The Second Sight, page 45
It was widely assumed among Washington hostesses (their husbands tended to like her) that Martha, who had graduated from Radcliffe College summa cum laude, was simple-minded—the homely, foolishly dressed, pathetically unsuitable wife Patchen had had to settle for because of his grotesque appearance. She was certainly nothing like the wives of other men of his rank and celebrity. Her table talk consisted almost entirely of non sequiturs and unfunny witticisms derived (though nobody guessed this) from her Indians’ dreamlike view of existence; these remarks drifted over the heads of her dinner parners like fluttering reed arrows launched from a Stone Age bow. Martha had no small talk, no gossip. She had no interest in politics, fashion, the rise and fall of Presidential favorites, the adulteries and other follies of the renowned. This waste of opportunity was maddening to the few career hostesses who knew her. Here she was, married to the one man in America who knew everything about everybody, and she did not even understand that to be in the know was to be alive, and vice-versa.
Martha was only dimly aware that her husband was a famous man—or as Patrick Graham described him on national television, an infamous one, in command of the darkest, most satanic powers of the American government. “The Man on the Dinosaur,” Graham called Patchen, the dinosaur being the Outfit and all the atavistic horrors that it stood for. Martha knew what Patchen’s position in the government was, of course, and in a vague way, what the Outfit did. She knew perfectly well that its employees did not commit the awful crimes of which they were always being accused by Graham and even by some of the politicized Quakers and Jesuits she encountered in Central America. The O. G.? David? Paul? Horace Hubbard? Murderers? Enemies of the people? The idea was ludicrous; at least one of them, Paul, might even be a saint. She knew that her husband saw the President often, testified before Congress, knew nearly all the famous personages in Washington by their first names, and supervised thousands of employees who worked in secret ways in every country on earth, “doing good by stealth,” as the O. G. had described it to her the first time she met him. She liked the phrase; it also perfectly described what Martha had been trying to do among her Indians all these years.
Nevertheless, she worried about her husband’s soul. What did fame and position matter if Patchen had not yet found the Inward Light? She knew in her heart that he would find it one day, even if he had not yet done so; even if he was as unhappy now, and as lonely, and as skeptical of her love, and as angry about his affliction, as he had been when he Came home, ruined in body and sore in spirit, from the war.
“Have you looked outside?” Patchen asked her on the first morning of the media siege.
Martha opened her eyes and saw him standing by the window, already dressed in one of his dark Brooks Brothers suits. “No,” she replied. “Are the leaves on the maple turning?” That was the last thing they had talked about the night before, the autumn foliage and the order in which the trees changed color; they could never agree whether their sugar maple, transplanted from the woods at the Harbor, was among the first or the last to turn because it was growing in the wrong climate. The bed was warm and filled with the fragrance of marriage; she had awakened David and been a wife to him in the night. Her voice was drowsy and happy.
“Come look,” Patchen said.
Martha got up, put on her glasses, and, modestly using his clothed body to shield her naked one from peering eyes, looked outside. It was just after five o’clock, but a large crowd of media people had already gathered in the darkness at the gate; she was able to see them in the dazzling camera lights that went on and off as the television reporters practiced stand-ups.
“Who are they?” she asked. “What are they doing?”
Patchen explained, tersely: “Some of our people were kidnapped by terrorist guerrillas and the media have got hold of the story.”
“Guerrillas?”
She pronounced it with dread, as a Spanish word; she had told him over and over how the Maoists had come into the village to collect “taxes” from her Indians, how they had offered the armed strangers the only thing they had, guaro, how the guerrillas had beaten the people in the drinking hut and taken the boys and girls away. Martha, following their trail the next day, found two corpses, both girls, and buried them where they lay. One of them was the child who, long before, had sewn her finger to the cloth.
Patchen knew what her memories were. “Everybody’s all right,” he said, touching her. “The terrorists let them go after they questioned them. If you want to read about it, there’s a story in this morning’s Post.”
“Thee knows I never read the newspaper.”
Standing behind Patchen with her arms wrapped around his waist, she gazed on the scene below. Because she was so recently awake, it seemed even stranger to her than it was. It was a chilly morning. The news people hunched their shoulders against the cold as they sipped coffee from Styrofoam cups, gazing vacantly into space like her Indians in the moment following the bicycle accident—as though, having witnessed that strange event, they never wanted to see anything interesting again.
Just then Patchen’s car arrived, not his usual nondescript Chevrolet but a long black-windowed limousine bristling with antennas. The news crews sprang to life, all staring hungrily at the front door of the house. They seemed to do everything in unison.
Patchen kissed Martha goodbye and went downstairs. When he emerged from the house the journalists surged forward, shouting and brandishing their cameras, tape recorders, and microphones. Strobe lights sparkled in the darkness like the feverish impulses of a mob, and then the floodlights came on and absorbed the flashes into a single glaring entity. The people reminded her again of Indians, as when they danced, or when an entire village rushed menacingly toward a visitor to see if he could be frightened away. This had happened to her more than once, and she had learned that such behavior was a sign that the Indians themselves were frightened and uncertain. All you had to do was smile and stand your ground and make no threatening gesture that might cause some drunk or fool or frightened boy among them to shed your blood.
Patchen never spoke to the media; he did not even smile at them. Now he simply walked through them as if they did not exist, saying nothing in response to a babble of questions, lurching from side to side because of his limp. There was something threatening about this behavior; Martha could see it in the faces of the crowd. Tears came to her eyes. How alien he always seemed among normal people, she thought, how like a man from another world or time who did not bother to listen to people’s voices because he could read their thoughts. How unfair it was that he should seem to be like this when his heart was so good; how much she loved him because others seemed to be unable to do so.
Patchen got into the backseat of his car and was driven away, followed by a motley convoy of vehicles with the names of news organizations painted on the sides.
A few blocks away in the exercise room of his house on O Street, Patrick Graham watched live coverage of this scene on a bank of television monitors while he took his usual brisk morning walk on a treadmill.
“The night of the living dead! Great shot!” he said to Dorcas, his secretary. She laughed more heartily than the joke deserved, but she was glad that he was speaking to her at all. He had ignored her for two days after she had failed to give him a description of the runner in the surgical mask. Graham had hired her because he liked the look of her, and now he liked the chastised look on her face. Because she had overslept and arrived five minutes late that morning, she still wore running shorts and sweat-soaked T-shirt. Graham stopped exercising. “Take off that sweatband,” he said. She did as he ordered, shaking out her long dark hair. “Come here,” he said. The girl looked questioningly at the door leading into the master bedroom; behind it, Charlotte was still abed. “Do as I say,” Graham said. “She knows better than to open that door.”
4
“PATRICK GRAHAM LIVE” WAS BROADCAST AT SEVEN O’CLOCK ON Saturday evenings. This was an advantageous time slot because it gave the Sunday newspapers and the other television networks plenty of time to pick up and repeat Graham’s revelations, but made it difficult for anyone he happened to attack on the air to get out his side of the story until Monday morning. By that time, unless the material was unusually sensational, the evening news and the front pages had gone on to something else and had no room or time for rebuttals. Although this was no direct concern of Graham’s (he never even looked at the commercials on the studio monitor), the network’s commercial billings for his half-hour of prime time averaged just over a million dollars a show, or about $40 million a season. These numbers did not include the millions collected by television stations across the country for the local commercials sandwiched between network advertising messages. Nor did Graham’s own earnings from the show, just over three million dollars a year, constitute his total income. He took in almost as much again from books, lectures, and other appearances. After ten years as a media celebrity of the first rank, he was one of the richest men in Washington—not merely one of the best paid, one of the richest, because he had invested much and invested well in real estate (but only in buildings with acknowledged architectural merit), works of art, rare books, an extremely profitable health food and recycling enterprise, and other politically clean possessions. He did not own a single share of stock or a single bond.
Graham was explaining to Dorcas why he refused, as a matter of principle, to invest in capitalistic enterprises that supported an imperialist foreign policy, when the telephone rang. This was not the business phone with its many blinking Lucite buttons, but his personal instrument. No one had its number unless Graham provided it; he called it his “black number,” and it was the only telephone he ever answered himself. No one else was permitted to touch it. If he wasn’t there, it rang until the caller hung up. All this had been explained to Dorcas. Nevertheless, when it rang she started to answer, crawling across the mat on which she and Graham were lying. He slapped her hard on her upraised bare bottom before she could touch the phone. She squealed in pain and surprise; they had become lovers only fifteen minutes before. She had never before been physically hurt so soon after making love, or in a part of her body so close to the seat of pleasure. Still gasping in pain, still disconcerted by the stinging blow, she rolled helplessly over onto her back, so that when Graham reached across her supine body to pick up the receiver he found himself looking down into a tear-stained face in which feelings of betrayal and reawakening lust transparently mingled. It was an exciting combination. The phone rang for the third time. Graham kissed Dorcas on the lips and lifted her head to arrange her hair in a fan around her face. She sniffled like a child and smiled tentatively. He took her breasts, very nice ones but a bit larger than he liked, into his hands and manipulated the nipples with his thumbs. On the fourth ring he pushed her legs apart with his knee and mounted her, all in one practiced seignorial movement. Then he picked up the phone.
“Patrick Graham here.”
The voice on the line was male and Middle Eastern. But it did not sound exactly like the voice Graham had heard the last time. As he listened, he pumped rhythmically; beneath him, Dorcas responded, her bland face thickening slightly as her passion mounted.
The man on the line said, “You have betrayed us, Mister Graham. We require an explanation.”
“Betrayed you?” Graham said. Obviously this call was a joke—someone in the White House or Hollywood putting on an accent before asking him to lunch to discuss his last show. How could a terrorist have obtained this number? Dorcas twined her legs around his waist and moaned. He lifted a threatening hand at the sound.
She shut up immediately. She liked power; they were going to get along just fine.
“Who the hell is this?” he said into the telephone, controlling his impulse to laugh with great difficulty. If this was a joke, the joke was on the joker.
“This is the Eye of Gaza.”
Graham barely registered the name; he had not thought about the Eye of Gaza since leaving the studio. “Is it really?” he said. “How’d you like the show?” He changed position, rearranging Dorcas’s body into the position called “the yawning position” in the Kama Sutra; in the terminology of the Hindu classic (which Graham had read), Dorcas was a mare, possessed of the middling of the three sizes of yoni. Wild-eyed and gasping, she achieved orgasm. He cupped her face in his hand; she covered it with kisses. He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s the Eye of Gaza,” he said. He withdrew and rolled over onto his back.
The voice said, “We require to know the source of your information concerning the identity of our commando.”
Something in the caller’s tone made Graham pay closer attention.
“You require to know the source of my information?” he said. “What are you talking about?”
“How did you know who we were?”
“Come off it. You told me. On the telephone.”
“That is impossible. This is our first call to you.”
Was this a joke? Graham pushed Dorcas’s sweaty body aside and leaped to his feet. He said, “How did you get this number?”
“We know a great deal about you, Mister Graham. We know who you have dinner with. We know you go for midnight walks in very strange company. Afterwards you broadcast our name to the world without our permission.”
“Bullshit. That’s a lot of bullshit.”
“Bullshit? I don’t understand ‘bullshit.’ “
“It means filthy lies.”
“Be careful, Mister Graham. You knew something you had no right to know. We did not tell you. How, then, did you know? You betrayed us, put us in danger. Why should we believe anything you say?”
Suddenly Graham was confident that this was no prank. But how had they got this number? Was one of his closest friends mixed up with these killers? “Who is this?” he said, placatingly. “What’s your name? Give me a number where I can reach you.” He snapped his fingers at Dorcas and mouthed the word “pad.” She said, “What, darling?” He covered the mouthpiece and hissed, “Pad, pad, pad. Get your fucking pad and write down this number.”
But the man from the Eye of Gaza did not give him a number. He said, “We think you are a tool of the Outfit, Mister Graham. You are very clever, but we are not deceived. You are a friend of our enemies.”
“Wait a minute!” Graham said. “Just a goddamn minute! I won’t take that from anybody!”
“You will not take? We shall see, Mister Graham, what you will take. You have put us in danger. You owe us a debt. It will be collected. The Eye of Gaza does not forgive or forget. Goodbye.”
“Just a minute,” Graham said. “I need a telephone number.”
But the line was dead. He stood for a long moment with the buzzing receiver at his ear, looking at himself in the long mirror across the room and seeing the lean body of a man years younger than he really was, and a face blank with terror. Dorcas was looking up at him. As soon as he noticed this, he changed his expression at once from panic to nonchalance, but waves of nausea continued to surge through his body, and at the back of his throat he tasted the sour contents of his stomach.
Around eleven o’clock Graham’s producer called from New York. It came in on one of the regular lines and Dorcas answered; the producer was not one of the people who knew Graham’s black number. When Graham came on the line, he said, “The lawyers just had a call from Garth Robertson’s attorney. He says that Robertson is a devout Mormon who has always worked for the Church of Latter-day Saints except for a hitch in the Army. He had an arm blown off in Vietnam. He’s just been transferred to Vietnam, to work with the GI orphans.”
“A likely story.”
“Well, we checked with Salt Lake City. They say Robertson’s legit. And they are not amused by having one of their people identified as an Outfit thug.”
“You believe this crap?”
“I’m telling you what’s been said.”
“It’s the Outfit fucking us around.”
“Could be,” the producer said. “But Robertson is suing you and the network for a hundred million dollars. If he wins, he says he’s going to give the money to the orphans. The papers are already on the story. So stand by for inquiring reporters.”
“Me? Inquiring reporters?” Graham said. “What am I? One of the bad guys already?”
5
MARTHA WAS SURPRISED TO RECEIVE AN INVITATION TO LUNCHEON from Charlotte Graham. She accepted without hesitation, then called Patchen at the office. She did this so rarely that there was anxiety in his voice when it came on the line, and she could sense his relief when she told him what had happened.
“It sounds like fun,” he said. “Enjoy yourself.”
“Does thee object?”
“Why should I object? What does she say she wants?”
“She says she wants to talk about my Indians some more. She has some ideas.”
“Indians, eh? Keep your knees together.”
“What does thee mean by that?”
“I mean listen to what she has to say, but don’t promise any favors.”
“Thee isn’t angry with her husband?”
“No. You might as well be angry with an alley cat. You can say that’s what I said in case she asks.”
“Thee should be angry. I’ll tell her that.”
“Okay. Have a nice lunch. Just don’t ride in the Grahams’ car.”
“All right. But why not?”
“Just promise me you won’t.”
