American Quartet (18 page)

“I should be out there in the street,” he said. “I knew him. I knew his family. His kids.” She could see the sinews in his neck force a swallow. “I should be out there, finding the muvva who wasted him.” He turned to her. “You just don’t know.”

“You think so?”

“How could you . . . damned bitch,” he mumbled. He was, she sensed, reaching for something deep inside of him. She admitted to some brief speculation about his history, but he had been so off-putting and offensive that she had deliberately let it pass, convincing herself instead that he had been hatched from a big black egg, whole and mean. What she knew about him was shorthand. He was a Ranger in Vietnam. He lived alone. He chased women.

“You know why bad is good in ghetto talk?”

She shrugged, stringing along.

“Because good is bad . . .” His voice trembled and she turned away. “You wear this skin, you know. My old man . . .” he swallowed quickly. “He was bad . . . You know what it is to drag yourself out of that shit? You know how many bodies you have to walk over? My mother wouldn’t eat so’s I could become . . . a person. You know who the real enemy is. Not you honkies. You’re all just turd, subhuman. The real enemy is those niggers, killers, junkies, robbers . . .” His voice trailed off. She wanted to reach out, to comfort him. I feel your agony. She wanted him to know that.

But suddenly the car was speeding up Canal Road, along the Potomac. The speedometer climbed as they crossed the border into Maryland. Still she said nothing.

When the car turned off into a side dirt road, she became uneasy and began to finger her piece, hanging in its holster.

“Calm down, Frank,” she said gently, as she had been taught to handle people caught in the whirlpool of rage. “We’re out of our jurisdiction.”

Ignoring her, he drove the car to the end of the bumpy road. She sensed that he had been here before. The dirt road ended at the edge of a clump of evergreens, through which she could see a narrow trial. Abruptly, he stopped the car and rushed out, heading into the woods. For a moment the illogic of his action stunned her and she sat in the car, uncomprehending and confused.

The vaguely familiar sound, like the boom of a bass drum, roused her.

“No, Jefferson!” Her voice was stuck somewhere in the base of her throat. She ran into the woods drawing her revolver. As she ran, she heard the boom again, alleviating her panic. At least he hadn’t shot himself.

He was standing on the bank of the river, firing the Magnum in a rhythmical beat at a spot on the Virginia side. The target was a small clump of saplings, each splitting apart as his deadly shots ripped at them.

He stood stiffly, showing no emotion, his feet planted firmly, his body braced against the recoil. He fired round after round until the saplings were totally destroyed. Calmly he observed the wreckage for a few moments, then slipped the Magnum back into his holster.

“Feel better?”

He grunted and they got back into the car. “That’s one way to throw away your career,” she said after a while. The car seemed to slow down and she could sense that he was, at last, mastering his rage.

“You’re not the only one with feelings around here. You haven’t got a patent on anger. It’s my career, too.” When he didn’t respond, she felt her own emotions take hold. “It’s not worth it. You’ve worked too hard.” She reached out and touched his arm. When he didn’t flinch, she increased the pressure. He did not talk for a long time. Finally he turned and looked at her.

“I got to work to get it under control,” he said calmly.

“I know.”

“Do you?” he snapped, lips curling.

“Maybe you should put that energy to better use.”

“Like what?” He looked at her and she saw the old lasciviousness.

“Like what I told you about.” She paused, wondering if he understood. She had thrown the pebble in the pond.

“You mean about the others?” She could see the ripples begin.

“They could be all connected.” His silence encouraged her and she continued.

“The MO. Random selection. The killer just upped and pumped the bullets in at close range. Temple was a desk cop. He had no enemies. Hadn’t made an arrest in years.”

“The ammo doesn’t tally,” he said flatly, his attitude suddenly professional. “The gun was a thirty-eight Special. S. and W. Victory model. The barrel was sawed down. The ammo recent vintage, maybe fifteen years.”

“Not bad for a guy not working on the case. It also wasn’t connected with a public building. Temple was shot in the street.” She was reversing roles now, drawing in the hook.

“But the time frame. I drove it last night. About half an hour. They were thirty-five minutes apart.” Strangely, the ghetto inflections had disappeared.

“And all four with different weapons,” she pressed.

He shrugged. “Maybe there’s four of them out there.”

“Maybe.”

“Four white men. It’s a white man’s crime, Jefferson.” She watched him flinch again.

It was, she knew, statistically right. Blacks weren’t good at mass killings. They got caught too early. And the motivation was different. Usually money. Addiction. Domestic anger. Transparent rage. This was more complex, beyond explanation. All she had to go on was intuition. She wouldn’t dare mention that.

“White killer. Black victim. That turn you on, Jefferson?”

The car lurched, heading east on the Beltway.

“We got a natural to investigate,” he said, and remained silent until the car turned again, going south on Connecticut Avenue.

“If it connects,” he said, “I gotta see more.”

“Suppose I force it?”

“I gotta see more,” he repeated.

The car moved in fits through traffic.

“You’re one hell of a shot, Jefferson,” she said, strangely elated. “A real killer.”

BECAUSE
those who attended the inaugural balls were always disappointed, Remington kept open house from ten o’clock on. Engraved invitations were sent to various ambassadors and politicians who were certain to troop in with horror stories about crowds and traffic. He had gone to the Kennedy ball at the Armory in a snowstorm, but he had the box next to the Kennedys and Jack had waved and Jackie blown a kiss. Even the old man had punched him in the arm. Remington had loved it, but after the assassination it was never the same again. He went to the first Nixon ball, came home disgusted, and never went again.

Three liquor bars were placed strategically around the house and in addition to the usual buffet, he had set up a special bar with three professional omelet makers on continuous duty. This was, after all, to be a gala celebration in more ways than one.

The past two months had been euphoric. Nothing could ruffle his calm. He slept like a baby. Eagerly, he had read the accounts of the police investigation, until they faded from the papers. It was amusing, too, to see how the newspapers had concentrated more on the killing of the policeman than on the sniper. The fools. They had missed the main point. Poor Officer Temple. A tiny footnote to history. How could he have been more obvious, leaving them three spent cartridges from a 6.5 millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano, manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company of East Alton, Illinois. More proof of their ignorance.

He also regretted not getting the angle right, although the ninety-yard distance was reasonably close. But the car wasn’t open on top and he couldn’t quite fire from behind, although he would have loved to have read the autopsy report to find out how close he had come. The fools. It should be as plain as the noses on their faces. What it proved was that we were a country without any sense of history. That’s why we were doomed. That’s why he could never have been President. His sense of history was too profound.

“It is preordained,” his mother had assured him. “Meant to be.” But the divine forces had changed their minds at the last moment, saving him for what would come later. He would show them all how vulnerable we had become as a nation. How our leadership would grow weaker. How the Presidency would fail! It was his mission to reverse this decline.

He waited now for the last signs to come, the ultimate signals. Every sensor in his being was tuned in to pick them up. They would come of their own accord, as the others had come. Yet, they had merely been dress rehearsals for the main event.

During the swearing-in ceremonies, he had sat a number of rows behind the President on the Capitol steps, a reward for his fundraising efforts. He was probably visible in the photographs, another footnote to history, and archivists would one day pore over them with a magnifying glass looking for his face. This is the man that saved America, they would say.

Before he dressed, he studied the photograph of Lincoln’s swearing-in. It was the first photograph ever taken of that event. Lincoln and the crowd behind him looked blurred, but an astute eye could see that the tall man in the stovepipe hat, looking wan and tired, was marked for death. Hadn’t Wilkes himself been in that crowd?

It was appropriate that the cosmic presence had urged him to do Lincoln last. Wasn’t he the last great leader, the Emancipator, the one who preserved the American nation as God had meant it to be? Were we one day doomed to be a splintered nation again, torn apart irrevocably by decadence, alien creeds, indifference, selfishness, greed? The nation craved the historical reminders he was being ordained to recreate.

Each mission accomplished had brought him one step closer. The day would come when the world would understand what he had achieved. I am tolling the bells, he told his images in the mirrors. There was one spot in the room where bits of his reflected image could be seen on every mirror at once. They were like people, seeing him differently. Only one had ever truly seen him whole.

“Mother! See me.” He stood, as he always did in that spot, naked, revealing himself to her. He watched that part of him grow, pulsate with life, the blood surge. “My young god,” she had told him. He had watched her eyes, lashes fluttering, felt her sweet soft touch gently on his flesh, the ecstasy so moving that the joy of it, the residual wonder of it, would stay with him for a lifetime. Even now, he felt it; could recall it at will.

“You mustn’t ever,” she had told him. He had stood before her, contrite, humiliated, ashamed. The gardener’s boy. She had seen them at it. The boy was pretty, with large sad eyes that would stare out with longing as he helped his father trim the hedges, rake the flower beds around their pool.

Young Tad, as he referred to himself even then, had invited the boy for a swim. It was, he knew, even then a powerful unnatural force, leaving him without will. It was dusk, the sun glowing golden in a display of California spring and he had told the boy that there was no need of bathing suits, not then with darkness coming. Hadn’t he shown him by removing his own clothes? The boy had hesitated, turning shyly as he removed his shirt and pants, his pink skin glittering in the golden glow, a fleshed reed swaying gently in the warm breeze.

“It’s all right,” he had whispered, still not diving, showing himself, watching the boy’s grow and lift. Time had only deepened the imagery. The boy had come closer, hesitant, moving silently. He had by then grown to his fullest. Young Tad as well. They had simply moved toward each other. The dusk was tardy that night. It was the first time in his life that he had understood the sign. The divine will had simply stopped time so that his mother could see.

On the balcony above the pool, backlit by her dressing mirror, which had caught the last golden spears of the hesitant sunlight, she had seen them. What had brought her to the balcony at exactly that moment? Since it was the first sign, he had naturally puzzled over it. Why had she deliberately waited?

He had seen her only when he had turned; he, a bitch dog in heat, on his hands and knees on the trimmed grass, the gardener’s boy doing him like a giant mastiff, grunting, sweating. By then, neither of them could stop. The gardener’s boy was too busy with his pleasure. It came, young Tad was certain, at exactly that point that he had seen his mother, had met her eyes and seen in them the terror. Young Tad knew, too, that he could never live with that look of terror, that it had to be erased for all time.

She had quickly disappeared inside her room. The darkness had descended like a dropping stone and he seemed at once to be faced with only two alternatives. To throw himself in the pool or go up to her and erase that terror. He chose the latter.

She was sitting quietly, looking into her mirror, staring through tears. He was certain that all she was seeing was the two boys, in their animal squirming, their obscene coupling. In his panic, he had not bothered to put on his bathing suit and he kneeled against her, naked and miserable, a supplicant.

“Forgive me, mama,” he cried, flooding her peignoir. He reached upward, hungering for her embrace. She turned toward him after a while, her cheeks moist, her lips trembling. Briefly, she studied young Tad’s ravaged face, then grasped him to her soft, soothing, billowing breasts. Below her peignoir, she, too, was naked and, surely by divine design, a snowy breast revealed itself and he kissed the hard nipple.

She held him there for a long moment, then lifted him, stretching her arms before his nakedness.

“You mustn’t ever,” she said gently. By then, her peignoir was fully opened.

“My darling boy,” she whispered, her lips touching him. He watched the rising of himself again, not obscene now, pure, cleansing. She lifted her breasts, which formed their own warm caress, around him.

“A man,” she said, looking clearly at him. His hands caressed her soft blonde hair. “My man. You must be a man.”

Standing there, wrapped in her flesh, he felt the floodgates open and the obscenity, the unnatural evil, spill out of him. In its place was his gratitude, his love.

“Oh, mama,” he cried as she held him. Tears of joy came then. He felt the sweet touch of her, her goodness and purity. She stood up and removed her peignoir, showing him her full body in the soft light, the curved womanly form.

“Look at me.” She turned in a complete circle. Then she walked toward her bed, leading him by the hand. She lay back, watching him.

“I am woman,” she said. Her voice was a song. She opened her body to him and, for the first time, he saw what a woman was.

“My baby,” she purred. He hesitated, wanting to stand there forever. He stared at the darkness between her legs until she reached out to touch him and bring him to her.

“Mama. Mama.”

He heard it again. Now! How many times had he said it when she was alive?

“You are a man. My man,” she had cried out.

He heard the words again, gasping out of her, proving his manhood.

“Mama, mama.”

He shuddered, feeling waves of pure joy, the intensity of which would mark him forever. But he knew the pact was made at that moment.

Moving from that spot which replicated his full mirror image, he carefully laid out his tuxedo, his jade studs, his patent leather shoes with the bows, his diaphanous bikini undershorts, lingering over the smooth silky fabric, then laying it neatly on the bed. A long shower calmed him and by the time his guests arrived, he could greet them with complete confidence: with his carefully cultivated charm, the shy self-effacing smile to put them at their ease, the humorous jibe, offering the intimate bonding of peers.

He knew exactly how it was done, the admiring glance for the ladies, the discreet flap of his lashes, the meassured pressure of the handclasp, the brief intensity of serious conversational exchange, revealing a bit of personal, informed knowledge that flattered and reassured them.

“Soon you will be playing ping-pong with computers on your television sets,” he told the Chinese ambassador who arrived, as always with his interpreter and his inscrutable smile.

To a defeated congressman already connected to a major defense contractor, he said: “By the end of the year, you’ll be screaming for tax shelters.” And to his wife, he whispered: “Put it in diamonds. They’re still a girl’s best friend.”

“That’s what I need most,” she agreed with pleasure.

Most of the guests arrived red faced and agitated by the traffic, the crowds and congestion of the various Inaugural balls. When one bar got too crowded, he showed people to the others.

“The President looks marvelous. It’s a wonder he can still smile in that flesh crush,” a senator said, between bits of cheese puffs.

“He must show himself as superior to the discomfort,” Remington said seriously. “A true leader knows what to do.”

“Your house is the only place to be, Tad.” It was the wife of the German ambassador, showing her usual expanse of bosomy flesh, itching as always for a flirtation, and he chose not to discourage her. There was currency in flirtation as well. Everything depended on appearances, mystique that hinted of vast potential gain.

He had invited people new to Washington, politicians and administrators swept in by the winds of change, their eager faces unable to mask their ambition as they wallowed in the trough of power. They came to town in waves, grasping at the coattails of the ultimate manifestation of it, the Presidency.

“It was wonderful. Wonderful.” A newly appointed cabinet minister exulted. “I love it.”

“That’s because you’re one of the stars,” Remington said. The man flushed with happiness and dipped into a glass of champagne.

“We may not be able to get things done. But we’ll sure as hell have fun.”

He had invited members of the press as well, although cameras were strictly forbidden. To a lady from “W,” he was charmingly firm.

“He can come in and drink, but he’ll have to check his camera at the door.” A number of photographers had gathered shivering in the cold, their puffy faces lost in icy vapors. They were like a herd of cattle, magnets to the trappings of power.

“We must remember to feed the animals,” he told the caterer.

“We have an outdoor coffee van for the chauffeurs,” the caterer assured him.

“Those as well,” he said, pointing to the growing knot of reporters and photographers. The caterer scurried off.

“Fantastic as always, Tad.” The voice was familiar and Remington turned to face Bruce Rosen and his girl friend. He shook his hand and embraced his upper arm, then gave Fiona a two-cheeker.

“This guy is going places,” he told her.

“Thanks to you, Tad.” Bruce lowered his voice. “I’m very grateful.” He felt Fiona’s uneasy stare.

“I’ve got a clear shot . . . “

It was Bruce speaking, but Remington’s mind had drifted. A spear of panic jogged him. Shot? He remembered suddenly what kind of work she did. Another sign! Had she worked on any of the cases?

“ . . . at the Senate seat,” Bruce continued.

“We’ll make it,” he murmured, nodding, turning to the girl. Was she probing? Was it his imagination? He shook off the strange sensation, determined to speak with her later.

“Maybe even higher some day. The President,” he said, watching the policewoman’s face.

“Why would anyone want that job?” Fiona asked.

“Because it’s there,” Remington quipped.

“There’s not a man in this room wouldn’t give his right nut for the job,” Bruce said, upending his Scotch.