A woman with a small child holding each of her hands interrupted him to ask how to get to the subway. The man stood up and took off his hat. He showed her the way. He sat down, replacing his hat.
“You might never guess why money was invented, Tom. While we talk here you’ve got to bear one thing in mind. Money was invented to accommodate human emotion. Human emotion, Tom—not daily needs or trade—human emotion established money among the earliest and most primitive people. Money was invented for only two uses, Tom—and these are anthropological and sociological facts, not any whim of mine—for marriage first, for blood money second. The second use of money by mankind, Tom, was for blood revenge. Blood revenge always demanded a life for a life unless the injured party could be suitably compensated for the loss of services. Simple. Now—the loss of services of your son as President of the United States presents an extraordinary position of advantage for you and goes far beyond the usual measurement in the use of money for blood revenge.”
“Are you trying to pay me for the loss of my son’s life?” Pa asked incredulously.
“No.”
“You haven’t talked this much in all the time I’ve known you. You can save your breath. I’m going to kill you sometime tomorrow.”
“I don’t think so, Tom. Not after you hear my proposition.”
“What proposition?”
“Lemme tell you. Lemme say it the way I thought it all the way through, because that’s how it’s going to make sense for both of us. Now—the first thing—of course I can’t really pay you for your son’s life. Sure, the whole blood revenge thing is right there between us, but you have so much money now that for me to try to pay you pro rata would mean I’d have to treble your fortune. I just don’t think any one man has any money like that.”
Pa had a kind of sense of smell that not many men have, because if more than a few had it, there wouldn’t be enough money in the world for all of them or anyone else. The man who was talking to him, who had the gift himself, saw it come over Pa. He had been rambling, waiting for Pa’s blinding anger to diminish so that his great natural force could take over again. The time had come.
“Then what are you talking about?” Pa asked.
“I want you to think about one thing, Tom. Just one thing. I want you to think about having three times as much money as you have right now. Then we can call it quits, because the right thing will have been done. Now—I’m going to leave, and your people are going to try to follow me. We’ll be in touch.”
The red light for north-south traffic on Broadway changed just then. The man got up and walked rapidly across the street to the downtown side and got into a large black limousine. The car rolled before the door closed. Two policemen on roaring motorcycles came out of One Hundred and Twelfth Street, sirens open, to make way for the limousine. A motorcycle escort filled in behind the car as well. The procession picked up enormous speed, turned toward the river at One Hundred and Tenth Street, and disappeared.
Pa goggled after it with admiration.
***
June was the best time for Pa because it was the time furthest away from Christmas. Christmas always made him feel almost suicidal, because it brought out his feelings of unworthiness when so much emphasis was placed on the time of Christ’s birth, the screaming shops, secrecy of the surprises, the last-minute flurries of activity, which muddied the water of his imperfections all over again—everything pointed to that one allegedly perfect figure, all of it suggested the birth of more wives like Nick’s mother, who had called him a guttersnipe, proclaiming to all that he was the least of men.
But it was June and he was safer. Christmas was as far away as Nick’s mother. She was dead, but he was alive. He had her son in his fist with June and his money to protect him. He would play it loose. He would employ his cardinal rule of living, which was to imagine everyone in the world wearing long, red, lumpy winter underwear. Nobody could dominate him standing out there in lumpy red flannels. Tim was dead. Nothing he could do about that. Amen. God bless you, Tim. He sobbed uncontrollably in the closed room at Rockrimmon. Alan John Melvin must have reached the main gate by now. The car would take him to the country airport and the government plane would fly him back to Washington. It was clear and simple. Proper blood-revenge money had been paid over as the greatest homage ever made to Tim’s life and memory. He had done it for Tim.
***
“The requirement here, Mr. Kegan,” Alan John Melvin had said, “is that you assemble forty-seven blind companies in not less than thirty states that ostensibly have no connection with you and, most important, no connection with any single person or ownership. We think it will be all right if these companies shuttle their tenders through as few as a dozen of the private procurement and lobbying offices in Washington. That could add to the general diffusion. My office will see that these forty-seven firms get the major contracts for the program. Of course the moonshot and the whole space program is a very big and going concern even now, but by sixty-two it is going to be so enormous that you will be required to form probably ninety to a hundred and fifteen more companies as anonymous as the first forty-seven, because several billions—twelve to thirty billions of dollars—are going to be involved here.”
During those first years, his busiest years with the space requirement, he certainly didn’t want the status quo disturbed (mainly because he didn’t want to have to think about it until he had become entirely used to the new arrangement). But as the contracts were transformed into so much money and into the power of so much money he became each year more agitated until, at last, he instructed Professor Cerutti and the unit at Industrial Maintenance Services Corporation to find the second rifleman and to build an apparatus to overtake the evidence that would be a case against the man without in any way seeming to involve Thomas Kegan, because that would have constituted a double cross.
Now that the money had been earned, Tim’s and his own honor would be finally avenged.
***
The trouble was at night. Sometimes late at night he would come wide-awake despite the cold baths and the massages, despite the sleeping pills. He would feel such a guilt of greed, and a father’s guilt, and a kinsman’s guilt, and the guilt of power, that he would need to scream. He would put on a pair of swimming trunks, go out and lower himself into the heated pool, and try an underwater scream.
He thanked the compassionate Almighty God with large contributions to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith for His mercy in making each year less and less terrible. When three years had gone by, he could live with it. He had his own billion dollars. By the time ten years had gone by and he had three billion dollars of his own, he never thought of it at all. His one hundred and sixty-three companies had done a grand job for the space program, had probably done a better job for being under his direction than discretely owned companies could ever have done, because, in the finest sense, he had done it all for Tim—for President Kegan. The conquest of space had been Tim’s own program, originated and installed by Tim, then made possible and practical by his consecrated father.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1974—NEW YORK
Pa let his head fall back on the sofa. He closed his eyes. There was a considerable silence. Pa opened his eyes.
Nick said, “I see.”
“In a sense I betrayed him. In another sense I did not.”
Nick said, “So you have known all these years who murdered Tim.”
“Yes.”
“When I found that rifle it must have upset you greatly.”
“I didn’t know what to do.”
“So you called the man and asked for orders.”
“Yes.”
“He told you to send me to that house on the Muskogee road.”
Pa closed his eyes. “Yes.”
“Then all those other things to throw me off the track.”
“Yes.”
Nick leaned forward. His voice rose and trembled. “Well, I didn’t make any whoring deal with the son-of-a
-bitch—who is he? He has Yvette. He’s holding Yvette. Who is he, Pa?”
“Z. K. Dawson.”
“Dawson.”
“The real Dawson. But no use your going after him. He made that deal with me, but he isn’t the one who had Tim killed.”
“Who was it, then?”
“His daughter.”
“What?” It was a cry of pain.
“Dawson only made the deal to buy safety for his daughter.”
“Pa, open your eyes.”
Pa’s eyes opened.
“Z. K. Dawson’s daughter was only about sixteen when Tim was killed.”
“Oh, no. She was older than that. She had to be. She was sleeping with Tim. She was laying men at Lola Camonte’s. She planned Tim’s killing with cold blood. We have the whole story. Cerutti dug up the whole story.”
SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 1955—WASHINGTON
Z. K. Dawson’s daughter met Tim Kegan in Washington when he was a young “bachelor senator” just three weeks after his nomination to the candidacy as President, three weeks before his official campaign for election began. It was so exciting for such a country girl. She had hardly ever left her daddy’s ranch—which surrounded Bryson, Texas—until she was fourteen. Daddy ran eight or ten thousand head of cattle as a tax gimmick. He wasn’t a rancher. He was an oil man: fields, pipelines, gas, refineries, tankers, gas stations, trucks and money. He had big oil and helium plants in Amarillo. He was heavy with grain elevators, zinc smelters, meat-packing and flour-milling in the Amarillo area. The ranch straddled the New Mexico border for hundreds of square miles on either side and swole out all over Deaf Smith County. It was just about the healthiest place in the world to raise a little girl.
Her culture was rounded off in three finishing schools in three altogether different European countries so she could have the power of talking foreign languages plus American and West Texan. Her daddy was as proud as proud can be (Pa said): “She sure as hell is entitled to a warm corner. She can speak Italian, French and German just like she was a wop, a frog or a kraut.”
When she was sixteen she was sent to school in Italy for two years, under the tutelage and protection of the Duchessa di Giorgio, who ran a school for five young girls each year in different parts of the Italian peninsula, depending on the seasons. It was after the long series of operations, and she was a lovely child, with hair the color of an almond skin and eyes like laurel leaves. She was tall, with a wistfully faraway expression, yet with enormous animal vitality. Italy was her dream. Italy was the distilled adventure of all history. Italy was the romantic time of the world.
After two springs with the duchessa at Villa Somali, twenty-three kilometers from Venice on the Treviso road, then two summers at another Villa Somali (next door to the central residence of the late, thrilling Gabriele D’Annunzio Rapagnetta, Prince of Monte Nevoso, at Lago di Garda), two autumns at yet another Villa Somali at Siena to learn the supreme enunciation of the Italian language, and two winters in Rome at the Palazzo di Giorgio, she was no longer a virgin. The duchessa was firm, almost harsh, with her girls about virginity. She not only did not believe in it for young civilized women but she had two almost-elderly clients among the Black nobility who paid her well to deliver them.
One of these was a marchese, Luigi Debole, a diplomat who had served his country steadfastly in the Argentine, France and Yugoslavia, who had certain difficulties in sexual expression. Signorina Dawson’s youth meant a great deal to him, so much so that, on her nineteenth birthday, when he was sixty-two, they married in Rome in a civil ceremony that was accompanied by a marriage contract drawn by Daddy’s lawyers. In the contract it was stated that Signore Debole had an aversion to using his title, although it was acknowledged that his wife could use it after his death if that suited her.
After the wedding, Daddy, through the President and the Secretary of State, arranged to have the Deboles posted to Washington, where her beauty transfixed the diplomatic corps and the press.
What started her on being the first roundly educated member the family had ever had was the bad car accident she had with Daddy (Pa explained), which had nearly ruined her face. In less than a year she had recovered nicely from all the plastic operations, but Daddy couldn’t bear to look at her, because they wouldn’t have gotten into the accident at all if Daddy hadn’t been such a heavy drinking man in those days. She wouldn’t have been a fraction as lovely as those three Japanese surgeons made her if it hadn’t been for the accident. If she had looked the way she had been born to look, it seemed an easy thing to say that Tim would not have glanced twice in her direction, and very well might have had another shot at the Presidency after taking a four-year rest at the end of his second term.
But there had been the terrible accident. She had been sent away to school in Siena, Lausanne and Baden-Baden. She had married an Italian diplomat named Luigi Debole, who was always described in Washington society pages as “an older man.” The Deboles were assigned to the Italian Embassy in Washington because Daddy had explained to the President that it was something close to his heart.
Tim was never sure where it was they met in Washington. It would be fair to say that they met at about thirty cocktail parties, dinners, balls, late suppers, hunts, charity auctions and lunches that they both attended on a professional basis. Unknown to her, and for reasons of appeasing his own conscience, Daddy had hired the best, most accepted high-pressure public-relations firm in the country to undertake the job of establishing in print—as if it weren’t true unless it had been set and seen in print over and over again—that she was the most beautiful woman to grace official Washington since Evalina Hunt, daughter of the British ambassador in the time of the thirty-one day Harrison administration in 1841. Since he was a modern man, it is possible that it was these repeated published claims measuring the extraordinary beauty of Signora Debole that first moved Tim to “pay attention” to her, rather than when, where or how often they had met. However, it was generally decided by both of them after the fun and games had gotten under way that they had been introduced by Lola Camonte at her “magnificent Georgetown house.” During this time Lola was hard at work as an erection engineer on Signore Debole. As an Italo-American, she was determined to be decorated by the Italian government for the undoubted effect it would have upon many key members of her own (invisible) organization.
Before the campaign started, Tim and Signora Debole had about eight days of callid copulating in a flat that the wily senator had rented for the purpose. Then he had to become inseparable from his entourage of press and politicians, and he found himself under total scrutiny. He had become almost physically addicted to her (and she to him). Pa noticed how distracted he was when he should have been giving all his attention to the campaign. He and Tim had a showdown about it, screaming at each other (in whispers) in Tim’s compartment on the plane, Pa attacking him obscenely for what he clearly saw to be a dangerous weakness, but Tim said he was just unable to accommodate Pa without any relief for himself. So a compromise was reached. Rockrimmon was named as the place of withdrawal to which the candidate would go whenever possible during the campaign and where, by common agreement with the press, he would be allowed to recharge his vigor without any encroachment by them. They watched every entrance and exit to the place, but they couldn’t get closer to the candidate than two miles. He never overdid it. Three days away from them was the most he was ever able to achieve, but each time he visited Rockrimmon Signora Debole would have been flown in by a small Jovair helicopter at least twenty-four hours before the candidate’s arrival. The signora and her husband solemnly told each other that she needed to visit her father in Texas each time she had to be away with Tim.
An irreparable thing happened. Tim was able to transfer his physical addiction to six or so other ladies while, almost simultaneously and certainly against her will, Signora Debole fell hopelessly in love with him. It was not only irreparable. It was incompatible with serenity.
The time between his election a
nd his inauguration, Tim reasoned, would be the logical time to let the signora cool off. He had had a lot of fun with her, even though in a confined way upon a small space, but now there was work to do (as opposed to what he had been doing in the Senate) and other beds to activate. From the beginning of his time with her he had said all the usual words, because she seemed to have become a passionate Italianate by adoption, utterly denying herself the laconics of an uncomplicated Texas girl in love. But the accident with Daddy in that terrible swaying, roaring car had turned her into an extraordinarily complicated woman. The awful fright of the long drive on the high mountain road with a drunken man at the wheel began it, and it never ended. If she dozed without the right drugs to put her completely to sleep with a wiped mind, that all came back to her. The pain throughout her body between the periods of oblivion brought by the morphine and the Demerol impressed itself upon the country-girl placidity she had been born with and changed all its smoothness into the contours of a serpentine nebula. Then the mysterious Japanese surgeons had appeared riding in on the carpet of Daddy’s money. A face, a new chest and legs, had been chosen for her from the arcane records of the faces and figures of wonderful fairies who lived amid the flowers of a child’s dream, and she had been transformed. Everyone soon came to see what the surgeons showed them as being her. But she knew the molded flesh between the back of her eyes and the tip of her nose was not her. She was wearing a mask. She knew the perfect bosoms, more flawlessy sculpted than anything by Bernini, and the incomparable legs were a shell she had been packed into, a suit of armor that concealed the real plainness of a piano-legged, flat-chested, turnip-chinned country girl with teeth like a mouse’s and eyes so close together that they turned her full face into a profile. All the press carried on about her beauty, but she knew. Her husband rhapsodized about her beauty, but she knew. When Tim happened to her, she was liberated from the mean little prison of her surgery. In Tim’s arms, listening to him make love, she not only forgot all about what she had looked like once, but she didn’t care. She didn’t have to care. The most important man in the world wanted her and needed her so deeply and frantically that he could not understand how he survived when they were apart.