Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  The officer put his hands on his hips. “You might find this hard to believe, Mr. Westerly, but I don’t actually buzz upstairs every time somebody claims to be a friend of the family. Now, what I think you should do is move along, and if you want to see the Frosts, give them a call.”

  The front door opened.

  “It’s all right, Officer Craig,” said Margot Frost. “I don’t think Mr. Wesley has murder on his mind.” The green eyes sparkled mischief. “Not tonight, anyway.”

  (II)

  THEY SAT in the kitchen, with a view into the garden where three years earlier Lanning Frost had asked him to find dirt on Nixon because Nixon was finding dirt on him. The same shameless collies, Darrin and Samantha, padded around the kitchen like an encircling army. The maid offered to make tea and sandwiches, but Margot sent her back to bed. For privacy, she said, once the maid had gone. Eddie matched her steely smile. Margot, no homemaker except to the voters, barely knew her way around the cabinets, so they scrounged. Eddie nibbled on an apple. Margot gorged herself on barbecue potato chips and lemonade—not what she ate on the campaign trail, she said, and not when her husband was in eyeshot, either. So don’t tell anyone, she added, grinning, but Eddie could read the tension in her fleshy pink face. He supposed his own face must look worse. He remembered the empty eyes of Lieutenant Cox, when they met in Saigon after the battle: We kept the hill.

  “Lanning is away raising money,” Margot said. “You’ll have to settle for me.”

  “You knew I was coming,” said Eddie. “That’s why you waited up.” He hesitated, doing the arithmetic in his head, wondering how much she knew. “You have somebody at the White House.”

  “Lanning does.”

  “A spy.”

  She shook her head firmly. One of the dogs nuzzled her leg. “Somebody who cares about the future of this country, Eddie. Somebody who isn’t prepared to let it go down the tubes because of the antics of a single paranoid—”

  He held up his hand. “Please, Margot. Save it for the campaign trail.”

  She stood abruptly, startling the dogs, who had taken up resting positions at opposite ends of the room. She jerked open a few cabinet doors, found a bag of Toll House cookies, smiled. “I’m supposed to be on a diet, but you know what they say”—settling once more—“the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” To the dogs: “You won’t tell, will you?” She crinkled open the bag and nibbled the edge of a cookie, savoring her own inability to resist, then plunged the entire thing into her mouth. “I’m sorry. Look at my manners. Want one?” Proffering the bag.

  “You know why I’m here, Margot.”

  “I do?”

  “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have waited up or called extra security. I didn’t tell anybody at Camp David that I was coming here tonight. Something else must have tipped you off. Or someone else. Who called the house, Margot? Who told you I was coming?”

  “Nobody called. I’m always up late. I heard the officer talking, I looked out the window and saw you—”

  Eddie rode right over her. He had had his fill of lies, and this one was about to become too elaborate. “And I’m willing to bet you have no idea who went to Camp David to blackmail Nixon, either, do you?”

  “Blackmail Nixon? Eddie, what on earth—”

  “Never mind. Margot, look. I’ve been thinking about what you said in Hong Kong.”

  A flush crept up her throat, and she dropped her eyes. “Eddie, you know, I was just so upset seeing you that way, I didn’t know what I was saying, or doing….”

  Margot trailed off. Eddie waited until the silence became uncomfortable for her, watched as she began fidgeting in the chair. “Tell me about your mother.”

  “What about her? She was wonderful. Wonderful mother, wonderful wife.” Smiling wistfully, but rushing the words. “First lady of the state when Dad was in the state house, and then the Senate, and—”

  “And she was…black.”

  Margot put down a half-eaten cookie so fast one of the dogs leaped to its feet, ready to assist. Maybe they really were trained guard dogs after all. A final line of defense. “She was what?”

  “Black. A Negro. Colored. A woman of the darker nation. An Afro-American. Take your choice.” He leaned in closer. “Your mother was black. She was Sumner Mount, wasn’t she? Perry’s aunt. The one who passed into whiteness in the 1930s. Very light-skinned, but black. That’s why your mother looked so swarthy. That’s why you could never remember whether you told people she was part Greek or half Italian or some mixture from New Orleans, although I assume by now you have your lie straight. What your stories had in common was that they would all explain skin of a faint brown tinge, not quite olive but almost. She was a black woman who raised you as a white woman. Well, that’s not a sin or a crime, and it happens all the time.” He saw her face. “No. I don’t care about it. I’m not planning to go public. I know it would ruin Lanning. I know we like to say it’s 1973, America is above that kind of thing, but the truth is, there’s very little America is above. So, yes, I suppose you hide it. I understand that. By the way, does Lanning know?”

  “Of course he knows.” Her face had gone ashen, and she looked closer to sixty than forty. “I have no secrets from my husband.”

  “Or only a few.”

  “Yes, Eddie. Only a few.”

  One of the dogs had padded from the room, like a sophisticate in search of less callow conversation. The other watched, over folded paws.

  “So you and Perry Mount are—what?—second cousins?”

  “First. My mom was his father, Burton’s sister.” She lifted the cookie, studied it, put it back down. “I know what you’re thinking. I eat the way some women drink. In private. Because I’m unhappy. Because of stress. Because I’m lonely.” A gruesomely forced laugh, like the last joke ever. “Well, you’re wrong. I eat because Lanning doesn’t like me eating. He wants me thinner, so I’m getting thicker. There. Now you know my deep, dark secret. Happy?”

  “I’m not judging you, Margot.”

  “Then why are you looking at me that way?”

  “Tell me about the Agony.”

  “I wouldn’t call it agony, Eddie. I live with pain, but it isn’t—”

  He lifted a hand. She subsided at once, mystified. “I mean Agony with a capital ‘A.’ What the press calls the Jewel Agony.”

  Margot tilted her head to the side, and the half-smile reminded him of the night they met. “You mean your sister’s group? What about them?”

  “Come on, Margot. I know the truth.”

  “What truth? About the Agony?”

  “The name comes from Book II of Paradise Lost.” Eddie decided that Margot pulled off perplexity and bewilderment rather well, even when it was fake. “The guardianess of Hell is talking to Satan. She describes the plight of the lower realm as ‘perpetual agony and pain.’” Margot kept staring blankly. He wanted to reach out and shake her. Instead, he pointed toward her neck. “Come on, Margot. Don’t play games. I’m talking about the people whose cross you were wearing the night we met, and lied about the last time I was here.”

  Margot flushed and looked down. “I’m sorry about that, Eddie. About lying. But, really, I’m sorry I let you see the cross in the first place. Mom was furious. I was supposed to wear the cross that night, but I wasn’t supposed to be off in the corner discussing it with you.”

  “You were supposed to?”

  She nodded. “Mom told me to wear it to the party. There was someone there who was supposed to see it, she said. That was all she would say.”

  Someone there. If not Gary Fatek, then who? Some other fellow traveler of the Council, no doubt. Someone he would never be able to identify, because Margot genuinely did not know. He was thinking about Nixon, and the follies of youth, and finding out who your real friends are. He was thinking about heirs, and his own blindness: Elliott Van Epp need not have chosen his daughter as successor.

  “Oh, no. No.”

  “What? What are you upse
t for? I’m the one who should be upset, with you barging in here.”

  Eddie sat back, worried. “Because I guessed wrong. I thought it was you. It isn’t you. It’s him, isn’t it? All this time, it’s been Lanning.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I thought you were the contact. I thought Lanning was your…well, I guess, your puppet. Yours and Perry’s. But when you snuck off to see Perry, that was just because he was family. Nothing else. Just saying hello.” Even now he could not quite get the last piece. “I thought the same thing as everybody else. That your husband was the dummy. The stuffed shirt. That the big plan was to hand Lanning the presidency, and run the country through you and your cousin.”

  “Lanning is no dummy,” she began.

  Eddie shushed her. “I know. I know. Everybody was wrong. Lanning is no dummy. That was an act. And it was just Perry all along. You had nothing to do with it, except that you introduced them. Or maybe your father did. Perry and Lanning. And Mr. Collier did the rest.”

  “What rest?” Panic in those remarkable eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your husband. That was your father’s plan all along. To seduce your husband, then pave his road to the White House.”

  “Whose plan?”

  “The Palace Council. Your Uncle Burton’s idea. You’ve never heard of the Council, have you? Not the Empyreals, either. There’s no reason you would have. They’re a—a Harlem social club. And you were raised as a white woman. No Harlem clubs for you.”

  “I still don’t know what you mean.”

  “Unfortunately, I believe you.”

  “I am glad that you believe my wife,” said Lanning Frost, from behind. “Especially because she is telling the truth.”

  CHAPTER 66

  The Apparent Heir

  (I)

  HE STRODE into the room, tall and slim and presidential. His tie was loosened, and his manner easy, casually confident. Behind him was his foreign-policy adviser, Perry Mount. The Senator said, “I am sorry Mr. Wesley has disturbed you, my dear. Perhaps you should retire and let us talk.”

  “Are you saying you know what this is all about?” Margot asked, displaying little of her usual smooth self-assurance. “The plan? Smoothing the path? What’s going on, Lanning?”

  “You should retire, Margot.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Perry in that tone of softly wondering innocence.

  “But—”

  “Go,” Lanning said sharply, and, gathering her robe, she went, sparing a final glance at Eddie, part despair, part supplication, and part warning.

  The remaining dog followed.

  Perry closed the door and stood in front of it, arms crossed. Lanning looked at the table, scooped up the cookies and potato chips, and tossed them into the trash. Opening the refrigerator to dump the lemonade, he spoke over his shoulder. “She knows better than to eat this junk. She has to lose weight. Her weight is unhealthy.”

  “She can’t be more than ten pounds overweight. Eight.”

  The Senator had already moved to the next topic. “You should never have troubled my wife, Eddie. Why would you do that? You should have come to me in the first place. Then we could have thrashed all of this out.”

  “All of what?” Eddie asked, sitting very still, his eyes mostly on Perry, the former intelligence officer who had presided over his torture. Perry stared steadily back.

  “You seem to be against me, Eddie. I don’t understand why.” Washing the dishes, reciting the words by rote. “I am trying to build a better America, an America worth loving again, an America free of the nightmares of poverty, of racial injustice, and of threats from abroad. Why does that bother you so?” Drying with the towel, putting plates and glasses into the proper cabinets. “I would think you would be with us, Eddie. For all these years, you’ve fought for a better America. You’ve tried to make us look at ourselves.” He leaned against the sink, folding his arms across his chest much as Perry had done. “You see the nation’s flaws as well as its possibilities. I see the same thing. You see the abuse of power as well as the chance to use it for good. I see the same thing. Why must you work against me, Eddie? What have I done to deserve this?” He turned the force of his charm on his visitor. “We’re going to change the world, Eddie. That is what my campaign is going to be about. We will make America stronger and safer, but also fairer, more just. We will never be content to serve as mere stewards of our national inheritance. We will transform that inheritance into something greater. Why will you not help us?”

  Another glance at the stoical Perry. “Because you’re a monster, Senator. A monster who’s sold your soul to the devil.”

  The Senator whistled. “The devil. That’s pretty low, Eddie.”

  “But it’s true. You and the Palace Council—”

  “Eddie, please. No more wild conspiracy theories. No more paranoia. I do not for one moment believe that your love of country is so great that you would go to all of this trouble just to save America from a President whose friends you dislike. Come on. Nixon has broken half the laws on the books, yet you and Nixon are friends. Why not you and Frost?”

  “Because Nixon never betrayed my sister.”

  A knife-edged silence and, from Perry behind him, a greater stillness, like tension before a battle. The Senator narrowed his brilliant eyes, and the decisive chin lifted a millimeter and jutted. “Didn’t what?”

  “Junie. My sister. You betrayed her, Senator. Not the Empyreals. Not the Palace Council. You personally. You seduced her, you set her on her course, you sent her underground, and when it suited your purposes, you had her kicked out and left to rot.”

  (II)

  FROM THE DOOR, Perry Mount laughed in disbelief. The Senator moved away from the sink and sat across the table. His smile was amiable. “How does that theory run exactly?”

  “The dirt you were afraid Nixon would find. I thought it was the Palace Council you were hiding, but I was wrong. Oh, I grant you wouldn’t want that to come out, the deal you made, whatever it was, through Perry and, I suppose, Margot’s mother. But that wasn’t the big secret, was it? It all started in the fifties. You had a girlfriend, Lanning. A girlfriend who was…black. That was what the Soviets were buying from Phil Castle. Not nuclear-weapons secrets. They collected the same secrets Hoover did. Secrets they could use later on, for blackmail. You killed Castle to try to get the toothpaste back in the tube, but you couldn’t find the material, could you?”

  “I was not even in Congress—”

  “But you were headed there, weren’t you? Margot’s father had cleared the way. He was at the meeting in 1952. He knew the Council wanted to elect a President within two decades.” Over his shoulder: “Shaking the throne, right, Perry? His own chance had passed, and so he arranged for an heir. And he knew just where to bring pressure, didn’t he?” Eddie’s laugh was mirthless. “Funny how the Bureau’s public position was always that Colonel Abel never came up with any valuable intelligence. So how come when he went home the Russians treated him like a hero? Could it be that they gave him those medals because he had gathered enough dirt on potential future Presidents of the United States? Including Lanning Frost?”

  Silence in the kitchen. But there was no point in stopping now.

  “The summer before her third year of law school, Junie worked a few weeks as Benjamin Mellor’s research assistant, but the rest of that summer she was an intern at your law firm in Chicago, wasn’t she? That was where you met, unless you knew each other before. You were married, but you had an affair. It continued in Cambridge. Then, one day, she told you she was pregnant, didn’t she? She refused to have an abortion, so you invented this elaborate fiction of an affair with Professor Mellor. You, or maybe Senator Van Epp. Junie went along. She even told me that Mellor was the father. But he wasn’t. That was the significance of the note Castle left. Not as in a tragic age. It’s a literary reference. Never mind what it refers to. Let’s just say it makes clear that Benjamin Mellor wasn
’t the father of Junie’s baby.”

  Eddie paused, expecting a crack in the Senator’s granite mien, but Lanning only stroked his rugged chin. Perry was motionless. “Well, let’s take a minute and figure this out,” said the Senator. “Suppose I had a girlfriend. All right, it happens. I am not confirming it, but suppose. There is no earthly reason to think it was your sister, Eddie. Even if she worked at my law firm in the summer of 1956, I fear I would have been off raising money for my congressional race.”

  “You ran in 1958, not 1956.”

  “And if you think it’s possible to make all the contacts, raise all the money, in just one year, you’re a rather naïve radical, Eddie. Now, consider the rest. Suppose I indeed possessed the magical ability of persuasion—to say nothing of the utter lack of conscience—necessary to set up a substitute boyfriend, as you suggest. Why on earth would your sister have gone along?”

  “For you, you bastard. She did it for you. She loved you, Senator. Remember that word? Love? She loved you, and would have carried your secret with her to the grave. But you don’t understand love, or believe in it.” Eddie hesitated, feeling accusation pointing the other way. The words were all at once a struggle. “But you couldn’t take the chance.” Strong again. “First you sent her away. Then, when you found out what she was doing, you got in touch. She stayed underground, she ran Agony your way—”

  “Agony, you may recall, tried to kill me.”

  “That was a lovely moment, wasn’t it? Cementing your position with the moderate voters because a violent revolutionary group targeted you. Funny how they missed, though. They killed Kevin and missed you. Those years were rough on the insiders of Burton Mount’s plan, weren’t they? Castle and Belt and Hamilton Mellor in the fifties. Matty Garland and Kevin Garland in the sixties.” He turned toward the door. “Friends of yours, Perry. That’s who was being slaughtered. Friends of yours. All to turn the game around. You thought your father was in charge of the Council. So did your father. But it was Elliott Van Epp all along, Perry. And his tame killer, Mr. Collier, now works for Senator Frost. The people who thought they were running Lanning Frost—well, one by one, they’re going. They got your friend Ben Mellor tonight, Perry. Did you know that? Right in front of me. You might be the last one, Perry. Watch out. You could be next.”