The Manchurian Candidate (20 page)

There were a few groups and individuals who were able to find the courage to assail him. One of the most astute political analysts of the national scene wrote: “Iselinism has developed a process for compo
unding a lie, then squaring it, which is a modern miracle of dishonesty far exceeding the claims of filter cigarettes. Iselin’s lies seem to have atomic motors within them, tiny reactors of such power and such complexity as to confound and baffle all with direct, and even slightly honest, turns of mind. He has bellowed out so many accusations about so many different people (and for all the public knows these names he brandishes may have been attached to people of entirely questionable existence) that no one can keep the records of these horrendous charges straight. Iselin is a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts.”

The American Association of Scientists asked that this statement be published: “Senator Iselin puts the finishing touches on his sabotage of the morale of American scientists to the enormous net gain of those who work against the interests of the United States.”

Johnny was doing great. From a semi-hangdog country governor, Raymond’s mother said, utterly unknown outside domestic politics on a state level in 1956, he had transformed himself into a global figure in 1957. He had a lot going for him beyond Raymond’s mother. His very looks: that meaty nose, the nearly total absence of forehead, the perpetual unshavenness, the piggish eyes, red from being dipped in bourbon, the sickeningly monotonous voice, whining and grating—all of it together made Johnny one of the greatest demagogues in American history, even if, as Raymond’s mother often said to friends, he was essentially a lighthearted and unserious one. Nonetheless, her Johnny had become the only American in the country’s history of political villains, studding folk song and story, to inspire concomitant fear an
d hatred in foreigners, resident in their native countries. He blew his nose in the Constitution, he thumbed his nose at the party system or any other version of governmental chain of command. He personally charted the zigs and zags of American foreign policy at a time when the American policy was a monstrously heavy weight upon world history. To the people of Iceland, Peru, France, and Pitcairn Island the label of Iselinism stood for anything and everything that was dirty, backward, ignorant, repressive, offensive, antiprogressive, or rotten, and all of those adjectives must ultimately be seen as sincere tributes to any demagogue of any country on any planet.

After Raymond’s mother had written the scriptures and set the tone of the sermons Johnny was to make along the line to glory, she left him bellowing and pointing his finger while she organized, for nearly fifteen months, the cells of the Iselin national organization she called the Loyal American Underground. This organization enrolled, during that first period of her work, two million three-hundred thousand members, all militantly for Johnny and what he stood for, and most deeply grateful for his wanting to “give our friends a place from which they may partake of a sense of history through adventure and real participation in the cause of fanatic good government, cleansed of the stain of communism.”

Raymond’s mother and her husband held their mighty political analysis and strategy-planning sessions at their place, which was out toward Georgetown. They would talk and drink bourbon and ginger ale and Johnny would fool around with his scrapbook. He always had it in his mind that cold winter nights would be the best time to paste up the bundles of clippings about his work into individual books, with the intent
of someday providing the vast resources for a John Yerkes Iselin Memorial Library. The analyses of the day’s or the week’s battles were always informal and usually productive of really constructive action for the immediate future.

“Hon,” Raymond’s mother said, “aren’t there times when you’re up there at the committee table when you have to go to the john?”

“Of course. Whatta you think I’m made of—blotting paper or something?”

“Well, what do you do about it?”

“Do? I get up and I go.”

“See? That’s exactly what I mean. Now tomorrow when you have to go I want you to try it my way and see what happens. Will you?”

He grinned horribly. “Right up there in front of all those TV cameras?”

“Never mind. Tomorrow when you have to go I want you to throw yourself into a rage—making sure you are on camera—wait for a tight shot if you can—and bang on the desk and scream for the chairman and yell ‘Point of order! Point of order!’ Then stand up and say you will not put up with this farce and that you will not dignify it with your presence for one moment longer.”

“Why do I do that?”

“You have to start making the right kind of exits for yourself, Johnny, so that the American people will know that you have left so they can sit nervously and wait for you to come back.”

“Gee, hon. That’s a hell of an idea. Oh, say, I like that idea!”

She threw him a kiss. “What an innocent you are,” she said, smiling at him dotingly. “Sometimes I don’
t think you give a damn what you’re talking about or who you’re talking about.”

“Well, why the hell should I?”

“You’re right. Of course.”

“You’re damn right, I’m right. What the hell, hon, this is a business with me. Suppose we were lawyers, I often say to myself. I mean actual practicing lawyers. I’d be the trial lawyer working out in front, rigging the juries and feeding the stuff to the newspaper boys, and you’d be the brief man back in the law library who has the research job of writing up the case.” He finished the highball in his hand and gave the empty glass to his wife. She got up to make him another drink and said, “Oh, I agree with that, honey, but just the same I wish you would try a little bit more to feel the sacredness of your own mission.”

“The hell with that. What’s with you tonight, baby? I’m like a doctor, in a way. Am I supposed to die with every patient I lose? Life’s too short.” He accepted the highball. “Thank you, honey.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart.”

“What is this stuff? Applejack?”

“Applejack? It’s twelve-year-old bourbon.”

“That’s funny. It tastes like applejack.”

“Maybe it’s the ginger ale.”

“The ginger ale? I always drink my bourbon with ginger ale. How could it taste like applejack because of the ginger ale? It never tasted like applejack before.”

“I can’t understand it,” she said.

“Ah, what’s the difference? I happen to like applejack.”

“You’re so sweet it isn’t even funny.”

“Not so sweet as you.”

“Johnny, have you noticed that some of the newspaper idiots are getting a little nasty with their typewriters?”

“Don’t pay any attention.” He waved a careless hand. “It’s a business with them just like our business. You start getting sensitive and you just confuse everybody. The boys who are assigned to cover me may call themselves the Goon Squad but I don’t notice that any of them have ever asked to be transferred. It’s a game with them. They spend their time trying to catch me in lies, then printing that I said a lie. They like me. They try to knife me but they like me. I try to knife them but we drink together and we’re friends. What the hell, hon. All we’re all trying to do is to get a day’s work done. Take it from me, never get sensitive.”

“Johnny, baby?”

“Yes, hon?”

“Do me a favor and tomorrow at the lunch break please make it a point to go into that Senate barbershop for a shave. You can stand two shaves a day. I swear to God sometimes I think you can grow a beard in twenty minutes. You look like a badger in a Disney cartoon on that TV screen.”

“Don’t worry about it, hon. I have my own ways and I look my own way, but I’m very goddam American and they all know it out there.”

“Just the same, hon, will you promise to get a shave tomorrow at the lunch break?”

“Certainly. Why not? Gimme another drink. I got a big day coming up tomorrow.”

John Yerkes Iselin was re-elected to his second six-year term on November 4, 1958, by the biggest plurality in the history of elections in his state. Two hundred and thirty-six fist fights went unreported the following evening in the pubs, cafés, bodegas, cantinas, tr
attorias, and sundry brasseries of western Europe between the glum American residents and the outraged, consternated natives of the larger cities.

Early one Monday morning in his office at
The Daily Press
(for he had taken to arriving at work at seven-thirty rather than at ten o’clock now that he was the department head, just as had Mr. Gaines before him) Raymond looked up and saw, with no little irritation at the interruption, the figure of Chunjin standing in the doorway. Raymond did not remember ever having seen him before. The man was slight and dark with alert, liquid eyes and a most intelligent expression; he stared, with wistful hopefulness mixed with ascending regard, but these subtleties did not transport Raymond to remembering the man.

“Yes?” he drawled in his calculatedly horrid way.

“I am Chunjin, Mr. Shaw, sir. I was interpreter attached to Cholly Company, Fifty-second Regiment—”

Raymond pointed his outstretched finger right at Chunjin’s nose. “You were interpreter for the patrol,” he said.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw.”

Other men might have allowed their camaraderie to foam over in the warming glow of the good old days, but Raymond said, “What do you want?” Chunjin blinked.

“I mean to say, what are you doing here?” Raymond said, not backing away from his bluntness but attempting to cope with this apparent stupidity through clearer syntax.

“Your father did not say to you?”

“My
father?”

“Senator Iselin? I write to—”

“Senator Iselin is
not
my father. Repeat. He is
not
my father. If you learn nothing else on your visit to this country memorize that fact.”

“I write to Senator Iselin. I tell him how I interpret your outfit. I tell him I want to come to America. He get me visa. Now I need job.”

“A job?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw.”

“My dear fellow, we don’t use interpreters here. We all speak the same language.”

“I am tailor and mender. I am cook. I am driver of car. I am cleaner and scrubber. I fix anything. I take message. I sleep at house of my cousin and not eat much food. I ask for job with you because you are great man who save my life. I need for pay only ten dollars a week.”

“Ten dollars? For all that?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Shaw.”

“Well, look here, Chunjin. I couldn’t pay you only ten dollars a week.”

“Yes, sir. Only ten dollars a week.”

“I can use a valet. I would like having a cook, I think. A good cook, I mean. And I dislike washing dishes. I had been thinking about getting a car, but the parking thing sort of has me stopped. I go to Washington twice a week and there is no reason why I shouldn’t have the money the airlines are getting from this newspaper for those trips and I’d rather not fly that crowded corridor anyway. I would prefer it if you didn’t sleep in, as a matter of fact, but I’m sorry, ten dollars a week just isn’t enough money.” Raymond said that flatly, as though it were he who had applied for the job and was turning it down for good and sufficient reasons.

“I work for fifteen, sir.”

“How can you live on fifteen dollars a week in New York?”

“I live with the cousins, sir.”

“How much do the cousins earn?”

“I do not know, sir.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Chunjin, but it is out of the question.” Raymond, who had still not greeted his old wartime buddy, turned away to return to his work. From his expression he had dismissed the conversation, and he was anxious to return to the bureau reports and to some very helpful information his mother had managed to send along to him.

“Is not good for you to pay less, Mr. Shaw?”

Raymond turned slowly, forcing his attention back to the Korean and realizing impatiently that he had not made it clear that the meeting was over. “Perhaps I should have clarified my position in the matter, as follows,” Raymond said frostily. “It strikes me that there is something basically dishonest about an arrangement by which a man insists upon working for less money than he can possibly live on.”

“You think I steal, Mr. Shaw?”

Raymond flushed. “I had not considered any specific category of such theoretical dishonesty.”

“I live on two dollars a week in Mokpo. I think ten dollars many times better.”

“How long have you been here?”

Chunjin looked at his watch. “Two hours.”

“I mean, in New York.”

“Two hours.”

“All right. I will instruct the bank to pay you a salary of twenty-five dollars a week.”

“Thank you, Mr. Shaw, sir.”

“I will supply the uniforms.”

“Yes sir.”

Raymond leaned over the desk and wrote the bank’s address on a slip of paper, adding Mr. Rothenberg’s name. “Go to this address. My bank. Ask for this man. I’ll call him. He’ll give you the key to my place and some instructions for stocking food. He’ll tell you where to buy it. We don’t use money. Please have dinner ready to serve at seven-fifteen next Monday. I’ll be in Washington for the weekend, where I may be reached at the Willard Hotel. I am thinking in terms of roast veal—a boned rump of veal—with green beans, no potato—please, Chunjin, never serve me a potato—”

“No, sir, Mr. Shaw.”

“—some canned, not fresh, spinach; pan gravy, I think some stewed fruit, and two cups of hot black coffee.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Shaw. Just like in United States Army.”

“Jesus, I hope not,” Raymond said.

Eleven

ON APRIL 15, 1959, THE VERY SAME DAY ON
which Chunjin got his job with Raymond on transfer from the Soviet Army, another military transfer occurred. Major Marco was placed on indefinite sick leave and detached from duty.

Marco had undergone two series of psychiatric treatments at Army hospitals. As the recurring nightmare had grown more vivid, the pathological fatigue had gotten more severe. No therapy had been successful. Marco had weighed two hundred and eight pounds when he had come into New York from Korea. At the time he went on indefinite sick leave he weighed in at one hundred and sixty-three and he looked a little nuts. Every nerve end in his body had grown a small ticklish mustache, and they sidled along under his skin like eager touts, screaming on tiptoe. He had the illusion that he could see and hear everything at once and had lost all of his ability to edit either sight or sound. Sound pa
rticularly detonated his reflexes. He tried desperately not to listen when people talked because an open
A
sound repeated several times within a sentence could make him weep uncontrollably. He didn’t know why, so he concentrated on remembering the cause, when he could, so that he would not listen so attentively, but it didn’t work. It was an
A
sound that must have been somewhat like a sound he had heard many, many years before, in utter peace and safety, which through its loss or through his indifference to it over the years could now cause him to weep bitterly. If he heard the sound occur once, he quickly hummed
“La Seine,”
to push the
A
sound off to the side. His hand tremors were pronounced when his arm was extended unsupported. Sometimes his teeth would chatter as though he had entered a chill. Once in a while, after four or five unrelieved nights of nightmare, he developed a bad facial tic, and it wasn’t pretty. Marco was being rubbed into sand by the grinding stones of two fealties. He was being slowly rubbed away by two faiths he lived by, far beyond his control; the first was his degree of holy reverence for the Medal of Honor, one of the most positive prejudices of his life because his life, principally, was the Army; and the second was the abnormal degree of his friendship for Raymond Shaw, which had been placed upon his mind, as coffee will leave a stain upon a fresh, snowy tablecloth, by the deepest psychological conditioning.