Lucky Bastard (56 page)

“A personal best, anyway,” Cindy said.

Jack's face wore a look of real tenderness. He said, “You're not going to believe this, but I've never fucked in this bed before.”

“Right now I'd believe anything you said, big boy,” Cindy said. “Turn over.”

“What for?”

“Trust me.”

In good-natured surrender, Jack rolled over onto his stomach. “God,” he said. “The wasted years.”

Cindy said, “Where's the Vaseline?”

“Wait a minute!”

“Scaredy-cat. Relax.”

Kneeling between his outspread legs, she rubbed his back, deep massage as she had learned when the VA doctors believed that massage might bring back Danny's muscles.

Cindy could not open the hollow ring she wore with greasy fingers, so she wrenched it open with her teeth. She inserted the ricin suppository it had contained.

Feeling her finger, Jack said, “
H
—”

Before he could pronounce the
ey
in
Hey
or Cindy could withdraw her finger, he convulsed, then lay still, eyes wide open and empty.

Cindy closed the ring, put the top back on the Vaseline tube, then put on her dress. There was no need to wipe fingerprints; the Vaseline had prevented her from leaving any.

Carrying her shoes in her hand, Cindy walked down the hall to the head of the stairs. She had left her fur coat in Jack's office, a mistake. As she placed her hand on the banister, she heard a hiss. Cindy turned her face to the sound and saw Morgan standing in shadow on the other side of the stairwell. Morgan wore a floor-length navy-blue dressing gown; her loose hair hung down her back. When she recognized Cindy, her face twisted into a rictus of utter surprise.

The encounter was a shock to Cindy, too. She did not know what to expect—gunshots, perhaps. She started to speak. Morgan shook her head violently and pointed downward. Cindy looked over the stairwell and saw a bodyguard seated in the foyer below.

Cindy's mink coat, vile Republican object that it was, hung suspended by its collar loop from Morgan's forefinger. Cindy took it, as from a hook, and put it on. The women did not speak or look into each other's eyes. Cindy followed Morgan down the hallway, then down a back stairway to a back door that opened onto the private parking lot, where a car was waiting.

Upstairs again, Morgan found Jack as Cindy had left him. She saw at once what had happened. As the inventor of the suppository, Morgan knew that all traces of the poison would disappear from the victim's system in less than two hours. It was 2:12
A.M
. She removed her dressing gown, took the ribbon from her hair, and got into bed with her husband. When the clock read 4:30, she ran naked into the hall and shrieked down the staircase for help. The Secret Service agents on duty came at once, and when they saw the presidentelect they threw aside their drawn weapons and tried to revive him. But of course it was too late.

5
Four days later, the veiled widow walked behind the caisson to Arlington Cemetery. On either side of her marched the twin sons who looked so much like their father. It was unclear whether Jack, as the only president-elect to die before inauguration, was entitled to a president's funeral or to burial in Arlington among the nation's bravest dead. But that was what he got. Although there was a difference in the manner of death—the world believed that Jack Adams had met an enviable but risible end in the arms of his loving wife—the ceremony bore an eerie resemblance to an earlier presidential funeral. Morgan's dress and behavior—the black veil, the admirable self-control—added to this effect. So did the presence of the children.

As “Taps” sounded among the gravestones, Morgan lost her composure for a brief moment and let out a great but silent sob. And then she gazed icily into the cameras as if directly, contemptuously, into the eyes of all the sluts who had ever slept with her husband. Her whole being seemed to say, with almost superhuman vehemence, “You had your moments, but this is the final moment, and I am the one in black.”

Fitz and Skipper had been given strict instructions not to salute when “Taps” was played, and so they did not. This was a disappointment to many.

Epilogue

As perhaps you have guessed, I have always loved the movies. In my new life, I go more than ever. I like the darkness, the pictures flickering on the wall of the cave, the churchly oneness of the audience, the luxury of surrendering to the implausible.

Usually I avoid foreign movies, but in my travels—there is safety in movement, so I am continually in passage these days—I saw a German film in which some of the actors played the parts of angels. They were assigned to watch over certain human beings, to whom the angels were, of course, invisible. The angels were quite unhappy. They were former human beings themselves, and they longed to go back to being what they once had been.

The wonderful thing was, return was possible. Angels who did their duty by their human wards could earn redemption and return to the world somewhat in the way that good Christians go to heaven. Such second-comers to earthly existence were able to see angels, though they did not always know right away that they
were
angels, because, as I have explained, they looked just like the other actors in the film. The only returned angel in the movie was played by an American. All the rest were Germans.

I am haunted by this movie. It gave me the idea that I had been Jack Adams's angel, invisible to him but always by his side, speaking to him through other, seemingly real beings whom he could see and hear and touch. As a child, to keep me good after my parents were murdered, I was told that the dead know everything, so perhaps Jack can see me now.

No one else seems to be able to do so when I make my little visits. Not Cindy when she met Danny at the gates of his prison with a picnic basket full of Ohio treats. Not Morgan when she takes her boys to visit their father's grave at Arlington, and their grandfather's fabled grave nearby. Not Arthur from his resting place.

I watch, I remember, I go away. I drive a hundred miles and check into a motel. I stand in line with children and order a Big Mac supermeal. I buy a movie ticket. A flower. No one lifts his eyes.

Except, now and then, another member of our order of angels. We are a multitude, of course. We recognize each other, we exchange glances. But we do not speak, we do not tarry. We have anniversaries to observe, watches to keep, hopes for the world.

To the Reader

Lucky Bastard is a work of the imagination in which no character is based on anyone who ever lived and no reference is intended to anything that ever happened in the real world. To the reader whose own imagination perceived linkages that I did not intend, I can only suggest that Dmitri's confessions make the same essential points as the memoirs, biographies, and investigations of some of the great figures of the twentieth century, namely that in our time history became fiction and fiction history. It is no simple matter to reclaim the one from the other.

In the realm of the unequivocal, I am indebted to the late Emily Sears Lodge for the description of the vice presidential nomination; to Allen Weinstein's Perjury for details of Alger Hiss's life; to Loren McIntyre for introducing me to Amazonia; to Arthur Zich for snapshots of Shanghai; and to George Foot for the renminbi scenario. Nancy McCarry was, as always, my first and best reader.

C. McC.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1988 by Charles McCarry

cover design by Michael Vrana

This edition published in 2011 by
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