Palace Council (33 page)

Out again. In again. Out again. In again.

The next time they pulled him up, the tape on his eyes was also looser, and he could see, mistily, metal walls, a concrete floor, and, worst of all, the water, cold and dark and filthy, waiting directly beneath for the next dunking. He knew he was seeing everything for the last time. He strained to force a word or two through shivering lips but could only cough blood into the gag. He was not even sure what he was trying to say. Maybe goodbye.

Only they seemed to prefer hello.

They swung him wide of the tank and cut the ropes. He hit the floor and lay in a heap. It was not possible, gasping only through his aching, bloody nose, to get enough air, so he decided that dying on the concrete was as easy as dying in the tank.

Footsteps approached. A figure crouched beside him.

A whisper in his ear, the same voice, chilly as the water, and as willing to end his life. “You don't know where she is, do you, Mr. Wesley?”

He could not even croak. He did not think of lying. He shook his head. A rapid-fire argument took place somewhere in the room, but not in English.

The voice again, this time with instructions: “Whatever you think you know, Mr. Wesley, you do not know.”

Fine with Eddie. No idea what it meant, but it sounded just fine.

They lifted him to his feet and pulled his shirt back on. They wanted him dry. That was why they had taken it off before shoving him into the tank, and why they had dunked him only waist-deep. Eddie congratulated himself on this deduction as they dragged him, coughing and choking and spitting water and blood, out of the building and into the truck. After a short drive, they cut the bonds on his wrists and yanked the tape from his mouth. “None of this happened,” the voice informed him. They poured something over his face and upper body. Cheap wine. For good measure, they poured it down his throat, too. The truck slowed but never stopped. They lifted him and pulled the tape from his eyes, the pain making him cry out. They threw him out the back and slammed the doors long before it occurred to him to turn his head and get a good look at his tormentors. He landed on something squishy and disgusting. Garbage, his exhausted mind informed him. Mostly dead fish. The drenching odor was almost as bad as the water. Still, his legs were free, weak but functional. His hands were free. He could at least crawl out of the garbage. But even crawling seemed like an awful lot of work, so Eddie closed his eyes instead. The last image in his mind before darkness settled in with all the sweetness of rescue was of what he had seen on the floor of the warehouse.

A Baby Ruth wrapper.

CHAPTER
46

Yet Another Old Friend Returns

(I)

T
HE OWNER
of the fish market found him in the morning, wine-soaked and bloody and incoherent but, fortunately if surprisingly, with wallet undisturbed, so that, from the moment of his admission to the hospital, enterprising staffers knew his name and were able to call their newspaper contacts.
EDDIE'S DRUNKEN NIGHT IN HK
, as the British tabloids called it, became worldwide news. The doctors decided he did not have to stay overnight. A British police inspector openly disbelieved that he had been kidnapped, and the inspector's Chinese colleague sat silently, allowing him to go on disbelieving. It occurred to Eddie that every word out of his mouth would just make things worse, so he bade them good day and asked for a ride home. The Chinese officer drove him.

“You are a very lucky man,” the officer said as they fought the snarly traffic. “The triads have only warned you, not killed you. To be killed by them is not a pleasant experience.”

“Not being killed by them wasn't so pleasant, either.”

“They are not pleasant people, Mr. Wesley.”

“It wasn't the triads,” said Eddie after a moment. His voice was weak. He shivered.

“Do you have enemies, sir?”

“Millions.”

The officer gave him a searching look. “Is there anything you would like to tell me, sir?”

Eddie drew a roguish grin from deep within his reserves. “Believe me, Inspector, I wish there were.”

The apartment had been searched, and not by the police. His notebooks were gone. His summaries of what he had learned, and what he had guessed. No matter. Nothing was irreplaceable. He could reconstruct it from memory.

They had also taken his notes for the Southeast Asia novel he had planned. They were less replaceable. He wondered if he could negotiate, get them back.

Then he laughed at himself, realizing how punchy he must be.

He looked at the bulletin board. They had taken the photo of Junie's law-school class, and that loss hurt more than his bruises.

Later. Worry about it later. Moving to the sofa, to say nothing of the bedroom, seemed like a lot of unnecessary work. Exhausted, he almost missed the knock. It came a second time, authoritative and peremptory.

Eddie creaked to his feet and peered through the peephole, expecting David Yee or perhaps Perry Mount, dropping by with candy bar in hand, just to make sure Eddie no longer knew what he thought he had known. What he saw almost knocked him over.

He opened the door.

“What have they done to you?” said Margot Frost.

(II)

M
ARGOT BREWED TEA
in the kitchenette, but not before making him comfortable on the living-room sofa, pillows for his head, a blanket for his body, clucking like a mother hen. She was a little softer, a little rounder, a little more somber, a little less playful. She was a political wife now, married to presidential timber, and probably could not afford to stay long in the apartment of so notorious a libertine as the acclaimed Edward Wesley Junior. But she seemed in no hurry to go. She was in Hong Kong for a week with the children and their nanny, while Lanning and half a dozen other Senators did the obligatory fact-finding tour of Vietnam.

“Everybody does one these days,” she explained.

“I'll say,” he muttered.

Watching her move smoothly around his flat, Eddie remembered the last time they had been together, the terrible explosion in Harlem that had killed Kevin and sent Lanning's approval ratings skyward. He remembered how everybody said that Margot provided both the brains and the ambition in the marriage. Most of all, he remembered that George Collier used to work for Margot's father.

Eddie rolled over, groaning, and not only from physical pain.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Not really.”

She smiled.

Lanning was in Vietnam, where Eddie had been but now wasn't. Margot was in Hong Kong, where Eddie now was. The front man was away finding facts. The brains of the outfit stood in Eddie's kitchen. He watched her. Margot kept smiling and clucking and assuring him that everything was going to be fine, even though he had expressed no sense that anything would not. He remembered the Cross of Saint Peter around her neck the night they met, and how she had warned him that some things cannot be stopped.

“What do you think?” Margot murmured at one point, spooning the tea into his mouth because he was too tired to sit up. Her hip snuggled warmly against his leg. “Do you know why they did it?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Were they sending you a message? Was that it? Oh, Eddie, dear Eddie, have you been poking your head into other people's business? Or just sleeping with the wrong man's wife?”

But Margot laughed alone.

“Do you think it's that article you wrote? About the CIA and Operation
PHOENIX
? Are they punishing you for that? Because, if they are, we should tell Lanning. We can't let them get away with this, dear.”

Eddie shivered. Margot kept referring to what “they” had done to him, even though the papers had twisted the story around to make it sound as if Eddie had done it all to himself: selecting the nearest trash bin to sleep off a bad drunk. She stood up and went to the kitchen to freshen the cup. She seemed to know where he kept his tea, and where he kept his cups, and where he kept his blankets. He wondered how long Margot had spent here last night while the place was being searched; or if she might even have been in the warehouse while they took him to pieces, standing silently next to Perry as he munched calmly on his Baby Ruth.

Finally, Eddie said, “How long have you been in Hong Kong?”

“What?”

“When did Lanning leave town?”

Margot was sitting next to him once more, trying to make him open his mouth. Chicken broth this time. “Lanning flew straight to Saigon. He's meeting us back here next week.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why, Eddie Wesley. I hope you're not suggesting anything untoward.”

“Untoward?”

“Number one, I'm not that kind of woman.” Smiling, Margot laid a finger across his lips. “Number two, even if I were so inclined, you're not in any kind of condition.”

“Ah. True.” He shifted position, sucking greedily on the spoon. From what he could tell, the broth was not poisoned. He closed his eyes for half a minute, or maybe half an hour, because when he opened them Margot was on the settee, reading, without permission, the draft of his latest essay about the war. It was one of the few pieces of paper left in the place. He said, “What time is it?”

“Time for me to go. Can't have people talking.”

He gestured with his chin. “I'm pretty sure I left that in the other room.”

“That's where I stole it from.” She grinned. “You're a brilliant writer, Eddie. And you're right about the war.”

“Thanks.”

“You're welcome.” She stood up. “We're going to stop it.”

“We?”

“Lanning. Me. You. People of good will, Eddie. That's who ends most evil things. People of good will, working together.”

“We'll work together,” he agreed, watching. “We'll shake the throne, won't we?” Quoting Perry Mount. “End the agony, once and for all?”

Margot frowned. “I better go,” she said again. She kissed his forehead.

“Margot?”

“Yes, Eddie?”

“Why did you come here?”

“To Hong Kong? To wait for Lanning and give the children a vacation, I told you.”

“I mean here. My flat.”

Margot had found her wrap. “Oh, well. I couldn't let them get away with this. I had to make sure you're okay.” Her voice trembled unexpectedly. Her eyes glistened. “I can't believe what they did to you.”

Because they didn't tell you first? Or because it was worse than you expected?

Aloud, he said, “Does Lanning know?”

“Know what?”

“About the Project.”

The thick, owlish brows furrowed. “What project?”

Eddie took his time, and not only for effect. “What you're doing with Perry.”

She sat next to him again, felt his wrist, the side of his neck. “I think you're delirious, Eddie.” Another soft kiss on his forehead. “Go to sleep. Do you have a friend you want me to call? Otherwise, I can make sure somebody checks on you in the morning.”

Sleep indeed tugged at him, but he had to finish. “I don't think Lanning knows. I think this is your own thing, isn't it? He's a…a stuffed shirt.”

Margot bristled. “Lanning is a very intelligent man,” she announced crisply, a statement for the press from an irritated wife. “You can't believe what you read in the papers.”

“How true.”

“I'm sorry. We're sensitive on that point. People are always saying—”

“I know what they're saying.” He sighed, squirmed. “I'm sorry.”

“Sleep, Eddie.” She half stretched beside him, hugged him into her warmth. “I'm just glad to see you're okay,” she said into his hair. For several minutes, they held each other, although the holding was mostly friendship—if even that.

“Margot?”

She stirred beside him. Perhaps she had been dozing, too, for her voice was far away. “Yes, dear?”

“Remember Palm Sunday three, four years ago? When Lanning spoke at Saint Philip's in Harlem?”

“The day poor Kevin died.”

“Yes. Ah.” Adjusting position again. But nowhere was comfortable. “Did Lanning write his own speech?”

Stiffening in his arms. “I told you, he is not a dummy.”

“Please, Margot. I just want to know about that one speech. Did Lanning write it himself?”

She sighed, relaxed a bit. “Oh, Eddie, I don't remember. Probably his staff wrote it. That's what staff does. Maybe I contributed a line or two. It was two or three hundred speeches ago.” A glance at her watch, a theatrical rolling of dark, teasing eyes. “You did it to me again, Eddie. Just like ten years ago. Made me stay when I was all set to leave.” She sat up, smiling, shaking her head. “I told you then, I'll tell you again. You're a dangerous man.” He watched her climb to her feet. A floor-length mirror adorned the back of the door, and Margot stood before it, twisting this way and that, sweeping wrinkles out of her skirt and sweater so nobody would guess she had been lying down. “I'm a mess,” Margot muttered, but she looked just fine, so maybe she was not talking about her physical appearance. “It was so great seeing you, Eddie,” she said, opening the door and peering out to make sure that the hall was unoccupied. “I'm sorry it had to be an occasion like this.”

“Thanks for coming,” he said tonelessly from the sofa.

“I'm just glad you're okay.”

“Margot?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Tell them I got the message. I'll leave it alone.”

“Eddie,” she began, and then, as if disciplining an untamed emotion, stuck her fist in her mouth, slipped into the hall, and shut the door.

PART V

Ithaca/Oak Bluffs/Washington
1969–1972

CHAPTER
47

The Project

(I)

“D
O YOU THINK HE DID IT
?” said Megan Hadley.

Aurelia, cutting into her veal, looked up in confusion. “Do I think who did what?”

They were seated in a small Italian restaurant on a downtown side street. Megan pointed at the television screen above the bar, where the announcer was reporting James Earl Ray's guilty plea in the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was March of 1969, and King had been dead eleven months.

“I think it was a conspiracy,” said Megan, for whom everything was. Although Aurie was now an assistant professor and Megan was still an instructor, they continued to steal time for evenings out like this. “Ray pleads guilty this week. Sirhan Sirhan pled guilty last week.” Sirhan being the man who killed Robert Kennedy in the midst of his presidential campaign. Three assassinations in five years.

“So what?” said Aurie, uneasily.

“So, it seems a little convenient. Everything wrapped up nicely for us like that.” Megan sipped her water. “I'm surprised your boyfriend doesn't write one of his essays.”

It took Aurelia a painful moment to understand that Megan was referring to Eddie.

“You should tell him,” said Megan, waving her glass. “And tell him I loved his book. Not the novels. The new one.”

Everybody loved the new book. Everybody on the left. Entitled
Report to Military Headquarters,
it consisted of essays against the war crafted for a general readership. The
PHOENIX
article, expanded and more deliberate, was included. So was the story of his week at the front, along with several other tales of morally shaky activities undertaken by the American government in the name of the holy struggle against Communism.
Report
had been published during Eddie's time abroad, and sold astonishingly well, but was condemned on the floor of Congress as the work of a traitor. On college campuses Eddie was in demand as a lecturer. He was seen in the company of famous radicals. Perhaps only Aurelia suspected that Eddie's sudden infatuation with the left he had always mocked was a last-ditch effort to ingratiate himself with the people who might help him find his sister.

“It should be required reading,” said Megan firmly. “The President and Congress should especially be required to read it.”

Aurelia smiled with difficulty, and promised to pass on the praise. The trouble was, she did not know how. Since his return from abroad, Eddie had called her only once, and had not visited Ithaca. He had traveled instead to a number of speaking engagements. That little bitch Mindy, who had waited patiently for the twenty months of his exile, was traveling with him. So Sherilyn said, anyway, and Sherilyn was hardly ever wrong.

Most of the time.

Aurie needed to talk to him. Urgently. But she could not commit her worries to paper, and there was no way she would tell Mindy what was on her mind. Instead, knowing how it would sound, she told the girl only that it was important, and that Eddie should contact her as soon as possible. His single call in response was to tell Aurie he was on the road, and busy, and would talk to her later.

His voice had been icy.

“Did they ever find his sister?” Megan asked. “The bomber?”

Aurelia spilled her wine.

“Not that I know of,” she managed, coughing hard.

“Good,” said Megan. “I'm such a fan of hers.”

(II)

A
FTER DINNER,
Aurelia called home. Locke was ten. Zora was twelve. Neither believed a sitter was necessary, but, as their mother often told them, their votes didn't count. She ascertained that they had not killed each other, or the teen from next door. Then she walked with Megan to the Strand, Ithaca's only movie theater. The building was a palace in the old style. The lobby floor was terrazzo. There were marble accents everywhere. The main stage could have held an army brigade. The Strand had been built for live spectaculars. Tonight's showing was almost empty, as Aurelia would have predicted. The film was about the first black President. Going to see it had been Megan's idea.

Something about solidarity.

On the way home, the two women talked, vaguely, politics: which was less likely, Megan wondered, that a black man would become President, or that Richard Nixon would? Aurelia laughed this off. Dick Nixon, her old family friend, had been sworn in two months ago. Aurelia had gone to Washington for the inaugural ball, escorted by a black congressman named Dennison, who was trying to get the other black members to join in creating a formal congressional caucus. Representative Byron Dennison, Bay to his many friends, chaired an important House committee and was a power broker. At fifty-one, he had never been married. There was nothing romantic between them. Bay Dennison escorted everybody. They had met years ago through Matty, and kept in touch ever since. Bay was the first man she had dated since Kevin who actually knew how to dance. At the ball, people watched them twirl around the room. Afterward, as the Congressman's driver held the door for her outside her hotel, Aurie was surprised to find Dennison's hand on her arm.

“Wait,” he said.

“What's the matter?”

“This has been fun,” he said. “You need more nights like this. More fun.”

“Maybe so,” she said, cautiously, now terrified that Dennison would invite her back to his townhouse. She clutched her sequined purse tightly, just in case she needed to swat him with it.

“That's how you should spend the rest of your life, Aurelia. Having fun. You deserve it.”

All right, so maybe he was proposing marriage. “I don't understand.”

“I understand your friend Eddie Wesley is coming home soon.”

“Next month. At least, that's what he wrote me.”

Byron Dennison nodded. “Here's the thing, Aurelia. You're raising the Garland heir. That's an important responsibility. And your wonderful little girl, too.” He had released her arm but was holding her with his words. “Maybe it's time to stop the other nonsense, Aurie. Stop worrying about things so much. It seems to me that you should spend your life raising your kids and having fun. You and Eddie, even. He'd marry you in a shot. You know that.”

“Bay—”

“You should marry him. That's what I think. Marry him, the two of you ride into the sunset together.”

“What other nonsense? What is it you want me to stop?”

“Not me.” He splayed his fingers on his chest to prove his innocence. “I'm just delivering a message. From good people, Aurie. People who want you to be happy.”

Bewildered, she shook her head. “I can't marry Eddie. I just—I can't.”

The smile vanished, as if the Congressman had put it away until next time. “No? Well, that's your call, of course, but it's really too bad. Still, you know best.”

He bade her good night.

(III)

S
HE WOULD HAVE TOLD
E
DDIE,
but their paths stubbornly refused to cross. She called him several times at home, but only Mindy ever answered. She tried his office—he still held his part-time appointment at Georgetown—but she only reached the departmental secretary. She even tried through his literary agent, who promised to pass on her message. By the time of her dinner with Megan Hadley, Aurie supposed that the entire darker nation must know that the widow of Kevin Garland was shamelessly throwing herself at her old boyfriend.

At night, she still studied the notebooks where she continued the hard work of deciphering Kevin's codes, and, thrice, she even went hat in hand to Tristan Hadley, sitting nervously in his office, even flirting a bit in order to get him to pass on questions, surreptitiously, to his wife. Each time, Tris dutifully turned up on her doorstep with the answers, and Aurie gave him coffee to be polite. On the third occasion, he brought her roses, a gift she knew she should refuse. Instead, she accepted them, to keep the pipeline open. She supposed people would say she was using him. A university could be like a small town. If she wanted to keep the information flowing and the gossipy tongues silent, her meetings with Tris had to be surreptitious. Once, they grabbed lunch at a greasy diner in the far corner of Trumansburg, a working-class suburb. Another time they managed a really clever encounter in the stacks of the Olin Library, and when Tristan took her by surprise, stealing a kiss, she finally had the satisfaction of slapping his face.

Tristan only grinned, and, for the next few days, whenever Aurelia ran into Megan, she cringed with shame.

Still, by now, with Tristan's help, she was getting a detailed picture. Two or three nights each week, after the children were in bed, she locked her bedroom door and took out the notebooks. She knew that Kevin had been part of a group that called itself the Palace Council—a modern-day analogue to the council of demons and fallen angels who, in Milton's
Paradise Lost,
assisted Satan in his rebellion against God. The leader of the Palace Council was referred to as the Paramount, or the Author. Some years ago—what she had translated so far had yielded no dates—the Council had been formed to implement a plan, called the Project, that would “shake the throne.” In Milton's tale, shaking the throne referred to Satan's plot to spoil God's creation, given that God Himself was beyond reach. At first Aurie had thought the matter one of simple substitution—the members of the Palace Council were black, and the throne they planned to shake was the seat of white power. But she soon realized this was untrue, and not only because of the note she had found in Kevin's safe, scrawled during the fifties in a lily-white Florida hotel. There was also internal evidence, in her remembered jottings, of a great variety of members of the Council, just as Milton numbered among the demons the gods worshiped by many non-Christian cultures.

She still did not know exactly what the Project was. She did know that it was meant to be implemented over a long period, that shaking the throne was meant to encompass several generations, and that the plan involved battle. She was not sure whether the war was metaphorical or not, but at least some of the violence was real. Everything Eddie had told her suggested that Phil Castle was a member of the Council. Maybe his friend the physicist, whose death in Los Alamos was ruled a suicide. Probably poor Matty.

And very likely Kevin.

And there was something else—the reason she had been certain, whether rationally or not, that Eddie would be killed in Vietnam. When she lined up the deaths—Phil Castle, Joseph Belt, Matty, Kevin—it seemed to her that the other members of the Council were being systematically killed off. As if everyone with direct knowledge of the Project had to go.

The Catholic in her wanted to do the right thing. Take it to the authorities. Call the FBI. Call Nixon. Call somebody. But what was she going to say? That someone whose identity she did not know was methodically killing off everyone who knew about a plot she could not describe? A plot with its roots in Eddie's darker nation? She imagined the repercussions in her community and shivered. The ensuing investigation, the explosion of mistrust between the races, would shake the throne all right—the wrong throne.

And so she kept it to herself, patiently husbanding her information, hoping to avenge her husband, waiting for—well, she did not know exactly what she was waiting for. She just knew it hadn't happened yet.

Proof, maybe. That was the thing. She needed hard evidence instead of a theory.

She needed Castle's testament.

(IV)

I
N LATE
M
ARCH,
Dwight Eisenhower died. Aurelia went to Washington, because the President said she should attend the funeral. She sat at the National Cathedral alongside other Garlands: Oliver and his wife, Claire; Kevin's mother, Wanda; and Cerinda from Chicago. Nixon invited her to have breakfast with him and Pat the following morning in the White House residence. The President was upset. Students at Harvard had seized the main administration building. “I thought we were past this kind of thing,” he said.

“They're upset about the war,” said Pat.

“It's not my war. It's Johnson's war. It's Kennedy's war. People elected me to bring our boys home, and now these bums won't even give me two months—”

He raved on. Pat looked at Aurelia, who carefully did not smile until the First Lady smiled first.

The President, meanwhile, had finished his speech. He tossed his napkin onto the table. “Tell you why you're here. You have to tell your friend Eddie to stop.”

“Stop what?” said Aurelia, very surprised.

“Making trouble. Turning over stones.” From a side table he pulled a copy of
Report to Military Headquarters.
“He's not giving us a chance.”

“I believe he wrote the book during the previous Administration,” said Aurelia, trying to keep things calm.

Nixon nodded. “Well, tell him to come see me. Set him straight. Help each other. There are plans in the works. This term, we do foreign policy. Spheres of influence. Next term—well, next term, we go domestic. Tell him.”

Aurelia said that she would. She wondered if the President knew how much he sounded like Eddie himself, back when he used to defend Kennedy.

“Did he ever find his sister?” asked the President, escorting her to the elevator, where an aide waited to lead her out. “Your friend Eddie. Does he think she's alive?”

Surprised, Aurie hesitated. “Is there some reason to think she isn't?”

“No idea. No idea. Just wondering.” The awkward smile. “Listen. Tell him to come see me. Have to have a talk. It's important.”

Alas, she had no way to reach Eddie. And so she did the next-best thing.