The Second Sight, page 44
“Did she have a cold?”
“I don’t know. She was short like a Japanese.”
“Did she have Japanese legs?”
“Japanese legs!”
“Short, thick, bowed—Japanese legs. Did you look at her legs?”
“No.”
“I’m not surprised. What was her accent like? Was it a Japanese accent?”
“I didn’t notice. She only spoke five words. She just spoke English.”
“Goddamnit, Dorcas! What did you notice?”
“Only what I said. I was startled. I mean, she just ran up to me and slammed this thing up against my chest. And I don’t wear my glasses when I run.”
“Then get some contacts. And don’t give me any more excuses. You’re paid to keep your eyes open. Remember that.”
He was shouting at the top of his powerful voice. The girl was stricken to the heart by his displeasure. She was blushing. Her voice trembled. Tears spilled from her sleepy eyes. Graham observed these symptoms with satisfaction; he was merely testing her to see how she responded to negative reinforcement. All the signs were excellent: Criticism frightened her, gave her a feeling of failure. She was consumed by guilt; she belonged to a class to whom failure was the worst of the sins.
He was pleased by what she had brought him, too. Inside the supermarket bag he found a large brown envelope, and inside the envelope was a glossy photograph of Walpole, an ordinary-looking, unsuspecting suburbanite walking away from a car on which the Virginia license plate was clearly visible. His expression was less euphoric than on the tape, but it could not be anyone else. Pasted to the back of the picture was a brief message in dot-matrix characters generated by a cheap computer printer: “CHECK OUT THE LICENSE NUMBER. GO TO THE OWNER’S ADDRESS. ASK THE NEIGHBORS IF THEY KNOW THIS MAN.”
The neighbors did know him, as Garth T. Robertson, the name under which the car was registered. He worked, as an accountant, perhaps (no one was sure), for one of those acronymic Beltway Corporations—TEBAK? BATEK? He and his family had recently been transferred overseas. No, they didn’t know where they had gone, exactly. The Robertsons hadn’t been very outgoing people.
The fact that Walpole had lived under a different name, and had suddenly vanished, was all the proof Graham needed that Walpole, or Robertson, was an employee of the Outfit. He decided to broadcast the tape.
The man with the Middle East accent called again that evening. “Have you identified Mister Garth T. Robertson?” he asked.
“We found the house he used to live in. Where is he now?”
“Patience, Mister Graham. We will be watching your show.”
2
IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY WASHINGTON, DAVID PATCHEN SAID blandly to Patrick Graham, a certain politicized segment of the news media exercised many of the functions belonging to the secret police in totalitarian countries. They maintained hidden networks of informers, carried out clandestine investigations, conducted interrogations on the basis of accusations made by anonymous witnesses and agents provocateurs, and staged dramatic show trials in which the guilt of the accused was assumed and no effective defense was allowed. They had far greater powers of investigation than the government. The authority of the state to persecute the individual was defined and limited by the Constitution, whereas the media were restrained by nothing more than the rules of theater. Because their targets were usually thought by the best people to deserve the punishment they might otherwise have eluded, the media had no need to worry about the quality of its evidence; journalists were not concerned with truth in any case, only with “accuracy.” That consisted of verifying the existence of their sources and confirming that they had actually spoken the words quoted, or something close to those words; nothing beyond that was required. If one person denounced another, even if anonymously, that was reason enough to publish the charge. There was no requirement to question the evidence or the accuser’s motives, or even to identify the accuser; in fact the accuser usually spoke on the understanding that his anonymity would be preserved under all circumstances. Verdicts of “innocent” based on these rules of evidence were almost unknown. The sentence was degradation, shame, exile, and, usually, a lifetime of impoverishment resulting from the attempt to pay lawyers’ fees incurred in the vain hope of self-defense. Conviction in the media was sometimes followed by conviction in the courts, but the punishment handed down by judges, a mere prison sentence or fine or condemnation to a stated number of hours of good works among the underclass, was regarded as the lesser penalty.
Hearing these outrageous statements, Patrick Graham stared dumbfounded at Patchen—or rather, stared into the pitch darkness through which they were walking. He could not actually see Patchen, only his silhouette and the dull reflection of the neon corona of the city in his eyeglasses. After trying all day to get Patchen on the telephone, he had accosted him as he and his Doberman began their regular nighttime walk along the tow path of the C & O Canal. Graham had hoped to conclude their business on the spot in a matter of minutes, but Patchen had plunged off into the shadows. Graham had no choice but to follow. The threatening surroundings, thickets on one side, deep stagnant water on the other, made him nervous. He felt vulnerable, exposed, hunted by stronger beasts; he was usually accompanied by a bodyguard when he went out at night but he had left the man behind tonight so as not to arouse Patchen’s anxieties.
He didn’t seem to have any. He seemed to have no protection besides the dog. This astonished Graham, but Patchen gave him no chance to raise this or any other subject. He immediately launched into this crackpot diatribe about investigative journalism. Crackpot or no, Graham was deeply offended. Who was this blackshirt to criticize the press? (Graham still called the media “the press,” though he himself had never worked a day in print journalism after resigning from the staff of the Yale Daily News in protest over the undergraduate paper’s refusal to print a story he had written about the death of Che Guevara in which Graham remarked that the martyr’s waxen corpse, photographed in a morgue in Bolivia, had “assumed the authentic expression of Christ.” The managing editor, later a fighter-bomber pilot in Vietnam, had called this phrase, and Graham’s whole report, which had been inspired by Radio Havana’s obituary notice of the fallen Fidelista, “counterculture gibberish.”)
In the years since then Graham had learned not to let his anger show in the presence of ideological enemies. Instead, he put a question to Patchen that he had always found to be an effective weapon against McCarthyites. “Do you,” he asked with a knowing smile, “think that the entire press is involved in this conspiracy?”
“No, I don’t think there’s a conspiracy,” Patchen replied. “It’s worse than that. I think that you and your fellow true believers are in the grip of a collective dementia that makes it impossible for you to perceive reality.”
“I see. But whatever is going on involves every reporter and editor in town.”
“I didn’t say that and what’s more I don’t believe it. Most reporters are perfectly sane and highly competent. If life were baseball, I’d gladly swap every agent the Outfit now has in the field for the editorial staff of the Washington Post and throw in a hundred future draft choices from Yale and Princeton. No, I’m talking about the few ideologues to whom the many owe so much.”
“Including me.”
“Yes, of course. You’re the star. Everybody in town is terrified of you, Patrick.”
They were entirely alone now, strolling farther and farther into the darkness—if they really were alone; Graham could not bring himself to believe that the woods along the canal were not, in fact, full of heavily armed Outfit men, dressed in black and drifting from tree to tree.
“I don’t know whether it’s occurred to you,” Patchen continued cheerfully, “but there’s a paradox in all this.”
“In all what?”
“In the media giving birth to this Cheka.”
“ ‘Cheka’? Cheka? That’s insulting.”
“Then what is the word? Thought Police? Night Riders?”
“Try ‘defenders of the First Amendment.’ “
“Ah,” Patchen said, “that has a ring to it, and English words have been distorted to mean stranger things than that. The point is that even in a democracy like ours, it is the government, not the press, that controls information, for the obvious reason that the government manufactures it. All you people do is call at the back door and cart it away and sell it. And because your information comes from anonymous sources inside the government that you protect with your lives, your fortunes, and your sacred honor, it’s possible you’re not quite the swashbucklers you think you are.”
“Swashbucklers? What a weird vocabulary you have. Nobody I know in this business thinks that way.”
“Okay, but think about something. But what if the government, or certain elements within the government, are using the media as a supernumerary ideological police force? What if you’re just assets in somebody else’s covert action operations?”
“ ‘Assets’? ‘Covert action’?” Graham’s voice broke; Patchen might as well have flung human feces into his face as these hated words describing abominable practices. “That’s a lot of Outfit bullshit,” he snapped. “We do what we have to do.”
“Of course you do. And let me tell you something: Finding somebody who wants to do a thing, and then making it possible for him to do it in what he believes to be his own interest, is the definition of covert action.”
Dark as it was, Graham could see, or feel, that the other man was smiling at his own sarcasm. Graham was being goaded, ridiculed. He knew this, but he could not control the waves of anger that rose from his entrails. It had been years since he had been forced to listen to someone he disagreed with; since his first semester at New Haven, when he discovered his true beliefs with the assistance of a sympathetic professor and his circle of like-minded friends, he had selected his company so as to isolate himself from heresy. Even when traveling he took the necessary precautions, moving from one pious counterculture household to another, as an incorruptible Dominican might have traveled during the Thirty Years War from monastery to monastery of his own order, avoiding any possibility of meeting the Devil by shunning not only Protestants but Franciscans and Jesuits, too.
Without warning, Patchen stopped in his tracks. “Let’s go back the other way,” he said. As the two men turned around, the Doberman watched Graham’s every move, keeping himself between Graham and his master. The dog was so well trained that it seemed less an animal than a machine—or was the air of menace that it radiated related to the fact that it was Patchen’s dog? In spite of himself, in spite of his loathing for the work Patchen did, Graham was in awe of the other man’s power, or what he imagined to be his power. Presidential assistants seemed larger and fiercer in the White House than otherwise; they shrank back into their former, uninteresting selves when their man left office and the mystique hissed out of them like gas from a toy balloon. Why wouldn’t Dobermans who guarded people like Patchen seem bigger to a common man like Graham than they really were? Graham made a mental note of this thought; it was something he could use while broadcasting, disguised as an idea that had popped into his mind the instant before it was spoken.
Patchen continued to talk in his maddeningly reasonable tone of voice. It was his habit at bedtime, he told Graham, to read authors who were no longer read by the intelligentsia. This enabled him to escape, for a few minutes at least, from the orthodox opinions of his own time. Graham had always heard that this man was blessed with a photographic memory, and now Patchen confirmed this by quoting examples from history to show that the ordeals by slander so common in their own time and place were nothing new.
“Do you ever read Macaulay?” Patchen asked.
“Not since Yale,” Graham replied. “He’s a bad habit.” In fact he had never read Lord Macaulay at all; the sympathetic professor, who had told him what not to read, had equipped him with an opinion of the essayist.
“I was reading his essay ‘England in 1685’ just the other night,” Patchen said, unperturbed. “Macaulay has some interesting things to say on the connection between entertainment and political revenge. One passage in particular struck me as very apt. In fact it’s what got me started thinking along the lines we’ve been discussing. I think I can quote it more or less verbatim: ‘The spirit by which Dryden and several of his compeers were at this time animated against the Whigs deserves to be called fiendish. The servile judges and sheriffs of those days could not shed blood so fast as poets cried out for it. Calls for more victims, hideous jests on hanging, bitter taunts … were publicly recited on the stage, and, that nothing might be wanting to the guilt and the shame, were recited by women, who, having long been taught to discard all modesty, were now taught to discard all compassion.’ “
Graham said, “You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of women.”
“I don’t?” Patchen said. “What makes you think that?”
“Those were hardly feminist sentiments you just quoted so approvingly.”
“No? Then you should read Macaulay. He was talking about the bawdiness of the Restoration period and how men exploited women by corrupting their virtue for what they called political truth but was in fact simple lust. Licentiousness of speech and deed was a reaction to Puritan repression under Cromwell, something like the sexual revolution of your own generation after Eisenhower. The same things happened to the girls. How did you put it in the Movement—‘Chicks up front’? ‘The correct position of women in the Movement is prone’? Of course, Macaulay was a Whig propagandist. And I’m not for a moment comparing the Patrick Grahams of this world to Dryden and his compeers. But you see the point.”
“No,” Graham said. “I don’t see the point. You have no point. But I don’t have time to argue with you. I came here to tell you something important.”
“Oh, my,” Patchen said. “And here I am babbling on about Macaulay. I’ll shut up now.”
Up ahead, the humming sodium lamp under which they had met half an hour before cast a pool of welcoming light. Graham picked up the pace so as to reach it as quickly as possible, and this change in behavior made the Doberman nervous again. Bleached by the incandescent glare, the dog’s eyes seemed even more robotic than before. Graham had never in his life been in any real danger, and he knew that he was in none now, unless a gang of muggers burst out of the undergrowth. But it was chilling to realize that this animal could and would kill him. All that was required was for Patchen to give the command and he would tear out Graham’s throat. Graham was in no doubt that Patchen had given similar commands to scarcely more human assassins many times in his life.
“Will you listen to me?” he said.
“Certainly,” Patchen replied.
“Two things. First, I’m going on the air with the tape tomorrow night.”
“You are?”
“I’m going to tell the audience everything I know. Everything. Including everything you told me at your house the other night. If that upsets you, I’m sorry. But you knew who I was when you talked to me, and you know the rules that apply in this town.”
“I’m glad I made myself understood. But why are you telling me all this?”
“In case there’s anything else you want to tell me. If it’s meaningful I’ll work it in. You have my word on that.”
“It has to be meaningful? Thanks. But no thanks. What made you decide to go ahead?”
“That’s the second thing. We found out who sent us the tape. It’s a small underground group of freedom fighters called the Eye of Gaza.”
“ ‘Freedom fighters’? Is that what you call them?”
“You know about this group? Nobody else has ever heard of it.”
“Then how can you be sure it exists?”
“Well, does it or doesn’t it?”
“You know we never answer questions about what we know.”
“A wise policy,” Graham said. “If you did, people would realize how much you don’t know.”
Patchen smiled in cordial acknowledgment of a point well taken. “That’s the operating principle, all right.”
“Whatever you say or don’t say, David, I have reason to believe that the Eye of Gaza exists and that it kidnapped a real person named Harvey Walpole. And that Walpole, or, if you prefer, Garth Robertson, worked for the Outfit.”
Graham watched Patchen for a reaction to the link-up of identities. There was none.
“We’re following up on what we know,” Graham said. “That’s all I can say about the matter. Unless you have something to add.”
“What is there to say?” Patchen said, still affable. “If you believe in the existence of this Eye of … what?”
“Gaza.”
“… Gaza. As I started to say, if you believe in it, then I suppose it exists,” Patchen said. “Did they teach you anything about solipsism at Brown?”
“Yale,” Graham said. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“A solipsist is someone who believes only in himself and his own perceptions. Nothing else has any reality, and the world is a dream that would vanish if he did not exist to imagine it.”
“Now I’m a solipsist? What’s that supposed to mean? What’s all this shit you’ve been handing me all night supposed to mean?”
“It’s all part of a diabolical plot to save the Outfit with your help,” Patchen said. In the weird and shadowless lamplight, he looked more than ever like Mephistopheles. “We couldn’t possibly do it without you.”
This was the unvarnished truth. As Patchen had expected, Graham did not believe it.
“You’re crazy,” he said, and hurried away.
3
AS SOON AS GRAHAM BROKE THE BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS STORY, Patchen was besieged by a large crowd of journalists. This had happened before, notably when Wolkowicz’s anchored corpse was discovered ten years before by a fisherman in Chesapeake Bay, but never while Martha was at home. On all other such occasions she had been with her Indians in Guatemala, and by the time she returned the incident was over, all memory of it obliterated by the hundreds of tiny, routine electronic shocks that had been administered by the media to Washington’s brain in the intervening months. Patchen never mentioned these episodes to her; sometimes others did, at dinner parties, but they quickly changed the subject, mistaking the look of bewilderment that came into her eyes for the humiliation they themselves would have felt if they had been married to a man like Patchen.
