Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Morgan watched, rigid with fascination. She controlled her breathing with difficulty. As girl succeeded girl—Jack appeared to find a new and very willing partner almost every day—I expected her to say, Enough. But she watched the screen fixedly—compulsively might be the better word—until the show was over. Then, feigning amusement with an almost complete lack of success, she said, “Jack missed his calling. The son of a bitch should have been a porn star.”

  Clearly she was in a state of desire—this was obvious to several of my own dulled senses. But something deeper was going on. She was jealous. She twitched with it. She was sick with anger. Like any normal American wife, she regarded her husband as her property and looked on other women, all of them, as a threat to her rights over him. That she was also his handler, that she had been entrusted and given authority over him by the revolution, only intensified her boiling emotions.

  At last she cleared her throat violently and then said in a normal, perfectly steady voice, “It’s a hopeless case. He’s in the grip of a psychotic compulsion. It’s folly to think we can control it. Do you agree?”

  I did not agree. What I had seen on the surveillance tape was quite understandable human behavior, no more perverse in its way than a prude insisting on the missionary position. Sex creates patterns by providing a pleasure worth repeating. Carefully, I said, “I agree that he will do it again, many times.”

  “Would you say this is a bad situation?”

  I nodded. What was she leading up to?

  “In that case,” Morgan said, “I have a suggestion.”

  I waited encouragingly. Morgan crossed her trousered legs, hugged herself, leaned toward me, dropped her voice. “Do you remember,” she asked, “what Peter told Jack in Palma about János Kádár?”

  I most certainly did. No doubt it was a vivid memory to Jack, too. I said, “Yes. What about it?”

  “That may be the only solution for Jack.”

  In my long and in many respects unusual life I have often had the wind knocked out of me. But never quite so violently as on this occasion.

  I said, “Comrade Captain, you amaze me.” My tone was harsh, angry. Castrate him? I could have killed her. She took my reaction as delighted surprise. She was oblivious to my real mood. While I recovered my self-control she went on, enumerating the advantages of turning Jack into a eunuch. It occurred to me she was insane—not in her whole being, but in this narrow little strip of it that burned with her hatred, not only of Jack, but—

  I interrupted. “Morgan, the answer is no.”

  She was flabbergasted. “But—”

  “Morgan,” I said. “No.”

  “But why? It’s so obvious!”

  What would convince her? I said, “Because he’s not Kádár and we are not in Hungary and it is not 1955 and I am not Beria.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  By now I was calmer; I said, “Let me ask you a question: Is it not the first principle of this operation that Jack, our asset, can come to power—supreme power—on the basis of his personality?”

  “Yes.”

  “His unique and sparkling personality?”

  I was not smiling. Neither was Morgan, suddenly a darling daughter who was taking my refusal hard. She said, “If you say so.”

  “Not ‘if I say so.’ I am asking you if you acknowledge this reality. Answer.”

  She looked this way and that for some sort of psychic escape hatch but saw none. I was playing the commissar to the hilt. Finally she gave me a tight little nod, lips compressed, eyes defiant. A child betrayed by the person she had trusted most.

  “Very well,” I said. “What do you think will happen to the sparkle if you cut off his balls?”

  She thought and thought. “You have a point,” she said at last.

  I merely nodded. Within me, anger still boiled. I had not felt such emotion in years. Perhaps I was as irrational on this subject as she was on another. But how could she imagine?

  She was chastened by my disapproval, but by no means struck dumb. “What are we going to do about this?” she asked.

  “That is not your concern. It will be handled.”

  She flinched. Even before this meeting—though I confess I never expected the dialogue to take the turn it took—I had decided to take certain steps to resolve the situation, Peter or no Peter. My solution was unorthodox, but justified by circumstances. It was a matter of saving the operation by saving Morgan from herself, because the problem was not Jack. It was Morgan. It was essential that the tension be broken.

  I left her without bestowing the usual comradely kisses on her cheeks.

  7 In all the years that I had managed his life, Jack Adams had never seen me, as he might have put it, one on one. In theory he did not even know that I existed. Nevertheless, taking into account that evening in the Italian restaurant in Manhattan and Jack’s famous gift for remembering faces, I wore a disguise when we met for the first time. Jack was quite visibly surprised when, at four-thirty in the afternoon, his usual hour of assignation, he stepped onto the elevator to the Gruesome penthouse and found a stocky man wearing a highly realistic gorilla mask already aboard. He recoiled momentarily, as who would not, but after I gave him a friendly waggle of the fingers he grinned and stepped inside. Who could this frolicsome creature be but a fellow Gruesome on his way up to the penthouse for a bit of fun?

  The elevator rose. Jack, eyeing me in amusement, said, “Ed?”

  I shook my head. Jack grinned. I said, “Welcome to the country of the blind.”

  Jack fell back against the wall of the car. His face turned white. A tremor swept downward as if a plug had been pulled in his nervous system, releasing a pent-up torrent of dread. In rapid sequence his eyes fluttered, his head shook, his breath became shallow, his shoulders hunched, his hands fluttered, his knees trembled, his shoes scraped on the carpeted floor in a pantomime of instinctive flight. I had never seen anything like it. I stopped the elevator.

  “Be calm,” I said. “I am your friend.”

  Jack was anything but calm. However, he seemed to be recovering himself, so I waited, breathing moistly inside the ill-fitting mask and observing him through the tiny eyeholes. It was like being inside a primitive pinhole camera: The image was too large for the point of light in which it was captured.

  Finally Jack said, “Give me a name.”

  I said, “I’ve already given you words you obviously recognize.”

  “I still want a name. Who sent you?”

  “Peter,” I said. This was not strictly true, because this meeting was completely unauthorized, but under the circumstances, perfect veracity was not a consideration.

  Jack shook his head. He had a grip on himself now; there was a glint of humor in his eye. “I wish you people would call first,” he said.

  I told him about the surveillance. On the basis of what I knew about his response to threats, real or imagined, I expected hysteria. However, to my relief Jack took my revelation calmly, even showing a kind of admiration as I described the techniques used and the results obtained. So intense was his interest that I would not have been surprised if he asked to see the pictures we had taken of him and his girlfriends. But he asked no questions. Nor did he seem to be particularly surprised. Given the shocks we had delivered in the past, he must by this time have taken it for granted that Peter and his thugs were everywhere, could do anything, could suborn anyone. How much more efficient than Big Brother was Peter, who understood that he did not have to watch everybody all the time as long as all his assets knew that he could watch them whenever he wished. Paranoia was cheaper than manpower.

  “Okay,” Jack said. “You’ve got me. I have committed fornication. Now what?”

  His bravado amazed me. He was negotiating.

  That being the case, I offered a concession. “We have failed you,” I said. “You were promised safe sex—”

  “I remember,” Jack said.

  Inside the mask, I smiled. I went on: “We did
not deliver. I apologize. But what you are doing to remedy the failure is unsafe. Moreover, it is disturbing the harmony of your relationship with your wife.”

  “My wife? Let me tell you something, my friend—do you have a name?”

  “No. Go on.”

  “Okay. You’re the ones who’ve got a problem, not me. She’s fucking obsessed. This is a woman who loves it, does it like a champ, and she’s supposed to live with her memories for the rest of her life? I’ve got to tell you, it shakes my confidence in you guys that you—”

  “So what are you proposing?” I interrupted. “A resumption of marital relations?”

  “No. It’s too late for that, and if we started fucking she’d only be worse. But an open marriage, that’s another matter.”

  This term was just coming into fashion. I did not quite understand what he meant.

  Jack said, “Do everybody a favor. Order her to get laid and leave me alone. It won’t cure the problem. She wants total control of every atom of my being. Especially my cock.”

  Jack had no idea how right he was, or by what means Morgan had proposed arranging that control. “You make an interesting point,” I said. “But it’s not your wife we’re concerned about. It’s you.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “Because you don’t seem to understand the meaning of discretion.”

  “Really?” Jack said. “How long did it take you to catch me?”

  I said, “After we set out to do so, three days, to be precise. And what we did, others can do. Believe me.”

  “So what? Everybody does it.”

  “Not everybody does it in the next room to cocaine and marijuana and pornography and underage girls doing the hootchy-cootchy for dirty old men—”

  He grinned. “You do have the place bugged—”

  “—and in the company of people who have a lot to gain from bribing the attorney general with sex and drugs—”

  Jack gave me the full Hyannis Port smile. “The flesh is weak.”

  “That’s why they invented blackmail.”

  “Then give me an alternative,” Jack said. “Your problem is, you can’t keep up with the requirements, and even if you could, what you’ve got ain’t what I want. Believe me.”

  Bear in mind, as you listen to Jack, that he was locked in an elevator with a man in a Halloween mask whom he did not know and who might, as far as he knew, turn out to be a mafioso who would murder him or kidnap him. He may have been a physical coward, but he feared no man—and only one woman—when it came to matching wits.

  I said, “Your basic requirement, based on our observations, seems to be roughly four women a week.”

  “You must have been following me around during a slow week. Ten is more like it. A dozen is better.”

  “You seem to have no trouble getting partners. Does someone procure them for you? Tell the truth. This is important.”

  “No. They call in to my radio show during commercials and we chat off the air. I meet them at political rallies, ball games, everywhere. Some are referrals.”

  “Referrals?”

  “They tell their girlfriends. Mostly they’re married. They’re curious. They want what I want, a little nookie with no risk and then goodbye. They have their orgasms, take a shower, and go home and cook supper. And then maybe they have another one to sleep on with good old Harry, who wonders what got into Bobbie Sue.”

  “So you don’t really need this hideout.”

  “If you want discretion, I need something like it,” Jack said. “It’s part of the reason the women show up. They think it’s safe. If they think they’re going to get caught, they won’t take the chance. Why should they, for a two-hour jump?”

  “Are you meeting somebody today?”

  “Why else would I be here?” Jack looked at his watch. “She’s probably downstairs now.”

  “All right,” I said. “I won’t keep you. But make this the last time you use this elevator. Do you understand?”

  I used Peter’s favorite question and voiced it in Peter’s diction. The stimulus worked. Suddenly Jack remembered where he was, who I was, what he was. He nodded obediently.

  “Out loud,” I said.

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “Good,” I said. “Within a month you will receive, at your office, an envelope delivered by messenger. Inside the envelope will be a key and an address. From time to time you’ll receive other packages with the same contents. When you do, drop the old key down a sewer—just like you did in Heidelberg, Jack—and start using the new address. Never install a telephone or cable television in any of these places or bring any sort of an electronic device into them. Do you understand all that?”

  This time he spoke right up. “I understand.”

  “Good. Because the next time someone has to meet you in an elevator the encounter may not end quite so pleasantly.”

  Silence. Solemnity, a rare state in Jack. I turned the key. The elevator rose.

  We arrived at the penthouse. Jack said, “Don’t forget the other side of the equation. I feel for her.”

  I nodded.

  Jack said, “Just a suggestion. Take that thing off on the way down.”

  He got off the elevator. I went down. The young woman waiting at the bottom was dressed as if for dinner at Côte Basque. I held the door open for her. With the incredible efficiency for which the KGB was famous, I had stuffed the gorilla mask beneath my coat. When I lifted my arm to hold the door, it fell out. She paused, looked down, stepped over it, and got right on the elevator.

  As the door closed she smiled a sweet Ohio smile. Brave girl. Pretty ankles, sleepy eyes, wonderful scent. Lucky Jack.

  8 A week later, Morgan opened the door of her motel room in response to my usual signal—a knock, a rattle of the doorknob, two more knocks.

  It was not Dmitri who stood in the doorway, but the Georgian who had been her lover in Cuba. He had nearly knocked me down in his anxiety to find out if Morgan still had her old power to reinvent herself in bed.

  I watched the reunion through the windshield of my parked car, and judging by the expression on Morgan’s face when she saw the surprise I had provided—and, of course, understood why—the Georgian needn’t have worried.

  Morgan’s Room

  One

  1 No member of Jack’s own party wanted to run against him in the primary election in April, and once again he was fortunate in his opponent for the office of lieutenant governor—the Republican nominee was his old, all-thumbs adversary, F. Merriwether Street. But it was a Republican year, the final year of a disastrous Democratic presidency, and Jack’s party did not provide the money or the organizational support he needed. In fact, frightened as it was by the growing realization that the Right was on the march again, it made no pretense of backing Jack. The fate of the party did not hang on his being elected lieutenant governor, and the regulars didn’t much like him anyway. Many feared him as a threat to their own future ambitions and the Cleveland machine positively hated him, so cash flowed to other candidates who were more important, more conventional, and more deserving. Street, handsomely financed by his family and the rest of the Republican establishment, surprised everyone by running a very strong race, never once putting his foot in his mouth. Hoping to change that, Jack demanded a debate, the losing candidate’s traditional last resort. Street ignored him.

  Jack fell precipitously in the polls. Rumors of his scandalous private life ran through the state. Republican operatives floated scatological Jack jokes. There were allegations—all true, alas—of a secret love nest, of cocaine, of underage girls.

  None of this worried Jack. Rumors of his enviable sex life never made the newspapers because the reporters assigned to investigate them were loath to discredit the media hero they had created—and, just as important, even more reluctant to help his Republican opponent. And even though this harmless little exercise in hypocrisy helped her cause, it gave Morgan another reason to despise the press. Weaklings. Whores. If Jack could u
se them so easily, so could his enemies.

  Jack understood this and of his own volition gave up women for the remainder of the campaign. Although he had lost nothing of his seemingly inborn conviction that he could lie his way out of anything, he understood that not even the most ingenious lie could save him if an enemy obtained pictures of him or planted an agent provocateuse on him. He did not subject his partners to background checks before he invited them to his lair, and the game of friendly rape his women came to play could easily be portrayed as a brutal crime. He knew this would finish him, that no one could protect him in such a case. The badger game, in which the errant wife is surprised in the presence of witnesses by an irate husband and a cameraman, has served politics well. Jack did not throw the key to his secret apartment down a sewer, but knowing himself at least as well as Morgan thought she knew him, he gave it to Danny Miller for safekeeping.

  “Don’t give this back to me before Election Day no matter what I say,” Jack said.

  Danny fingered the envelope and felt the shape of the key inside. There was no need to tell him what lock it fitted.

  Danny said, “This is a truly noble sacrifice.”

  Jack grinned and made an ancient masculine hand movement. “Anything for the cause,” he said.

  “Sit down, I’ve got something to show you,” Danny said. He switched on the television set and put a videotape into the VCR. F. Merriwether Street popped onto the screen. He was giving a stump speech.

  “Jesus,” said Jack, “the eloquence.”

  Danny said, “Pay attention.”

  Street was on the attack. “Ohio is snakebit by drugs,” he cried. “They’re in every school, in too many homes, they are ruining young lives every single day. And, my friends, this happened while my opponent was the chief law enforcement officer of our state. As attorney general he did not prosecute one single significant drug case in four long years. I wonder why. We all wonder why.”