the picture.
“I tell you they’re part of the plot,” he said.
“I agree,” another man said.
“I don’t,” a calm voice behind me said. “They were simply hysterical. When the shooting started everybody was hysterical—”
“Hysterical, hell,” the first man said, “I saw them attacking the guards—”
“Oh, no, you merely saw some old ladies waving their arms around.”
“Say,” the hysterical man said, “are you a reporter?”
“No, I’m a member of the Congress.”
“Well, excuse me, sir, but I’m a reporter and trained to observe, and I saw them attack the guards. I was upstairs, looking across. You were below, and evidently you couldn’t see what was happening.”
“That’s right, those of us above saw it all,” another reporter said.
“You’re damn right, and they were acting with discipline,” the hysterical man said.
“Look, they were simply acting like a bunch of frightened Negroes,” the Congressman said. “Let’s not add to the confusion.”
“I tell you they were part of a plot.”
“What plot?”
“The plot to get Sunraider,” the hysterical man said. “They were under orders, and what’s worse, I believe that the gunman was under orders.”
“Now I don’t know about that, although things did seem to happen all at once.”
“You’re right there, the plot moved like clockwork!”
“But under whose orders?” someone said.
“That old burly Negro’s,” the hysterical man said. “Didn’t you see the assassin throw down his gun when the old man yelled at him?”
“Did anyone catch what the Negro said?”
“No, not exactly, but I saw the assassin throw down his gun.”
“But then why did he jump?”
“Because,” the hysterical man said with emphasis, “that old nigger ordered him to!”
“Nuts! Are you out of your mind?”
“No, I’m not. He jumped, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but how do you know that he even heard the Negro?”
“I tell you he was ordered to jump. We all saw him jump. That old nigger barked and he went over the rail like a trained seal.”
“But why would you think that he’d take orders like that?”
“Wait a second,” someone said. “Was the assassin a white or a nonwhite?”
“White,” the hysterical man said. “Everyone saw him. You can look in there and see for yourself.”
“White or nonwhite, what I want to know is, why do you think the assassin would take an order like that?”
“Because there’s more to this thing than meets the eye. Those niggers had something on that fellow. Most likely they’re all under Communist discipline.”
“Look, my friend,” the Congressman said, “you’re getting hysterical.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I can’t imagine anyone taking an order like that from anyone, let alone a Negro.”
“But these are revolutionary times,” the hysterical man said. “There’re a lot of misguided people around who’ll take orders from anyone to do anything.”
“You’ve got something there,” someone else said.
“You’re damn right I have! They’re fanatics! Terrorists! They’ll do whatever they’re told! And you have to remember that we’re dealing here with a background of slavery. For years back those people have been trained to take orders, and now the Communists have moved in. Didn’t they run one for vice president? That’s why I say that old bastard was probably under orders to have that fellow shoot Senator Sunraider and then kill himself.”
“Of course this is nonsense,” someone said.
“I agree,” the Congressman said, “and you should remember that the government isn’t exactly uninformed as to the activities of the Communists and other such subversive groups. Don’t let yourself be carried away, at least not before we have more information.”
“I trust my own information,” the hysterical man said.
“Was that what the old man yelled?” the Congressman asked.
“What?”
“Dive in the name of the Party?”
“Sir, this is no kidding matter. You should study the history of terrorism, of brainwashing, the uprising in Santo Domingo, the Nat Turner rebellion!”
“But did anyone hear the old Negro’s words?”
“Hear? Who had to hear it?” the hysterical man said. “We all saw that nigger grapple with the guard, we saw him yell something to the gunman, and we saw the gunman leap. He was like somebody hopped up or hypnotized, wasn’t he? What more do we have to know?”
“There’s a hell of a lot we have to know,” another man said.
“Yes, we’re leaping to conclusions. We don’t know the gunman’s race, nationality, name, or age—”
“Listen,” the hysterical man said, “if that nigger wasn’t giving orders, why didn’t the gunman shoot him?”
“Maybe he was out of bullets.”
“I doubt if that’s the explanation,” someone said. “A terrorist on a mission like that would carry extra clips. Even an extra weapon.”
“That’s possible,” the Congressman said, turning again to the hysterical man, “but now I’ll ask you this: Why, instead of throwing himself over the railing, didn’t he try to escape through the crowd?”
“Because that big nigger was in the way, that’s why! If he hadn’t jumped, that nigger would have blown his head off and thrown him over. Didn’t you see how the burly bastard handled that guard?”
“But the old man was empty-handed.”
“I tell you that fellow would have been shot!” the hysterical man said.
“By whom, the
guard?”
“Hell, no, by that big nigger! Or by one of those nigger women. I’ll bet you every one of them was armed.”
“But I heard the old man yell, ‘Don’t shoot that boy,’ “a man who had been silent said.
“I’ll be damn if I heard him say anything like that.”
“Well, I did, and that’s when he overpowered the guard.”
“Did anyone actually see whether the Negro was armed or not?”
“All I know is that when he started that damned singing and praying he threw out his arms and his hands were empty.”
“Look,” the hysterical man said, “that nigger probably passed his own gun to one of those other niggers.”
“That’s raw speculation,” the Congressman said. “We don’t know anything for sure. I wish they’d find that bomb and let us out of here so that we can gather the facts.”
“Hey, McIntyre!” a voice called, and I snapped around to see McGowan, his face red with excitement, pushing his beefy way toward me.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “I just got through a call to my editor, and it’s unbelievable!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you know what they’ve done with that nigra Hickman?”
“Hickman?”
“The big one who did the singing.”
“So that’s his name,” I said. “What happened, did someone kill him?”
“Hell, no. That nigra’s got more guards around him than Fort Knox.”
“Then what happened?”
“Man, instead of taking that nigra to the Justice Department with those other nigras, they have taken him to the hospital—along with the Senator!”
“With him, my God,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“I mean in the same ambulance,” McGowan said. “Did you ever hear of such a thing?”
“But why? Did the old man have a heart attack?”
McGowan shook his head. “Heart attack, hell! Dammit, ma-yan, what I’m trying to tell you is, they took that nigra along because the Senator demanded that they take him!”