THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

Postby admin » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:26 am

Chapter 7

The war was over in Korea. That camera which caught every movement of everyone's life was adjusted to run backward so that they were all returned to the point from which they had started out to war. Not all. Some, like Mavole and Lembeck, remained where they had been dropped. The other members of Marco's I&R patrol whose minds believed in so many things that had never happened, although in that instance they were hardly unique, returned to their homes, left them, found jobs and left them until, at last, they achieved an understanding of their essential desperation and made peace with it, to settle down into making and acknowledging the need for the automatic motions that were called living.

Marco didn't get back to the States until the spring of 1954, on the very first day of that spring. His temporary orders placed him with the First Army on Governor's Island in the New York harbor, so he blandly took it for granted that he would be more than welcome to spend his stateside leave as Raymond's guest in Raymond's apartment. As far as Raymond was concerned, and this feeling mystified Raymond, Marco was more than welcome.

Raymond lived in a large building on Riverside Drive, facing the commercially broad Hudson at a point approximately opposite an electric spectacular on the New Jersey shore which said SPRY (some experiment in suggestive geriatrics, Raymond thought) to the demode side of Manhattan Island.

The apartment was on the sixteenth floor. It was old-fashioned, which meant that the rooms were large and light-filled, the ceilings high enough to permit a constant circulation of air, and the walls thick enough for a man and his loving wife to have a stimulating argument at the top of their lungs without invading the nervous systems of surrounding neighbors. Raymond had rented the apartment furnished and nothing in the place beyond the books, the records, and the phonograph was his.

The bank issued rent checks for the apartment's use, as they paid all the bills for food, pressing, laundry, and liquor. These the local merchants sent directly to Raymond's very own bank officer, a Mr. Jack Rothenberg, a formidably bankerish sort of a man excepting for the somewhat disturbing habit of wearing leather tassels on his shoes. Raymond believed that the exchange of money was one of the few surviving methods people had for communicating with each other, and he wanted no part of it. The act of loving, not so much of the people themselves but of the cherishment contained in the warm money passed from hand to hand was, to Raymond, intimate to the point of being obscene so that as much as possible he insisted that the bank take over that function, for which he paid them well.

Each Monday morning at fifteen minutes past ten, a bank messenger came to Raymond's office with a sealed Manila envelope containing four twenty-dollar bills, four ten-dollar bills, five five-dollar bills and thirty singles -- a total of one hundred and seventy-five dollars -- for which Raymond would sign. This was his walking-around money. He spent it, if he spent it, on books and off-beat restaurants for he was a gourmet -- as much as a man can be who eats behind a newspaper. His salary from The Daily Press of one hundred and thirty-five dollars and eighty-one cents, after deductions, he mailed personally to the bank each Friday and considered himself to be both lucky and shrewd to be living in the biggest city on the Western continent for what he regarded as a net of forty dollars per week, cash. The living expenses, rent, and such, were the bank's problem.

As much as possible, he ate every meal alone, excepting perhaps once a month when he would be forced into accepting an invitation from O'Neil, with some girls. All the men Raymond ever knew seemed to be able to summon up girls the way he might summon up a tomato juice from a waiter. Raymond was a theatrically handsome man, a well-informed man and an intelligent one. He had never had a girl inside his large, comfortable apartment. He bought the sex he needed for twenty-five dollars an hour and he had never found it necessary to exceed that time period, although he filled it amply every time. Out of distaste, because she had suggested it herself the first time he had been there, and most certainly not out of any unconscious desire to be liked, he would give the maid who ran the towels a dollar-and-a-quarter tip, because she had asked for a dollar, then would stare her down coldly when she thanked him. Raymond had found the retail outlet with efficiency. He had told the Broadway columnist on the paper that he would appreciate it greatly if one of the press agents with whom the columnist did business would secure him maximum-for-minimum accommodations atop some well-disposed, handsome professional woman. Had he known that this ritual and the attendant expense were the direct result of the release conferred on him by Yen Lo in Tunghwa, he would have resented it, because although the money meant little to him and although he enjoyed the well-disposed, handsome professional woman very much, he would just as well have preferred to have remained in the psychological position of ignoring it, because it meant getting to bed on the evenings he was with her much later than he preferred to retire and it most certainly had cut into his reading.

Marco gave him no warning. He called Raymond at the paper and told him he would be in town for a while, that he would move in with Raymond, and they met at Hungarian Charlie's fifteen minutes later, and that had been that. When Marco moved in, every one of Raymond's time-and-motion study habits was tossed high in the air to land on their heads. For ten days or so everything was turned upside down.

Marco didn't believe in buying sex because he said it was so much more expensive the other way, and he was loaded with loot. Drunk or sober, Marco found matched sets of pretty girls, bright and entertaining girls, rich girls, poor girls, and even one very religious set of sisters who insisted on getting up for church in the mornings, whether it was Sunday or not, then raced back to Marco's bed again. Marco had girls stashed in most of the rooms of Raymond's apartment whenever he thought it was a good idea (day and night, night and day), severely disturbing the natural rhythm of Raymond's life. There were too many cans of beer in the icebox and too few cans of V-8. Men kept ringing the back door bell, bringing boxes or paper bags filled with liquor or heavy paper sacks of ice cubes. Everybody seemed to be an expert on cooking spaghetti and there was a film of red sauce on every white surface in the kitchen. In the foyer, in the living room, in the dining room (which Raymond had converted into an office), brassieres were strewn, and slips, and amazingly small units of transparent panties. Marco made everyone wear shoes as a precaution against athlete's foot. He did not believe in hanging up his clothes when he was not in Army service because he said the agonizing reappraisal of the piles of clothing every morning in each room made him appreciate the neatness of Army life all the more. The positive thing to be said for Marco was that although he crowded the apartment with girls and loud music and spaghetti and booze, he never invited any other guys, so what was there was fifty per cent Raymond's. The women were all sizes and colors, sharing with each other only Marco's requisite of a good disposition, and he rarely hesitated to hand out a black eye if this rule were violated.

Raymond found it enjoyable. He could not have stood it as a constant diet (and he believed that there were people who could stand it as a constant diet) and it was all extremely confusing to him at first, from his doctrinaire perspective, because the properly dressed, immaculately spoken women seemed to him to be the wantons, and the naked or near-naked babes who talked like long-shoremen seemed to be there as professional comics or entertainers on the piano or on the long-distance telephone. They were talking, talking, always talking, but never with the unpleasant garrulity of Johnny Iselin.

At first when Raymond allowed himself to get around to feeling like having a little action for himself he would grow flustered, be at a loss as to how to proceed, and he would close the door behind him in the converted dining room he called an office and try to forget about the whole thing, but that simply was not satisfactory. He did that the very first night Marco had guests and he sat there, nearly huddled up with misery, fearing that no one would ever come in to make him come out, but finally the door was flung open and a small but strapping redheaded girl with a figure that made him moan to himself, stood in the doorway and stared at him accusingly. "What the hell is the matter with you, honey?" she asked solicitously. "Are you queer?"

"Queer? Me?" Strapping was definitely the word for this girl. Everything she had was big in miniature and in aching proportion.

"There are four broads out there, honey," she said, "and one man. Marco took me aside and told me that there was one more in here and although I ran right in here I've been worrying all the way because what the hell are you doing in here with very very ready broads out there?"

"Well -- you see --" Raymond got up and took a slight step forward. "I'd like to introduce myself." The excitement was rising and he forgot to think about himself. He was aware vaguely that this was the first time he had ever been courted and if she could keep the thing within bounds everything was going to be all right. ''I'm Raymond Shaw."

"So? I'm Winona Meighan. What has names got to do with what Marco promised I would be doing if I came here, but now I find out I may have to stand in line like at Radio City on a Sunday night?"

"I -- I guess I simply didn't know what else to say. I'm just as avidly interested as you are," Raymond said, "but, I guess -- well, I suppose you could say I am shy. Or new at all this. Shy, anyway."

She waved her hand reassuringly. "All the men are shy today. Everything is changing right in front of our eyes. It's become such a wonderful thing to find a man who actually is willing to go to bed with a woman that the women get all charged up and they press too much. I know it but I can't change it." As she talked she closed the door behind her. She couldn't find any way to lock it so she pulled a heavy chair in front of it. "So if you're shy we'll put out the lights, sweetheart. Winona understands, baby. Just get out of those bulgy pants and come over here." She unzipped the side of her dress and began to struggle out of it impatiently. "I have to get back downtown for an eleven o'clock show tonight, lover, so don't let's waste any more time."

By the third night Raymond felt that he was fully adjusted to the new way of life. Winona had been extremely grateful for the extreme care he had put into his work with her and that squealing, activated gratitude, which had been coupled with an absolute insistence that he take her name and permanent address and that she write down his name and permanent address because her company was leaving in the morning for eight weeks in Las Vegas, had given him considerable confidence. After she had had to leave, both of them feeling exhausted but triste after the parting, he had moved quietly and weightlessly into the living room where Marco was playing at seance, explaining to the four girls that he understood, academically, exactly how a seance should operate because he had researched every necessary move and that if they would all cooperate by believing perhaps he could make something interesting happen the way things had happened in a fascinating textbook he had pored over all the way from San Francisco. It hadn't worked, but everybody enjoyed themselves and when bedtime came two of the girls joined up with Raymond as though they had all been assigned to each other by a lewd housemother and, after loads of fun, they had all dropped off to sleep and had slept like lambs.

Raymond awoke twice during the night for a few languorous moments of trying to puzzle out how come he did not feel invaded by all these bodies that were hurling themselves at him or dotting the landscape of his privacy, but he could not reach the answer before he fell asleep and, in the morning, with the girls getting ready to go off to offices or studios or dress houses or stores, no one had much more time than to wait patiently for a turn to put on lipstick hurriedly in the bathroom and rush out without any breakfast.

The extraordinary thing to Raymond was that none of them ever returned.

Marco would spend all of his day in the reading room of the Forty-second Street library, then, in the late afternoon, devote two hours to fruitful bird-dogging that was, mysteriously to Raymond, always successful, and when Raymond got back to the apartment at six twenty-two every day there would never be less than three interested and interesting girls there, making spaghetti or using the telephone.

Marco explained, on the first Saturday morning, that women were much more like men, in many almost invisible ways, than men were. Particularly in the noninvolvement area in which they were many, many more times like men simply because their natural instinct to capture and hold could be suspended. Marco said that there was not a healthy woman alive who would not gladly agree to rush into bed if that action displaced only the present and did not connect with the past nor had any possibility of any shape in the future. Good health could be served in this way, he said. No fears of reputation-tarnish could threaten. It meant sex without sin, in the sense that, in the middle of the twentieth century, when sexual activity is credited to a woman by several men, creating what was termed a past could also penalize her for any sexual activity in the future. Since good health demands good sex, he assured Raymond that very nearly the entire female population of the city of New York would happily cooperate with them if approached in the proper, understanding manner.

"But how?" Raymond asked him in awe and bewilderment.

"How what?"

"How do you approach them?"

"Well, I do have the edge on others by being patently an officer and a gentleman by act of Congress, and I am graced with a certain courtliness of manner."

"Yes. I agree. But so am I."

"I approach them smiling. I tell them I am an officer passing through New York, leaving in the morning for my new station in Hawaii, and that merely by looking at them I find them enormously attractive sexually."

"But -- what do they say?"

"First, of course, they thank me. They are with it, Raymond. Believe me, they are even away ahead of me and depending on whether they need to be at home that evening to greet a loyal breadwinner, or under the clock at the Biltmore to persuade a courtier, or are committed to one or another irrevocable obligations which mar metropolitan life, they are keenly aware that one night is such a short, short burst of time in such a packed and crowded concealing city as New York."

"But when do they say --"

"Actually," Marco told him pedantically, "I don't actually know until I get back here, and the door bell begins to ring, who will arrive and who won't. I always invite six. Every afternoon. So far we have not had to make do with less than three and --"

"But how do you --"

"How do I get them here?"

"Yes."

"I explain I am using a friend's apartment. I write down the address, tear out the slip and press it into their hands, always smiling in a pleasant, lustful way, and I murmur about cold champagne and some great records. Then I pat them on the rear and walk on. I assure you, Raymond, that is all there is to it and everyone is richer all around."

"Yes. I see. But --"

"But what?"

"Don't you ever have any permanent alliances?" Raymond asked earnestly.

"Of course," Marco said stoutly. "What do you think I am -- a zombie? In London, before this last post where I met you, I was head over heels in love with my colonel's wife and she with me. And we stayed that way for almost two years."

One night Marco took two young things by the wrists and headed off for rest. One was a Miss Ernestine Dover who worked at an exceptionally fine department store on Fifth Avenue and the other a Mrs. Diamentez who was married to one of the best professional third basemen in the nation. After a while they all fell asleep.

Raymond was enjoying tremendous pleasure on a large bed in an adjoining room with a recording and variety artist, then unemployed, who was of Hawaiian, Negro, and Irish extraction and whom Marco had met that afternoon in the vestibule of a church, where he had gone to light a cigar out of the wind.

They all sat bolt upright, as one person -- Raymond and June, Miss Dover and Mrs. Diamentez -- because Marco was yelling "Stop him! Stop him!" in a wild, hoarse voice and trying to get out of the bed at something, his legs hopelessly entangled in the bedclothes. Mrs. Diamentez recovered first -- after all, she was married -- and she took Marco by the shoulders and threw him over backward on the bed, pinning his torso down with her own body while Miss Dover held down his thrashing legs with hers.

"Ben! Ben!" Mrs. Diamentez yelled.

"It's O.K., lover, it's O.K. You ain't over there, you're over here," Miss Dover shrilled.

Raymond and June stood naked in the doorway. "Whassamatter?" Raymond said.

Ben was rolling and pitching, his eyes wide open, as feral as a trapped animal who is willing to leave a paw behind if it can only get away from the teeth. June swooped an old highball up from the bureau and, rushing across the room, poured it on Marco. It brought him out. The girls climbed off him. He didn't speak to anyone but he stared at Raymond apprehensively. He shuffled dazedly out of the room and into the bathroom. He shook his head slowly from side to side as he walked, in tiny arcs, like a punch-drunk fighter, and his left cheek flinched with a tic. He closed the bathroom door behind him and they heard the lock snap and the light go on. Miss Dover went to the bathroom door and listened and suddenly the tub taps were turned on with full force. "Are you all right, honey?" Miss Dover said, but there was no answer. After a while, although Marco wouldn't get out of the bathtub or speak, they all went back to sleep and Mrs. Diamentez went in with Raymond and June.

***

Marco's ninth day was a Sunday. Without any warning, they were suddenly alone. All the chicks had gone to other roosts. Marco brooded over such a hang-over as had not happened to him in fourteen years, since he had mixed Beaujolais wine with something called Wilkins' Family Rye Whisky. They ate steak for breakfast. Raymond opened the French windows and sat idly watching the river traffic and the multicolored metal band that never stopped moving along the West Side Highway. After a while, with Marco sunk into the silence of his perfect hang-over, Raymond began to talk about Jocie. She had gotten married two months before. She was living in the Argentine. Her husband was an agronomist. It had run on the society page of his own newspaper and he said it as though if they had not run the item the marriage would not have been solemnized and she would be free to go to him.

Marco was ordered to Washington the following Thursday and he left without ever having seen the inside of a building at Governor's Island. He was ordered to the Pentagon, where he was assigned to active duty in Army Intelligence and promoted to major.

Of the nine men left from the patrol that had won Raymond the Medal of Honor only two had nightmares with the same awful context. They were separated by many thousands of miles and neither knew the other was suffering through the same nightmares, scene for scene, face for face, and shock for shock. The details of the nightmares and the rhythm of their recurrence were harrowing. Each man dreamed he was seated in a long line with the other men of the patrol on a stage behind Sergeant Shaw and an old Chinese, facing an audience of Soviet and Chinese officials and officers, and that they smiled and enjoyed themselves in a composed and gentling way, while Shaw strangled Ed Mavole then shot Bobby Lembeck through the head. A variation of that dream was the drill-session dream where they faced a blackboard while drillmasters took them through an imaginary battle action until they had memorized all details assigned to them. The incomprehensible part of the nightmare was that the details of the battle action they were taught exactly matched the battle action that had won Shaw the Medal of Honor. There was more.

One of these men had no course but to try to forget the nightmares as soon as they happened. The other man had no course but to try to remember the dreams while he was awake, because that was the kind of work he did, no other reason. Marco had been trained into wasteless usage of his highly developed memory. The first nightmare had come to him in bed with Miss Dover and Mrs. Diamentez. It had frightened him as he had never been frightened before. He had sat in that bathtub filled with cold water until daybreak and if the humorous, noisy women had not been there he would not have been able to face Raymond that morning. The dreams started again with regularity after he got to Washington. When he dreamed the same terrifying dream every night for nine nights, and began to develop hand tremors at his work, it grew into an obsession with him which he could not share with anyone else. The Soviet uniforms haunted him. Watching his friend kill two of his men in front of all of them every night, causing himself to become part of the Technicolor print of the action, complete and edited, was like an attack upon his sanity. He could not tell anyone else about it until he felt he might understand any part of it, so that people would have some reason to listen to him. Marco began to live with the incubus, inside of it when he was awake; it appeared inside of him when he was asleep. He would fight his way out, knowing he would be returned to it later because he could not stay out of sleep; and he made detailed written records of the section of the nightmare he had just left behind, and which waited to threaten him again. He gave up women because what happened to him while he slept frightened them, and he was fearful that he would talk or shout and that the word would go out that he was slightly shock simple. He must have been getting a little strange to give up women. Women were food to Marco, and drink and exciting music. The written notes grew voluminous and after a while he transferred them all to a large loose-leaf notebook. They said things such as: Where did the interpreter, Chunjin, get a cigar? Why was he allowed to sit as an equal in a chair beside a Soviet general? Marco began to keep careful score as to how many times such things appeared in the dreams. What is that blackboard? he would note. Three different colors of chalk. Why do the Chinese know in advance and in such detail about an action which will wipe· out one full Chinese infantry company? Why are the men of the patrol being worked so hard to remember so many details and different sets of details? His conflict between the love and admiration and respect for Raymond, which Yen Lo had planted in his mind, and his detailed, precise notes on exactly how Raymond had strangled Mavole and shot Lembeck had him beginning to live in dread and horror that everything which he still believed was happening in his imagination might somehow, someday, be proved to have happened in life. Marco had no thought that these things had ever happened. The notes were to keep him from unhinging, to provide the tools of his daily work to hold down his sanity. The dreams settled down to an occurrence of about three times a week in 1955, then began to step up inexorably in their appearances in 1956 until Marco was stumbling through his days on just about three hours' sleep each night. He never knew, all during that time, that he had remained sane.

***

In July, 1956, at about nine-twenty on a hot night for most New Yorkers, Raymond was reasonably cool as he sat before his opened French windows just inside the small balcony that was cleared by a strong breeze which had bowled down the Hudson River Valley. He was reading Le Compte and Sundeen's Unified French Course, because he had decided he would like to work directly from the notes of Brillat-Savarin and Escoffier during his recreational cooking periods, a new interest that had come to him since the many pleasant evenings when he had assisted so many expert young women in making so many different kinds of spaghetti sauce.

The telephone, on the desk beside his chair, rang. He picked it up.

"Raymond Shaw, please." It was a pleasant male voice with an indefinite accent.

"This is he."

"Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?"

"Yes, sir." Raymond disconnected. He burrowed through the desk drawers until he found playing cards. He shuffled the cards carefully and began to play. The queen of diamonds did not show up until the third layout. The telephone rang again forty minutes later as Raymond was smoking and watching the queen on top of the squared deck.

"Raymond?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Can you see the red queen?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you carry an accident insurance policy?"

"No, sir."

"Then tomorrow you will apply through the insurance department of your newspaper. Take all the standard benefits on a replacement income of two hundred dollars per week for total disability for as long as you have to be away from your job. Also take hospital insurance."

"The paper carries that for me, sir."

"Good. One week from next Saturday, on the fourteenth of July, you will report at eleven-ten A.M. to the Timothy Swardon Sanitarium at 84 East Sixty-first Street. We want you here for a check-up. Is it clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very good. Good night, Raymond."

"Good night, sir." The connection was discontinued. Raymond went back to Le Compte and Sundeen. He drank a bottle of Coca-Cola. He went to bed at eleven o'clock after a sensible shower, and slept dreamlessly. He breakfasted on figs and coffee, arrived at his desk at nine-forty-five, and called the personnel department immediately and made the arrangements for the insurance, naming in the life clause, his only friend, Ben Marco, as beneficiary of fifty thousand dollars if his death occurred by accident or by violence.

***

Senator Iselin's office forwarded a personal letter addressed to Raymond, care of the senator, to the newspaper office in New York. It was postmarked Wainwright, Alaska. Raymond opened it warily and read:

Dear Sarge:

I had to say this or write this to somebody because I think I am going nuts. I mean I have to say it or write it to somebody who knows what I'm talking about not just anybody and you was my best friend in the army so here goes. Sarge I am in trouble. I'm afraid to go to sleep because I have terrible dreams. I don't know about you but with me dreams sometimes have sounds and colors and these dreams have a way everything gets all speeded up and it can scare you. I guess you must be wondering about me going chicken like this. The dream keeps coming back to me every time I try to get to sleep. I dream about all the guys on the patrol where you won the Medal for saving us and the dream has a lot of Chinese people in it and a lot of big brass from the Russian army. Well, it is pretty rough. You have to take my word for that. There is a lot of all kind of things goes on in that dream and I need to tell about it. If you should hear from anybody else on the Patrol who writes you that they are having this kind of a dream I will appreciate if you put them in touch with me. I live in Alaska now and the address is on the envelope. I have a good plumbing business going for me here and I'll be in good shape if these dreams don't take too much of the old zing out of me. Well, sarge, I hope everything goes good with you and that if you're ever around Wainwright, Alaska, you'll give me a holler. Good luck, kid.

Your old corporal, Alan Melvin


Raymond had himself reread one part of the letter and he stared at that with distaste and disbelief. It offended him so that he read it and read it again: "you was my best friend in the army." He tore the letter across, then in quarters, then again. When he could no longer tear it smaller, he dropped the pieces into the wastebasket beside his desk.
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Re: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

Postby admin » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:26 am

Chapter 8

For three years after taking the oath of office as United States Senator in March, 1953, Johnny had been moved slowly by Raymond's mother to insure acceptance within the Senate and in official Washington, to learn to know all of the press gentlemen well, to arrange the effective timing for the start of his run for re-election; in short, to master the terrain. It seems almost impossible now to credit the fact that, halfway through his first time in office, Johnny Iselin was still one of the least-known members of the Senate. It was not until April, 1956, that Raymond's mother decided to try out the first substantial issue.

On the morning of April 9, Johnny showed up at the press briefing room at the Pentagon to attend a regularly scheduled press conference of the Secretary of Defense. He walked into the conference with two friends who represented Chicago and Atlanta papers respectively. They had had coffee first. Johnny had asked them elaborately what they were up to that morning. They told him they were due at the Secretary's regular weekly press conference at eleven o'clock. Johnny said wistfully that he had never seen a really big press conference in action. He was such an obscure, diffident, pleasant, whisky-tinted little senator that one of them good-naturedly invited him to come along and thereby unwittingly won himself a $250 prize bonus, three weeks later, from his newspaper.

Johnny was so lightly regarded at that time, although extremely well known to all the regulars covering the Washington beat, that if he was noticed at all, no one seemed to think it a bit unusual that he should be there. However, immediately after the press conference writers who had not been within five hundred miles of Washington that morning claimed to have been standing beside Johnny when he made his famous accusation. Editorialists, quarterly-magazine contributors, correspondents for foreign dailies, and all other trend tenders used up a lot of time and wood pulp and, collectively, earned a lot of money writing about that extraordinary morning when a senator chose to cry out his anguish and protest at a press conference held by the Secretary of Defense.

The meeting, held in an intimate amphitheater that had strong lights for the newsreel and television cameras, and many seats for correspondents, opened in the expected manner as the Secretary, a white-haired, florid, terrible-tempered man, strode on stage to the lectern flanked by his press secretaries and read his prepared statement concerned with that week's official view of integration of the nation's military and naval and air forces into one loyal unit. When he had finished he inquired into the microphones with sullen suspicion whether there were any questions. There were the usual number of responses from those outlets instructed to bait the Secretary, as was done in solemn rotation, to see if he could be goaded into one of his outrageous quotes that were so contemptuous of the people as to not only sell many more newspapers but to give all of the arid columnists of think pieces something significant to write about. The Secretary did not rise to the bait. As the questions came in more slowly he began to shuffle his feet and shift his weight. He coughed and was making ready to escape when a loud voice, tremulous with moral indignation but brave with its recognition of duty, rang out from the center of the briefing room.

"I have a question, Mr. Secretary."

The Secretary peered forward with some irritation at this stranger who had seen fit to take his own slow time about getting to his stupid question. "Who are you, sir?" he said sharply, for he had been trained into politeness to the press by a patient team of wild horses and by many past dislocations, which had been extremely painful, resulting from getting his foot caught in his mouth.

"I am United States Senator John Yerkes Iselin, sir!" the voice rang out, "and I have a question so serious that the safety of our nation may depend upon your answer." Johnny made sure to shout very slowly so that, before he had finished, every newspaperman in the room had located him and was staring at him with that expectant lust for sensation which was their common emotion.

"Who?" the Secretary asked incredulously, his voice electronically amplified, making it sound like the mating call of a giant owl.

"No evasions, Mr. Secretary," Johnny yelled. "No evasions, if you please."

The Secretary owned a tyrant's temper and he had been one of the most royal of big business dynasts before he had become a statesman. "Evasions?" he roared. "What the hell are you talking about? What kind of foolishness is this?" That sentence alone, those few words all by themselves, served to alienate the establishment called the United States Senate from sympathy with his cause for the rest of his tenure in office for, no matter what the provocation, it is the first unwritten law of the United States of America that one must never, never, never speak to a senator, regardless of his committee status, in such a manner before the press.

The members of the press present, who now recognized Johnny in his official status, grew lightheaded over the implications of this head-on encounter of two potentially great sellers of newspapers, magazines, and radio and television time. It was one of those pulsing moments auguring an enormous upward surge in profits, when one-half of the jaded-turned-thrilled stamped out their cigarettes and the other half lighted up theirs; all staring greedily.

"I said I am United States Senator John Yerkes Iselin and I hold here in my hand a list of two hundred and seven persons who are known to the Secretary of Defense as being members of the Communist party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the Defense Department."

"Whaaaaat?" The Secretary had to shout out his astonishment into the microphones to be heard over the excited keening and rumbling of the voices in the room.

"I demand an answer, Mr. Secretary!" Johnny cried, waving a clutch of papers high over his head, his voice a silver trumpet of righteousness.

The Secretary had turned from beet-red to magenta. He was breathing with difficulty. He gripped the lectern before him as though he might decide to throw it at Johnny. "If you have such a list, Senator, goddamit," he bellowed, "bring it up here. Give me that list!"

"There will be no covering up, Mr. Secretary. You will not put your hands on this list. I regret deeply to say in front of all of these men and women that you no longer have my confidence."

"Whaaaaat?"

"This is no longer a matter for investigation by the Department of Defense. I am afraid you have had your chance, sir. It has become the responsibility of the United States Senate." Johnny turned and strode from the room, leaving chaos behind him.

On the following day, consistent with a booking made weeks previously and involving a token "expenses" payment of $250, Johnny was to appear on Defenders of Our Liberty, a television program that was a showcase for the more conservative members of the government; an interview show on which questions of a nonstraightforward nature were asked before a national audience representing one of the lowest ratings of any program in the history of the medium, the program remaining on the air only because the sponsoring company found it generally useful and, of course, pleasant to be able to dine with the important weekly guests, following each show, when a special vice-president would make firm friends with them to continue the discussions of government problems and problems with government of a more or less specific nature over the years to come.

Johnny had been invited to appear on the show because he was one of the two senators remaining in office whom the company's special vice-president had never had to dinner, and the special vice-president was not one to underestimate.

However, on the day of his scheduled appearance, Johnny was the hottest statesman in the country as a result of thirty hours of continuous coverage and he had become an object of great importance to the television show and to its network. Wherever they could, in the extremely short time they had in which to turn around, they bought half-page advertisements in big city newspapers to herald Johnny's live appearance on the show.

Raymond's mother let everything develop in a normal manner, up to a point. Johnny was due to go on the air at seven-thirty P.M. At one P.M. she told them regretfully that he would not be available, that he was too busy preparing what would be the most important investigation the Senate had ever held. The network reeled at this news. The sponsor reeled. The press prepared to reel. After only the least perceptible stagger the special vice-president asked that a meeting between Raymond's mother and himself be quickly and quietly arranged. Raymond's mother preferred to hold this kind of a meeting in a moving car, far away from recording devices. She drove herself, and the two of them rode around the city of Washington and hammered out an agreement that guaranteed Johnny "not less than six nor more than twelve" appearances on Defenders of Our Liberty each year for two years at the rate of $7500 worth of common stock of the sponsoring company per appearance, and for which Johnny would supply the additional consideration of "staying in the news" in such a manner as could be reviewed after every three shows by the special vice-president and Raymond's mother jointly, to the point where the contract could be canceled or extended, by mutual consent.

Therefore, Johnny was most certainly on hand to face the fearless panel of five newspapermen before the television cameras at seven-thirty that evening. The developments and charges of the previous day were laid on all over again, with one substantial difference concerning the actual number of Communists in the Defense Department. What follows is an excerpt from the record of the telecast:

SEN. ISELIN: Yesterday morning I -- uh -- discussed the -- uh -- Communists high up in the -- uh -- Defense Department. I stated that I had names of -- uh -- fifty-eight card-carrying members of the Communist party. Now -- uh -- I say this. They must be driven out! They must be dragged out into the open from under the protection of the Defense Department!

JAMES F. RYAN (Stamford Bee): But you do have the names of fifty-eight actual card-carrying members -- absolute Communists -- who direct the policy of the Department of Defense -- actual card-carrying Communists?

SEN. ISELIN: I do-uh- Jim. Yes.

JAMES F. RYAN: Well, I am just a common man who's got a family and daughters and a job. You mean to say there are fifty-eight actual card-carrying Communists in our Defense Department that direct or control our Department of Defense policy or help direct it?

SEN. ISELIN: Well -- uh -- Jim, I don't want to give you or -- uh -- the rest of the American people the reassurance that there are only fifty-eight Communists high -- uh -- in the Defense Department. I say I have the names of only fifty-eight.

JAMES F. RYAN: It is my duty to ask this question and face the consequences of asking it later. Is the Secretary of Defense one of the names on that list?

SEN. ISELIN: I refuse to answer that question at this time -- uh -- Jim. And I am sure you know what I mean.

The program was interrupted for the closing commercial right at that point, and it was an enormous success. As Raymond's mother told Johnny from the very beginning, it wasn't the issue itself so much as the way he could sell it. "Lover, you are marvelous, that's all. Just absolutely goddam marvelous," she told him after the television show. "The way you punched up that stale old material, why, I swear to God, I was beginning to feel real deep indignation myself." She did not bother him with the confusion that had immediately arisen over the differences in figures she had given him on the two days. She was more than satisfied that the ruse had had people arguing all over the country about how many Communists there were in the Defense Department rather than whether there were any there at all, and it didn't interest Johnny anyway whether the true figure was two hundred and seven or fifty-eight, until the day she handed him the speech he was to read on the floor of the Senate on April 18. In that speech Johnny said there were eighty-two employees of the Defense Department who ranged from "persons whom I consider to be Communists" down to individuals who were "bad risks." On April 25, Raymond's mother reduced this figure at a press conference that had been called by the press of the nation itself, and not by Johnny's team, at which Johnny announced that he would "stand or fall" on his ability to prove that there was not just one Communist in the Department of Defense but one who was "the top espionage agent of an inimical foreign power within the borders of the United States of America."

Johnny had taken a riding in the Senate cloak room after he had changed the figures for the second time, in the Senate speech, and he was as sore as a pup at having been made to look silly in front of his pals. When Raymond's mother told him he was to drop the figure to one Communist, to one Communist from two hundred and seven in less than a month, he rebelled bitterly.

"What the hell do you keep changing the Communist figures for, all the time?" he asked hotly just before the press conference was to open. "It makes me look like a goddam fool."

"You'll be a goddam fool if you don't go in there and do as you're told. Who the hell are they writing about all over this goddam country, for crissake?" Raymond's mother asked. "Are you going to come on like a goddam expert, all of a sudden, like you knew what the hell you were talking about, all of a sudden?"

"Now, come on, hon. I was only --"

"Shuddup! You hear? Now get the hell out there!" she snapped at him -- so Senator Iselin had to face a battery of microphones, cameras, and questions, as big as ever had been assembled for any President of the United States, to say: "I am willing to stand or fall on this one. If I am wrong on this one I think the subcommittee would be justified in not taking any other cases I ever brought up too seriously."

If the scorecard of working Communists in the Defense Department seems either tricky or confusing, it is because Raymond's mother chose to make the numbers difficult to follow from day to day, week to week, and month to month, during that launching period when his sensational allegations were winning Johnny headlines throughout the world for two reasons. First, it was consistent with one of Raymond's mother's basic verities, that thinking made Americans' heads hurt and therefore was to be avoided. Second, the figures were based upon a document that a Secretary of Defense had written some six years before to the Chairman of a House committee, pointing out that, at the end of World War II, 12,798 government employees who had worked for emergency war agencies had been temporarily transferred to the Defense Department, then that group had been reduced to 4,000 and "a recommendation against permanent employment had been made in 286 cases. Of these, 79 had actually been removed from the service." Raymond's mother's subtraction of 79 cases from 286 cases left 207 cases, the number with which she had had Johnny kick off. She had made one other small change. The Secretary's actual language had been "recommendation against permanent employment," which she had changed to read: "members of the Communist party," which Johnny had adjusted to read: "card-carrying Communists."

Sometimes it tended to get a little too confusing until Johnny came at last to refer to it as "the numbers game." On one edgy day when Johnny had been drinking a little before he went on the Senate floor to speak, things got rather out of hand when he began to switch the figures around within the one speech, reported in the Congressional Record for April 10, in which he spoke of such varying estimates as: "a very sizable group of active Communists in the Defense Department," then referred to "vast numbers of Communists in the Defense Department." He recalled the figure of two hundred and seven, then went on to say, almost immediately following: "I do not believe I mentioned the figure two hundred and seven at the Secretary's press conference; I believe I announced it was over two hundred." He thereupon hastened to claim that "I have in my possession the names of fifty-seven Communists who are in the Defense Department at present," then changed that count at once by saying, "I know absolutely of one group of approximately three hundred Communists certified to the Secretary of Defense in a private communication who have since been discharged because of communism," and then at last, sweating like a badly conditioned wrestler, he sat down, having thoroughly confused himself.

He knew he was going to catch hell when he got home that night, and he did. She turned on him so savagely that in an effort to defend himself and to keep her from striking him with a blunt object he demanded that they agree to stay with one goddam figure he could remember. Raymond's mother realized then that she had been taxing him and making his head hurt so she settled on fifty-seven, not only because Johnny would be able to remember it but because all of the jerks could remember it, too, as it could be linked so easily with the fifty-seven varieties of canned food that had been advertised so well and so steadily for so many years.

Within three months Johnny bought Raymond's mother a case of gin for making him the "most famous man in the United States," and he was doing just as well all over the world. The whole thing was so successful that within five months after his first charges a Senate committee undertook a special investigation of Johnny, a public investigation that produced over three million words of testimony, of which Johnny claimed, later on, to have produced a million of those words himself.

Some important individuals refused to tolerate Johnny and said so publicly, and other bodies of elected public servants seemed to disagree with him, but when they came up to it, in the end, they equivocated because by that time Johnny had generated an extraordinary amount of fear, which he beamed directly into the eyes of all who came close to him.
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Re: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

Postby admin » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:27 am

Chapter 9

A short man with dark hair and skin, blue eyes, and blond eyebrows called for Raymond at his apartment at ten-seventeen the morning of July fourteenth, 1956, the day after the investigating committee had published their report on Johnny, and a hot Saturday morning it was. The man's name was Zilkov. He was Director of the KGB, or Committee of State Security, for the region of the United States of America east of the Mississippi River. The MVD, or Ministry of Internal Affairs, is much larger. The MVD had very wide powers and functions but they hold to a jurisdiction of a somewhat more public nature inside the Soviet Union. The KGB, however, is the secret police. Its director has ministerial rank today and is a much more feared personality than Gomel, the present MVD head. Zilkov was proud of the power he represented.

Raymond opened in response to the door bell, and stared coldly at the strange man. They disliked each other instantly, which was nothing against Zilkov because Raymond disliked almost everyone instantly.

"Yes?" Raymond drawled obnoxiously.

"My name is Zilkov, Mr. Shaw. As you were advised by telephone this morning, I have come to drive you to the Swardon Sanitarium."

"You are late," Raymond told him and turned his back to walk toward his baggage, leaving the man to decide whether he would enter or wait in the corridor.

"I am exactly two minutes late," the short man snapped.

"That is late, isn't it? An appointment is an oral contract. If we should happen to have any other business in the future, try to remember that."

"Why do you have three bags? How many bags do you think you will need in the hospital?"

"Have I asked you to help me with the bags?"

"That is not the point. An accident case is not admitted to a hospital with three pieces of baggage. At the most you may bring some necessaries in an attache case."

"An attache case?"

"You do know what that is?"

"Of course I know what that is."

"Do you have one?"

"One? I have three'"

"Please to place your necessaries into one of your three attache cases and we will go."

"No."

"No?"

"I will get there myself. I was told absolutely nothing about having to pack only the bare necessities into a leather envelope. I was told absolutely nothing about having to have to cope with a minor functionary of an obscure little hospital. That will be all. Return to your work. I will handle this myself." Raymond began to close the door in Zilkov's face.

"Wait!"

"Wait nothing. Get your foot out of the door, you boor. Out! Out!"

"You cannot'" The short man threw his weight against the door, but Raymond's greater weight and superior strength gradually slid the security chieftain backward. "Stop! Stop!" Zilkov cried.

"Out!" said Raymond inexorably.

"No! Please! Shaw, listen to me! Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?"

Raymond stopped pushing. Zilkov slipped into the apartment and shut the door behind him.

***

The Timothy Swardon Sanitarium had been a monument to personal philanthropy. Mr. Swardon, dead for eleven years, had been a wealthy alcoholic whose two daughters had been caught up in the narcotics habit. He had founded the superb private hospital mostly for himself and his family, but also for the benefit of other drunks and junkies who were friends of the family, or friends of friends. Through the spontaneity of this ever widening circle, the establishment had come to the attention of Giorgi Berezovo's organization men who protected Soviet security on the eastern seaboard of the United States, and eventually two full floors of the seven-floor hospital were taken over entirely for security use; the entire establishment having been bought at a real bargain from the youngest daughter who had still not been able to kick the cocaine habit, regardless of the advantages her father had showered on her medically. Under the new management, the little haven was in its second successful year of operation as one of the few money-making operations maintained by the Soviets, thanks to the many patients still loyal to the Swardon family.

Raymond had not actually been hit by a hit-and-run driver, but the many hospital and insurance and police forms served to legitimatize his stay, or the visits of others who, from time to time, found it necessary to go to Swardon for check-ups. Raymond had taken a taxi to the hospital and had checked in as he would have into a hotel, and within a half-hour two Soviet nurses had him in bed on the sealed fifth floor. His right leg was put into a plaster cast, then in traction, and his head was bandaged. He had been put into unconsciousness by voice signal while this was being done and the memory of the morning's events was erased. The office staff at the hospital had notified the police and a squad car came by immediately to interview the cab driver who had brought Raymond in after seeing him hit by a green station wagon with Connecticut plates. Fortunately, three other witnesses corroborated the account: two women who lived in the neighborhood and a young lawyer from Bayshore, Long Island. The personnel manager at The Daily Press was notified to activate both the hospital and accident policies indicated by the identification cards found in Raymond's wallet. The technicians assembled the X-rays which proved Raymond to have suffered a brain concussion and ripped calf muscles. The Daily Press published a short account of the accident on its back page. This was how Major Marco learned about it, and how Raymond's mother and Johnny got the news.

Raymond's boss, Holborn Gaines, dropped everything (a beer bottle and a report from the Manila office) and rushed to the hospital to see if there was anything he could do to help. The desk attendant, a Soviet Army lieutenant, upon studying his credentials and checking them against a list of Raymond's probable and therefore accredited visitors, sent him to the fifth floor just as though it were not a sealed floor. He was met at the elevator by a rugged army nurse who was wearing the traditional cap worn by graduates of the Mother Cabrini Hospital of Winsted, Connecticut, where she had never studied but which gave the establishment a certain amount of professional verisimilitude. Mr. Gaines was permitted to look in on Raymond, unconscious though he was, in traction and in presumed travail, and was told the running wheeze of the profession everywhere, that Raymond was doing as well as could be expected. Gaines left a bottle of Scotch for Raymond with the pretty young nurse (five feet tall, 173 pounds, mustache, warts). He also passed the word along that Raymond was to take it easy and not worry about anything, which the nurse was careful not to tell Raymond, in the event of possible prearranged code use. Technicians who worked directly under Yen Lo, albeit also possessing a political rating or classification, were flown in on embassy quota from the Pavlov Institute in the Ukraine. They went to work on Raymond between visiting hours, checking his conditioned apparatus from top to bottom. Five years had elapsed from the time the controls had first been installed at Tunghwa. All linkages were found perfect.

A courier took the detailed lab reports to the embassy in Washington; from there they were transmitted by diplomatic pouch to the project supervisors, who were ostensibly Gomel, Berezovo, and Yen Lo, but Berezovo had been deemed insufficiently worthy, following the disappointment that Lavrenti Beria had been to the Kremlin, and he was dead, and Yen La refused to look at the reports, saying with a mild smile that they could not do otherwise than certify the excellence of Raymond's conditioned reflexive mechanism, so only Gomel pored over the reports. He was mightily pleased.

Following the transmittal of the reports overseas, Raymond met his American operator who was to become his sole manager from that moment on, and whom he would never remember as having seen and whom he would never be able to recognize as his operator no matter where or when they met, because it had been designed that way. They were introduced, as it were, then the American asked to be alone in the room with Raymond. They conferred together for nearly two hours before Zilkov interrupted them. The two visitors in Raymond's room got into a heated argument, with Raymond watching them like a tennis spectator. Zilkov was a militant, bright young man. He maintained emphatically that Raymond must carry out a test assassination in order to complete the reflex check-out in a conclusive manner. The American operator opposed the suggestion violently and pointed out that it was both surprising and shocking that a security officer, with responsibility such as he held, would seek to risk a mechanism as valuable as Raymond.

Raymond listened gravely, then turned his eyes to hear Zilkov's rebuttal, which, of course, pointed out that the mechanism had been designed for assassination, that it had been five years since it had been tested, that conditions offering minimum risk for police reprisal could be designed, and that as far as he was concerned the test must be made before he would sign any certification that the mechanism was in perfect working order. The American operator said, very well, if that was how Zilkov felt about it then Raymond should be instructed to kill an employee of the hospital on one of the sealed floors. Zilkov said he would order nothing of the sort, that the table of organization in the area was under acceptable strength as it was, as far as he was concerned, and that Raymond could damned well kill some nonproductive woman or child on the outside. The American operator said there was no reason for Raymond to kill anyone unproductive -- that there might as well be some feeling of gain out of this since Zilkov was insisting on the risk -- and recommended that Raymond's position at the newspaper and therefore his general value to the party might be considerably strengthened if he were to kill his immediate superior, Holborn Gaines, as it was possible that, after five years as Gaines's assistant, Raymond would be given his job, which, in turn, would bring him wider influence within the inner chambers of the American government. Zilkov said he had no interest in whom Raymond assassinated so long as he worked efficiently and obediently. It was decided that Mr. Gaines should die two nights hence. Subsequently, the American operator complained bitterly through channels that Zilkov had been reckless and foolhardy with one of the Party's most valuable pieces of apparatus in the United States, and most entirely needlessly because Raymond had been checked out by Pavlov technicians. Unfortunately the complaint was not made in time to save Mr. Gaines, but within two weeks Zilkov was recalled and severely reprimanded. On his return to the United States, he could not have been more careful, both with Raymond and Raymond's operator, than if they had been his own department heads.

***

On the morning of the ninth day at Swardon, less than two days before he murdered Mr. Gaines, Raymond awoke as from a deep sleep, surprised to find himself in a strange bed and in traction, but even more shocked to find himself staring directly into, and on a level with, the grief-ravaged face of his mother. Raymond had never seen his mother's face as being anything but smoothly held, enforced, carefully supported, arranged, and used to help her get what she wanted as a Cadillac was used to get her where she wanted to go. The skin on his mother's face had always been flawless; the eyes were exquisitely placed and entirely clear, the whites unflecked by tiny blood vessels, merely suggesting malevolence and insane impatience. Her mouth had always been held well in, as the mouths of city saddle horses, and the perfect blond hair had always framed all of this and had always softened it.

To open his eyes and find himself looking into a wracked caricature of that other vision made Raymond cry out, and made his mother aware that he was conscious. Her hair was ragged and awry. Her eyes were rabbit-red from weeping. Her cheeks shone with wet, washing away the cosmetic that always masked the wrinkles. Her mouth was twisted in ugly self-pity, while she sobbed noisily and blew her nose into too small a handkerchief. She drew back instantly at his sound and attempted to compose her face, but it could not be done convincingly on such short order, and unconsciously she wanted to gain a credit for the feat she knew would be unbelievable to him: her tears because of him.

"Raymond, oh, my Raymond."

"Whassa matter?"

"Oh --"

"Is Johnny dead?"

"What?"

"What the hell is the matter with you?"

"I came here as soon as I could. I flew here the instant I was able to leave."

"Where? Pardon the cliche, but where am I?"

"The Swardon Sanitarium."

"The Swardon Sanitarium where?"

"New York. You were hit by a hit-and-run driver. Oh, I was so frightened. I came as soon as I could."

"When? How long have I been here?"

"Eight days. Nine days. I don't know."

"And you just got here?"

"Do you hate me, Raymond?"

"No, Mother."

"Do you love me?"

"Yes, Mother." He looked at her with genuine anxiety. Had she run out of arm sauce? Had she broken the arm-banging machine? Or was she just a very clever impersonator sent over to play the mother while my true mummy tries to sober up the Great Statesman?

"My little boy. My darling, little boy." She went into a paroxysm of silent weeping, working her shoulders up and down in a horrible manner and shaking the chair she sat in. There was nothing faked about this, he knew. She must have hit some real trouble along the line. It simply could not possibly be that she was weeping over him being stretched out in a hospital. Mucus slid from the tiny handkerchief and rested on her left cheekbone. Raymond closed his eyes for a moment, but he would not tell her what had happened and felt a deep satisfaction that ultimately she would look in some mirror after she had left him and see this mess on her face.

"You are such a fraud, Mother. My God, I feel as well as I have ever felt and I know that you have been all over this with whatever doctors there are out there on the telephone days ago, and now you're at the hospital because there is probably a sale at Bloomingdale's or you're having a few radio actors blacklisted and you make a production out of it like I was involved somehow in your life." His voice was bitter. His eyes were hard and dry.

"I have to be a fraud," she said, straightening her back and slipping several lengths of steel into her voice like whalebone into a corset. "And I have to be the truth, too. And a shield and the courage for all the men I have ever known, yourself included, excepting my father. There is so much fraud in this world and it needs to be turned away with fraud, the way steel is turned with steel and the way a soft answer does not turneth away wrath." She had emerged, dripping with acid, from her grief. Her face was a mass of ravaged colors and textures, her hair was like an old lamp shade fringe and that glob of mucus still rested on her left cheekbone disgustingly, but she was herself again, and Raymond felt greatly relieved.

"How's Johnny?"

"Fine. He'd be here, but that committee just finished working him over -- ah, wait until that one is up for re-election." She sniffed noisily. "So I told him he must stay there and stare them down. You have no use for him anyway so I don't know why you bother to ask for him unless you feel guilt about something."

"I do feel guilt about something."

"About what?" She leaned forward slightly because information is the prime increment of power.

"About Jocie."

"Who's Jocie?"

"Jocie Jordan. The senator's daughter."

"Oh. Yes. Why do you feel guilt?" his mother asked.

"Why? Because she thinks I deserted her."

"Raymond! Why do you dramatize everything so? You were babies!"

"I thought that since we're having our first meeting since I got the medal, since I got back from Korea, and I was in Korea for two years, I thought since you've been pretending to be two other people -- you know, honest and maternal and wistfully remorseful about how we had let our lives go along -- coldly and separately -- and I thought that before we got any more honest and hated ourselves in the morning, that we might just pay Jocie the respect of asking for her -- you know, mentioning her name in passing they way they do about the dead?" His voice was choked. His eyes were not dry.

As though he had reminded her of what had triggered her in the first place, she began unexpectedly to weep. The lemon sunlight was reflected from the bright white blank wall outside the window at her back and it lingered like St. Elmo's fire around the ridiculously small green hat she was wearing, a suspicion of a hat that had been assembled for seventy dollars by an aesthetic leader for whom millinery signified the foundation stone of culture.

"What is the matter with you, Mother?"

She sobbed.

"You aren't crying about me?"

She sobbed and nodded.

"But, I'm all right. I don't have a pain or an ache. I am absolutely fine."

"Oh, Raymond, what can I say to you? There has been so much to get done. We have so far to go. Johnny is going to lead the people of our country to the heights of their history. But I have to lead Johnny, Raymond. You know that. I know you know that. I have given my life and many, many significant things for all of this. My life. Simply that and I can see that if I were to ransack my strength -- remembered strength or future strength -- I could not give more to this holy crusade than I have given. Now I have come face to face with my life where it has failed to cross your own. I can't tell you how a mother feels about that, because you wouldn't understand. It made me weep for a little bit. That's all. What's that? Anybody and everybody recovers from tears, but I'm not sad and I don't have regrets because I know that what I did and what I do is for the greatest possible good for all of us." Raymond watched her, then made the small despising gesture with his right hand, brushing her world out of his way as it came too close to him.

"I don't understand one word of what you are saying," he told her.

"I am saying this. Some terrible, terrible changes are going to come to this country."

He flicked at the air with his hand violently, unaware of the movement, and he closed his eyes.

"This country is going to go through a fire like it has never seen," she said in a low and earnest voice. "And I know what I am saying because the signs are there to read and I understand politics, which is the art of reading them. Time is going to roar and flash lightning in the streets, Raymond. Blood will gush behind the noise and stones will fall and fools and mockers will be brought down. The smugness and complacency of this country will be dragged through the blood and the noise in the streets until it becomes a country purged and purified back to original purity, which it once possessed so long ago when the founding fathers of this republic -- the blessed, blessed fathers -- brought it into life. And when that day comes-and we have been cleansed of the slime of oblivion and saved from the wasteful, wrong, sinful, criminal, selfish, rottenness which Johnny, and only Johnny is going to save us from, you will kneel beside me and thank me and kiss my hands and my skirt and give only me your love as will the rest of the great people of this confused and blinded land."

He put his hand over hers on the bed, then lifted it to his lips. Suddenly, he felt himself being made soft with pity for both of them. He could not comprehend that his mother had any feelings, and it shocked him deeply.

***

Two days later, immediately after Raymond ate dinner in the room at Swardon with his leg still in a cast, Zilkov and the American operator came to the room with a package of playing cards and subsequently gave him detailed instructions as to how he was to kill Holborn Gaines. The time they set was three forty-five the following morning. Gaines lived in an apartment house, alone. The house maintained a self-service elevator after one A.M. when the night man went off duty. There was no doorman. Zilkov had had a key made to fit the front door of the building and to Mr. Gaines's apartment, which was one of four on the ninth floor. The security man went over the pencil-sketched, then photos tatted floor plan of Gaines's small unit of three rooms and a bath, indicating where the bedroom was and suggesting that Raymond strangle him, as it was the quietest and least complicated method and, considering the close quarters in which he would have to work, the neatest. He added that Raymond must accept it as a rule, then and forever, that in the event that anyone, repeat anyone, ever discovered him on the scene of the assignment, this other person or persons must be killed. Was that clear? Zilkov may have reconsidered the risk he had decided to have Raymond run, for, to make sure this condition was understood, he asked the American operator to repeat the admonition.

As it worked out, Mr. Gaines was alone but he was not asleep as he should have been to save Raymond considerable embarrassment. He was reading in bed, a four-poster feather bed, with nine soft pillows all around behind him and a shocking-pink maribou bed jacket around his shoulders; chuckling over a few pounds of confidential reports from bureau chiefs in Washington, Rome, London, Madrid, and Moscow. The windows were closed tight and, as in the office at all times, an electric heater was beaming up at him from the floor nearby: in July.

As Raymond opened the door to the apartment he knocked over the tall paper screen that Mr. Gaines kept in front of the opened door in the summer time. As it fell it dislodged a picture hanging on the wall; it hit the floor with a crash. There could be no doubt that someone had come to call, and Raymond cursed himself as a blunderer because he knew well that Mr. Gaines would be tart about the visit, in any event.

"What the hell is that?" Mr. Gaines yelled shrilly.

Raymond flushed with embarrassment. It was an entirely new feeling for him and Mr. Gaines was the only living person who could have made him feel that way, because Mr. Gaines made him feel helpless, gawky, and grateful all at the same time. "It's me, Mr. Gaines," he said. "Raymond."

"Raymond? Raymond?" Mr. Gaines was bewildered. "My assistant? Raymond Shaw?"

Raymond appeared in the bedroom doorway at that moment. He was wearing a neat black suit, a dark gray shirt, a black tie, and black gloves. "Yes, sir," he said. "I -- I'm sorry to disturb you, Mr. Gaines."

Mr. Gaines fingered the maribou bed jacket. "Don't get any ideas about this silly-looking bed jacket," he said irritably. "It was my wife's. It's the warmest thing I have. Perfect for reading in bed at night."

"I didn't know you were married, Mr. Gaines."

"She died nearly six years ago," Mr. Gaines said gruffly, then he remembered. "But -- but, what the hell are you doing here at --" Mr. Gaines looked over at the alarm clock on the night table. "At ten minutes to four in the morning."

"Well -- I -- uh --"

"My God, Raymond, don't tell me you've come here to talk something over? I mean, surely you aren't going to pour out your heart with the details of some sordid love affair or anything like that?"

"No, sir, you see --"

"Raymond, if you feel you must resign for any reason -- a circumstance which I would regret, of course -- surely you could leave a little note on my desk in the morning. I hate chattering like this! I thought I had explained to you that I loathe having to talk to people, Raymond."

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry, Mr. Gaines."

Mr. Gaines suddenly seemed to remember something significant. He lifted his left hand and pointed vaguely toward the door, looking, because of the fluffy feathers all around his white hair, something like the ancient Mrs. Santa R. Claus. "How did you get in here? When I close that door, it locks."

"They gave me a key."

"Who did?"

"The people at the hospital."

"What hospital? But -- why? Why did they give you a key?"

Raymond had been moving slowly around the bed. At last he stood at Mr. Gaines's side, looking down at him sunk into the feather bed. He felt sheepish.

"Raymond! Answer me, my boy! Why are you here?"

It was a relatively effortless job because Mr. Gaines, being such an old man, did not have much strength and Raymond, because of feelings of affection and gratitude for Mr. Gaines did everything he could, with his great strength, to terminate his friend's life as quickly as possible. He thought of extinguishing the bed light as he left, but turned it on again, remembering that he wouldn't be able to find his way out to the front door if he left the room in darkness.

He walked four blocks west before taking a cab north on Lexington Avenue; he left it three blocks away from Swardon. He entered the sanitarium through the basement door, off the back areaway, showing his pass to the Soviet Army corporal in overalls who had taken him under the throat with the left forearm without speaking and held until Raymond tapped his third finger twice, then showed the pass. When Raymond got to his room the American operator was waiting for him.

"Still up?" Raymond said conversationally. "It's almost four-thirty."

"I wanted to make sure you were all right," the operator said. "Good night, Raymond. I'll send the nurses in to rig you up again."

"Do I have to have those casts put on again?"

"Those casts must stay on until you are discharged. How do you know who'll show up here as a visitor now that Mr. Gaines is dead?" The operator left the room. The nurses had Raymond undressed and bandaged in no time at all.

***

Raymond, as it turned out, did have two more visitors before he left the hospital. Joe Downey, the managing editor of The Daily Press, stopped by after Mr. Gaines's funeral and offered Raymond the job of writing the column, which meant a two-hundred-dollar-a-week raise in pay and a net saving of three hundred dollars a week to the paper because, naturally, they didn't figure to start Raymond at the figure Mr. Gaines had finished at, and Mr. Gaines had been political columnist for the paper for twenty-six years. They also offered Raymond fifty per cent of the syndication money, a net increase of one hundred per cent to the paper because under the prior arrangement Mr. Gaines had kept it all, excepting the sales and distribution and promotion percentage. To the paper's owners, Mr. Downey allowed that Raymond was new and had such an unpleasant personality that it was better than five to one that no one would ever get around to telling him that he rated all the syndication money. It was fair. The reports from the bureau chiefs made up most of the columns and the paper, not Raymond, had to pay the bureau chiefs. Besides, one half of the syndication money came to five hundred and six dollars per week, which lifted Raymond's take-home pay by seven hundred and six dollars per week; Mr. Downey estimated this as being a bargain because the paper would have the only Medal of Honor columnist in the business, which certainly should open the doors to information at the Pentagon, and he had that crazy stepfather who could scare people into talking to Raymond, and that mother who could get him in anywhere, even to share a double bed with the President if he felt like it, and he had had five solid years of learning his job from Holborn Gaines. Seven hundred and six dollars a week is a nice raise for a young fellow, particularly if he likes money.

Actually, the increased income took the edge off the promotion for Raymond but, the way he would handle it, he figured the money would be the bank's problem, not his.

Raymond was distraught over the murder. He had had great regard for the old man and a fondness that was unusual inasmuch as he felt fondness for only two other people in the world, Marco and Jocie, and Jocie should not be included in the category because the feeling for her was vastly different again. He just could not get it through his head that anyone would want to murder Mr. Gaines. He had been a kind and gentle and helpless old man, and how could anyone do such a thing? Mr. Downey expressed the police opinion that it must have been some mentally unstable political crank. "Holly was one of the oldest friends I had left," Mr. Downey said sadly, mourning for himself.

"Is the paper going to post a reward?"

Mr. Downey rubbed his chin. "Hm. I guess we should, at that. We certainly should. Can charge it to promotion if we ever have to pay it."

"I want to pledge five thousand dollars of that reward," Raymond said hotly.

"You don't need to do that, Raymond."

"Well, I want to, goddamit."

"Well, O.K. You pledge five and we'll pledge ten, although the board'll have to O.K. it of course, and I'll call Centre Street soon as I get back to the office so they can send out paper on it. By God, we'll pay for a general alarm, too. The dirty bastard." Downey was doubly upset because he hated to spend the paper's money and he knew damned well that Holly Gaines, wherever he was, wouldn't approve of a goddam, boy-scout, grandstand play like that, but, what the hell, there were certain things you pretended you had to do.

***

Marco came in to see Raymond the same afternoon. "Jesus, you look like hell," Raymond said from under his head bandage and traction equipment. "What happened?"

Marco looked worse than that. The old sayings are the best, and Marco looked like death warmed over. "What do you mean, what happened?" he said. ''I'm not in a hospital bed, am I?"

"I just mean I never saw you look so lousy."

"Well, thanks."

"What happened?"

Marco ran his hand across his face. "I can't sleep."

"Can't you get some pills?" Raymond said tentatively -- having a narcotics addict for a mother, he had developed an aversion to drugs. Also, it was difficult for him to understand any kind of a sleeping problem, since he himself could have fallen asleep hanging by one ankle in a high wind.

"It's not so much that I can't sleep. It's more that I'd rather not sleep. I'm walking around punchy because I'm scared. I keep having the same nightmare." Raymond, lying flat on his back, made the flicking gesture with his right hand.

"Is it a nightmare about a Soviet general and a lot of Chinese and me and the guys who were on the patrol?" Marco came out of the chair like a tiger. He stood over Raymond, gripping the cloth of his pajama jacket in both fists, staring down at him with wild eyes. "How did you know that? How did you know that?" His voice went up and up like eccentric stairs in front of a hilltop summer beach house.

"Take -- your -- hands -- off -- me." With that sentence Raymond's voice fell back into his horrid drawling manner; into his repulsive, inciting, objectionable voice that he used to keep the rest of the world on the other side of the moat surrounding the castle where he had always lain under the spell of the wicked witch. It was curdingly unfriendly, and so actively repellent that it drove Marco backward into the chair, which was a good thing because Marco had gone into a sick yellow-ivory color, his breathing was shallow, and his eyes shone with an ever so slight sheen of insanity as he had reached out to take the shape of his oppression into the muscles of his fingers and hands and punish it for what it had been doing to his dignity, which is man's own inner image of himself.

''I'm sorry, Raymond."

Raymond became Marco's friend again instantly, as though there had been no lapse.

"Please tell me how you knew about my nightmare, Raymond."

"Well, you see, I didn't really. I mean, it's just that Melvin -- you know: Al Melvin, the corporal on the patrol -- he wrote me a long letter about a week ago. I was naturally surprised to hear from him because -- well -- as you know, I was never much one for fraternizing, but he said in the letter that I was the only one he knew how to reach -- he sent the letter to Johnny because everybody certainly knows how to reach him -- because he had to tell somebody in the patrol about this nightmare or he was afraid he would lose his mind and --"

"Please tell me about the nightmare, Raymond."

"Well, he dreams that the patrol is all sitting together. He says he dreams about a lot of Soviet officers and some Chinese brass and us being on the patrol. What is such a nightmare about that?"

"Where's the letter? Do you have the letter?"

"Well, no. I mean, I never keep letters."

"Is that all he wrote? Is that all about the nightmare?"

"Yeah."

"It just stops right there?"

"I guess so."

"Man!"

"Is it like your nightmare?"

"Yeah. As a matter of fact, mine is a lot like that."

"You guys ought to get together."

"Right away. You don't know what this means to me. I just can't explain to you what this means to me, Raymond."

"Well, you can't see him right away, though, Ben. He lives in Wainwright, Alaska."

"Alaska? Alaska?"

"Yes,"

"Jesus. Wainwright, Alaska. You have to be kidding!"

"No. I wish I was, Ben. I'm not. But, so what? What's the difference?"

"What's the difference? I told you I can't sleep. You told me I look like hell. Well, I feel like hell and I'm shaking all to pieces and I think sometimes I should kill myself because I'm afraid of going insane, and then you tell me like you were talking about the weather that another man who was on the patrol is having the same delusions that I was afraid were driving me crazy, and you tell me he lives in some place called Wainwright, Alaska, where I can't sit down and talk to him and find out if he's cracking up like I am and how we can help each other, and you say what's the difference."

Marco began to laugh hysterically, then he put his face forward into his large hands and wept into them, squeezing tightly at his cheekbones, his heavy shoulders moving grotesquely and causing the four rows of his decorations to jump up and down. He made such tearing sounds that the two Soviet Army nurses on the floor came running in. After six or seven minutes of Marco's reckless, unrelieved, and shocking sobbing, at which Raymond stared helplessly, they hit him with a hypo to calm him down and get him the hell out of there.

All in all, Raymond had had a most ironic hospital stay, what with a visit from the wife of America's most gallant and noisy anti-Communist to a hospital operated by the Soviet secret police, what with a U.S. Army Intelligence officer breaking down and embarrassing the staff of the same place, what with contributing five thousand dollars to a reward for his own capture, and what with learning that two grown men were capable of behaving like children over a perfectly harmless, if repetitious, dream.
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Re: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

Postby admin » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:27 am

Chapter 10

Johnny had become chairman of the Committee on Federal Operations and chairman of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, with a budget of two hundred thousand dollars a year and an inculcating staff of investigators. He grew sly, in the way he worked that staff. He would sidle up to a fellow senator or another member of the government placed as high and mention the name and habits of some young lady for whom the senator might be paying the necessities, or perhaps an abortion here, or a folly-of-youth police record there. It worked wonders. He had only to drop this kind of talk upon five or six of them and at once they became his missionaries to intimidate others who might seek to block his ways in government.

There were a few groups and individuals who were able to find the courage to assail him. One of the most astute political analysts of the national scene wrote: "Iselinism has developed a process for compounding a lie, then squaring it, which is a modern miracle of dishonesty far exceeding the claims of filter cigarettes. Iselin's lies seem to have atomic motors within them, tiny reactors of such power and such complexity as to confound and baffle all with direct, and even slightly honest, turns of mind. He has bellowed out so many accusations about so many different people (and for all the public knows these names he brandishes may have been attached to people of entirely questionable existence) that no one can keep the records of these horrendous charges straight. Iselin is a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts."

The American Association of Scientists asked that this statement be published: "Senator Iselin puts the finishing touches on his sabotage of the morale of American scientists to the enormous net gain of those who work against the interests of the United States."

Johnny was doing great. From a semi-hangdog country governor, Raymond's mother said, utterly unknown outside domestic politics on a state level in 1956, he had transformed himself into a global figure in 1957. He had a lot going for him beyond Raymond's mother. His very looks: that meaty nose, the nearly total absence of forehead, the perpetual unshavenness, the piggish eyes, red from being dipped in bourbon, the sickeningly monotonous voice, whining and grating, -- all of it together made Johnny one of the greatest demagogues in American history, even if, as Raymond's mother often said to friends, he was essentially a lighthearted and unserious one. Nonetheless, her Johnny had become the only American in the country's history of political villains, studding folk song and story, to inspire concomitant fear and hatred in foreigners, resident in their native countries. He blew his nose in the Constitution, he thumbed his nose at the party system or any other version of governmental chain of command. He personally charted the zigs and zags of American foreign policy at a time when the American policy was a monstrously heavy weight upon world history. To the people of Iceland, Peru, France, and Pitcairn Island the label of Iselinism stood for anything and everything that was dirty, backward, ignorant, repressive, offensive, anti-progressive, or rotten, and all of those adjectives must ultimately be seen as sincere tributes to any demagogue of any country on any planet.

After Raymond's mother had written the scriptures and set the tone of the sermons Johnny was to make along the line to glory, she left him bellowing and pointing his finger while she organized, for nearly fifteen months, the cells of the Iselin national organization she called the Loyal American Underground. This organization enrolled, during that first period of her work, two million three-hundred thousand members, all militantly for Johnny and what he stood for, and most deeply grateful for his wanting to "give our friends a place from which they may partake of a sense of history through adventure and real participation in the cause of fanatic good government, cleansed of the stain of communism."

Raymond's mother and her husband held their mighty political analysis and strategy-planning sessions at their place, which was out toward Georgetown. They would talk and drink bourbon and ginger ale and Johnny would fool around with his scrapbook. He always had it in his mind that cold winter nights would be the best time to paste up the bundles of clippings about his work into individual books, with the intent of someday providing the vast resources for a John Yerkes Iselin Memorial Library. The analyses of the day's or the week's battles were always informal and usually productive of really constructive action for the immediate future.

"Hon," Raymond's mother said, "aren't there times when you're up there at the committee table when you have to go to the john?"

"Of course. Whatta you think I'm made of -- blotting paper or something?"

"Well, what do you do about it?"

"Do? I get up and I go."

"See? That's exactly what I mean. Now tomorrow when you have to go I want you to try it my way and see what happens. Will you?"

He grinned horribly. "Right up there in front of all those TV cameras?"

"Never mind. Tomorrow when you have to go I want you to throw yourself into a rage -- making sure you are on camera -- wait for a tight shot if you can -- and bang on the desk and scream for the chairman and yell 'Point of order! Point of order!' Then stand up and say you will not put up with this farce and that you will not dignify it with your presence for one moment longer."

"Why do I do that?"

"You have to start making the right kind of exits for yourself, Johnny, so that the American people will know that you have left so they can sit nervously and wait for you to come back."

"Gee, hon. That's a hell of an idea. Oh, say, I like that idea!"

She threw him a kiss. "What an innocent you are," she said, smiling at him dotingly. "Sometimes I don't think you give a damn what you're talking about or who you're talking about."

"Well, why the hell should I?"

"You're right. Of course."

"You're damn right, I'm right. What the hell, hon, this is a business with me. Suppose we were lawyers, I often say to myself. I mean actual practicing lawyers. I'd be the trial lawyer working out in front, rigging the juries and feeding the stuff to the newspaper boys, and you'd be the brief man back in the law library who has the research job of writing up the case." He finished the highball in his hand and gave the empty glass to his wife. She got up to make him another drink and said, "Oh, I agree with that, honey, but just the same I wish you would try a little bit more to feel the sacredness of your own mission."

"The hell with that. What's with you tonight, baby? I'm like a doctor, in a way. Am I supposed to die with every patient I lose? Life's too short." He accepted the highball. "Thank you, honey."

"You're welcome, sweetheart."

"What is this stuff? Applejack?"

"Applejack? It's twelve-year-old bourbon."

"That's funny. It tastes like applejack."

"Maybe it's the ginger ale."

"The ginger ale? I always drink my bourbon with ginger ale. How could it taste like applejack because of the ginger ale. It never tasted like applejack before."

"I can't understand it." she said.

"Ah, what's the difference? I happen to like applejack."

"You're so sweet it isn't even funny."

"Not so sweet as you."

"Johnny. have you noticed that some of the newspaper idiots are getting a little nasty with their typewriters?"

"Don't pay any attention." He waved a careless hand. "It's a business with them just like our business. You start getting sensitive and you just confuse everybody. The boys who are assigned to cover me may call themselves the Goon Squad but I don't notice that any of them have ever asked to be transferred. It's a game with them. They spend their time trying to catch me in lies, then printing that I said a lie. They like me. They try to knife me but they like me. I try to knife them but we drink together and we're friends. What the hell, hon. All we're all trying to do is to get a day's work done. Take it from me, never get sensitive."

"Johnny, baby?"

"Yes, hon?"

"Do me a favor and tomorrow at the lunch break please make it a point to go into that Senate barbershop for a shave. You can stand two shaves a day. I swear to God sometimes I think you can grow a beard in twenty minutes. You look like a badger in a Disney cartoon on that TV screen."

"Don't worry about it, hon. I have my own ways and I look my own way, but I'm very goddam American and they all know it out there."

"Just the same, hon, will you promise to get a shave tomorrow at the lunch break?"

"Certainly. Why not? Gimme another drink. I got a big day coming up tomorrow."

***

John Yerkes Iselin was re-elected to his second six-year term on November 4, 1958, by the biggest plurality in the history of elections in his state. Two hundred and thirty-six fist fights went unreported the following evening in the pubs, cafes, bodegas, cantinas, trattorias, and sundry brasseries of western Europe between the glum American residents and the outraged, consternated natives of the larger cities.

***

Early one Monday morning in his office at The Daily Press (for he had taken to arriving at work at seven-thirty rather than at ten o'clock now that he was the department head, just as had Mr. Gaines before him) Raymond looked up and saw, with no little irritation at the interruption, the figure of Chunjin standing in the doorway. Raymond did not remember ever having seen him before. The man was slight and dark with alert, liquid eyes and a most intelligent expression; he stared with wistful hopefulness mixed with ascending regard, but these subtleties did not transport Raymond to remembering the man.

"Yes?" he drawled in his calculatedly horrid way.

"I am Chunjin, Mr. Shaw, sir. I was interpreter attached to Cholly Company, Fifty-second Regiment --"

Raymond pointed his outstretched finger right at Chunjin's nose. "You were interpreter for the patrol," he said.

"Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw."

Other men might have allowed their camaraderie to foam over in the warming glow of the good old days, but Raymond said, "What do you want?" Chunjin blinked.

"I mean to say, what are you doing here?" Raymond said, not backing away from his bluntness but attempting to cope with this apparent stupidity through clearer syntax.

"Your father did not say to you?"

"My father?"

"Senator Iselin? I write to --"

"Senator Iselin is not my father. Repeat. He is not my father. If you learn nothing else on your visit to this country memorize that fact."

"I write to Senator Iselin. I tell him how I interpret your outfit. I tell him I want to come to America. He get me visa. Now I need job."

"A job?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw."

"My dear fellow, we don't use interpreters here. We all speak the same language."

"I am tailor and mender. I am cook. I am driver of car. 1 am cleaner and scrubber. I fix anything. I take message. I sleep at house of my cousin and not eat much food. I ask for job with you because you are great man who save my life. I need for pay only ten dollars a week."

"Ten dollars? For all that?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw."

"Well, look here, Chunjin. I couldn't pay you only ten dollars a week."

"Yes, sir. Only ten dollars a week."

"I can use a valet. I would like having a cook, I think. A good cook, I mean. And I dislike washing dishes. I had been thinking about getting a car, but the parking thing sort of has me stopped. I go to Washington twice a week and there is no reason why I shouldn't have the money the airlines are getting from this newspaper for those trips and I'd rather not fly that crowded corridor anyway. I would prefer it if you didn't sleep in, as a matter of fact, but I'm sorry, ten dollars a week just isn't enough money." Raymond said that flatly, as though it were he who had applied for the job and was turning it down for good and sufficient reasons.

"I work for fifteen, sir."

"How can you live on fifteen dollars a week In New York?"

"I live with the cousins, sir."

"How much do the cousins earn?"

"I do not know, sir."

"Well, I'm sorry, Chunjin, but it is out of the question." Raymond who had still not greeted his old wartime buddy, turned away to return to his work. From his expression he had dismissed the conversation, and he was anxious to return to the bureau reports and to some very helpful information his mother had managed to send along to him.

"Is not good for you to pay less, Mr. Shaw?"

Raymond turned slowly, forcing his attention back to the Korean and realizing impatiently that he had not made it clear that the meeting was over. "Perhaps I should have clarified my position in the matter, as follows," Raymond said frostily. "It strikes me that there is something basically dishonest about an arrangement by which a man insists upon working for less money than he can possibly live on."

"You think I steal, Mr. Shaw?"

Raymond flushed. "I had not considered any specific category of such theoretical dishonesty."

"I live on two dollars a week in Mokpo. I think ten dollars many times better."

"How long have you been here?"

Chunjin looked at his watch. "Two hours."

"I mean, in New York."

"Two hours."

"All right. I will instruct the bank to pay you a salary of twenty-five dollars a week."

"Thank you, Mr. Shaw, sir."

"I will supply the uniforms."

"Yes, sir."

Raymond leaned over the desk and wrote the bank's address on a slip of paper, adding Mr. Rothenberg's name. "Go to this address. My bank. Ask for this man. I'll call him. He'll give you the key to my place and some instructions for stocking food. He'll tell you where to buy it. We don't use money. Please have dinner ready to serve at seven-fifteen next Monday. I'll be in Washington for the weekend, where I may be reached at the Willard Hotel. I am thinking in terms of roast veal -- a boned rump of veal -- with green beans, no potato -- please, Chunjin, never serve me a potato --"

"No, sir, Mr. Shaw."

"-- some canned, not fresh, spinach; pan gravy, I think some stewed fruit, and two cups of hot black coffee."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw. Just like in United States Army."

"Jesus, I hope not," Raymond said.
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Re: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

Postby admin » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:28 am

Chapter 11

On April 15, 1959, the very same day on which Chunjin got his job with Raymond on transfer from the Soviet Army, another military transfer occurred. Major Marco was placed on indefinite sick leave and detached from duty.

Marco had undergone two series of psychiatric treatments at Army hospitals. As the recurring nightmare had grown more vivid, the pathological fatigue had gotten more severe. No therapy had been successful. Marco had weighed two hundred and eight pounds when he had come into New York from Korea. At the time he went on indefinite sick leave he weighed in at one hundred and sixty-three and he looked a little nuts. Every nerve end in his body had grown a small ticklish mustache, and they sidled along under his skin like eager touts, screaming on tiptoe. He had the illusion that he could see and hear everything at once and had lost all of his ability to edit either sight or sound. Sound particularly detonated his reflexes. He tried desperately not to listen when people talked because an open A sound repeated several times within a sentence could make him weep uncontrollably. He didn't know why, so he concentrated on remembering the cause, when he could, so that he would not listen so attentively, but it didn't work. It was an A sound that must have been somewhat like a sound he had heard many, many years before, in utter peace and safety, which through its loss or through his indifference to it over the years could now cause him to weep bitterly. If he heard the sound occur once, he quickly hummed "La Seine," to push the A sound off to the side. His hand tremors were pronounced when his arm was extended unsupported. Sometimes his teeth would chatter as though he had entered a chill. Once in a while, after four or five unrelieved nights of nightmare, he developed a bad facial tic, and it wasn't pretty. Marco was being rubbed into sand by the grinding stones of two fealties. He was being slowly rubbed away by two faiths he lived by, far beyond his control; the first was his degree of holy reverence for the Medal of Honor, one of the most positive prejudices of his life because his life, principally, was the Army; and the second was the abnormal degree of his friendship for Raymond Shaw, which has been placed upon his mind, as coffee will leave a stain upon a fresh, snowy tablecloth, by the deepest psychological conditioning.

When Marco completed, for the want of any other word, the second course of treatment and was ordered to rest, they knew he was through and he knew they knew it. He headed for New York to talk to Raymond. He had never been able to tell the doctors the part of the dream where Raymond killed Mavole and Lembeck, on a continuous-performance basis, and he had not allowed himself to mention every phase of the four variations on the drill that had been used to win Raymond the Medal of Honor. He had written to Al Melvin and, between them, he and Melvin had spent over three hundred dollars talking to each other on the long-distance telephone, and it had brought considerable relief to each to know that the other was suffering as deeply from the same malady, but it did not stop the nightmares. Marco knew that he must talk to Raymond. He must, absolutely must. He knew that if he did not talk to Raymond about most of the details in his dreams he would die from them. Ironically, as Marco was riding one train to New York, Raymond was riding another to Washington.

Marco sat like a stone in the train chair, riding sideways in the club car. The car was about half filled. Almost all of the seats were occupied at one end, Marco's end, by businessmen, or what seemed to be businessmen but were actually an abortionist, an orchestra leader, a low-church clergyman, an astrologer, a Boy Scout executive, a horticulturist, and a cinematographer, because, no matter how much they would like the world to think so, the planet is not populated entirely by businessmen no matter how banal the quality of conversation everywhere has become. Some women were present; their dresses gave the car the only embarrassing touch of color, excepting the garish decorations on the upper left side of Marco's blouse.

Marco had a rye old-fashioned placed on the round, metal stand in front of him, but he hadn't tasted it. He kept wishing he had ordered beer not to taste and he was careful not to look at anybody, because he had stopped doing that several weeks before. He sweated continuously. His face had very little color. His palms drenched his trousers at the tops of his knees. He was battling to make a decision as to whether he wanted to smoke a cigar or not. His eyes burned. He felt an agony of weariness. His stomach hurt. He concentrated for an instant on not clenching his teeth but he could not retain the thought. His jaws were tired and some doctor had told him that he would grind the dentine off his molars if he didn't concentrate on not clenching his jaws. He turned his body slightly, but not his head, toward the person sitting beside him, a woman.

"Do you mind cigar smoke," he mumbled.

"Not at all," she murmured. He turned away from her but made no move to find a cigar.

"Go ahead," she said. "As a matter of fact, I wish you'd smoke two cigars at the same time."

"You must really like cigar smoke."

"Not especially, but I think two cigars going at the same time would look awfully amusing."

He turned his body again toward the woman sitting beside him. He lifted his eyes slowly, hesitantly, beyond the long, scarlet-tipped fingers at repose in her lap, past a shining silver belt buckle shaped as Quetzalcoatl, an urbane feathered serpent; past uptilted, high-setting, pronounced breasts that stared back at him eyelessly through dark blue wool; past the high neckline and the discreet seed pearls around a long throat of white Carrara marble, to a mouth whose shape he had yearned to see in living flesh since he had seen its counterpart within a photograph he had found in a German magazine twenty-three years before, rolled up in his father's effects in the trunk of a command car. In abstract, it was a sexual object. It was a witty mouth. It looked insatiable. It told him about lust which had been lost far back in mythology, lust which could endow its tasters with eternal serenity, and it was the mouth of many varieties of varying kinds of woman. He regretted having to leave off his concentration on the sight of it; with difficulty he moved his eyes upward to the questing horn of a most passionate nose; a large, formed, aquiline, and Semitic nose, the nose of a seeker and a finder of glories, and it made him remember that every Moslem who attains heaven is allotted seventy-two women who must look exactly like this between the eyes and the mouth, and he thought across the vast, vast distance of the huanacauri rock of Incan puberty to the words of the black, black, black song that keened: "If she on earth no more I see, my life will quickly fade away." Then at last his eyes came to the level of the eyes of a Tuareg woman and he rushed past a random questioning as to whether the Berlitz Schools taught Temajegh, and he thought of the god of love who was called bodiless by the Hindus because he was consumed by the fire of Siva's eyes, then he closed his own eyes and tried to help himself, to stop himself, to -- SWEET GOD IN HEAVEN! -- he could not. He began to weep. He stumbled to his feet. The passengers across the aisle stared at him hostilely. He knocked his drink over, and the metal stand over. He turned blindly and noisily to the left, unable to stop weeping, and made it, from behind the wet opaqueness, to the train door and the vestibule. He stood alone in the vestibule and put his head against the window and waited for time to pass, feeling confident that it would pass, when his motor would run down and this sobbing would slowly subside. Trying to analyze what had happened, as though to fill his mind, he was forced into the conclusion that the woman must have looked the way that open A sounded to him: an open, effortless, problemless, safe, and blessed look. What color had her hair been? he wondered as he wept. He concentrated upon the words by which angels had been known: yaztas, fravashi, and Amesha Spentas; seraphim and cherubim; hayyot, ofanim, arelim, and Harut and Marut who had said: "We are only a temptation. Be not then an unbeliever." He decided that the woman could only be one of the fravashi, that army of angels that has existed in heaven before the birth of man, that protects him during his life, and is united to his soul at death. He sobbed while he conjectured about the color of her hair. At last, he was permitted to stop weeping. He leaned against the train wall in exhaustion, riding backward. He took a handkerchief slowly from his trousers pocket and, with an effort of strength which he could not replenish with sleep, slowly dried his face, then blew his nose. He thought, only fleetingly, that he could not go back into that club car again, but that there would be plenty of other seats in the other direction, toward the rear of the train. When he got to New York, he decided, he would pull on a pair of gray slacks and a red woolen shirt and he'd sit all day on the rim of the map of the United States behind Raymond's big window, looking out at the Hudson River and that state, whatever its name was, on the other shore and think about the states beyond that state and drink beer.

When he turned to find another seat in another car, she was standing there. Her hair was the color of birch bark, prematurely white, and he stared at her as though her thyroid were showing its excessive activity and her hypereroticism. She stood smoking a new cigarette, leaning back, riding forward, and looking out of the window.

"Maryland is a beautiful state," she said.

"This is Delaware."

"I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid track on this stretch, but nonetheless Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter."

"I guess so. Columbus is a tremendous football town. You in the railroad business?" He felt dizzy. He wanted to keep talking.

"Not any more," she told him. "However, if you will permit me to point it out, when you ask someone that, you really should say: 'Are you in the railroad line?' Where is your home?"

"I've been in the Army all my life," Marco said. "We keep moving. I was born in New Hampshire."

"I went to a girls' camp once on Lake Francis."

"Well. That's away north. What's your name?"

"Eugenie."

"Pardon?"

"No kidding. I really mean it. And with that crazy French pronunciation."

"It's pretty."

"Thank you."

"Your friends call you Jenny?"

"Not yet they haven't."

"I think it's a nice name."

"You may call me Jenny."

"But what do your friends call you?"

"Rosie."

"Why?"

"My full name -- the first name -- is Eugenie Rose. I have always favored Rosie, of the two names, because it smells like brown soap and beer. It's the kind of a name that is always worn by the barmaid who always gets whacked across the behind by draymen. My father used to say it was a portly kind of a name, and with me being five feet nine he always figured I had a better chance of turning out portly than fragile, which is really and truly the way a girl using the name Eugenie would have to be."

"Still, when I asked you your name, you said Eugenie."

"It is quite possible that I was feeling more or less fragile at that instant."

"I never could figure out what more or less meant."

"Nobody can."

"Are you Arabic?"

"No."

He held out his hand to be taken in formal greeting. "My name is Ben. It's really Bennet. I was named after Arnold Bennet."

"The writer?"

"No. A lieutenant colonel. He was my father's commanding officer at the time."

"What's your last name?"

"Marco."

"Major Marco. Are you Arabic?"

"No, but no kidding, I was sure you were Arabic. I would have placed your daddy's tents within twelve miles of the Hoggar range in the central Sahara. There's a town called Janet in there and a tiny little place with a very rude name that I couldn't possibly repeat even if you had a doctorate in geography. When the sun goes down and the rocks, which have been heated so tremendously all day, are chilled suddenly by the night, which comes across the desert like flung, cold, black stout, it makes a salvo like a hundred rifles going off in rapid fire. The wind is called the khamseen, and after a flood throws a lot of power down a mountainside the desert is reborn and millions and millions of white and yellow flowers come to bloom all across the empty desolation. The trees, when there are trees, have roots a hundred feet long. There are catfish in the waterholes. Think of that. Did you know that? Sure. Some of them run ten, twelve inches. Everywhere else in the Arab world the woman is a beast of burden. Among the Tuareg, the woman is queen, and the Hoggar are the purest of the Tuareg. They have a ceremony called aha I, a sort of court of love where the woman reigns with her beauty, her wit, or the quality of her blood. They have enormous chivalry, the Tuareg. If a man wants to say 'I love!' he will say 'I am dying of love.' I have dreamed many times of a woman I have never seen and will never see because she died in 1935, and to this day the Tuareg recall her in their poetry, in their ahals, telling of her beauty, intelligence, and her wit. Her name was Dassine ouIt Yemma, and her great life was deeply punctuated by widely known love affairs with the great warriors of her time. I thought you were she. For just an instant, back there in that car a little while ago, I thought you were she."

His voice had gotten more and more rapid and his eyes were feverish. She had held his hand tightly in both of hers as he had spoken, ever since he had introduced himself. They stared at each other.

"Thank you," she said.

"You became one of my best and bravest thoughts," he told her. "I thank you." The taut, taut band around his head had loosened. "Are you married?"

"No. You?"

"No. What's your last name?"

"Cheyney. I am a production assistant for a man named Justin who had two hits last season. I live on Fifty-fourth Street, a few doors from the Museum of Modern Art, of which I am a tea-privileges member, no cream. I live at Fifty-three "Vest Fifty-fourth Street, Three B. Can you remember that?"

"Yes."

"Eldorado nine, two six three two. Can you remember that?"

"Yes."

"You look so tired. Apartment Three B. Are you stationed in New York? Is stationed the right word? Fifty-three West Fifty-fourth Street."

''I'm not exactly stationed in New York. I have been stationed in Washington but I got sick and I have a long leave now and I'm going to spend it in New York."

"Eldorado nine, two six three two."

"I stay with a friend of mine, a newspaperman. We were in Korea together." Marco ran a wet hand over his face and began to hum "La Seine." He had found the source of the sound of the open A. It was far inside this girl and it was in the sound of the name Dassine oult Yemma. He couldn't get the back of his hand away from his mouth. He had had to shut his eyes. He was so tired. He was so tired. She took his hand gently away from his mouth. "Let's sit down," she said. "I want you to put your head on my shoulder." The train lurched and he almost fell, but she caught and held him, then she led the way into the other car where there were plenty of seats.

***

Raymond's apartment was on the extreme west coast of the island where firemen had heavy bags under their eyes from piling out four and five times a night to push sirens to brownstone houses where nobody had any time to do anything about too many bone-weary Puerto Ricans living in one room. It was a strip of city too dishonest to admit it was a slum, or rather, in all of the vastness of the five boroughs of metropolis there was a strip of city, very tiny, which was not a slum, and this was the thin strip that was photographed and its pictures sent out across the world until all the world and the minuscule few who lived in that sliver of city thought that was New York, and neither knew or cared about the remainder of the six hundred square miles of flesh and brick. Here was the ripe slum of the West Side where the city had turned so bad that at last thirteen square blocks of it had had to be torn down before the rats carried off the babies. New York, New York! It's a wonderful town! The west side of the island was rich in facades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis. Central Park West was all front and faced a glorious park betrayed only now and then by bands of chattering faggots auctioning bodies and by an excessive population of emotion-caparisoned people in the somewhat temporary-looking sanitariums on so many of its side streets. Columbus and Amsterdam avenues were the streets of the drunks, where the murders were done in the darkest morning hours, where there were an excessive number of saloons and hardware stores. They were connected by trains of brownstone houses whose fronts were riotously colored morning and evening and all day on Sunday by bursts and bouquets of Puerto Ricans, and beyond Amsterdam was Broadway, the bawling, flash street, the fleshy, pig-eyed part of the city that wore lesions of neon and incandescent scabs, pustules of lights and color in suggestively luetic lycopods, illuminating littered streets, filth-clogged streets that could never be cleansed because when one thousand hands cleaned, one million hands threw dirt upon the streets again. Broadway was patrolled by strange-looking pedestrians, people who had grabbed the wrong face in the dark when someone had shouted "Fire!" and were now out roaming the streets, desperate to find their own. For city block after city block on Broadway it seemed that only food was sold. Beyond that was West End Avenue, a misplaced street bitter on its own memories, lost and bewildered, seeking some Shaker Heights, desperately genteel behind an apron of shabby bricks. Here was the limbo of the lower middle class where God the Father, in the form of sunlight, never showed His face. Raymond lived beyond that, on Riverside Drive, another front street of large, grand apartments that had become cabbage-sour furnished rooms which faced the river and an excessive amount of squalor on the Jersey shore. All together, the avenues and streets proved by their decay that the time of the city was long past, if it had ever existed, and the tall buildings, end upon end upon end, were so many extended fingers beckoning the Bomb.

***

Marco paid the cab off in front of Raymond's building. On an April day the city was colder than Labrador, and the wind had found teeth which tore at his face.

Marco felt like a giant. He had slept three hours on the train without dreaming and he had awakened in Rosie Cheyney's arms. He would have a very delicious therapy to tell those pate doctors about when this was all over. When it was all over but the sobbing. Big joke. All over but the sobbing, he thought, giving the driver a quarter tip. He got into the elevator feeling confident that behind Raymond's mustard-colored eyes there was an almost human understanding, not that Raymond was any monotreme but he seemed pretty much like a Martian sometimes. Fifty-three West Fifty-fourth, apartment Three B. He just wanted to hear Raymond tell how he had gotten the Medal of Honor. He just wanted to talk about blackboards and pointers and Chinese and that crude animated cartoon with the blue spot. Eldorado nine, two six three two. He wouldn't talk to Raymond about the murders in the nightmares. Rosie. Eugenie Rose. My Wild Arab Nose. Oh, What a Gorgeous Nose! Cyrano: Act 1, Scene 1: Pedantic: Does not Aristophanes mention a mythologic monster called Hippocampelephantocamelos? That projection room and the American voice on the sound track and the fiat, empty, half film cans like pie plates used as ash trays. Suddenly, he could taste the yak-dung cigarettes again and it was marvelous. If he could only remember the name of that brand, he thought, but somehow he never could. He thought about the movement of the many red dots on the screen, then of Raymond, symbolized by the blue dot, and the canned voice telling them that they were seeing the battle action in which Raymond had been willing to sacrifice his life, again and again, to save them all.

The elevator operator indicated the doorway directly across the hall. Marco rang the door bell while the operator waited. Chun jin answered the door. He stood clearly under good light wearing black trousers, a white shirt, a black bow tie, and a white jacket, looking blankly at Marco, waiting for an inquiry, not having time to recognize the major, and most certainly not expecting him. To Marco he was a djinn who had stepped into flesh out of that torment which was giving him lyssophobia. Not more than four fifths of a second passed before Marco hit Chunjin high in the chest, having thrown the desperate punch for the center of the man's face, but the Korean had stepped backward reflexively and had saved himself, partially, from the unexpectedness of Marco's assault. Because he had not thought of himself as being on duty while Raymond was out of the city, Chunjin was unarmed. However, he was a trained agent and a good one. He held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Soviet security forces and he had been assigned to Raymond on a crash basis. He had recognized Marco too late. He was entirely current on Marco's dossier because the major was Raymond's only friend.

The elevator operator, a sturdy twenty-eight-year-old, watched the Korean carried backward and the door flung inward to bang against the pink plaster wall. He rushed in fast behind Marco and tried to pull him back. Marco held Chunjin off with his left hand and cooled the elevator man with his right. Chunjin took that left arm and drew Marco into a prime judo catch and threw him high across the room so he could get at Marco's neck, coming down on it hard enough to break it in the follow-up, but Marco rolled and kept rolling when he hit the floor and slipped locks on hard when Chunjin came down, missing him.

They were both Black Belts, which is the highest judo rank there is, this side of a Dan. Marco had weight on his man, but Marco was in a run-down condition. However, he had been lifted into a murderous exhilaration and was filled to his hairline with adrenalin because he had at last been permitted to take those nightmares and one of the people in them into the fingers of his hands to beat and to torture until he found out why they had happened and where they had happened and how they could be made to stop. What worked the best was the twenty-nine extra pounds of weight and, as four neighbors watched with studious curiosity from the safer side of the doorsill, he broke Chunjin's forearm. The Korean almost took the side of his face and his neck off, not losing a beat of his rhythm during the fracture and appalling Marco that such a slight man could be so tough. Then Marco dislocated the man's hip joint as he leaped to jab his foot into Marco's larynx, and it was that second catch which brought out the great scream of agony.

He was pounding the back of Chunjin's head into the floor and asking him a series of what he thought were deliberative questions when the youngest squad-car cop came into the room first and fast, hitting him behind the head with a sap, and the entire, wonderful opportunity passed.

***

At St. Luke's Hospital, Chunjin was adamant about two things: (1) he was emphatic in his refusal to press charges against his former commanding officer whom he had served long and intimately as orderly and interpreter, and who had most obviously mistaken him for an intruder in Mr. Shaw's apartment, knowing that Mr. Shaw had never employed a servant before, and (2) it would be most necessary for the hospital staff to get him out of the place not later than noon on Monday so he could shop for food, then cook the first meal on his job for Mr. Shaw, because if they did not get him out he could lose his job and it was the only job he wanted in the United States of America. He could not, of course, explain that he would be shot if he lost it.

At the Twenty-fourth Precinct House at 100th Street and Central Park West, after riding the uniformed, half-conscious Marco from Raymond's apartment in the squad car, they went through his effects, found his AGO card, made his branch, and called the Military Service Bureau downtown at the Police Academy, which maintained liaison between the New York police and branches of the armed forces. The bureau reached the duty officer at Army Intelligence, Washington, early in the evening. Marco was identified. The police were told with a very special sort of a voice, effectually a pleader's voice, that Marco was one of the best men they had and that he had been having a very hard time. The voice explained, with great attention to their credulity, that Marco had picked up a sort of infection in his imagination while in the forward area in Korea, that he had run two hospital courses which had proved that he was as sane as anybody else but, well, Marco had had a hard time and anything the New York police could do that would tend to pull him together and send him on his way would be greatly appreciated by the U.S. Army.

Under proper conditions, there is no more cooperative institution than the New York Police Department, but they had had so much experience with top-blowers they insisted that Marco leave the station house in some custody which could be certified as being equable. Marco's head still wasn't very clear. He had been slugged. He had been in a rough fight and the adrenalin had turned to curds and whey in his veins. He was exhausted and he hadn't been eating very much, but he knew enough to ask them to call Eldorado nine, two six three two and ask for Miss Eugenie Rose Cheyney.

They left him in a cell while they made the call and before the cell door had closed he was asleep. Rosie got to the station house in thirty-seven minutes. Unfortunately, just as she and the two detectives came along the cell-block corridor, he had been sleeping just long enough to have reached the auditorium at Tunghwa where Raymond was strangling Mavole with a silk scarf. As they stared into his cell, motionless for an instant, even the two cops were stricken with fright at the piteousness of his sounds and the imploring motions he succeeded in shaping with his hands. One detective got the door open. Eugenie Rose had gone chalk-white and was gripping her whole lower lip in her teeth to keep from yelling. She slid into the cell ahead of the second cop and got on her knees beside Marco's bunk and shook him by the shoulders, talking steadily; then, desperate to get him out of the trap he was in, she whacked him with the full strength of her splendid arm across the left cheek and he came out of it, shaking. She held him in her arms. "It's O.K., sweetheart," she said. "It's Rosie. It's all right now. The dream is over. It's Jennie." And stuff like that.

She signed out for him at the desk as though he was a ripped purse some cannon had torn off her arm. He swayed slightly as he waited for her. She shook hands like a fight manager with the desk lieutenant, the two detectives, and a patrolman who happened to be passing through, and she told them if she could ever line up any hard-to-get theater seats for them they were to call her at Job Justin's office and she would handle it with joy. She took Marco out into the air of that freak night; a cold, cold night in mid-April that was just one of the vagaries that made New York such an interesting place to die in.

He was wearing a uniform overcoat and an overseas cap. He did not look so bad in the half light. Everything was pressed. There was just a little blood on his right sleeve from Chunjin's face from when he had overshot with the second right-hand punch. Eugenie Rose called a taxi as if it were her own hound dog: it came to heel with a hand signal. She put Marco in first, then she got in and closed the door. "Just drive through the park," she said to the driver, "and discard the conversation you've been hoarding up since the last fare."

"I don't talk to passengers, lady," the driver said. "I hate people until they tip me and then it's too late."

"I think you should eat something," she said to Marco.

"I love food," he answered. "I always have but I can't swallow very well any more."

"We'll try, anyway," she told him and leaned forward to tell the driver to take them to the Absinthe House, a calorie and beverage bourse catering to some of the craftiest minds this side of the owl and the pussycat, on West Forty-eighth. She leaned back on the seat and looped her arm through his. She was wearing a dark blue polo coat, some firm, dark skin, some white, white teeth, egg-sized dark eyes, and white hair.

"It was very original of you to have the Police Department call so shyly and ask for our first date," she said softly.

"They asked me who I would-who would be willing, and I just -- I --"

"Thank you. Very much." She decided they needed more air and started to open all windows, telling the driver, "Sorry about all this air, but it's very important. Take my word."

"Lissen, lady, while the meter is going it's your cab arreddy. Go ahead take the doors off it gets stuffy." Marco's teeth began to chatter. He tried to hold them clamped shut because he wanted her to feel efficient about opening the windows, but he sounded like a stage full of castanets. She closed the windows.

"Let's pick up a can of soup and go to your place."

"Sure." She gave the driver the changed destination.

"You think they'll let me visit that fellow at St. Luke's tonight?"

"Maybe first thing in the morning."

"Would you come with me? It would keep me calm. I wouldn't want to hit him lying down like that."

"Sure."

"I have to find out where Raymond is."

"The newspaperman you told me about? Why not call his newspaper?"

"Yeah. You're right. Well, sure. So let's go to the Absinthe House if you'd rather do that. I feel better."

"You know what I was doing when you had the police call me?"

"I could guess, if I wasn't so tired. I give up."

"Well, after you dropped me off and I got upstairs, and before I took my coat off, I telephoned Lou Amjac, my fiance --" Marco came forward, alert and alarmed. "-- and he came over as soon as he could, which was instantly, and I told him I had just met you and I gave him his ring back." She held up her naked, long fingers of the left hand, and wriggled them. "I tried to convey my regrets for whatever pain I might be causing him. Then, just then, you had the police call me with the invitation to go into the tank at the Twenty-fourth Precinct. I grabbed this coat. I kissed Lou on the cheek for the last time in our lives that I would ever kiss Urn and I ran. At the station house they told me you had beaten up a very skinny little man but that you were a solid type yourself, according to Washington, so I figured that if they were willing to go to the trouble to get a comment on you out of George Washington, you all must have had a really successful seance while you were in the poky, and I must say it was real sweet of General Washington with you only a major, and I hadn't even known you two had met, but if those policemen were the tiniest bit puzzled about you, they could have asked me. Oh, indeed yes, my darling Ben -- I would have told them."

He glared at her fiercely and possessively, clapped an arm about her shoulders, and pulled her evocative mouth into his while the driver, intent upon estimating within two per cent the amount of the tip he would be paid, cleared one more stop light just as it changed, heading east on Fifty-fourth Street.
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Re: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

Postby admin » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:28 am

Chapter 12

After days of wonderful, dreamless sleep upon the bed and breast of Miss Cheyney, Marco called The Daily Press early Monday morning and learned that Raymond was in Washington. He reached Raymond at the Press office in Washington a few minutes later. When he told Raymond he wanted very much to see him, Raymond invited him to dinner in New York that evening to help him rate a new cook, then, remembering, babbled the news. "I just remembered. Your own orderly. Yeah. Remember your orderly in Korea, the little guy who was interpreter on the patrol -- Chunjin? That's my new cook! Hah? I mean, would you ever have been able to anticipate that?" Marco stated that he would not have been able to so anticipate, and inquired as to what time Raymond would arrive from Washington for the tasting.

"Estimating the traveling time from Penn Station -- and I believe you'll find I won't be more than five minutes off either way -- I should arrive at the apartment at -- say -- six twenty-two."

"Even if you have to wait out on the corner to do it."

"I wonder if you'd mind calling Chunjin and telling him there'll be an extra place for dinner? You're probably dying to talk to him anyway. I know you old Army guys."

"I'll take care of everything, Raymond," Marco said, and they both hung up.

***

Raymond opened the door.

"Chunjin isn't here," he said. "There's no dinner to offer you."

"Or you."

"But I did find a note. It's from him and it says you beat him up and that he's now in St. Luke's Hospital."

"One thing is for sure," Marco said. "There are plenty of sensational delicatessens in this neighborhood."

"Why, that's a marvelous idea!" Raymond said. He walked away from the door, allowing Marco to close it or not close it as he chose, and flipped open a telephone book across the square foyer. "I never seem to be able to think of it myself. And I love it. Pastrami and those pickles and that crazy rye bread with the aphrodisiacal seeds and maybe a little marinated herring and some pot cheese with a little smoked salmon and some of that indigestible sauerkraut they make out of electric bulb filaments and some boiled beef." He began to dial. "On account of this I am absolutely grateful to you for getting Chunjin out of the way."

"Ah, that's all right," Marco said. "Glad to do it."

"The elevator man was singing the blues so I gave him five."

"He sure can keep a secret. He just sang a second chorus for me and I gave him five."

"What did you hit him for?"

"He was determined to play peacemaker."

"What did you whack Chunjin for?"

"That's all part of what I came to tell you about."

"Hello -- Gitlitz? This is Shaw. Right. Now hear this." Raymond ordered food for ten, as one does when one calls a delicatessen situated anywhere on Broadway in New York between Thirty-fourth and Ninety-sixth streets, and told them where to send it.

"I've been in the hospital off and on quite a bit over the past two years."

"Hospital? What was the matter with you?" Raymond opened a can of beer. The room was fragrant with the smell of furniture polish from Chunjin's working weekend. Marco looked very thin, but no longer drawn. The Cheyney method of soul massage had elements of greatness. He was dressed in civilian clothes, and his face had a distant, inactive look such as a man about to practice a banquet speech alone in a hotel room might have. Eugenie Rose had him coked to the gills on tranquilizers.

The authority which had come with writing a successful column on national affairs had settled Raymond considerably, Marco thought, and had made him seem taller and broader. Raymond was thirty years old. He could not have moved up the scale to a better tailor because he had always used the best. He could not have worn whiter linen. His fingernails gleamed. His shoe tips glowed. His color shone. His teeth sparkled. The only fault with the lighting circuit was behind his eyes. Raymond may have believed that his eyes did light up, but unfortunately they could shine only within the extent of his art as a counterfeiter of emotions. Raymond did not feel emotion, and that could not be changed. When he was content he would try to remember how other people had looked when they had manifested happiness or pleasure or satisfaction, and he would attempt to counterfeit the appearance. It was not effective. Raymond's ability to feel anything resembling either sympathy or empathy was minimal and that was that.

As Raymond listened to Marco's story with all of his attention he could only understand that an all-out attack had been mounted against his friend and that it had almost destroyed him. He supposed he would be expected to be upset as they went on to talk about that lousy medal which had always been a lot of gas to him -- tin-soldier-boy stuff: he had never asked for it, had never wanted it, and if there was some strange way that medal could keep his friend in the Army and get him his health back, then they had to make sure that he found out exactly what that was, and, if necessary to straighten this out and keep Ben safe, why, for crissake, he'd even call in Johnny Iselin. He did not say any of this to Marco. He concentrated on trying to counterfeit some of the reactions he felt Marco must expect.

"If what you've been dreaming actually happened, Ben," he said slowly, "then it happened to me and it happened to everyone else on the patrol."

"Such as Chunjin," Marco replied.

"How about an investigation?" Raymond said. "That ought to do it."

"Ought to do what?"

"Uncover what happened that made you dream all that."

"What kind of an investigation?"

"Well, my mother can always get Johnny Iselin's committee in the Senate to --"

"Johnny Iselin?" Marco was utterly horrified. "This is Army!"

"What has that got to do with --"

"All right, Raymond. I won't explain that part. But what happened is inside my head and Melvin's head and the best head doctors in this country haven't been able to shake it out and don't have even the first suspicion of what could be causing it. What could a Senate committee do? And Iselin! Jesus, Raymond, let's make an agreement never to mention that son-of-a-bitch ever again."

"It was just an idea. To get started. I know Johnny is a swine better than you do."

"Then why bring it up?"

"Because we have to dump a thing like this on the specialists. What the hell, Ben, you said so yourself -- the Army can't cope with this. What there has to be, if we're going to get anywhere with it, is a big, full-scale investigation. You know -- somebody has to make people talk."

"Make who talk?"

"Well -- uh -- I --"

"Yeah."

"Well, the patrol. If my Medal of Honor is a fake, and believe me I don't see how it could be anything else because it doesn't figure that I'm going to stand up in front of a lot of bullets and be a big hero for that passel of slobs, then somebody has to remember and somebody else has to make the rest of those guys remember that we've all been had. That's all. We've been had. If you can't stand the idea of Johnny Iselin, and I don't blame you, then I guess you'll just have to demand your own court-martial."

"How? What do you mean? What are you talking about?" Marco looked as though he was just beginning to understand what Raymond was talking about, almost but not quite.

"You have to charge yourself with falsifying your report that led to me getting the Medal of Honor and you'll have to demand that the Army investigate whether or not that was done in collusion with the men of the patrol. That's all there is to it."

"They wouldn't be able to comprehend such a thing. A Medal of Honor -- why, a Medal of Honor is a sacred thing to the Army, Raymond. I mean -- I -- Jesus, the roof would come off the Pentagon."

"Sure! That's what I'm saying! Throw it wide open! If the Army can't understand, then, what the hell, believe me, Iselin'll understand. He'll get you off the hook."

"No. No, never."

"It's got to be done the sensational way just to make sure it's done and that the Army doesn't get to sit on another ridiculous mistake and let you stay sick like this. What would they care? You're expendable. But they made a hero out of me so I'm not expendable. They couldn't take back a mistake as big as this one."

"Raymond, listen. If it wasn't for those Soviet generals and those Chinese in that dream, I'd be willing to be expendable."

"All right. That's your problem."

"But with the chance, just the sick chance that there may be such an enormous security risk involved I have to make them dig into this thing. You're right, Raymond. I have to. I have to."

"Why should I have gotten a Medal of Honor? I can't even remember being in the action. I remember the facts about the action, sure. But I don't remember the action."

"Talk about it. Keep talking about it. Please."

"Well, look. Let's reconstruct. We're on the patrol. You'll be at the center of that line and I'll be off on their right flank. You know? It will be dark. I'll yell out to you, 'Captain! Captain Marco! Get me some light twenty yards ahead at two o'clock!' And you'll yell back, 'You got it, kid,' and very soon a flare will break open and I'll pour on some enfilade fire on their column and, as everyone who reads comic books knows, I am a very good shooter. I'll start to move in on them and I'll take up one of their own heavy machine guns as I go and I'll move eight of their own grenades up ahead of me as I move along."

"Yeah, yeah," Marco said. "But you don't remember doing all those things."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," Raymond answered irritably and impatiently. "Every time I'm directed to think about the action I always know what will happen exactly, but I never get to the place where it actually happens."

"Do you remember anything about a blackboard? Chinese instructors?"

"No."

"Memory drills? Anything about a movie projection room and animated cartoons with a sound track in English and a lot of Chinese guys standing around?"

"No."

"You must have gotten a better brainwashing than I did. Or Melvin."

"Brainwashing?" Raymond did not like that note. He could not abide the thought of anybody tampering with his person so he rejected the entire business then and there. Others, told the same set of conjectures, might had been fired into action or challenged, but not Raymond. The disgust it made Raymond feel acted like a boathook that pushed the solid shore away from him to allow him to drift away from it on the strong-flowing current of self. It did not mean that he had instantly closed his mind to Marco's problem. He most earnestly wanted to be able to help Ben find relief, to help to change his friend's broken mechanism, to find him sleep and rest and health, but his own participation in what he had started out to make a flaming patriotic crusade when he had first started to speak had been muted by his fastidiousness: he shrank from what he could only consider the rancid vulgarity of brainwashing.

"It has to be a brainwash," Marco said intensely. "In my case it slipped. In Melvin's case it slipped. It's the only possible explanation, Raymond. The only, only explanation."

"Why?" Raymond answered coldly. "Why would the Communists want me to get a Medal of Honor?"

"I don't know. But we have to find out." Marco stood up. "Before I take this first step, before I leave here, I'd like to hear you say that you understand that I'm going to explode this whole thing with a court-martial, not because -- not to save myself from those dreams --"

"Ah, fuh crissake, Ben! Whose idea was it! Who gives a goddam about that?"

"Let me finish. This is an official statement because, believe me, pal, I know. Once I get that court-martial started -- my own court-martial -- it can get pretty rough on both of us." He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. "My father -- well, it's a good thing my father is dead-with me starting out to make a public bum out of a Medal of Honor man. Shuddup! But I have to do it. Security. What a lousy word. I look right into the horrible face of something that might kill my country and the only word for the danger is a word that means the absolute opposite. Security. Well, as you said -- with stakes like that I'm expendable. And so are you, Raymond pal. So are you."

"Will you stop? Who thought it up? Me. Who practically made you agree to do it? Me. And you can shove that patriotic jive about saving our great country. I want to know why a bunch of filthy Soviet peasants and degraded Chinese coolies would dare to confer the Medal of Honor on me."

"Raymond. Do me a favor? Tell me about the action again. Please."

"What action?"

"Come on! Come on!"

"You mean go on from where I was?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"Well -- you will throw up another flare but you'll throw it about twenty yards ahead of me at maybe twelve o'clock, at maybe dead center of the line, because you will figure I'll be moving across the terrain up that ridge so --"

"Man, oh man, this is something."

"What?"

"Each time you talk about the action you even tell it as though it hadn't happened yet."

"That's what I'm saying! That's the way I always think about it! I mean, when some horrible square comes out of nowhere at a banquet, the paper makes me go too, and he starts asking me about it. Come on, Ben. You made your point. Let's go meet your girl."

Marco ran his fingers through his thick hair on both sides of his head. He put his elbows on his knees and covered his face with his hands. Raymond stared down at him, almost tenderly. "Don't be embarrassed if you feel like you're going to cry, Ben," Raymond said gently.

Marco shook his head. Raymond opened another can of beer.

"I swear to sweet, sweet God I think I am going to be able to sleep," Marco said. "I can feel it. There isn't anything about those crazy voices and those fast, blurring colors and the eyes of that terrible audience that frightens me any more." He took his hands away from his face and reflexively reached over to take Raymond's can of beer out of his hand. Raymond reached down and opened another. Marco fell asleep, sitting up. Raymond stretched him out on the sofa, brought him a blanket, put out the lights, and went into his office to listen to the river wind and to read a slim book with the highly improbable title of Liquor, the Servant of Man.

***

Marco was still asleep when Raymond left the apartment the next morning. Eugenie Rose Cheyney called him soon after he reached his office. She asked if Marco had been sleeping quietly. Raymond said he had. She said, "Oh, Mr. Shaw, that's just wonderful!" and hung up.
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Re: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

Postby admin » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:29 am

Chapter 13

Raymond's mother called him from the Idlewild Airport. She wanted him to have lunch with her. He tried to think quickly of somebody whom he could say he had to have lunch with but she said he was not to stall her, that she was well aware that he disliked people too much to be stuck for an hour or more at a luncheon table with one, so he could damn well show up wherever they let ladies eat luncheon at the Plaza Hotel at one o'clock. He said he would be there. Beyond having acknowledged that his name was Raymond when she had first spoken, it was all he said to his mother.

She was hard at work making a scene by bossing the maitre d' hotel, a table captain, and two waiters at a table that faced the park in the big corner room when he arrived at the Plaza at ten seconds before one o'clock. She motioned him to stand beside her chair until she finished her oration about exactly how they were to stuff the oysters into a carpetbag steak and that she would not tolerate more than eleven minutes of broiling on each side, in a preheated grill, at four hundred degrees. The waiters bowed and left. Raymond's mother gave the maitre d' the full glare of her contempt for an instant, then spoke to Raymond. "I ask you to imagine a restaurant," she said, "which does not list Clos de Lambrays or a Cuvee Docteur Peste!" She waved the man away, with bitterness. She permitted Raymond to kiss her on the right cheek, ever so lightly, then motioned him to his chair at the table for four, not at her right or directly across from her, but at her left, which made it impossible for either of them to look out of the window at the park.

"How have you been?" she asked.

"Fine."

"As am 1. Not that you asked."

"When I heard you ordering a steak stuffed with oysters I had a clue."

"The steak will be mainly for you."

"Sure."

"Johnny is fine."

"You mean his physical health, I presume?"

"I do. And everything else."

"Is he in a jam?"

"Of course not."

"Then why are we here?"

"Why are we here?"

"Why are we having our annual meeting?"

"I am your mother, which is a sufficient reason. Why did you ask if Johnny is in a jam?"

"It occurred to me that you might have decided that you would have use for my column, which has so carefully disqualified itself from ever printing Johnny's name despite the fact that he is an assassin, pure and simple. An assassin of character and the soul. He reeks of death, you know?" Raymond exceeded his own gifts for being obnoxious and impossible when he was with his mother. His brushing gesture worked for him almost all the time, punctuating his haughtiness and scorn. His posture was as attenuated as liquid being drawn up through a drinking straw.

His mother closed her eyes tightly as she answered him. "My dear boy, one more column of type in this weltered world spelling out Johnny's name would not be much noticed."

"I'll remember that."

She opened her eyes. "What for?"

Raymond, when he was with his mother, always felt a nagging fear that he was gaping at her beauty. As they spoke, whenever they met, his eyes searched each millimeter of her skin for a flaw and weighed each of her gestures, anxious that he might discover some loss of grace, but to no avail. He was dismayed and gratified to fall back upon the mockery of her pretense at disappointment because there had been no Clos de Lambrays or Cuvee Docteur Peste, which so failed to find harmony with the fact that Johnny Iselin drank bourbon with his meals.

"Mother, in God's name, where did you ever hear of a thing like a carpetbag steak? Johnny found it, didn't he? Johnny had to find it, because in the world's literature of food there couldn't be a dish which expresses his vulgarity better than a thick, contemptuously expensive piece of meat pregnant with viscous, slippery, sensual oysters."

"Raymond, please I Watch your language." She leered at him.

"It's disgusting and he's disgusting."

"The reason I asked you to lunch today, Raymond," his mother said smoothly, "is that I have not, actually been entirely well and my doctor has suggested a trip to Europe this summer."

"What's the matter with you?" He stretched out the diphthongs of the drawl until its sounds reverberated nasally into his soft palate, thinking: Has there ever on God's earth been a liar like this woman? Does she at any square inch of her mountainous vanity, conceive that I can be had through the delicate health appeal? Will she produce a forged electrocardiogram? Will a malpracticing doctor with an even gaze suddenly happen to discover that we are lunching here? She would never pull anything as crude as a faint, but she could play a great scene with any given kindly old physician who had been coached in his lines.

"The doctor was a fool, of course," his mother said. "I went to the Leahy Clinic and to the Mayos for two separate checkups. I am as sound as a Swiss franc."

Raymond's resentment of her made him feel as though steel burrs were forming everywhere under his skin. I am going to lose this, he thought, just as I lose them all with her. I am being blindfolded as I sit here and she will win if I cannot anticipate where she is leading me. Oh, what a woman! What a beauty she is and what a dirty fighter. She is where the world should spit when they seek to spit upon Johnny Iselin. How can I forget that? How can I look into those serenely lovely eyes, how can I be so deeply thrilled by the carriage of her exquisitely wholesome body and grow so faint at the set, the royal set of that beautiful head and not remember, not always and always and always remember that it encases a cesspool of betrayal, a poisoned well of love, and a city of deadly snakes? Why am I here? Why did I come here?

"I am glad to hear it," he said. "But I distinctly remember you telling me that you had not, actually, been entirely well. Just a few seconds ago. In fact, that was exactly the way you phrased it."

She smiled at him with forbearance, showing rows of perfect white teeth. "I said -- oh, Raymond! For heaven's sake, what does it matter what I said?"

"I'd like a drink."

"At lunch?"

"Yes."

"You generally sulk if people drink at lunch."

She tilted her head back and made a repulsive kissing sound with her pursed lips. A waiter sprinted toward her so rapidly that Raymond thought the man had decided to kill her, but that was not the case. He came to a point beside her and stared at her abjectly as though pleading for the knout. Raymond's mother had that effect upon many people.

"Speak up, Raymond."

"I would like to have some beer. Served in the can,"

"Served in the can, sir?" the waiter asked softly. Raymond's mother snarled and the man shrilled "Yes, sir!" and was off.

"And who is the more vulgar now?" she asked in a kindly tone. "How about a can of beans, opened with a hatchet, with the can of beer?"

"Mother, for crissake, will you please tell me how come we are having lunch today?"

"Oh. Well, this fool of a doctor whom I shall expose as an alarmist, I assure you, told me that I should go to Europe for a change and whether it was from the wrong reason or not, it did plant the idea. So, since I can't go alone and since it would present too many security difficulties for Johnny to go with me, I wondered ... and I most certainly expect you to accept for professional reasons as I will be traveling as a full, accredited representative of the Appropriations, Foreign Relations, and Finance Committees -- I will be representing the Senate, you might say -- and I will be there to remind the forgetful rulers of Europe and England that the United States was established not as a democracy but as a Federal Union and Republic that is controlled by the United States Senate, at this moment in our history, through a state-equality composition designed to maintain this establishment and that it exists, in the present moment of our history, to protect minorities from the precipitate and emotional tyranny of majorities. That means, of course, that I will be able to get you into places and cause you to be adjacent to people which neither your newspaper nor your column could reach in a decade of Sundays. I assure you, before you answer as to whether or not you will consent to accompany me, your own mother, on a tour of Europe at no cost whatever to you, that there is no one in the British Isles or on that entire subcontinent of Europe whom you might decide that you would like to meet -- and for reasons of publication should you so choose -- that I cannot deliver to you. Should you also decide that you would enjoy extending the already influential syndication of your daily writings to other languages and to foreign newspapers and opinion-molding periodicals, I should think that could be arranged. Furthermore --" Raymond's mother was wooing him as she had wooed Johnny Iselin. Raymond's own father must have been a dreamer, indeed, to have lost her point so far back in the thickening fullness of her youth.

"I would love to go to Europe with you this summer, Mother."

"Good. We will sail from West Forty-sixth Street on June 15, at noon, on the United States. My office will mail you the itinerary and hotels and indicate the shape of appointments and meetings, business and social. Would you like to see the Pope?"

"No."

"I'll do that alone then."

"What else?"

"Isn't this carpetbag steak absolutely delicious? Eating it is an absolute sexual experience! What a marvelous conception -- steak and oysters, I mean. Johnny eats it all the time, you know."

"It figures."

"Is there anything I can get done for you in Washington, dear heart?"

"No. Thank you. Yes. Yes, there is something. I have a friend --"

"A friend? You have a friend?" She stopped chewing for a moment and put her fork down.

"Sarcasm is the cheapest kind of a crutch to humor, Mother."

"Please forgive me, Raymond. I was not attempting sarcasm. You must believe that. I was startled. I had never heard you mention a friend in your entire life before. I am very, very happy that you do have a friend and you may be sure, darling, that if I may help your friend I most certainly will be overjoyed to do so. Who is he?"

"He's a major in Army Intelligence in Washington." Raymond's mother had whipped out an efficient-looking looseleaf notebook.

"His name?"

He told her.

"Academy?" He said yes.

"Would full colonel be what you had in mind?"

"That would be fine, I guess. I hope there is some way it can be done without PI being stamped all over his personnel file."

"What is PI?"

"Political influence."

"Of course they'll stamp PI all over his personnel file! Are you out of your mind? What's wrong with letting the Board know that he happens to have a little muscle in the right places? Sweet Jesus, Raymond, if it weren't for PI some of the brass we call our leaders would be the oldest crop of second lieutenants in military history. I swear to God, Raymond," his mother said in extreme exasperation, chopping savagely at a large gooseberry tart that glistened with custard filling, "sometimes I think you are the most naive of young men, and when I read your column, I am sure."

"What's wrong with my column?"

She held up her hand. "Not now. We will reorganize your column aboard ship in June. Right now let's make your friend a chicken colonel." She looked at her notes. "Now, is there anything -- well, anything negative I should know about this one?"

"No. He's a great officer. His father and grandfather and great-grandfather were great officers."

"You know him from Korea?"

"Yes. He -- he led the patrol." Raymond hesitated because mentioning the patrol made him think of that filthy medal again and of how much his mother had made that medal mean to Johnny Iselin and what a fool she had made of herself at the White House and later what a fool Johnny had made of himself in front of the TV cameras and press cameras at that goddam, cheap, rotten, contemptuous luncheon where he had been humiliated, and all of a sudden he saw that it would be possible, too, for him to take a little bit of her skin off painfully and to kick Johnny right between the eyes with the medal nailed to the toe of his boot so that he, Raymond, would finally have a little pleasure out of that goddam medal himself, finally and at last. He was patiently quiet until she sensed the meaning of his hesitation and took it up.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Well, there is one thing which the Army might figure as negative. In the past. I think it's all right now."

"He's a fairy?"

"Hah!"

"This little negative thing. You say you think it's all right now?"

"Yes."

"You don't think you should tell me what it is?"

"Mother, are you going to put Johnny up for the Presidency at the convention next year?"

"Raymond, shall we make your friend a colonel or not? I don't think Johnny can make it for the Presidency. I may go after the number-two spot."

"Will you enter him in the primaries next spring?"

"I don't think so. He has too much strength for that. I don't think I need any popularity contests for Johnny. Now -- about the negative side of the major." Raymond folded his hands neatly before him on the table. "He's been in Army psychiatric hospitals twice in the past year."

"Oh, that's all," she drawled sarcastically and shrugged. "And all the time I thought it might have been something which could present a problem. My God, Raymond! A psycho! Have you ever seen what that looks like when it's stamped across a personnel file?"

"It's not what you might think, Mother. You see, due to an experience in Korea, a very vivid experience, he has been suffering from recurring nightmares."

"Is that right?"

"What happened to him could give anyone nightmares. In fact, it might even give you a nightmare or two after you hear it."

"Why?"

"Because it's quite a story and I'm involved in it up to my ears."

Her voice picked up a cutting edge. "How are you involved?" she asked.

He told her. When he had finished explaining that Marco had decided to demand his own court-martial to prove falsification and collusion in conjunction with the conferment of that Medal of Honor, savoring each word and each shocked look on his mother's face with great and deep satisfaction, she was the color of milk and her hand trembled.

"How dare he?"

"Why, Mother, it is his duty. Surely you can see that?"

"How dare the contemptible, psychoneurotic, useless, filthy little military servant of a --?" She choked on it.

Raymond was startled at the intensity of her attack. She brought her fist down on the table top with full force from two feet above it, in full tantrum, and the glasses, plates, and silver jumped and a full water pitcher leaped into the air to crash to the floor. Everyone in the dining room turned to stare and some stood up to look. A waiter dashed toward the table and went to his hands and knees, fussing with the sopping carpet and the fragments of heavy glass. She kicked him in the thigh as she sat, with vicious vigor. "Get out of here, you miserable flunky," she said. The waiter stood up slowly, staring at her, breathing shallowly. Then he left abruptly. She stood up, breathing heavily, with sweat shining on her upper lip. "I'll help your friend, Raymond," she said with violence in her voice. "I'll help him to defame and destroy an American hero. I'll cheer him as he spits upon our flag." She left him there, striding rapidly through knots of people and attendants, shouldering some. Raymond stared after her, knowing he had lost again but not knowing what he had lost. But he was not dismayed, because losing was Raymond's most constant feeling.

She went to the manager's office in the hotel. She brushed past his secretary and slammed the door behind her. She said she was the wife of Senator John Yerkes Iselin and that the two people then meeting with the manager, two barber-pinked businessmen each wearing a florid carnation, would oblige her by leaving the room. They excused themselves and left immediately, vaguely fearful of being proved Communists. She told the manager that it would be necessary to use his office and his telephone and that it would be necessary for her to have utter privacy as she would be talking about an emergency matter with the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, and that she would greatly appreciate it, in fact she would regard it as a patriotic service, as would indeed her husband, Senator Iselin, if he were to go to the telephone switchboard in person and direct the placement of the call to the Secretary, reversing the charges, and standing by at the operator's shoulder to make sure there was no eavesdropping on the call, a natural and human tendency under the circumstances.

Raymond paid the check and wandered about the lobby looking for his mother. He concluded that she had left so he went out of the hotel on the Fifth Avenue side, deciding to walk back to his office. When he reached the office he found a message to call Army Intelligence in New York. He called. They asked if he could help them locate Major Bennett Marco. Raymond said he believed Major Marco was presently at his apartment, as he was visiting him in New York. They asked for the telephone number. He gave it to them, explaining that they were not to give it to anyone else, then felt silly having said such a thing to professional investigators. He got busy after that on a call from the governor's press secretary and the three check-up calls that were made necessary by that call. When he called Ben at the apartment there was no answer. He forgot about it. That night, when he got home at six twenty-two, he found a note from Ben thanking him and saying that his indefinite sick leave had been canceled and that he had been recalled to Washington. The note also urged Raymond not to question Chunjin in any way after he came out of the hospital.

In Naples, in the summer of 1958, in discussing the most powerful men in the world with Leonard Lyons, the expatriate Charles Luciano had said: "A U.S. Senator can make more trouble, day in and day out, than anyone else." The condition as stated then had not changed perceptibly a year later.
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Re: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

Postby admin » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:29 am

Chapter 14

When Lieutenant General Nils Jorgenson had awakened that morning, a celebrant of his fortieth anniversary in the United States Army, he had been euphoric. When he left the office of the Secretary and the further presence of the Army's Congressional liaison officer, he was dismayed, cholerically angry, but mostly horrified. The general was a good man and a brave man. He locked the doors when he and Marco were alone in his office, then demanded that Marco confirm or deny that Marco had planned to request a court-martial of himself to enforce a public investigation of circumstances involving a Medal of Honor man. Marco confirmed it. The general felt it necessary to tell Marco that he had known Marco's father and grandfather. He asked Marco what he had to say.

"Sir, there is only one person in the world with whom I have discussed this course and that was Raymond Shaw himself, at his apartment last night, and it was Shaw, sir, who urged the course and originated the conception. May I ask who has made this accusation to the Secretary, sir? I cannot understand how --"

"Senator John Yerkes Iselin made the accusation, Major. Now -- I offer you this because of your record and the record of your family. I offer you the opportunity to resign from the Army."

"I cannot resign, sir. It is my belief, sir, that the Medal of Honor is being used as an enemy weapon. I -- if the general will understand -- I see this as my duty, sir."

The general walked to the window. He looked out at the river for a long time. He went to a casual chair and sat down and he leaned far, far forward, almost bent double, staring at the floor for a long time. He went to his desk and took a chewed and battered-looking pipe from its top drawer, plugged tobacco into it, lighted it, and smoked furiously, staring out of the window again. Then he went back to the desk and sat down to stare across at Marco.

"You not only will not get the court-martial but I am advising you that you will have no rights of any kind." He snorted with disgust. "On my fortieth anniversary in the Army I find myself telling an American officer that he will have no rights of any kind."

"Sir?"

"Senator Iselin is the kind of a man who would work day and night to block the entire defense appropriation if he were crossed on a matter as close to him as this. Senator Iselin is capable of wrecking the entire military establishment if an investigation of his stepson's glorious heroism were permitted to go through. He would undertake a war upon the United States Army which would be far more punishing and ruinous than any ever inflicted by any enemy force of arms in our history. To convey to you the enormity of the responsibility you carry, I have been ordered to tell you this, and it violates everything I stand for. Under orders, I will now threaten you." His voice trembled. "If you persist in urging your own court-martial for the purpose of examining Raymond Shaw's right to wear the Medal of Honor, you will be placed in solitary confinement."

Marco stared at the general.

"Have you ever had to threaten a private to force him to police a yard, Major? The Army, as we have known it, has heretofore functioned under a system utilizing orders. Do you remember? I must now tell you that I have not been permitted to consider this conversation a travesty on both our lives. I have been ordered not to halt at merely threatening you. Senator Iselin has decided that I was to be ordered to bribe you. If you will agree to ignore your honor as an officer and will sign a paper which has been prepared by Senator Iselin's legal counsel which guarantees that you will not press for the investigation of this matter, I am to advise you that you will be advanced in rank to lieutenant colonel, then effective instantly, to the rank of full colonel."

The nausea rose in Marco like the foam in a narrow beer glass. He could not speak even to acknowledge that he had heard. The general took a paper from his blouse and placed it on the desk, on the far side of it, in front of Marco. "So much for Iselin," he said. "I order you to sign it." Marco took up the desk pen and signed the paper.

"Thank you, Major. Dismiss," the general said. Marco left the office at four twenty-one in the afternoon. General Jorgenson shot himself to death at four fifty-five.
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Re: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

Postby admin » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:30 am

Chapter 15

There is an immutable phrase at large in the languages of the world that places fabulous ransom on every word in it: The love of a good woman. It means what it says and no matter what the perspective or stains of the person who speaks it, the phrase defies devaluing. The bitter and the kind can chase each other around it, this mulberry bush of truth and consequence, and the kind may convert the bitter and the bitter may emasculate the kind but neither can change its meaning because the love of a good woman does not give way to arbitrage. The phrase may be used in sarcasm or irony to underscore the ludicrous result of the lack of such love, as in the wrecks left behind by bad women or silly women, but such usage serves to mark the changeless value. The six words shine neither with sentiment nor sentimentality. They are truth; a light of its own; unchanging.

Eugenie Rose Cheyney was a good woman and she loved Marco. That fact gave Marco a large edge, tantamount to wiping out the house percentage in banker's craps. No matter what the action, that is a lot of vigorish to have going for anybody.

Eugenie Rose had had her office route all business to her home that day, because she knew Marco would call whenever he woke up at Raymond Shaw's apartment. Her boss, Justin, was overdrawn at the bank, and it irritated her that they would seek to bother him about such a thing. He was overdrawn for a tiny period every sixty days or so, at which time he always managed to make an apple-cheeked deposit that kept the bank not only honest but richer. The set construction company had called at about eleven o'clock about some bills that the general manager had questioned. She had all of his questions ready and a set of the only answers in Christendom so she was able to cut four hundred and eleven dollars and sixty-three cents from the construction of a fireplace for the main room of the castle. After that call sixteen persons of every stripe, meaning from quarter-unit investors in the next show down to press agents for health food restaurants, called to try to get house seats for specific performances, and she had to invent a new theatrical superstition to fit the problem, which was how the others had come into being, by saying that surely they knew it was bad luck to distribute seat locations for the New York run until the out-of-town notices were in. And so chaos was postponed again. When she hadn't heard from Marco by seven-ten that evening she decided that he must have tried and tried to call her while all those other calls had been coming through, so she called Raymond at home, reading Marco's handwriting as he had written the number down as though it had the relative value of the sound of his voice at her very ear. Before Raymond answered, as the instrument purred the signal, she heard the elevator door open, pause, then close in the hallway just outside her door. She decided she knew it must be Marco. She slammed the phone down and rushed to the door worrying about her hair, so that she could hold it open in welcome before he could have a chance to ring the bell.

He looked terrible.

He said, "Let's get married, Rosie." He stepped over the threshold and grabbed her as though she were the rock of the ages. He kissed her. She kicked the door shut. She started to kiss him in return and it turned his knees to water.

"When?" she inquired.

"How long does it take in this state? That's how long." She kissed him again and massaged his middle with her pelvis. "I want to marry you, Ben, more than I want to go on eating Italian food, which will give you a slight idea, but we can't get married so quickly," she breathed on him.

"Why?"

"Ben, you're thirty-nine years old. We met three days ago and that's not enough time to get a bird's-eye view or a microscopic view of anyone. When we get married, Ben, and please notice how I said when we get married, not when 1 get married, we have to stay married because I might turn into a drunk or a religieuse or a cryto-Republican if we ever failed, so let's wait a week."

"A week."

"Please."

"Well, all right. There is such a thing as being overmature about decisions like this but we won't get married for a week. But we'll get the papers and take the blood tests and post the banns and plan the children's names and buy the ring and rent the rice and call the folks --"

"Folks?"

He stared at her for a moment. "You neither?"

"No."

"An orphan?"

"I used to be convinced that, as a baby, I had been the only survivor of a space ship which had overshot Mars."

"Very sexy stuff."

"You look a different kind of awful from yesterday. Mr. Shaw told me you slept all night. Quietly."

"Ah. You talked to Raymond."

"This morning. He is very formal about you."

"Poor Raymond. I'm the only one he has. Not that he needs anybody. Old Raymond has only enough soul to be able to tolerate two or three people in his life. I'm one of them. There's a girl I think he weeps over after he locks the doors. There's room for just about one more and he'll be full up. I hope it's you because having Raymond on your side is not unlike being backed up by the First Army."

"Did you have a bad time today?"

"Yeah. Well, yes and no."

He sat down as suddenly as though his legs had broken. She descended like a great dancer to rest on the floor beside his chair. He rubbed the back of her neck with his right hand, absent-mindedly, but with sensual facility.

"You are the holiest object I have in the world," he said slowly and with a thick voice, "so I swear upon you that I am going to get even with Senator John Iselin for what happened today. I don't know how yet. But how I will do it will always be somewhere in my mind from today on. From today on I'll always be thinking about how I, Marco, am going to make him pay for what he did today. I probably won't kill him. I found out today that I will probably never make a murderer."

She stared up at him. His face glistened with sweat and his eyes were sad instead of being vengeful. Her own eyes, the Tuareg eyes, were black almonds with blue centers; a changing blue, like mist over far snow. They were the eyes of a lady left over from an army of crusaders who had taken the wrong turning, moving left toward Jarabub in Africa, instead of right, toward London, after Walter the Penniless had sent them to loot the Holy Land in 1096, to settle forever in the deep Sahara, to continue the customs of the lists, knight errantry, and the wooing of ladies fair for whose warm glances the warriors sang their songs. She stared at him steadily, then rested her head on the side of his leg and sat quietly.

"Iselin is Raymond's stepfather," Marco told her. "He sits right there in his office on the Hill. He's the most accessible, available senator we have, you know, because most of our newspapers are published right in his office nowadays. Senator Iselin is really fond of Raymond because Johnny is a terrific salesman. Raymond has no use for him, and a lack of buyer feeling about the product has always been a tremendous challenge to a salesman. All I needed to do was to call Johnny, tell him Raymond sent me, be shown right into his office, lock the door, and shoot him through the head. Or maybe beat him to death with a steel chair." Marco was talking quietly, through his teeth. He thought about his lost opportunity for a moment.

"Did you know Raymond was a Medal of Honor man, Rosie?" he asked almost rhetorically. She shook her gray-white head without answering. "I wish I could explain to you what that means. But I'd have to find a way to send you back to grow up on Army posts and put you through the Academy and find you a couple of wars and a taste for Georgie Patton and Caesar's Commentaries and Blucher and Ney and Moltke, but thank God we can't do any of that. Just believe it because I say it, that a Medal of Honor man is the best man any soldier can think of because he has achieved the most of what every soldier was meant to do. Anyway, after Raymond got the medal, I began to have nightmares. They were pretty bad. I had come to the worst of them when I found you, thank God. The nightmares were always the same for five years and they took a lot of trouble to suggest that Raymond had not won the medal rightfully after I had sworn he had won it and the men of my patrol had sworn to it. In the end, the dreams have convinced me that we were wrong. I am sure now that the Russians wanted Raymond to have the medal so he got it. I don't know why. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I never will know why. But I'm an officer trained in intelligence work. I filled a notebook with details about furniture and clothing and complexions and speech defects and floor coverings. I talked everything over with Raymond. He got the idea that I should request my own court-martial for falsifying the report and explode a public investigation so that the enemy, at the very least, would think we knew more than we knew. That idea ended this afternoon with a lieutenant general putting a bullet into his head because it was the only possible thing he could have done to make Iselin hear the Army's protest against what Iselin had done to us. I knew that general. He liked living and he had a big time at it but he saw that protest as being an important Army job and he had been trained to accept responsibility." Marco's voice got bleak. "So I swear on you, on my Eugenie Rose, that the day will come that I, Marco, will make Senator John Iselin pay for that, and if he has to be killed, and I can't kill him, I'll have someone kill him for me." He closed his eyes for a few beats. "We got any beer in the house?" he asked her.

She got some. She drank plain warm gin.

Marco drank a can of the beer before he spoke again. "Anyway I was stopped," he said at last. "Before he shot himself the general ordered me to forget the court-martial, so that is that. I'm frozen with my terrible dreams inside of a big cake of ice and I'll never get out."

"You'll get out."

"No."

"Yes you will."

"How?"

"Do you remember that thing I told you which no girl in her right mind would ever tell a man she had gone limp over, about how I called up the man I was engaged to and resigned from the whole idea because you happened to smell so crazy?"

"I thought you just said that to get me to kiss you."

"His name was Lou Amjac and you happen to be right."

"You know, you weren't attracted to me irrevocably only because I smell this way. Don't forget I cried like a little, lost tyke the instant I first looked at you. Stuff like that is a steam roller for a potential mother."

"Have you ever done that with another woman? The smell you can't help, but I don't think I could stand sharing your sniveling with another woman."

"Never mind. That's the kind of stuff that'll come out after we're married. What about Lou Amjac?"

"He's an FBI agent. They are good at their work. I have a whole intuitive thing about how they can help you with that notebook -- The Gallant Major's Gypsy Dream Book."

''I'm Army Intelligence, baby. We don't take our laundry to the FBI. Macy's definitely does not tell Gimbel's."

"The way you told it to me, you were Army Intelligence. If the FBI can prove you have something worth going on with, then your side will take you back and you can run the whole thing down yourself."

"Jesus."

"Isn't it worth trying?"

"Well, yeah, but still, I don't see Lou Amjac going out of his way to help me. After all, you were his girl."

"He might not be pleasant about it, that's true, but he's an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and if you've got something in his line, you're not going to be able to shake him."

***

Amjac wasn't entirely pleasant about Marco. In fact, he was particularly surly. Amjac was a skinny man with watery eyes and when Marco saw them for the first time he had a hot flash of jealousy go through him, feeling that maybe Eugenie Rose was nearsighted and that perhaps when she had first seen this guy she had thought he was crying. Amjac was tall. He had florid skin and sandy hair, freckles all over the backs of his hands, and looked as though he had a tendency to boils on the back of his neck. His hair was fine lanugo and he couldn't have grown a mustache if he had stayed in bed for a year. He had a jaw like a crocodile and as he sat in Rosie's small, warm, golden-draped room, which had horrible, large cabbage roses woven into the carpets and ancient northern European brewery posters on all walls, separated by mountain goat heads mounted on stained ash, he looked as though he would be happy to be invited to bite Marco's right arm off.

When he entered the apartment and had stood staring down, repelled, at Marco, Eugenie Rose had said serenely, "This is Bonny Benny Marco, the chap I was telling you about, Lou. Benny boy, this here is a typical, old-time shamus right out of Black Mask Magazine name of Lou Amjac."

"Did you bring me all the way over here in the rain just to meet this?" Amjac inquired.

"Is it raining? Yes, I did."

"What am I supposed to do? Arrest him for impersonating an officer?"

Marco figured it would be better just to let the two old friends chat together.

"Would you like a nice plebeian rye highball, Lou?"

"Plebeian? Your friend is drinking beer right out of the can."

"Wow, you FBI guys don't miss a trick, do you?" Eugenie Rose said. "Do you want a rye highball or don't you?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, what?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"That's better. Give me your coat. How is your elbow with the weather changing like this? Now sit down. No. Walk with me to the kitchen whilst I decant. Did your mother get back from Montreal?"

Amjac took off his coat.

"You know, I think if I was right-handed I would have had to quit the Bureau, Rose. I could hardly bend my elbow this afternoon, believe it or not. This Dr. Weiler -- you met Abe Weiler, the specialist, didn't you, Rose? -- he may be a good man at certain things -- you know what I mean -- but I don't think he even knows where to grope when it comes to arthritis." He followed her into the tiny kitchen and Marco watched them go, goggle-eyed. "My mother decided to stay over another week," he could hear Amjac say. "They sell very strong ale up there and since my sister's husband won't be home from the road until Monday, why not?"

"Of course, why not?" Rosie's voice said. "Just make sure she's out before he's home, is all. He'd love to punch her right on her sweet little old-lady nose, he told me."

"Aaaah, that's a lot of talk," Amjac said petulantly. "Thanks." He accepted the stiff highball.

"Are your lads still interested in this and that about the Soviet lads? Spy stuff?"

Amjac jerked his head back toward Marco. "Him?"

"He knows a couple," she said. They walked back into the living room with Rosie carrying four beer cans at stomach level.

"Can he talk?" Amjac asked.

"He talks beautifully. And, oh Lou, I wish you could smell him!" Amjac grunted and stared hard at Marco who seemed considerably embarrassed. "Just the same I'd like to tell you the story," Rosie said, "because you are gradually making Major Marco believe that after eleven years of rooming with you at the Academy he has stolen your wife, and as you know the very best in the world that just isn't the case."

"So tell!" Amjac snarled.

She told it. From the patrol forward. She went from the Medal of Honor to the nightmares, to Melvin in Wainright, to the Army hospitals, to Chunjin and Raymond, to Raymond's mother and Senator Iselin, to Marco's court-martial project and General Jorgenson's suicide. They were all quiet after she had finished. Amjac finished his highball in slow sips. "Where's the notebook?" he asked harshly.

Marco spoke for the first time. "It's with my gear. At Raymond's."

"You think you can remember any of the faces of the men in your dreams?"

"Every man, every face. One woman."

"And one lieutenant general?"

"With Security service markings."

"And this Melvin dreamed the same thing?"

"He did. And that man who was sitting beside the lieutenant general is now Raymond Shaw's house man."

Amjac stood up. He put his coat on with deliberate movement. "I'll talk it over with the special agent in charge," he said. "Where can I reach you?" Marco started to answer but Eugenie Rose interrupted him. "Right here, Louis," she said brightly. "Any time at all."

"I live at Raymond Shaw's," Marco said quickly, coloring deeply. "Trafalgar eight, eight-eight-eight-one."

"I cannot believe it," Amjac said to Rosie. "I simply cannot believe that you could ever turn out to be this kind of hard, cruel girl." He turned to go. "You never gave a damn about me."

"Lou!"

He got to the door but he had to turn around. She was staring at him levelly, without much expression.

"You know I cared," she said. "I know that you know exactly how much I cared."

He couldn't hold her stare. He looked away, then looked at the floor.

"With all the girls there are in the world," she asked, "do you think a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor who has been batting around the world most of his life wants to get married? Well, he does, Lou. And so do I. Maybe if you had been able to make up your mind between me and your elbow and your mother, you and I would have been married by now. We've been together four years, Lou. Four years. And you can say that I never cared about you and I can only answer that the cold-turkey cure is the only way for you because I have to make sure that you understand that there is only Ben; that it is as clear as daylight that Ben is the only man for me. Someday, if you keep playing the delaying game, and I guess you will, some girl may pay you out on a slow rope, then cast you adrift miles and miles away from shore and you'll know that my way -- this hard, cruel way you called it -- is the way that leaves the fewest scars. Now stop sulking and tell me. Are you going to help us or not?"

"I want to help him, Rosie," Amjac said slowly, "but somebody else has to decide that, so I'll let you know tomorrow. Good night and good luck."

"Night, Lou. My best to your mother when she calls later."

Amjac closed the door behind him.

"You don't just fool around, do you, Eugenie Rose?" Marco asked reverently.

***

Amjac was one of the four men in the large room in the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation toward noon the next morning. Another man was the special agent in charge. Another man was a courier who had just come in from Washington. The fourth man was Marco.

The courier had brought one hundred and sixty-eight close-up photographs from one of the Bureau's special files. The close-ups included shots of male models, Mexican circus performers, Czech research chemists, Indiana oil men, Canadian athletes, Australian outdoor showmen, Japanese criminals, Asturian miners, French head waiters, Turkish wrestlers, pastoral psychiatrists, marine lawyers, English publishers, and various officials of the U.S.S.R., the People's Republic of China, and the Soviet Army. Some shots were sharp, some were murky. Marco made Mikhail Gomel and Giorgi Berezovo the first time through. No one spoke. The second time through he made Pa Cha, the older Chinese dignitary. He pulled no stiffs, such as North Carolinian literary agents or Basque sheep brokers, because he had done so much studying so well through five years of night.

The courier and the special agent took the three photographs which Marco had chosen and left the room with them to check their classifications against information on file. Marco and Amjac were left in the room.

"You go ahead," Marco said to Amjac. "You must have plenty to do. I'll wait."

"Ah, shut up," Amjac suggested.

Marco sat down at the long polished table, unfolded The New York Times and was able to complete two-thirds of the crossword puzzle before the special agent and the courier returned.

"What else do you remember about these men?" the special agent asked right off, before sitting down, which caused Amjac to sit up much straighter and appear as though a dull plastic film had been peeled off his eyes. The courier slid the three photographs, face up, across the table to Marco. "Take your time," the special agent said.

Marco didn't need extra time. He picked up the top photograph, which was Gamel's. "This one wears stainless-steel false teeth and he smells like a goat. His voice is loud and it grates. He's about five feet six, I'd figure. Heavy. He wears civilian clothes but his staff is uniformed, ranging from a full colonel to a first lieutenant. They wear political markings." Marco picked up the shot of the Chinese civilian, Pa Chao "This one has a comical, high-pitched giggle and killer's eyes. He had the authority. Made no attempt to conceal his distaste and contempt for the Russians. They deferred to him." He picked up Berezovo's picture, a shot that had been taken while the man was in silk pajamas with a glass in his hand and a big, silly grin across his face. "This is the lieutenant general. The staff he carried was in civilian clothes and one of the staff was a woman." Marco grinned. "They looked like FBI men. He speaks with a bilateral emission lisp and has a very high color like -- uh -- like Mr. Amjac here."

A new man came into the room with a note for the special agent who read it and said, "Your friend Mr. Melvin has been cooperating with us in Wainwright, Alaska. He's made one of these men, Mikhail Gomel, who is a member of the Central Committee." Marco beamed at Amjac over this development, but Amjac wouldn't look at him.

"Can you return to Washington today, Colonel? We'll have a crew of specialists waiting for you."

"Any time you say, sir. I'm on indefinite leave. But the rank is major."

"You have been a full colonel since sunrise this morning. They just told me on the phone from Washington."

"No!" Marco yelled. He leaped to his feet and gripped the table and kept shouting, "No, no, no!" He pounded and pounded on the shining table with rage and frustration. "That filthy, filthy, filthy son-of-a-bitch. He'll pay us for this! He'll pay us someday for this! No, no, no!"

Potentially, Marco might have been a hysteroid personality.

***

Colonel Marco worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and his own unit of Army Intelligence (into which he had been honorably and instantly reinstated upon the recommendation of the FBI's director and the Plans Board of the Central Intelligence Agency). There was no longer any question of a need for a court-martial to institute a full investigation. A full unit was set up, with headquarters in New York and conference space at the Pentagon, and unaccountable funds from the White House were provided to maintain housing, laboratories, and personnel, including three psychiatrists, the country's leading Pavlovian practitioner, six espionage technicians (including three librarians), a mnemonicist, an Orientalist, and an expert on Soviet internal affairs. The rest were cops and assistant cops.

Marco was in charge. His aide, assistant, and constant companion was Louis Amjac. The other side-kick was a round type, with the nerves of a Chicago bellhop, named Jim Lehner. He was there representing the CIA. They worked out of a capacious, many chambered house in the Turtle Bay district of New York, right through the summer of 1959 but they did not get one step further than the alarming conclusions which had been reached originally by Marco. It is questionable whether any definitive conclusions beyond those reached could have been attained if Marco had been able to allow himself to tell the part of his dreams having to do with Raymond's murders, but he could see no connection, he didn't think the time had come, he couldn't keep the thought in his mind, and so on and on into many splinters of reasons why he did not divulge the information. Thousands of man-hours were put in on the project and as time went on the pressure from exalted sources grew and grew. A three-platoon system of surveillance was put around Raymond. The total cost of the project which the doctrinaire romantics in the service classified as Operation Enigma has been estimated at, or in excess of, $634,217 and some change, for travel, salaries, equipment, lease, and leasehold improvements, maintenance and miscellaneous expense -- and not a quarter of it was stolen beyond a few hundred rolls of Tri-X and Hydropan film, but even accountants don't recognize such losses because all photographers everywhere are helpless about film stocks to the point where it is not even considered stealing but is called testing.

The Army flew Alan Melvin, the former corporal turned civilian plumber, from Alaska to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, then to the house in Turtle Bay in New York, but the interviews with him revealed no more than what had been gleaned from Marco. However, the call to Operation Enigma seemed to have come in time to have saved Melvin's sanity -- even his life. The nightmares had caused a weight loss of seventy-one pounds. He weighed one hundred and three pounds when picked up at Wainwright. He could not be moved for seventeen days, while he received high-caloric feeding, but by that time he had talked to Marco. When he learned that what he had dreamed had reached such a point of credibility that it had become one more terrible anxiety for the President of the United States, it seemed as though all dread was removed instantly, enabling Melvin to sleep and eat, dissolving the concretion of his fears.

Upon his restoration to active duty Colonel Marco requested, and was granted, an informal meeting with representative officers of the Board. They explained that it would not be possible for Colonel Marco to refuse advancement to the rank he held but that it was to his great credit that he felt so strongly about the matter. They explained that such an action could disturb legislative relationships in the present climate, so extraordinary that it had to be considered the far, far better part of valor for government establishments to run with the tide. Colonel Marco asked that he be permitted to register his vociferous distaste for Senator Iselin and be allowed to demonstrate that he rejected any and all implied sponsorship of himself by such an infamous source; he wished the condition to be viewed by the Board as being and having been untenable to him as well as having been unsolicited by him and undesirable in every and any way. He added other stern officialese. He asked that he be allowed to express, in an official manner, his innermost fears that this promotion to the rank of full colonel would inconsiderately prejudice the future against his favor for an optimum Army career.

The Board explained to him, informally and in a most friendly manner, that whereas it was true that it would be necessary that his personnel file forever retain Senator Iselin's stain to explain Colonel Marco's -- uh -- unusual -- uh -- advancement, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, with his own hand, had appended an explanation of the attendant circumstances, absolving the colonel of any threat of shadow.

All in all, because he was human to extreme dimension, Marco secretly felt he had done pretty well out of the Iselin brush, which in no way forgave Iselin or diminished Colonel Marco's prayers for vengeance. The single negative factor connected with the mess had been the death of General Jorgenson, but that was another matter entirely and one not pertinent to his promotion. Someday, he thought fervently, he would like to see the notation made by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs upon the personnel file of General Jorgenson before it was permitted to pass into Army history. As a soldier, Colonel Marco knew that the general's death had been a hero's death, in the sense that a Hindu priest would believe deeply in the right of a widow to burn herself upon her husband's funeral pyre, becoming a saint and joining Sati. So saved are all those who enable themselves to believe, and therefore was the military mind called a juvenile mind. It was constant; it observed a code of honor in a world where any element of devotion to a rationale summoned scorn; but the world itself knew itself was sick.

Colonel Marco puzzled his past nightmares and decided they could make him a full general yet.

While Raymond toured Europe with his mother, Marco toured the United States with Amjac and Lehner and completed a formal canvass of the survivors of the patrol. This yielded nothing. Nightly, in the manner of a lonely drummer distracted by the boredom of the road, Marco telephoned his girl whom he had not yet had either the time or the opportunity to marry. She comforted him. The three men moved through seven cities from La Jolla, California, to Bayshore, Long Island. Marco and Melvin had been the only two men on the patrol who had ever dreamed of it.
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Re: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, by Richard Condon

Postby admin » Sat Dec 12, 2015 4:31 am

Chapter 16

Mrs. John Iselin's tour of Europe in the summer of 1959 with her son developed into the most shocking string of occasions, as redolent of that decade as a string of garlic pearls. Mrs. Iselin achieved more for sustained anti-Americanism and drove infected wedges more deeply between America and her allies than any other action by any individual or agency, excepting her husband, of the twentieth century.

It would seem that wherever Mrs. Iselin set down with her personable, strangely expressed son, she gave a different account of why she was traveling. In Paris, she was looking for inefficiency in United States Government offices overseas. In Bonn, she said she was looking for subversives in United States Government offices overseas. In Munich, she said she was looking, actually, for both, because "any concept of efficiency in government must include complete political responsibility. If anyone should favor the Communists, then he cannot be efficient," Mrs. Iselin explained to the German (and world) press.

Mrs. Iselin's only brother was, at the time of her visit to Rome in late July, the American ambassador to Italy. He extended an invitation to his sister and his nephew to stay with him and his family, which Mrs. Iselin accepted via the Associated Press. "My brother is so dear to me," she said for publication in many languages, "and I do so ache to see him again after a long separation, listen to his wisdom, and rejoice in his embrace. Pressure of work for our country has kept us apart too long. We are out of touch." It was not told that what had put them in direct touch again was a specific coded order from the Secretary of State ordering his ambassador to invite his sister to be his house guest.

Mrs. Iselin moved out of the ambassador's residence to the Grand Hotel on the afternoon of the second day she had been her brother's guest and immediately called a press conference to explain her action, saying, according to the transcript which was printed in full in The New York Times for July 29, 1959, "In every sense of that melodramatic word I am standing before you as a torn woman. I love my brother but I must love my country more. My loyalty as a sister of a beloved brother must be moved to serve a greater loyalty to the unborn of the West. My brother's embassy is wholly directed by American Communists under direct manipulation by the Kremlin, and I pray before you today that this is a result of my brother's ineptness and ignorance and not of his villainy."

After the press had left, Raymond languidly asked his mother what in the world had ever possessed her to do such an unbelievably malicious thing. "Raymond, dear," his mother said, "in this life one can turn the other cheek in a Christian manner only so many times. A long, long time ago I told that brother of mine that I would see him nailed to the floor and today he knows that I kidded him not. I kidded him not, Raymond, dear."

***

Mrs. Iselin's brother resigned at once as ambassador to Italy and his resignation was at once accepted by the State Department and refused by the White House because Foster had not cleared through Jim or Jim had not cleared through Foster. For thirty-six hours thereafter the matter remained in this exquisite state of balance until, on return from the greenest kind of rolling countryside in Georgia, the President's will prevailed and the ambassadorship of Raymond's mother's brother was restored, the wisdom of the President's decision being based upon the choleric rages into which the mention of Johnny Iselin's name could throw him.

As his wife succeeded with such consistency in gaining so much space in the press of the world, Senator Iselin found it necessary to issue his own directive as to his wife's mission in Europe, from Washington. In close-up on television during his formal investigation of atheism in the Department of Agriculture he said to the millions of devoted viewers throughout the country, "My wife, a brilliant woman, an American who has suffered deeply before this, long before this, in the name of her great and abiding patriotism, was sent abroad as unofficial emissary of the United States Senate to bring back a report on the amount of money that this Administration has spent to further the cause of communism in the Western World. It is my holy hope that this will answer the question of certain elements in this country for once and for all with regard to this matter."

Alas, the statement did not settle the matter for once and for all, as the President insisted that his Minority Leader in the Senate make a policy answer to settle Senator Iselin's statement for once and for all. The President, being of the Executive Branch, overlooked the fact that the Minority Leader was first a member of the Senate, an establishment which has always taken a dim view of any directives from the Executive.

The Minority Leader's text was a model of political compromise. As Senate spokesman the leader denied, in a sense, that Mrs. Iselin was an "official" emissary of the United States Senate although he conceded that the Senate would indeed feel honored to think of her as its "unofficial" emissary at any time. "Mrs. Iselin is a beautiful and gracious lady," this courtly gentleman said, deeply pleased that the White House was so discomfited, "a delightful woman whose charm and grace are only exceeded by her outstanding intelligence, but I do not feel that either she or her distinguished husband would want it said that anyone not actually elected by the great people of the states of the United States to the sacred trust of the United States Senate could be said to represent that body. Say, rather, that Mrs. Iselin represents America wherever she may be." (Applause.) The gentleman received a written citation from the Daughters of the American Struggles for Liberty for his gallantry to American womanhood.

Citations from the presses of Europe, mainly those of a conservative stripe, took a different tack. In Stockholm, Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest and most influential daily wrote: "What the wife of Senator John Iselin possibly might have discovered, she has already spoiled by foolishness and arrogance. She has introduced anti-American feeling far more effective than any that could possibly have been initiated by the Committee and their paid agents. The unanimous opinion of Europe is that Iselin symbolizes exactly the reverse of what America stands for and what we have learned to appreciate. Iselinism is the archenemy of liberty and a disgrace to the name of America."

Throughout the tour, until its closing days in England, Raymond had not so much as acknowledged the existence of his mother or his stepfather in the newspaper column that he wrote daily and transmitted by cable as he covered, with considerable cogency, a startlingly intimate view of the European political scene. The Daily Press, his employer in New York, was said to have had to resort to threats to force Raymond into writing and publishing a statement regarding his own position. This was the sheerest nonsense: the kind stimulated by the need of metropolitan people who feel that they simply must be seen as having inside information on everything. The fact of the matter was that Raymond's publisher, Charles O'Neil, was a more that ordinarily perceptive man. He telephoned Raymond at the Savoy Hotel in London and, after an exchange of information on the prevailing weather conditions in each country, a report of past weather phenomena, and a foretelling of what might be expected from the weather on either side of the Atlantic, O'Neil, who was paying for the call, broke in saying that he felt Raymond could have no conception of the extent of the publicity his mother's European tour had been producing all over the country, nor could he have any way of realizing how closely he, Raymond Shaw, had been allied with Iselin's actions and purposes. He read from a few articles, shuddering at the cost of the telephone tolls. Raymond was aghast. He asked what O'Neil thought he should do. The publisher said he saw no reason why the cost of the entire call could not be charged to the syndicate -- uh -- he meant, rather, that he felt both the paper and Raymond should relent from their fixed position on the matter of Raymond's family being mentioned in his writings, and that Raymond should at once file at least one column of opinion on Iselinism and the present tour.

Raymond complied that day and the column was reprinted more than any other single piece the paper had ever caused to be syndicated and the toll charges for the call to London were absorbed by the syndicate without the slightest demurral. The column read, in part: "I have known John Yerkes Iselin to be an assassin and a blackguard since my boyhood. He lives by attacking. He is the cowardly assassin in politics who strikes from the dark and evil alley of his opportunism. With no exceptions, the justifications for these attacks have been so flimsy as to have no standing either in courts of law or in the minds of individuals capable of differentiating repeated accusation from even a reasonable presumption of guilt. The ultimate result is a threat to national security. Iselin is laying a foundation for the agencies of American government to serve totalitarian ends rather than the Government of the United States as we have hitherto known it."

Raymond insisted upon reading the dispatch to his mother before he sent it off. He read it in a monotone with a stony face, fearful of the response it would bring. "Oh, for crissake, Raymond," his mother said, "what do you suppose I'm going to do -- sue you? I know you aren't asking me, but send the silly thing. Who the hell reads beyond the headlines anyway?" She waved him away contemptuously. "Please! Go cable your copy. I'm busy."

***

Raymond was unaware of being in an anomalous position in London after his column on Johnny and his mother appeared in the States. It was reprinted in the English newspapers at once. Writing of his mother's part in what he termed their "conspiracy of contempt for man," Raymond had described her as "a caricature of the valiant pioneer women of America who loaded the guns while their husbands fought off the encircling savages" in that he saw his mother and Johnny as the savages and "if a nation's blood is its honor and its dignity before the world, then that blood covered their hands." This appeared to be in direct opposition to basic policies of some British newspapers that had made a pretty pound indeed out of that steely treacle of Home and Mother, so that at least a portion of the press that attended Raymond's mother's farewell conference at the Savoy Hotel viewed Raymond not at all enthusiastically. Had they been able to measure how Raymond viewed them, as he viewed all the world, the shooting would have started, straight off. On the other hand, another section of the British press so detested Senator and Mrs. Iselin that it quite approved of Raymond's attack upon his mother, although it would not, of course, ever permit itself to print that view.

Both sides had the opportunity to air their views, however indirectly. Before she left London Mrs. Iselin told the reporters who had assembled in a large room named after a production of Richard D'Oyly Carte that she would urge her husband's Senate committee to investigate the Labour Party of Great Britain, as she had assembled documentary proof that it was a nest of Socialists and crypto-Communists and that this political party could, if returned to power, "smash the alliance upon which the friendship of our two great nations has been based and, under the guise of honest difference of opinion, sabotage the great American purpose before the world." It was as though the great glacier had slid down from the top of the world and enveloped the hotel. Sixty men and women stood staring at her, their chins resting comfortably on their chests, mouths wide open, eyes glazed. One gentleman of Fleet Street threw his full glass of whisky and water backward over his head in a high arc to crash in the corner of the large room rather than drink it, which is criticism indeed from a newspaperman of any country. He said, "Madame, my name is Joseph Pole of the Daily Advocate-Journal. I repudiate you, your husband, and your most peculiar son." He turned to a lady journalist on his left and took the highball from her hand. "May I?" he asked. Then he threw the contents of the drink into Mrs. Iselin"s ankles.

Raymond knocked him right through the throng. At this juncture, that portion of the journalistic group which had objected to Raymond in the first place for having attacked the profitable institution of Motherhood in his column, took this chance to strike out at him, while the group which had secretly approved Raymond's utter public rejection of his mother now saw their chance to have at her themselves, and were led forward by female colleagues brandishing raised umbrellas. The result was a melee. Mrs. Iselin swung chairs, water carafes, and broken whisky bottles, doing most painful damage but emerging physically unharmed. Raymond lay about him with his extraordinary strength and his natural antipathy. The news photographers present very nearly swooned with ecstasy over the turn taken, for, from every British newspaper-reader's point of view, here was Iselinism in action with British righteousness whacking it over the head.

Beginning with the very next editions, the British press indulged in its own sort of good-natured London journalists' fun, which could be described by the subject of their reporting as being an experience not unlike falling nude into a morass of itching powder while two sadistic dentists drilled into one's teeth at the instant of apogee of alcoholic history's most profligate hang-over. The ultimate end of all of these combative news stories was that when Mrs. Iselin and her son needed to journey to Southampton to embark for home, some one hundred and fifteen London policemen, whom the world knows affectionately as "bobbies" after their founder, Sir Robert Peel, needed to bludgeon a path through the howling mass of outraged citizenry to get them out of their hotel, following which a semi-military motorcade was formed to race them to the ship. The entire incident was a stiff test of Anglo-American relations, beyond a doubt, and somewhat scored John Iselin's own lack of popular favor in the British Isles.

***

While Raymond had been in Paris, in late June, a member of the French Chamber of Deputies who was co-leader of the political party having the record of greatest resistance to the government then in power, was assassinated in his hotel particulier on Rue Louis David in the sixteenth arrondissement, baffling police and security agencies.

While Raymond was in London, on the evening before his mother's famous debate with the British press, a peer who was greatly admired for having articulated a liberal, humanistic, and forward-looking life as publisher of a chain of national newspapers and periodicals, Lord Morris Croftnal, was murdered while he slept. There was not a clue as to the identity or motivation of his killer.
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