Black heart, p.23
Black Heart, page 23
Immediately she heard Gottschalk's voice talking and, she crept across the kitchen floor. She reached up for the wall phone, hesitated. She looked around, saw the glass bowl of fruit on the table. Without hesitating, she took a swipe at it with the back of her hand. It flew off the table, crashed to the floor in splintered shards. At almost the same instant she raised her arm to protect her face, Kathleen picked up the receiver off the wall.
'What the hell was that?' she heard Gottschalk bellow down the hall.
'Just me,' she said, carefully covering the phone with her palm. 'I came in for a drink and knocked the fruit bowl over.'
'Well, for Christ sake make sure you pick up every piece. I don't want to find one in the sole of my foot tonight.'
'All right.' She heard him back on the phone. 'Just someone
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mucking around. You tell him I'd like some assurances, that's
all.'
'I'm not an idiot,' the voice on the other end of the line said.
Kathleen strained to make it out.
'But your heart's not in it,' Gottschalk said. 'That's every bit as dangerous. I cannot understand why he insists on using you.'
'Because I'm his son,' the second, lighter voice replied. 'He doesn't trust anyone else. Would you?'
'I wouldn't even trust my son ... if I had one.' He laughed. 'I don't trust my own wife.'
'Must be some kind of marriage.'
'Don't get so cute with me, sonny,' Gottschalk snapped. 'We'll see how long you're doing this after I talk to Macomber!'
'Jesus!' The other voice came back hushed, filled with an odd kind of fear. 'What're you doing? No names! Jesus Christ! He's
my father."
Kathleen could hear Gottschalk breathing hard into the phone; he was making no effort to disguise it. 'That's what you get for needling me, you little snot nose. Anyway' his voice had regained its composure 'this cloak-and-dagger business is a load of manure. Who the hell is going to bug this line without my knowing it, huh? I have it swept twice a week.' He took a breath. 'Just do your job and leave the psychology to the experts. Just get the message straight.' The voice on the other end repeated it and Gottschalk hung up.
In the kitchen, Kathleen carefully replaced the receiver as slowly as she dared. She did not want Gottschalk blundering into her as he came back down the hallway. When she estimated it had gone down far enough in the cradle she let go. It swung there, a wagging yellow finger admonishing her.
Christ, she thought, staring at her hands. They were trembling with excitement. She had stumbled across the secret. She paused to look at it logically but that would not work. Outwardly Gottschalk and Macomber espoused different sides of the political pinwheel. She shook her head. Powerful as Gottschalk was, he could not do it alone; no one could. The image of the President as a lone heroic figure making lonely decisions was one that belonged only to the imagination.
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Kathleen had been around Washington all her life and she (cnew the banal truth: it was everyone else who made your decisions for you and no matter who you were when you were elected, you were a dedicated centrist when you left. It was the office itself that battered you down to size. The good men survived and even prospered beneath the staggering weight. The others came away defeated, old before their time. And Kathleen, fixed as she was towards power, could not understand the lust men had to become President.
She laughed to herself. What was the saying? There are no brilliant Presidents, only providential decisions.
She went back and using a wet towel picked up the broken glass. Then she went out the door. Night had swept in while they had been inside. The crickets droned on as the heat continued unabated.
Damn! She thought. She turned back towards the house as if she could see through the walls. Maybe he will be President after all, she thought wonderingly. And it will be me he takes to Camp David. She knew she had just scratched the surface and she had no idea of where it would lead her. But one thing she was quite certain of: the alliance of Atherton Gottschalk and Delmar Davis Macomber was a potent one indeed.
Lauren was at the barre, one hand lightly placed on its wooden length, slightly in front of her elbow. 'The barre,' Stanilya, her first dance instructor, had said, 'allows you to concentrate on one movement at a time. This is essential because you must build them one at a time. But more, it allows you to develop a quiet discipline so that you can explode into motion from a position of absolute motionlessness.' And because under Martin's tutelage, her leaps had become even more spectacular in both their height and their illusion of weightlessness, she never forgot these basics.
She went to the fifth position as soon as she had warmed up because in this position her body's weight was directly over her foot. She had learned long ago not to use the barre as a support ~ 3 common habit among young students and a difficult one to get out of- and to keep the balance within herself.
2I9
She began with plifs, working up through the feet, to batte. ments tendus, into the knees, battements jrappts; hips, grands batte. ments, to stomach and back, d&velopph and stretches. As she did so, she alternated slow and fast, the one for strength and control the other for execution.
By the time she got to 'turn-out', she was satisfied and she turned her body to the opening steps of the new choreography Martin had created for her. She went neatly through a threecombination into turns on point, sustaining the elevation as the turns became slower and slower.
The section ended with a triple line of pas de chat, modified in Martin's brilliant fashion so that the legs crossed in midair and, by tightening the leg muscles up towards the crotch at the height of the arc of the leap, gave the impression of the dancer being suspended in flight.
Several of the younger girls soloists - paused in their own work to watch her and wonder among themselves when they would be able to perform the pas de chat with such precision and elan. One of them, a willowy blonde who had not been with the company long enough to work up sufficient inhibitions, approached Lauren then, asking her advice about a stone bruise she had developed from holding fifth position in the extraordinarily tight fashion Martin had dictated so slippage would
be to third, not first.
Lauren was happy to help; she felt little of the almost painfully sharp jealousy many of the other principals felt at the rise of younger talented dancers. Perhaps it was only because her memory was better than theirs; she could not forget scenes after auditions at the American Ballet School when frail little girls, crushed by their failures, would curl up in a corner, weeping uncontrollably into their raised hands, their whiplike bodies trembling like lost animals.
In any event, Lauren respected talent; because she recognized her own, she was not frightened of it in others.
Yet when the young blonde left her side, she found herself inexplicably depressed and, staring into the mirrored wall, she recalled the stone bruise she had once had - an ugly thing which Bobby had persisted in making fun of. She wanted so much then
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to bring to mind the good memories of him but what surfaced was vastly different.
A summer's afternoon filled with pelting rain and blue lightning. There was nothing to do - all of the day's bright plans cancelled: no picnic with the Levitts, no swimming in Water jViill's salty surf, no sandy tunafish sandwiches and Hostess cupcakes, her favourite meal at the time. Instead, she had been pent up in the old rambling beach house with Bobby.
She had been twelve; Bobby was ten-and-a-half. He was introspective and, she thought, dumb. He wanted to read and sit around while she spent her time working at her dance. Already her body was becoming a finely tuned instrument with which, she found, she could do anything she set out to do.
It was not only her technique that thrilled her instructor but her discipline. 'I've never encountered such unflagging diligence in a child of Lauren's age,' she had told Adele one day after class. Lauren had been so very proud of that singing moment. She replayed it again and again in her mind until it became her favourite movie.
Yet she longed for a more normal life with friends and parties to go to, real films to see and sundaes to be consumed. She had to be content with living all of that through Bobby. She could not do it and she could not change herself. So she did the only thing that seemed to make her feel less bad. She tormented him.
She teased him about his reading, the smell of sweat on him, his rumpled clothes and, especially, his body. Lauren was already an expert on bodies and fitness. To her way of thinking, Bobby was a little weasel with his thin, undermuscled white body. She laughed when she saw it and poked the end of her finger into his soft flesh.
She would watch him eating six slices of white toast smeared with melting butter and groan inwardly. If she had done such a thing on the same regular basis he did, she would be a blimp overnight. He ate and ate and never got fat. He demolished calories as if they were pennies.
Yet they had - as almost all siblings do - their moments of quiet and love when Lauren would read to him at bedtime about King Arthur and his Court or The Adventures of Robin Hood by
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< py,e, OT ** «M *~*££Z*£Z££
birthday and unexpectedly find a card tor P B y
handmade by him. ftprno0n with their parents gone
But that stormy summer ^^Thad happened. Somefor the day and nothing to do, something naa n
thing awful and irretrievable. watching The Dick
Lauren had left Bobby in front of the l v w *
Van Dyke Shou,, Mary Tyler ^^^SS^S her out onto the ^J^tTfoSmre felt too damp and the metal mesh and the outdoo^^ overcast day and sodden to sit on. She stared out at thedrnn hfi h
thought about the surf breaking across her chest a
strikfng the tops «Ff^JS?^^£
toasted almonds. She did .somV"e^ of spins. But,
reaUy thinking about technique thendidcoup P ^
off-balance, she was obliged to reach out to P
beam. It was slick with moisture and, ^^5 Pd
she abruptly had had enough. She headed back inside get
diet cola. commercial for Pep-
Bobby was not in front of the set; jV^hen, opened the sodent toothpaste was on. She wen unto,**£chen P ^ refrigerator. There s no diet cola, no d^et sod y^ ^
She rummaged through the shelves «* |°T pitcher of ice8d coffee. Two sealed bottles o^f «^me wa.^ ^ If she wanted the diet cola, she d have= ««8 ,
weather for it. But then again, she reasoned, the store w three short blocks away. She decided togo^ ^^ was
On the TV, the second act of The Dick Van y ^
m.^wa.injaawitha^^^^P^^M, how he got there to an angry Laura, oouuy
*£S±E« d. ha«, J * ""fn^ed'S and stopped ,hor, A,,.*-*"* ~2^taS. «? diet cola flew out of her mind, bhe saw D , ^ m
^J^^^^V-Sl^
s^ss^^^s^^*^
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waist band, pulled outward experimentally. He stared at the double inset panel at the crotch.
It struck a spark inside Lauren. She was incensed. She felt simultaneously violated and humiliated. But all she knew at the moment was anger. She strode across the room in three lithe strides, ripped the pants out of Bobby's hands.
He looked up at her, terrified, opened his mouth. 'But '
Lauren slapped him as hard as she could. Taken unawares, his head snapped around on its thin neck and he staggered against the dresser. His stockinged feet slid along the waxed linoleum and he fell on his hip at her feet. He began to cry.
Oddly, this angered Lauren even more. 'Baby!' she cried, tears of outrage spun from her. 'You're nothing but a baby!' She flung her panties back in their drawer, slammed it closed with the heels of both hands. She loomed over her brother. 'Don't you ever, ever go through my things again, Baby! If you do, you'll be sorry, I promise you!'
She hauled him up to his feet. 'Now get out of here and don't you come in again! Ever! Do you understand me?'
Bobby understood. He never asked her to read to him at jedtime again.
Then it went well.'
'Exceptionally well. He bowed before the inevitability of his Pate. He was humbled by it.'
Khieu smiled. 'That is good.'
Macomber had always felt that the world blossomed wlien Khieu smiled. There was a peculiar power in that expression he was incapable of denning. Many others were affected by it, he bew, especially women.
'Harlan Esterhaas is an important link for us; he controls the Armed Services Committee. Now we control him. It pleases me that there were no problems.' Khieu moved but made no sound as he did so. The scent of incense perfumed the air; he had just completed his evening prayers.
Macomber turned his head. There was a restlessness in the other. Quietly, almost gently, he said, 'Khieu, what is it?' He ojtowed the other's movements with his eyes.
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'I am ashamed,' Khieu said, stopping suddenly. 'Senator Burke's ... unavailability rests on my shoulders.'
'Forget Burke. I don't think I could have done a more forceful selling job than you did. Time was of the essence ... we split our targets. If there is a fault, it lies in the system. It kicked out his name, after all.' He smiled. It's worked out for the best anyway. Our replacement will serve the angka far better than Burke ever could. Jack Sullivan, the Republican senator who heads the Select Intelligence Committee. The delay has been beneficial - he's ripe for us now.'
'And what about Richter?'
Macomber thought about that for a moment. 'I think his old man's a dead end for him. And where's he got to go after that? There's nothing left for him to go on. We leave him alone for the time being. I mustn't get too close to him and if we have to take him out it must be a one-time affair.'
Their eyes locked. 'I understand.'
Macomber nodded. 'Good.' His long forefinger stroked the impeccable line of his moustache. 'Still that bug is a loose end. Soon, I think, you'll have to devise a way in there to retrieve it.'
'I doubt that will present any special problems.'
'Otherwise, we're on schedule for the angka''s timetable.'
'Gottschalk will be pleased to hear that. He's asked us through Eliott for confirmation.'
Macomber grunted. 'Well, have Eliott give him the okay. He's got all the information by now, hasn't he?'
'All of it, yes.'
Macomber had, of course, first asked the system to amass psychological profiles on the politicos he had met who he felt might be presidential material. There were five of them but the system soon reduced that figure to a majority of one: Atherton Gottschalk. Then and only then did he make his offer. He did it slowly, a piece at a time, being careful to use what he had learned about the man, choosing an approach to slide Gottschalk into his current position. Macomber told him only as much as he needed to know in order to make his decision. Just like a tailor-made suit, it made Gottschalk comfortable and, after all, Macomber had learned that comfort was next to pliancy.
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V
During his tour of duty in Southesast Asia Macomber had also learned to cover every angle, even those that seemed remote possibilities at the time. And so he hj*d returned to his investigation, turning up facts here and there, extracting them, placing them in what he called Red Files i»j a safety deposit box at a midtown Citibank branch. 'Operation Sultan' had made him most cautious.
Not that he really expected there to be problems with Gottschalk; the system would not have picked him, otherwise. But then again, it had chosen Roland Burke. Macomber had to admit that when it came to people he did not fully trust any computer system. They were merely programmed morons; they could not actually think and certainly could not weigh intangibles.
So he had managed to get two reels of Super 8mm film complete with a highly illuminating soundtrack - depicting Atherton Gottschalk and Kathleen Christian in the midst of some steamy activities that were definitely not presidential in nature.
'Then he knows just what to do with it.'
Macomber stood with one hand On the iron frame of the window, looking down at the joggers circumnavigating Gramercy Park. He did not mind that kind of activity. Fitness was something he understood quite well.
It occurred to him to reward Khieu's intuitiveness but he had to restrain that part of him, knowing that the other would take offence at such a gesture. The fact that Khieu was keeping Joy occupied had not escaped his notice. Far from being angry, he was delighted. His physical attraction towards her had quickly dwindled away. But since he wished to do nothing to anger her brother, he had begun to leave the house more often, throwing the two of them together. He had counted on Khieu's magnetism, fuelled by Joy's loneliness, And of course Khieu's peculiarly Oriental sense of loyalty. Neither had disappointed him and he was satisfied.
'Turn on the TV,' he said, 'it's almost five o'clock.' He was an inveterate early news watcher. The late-breaking items he savoured in detail the morning after via the New York Times. There was Dan Rather, his face looking lined and white and
B-H.-H
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Macomber said, 'What the hell's going on? Turn up the sound will you.'
The graphic behind the newscaster was a black-and-white photo of an eagle-faced man in a black-bordered inset.
'... recap,' Rather was saying. 'Lieutenant Colonel Roger DeWitt, the American military attache, in Cairo for talks with President Mubarak, has been shot dead by unidentified gunmen. Reports are still sketchy as to details but sources indicate at this time that at least three assailants were involved.'
Rather glanced down at the sheaf of papers on the desk in front of him. 'Just moments ago in Beirut, a terrorist group known as the Lebanese Revolutionary Faction, issued a statement apparently claiming responsibility for the assassination.
'In Cairo, President Mubarak has called the killing "dastardly". He went on to call on the mobilization of the Egyptian military in an attempt to find Lieutenant Colonel DeWitt's murderers.
