Edge of Eternity (97 page)

Smithy said: ‘Do it, Jack.’

Jack lay on the girl, his big frame hiding most of her slight body. He seemed to be having difficulty penetrating. The other men shouted encouragement and made jokes. Jack gave a powerful thrust, and the girl screamed.

He pumped vigorously for a minute. The mother continued to plead, though Slope did not bother to translate. The father was silent, but Jasper saw tears streaming down his face. Jack grunted a couple of times, then stopped and withdrew. There was blood on the girl’s thighs, bright red on her ivory skin.

Smithy said: ‘Who’s next?’

‘I’ll do her,’ said Donny, unzipping.

Jasper left the temple.

This was not normal. Any pretext of getting the father to talk was now redundant: if he had known anything he would have revealed it before the rape began. Jasper had run out of excuses for the men of this platoon. They were out of control. General Westmoreland had created a monster and deliberately let it loose. They were beyond sanity. They were not even animals; they were worse than that; they were mad, evil fiends.

Neville followed him out. ‘Remember, Jasper,’ he said, ‘this is necessary to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.’

Jasper knew that this was Neville’s way of bearing the unbearable, but all the same he could not stomach Neville’s humour at this moment. ‘Why don’t you shut the fuck up,’ he said, and walked away.

He was not the only one sickened by the scene in the temple. About half the platoon were out here, watching the village burn. A pall of black smoke lay over the village like a shroud. Jasper could hear the girl screaming in the temple, but after a while she stopped. Minutes later, he heard a shot, then another.

But what was he going to do about it? If he made a complaint, nothing would be done except that the army would find ways to punish him for stirring up trouble. But maybe, he thought, he should do it anyway. In any case, he vowed to go back to the States and spend the rest of his life exposing the liars and fools who made this kind of atrocity happen.

Then Donny came out of the temple and approached him. ‘Smithy wants you,’ he said.

Jasper followed the corporal back into the temple.

The girl lay splayed on the floor, a bullet hole in her forehead. Jasper also noticed a bleeding bite mark on her small breast.

The father was dead, too.

The mother was on her knees, begging, presumably, for mercy.

Smithy said: ‘You haven’t lost your cherry yet, Murray.’

He meant that Jasper had not yet committed a war crime.

Jasper knew what was coming.

Smithy said: ‘Shoot the old woman.’

‘Fuck you, Smithy,’ said Jasper. ‘Shoot her yourself.’

Mad Jack raised his rifle and pressed the end of the barrel into the side of Jasper’s neck.

Suddenly everyone was silent and still.

Smithy said: ‘Shoot the old woman, or Jack will shoot you.’

Jasper had no doubt that Smithy was willing to give the order, and that Jack would obey. And he understood why. They needed him to be complicit. Once he had killed the woman he would be as guilty as any of them, and that would prevent him making trouble.

He looked around. All eyes were on him. No one protested or even looked uneasy. This was a rite they had performed before, he could tell. No doubt they did it with every newcomer to the company. Jasper wondered how many men had refused the order, and died. They would have been recorded as killed by enemy fire. No downside.

Smithy said: ‘Don’t take too long making up your mind, we have work to do.’

They were going to kill the woman anyway, Jasper knew. He would not save her by refusing to do it himself. He would be sacrificing his own life for nothing.

Jack prodded him with the rifle.

Jasper raised his M16 and pointed it at the woman’s forehead. She had dark-brown eyes, he saw, and a little grey in her black hair. She did not move away from his gun, or even flinch, but continued pleading in words he could not comprehend.

Jasper touched the selector lever on the left side of the gun, moving it from ‘Safe’ to ‘Semi’, allowing it to fire a single round.

His hands were quite steady.

He pulled the trigger.

Part Six

FLOWER

1968

41

Jasper Murray spent two years in the army, one year of training in the US and one of combat in Vietnam. He was discharged in January 1968 without ever having been wounded. He felt lucky.

Daisy Williams paid for him to fly to London to see his family. His sister Anna was now editorial director of Rowley Publishing. She had at last married Hank Remington, who was proving to be more enduring than most pop stars. The house in Great Peter Street was strangely quiet: the youngsters had all moved out, leaving only Lloyd and Daisy in residence. Lloyd was now a minister in the Labour government and therefore rarely home.

Ethel died that January, and her funeral was held a few hours before Jasper was due to fly to New York.

The service was at the Calvary Gospel Hall in Aldgate, a small wooden shack where she had married Bernie Leckwith fifty years earlier, when her brother, Billy, and countless boys like him were fighting in the frozen mud trenches of the First World War.

The little chapel could seat a hundred or so worshippers, with another twenty or thirty standing at the back; but more than a thousand people turned up to say goodbye to Eth Leckwith.

The pastor moved the service outside and the police closed the street to cars. The speakers got up on chairs to address the crowd. Ethel’s two children, Lloyd Williams and Millie Avery, both in their fifties, stood at the front with most of her grandchildren and a handful of great-grandchildren.

Evie Williams read the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke. Dave and Walli brought guitars and sang ‘I Miss Ya, Alicia’. Half the Cabinet were there. So was Earl Fitzherbert. Two buses from Aberowen brought a hundred Welsh voices to swell the hymn singing.

But most of the mourners were ordinary Londoners whose lives had been touched by Ethel. They stood in the January cold, the men holding their caps in their hands, the women shushing their children, the old people shivering in their cheap coats; and when the pastor prayed for Ethel to rest in peace, they all said Amen.

*  *  *

George Jakes had a simple plan for 1968: Bobby Kennedy would become President and stop the war.

Not all of Bobby’s aides were in favour. Dennis Wilson was happy for Bobby to remain simply the Senator from New York. ‘People will say that we already have a Democratic President and Bobby should support Lyndon Johnson, not run against him,’ he said. ‘It’s unheard of.’

They were at the National Press Club in Washington on 30 January 1968, waiting for Bobby, who was about to have breakfast with fifteen reporters.

‘That’s not true,’ George said. ‘Truman was opposed by Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace.’

‘That was twenty years ago. Anyway, Bobby can’t win the Democratic nomination.’

‘I think he’ll be more popular than Johnson.’

‘Popularity has nothing to do with it,’ Wilson said. ‘Most of the convention delegates are controlled by the party’s power brokers: labour leaders, state governors and city mayors. Men like Daley.’ The mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, was the worst kind of old-fashioned politician, ruthless and corrupt. ‘And the one thing Johnson is good at is in-fighting.’

George shook his head in disgust. He was in politics to defy those old power structures, not give in to them. So was Bobby, in his heart. ‘Bobby will get such a bandwagon rolling in the country that the power brokers won’t be able to ignore him.’

‘Haven’t you talked to him about this?’ Wilson was pretending to be incredulous. ‘Haven’t you heard him say that people will see him as selfish and ambitious if he runs against a Democratic incumbent?’

‘More people think he’s the natural heir to his brother.’

‘When he spoke at Brooklyn College, the students had a placard that said: “Hawk, Dove – or Chicken?”’

This jibe had stung Bobby and dismayed George. But now George tried to put it in an optimistic light. ‘That means they want him to run!’ he said. ‘They know that he’s the only contender who can unite old and young, black and white, and rich and poor, and can get everyone working together to end the war and give blacks the justice they deserve.’

Wilson’s mouth twisted in a sneer but, before he could pour scorn on George’s idealism, Bobby walked in, and everyone sat down to breakfast.

George’s feelings about Lyndon Johnson had undergone a reversal. Johnson had started so well, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and planning the War on Poverty. But Johnson failed to understand foreign policy, as George’s father, Greg, had forecast. All Johnson knew was that he did not want to be the President who lost Vietnam to the Communists. Consequently, he was now hopelessly enmeshed in a dirty war and dishonestly telling the American people he was winning it.

The words had also changed. When George was young, ‘black’ was a vulgar term, ‘colored’ was more dainty, and ‘Negro’ was the polite word, used by the liberal
New York Times
, always with a capital letter, like ‘Jew’. Now ‘Negro’ was considered condescending and ‘coloured’ evasive, and everyone talked about black people, the black community, black pride, and even black power. Black is beautiful, they said. George was not sure how much difference the words made.

He did not eat much breakfast: he was too busy making notes of the questions and Bobby’s answers in preparation for a press release.

One of the journalists asked: ‘How do you feel about the pressure on you to run for President?’

George looked up from his notes and saw Bobby give a brief, humourless grin, then say: ‘Badly. Badly.’

George tensed. Bobby was too damn honest sometimes.

The journalist said: ‘What do you think about Senator McCarthy’s campaign?’

He was talking not about the notorious Senator Joe McCarthy who had hunted down Communists in the fifties, but a completely opposite character, Senator Eugene McCarthy, a liberal who was a poet as well as a politician. Two months ago Gene McCarthy had declared his intention of seeking the Democratic nomination, running as the anti-war candidate against Johnson. He had already been dismissed as a no-hoper by the press.

Now Bobby replied: ‘I think McCarthy’s campaign is going to help Johnson.’ Bobby still would not call Lyndon the President. George’s friend Skip Dickerson, who worked for Johnson, was scornful about this.

‘Well, will you run?’

Bobby had lots of ways of not answering this question, a whole repertoire of evasive responses; but today he did not use any of them. ‘No,’ he said.

George dropped his pencil. Where the hell had that come from?

Bobby added: ‘In no conceivable circumstances would I run.’

George wanted to say:
In that case, what the fuck are we all doing here?

He noticed Dennis Wilson smirking.

He was tempted to walk out there and then. But he was too polite. He stayed in his seat and carried on making notes until the breakfast ended.

Back in Bobby’s office on Capitol Hill, he wrote the press release, working like an automaton. He changed Bobby’s quote to: ‘In no foreseeable circumstances would I run,’ but it made little difference.

Three staffers resigned from Bobby’s team that afternoon. They had not come to Washington to work for a loser.

George was angry enough to quit, but he kept his mouth shut. He wanted to think. And he wanted to talk to Verena.

She was in town, and staying at his apartment as always. She now had her own closet in his bedroom, where she kept cold-weather clothes she never needed in Atlanta.

She was so upset she was near tears that evening. ‘He’s all we have!’ she said. ‘Do you know how many casualties we suffered in Vietnam last year?’

‘Of course I do,’ said George. ‘Eighty thousand. I put it in one of Bobby’s speeches, but he didn’t use that part.’

‘Eighty thousand men killed or wounded or missing,’ Verena said. ‘It’s awful – and now it will go on.’

‘Casualties will certainly be higher this year.’

‘Bobby has missed his shot at greatness. But why? Why did he do it?’

‘I’m too angry to talk to him about it, but I believe he genuinely suspects his own motives. He’s asking himself whether he wants this for the sake of his country, or his ego. He’s tormented by such questions.’

‘Martin is too,’ Verena said. ‘He asks himself whether inner-city riots are his fault.’

‘But Dr King keeps those doubts to himself. You have to, as a leader.’

‘Do you think Bobby planned this announcement?’

‘No, he did it on impulse, I’m sure. That’s one of the things that make him difficult to work for.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Quit, probably. I’m still thinking about it.’

They were getting changed to go out for a quiet dinner, and at the same time waiting for the news to come on TV. Tying a wide tie with bold stripes, George watched Verena in the mirror as she put on her underwear.

Her body had changed in the five years since he had first seen her naked. She would be twenty-nine this year, and she no longer had the leggy charm of a foal. Instead, she had gained poise and grace. George thought her mature look was even more beautiful. She had grown her hair in the bushy style called a ‘natural’, which somehow emphasized the allure of her green eyes.

Now she sat in front of his shaving mirror to do her eye make-up. ‘If you quit, you could come to Atlanta and work for Martin,’ she said.

‘No,’ said George. ‘Dr King is a single-issue campaigner. Protesters protest, but politicians change the world.’

‘So what would you do?’

‘Run for Congress, probably.’

Verena put down her mascara brush and turned to look directly at him. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘That came out of left field.’

‘I came to Washington to fight for civil rights, but the injustice suffered by blacks isn’t just a matter of rights,’ George said. He had been thinking about this a long time. ‘It’s about housing and unemployment and the Vietnam War, where young black men are being killed every day. Black people’s lives are affected even by events in Moscow and Peking, in the long term. A man like Dr King inspires people, but you have to be an all-round politician in order to do any real good.’