Palace Council (26 page)

All of this she said to Mona in a furious weepy ramble, and Mona patted her shoulder and murmured soothing sounds.

Aurelia did not say the rest of it, the secret only she knew: the other reason it was absurd to think that her husband had given his life for the Senator.

Kevin had not been an innocent bystander that afternoon.

He was the target.

CHAPTER
37

Denial

(I)

E
DDIE WAS WRITING
about Che Guevara. He had become fascinated by the fascination of American leftists with Marxist revolutionaries, and wondered if they really would like to live in the sort of state that successful revolutionaries tended to produce. It was early October of 1965, and Guevara had just split with Castro and left Cuba. College students could hardly cross the street unless they first demonstrated their knowledge of the difference between Marcuse and Sartre. At his house on I Street, Eddie was trying to craft an essay conveying his amusement. They were all armchair radicals, he insisted. They would all wind up working on Wall Street.

Gary said his old friend was growing cynical, but Gary was no oracle. Since Erebeth's death and his takeover of the Hilliman trusts, he had retreated behind a wall of skepticism. About politics. About people. About everything. Gary's perennial good humor had somehow twisted into sardonic malice. It was not, Gary often explained, that he had rejected his former leftish views. Rather, he had decided that ideology itself was a bad idea, that the only ethical and dependable human attitude was doubt—

The doorbell rang.

Annoyed, Eddie looked up from his work. He was not expecting anyone. The bell rang a second time.

He answered, and found a couple of young people, white, college-age, looking lazy yet alert. Eddie assumed they wanted autographs, or instruction in the mysteries of the universe. Both kinds dropped by without invitation, and both had to be sent on their way swiftly; if necessary, rudely.

“Mr. Wesley?” said the girl, smiling prettily. “Yes?” “Could you maybe go for a ride with us?” “I'm terribly busy right now,” he began. “It's about the woman you've been looking for,” said the boy. Outside in his driveway, the door to a car stood open.

(II)

E
DDIE CONSIDERED THE BLINDFOLD MELODRAMATIC,
and said so, concealing the deeper truth that he was terrified. Even in childhood, he had never liked having his eyes bound, secretly afraid that he would go blind, like his Aunt Carrie. The car was full of kids. From what he could tell before they bound his eyes, all were white. It occurred to Eddie, too late, that he was entirely at their mercy. He had no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that he was in the hands of Jewel Agony.

They drove for an hour or so, and he tried to figure out whether they were heading into the countryside or just circling around to confuse him. The car clunked and rattled, and the young revolutionaries on either side kept bumping against him. Twice they braked hard enough to slam his face into the vinyl seat back. Another time they pushed his head down toward his lap as if to hide him. At last they stopped someplace noisy and bundled him into another vehicle without unbinding his eyes. This time they slipped glasses over the blindfold. The new car sped off.

“Nobody's following me,” Eddie said calmly. “You may safely dispense with these precautions.”

“Nothing need be true,” said a new voice from the front seat, a male, probably white, certainly much older than the kids, “as long as it persuades.” The man was quoting Eddie's novel
Netherwhite,
but the author felt more threatened than flattered.

“You believe me to be a liar?”

“I believe you should shut up.”

The anger rose in Eddie, but he squelched it, not least because it would do him no good. If he ripped off the blindfold, they would throw him out of the car. He had chosen this road: the road to Jewel Agony, and to Junie. Having petitioned for entrance to their world, he could hardly complain of his treatment. Eddie was taking a risk, but theirs was greater. He was the famous writer with powerful friends to protect him, and the kids beside him on the seat lived every second in fear of the helicopter overhead, the battering ram against the door, and the rest of their lives behind bars.

“Why are you doing this?” the new voice asked after a moment. “Why are you making all this trouble?”

“You know why.”

“You want to join us?”

“No.”

“We don't want you.”

Eddie smiled. “I don't want you, either.”

An intake of breath around the car, but he had said nothing anybody could argue with. “Then why?” the voice demanded.

“I want to find my sister.”

“Who's your sister?”

“If you didn't already know that, I wouldn't be here.”

A sullen silence stretched. He had the sense that they were crossing a bridge. He heard banter with a toll-taker, and wondered why nobody noticed him blindfolded in the back seat. Then he remembered the glasses, and supposed he was meant to seem blind. An hour later, the car stopped. The doors opened, and Eddie heard twittering birds. Two voices whispered, an argument he could not quite make out, except that he was pretty sure somebody wanted to send him back. He heard lowing cattle. Farmland. Northern Maryland? New Jersey? He assumed the journey was over, but they led him into another car.

“Don't say a word,” said the same male voice, this time alongside rather than in the front seat.

He did not.

“There's no such thing as this Jewel Agony, okay?” the man said. “There never was. The pigs made it up.”

The pigs.
He had noticed this term filtering into the language of the young: a peculiar catchall for police, federal agents, anybody representing law and order.

“Just sit still and be quiet,” the man said.

Eddie had the sense that the decision was still being made, even without a spoken word. The car started moving. The silence was thrilling, a tease. She was in the car. Eddie trembled with certainty. His sister was in the car, maybe right next to him, and if he just reached out—

“Don't
move,
” said a female voice.

Not Junie's. Caucasian.

Eddie frowned, turned the other way. Then he remembered: the older man was sitting there. Maybe the front seat, then. But as he tried to lean, the man grabbed his head and made him face the woman beside him.

“You work for
Hoover,
” said the same female voice. He had never heard it before, but he would have known it anywhere. “
Everybody
knows that. You and Nixon are
buddies.
You're a spy.”

He had the wit to obey his original orders. He remained silent. They were climbing a hill, very steep. Maybe they planned to toss him over the side.

“You're
crazy
to come here,” the woman told him, but he already knew that. “Don't you read the
papers
? We kill without
compunction.
A federal
informant,
sent to
spy
on us, do you think we'd
hesitate
?”

Still Eddie kept his silence.

“Feel this,” said the male from the other side.

Eddie felt.

A gun, pressed into his side, just above the kidney, where even a small-caliber bullet would do a lot of damage.

“You're a
dead
man,” said the woman. She sounded just like her mother. “You shouldn't
be
here. Your FBI friends will
lynch
you.”

A chuckle from the front seat, although nothing was remotely funny.

“You shouldn't
be
here,” she repeated. She was not, he decided, quite sane. “Do you really think
she
would want you here? Don't be a
fool.
”

“This is our commander,” said the man, and Eddie took the meaning at once: hers was the final authority. From whatever sentence she pronounced there would be no appeal.

“She's not
here,
” the female voice continued. They were headed downhill again. “She's not
anywhere,
okay? I can't
believe
your FBI friends didn't
tell
you.”

Fear has a way of working its way upward, hotly, from bowels to stomach to throat, like rancid food. And, in the end, it comes vomiting out of your mouth. “Are you saying she's in custody?” he demanded, rounding on the woman beside him. No answer. He turned the other way, toward the gunman. “She's dead? Is that what you're saying? Junie is dead?”

The car screeched to a halt. Doors flew open. Somebody dragged him out and thrust him to the ground. Grass. A field of grass.

“Don't turn around,” said the gunman, prodding the back of his neck.

Eddie nodded. Although already blindfolded, he shut his eyes. Maybe this was the end after all.

“He's
serious,
” said the madwoman. Eddie wondered what Irene and Patrick would say if they could see their daughter now, waving guns and promising death: the new Commander M, “M” for “Martindale,” not “Miranda.” “M” for Sharon, not Junie. “If you turn
around,
he'll blow your
head
off.”

Eddie nodded again.

“
We
didn't blow up that
bomb. We
didn't try to kill
Frost.
That was the
pigs
trying to
frame
us.”

“They killed Kevin Garland to frame you?”

“That fool was like collateral
damage.
They wanted to kill
Frost,
and then we'd
really
be in the
shit.
”

He let this pass. “Please tell me about my sister.”

“She's a
wrecker.
We don't put up with
wreckers.
”

Eddie was trembling with fear, but not for himself. Wrecker. He knew that word. A term Marxist regimes used before purging dissenters. Sometimes the wreckers were expelled. Sometimes they were liquidated.

“What are you trying to say?”

“We didn't
want
her any more. We don't want
you,
either. Don't turn
around.
”

The gun remained on his spine. Fingers from behind removed the dark glasses and lifted the blindfold. Eddie blinked in the moonlight, careful not to turn. He was on his knees on the grass. The grass was sprinkled with bird shit. The gun withdrew. He heard the car doors slam. The engine gunned. The car sped off. He waited a full minute, then raised his head.

He was on the grassy median on the other side of I Street from his house.

They had driven him in a circle.

CHAPTER
38

Aurie's People

(I)

B
Y THE AUTUMN
of 1966, life in Ithaca had settled into routine. For most of Aurelia's life, routine had been her enemy, excitement her friend, but the roller coaster of the past ten years had persuaded her of what most adults pretend to have known all along: children need stability. In Ithaca they had it. The house was a cavernous Victorian half a block from the long pedestrian bridge that swayed gently several hundred feet above Fall Creek Gorge. In the morning, Aurelia laid out cereal and milk and fruit, then dressed while Zora and Locke ate. She walked them to the school-bus stop, taking along Crunch, the shivery beagle they had saved from the pound, who generally did his business on the way back. She left Crunch in his pen behind the house, then headed for work, leaving the station wagon in the garage because spaces on campus were expensive. She crossed the bridge, climbed the steep wooden stairs set into the muddy slope opposite, and strolled through the campus to the English department in Goldwin Smith Hall. She taught her classes, she met her students, she argued obscure literary theories with her colleagues, and about once a week she was asked to justify her presence in the faculty women's bathroom. By three-thirty she was done, and hurried home to meet the bus, because the school day was arranged, in Ithaca as everywhere in the country, around the assumption that a mother would be home to receive the children.

There were faculty parties, too, some of them mandatory. The sitter was a gangly teen from next door who played the flute. One of Aurelia's friends was a lecturer named Megan Hadley, who had been in her year at Smith. Megan taught early-modern literature—that is, literature from three hundred years ago—and her husband, a goateed anthropologist called Tris, short for Tristan, frequently hit on Aurie, who had been hit on by husbands of friends for much of her adult life. Another suitor was a chubby engineer named Bergson, a shy man who seemed happy simply to moon over her at the occasional lunch. She even had a flowery letter or two from Charlie Bing, ex-husband of her friend Chamonix, insisting that she let him buy a drink whenever she next came to Manhattan. And then there was Lawrence Shipley, the only black professor in the history department, brilliant and beautiful and devotedly single, whose playful overtures she one tipsy night, and never again, found herself unable to refuse. Loneliness can do that, but Aurelia was humiliated. She did not want to be a notch on the handle of a campus Lothario's gun; and Lawrence was known to talk about his conquests. Mention this one, she warned him as she dressed, and she would have some of her old Harlem friends trim him up, as it used to be called; and Lawrence Shipley, who had never set foot in Harlem in his life, promised.

She figured he would keep his promise for at least a month.

Every so often she heard from Eddie. He usually called late at night. Over the scratchy long-distance lines, they kept a careful emotional distance from each other, devoting their conversations to family news. He would ask about the children, and she would ask if there was word of Junie. There never was.

One afternoon, as Aurelia returned to her office after lunch, she found Megan Hadley camped outside her door, holding a clipping from the
Times:
had Aurie seen it? She had not. Lyndon Johnson had nominated Oliver Garland, her late husband's cousin, to be a federal judge.

“I thought you told me the Garlands were all Republicans.”

Aurelia managed a sickly smile. “They're whatever they have to be to get ahead.”

But Megan wanted outrage. Outrage that any Negro in America could be a Republican. And simultaneous if slightly dissonant outrage that any thinking person could cooperate with Johnson, the great baby-killer. Aurelia's aplomb bewildered her. Oppression was everywhere. Megan urged her colleague to give vent to her feelings instead of bottling them up. It was time to reject her socialization, said Megan. Aurie thanked her kindly, and, when Megan was gone, stared out the window at the parking lot, wondering if Oliver knew what his cousin Kevin and his Uncle Matty had been involved in.

And if Castle's testament had ever turned up.

Another time, Mona Veazie came down from New Hampshire to visit—Mona, who had gotten her into the academic world in the first place. She brought her new husband, a quiet schoolteacher named Graves—white, like her old one—and the children, Julia and Jay. They looked less like twins every time Aurelia saw them, for Julia was half a head taller. But girls mature faster than boys, Aurie reminded herself. The two families saw each other often. Locke and Zora called the twins their cousins. While the children chased the dog and each other around the yard, the adults played three-handed pinochle, one of Harlem's royal games.

Later, the two women sat up in the master bedroom, watching the late movie on Channel 5 and drinking wine. Mona was maudlin. She did not love her husband, she said, but he kept her warm at night. Aurie refused to bite. She asked instead for news of Harlem. Mona prophesied doom. She was not sure how much longer to allow her ailing mother to live alone at the Edgecombe Avenue townhouse.

Oh, and there was one other thing. Maybe Aurie had heard the news?

What news?

Well, not news exactly, said Mona. A friend of hers with Washington connections had called. The remnants of Agony were said to have gravitated to the San Francisco Bay area. They were joining up with other radical groups to try to give the movement a push. The hard left was thought to be in dire straits. Hoover had informers everywhere. Three members of the Revolutionary Action Movement had recently been arrested, charged with planning to blow up the Washington Monument. Militant organizations were disintegrating. But in Oakland, a new movement had adopted as its name and symbol the Black Panther, formerly used by voting-rights activists in the South, and trying to raise revolutionary consciousness among welfare recipients, janitors, nurses, and other members of what it called “the industrial army.” The Panthers scared people. They wore black berets and black leather jackets. They carried weapons openly, relying on their rights under the Second Amendment.

Aurie said, “Agony is joining up with the Panthers?”

“I don't know,” said Mona. “Neither does my friend. The point is, the feds have good penetration. My friend says they expect to have Commander M in custody in a matter of weeks.”

Aurelia sat for a few minutes, smoking and thinking. “Do they really think it's Junie out there?” she finally said.

“They really do.”

“Can you imagine her behind bars?”

“Not really.”

Aurie blew smoke through her nose. “Eddie says they'll never catch her. He thinks she's smarter than they are.”

“So do I.”

Before Mona left, Aurie asked if the friend with Washington connections was Gary Fatek. Mona grinned, but sadly. “Gary's way up there now. He's out of my league. I hear you have to be God, or at least a President, to get in to see him.”

“Eddie sees him.”

“God, or President, or twice winner of the National Book Award.”

“What I'm saying is, if Gary told you that they think Junie's in California, then he probably told Eddie, too. He'll go out there, Mona. He could get into trouble.”

“Sorry, sweetie. I can only take care of two children at a time.”

A week later, the Bureau announced with great fanfare the arrest of a couple of members of Agony in Berkeley, California, at what the papers described as a safe house, but when Aurelia talked to Eddie, he told her that the “safe house” was an apartment full of unkempt heroin addicts, and the pair of college dropouts who were hauled in, neither of whom had ever heard of a Commander M, could not have blown up a balloon.

(II)

U
NLIKE
M
ONA,
Aurelia was not a professor—not yet. She was, at the moment, simply a lecturer, a distinction that explained why she worked from a cubicle rather than an office. The department chair had assured her, however, that the assistant-professorship opening up in eighteen months would be hers if she wanted it, and she did. She liked Ithaca. She had used a small part of her inheritance from Kevin to buy the huge house on Fall Creek Drive. Few senior members of the faculty owned houses so grand, but Aurelia did not care about the whispers behind her back. She wanted Locke and Zora to grow up with all she had lacked—a yard, space, the dog, friends next door. Christmas was a gigantic occasion for the family, gifts heaped beneath the tree. Probably she spoiled them. The way they had lost their father, she could not imagine doing anything else.

Most nights, while the children slept, Aurelia prepared for class or graded student papers. Then, her professional life out of the way and her personal life on hold, she honored Kevin's memory the only way she knew. She withdrew a diary carefully hidden in one of the messier drawers of her dresser. On its creamy pages she was trying to reconstruct the documents she had found in her husband's safe ten years ago, and copied, and burned. Sometimes she would recall another word or phrase and add it to the pattern; two days later, she would decide she had remembered it wrong. And yet, slowly, the documents were reemerging. She had copied the words
shake the throne
at least four times, so she wrote them now on four separate pages, hoping to spark a buried memory. There had been several references to
Pandemonium,
always capitalized, one to the
Palace Council,
and several more to someone named
Author,
or
the Author,
presumably the intended recipient of the letter delivered to the Dorchester during their honeymoon. She supposed it was possible that her late husband was the Author, but she doubted it. The Author seemed to be in charge of things, and Kevin, for all his virtues, was exactly what Matty had once described: a born second-in-command.

This was her secret obsession. She had told Eddie a year and a half ago that she would not discuss his theories. She had not mentioned that she had theories of her own.

Aurelia put the notebook aside. She smiled a little, smoked a little, cried a little.
It's getting worse,
Kevin had said in their last conversation.
The whole Council is scared.
Minutes later, standing next to Lanning Frost, he had been blown to bits.

Aurelia took up the diary again. She turned the smooth pages, studying her notes. She made a correction here, added a word there. Bit by bit she was rebuilding. Bit by bit she was forgetting the pain of losing Kevin, whether she had loved him or not.

The only other person aware of the diary was Tristan Hadley, Megan's husband. He had discovered the volume back when she used to keep it in her downstairs study rather than her bedroom. Aurelia had cooked dinner for the Hadleys and three other academic couples from her department. During dessert, when the talk turned to nineteenth-century literature, Tris had taken himself off to wander around the house. Like many intellectuals, he hated conversations in which he could not shine. When his absence became embarrassing, Aurie had gone searching. She found him in her study, watched by Crunch, his tangly tail wagging with peculiar canine approval. Professors enjoyed peeking into each other's home libraries, for the pleasure of critiquing the books on their shelves. But Tristan had pillaged her desk and was leafing through the diary.

“What the fuck do you think you're doing?”

“Figuring you out.” He handed the book back before she could slap him. “You're so delightfully mysterious.”

“How dare you go through my private things!” she sputtered, unable to come up with anything better.

“I dare a great deal, Aurie. Maybe one day we can dare together.”

“Tristan—”

“What are all those notes about, anyway? The Author? Shaking the throne? It's like a secret code.”

“None of your business.”

His eyes lit up. “You're writing a novel. Like your friend Edward Wesley.”

“No.”

“Then it's the other way around. You found them somewhere, and you're trying to figure them out for some reason.” One of the risks of dealing with Tristan was that his mind worked a good deal faster than anyone else's. Except when he was busily experimenting, as he put it, with psychedelic drugs to expand his range of consciousness. “That explains why there's so much repetition and so many cross-outs. A mystery.” Rubbing his palms together. “How exciting. You're solving a mystery. Maybe I can help.”

“I don't want your help.”

He pointed to the diary, which she had tucked under her arm. “Some of the phrases looked familiar.”

“Why do you do this, Tristan? Why can't you leave me alone?”

“I love you. It's as simple as that.”

Aurelia groaned. “You're a married man.”

“So?” He seemed genuinely puzzled. “What does that have to do with anything? Don't you know the legend of Tristan?”

“Yes. But I'm not your Isolde. Now, will you please get out of here?”

“Certainly,” he said, patting her bottom as he passed, and so drew a slap after all.

Not the first time. Probably not the last.

(III)

T
HEN THERE WAS THE CONSTANT STREAM
of letters from Callie Finnerty, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, the bubbly blonde who had taught her how to mother. Callie loved the word “great.” Callie's life was going great. Her husband's career was going great. Her new house in Scarsdale was great. Her three children were growing up great. Callie's only fear was that her eldest would be drafted: other than that, things were great, great, great. Kevin had always looked down his nose at Callie, and Eddie would have had a grand old time mocking her letters. But there were nights when Aurelia sat alone in the kitchen, sipping what she always swore was her last glass of wine, envying the simplicity of Callie Finnerty's life.

Simplicity. Normality.