Jailbird (13 page)

I was unsurprised. I did think, though, that he might recognize the voice from inside the prison, which we could all hear so clearly now. It was the voice of his closest Watergate coconspirator, Emil Larkin, singing at the top of his lungs the Negro spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”

Greathouse had no time to show his reaction to the
voice, for a fighter plane leaped up from the tip of a nearby runway, tore the sky to shreds. This was a gut-ripping sound to anyone who had not heard it and heard it and heard it before. There was never a warning build-up. It was always an end-of-the-world explosion overhead.

Greathouse and the lawyers and the chauffeur flung themselves to the ground. Then they got up again, cursing and laughing and dusting themselves off. Greathouse, supposing correctly that he was being watched and sized up by people he could not see, made some boxing feints and looked up into the sky as though to say, clowningly, “Send me another one. I’m ready this time.” The party did not advance on the prison, however. It waited by the limousine, expecting some sort of welcoming party. Greathouse wanted, I imagine, one last acknowledgment of his rank in society on neutral ground, a sort of surrender at Appomattox, with the warden as Ulysses S. Grant and himself as Robert E. Lee.

But the warden wasn’t even in Georgia. He would have been there if he had had any advance notice that Greathouse was going to surrender on this particular day. But he was in Atlantic City, addressing a convention of the American Association of Parole Officers up there. So it was finally Clyde Carter, the spit and image of President Carter, who came out of the front door a few steps and motioned to them.

Clyde smiled. “You all come in,” he said.

So in they went, with the chauffeur bringing up the rear, carrying two valises made of buttery leather and a
matching case for toiletries. Clyde relieved him of the bags at the threshold, told him politely to return to the limousine.

“You won’t be needed in there,” said Clyde.

So the chauffeur got back into the limousine. His name was Cleveland Lawes, a garbling of the name of the man I had ruined, Leland Clewes. He had only a grammar-school education, but he read five books a week while waiting for people, mostly RAMJAC executives and customers and suppliers. Because he had been captured by the Chinese during the Korean War, and had actually gone to China for a while and worked as a deckhand on a coastwise steamer in the Yellow Sea, he was reasonably fluent in Chinese.

Cleveland Lawes was reading
The Gulag Archipelago
now, an account of the prison system in the Soviet Union by another former prisoner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

So there I was all alone on a bench in the middle of nowhere again. I entered a period of catatonia again—staring straight ahead at nothing, and every so often clapping my old hands three times.

If it had not been for that clapping, Cleveland Lawes tells me now, he would never have become curious about me.

But I became his business by clapping my hands. He had to find out why I did it.

Did I tell him the truth about the clapping? No. It was too complicated and silly. I told him that I had been daydreaming about the past, and that whenever I remembered
an especially happy moment, I would lift my hands from my lap, and I would clap three times.

He offered me a ride into Atlanta.

And there I was now, after only half an hour of freedom, sitting in the front seat of a parked limousine. So far so good.

And if Cleveland Lawes had not offered me a ride into Atlanta, he would never have become what he is today, personnel director of the Transico Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. Transico has limousine services and taxicab fleets and car-rental agencies and parking lots and garages all over the Free World. You can even rent furniture from Transico. Many people do.

I asked him if he thought his passengers would mind my coming along to Atlanta.

He said that he had never seen them before, and that he never expected to see them again—that they did not work for RAMJAC. He added the piquant detail that he had not known that his chief passenger had been Virgil Greathouse until the arrival at the prison. Until that moment Greathouse had been disguised by a false beard.

I craned my neck for a look into the backseat, and there the beard was, with one of its wire earloops hooked over a door handle.

Cleveland Lawes said as a joke that he wasn’t sure Greathouse’s lawyers would come back out again. “When they were looking over the prison,” he said, “seemed to me they were trying it on for size.”

He asked me if I had ever ridden in a limousine before.
For simplicity’s sake I told him, “No.” As a child of course, I had often ridden beside my father in the front seat of Alexander Hamilton McCone’s various limousines. In my youth, as I was preparing for Harvard, I had often ridden in the backseat with Mr. McCone, with a glass partition between myself and my father. The partition had not seemed strange or even suggestive to me at the time.

And when in Nuremberg I had been master of that grotesque Fafner of a Mercedes touring car. But it had been an open car, freakish even without the bullet holes in the trunk lid and the rear windshield. The status it gave me among the Bavarians was that of a pirate—in temporary possession of stolen goods that would certainly be restolen, again and again. But, sitting there outside the prison, I realized that I had not sat in a real limousine for perhaps forty-five years! As high as I had risen in public service, I had never been entitled to a limousine, had never been within three promotions of having one of my own or even the occasional use of one. Nor had I ever so beguiled a superior who had one that he had said to me, “Young man—I want to talk to you more about this. You come in my car with me.”

Leland Clewes, on the other hand, though not entitled to one of his own, was forever riding around in limousines with adoring old men.

No matter.

Calm down.

Cleveland Lawes commented that I sounded like an educated man to him.

I admitted to having gone to Harvard.

This allowed him to tell me about his having been a prisoner of the Chinese communists in North Korea, for the Chinese major in charge of his prison had been a Harvard man. The major would have been about my age, and possibly even a classmate, but I had never befriended any Chinese. According to Lawes, he had studied physics and mathematics, so I would not have known him in any case.

“His daddy was a big landlord,” said Lawes. “When the communists came, they made his daddy kneel down in front of all his tenants in the village, and then they chopped off his head with a sword.”

“But the son could still be a communist—after that?” I said.

“He said his daddy really had been a very bad landlord,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “that’s Harvard for you, I guess.”

This Harvard Chinese befriended Cleveland Lawes and persuaded him to come to China instead of going back home to Georgia when the war was over. When he was a boy, a cousin of Lawes had been burned alive by a mob, and his father had been dragged out of his house one night and horsewhipped by the Ku Klux Klan, and he himself had been beat up twice for trying to register to vote, right before the Army got him. So he was easy prey for a smooth-talking communist. And he worked for two years, as I say, as a deckhand on the Yellow Sea. He said that he fell in love several times, but that nobody would fall in love with him.

“So that was what brought you back?” I asked.

He said it was the church music more than anything else. “There wasn’t anybody to sing with over there,” he said. “And the food,” he said.

“The food wasn’t any good?” I said.

“Oh, it was good,” he said. “It just wasn’t the kind of food I like to talk about.”

“Um,” I said.

“You can’t just eat food,” he said. “You’ve got to talk about it, too. And you’ve got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.”

I congratulated him on having learned Chinese, and he replied that he could never do such a thing now. “I know too much now,” he said. “I was too ignorant then to know how hard it was to learn Chinese. I thought it was like imitating birds. You know: You hear a bird make a sound, then you try to make a sound just like that, and see if you can’t fool the bird.”

The Chinese were nice about it when he decided that he wanted to go home. They liked him, and they went to some trouble for him, asking through circuitous diplomatic channels what would be done to him if he went home. America had no representatives in China then, and neither did any of its allies. The messages went through Moscow, which was still friendly with China then.

Yes, and this black, former private first class, whose military specialty had been to carry the base-plate of a heavy mortar, turned out to be worth negotiations at the highest diplomatic levels. The Americans wanted him back in order
to punish him. The Chinese said that the punishment had to be brief and almost entirely symbolic, and that he had to be returned nearly at once to ordinary civilian life—or they would not let him go. The Americans said that Lawes would of course be expected to make some sort of public explanation of why he had come home. After that, he would be court-martialed, given a prison sentence of under three years and a dishonorable discharge, with forfeiture of all pay and benefits. The Chinese replied that Lawes had given his promise that he would never speak against the People’s Republic of China, which had treated him well. If he was to be forced to break that promise, they would not let him go. They also insisted that he serve no prison time whatsoever, and that he be paid for the time he spent as a prisoner of war. The Americans replied that he would have to be jailed at some point, since no army could allow the crime of desertion to go unpunished. They would like to jail him prior to his trial. They would sentence him to a term equal to the time he had spent as a prisoner of war, and deduct the time he had spent as a prisoner of war, and send him home. Back pay was out of the question.

And that was the deal.

“They wanted me back, you know,” he told me, “because they were so embarrassed. They couldn’t stand it that even one American, even a black one, would think for even a minute that maybe America wasn’t the best country in the world.”

I asked him if he had ever heard of Dr. Robert Fender,
who was convicted of treason during the Korean War, and was right inside the prison there, measuring Virgil Greathouse for a uniform.

“No,” he said. “I never kept track of other people in that kind of trouble. I never felt like it was a club or something.”

I asked him if he had ever seen the legendary Mrs. Jack Graham, Jr., the majority stockholder in The RAMJAC Corporation.

“That’s like asking me if I’ve seen God,” he said.

The widow Graham had not been seen in public, at that point, for about five years. Her most recent appearance was in a courtroom in New York City, where RAMJAC was being sued by a group of its stockholders for proofs that she was still alive. The accounts in the papers amused my wife so, I remember. “This is the America I love,” she said. “Why can’t it be like this all the time?”

Mrs. Graham came into the courtroom without a lawyer, but with eight uniformed bodyguards from Pinkerton, Inc., a RAMJAC subsidiary. One of them was carrying an amplifier with a loudspeaker and a microphone. Mrs. Graham was wearing a voluminous black caftan with its hood up, and with the hood pinned shut with diaper pins, so that she could peek out, but nobody could see what was inside. Only her hands were visible. Another Pinkerton was carrying an inkpad, some paper, and a copy of her fingerprints from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Her prints had been forwarded to the F.B.I. after she was convicted
of drunken driving in Frankfort, Kentucky, in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-two, soon after her husband died. She had been put on probation at that time. I myself had just been fired from government service at that time.

The amplifier was turned on, and the microphone was slipped inside her caftan, so people could hear what she was saying in there. She proved she was who she said she was by fingerprinting herself on the spot and having the prints compared with those possessed by the F.B.I. She said under oath that she was in excellent health, both physically and mentally—and in control of the company’s top officers, but never face-to-face. When she instructed them on the telephone, she used a password to identify herself. This password was changed at irregular intervals. At the judge’s request, I remember, she gave a sample password, and it seemed so full of magic that it still sticks in my mind. This was it: “shoemaker.” Every order she gave on the phone was subsequently confirmed by mail, by a letter written entirely by her own hand. At the bottom of each letter was not only her signature, but a full set of prints from her eight little fingers and two little thumbs. She called them that: “… my eight little fingers and my two little thumbs.”

That was that. Mrs. Jack Graham was unquestionably alive, and now she was free to disappear again.

“I’ve seen Mr. Leen many times,” said Cleveland Lawes. He was speaking of Arpad Leen, the very public and communicative president and chairman of the board of directors of The RAMJAC Corporation. He would become
my boss of bosses, and Cleveland Lawes’s boss of bosses, too, when we both became corporate officers of RAMJAC. I say now that Arpad Leen is the most able and informed and brilliant and responsive executive under whom it has ever been my privilege to serve. He is a genius at acquiring companies and keeping them from dying afterward.

He used to say, “If you can’t get along with me, you can’t get along with anybody.”

It was true, it was true.

Lawes said that Arpad Leen had come to Atlanta and been Lawes’s passenger only two months before. A cluster of new stores and luxury hotels in Atlanta had gone bankrupt, and Leen had tried to snap it all up for RAMJAC. He had been outbid, however, by a South Korean religious cult.

Lawes asked me if I had any children. I said I had a son who worked for
The New York Times
. Lawes laughed and said that he and my son had the same boss now: Arpad Leen. I had missed the news that morning, so he had to explain to me that RAMJAC had just acquired control of
The New York Times
and all of its subsidiaries, which included the second-largest catfood company in the world.