Undertow

by Warren Adler

  “You know, Senator, neither have I.”

  It was just then, watching this inexplicable police chief, that I began to see his dilemma. He was concerned about his own role in this episode. We had, it seemed, all been looking down the wrong alley. He had his own image, his own niche in life to protect. He, too, had been weighing options. There was simply no end to the complications that presented themselves.

  “This is no ordinary case, Senator,” Chief Bernhard said. “It puts us all on our mettle. No, I don’t really think you’re guilty of anything but indiscretion. That’s my gut reaction. You don’t have to respond. I know the fix you’re in, and believe me, I don’t want to make things worse than they are. But look at it from my point of view. I could make the determination myself. That could be interpreted as a whitewash. On the other hand, I could draw out the investigation and buck it upstairs. That’s the easiest way out for me—a typical bureaucratic reaction.”

  “Why the hell don’t you vote your conscience, then?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Frankly, I think you’re needlessly torturing me.”

  “I guess I am.”

  The extent of Don’s luck never failed to amaze me. If I believed in God, I might attribute it to—what did we say in the statement?—“Divine Providence.” What had been revealed in this crackling discussion was that under his blank exterior, the chief owned a rather highly versatile intelligence. This was no stock character police chief, no one-dimensional “pig,” stereotyped in our brains as unthinking, unwise, and above all, sadistic. Chief Bernhard was none of these things. The problem was that he saw through us. Now the question was, did he see through us because our strategy was so transparent, or was his intelligence so keen that he grasped the truth of it by clever and imaginative observation. It gave me a cold shudder to think that our plans were not good enough to get past a single small-town police chief. Of course, now that I had vested him with superior intelligence, I suppose the plan had regained its credibility again.

  This man, Bernhard, could murder us. He could raise doubts. He could do a big job with innuendo and half truths. Hell, he could get his face on network television. How many men tucked away in a small town like this dream of miraculously being plucked out of their anonymity? Overnight, Chief Bernhard could be a national, an international figure—fleeting, yes, but there are many who must yearn for such a moment. Bernhard was no fool. He knew the extent of his power.

  “I think I’m entitled to know which way you’re going to jump,” Don said.

  “I’ve been thinking about this all day long, Senator. But only now, only now that I have the body and we have had our talk, has it become obvious to me what I must do. You see, I detest you politicians. As a man who deals strictly in truth and facts, I have no use for the lot of you. This whole episode is a case in point. You’ll do anything, pretty nearly anything, to fudge up the facts.”

  “Your judgment is harsh. You don’t understand. Politics is a business. It has its own vocabulary. Its own idiom. Its own way of doing things.”

  “I know. It makes me want to vomit.”

  “Well, here’s your golden opportunity to have your revenge.”

  “You’ve got the wrong boy. I haven’t got the stomach for all those lies, and I’m too damn old to be lying myself. There’s no reason for me to continue my involvement in this case. The girl drowned. The drowning was an accident.”

  “That’s pretty damned obvious.”

  “Yes, Senator, it is. But so is your attempt to block out the truth.”

  “Nothing is that black and white.”

  “Aside from despising politics, I detest your point of view. Promising all the downtrodden that you’re going to make them have a better world—bullshit. You’re lucky, in a way, that I feel the way I do. If I didn’t detest all that you stood for I might have done it differently.”

  “Done what?”

  “I could have brought the reporters to the beach, had them take pictures of the body. I could have asked the coroner to determine if there were evidence of intercourse. I could have asked for an autopsy to determine whether she was under the influence of anything. I could have tipped off reporters. Believe me, Senator, I know what I could have done. But I didn’t.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re not out of the woods, by any means.”

  “You make me feel dirty.”

  “You are dirty. You know why—because you’re a damned liar and a cheat. We both know that. The worst part is that people might believe you. God help us all if that happens.”

  “I am an innocent victim of a strange set of circumstances.”

  “You’re not an innocent anything. Just a petty liar. But just remember. You don’t own the world. You can’t always do what you want.”

  “Okay. I heard your speech. Now stop preaching.”

  He stood up; the eyes behind his mask said nothing. He looked at me.

  “I’ll issue my report—and I’ll tell them.” He pointed to the reporters.

  “What will you tell them?” I said hesitantly.

  “The truth.”

  “And as you see it, what is that?” Don asked.

  “That a girl, race black, age about twenty-three or four, drowned and was washed ashore at Buzzards Point—” He looked at his book. “—at about 11:15 A.M. I will say that this girl meets the description of your staff person who was reported missing at 6:00 A.M.”

  “And what about the big question?”

  “You mean the lapse between the time you knew the girl had disappeared and the time she was reported missing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Nearly eleven hours.”

  “My God, you’ll finish us,” I said.

  “The truth is the truth.”

  “You can’t do it,” I protested.

  Chief Bernhard looked at me and then at Don.

  “We have no choice. Everything has an Achilles’ heel. That’s mine,” Don said, shrugging.

  “We could deny it,” I said.

  Don paused.

  “Do what you have to do, Chief.”

  “I fully intend to.”

  “He can’t—,” I began.

  “Shut up, Lou—will you please just shut up. We’ll figure—” He checked himself.

  “I’m sure you will,” Chief Bernhard said.

  He turned and, without bothering to say goodbye, walked out the front door. The press mobbed him. He talked to them briefly, then made his way to his car.

  “Every dog has his day,” Don said when he had gone.

  “My God. You should be ecstatic. He took you off the hook,” I said.

  “Off the hook? I’ve swallowed the damned thing. It’s like I’m on a roller coaster straight to hell. He saw me. That son-of-a-bitch saw me. He’s worth a hundred of any one of us.”

  “Come on off it, Don. What did he see? He doesn’t understand your orbit. It’s a different world from where he sits.”

  There’s nothing more discouraging than being exposed to a politician in the midst of moralizing. To a realist, fantasy is a put on. And Don was putting me on. Believe me, I understood. It was like getting laid, that brief release of pure ecstasy and then the reality of the soft cock again.

  “He knew,” Don said.

  “I think you’re damned lucky.”

  “Yeah, I’m lucky.”

  “Now you’ve got to see the girl’s father. That’s going to be a tough hurdle. He may not buy the chief’s report. He may have ideas of his own.”

  “He might. But the ironic thing is that the chief’s report is true,” Don said.

  “Who knows what’s true?” I said.

  I mean that. I’ll say it again. Who knows what’s true?

  XX

  “We need a performance now,” Jack Barnstable said.

  It was nearly one by the time Chief Bernhard had left. I briefed everyone on our conversation, with appropriate editing. The conclusion was satisfying to everyone.

 
“That’s a big plus,” Don said. “Depending on the way the chief handles it.”

  “You needn’t worry,” I said. “He has lots of contempt for politicians and newspapermen.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Barnstable said. “Okay, Davis, would you bring the senator up to date?”

  We were all in the living room now. Karen had combed her hair and put on makeup. She looked younger, more composed. The resourcefulness of the human spirit never ceases to leave me in awe. You see a lot of it in this business. Where in hell did these people, Don and Karen, get their reservoirs of strength? Maybe that’s what set them apart, this wellspring of constant replenishment.

  “As we had expected, the stories in both print and the electronic press are catering to everybody’s baser instincts,” Davis said. “Some of the afternoon papers are writing headlines with question marks, like ‘Did He or Didn’t He?’ TV and radio all put out special bulletins. They’re now following up with fill-ins. The coverage is one of unremitting blackness from our point of view. Our statement was given to the press outside here and distributed in Washington and by wire. It’s our opening gun, and should give us the edge in the morning coverage and certainly in the early evening news shows. If the chief handles the situation correctly, he should upstage us in the stories, which would be great. Our statement logically should follow the verdict of the police chief. Now comes a little of the hard part. Senator, you and Mrs. James have got to go out there and face the cameras, and you’ve got to make it look good. No statements. We want silent stuff.”

  “What would you suggest?” Don said. “Just walk out there like a dummy and say nothing?”

  “I’ve already arranged for everything. Take a look outside—the beach side.”

  We followed the direction of Davis’ pointing finger. There was a large knot of people standing on one spot along the water’s edge. We made out a nest of cameras and a number of ladders on which photographers perched.

  “I told them,” Davis said, “that I’d let them take you while you walked on the beach. I thought it would be a nice touch. And for Pete’s sake, try not to smile. This is strictly for the photo boys. They were happy for the opportunity. There’ll be no funny stuff. I told them I’m doing them a favor. They’re here to get footage. This will placate them temporarily. I left an opening for later in the day.”

  “What’s that mean?” Barnstable asked.

  “It means that I lied to them. I promised them something that I have no intention of delivering.”

  His arrogance was beginning to grate on me. He was so damned cocky and had this positive way of putting everything as if he were so certain, so sure of his approach. I guess maybe in situations like this a guy like Davis shines. He gives you the impression that he has weighed all the possibilities and come up with the only answer, the only option. Even Don wasn’t bucking. He understood exactly what his role would be. He and Karen would walk arm in arm on the beach along a prescribed route in the path of the cameras. They would first walk away from the cameras, then towards them, pausing to look out to sea. This would give lots of pensive sideshots. They had to look regretful. That was most important. They were playing strictly for the cameras, following Henry Davis’s script; and, apparently, the cameramen had agreed to take his direction. He explained the conditions carefully to Don and Karen, pointing to little, unobstrusive markers that he had placed along the beach indicating where to stop, how far to go.

  “It’s a fifteen-minute deal,” Davis said. “I’ve paced it off exactly. At the end of the fifteen minutes, head back to the house. The TV boys will hold their ground—the state troopers will make sure of that. I told them to stay out of sight. Expect the TV people to shout questions at you. Don’t answer them. Don’t acknowledge them. Have you any questions?”

  “Lots,” Don said. “But no answers.”

  “And put some TV makeup on,” Davis urged. “The darker kind. Mrs. James doesn’t need it.”

  “Should I wear my sunglasses?” Karen asked.

  “No,” Davis said. “That will give you too much of a mysterious, glamourous look. The audience we’re playing to will resent that look.” She took her sunglasses, which were lying on the table beside her and with a testy shrug, put them in her pocketbook and snapped it shut.

  At one o’clock precisely, Don and Karen emerged from the screened porch and headed toward the water’s edge. They walked hand in hand. Even from their backs, you caught a clear picture of what they were trying to convey. Closeness. Sadness. Poetry. The enigma of the sea. The sanctity of marriage. From the moment they stepped onto the beach, they became media, both the content and the media itself. This was the extra measure that gave Don his uniqueness, that marked him for the power role he was seeking in the context of present-day politics. He could rise up and accept the role and play it to the hilt with skill. He had the ability to play all the instruments in the orchestra, and, consequently, he orchestrated. He was admirable.

  “He’s been a good soldier,” Barnstable said. “He hasn’t let us down yet. I hope he makes it.”

  “There’s still a hell of a lot of mine fields ahead,” I said.

  We stood on the screened porch watching the performance. The cameras were grinding. Flashbulbs were popping, and, as if indifferent to all that was happening, two lone figures picked their way along the ocean’s edge. The sea was rough again, just as it was yesterday. Davis obviously chose the site to pick up the roughness and roar of the sea, to buttress the story of Marlena’s death. The sea had found her and claimed her. The gloom of the day. The starkness of the beach. The anger of the sea. The pensiveness of the figures walking. It would make superb footage—a great counterattack.

  Kessler came in carrying a yellow lined pad filled with copious notes.

  “As could be imagined,” he said, “all the troops are in a state of shock. The telegrams have begun to swarm in. We’ve received about three thousand. Seventy percent are outraged and nasty. The other thirty percent are peptalks. It’s been rough.”

  “And the papers?” He had asked Kessler to assign three of his best researchers to come up with position papers to determine the impact of the incident on the four major areas of the country—East, West, Midwest, South.

  “They’re working around the clock. We should get some feedback by tomorrow afternoon. The boys are good. They should give us the kind of input we’ll need to get through the rest of the week. Oh, yes, I’ve contracted for the surveys.”

  Barnstable followed Kessler back into the house while I stood there alone watching Don and Karen continue their walk along the beach.

  “Good soldiers,” Henry Davis said from behind me. “I think she’s fantastic!”

  I turned around, looking into his intense, icy eyes, as they caught my look.

  “I think the whole thing stinks,” I said, expressing my contempt for him. I loathed him and our predicament.

  “Yes, it does,” he said, cool behind a stare that was both contemptuous and filled with envy. “All shit stinks.”

  It was frustrating as hell to find yourself at the mercy of someone like that. He was like a computer plugged into the mass media.

  “The ultimate prize,” he said, smiling. “If you play in that big poker game, you’ve got to be prepared to bluff once in a while.”

  I didn’t appreciate his analogy. But it was more out of resentment than logic. He was right. He was right all the way down the line. Why had we let him take command if we didn’t think so? And he was unquestionably assuming command.

  “What’s next on the agenda?” I asked.

  “The father,” he said. “I am genuinely worried about the father. We have no control in that situation. We lucked out with Bernhard.”

  Don and Karen returned from the beach in a state of irritation.

  “The whole thing was silly—silly,” Don said.

  “How do you think I felt?” Karen said.

  “With due respect, Senator,” Davis said, “the important thing is how you
will be perceived by the people who will view the footage, not how you both felt inside.”

  “It’s really not necessary to go over that ground again, Davis,” Don said. “I wouldn’t have gone along with it if I didn’t think it was right.”

  “Right?” Karen asked. “Right, you say?”

  “Please, Karen. Cool it.”

  “I am cool.”

  Don went back into the living room and sprawled on the couch. We all followed. Barnstable hung up the phone and came into the room.

  “We’re really taking it from all sides. I’ve explained everything to Max Schwartz. He seems disappointed, but understanding. If anybody can hold the fat cats in line, he can.”

  “What can he say?” Karen asked.

  “He’ll say, ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’ He’ll say, ‘Have good faith.’ He’ll make an appeal to their steadfastness—I guess that’s a good word.”

  The group of reporters and cameramen seemed to have thinned out. Some had certainly gone to drop their footage at the airport and would be back. The state troopers quietly continued to bar admittance—a fact for which we were very grateful. We all knew that the time was fast approaching when we could no longer hide from the world, although we were doing quite a good job of it at the moment.

  Barnstable seemed tired now. He was showing his age. He sat down heavily in a nearby chair. Karen went back into the bedroom. Christine continued to type in the kitchen, and Kessler perched himself near the phone. Davis looked toward the water watching the last of the cameramen pack their gear and slowly straggle back from the beach, leaving in their wake the little yellow piles of Kodak boxes and the inevitable coffee containers, little white mounds of styrofoam strewn like snowballs along the beach.

  XXI

  The growing knot of reporters outside the beach house were lounging, pointlessly it seemed, waiting for something to happen. Information was sparse. There was no spokesman, only an inane statement extolling the virtues of the girl who had drowned, or was alleged to have drowned. Even that was a mystery, since there was no body. Speculation was rampant. Ernie compared notes with the other reporters and tried to get the time frames in perspective. This proved illusive.