“Try and stop me,” she said, laughing.
His eyes are quite hypnotic, she thought.
She did spend the next day as close as possible to the two women. This time they divulged nothing.
That evening, fearing her enthusiasm for the day’s work barely masked her exhaustion, the senator, over cocktails, quietly told Guy Steavenson that Jackie was pregnant.
“We’ve lost two babies. I know that this is important but you have got to let her off the hook now. Tomorrow she needs to rest.”
After dinner that night Guy lied impeccably when she playfully accosted him and whispered that she was standing by for her orders.
“Mrs. Kennedy, you have been wonderful. You really don’t need to follow these women any longer. We know everything we need to know. What you have done has been above and beyond what we could have expected.”
“I’ve done nothing really.”
“Well, you’ve proved how we linguists will rule the world eventually.” He smiled.
“Don’t you want to know how many of them are going?”
“The truth is,” he lied, “we have discovered that they have called off going on tomorrow’s trip. So I am afraid that we have no way of putting you together with them.”
She looked at him, the question in her eyes doing all the talking.
Shrugging his shoulders, he moved toward the samovar for some more tea. She followed, having decided on defiance.
It had not occurred to her that her husband had warned him off.
“Well, I am not giving up. Maybe they’ll return to their old afternoon haunts. It’s worth a try.”
There was, he was relieved to think, no way that he could order her not to watch out for the women from the comfort of the grand salon.
She did not see them again until they were all checking in at the airport. They were in the Aeroflot line. Jackie, noting that they and three other couples seemed to have much less luggage than the rest of them, tried to lip-read to see if she could discover any more, but when they were with their husbands they reverted to Russian.
She wondered if Guy could speak Russian. He had told her just a little about his upbringing. How he was good at languages because his grandfather, his only family after his parents had died in a car crash, had sent him off to boarding school when he was thirteen, fearing that his uncontrollable grandson was going to end up in jail.
She would have liked to have told him about the other couples who were also traveling light, but Jack told her to leave that to him. He had decided that they should take no more chances with this baby. “From now on you are to put your feet up. I promise I’ll spend more time with you in New York, where you’ll be just a few blocks away from the best obstetrician in the country.”
As the Cold War iced up and rumors that the French were close to having nuclear capability, the Americans became more determined to push on with the Atoms for Peace agenda.
They called the next nuclear club conference in 1958.
Once again the venue was neutral Switzerland and the senator for Massachusetts was included among the political invitees.
Now that he was seriously thinking of running for president in 1960, he thought it was worth impressing the inhabitants of the smoke-filled rooms of power that though he might be young, he was already involved in foreign policy. No matter that these talks were low-key and not publicized; these influential men would know of their existence and their importance.
Meanwhile America was convinced that to increase their influence the Soviets were selling arms and giving atomic secrets to third world countries.
The CIA was sent in to do what they could to bug and wiretap the Russians’ hotel rooms and villas.
Having taken these precautions, the Yanks sat back and waited.
Now, surely they would find out what the Communists were up to. When nothing resulted from their electronic handiwork except discussions about the weather or which shop did the best deals on watches, they were unprepared. It was almost as if the Soviet delegation knew they were there.
In desperation, the day before the conference began they called Prague for help.
Jackie knew nothing of this as she came off the boat from the first of the wives’ excursions.
Already she was not enjoying this trip as much as the last. Not only was she missing her baby daughter, but her husband had changed. To get over jet lag, they had, like many of the delegates, arrived forty-eight hours early.
“Do you remember that little café we went to in Prague? In the Art Deco district? I’ve seen a charming place, not exactly the same of course, but at least not covered in cuckoo clocks, for us to have lunch,” she eagerly told him the first morning.
“Jackie.” He barely looked up from his background notes. “I’d love to, but there are people here that I never get a chance to talk to
at home. My father has fixed up one or two meetings, as well. I’m sorry, but we’ll have some time together when we get back.”
“I am not sure the presidency is worth it,” she muttered but stopped when she saw his disappointed face. “I mean, look at this.” She picked up a cerise shantung pillbox hat and perched it on her head.
“Jackie, you look good in it. You look great in anything. We promised, from now on we would both wear hats, try to appear more serious and more mature to the voters,” he said, lowering his voice in a theatrical way.
“Why don’t you do what I do, just carry it.”
“You don’t have a handbag to cart around, as well,” she said, thinking how this election was changing everything.
Even with an internal band of elastic her headgear would not stay put. The next day, knowing she was going out on the lake, she had tried to skewer it to her hair with several hair grips but it had started to slip. When they came in for lunch she was glad to take it off and leave it on a high wooden shelf in an empty conference room on the ground floor.
She didn’t see Guy Steavenson arrive, and would not have recognized him anyway in his disguise as a stooped figure with gray hair and heavy tortoiseshell glasses in an ill-fitting suit who spent the afternoon pretending to be delivering important papers and interpreter equipment around the atrium entrance hall. He watched everything and noted that each time the Russians emerged from their conference room, Jackie’s hat on the shelf remained untouched. He continued his vigilance until Jackie remembered to pick it up at the end of the day.
The next morning there was real animosity between the delegations. Constructive talks seemed impossible.
Just before lunch when the small bus that had taken the delegates’ wives to a china factory drew up outside the conference center, Jackie was delighted to bump into Guy again.
She wore a simple scarlet wool suit, matching hat in hand. The
wind blowing off the lake lifted her hair. He thought that motherhood had made her even
more
beautiful.
She wondered why he was looking so pale with such dark circles under his eyes but when he suggested that she take him to a small boutique, just around the corner, to buy a layette for his best friend who was a brand-new father, she thought this explained it.
He was glad that the agency had sent for him on the off chance that he could be helpful. He hoped that his good contacts in Switzerland (his first posting for the CIA had been in Basel), added to the relationships that had been forged during the two earlier Atoms for Peace conferences, would prove useful.
He had been briefed on the failure of the bugs to gather any intelligence. His first order was to send an undercover expert out to check on the equipment in one of the villas. It had not been tampered with. It was still in place. The only conclusion was that no one had spoken of anything significant in that room.
He had been up nearly all night talking to the other agency members about where and how they had been stymied. They had come to no conclusions. At four
A.M.
he had finally gone to bed, only to remember that before he could go to sleep he had to remove the gray from his hair. He was drained.
Jackie took a good look at him as they stepped across the tramlines.
She wondered what his life in Prague was like. As he guided her toward an expensive baby boutique she wondered what was going on, realizing that she knew absolutely nothing about him.
After the preliminaries he had launched straight in.
“We did good work in Prague. Did your husband tell you? The other three that you described, the ones at the airport, they were really important. We soon nipped their traveling plans in the bud.” He grinned. “With a tip-off here and an anonymous note there we ensured that their bosses questioned their loyalty.”
She felt a moment’s dismay. Why hadn’t Jack told her?
“Because of their skills they are working inside Russia or at the
Siberian testing stations. I guess less clever scientists are advising the Chinese.
“See how helpful you were? Now I’d like your assistance again. Would you help us if I promise that I’ll make sure your husband is informed?”
“Of course”—she grinned—“I’m a loyal American citizen. How can I refuse?” she said.
“Before we leave I want you to buy something and put it in a carrier bag with your hat. Then come and join me in a close examination of those big teddy bears at the back of the shop. There, while we’re talking about which one has the most squishiness or will be easiest to get on the plane, we’ll swap bags. Okay so far?”
She nodded.
“But I’ll need the hat back,” she said with a glint.
“I promise,” he said, smiling.
“After lunch I will leave the bag at the interpreter’s reception desk in the conference hall,” he continued. “You probably haven’t even noticed it, it’s just a table covered in dark gray fabric, with lists and badges on it. Because of security it is always manned. Two lovely girls do it, Irene and Marie-Louise. Simply say you are really worried, that you left the bag somewhere on the ground floor, you have tried the ladies’ room but you think you may have put it on the desk when taking your coat off, prior to going into lunch. Push it, make them look under the table, start looking yourself if need be. But rest assured, it will be there.
“You pick it up, take it to the ladies’ room, haul the hat out, and in front of the mirror you spend a few moments trying your darnedest to get it on right. There will be other women in there and ideally you will have witnesses. In a perfect world, one of them will be a Russian.
“You fail, mostly because you are in a hurry as you really don’t want to risk missing the bus that will transport you and the other ladies to the watch factory, someplace I guess you wouldn’t want to miss under any circumstances.” He smiled.
“For speed, you simply give up and leave the hat in exactly the same place you did yesterday.”
He stopped, letting it all sink in.
“Can you do that?”
Over lunch she thought about him. She’d only met him once before but again he had instilled a sense of adventure into her life.
While the usual three-course lunch was served two CIA officers somehow managed to sew a tiny microphone into the lining of the crown of her hat. Her husband was told of the plan by the courtly American ambassador to Switzerland who had insisted on dragging him out to the frost-covered garden. If the Russians were so aware, who knew what they had bugged!
The diplomat was so busy trying to impress someone who might one day be his boss that Jack had no time to warn her off the whole thing.
She carried out the charade with the hat and eventually it was placed in exactly the same spot as before. This time, when the Russians went into private talks every single word could be heard by the American listeners in a room at the rear of the conference center.
At last the Americans understood. The Russians were waiting for the right moment to stage a walkout denouncing the West. They hoped this would deflect any criticism about their aid to China and with the UN in session act as a smokescreen for their own activities.
The Americans decided that the best way to stop this plan was to fold the talks immediately.
A few weeks later Guy sent her a pale pink smocked dress in Caroline’s size that almost replicated the romper suit they had chosen together.
When she became First Lady he was encouraged by his immediate boss to keep in touch.
When he made his twice-yearly visits home on leave Guy would bring her the latest European gossip. They talked about their child
hoods. She found it easy to be honest with him about how she felt about her mother and her late father, and he told her how he’d got into the CIA, about how he remembered so little about his parents, and how his grandfather, a wealthy Bostonian with a great deal of old money, had packed him off to a strict school that had a strong military slant.
“It seems cold and callous but he was only doing his best. As a hardworking widower with no free time, he was sure I would go off the rails without it,” Guy said.
“Now, when he waves me off to another posting in a foreign embassy I think he regrets it.”
Jackie always looked forward to seeing him. Witty, with a store of stories about the Russians, Guy always made sure that he told her how useful she had been, a lesson her husband only learned toward the end of his life.
As it was the first time Guy had seen her since the assassination, he expressed his sympathy and sorrow. Then, breathing on his cupped hands, he said, “It’s about as cold as a Siberian winter out there today. Does this mean there are always people waiting outside?”
“Yes, always,” she said, sighing.
Now that she was alone it seemed only natural that she should tell him about the problems she was having with security. With his background he would be in a good position to understand.
“They wait at all hours and as the Secret Service can’t be sure that one of them isn’t a madman we have extra men on guard. The whole thing escalates from there. Since these extra guys are all visible, passers by see them and think, Hey, something’s going on, and so it mushrooms. The three of us have started to hate going out. You should come at the weekend!”