Back Channel (38 page)

The President looked at his watch. Bundy understood. He wanted to get back to the Oval Office and catch the Security Council debate on television. But they needed a decision first on the ship, and Kennedy would follow his natural inclination to let all sides argue for pretty much as long as they chose.

“If we stop them, we show we mean business,” said Bobby. “We’re calling it a quarantine, but we haven’t actually stopped anybody yet.”

“Fifteen ships have turned back without challenging the line,” McNamara reminded the group. “That’s a bigger victory than one symbolic stop.”

“What about the
Grozny
?” asked the President. “We know it’s carrying military equipment, right?”

“The
Grozny
will be at the blockade line late sometime tomorrow,” McNamara said.

General Taylor wanted to return the conversation to where it had stalled this morning: the possibility of attacking the missile sites.

“I thought we were going to wait on that,” said Gwynn, who was representing State this evening. “I thought the idea was to see how the blockade went first.”

Silence greeted the remark. Poor Gwynn was bewildered. Bundy hid a smile. Yes, the man had made a good point, but it wasn’t his point to make. He didn’t understand his role here. He was somebody’s deputy—not even an undersecretary—and here he was, trying to argue with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bundy gave him high marks for courage but no marks for bureaucratic intelligence.
Maxwell Taylor was the sort who wouldn’t forget, and who would, on some fitter occasion, visit retribution on him.

“Let’s remember this morning’s intelligence brief,” said Taylor, as if Gwynn had never spoken. “Langley’s sources say the Russian antiaircraft crews have orders not to fire on our surveillance planes, right? So we could fly in bombers at high altitude. The Russians would think it was a reconnaissance mission. They wouldn’t know it was an attack until the bombs were falling.”

“At which point they’d fire back,” said McNamara, clearly irritated.

“I still want to be prepared to go in there at a moment’s notice,” said Kennedy. “How much notice do we need?”

“Half an hour to hit the SAMs.” Taylor always had precise facts at his fingertips, a talent Bundy appreciated. “Two hours to hit the missiles.”

The President nodded. He stood up, and the room with him. “Don’t turn the passenger liner. Let it go.” He glanced at Maxwell Taylor. “But I want a plan to intercept the
Grozny
if it doesn’t turn.”

“What do we do then?” asked Gwynn, once more out of turn: the President had already announced his decision.

“Then we shoot,” said General Taylor.

The President left, and the others filed out in twos and threes. Bundy stood with the attorney general in the private foyer connecting the Cabinet Room and the Oval Office. Two of the three secretarial desks stood empty, typewriters covered for the night. A young woman sat filing behind the third desk, on call in case she was needed.

“Is she seeing Fomin tonight?” asked Bobby.

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard.”

“We need Khrushchev’s answer,” Bobby persisted. “You heard the President in there. He’s wavering. We need something fast, or he’s going to bomb those missile sites.”

“I thought you were in favor of an attack.”

“Devil’s advocate. The President didn’t tell you? He asked me to take that side in the meetings, then wait and see who piles on. I assumed you knew.”

Bundy had his arms crossed. He was peering into the Cabinet Room, where Maxwell Taylor and Curtis LeMay were whispering with CIA Director McCone. Kennedy had been trying for a year and a half to get
the military and the Agency to do a better job of coordinating their efforts. That they seemed to be getting along should have struck the national security adviser as good news.

Only it didn’t. The sight chilled him, though he couldn’t say why.

“Mac? Did you hear me?”

“Sorry, Bobby. Yes. She’ll call when Fomin gets in touch. We have to be patient. Khrushchev is making a momentous decision.”

“So are we. And I don’t know if everybody’s willing to wait.”

And he joined Bundy in watching worriedly as the generals and the spies plotted together.

That night was dinner at the Madisons’: old friends of Nana, who had made her granddaughter promise to visit them while in Washington. Miles Madison was a major in the Marine Corps, a boisterous Jamaican with dreams of becoming a real-estate investor. His wife, Vera, was among Nana’s many godchildren. Vera was from one of what Nana called the old families, and it was her family money that had mainly paid for their rambling house on Sheperd Street, not far from Rock Creek Park, in an enclave of well-to-do Negroes known as the Gold Coast.

Margo arrived, still shaken from her twin encounters, first with Erroll Haar, then with Torie Elden. The secret was obviously out. She rang the doorbell not entirely sure what to expect from so prominent and proper a couple. But the Madisons enfolded her in a warmth so unexpected and reassuring that Margo found herself, within minutes, relaxed and very nearly happy. They were a study in contrast, Miles Madison tall and broad, his wife so delicate you feared to breathe hard in her presence, lest she crumple to dust. But her laugh was full and hearty, belonging to a larger woman.

While Vera got dinner together and the Major, as he was known, chomped on his cigar and took occasional telephone calls in his study, Margo sat on the living-room floor playing with the children, the two-year-old Kimberly and the ten-month-old Marilyn, the pair of them already declared the princesses of a world of colored privilege that Margo had frequently observed but never quite inhabited. A sitter
materialized to put the children to bed while the grown-ups sat down to eat. The Madisons peppered her with questions about job and friends and school, all slightly intrusive without being in the least offensive. Vera told stories about a much younger and rather wilder Claudia Jensen, and on any other occasion Margo would have been riveted. But tonight it was the Major’s descriptions of his work in a bunker beneath the Pentagon that caught her interest. Vera explained that Miles Madison was part of a small group of military men with top security clearances who routed orders and messages around the world.

“If we do go to war over Cuba,” she said, “it will be the Major who transmits the orders.”

Dinner was over; and so was Adlai Stevenson’s address to the United Nations Security Council, which they had watched together. Miles Madison crossed the carpet and turned down the volume knob. He glanced toward the alcove, and Margo realized that he had been waiting until they were alone.

“I’m sending the family to Ohio tomorrow. My wife has people near Cincinnati.” His usually humor-lit face was all at once careworn. The raucous storyteller of an hour ago might never have existed. His tone was grimly serious. “It’s only a precaution, Margo. Just for a few days, I hope. Until this thing blows over, as I’m sure it will.” He was still standing near the television. He cocked his head: in the next room, the phone was ringing. “If it doesn’t, those of us in uniform will have to start earning our pay the hard way.” The sad eyes flicked over her face. “Maybe you should go, too. Not to Garrison,” he added hastily. “That’s not really far enough if …”

He trailed off. Margo was sitting very straight. From studying with Niemeyer, she had this part off pat; the nightmares filled in the rest.

“If there’s a near miss on Manhattan,” she said, voice like straw.

The Major nodded. “Exactly. Sorry. That’s the way it is.” He tilted his head toward the alcove. “You’re welcome to go with Vera and the girls if you want. Cincinnati would be a low-priority target, so you should be safe. Again, it’s just for a few days. I’m sure your internship will wait, and it’s the least I could do for your grandmother. She asked me to keep an eye on you, make sure nothing happened, and, to be honest—”

He shut up at once, because Kimmie came hurtling back into the room, chased by her shrieking sister Marilyn. Their mother bustled in after, somehow stately despite her rush. Tension pinched the long planes of Vera Madison’s elegant face, but she managed a smile.

“The phone is for you, dear,” she said.

It took Margo a moment to realize which of them was being addressed.

The telephone, a blue Trimline, sat on a three-legged table in the alcove. A notepad lay handily beside it, the Bic pen attached with prudent string. Lifting the receiver, Margo caught her reflection in the oval mirror with its pretty gilt trim. Haggard. There was no other word. She was looking haggard, and a decade older than she had a few weeks ago. Pretty soon, it would be “ma’am” instead of “miss.”

If there was a pretty soon.

“Hello,” she ventured.

“Margo, honey, it’s Carol,” the familiar voice gushed. “I’m really sorry to bother you. You said you might be at the Madisons’ tonight, and I thought I’d take a chance.” A beat for the listeners, if any, to work that out. “Anyway, I have to cancel. I can’t do lunch tomorrow. Will Monday work for you?”

For a mad moment Margo found that she couldn’t play her role any more. Major Madison had awakened in her the fears that haunted her dreams, and what she wanted more than anything was to hop on the train to New York, change for Garrison, and hide her head in her grandmother’s skirts; or, better still, her late mother’s. Failing that, she wanted someone to disqualify her, to find a better actress; and better liar. And so, ignoring the lines she had so painstakingly memorized, she answered with great umbrage.

“You called me here to tell me that? Couldn’t it have waited until morning?”

But Carol, whoever she really was, kept her cool. “I’m sorry, honey. I don’t mean to spoil your dinner. If the Monday won’t work, how about next Tuesday?”

“No, no, it’s fine,” said Margo with a theatrical sigh. The plan was really clever, fiction within fiction within fiction: anyone who looked
at her life closely enough to discover that she had no friend Carol would think the calls were arranged by insiders at the White House to cover her affair with Kennedy. Nobody would imagine that she might actually be talking to a Russian spy. “Monday, at the usual place,” she muttered. “I’ll be there.”

“Great,” chirped Carol with the same brightness. “You sound tired, honey. Try to get some rest.”

“Thanks,” said Margo, bitterly, but the other woman had already hung up.

She returned briefly to the parlor. Her hosts were standing near the fireplace, whispering. From their guilty expressions as she entered, Margo knew that the subject was herself.

“Mrs. Madison?”

“Yes, dear?”

“May I use your phone to make another call? I’m sorry.”

Vera smiled indulgently. “Of course, dear. It’s local, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

Margo walked back to the alcove, reviewing her lines. She felt no excitement and no fear. She felt robotic, controlled, spoken for. As she lifted the receiver, she glanced in the mirror again and saw not Vera but the Major standing in the doorway, smoking his cigar, yellowy eyes narrowed as he regarded her thoughtfully. Margo shut her eyes. She had muffed it. She had said the wrong thing, given away the secret—or at least that there was a secret. As soon as she was off the phone, Major Madison would renew his offer to send her to Ohio, and then, when she declined, begin to wonder why. He would ask around, and before too long he would be on the phone to Nana, warning that her innocent little granddaughter was spending a little too much time alone with the President of the United States.

All of this flashed through her mind in an instant, but when her eyes fluttered open again, the Major was gone.

She let her shoulders sag and dialed.

“Yes?” said a growling male voice.

“Is Crystal there?”

“Crystal? Who is this?”

“This is Margo. I’m a friend of hers.”

“I think you have the wrong number.”

“Isn’t this 5502?”

“It’s 5505.”

Click.

She opened her purse, took out the worn address book McCone had given her—full of names and numbers in her handwriting, but penned by others!—and flipped to the “S” page. The code was in the “05.” She added two, making it “07,” and ran her fingers down to the seventh name, someone she’d never met. An address on Brandywine Street. She turned the page, counted seven entries up from the bottom: this time, somebody she did know, a cousin, address on Mayflower Avenue in New Rochelle. The last two digits were a pair of ones.

The car would pick her up on Brandywine Street tonight at eleven.

She had an hour to get down to the restaurant, and then it was back up Connecticut Avenue to meet her driver.

The President would be waiting.

Doris Harrington, too, was out that night. She had dined with a prominent journalistic couple who lived two blocks away. She had tested carefully for relevant rumors, and found none. Now, walking home through the misty Washington night, she could almost imagine that the years were rolling away, and the cobbles of Georgetown were the pavements of Vienna during the war. The teenagers making out in an alley were Gestapo informants; the bus trundling northward on Wisconsin Avenue was the stinking, belching tram; the White Castle restaurant on M Street was a Viennese café where the habitués stayed up half the night playing chess and murmuring revolutionary slogans and state secrets.

What sparked the overlap of memory and reality was a silent scream that told her she was being followed, not just tonight but all the time now. She tried to blame it on Gwynn, but he had neither the cleverness nor the entrepreneurial spirit. Instinct told her that whoever was out there was malevolent. Whoever was out there was also skilled at surveillance, so that she rarely caught anything but the merest breath of their presence.

She walked faster.

“Tell the President that the Comrade General Secretary cannot turn the ship.”