Underworld (77 page)

A subdued roar, a sort of rumble-buzz, with a chandelier jingle in the mix and the dreamy sway of dance music and a vocal note of self-delight—the
lure, the enticement of a life defined by its remoteness from the daily drudge of world complaint.

“Tapes of cries and moans,” Edgar said, “which I would play to help me sleep.”

They moved through the ballroom, they circulated, seeing prominent people everywhere. The room was high and white and primrose gold, flanked by Greek columns that caught the lickety amber light of a thousand candles.

Swan-necked women in textured satin gowns. Masks by Halston, Adolfo and Saint Laurent. The mother and sister of one American president and the daughter of another. Crisp little men aswagger with assets. Titled jet-setters, a maharajah and maharani, a baroness somebody in a beaded mask. Famous and raging alcoholic poets. Tough smart stylish women who ran fashion books and designed clothes. Hair by Kenneth—teased, swirled, backcombed and ringleted.

“Did you see?”

“The old dowager,” Edgar said.

“In the dime-store mask.”

“Decorated with pearls.”

They shook hands here and there, daintily, and dropped a flattering remark to this or that person, and Clyde knew how the Director felt, mixing with people of the rarest social levels, the anointed and predestined, aura'd like Inca kings, but also the talented and original and self-made and born beautiful and ego-driven and hard-bargaining, all bearing signs of astral radiance, and the ruthless and brutish as well.

Yes, Edgar was damp with excitement.

He stopped to chat with Frank Sinatra and his young actress wife, a nymph in a boy's haircut and a butterfly mask.

“Jedgar, you old warhorse. Haven't seen you since.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Tempus fugits, don't it, pal?”

“Yes, it does,” Edgar said. “Introduce me to your lovely.”

Sinatra was in the files now. Many people in the room were in the files as well. Not a single one of them, Clyde imagined, more accomplished in his occupational strokes than Edgar himself. But Edgar did not carry the glow. Edgar worked in the semidark, manipulating and
bringing ruin. He carried the small wan grudging glory of the civil servant. Not the open and confident show, the wide-striding boom of some of these cosmic bravos.

On the stage, under the furled curtain, two bands took turns. A white society band and a black soul group. All musicians masked.

People loved Edgar's leather mask. They told him so. A woman in ostrich feathers ran her tongue over the handlebars. Another woman called him Biker Boy. A gay playwright rolled his eyes.

They found their table and settled in for a spell, sipping champagne and nibbling on buffet tidbits. Clyde uttered the names of people dancing past and Edgar commented on their lives and careers and personal predilections. Whatever anecdotal lore he failed to recall, Clyde was quick to provide.

Andy Warhol walked by wearing a mask that was a photograph of his own face.

A woman asked Edgar to dance and he flushed and lit a cigarette.

Lord and Lady somebody held their masks on sticks.

A woman wore a sexy nun's wimple.

A man wore an executioner's hood.

Edgar spoke rapidly in his old staccato voice, like a radio reporter doing a series of punchy news items. It made Clyde feel good to see the Boss show such animation. They spotted a number of people they knew professionally, administration faces, past and present, men who held sensitive and critical positions, and Clyde noted how the ballroom seemed to throb with crosscurrent interests and appetites. Political power mingling lubriciously with art and literature. Domed historians clubbing with the beautiful people of society and fashion. There were diplomats dancing with movie stars, and Nobel laureates telling chummy stories to shipping tycoons, and the demimonde of Broadway and the gossip industry hobnobbing with foreign correspondents.

There was a self-conscious sense of some profound moment in the making. A dreadful prospect, Clyde thought, because it suggested a continuation of the Kennedy years. In which well-founded categories began to seem irrelevant. In which a certain fluid movement became possible. In which sex, drugs and dirty words began to unstratify the culture.

“I think you ought to dance,” Edgar said.

Clyde looked at him.

“It's a party. Why not? Find a suitable lady and spin her around the floor.”

“I do believe the man is serious.”

“Then come back and tell me what you talked about.”

“Do I remember a single step?”

“You were quite a good dancer, Junior. Go ahead. Do your stuff. It's a party.”

On the floor the guests were doing the twist with all the articulated pantomime of the unfrozen dead come back for a day. Soon the white band reemerged and the music turned to fox-trots and waltzes. Clyde watched the slowly shuffling mass of careful dancers, barely touching, heedful of hairdos and jewelry and gowns and masks and always on the alert for other fabulous people—heads turning, eyes bright in the great black-and-white gyre.

“Yes, show your true colors,” Edgar said with a twisted grin.

So that was it. Tipsy and bitter. All right, thought Clyde. If this was to be a night in which old restrictions were eased, why not a turn around the floor?

He approached a woman not only masked but wholly medieval, it seemed, a cloth wound about the head and a long plain cloak sashed at the waist and a tight bodice girdled high under her breasts.

She smiled at him and Clyde said, “Shall we?”

She was tall and fair and wore no makeup and spoke without awe of the evening and its trappings. A levelheaded young lady of the sort that Edgar might admire, and therefore Clyde as well.

She wore a raven's mask.

Clyde's own mask, an unadorned domino, was in his pocket by now.

“Are we using names,” he said, “or shall we abide by strict rules of anonymity?”

“Are there rules in effect? I wasn't aware.”

“We'll make our own,” he said, surprised by the slightly sexy banter he was generating.

He led her in and out of pairs of bodies ghost-floating to the tune of an old ballad from his youth.

Clyde used to have women friends. But when the Boss started to court other possible protégés, strong-bodied young agents who would serve a social function more than a Bureau function, Clyde knew it was time to submit to Edgar's need for a steadfast and unquestioning friend, a mate of soul and word and unvarying routine. This was a choice that answered Clyde's own deep need for protection, a place on the safe side of the fortified wall.

Power made his suits fit better.

He saw Edgar being photographed with a group at the far end of the ballroom. Clyde recognized most of the people and noticed how eager Edgar seemed to nestle among them.

Edgar's own power had always been double-skinned. He had the power of his office of course. And also the power that his self-repression gave him. His stern measures as Director were given an odd legitimacy by his personal life, the rigor of his insistent celibacy. Clyde believed this, that Edgar had earned his monocratic power through the days and nights of his self-denial, the rejection of unacceptable impulses. The man was consistent. Every official secret in the Bureau had its blood-birth in Edgar's own soul.

This is what made him a great man.

Conflict. The nature of his desire and the unremitting attempts he made to expose homosexuals in the government. The secret of his desire and the refusal to yield. Great in his conviction. Great in his harsh judgment and traditional background and early American righteousness and great in his quibbling fear and dark shame and great and sad and miserable in his dread of physical contact and in a thousand other torments too deep to name.

Clyde would have done whatever the Boss required.

Knelt down.

Bent over.

Spread out.

Reached around.

But the Boss only wanted his company and his loyalty down to the last sentient instant of his dying breath.

Clyde saw another man, and another, in executioners' hoods. And a figure in a white winding-sheet.

“And that man over there. Having his picture snapped,” the young woman said. “That's the person you were sitting with.”

“Mr. Hoover.”

“Mr. Hoover, yes.”

“And with him, let me see. The wife of a famous poet. The husband of a famous actress. Two unattached composers. A billionaire with a double chin.” Clyde realized he was showing off. “And a stockbroker-yachtsman, let me think, called Jason Vanover. And his wife, a middling painter called whatever she's called. Sax or Wax or something.”

“And you are Mr. Tolson,” said the woman.

And how clever, thought Clyde, who was rarely recognized in public and felt a bit flattered and somewhat unsettled as well.

They were dancing cheek to cheek.

He saw another woman in modified medieval dress, a bit more shrouded and hooded, and it brought to mind—no, not the sixteenth-century painting Edgar was so morbidly fond of, the Bruegel, with its panoramic deathscape. (Edgar had postcards, magazine pages, framed reproductions and enlarged details stored and hung in his basement rumpus room. And he'd ordered Clyde to talk to officials in Madrid about the priceless original and how he might acquire it as a gift to the American people from a Spanish nation grateful for the protective shield of U.S. armed might. But when a B-52 and a tanker collided during routine refueling, earlier this year, and four hydrogen bombs came crashing to earth on the Spanish coast, releasing radioactive materials, Clyde had to deinitiate all discussions.) No, not Bruegel. The nunnish woman brought to mind, of all things and all people, the hip sick dopester comic—Lenny Bruce. No, Lenny Bruce was not a guest at the Black & White Ball. Lenny Bruce was dead. Died several months ago, at his home in Los Angeles, of acute morphine poisoning, naked on his toilet floor, limbs gone stiff, mucus trailing out of his nose, his glassy eyes wide open, the syringe still stuck in his arm.

An 8×10 police photo of the bloated body—the picture could have been titled
The Triumph of Death
—was in the Director's personal files. Why? The horror, the shiver, the hellish sense of religious retribution out of the Middle Ages. And only hours after the body was
found a buzz began to circulate in the usual places. Dig it. Lenny's been killed by shadowy forces in the government.

Lynda Bird Johnson danced past with a Secret Service agent.

The rumors had not surprised Clyde. He could smell the decade's paranoid breath. And he wondered suddenly about the woman in his arms. Had he in fact approached her on the dance floor or had she subtly stepped into his path?

A man with a skeleton mask and a woman with a monk's cowl. There, standing at the edge of the bandstand.

“You know my name,” Clyde said, “but I'm at a loss, I'm afraid.”

“Which doesn't happen very often, does it? But I thought our rules tended to favor nondisclosure.”

They were dancing to show tunes from the forties. She pressed slightly closer and seemed to breathe rhythmically in his ear.

“Have you ever seen so many people,” she whispered, “gathered in one place in order to be rich, powerful and disgusting together? We can look around us,” she whispered, “and see the business executives, the fashion photographers, the government officials, the industrialists, the writers, the bankers, the academics, the pig-faced aristocrats in exile, and we can know the soul of one by the bitter wrinkled body of the other and then know all by the soul of the one. Because they're all part of the same motherfucking thing,” she whispered. “Don't you think?”

Well, she just about took his breath away, whoever she was.

“The same thing. What thing?” he said.

“The state, the nation, the corporation, the power structure, the system, the establishment.”

So young and lithe and trite. He felt the electric tension of her thighs and breasts passing through his suit.

“If you kiss me,” she said, “I'll stick my tongue so far down your throat.”

“Yes.”

“It will pierce your heart.”

Then everything happened at once. Figures in raven faces and skull masks. Figures in white winding-sheets. Monks, nuns, executioners. And he understood of course that the woman in his arms was one of them.

They formed a death rank on the dance floor, halting the music and
sending the guests to the fringes. They commanded the room, a masque of silent figures, a plague, a spray of pathogens, and Clyde looked around for Edgar.

The woman slipped away. Then the figures trooped across the floor, draped, masked, sheeted and cowled. How had they assembled so deftly? How had they entered the ballroom in the first place?

He looked for old Edgar.

An executioner and a nun did a pas de deux, a round of simple circling steps, and then the others gradually joined, the skeleton men and raven women, and in the end it was a graceful pavane they did, courtly and deadly and slow, with gestures so deliberate they seemed acted as well as danced, and Clyde saw his young partner move silkenly in their midst.

I will stick my tongue so far down your throat.

The guests watched in a trance, five hundred and forty men and women by actual count, and musicians and waiters and other personnel, and men assigned to guard the jewelry of the women, all part of the audience for an entertainment other than themselves—respectful, hushed and half stunned.

It will pierce your heart.

When they were finished the troupe stood in a line and removed their headpieces and masks. Then they opened their mouths, saying nothing, and directed hollow stares at the guests. An extended moment, a long gaping silence in the columned hall.

They departed single file.

A couple of minutes later Clyde found the Boss and they went to the men's room to collect themselves.