Lucky Bastard (3 page)

In the most important picture, the skinny young officer sat bare-chested in a hospital bed, grinning broadly, a bottle of beer in his hand and Betty's cap perched on his thick, tousled hair.

Arthur said, “Have you guessed?”

The answer was yes. But I replied, “Guessed what?”

“Jack's secret,” Arthur said. “He thinks he's the love child of John F. Kennedy.”

I took off my reading glasses and examined Arthur's face: a faint smile, a glimmer of triumph, but no sign of a joke.

“I kid you not,” Arthur said.

I examined the pictures again. The quality was poor. They had been taken in feeble light with a cheap camera and inferior wartime film. These defects made them seem all the more authentic, of course.

I said, “Jack thinks this person in the snapshots is JFK?”

“He's certain of it,” Arthur replied. “Read on.”

The next item in the file was a magazine picture of the future president as he had looked in 1944 while recuperating from the injuries he received during the sinking of PT 109. This juvenile JFK was very thin, almost emaciated, but radiant with sexual glamour—just like the smiling young lover in Betty's snapshots.

Arthur said, “Jack thinks the snapshots were left to him by his mother as evidence that John F. Kennedy is his natural father.”

“And you think that's possible?”

“The dates coincide. I researched it myself. PT 109 sank on August second, 1943. Kennedy spent some time in sick bay, then rode back to the States on an aircraft carrier. The carrier docked in San Francisco on January seventh, 1944. He stayed there until January eleventh. JFK being JFK, it's a fair assumption that he would have been looking for a piece of ass. He was in the navy; so was Betty. They were in the same town. Suppose he knocked her up the night before he left. Jack Adams was born 281 days later. Do the arithmetic.”

“What would that prove?”

Arthur said, “Nothing, in itself. To Jack, it proves everything. The idea that he is a Kennedy bastard is the central obsession of this kid's life. True or not, that's the key to his being.”

He went on. As a teenager, Jack had confirmed all the dates, all the coincidences. He had studied press photographs of JFK and the one surviving photograph of the lumpish Homer Adams. He had studied himself in the mirror. He looked nothing like his mother, nothing like Homer. He could not possibly be Homer's son. Betty had tricked Homer into marriage in order to legitimize the pregnancy that had gotten her kicked out of the Navy Nurse Corps—a pregnancy that she had wanted, a pregnancy that lifted her out of the drab and meaningless existence into which she had been born.

What could Betty's strange history possibly mean except that her fatal accident had been a murder-suicide perpetrated by Homer, the salesman of Hudson Hornets, who had somehow discovered the truth about Jack's paternity? The more Jack found out about JFK's frenetic sex life, the more likely the theory became.

I looked at the snapshots again. Even through my eyes, there was no question about it: At 107 pounds, smiling with those strong white teeth after years of practice in the mirror, Jack Adams the draft dodger looked very much like the handsome bag of bones who had been the post–PT 109 Jack Kennedy.

3
It was a moonless night in May, quite warm. The darkness was almost liquid; you hung in it as in a tepid sea, seeing glimmers of light far above your head. Perhaps one streetlight in six remained unbroken. The garbage had not been collected for days. The sweetish odor of rotting vegetation rose to the nostrils, as in a rain forest untouched by sunlight. We walked on between darkened tenements. Although we could not see them, people sat on stairways in the balmy weather, drinking. In inky shadow, bottles clinked on concrete. Men coughed and spat, women scolded: murmurs, bursts of laughter, profanity. Loud, angry music.

There was no possibility of finding a taxi in this neighborhood, at this hour. I took Arthur by the arm and walked him westward, toward the Hudson River.

Arthur resisted. “You're going the wrong way,” he said. “The subway is back there.”

“I know. We'll walk.”

“You're crazy.”

I said, lying, “I have a pistol.”

Reassured, Arthur walked with a lighter step. He knew about pistols. I had recruited him in Cuba, where he had gone to cut sugar cane for Fidel Castro. In a training camp in the Sierra Maestra, he had fired Russian pistols into bags of slaughterhouse blood.

I said, “I'm interested in this boy's cowardice. Tell me more.”

Arthur said, “Dmitri, please. Why do you keep using that word? It's so irrelevant. Does such a thing even exist?”

“It exists. And it's always relevant.”

“Whatever you say. But look at the whole picture, Dmitri.”

“The file does not give me the whole picture. For example, some of these girls he slept with seem to think that he is not in his heart of hearts a person of the Left, that he has no real political convictions.”

“I disagree,” Arthur said. “Appearances can be deceiving, especially to girls.”

“So the only thing that
is
important is his delusion?”

Arthur stopped in his tracks. He was a picture of misery. He said, “Dmitri, what are you saying to me? That I've fucked up again?” His voice trembled.

I put a fatherly arm around his shoulders and squeezed.

I said, “No.”

He had no idea how well he had done. At that moment, of course, neither had I. Another hug. How thin he was in spite of his appetites, how frail. How hard he tried. Like a father I smiled, a smile of real affection, of expectations fulfilled.

I said, “I see possibilities.”

Arthur touched my hand, the one that gripped his shoulder, and smiled back, this time like a man.

By now we had walked many blocks downtown. We were out of Harlem, near the Columbia campus, where Arthur lived, apparatchik that he was, in an apartment that belonged to the university. The light was better, the sidewalks were all but empty except for husbands walking little dogs. We could hear the traffic signals changing, feel the subway trains passing beneath the pavement. The dangers Arthur had feared were miles behind us.

He gripped my arm, making his points after the need had passed.

He said, “The point is, Jack has a great natural gift. Since childhood, he has studied people, found out what they wanted, and made them believe he was giving it to them even when he wasn't. Without money, without influence, without connections, he has risen to the top every time. He has this uncanny gift for making others like him. Trust him. Want to help him. It's like a spell he can cast at will.”

I said, “You're describing a born liar.” My tone was encouraging.

Arthur swallowed the encouragement I offered like a sweet and cried out, “Yes! That's the point.”

“Then why didn't you mention it before?”

“I didn't realize its importance until just now. Jack lies about everything, all the time. He always has. He's not even conscious that he is lying. He lies to please, to manipulate, to get what he wants. The amazing thing is, everyone knows that he lies all the time and about everything, but
nobody seems to mind.
”

“So what does that make Jack?”

Arthur threw up his hands. “You tell me.”

“A megalomaniac in the making,” I said. “A driven man. Unpredictable. Mad. Biting the hand that feeds him.”

Arthur laughed in delight. “An American Lenin,” he said. “Just what Dr. Dmitri ordered.”

“I think I had better take a closer look at this young man,” I said.

“You want to meet him?”

“No. Observe him. In due course.”

And that is how it all began.

Two

1
Only a few days after Arthur told me about Jack Adams, my superior, by coincidence, arrived from Moscow. Everyone in this story will call this man Peter, a poetic choice of alias, because Peter was a fisher of men if ever there was one. Our intelligence service, founded by intellectuals and perpetuated by drudges, had an unfortunate tendency to assign excessively appropriate pseudonyms to secret operatives. This was a great weakness in our security because the entire basis of cryptanalysis is the discovery of context. If you call an agent Lothario because he is a compulsive seducer, you must expect that the enemy will work backward through a million females, if necessary, to discover his identity.

Peter had traveled to New York, where he was not welcome in his true identity, using a false name, as a specialist in fisheries attached to the Ukrainian delegation to a UN meeting on national rights to fishing grounds. Peter found this cover amusing. At the time in question, Soviet trawlers were indiscriminately vacuuming up huge quantities of fish off the coasts of North America, processing their catch using the most modern technology, and then unloading these frozen cargoes at Murmansk and other Barents Sea ports—where they thawed and rotted on the docks because there were no refrigerated trains or trucks to haul them to market. Or only enough to supply the Nomenklatura, as the higher-ranking circles of the Party and government officials were called, with the one fish in a million that made it to Moscow.

The real work of the trawlers, some of which were loaded with highly advanced electronic gear, was to eavesdrop on the U.S. Navy.

“This means,” Peter told me over lunch at the Côte Basque, his favorite restaurant in New York, “that the price of each kilo of cod eaten by a member of the Politburo is about the same as that of a medium-range ballistic missile.”

He spoke airily, as was his style, as if there was nothing unusual about a lieutenant general in the KGB describing a major espionage operation to a subordinate as a farce. You may think that he felt free to do so because I
was
his subordinate and could do him no harm without destroying myself, but he spoke just as recklessly to everyone. He was the son of one of the original Bolsheviks, now dead, who had begotten him on a famous ballerina. This alone gave him a license to be eccentric. Few outsiders knew this, but even under Stalin, Russia had a whole class of spoiled brats, the children of the mighty, who did and said pretty much as they liked—until their fathers disappeared. Peter's father had done him the inestimable favor of dying for the revolution, an act that placed both of them out of the reach of the secret police.

Peter looked like his mother, tall with a symmetrical European face and large, keen, nonepicanthic blue eyes. The ballerina had raised him as an old-fashioned gentleman, privately tutored in the old culture by men who had been saved from the camps by his father. He knew languages, literature, painting, music, delightful gossip about the famous, dead and alive. As an adult, Peter behaved like an English nobleman in a nineteenth-century novel: with a certain natural hauteur, but with a single manner for all mankind. He treated everyone the same, commissar or zik.

As children of heroes went, Peter was unusual in that he was talented, extravagantly so. He went straight into intelligence at a young age, placed in a favorable position by Lavrenti Beria, a devoted friend of his mother's. The boy was given opportunities to excel, and he worked hard and won golden opinions from the start. In Budapest during the uprising, the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Andropov, a future head of the KGB and of the Party itself, was so impressed by Peter's work in subverting the rebellion from within that he practically adopted him as a son.

Now, still in his forties, barely older than I was, he was head of a directorate that he himself had invented. Even inside the KGB no one was quite certain what this directorate did, or even what its targets were. With a very small headquarters staff that was absolutely loyal to him, Peter operated outside the usual chain of command, running strange operations for obscure purposes all over the world—but primarily in the United States. He reported directly to the Politburo through his mentor and protector, Andropov, by now the head of the KGB. Through Andropov's good offices and his own charm, Peter was also a favorite of the somewhat dimwitted general secretary of the time, Leonid Brezhnev. It was said in the KGB canteen that Peter could make Andropov laugh and Brezhnev think. This was enough to make anyone fear him.

That was Peter's advantage. Until those two turned on him or died, he was immune to the system. And even then, as we shall see, he was too much for his enemies. Peter could make anyone trust him, though few liked him. He also had a truly Napoleonic instinct for maneuver, timing, and choice of ground. And, of course, he was highly developed politically—utterly ruthless and without scruples or personal loyalty to anyone below him.

I had been working under him for ten years. He had chosen me, plucked me out of the squirrel cage of espionage operations, because he sensed that he and I were kindred souls. Sensed it? I blurted it out to him on first meeting. I came to his notice when he visited my language school and I was assigned as his guide. From the start we spoke American English together; his was perfect. Within an hour I was saying things to him for which I could have been shot.