The Second Sight, page 50
“Why did just the two of you go?” Patchen asked.
“The rest were needed to defend Tifawt in case it was attacked.”
“Yeho says you decapitated the guards after you killed them.”
“Not really. Ja’wab used a strangling wire. It cuts through everything but the bone. Even that if you saw a little.”
“How did he manage to get behind them?”
“It was a problem because the moon was full. We used a pincers movement. I went in front, he went behind. Then I rose up out of the desert, practically at their feet, and while they were distracted, he attacked.”
“Why didn’t they shoot you?”
“I think it was the element of surprise. When the Ibal Iden enter an enemy camp at night they always take off all their clothes. They used to believe that a naked person was invisible to his enemies.”
“Is that true, on the basis of your experience?”
“No.”
Graham watched them closely while avoiding the eyes of the chattering Peruvian, who had renounced her Spanish names because they had originally belonged to imperialist rapists and insisted on simply being called “La Senderista”; her boyfriend called her “Sendy.”
“The ultimate objective of the Shining Path movement is to eradicate all stains of the colonial experience, including the existing bourgeoisie, thus restoring Peru’s original and unique culture and people,” La Senderista said.
Graham did not hear her.
“Sounds rather like what the Khmers Rouges did in Cambodia,” Charlotte said.
“Except that we will steadfastly carry out our program to the logical end,” said La Senderista.
“You mean you plan to kill everybody!” Charlotte said. “I bope you’re in touch with the IRA; it sounds just the thing for Ireland.”
No one thought that she was joking. The National Geographic man, stirring his third Negroni with a stiff forefinger, nodded judiciously. La Senderista, eyes blazing with conviction, drew breath and continued with the indoctrination. Graham continued to stare across the room like a man hypnotized. It seemed to him that Patchen’s blonde emitted a post-coital glow; it reminded him of the sensuous, half-contemptuous, half-inviting look of an expensive cat after stretching.
“She looks like somebody we know,” Graham said to his wife.
“But it’s not Madeleine Carroll.”
He sent a bottle of fifteen-year-old Vino Nobile de Montepulciano, the most expensive Italian wine on the list, to Patchen’s table. On the way out, quite soon afterward, he stopped to chat, sending La Senderista and her slow-witted boyfriend (“Who’s that?” he had asked when Graham and Patchen lifted their glasses to each other, causing La Senderista to snarl like a jaguar) outside under Charlotte’s care.
“Patrick Graham,” he said heartily, extending his hand, as if the wholly superfluous gesture of identifying himself were proof of his democratic modesty.
“Hello, Patrick,” Patchen replied.
The girl said nothing and Patchen made no move to introduce her.
“I didn’t quite catch your name,” Graham said.
Patchen remained silent. Zarah said, “Zarah Christopher.”
“That’s who you look like—Paul Christopher. My wife and I have been racking our brains. What’s the relationship?”
“He’s my father.”
“You’re Christopher’s daughter?” Graham was genuinely surprised and let it show. “I didn’t know you existed.”
Zarah smiled up at him with Paul Christopher’s aloof, well-bred smile, as if, Graham thought, she were being polite to the Invisible Man.
“Well, now that you do know, I do exist, obviously,” she said.
2
DORCAS HAD SOME DIFFICULTY IN ARRANGING AN APPOINTMENT between Patrick Graham and Stephanie Christopher. Finally, after refusing invitations to breakfast at the Hay-Adams Hotel and luncheon at the Lion d’Or, Stephanie agreed to drinks after work at Joe and Mo’s. They sat in a front corner, beneath the framed and autographed dust jackets of Graham’s books. He and Stephanie had known each other before he was famous; he had recruited her for his Maoist cell in the East Village after the original small black-haired girl, the one he had loved, defected from it in order to marry Julian Hubbard. He admired Stephanie. Of all the look-alike diminutive brunettes Graham had collected over the years to service his obsession, Stephanie was the only one he had been unable to get into bed. She was also the brightest and toughest and most skeptical. In the Maoist cell he had believed that she refused him because she was a lesbian, but he subsequently learned that she had known Emily at school, where they were sometimes mistaken for sisters, and understood what he was up to. Now, however, it was his secret opinion that she had never slept with anyone except Christopher, that she had been waiting for him even then. It was certainly true that she had pounced on Christopher, despite the difference in their ages and political sentiments, almost as soon as he stepped off the plane from China.
They both ordered carbonated mineral water. Graham lifted his glass, and said, “Power to the people,” their toast from the old days. Then, after swallowing, he came directly to the point. “I didn’t know that your husband had a grown-up daughter,” he said.
“Really?”
“Really. She looks just like him. What’s the story?”
“The usual, Patrick. Her mother got pregnant and nine months later out came Zarah.”
“Who was her mother?”
“Someone Paul married and divorced when I was a child. She’s dead.”
“Did you know her?”
“Very slightly.”
“Was she a German, too?”
“She was a Southern belle. I’m in a hurry, Patrick. What’s this all about?”
“So is her daughter. Belle, I mean.” Graham smiled and batted his eyes in mocking imitation of the flirtatious unliberated females of a bygone age. “Unless I’m reading you wrong, old friend, and I don’t think I am, you didn’t like wifey número uno one little bit. Or is this retroactive jealousy? What was her name?”
“What difference does it make? What are you up to, Patrick?”
“Why should I be up to anything? I’m sure Paul has forgotten all about this kid’s mother even if she was as big a knockout as the daughter. I would if I were in his shoes. The greatest regret of my life is that you and I never …”
Stephanie started to slide along the banquette. Graham seized the strap of her shoulder bag to stop her from leaving.
“Don’t go yet,” he said. “Stay and talk. You of all people know how good it is for the lovelorn to get it all out. Come on, tell the nice doctor—what was she like?”
“Cathy was just a normal, old-fashioned American girl,” Stephanie said. “All she wanted was twenty-one orgasms a week, a hundred thousand dollars a year in spending money, and total and unquestioned control over the actions, speech, and thoughts of the lucky man who was providing these things for her.”
“Sounds like a pretty good deal. Which part of it did Christopher fail to live up to?”
“Goodbye, Patrick.”
He let go of her purse. “You’re really pissed off about something, aren’t you?” he said. “It can’t be me you’re mad at because I’ve never done anything to you. Literally. So it must be Zarah. Let me tell you what I think. I think your stepdaughter is fucking David Patchen.”
By now Stephanie was standing up. “I’m practically sure of it,” Graham continued in a voice audible in every corner of the restaurant. “What does it all mean? That is the question.”
Stephanie tossed her hair from her face and stared at him with withering contempt. Graham, smiling amiably in return, felt a pang of nostalgia. She didn’t look a day older than she had looked as a Movement chick. She still wore her hair in a mop, she still dressed with no regard to bourgeois style, she still peered through her tresses with those burning hostile eyes. Sixties eyes. And she was sleeping her life away with an old spy. What a waste. Well, her life wasn’t yet over and neither was his. Graham lifted his glass of sparkling water in a toast.
“Here’s to dangerous liaisons,” he said.
“Patrick,” she said. “You really are an asshole, do you know that?”
3
STEPHANIE, SITTING CROSS-LEGGED ON THE RUMPLED SHEETS, SWITCHED on the bedside lamp and looked down into Christopher’s face. She was naked; nudity seemed somehow to complete the atmosphere of total frankness she strove for. Her face was troubled and angry.
“Something’s happened to you,” she said. “You’re not the same.”
Christopher said, “Yes, we’ve just got through discussing that.”
They had just made love, but before that they had talked for hours. She knew every detail of Christopher’s conversations with Lla Kahina and Sir Richard Shaw-Condon. Their revelations had horrified Stephanie, not in and of themselves, because descriptions of human behavior never shocked her out of her clinical detachment, but because of what she feared they might do to Christopher. She had always thought that he needed professional help to come to terms with the disappearance of his mother; he had always refused to talk about it to anyone but her.
“I’m not talking about your mother,” Stephanie said. “This has to do with you and me. You’ve changed. You were like a stranger when we were making love just now. You were evading me; I could feel it. Something is going on with you. I know it.”
She was right. Christopher did not know how to explain it to her. In the middle of the act he had suddenly realized that his wife’s body was not the one he had imagined himself making love to. The feeling was so strong that he drew back to look at her. He had expected to see Cathy, or Molly, or even Lê—anyone but the familiar woman whose face he recognized on the pillow. Stephanie, the physical Stephanie, was an intruder in this fantasy, and he forced himself to remember who she was and where in time he was. This strange, faintly pornographic trick of the mind surprised him as much as it distressed Stephanie. Only once before, shortly after his return from China, had anything like it happened to him. The first time he made love to Stephanie (or, more accurately, the first time she had made love to him; he had done little more than acquiesce in what she obviously regarded as an act of healing), Molly had hidden in Stephanie’s body and he had believed—only for a moment, but with every nerve in his own body—that she was with him again even though she had been dead for more than ten years. But always after that he had kept her ghost at bay.
Stephanie had been watching Christopher’s face as it registered these thoughts. “Is there someone else?” she said. “If there is, tell me. We can deal with it.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Christopher said. “It’s a whole roomful of others.”
“What?”
He told her what had been in his mind. Relief, then sympathy, then reassurance flooded into her face.
“There’s nothing so bizarre about that,” she said. “People fantasize all the time.”
“I wouldn’t call this a fantasy. It was involuntary.”
“Whatever you want to call it, you suppressed it. Why?”
“Because thinking about one woman while making love to another is a betrayal of both.”
Stephanie raised her eyebrows. “Double infidelity?”
“You could call it that.”
“Oh, Paul!” Stephanie smiled for the first time that evening, wagging her tousled head. “Who but you would invent a scruple like that?” Now she did giggle. “Is fighting off the memory of all these ex-wives and lovers a constant struggle for you?”
“No. No more so than any other form of fidelity is a struggle. You just put temptation out of your mind.”
“It’s impossible to put anything out of your mind, as you’ve just found out. All you do is repress it.”
It was Christopher’s turn to be amused; psychology was a religion to Stephanie, and her certitude always entertained him. He said, “And then one night when you open the closet door, there it is among the clothes-hangers, grinning at you out of horrible empty eye sockets.”
“Exactly,” Stephanie said. “Go ahead and make fun—that’s just another form of repression. The question is, why is this happening to you? Do you have any idea?”
“I think I do, yes. But let me hear what you think.”
“All right,” Stephanie said. “I’ll tell you what I think. You haven’t left me, you’ve left the man you are now and gone in search of the one you used to be. You’ve gone back to the past, to a time when I wasn’t in your life. That’s why you didn’t know who I was just now.”
She was right. Christopher knew it. He said, “Go on.”
“Prison was like the grave for you. You died in China because you were sure they were going to kill you, and then David Patchen brought you back to life. And now the past has come for you again—first Zarah, materializing out of thin air, then these revelations about your mother. It’s no wonder you’re disoriented.”
Christopher was amused again. “Doctor Webster-Christopher explains it all.”
“Go ahead and scoff,” Stephanie said. “But this is not the next world, Paul, even if you have found more happiness in it than you think you have coming to you. I’ll tell you something else I suspect: You’ve gotten yourself mixed up with the Outfit again. True or false?”
“True.”
He told her everything he knew about the Beautiful Dreamers operation. She understood each nuance of the plan. Stephanie had been born into the Outfit. She knew how the game was played, and what motivated the players.
“Why, for God’s sake?” Stephanie asked.
“Old debts,” Christopher replied.
“Bullshit. You don’t owe David or the O. G. or the Outfit anything. Remember what happened to you; the Outfit did that. Remember the facts of the case.”
“I do remember. This is something else.”
“How can you say that? It’s always the same. It’s always crazy. David will be tortured and killed. So will all the rest of them, probably. They’ll never get away with it.”
“Probably not,” Christopher said.
“Then why are you helping them?”
“You know why.”
“Because you think you can take care of Zarah?”
“In a word, yes.”
Stephanie snorted. “You actually think she needs you? I’d say that anybody who goes around cutting off people’s heads in the Sahara Desert doesn’t need her daddy’s protection.”
“I’m going to be there anyway.”
“Why, for God’s sake? Isn’t knowing what these psychopaths did to your mother and you and your father enough for you?”
“You think that Zarah is a psychopath?”
“I’m not even going to respond to that,” Stephanie said. “If you want to behave like a father, then forbid Zarah to go on this mad expedition. Lock her in her room. But don’t give her the keys to the car and then drive off the cliff with her.” Stephanie’s tone was reasonable, even conversational. She was no longer angry. She said, “You won’t be able to control what happens to Zarah any more than you could control what happened to your mother.”
“Maybe not,” Christopher said. “But this time at least I’ll be with her to the end.”
“Be with her or die with her? Are you sure which you mean? Which you want?”
“Come on, Stephanie.”
“Then what do you want? What about me? What about your other child? Is knowing the dead all that matters to you?”
“Not the dead. The truth.”
“You think there’s a difference in your case? It is all that matters to you. It always has been.”
Christopher was smiling no longer. “You’re entitled to your theories. But what if it were Lori? Would you say the same things then as you say to me now about Zarah?”
It was not like Stephanie to cry, but when Christopher spoke these words, first one tear and then another coursed down her cheek.
“That’s not fair,” she said.
“I know,” Christopher replied. “But let me tell you something. You say I died in some symbolic way in China, but China came twenty years too late.”
“You mean your life stopped when the Gestapo led your mother away. I know that. That’s why you can’t admit she’s dead forty years later.”
“Longer,” Christopher said.
“Because if she’s dead,” Stephanie said, “then you are too.”
Christopher was so silent that Stephanie was not sure that he had heard what she said. Finally he said, “Molly used to say that the dead know everything. All I can say is, I hope not.”
4
TO ANALYZE THE DRUG SAMPLE COLLECTED BY YEHO’S TEAM, PATCHEN called on a retired Outfit scientist who now worked in a private medical laboratory in the suburbs.
“It appears to be a drug called Versed,” he told Patchen.
“ ‘Appears to be’ or is?” Patchen said.
“Is. Chemical name, midazolam hydrochloride. It’s a benzodiazepine from the same family of tranquilizers as Valium, but much more powerful.”
“What are the effects?”
“It depresses the central nervous system. When administered in sufficiently large doses it induces euphoria, suggestibility, and a tremendous sense of cooperativeness. The subject will do anything. Anything. The beauty part is, it’s hangover free. The subject doesn’t remember a thing that he did or said afterward or have the slightest feelings of guilt or remorse.”
“Is there an antidote?”
“In an unscientific manner of speaking, Versed in big doses is an antidote to the natural responses of the brain. It turns off the conscience.”
“Can it be overcome with another drug?”
“In theory, yes. Amphetamines might work. But no sane person would administer them for that purpose.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d probably kill the patient. Or worse. You could stop the heart or damage the brain and turn the patient into a vegetable.”
