Palace Council (20 page)

“I'd like your advice,” said the President.

“Of course, sir.”

“Off the record.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Too many leaks, Eddie. Information everywhere. Security's all to hell.” He lifted a newspaper, then tossed it aside. “Every bureaucrat whose responsibilities allow him to learn the confidences of this government seems to think it's his right and duty to call the nearest reporter. We could never have won the war this way.”

“Yes, sir.” Eddie wondered if the President knew about Stilwell's visit. And if protocol allowed him to bring it up.

“Allen Dulles wrote me.” Kennedy gestured to a letter on his desktop. “Dulles says we need an Official Secrets Act. Like the British have. They tell me it would be unconstitutional, but we have to do something, Eddie. The leaks are getting out of hand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, meaning, you agree?”

Eddie shook his head. “No, Mr. President. I don't agree. With all due respect to Director Dulles, I think it's a terrible idea.”

“You don't think people should be punished for telling our secrets?”

“If you catch the leaker, yes. But not the newspaperman who prints what he's told. No, sir.” About to embark on a disquisition about the importance of free speech to democracy, Eddie read in those thoughtful eyes the message that a lecture would not be welcome. Besides, he sensed that he was merely speaking the President's own thoughts. So he said instead, “I think you as President have the right to expect that the people in whom you confide will not pass what you say on to others. I agree with that strongly, sir.”

The appointments secretary came in. The President had to run.

That night, Eddie walked for hours along the Mall, working things through. He told himself that Hoover, three years after Maxton, was only stringing him along. But even if the Director really planned to trade information on Junie for dirt on Kennedy, Eddie knew that he could not be a part of wrecking the Administration of the only President he had admired in his lifetime. And so, two days later, he resigned his post. He kept the house on I Street, but severed all contact with the White House. He publicly wished Kennedy well, and explained to his astonished friends that he needed to devote more time to his writing.

“You think you're clever,” said Stilwell afterward, the two of them walking along the Mall.

“Not often. Sometimes.”

“You do understand this terminates our deal.”

“Yes.”

“No more protection.”

“Protection?” Eddie thought again of the blond man, the face so familiar. “You've been protecting me? From what?”

The agent did not deign to answer. “No more protection, and no more information.”

“Maybe I'll do better on my own.”

Stilwell laughed, and clapped him on the shoulder. “You know something, Eddie? Everybody thinks they will. But hardly anybody ever does.”

CHAPTER
30

The Chess Player

(I)

I
N
N
OVEMBER
of 1962, Richard Nixon's campaign for governor of his native California ended in heavy defeat. The next morning, wild-eyed and sleepless, Nixon made a surprise appearance at his hotel before the reporters who had covered the campaign. Nixon did not like the press. The press did not like him. Nixon thought he had been smeared by journalists when he ran for President two years earlier, losing to Kennedy in one of the closest elections in history. The press thought it had told the nation only the unsavory truth. Now Nixon looked around the room at the assembled reporters. He told them it was fine to give the candidate the shaft if they disliked him, but added that they should put one “lonely” man on the beat who would just report what was said. He concluded, “You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” Everyone believed him, many with pleasure. Syndicated columnists buried his career. ABC News even ran a nighttime special titled
The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.
Newspaper cartoonists despaired, for they had loved his jowly face and long curving nose.

As it happened, Edward Wesley Junior was in the back of the room when the former Vice President made his announcement. Eddie was covering the campaign for
The Nation,
where he had a contract to write four essays a year on politics. He was not sure what to say about Nixon.

By this time, Eddie was a huge name. His fourth novel had made his literary reputation. Entitled
Netherwhite,
it told the story of an obsessive social climber who, rejected by the Negro upper classes, resorted to violence, waging a one-man guerrilla war until cut down by the police. The book opened with a line that was later so often quoted that people forgot where it came from: “Plotting revenge can be such wonderful therapy.” Langston Hughes, who never stopped loving Harlem, had urged Eddie not to publish it, but Eddie's judgment had proved correct. The white critics praised its sharp satiric eye, not realizing that everything Eddie wrote about Harlem he meant literally. The critics did not believe, even after reading the novel, that a wealthy black society actually existed in the secret uptown shadows of their own. This was the liberal era in our politics, and the Negro was understood by all to be poor, oppressed, and in special need of white solicitude. The Negro was a seamstress refusing to move to the back of the bus. The Negro was a sharecropper stymied by a literacy test for voting. And for once Eddie's political judgment proved superior to his mentor's. The Harlem society biddies, as he called them not only behind their backs but also in print, were enchanted. Delighted to be the subjects of a serious novel, they played round upon round of “who's who,” skewering each other happily with Eddie's furious words.
Jet
magazine ran a column guessing at the true identities of his characters—and, in most cases, getting them right.

But Eddie, as usual, put accomplishment behind him. The novel was old news. Now he was worried about the Nixon story. How could it be that he was seeing what everyone was missing? The day after his return from California, Eddie went sailing on the Chesapeake Bay with Gary Fatek. The weather was atrocious, but this time Eddie was properly dressed for it.

“There's something wrong with the way the story is being covered,” he told Gary, shouting as waves battered the sloop. “People are missing Nixon's tragedy. The pathos.”

“Erebeth loves him,” Gary shouted back. “She still thinks the Commies are hiding under the bed.”

“What I'm saying is, there's an angle here we're overlooking. We all say we hate Nixon so much. Ambitious schemer, no principles, anything to win.”

“Sounds right.”

“But isn't that all of us?” Eddie shouted. Gary looked at him. “Doesn't Nixon somehow represent America? We're a nation of winners.” A wave drenched him. “We want leaders who win, and we don't care how they do it.”

Gary handed him a rope from somewhere, told him to hold it, stepped over Eddie's arm, took it back. The sail jumped, then filled afresh. Gary told Eddie to tie down the line, and Eddie remembered, more or less, how to do it.

“This isn't about Nixon, is it?” said Gary. On their new tack, the noise was suddenly less. “It's about Aurelia.”

Eddie looked up. “Aurelia?”

“Sure. She's a Nixon fan, right? A big one. Her father-in-law was a Nixon backer, so is her husband, and Aurie thinks the world of him. That's why you can't see him as a monster, Eddie. Because it would betray Aurie.”

“Then why didn't I support Nixon to begin with?”

“Maybe a rivalry with Kevin. I don't know.”

“Come on, Gary. You can't have it both ways!”

But the smile on his old friend's face suggested that Gary did not care which way he had it, as long as he got under Eddie's skin. Over the past year or two, the old friends had more and more gotten on each other's nerves. Gary had withdrawn from his former life. Eddie no longer had any idea how his classmate spent his time, and Gary never volunteered.

“Write the essay the way you want,” said Gary as they scudded toward shore. “Just be ready for the firestorm.”

And a firestorm there was. The essay ran to sixteen hundred words.
The Nation
titled it “Dick Nixon, All-American.” Angry mail poured in from the right, where, interestingly, Eddie's point came across with crystal clarity: by arguing that Nixon embodied the American character, he was insulting Americans, not complimenting Nixon. But the magazine's readership was mostly on the left, and nearly everybody seemed to interpret Eddie's words the other way around: he was pro-Nixon!

Soon people who had never read the essay—and never heard of Eddie—were absolutely certain they understood his argument. And, mostly, they hated his argument, and therefore, in keeping with American tradition, hated him, too. Thus was Edward Wesley Junior labeled, for the next period of his career, a conservative. There was even an abortive move to take back his National Book Award.

“It's not so bad,” said Aurelia, when Eddie ran into her at the opening of an art exhibition in New York just after Christmas. She was alone, looking tall and beautiful and utterly devoted to her husband. “They've been calling Kevin a conservative for years.”

“Kevin
is
a conservative.”

“Well, yes. But the way they say it, they make it sound so dirty.” Aurie brightened. “Speaking of Kevin, he's so proud of Kennedy now. The way he faced down Khrushchev and made him take those missiles out of Cuba. Personally, I was scared to death. I thought we were about to have World War III. But Kevin loved it. He even says he might support a Democrat next time around.”

“Wonderful,” said Eddie, forcing a smile.

Afterward he helped her find a taxi. He was too savvy to offer to share.

“I'm sorry about you and Torie,” she said, standing by the open door. “You would have been a great match.”

“That was over months ago.”

“The grapevine's a lot slower than it used to be.” A cheery smile. “So—who's special now? In your life, I mean?”

“I'm too busy for romance,” he said, the line he always used, usually when fending women off.

“Silly man,” she said, and touched his cheek with her gloved hand. “You need to find yourself a silly woman and settle down.”

He watched the cab drive away. He saw Aurelia dip her face into her hands, but she probably had something in her eye.

(II)

E
DDIE WAS A MAN
of two cities now. Despite his departure from the Kennedy Administration, he had kept the house on I Street, unwilling to be separated too far from the President he so admired. But he had never surrendered the apartment on Convent Avenue, and stayed there on his frequent visits to New York. After seeing Aurelia off, however, he did not return to Harlem at once. He had a man to see, a source he had known from the beginning he would need.

He took the train to Brooklyn, where he knocked on the door of a basement apartment in a dank, crumbling building near Eastern Parkway. Derek Garland answered the door. There were three rooms, all cluttered with books. The two men sat at the battered table sipping a Russian vodka so bland you could almost taste the potatoes. Derek was a Harlem legend. He was also a madman. His face was suspicious and sweaty. He lived this way because he had trouble holding a job, and he had trouble holding a job because his politics kept landing him in front of congressional committees, or in jail. He refused as a matter of ideological conviction to accept his family's offers of assistance, offers that lately came less and less frequently. He had announced for the last several years his impending move to Ghana but had yet to show the gumption to do it. Nobody Eddie knew lived closer to America's radical fringe, and it was to the radical fringe that Eddie, from the moment he received the photograph of Junie toting a rifle, had known he would sooner or later have to go.

Eddie began with the truth. It was he who had turned in Emil Goldfus, also known as Rudolf Abel, whom Derek had brought to Aurelia's wedding seven years ago. He had protected Derek himself out of loyalty to the cause: he knew Derek liked that sort of talk. Now he was asking to be paid back. He had to get in touch with Jewel Agony. Anticipating Derek's response, he hastened to add that this had nothing to do with turning anybody in. His reasons, he said, were personal. All the while, Derek poured and drank and stared.

“This is about your sister,” Derek said once he heard Eddie out.

“Yes.”

“I can't help you.” He wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “Those people are crazy.”

“What people?”

Derek Garland had a way of opening his hazel eyes very wide behind the thick glasses while he took time to think. The goggling look made him seem stupid, but Eddie knew he was very much the opposite. Behind that strange face was a stranger brain. He had been the many-time chess champion of the Metropolitan, the private Negro social club in Sugar Hill, before denouncing the venue as a petit-bourgeois distraction. His ascetic face wore permanent bruises, and his movements were jerky. People said he had never been the same since nearly dying in a Southern jail; and only a madman would have returned for more, as Derek Garland regularly did.

“The thing about these Agony types,” said Derek calmly, as if he had not been staring into space for the past few minutes, “is that they'll shoot you. Shoot you with a
gun,
” he added, in case Eddie had been worried about artillery fire.

“They won't shoot me,” said Eddie.

“Anyway, I don't know any of them.”

“But you know who to ask.”

A pause. “Maybe.” His eyes leaped at something on the far wall, and Eddie turned to look but saw only shadows and, through the window, passing headlights. “I'm moving to Ghana,” Derek continued in the same even tone as before. “Or Moscow. First, though, I'm getting married.”

Eddie tried to catch his gaze for a congratulatory smile. “Who's the lucky lady?”

“I don't know yet. I have to find one.” His tone was perfectly serious.

“Well, I wish you well.”

“I wish you well, too. But be careful, lest you get cast into the fiery pit.” An unexpected burst of laughter. He laughed for a very long time, hands over his ample stomach, rocking in his tottering chair. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, he was calm again. “Not that the fiery pit is so bad. I hear the people who live down there are always dreaming big dreams. Not that I believe in God myself. Or is it God who doesn't believe in me?” He frowned, nibbling at his scarred lip, and seemed genuinely to be trying to work this one out. “Funny thing about God. He only shows up in churches. He's never around when they're feeding His people to the lions.”

“I've often had the same thought,” said Eddie, very surprised.

“Then you're a damned fool,” retorted Derek, with satisfaction.

“I'm sorry?”

“You think God isn't watching?” Voice rolling like Wesley Senior's. “You think God doesn't know? You think—” Just like that, Derek was calm again. “Tell you something about your Agony friends. They're not afraid of the lions or the hellfire. Martyr complex. Your sister probably has one, too.”

“I doubt that very much,” said Eddie, indignantly. But he wondered.

Derek was not even interested. “Listen. Met somebody in jail years ago. In there for the same thing as me, telling the HUAC fascists to go to Hell and take their committee with them. Man had this idea. Group like that. Raise some money, build them a camp somewhere. Train them. Start shooting things up, scaring people. Scare them enough, he said, and they'd do the right thing. Stupid. He wanted educated people only. College degrees. So they could see further than the huddled masses, et cetera. Serious ideological error, Eddie. Hadn't read his Lenin, obviously.”

“What was the name?”

“Didn't have a name back then”—Eddie realized that Derek was talking about the group the man wanted to form, not the man himself—“but he wanted to get the Negroes involved. Prominent Negroes. White man. Professor of something.”

“Professor where? And what was his name?”

“Doesn't matter. He's dead now.”

“But what—”

“I'll see what I can do,” Derek said. “I don't know those Agony people, but, if you have a martyr complex, too? Want to get yourself shot?—I'll see what I can do.” He was escorting Eddie to the door. “Don't call me. Don't use your home phone. Not for any purpose. It's not a tap you should be worried about. They put bombs in phones these days—”

And, just like that, Eddie was out on the street.

Maybe he had put out a feeler. Maybe he had visited the asylum.