On her bike once more, Margo headed east again. It took her a good half-hour to reach the address she had found in the directory, way up the Dryden Road. It turned out to be not a house, but Mr. Khorozian’s antiques business. As if they didn’t want people knowing where they lived. The storefront was shuttered. At the auto-repair shop on the corner, the mechanic gave her what Nana called the twice-over and offered a crafty smile. Using a soiled cloth to clean grease from his hands, he told her she could try the Khorozians at home.
“Sometimes Mr. K works from there. Sometimes he don’t come in.”
Her sweetest smile: forced, but it still counted. “Would you happen to know their address?”
He did, and, leering, led her into the cluttered office. He grabbed a grimy card file, found the one he wanted, held it out for her to memorize. “But you won’t find them up there,” he added. “Not today.”
“Why not?”
“They left in a hurry yesterday morning. Big black car came for them.” He was still wiping grease from his fingers; and still looking at her all wrong. “Driver spoke one of those foreign languages. Maybe Russian.”
V
There was an emergency number at the State Department. Harrington had vouchsafed it to Margo before sending her into the lions’ den, and made her repeat it back until she had it cold. Margo used it now, from the telephone in the back of the repair shop. She had offered to pay for the call, but the mechanic had magnanimously told her to go ahead, while he stood out in the shop ogling her backside through the smeary glass. Her sweaty fingers fumbled at the dial, and she had to try three times before she got it right.
“D.O.,” said the laconic voice at the other end.
Margo recited precisely from her script. She felt idiotic, but the rules were the rules. “This is Hyacinth calling for Miriam.”
She heard pages turning as the duty officer looked up “Hyacinth” and “Miriam” in his codebook. His response, she remembered, should be Miriam’s not here right now. Can Gwendolyn help you?
Finally, the answer came back. “We don’t have a Miriam,” he said.
Margo stared at the phone. “How about Gwendolyn?” she finally said. “Maybe Gwendolyn can help.”
This time the response was instantaneous.
“We don’t have a Gwendolyn.”
Had she gotten it wrong? Misremembered, as Nana liked to say? Was it Glynis, perhaps, or Guinevere? No. She remembered perfectly. This was something else. They were cutting her off. She didn’t know why, but no other answer made sense.
Margo glanced out the window at the mechanic, who was looking pointedly at the clock above her head. She had promised that the call would only take a minute. She smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. Plainly he thought he’d been had.
She made another try. “Can you connect me with Dr. Harrington?”
“We don’t have a Harrington.”
“Listen to me,” she said. “My name is Margo Jensen. I was in the building last month. I met a Dr. Harrington. I don’t know her first name, but she must have a desk or an assistant or a supervisor or somebody you can connect me with.”
“We don’t have a Harrington,” he repeated.
“I don’t think you understand. My message is urgent. That’s why I called this number. I’m in trouble. There must be somebody who can help in an emergency.”
“Impossible,” said the duty officer, and hung up.
TWENTY-THREE
Plans Within Plans
I
In Washington, it was the same Thursday afternoon, and the ExComm was on the verge of voting for war. The mood in the Cabinet Room was somber. CIA Director McCone had just reported that a handful of the MRBM sites were probably operational, and the President’s advisers were facing the real possibility of their own extinction, perhaps within days. McCone’s announcement had lent to the proceedings an air of reality that had previously been lacking. Until today, the ExComm might have been an academic seminar.
No longer.
Bundy glanced around the table. McCone had said “probably,” but he could see from their faces that the group had missed the qualifier. It was entirely possible that this very afternoon, without waiting for authorization from Congress, the President would allow a dozen or so worried advisers to persuade him to push the button.
“ ‘Operational’ meaning what?” asked Bobby Kennedy, who saw the same danger.
McCone looked straight at him. “Meaning, from launch order to missile away would be about eight hours.”
“Why so long?” asked Gwynn, from State.
All eyes swung his way. The poor man didn’t seem to understand that his job was to shut up and take notes. Watching him, Bundy wondered whether his own alternative plan had any chance of swaying the President: especially given that he wasn’t quite ready to share it. In a crisis, time was always the enemy.
“Because they use liquid fuel,” said General Curtis LeMay, Air Force chief of staff, whose task it would be to execute the attacks on the missiles if and when they were ordered. He toyed with his slate-gray mustache. He was rarely seen not chomping on his trademark cigar, but had forsaken it for the afternoon. “Ours use solid fuel. That’s another advantage we have over the Reds. We can have a bird in the air on fifteen minutes’ warning. A few years from now”—this almost wistful—“well, that advantage just might have disappeared. It might be a good thing this is happening now instead of later.”
The President frowned. Bundy knew what was going through his mind: McCone said some of the launchers were operative, but the truth was that the Agency didn’t know for sure. In the bureaucratic competition to get information to the table, they were reaching the point where unanalyzed rumor was being passed along as fact.
“Let’s come back to this later,” said Bundy. “I understand the Joint Chiefs have prepared attack plans.”
Taylor and LeMay presented the scenarios together. They would begin with two waves of air attacks, the first aimed at destroying the surface-to-air missiles, the second to take out the MRBM launchers. The ideal follow-up would be a ground assault on the launch positions, just to be sure. The discussion went on for a good forty-five minutes. Most of those at the table seemed inclined toward an attack. Then McNamara threw cold water on the whole thing with a chilly reminder that any attack on the missiles would entail significant Soviet casualties—and, since the attack would have to include napalm to be sure that the launching sites were destroyed, the manner of many of those deaths would be quite horrible.
“So, you still think they’d retaliate,” somebody clarified.
“They’d go nuclear,” said McNamara. “They’d have no choice.”
“We could handle them,” said LeMay. He was one of the most respected commanders in the military, but Kennedy loathed him, and the feeling was mutual. Yet Bundy had to admit that LeMay, for all his bellicosity, had been responsible for building the Strategic Air Command into the serious deterrent force it had become. “Believe me, Mr. President, they don’t want war with us.”
“We don’t want war with them, either,” Ted Sorensen shot back. But it was plain that the ExComm was inclined in LeMay’s direction. The man was an aggressive spellbinder. The Kennedys were about to lose control of the table.
“I had a conversation with President Eisenhower,” McCone offered. “He proposes ignoring the missile sites and attacking the Castro regime instead.”
It took the group a moment to appreciate the distinction, but Bundy immediately saw the appeal. First, an attack on Havana was less likely to entail Soviet casualties. Second, once a new regime was installed, the Cuban government itself could demand the removal of the missiles, and if the Soviets refused, they would then be committing the act of war against Cuba.
Bundy thought the plan had merit, but Kennedy seemed uninterested, maybe because he had now twice burned his fingers trying to unseat the Castro regime, maybe because the suggestion came from his still-popular predecessor.
Or maybe bec
ause, for all his Cold Warrior credentials, Kennedy still believed in the power of words. That was the part that worried Bundy most.
Bundy stood. “The President has a meeting,” he said. “Let’s resume in ninety minutes.”
II
From the Cabinet Room, the President returned to the Oval Office to meet Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador. Bundy had to be there, but first he stopped Alfred Gwynn in the corridor, drew him away from the others.
“You’ve been pestering your superiors about Dr. Harrington,” he said without preamble. “She’s your problem. How you handle her is entirely up to you.”
Gwynn was cautious. “She has powerful friends.”
“They won’t interfere.”
Bundy turned away, but not before noting with satisfaction the leap of delight in the little man’s eyes. A fundamental principle of Washington life was never to let ambition blind you to manipulation. By that measure, poor Alfred Gwynn was as blind as they come.
The question was whether the same could be said of Doris Harrington.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Grand Illusion
I
The New York Central had a six-thirty train running south from the depot in Syracuse, more than an hour’s drive away, and even with Annalise driving full-tilt, Margo almost missed it. The train reached Garrison a little past eleven. There were no taxis at that hour, but from Syracuse she had called the Paxtons, the only other Negro family of means in the town, and their batman, as Mr. Paxton insisted on calling him, was waiting. The ride to Nana’s house from the station was all of five minutes. Margo could have walked, but arriving sweaty would have been taken by Claudia Jensen as a sign of disrespect and even what she referred to as disrepute: the sort of thing associated with the riffraff.
They turned past the crumbling stone lion—its mate had vanished long before Margo moved in—and entered the pitted drive that wound its way up Nana’s hill. Another corner, and suddenly the house loomed out of the darkness, a hulking shadow against the night sky. It was an Irish Palladian, sprawling and tumbledown, a granite monstrosity with chimneys and balconies and clever stone carvings everywhere you looked: one of those grand mansions built along the river at the turn of the century by the great industrialists—the barons, Nana called them—who used to shuttle between city and country by private barge, or, in a few cases of obscene wealth, private railway. The barons were long gone, and half the grand palaces stood empty and dying. Thus the wheel of history: the spectacular achievements of one age became the forgotten detritus of the next. Margo had learned this history at her grandmother’s feet, because Nana wanted the little girl she raised as her own to be the brightest child in every classroom she would ever enter.
Knocking took as much courage as stepping alone onto that tram in Varna.
The heavy door opened at once: Muriel, the maid, had waited up. She told Margo that Mrs. Jensen had retired but would join her at breakfast. There was hot chocolate in the kitchen. Margo thanked her and told her to go to bed. She made a cup, then stood for a while on the stone portico around the back of the house. The hot chocolate warmed her against the autumn night. Once upon a time, Claudia Jensen had hosted grand parties out here. Now the stonework was cracked and the metal furniture sagging. Down below was a field of rushes that Nana always said would poison you should you get a scratch. Margo had never believed the story, and never tested it. Beyond the rushes was a mud-bound, bashed-in dock to which nobody would ever tie up a boat, and beyond the dock was the river. Ripples of moonlight teased their way toward the city. A distant thrumming marked the passage of a barge, gentled northward by a tug. In daylight the barge would be rusted and ugly, but by night it was majestic, braving the current. Margo thought of Fitzgerald, and wondered how you avoided being borne back into your own past. She nibbled at her lower lip. She hated this house, and for much of her life she had hated her grandmother, too, but no other route was available. Robert Frost was right in “Death of the Hired Man”: Home was indeed where, when you had to go there, they had to take you in.
Margo had nowhere else to go; and so had gone home.
She had told nobody other than Annalise that she was leaving campus, and nobody at all her reason: she had run out of ideas she could pursue from Ithaca. Nana represented her last hope. In a way, she always had. Claudia Jensen had never been kind to her granddaughter, but she had also never admitted that a single problem existed that was unfixable. That attitude had evidently rubbed off on her son, and perhaps a bit on Margo as well. Nana always claimed to know everybody who was anybody. Tomorrow Margo planned to put that claim to the test.
She had no choice. Fomin was counting on her, and if a part of her knew perfectly well that the fate of the world could not possibly rest on her slim nineteen-year-old shoulders, another part of her hoped that history had thrown up a chance for the daughter to complete the work the father had begun.
The wind freshened. Margo sipped her cocoa and lifted her eyes to the lighted spires of West Point across the river. She remembered the dream. Was Garrison far enough from New York? Niemeyer would have said that was the wrong question. She knew because Littlejohn had asked in class whether Ithaca was far enough from some military base in upstate New York.
Niemeyer had smiled benignly, the way he did in the face of lesser minds.
“Stop being a ninny,” he’d said. “Remember, we’re stronger than they are. We might not be stronger tomorrow, but we are today. They’re more frightened of us than we are of them. The right question, children, is whether Dubna or Kaliningrad or Yaroslavl—or wherever they plan to hide the Central Committee in case of war—is far enough from Moscow.”
“Are you saying you want a war?” another acolyte had asked, for the sheer pleasure of hearing Niemeyer’s response.
The great man waddled to the center of the stage. “Nobody wants a war,” he announced, and if he had told them he held the survey results in his hand, they would have believed him. “But if we’re going to fight one, the time to do it is now, when we can still win. Ten years from now, fifteen, God alone knows what the correlation of forces will be.” He flipped his hand dismissively. “When you children get to run things, I’m sure the first thing you’ll cut will be our military. Good luck scaring the Bear or the next bogeyman after you’re done beating your guns into butter.”
The memory of classroom banter had almost warmed her, but the bitter chill riding the river breezes reminded her of reality. Niemeyer was gone. He had abandoned her; and so had the State Department. The duty officer had paged through his codebook until he found the notation telling him to cut her off. Margo could not begin to fathom Niemeyer’s sudden flit, or the abrupt severing of her connection to Harrington, but she had to press on. Others in her position would have accepted that the world would likely be able to save itself without their urgent assistance, but for Margo the matter had nothing to do with choice. It had to do with expectation.
Claudia Jensen had not raised her granddaughter to retreat; and Donald Jensen would never have given up.
Margo lay awake in the room of her youth, window open to catch the distant lapping of the waves, wondering whether tonight she would have the dream.
On Friday morning, she got down to business.
II
“The White House? You mean, the Kennedys?”
“Yes, Nana. The Kennedys. I’d like to meet the President.”
“Mmmm.”
“This weekend,” Margo added, feeling at once idiotic and determined. They were in what Claudia Jensen called the morning room, a glass-walled atrium off the kitchen, added well after the house was built. Potted monkey-puzzle trees guarded the corners. The view was of the sloping brown lawn down to the playhouse. The rosebushes had been covered in burlap for the season.
“Oh, well, of course, then,” said Nana, quite loud. She was a tall, imperious woman, whose idea of raising children had been to bark orders and then tell you to go away. If you ran to her because you had fallen and scr
aped your knee, she upbraided you for carelessness and called the maid to take care of the problem. A long time ago, she had been the first Negro to serve as a deputy mayor in New York City. The money was her late husband’s, because, in addition to practicing medicine, Arturo Jensen had owned a small piece of the largest black life insurer in the country.
Not that there was as much money left as Nana liked to pretend.
“Of course,” said Nana again. She took a long gulp of orange juice. She was unaware that Margo had known for years where Nana hid the gin she always had Muriel mix in. “Meet the President. I’ll call him up. How’s that? Call him up, tell him to make time in his schedule.”
“Nana—”
But Claudia Jensen’s sarcasm was as awesome as her disapproval, and, once launched upon the project of your humiliation, she never stopped until your mortification was complete. If you cried, that was bonus.
“Mr. President, my dear old friend, how lovely to hear your voice. How’s Jackie and the little ones? Marvelous. Yes, I’m fighting fit, so terribly good of you to ask. Now, Jack, I’m afraid I need a little favor. Yes, another one. What can I tell you? I’m a soft touch, everyone knows it, so everyone asks. But if you might oblige me one last time, my fool of a granddaughter wants to visit the White House this weekend. Would you be available to give her a personal guided tour? You will? First thing tomorrow? I am so very grateful, Mr. President. I am forever in your debt. If you need any help against the Russkies in Berlin, or against the heathen Chinese wherever they might be making trouble, give a call.”
“Are you finished?” said Margo.
“What did you think I was going to say? Do you think I’m a magician?”
“Sometimes you are. Yes.”
The old woman smiled at this. “Well, well,” she said; and nothing more. Her heavily powdered face was almost pale enough to pass for white.
“I’m serious, Nana. I really do need to meet the President. Not want to. Need to. And I can’t tell you why.”
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