“I don’t think so,” Nick said. “That was fifteen years ago. Pa and Frank Mayo looked to me to be very good friends. But it could be that Pa is just too close to them to ask them for a favor like that.”
“It is not my place to conjecture.”
“What happened after the man Donnelly came out from Washington with the information Tim wanted and Tim and Pa had their ‘talk’ about the two million dollars Pa had accepted in Tim’s name?”
Cerutti stared sadly into Nick’s eyes. “They met and then your brother never spoke to your father again. He never saw him again. They broke over that issue. It was a terrible blow to your father both personally and financially.”
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1974—NEW YORK
Nick didn’t play the organ while the Wendebo took him back to Ashland the next day. He sat in the main saloon, drank hot tea and felt proud of Tim. He understood all of it, not in its details or even in the inner meanings of politics, but he knew Tim had been waiting all his life for one black-and-white instance of Pa’s essential unreliability. He suddenly realized that Tim had lived with what he himself had run away from, and he began to understand what that signified. They had both lived in fear of Pa’s undependability in any single moment of time when the existing conditions forced a choice on Pa of either serving his sons’ best interests or serving Pa.
Nick sat and tried to imagine what had happened that night in Palm Springs after Tim dismissed Camonte and called his father in. It must have been a grisly scene.
Four times, in different places, Nick had read that, as estimated by historians, psychologists and anthropologists, Tim Kegan had wanted to be President of the United States more than any other man in the history of the Republic. To get to the White House he had had to pay the price of admission to Pa. Somehow his administration had survived Pa’s demands during the first eleven months of Tim’s office. Throughout that time Tim had tried to go forward, carrying the weight of Pa all alone, taking his cues from Pa on the directions in which the country was to go, trying to judge when it would reach a point of no return, living in anguish that the break with Pa would never come.
Then the break came. Lola Camonte gave Tim his freedom. Sometime late that night or early the next morning the finance chairman of the campaign committee arrived at Palm Springs with the records. Tim would have turned everything inside out and would have discovered that two million dollars in hundred-dollar bills had never gone into the campaign fund. A free man, unchained from Pa, Tim would have kicked Pa’s door down and would have gone in to tell him that he was barred from the White House and from Washington together with his Sicilian friends, and that if he ever as much as showed his face there again Tim would wind up a Senate committee for an investigation into all of Pa’s affairs, including the disappearance of the two million dollars.
It had to have happened that way. In the time he had left, Tim became a different President. Instead of the go-along, frivolous, laissez-faire figure he had offered during his first year of office, he tried to become a strong, pace-setting President of all the people. Nick imagined he could hear Pa shouting that night, “What the hell do you think I made you President for, you little shit—to review the fucking fleet in New York harbor?”
Then Tim would say, cooler than cool, “You had a great ride, Pa. Now you either disappear or I’ll drag you at the end of a rope behind the bus.”
Nick felt exhilarated. By his own choice, Tim had broken with Pa and had banished him. He felt a wave of love for Tim wash over him. He had always wanted to love Tim. He was ashamed that he had treated Tim the way he had, because Nick knew Pa. He had fled Pa. He should have had understanding of the load Tim had carried within the sound of Pa’s voice.
As he was driven into New York, Nick saw all sides of his family clearly for the first time. He was exultant for Tim but he was sorry for Pa. Pa had been Tim’s only dominant teacher, and he had conditioned Tim’s reflexes the way Pavlov had conditioned his dogs. Pa had bred and trained Tim to be President his way. Pa had inculcated all Tim’s attitudes and reactions. Pa had given Tim a religion that money was the only morality or salvation. For Pa (and Pa thought for Tim), if all the criminals and murderers and dope peddlers were on your side to help you make more money, they deserved your support and your country’s support. If a bunch of niggers and students and liberals ready to stool-pigeon for the press wanted to try to rock the boat, they had to be clobbered until they could find the carrot held out to get them back on their feet, pulling on the ropes, to keep Pa and his friends moving toward more money.
Pa had thought Tim really understood all that.
Nick called Yvette from Kennedy as soon as he got off the plane. He was self-conscious, spoke stiffly, unable to think of much else except the one big argument they had ever had in three years over a wonderful beef daube that he could still smell. Yvette spoke as if they had never had the argument. She was relaxed and gay.
“Where have you been?” he asked. “I have called you five times from two different cities and maybe five different phones.”
“I went to a wedding in Montreal. Best wedding I’ve ever been to.”
“Are you free for dinner?”
“When?”
“Tonight!”
“Yes, I’m free for dinner tonight. What’s on your mind?”
“I have to talk to you.”
“Have you pinned the killing on Dawson yet?”
“Listen—can’t we get whatever it is on your mind dragged out into the open and talk about it?”
“I’ve been thinking about that all the time.”
“Well?”
“I decided—yes—it should be out in the open. We can talk about it tonight.”
“That’s wonderful. Jesus—I mean, that’s great.”
“Maybe you better wait until you say it like that. Where shall we meet?”
“I’m at the airport. I have to go to the Walpole to change clothes, but if it’s all right with you I’ll send a car for you, then you and the car pick me up on the way downtown.”
“Fine. What time?”
“Eight twenty your house, eight thirty the Walpole. I’ll be in the lobby.”
***
It was snowing. It was freezing and getting colder. The prevailing wind was pushed through the high-walled streets building power, turning each snowflake into a razor blade, driving each one with great force into the faces on the streets of the city.
The table they sat at in the L-shaped top of the dining room at the Canopy—one of the perfect restaurants that Pa owned in New York—put them just out of sight of the rest of the room but directly in line with the main entrance, which was the whole point of the yearning to be seated at one of these six tables that were traditionally reserved for visiting royalty or stately patrons who gave the maître d’hôtel fifty dollars or more. Or for Pa or Nick. Everyone else who entered or departed the place got to see the elite seated to eat against that hallowed wall. Yvette, a seeded international diner, was gratifyingly impressed. She was awed when Nick said offhandedly to the Patron (himself), who hovered over them grinning and rubbing his hands, “You know what we like, Carlo. Do it well, please,” and handed the carte back to the man without looking at it. Carlo, who was perhaps the third most important man in New York society and in all business conducted on the eastern seaboard, murmured his gratitude and backed away with lowered eyes. The word rolled across the dining room swiftly between and around the packed tables that a British royal was dining at the stem of the L.
“You certainly have a way with tyrants,” Yvette said humbly.
“I ought to. My father owns this place.”
“Owns it?”
“If you like this sort of thing, you should ask your father to buy you a fashionable restaurant. But you have to have a very rich father, and—quite possibly—you have to feel certain that such a headwaiter as Carlo would be cruelly rude to you if you did not.”
“As it happens, I do have a very rich father,” Yvette
said.
“But not the need.”
“This is as good a time as any to bring this up and get it over with. My father is Z. K. Dawson.”
“Zane Kenneth Dawson?”
“Yes.”
“He is your father?”
“That is why I cannot—will not—marry you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You and your family think my father had something unspeakable to do with your brother’s murder.”
“Is that because—are you saying that because of that little reference I made in the letter I mailed from Frankfurt?”
“That was the first time I knew you had any connection with that vile man Thomas Kegan, yes. But you even said yourself that my father was probably the assassin.”
“Well, I—you see, Yvette, I—”
“Your father and his people have spread that word from the very first day. From the day your brother died. That wasn’t the only word he spread or the only one he blamed, but we know he was the spreader because my father spent a lot of time and money tracking those rumors down.”
“This is a very hard thing to talk about, but we’ve got to do it.”
“We are doing it.”
“When I wrote that to you it wasn’t because of anything my father said to me. My father had never mentioned the name of Z. K. Dawson to me.”
“Then how did you—?”
“A man who has turned out to have been the second rifleman at Tim’s murder confessed to me on his deathbed just ten days ago tonight. We asked him who hired him. He said he didn’t know but that he thought it was probably Z. K. Dawson.”
“That’s a goddam lie. He’s a goddam liar.”
“Well, just the same I had to check it out. I went all the way to Tulsa to see your father and—”
“Tulsa?”
“The little white house on the Muskogee road. Dentist’s chair and everything.”
“Dentist’s chair?”
“He was pretty convincing in an intellectual way about why he hadn’t had anything to do with the assassination, but—I’m sorry, Yvette, this is what happened and I’ve got to say it—he sent me to a motel in Tulsa at the airport, and while I was there—I’m sorry, Yvette—his people tried to kill me.”
“Every bit of that actually happened?”
“Every bit.”
“Then we both have a bad enemy somewhere. You and me and Daddy. Nick, my daddy hasn’t set a foot outside his ranch in the back country of Venezuela in maybe twelve or fourteen years, because he had a bad automobile accident that left him with kind of a crushed face which he is very sensitive about strangers looking at. So much for his living in a little white house outside of Tulsa. Now what is this about the dentist’s chair?”
“Z. K. Dawson is famous for holding all his meetings in a dentist’s chair.”
“Nick, you got a master illusionist working on you. We’ve got to be talking ’bout two different people. And as far as daddy ever owning a crappy little motel in a crappy little town like Tulsa, that’s silly. He’s an Amarillo oil man and a horse-race bettor, and that’s all he’s ever been or ever wanted to be.”
“I saw him. I was with him. Will you let me describe him?”
“I can’t wait.”
“He’s a man of about seventy-five—”
“Ha!”
“—with a great big stomach, a real pink, round face and dead-white hair that curves down over his forehead like a Gay Nineties bartender.”
“That tears it. Look, my daddy—that is, Z. K. Dawson of Amarillo, Texas, and Jaime del Arias, Venezuela—is a sixty-two-year-old man with a flat stomach, a dark, dented face and jet black hair that he combs straight back on his head like a Cherokee Indian, of which he happens to be part of, partly.”
Nick gulped.
“And if my daddy ever decides to kill you he’ll do it in the middle of Main Street at high noon, with a great big loud pistol if not with his bare hands.” Yvette fumbled in her purse. She came out with a Polaroid snapshot. Her eyes were filled with tears of indignation. “That is Z. K. Dawson, you turd,” she said.
Nick held the picture and stared at it. “I’m knocked out. I’m all out of synch. Not that I’m not glad. I was absolutely wrong. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that it all happened that way. But now you can marry me.”
There was a delay while the waiter poured wine. Then Nick said, “First, will you accept my profound apologies?”
“Yes. I will. But it hurts to know you’re so dumb.”
“It all sounds dumb but—”
“I guess I don’t really mind if you’re dumb. Daddy can support us.” He produced a look of such shocked outrage that she giggled.
“Next, are you going to marry me?”
“Yes. I will. If you go to Venezuela and ask Daddy for my hand.”
***
Keifetz had moved into a room at the Waldorf at ten o’clock that night on the supposition that no one would have the time to wire the room for bugging before he and Nick started to talk. Nick had told him to stay out of hotels built after 1962 because there was always the chance that they had had wiring for taps all built in during the construction. Nick got to the hotel at 10:10 P.M. after sending Yvette home in one of Pa’s cars.
“How did it go in Wisconsin?” Keifetz asked.
“Interesting. But the real news is that Yvette says she’ll marry me.”
“Nicholas! Oh boy, that’s great.”
“So if I take Carswell’s job—on account of nobody else wants it—and we move the main office from London to Paris—if that’s okay with the tax lawyers—can you handle the operations end alone?”
Keifetz snorted. “What do you think?”
“Okay. Seven percent of the profits, and we apply the other four points of that agreed escalation to start at seven percent.”
“What happened to you?”
“No, it’s okay. It’s fair.”
“I’ll take it. Any cash?”
“A twenty-percent raise.”
“Jesus, now I can take two wives. Daisy won’t mind. Her father had four, and she says the second wife is a lot of help around the house.”
“You want something to drink?”
“Sure. Why?”
“I have to talk. We have a lot to figure out. It’s getting real bad.” He picked up the phone and called room service. He ordered a bottle of Scotch, some setups, a platter of cold roast beef and some toast.
“Now think. Did you talk to my father that first day, the day I left Brunei?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. He just wanted to know what plane you were on. Why?”
“You are sure that’s all you talked about?”
Keifetz thought about it. He said, “I think he asked me why you were going to Philadelphia.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him about Fletcher—and I told him about the rifle. And I said you were going on to Palm Springs—I think.”
“So the only thing he knew before he called you was that I was going to Philadelphia. That means that little sod Carswell called him as soon as he hung up on me.”
“What’s this all about?”
“Mainly it’s about the fact that Pa pretended to me never to have heard the name Fletcher or anything about Fletcher or the rifle when he had discussed everything we knew about Fletcher within an hour after I left Brunei.”
“But—what is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to ask my father. And he wasn’t at Palm Springs when I got there. Somebody went to see Miles Gander to bribe him. Somebody knew all about that rifle the instant we found it.”
“Your father?”
“I don’t know. But he was the only one who could have had all those facts. So I’m going to ask him to explain all that to me.”
A room-service waiter brought in the food and the liquor and left.
Keifetz poured drinks for both of them.
“I lift it to Yvette and you,” he said.
“I lift it to your entirely legal harem,” Nick said.
They drank. “Enough talk about sex,” Keifetz said. “What else about your father?”
“He set up the meeting with Z. K. Dawson for me. Tonight I found out that the man I saw wasn’t Dawson, that Dawson hasn’t been out of Venezuela for like ten years.”
“How could you find out a thing like that tonight and check it out?”
“Because I found out tonight that Z. K. Dawson is Yvette’s fathers and he comes complete with a photograph.”
“But—”
“But what?”
“Well, Jesus. This is a rotten thing to say but—well, what the hell, everybody else has been bending your mind—maybe Yvette gave you a bum steer.”
“It didn’t happen that way. Besides, she wants me to fly to Venezuela to meet her father. No, it’s Pa. And it’s not even so much that Pa sent me to the fake Z. K. Dawson, it’s that the people who paid to have Tim killed knew I would be at the fake Dawson’s, arranged that I be sent to that particular house on that particular road so that they could plant Chantal Lamers and so that everything that led up to Lamers could lead away from her—the magazine, Mentor, the fake stories, everything.”
“Then that whole trail led you right back to your father again. Jesus. What are you going to do?”
“You were born in New York. Do you know any cops?”
“My kid brother, Alvin, is a Homicide lieutenant in Bay Ridge.”
“Is he straight?”
“Is he straight? My uncle, Doc Lesion, would beat the pole off him if he wasn’t straight. He’s as straight as a great big Mosler safe at the headquarters of the Boy Scouts of America.”
“Good. Now—please get your brother to get a copy of the statement by Martin Keys, the Englishman who tried to throw me out the window. They booked him at the East Sixty-eighth Street station.”
“What are you going to be doing?”
“I’m going to Oklahoma to see if I can talk to Chantal Lamers’ father in Muskogee. She claimed he was the oldest established pharmacist in town and I have no choice, I have to buy that.”