42
The camera operators removed their earphones and put them on top of the machines. Fisher said something into her microphone, removed it and her headset, placed that and the clipboard on the front of the platform, and said: “Tom, do we know anything about a reception at Bill Wingate’s tonight?”
“I don’t,” he said.
“Shit,” Fisher said. “The desk’s got some garbled message about a reception tonight at Wingate’s, after the show.”
“Well,” he said, “you know how Adele is. All that rock’n’roll crap about spontaneity, and life. There’s probably some visiting fireman in town at loose ends that she just found out about, so now all of a sudden she’s going to have a party.”
“What should I do?” Fisher said.
“Couple possibilities,” he said. “You can call her up and bag it. Tell her, as she already knows, that I don’t go to parties on the nights when I’m working. That I’m tense and exhausted when I finish these things, and all I want to do is go home, and sit down, and have a couple good stiff belts and then get you in bed. Or: We can ignore the damned thing, pretend we never heard it, and if she ever asks, say we never got the word.”
“Is that a good idea?” Fisher said. “She does have that big mouth.”
“So’s the Midtown Tunnel,” Oates said. “That doesn’t scare me either.”
“I’m going to call her,” Fisher said. “I’ll tell her we’ll be tied up here ’till late, and we’re sorry we can’t come.”
“Up to you,” he said.
She left the studio. He walked to front and center on the platform and stuck his hands into his pockets, the mike cord stretching behind him. He scuffed at the carpeting. He turned and faced Naisbitt. “You,” he said, “you knew there was a time when Carl and I didn’t talk.”
“Yes,” Naisbitt said.
“You know why we didn’t,” Oates said.
“Yes, I do,” Naisbitt said.
“You know what that did to me?” Oates said.
“Not directly,” Naisbitt said. “I do know what it did to him. That I know empirically.”
“What do you think it did to me?” Oates said.
“I surmise,” Naisbitt said, “and be mindful that I don’t know you anywhere nearly as well as I knew Carl, but I surmise it hurt you. Bothered you. Troubled you. Whatever you’d like to say.”
“It damned near killed me, ’s what it did,” Oates said. “You know how I was about my father.”
“I do,” Naisbitt said. “I also know it damned near killed him, as you put it. Because I know how he felt about you. I must say I was greatly pleased and relieved when he came to London, back however many years, and we met at Scott’s for oysters and he told me that was over. The long interval you had. You meant a lot to him. More than either Donna or Carol, and he loved them a lot. In the beginning, at least. You were his posterity. It, your quarrel ate at him. I was glad to see it over.”
“You think you knew him so well,” Oates said.
“I did,” Naisbitt said. “We were two of many people who would have been perfectly contented to lead ordinary lives, suddenly united by maximum danger. Our sensibilities, if that’s the right word, were heightened forever by that experience. The world was under attack by a despotic maniac, a maniac with more than a marginal hope of bringing all of us under his heel, and grinding us to bits. Each of us believed he had some small part in preventing Hitler from doing that. We were proud, and we never forgot.”
“And therefore,” Oates said, “when I started the Fulbright interviews; when I did the McGovern stuff; when I talked to Sam Browne and did all those other things that my father disapproved of, almost to the point of disowning me, he was right and I was wrong?”
“Simply put,” Naisbitt said, “that is what I thought. He was right to be angry. You were employing his medium — he thought it was his, as he thought that every instrument he used was his — to contradict what he deeply believed. What he knew, in fact. That was his opinion. And he did not like that.”
“And you agreed with him,” Oates said.
Naisbitt sighed. “Tom,” he said, “Churchill was right. Roosevelt was wrong. Forty-one years ago, when Germany surrendered, my visceral notion was that the war in the Pacific should be left in its current condition, subordinate to the conflict in Europe, and that the concentrated strength of the Allies should be marshaled against Stalin, while we had him breathless. I’ve seen nothing since to change my mind.”
“He was our ally,” Oates said. “We had a treaty with Russia.”
“The obligations of which were as sacred to Stalin,” Naisbitt said, “as had been the obligations of Russia’s non-aggression treaty to Hitler. Treaties are always expressions of hope. Nothing more.”
“You think nations have a moral right to attack other nations that have systems they don’t like?” Oates said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Not quite,” Naisbitt said. “I think moral men and women have not only the right but the obligation to defend themselves and their civilizations against aggressive, uncivilized, savage adversaries who would crush them, regardless of the aggressor’s ideology. Adequate defense against such opponents has often mandated pre-emptive attack. And if you wish to disagree with me, be prepared to explain to the shades of six million Jews, and five million gentiles of assorted religious and ethnic persuasions Hitler deemed insufficiently Aryan, vaporized by that monster because we failed to act as promptly as we should.”
“You lost someone, didn’t you,” Oates said, in a softer voice. “I’d forgotten that.”
“I lost many people,” Naisbitt said. “I lost old friends from college. I made new friends in the military, and I lost them as well. I lost my first wife and my two children in the raid on Coventry that we knew was on the way, and I agreed with Churchill’s decision not to warn the populace — because that would have made it evident to the Nazis that we had broken their codes.”
“In other words,” Oates said, “you participated in their sacrifice.”
“I colluded in it,” Naisbitt said. “Exposing them to the possibility of death in the bombing. Of course I hoped the possibility would not be realized, but when it was, I could not claim I hadn’t meant that to happen.”
“And yet,” Oates said, “knowing how you must have felt, how you must feel today, you can still argue that the war should’ve been prolonged, leading to vastly more deaths and atrocities? You can really say that?”
“Certainly,” Naisbitt said. “Think of the problems that would have solved. Think how the map of the world would look today, if that had been done. The Allies would have a nuclear monopoly. The ultimate danger, nuclear war, which we never dreamed of back in Nineteen-forty-two, would simply not exist.”
“Unless we decided to use it,” Oates said.
“Nonsense,” Naisbitt said. “We would not do that.”
“After what we did in Southeast Asia?” Oates said. “Can you say that, Neville?”
“Of course I can,” Naisbitt said. “Not only say it, but mean it. America’s sin in Vietnam was not what it did, but what it failed to do. It failed to win.
“The watermark of tyranny,” he said, “is not the tendency to invade or subjugate other nations. That comes later on, after the character of the assassin has become clear. The watermark is the eagerness of the assassin to tyrannize and slaughter his own countrymen. In the Forties, some of my countrymen dismissed the possibility that fascism, denominated ‘communism’ or ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ remained just as brutal, aggressive, repressive and threatening in Moscow as it had been in Berlin and Rome. In the Fifties, otherwise clearheaded and intelligent Frenchmen excused weariness of the struggle in Indochina by uttering the rubric that Ho Chi Minh was his country’s chosen leader, and that although he was a committed, Stalinist Marxist, he would rule it benevolently once he got control. In the Sixties and the early Seventies, the virus was abroad in America, and the very people whom you pre
sented by this medium as wise, compassionate and, above all, right, were totally unwilling to credit overwhelming evidence that a Viet Cong triumph would be immediately followed by transformation of the country into an abattoir. The triumph was permitted, and the bloodletting began.
“To blink history is always a serious blunder,” Naisbitt said. “It is a blunder which the private citizen may permit himself, in the luxury of irresponsibility for outcomes. But for someone in your profession, and in your position in it, it’s a luxury of intemperate price and appalling consequence. You educate people, like it or no. Just as your father did. When he saw you educating the public as you did, it horrified him.”
“He thought it was ‘despicable,’ ” Oates said. “That’s the word he used to me.”
“He was understating his opinion,” Naisbitt said. “Being kind to you. It was worse than despicable — it was stupid. That’s what caused his rage — and that was what it was. He met Claire and me on one of these trips that we made, out in San Francisco, and I recall we were having a drink at the Top of the Mark. Claire asked him about you. How your career was going. And his face changed. His voice turned into a snarl. ‘Oh, swimmingly,’ he said. ‘Absolutely wonderfully. He’s more famous now than I am. Certainly more admired. And you know how he’s done it? He’s done it by identifying opportunity when it leaps up before him. He’s found out about this little conflagration going on in Vietnam, and he’s taken the pulse of his generation and from it deduced that many of his contemporaries disapprove of making war, and shooting guns and dropping bombs. They don’t think it’s nice. So, every chance he gets, and he gets a lot of them, he rounds up some other damned opportunist and the two of them go on the air and sprinkle some more gasoline on the issue here at home. I think he must’ve been switched in the cradle, the stupid little fuck. I can’t’ve spawned this jellyfish. I’ve got a fucking brain, for Christ sake. This kid can’t be mine.’ ”
The camera operators straggled back into the studio, carrying cardboard containers of coffee. Fisher returned after them, carrying a tray with two more glasses of scotch.
“And yet,” Oates said, “yet when I saw you in those years when the two of us weren’t speaking, when Dad wouldn’t speak to me, you were always warm to me. Always hospitable. And you agreed to come on here, come on here tonight. Knowing how he felt about me, how could you do that? Wasn’t that betraying him? Wasn’t that disloyal? Wasn’t that another form, what Dad called ‘shiftiness’?”
“Absolutely not,” Naisbitt said. “In the first place, I disapproved of Carl’s conduct. Not that I disagreed with the substance of his appraisal. I disapproved of his vehement refusal to have anything to do with you because, well, it amounted to a private decision to send a son to Coventry in the hope he would be hurt. No private disagreement warrants any kind of death — and banishment and exile, those are kinds of deaths. I told him he was wrong to do that. That he would cause himself to grieve, and that he should patch things up, no matter what it needed.
“And about two years later,” Naisbitt said, “he came to London, and he told me that he had done as I had said. I said that made me glad.”
Fisher, standing at the edge of the platform with the tray in her hand, cleared her throat. “Ah,” she said, “pardon me, Tom, but, ah, are you planning to use that? Use that on the show?”
He turned and stared at her. He shook his head. “No,” he said, “no, I don’t plan to. I’ll use this instead.” He crouched to receive the tray. His hand shook as he took it from her, and some of the Famous Grouse scotch whisky spilled.
“Are you okay?” she said.
He stood up. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “Once I get on the outside of this.” He turned to and walked to Naisbitt. “Restorative?”
“Very much so, thanks,” Naisbitt said, accepting the glass. “This is demanding work.”
43
The digital clocks against the spectrum on the monitor screens read 21:07:04:00 when Fisher dropped her left forefinger for the second time on the evening of February 21, 1986.
“My understanding, Neville,” Oates said, “is that while others have written and spoken at length about the Enigma machine, and the general work done by British Intelligence during the war, you still refuse to do so.”
“That’s correct,” Naisbitt said.
“Why is that?” Oates said. “The story’s pretty much out. How could anything you might add harm any present interest of your government?”
Naisbitt chuckled. “Well,” he said, “perhaps that’s part of the reason I decline to discuss my role in the matter — because it was so small, so ancillary to the accomplishments of the major participants, that I would seem ridiculous.”
“I doubt that,” Oates said.
“Well,” Naisbitt said, “but then there’s the overriding issue here. Which is that I signed an agreement binding me to secrecy in Nineteen-forty-two, and so far as I know, not been released from it. Nor have I asked to be released from that pledge, or wish in fact to be. We lived then, and we live now, in a world filled with predators. To this point at least we’ve been able to fend them off.” He shifted in his chair. “I just don’t see any benefit in the revelation of secrets about national security, no matter how old they may be.”
“All right,” Oates said, “we’ll honor your reluctance. Tell us about the Ipswich Ensemble. How it started, who was in it, what its purpose was. And why you’re here tonight.”
“Happy to,” Naisbitt said. “After the war ended, and all the Yanks went home — most of you, at any rate — there was a curious sort of lull. An intermezzo, as it were, people hunting around for the pieces of the lives they’d discarded when it began.
“Now,” he said, “in that almost post-coital depression that came after the war was over, I found myself in a situation where the issue of whether to rebuild my life had been made for me. I’d been on sabbatical from Cambridge when it started, doing some research and living with my family in Coventry, wishing I could afford to purchase one of the Jaguars made there and knowing I never could, looking toward an intellectually if not financially rewarding adult lifetime on the Cambridge faculty. And suddenly, if a span of six years can be called ‘sudden,’ it was all gone. My family were dead. I decided I’d had thrust upon me either an exercise in damage control or an opportunity, an adventure.
“I chose to treat it as an adventure,” Naisbitt said. “I took an inventory,” he said. “I don’t mean that I did it all at once, sitting down with a tablet of paper, ticking off alternatives, ‘one from column A and two from column B.’ And I did rather rapidly conclude that I did not wish to return to Cambridge. It was home to me, and I still loved it, but I’d involuntarily sharpened my appetite for risk, in the war, and since I was without responsibilities at its end, I could voluntarily elect to continue taking risks. So, instead of returning to Cambridge, I chose to accept a most flattering offer to head the mathematics department at the new University of Ipswich.
“The effrontery of the founders, when you think about it,” he said, “was positively astonishing. What they proposed to do was take a huge estate, out in the middle of nowhere, and convert it into a university on the American model. To make available to English students of the middle and lower classes the sort of educational opportunity that American institutions, aided by your GI Bill, were gearing up to offer here. It promised ferment, Ipswich did, excitement, enthusiasm, maybe even joy.
“We began making do with quarters in a huge old manor house, extremely grand, extremely draughty, and extremely unsuited to pedagogy. But the commitment and the money were forthcoming if not there, and the land around the manor was expansive, and the buildings began going up and the students coming in, and the faculty began to grow and it was inspiring. Just as I had hoped, it was an adventure.
“In Nineteen-forty-six,” he said, “Claire very much against her will visited the campus with her second husband, Cecil. Cecil Moody, his name was, and he was a fine architect. I was assign
ed to cultivate Claire, because Cecil’s agreement to design new buildings was very important to someone or other who controlled a lot of money, and we were supposed to make them happy so that Cecil would agree.”
“And you did,” Oates said.
Naisbitt smiled. “Well, I’m not sure Cecil came away at first quite as happy as Claire.”
“My first husband, Ronald,” Claire said to Fiona Cangelosi, “picked me up at a recital I gave in the Young Players’ Competition they used to have each spring at Carnegie. I was seventeen years old. He was forty-one. It didn’t occur to me then that a girl of seventeen probably ought not to turn a fling into a permanent arrangement, nor did I step back and consider that marriage to a man with three marriages behind him might not be such an arrangement.” She smiled. “He was just as fickle as I was. Nearly a quarter-century older, but quite as immature.
“He was in banking. There was, naturally, a scandal. This was Nineteen-thirty-seven — if his family hadn’t had a lot of money in the firm, he would’ve been cashiered. Since they did, he was banished. To the London office. Where almost immediately he went into the second of his two cycles: find a new pastry to replace the old pastry now his lawful, wedded wife.
“I was a spiteful little thing, but not stupid. I suppose he got away with screwing his new tart for about a month before I caught on. I was furious. We were having our flat redone and there was quite a bit of structural renovation required, and he’d retained this architect, Cecil Moody. Cecil lived in Montagu Square, lovely old barn near where Anthony Trollope’d lived, and he wanted to show me some of the things he had done to make it liveable, while preserving its character. So one morning, full of rage at Ronald who had not come home the night before until gone three or so, I went there with Cecil, and seduced him. He appeared only mildly surprised by the approach — told me later that he’d regularly shown his house to clients, and a few of them had taken the invitations as the same sort of opportunity it had seemed to me — but quite overcome by the performance.” She paused. “I don’t think Cecil had a strong sexual drive. Oh, he liked it well enough, wasn’t defective or anything — thought it was quite pleasant, in fact. Something like a day’s good shooting: bracing fun. But really, nowhere near as absorbing, as satisfying, as what he really liked to do. Which was think. Cecil loved to think. So, as much as my angry prowess excited and beguiled him, in the long term it would be no match for my competition — which was of course his work.
Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) Page 38