The American Ambassador

by Ward Just

  He stepped back into the shadows and checked his watch. Not much time. He looked left and right, and across the street. A woman interested him. She was walking with a man in a Borsalino hat; they were both carrying briefcases. They were talking animatedly. The woman was wearing very high heels and he fancied he could hear them, even across the street above the noise of the traffic and the music and chatter. Click, click, click. The man was good-looking, no doubt her husband or lover. Bill Jr. quickly crossed the street and fell in behind them, ten feet or so behind, other people in between. She was familiar, a face from his adolescence. What was her name? Wendy? Wanda. The wickedly wonderful Wanda. He and Mel Crown had discovered her in New York; it was some weekend or other. She and Mel had smoked grass and they had taken turns screwing her. She had loved to play games in bed; had been happier, he thought, with Mel than with him. Mel Crown was soooo black. Bill Jr. scrutinized her, noting the changes, a little heavier in the rear; her step didn’t have quite the bounce it once did. Her father was a congressman, now she looked like one. The man with her was a lawyer or influence peddler. Possibly a journalist. It was all the same thing. He stopped and let them advance. At Q Street they turned left, and disappeared from his view. They had had a raunchy time that weekend, he, MC, and WWW. She had taken them out for lunch on Sunday, a last meal before they returned to school. An expensive New York restaurant, she had paid with credit cards. She had opened her purse and the cards fell out, one card after another, American Express, Visa, Master Charge, Diner’s, Hilton. Brooks Brothers, Bloomingdale’s. Hertz, Avis. She was laughing, dumping the cards on the table in a rattle of plastic. Mel looked at her, spoke his favorite word, and left the table. Mel was always quick to identify the enemy. Now Mel was in Attica, she looked like a member of Congress, and he was on the run. Varieties of American experience. He wondered if she knew anything about him. Or if she ever thought about him, where he was or what he did. What ever happened to Bill North, you remember him, the quiet one, the one who never said anything, always glowering and sarcastic, so dissatisfied with things? Probably her father would know, would grunt and say something like “The North boy went off the deep end, and I feel so sorry for Bill and Elinor, such terrific people.” He felt a sudden tug on his arm. The derelict had followed him across the street and stood there in front of him, his hand out, eyes averted. A useful reminder. Time was short.

  Bill Jr. crossed the street again and hurried back to the drugstore. He had been stupid. Wanda was trouble, always had been. It was stupid, hanging around Georgetown, anyone could recognize him; he had changed his appearance, but his walk or his posture could ring a bell. And the bell could be an alarm. This fat, dumb country always lulled him. There were too many faces from the past, too much history. It was time to go home, time to return to Gert. He fished in his pocket for a coin and stepped into a telephone booth, closing the door. He dialed and waited. One ring, two, three.

  She said, “Hello.”

  He pressed the palm of his hand over the mouthpiece so that she could hear no sound. He listened to her breathing. He was concentrating, needing to hear everything.

  She said again, tentatively now, “Hello.” Then, very clearly, as if she wanted someone to overhear, “No, I’m afraid you have the wrong number.” And then another long silence.

  He hung up and left the phone booth. He was smiling. Why had she lied? She had lied because someone was there, Herr Kleust no doubt; his Mercedes was still parked in front of the house. So she did not want Herr Kleust to know that he had been in touch, that perhaps—perhaps! It was so difficult to know, with the clear overseas connections—he was even in the United States. And that lie meant that they would go to the Kunsthalle.

  There was one last souvenir to deliver. His car was parked on 28th Street near P. He drove quickly to Q Street and across Wisconsin Avenue and left on 34th Street to the park. He waited for five minutes, watching for any unusual movement. But there was no one about, either in the park or on the sidewalks. It was drinks time in Georgetown. He left the car and walked in the darkness to the bench near the baseball diamond. He stuffed the paper bag into the trash can.

  Back in the car, he checked his watch. An hour to Dulles, and seven hours to Geneva. Geneva to Copenhagen, and by car from Copenhagen to Hamburg. At about the time he was leaving Geneva, the bomb would explode. It would be five in the morning, no casualties, a bench and a trash can destroyed, windows shattered nearby. The fact that it would be five in the morning, and that there were no casualties, would be an ominous message all its own. It would give those terrific people a little something to think about. How vulnerable they were. How easy it was for him to move in and out of his native land. How simple to obtain and transport the materials for an explosive. How far off the deep end he really was, and how necessary, therefore, that they journey to Hamburg for the last act, if that was what it was.

  Crossing Key Bridge to George Washington Parkway, he realized that his breathing was shallow and that he was sweating. That was the thrill of it. The doing of it, with no errors. The movement back and forth, the package, the bomb in the package, the timer in the bomb. The danger, the mystery, the unknowableness of the present moment. Coincidences, unexpected sightings. Standing motionless on Wisconsin Avenue for thirty minutes, watching the parade. The telephone call, her breathing, her voice, so brittle, so familiar. And to have control, meaning to have it all in your own hands. Go or No Go. The thought always that you could do this forever, take it to whatever point you wanted. There was uncertainty in everything. At the last minute, there was no reason not to back away, save the last act for another day; the important thing was that it was always there. You never ruled it out; you never signed the treaty renouncing the use of force. It was just a little bit like the Cold War itself, an infinite number of possibilities, meaning calculations and miscalculations. Wasn’t that what the old men meant when they talked about the balance of terror? It had been nicely balanced since the end of the Second War. It wasn’t only the weapons, fascinating as the weapons might be, it was the calculation of intent, and not only the intent of the venerables in Washington and Moscow, but the intent of younger, harder men in capitals no one ever heard of.

  He began to laugh. The beauty of his plan was that it could go either way with no loss of tension or menace. They would always be at the edge of the precipice. His plan was a replica of the time. The threat was always there. Kismet.

  PART FOUR

  1

  THEY SAID that a cancer cell was a cell that went haywire. One minute it was good, the next it was bad; one minute normal, the next wild, momentous, and out of control. They did not know why. They could observe it under their microscopes, but were powerless to do anything about it. Tant pis. Except for a final solution, kill it or it kills you. Take no prisoners. The medical equivalent of the neutron bomb, leaving the body’s skin in place but everything within dead. No halfway measures, no patient negotiations. Yet there were decisions to be made. Life was precious, but was it that precious?

  That’s very cheerful, Hartnett said.

  We are not a witty family, Bill replied.

  Hartnett thought that an odd reply, and said so,

  They were having a drink in the first-class lounge at JFK. Elinor was at the newsstand, buying the papers and a magazine. Bill had been talking about his father, in response to some question of Hartnett’s The old man had been dead ten years, cancer, acute lymphocytic leukemia. That was the time, Bill said, when the only possible reaction to anything was—a kind of caustic benevolence. The old man had reserves of courage and patience that were astonishing in the circumstances; they were his weapons in the final quarrel with God.

  Hartnett sipped his drink, not wanting to hear it, but listening anyway. When Bill North had a story to tell, he told it.

  They had a program for him, Bill said. A protocol, they called it, an inventory of chemicals, seven specific drugs that acted in concert. This was the strenuously named Regimen B maintenance schedule. I
was there when the doctor explained it to him. Doctor was about thirty-five, nice-looking fellow, thin as a pencil, very intense. He had a rubber band he kept winding around his fingers while he talked. No promises, he promised no promises; this was experimental treatment. Might work, might not. He watched my father as he spoke. The old man’s eyes never wavered, he never looked more like a woodcut. The doctor started out talking rapidly but he eventually slowed down, and began speaking in complete sentences, often clearing his throat. There were seven drugs and I can remember their names even now. Daunorubicin, vincristine, prednisone, L-asparaginase, 6-mercaptopurine, cystosine arabinoside, methotrexate. He did not rush over the names but enunciated them carefully, the old man nodding as if they were euphonious Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah, Micah. The doctor said there were dangers which every patient should be aware of. The drugs were toxic and had side effects. The old man had not said a word until then. He raised his index finger and said: “Explain them.” Well, the doctor said, each drug had its own specific side effect. Daunorubicin caused bone marrow depression, which often resulted in infection and bleeding. There was also hair loss. Reversible, he said. Also, possibly, cardiac toxicity. Vincristine caused hair loss, tingling of the fingers and toes, muscle weakness, and loss of reflexes. And, frequently, a mild form of bone marrow depression. Prednisone often caused fluid retention, diabetes, skin rash, high blood pressure, stomach ulcers, and curious changes in appearance, which included a rounding of the face. L-asparaginase often caused nausea and vomiting, diabetes, abnormalities of the liver, pancreas, and serum proteins; mental changes and anaphylaxis. (He told me later that it was difficult for him to maintain a straight face. Mental change as a side effect! And if there were no mental change, would that be considered normal? Perhaps that would be an anaphylaxis of its own, a severe allergic reaction, though seldom fatal.) 6-mercaptopurine also caused bone marrow depression. Similarly, cytosine arabinoside. Methotrexate typically caused sores of the inside of the mouth and the lining of the gastrointestinal tract, and hair loss. When it was administered into the spinal fluid, headaches or fever were common. That was pretty much it, the doctor said, not a pretty inventory, though every human being was different and reactions varied, they could be worse or they could be better, that is, milder, but that was what Mr. North could expect, pretty much. The doctor used the collective pronoun “we” when describing what could be expected, “we” being the medical profession, medical science, chemotherapists. At the end, God bless him, he told my father that he was very gravely ill and that the prognosis was not “positive.” The old man listened to this, lying in bed, his hands folded on his stomach (only once did he look at me, and that was at the third or fourth mention of hair loss, the old man being bald as an egg, a condition that the doctor did not notice, being so concerned to get the protocol in its proper sequence). He did not look gravely ill just then, his complexion was still ruddy and his belly round and full. When the doctor had finished, he nodded slightly and glared at the bureau. His Hebrew texts were piled high, eight, nine books, heavy, thick tomes that he had brought from his library. Also Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. The doctor looked at me and I made a sign to stay put; my father was thinking. He had been told all he wanted to know, and now he needed to think about it. But the doctor had one thing to add, it was the question he was always asked, and now he moved to anticipate his patient. He said, “You’ll be wondering about the odds, in treatment of this kind—”

  My father shook his head. “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I know what they are, without hearing them from you.” He continued to think.

  I sat quietly, looking out the window. The doctor wrapped and unwrapped his rubber band, impatiently turning the face of his wristwatch, pursing his lips; the old man had him spooked. I turned away so that my father could not see my tears, though of course he knew. Twice I had to blow my nose. It is not possible to weep in silence. I admired him so: he had been given a sentence of death, which might be spared by torture. I think my father was looking into his own soul, into the marrow of his bones, to calculate the time; to figure the odds in his own way. At last he shifted, sitting up on one haunch. He put his hand out and the doctor shook it. He thanked the doctor for explaining things so clearly. Of course he had done some reading himself, on acute lymphocytic leukemia, and other, related, matters. But he would not agree to the protocol. He smiled sadly, as if distressed to disappoint medical science. “I would rather struggle with God,” he said. And he was dead in three weeks.

  “The doctor, poor son of a bitch, thought he’d failed.”

  Hartnett put his arm around Bill’s shoulder.

  “The unspoken thought was that the old man’s body could be of use. They might learn something from it, its reaction to daunorubicin, vincristine, and the other toxic prophets. But he didn’t see himself as a gerbil. One to be experimented upon, the results tabulated and published. I think that brought forth other memories, and a precedent that had already been set, that he did not want to see reset. He was very much of the world, and of his books. At the end all he could think about was Auschwitz.”

  “My God,” Hartnett said.

  “God, too,” Bill said. “God and Auschwitz.”

  “Did you ever have second thoughts—” Hartnett began. A lawyer’s question.

  “All the time. One thought after another. And third thoughts, and fourth thoughts. But he didn’t.”

  “Tough man,” Hartnett said.

  “Not at the end. At the end he wasn’t so tough.”

  “No, of course not,” Hartnett said. He was unnerved. He could not imagine the situation, he who prided himself on being able to imagine anything. Caustic benevolence, indeed! He thought to say, “And your mother?”

  He remained at home, Bill said, until the very end. She cared for him, fed him, washed him, injected him. At the very end he went to the hospital, where we had our last conversation. He was very sick, in and out of consciousness. He was lying on his side because his stomach hurt. I sat next to the bed, and told him how worried I was about Bill Jr. This was about a year after the incident with the English teacher. I said that the boy had grown away from me, from us both, Elinor and me, and that he seemed to be far from home. The old man listened to me, breathing very heavily, trying to concentrate. I said that the boy was consumed with hatred, and that I was afraid. I was afraid for all of us, perhaps because things were the way Nietzsche said they were, that God was dead and that we had killed Him. To a son, a father was God. There was some ritual killing that had to take place, everyone knew that; it was normal. A boy had to find his own feet. I looked at my father and reminded him of our own bad time; perhaps we had never completely settled it. He and Mother were so close, as Elinor and I are close. I said that I felt the darkness closing around me—and at that he turned, looked me in the eye, and smiled. It was the only time that night. I was flustered, but I went on. I felt that I had to tell him everything, that I could confide in no one else. I was incoherent, but there seemed so much to say and so little time to say it. I found myself talking about true faith, and that led naturally to my oath of office, “true faith and allegiance . . . that I take this obligation freely and without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, that I will well and truthfully discharge the duties of this office . . .” It sounded like the marriage vows from the Book of Common Prayer. I was drawn back into the Constitution and from the Constitution to the government, and all this was us; him and me, and me and my son. This seemed to be all I had to go on; my true faith and allegiance, and of course Elinor. But somewhere with this boy there had been a profound disappointment, some monstrous evil. I did not know where it began, but I thought I knew where it would end, hence my fear. There was nothing I could do about it.

  He said, “William,” his voice soft as cotton.

  I said, “Probably you were right.”

  He murmured, “About what?”

  “The g
overnment,” I said, and then knew I didn’t mean that at all. I said, “Moving on.” But I didn’t mean that either, and what I did mean I could not find voice to say. I meant to tell him that what he had said so long ago was correct. There was only us after all. There was not more than just us. We were what we had, and we had our history also. We need not neglect or despise others, but they were not what we had. However, that was too much for this old man in extremis. I did not think he would find the thought consoling.

  He smiled a kind of cracked half smile. He said, “You’re a good man, William.”

  I lowered my head. I was staring at the threads of the bedsheet. He had never said that to me before, and now I wanted him to say it again. “Do you think I am?”

  He said, “Yes.” And then something seized him because he moved, groaning. He turned his back to me, seeking a more comfortable position. I put my hand on his shoulder. We were both trembling. I wanted his advice. I wanted him to tell me what to do, and how to do it.

  I said, “Can you tell me—”

  But he shook his head before I was finished. He had something that he wanted to say. “The boy,” he said.

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Your son,” he said, “my grandson.” There was a very long pause while he shivered, his teeth rattling. I could feel his muscles and bones move under his skin. I rose to lean over the bed to look at him. He was crying freely but the tears seemed to arise from some ghastly, equivocal joke because he was smiling, too, and when the words came they were droll indeed. “He needs someone to sue.”