The General reached out and signaled the young woman by patting the top of her bobbing head affectionately. He told her that would be enough, that he had to get along.
***
“Of course, we had no problem finding the people to play Harry Greenwood, the magazine editor, or Irving Mentor, the false Syndicate man,” Professor Cerutti explained to Nick in the enormous files room at Schrader Island. “But they were the last of the professional actors we used. Everything else was purest fiction, to be sure, but it was allowed to play out in your own imagination, using established premises as the stuff such dreams are made on—such as the known enmity between your brother and the head of the Tubesters Union. We were prepared to go on weaving scenarios until we had exhausted you. Fictionized facts. Fantasized facts. Those are the steady cultural nourishment of the American people, forcefed down their throats through the power hoses of the most powerful and pervasive overcommunications design ever dreamed of by man to enslave other men. Still, the subtlety of lying can be fun, as we all know. It wasn’t the exposure of the Watergate tragedy that told Americans of the glorious Freedom of Their Press institutions—also called the Triumph of the Little Man Over the Forces of Repression—because, after all, the Glorious Free Press and the readers of that press had known about the Watergate since June of 1972, well before the presidential elections, in time for the Glorious Free Press to expose the Forces of Repression and prevent them from ever reaching the White House again. The skill there was that we could experience the thrill of the fantasy of a free press through which the Watergate was re-exposed, after our free press had gotten permission to do so. And that is where our collective genius really lies—in the extraordinary American ability to perceive only when we are told to perceive and to believe only when we are told to believe. Not before. All the facts of your brother’s murder have been there to be examined for fourteen years, Mr. Thirkield. It is only now that you have been told to disbelieve them.”
“Told by whom, Professor Cerutti?”
“By your father, who has lost whatever power he had to contain his guilt any longer.”
THURSDAY AFTERNOON, FEBRUARY 7, 1974—NEW YORK
Yvette and Nick, Keifetz and Alvin got back to New York at five minutes to three and went directly to the apartment at the Walpole. Nick called Mr. Zendt and asked him to arrange his marriage to Yvette aboard the S.S. France, which was to sail the following evening.
“If that’s the way it’s going to be,” Yvette said, “what am I doing here? I have to get home to pack.”
“Don’t go home yet,” Nick said. “Please wait right here until I get back. I don’t see how I can be more than an hour.” The doorbell rang. Keifetz opened the door on Keith Lee. The four men left the duplex. Yvette went to bed.
***
It was snowing heavily as the big limousine moved down Park Avenue into a cold, cutting wind. Far down the avenue they could see the colors of the superflag bleeding through the hazing screen of the falling snow as the cup of smog pressed down, distilling out much of the light.
“My God,” Keith said, “I heard about your father’s house flag, but I hadn’t ever seen it before.”
Nick couldn’t answer. He was thinking about Tim. Tim had believed everything Pa had taught him, so he could not ever have won over Pa. They were the long, long yesterday. Nick shivered in the ice cave of Now. He shivered from the mindlessness and helplessness of Now, but he shivered out of fear of what tomorrow would be like—how tomorrow would contrast with Pa’s image.
Pa greeted Nick jovially as Nick went into Pa’s office alone. Alvin and Keifetz had subdued the floor security men. The people who worked in Pa’s executive suite had been locked in one room and the telephones had been ripped out of the walls.
Pa and Nick settled into deep leather chairs.
“Have a little wine?” Pa asked.
“No, thanks.”
“On your way back to Asia?”
“Very soon.”
“I think you’re doing the right thing, Nick. If you leave with as much fanfare as we can lay on, whoever has your girl will know that you’ve decided to wrap the whole thing up—then I’ll be able to negotiate for her return, and I’ll bundle her up and send her on to you.”
“Thanks, Pa. But that’s okay. I got her back. A few hours ago.”
“You got her back?” Pa was uncomprehending. He knew he had not heard Nick correctly.
“I spent almost two hours in a very frank talk with Professor Cerutti. He cooperated, Pa.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“He told me everything, Pa.”
“But—if he told you everything, why did you come here? I’ve done everything I could do to save you, and now you do this. Now I am going to have to have you put away, Nick. I am going to have to have you certified and put away.”
“Pa—please. Just tell me why you had Tim killed. I can’t get that part straight. I have to hear it from you. Please—in the little time we have left—I want to talk about that, Pa.”
Pa took off his glasses and began to polish them with a handkerchief. He was trying to assemble reality. He hadn’t been ready, and he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been ready. But this boy had become deadly dangerous. He had to be put away for everyone’s protection, most of all his own.
Pa hunched forward in his chair and slipped his glasses on again. “I had to do it, Nick. Tim was dying. He would have been a hopeless invalid—just as paralyzed and helpless as Woodrow Wilson. I—I could not have stood that, Nick. He was the meaning of youth and the force of youth to the whole world. Could anyone have been able to see that golden hero turned into a twisted thing? I committed an act of mercy. I made immortality fall on him while he was at the greatest glory of his powers. I had him killed so that the American ideal he stood for might live on forever.”
“That is a total lie, Pa. Why did you have him killed?”
Pa stared at Nick, his face draining of color. Murder burned in his eyes. His voice trembled. White sputum bubbled at the left corner of his mouth. His lips worked silently, then he found his voice. “Why did I have him killed?” he almost screamed. “I’ll tell you why I had him killed. I spent eleven million dollars to build him up from a cunt-simple college boy to the President of the United States! I drilled him every day and every night on what he was to become. For twenty years I told him what was going to happen and how and why we were going to do it and everything that was going to happen after we did it. He knew better than anyone alive that I hadn’t made him the President of the United States so that we could review the fucking fleet together! It was a cold-assed business proposition just like everything else in this life. Let the rope-pullers have ‘Hail to the Chief’ and those wonderful evenings in the East Room with Alice Cooper and Pablo Casals. I put Tim in the White House because that’s where you can generate the most cash. What the hell do you think American politics is all about, kiddo? What the hell do we send the niggers out to fight the wars for? What is all this Latin-American brotherhood shit, our new pals the Chinks and the fucking Russians? Watch the price of oil go up the way we’ve been pushing it up, and soon it will be worthwhile to have those Arabs blown apart by our brave free-world fighters, and that small town they call Canada taken over and annexed if they don’t go along. Tim had known all his adult life that he was going to be sitting in the White House as my sales-promotion manager, and he knew he had to deliver on a quota basis.
“If he knew all that, Pa, then what went wrong? What happened?”
“What happened? It went to his head. Lunch with De Gaulle. Dinner with Khrushchev. A thousand built-in broads. The Marine with the box. Five-star generals shining his shoes. Front pages with his name everywhere he looked. It all turned him into a flag-kisser, for Christ’s sake. He was all right for almost one year, then the whole razzle-dazzle turned his head. He peed all over his quotas. He decided to teach the niggers to read. He began to think we were all living in a democracy. He double-crossed me w
hile he double-crossed himself. And I had every right to put out a life I had created in the first place. That’s logical, isn’t it?”
“Sure is, Pa.”
“I let him trade in the Presidency for a sainthood. I gave him open-end immortality in exchange for spitting in my eye. That was more than fair, wasn’t it?”
“Sure was, Pa.”
“And yet—in spite of the fact that everyone out there in this country believes in and lives in the very same dog-eat-dog way, in spite of the fact that every one of them would use any angle they could find to make a fast buck, if you were to tell them that I had Tim killed, they’d want to tear me limb from limb. What the hell. That’s the system we wanted, and we’re goddam lucky to have it. That’s the American way. But they have to catch you first. That’s the whole secret. Cover your tracks and don’t get caught, and that’s why—as sorry as I am about it, as much as I regret it, Nick—you are going to have to be locked away for a long time, and I’m going to have to see that you get a prefrontal lobotomy to help you wait for the years to go past.”
“Good-bye, Pa,” Nick said as he watched Keith Lee, the Keifetz brothers and two city patrolmen come into the room far behind Pa’s chair. Pa heard the rustle they made. He turned. Without a second of hesitation he darted out of the chair to the far side of the room and stood beside the farthest window.
“Stay where you are,” he said loudly. Nick stood up, twenty feet on Pa’s right. The block of men stopped dead, thirty feet on Pa’s left. Pa turned quickly and opened the window wide.
“All right, boys,” he said. “You asked for it. You are finished. I am going out on that ledge, fifty stories above the street in the most prominent location in Manhattan. In ten minutes I’ll draw a crowd of maybe three thousand, maybe seven thousand people. In half an hour the television crews will have set up in the building just across the street. They’ll interview me with parabolic mikes and I will expose this conspiracy by my son, Nicholas Thirkield, who, with bribed police and a crooked doctor, plans to take over my fortune on trumped-up charges so fantastic that they cannot be believed by any honest, freedom-loving, right-thinking Americans.” He climbed up on the windowsill with athletic agility. “We will see then whether the enduring American system will allow you to conspire to break the heart of the father of its greatest President.”
He slipped out on the ledge. He began to sidle away from the window. The men rushed to the window to grab his legs. As they rushed at him he pulled back involuntarily, even though he was already too far away from them to be reached. Had he not pulled back he might have won it all—just as he had said. But as he pulled back reflexively, his foot slipped on the ice-coated ledge. He fell, dragging the other foot off the snow on the ledge.
As he fell he grabbed at the folds of the gigantic flag, his house signal, as it hung downward for fifteen stories. He held onto the flag desperately four feet below the window ledge, just too far below for the hands above him to reach down to grasp his clothing and pull him up to safety. He looked up at Nick’s face with terror.
“Son! Help me! Help me!” he screamed, his eyes popping with the fear of death. There was the sudden sound of ripping. The years Pa had exposed the great flag in every kind of weather had rotted it.
The flag began to tear just above Pa’s gripping hands. There was a terrible ripping sound as the flag burst apart. Staring upward and screaming into Nick’s eyes, Pa fell down and down and down until he hit the pavement fifty floors below.
Richard Condon, Winter Kills
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