The Pinocchio Syndrome

by David Zeman

  85

  —————

  Hamilton, Virginia

  May 10

  MICHAEL CAMPBELL was buried in the local cemetery a mile from the Campbell house. His funeral was private; no political colleagues were invited. The ceremony was covered by a handful of journalists, most of them from other countries. The American press stayed away.

  A day after Michael’s suicide Colin Goss abandoned his campaign to force a special election and devoted himself to the legal battle he would soon face. The president had not yet made his fourth and final choice for vice president, but his standing in the polls remained strong, and the business of government was returning to normal.

  A striking downturn in the Pinocchio Syndrome epidemic was noted by World Health Organization monitors as the summer approached. No connection was seen between this happy circumstance and the tumultuous political events of the previous months.

  On a windy Saturday afternoon Judd Campbell sat on the veranda of his Chesapeake Bay house, looking out at the ocean he loved.

  Gulls were wheeling in the gusty breeze. The waves were choppy under a turbulent sky, though a bright sun was shining. The effect was striking. The ocean looked angry, dissatisfied, and yet full of vibrant energy, as though eagerly awaiting some momentous natural event.

  Judd heard the screen door open. He turned to see Stewart approaching with a glass of dark ale.

  “What do you say, Dad?”

  “Thanks, son.”

  Stewart handed over the glass and stood by his father’s chair, looking out at the Bay. Though Judd was silent, there was an intimacy between the two men. Stewart was now the only son Judd had. This changed things between them. Stewart felt an impulse to comfort his father, for only Stewart knew how much Judd had lost. As for Judd, the losses he had suffered had at last dissolved the old grudge he had against the son who had defied him. He respected Stew for his independent spirit.

  It was not the easiest of truces, but Stewart had missed his father all these years. He was glad for the chance to bury the hatchet.

  “I’m going to see how June’s doing on that potato salad,” Stewart said.

  Stewart’s wife, June, had not been easy to win over. She had had many years to nurture her resentment of the father who had hurt Stewart so much. She would never warm up to Judd as much as Susan had, but she joined the truce for the sake of Stewart, who seemed to be taking something truly important from the reconciliation.

  “All right, son.”

  The screen door tapped closed as Stewart went back into the house.

  Judd picked up his binoculars and looked down the beach. Far away, just shy of the Point, he saw two small figures walking side by side. Joe Kraig’s hard, square body was familiar to Judd. Alongside him the sweetness of Susan’s walk—rhythmic, a little diffident, always feminine—was unmistakable. Judd smiled.

  Kraig had always been in love with Susan. Judd realized that the first time he ever saw them together, when Michael was in the hospital after his second spine operation. Kraig couldn’t bear to look at Susan. He averted his eyes in the saddest way whenever she was the center of attention.

  In later years, after his own divorce, Kraig made himself scarce, refusing most of the Campbells’ invitations. Judd missed him during those years. Kraig had a quiet, stubborn integrity that had probably done him more than a little harm in his life but was very good for others. That integrity had kept him from letting Susan know how he felt.

  Looking through his binoculars, Judd reflected that they made a beautiful couple. Was it too fanciful to hope that Kraig might one day marry Susan and become—once removed, of course—the son that Judd had never had? Kraig would, indeed, complete a puzzle that had haunted Judd’s family all these years. A missing piece whose absence Judd had never quite noticed, at least consciously, because his love for Michael was so consuming.

  And if that strange, unlikely union did take place, would it produce the child that Michael had never been able to give Susan? Judd hoped so. Susan’s childlessness had hurt him even more than it hurt Michael. If she could bear fruit after all . . .

  Ah, well. No sense counting chickens, Judd thought. There was plenty of time.

  On the beach, Susan turned to smile at Joe Kraig. The wind whipped her hair across her cheek, and a sudden gust made her eyes mist.

  “The ocean is strange today,” she smiled. “It looks—I can’t think of the word.”

  “Impatient,” Joe said. “A little pissed off.”

  “Exactly.”

  She smiled at him. Underneath his taciturn face he was a sensitive man. She had known that about him long ago, even before she married Michael. But now she realized there was more to Joe Kraig. He had a very original mind, and a slightly crazy sense of humor. He knew how to say things that took her completely by surprise, forcing laughter from her lips before she really knew why.

  That quality had come in handy during the weeks since Michael’s death. Kraig spoke to her on the phone every day and came over when she asked him to. She knew he himself was carrying a heavy load—the role he had been forced to play in the search for her had been a thankless one—but he acted as though she were the convalescent, and he the nurse.

  An interesting man, she thought. A very good man.

  They turned back as the Point approached and saw the house again. Huge, many-roomed, it thrust its weathered face at the Bay like a dauntless opponent, proud of its endurance and of the chip on its shoulder—like its owner.

  “So you’re quitting,” Susan said.

  “Yup.” Kraig nodded firmly.

  “What will you do?”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t got a clue. But whatever it is, it will be something small. I’m tired of being mixed up in things that are so big. The fate of the world, and all that.” He gave a short laugh. “I have a yearning for little things. A little office. Maybe a little town. Problems that one small man can solve.”

  “You’re not a small man, Joe.”

  He let her comment pass, a smile playing over his lips.

  “And you?” he asked. “What will you do now?”

  On an impulse Susan took his hand. “Start over,” she said.

  “That’s always a good policy,” he said. “Any particular place in mind?”

  “At the beginning.”

  Kraig shook his head, smiling. “I meant geographically.”

  “Oh.” Susan laughed. “I guess I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  She looked out at the waves, which beckoned with their eternal contradiction, thrusting in toward shore while carrying shorebound things out to sea.

  “I don’t know, Joe,” she said. “Someone once said you can travel the world, but it’s the inner landscape that matters. Mine will have to change. Whether it will change in the right way, I don’t know.”

  She turned to look at him, brushing another windblown strand of hair from her cheek.

  “Out of the limelight, anyway,” she said. “I owe myself that.”

  “You’ve earned it.”

  A freak wave rose up, ten feet higher than its fellows, and crashed to the sand under them with an angry roar. Susan jumped back from the foaming sea water, laughing. Kraig held out a hand to brace her, and she regained her balance. They resumed their walk. As they did so the ocean seemed to calm behind them, lulled like a child settling into slumber. Susan saw Judd on the porch and waved.

  Kraig stopped in his tracks and turned to Susan.

  “Susan . . .”

  She stopped, hands on her hips, looking at him.

  “Yes, Joe?”

  She was heartbreakingly beautiful. Beautiful enough to wipe away a lot of memories, and even to make the future look as bright as this shining day.

  There was a time when he would have sold his soul to the devil for a chance to kiss those lips.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  86

  —————

  Atlanta

  COLIN GOSS was a fighter. />
  In withdrawing as a presidential candidate he proclaimed that he was innocent of the slanderous accusations that had been circulating about him in the press. He expressed deep sadness over the fate of Michael Campbell, a dedicated and promising public servant, but insisted that he himself had no connection to the sex ring in which Michael had been involved in his youth.

  At Goss headquarters in Atlanta the mood was one of watchful waiting and damage control. If Goss’s involvement with Michael Campbell could be proven, Goss would be tried for conspiracy in the murder or mutilation of fourteen young girls. The result could be prison and even execution. In the meantime civil suits would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.

  However, there were no video images of Goss himself playing the Donkey Game. Goss had taken precautions on that score. Thus Goss had every reason to hope that when an indictment came down against him, an aggressive defense conducted by the best lawyers in the land would get him off.

  True, there were many individuals still alive who remembered the Donkey Game—and other things. But that did not equate to a conviction of Colin Goss in a court of law.

  Colin Goss had weathered many a storm in his day. The army of lawyers in his headquarters was at work evaluating statutes of limitations, burden of proof, quality of evidence. They were prepared to fight in the trenches to get him acquitted of all charges.

  What astonished Goss was the damning videotape of Michael that had been sent to the press. Michael had played the game only once. A politician by instinct even as an undergraduate, Michael had known he must tread carefully. He always refused to play the game, though he watched it being played many times and obviously got off on watching it.

  One night during that year in Boston Michael had been snorting some company cocaine (made in Goss’s own laboratories and about ten times as potent as street cocaine) and was in a hectic, sexual mood. Goss told him, “Go ahead, this one time, it won’t hurt anything.” And so it was that, on that single night, Michael had taken off his clothes, donned the blindfold, and played the game.

  Goss had put the tape in a safe place. He knew he would probably never need it, for Michael was loyal to him. But politics is a filthy business, and betrayal is part and parcel of it. One could never be sure.

  How in the world had Michael’s enemies gotten their hands on that tape? Their infiltration of The Goss Organization must have been profound.

  Oh, well, Goss thought. They got Michael, but they didn’t get me.

  As a political candidate Goss was probably finished. That was a fact of life. And, of course, his master plan for the civilized world—of which the public still knew nothing—would not become a reality anytime soon. Such a plan could never be implemented without the cover and the power of a great government.

  Yet even on this score Goss was not prepared to give up. The priority was to survive the immediate storm and live to fight again another day. Michael Campbell was dead. Another political sponsor could be a junior congressman today, or a young official in the White House, or even a private citizen. If there was one thing Colin Goss had learned in his long years, it was “Never say never.” Today’s dead end can turn into tomorrow’s opportunity, with one turn of the wheel.

  Thanks to Goss and his scientists, the machinery was in place for a procedure that would revolutionize the political landscape and bring peace to the civilized world. That machinery would remain in place, silent, apocalyptic, until the moment was right. Colin Goss intended to survive until that moment came.

  On a hot June evening in Atlanta Goss sat watching the president give the graduation address at Georgetown University. It was a well-written speech. The president urged young people to become involved in the political process. Alluding to the struggles that had beset his administration since theCrescent Queen disaster, he assured his listeners that America was strong enough to withstand even the cruelest assaults on its institutions.

  “Soon my day, and that of my political colleagues, will be over,” he said. “We will have done our best for our country, and when we look back on our own weaknesses we will remember that human beings may be weak, but freedom is strong. As I look at you today, on the threshold of your adult careers, I have no fonder wish than that, like me, you will someday be able to look back on your lives and know that, whatever your own failures, you contributed to something great—the United States of America.”

  Colin Goss took a bottle of mineral water from the lowboy and undid the seal. He poured a tall glass of the bubbly liquid and took a long draft. The familiar tang of sulfur and natural herbs refreshed him.

  He looked at the president, who was smiling as the youthful audience applauded. “You’re a lucky fellow,” Goss said, bringing the glass of water to his lips. “You get to stay alive.”

  The next morning the head of Goss’s legal team entered the penthouse office. He had worrisome news to report. One of the girls in Boston was responding to a special medication developed by the Roche Corporation and might come out of her coma. If that happened she would be a living witness to Goss’s participation in the Donkey Game.

  Goss was no longer in front of the TV. He was sitting in the orthopedic swivel chair behind his desk. His hands were on the desktop. He wore an oddly formal, ramrod-straight look.

  “Mr. Goss?” the attorney said. “Have I picked a bad time? I think we should talk.”

  Goss did not reply. He looked deeply preoccupied, his eyes fixed on the desk before him.

  “Sir? Are you all right?”

  The attorney looked at the desktop. On it was the bottle of Goss’s Italian spring water, with a crystal tumbler. One of Goss’s hands was still around the glass. The other was holding a pen. His notepad was on the desktop.

  “Sir? Are you all right?”

  Goss did not respond. His face bore a rigid, empty look.

  The attorney began to worry that Goss had had a stroke.

  “Sir, please say something. Do you want me to call the doctor?”

  Goss was silent. The stern, rigid look on his face would have seemed like stubbornness, were it not for the circumstances.

  “Sir, I’m going to call the doctor.”

  The attorney bent over Goss to get at the phone. As he did so he noticed a word scrawled on the pad in a distorted handwriting that looked as though it had taken the last of Goss’s energy.

  Easter,the note read.

  EPILOGUE

  —————

  July 11

  KAREN EMBRY was getting ready to drink her dinner.

  The Washington summer was heating to its first crescendo. It would not be the last. Karen had to run the window air conditioner almost constantly. She hated the whine, but she lacked the money to move to a condo with central air.

  A hundred years ago this city emptied out in the summer. In those days every president summered out of town somewhere. Nowadays everyone had to stay, and it was politics as usual under the burning sun.

  Karen felt drained. Somehow the news about Michael Campbell and Colin Goss had not made her feel happy or vindicated. It felt more like a grim coda added to the end of a long tragedy. Fourteen million people, more or less, were victims of that tragedy. It was hard to feel jubilant about the end of a horror that never should have happened.

  Karen would never publish her book about the history of the Pinocchio Syndrome and its political ramifications. The story was too horrible to ever become public. Now that the epidemic was over, the whole ghastly thing would fade into history, or into something beneath history. That was where it belonged.

  A joint FBI/CIA task force had arrested six Libyan terrorists and charged them with complicity in theCrescent Queen attack. According to unconfirmed reports, the nuclear technology behind the blast had been provided by Iraq. Now that Saddam Hussein had died of the Pinocchio Syndrome, the Iraqi leadership was only too happy to blame the complicity on him and his government. The public was assured that the mystery of theCrescent Queen had been solved, and that no further attack
s were to be feared.

  The great terror of the early twenty-first century was over. No one would ever know the part Karen had played in all of it. And she was content with that. She wanted to move on with her life, as Susan Campbell was doing. As everyone else was doing, including those who had lost a family member, a friend, a lover to the disease.

  As a citizen she was happy to see America surviving Colin Goss and Michael Campbell and the Syndrome. It was very hard to wreck America. The old saying “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time” was perfectly suited to the American psyche. Americans were ambitious, they loved success. And sometimes they were not too particular about how they attained it. But they also loved freedom, and they loved the truth. Over their busy 225-year history they had been known to sacrifice a lot for the truth.

  Justine Lawrence had sacrificed everything for it. So had “Grimm,” who had revealed it to Karen at so high a price. So had Susan Campbell, who had lost a husband.

  And so had Karen, whose vocation consisted in trying to help truth along in its unequal battle with lies. Now the story of the Pinocchio Syndrome was over, and most of the truth would never be known. Karen felt empty.

  She had the TV on as usual, with the volume turned down as Mozart played on her stereo. Images of political strife around the world were being shown, along with news of another massacre, this one by a crazed counselor at a summer camp for girls in the Adirondacks. Calls for gun control were being made, but the National Rifle Association was as powerful a lobby as ever, and the votes for the legislation weren’t there.

  Karen’s stomach was empty. She had eaten almost nothing today. It was hard to work up an appetite, feeling as she did. And much easier to pour a drink.

  The floor of the House was shown, with a representative shaking his fist at his colleagues, probably about the gun control bill. Karen sighed. She opened a new bottle of Early Times and took the glass out of the sink. A stiff bourbon would take the edge off the emptiness she felt.

  The phone rang. With her glass in her hand she padded to the phone and picked it up.