Lucky Bastard (36 page)

“That doesn't answer the question.”

By now I was calmer; I said, “Let me ask you a question: Is it not the first principle of this operation that Jack, our asset, can come to power—supreme power—on the basis of his personality?”

“Yes.”

“His unique and sparkling personality?”

I was not smiling. Neither was Morgan, suddenly a darling daughter who was taking my refusal hard. She said, “If you say so.”

“Not ‘if I say so.' I am asking you if you acknowledge this reality. Answer.”

She looked this way and that for some sort of psychic escape hatch but saw none. I was playing the commissar to the hilt. Finally she gave me a tight little nod, lips compressed, eyes defiant. A child betrayed by the person she had trusted most.

“Very well,” I said. “What do you think will happen to the sparkle if you cut off his balls?”

She thought and thought. “You have a point,” she said at last.

I merely nodded. Within me, anger still boiled. I had not felt such emotion in years. Perhaps I was as irrational on this subject as she was on another. But how could she
imagine?

She was chastened by my disapproval, but by no means struck dumb. “What
are
we going to do about this?” she asked.

“That is not your concern. It will be handled.”

She flinched. Even before this meeting—though I confess I never expected the dialogue to take the turn it took—I had decided to take certain steps to resolve the situation, Peter or no Peter. My solution was unorthodox, but justified by circumstances. It was a matter of saving the operation by saving Morgan from herself, because the problem was not Jack. It was Morgan. It was essential that the tension be broken.

I left her without bestowing the usual comradely kisses on her cheeks.

7
In all the years that I had managed his life, Jack Adams had never seen me, as he might have put it, one on one. In theory he did not even know that I existed. Nevertheless, taking into account that evening in the Italian restaurant in Manhattan and Jack's famous gift for remembering faces, I wore a disguise when we met for the first time. Jack was quite visibly surprised when, at four-thirty in the afternoon, his usual hour of assignation, he stepped onto the elevator to the Gruesome penthouse and found a stocky man wearing a highly realistic gorilla mask already aboard. He recoiled momentarily, as who would not, but after I gave him a friendly waggle of the fingers he grinned and stepped inside. Who could this frolicsome creature be but a fellow Gruesome on his way up to the penthouse for a bit of fun?

The elevator rose. Jack, eyeing me in amusement, said, “Ed?”

I shook my head. Jack grinned. I said, “Welcome to the country of the blind.”

Jack fell back against the wall of the car. His face turned white. A tremor swept downward as if a plug had been pulled in his nervous system, releasing a pent-up torrent of dread. In rapid sequence his eyes fluttered, his head shook, his breath became shallow, his shoulders hunched, his hands fluttered, his knees trembled, his shoes scraped on the carpeted floor in a pantomime of instinctive flight. I had never seen anything like it. I stopped the elevator.

“Be calm,” I said. “I am your friend.”

Jack was anything but calm. However, he seemed to be recovering himself, so I waited, breathing moistly inside the ill-fitting mask and observing him through the tiny eyeholes. It was like being inside a primitive pinhole camera: The image was too large for the point of light in which it was captured.

Finally Jack said, “Give me a name.”

I said, “I've already given you words you obviously recognize.”

“I still want a name. Who sent you?”

“Peter,” I said. This was not strictly true, because this meeting was completely unauthorized, but under the circumstances, perfect veracity was not a consideration.

Jack shook his head. He had a grip on himself now; there was a glint of humor in his eye. “I wish you people would call first,” he said.

I told him about the surveillance. On the basis of what I knew about his response to threats, real or imagined, I expected hysteria. However, to my relief Jack took my revelation calmly, even showing a kind of admiration as I described the techniques used and the results obtained. So intense was his interest that I would not have been surprised if he asked to see the pictures we had taken of him and his girlfriends. But he asked no questions. Nor did he seem to be particularly surprised. Given the shocks we had delivered in the past, he must by this time have taken it for granted that Peter and his thugs were everywhere, could do anything, could suborn anyone. How much more efficient than Big Brother was Peter, who understood that he did not have to watch everybody all the time as long as all his assets knew that he could watch them whenever he wished. Paranoia was cheaper than manpower.

“Okay,” Jack said. “You've got me. I have committed fornication. Now what?”

His bravado amazed me. He was negotiating.

That being the case, I offered a concession. “We have failed you,” I said. “You were promised safe sex—”

“I remember,” Jack said.

Inside the mask, I smiled. I went on: “We did not deliver. I apologize. But what you are doing to remedy the failure is unsafe. Moreover, it is disturbing the harmony of your relationship with your wife.”

“My wife? Let me tell you something, my friend—do you have a name?”

“No. Go on.”

“Okay. You're the ones who've got a problem, not me. She's fucking
obsessed.
This is a woman who loves it, does it like a champ, and she's supposed to live with her memories for the rest of her life? I've got to tell you, it shakes my confidence in you guys that you—”

“So what are you proposing?” I interrupted. “A resumption of marital relations?”

“No. It's too late for that, and if we started fucking she'd only be worse. But an open marriage, that's another matter.”

This term was just coming into fashion. I did not quite understand what he meant.

Jack said, “Do everybody a favor.
Order
her to get laid and leave me alone. It won't cure the problem. She wants total control of every atom of my being. Especially my cock.”

Jack had no idea how right he was, or by what means Morgan had proposed arranging that control. “You make an interesting point,” I said. “But it's not your wife we're concerned about. It's you.”

“Oh? Why's that?”

“Because you don't seem to understand the meaning of discretion.”

“Really?” Jack said. “How long did it take you to catch me?”

I said, “After we set out to do so, three days, to be precise. And what we did, others can do. Believe me.”

“So what? Everybody does it.”

“Not everybody does it in the next room to cocaine and marijuana and pornography and underage girls doing the hootchy-cootchy for dirty old men—”

He grinned. “You
do
have the place bugged—”

“—and in the company of people who have a lot to gain from bribing the attorney general with sex and drugs—”

Jack gave me the full Hyannis Port smile. “The flesh is weak.”

“That's why they invented blackmail.”

“Then give me an alternative,” Jack said. “Your problem is, you can't keep up with the requirements, and even if you could, what you've got ain't what I want. Believe me.”

Bear in mind, as you listen to Jack, that he was locked in an elevator with a man in a Halloween mask whom he did not know and who might, as far as he knew, turn out to be a mafioso who would murder him or kidnap him. He may have been a physical coward, but he feared no man—and only one woman—when it came to matching wits.

I said, “Your basic requirement, based on our observations, seems to be roughly four women a week.”

“You must have been following me around during a slow week. Ten is more like it. A dozen is better.”

“You seem to have no trouble getting partners. Does someone procure them for you? Tell the truth. This is important.”

“No. They call in to my radio show during commercials and we chat off the air. I meet them at political rallies, ball games, everywhere. Some are referrals.”

“Referrals?”

“They tell their girlfriends. Mostly they're married. They're curious. They want what I want, a little nookie with no risk and then goodbye. They have their orgasms, take a shower, and go home and cook supper. And then maybe they have another one to sleep on with good old Harry, who wonders what got into Bobbie Sue.”

“So you don't really need this hideout.”

“If you want discretion, I need something like it,” Jack said. “It's part of the reason the women show up. They think it's safe. If they think they're going to get caught, they won't take the chance. Why should they, for a two-hour jump?”

“Are you meeting somebody today?”

“Why else would I be here?” Jack looked at his watch. “She's probably downstairs now.”

“All right,” I said. “I won't keep you. But make this the last time you use this elevator. Do you understand?”

I used Peter's favorite question and voiced it in Peter's diction. The stimulus worked. Suddenly Jack remembered where he was, who I was, what he was. He nodded obediently.

“Out loud,” I said.

“Yes. I understand.”

“Good,” I said. “Within a month you will receive, at your office, an envelope delivered by messenger. Inside the envelope will be a key and an address. From time to time you'll receive other packages with the same contents. When you do, drop the old key down a sewer—just like you did in Heidelberg, Jack—and start using the new address. Never install a telephone or cable television in any of these places or bring any sort of an electronic device into them. Do you understand all that?”

This time he spoke right up. “I understand.”

“Good. Because the next time someone has to meet you in an elevator the encounter may not end quite so pleasantly.”

Silence. Solemnity, a rare state in Jack. I turned the key. The elevator rose.

We arrived at the penthouse. Jack said, “Don't forget the other side of the equation. I feel for her.”

I nodded.

Jack said, “Just a suggestion. Take that thing off on the way down.”

He got off the elevator. I went down. The young woman waiting at the bottom was dressed as if for dinner at Côte Basque. I held the door open for her. With the incredible efficiency for which the KGB was famous, I had stuffed the gorilla mask beneath my coat. When I lifted my arm to hold the door, it fell out. She paused, looked down, stepped over it, and got right on the elevator.

As the door closed she smiled a sweet Ohio smile. Brave girl. Pretty ankles, sleepy eyes, wonderful scent. Lucky Jack.

8
A week later, Morgan opened the door of her motel room in response to my usual signal—a knock, a rattle of the doorknob, two more knocks.

It was not Dmitri who stood in the doorway, but the Georgian who had been her lover in Cuba. He had nearly knocked me down in his anxiety to find out if Morgan still had her old power to reinvent herself in bed.

I watched the reunion through the windshield of my parked car, and judging by the expression on Morgan's face when she saw the surprise I had provided—and, of course, understood why—the Georgian needn't have worried.

Morgan's Room

One

1
No member of Jack's own party wanted to run against him in the primary election in April, and once again he was fortunate in his opponent for the office of lieutenant governor—the Republican nominee was his old, all-thumbs adversary, F. Merriwether Street. But it was a Republican year, the final year of a disastrous Democratic presidency, and Jack's party did not provide the money or the organizational support he needed. In fact, frightened as it was by the growing realization that the Right was on the march again, it made no pretense of backing Jack. The fate of the party did not hang on his being elected lieutenant governor, and the regulars didn't much like him anyway. Many feared him as a threat to their own future ambitions and the Cleveland machine positively hated him, so cash flowed to other candidates who were more important, more conventional, and more deserving. Street, handsomely financed by his family and the rest of the Republican establishment, surprised everyone by running a very strong race, never once putting his foot in his mouth. Hoping to change that, Jack demanded a debate, the losing candidate's traditional last resort. Street ignored him.