A Shade of Difference (47 page)

“All right,” Lafe said indifferently. “Maybe I don’t, if you want it that way. But I do care what happens to this country, and if you don’t care, friend chairman, I think you’re a damned fool, because it’s just as much your neck as it is mine.”

“Is it?” LeGage demanded, breathing heavily but trying to keep his voice down. ‘Is it, now? Maybe we’ll see about that someday, Lafe. Maybe we’ll just see.”

In response Lafe spoke sharply and too fast, and his reply could not have been more infuriating had he deliberately planned it so.

“You’re talking like a child. A sick child. You’re off in some dream world someplace.”

“I know,” LeGage said softly. “Tell me we’re all Americans together, why don’t you?”

“You’re going down a bad road, boy,” Lafe said, and was aware of a sudden convulsive movement in the chair alongside.

“Don’t ‘boy’ me,” ’Gage whispered savagely, turning his face away from the room and pretending to study the telephone dial, so that no one but Lafe could see his angry, half-crying expression. “I hate that!”

“I didn’t mean it the way you choose to take it,” he said, equally low-voiced, equally absorbed in studying the dial. “I said it as I would to any of my friends, that’s the way I talk, you know that. But I guess it wasn’t—to a friend, in this case. But watch out for yourself, that’s all I can say. It’s a dangerous game and we could all get hurt.”

“I’ll play it right,” LeGage promised fiercely, still averting his face from the room. “You can be sure of that. I’ll play it right!”

“I hope so for your sake,” Lafe said, forcing himself to relax and turn back casually, nodding brightly to a Pakistani, bowing politely to the Italian Ambassador, noting with half a thought the little group of interested delegates surrounding the M’Bulu and Krishna Khaleel, far down the room near the bar. His eyes came back to the entrance and it took him several seconds to really focus on the figure that stood there, peering about in a slightly self-conscious but typically brash and arrogant fashion. It was a figure so out of place in this setting that for a moment he literally could not believe it was there. When he accepted the fact, he started to rise, but too late. The junior Senator from Wyoming had noted his movement and was upon them both before they could escape. There was one small bright note for Lafe: LeGage’s face was as much a study as his own, and he could not believe there had been any prearrangement about this unexpected meeting.

“Well, if it isn’t Iowa’s gift to the motherhood of the whole wide world,” Fred Van Ackerman said with the unctuous heartiness that always trembled on the edge of a sneer. “How’s it going up here? Getting all you want?”

“Want some, Fred?” Lafe asked evenly. “I might have a little extra lying around that I could arrange for you, if you’re hard up.”

“I’ve got more important things to think about, thanks,” Senator Van Ackerman said. “Such as this almighty mess old Half-Ass Harley has gotten us into right here in the UN. What are you doing about that, Lafe? Anything?”

“We’re working on it,” Lafe said, rather lamely. Fred Van Ackerman snorted.

“Well, that’s good. I’m glad to know somebody is. Why don’t you run along and let me talk to LeGage here? Maybe he has some practical ideas about what we ought to do.”

“What brings you up here, Fred?” Lafe asked. “Is Washington getting to be too small an area for you to do damage in?”

The Senator from Wyoming gave him a sudden furious look but refrained from reply. Instead he sat down abruptly in the chair Lafe had just vacated and turned to LeGage as though no one else were there.

“I’d like to talk to the only sane man in the U.S. delegation. How’s it going, boy?”

“Tell him,
boy
,”
Lafe said, turning on his heel. “Tell him, and have fun.”

“I never know what that fornicating jackass means, half the time,” Fred Van Ackerman remarked, shaking his head. “Do you?”

But LeGage only gave him a strange look, as though words failed him, and after a moment the junior Senator from Wyoming dismissed it.

“Now look here, boy,” he said, leaning forward and clamping a hand on LeGage’s arm, “I think you and I can do business on this. I’ve got some powerful friends in COMFORT, you know, and I think maybe all of us liberals can get together and—”

Another day, Hal Fry told himself as he looked across First Avenue at the green-and-white shaft of the Secretariat making its powerful statement against the autumn sun, another dollar. He had been up since six, reading the papers, studying reports, making vote-tallies as earnestly as though he were helping Bob Munson on some major issue in the Senate. It was a frustrating pastime, because every time he thought he had a nation accurately pegged, some other aspect of its self-interest would occur to him and he would have to move it into the doubtful column again. Even the powers that normally sided with the United States were doubtful now, so many were the passions aroused by the Labaiya amendment and so strong the subtle, corroding elements that colored the world’s attitudes toward the great Republic of the West. It was in an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion that the acting head of the American delegation moved forward now, aware that his country was surrounded on all sides by active enemies and shifty friends, aware that the world was in a turmoil from which nothing constructive or lasting ever seemed to emerge, aware that men advanced on the basis of their passions with the mind left far behind, aware that in this present era events such as those which were now developing were quite capable of producing consequences of a gravity and permanent destructiveness far beyond the consequences reasonable men might have the right, in some other, more rational age, to expect. He did not even know, for instance, what would come of the appointment he was about to have, here in his office in U.S. delegation headquarters. His only strength at the moment was that his visitors had come to him, not he to them. For what it was worth, this was some small indication of status, and he decided to make the most of it. But it took some doing to be outwardly cordial and calmly unconcerned as he prepared to greet the Ambassadors of Panama and India and their carefree companion, the dashing young heir to Gorotoland.

Even as he rose to do so, the problem was suddenly and terribly complicated by the strangest combination of physical sensations he had ever known. A sudden feeling of nausea, a terrible dizziness, a feeling as though a vise had clamped upon his chest and stomach, shooting pains down his arms and legs, a sudden strangled feeling in his windpipe, a sudden hazy fog in his eyes—he was so completely taken aback at this fantastic and unexpected onslaught that for a second he was terrified that he might fall forward across his desk with hand outstretched in a greeting never to be completed.

Apparently, however, none of this was visible on the surface at this moment. He was to be struck with the fearful irony of it in succeeding days, that apparently his color remained unchanged, his outward appearance normal, only his eyes, Lafe was to tell him later, showing any indication of strain, and that only to those who looked into them with a real perception.

Now, none of the three faces that he could see in a half-blurred haze showed concern or alarm. Evidently what was to him a major and terrifying experience was not communicated to them in any way. What to him seemed agonized minutes must be only the slightest of seconds as the wave of pain throughout his body seemed to build and then began gradually to recede. It was not like what he had ever heard of a heart attack, though the chest pain immediately suggested that conclusion. It was an utterly irrational and erratic onslaught upon his entire system for which he could not, as a layman, find explanation: except that he knew, suddenly and completely and finally, that he was very seriously ill.

All of this, so deeply shattering, so profoundly unsettling as well as painful, the psychological impact even greater than the torturing physical pain, took seconds. With a great and definite effort of the will, through sheer strength of character, relying on plain and simple guts of which he fortunately had a great many, he continued his greetings as casually as he could, talking through a screen of pain that gradually, but only gradually, eased throughout his body. Some impulse to duty, some feeling that the accustomed forms would pull him through, some basic determination not to fail his task in this crucial moment for his country, gave him the strength he needed. But it was with a tenuous and shaky control at best that he continued the greetings so harshly interrupted.

“Felix,” he said, “K.K., Terry—please sit down. I can’t tell you how honored I am by this distinguished trio. Which am I entertaining,” he added with a desperate attempt to cling to his customary humor, “the Three Graces, the Three Fates, or the Three Blind Mice?”

But this, which they of course could not understand was a genuine necessity for him in his present state, was obviously the wrong thing to say to the two Ambassadors, for Felix gave only his small, tidy, unamused smile, and K.K. looked quite offended. Only the M’Bulu burst into ringing laughter as he deposited his towering form gracefully in a chair. In fact, Hal Fry noted through the screen of pain, he even clapped his hands a couple of times as though he were a delighted child with a new toy. This act of innocence was so stagy that the Senator, even in his agonizing physical discomfort, was at once put even more on guard than he was already.

“Senator,” Terrible Terry declared, “you are always so witty. No matter what happens, we can count on you for laughs. It makes of the UN a happier place than it might otherwise be.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Hal Fry said, as the pressures began to increase again throughout his body. “I try to spread what cheer I can in such troubled times. It seems the least I can do.”

“Some of us,” Krishna Khaleel said in a tone of starchy disapproval, “do not think the world is quite that funny, Hal.”

“You’re certainly doing
your
best to make it not so,” he snapped, egged on by the rising pain which now was attacking him again in his chest, his stomach, his eyes, down his arms and legs, threatening to choke off his breath, savagely enfolding his body in a silent and terrible embrace. “I suppose you have some reason for it that seems logical to you.”

“The logic is clear enough,” the Indian Ambassador said coldly. “You surely did not think the United States could maintain its racial policies in the face of world disapproval forever.”

“The United States is doing its best to straighten out its racial poli—” he began, but his voice died, with the pain, and even more, at this moment, in the face of the three archly knowing expressions that confronted him. What was the use, he managed to think through the silently frightful struggle going on within him, when the world would not believe? What was the point in honor and good faith and the government trying to better the conditions of its people, when no one gave you credit, or even credence? These minds were closed. The great majority of minds around the world were closed. The United States could talk forever, reasonably and with complete honesty, about what it was doing to improve the status of the Negro, and from around the world it would get back exactly this smug, superior, impenetrable, know-nothing smirk. So why, he wondered painfully, should anyone bother?

“How many votes have you got, Felix?” he asked, feeling dreadfully sick but managing by sheer will power to put a cold forcefulness in his voice. “Apparently we might as well get down to brass tacks. You haven’t got enough yet, have you?”

A sudden extra-agonizing twist of pain shot through his entire body.
My God,
he thought,
what is the matter with me?

“Do you think I should admit it if I did not have the votes?” Felix asked calmly. “Certainly I should not. Prove it, if you think I do not have enough.”

“I can’t prove you haven’t, any more than you can prove you have,” he said with a painful slowness that to them apparently only sounded deliberate. “I just don’t think you do. You don’t think you do, either. So what is the purpose of this call? To try to bluff the United States into something? What do you take us for?”

The pain was gone, abruptly, from his stomach and chest; now an almost unbearable ache was in his arms and legs, and he felt as though he could not draw another breath, although, slowly and carefully, he did.

“Well, Hal,” the Indian Ambassador said with a stuffy annoyance, “I must say you are not making it easy. I must say we did not expect to find such intransigence, Hal, nor such, one might even say, as it were, hostility.”

“My as it were hostility is in good shape, K.K.,” he said, again with what they apparently took to be a thoughtful slowness, though it was in reality an outward sign of the desperate struggle he seemed to be waging with his own body. “How else am I supposed to react, as though you were offering me rubies and roses? Now,” he said with another effort of will that put a show of challenging vigor in his voice, “I want to know what the purpose of this call is. I have a lot of things to do, including a luncheon date, and I can’t afford to spend all morning with you three, delightful though your company is.”

“Are you feeling all right, Hal?” the Indian Ambassador asked, apparently really looking at him for the first time. He drew himself up in his chair and managed a firm smile.

“I’m feeling fine.” The smile faded, because he could not hold it longer against the devils who were now re-entering his chest, turning their screws upon his stomach, shooting the waves of terrible dizziness into his head; but this his guests evidently did not perceive, and he covered it by a renewed tone of coldness. “I’m just annoyed by this attempt at flimflammery, that’s all.”

“We had not thought to find you in such a mood,” Felix Labaiya said quietly. “We had thought to find you in a mood to listen to reason.”

“In a mood to turn tail and run, is that it?” he managed with a sharpness aggravated by the bewildering sensations running through him. “That is not the American mood, Felix, even though you sometimes find it difficult to understand what that mood is. Perhaps your in-laws aren’t a good example.”