Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  “You! Wesley!”

  He turned back into the gloom. Another unsung genius was heading for the mike. The waitresses had vanished. Marijuana smoke lay heavy upon the air, but the food had no additives.

  Another call.

  “Wesley!”

  He found the source. In a booth near the back, a young white woman sat despondently, a roach clip in one hand, a Scotch in the other. Both hands trembled. Her hair was trimmed short, and sloppily, as if she had cut it herself. Her scruffy tee shirt displayed the American flag upside down. She possessed the painful skinniness of the badly addicted.

  “Sit,” she commanded, pointing, and a chubby, earnest student with a goatee and a Tufts sweatshirt hastily made room, vanishing into the shadows.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  She took a long drag. She continued to shake. Seen close up, her face was older than he had thought.

  “Not know as in know,” she explained with an addled seriousness. “We spoke once before. I spoke. You fucking sat there and listened like a good little boy. But we couldn’t fool you. You’re too fucking smart.”

  Eddie sat straighter. “Sharon. You’re Sharon Martindale.”

  She giggled, and it occurred to him that she was either very high or very crazy, or, possibly, both. “I was Sharon fucking Martindale. I’ve had a lot of names since those days. I’m with fucking Weatherman now.” Tossing in the “f” word everywhere seemed, at the moment, the largest rebellion of which she was capable. But he knew something of her crimes, and warned himself that her madness made her no less dangerous. “Except we are going to fucking rename it. What do you think of Weather Faction? Or Weather Underground? Because Weatherman has such connotations of—”

  She stopped and took a largish gulp of Scotch.

  Eddie wanted to reach across the table and shake the answers out of her. “Junie,” he said, knowing she must be close. “Where’s Junie?”

  “Junie’s not with fucking Weatherman. She wouldn’t be allowed. She doesn’t believe in the imminent fucking worldwide revolution.” Her eyes closed briefly. “We’re going underground soon.”

  “You and Junie? You were already underground.”

  “Weatherman. Don’t be fucking dense. Weatherman is going underground. Junie is already fucking gone.”

  “Gone?” Gripping the edge of the table. “Dead?”

  “She fucking left town,” Sharon explained, with her mother’s gift for speaking as if surrounded by idiots. “She hates meetings and debates. She believes—I don’t know what she fucking believes. Not in the imminent revolution.”

  “She was here?”

  “Everybody was here.”

  There were so many questions he wanted to ask. About Jewel Agony. About membership and money. About who tried to kill Lanning Frost. But now, presented with the opportunity, only one query suggested itself: “Where is she, Sharon? Where did she go?”

  “I don’t keep tabs on her. I’m not your sister’s fucking keeper.” She dipped her head, but not her screechy voice. “Security. Compartments. No two cells know each other.” Another gulp. “It’s better for all concerned.”

  Eddie reached over and, gently, took the clip. He put it on the table. He took the glass. “Where is she? Why did you call me over?” Sharon stared at him with her mother’s crazed eyes. “What is it? What did you want to tell me?”

  “We tried to get you to stop looking. You refused to stop looking. You were fucking warned. It was Junie’s idea.” A hiatus as her eyes lost focus. She sounded as if she wanted to fucking shoot him. A few tables away, a man with shaggy red locks was arguing about a favorite chair. No one, he shrieked, was ever to sit in his chair again. Nobody bothered with him. Sharon coughed. Her whole body rattled. Eddie turned back. “She doesn’t like it.” She reached for the glass. He held it away. “Living how she lives. She’s fucking tired, Eddie. We’re all fucking tired.”

  “Help me find her, Sharon.”

  “Are you fucking nuts? I’m no snitch.”

  “It’s not snitching. I’m her brother.”

  “Well, then, let me fucking tell you something. Families don’t matter. Brothers and sisters don’t matter. Fucking countries don’t matter. Only one thing fucking matters. What side you’re on.” Sharon snatched the clip, took a long drag. “And you and your sister aren’t on the same fucking side.”

  “I’ll always be on Junie’s side,” he said, startled.

  “Yeah, well, your sister has a side of her own now. She doesn’t believe in the revolution. She said the revolution turned rotten.” She took her glass back, held it aloft, but no waitress came. It crashed back down as if too heavy for her shrunken arm. “I told her, everything is rotten. The whole fucking world is rotten. We have to burn it down and start over. She said, if you try to burn down the world, the man with the match dies first.”

  “I wrote that. I wrote that about Jewel Agony, oh, four, five years ago.”

  “She knows that, Eddie. She reads everything you write.” An evil little smile. “She thinks you hate her.”

  “She what?”

  “She’s fucking scared of you, Eddie. Every time you got close, you drove her further fucking underground.”

  “That’s not true,” said Eddie, fighting the desperate fear that what he had thought of as years wasted had actually been years of making things worse. “I love Junie. She knows that. She’s always known that.”

  “Well, your dear sister never wanted you to fucking find her.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s why she ran away. Because you were getting too fucking close.”

  But the obvious pain in the radical’s shivering face gave the lie to her words. She was telling Eddie not what was true but what she wanted to be true. He shook his head. “I know what happened, Sharon. I know about the trial. I know you expelled her. And it wasn’t just this year. Please stop lying to me. Tell me where she is.”

  “I don’t fucking know where she is! She wouldn’t fucking tell me!”

  “But you know why she left, don’t you? Why she really left.”

  Sharon Martindale said nothing. She shook her head.

  “Please, Sharon. Look. I know you’re scared. I won’t pretend. I can’t offer you anything. I don’t have any connections. I can’t keep you out of prison if they catch you. I’m asking you for Junie’s sake. Not mine. I want to help my sister. You know I would never hurt her. Please, Sharon.”

  He had overplayed his hand. He recognized the signs. Sharon had shrunk into her chair and was looking frantically around the coffeehouse, maybe for someone who would rid her of this quarrelsome writer.

  “I remember the night the first baby was born,” said the radical after a moment. “She wouldn’t let me fucking see it. She wouldn’t let me come to the fucking hospital. She got on the train the next fucking day and took the baby somewhere. I never knew where. I never even found out if it was a boy or a girl. Same thing the second fucking time.” Eddie was about to object that Sharon was not answering his question, until he realized that she was. “Her babies,” said Sharon, her voice almost gentle. “She went to find her fucking babies.” She laughed. “What the fuck? If I had any fucking babies, I’d go find them, too.”

  And just like that, everything was clear. Strolling back to his hotel through the same drenching rain, Eddie found himself smiling. He did not know where his sister was, but, still, he had information that Sharon Martindale did not: Junie had broken cover long enough to tell her mother that she was happy. After her fall from power, according to Sharon, Junie had left Agony to track down her children.

  She had visited her mother because she had found them.

  (III)

  EDDIE TOOK THE MORNING FLIGHT to Washington. He met Bernard Stilwell at the National Gallery of Art, in front of an indifferent Goya. The two men strolled through the crowds of tourists. Eddie proposed to trade. The trouble was, he could offer nothing the federal government wanted. Stilwell already knew that Sh
aron Martindale had attended the disorderly SDS convention in Chicago.

  “Did you see your sister?”

  “If I had, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

  “You might want to do your patriotic duty.”

  “My first duty is to my family.”

  Stilwell grinned. “Do you want to know why you didn’t see her? Because she wasn’t there.”

  “Sharon Martindale said she was.”

  “Sharon Martindale is a drug addict. She’s nuts. She’s dying of about six different diseases. I wouldn’t pay attention to anything she said.”

  “Why haven’t you arrested her?”

  “Because she’s so easy to follow.”

  In the great hall, Stilwell told Eddie what he already knew—that his sister had left Agony to find her children—and then added a detail of which Eddie was unaware. “We tracked one of the babies—the first one—to an orphanage. She was adopted maybe seven or eight years ago, but get this—the adoptive parents turned out not to exist. False names, false addresses, the whole thing.”

  “Aren’t they supposed to check on these parents? Isn’t there some kind of law?”

  “I guess they broke it.”

  “Where was the orphanage?”

  The agent shook his head.

  “I’m retiring, Eddie. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Not mandatory age, frankly, but it’s high time. I don’t like what’s going on in this town any more. I came to Washington to catch bad guys, and now—well, never mind. Doesn’t matter. Look. In the unlikely event that you want to get in touch with the Bureau, call the same number. Somebody will answer. They might even listen.”

  The brisk farewell on the front step carried an aura of tragic ceremony, like the final reunion of a college class whose members have mostly passed on.

  “The Bureau will find Junie sooner or later,” said Stilwell, hands in his pockets to avoid the necessity of shaking. “She’s out of places to run, Eddie. We almost had her in that explosion in San Antonio last year. Yes. She was there. One day soon, we’ll scoop your sister off the street. After that, you can visit her as often as you want, at the federal women’s penitentiary in Tallahassee.”

  CHAPTER 54

  The Latest Gossip

  (I)

  “YOU REALLY NEED to meet new people,” said Mona Veazie, the two of them standing on South Main Street with several other Dartmouth faculty and a student or two. The group had just finished dinner. In a few minutes Eddie would be delivering a lecture entitled “The Left’s Silly Season.” A couple of the more agitable campus political groups had vowed not to let him speak. It was November, and snowflakes were swirling. The New Hampshire wind insinuated itself inside Eddie’s thin jacket with frigid intelligence. “I have this really sweet friend—”

  “Thank you, but no,” said Eddie, irritated.

  Another professor spoke up. “Give it up, Mona. He’s dating what’s-her-name, the big Communist.”

  “She’s not a Communist,” said someone from behind. “She’s a nationalist socialist.”

  What a phrase. Eddie frowned at the failure of historical memory. But memory was failing everywhere. Thus his topic tonight was how Woodstock and the lionization of the Chicago Seven, on trial for conspiracy, distracted the nation’s progressive forces from fundamental challenges. The left, he planned to say, had become far too interested in making fun and having fun. A big crowd was expected. Edward Wesley Junior was, after all, the author of Report to Military Headquarters, and it was generally assumed that Spiro Agnew, the Vice President of the United States, had Eddie principally in mind in his recent denunciation of the war’s critics as “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

  They strode toward the theater where Eddie would speak. Mona kept teasing him, naming various women from his past. Did he hear from Torie Elden any more? Had he heard that little Cynda got married? She mentioned, in fact, everyone but Aurelia, her own best friend, leaving Eddie to assume that Aurie was avoiding him every bit as hard as he was avoiding her. He supposed he would run into her next month, at Bay Dennison’s New Year’s Eve bash, but—

  “And Chammie Bing is getting married again,” Mona went on, clucking with disapproval, the way her mother used to. “Remember Chammie? Charlie’s wife in the old days? Well, guess who she’s marrying?”

  Gossip had never interested Eddie before his trip, and it interested him less now. “Who?” he said.

  “Your sister’s old flame. Perry Mount.”

  Eddie stopped walking. He felt the flex, the sense of reality shifting. The frigid water was everywhere. The next plunge would kill him. He clenched his fists. On the floor of the warehouse was a Baby Ruth wrapper—

  “We’re going around the back,” said a dean of something. Eddie realized that a couple of police officers had joined them. The dean pointed. “Demonstrators. Sorry.”

  Eddie forced a smile. “This is what the soldiers call earning our pay the hard way. Let’s go in the front.”

  They did. The jeers and catcalls and chants were probably outweighed by the cheers, but in the general noise, with the harsh wind as backdrop, and the water sloshing below him in the Hong Kong warehouse, it was difficult to be certain.

  (II)

  THEY SAT in the cluttered kitchen of Mona’s house, a neat colonial on North Balch Street, at the eastern edge of the campus. Her twins, Julia and Jay, were running around in the other room. Mona offered wine, but Eddie stuck to tea.

  “Sorry about the mess,” she said. In the sink, several days of plates awaited washing. Cabinet doors stood open. Eddie’s mother would never have tolerated such disorder. Neither would Eddie. Evidently, Mona’s lifelong rebellion extended to housekeeping. “I get busy sometimes.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Good. Great speech, by the way. Except when that guy from the Spartacus League tried to rush the stage.” She munched on a Ritz. Her nervousness fluttered in the room like a live thing. Mona’s life was not particularly ordered, but Eddie’s presence had disrupted it. “You’re really good with handling people who disagree with you. Well, except the ones who want to blow your head off.” Another bite. “Now, tell me what’s up. I’m assuming you’re not after my body.”

  “I want to hear about Perry Mount.”

  “Perry? What about him?”

  “You said he’s marrying Chamonix—”

  “Well, honestly.” Slapping the countertop, an old Harlem gesture. “She’s so sweet. I can’t believe Charlie left her for some hussy. It’s been six years, Eddie. Raising those kids by herself—well, I know what that’s like. All I can say is, it’s about time some guy realized how great she is.” Mona shoved her teacup aside. A look of pain flitted over her face. Then the children ran in. They hardly said a word. They took down a box of cookies and ran out again.

  “Kids today,” said Mona, forcing a smile. She jumped to her feet. In the refrigerator she found a couple of beers.

  “No, thank you,” said Eddie when she offered.

  Mona poured and drank and, for a moment, shut her eyes. Eddie realized how little he knew about her life. Here she was, Aurelia’s best friend in the world, and he hardly knew her. The two women had shared some trauma years ago that bound them together, but he had no idea what it was. She struck him as terribly unhappy. She seemed to view the twins as a burden.

  “I’ll tell you something funny,” Mona resumed. “About Chammie and Perry, I mean. She doesn’t think he loves her. She says he told her she’s the kind of woman his parents would have wanted him to marry. You know. Old Harlem family, et cetera. It’s all very practical for him. Very orderly. But Chammie, well, when you get to a certain age, you don’t worry so much about if the guy loves you or not. He said to her—I wouldn’t want this to get around—but Perry told her he had thought of marrying a younger woman but she would do. That’s what he told Chammie. That she would do. Well, he was always a little strange.”

  “I’ll say,” said Eddie, shuddering with memory.

&nb
sp; Mona gave him a look. “Well, so far, Chammie could live with it,” she resumed. “Yes, fine, it’s not true love, but a husband, the golden boy—who’s going to complain, right? Except then it got stranger.” She poured another glass. “Turned out, the reason Perry thought about marrying a younger woman was because he needed an heir. It was time, he said. Past time. Like he was on a schedule. Can you imagine?”

  Eddie said nothing. But he could imagine quite easily.

  “And Perry told her—get this—that, marrying her, he’d get an heir quicker than marrying a younger woman. He didn’t need a baby, he said. Just an heir. Her own boy—you remember Jonathan?—he told her Jonathan would do just fine. In fact, he told her Johnny was even better than a new baby, because he was eleven, and that’s old enough to understand.”

  “To understand what?”

  “His responsibilities. He told her great ideas need great thinkers first, but then they need great stewards. Perry said he was the steward of a great idea, and his son would steward it after him.” Eddie wondered how many other heirs were out there, being trained to join the Palace Council. And wondered, too, who might be responsible for training Aurelia’s son, Locke.

  Mona looked at her watch. “Oh, dear. I had no idea it was so late. You better get going, or people will start to talk.”

  Walking back to the Hanover Inn through the chilly night, Eddie experienced an unexpected sympathy with his tormentor. Perry was evidently under a great deal of pressure. Well, no wonder, if the Project he was supposed to be stewarding had run so badly off the rails.

  Maybe this was what Benjamin Mellor had wanted to tell him in Saigon, before Mr. Collier got him. Not about the marriage. About Perry. He had not told Chammie that he was a steward. He had told her he was the steward.

  Perry Mount was the head of the Palace Council.

  (III)