Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  “Trust me,” he said. “Politics comes to him straight from the unconscious, in the same way that operas and symphonies came to Mozart. Whole concepts of how to use power just pop into his head, ready for orchestration. He doesn’t even have to think about it. And he’s never wrong. He’s extraordinary in class, in his papers, in action. And unlike Mozart he has no Salieri. Jack doesn’t have an enemy in the world. He’s such a big dumb shit with such a dazzling smile that he excites no jealousy, no hostility. It doesn’t matter what he does. It’s uncanny. People will forgive him anything.”

  I interrupted. “What is there to forgive?”

  “His sex drive,” Arthur said. “He’s mad for pussy. Tries to screw every female he meets, including the wives and girlfriends of his best friends.”

  “Does he succeed?”

  “More often than not. It’s puzzling in a way. The girls say he has absolutely no finesse—comes right at them, puts it in their hand. They say yes anyway. My wife says it’s the way he smells.”

  “She’s one of his conquests?”

  “He made a pass,” he replied. “Myra turned him down.”

  “Ah. But she noticed the way he smelled?”

  Arthur smiled. He was not offended by my questions; he and his wife were people of their time and class—sexual revolutionaries who slept with whomever they wished. He reached into the little schoolboy knapsack he carried instead of a briefcase and handed over a thick brown envelope. Inside the envelope was Jack Adams’s dossier, as compiled by Arthur’s network of informants—at least one hundred pages of photocopied official records, together with neatly typed contact reports on Jack’s background, behavior, apparent beliefs, and circle of friends. The contact reports—accounts of conversations with Jack—had been provided by student activists organized by Arthur to keep an eye on fellow radicals. These junior Chekists, all students of Arthur’s, regarded themselves as a secret counterintelligence force whose work was necessary to protect the Movement from penetration by agents of the FBI, CIA, and other mostly nonexistent colonialist-imperialist enemies.

  I put on my glasses and began to read. John Fitzgerald Adams—since birth called Jack and nothing but Jack—was the only child of a young woman named Betty Herzog. Betty herself had been an adored only child, pretty, smart, and lively. And—this is important—virtuous. In 1939, she was the Tannery Falls High School homecoming queen. This was the highest tribute to beauty an American village could pay, and in the period in question it could never have been bestowed on a girl who was not perceived to be a virgin. After high school, she became a registered nurse, and as soon as she was qualified, joined the U.S. Navy as an ensign. She was posted to a naval hospital in San Francisco. This was in 1943.

  In her letters to her mother Betty seemed happy in her new life. She was promoted to lieutenant junior grade; her picture was in the Tannery Falls Evening Journal. Then, mysteriously, early in 1944, long before the war ended, she came home, discharged by the navy. A month later she married Homer Adams, a man ten years older than herself, a man too old for military service, a salesman of Hudson automobiles. On September 17, 1944, not quite six months after the wedding, Betty gave birth to Jack, a ten-pound baby.

  It was Betty who insisted on naming the child John Fitzgerald, even though she had no relatives who bore either name. She gave no explanation. Her husband was angered and hurt. He wanted the boy to be named Homer, Jr., but Betty would not budge. “We’ll call him Jack,” she said. She corrected everyone who tried to call the child anything else—Jackie or Johnny or even John. “His name is Jack,” she would say firmly. Jack remembered this vividly.

  Betty and Homer Adams died five years later when a car driven by Homer, who was drunk at the time, crashed into a stone abutment at 70 mph. There were no skid marks at the scene. From his grandmother, Jack learned that Betty and Homer had had a terrible argument on the night of the accident—an argument so terrible that Betty had dropped Jack off at her parents’ house, waking them at midnight. “Lock the doors, call the police if you have to, but don’t let him touch my boy!” Betty had cried before running out into the night. This was the last time her mother saw her alive.

  At his parents’ funeral, five-year-old Jack had suffered a textbook trauma. The undertaker had done his best to put the smashed-up bodies back together. But to the terrified little boy, dangled over the open coffin by his weeping grandmother (“Kiss Mommy goodbye, Jack!”), the corpses, waxen and cold, looked like the stitched-together monsters in Frankenstein movies. Ever after, when Jack pictured death, his own or anyone else’s, he pictured his parents in the funeral home.

  Or so he told the people to whom he related this story—usually girls he was trying to seduce. Needless to say, Jack could not have seen very many Boris Karloff movies at the age of five, but he was never one to let facts stand in the way of a telling image. According to the reports, his voice broke as he summoned up the Frankenstein illustration; he covered his face with his hands and shuddered at the memory. Usually he was between the girl’s legs moments later. Few objected afterward. Many reports mentioned that Jack was a single-minded, driving lover of amazing endurance. He bestowed orgasms on even the most disinterested partners.

  “He does sex like in a dream, like he’s in another state of consciousness,” wrote one of his conquests. “Like he’s on another planet. Like the woman is not there, or is somebody else. He just keeps going. And going. And going. Then he stops, gets up, and acts like nothing happened. This is weird but very sexy.” The author of this report, who wrote on the basis of personal experience, was a psychology major. She thought that Jack’s single-minded, blind copulations were an unconscious attempt to reenact his own conception over and over again. “Like he’s trying to bring himself to life,” she wrote.

  Arthur watched me as I read. He saw that I was interested. He knew exactly where I was in the file, and what was coming next. I turned a page and came upon a brief report written by Arthur himself.

  He said, “Heads up, Dmitri. The next part is the heart of the matter.”

  Indeed it was. As a teenager during the Kennedy presidency, Jack had discovered, hidden in the lining of his mother’s naval uniform, several blurred photographs. One showed Betty in that same blue uniform, with her bright curly head on the shoulder of a scrawny young navy officer; other shots showed them together on a beach, or grinning at the camera from a convertible coupe. In one of these photographs, Betty, her young body obviously nude beneath the sheet that she held coquettishly beneath her chin, sat up in a rumpled hotel bed. In yet another, slim and naked, a truly lovely girl, she looked straight at the man behind the camera with the radiant smile of a woman in love. About that, there could be no doubt.

  In the most important picture, the skinny young officer sat bare-chested in a hospital bed, grinning broadly, a bottle of beer in his hand and Betty’s cap perched on his thick, tousled hair.

  Arthur said, “Have you guessed?”

  The answer was yes. But I replied, “Guessed what?”

  “Jack’s secret,” Arthur said. “He thinks he’s the love child of John F. Kennedy.”

  I took off my reading glasses and examined Arthur’s face: a faint smile, a glimmer of triumph, but no sign of a joke.

  “I kid you not,” Arthur said.

  I examined the pictures again. The quality was poor. They had been taken in feeble light with a cheap camera and inferior wartime film. These defects made them seem all the more authentic, of course.

  I said, “Jack thinks this person in the snapshots is JFK?”

  “He’s certain of it,” Arthur replied. “Read on.”

  The next item in the file was a magazine picture of the future president as he had looked in 1944 while recuperating from the injuries he received during the sinking of PT 109. This juvenile JFK was very thin, almost emaciated, but radiant with sexual glamour—just like the smiling young lover in Betty’s snapshots.

  Arthur said, “Jack thinks the snapshots were left to him by h
is mother as evidence that John F. Kennedy is his natural father.”

  “And you think that’s possible?”

  “The dates coincide. I researched it myself. PT 109 sank on August second, 1943. Kennedy spent some time in sick bay, then rode back to the States on an aircraft carrier. The carrier docked in San Francisco on January seventh, 1944. He stayed there until January eleventh. JFK being JFK, it’s a fair assumption that he would have been looking for a piece of ass. He was in the navy; so was Betty. They were in the same town. Suppose he knocked her up the night before he left. Jack Adams was born 281 days later. Do the arithmetic.”

  “What would that prove?”

  Arthur said, “Nothing, in itself. To Jack, it proves everything. The idea that he is a Kennedy bastard is the central obsession of this kid’s life. True or not, that’s the key to his being.”

  He went on. As a teenager, Jack had confirmed all the dates, all the coincidences. He had studied press photographs of JFK and the one surviving photograph of the lumpish Homer Adams. He had studied himself in the mirror. He looked nothing like his mother, nothing like Homer. He could not possibly be Homer’s son. Betty had tricked Homer into marriage in order to legitimize the pregnancy that had gotten her kicked out of the Navy Nurse Corps—a pregnancy that she had wanted, a pregnancy that lifted her out of the drab and meaningless existence into which she had been born.

  What could Betty’s strange history possibly mean except that her fatal accident had been a murder-suicide perpetrated by Homer, the salesman of Hudson Hornets, who had somehow discovered the truth about Jack’s paternity? The more Jack found out about JFK’s frenetic sex life, the more likely the theory became.

  I looked at the snapshots again. Even through my eyes, there was no question about it: At 107 pounds, smiling with those strong white teeth after years of practice in the mirror, Jack Adams the draft dodger looked very much like the handsome bag of bones who had been the post–PT 109 Jack Kennedy.

  3 It was a moonless night in May, quite warm. The darkness was almost liquid; you hung in it as in a tepid sea, seeing glimmers of light far above your head. Perhaps one streetlight in six remained unbroken. The garbage had not been collected for days. The sweetish odor of rotting vegetation rose to the nostrils, as in a rain forest untouched by sunlight. We walked on between darkened tenements. Although we could not see them, people sat on stairways in the balmy weather, drinking. In inky shadow, bottles clinked on concrete. Men coughed and spat, women scolded: murmurs, bursts of laughter, profanity. Loud, angry music.

  There was no possibility of finding a taxi in this neighborhood, at this hour. I took Arthur by the arm and walked him westward, toward the Hudson River.

  Arthur resisted. “You’re going the wrong way,” he said. “The subway is back there.”

  “I know. We’ll walk.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  I said, lying, “I have a pistol.”

  Reassured, Arthur walked with a lighter step. He knew about pistols. I had recruited him in Cuba, where he had gone to cut sugar cane for Fidel Castro. In a training camp in the Sierra Maestra, he had fired Russian pistols into bags of slaughterhouse blood.

  I said, “I’m interested in this boy’s cowardice. Tell me more.”

  Arthur said, “Dmitri, please. Why do you keep using that word? It’s so irrelevant. Does such a thing even exist?”

  “It exists. And it’s always relevant.”

  “Whatever you say. But look at the whole picture, Dmitri.”

  “The file does not give me the whole picture. For example, some of these girls he slept with seem to think that he is not in his heart of hearts a person of the Left, that he has no real political convictions.”

  “I disagree,” Arthur said. “Appearances can be deceiving, especially to girls.”

  “So the only thing that is important is his delusion?”

  Arthur stopped in his tracks. He was a picture of misery. He said, “Dmitri, what are you saying to me? That I’ve fucked up again?” His voice trembled.

  I put a fatherly arm around his shoulders and squeezed.

  I said, “No.”

  He had no idea how well he had done. At that moment, of course, neither had I. Another hug. How thin he was in spite of his appetites, how frail. How hard he tried. Like a father I smiled, a smile of real affection, of expectations fulfilled.

  I said, “I see possibilities.”

  Arthur touched my hand, the one that gripped his shoulder, and smiled back, this time like a man.

  By now we had walked many blocks downtown. We were out of Harlem, near the Columbia campus, where Arthur lived, apparatchik that he was, in an apartment that belonged to the university. The light was better, the sidewalks were all but empty except for husbands walking little dogs. We could hear the traffic signals changing, feel the subway trains passing beneath the pavement. The dangers Arthur had feared were miles behind us.

  He gripped my arm, making his points after the need had passed.

  He said, “The point is, Jack has a great natural gift. Since childhood, he has studied people, found out what they wanted, and made them believe he was giving it to them even when he wasn’t. Without money, without influence, without connections, he has risen to the top every time. He has this uncanny gift for making others like him. Trust him. Want to help him. It’s like a spell he can cast at will.”

  I said, “You’re describing a born liar.” My tone was encouraging.

  Arthur swallowed the encouragement I offered like a sweet and cried out, “Yes! That’s the point.”

  “Then why didn’t you mention it before?”

  “I didn’t realize its importance until just now. Jack lies about everything, all the time. He always has. He’s not even conscious that he is lying. He lies to please, to manipulate, to get what he wants. The amazing thing is, everyone knows that he lies all the time and about everything, but nobody seems to mind.”

  “So what does that make Jack?”

  Arthur threw up his hands. “You tell me.”

  “A megalomaniac in the making,” I said. “A driven man. Unpredictable. Mad. Biting the hand that feeds him.”

  Arthur laughed in delight. “An American Lenin,” he said. “Just what Dr. Dmitri ordered.”

  “I think I had better take a closer look at this young man,” I said.

  “You want to meet him?”

  “No. Observe him. In due course.”

  And that is how it all began.

  Two

  1 Only a few days after Arthur told me about Jack Adams, my superior, by coincidence, arrived from Moscow. Everyone in this story will call this man Peter, a poetic choice of alias, because Peter was a fisher of men if ever there was one. Our intelligence service, founded by intellectuals and perpetuated by drudges, had an unfortunate tendency to assign excessively appropriate pseudonyms to secret operatives. This was a great weakness in our security because the entire basis of cryptanalysis is the discovery of context. If you call an agent Lothario because he is a compulsive seducer, you must expect that the enemy will work backward through a million females, if necessary, to discover his identity.

  Peter had traveled to New York, where he was not welcome in his true identity, using a false name, as a specialist in fisheries attached to the Ukrainian delegation to a UN meeting on national rights to fishing grounds. Peter found this cover amusing. At the time in question, Soviet trawlers were indiscriminately vacuuming up huge quantities of fish off the coasts of North America, processing their catch using the most modern technology, and then unloading these frozen cargoes at Murmansk and other Barents Sea ports—where they thawed and rotted on the docks because there were no refrigerated trains or trucks to haul them to market. Or only enough to supply the Nomenklatura, as the higher-ranking circles of the Party and government officials were called, with the one fish in a million that made it to Moscow.

  The real work of the trawlers, some of which were loaded with highly advanced electronic gear, was to eavesdro
p on the U.S. Navy.

  “This means,” Peter told me over lunch at the Côte Basque, his favorite restaurant in New York, “that the price of each kilo of cod eaten by a member of the Politburo is about the same as that of a medium-range ballistic missile.”

  He spoke airily, as was his style, as if there was nothing unusual about a lieutenant general in the KGB describing a major espionage operation to a subordinate as a farce. You may think that he felt free to do so because I was his subordinate and could do him no harm without destroying myself, but he spoke just as recklessly to everyone. He was the son of one of the original Bolsheviks, now dead, who had begotten him on a famous ballerina. This alone gave him a license to be eccentric. Few outsiders knew this, but even under Stalin, Russia had a whole class of spoiled brats, the children of the mighty, who did and said pretty much as they liked—until their fathers disappeared. Peter’s father had done him the inestimable favor of dying for the revolution, an act that placed both of them out of the reach of the secret police.

  Peter looked like his mother, tall with a symmetrical European face and large, keen, nonepicanthic blue eyes. The ballerina had raised him as an old-fashioned gentleman, privately tutored in the old culture by men who had been saved from the camps by his father. He knew languages, literature, painting, music, delightful gossip about the famous, dead and alive. As an adult, Peter behaved like an English nobleman in a nineteenth-century novel: with a certain natural hauteur, but with a single manner for all mankind. He treated everyone the same, commissar or zik.

  As children of heroes went, Peter was unusual in that he was talented, extravagantly so. He went straight into intelligence at a young age, placed in a favorable position by Lavrenti Beria, a devoted friend of his mother’s. The boy was given opportunities to excel, and he worked hard and won golden opinions from the start. In Budapest during the uprising, the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Andropov, a future head of the KGB and of the Party itself, was so impressed by Peter’s work in subverting the rebellion from within that he practically adopted him as a son.