But no. Her plan was far more complex, conspiratorial, and perverse than that—so much so that I knew, the moment I heard it, that it would be irresistible to Peter.
Morgan’s entire contribution to the project would be the donation of ova. One of her clients and fellow militants, a medical researcher at Ohio State, was working in an experimental program of in vitro fertilization. An egg was removed from the prospective mother’s womb, then mixed with sperm in a petri dish. The resulting embryo was then implanted in the uterus of the mother, who carried it to term and delivered the baby in the usual way. This method of sexless conception, commonplace today, was in its early laboratory stages then, and it was regarded—at least by Morgan and her feminist friends—as a revolutionary advance in female empowerment because it offered women the possibility of conception without admitting actual living sperm into their bodies.
What appealed to Morgan was this: The donor of the ovum did not even have to gestate her own child. The embryo could be implanted in any woman healthy enough to carry the fetus to term and then be delivered of a living baby. The newborn would be handed over immediately to the biological mother, who for the previous nine months had gone on with the more important activities of her life without the inconveniences and discomforts of pregnancy.
“So what we need,” Morgan told me, “is a healthy young woman who will carry the child, under discipline of course—”
I was amused. “Of course. What sort of discipline?”
“She’ll have to eat a proper diet and avoid drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and sex for nine months. And be willing to bear the child without meeting its actual parents or, above all, knowing who they are. And then she must disappear forever.”
I said, “What do you mean by disappear?”
“Go away,” Morgan said. “Far away, back to where she came from. Go on with her life.”
I said nothing.
Morgan went on, “Secrecy is assured at our end. My friend, who is a physician and therefore bound by an unbreachable oath of secrecy in regard to her patients, will retrieve the ovum and mix in the other ingredient. She herself will implant them in the child-bearer—”
I guffawed.
She interrupted herself. “What’s so funny?”
I shook my head, wiped my eyes. The lunacy of it. The solemnity of it, the invention of an arcane vocabulary understood only by the priestesses of the cult, the treatment of the essentially monstrous as a god-pleasing action—it was all so familiar, yet also so novel. Then I stopped. These little games, these tangled webs, are terribly amusing in the abstract. But oh so different in their human reality, and so incalculable in their consequences.
“Nothing,” I said. “Sometimes you forget that I am merely a peasant, a stranger in this strange land. Go on. I am most interested.”
“You, a peasant? You’re ridiculing me.”
“No. Far from it. Continue.”
Morgan examined me in moody, disappointed silence. The worst thing a handler can do is step out of character, reveal that the person the agent knows—infinitely patient, infinitely sympathetic, infinitely stern in the name of the agent’s own happiness and success—may not be the whole person.
Fearing that she might not tell me the rest (and then what would I tell Peter?), I said, “Morgan, this is one of your most intriguing ideas. Really Go on.”
Somewhat less confidently, but with her usual concision and nicety of detail, she told me the rest of the plan. It was complex but feasible, as almost any lunacy is feasible if tightly controlled from start to finish.
I said, “One question. The world will assume that you, not the anonymous girl, bore the child?”
“Yes. That’s the whole point.”
“How are you going to fake a pregnancy?”
“Quite simple. Put on a little weight, not too much. Get my exercise. Not show too much—lots of women don’t. I know one in New York whose best friends never guessed. Near the end, wear a preggie.”
“A what?” I inquired again.
“A preggie. It’s a cushion you tuck in your pants. It makes you look pregnant. Actually, a series of cushions, you keep adding padding. It’s a sort of post-Pill fad. Everybody fucks, nobody conceives, it’s a way to experience the thing, get the look, without actually going through it.”
“American women actually wear these things?”
“Some do. It’s like meditation or deep analysis or projecting your consciousness onto Mars. Imagining is being.”
“Are you actually going to imagine you’re pregnant or just wear the pillow?”
“What do you think? I’m a Marxist-Leninist, for God’s sake, Dmitri.”
“I will consult Peter.”
“Good,” Morgan said. “I’ve prepared a budget and a rough operational plan.”
To repeat, no project could have been better calculated to appeal to Peter’s sense of the outrageous. He provided a nice English-speaking Circassian girl, a Swallow of course, who resembled Morgan enough to deceive the casual eye as long as the two were never seen together. We also provided a midwife to keep an eye on her, a stalwart American Party member long under discipline.
In due course, just as Morgan had described, the Circassian girl was impregnated with one of Morgan’s ova, fertilized by one of Jack’s sperm. The very first implantation was a success, an omen. After the Circassian missed her second period, the pregnancy was confirmed by a busy Columbus obstetrician, who cared for her—she was using Morgan’s original name, Eleanor M. Weatherby—until the end of the eighth month, when she informed him over the phone that she intended to have the child at home. He refused to cooperate. She then went to a female obstetrician who specialized in home deliveries and who had no interest in politics below the abstract level and therefore had no idea who the Adamses were. When the Circassian’s labor pains began late one night, she was rushed by the midwife to the Adamses’ bungalow. Jack called the doctor, who arrived minutes later.
Jack, attired in surgical gown and mask, assisted at the delivery, holding the Circassian Swallow’s hand, helping her breathe and whispering encouragement in her ear as she gasped out the Russian names for the Trinity and howled in the agony that God had promised Eve after the incident of the apple. A child was born.
A son. Followed an instant later by an identical twin who looked as much like Jack as the first comer did. When their eyes were cleaned out, these two little Jacks gazed curiously into the overflowing eyes of their masked and sobbing father, who had never before understood that such unbounded joy was possible to the human heart.
Against all Morgan’s instructions, Jack ripped off his mask, revealing himself to the Swallow as his sons suckled for the first and last time at her breasts. Kneeling by the bed, Jack kissed the girl on the lips as if she were, in fact, a beloved wife to whom he owed the ecstasy that gripped him. In a voice broken by emotion, he murmured over and over again, “Thank you.”
5 As soon as the Circassian was spirited away—back to Minsk and the part-time ballet lessons she longed for but was too old, at eighteen, to profit from—Morgan removed her preggie and assumed the public role of mother. She immediately resumed her two-mile daily runs, to the astonishment and admiration of all, and was soon as trim as ever. Home birth was not yet the fad that it later briefly became, and to those who asked her reasons for delivering the twins at home she explained that it had been an act of feminist conviction. “I wanted a natural birth, without drugs, without instruments, without, frankly, some male doctor calling the tune,” she would say. “I wanted the children to come into the world in their own home, and for their father’s face to be the first face they saw. I hoped that this would bond them together right away. And”—here she would smile fondly if she happened to be talking to a reporter or a constituent—“in Jack’s case it sure seems to have worked.” After catching several colds and flus from the boys, Morgan took care to stay at a safe distance from their sneezes and runny noses. Jack seemed to be immune to them.
�
�The Adams vigor,” I said when Morgan informed me of his strange immunity.
“Not funny,” said Morgan, before coughing deeply into a Kleenex. She had never expected to enjoy motherhood, but like most women who experience it for the first time, even at arm’s length like Morgan, nothing had prepared her for its sleepless reality or for the pitiless demands of helpless creatures. Drawing liberally on her trust fund, she hired a live-in, round-the-clock nanny, a squat, slightly hirsute Guatemalan woman who spoke no English. When this woman found the twins were too much for her, Morganhired her equally unattractive sister as assistant nanny. She called them “the Hermanas,” the sisters. After they were hired, Morgan seldom saw the twins awake, except on public occasions.
Morgan had been right about one thing. The twins were a public relations bonanza—wild cards to fill an inside straight, as Danny called them, just two more examples of their father’s unpredictable and altogether astonishing luck. To Jack, they were the final proof of his secret genes. Like most male members of what he believed to be their line of descent, the boys were thick-haired exuberant roughhousers and photogenic smilers who attracted cameramen like flies. Jack named them, in order of birth, John Fitzgerald, Jr., and John Morgan; to avoid confusion they were called Fitz and Skipper. It was Morgan’s idea to name them both for their father; she reckoned that this doubling of doubles would intrigue the tabloids.
Jack’s love for the boys was as real as it was instantaneous. Even Morgan believed that they had truly awakened his heart. She herself had no particular feeling for her sons, and came into physical contact with them only at political rallies or when having her picture taken with them. The twins, who ignored her as she ignored them, seemed to sense that they had some sort of pre-agreed nonaggression pact with their mother. They never fussed when she plopped them down on her lap or offered them a non-gender-specific toy while the kliegs and strobes bathed them in their pitiless glare. (She stopped offering them dolls after, at age one, they dismembered a Barbie on camera, one pulling off the golden head, the other the lissome legs.)
Jack, on the other hand, could not get enough of his kids. He fed them their bottles, changed their diapers, rolled on the floor growling with both of them guffawing in his arms, bought them bicycles and footballs and bats long before they could possibly use them. Even when they were infants he took them everywhere it was possible to take them. He bought them a double pram and, later on, when they could sit up and wave at the crowd like proper little Kennedys, a double stroller. On sunny mornings he would push them as far as Morgan’s office, conversing delightedly with his tiny passengers as he went. The twins were as taken with him as he was with them, and on these outings they would gaze upward at their father, fascinated by the chortling happy noises and the grinning faces he made for them. Fitz and Skipper really were identical—so alike that Morgan habitually called them by the wrong names.
Photos of the Adamses peppered the newspapers and local television. Even People ran a picture—Jack holding the handsome boys on his knees, all three males smiling identical grins, and Morgan standing behind, a bespectacled Madonna with her own secret smile, steadying fingertips on her proud husband’s shoulders. “3 Jacks, Queen High,” read the Time-style caption.
6 Despite this image of perfect happiness, Morgan continued to suspect Jack of bedding nearly every woman he met. She accused him of having affairs with female lawyers he met in the course of his duties, of using his radio show and campaign speeches as means of lining up quickies with his listeners, and especially of using the miniskirted reporter who still waylaid him on his morning walks as what she called his back-up fuck: “What do you do, give her an interview if nothing else is available and hump her on the desk?” Jack denied all, especially the reporter. “I’d screw a cobra quicker than a journalist,” he said. His denials availed him nothing. Morgan was convinced that no one with Jack’s sex drive could go without coitus and look as happy as he did. She knew he was doing it; the unanswered question, the one that drove her into her strange brain-numbing rages, was with whom?
When Jack stayed out late, which was often, Morgan questioned him in furious whispers in the kitchen or the living room. She examined his underwear, sniffing it for traces of female musk. Sometimes she smelled him when he came home late, sniffing his torso like a dog. She went through his pockets. She never found any conclusive evidence, but she knew—knew—that Jack was not living without sex.
Morgan’s reports to me regarding her suspicions of Jack were always presented as operational considerations, never in personal terms. Our discussions on this subject were calm, even tinged with a certain humor; nothing is quite so funny as a bedroom farce as long as it’s not one’s own true love who is slipping through the wrong doors. But underneath Morgan’s worldly nonchalance I sensed the inevitable tension. She may have couched her anxieties in terms of the dangers posed to the operation by Jack’s peccadilloes, and she was right to fear blackmail and even accusations of rape, given Jack’s favorite technique and the many new definitions of this crime that were then being formulated by feminist thinkers. But something primal was involved. I had thought so for a long time; I had discussed the matter with Peter. He had always refused to alter the rules of the operation. He was possessed by the notion that Morgan would channel her sexual energy into operational effectiveness, and that any relief of her pent-up desires would somehow diminish her efficiency as an agent. If it worked for nuns, why not for a bride of Lenin? It would have been futile to point out that it is one thing for a young virgin to renounce the flesh and join a community of penitents and quite another for an experienced woman at the height of her sexuality to be forbidden carnal pleasure while living in the same house as a man who is obsessed with sex. As usual, the idea was all to Peter, the reality nothing; no wonder he commanded such worship from his young idealists. Knowing him as I did, I wondered if he did not have some plan to relieve her stress himself, on some future occasion he had marked on some astrological calendar in his mind.
In any case, my fatherly sympathy for Morgan was such, and her fundamental argument about the danger of Jack’s sex drive compromising the operation was so undeniably correct, that I agreed at last to test her suspicions by putting a tail on the suspect. Limited surveillance, I told her, for a limited purpose for a limited time. I thought it unlikely we would uncover anything more than an occasional quickie, very likely arranged pretty much as Morgan had imagined. I isolated Morgan from the investigation; she would hear the results after we obtained them. If Jack had been smart enough and resourceful enough over a period of years to keep a keen operative like her from finding out anything for certain about his sex life, he would be a wary subject. For all her advanced training and impressive skills, he would have spotted her behind him in a minute, and I assumed he had long since alerted whatever sentries he had posted to be on the lookout for her or anyone who even looked like a snooper in her employ. On the theory that Jack had been too terrified the last time he glimpsed their faces to remember them now, I used two of the three thugs who had shot up the Adamses’ bungalow to such splendid effect three years before.
What my team found, not by actually following Jack, with all the risks that involved, but by identifying the members of the Gruesome whom he called most often on the phone and following them, was this: A sort of Gruesome-within-the-Gruesome existed. A dozen of its members, driven by stranger appetites than their fellows, had banded together to set up what amounted to a safe house in one of those huge multipurpose complexes beloved of American developers. Pooling money, each according to his means, they had leased the penthouse. This penthouse had an elevator of its own that connected it to a vast underground garage that was shared by several other apartment and office buildings and a shopping mall. It was possible, therefore, to enter any of those buildings on foot or in a car, or to stroll through the mall and duck into any of half a dozen staircases, and then walk to the elevator, call it by punching in a code on a keypad, and ascend unnoticed to the top. I
t was an arrangement any intelligence service would have been proud of but few would have possessed the wit to conceive or the funds to support on an ongoing basis.
There was good reason for secrecy. What these Super Gruesomes did in the penthouse was drink good liquor, snort cocaine, and watch pornography on a huge back-projection television screen. Sometimes, usually on a member’s birthday, there were orgies featuring women who shared their tastes, including some very young girls. Such females abounded, and the rule of the house was that no female could be invited more than once. No wonder Jack loved the place and spent about half his salary in its support.
After defining the target, my men installed the usual devices, and we soon had a rich archive of videotapes, still photographs, and audiotapes. From this trove of real-life pornography the technicians winnowed a selection of Jack’s performances, and at our next operational meeting, in a motel in Parkersburg, West Virginia, I showed Morgan a montage. Even for surveillance tape, even for amateur pornography, it was remarkably boring footage, because only the girls changed. Jack’s technique, described earlier, was always exactly the same. Enter Jack and partner. A snuggle, a murmur or two. Jack pounces. The girl’s surprised outcry, part grunt, part gasp, part shriek, part giggle. The marathon coupling, always the same positions in the same sequences, the girl moaning, shouting. Because Jack apparently preferred to fornicate in the dark, these images were in infrared, in which he and his partners were perfectly recognizable but surreal, like transparent lovers risen from the tomb to repeat as ether what had delighted them as flesh.
Lucky Bastard Page 26