Underworld

  “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.

  “Enjoy your dance, Junior?”

  “I think I know who they are.”

  “Didn’t you say that last time we were in here?”

  “A group little seen and less known. Campus demonstrations mostly. No one, and this is odd.”

  “What?” the Boss barked.

  “No one in Internal Security has come up with a name for the group. They’ve been known to act out protests, playing all the roles, even the police. Turn around.”

  “Find the links. It’s all linked. The war protesters, the garbage thieves, the rock bands, the promiscuity, the drugs, the hair.”

  “There’s some dandruff on your jacket,” Clyde said.

  Men entered and left, carrying a single sullen murmur in and out of the tiled room. They unzipped and peed. They urinated into mounds of crushed ice garnished with lemon wedges. They unzipped and zipped. They peed, they waggled and they zipped.

  Edgar stood before the mirrors, still masked, and the sight of him prompted Clyde to think of the secret garden behind the Director’s house, a sector fenced away from neighbors and never shown to guests, where statues of nude young men rose from fountains or stood draped in fall-flaming vines. Less titillating than inspirational, Clyde believed. This was the male form as Edgar’s idealized double. A role livingly filled by Clyde. At least it used to be that way in the days when Edgar would stealthily tilt a mirror so he could lie in bed and watch Junior doing push-ups in the adjoining room.

  That was 1939 in Miami Beach. This was 1966 in New York and we are living in muddle and shock.

  He’d let that girl charm and tempt him, and he’d liked it, and he’d been disappointed when she slipped away before the kiss, and he’d been played for a fool in the oldest way—that radical enravishing self-possessed heartless come-hither bitch.

  Back in the ballroom half the guests were gone. The rest measured out the time so their departure would not seem influenced by the spectacle, the protest, whatever it was—the mockery of their sleek and precious evening.

  The society band played some danceable numbers but nobody wanted to dance anymore. Edgar and Clyde sat drinking with a putty-colored man in smoked glasses and his overmasked wife—satin wings, coq feathers and embedded diamonds.

  Possibly Mafia, Clyde surmised.

  Edgar would not speak to anyone. He sat, drank and hated. He had the sheen of Last Things in his eye. Clyde knew this look. It meant the Director was meditating on his coffin. It gave him dark solace, planning the details of his interment. A lead-lined coffin of one thousand pounds plus. To protect his body from worms, germs, moles, voles and vandals. They were planning to steal his garbage, so why not his corpse? Lead-lined, yes, to keep him safe from nuclear war, from the Ravage and Decay of radiation fallout.

  And when he died, whatever the circumstances, they would suddenly, all those elements that despised his unchecked power—they would invert their distrust and begin to float rumors that the Director himself was the victim of a wry homicide planned and carried out by unknown parties in the vast and layered webwork of the state.

  This is how the Boss would finally draw some sympathy, an old man put to sleep in a complex scheme so expedient and deceitful as to be widely admired even as it was only half believed. And Clyde himself was already prepared to half believe it.

  Edgar dead, pray God, not for ten, fifteen, twenty years yet.

  Maybe the sixties would be over by then.

  The woman in the gaudy mask said, “You think they’ll be waiting outside, those creeps, to make me miserable all over again?”

  The husband said, “It’s nearly four a.m. Hey. They gotta sleep sometime.”

  At four a.m. they were waiting outside. Clyde and Edgar watched from the lobby. The last partygoers straggled out and the protesters rasped and chanted, wearing children’s masks again.

  An hour later it finally ended. Edgar and Clyde left by the main entrance and went down to the Cadillac as the spent trash of a day and a night in a great coastal city went wind-skidding through the streets.

  The armored limousine rolled slowly back to the Waldorf.

  Yes, the Director would finally get some sympathy from the same people who made jokes about them both. Smutty swishy jokes. But Edgar and Clyde were not a couple of old queens doddering on. They were men of sovereign authority. And Edgar did not intend to yield control anytime on this earth.

  Clyde spotted the bug.

  He glanced at Edgar, who sat mute and brooding in his sequined mask. He’d worn the mask steadily since dinner. Hard, cold, laconic, with all the private fury of some unassuageable pain, he wore the leather mask because it eased, if only briefly, the burden of control.

  And when Clyde spotted the bug, the poky little Volkswagen with its incandescent doodles and whorls, he decided to say nothing to Edgar. The car was a hundred feet behind them, like a day-glo roach, slow and sleepless and clinging.

  He said nothing to the Boss because the night had been filled with shock and distress and he wanted to absorb this final bodeful moment on his own. He was Junior after all, now and always, willingly, necessarily, however tired and befooled, the life companion and loyal second man.

  5

  * * *

  OCTOBER 25, 1962

  This was Thursday. They’d first felt the full impact of the danger on Monday evening when the President addressed the nation on radio and television. On Tuesday they were told that Soviet ships were en route to Cuba with missiles and warheads to add to the number already installed on the island. Wednesday was tense. On Wednesday they found out that our naval blockade was in effect and that fourteen Soviet ships were nearing the quarantine line.

  Now it was Thursday. On Thursday evening as SAC bombers carrying thermonuclear weapons circled the Med or flew Arctic routes across Greenland or hugged the western borders of North America, people rode home from work with the radio on or the newspaper up in their eyes.

  And with darkness webbing down out of the broad and soaring sky over the lake, deeper into evening now, the night people were out, slipping past the bars and tonky clubs, mingling with tourists and conventioneers who were checking out the action. On the fringe streets they sidestepped taxis on the prowl and veered around the traffic of negotiated vice and they made their way to Rush Street, finally, where Mister Ke
lly’s stood, a big-name room in Chicago’s bouncing night.

  Lenny Bruce came slouching down from the second-floor dressing room and walked a little bleary-eyed through the kitchen and out the swinging doors, where he did a sidle step onto the stage.

  A waiter with a tray said, “It’s a human zoo out there tonight.”

  Fifteen minutes into his act Lenny took a condom out of his pocket and tried to fit it over his furrowed tongue. Then he tried to talk through it, or out of it. Finally he dangled the item between his thumb and index finger, holding it away from his body, specimenlike—it’s a dead jellyfish that has the reflex power to deliver one last spasmic sting.

  “I can be arrested in twenty-three states for waving this thing in public. You’re thinking, Sure in the Bible belt. Actually I’m safe in the Bible belt because they don’t know what this is. They put Saran Wrap on their dicks.”

  He shook his hands hallelujah and took a stagger step back.

  “I swear I saw it in Time magazine. You get a box of Saran Wrap and you tear off as much as you need for your particular endowment.”

  The word endowment got a bigger response than Saran Wrap or Time magazine.

  “Leftover meatloaf.”

  He did his hipster crack-up laugh, bending from the waist like some Hassid at serious prayer. There were a few people in the audience, two, three, four people going small and tight in their seats.

  “Saran Wrap. It sounds interplanetary. Picture it. A little town somewhere in America. A housewife pins laundry on a line. White and Negro children play peacefully in a schoolyard. Apple pies are cooling on kitchen windowsills. Suddenly a deathly stillness. People pause in midmotion. A dog named Skipper hides under the porch steps. Then a blinding flash. It’s a visit from outer space. Creatures from the planet Saran. They’re very thin and sort of filmy looking. They say to the leaders of Earth, Take this new material we’ve just invented and test it on yourselves, because frankly we’re afraid to.”

  Lenny’s heavy lids began to lower slowly as he changed the scene.

  “It’s a documented thing, farm boys and ranch hands taking strips of Saran Wrap with them when they go on dates. There are teams of sociologists doing fieldwork on this matter. Not to mention admen on the Dow Chemical account, which is the company that makes the stuff, and they’re looking to position their product as a food wrap and a scumbag, if only they could devise a diplomatic language. Ad biggies on Madison Avenue. Let’s do a nice old country doctor in a lab coat. Sitting in his rustic office pulling Saran Wrap off the chicken sandwich his wife packed for his lunch and he drapes the wrap absent-mindedly around his finger. Talking about freshness and protection. Maybe sneaking in a word about overpopulation. And the admen get excited by the idea. Let’s run it up the flagpole blah blah blah. It’s nearly subliminal, dig?”