Palace Council (22 page)

“Oh, I know what you're after.”

“You do?”

“You want to know who the white man was in the club that night.”

“How did you figure that out? I didn't tell Scarlett.”

Lenny smiled. “Not hard to guess. What else would take you all the way to Attica to visit a gangster from the old days, Eddie? When you have your cushy writing career to worry about?”

Eddie frowned, wondering if Lenny intended an insult. His former friend had always been sly, and smooth. “So, then, what's the answer?”

“First you tell me yours.”

“A bundle of letters.”

“Letters?”

Eddie nodded. “Letters to Philmont Castle from a woman with whom he was having an affair. That's all.” He raised his palms to prepare the lie. “I don't have them any more.”

“Wouldn't matter if you did, my brother. I'm not in the happy end of the business any more. I'm not even in the business.” He seemed wistful. “I don't care about the letters. I'm not even going to pass on what you said.”

“Why not?”

“It would be un-Christian.”

Again Eddie wondered whether he was being mocked. “Then why did you make me tell you?”

“Just wonderin how badly you wanted my information.” The preacher scratched his shining brown pate. “Not that you have to earn it, Eddie. All you ever had to do was ask.”

“All right. I'm asking. Who was he?”

“Man name of Collier. George Collier. Don't know where he came from, exactly, but that was his name.”

“You're joking.”

Brother Leonard grinned. “I take it you know him.”

“Not know him. Know of him.” And he did. Aurelia had mentioned her conversation with Senator Van Epp's bodyguard. But Van Epp had left the Senate. Presumably he no longer needed a bodyguard. Meaning that Mr. Collier must be working for somebody else.

“I don't know why you're so interested in Mr. Collier,” said Brother Leonard. “But I'd be careful.”

“Careful?”

The preacher nodded. “I'll tell you somethin for free, Eddie. Maceo Scarlett wasn't never afraid of nobody. But he was scared to death of Mr. Collier.”

Then the good Brother remembered that he had to go to a rally. He ushered Eddie to the door, offering travel blessings for his ride home. He made Eddie promise not to be a stranger, but both men knew their business was done, forever.

Back in his car, Eddie could not help thinking that Scarlett was not the only one who was afraid of Mr. Collier.

(V)

E
DDIE HAD AN OFFICE
at Georgetown University, where he taught a seminar. Without the resources of the federal government to draw on, he had to rely instead on the university's formidable staff of research librarians. Accomplished burrowers, delighted to be challenged, they had an answer for him within days. A woman in her fifties named Margolis briefed him. What George Collier was doing now, the librarians had been unable to ascertain. He was on the military's books, Mrs. Margolis said. In the Army. There the books stopped dead, without even a unit designation, making it likely, said Mrs. Margolis, that his assignment was clandestine.

“I see,” said Eddie.

There was more, the librarian said. Before entering military service a year and a half ago, Mr. Collier had served as an “executive assistant” for a wealthy family.

“‘Executive assistant' meaning what?”

“I cannot venture to say based on nomenclature alone.”

“This would be the Van Epp family?”

Mrs. Margolis nodded. “He was with them for almost ten years. Before that he was in Korea.”

“Do you have a photograph?” asked Eddie, who had yet to get a good look at the blond man's face.

“The library does not at present possess one.”

“What else can you tell me?”

“Only this, Mr. Wesley. Last year, after his separation from the Van Epps, it seems that Mr. Collier used the facilities of our library. One of our researchers assisted him in his work.”

“And what exactly was Mr. Collier doing?”

“My understanding is that he was assembling a dossier,” said Mrs. Margolis, saving her trump for last. “A dossier on you, Mr. Wesley.”

CHAPTER
32

A Year of Moment

(I)

I
N THE FIRST WEEK
of November, a coup in South Vietnam overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem. Mona Veazie called from New Hampshire to ask Aurelia whether her boyfriend, as she called him, could possibly put a stop to this shit. There were only American advisers over there now, said Mona, but the way things were going, it was starting to look as if we might wind up owning the war. Eddie might not work in the White House any longer, but everybody knew—said Mona—that he had friends there. He adored the Kennedys, and they adored him right back. Couldn't he get the President's ear for five minutes?

Aurelia said none of that was remotely funny. She cared nothing about military advisers. She had spent an exhausting afternoon meeting with her dissertation advisers, and now was sitting in the Harlem office she occasionally visited, staring out at the dulling city. Beyond her desk, the newsroom was quiet, and not only because Harlem produced little news these days. Aurie had been forced to lay off most of her staff. The pages of the
Sentinel
now carried mostly wire copy, gossip, and editorials.

“You think I'm joking?” Mona demanded.

“I hope so.”

“Because people tell me the two of you were seen together.”

“It was just a drink,” Aurie protested. She looked at her watch. She would have to hurry to catch the Hudson Line commuter train at 125th Street. “One drink, Mona. And it was—oh—four months ago. Five.”

Five months ago: June, the week after the assassination of civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, which in turn took place less than twenty-four hours after President Kennedy's magnificent speech to the nation on civil rights, a speech that heavily reflected Eddie's hand. Eddie, depressed and angry, had called Aurelia to say he would be in the city on business. When they met in midtown, he told her that Southerners were blaming the murder on the harsh language of the speech—

Mona, relentless, interrupted the moment of memory. “Sherilyn DeForde says the two of you got pretty sloshed together.”

“Nobody was sloshed, and Sherilyn wasn't there.”

“That's my point. If she heard the news in New Jersey, everybody else heard first.”

“What have you been doing all these months? Sitting on the rumor, waiting for the right moment to spring it on me?”

“I called to warn you. After what happened week before last, Eddie's likely to be calling again. This time, you have to say no.”

A tumultuous time. In late August, Aurelia had stood happily in the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, five-year-old Locke holding one of her hands and seven-year-old Zora the other, with Kevin hugging them all from behind, the family together, listening as Martin Luther King addressed the March on Washington. Two weeks later, a bomb went off during Youth Day at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four children and injuring twenty-two others. The city's former commissioner of public safety suggested placing the blame on the Supreme Court, unless “King's crowd” had done it themselves. The nation was furious. The tide was turning. Passage of a civil-rights act was thought inevitable. Until three weeks later, in early October, when a car bomb killed a prominent Alabama Klan member who had boasted privately of his involvement. Another bomb, the following week, missed its Klan target, blowing up the right car but killing the wrong man. Agony, long dormant, took the credit, insisting that it would target all those who preyed upon the helpless.

“He called already,” said Aurelia.

Mona snickered. “And he was depressed again, right? He wanted comfort?”

“He was angry.” Remembering his words. “He said everybody was missing the point, and nobody would listen to him.”

“The point being?”

“The communiqué from Jewel Agony. All the usual stuff about the fascist parasites and so forth.”

“What about it?”

“It wasn't signed by Commander M.”

A long pause over the long-distance line. Mona got the point. “So, where does he think she is?”

“Somewhere else.”

The two women got on to other things—Aurelia's children, Mona's twins, New England life—and Aurie managed to hang up without mentioning the other matter Eddie wanted to discuss with her. He seemed determined to discover, although he would not say why, what had become of Senator Van Epp's onetime bodyguard, Mr. Collier.

Aurelia said she had no idea.

(II)

A
FEW NIGHTS LATER,
Aurelia and Kevin attended a private dinner at the apartment of Richard and Pat Nixon on Park Avenue. Dick Nixon, having lost his gubernatorial race last year, had taken up the well-remunerated life of a New York lawyer. Nobody thought the change was permanent. He was widely expected to make another try for the presidency in 1968, after Kennedy trounced whoever the hard-line wing of the G.O.P. put up against him in 1964. The dinner was quiet. Neither Dick nor Pat provided scintillating conversation, because both were fundamentally shy, and Kevin, although he tried hard, was not Matty. As a result, Aurelia found herself forced to lead. It occurred to her that Nixon still had contacts, and plenty of them, in what had come to be known as the national-security establishment. So, without mentioning Eddie's name, she raised his concern—that after this last series of bombings in Alabama, the first confirmed attacks by Jewel Agony that had taken human lives, the usual communiqué taking credit had not been signed by Commander M.

Kevin looked at her hard. Pat said something about how horrible the whole thing was, and wondered why people could not resolve their differences peacefully.

Nixon laughed. “You don't see it, do you? This is like Russia's feud with Red China. They might be fighting with each other, but that doesn't mean they're not both going to try to bury us. You know what this is?” Circling a finger in the air, presumably to signify Jewel Agony. “This is just arguing over who gets to hold the shovel. What matters is the big picture.”

“Which big picture is that?” Aurelia prompted, eyes wide and innocent, an expression she could pull off at the drop of a hat.

“The nation's moving right,” said Nixon. “People like this Agony whatever—well, all they do is help things along. Every time these bums blow something up, they turn a million voters from Democratic to Republican.”

This was too much even for Kevin. “And what about when the Klan blows actual people up?”

Again Nixon laughed. “The Klan. Hoover will have them shut down pretty soon. That's what he tells me.” He fumbled with his knife and fork. “Those Agony people, on the other hand—they're pretty clever. That's what Hoover says. Lots of discipline, lots of commitment. Hard to track down. Tell you something. Next President, whoever he is? The one after that? They're gonna face so many of these left-wingers, he'll have to put troops in the streets.”

“Not in America,” said Kevin. “Never in America.”

Nixon put his fork down. He glanced at his wife. “Let me make one thing crystal clear. America's just a country. It's like anyplace else. Anything that happens anywhere can happen here. If it's different, it's because we make it different. Us. The good guys. The quiet people. The majority nobody ever talks about or listens to. If we let the bums run the place, blow things up, burn things down? Anything can happen, Kevin. Anything.”

Before the Garlands left, the former Vice President managed to pull Aurelia aside in the living room while his wife chatted with Kevin. He dropped his voice.

“Know why you're asking these questions. Know what Eddie thinks. Saw him the other day. Listen. Hoover doesn't know where she is. Nobody knows. He thinks she's still with those bums, demoted to cleaning the latrine. Reds are big on that kind of thing. Discipline. Party line. No way to tell.”

He had left her behind. “You saw Eddie?”

Nixon nodded, offered that awkward smile, head bobbing. “Never got the chance to thank him for those kind words in the magazine. In Washington on some business. Dropped in at his office. Surprised him. He's a good kid. I like him. Of course, he's with the Kennedys, and the Kennedys—Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I think Jack's heart is in the right place, always have. Got him to sign one of his books for my kids. Eddie. Maybe you could talk to him.”

“About what?”

“Next year, the party runs Goldwater. Gotta get it out of their system. I'll campaign for him—do one's duty—but, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I'm not Goldwater. I'm Nixon. Next time around, 1968, we have big plans. Do great things for America. Could use his help on the campaign. Your Eddie. Writes a great speech. Thinks we're the devil incarnate. Listen. Put in a word. You owe me one, Aurie.”

The funny thing was, she did. All the way home in the car, half dozing on her husband's warm shoulder, she reminded herself that she did indeed owe Nixon one. He had done her a favor four years ago, giving Eddie hope in his moment of greatest despair. It was at Aurelia's desperate insistance that Nixon had sent Eddie the photograph of June Cranch Wesley toting her rifle in the battle of Maxton, North Carolina.

(III)

A
S FOR
E
DDIE,
he was pulling in every marker he could think of, and discovering how few he really held. Bernard Stilwell was suddenly unavailable. His friends in the White House gave him lunch, and pitying smiles. He knew what they were thinking: that he was raising the question of Commander M's absent signature in an effort to get his sister off the hook for this, Agony's first fatal bombing. They were missing the point, but he had no way to explain. It had not occurred to him how desperately he relied on news of the group's crimes as evidence of Junie's continued safety.

“These groups change leaders all the time,” said Langston Hughes when Eddie dropped by 127th Street. “You can't attach any importance to it.”

“What if they purged her? What if she's dead?”

“You can't divine all that from a single letter, Eddie. You have to be patient.”

But patience came hard to Eddie at the best of times. He tried his connections again and met blank walls. He talked to a couple of in-the-know journalists, but if they knew anything about the fate of June Wesley they were not admitting it. He returned to New York to track down Derek Garland, but Derek had gone off to Ghana, and his brother Oliver seemed delighted to have no idea how to get in touch. Gary Fatek was suddenly, and suspiciously, too busy to meet.

And so, in the third week of November, Eddie went home.

Not to I Street. To Boston, to visit his parents. Life had changed in the Wesley household. Wesley Senior had turned his pulpit over to a younger man, and had become a virtual recluse. He sat with his son in the study. He listened without hearing, and talked mostly about the Book of Daniel. Was he thinking of Junie? Of himself? Or simply remembering a sermon from days past? Whatever the answer, Eddie's father was visibly fading, less a shadow of his former self than a refraction, thin and without affect. The fire had gone out of his eyes, and his manner. It was as though his daughter's crimes had sapped his life's force.

Hoping to rouse him, Eddie mentioned the Supreme Court's decision last spring, banning Bible readings in public schools. Surely this would rouse his father's ire. But Wesley Senior merely nodded. “The old ways were not sustainable,” he said, and, briefly, shut his eyes. “But the new ways will be the death of our people. Wait and see.”

Eddie said something silly about the wheel of history.

His father snorted. “Well, you'd say that. You work for Kennedy.”

“What's wrong with Kennedy?” asked Eddie, very surprised.

“Where's his civil-rights bill?” Wesley Senior demanded, but more in despair than in ire. “We turned out all those voters for him….”

He trailed off.

“There's big plans for the second term,” said Eddie, wishing he could communicate his enthusiasm. “You'll be proud of him, Poppa.”
And of me,
he wanted to add, but dared not.

“America has been good to us,” Wesley Senior said before going upstairs to take his nap. “Even when it's not, we are called to turn the other cheek.” He shook his head. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” The words were as close as he would come before he died to acknowledging that Junie existed.

As for Eddie's mother, she bustled about, to all outward appearances her usual self, but, in truth, Eddie made her nervous. She did not know how to treat him—nor he, her. There was a great deal of tiptoeing around the obvious. Only on the second morning of the visit did Eddie have the chance to talk to her. They were in the kitchen. Marie had made pancakes and sausage. Wesley Senior, as was his recent habit, was sleeping late. Marie poured Eddie a huge glass of orange juice. She watched him eat, but limited her own meal to tea and a bit of toast. Wesley Senior was fourteen years older than his wife, and Marie seemed to her son to be trying to close the distance.

“The hardest days,” she said, “are when the reporters come around. Usually right after some action. Isn't that what she calls it? In her letters? Action. Her people take an action, they blow something up, and then the reporters come.”

“I'm sorry, Momma.”

“We raised her right. We didn't raise her for this. That's what your father says, and he's right.” Animation crept into her tone. It occurred to Eddie that his mother wanted to talk about Junie, and had nobody to talk to. “He's disowned her,” Marie continued. “He wrote her out of his will.”

Eddie would have smiled had his mother's face not been so grim, for Wesley Senior possessed no significant assets other than the house, and he had made clear years ago his intention to deed it back to the church once Marie died.

“She's a good girl,” said Marie Wesley, hopelessly. “I know she is. No matter what they say, she would never have done these things. Never.”