The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America (9 page)

Vandermeer shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. Not at this point in time.”

Malcolm Chaymber got out of the cab at the corner of Third Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street, Manhattan. He looked around cautiously as the cab pulled away, haunted as always at moments like this by the conviction that someone he knew would walk around the corner and recognize him.

His heart pounding with fear and excitement, as it invariably did at the start of one of his adventures, Chaymber walked the two blocks to the bar called Peters and went in. Of course, Chaymber admitted to himself, the fear was part of it. It was cathartic. Without the excitement, the danger, and the fear, the whole thing would seem like a sordid little meaningless affair of the flesh each time; and despite his body’s hunger, he probably wouldn’t be able to go through with it. So the very factors that made it so unwise—that it was illegal and dangerous, and could ruin his career—in a strange way were what made it possible.

Peters was, as usual, crowded to overflow. Account executives with forced laughs and hungry eyes jammed at the bar. Pretty boys with tight jeans and lean, muscular bodies posed against the far wall and nursed their drinks to make them last. Couples at the tables leaned over in close conversation, earnestly lying to each other. The tacky tinsel Christmas decorations looked worn out already, and it was still a week before Christmas.

Chaymber wedged himself into a spot at the bar, ordered a scotch, and looked around at the scene. And we call ourselves gay, he thought. As he always thought. He would stand there, speaking to no one, and have three or four drinks. And one of the young men across the way would begin to look appealing to him, would suddenly attain attributes of truth, beauty, wisdom, and grace that would astound even his own mother, and he would think of some clever line to approach the youth with: a line that would enable them both to preserve some measure of self-respect as they both pretended they believed it.

“You are quiet and pensive,” a voice on his left said.

“What?” Chaymber turned. A young man with brown hair and frank eyes was staring at him.

“Pensive,” the young man said. “And quiet. And a little morose. You’re eyeing the meat rack over there as though you contemplate a painful duty.”

“Not painful, no,” Chaymber said.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know if there’s a word,” Chaymber said.

“If there were, what would it mean?”

“I think ‘doomed to disappointment’ would approach it.”

The young man put his hand to his head and twisted it as though turning a key. “Nope,” he said after a moment, “my mental thesaurus has no single word that means ‘doomed to disappointment.’ The closest it can come is ‘life,’ but that’s the closest it can come to a lot of things.” He brushed some dust off the sleeve of his suede jacket. “My name is Sandy, by the way.”

“Richard,” Chaymber said. “Richard Hatch.” He held out his hand and Sandy shook it firmly.

“No last name,” Sandy said. “I had one once, but I lost it in the dust of a previous journey.”

“It must have been quite a trip,” Chaymber said.

“Oh, it was,” Sandy agreed. “I traveled from there”—he nodded over at the meat rack—“to here, but on a very circuitous path.”

“You hardly look old enough to have a past,” Chaymber said, mentally digesting the fact that Sandy had once been a hustler.

“The past is only yesterday,” Sandy said, and then he grinned. “And that’s either very profound or very, very stupid.”

“I’m hungry,” Chaymber said, suddenly realizing it was so. “Come have dinner with me.”

“Glad to,” Sandy agreed. “But, you understand, I’ll buy my own.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Chaymber said.

They went to dinner and they talked. Malcolm Chaymber talked about the world and Sandy talked about himself. Chaymber was unprepared to talk about himself, so it was a fair exchange. They enjoyed each other’s company and, for the first time in one of these relationships, Chaymber didn’t feel lied to or manipulated.

Sandy told Chaymber what it was like being a male hustler: the insecurities, frustrations, self-denials; and how he had left the meat rack. “I met a father figure,” Sandy said. “Not a sugar daddy, you know, but a real surrogate father. And, believe me, incest can be beautiful. He was a novelist. You’d know his name, but there’s no point in my using it except to impress you, which it wouldn’t; you’re not the sort to be impressed by names. But anyway, we traveled together and I met all his friends. And he never introduced me as his ‘son’ or his ‘nephew’ or any of that bullcrap, but always as his friend. It lasted for two years and then we parted—friends—and he laid some money on me, and here I am.”

“I have a wife,” Chaymber told Sandy over coffee, “and two children.”

“Does she know about—you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never been close to any woman since I left home when I was fourteen,” Sandy said. “I mean, when I was a hustler I went through the usual macho trip of pretending that I only did it for the money, and I really preferred girls in the sack. So I took a few to the sack and I grunted and groaned, but I was never able to get it off with them.”

“When I started coming to New York,” Chaymber told Sandy, “my wife threw a tremendous scene. She thought I had a girl here.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I finally told her the truth. I was afraid she’d go through the roof, maybe get a divorce, but it was just the opposite. At first she didn’t believe me. Then she started laughing. Then she got very sympathetic and told me we’d work it out.”

“Did you?”

“We worked out a very important part of it; we stopped lying to each other. We also stopped having sex.”

Sandy had a loft on Houston Street, and they went there after dinner. “Careful where you step!” Sandy warned, switching on the overhead lights. The loft was done in a severe modern style, all chrome and bent plastic and stretched canvas like a harsh parody of the Bauhaus forty years later. The various work and sleep areas were formed by heavy drapery hangings suspended by wires several feet below the fourteen-foot ceiling.

“Well!” Chaymber said. “I’m impressed. The place is huge.”

“That’s why I didn’t put up full partitions,” Sandy said. “I get privacy and keep spaciousness at the same time.”

Sandy pulled Chaymber through the various “rooms” to the rear of the loft. In the center of the large clear space, there rose a creation of welded bronze and steel rod, tube, and sheet. “My latest,” he said proudly.

“You didn’t tell me you did anything like that,” Chaymber said, obviously impressed. “What do you call it?”

“Right now I call it Chaos,” Sandy said. “Chaos by Sandy. But I don’t know what I’ll call it when it’s done. I have such fun doing them that I don’t have time to think about what they are. And then people come and pay me to take them away and make room for the next. It’s like being paid to make love.”

“Which you were,” Chaymber said.

“No,” Sandy corrected him. “I was paid to screw, but never to make love. Come with me—I’ll show you the difference.”

They stayed in the loft together until the next evening, when they went to Pietro’s for dinner, then went to see
The Sunshine Boys
at the Broadhurst Theater. Then they went back to the loft and stayed together until eight the next morning, when Chaymber left to catch the shuttle back to Washington.

Sandy went back to sleep, and slept till noon; then he rose and showered and had a cup of coffee and picked up the phone to dial a number. “St. Yves,” he said. “Tell him it’s Sandy.”

“Hi. It’s me, Sandy. I got him.…

“Of course I’m sure. He called himself Richard Hatch, but it was him. I got a look in his wallet. Senator Malcolm Chaymber. No question.…

“Okay. I’m seeing him again next week. I’ll keep him on the string—no sweat. But listen, go easy on the guy, will you? I kind of like him.”

George Warren drove his light-green Camarro north on the Garden State Parkway, keeping to the posted sixty-mile speed limit. The day was crystal-clear and the woods, covered with fresh snow, gleamed with peculiarly three-dimensional purity. Neither of which facts Warren noticed. For him, weather was an annoyance that made him add or subtract layers of clothing, and scenery was no more than an incidental backdrop.

What concerned Warren was people and how to manipulate them. He considered himself something of an expert in this, and performed his expertise with cold-blooded efficiency. After ten minutes with a girl he could tell how many times he’d have to say “I love you” before she would spread her legs. After ten minutes with a man he would know whether threats of extortion or physical torture were more likely to cause him to become talkative.

Warren turned off the Parkway and headed west. When the odometer had clocked ten and a half miles, he pulled over to the edge of the two-lane blacktop and shut off the engine.

The manila envelope that St. Yves had given him was behind the sun visor. He pulled it out and examined the two photographs it contained. The first, a tall, skinny, blond Caucasian in his mid-twenties, was his contact, Calvin Middler. The second, a candid shot of a short, round-faced, blond Caucasian female in her early twenties, side view, was Zonya (believed alias, prints not on file). After staring at the two photographs for a few minutes, he slowly tore them into small pieces, which he wadded up and put in a lump on the dirt shoulder of the road. Then, with a heavy Zippo lighter, he set fire to the lump. When it burned out, he ground the ashes into the dirt.

Warren checked his watch as he climbed back into the car. It was eleven twenty in the morning, ten minutes before the rendezvous, and just time to get there. He started the car and drove slowly ahead, looking for a side road on the left. A few hundred yards on, he came to it and turned.

About a quarter mile in, the road turned to dirt. Well-worn tractor ruts made the going more difficult, pitching the car about like a small boat in a choppy sea. Warren was forced to slow down to a crawl, and shortly he gave up altogether. He slowly maneuvered the car around so that it was facing back out, then he got out and locked it. By the odometer he had less than half a mile to go anyway. He opened the trunk and took out a knapsack, pulling the straps through his aims and adjusting it to ride high on his back. Then he closed the trunk and started off down the road.

Ten minutes later he came to a clearing where two Army-surplus command tents had been pitched. There were nine or ten people of indeterminate sex, dressed in various versions of woodsman-hippie, gathered in a wide circle in front of the far tent. In the middle of the circle, neatly stacked, were six machine guns and two Army ammo boxes. The boxes were open, and two of the group were kneeling by them and filling clips for the machine guns with the loose bullets. The rest of them were watching intently, while passing two small hash pipes around the circle.

The circle broke apart as Warren approached, and one of the hash pipes hastily disappeared. The girl holding the other pipe kept it between her lips as she turned toward Warren, jauntily thrusting it out like F.D.R.’s cigarette holder. It was Zonya—the girl in the photograph—but now her hair was long, thin, and brunette.

Warren spotted Calvin Middler as one of the two men loading clips. Since they were supposed to already know each other, Warren waved casually. “Hi, Middler,” he said.

Calvin jumped to his feet. “This is the man I been telling you about,” he told the group.

“I don’t know,” the young man who had hidden the hash pipe said, “He looks pretty straight to me.”

George Warren slowly and calmly looked the youth over. The others, silent and hostile, waited for him to speak. “I don’t look straight to you, boy,” he said finally, “I look neat. You look sloppy and undisciplined—all of you.” He walked over to Middler and tapped him on the chest with his right forefinger. “You called me here to meet these infants?” he demanded. “In the jungles of Bolivia I worked with starving peasants—illiterate, disease-ridden, filthy, malnourished, hopeless men—and we turned them into an army. But these upper-middle-class infants who think that to be sloppy is to be free, and that smoking dope is an act of rebellion against authority—” Warren turned to the group. “They chewed coca leaves in the jungle. Not to turn themselves on, but to stop them from feeling the hunger pangs and let them keep drilling and working. And we won in Cuba, and we’ll win in South America. But the United States?” He thrust his finger in the face of the youth who had called him straight. “You people call yourselves the People’s Revolutionary Brigade. Why? What people? What revolution? You people are so stupid you don’t even know enough to post perimeter guards. What the fuck do you think you’re doing out here?”

“Now, calm down, Carlos,” Middler said, raising his arms in the air in a cross between pacification and benediction. “These people are new to all this. But they’ve got guts. You read about that bank robbery in Brooklyn last week?”

“You mean the one where four masked men with machine guns held up a row of young girl tellers and a sixty-four-year-old bank guard and got away with eight thousand? I read about it.”

“It was our first operation,” Zonya said.

“Zonya!” the young man yelped. “Shut up!”

“What for, Jay-boy?” Zonya asked. “You think he’s a nark?”

“Look” Warren said. “Whatever your friend Jay thinks, I’m not a nark. What I am is a contact man for goodies: goodies that explode, goodies that shoot, all goodies that bother the capitalist pigs. You want to see?”

“Sure,” one of the group spoke.

“I’ll show you what I’ve got. You make good use of them, I get you more. But you people better get more professional if you want to do any good. The FBI and the CIA aren’t staffed with amateurs.” With a shrug of his shoulders, Warren dropped the backpack, catching it with his right hand as it fell. He undid the flaps and distributed the contents in a line on the ground in front of him.

“These are bombs,” he said. “They’re professionally made, and can be depended on to do what they’re supposed to.”

“Which is what?” Zonya asked.

“Blow up things,” Warren said. He picked up one of the objects and held it in the air in front of him. It was the general size and shape of a cigar box with a brown drafting-paper finish. On the side of the box were two small spring clips for wires to be attached. “You pass a six-volt current through these clips, you blow up a car, a room, a locker, a bank, a few people, whatever. You want to use a couple of lantern batteries if you can, be sure you’ve got enough amperage. One six-volt lantern battery will probably do. A transistor radio battery or four flashlight batteries in series probably won’t.