by James Philip
“You know I’m not going to make a direct play for the nomination, Claude,” Johnson said coyly.
“Quite,” the older man confirmed. “But if the moment arose?”
“Yeah, well,” the tall Texan guffawed, levering himself to his feet. “I ain’t going any place any time soon. Those damned doctors and Lady Bird say I need to be ‘in retreat’ or some such for a week or month or two. Maybe, they’re right. Either way, you old boys will know where to find me if you need me!”
Claude Betancourt sipped his bourbon.
“Respectfully, sir,” he decided, slowly rising to his feet, “if you entertain ambitions of being the President I strongly suggest you return to Philadelphia in time to assume your rightful place on the steps of City Hall on 4th July.”
Johnson’s right eyebrow arched momentarily.
His lips quirked into a half-smile.
“What exactly are you telling me, Claude?”
The older man hesitated knowing the time to beat about the bush was over.
“May I speak plainly, sir?”
The Vice President scowled.
“I reckon there’s a first time for everything,” he growled.
“If you can rally the Southern Democrats I will deliver sufficient votes from New England and the northern states to carry the Atlantic City convention,” Claude Betancourt said quietly. “That is what I am telling you, sir.”
Chapter 32
Sunday 21st June 1964
Berkeley, California
He had lain on her and in her a long time in the dark, sweaty warmth of the summer night. Caroline had like that. She had clung to him, wrapped herself around him, stroked his wet back, giggled as his lips nuzzled and tickled her ears, they had kissed many, many times and his weight had pinned her down among the crazily confused sheets for a blissful age.
Eventually, something like reality had impinged.
“I have to go to the John, sweetheart,” she had murmured in his ear.
With a slothful, reluctant groan he had raised himself on his elbows.
He started kissing her again; and initially she had not discouraged him.
“I have to go now,” she had apologized eventually. “I really have to go...”
Nathan had rolled off her and she had scampered out of the room in an undignified rush, only just making it to the bathroom in time. Then as she recovered her breath and something like her presence of mind as she sat beneath the swinging single bathroom lamp she had vented an inadvertent, entirely spontaneous giggle; and immediately afterwards, another. She had almost but not quite forgotten the delicious indignity of sexual intercourse. Well, fucking really. Coming back from the Berkeley Campus she had let her lover maul her inside the front door. Naked in the bedroom she had demanded to go on top. He had been so hard she was afraid he would split her in half. Nevertheless she had impaled herself upon him, taken him deeper inside than she had thought possible and ridden him until she could bear it no longer. He had exploded inside her long before that; all she had cared about was prolonging the ecstasy. Eventually, she had collapsed on him, possibly she had fainted. In any event she had awakened bathed in a dripping sheen of perspiration. Later – she had lost all sense of time – Nathan had turned her on her back and worshipped her into renewed insensibility.
She stood up, viewed her reflection in the mirror above the small hand basin. Her grey-streaked hair was wild, plastered this way and that across her face. She pushed the matted strands off her brow, looked down at the white nakedness of her torso contrasting sharply with her tanned lower legs and arms. The California sun had reddened her shoulders, painted a v-shaped arrow from her throat to a point just above her small breasts; which sagged as they had every right to sag at her age even if Nathan seemed as insatiably hungry for them as a baby in arms...
How twisted was that?
There was a quiet knock at the half-open bathroom door.
“You okay?” The man asked from outside.
“Never better,” Caroline replied.
Except that the woman in the mirror was crying.
“Caro?” The kid was really worried, scared.
She opened the door.
“It’s just me, okay,” she sniffed.
Nathan held her close anyway.
“This is all kind of weird,” he muttered. “I’m sorry...”
“Don’t be. I’m happy...”
They went back to bed and lay on their backs contemplating the stygian darkness. In an hour or so the first glimmer of the new day would intrude on their intimacy.
Caroline could not sleep.
Her senses were wearily supercharged by love-making and drawn back time and again to the oddly religious denouement of the previous evening’s rally in the Wheeler Auditorium of Berkeley University.
‘My name is Miranda Sullivan... The man I loved is dead. He died standing between Doctor Martin Luther King – the greatest living American of our time – and the assassin’s bullets...’
Afterwards Caroline had learned that Miranda Sullivan was the daughter of the movie stars Ben and Margaret Sullivan, a young woman who by her own admission had ‘dropped out’ and ‘lost herself’ in the year before the October War but since re-dedicated her life to being a better person.
It sounded so trite, so invented and yet there had been something positively charismatic in her story. The fable concerning a journey from spoiled rich kid disinterested in anything and everything that was not to do with her, to being the woman she was today and hoped to be tomorrow.
The great unrequited love of her life was a black man who had befriended an abused white woman and run away from a likely lynch mob in Georgia. She had met him by accident on the night of the October War, never expecting to see him again. Fate had decreed otherwise and she had found love.
The bullets which had ripped the life out of Dwayne John’s body would have done the same for Doctor King also, had not their passage been slowed by the flesh, blood and bone of the man Miranda loved...
‘I never told Dwayne I loved him. I think we both knew. When he went back to Atlanta the last time it was like a piece of me boarded the Greyhound to the east with him. I planned to tell him everything when he got back to the West Coast. I knew things would be hard for us but,’ the young woman had raised her hands in supplication, ‘sometimes you just have to have a little faith...’
Caroline stared into the gloom.
“Sometimes,” she murmured, inadvertently speaking her thoughts aloud, “you just have to have a little faith...”
“What’s that?” Nathan asked, turning on his side to face her.
Caroline moved likewise, kissed him.
Inevitably, she felt him hardening against her. She pushed him away, very gently, took him in her right hand, squeezing and stroking his rapidly engorging penis. He was in no hurry and neither was she before tendrils of cramp twitched up and down her arm; she worked on him with gathering urgency as he drew her to him, flesh to flesh. Later they slept, heedless of the new day deep into the sultry California morning as if nothing that happened outside the wall of the bedroom mattered.
She slept until noon and awakened alone.
Around her the house was quiet.
Getting up –in stiff, aching slow motion – she pulled on the first of Nathan’s shirts hanging up in the bedroom’s one cupboard. It came down to her upper thighs and providing she kept her legs together offered a semblance of decency. She stumbled into the corridor.
The note pinned on the inside of the front door read: ‘Caro, gone for a run, Nathan.’
There was a fresh loaf of white bread on the wooden carving board in the kitchen, a bottle of milk and eggs in the small refrigerator. She toasted a couple of slices of the bread, made herself coffee, throwing beans into hot water. She visited the bathroom, not daring to risk a look in the mirror because she suspected she looked as old and worn as she felt.
Back in the kitchen she mechanically munched half-burned toast leavened wit
h blotches of butter and sipped coffee, hoping she would be feeling half-alive whenever her young lover returned.
“That looks better on you than me,” the man observed, pulling up a chair at the table. He was wringing with sweat, his face reddened as he toweled his head. He sucked down the glass of milk Caroline handed him in one gulp.
She looked down at herself shyly.
“It’ll be all creased. Sorry. I know how much care you take over your stuff,” she apologized.
Their eyes met.
“I must look awful,” Caroline blurted.
The man shook his head.
“You look like a million dollars to me,” he retorted. “You always do...”
“Nathan, I’m...”
Again the man shook his head.
“Twenty million dollars!”
Caroline was silenced by his quiet vehemence.
“Look, I’m this mass-murdering war criminal,” Nathan said, ruefully running a hand through his sweat-slicked short hair, “with this crazy woman mother who tried to murder the President. But for you I’d have blown my brains out by now. I think I love you...”
“Nathan, I...”
“Everything’s crazy, right?” The man rejoined, leaning towards her. “The Russians are fighting the Brits, there’s bad stuff going in the Midwest. Heck, California and the whole South West could secede from the Union any day. Then what happens? Another Civil War but with nukes this time! It’s like Miranda Sullivan said last night. How dumb is it to die wondering? How crazy is it to worry about what anybody else thinks about anything? Maybe I don’t love you. Maybe I do. I think I do. I’ve never been in love before and the way I feel about you is so weird I don’t know what else it could be. But I do know I care about you a lot and I want to be with you. I do know that every time we get naked I get so hard it hurts. And I do know you like me.”
And there it was; the clinching argument.
“Baby,” Caroline muttered, bewildered and frightened, “I don’t just like you. The reason I came back here is because there’s nowhere else in the World I’d rather be right now.”
Chapter 33
Monday 22nd June 1964
FBI Field Office, 9th and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia
There were four of them waiting for Gretchen as she left the foyer of her new Walnut Street apartment. Men in dark suits, white shirts and black ties, and they were not about to take no for an answer. They surrounded her before she could raise an arm to hail a cab.
Special Agent Noble allowed her to examine his card.
‘We’re sorry if we alarmed you Mrs Brenckmann,’ the man had apologized but only perfunctorily. He was in his fifties, still lean and possibly mean beneath the fixed half-smile he had stuck onto his lined face. ‘A situation has arisen and Director Tolson needs to speak to you immediately.’
Gretchen had been invited to get into the back of the first of two black Lincolns idling at the roadside just down from the entrance to her apartment.
‘I have appointments!’ She had objected.
‘I have my orders, Ma’am.’
Gretchen had huffed and puffed – secretly a little relieved that Dan had left for Chief Justice Earl Warren’s office at the Department of Justice on South Broad Street literally at the crack of dawn. Ironically, the preparatory work for the Commission on the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War had suddenly shifted up another gear now that both Houses had realized that it was increasingly unlikely that there would be any sittings – exploratory or otherwise of ‘the Commission’ - until sometime after the November elections. Gretchen strongly suspected that if her husband had been with her when the FBI men swooped there would have been a scene.
‘I will be complaining about this to the Attorney General,’ she promised her abductors as the Lincoln cruised down the road. Thereafter she had said absolutely nothing until she was escorted into the second floor conference room of the Philadelphia Field Office of the FBI.
Clyde Tolson was grim-faced and agitated.
Gretchen, who had made a point of keeping up with her kidnappers as they marched her through the building, winced and reached for the back of a chair to support herself the moment she stopped moving forward.
Tolson’s expression changed.
“Are you...”
“I am perfectly all right!” Gretchen snapped irritably, making an effort to straighten to her full height while she was busily fixing the veteran FBI-man with a look of undiluted feline contempt. “How dare you arrest me on the street like a common criminal and bring me to,” her right arm proscribed a dismissive waving away gesture, ‘this place!”
Tolson opened his mouth to speak.
“I have appointments scheduled this morning and this afternoon I am due to travel to Maryland to confer with several clients,” Gretchen continued, her tone very much that of a woman gratuitously wronged who had only just begun to protest. “How dare you!”
The Assistant Director of the FBI held up his hands.
“Bring Murdoch in,” he muttered to his men. “We have a situation, Mrs Brenckmann...”
“Where’s Frank Lovell?” Gretchen demanded. She had made it clear that she had no intention of being at J. Edgar Hoover’s disposal in her dealings with the Department of Justice. Justice’s ‘point man’ on this thing was the Attorney General’s fixer, with whom she had established acceptable ‘ground rules’. This morning the FBI had ridden roughshod over those arrangements.
“Mr Lovell is in New York. He is unable to get to Philadelphia before this afternoon, Mrs Brenckmann,” Tolson explained testily.
Agent William ‘Billy’ Murdoch was a tall, broad man, a bruiser who had obviously come off much the worst in a recent brawl. His left arm was in a sling, his wrist heavily plastered. His face was mottled and swollen – particularly on the left side where his brow seemed to be only held together by a maze of stitching – and he was noticeably unsteady on his feet.
“Christie attacked Agent Murdoch and escaped,” Clyde Tolson grated through clenched teeth, seizing the moment as Gretchen momentarily fell silent trying to work out what was going on.
Gretchen wasted no time going back onto the offensive.
“My client was not under arrest, Mr Director,” she retorted primly.
“He was supposed to be co-operating with Bureau operatives!”
Such was implied but not specifically stated in the immunity granted to Dwight Christie. He had actually agreed to make a full disclosure of his past activities and crimes, and to fully co-operate with FBI debriefings to facilitate the arrest of the perpetrators of the Bedford Pine Park atrocity. The FBI had interpreted this as a license to keep Christie under house arrest.
“I’m Mr Christie’s lawyer, not his keeper,” she reminded the FBI men around her. For the first time she began to take cognizance of the room into which she had been escorted. Dark blinds on the windows, just the one big table with several odd-looking, overlarge telephone handsets on it, each with two or three finger-thick cables running back to a circular opening in the middle of the table, thence into a metallic column that disappeared into the floor. There were lumpy microphones in front of each of the nine chairs positioned around the table. “What is this place?”
“A conference room, Ma’am,” explained Agent Noble. “The telephone sets on the table broadcast incoming calls and the microphones enable the caller to hear what is said in the room.”
There was talk of installing similar equipment in the downtown offices of Betancourt and Sallis. Corporate clients liked the idea, private clients less; no decision had been taken as yet.
Gretchen was suddenly frowning.
“When did you mislay my client?”
“Yesterday around noon,” Agent Murdoch slurred through puffy lips.
Tolson made a loud sighing noise.
“Last night Christie put a call through to the Field Office demanding that senior Philadelphia agents be in this room to receive his call at ten o’clock this morning. He t
hreatened that if you were not in the room that he would break contact and that we’d never hear from him again.”
Gretchen checked her wristwatch, a small, sparkly thing her father had given her on her twenty-fifth birthday.
09:45.
“I like my coffee black with one sugar,” she declared, badly needing to sit down and take the weight off her aching bones. Her doctors said it would take many more months for her to ‘fully recover’ from the injuries she had sustained in December; she doubted if she would ever ‘fully recover’, not at least in the sense that she would be as she was before. There would be pain, bearing children would probably not be the straightforward – well, relatively straightforward – thing it might have been, and inevitably, she would be a little old a little before her time. All of which she was fine with; being alive was the main thing and being happily married to a man she loved was a thing she had never, ever taken for granted. One way and another she did not plan to complain, or to make any kind of big deal about the things she could not longer do; life was about concentrating about what one can do.
The nearest FBI man pulled out a chair for her.
Gretchen sat down.
When it arrived her coffee was the right color and appropriately sugared but otherwise unpleasant and unlike anything she would call coffee at home, or in her own office. Notwithstanding, sipping the vaguely vile brew stopped her having to make polite conversation with the unhappy G-men gathering around the conference table.
“We will be taping the call,” Clyde Tolson said like a threat.
“I will expect a full transcript,” she replied, coolly.
Dwight Christie wasted no time calling the shots. The men in the room had been getting restive when, at 10:07, the air had crackled with distant background static.
“Are you there, Gretchen?”
“Yes, Dwight.”
“Who else is in the room?”
“Director Tolson, Agents Noble and Murdoch and four other men who have not been introduced to me.”