“No,” said Leary. He noticed the row of spaghetti sauce stains down Geller’s white shirt front, as though the red bow tie had bled.
“Okay,” said Geller. “Make me ask you. Who you with?”
“My name is Leary. Ben Leary. Immigration. I didn’t get your name.”
“That is right. You didn’t.”
Six more men in a cluster walked hesitantly into the room, talking in low, urgent voices. Their eyes darted back and forth among the seated figures as they approached the conference table to spread themselves in chairs along its edges, ducking short nods in the general direction of the others.
“What’s up? What are we here for?”
Undersecretary of State Stuart Halsey crossed the corridor from his office and briskly entered the conference room with four more men straggling behind. He walked immediately to the head chair and drew it out. “Charlie. Shut that door.” He sat down. “All right, gentlemen. Who’s got the ball?” He looked at Leary. “Let’s begin with the report from New York, Mr. Leary. Gentlemen, I’ll skip the introductions except for Mr. Leary, here, and Mr. Powell. Both are with the Department of Justice. Mr. Leary is legal counsel for the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. Mr. Powell is a special agent for the Alien Agent Registration Section. What they’re here to tell you is going to ruin your day. Mr. Leary, the report, if you please.”
Leary put his attaché case on the table and opened it. He read from a TWX report. “At 1126 EST today, five or six men, exact number unknown and all so far unidentified, entered the men’s lavatory in Grand Central Station in New York City. They blocked the door, preventing the public from entering. A few minutes later they emerged with another man who was evidently in physical distress. He seemed disoriented and exhibited poor motor coordination. The lavatory attendant summoned a foot patrolman, New York City Police Department. When questioned, the men stated that the distressed man was ill from too much drinking and needed to be put to bed. They led the man away with them. It is believed with considerable certainty that the man involved is Boris Kotlikoff, who for many years was one of Russia’s leading poets and who defected to the United States following a visit to Yugoslavia two years ago. From a detailed description, it seems medically probable he was not drunk, but drugged. Kotlikoff is a diabetic and cannot drink alcoholic beverages. An attaché case belonging to Kotlikoff was found in the lavatory following the events just described.”
Leary looked around the room. “That’s all we know at the moment. The FBI is still investigating.”
Geller snorted: “The FBI buys its information. By the shovelful.”
The Undersecretary said, “What that report doesn’t say is that the five or six men quite probably are Russian agents attached to the New York Soviet Mission to the United Nations.”
Many of the men shifted their positions and glanced at each other.
“For the record, this is an FBI matter. What we are all here for is a different reason entirely. I will explain in a moment. Now—Mr. Leary and Mr. Powell are about to unfold to you some very complex legal matters surrounding this abduction, the implications of which even I haven’t begun to perceive yet. Mr. Leary will now explain Boris Kotlikoff’s legal status.”
Leary said: “I’ll try to be brief. On October 3, 1965, Congress amended the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Law. In that amendment it created a category known as the ‘Conditional Entrant.’ What that does is give anyone running away from a foreign power quick admission to the United States. In a word—sanctuary. About two years ago, Kotlikoff was in Yugoslavia attending a Communist Writers’ Conference. He defected. You probably know that if a Russian leaves his country without permission, he immediately loses his citizenship. So—when Kotlikoff left Yugoslavia he was no longer a Russian citizen. Forty-eight hours later, he was here in the United States. And now comes the difficulty. Under the U.S. law a conditional entrant can eventually become a citizen of the United States—but he has to wait two years to qualify. After that, he waits five more years and he’s in. He’s a citizen. Now—the normal immigrant is fully protected by the laws of the United States. The conditional entrant isn’t. In fact, we aren’t even sure what his rights and protections are.”
“Can we find out?” asked the Undersecretary of State.
“Yes, I suppose. You’d have to ask the Attorney General’s office for a ruling, and they’ll probably bounce it to me—but it’ll be a guess. Nothing like this has ever happened before to someone like Kotlikoff. We just don’t have much legal precedence for a conditional entrant.”
“When are his two years up?”
“I’m sorry to tell you—in four days. Next Friday.”
The men looked at him in silence for a moment.
“Why would the Russians grab him now? What’s he been doing?”
“We don’t know. Nothing that we’ve discovered. He was working as an editor and translator for a New York publisher—a company that specializes in foreign-language books. He’s been leading a very quiet life. No known political activities.”
Stuart Halsey tapped the table with a pencil. “Let’s hold the questions for a while. We still have to hear from Mr. Powell of the Alien Agent Registration Section.” He nodded at Powell.
Powell said: “My message is very, very brief. If foreign agents grabbed Kotlikoff, there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. Period.”
“Diplomatic immunity?” someone said.
“Exactly,” said Powell. “A bona fide foreign diplomat cannot commit a crime in the United States. Under the rules of diplomatic immunity, a foreign diplomat cannot even be ticketed for speeding. He cannot be arrested for any reason, even murder. He cannot be involved in a trial. He cannot be enmeshed in our legal system in any way. The worst that can happen to him is that we can declare him persona non grata and give him three days to get out of the country. If foreign agents dragged Kotlikoff into a foreign chancery, there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. We have no legal control over the agents, and we apparently have no legal dominion over a conditional entrant. Furthermore, breaking in to save him is tantamount to involving the foreign country itself. It could be regarded as an act of war.”
“War?”
“What about the reverse?” asked a CIA agent. “Like kidnapping someone off the streets of New York. Isn’t that the same as an invasion of the United States?”
“Nope,” said Powell. “Not with diplomatic immunity. Legally, the diplomat isn’t here—since he isn’t subject to our laws.” Powell sat down and looked at the worried expressions around the table.
“No way? There’s no way at all to rescue Kotlikoff from a foreign embassy?”
“That’s what I’m saying. Nothing can be done.”
Stuart Halsey said: “If the Soviet Government ordered this kidnapping, it’s an extremely serious event—for them and for us. It may mean a major policy revision by the Soviets. We have to explore all the implications of this event, and we’re going to stay right here until we do. All of my people are on notice that you are on call twenty-four hours a day until this situation is cleared up. Understood? All of you are to turn your regular duties over to your immediate subordinates and remain within the environs of Washington, D.C.”
“Is Kotlikoff married?” someone asked. “To a U.S. citizen?”
Leary opened his pad. “Boris Kotlikoff is married. And he is married to a U.S. citizen, the former Amy Corson, and he married her on October 17, year before last, in Brooklyn, New York. But it doesn’t matter. His marriage is no protection. It still doesn’t give him any legal rights under U.S. law, and it can’t rescue him from a foreign embassy.”
Geller said, “Leary, let me play this back to you in plain nose-picker’s English. Okay? Wait.” He puffed on his cigar and stared at the ceiling, composing his words. “What you’re saying is—there may have been a crime committed. It may have been a kidnapping. It may have been committed by foreign agents. It may have involved a conditional entrant—and in any of the
se cases, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Leary nodded. “That’s right. Legally, what you heard didn’t happen. Boris Kotlikoff has fallen into a crevice between several U.S. laws, and he may have disappeared permanently.”
“—and all we have to go on is a probable kidnapping? If they hadn’t left the attaché case, we wouldn’t even know that much. That policeman would never have reported anything and Kotlikoff would be just another missing person. What was in the attaché case?”
Leary looked at his list. “Books, a manuscript, notebook, appointment pad, an orange, a hypodermic syringe, bottle of insulin, ID card, a yarmulke—” Leary reached up to touch the crown of his head. “That’s a—”
“I know what it is,” said Geller. He turned to Halsey. “They may have deliberately left it.”
“Why?”
“To let us know. In place of a ransom note.”
“Ransom! What would the ransom be?”
“That’s for us to figure out.”
“What’s a poet worth?”
“Nothing,” said Geller. “Nothing at all.”
Halsey looked at Leary. “In ten words or less, Mr. Leary, what is Kotlikoff’s precise legal status right now?”
“He’s a man without a country.”
“Jesus,” said Geller. “A loose ball. Why the hell would anyone kidnap a poet?”
“Mr. Geller,” said Halsey, “nations don’t kidnap poets—at least, not as poets. There’s something far more significant here than the rhymes of an expatriate Russian.”
“What the hell could he do to them?”
“That’s the question, Mr. Geller. If it wasn’t a few couplets of insulting poetry, what was it? What?”
As Leary shoved back his chair and stood up, he thought: Just what Kotlikoff needs—a committee—a whole committee. Instant rescue is at hand.
At the table, solemnly and silently, they watched him pack his attaché case, watched Powell push some paper into his inside left jacket pocket, watched everything like prisoners watching two parolees. Leary glanced at their faces: the Hot Potato Squad. They were all there, all the stock characters who’d served on every committee with him since his first days in Washington.
There with the faint saddle of red veins on his nose sat the alcoholic: each morning wanting the first drink of the day, the first soaring lift, that beautiful noon balloon; each afternoon sitting in a torpor, content and dull and thinking of five o’clock. Across from him the ambitious section head, scowling at unstated implications. Next to him the timid soul, ready to agree with the majority, to appease, to panic, to flee. Next to him the ingenue, the young, eager one at his first crisis meeting, preparing brilliant observations on Russian psychology to be uttered at precisely timed moments.
The table pounder was there: a frustrated self-praiser with a chunky red face and a bawling voice, he would demand a retaliatory scuffle, a complementing abduction at a border somewhere—anywhere. Just hit them. Strike. Smash: break bone, shatter teeth. Beside him the scowler who silently understands everything, says nothing, oozing wiseness. The tired, eroded civil servant sat, with his eyes already foreseeing the usual limp ending and the flat note. Around him were the spear carriers and scene swellers, the maxim sayers, the yawner, the doodler, the fatuous and the fumbling, the dull, the unimaginative, the devious.
It was the century of the common man; the era of the committee: incompetence compounded. There was, however, a consolation: in Russia there existed an equivalent committee equivalently staffed.
And, thought Leary, not a line of poetry among the lot.
At the door Leary noted the indefatigable notetaker ready with pad for his memoirs, My Forty Years of Washington Crises. He would now write: “Leary, Legal Counsel, Bur. Imm. & Nat., and Powell, spec. agent, Alien Agent Regis. Sec. FBI, left 1455 after briefing us on K’s legal status.”
At the elevator he said to Powell: “Who’s that lump of love whatsisface?”
“Geller?”
“A darling man.”
“Avoid him. He’s a goddam creep.”
“I thought I knew every loudmouth in Washington.”
“Stay away from him. He’s strictly back alley. No goddam good.”
Rumor had filled the lobby.
When Leary stepped off the elevator, people were standing in huddles in wet raincoats and umbrellas. The talk was low—eager and urgent. A man with a hearing aid held the pocket microphone on its cord into the midst of a group, close to the mouth of a rapidly talking bald man. His dull ear, augmented, drank information thirstily like a sponge, his smiling face comprehending. “Iran? Good. Iran.” Against a wall a man wrote a note on a piece of limp paper on a folded newspaper: “I must see you immediately. Have information of the gravest import.”
Newsmen had gathered. Diplomats and foreign affairs experts came and went in the heavy spring downpour. Limousines arrived; fresh cabs lined up as others hastily left. Groups dispersed and people hunted for telephones.
The bustle resembled an anthill that had been kicked open.
“Rain. Jesus,” said Powell.
“It’s okay, Powell. It’s raining on the Russian too.”
“You’re a comfort, Leary.”
Leary sat in the cab with the teletype message in his hand and pictured a half dozen short-armed, thick-chested Russians leading a drug-stunned poet across the concourse in Grand Central Station.
They had familiar faces. In fact, they had the same old faces. They’d worn jackboots in Hitler’s Germany, double-breasted pinstripes in Chicago, caftans in the Mid East, fur caps in Arctic labor camps. They throw bombs in Belfast, knives in Rio, acid in New York, gasoline in Hanoi.
The costumes, multitudinous; the weapons, various; the methods, endless—but in all cases, brown or yellow or black or white, they have the same faces, the same minds, the same unforgivable propensity for using force and violence.
All brothers. Fratricidal brothers. Some with creeds. All with greed. Things that belong in cages.
Goonish: he hated it so much, he writhed in a rage in the taxi.
Throughout the city in the heavy rain, the news would be spreading. The newspapers would chant Powell’s mocking line: the sky is falling. And, like a Gilbert and Sullivan refrain, the line reverberated in his head:
And nothing can be done.
Nothing can be done?
No, nothing can be done.
Tedum tedum tedum.
Can be done, said the cab’s windshield wipers. Can be done. Be done. Be done. Be done.
When he got back to his office, it was waiting for him on his desk: a brown attaché case, with a red shipping tag hanging by a string from the handle. Behind it, down the office windowpane, ceaselessly the rain rilled.
From his first dismayed glance, he protested its presence. It was wrong, unbidden, unwelcome, like a messenger with bad tidings; implacable, it had the quality of a petitioner, a call to duty, a demand for justice. He felt confronted.
“What’s that?”
“An attaché case, Mr. Leary,” said his secretary.
“Hmmm. It even looks like one. Whose is it? Who put it there?”
“It’s on the tag. It’s a jawbreaker.”
“Like Kot-li-koff?”
“Yes, like Kot-li-something.”
“Kotli-something.” He shrugged out of his raincoat. Taking off his glasses, he wiped away the raindrops from the lenses and tried again: “Why do I have it?”
“His Alien Registration Card is in the case.” She read from a note: “The card has to be retrieved; the dossier has to be processed and the attaché case to be returned to the owner.”
“If I physically return this to its owner, I’ll get my picture in the paper and a big silver medal maybe.”
“Well, to his family, I mean. You could take it to New York tomorrow.”
“Who put it on my desk?”
“Mr. Carlotti.”
He looked at his secretary and drew a deep breath: she was the p
erfect hostile witness under cross-examination. “Why?”
“He had to go out of town.”
“—and Mr. Bagget …”
“He’s on another case.”
“Sure he is, and you told them I was to be in New York tomorrow, so they elected me to carry it.”
Underneath the standing attaché case was the Kotlikoff dossier. Every single lawyer on the staff had bucked it down the routing list while he had been over at State testifying.
He put the attaché case and the dossier on her desk. “Send this back to Carlotti.” He walked back into his office.
She followed him. “Well—I can’t. He’s gone—”
“What do I care?”
“He’s on the coast. For ten days. And you’re his alternate.” She carried the case and the dossier back to his desk.
“Enough,” he said and waved her out.
He faced it again. It stood on the top of all his papers, ahead of everything. The attributes of a small animal descended on it; like a fox—a fox in a hencoop. The air would now be filled with feathers. Every line of it said one word to Leary—trouble. His bureaucratic instincts told him to get rid of it, to reroute it somewhere.
He carried the case and the file to her desk again. “Remove the Registration Card, send it to Mr. Rogers. Send the dossier to the file room and have the case hand-delivered tonight to Kotlikoff’s home or his publisher—it has a valuable original manuscript in it.”
He returned to his office and sat down in his chair to sort through his phone messages. She was back—and with the case.
“The messenger made his last pickup a half hour ago in this building. I don’t see why you can’t carry it yourself.” “Because I’m very bad with weepy middle-aged poets’ wives.”
“Chicken.” She left it on his desk and went back to hers. He sat listening to the sounds of remorseless bureaucracy at work. Phones rang. Typewriters ground out page after page to be added to the millions of unread and unreadable reports; the TWX blathered endless feet of teletype paper covered with more and more information. A great army of people manufacturing information to be buried unused in folders; the official sins of the nation interred in miles of files. He looked again at the attaché case. He felt that it was dogging him, and he told himself not to open it. It was pointless; it was prying; it might make Kotlikoff tangible. He might emerge as a whole rounded person from that case, like a djinn in a bottle, demanding rescue. Yet he was curious. He wanted to say to the case: Look, you can tell me. What did he do to stir them up like that? Tell me. Inside there were three books: The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas; Under Russian Skies, by Boris Kotlikoff, translated from the Russian by Daniel Schuler; A History of English Prose Rhythm, by George Saintsbury. He flipped the pages of the Dylan Thomas book.
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