The Art of the Devil

by John Altman

  The heavy brows rose slightly. ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Look: what Ike’s trying to do to me isn’t right, not by a long shot. But if certain men were to – let’s say – take action on my behalf – well, that might not be right either. If you follow. Depending, of course, on the nature of the action …’

  ‘You’re talking circles here, Dick.’

  ‘Joe implied some things.’ Nixon shrugged. ‘I’m not sure I liked the sound of them.’

  ‘You’re not sure,’ Hoover repeated – slowly, almost mockingly – ‘you liked the sound of them.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s just a man’s imagination. But if there’s …’

  The look on Hoover’s face – ironic, half-amused – made him trail off.

  Don’t forget Hoover, McCarthy had said. He’s in your corner, Dick. He can make things happen – or he can get out of the way and let things happen.

  Nixon blinked. He had been driven here tonight by pangs of conscience. If Fighting Joe McCarthy had gone off the rails, if some desperate eleventh-hour plot had been hatched against the President in smoke-filled rooms, then the Director of the FBI should know. For Eisenhower, despite his myriad flaws, was a decent man. He deserved more than a stab in the back from his own trusted generals.

  But Hoover, Nixon saw suddenly, did know.

  Hoover watched understanding dawn; one corner of his solid mouth ticked up with a glimmer of humor. He produced a cigarette lighter embossed with the Stork Club logo – bird wearing top hat, carrying cane – and lit a Chesterfield.

  ‘Dick,’ he said around the filter, ‘it’s a tough business we’re in. And between you and me: I’m goddamned sick of watching everything we’ve worked for get handed away to subversives. I’ve given up too damned much for this country. Now, you’re a stand-up fellow, Dick. I think we could do a lot worse, as a nation, than you.’

  Nixon opened his mouth, closed it again with a snap.

  ‘Stand-up fellow,’ Hoover said again. Leaning across the table, he thumped Nixon’s shoulder fraternally. ‘And a bright one, too. Bright enough to realize that sometimes all you’ve got to do is keep your mouth shut and let the cards fall where they may. We’ve had our differences. But we’ll work things out in the end, when it counts.’

  Nixon nodded dumbly. He smiled: first to cover his confusion, and then to cover feeling small. Despite his esteemed title, it seemed that he remained in many ways as unsophisticated as a naif. Although he had shown a willingness to bend ethically when necessary, rising to national prominence along similar lines as Joe McCarthy – baiting Reds, encouraging innuendo and guilt by association – apparently, he was but a schoolboy who had stumbled into a pick-up game with the big kids.

  He stood, still smiling, and firmly shook Hoover’s hand – a professional handshake, two solid pumps – and then turned away, weaving through the crowd, tossing a rakish, joking salute to Billingsley on his way out.

  GETTYSBURG

  The more Elisabeth willed herself to sleep, the more awake she felt.

  She forced her eyes to remain closed. JESUS LOVES YOU, read the wall plaque; yes, yes, she knew that; she didn’t need to be reminded. What she did need was rest. The next few days would tell the tale.

  Yet she couldn’t sleep; although the last noises from the party were finally falling quiet, her mind kept humming along.

  She must have faith – not in Christ, the false prophet, but in the destiny that was her birthright as a pure-blood Aryan. Mastery over subhumans was her inheritance and her due. And so she must believe: she would find success.

  To us, the privileged members of the master race, Karl had said, belongs the future.

  He had not been talking about an ordinary life, with a cross-breed as a best friend. He had been talking about luxury beyond imagining: Mitropa railroad cars and pure-blood lovers, diamonds and precious gems by the heap, mountain chalets and opulent ballrooms. These were her legacy. To settle for less – for coffee and fog and Frenchmen – would be cheating herself.

  With the sound of the party quiet at last, the night seemed eerily empty. Something was missing … Josette’s radio, of course. Drunk, the girl had fallen asleep without even tuning in her favorite rock and roll station for a nightcap.

  Elisabeth did her best to shake her doubts away. Everything she had done, and still would do, would prove worthwhile. All the choices she had made would be vindicated. She deserved more than an ordinary life. She deserved only the best.

  Yet still she lay awake, struggling in vain to rest as the sun rose outside her window on the morning of Sunday, November twentieth, staining the eastern sky the color of blood.

  PART THREE

  In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  FIFTEEN

  GAITHERSBURG: NOVEMBER 20

  The sight of Betsy’s pale lovely neck, as she lifted her hair so that Max Whitman could work the clasp of the necklace, made him ache in a place deeper than his bones.

  After she let auburn hair fall back to her shoulders, she turned and smiled. ‘Do you like it?’

  In answer, Max took her in his arms. As they kissed, he felt her mouth curve into a smile. He returned the smile, happy and content in a simple, amazed way. He thanked God for his blessings. Life was, after all, so very fragile.

  Recently, he’d had a dream – a terrible dream. In the dream, Betsy wasn’t truly his at all. She was only a hallucination, brought on by three straight days of degradation and deprivation. And his boss and best friend Emil Spooner had betrayed him, in this dream, and Betsy herself had turned out to be a no-good whore, falling into bed with whatever boy could offer her the fanciest night out on the town … and eventually marrying a haberdasher from Connecticut, of all things. A haberdasher from Connecticut. You couldn’t get more ordinary, more compromising, if you tried.

  And Max himself had children, in this dream: two beautiful daughters, the most precious little angels a man could ever wish for. A smile from one of the girls could turn a bad day neatly on its head. And the funny thing was, he felt even luckier to have these girls, in the dream, than he felt in reality to have Betsy – and that, it went without saying, was very lucky indeed.

  But in this dream, he had done a very stupid thing. He had given in to his baser instincts – jealousy, desire, ambition – and fallen in with some very bad people. And the hell of it was, his beautiful little girls would be the ones to pay the price. Because the last chance to make things right had passed. Now he was caught. If he confessed, he’d fry. If he didn’t confess, they’d beat him to death right here in this moldy cellar. And either way, his little angels would be left without a father.

  A tear tracked down his cheek, carving a channel from smears of blood.

  For a moment, his vision cleared. With his one remaining eye he saw Lou Candless and Eddie Grieg sitting on chairs in front of him, harshly backlit. Lou and Eddie were looking at him pityingly. They knew his daughters; once upon a time they had all been friends, equals. They had played ball together, shot the shit by the water cooler, picnicked with their families. But time was like a river and it rushed on, and sometimes the river took unexpected turns, and then you ended up here, in a dingy little cellar with instruments of interrogation – chains, clamps, baseball bats – hanging from the wall, with your former friends impelled by duty and honor and justice to beat the living crap out of you until you choked to death on your own blood and bile.

  Lou and Eddie exchanged a glance. ‘Coming around,’ said Lou softly.

  Eddie held a cup of water to Max’s parched lips. ‘Have a drink, Max.’

  Max drank. The water was cold and painful and drove a spike into his brain. He coughed, withdrew, vomited.

  ‘Help us stop this.’ The pleading note in Eddie Grieg’s voice
sounded genuine. ‘Please, Max. Tell us what we need to know.’

  If Max could have chuckled, he would have. It was far too late to stop. He had long since made his choices.

  Behind Eddie and Lou sat Betsy Martin, nodding. That’s absolutely right, Max. That’s my big, strong fella. Don’t let these pricks push you around. That’s what I love most about you – your strength.

  ‘Please,’ begged Eddie again.

  It’s almost over now, said Betsy. Forget your daughters. Forget your wife. Let this end, and you’ll be free. We’ll start over. We’ll start a family of our own. It’s okay, slugger; I don’t bite.

  Ah, but it was sad. Because he did love his little girls, so very much.

  Eddie sighed. Finding Lou’s eye again, he nodded. Lou stood, blocking out the harsh light. Something in his right hand slithered and jangled.

  Max retreated back into fantasy. He and Betsy were going out to dinner, and she was wearing the necklace he had given her. The restaurant was a modest little place with wine bottle candlesticks, with great pools of multicolored wax spreading over the tables. And cockroaches and spiders and maggots climbed over the wax, and when the waiter brought their plates, the meal itself was a dead rat, splayed on its back, pinned open like a student’s dissection project.

  Betsy took a forkful of entrails and angled it toward his mouth. Eat up, Max. This is what you’ve bought, after all. For the wages of sin are death, but the gift of God is eternal life. Let go, Max, and come along with me. And we’ll be together like this. Forever.

  He shook his head. It was all a mistake. He didn’t want this; this was not his fate. He would surface again. And he would tell them everything. It was not too late.

  But the candlelight was fading, the darkness closing in. Too late, he thought distantly. Too late, too late, too late …

  And Betsy, forcing the viscera and offal into his mouth, was smiling.

  Eddie Grieg raised a hand, preventing the next blow before Lou threw it.

  Stepping forward, he laid two fingers against Max’s thick neck. As he searched for a pulse, something crawled in the pit of his gut. He focused back on the task at hand. With the same two fingers, he lifted Max’s chin. The bleared remaining eye was still half-open, but the light inside was dead.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Eddie said.

  THE TREASURY BUILDING

  Entering the office one hour later, Lou Candless deposited a thin dossier on the desk without ceremony. ‘Final report on Max.’

  Before picking up the Manila folder, the Chief cultivated a layer of intellectual distance, impenetrable as enamel. He met Isherwood’s gaze squarely. Then he looked down and opened the file. The document covered half of one single-spaced page and reported nothing of value. Max had carried his secrets to the grave. Was it wrong that Spooner found that respectable? One thing about Max Whitman: even as a boy on the playground, he had never let anybody push him around.

  Covering a cough, Spooner ground out his cigarette and set the report aside. This had not been the way things were supposed to go. He heard, faint with distance and years, a remote echo of an ancient stickball game: whisk-crack.

  Lou Candless stood quietly before the desk, seemingly distracted by the picture of Joe DiMaggio hanging crooked behind the Chief. ‘You’re relieved,’ said Spooner shortly. ‘Eddie, too. Get some rest.’

  When the agent had gone, Spooner spent a few moments looking over the report again. The questions put to Max had been scrupulously recorded, as had the methods of encouragement implemented. Left to the imagination was the toll they had taken on that massive body, and of course the motivations behind the betrayal in the first place …

  Her, Max had sneered.

  Who?

  You don’t even know. That’s worst of all.

  He lit another Winston, immediately felt nauseated, sent out smoke on a dry, rattling cough. The phone gave another buzz. He grabbed the receiver. ‘Spooner.’

  As he listened, his secretary came in, carrying two steaming cups. Isherwood sat blowing ripples across the surface of his coffee, watching from the couch as the Chief grunted monosyllabic sounds of encouragement. After emptying the ashtray, the secretary left. Seconds later, the Chief hung up. Tenting one hand over his eyes, he sighed.

  ‘Maryland PD,’ he said at length. ‘Found a man who picked up Hart, last night, outside the motor court. Get this: he’s an administrative assistant in their third precinct. Saw the APB this morning and said, “I brought that man to Union Station.”’

  A moment passed.

  ‘Ticket vendors,’ Isherwood said then. ‘Conductors. Newsboys. Anyone who was on-board any train leaving Union Station last night …’

  Spooner nodded, looking into his coffee desultorily. From a lower drawer he removed a freshly starched collar, used silver studs to pin it to his shirt. Then he reached again for the phone.

  NEW YORK CITY

  At the sound of the bell, Myron Kemper bolted upright.

  Operating on instinct, he pulled a gun – his favorite pistol, a modified double-action Colt Python with a six-inch barrel – from beneath his pillow. Once the Python was trained on the door, he reached with his free hand for the glasses beside the bed. Balanced on the bridge of his nose, the thick spectacles brought the world into focus. He saw that the six locks running up the inside of the door-frame remained intact.

  The bell sounded again; he leapt out of bed. A calendar tacked to the wall announced the day as Sunday, the twentieth of November. He had a meeting scheduled this morning, clearly marked – yet he had overslept. Disruptions of schedule made Myron Kemper nervous. As he processed the situation, an asthmatic wheeze rose from within his shallow chest.

  Four strides brought him across a cramped apartment whose every level surface was covered with drills or barrel vises or borescopes or roll pins or torque drivers or carbon dies or gun components. Through the spyhole, he saw the face of the man who was ringing his doorbell. Warped by the curvature of the lens, foreshortened by the man’s extreme height, the features formed a funhouse travesty – small slanted eyes, impossibly straight nose, and bizarrely huge chin – but Myron nonetheless recognized the visitor as one of the few men he trusted in this world.

  He stuffed the Python into the back of his pajama bottoms; the elastic retained just enough tension to hold the two-pound weight. With practiced movements he opened the six locks, one after another. ‘Richard,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I overslept …’

  Absorbing his friend fully, he trailed off. Only a few days had passed since their last meeting, but Richard Hart presented a very different figure: leaning his entire weight against a crutch, right leg encased in a thick plaster cast, skin peeled from cheeks and temples, one eye blackened. Beneath a hat brim pulled low, the determined crimp of Hart’s expression spoke of intense pain.

  A tight steel cage closed inside Myron’s sternum. He was not good at handling unexpected developments. He was much better with the cold, logical processes that came with designing and modifying firearms, which was why he had gone into this line of work in the first place.

  Richard Hart managed a smile. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he said, and then after a moment: ‘May I come in?’

  With a jerky nod Myron stepped aside, closing and relocking the door behind his guest, forgetting in his shock to feel self-conscious at his own striped pajamas. From long habit they endeavored their customary greeting, rolling back shirtsleeves (Hart, on his crutch, clumsily) to reveal matching tattoos. The unit insignia of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment depicted a gold Chinese dragon and red acorns, rendered against a blue and white coat of arms. They pressed their forearms together briefly but significantly, a sacred rite.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Myron breathlessly. ‘Let me get you a chair.’

  ‘No, Myron, I’m in a hurry. Have you finished?’

  Despite his surprise at Hart’s appearance, Myron found it within himself to be insulted. ‘I said I would, didn’t I?’

  As he went to fetch his
work from a back room, Myron turned over in his mind the irrational alarm he felt at seeing Hart in this condition. Of course the man was one of his few friends, so it was somewhat natural to react with emotion … but this went deeper. They had been the only two in their company to emerge entirely physically unscathed from the war. On some unrecognized level, Myron had perhaps come to believe that they were specially blessed. But if Richard Hart could be injured by the world, so, too, could Myron Kemper.

  Returning to the front room carrying the case, he was taken aback all over again. Propped by a workbench, Hart was absent-mindedly examining one of Myron’s pet projects – a customized German Luger loaded, in an outré touch, with gold-plated bullets. Bludgeoned and battered, Richard Hart seemed a mockery of the respectable man he had recently become. After the war, like many others, he had fallen on hard times. But lately he had found an upscale crowd and made a new man of himself: always neatly groomed, well-dressed, reminiscent of one of the wealthy businessmen Myron saw through his window come cocktail hour. Sometimes Myron would watch those businessmen, strolling down the sidewalks with a secretary on each arm, through the cross hairs of a high-powered scope. Absorbing every detail of their placid, self-satisfied faces, he would relish a feeling of secret power. They had everything Myron lacked – pretty girls on their arms, wedding bands indicating wives at home, and no doubt nice suburban houses somewhere out on the Main Line, complete with kids and dogs – but Myron had something even better. He had their oblivious faces trapped in his cross hairs. All he need do was squeeze the trigger …