“Nurse Selff,” Bernstein said, his tone temperate, the gaze he gave her radiating reasonableness, “please know these are the ramblings, the ravings, of a very diseased mind.”
“Like me, Maria,” I said, “you were this bastard’s unwitting accomplice. You were still working the Roswell disinformation project, not realizing the good doctor was putting the Forrestal kill in motion.”
Bernstein snapped, “I was nowhere near that hospital when Mr. Forrestal took his life!”
Gun steady on him, I said, “Neither was I, Doc, but we killed him together, just the same.”
Confused, Maria asked, “How is that possible, Nathan?”
“The doc here was well aware that I was a veteran of hypnosis therapy, that my battle-fatigue amnesia had been cured by hypnotherapy, in fact. So he knew I’d make a good subject, easily controlled, by a combination of, well … sex-that’s, uh, your role, Maria … and of course a visit to the base guesthouse. Either before or just after my guesthouse stay, back at Bethesda the doc prepped Forrestal to be receptive to posthypnotic suggestion; how exactly the doc achieved that, narcosis, hypnosis … well, he’s the magician, not me.”
Maria asked, in a hushed voice, “What do you think happened to you in the guesthouse?”
“Well for one thing-and this much you do know, Maria-I was a guest at the base longer than I’d been led to believe … don’t play dumb, baby, that doesn’t become you, either. You told me, when I fell asleep at your bungalow, that I’d slept straight through, losing a day … but really I’d only slept through that one night. Right?”
Chagrined, she nodded.
“You even gave me a posthypnotic suggestion yourself, didn’t you, Maria? Per the doc’s instructions, when you said, ‘You must be very tired, very tired, very tired.’”
“That is true,” she admitted, sending an accusing glare Bernstein’s way.
“That had nothing to do with Forrestal,” he told her emphatically.
I shook my head. “It had everything to do with him, Doc. You had, what, a day, a day and a half to work your magic on me, in that guesthouse? Including giving me the posthypnotic suggestion to buy that book of poetry for Forrestal. I vividly remember, Doc, you repeating the phrase on the phone, twice: ‘A book of poetry would be comforting.’ As if that wasn’t enough, you advised me to tell Forrestal that I, his trusted associate, had been secretly working for his nemesis, Drew Pearson, making a damn good case for that being a good idea, while in reality anticipating that my disclosure would help create in Forrestal the right suicidal mind-set.”
Now some desperation had found its way into Bernstein’s voice and his demeanor, as he turned to the nurse. “Maria, do you realize how preposterous all of this is? Do you see now that Mr. Heller is suffering from a complete mental breakdown?”
Maria said nothing.
I said, “Funny thing is, Doc, after I looked the crime scene over? I figured somebody had sneaked in and murdered Forrestal … and I was right: I did. I was the murderer who sneaked into Bethesda to kill Forrestal-I just didn’t know it. I didn’t know that that book I handed him was as lethal as poison gas.”
Bernstein said, flatly, “Forrestal threw himself out a window. Nothing changes that.”
“Yeah, I gave Jim Forrestal my thoughtful gift, that book of poetry, and I must’ve also passed along a posthypnotic suggestion to him-when was that, Doc, when I said, ‘I thought you’d find a book of poetry comforting,’ something like that? Anyway, thanks to the doc’s manipulation of my meager subconscious, I passed on the posthypnotic suggestion that made Forrestal get out of bed in the middle of the night, read that uplifting suicide poem you’d programmed him to read, Doc-and when Forrestal hit the crucial, guilt-inducing word-nightingale-he followed doctor’s orders and got some fresh air, trying to hang himself but succeeding instead in just throwing himself out the pantry window.”
Maria frowned, the big dark blue eyes tensed with curiosity. “Why ‘nightingale’?”
“Well,” I said, “in the original German, it’s Nachtigall, right, Doc? A guy named Teddy Kollek told me about it-you ought to get together with him, Doc, with your mutual interest in Palestine. Anyway, Operation Nightingale was a particularly ugly act of collaboration that Forrestal approved, subsidizing Ukrainian anti-Communist guerrillas who during the war were a Nazi execution squad, responsible for the mass slaughter of thousands of Jews. Not a bad guilt trigger for a man who felt he’d betrayed his country through such associations.”
He sat erect; chin up. “My name is Dr. Joseph Bernstein. As a Jew, I deeply resent these implications and accusations.”
“You know, Doc, as a guy who fought in the trenches on Guadalcanal, as a half-assed Jew myself, I find you just about the lowest-life piece of shit it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter. But what I really resent, Doc, what really annoys me, what really puts me in a bad place right now, is being used as your murder weapon. Jim Forrestal hired me to find out if somebody was trying to kill him; and, like everybody, I told him he was crazy. Then I wind up helping the guy who wanted him dead make that happen. Funny, huh? Ironic, even.”
I lifted my arm from the table and leveled the nine-millimeter at Bernstein’s head.
“Probably a tactical error on your part, Doc,” I said, “making a murderer out of me.”
Maria reached over and touched my shoulder, gently. “Nathan-don’t do it.”
“Don’t tell me I’ve convinced you that the doc, here, has been a bad boy….”
“Yes you have. I believe he’s been a very bad boy indeed. If you leave this to me, Nathan, I’ll handle it. The government will handle it, clean up their mistake-discreetly, but decisively.”
I shook my head. “Can’t do that, baby-but here’s what I will do. I’ll take the doc into custody right now-citizen’s arrest, if you will, of a war criminal.”
“All right,” she said guardedly. “But what then?”
“Then you and I, Maria, will hand his ass over to Chief Baughman of the Secret Service. I’ll tell Baughman my story and you’ll corroborate it. What do you say, baby?”
But she didn’t answer; she didn’t have a chance to.
Bernstein lurched across the table with a savage suddenness and in less than an instant his hands latched onto my fist, which clutched the nine-millimeter, swinging the gun’s muzzle away from himself, one of his hands tightening around the trigger and trigger guard and the gun went off, in Maria’s direction.
The bullet caught her in the forehead and I saw the terrible immediate emptiness in the dark blue eyes as the back of her head emptied in a horrible spray of red and gray and white, and I screamed in horror and reflexively loosened my grip on the gun, for a fraction of an instant, and then she had gone backward in the chair, sprawled onto the floor, vacant eyes staring up at the ceiling, red spreading in an awful pool on the linoleum, and the nine-millimeter wasn’t in my hand, anymore.
Bernstein was seated across me, and now the nine-millimeter was in his hand, and leveled at me…. Only he didn’t shoot.
“Sit down, Mr. Heller. Relax.”
Slowly, I sat back down.
“There are advantages to knowing the ways of the human mind,” he told me calmly. “If I had struggled with you for this weapon, I might be dead now. But by helping you squeeze the trigger on the lovely … late … Nurse Selff, I created the only circumstance that would cause you to loosen your grip on that gun, however momentarily.”
I said nothing, wondering why I was still alive.
“You’re wondering why you’re still alive, aren’t you, Mr. Heller? Maybe I’d like a few moments to gloat. You certainly subjected me to enough humiliation.”
“Gloating can be dangerous.”
The dazzling white smile flashed in his pale handsome face. “Yes. Look where it led you. Now you’ve helped me kill two people. We make quite a team. Or I should say, ‘made.’”
“Better kill me with the first shot.”
The scorched odor of c
ordite was mingling with the smell of blood. I didn’t dare look at her, afraid of what the rage might make me risk; I needed just the right opportunity….
“I appreciate the friendly advice, Mr. Heller. I must admit, you displayed a remarkable ability to gather disparate information and form an unlikely, albeit largely accurate, whole. There are tiny aspects you’ve misunderstood, or gotten incorrect-but yours is an extraordinary, if limited, intellectual capacity.”
“Fuck you, you sick bastard.”
“You were right before-I’m not a Nazi. I was a party member only because it was a political necessity; all of us, von Braun and the rest, were ushered into the SS only as a formality … I wore the uniform a mere handful of times, at official functions.”
“Too bad. I bet you looked spiffy as hell. What else did you do as a political necessity? Suck off Adolf?”
The psychiatrist shook his head. “What a sad, pathetic man you are. Do you really think it was my choice to see Jew and Russian prisoners treated as subhumans? But once these creatures were marked for death, their destinies decided by those above me, why not use them for research, for the furtherance of science, and medicine? Why not give these pitiful martyrs some purpose for having lived and died, some meaning to otherwise meaningless existences? The things we discovered, because of having disposable specimens, will make life better for all the rest of us, and our children, and their children.”
“You should be getting that Nobel Prize in the mail any day now.” I grinned at him, and it unsettled him, I could see. “You’re trying to figure it out, aren’t you?”
“Figure what out, Mr. Heller?”
“How to stage this. How to kill me. It’s got to look right to your superiors. If they think you murdered Maria and me to cover something up, you’ll have some fancy explaining to do. I mean, there’ll be suspicions about Forrestal’s convenient exit, already. How do you explain two corpses in your kitchen?”
His mouth formed something that was half smile, half sneer. “Maybe the bodies won’t be in my kitchen. Maybe you’ll drag Nurse Selff out to my garage and put her in the trunk of my car.”
I nodded at the wisdom of this. “Yeah, then you could shoot me, push me in there, dump us both somewhere. Maybe make it look like a murder/suicide … lover’s quarrel. Not bad for a beginner, Doc.”
Bernstein stood. Gestured at me with the gun. I came around the table, on the side where Maria wasn’t, and he stood facing me, leveling the gun at my chest, maybe eight inches separating us.
“You know, Doc, you may know a lot about the human mind, but you don’t know jack shit about guns.”
“I know how to squeeze a trigger.”
“Not with a broken finger you don’t.”
And I grabbed the muzzle of the nine-millimeter and twisted it, hard; his howl of pain as his trigger finger broke, jamming against the metal trigger guard, was music to my ears. But he hadn’t let go of the weapon, so I jammed the slide back.
Then his hand loosened and I snatched the gun away as he fell to his knees, clutching his hand, the finger bent at an impossible angle.
“You see, the Browning nine-millimeter is a recoil-operated weapon, Doc. Everything has to be locked together for it to fire, everything has to be lined up perfectly-kind of like the human brain.”
By grabbing the nine-millimeter’s slide and pushing it back, I’d made a jammed weapon out of it. So I slapped its magazine, racked the slide and the weapon was good as new again. Ready to fire. But I had a better idea.
Bernstein sat on the floor, grasping his hand, whimpering, tears streaming down his face.
Kneeling at an angle that kept the fallen, sniveling psychiatrist in view, I took the opportunity to spend a moment beside my beautiful Maria. The vulnerable girl, the hard-as-nails woman, nurse, spy, lovely even in death, even with the black-and-red dime-size pucker in her forehead; I closed her eyes, kissed her cheek and whispered, “Forgive me.”
Then, rubbing the tears out of my eyes, I stood. “Jeez, Doc, we’re both crying. Real couple of he-men, huh?”
Bernstein, cheeks flushed-funny, his face finally had some color in it-looked up at me, the icy eyes red and blinking. “What … what now?”
Keeping the weapon trained on him, I moved to the stove, dropped open the door.
“Now, Doc?” I shrugged, walking back to where he sat, shivering with pain. “Now I’m going to embrace my Jewish side.”
The barrel of the nine-millimeter caught him across the forehead, knocking him out, and I dragged his unconscious form over like a bag of grain and shoved the top half of him into the oven.
Then I turned on the gas.
22
On a clear, sunny morning in May, after a nineteen-gun salute, the boom of howitzers playing bass drum to the Naval Academy Band’s rendition of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” the Old Glory-draped caisson bearing the casket, drawn by seven gray horses, accompanied by an honor guard made up of all three services, wound its way up the serpentine drive of Arlington National Cemetery.
There, on the Wednesday following his fatal fall, James Vincent Forrestal received full military honors at a ceremony attended by President Truman, the cabinet, an array of Congressional leaders, the diplomatic corps and several thousand friends and associates. A crowd of interested citizens numbering at least four thousand stood behind a velvet rope at the end of the white marble amphitheater, in the chapel of which the President, Vice President and pallbearers including former president Herbert Hoover, Generals Marshall and Eisenhower, Bernard Baruch and Forrestal’s friend Ferdinand Eberstadt, attended the service itself, with Bishop Conkling from Chicago presiding.
Jo Forrestal did not attend. She and her sons Peter and Michael, young men in their early twenties, both of whom had echoes of their father in their faces, waited a few hundred yards away, at the gravesite, for a ceremony reserved for family, relatives and close friends.
I’d been invited-by Eberstadt-and was among this fairly small group. Forrestal, of course, had been physically rather small, and the size of his casket reflected this, and was little bigger than a child’s coffin-like the coffins the Air Force had tried to buy from Glenn Dennis at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell.
The air was sharply cool, almost cold, and I stood at the back-immediate family seated on folding chairs, no tent-as Bishop Conkling read from First Corinthians. The little casket was lowered, and the sons threw in the symbolic clumps of earth. We were on an oak-studded knoll overlooking the tranquillity of the gray-blue Potomac and the panorama of government buildings beyond.
A slender, fragile, elegant-looking pale figure in mesh-veiled, stylish black (had Mainbocher designed her a funeral gown?), Jo Forrestal-looking more than ever like Charles Addams’ creation-drifted among the gathering of friends and relatives with her sons in attendance, making introductions when necessary. I shook hands with both boys, who had appropriately shell-shocked expressions.
Jo said to me, “You should have felt at home here today, Nate.”
“Well, uh, yes, you mean with Bishop Conkling presiding …”
“No, I mean Jim got a regular Chicago-style send-off, don’t you think?”
She took me by the arm and walked me a few steps away from her boys; I couldn’t smell any drink on her, but then I never could-vodka was kind to the breath, after all.
“I don’t quite get your drift, Jo …”
Her eyes glittered under the veil; her voice had a brittle edge. “All the pomp and goddamn circumstance, flowers and brass bands, it’s like when your syndicate big shots take one of the boys for a ride, right? Got to have a big show, after the bump-off-to feel less guilty, and fool the gullible fucking public. You must feel at home.”
“Now that you mention it,” I said, “it’s not the first time I’ve been at this kind of affair.”
She touched my sleeve with a black-gloved hand. “Jim liked you. I’m sure he didn’t show it, but you were one of his favorites. He felt you were a man’s man … sometimes he
felt his … intellectual pursuits were less than … I don’t know … manly.”
“You and Jim turned out a couple of handsome boys.”
“Nate, you may not believe this, but Jim and I loved each other, in our way. I will never forgive those shits for …” And she slipped a hanky-in-hand up under the veil and caught a sob.
“Jo …”
“… never forgive them for sending me out of town. When they killed him. Do you know how that made me look? ‘Mrs. Forrestal was in Paris when her husband fell to his death.’ Cold, heartless bitch. They’re the cold, heartless ones. I told the cocksuckers-you can have your gangster’s funeral, but I’ll have no part of it.”
“You better keep those thoughts to yourself, Jo.”
She smirked beneath the veil. “Why, ’cause I’ll be the next lunatic they stick on the sixteenth floor, near an open window?”
“… Yes.”
She thought about that for a moment, turning her gaze toward the Potomac. From this knoll on the heights of Arlington, we could see in the distance on this clear morning the great dome and the magnificent white marble temples of our nation’s capital.
“Funny, isn’t it?” she said. “What men in public life will do, in the name of the people.”
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