The four of them—Annee, Livia, Giancarlo and Sallu—sat down to lunch. Giancarlo served them portions of spaghetti from the bowl, and the waiter brought them salad, a dish of pink ham and a black-and-white grainy cheese.
“Just because we fight for a better world, we shouldn’t starve,” Giancarlo said. He was smiling and seemed completely at ease.
“Nor die of thirst,” Sallu said as he poured the wine. But he was nervous.
The women let themselves be served; as a matter of revolutionary protocol, they did not assume the stereotypical feminine role. But they were amused: they were here to take orders from men.
As they were eating, Giancarlo opened the conference. “You two have been very clever,” he said. “It seems you are not under suspicion for the Easter operation. So it has been decided that we can use you for our new task. You are both extremely qualified. You have the experience, but more important, you have the will. So you are being called. But I must warn you. This is more dangerous than Easter.”
Livia asked, “Do we have to volunteer before we hear the details?”
It was Sallu who answered, and abruptly, “Yes.”
Annee said impatiently, “You always go through this routine and ask, ‘Do you volunteer?’ Do we come here for this lousy spaghetti? When we come we volunteer. So get on with it.”
Giancarlo nodded; he found her entertaining. “Of course. Of course,” he said.
Giancarlo took his time. He ate and said contemplatively, “The spaghetti is not so bad.” They all laughed and right off that laugh he said, “The operation is directed against the President of the United States. He must be liquidated. Mr. Kennedy is linking our organization with the atom bomb explosion in his country. His government is planning special operations teams to target us on a global basis. I have come from a meeting where our friends from all over the world have decided to cooperate on this operation.”
Livia said, “In America, that’s impossible for us. Where would we get the money, the lines of communication, how can we set up safe houses and recruit personnel? And above all, the necessary intelligence. We have no base in America.”
Sallu said, “Money is no problem. We are being funded. Personnel will be infiltrated and have only limited knowledge.”
Giancarlo said, “Livia, you will go first. We have secret support in America. Very powerful people. They will help you set up safe houses and lines of communication. You will have funds available in certain banks. And you, Annee, will go in later as chief of operations. So you will have the tricky part.”
Annee felt a thrill of delight. Finally she would be an operational chief. Finally she would be the equal of Romeo and Yabril.
Livia’s voice broke into her thoughts. “What are our chances?” Livia asked.
Sallu said reassuringly, “Yours are very good, Livia. If they get onto us, they’ll let you ride free so they can scoop up the whole operation. By the time Annee goes operational, you will be back in Italy.”
Giancarlo said to Annee, “That’s true. Annee, you will be at the greater risk.”
“I understand that,” Annee said.
“So do I,” Livia said. “I meant, what are our chances for success?”
“Very small,” Giancarlo said. “But even if we fail, we gain. We state our innocence.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon going over the operational plans, the codes to be used, the plans for the development of the special networks.
It was dusk when they were finished and Annee asked the question that had been unasked the whole afternoon. “Tell me, then, is the worst scenario that this could be a suicide mission?”
Sallu bowed his head. Giancarlo’s gentle eyes rested on Annee and he nodded. “It could be,” he said. “But that would be your decision, not ours. Romeo and Yabril are still alive, and we hope to free them. And I promise the same if you are captured.”
CHAPTER
17
Christian Klee’s Special division of the FBI ran computer surveillance on the Socrates Club and members of Congress. Klee always started his morning going through their reports. He personally operated his desktop computer, which held personal dossiers under his own secret codes.
This particular morning he called up the file of David Jatney and Cryder Cole. Klee had a fondness for his hunches and his hunch was that Jatney could be trouble. He no longer had to worry about Cole; that young man had become an enthusiastic motorcyclist and bashed his head against a stone cliff in Provo, Utah. He studied the video image that appeared on his monitor, the sensitive face, the dark recessed eyes. How the face changed from handsomeness in repose to one of frightening intensity when he became emotional. Were the emotions ugly or just the structure of the face? Jatney was under a loose surveillance, it was just a hunch. But when Klee read the written reports on the computer, he felt a sense of satisfaction. The terrible insect buried in the egg that was David Jatney was breaking out of its shell.
David Jatney had fired his rifle at Louis Inch because of a young woman named Irene Fletcher. Irene was delighted that someone had tried to kill Inch but never knew it was her lover who had fired the shot. This despite the fact that every day she beseeched him to tell her his innermost thoughts.
They had met on Montana Avenue, where she was one of the salesgirls in the famous Fioma Bake Shop, which sold the best breads in America. David went there to buy biscuits and rolls and chatted with Irene when she served him. One day she said to him, “Would you like to go out with me tonight? We can eat Dutch.”
David smiled at her. She was not one of the typical blond California girls. She had a pretty round face with a determined look, her figure was just a little buxom, and she looked as if she might be just a little too old for him. She was about twenty-five. But her gray eyes had a lively sparkle and she always sounded intelligent in their conversations, so he said yes. And truth to tell, he was lonely.
They started a casual, friendly love affair; Irene Fletcher did not have the time for something more serious, nor the inclination. She had a five-year-old son, and she lived in her mother’s house. She was very active in local politics and was intensely involved in Eastern religions, which was not at all unusual for a young person in Southern California. For Jatney it was a refreshing experience. Irene often brought her young son, Campbell, to meetings that sometimes lasted far into the night, and she simply wrapped her little boy in an Indian blanket and put him to sleep on the floor as she vigorously pointed out the merits of a candidate for political office or the latest seer from the Far East. Sometimes David went to sleep on the floor with the young boy.
To Jatney, it was a perfect match—they had nothing in common. He hated religion and despised politics. Irene detested the movies and was interested only in books on exotic religions and left-wing social studies. But they kept each other company, each filled a hole in the other’s existence. When they had sex they were both a little offhand, but were always friendly. Sometimes Irene succumbed to a tenderness during sex that she immediately minimized afterward.
It was helpful that Irene loved to talk and David loved to be silent. They would lie in bed and Irene would talk for hours and David would listen. Sometimes she was interesting and sometimes she was not. It was interesting that there was a continuous struggle between the real estate interests and the small homeowners and renters in Santa Monica. Jatney could sympathize with this. He loved Santa Monica; he loved the low skyline of two-story houses and one-story shops, the Spanish-looking villas, the general air of serenity, the total absence of chilling religious edifices like the Mormon tabernacles in his home state of Utah. He loved the great expanse of the Pacific, lying unobscured by glass and stone skyscrapers. He thought Irene a heroine for fighting to preserve all this against the ogres of the real estate interests.
She talked about her current Indian gurus and played their lectures on her tapes. These gurus were far more pleasant and humorous than the stern elders of the Mormon Church he had listened to while growing up, and
their beliefs seemed more poetic, their miracles purer, more spiritual, more ethereal than the famous Mormon tablets of gold and the angel Moroni. But finally, they were just as boring with their rejection of the pleasures of this world and the fruits of success on earth, all of which Jatney so desperately desired.
And Irene would never stop talking, she achieved a kind of ecstasy when she talked even of the most ordinary things. Unlike Jatney, she found her life, ordinary as it was, altogether meaningful.
Sometimes when she was carried away and dissected her emotions for a full hour without interruption, he would feel that she was a star in the heavens growing larger and brighter and that he himself was falling into a bottomless black hole that was the universe, falling and falling while she never noticed.
He liked too that she was generous in material things but thrifty with her personal emotions. She would never really come to grief, she would never fall into that universal darkness. Her star would always expand, never lose its light. And he was grateful that this should be so. He did not want her company in the darkness.
One night they went for a walk on the beach just outside Malibu. It seemed weird to David Jatney that here was this great ocean on one side, then a row of houses and then mountains on the other side. It didn’t seem natural to have mountains almost bordering an ocean. Irene had brought along blankets and a pillow and her child. They lay on the beach and the little boy, wrapped in blankets, fell asleep.
Irene and David sat on their blanket and were overcome by the beauty of the night. For that little moment they were in love with each other. They watched the ocean, which was blue-black in the moonlight, and the little thin birds hopping ahead of the incoming waves. “David,” Irene said, “you have never told me anything really about yourself. I want to love you. You won’t let me know you.”
David was touched. He laughed a little nervously and then said, “The first thing you should know about me is that I’m a Ten-Mile Mormon.”
“I didn’t even know you were a Mormon,” Irene said.
“If you are brought up a Mormon, you are taught that you must not booze or smoke or commit adultery,” David said. “So when you do it you make sure you are at least ten miles from where anybody knows you.” And then he told her about his childhood. And how he hated the Mormon Church.
“They teach you that it’s OK to lie if it helps the Church,” David said. “And then the hypocritical bastards give you all this shit about the angel Moroni and some gold bible. And they wear angel pants, which I have to admit my mother and father never believed in, but you could see those fucking angel pants hanging on their clotheslines. The most ridiculous thing you ever saw.”
“What’re angel pants?” Irene asked. She was holding his hand to encourage him to keep speaking.
“It’s sort of a robe they wear so they won’t enjoy screwing,” David said. “And they are so ignorant they don’t know that Catholics in the sixteenth century had the same kind of garment, a robe that covers your whole body except for a single hole in it so you can screw, supposedly without enjoying it. When I was a kid I could see angel pants hanging from the laundry lines. I’ll say this for my parents, they didn’t buy that shit, but because he was an elder in the church they had to fly the angel pants.” David laughed and then said, “God, what a religion.”
“It’s fascinating, but it sounds so primitive,” Irene said.
David thought, And what the hell is so civilized about all those fucking gurus who tell you that cows are sacred, that you are reincarnated, that this life means nothing, all that voodoo karma bullshit. But Irene felt his tensing and wanted to keep him talking. She slid her hands inside his shirt and felt his heart beating furiously.
“Did you hate them?” she asked.
“I never hated my parents,” he said. “They were always good to me.”
“I meant the Mormon Church,” Irene said.
David said, “I hated the Church ever since I can remember. I hated it as a little kid. I hated the faces of the elders, I hated the way my mother and father kissed their asses. I hated their hypocrisies. If you disagree with the rulings of the Church, they could even have you murdered. It’s a business religion, they all stick together. That’s how my father got rich. But I’ll tell you the thing that disgusted me the most. They have special anointments and the top elders get secretly anointed and so they get to go to heaven ahead of other people. Like somebody slipping you to the head of the line while you’re waiting for a taxi or a table in a popular restaurant.”
Irene said, “Most religions are like that except the Indian religions. You just have to watch out for karma.” She paused a moment. “That is why I try to keep myself pure of greed for money, why I can’t fight my fellow human being for the possessions of this earth. I have to keep my spirit pure. We’re having special meetings, there is a terrible crisis in Santa Monica right now. If we’re not on the alert, the real estate interests will destroy everything we’ve fought for and this town will be full of skyscrapers. And they’ll raise the rents and you and I will be forced out of our apartments.”
She went on and on, and David Jatney listened with a feeling of peace. He could lie on this beach forever, lost in time, lost in beauty, lost in the innocence of this girl, who was so unafraid of what would happen to her in this world. She was telling him about a man named Louis Inch, who was trying to bribe the city council so that they would change the building and rental laws. She seemed to know a lot about this man Inch, she had researched him. The man could be an elder in the Mormon Church. Finally Irene said, “If it wasn’t so bad for my karma, I’d kill the bastard.”
David laughed. “I shot the President once.” And he told her about the assassination game, the Hunt, when he had been a one-day hero at Brigham Young University. “And the Mormon elders who run the place had me thrown out,” he said.
But Irene was now busy with her small son, who’d had a bad dream and waked up screaming. She soothed him and said to David, “This guy Inch is having dinner with some of the town council tomorrow night. He’s taking them to Michael’s and you know what that means. He’ll try to bribe them. I really would like to shoot the bastard.”
David said, “I’m not worried about my karma, I’ll shoot him for you.” They both laughed.
The next night David cleaned the hunting rifle he had brought from Utah and fired the shot that broke the glass in Louis Inch’s limousine. He had not really aimed to hit anyone; in fact the shot had come much closer to the victim than he had intended. He was just curious to see if he could bring himself to do it.
CHAPTER
18
It was Sal Troyca who decided to nail Christian Klee. Going over testimonies to the congressional committees of inquiry into the atom bomb explosion, he noted Klee’s testimony that the great international crisis of the hijacking took precedence. But then there were glitches; Troyca noticed that there was a time gap. Christian Klee had disappeared from the White House scene. Where had he gone?
They wouldn’t find out from Klee, that was certain. But the only thing that could have made Klee disappear during that crisis was something terribly important. What if Klee had gone to interrogate Gresse and Tibbot?
Troyca did not consult with his boss, Congressman Jintz; he called Elizabeth Stone, the administrative aide to Senator Lambertino, and arranged to meet her at an obscure restaurant for dinner. In the month since the atom bomb crisis the two of them had formed a partnership, in both public and private life.
On their first date, initiated by Troyca, they had come to an understanding. Elizabeth Stone beneath her cool, impersonal beauty had a fiery sexual temperament, but her mind was cold steel. The first thing she said was “Our bosses are going to be out of their jobs in November. I think you and I should make plans for our future.”
Sal Troyca was astonished. Elizabeth Stone was famous for being one of those aides who are the loyal right arms for their congressional chiefs.
“The fight isn’t over yet,”
he said.
“Of course it is,” Elizabeth Stone said. “Our bosses tried to impeach the President. Now Kennedy is the biggest hero this country has known since Washington. And he will kick their asses.”
Troyca was instinctively a more loyal person to his chief. Not out of a sense of honor, but because he was competitive, he didn’t want to think of himself as being on a losing side.
“Oh, we can stretch it out,” Elizabeth Stone said. “We don’t want to look like the kind of people who desert a sinking ship. We’ll make it look good. But I can get us both a better job.” She smiled at him mischievously and Troyca fell in love with that smile. It was a smile of gleeful temptation, a smile full of guile and yet an admission of that guile, a smile that said that if he wasn’t delighted with her, he was a jerk. He smiled back.
Sal Troyca had, even to his own way of thinking, a sort of greasy, piglike charm that worked only on certain women, and that always surprised other men and himself. Men respected Troyca because of his cunning, his high level of energy, his ability to execute. But the fact that he could charm women so mysteriously aroused their admiration.
Now he said to Elizabeth Stone, “If we become partners, does that mean I get to fuck you?”
“Only if you make a commitment,” Elizabeth Stone said.
There were two words Sal Troyca hated more than any of the others in the English language. One was “commitment” and the other was “relationship.”