The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, page 6
“Perhaps you’ll be so kind as to try anyhow,” Billings said.
Silence. At the instant it became painful, Kaplan spoke up.
“That’s what you’re paying me for. O.K., let’s start with the basics. There are roughly three reasons why people defect from our side to their side. First”—Kaplan leaned forward and began to speak intensely, his Adam’s apple bobbing, the words tumbling out like eighth notes—”they are running away from debts, divorces, entanglements, job troubles, crimes that are about to catch up with them, pressures they can’t stand, the sticks and stones of outrageous fortune, life in general. They have no idea where they’re going and couldn’t care less. They have no place to go but up. Now there is some evidence that could place Lewinter in this group. His job couldn’t have been all that satisfying or he wouldn’t have put so much time and effort into that garbage scheme of his. Then there is the business of the debts. And I get the feeling from the first batch of interviews that he was about to get hooked to a girl who sounds in many ways like a wax model of the wife he left. Maybe he realized this and skipped before it was too late.”
“So you think it’s a classic case of a man running away from troubles, then?” Billings summarized. It was a conclusion he personally found congenial.
“I didn’t say that. I said there is some evidence that he may fit into this category. But there is evidence that could put him into either of the other two categories also.”
“What are these, eh, other two categories?” asked Schindler, puffing away at the cigarette dangling precariously from his lips.
“The first batch are your runaways. O.K. The second batch are suffering from schizophrenia, which, technically speaking, is a functional psychosis characterized, among other things, by private fantasies. Occasionally one of these fantasies takes the shape of a person seeing himself as a symbol who, by his example, can remake the world. Jesus, I think, was suffering from schizophrenia. Anyhow, you find a lot of this among radicals. They see themselves as cogs in the machine, and fantasize about that single act—assassination, suicide, self-immolation, defection—which can elevate them into a symbol. Now if Lewinter were really moving in radical circles, as his brother suggests, he may have seen defection as a dramatic symbolic act that could thrust his life and ideas into the spotlight.”
Kaplan suddenly became aware of his own intensity. As if to sap it of its strength, he leaned back and stifled a yawn. “Then there is the third category, which is by far the most interesting, at least to me. To people in this group, defection is a kind of get-rich-quick scheme, or the psychic equivalent of it, which is to get status quick. And there is more than a hint that Lewinter could fall into this grouping too. What little we know about his life so far can be read as a frantic search for status: experimenting with a new name every few years until he winds up with initials, which are the trimmings of status; his concentration on an earthshaking scheme to save mankind from being overpowered by garbage; even his flight from his wife to another woman. Remember what his ex-wife—who didn’t have a very high opinion of him—said. Wait a second, here it is. Quote: August used to exaggerate his own importance, unquote; and again, quote: sort of created his own image of himself with a web of fabrications, unquote. Now of course all of us have an exaggerated image of our own importance”—again Kaplan made it a point to look at Billings—”but we have to find out how serious a theme this was in Lewinter’s case. If it was considerably exaggerated, and everything we know so far is compatible with this supposition, and if his achievements within this society were such as to give the lie to this image, then he could have skipped, or defected, as we say in the trade, in order to—and here I’ll use my term again—get status quick. He’d do that by taking something of value with him, something that would catapult him immediately upon arrival into a position of status in the eyes of his hosts. Now, whether this description fits Lewinter, and if it does, whether that something of value was his own warm body or a garbage-disposal scheme or secret ceramic nose-cone information or whatever remains to be seen.”
“Bloody confusing, eh? What you say”—Schindler, the physicist, interrupted himself to chain-light another cigarette—”only reinforces my impression, or should I say prejudice, that the whole thing, the transcripts, they, eh, read like something out of Rashomon—you know the Japanese Rashomon theme? —or Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet? Marvelous books, the Alexandria Quartet. A heterogeneous group of people look at the same set of circumstances or the same person, and each comes up with a different version of the truth. Ha! Lewinter appears to change from person to person, or should I say perspective to perspective. What I mean to say is that Fishkin’s Lewinter isn’t anything like the brother’s Lewinter, who in turn isn’t anything like the wife’s Lewinter. And so on. How in heaven’s name, or anybody’s name for that matter, are we supposed to pick out the real Lewinter from this, eh, what shall I call it, garbage heap? Ha! Yes, garbage heap will do very nicely. That’s what I would like to know. How, eh, to find the real Lewinter?”
“By cutting through the contradictions, the role playing, the posing and posturing, the conceits, to the quintessential Lewinter,” Billings offered. “That’s what the C.P.P. is all about—to strip away the outer layer and make some rather educated guesses as to whether he was the kind of person who could bring himself to harm his country, and whether, if he wanted to harm his country, he had the wherewithal to do so.”
“That’s a mighty tall order, that there is,” said the fourth member of the group, Fred Farnsworth, a retired chief of detectives from Houston who was the C.P.P.’s nuts-and-bolts cop.
“Let’s plod on, gentlemen, if you don’t mind,” Billings said, glancing at his watch. He turned back to Kaplan. “Do you get any general feelings about his childhood? The brother had a lot to say on the subject, you’ll remember.”
Kaplan appeared to weigh the question for a moment. “You can discount almost everything the brother says/’ he finally replied. “The one thing that came through with striking clarity was his jealousy of his sibling. The younger brother got everything the older brother had been denied, and he resented it. He still resents it. Observing Lewinter through the prism of his brother’s jealousy is a risky business, at best.”
“That doesn’t get us very far, does it?” Billings realized that he probably should have waited for another batch of transcripts to accumulate before beginning the round-table phase of the C.P.P.
“He was obviously fucked-up,” Kaplan went on, uninvited, beginning to enjoy the sound of his own voice. “Question is, how was he fucked-up?”
“What d’ya mean, how?” asked Farnsworth, the cop.
“I’ve got a theory about child rearing,” Kaplan said, winking at Schindler to indicate he was putting Farnsworth on. “It’s important to know whether his parents fucked him up spontaneously, without malice aforethought as it were, or whether they deliberately set out to fuck him up, which is the case a good part of the time in your average nouveau upper-middle-class families.”
Farnsworth snapped at the bait. “What’s the difference?” he asked.
“Good God, don’t you know? When you’re fucked-up premeditatedly, you wind up with an identifiable syndrome; you’re a manic depressive or a cleptomaniac or a sexual pervert or a sadist, or something a shrink can wrap up and put into a neat little package. But when you’re fucked-up spontaneously, you’re eclectic; you dip into this neurosis or that psychosis. Your shrink has just about pinned one label on you when you’re off and running, the shrink, textbook in hand, clamoring after you in a desperate attempt to follow your psychic footprints. Which he is never able to do. A lot of people who’ve been fucked-up spontaneously are mistakenly taken for geniuses. Take me. But that’s another case history. Hey, get a load of this”—Kaplan was thumbing through the ad section of The New Republic—“‘Attractive, athletic, highly intelligent black female intellectual, educated, warm, isolated, lonely, seeks dialogue with group of male intellectuals with eye toward communal living. No qualms about color.’ Why don’t we strike up a correspondence, sort of an indoor sport, if you know what I mean. What d’ya say, huh?”
Billings was furious. His thin, aristocratic features turned crimson—all except his lips, which, drained of color and moisture, looked like a slab of sidewalk. At that instant, he hated Kaplan and all the brainy young upstarts like him, inside and outside the department, who paid no allegiance to seniority, who showed no deference to experience, who forced those in a position of leadership to prove themselves over and over again. “Mr. Kaplan,” Billings said shortly, biting off the words. “I realize, of course, you are extremely entertaining—but your brilliance is not moving the puck off center.”
“But it’s certainly making the time pass!” Kaplan said. Schindler and Farnsworth chuckled. Kaplan wondered if he had gone too far. After all, the money wasn’t to be sneezed at. The smugness began to fade from his face.
That was it, the last straw, and Billings was on the verge of sending the wise-cracking Jew psychiatrist packing when Leo Diamond—looking casually elegant and cool, and feeling every bit as confident as he looked—strode into the room.
“Bob,” Diamond said, nodding in turn at Billings and the men scattered around the room. “Gents.”
“Leo,” Billings said—but with a barely detectable instant of hesitation, as if he wasn’t sure of his name. It was one of those little things that meant so much—the minute signal of who was to give ground.
“Well, I s’pose you haven’t gotten down to brass tacks yet,” Diamond offered, settling gracefully into a leather swivel chair. “I got my dupes of the interviews last night. There really isn’t very much to go on, is there, until we get some more raw material in.”
Kaplan sat back onto the couch and studied the ceiling. The smugness returned full force.
Billings took his eyeglasses from the stack of papers and, using both hands, his finger tips feeling for his ears, levered them onto his head. “We’ve been nibbling at the edges a bit, hunting for some themes and threads, as it were.” Billings was damned if he’d give Kaplan the satisfaction of agreeing with Diamond.
“You’re Kaplan, aren’t you?” Diamond said, swiveling toward the figure on the couch. Without waiting for an answer, he plunged on. “I read your article in Esquire on—how do you pronounce it?—the Ki-butz-ing Syndrome. Absolutely brilliant. I couldn’t put it down.”
Kaplan beamed at the compliment. “You’re pronouncing it wrong—it’s Ki-bitz-ing Syndrome, with the emphasis on the first syllable. That’s Yiddish.”
Diamond tasted the word two or three times to make sure he had it right. “I want to tell you, since I read that article, I’ve seen the syndrome a thousand times—even in myself. It’s damned difficult for a spectator to keep from intruding in the game in some subtle way, isn’t it? How d’ya come across the idea?”
“Intuition, I guess. My family gets together every Wednesday evening at my mother’s apartment in the Bronx for penny ante poker, dealer’s choice. Have for years. Sort of an institution, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, for the last year or so, my mother has sat out—she’s getting old and slows the game down. One night I noticed her flitting from one player to the next, glancing at the cards, whispering, advising, laughing, scowling, screwing up her face. It got so you wouldn’t watch the player so much as my mother’s face to get a line on anyone’s hand. Turns out she was having more fun kibitzing than playing. After that, I began to notice the same thing everywhere I turned—it always seemed to me that people in business, in the arts, what have you, were gathered around some invisible poker table, telling the players what to do, having all the fun but taking none of the risk. There you have it, the Kibitzing Syndrome.”
“Well, I’m speaking as a layman, of course, but I thought it was absolutely brilliant.”
Diamond knew that he could count Kaplan as an ally now.
“Was Lewinter a”—Diamond said the word slowly and correctly—”kibitzer?”
“No question. His relationship with the radicals that his brother obliquely referred to was in the nature of kibitzer to players. You can see it, too, in …”
Kaplan droned on, doing in essence what he had refused to do for Billings—poke among the meager clues to pick up the threads of Lewinter’s psychic life. As Billings listened, he sensed the unspoken alliance between Diamond and Kaplan, and knew he had to assert himself before Diamond completely dominated the session. God damn the Diamonds, he thought. It seemed as if his whole career had been spent jockeying for position with them. He himself had spent the war years behind a desk, committed to the colorless, thankless, work-a-day routines of espionage, laboring in an environment that nourished, and was nourished by, the notion that the side that kept the best records would inevitably emerge as the victor. Then the war ended and the field men returned, like pilgrims toward the church which sent them forth, to the desks, squirming into the pecking order ahead of those who served by sitting and filing. It wasn’t fair, Billings knew, but there was nothing to be done about it except to fight them every inch of the way.
“… gets the feeling also that the father was a doer, or player, and that this …”
Billings made his move. “Not all of us have had the pleasure of reading your article in Esquire, Mr. Kaplan. Perhaps you can say whether your syndrome sheds some light on why our subject defected—and whether he took any juicy secrets with him, which after all is the main business of this enquiry.”
“Aw, come off it, will you?” said Kaplan, aware that there was little that Billings could do as long as Diamond was running the show. “You’ve been ball busting all morning.”
At this point the game ended, for Leo Diamond did the single thing that sealed his right to dominate Bob Billings, the C.P.R, and the entire department: he came to Billings’ defense. “With all respect to your professional credentials,” he told Kaplan in a tone of voice that left no room for argument, “Bob Billings has been in this business a long time. What he understands is the element of time. His ball busting, as you call it, has saved a great many lives. We’re dealing with a hot potato this time out. The Ruskies have taken our fine feathered Lewinter to their bosom, and we’ve got to find out why and we’ve got to find it out fast. If Bob here is overeager, it’s because he understands what’s at stake.” Diamond looked around him and smiled. “Look,” he began again afresh, “let’s put these initial frictions down to overeagerness”—it wasn’t lost on Kaplan that Diamond, albeit in a kindly voice, was blaming Billings—”and start over again, huh? What d’ya all say?”
Outside the French windows, a robin gripping the branch of a mangled sycamore chirped away at another who was trying to intrude on his territory. It reminded Diamond of the birds he and Sarah had seen in the Central Park Zoo the day before—their contrapuntal bird barks echoing through the tiled chambers where they lived in imposed asylum from the world of trees and spaces between trees. Suddenly clutching his arm, Sarah had said, “I detest zoos.”
Diamond broke into his own thoughts. “There are a couple of items we can pin down today. The first—I noticed it the moment I read the transcript last night—is who the hell took Lewinter’s papers from the Sinclair woman’s apartment?”
“Since we’re the only ones, so far as we know, conducting an investigation,” said Billings, “one can only assume, as our investigator Wilson did, that it was one of our agents who got his signals crossed.” Billings tried to put the old firmness back into his voice—and almost succeeded.
“But that’s just it, Bob, are we the only ones investigating Lewinter?” Diamond asked. “After all, there is one other party who would be extremely interested in Lewinter’s past.”
“The Russians, huh?” Farnsworth asked, filling in the blank. I’ll be damned. It’s not far fetched. We had a biological warfare specialist defect two or three years ago, remember, guy name of MacComber, and there were some few of us who were convinced the old Ruskies were a-backtracking on him. Well, I’ll be damned.”
“At least it’s a possibility,” Diamond said. “Obviously, the first thing to do is find out if one of our people lifted those papers. If the answer is no, that should narrow it down to the Russians.”
“God damn,” said Farnsworth, who was still caught up with the idea that an honest-to-goodness Russian agent had waltzed in off the street and stolen Lewinter’s papers. “Listen, I’ll put a Bravo sixteen forty-two Charlie out to all city, state, and federal bureaus right off. If’n one of our people took it, we’ll have a positive reply within twenty-four hours. By God, this is something.”
“All right,” Diamond said, and moved on to the second item. “The other thing that struck me as one that we can profitably deal with now, if you agree, Bob, is the memory business.”
“What memory business is that, Leo?” Billings asked, coating his words with some of the old blandness.
“I noticed it, too—the memory,” Kaplan said, ignoring Billings and speaking directly to Diamond.
But Billings was not to be denied that easily. “Of course we all noticed the memory business—it stuck out like your proverbial sore thumb. But you’ll remember, I’m sure, that the brother said Lewinter had lost it in a fall when he was seven or eight years old. And this bit of evidence is entirely consistent with his standard printout, which makes no mention of a photo-memory ability, and more importantly, with the testimony of his former wife, who complained that—how did she put it—that he had no head for details, that he was always forgetting dates and, later, alimony payments. Lewinter, gentlemen, was a forgetful man. Quite obviously, his ability to retain material—which, I grant you, could be important if it were proved he had it—was certainly not remarkable.”
“First off—” from Kaplan.
“To begin with—” from Diamond.
