Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Peter was reading a report on his new bank. My words produced an uninterested lifting of the eyes, a shrug. What else was new?

  I persisted. “At one point, Comrade General, you suggested that the time would come when Morgan would have to become a more traditional American political wife.”

  Needless to say, he had never said any such thing, and probably realized this. Nevertheless he said, “Yes?” Just as if he really had made such a foresighted suggestion at an earlier time and was just too tired to remember it.

  I said, “I wonder if the time has now come.”

  Peter, his eyes still fixed on the page, said, “Why now, after all these years?”

  “Because we are moving into a new stage. Togetherness is important to Americans.”

  Until now, the cover story for Morgan’s apartness, designed to protect Jack from being contaminated should her cover ever be blown, had been that the Adamses were a loving and devoted but very private couple, and that Morgan insisted on leading her own professional life, quite independent of her husband’s political career.

  “And now what will she do?” Peter asked. “Gaze adoringly as he delivers speeches? Entertain political ladies to tea?”

  “She already does that when he’s out campaigning. What I have in mind is a physical transformation. This is called a makeover.”

  I saw that Peter was confused by the word, a most satisfactory result. He said, “Come to the point.”

  “New hair, new clothes, cosmetics. Manners. She must leave the costume of revolution behind her.”

  “Why?” said Peter. “Isn’t her dowdiness an advantage—handsome governor loves plain-Jane wife?”

  “In Ohio, perhaps. But when he runs for president he’ll need a princess by his side. Not a maid of Stalingrad.”

  A bad joke. But Peter said, “Very well. Make her over. Tell her it is my desire, my order.” He smiled, actually amused. “I wish I could be a fly on the wall when you give her the news.”

  I raised the matter with Morgan the next time we met, about three weeks later when a convention on women’s rights brought her to Manhattan. We dined late, at an expensive East Side Japanese restaurant. At the time sushi was a bourgeois fad and we were surrounded by an after-theater crowd who joked knowledgeably with aloof sushi-makers and kimonoed waitresses about negi toro and hamachi and uni, as if they were chatting about nose and finish with a sommelier. This made me gruff. We ordered tempura, the only cooked dish on the menu. I ate the shrimp, Morgan the vegetables. Then I passed on Peter’s instructions to Morgan. After absorbing the words she went as still as a doe.

  “What exactly are you talking about?” she said.

  I explained: a change in appearance as well as a change in role. New style, new personality, a certain new demureness, contact lenses instead of glasses. Dyed hair. Maquillage. Her jaw dropped.

  “Carmine fingernails,” I said, attempting to lighten the moment.

  She threw down her chopsticks and made a wordless sound of disgust.

  A flash of revolutionary temper, strangled shout: “Dmitri, I’ll be god—”

  I said, “Argument is futile. This is Peter’s wish.”

  Of course she did not stop arguing. As if I were a lover who had gotten her into bed by spouting Engels and then asked her to convert to Republicanism (not a bad analogy, in her mind), Morgan told me furiously that she was what she was, take it or leave it. She would lose all credibility with her clientele, with the Movement, they would denounce her as a sellout—

  “Believe me,” I said, “they will not. In their secret hearts they all want to be starlets.”

  “That’s insulting.”

  “Nonsense. Think of it as a disguise, an extension of your trade-craft, another way to blind the enemy.”

  “Jesus, but you’re diabolical. Everything is a revolutionary act.”

  “If coldly considered, yes.”

  I handed Morgan a business card for a charm farm in Florida.

  She said, “The Aphrodite? The Aphrodite? In Palm Beach, for Christ’s sake? I can’t go to Florida. I’ve got a million—”

  I said, “They are expecting you tomorrow. It will take a week for them to transform you, so be sure to call your husband.”

  “And tell him what?”

  I leaned toward her. “That you will have a surprise for him.”

  “Don’t wink at me, Dmitri,” she said. “I hate it.”

  But even at that early stage, one could see that she was not nearly so reluctant as she made out. She was human, after all, and female. Perhaps her Leonardo awaited her in Palm Beach, ready, like the original, to lead the dull young wife out of the mortal flesh and onto the canvas as the immortal Gioconda.

  I said, “One little smile?”

  Morgan obliged, tight-lipped and empty-eyed, as if she had read my thought. “Do you want a photograph of the results?” she asked.

  “I will have a personal report from a certain Georgian who will be in Palm Beach on business.”

  She smiled. “You think of everything.”

  In cold revolutionary terms, yes. And as might have been expected, he fell in love with this redesigned Morgan all over again, just as he had done with all her previous personae.

  2 A week later, when Morgan came home to the governor’s mansion, she found Jack playing cars on the floor with the twins. He did not recognize her at first; neither did Fitz and Skipper, who seldom saw her anyway.

  Then Jack said, “Shazam! It’s Mommy, guys!”

  “No it’s not,” said Fitz, kicking her on the ankle.

  Morgan had been transformed—flowing coiffure, face elaborately made up, sleek designer suit, long depilitated legs seldom before glimpsed by the eyes of man, pedicured feet in sling-back high heels. Her large eyes, always before swimming behind thick lenses, were now exposed, moist and dreamy and slightly out of focus, a most attractive effect, beneath new contact lenses that made them subtly greener than they really were. Perfume wafted from her hair, from the creases of her flesh.

  “Good God, how did you get past security?” Jack said.

  Morgan said, “They recognized my voice when I raised it. But I’m supposed to work on that, be more kittenish.”

  “But why?”

  “Orders from Peter. It’s a disguise, to get you more votes. How do you like it?”

  Morgan tossed her luxuriant hair, dark blond but crackling with auburn lights. Jack laughed aloud.

  “Yeah, baby,” he said. “That’s stimulating.”

  “Forget it, baby,” Morgan replied.

  To Morgan’s friends on the Left who were distressed by this abrupt transformation, she told the simple truth: This Morgan was an impersonation, a necessary tactic, a way like any other to wage revolution. The reassurance was not really necessary. As I had predicted, they loved the way she was now—the Red Avenger as Barbie. Such a delicious joke!

  For many years, as you know, Jack had been telling true believers to ignore appearances and believe in him as an act of faith. As he explained, “As long as these people think you’re lying for a good cause, their cause, you can get away with anything.” For Jack Adams, bastard son—in his mind at least—of JFK, a reincarnated Caligula who convinced the world that he was really young King Arthur, this was blood wisdom.

  Caligula’s court, the media, which the old Morgan had avoided like poison while they largely ignored her, was intrigued by the new one and, to her surprise, she by it. This new Morgan was tremendously telegenic. She began to appear with some frequency, then almost compulsively, on talk shows. So charming was her on-camera conversation, so quick her wit, so visible her sympathy for every kind of human being, that there was talk of giving her her own talk show.

  Something else happened. For the first time in years Morgan felt men’s eyes on her, and after years of feigning frigidity she was surprised to find that she enjoyed the heat of their regard, that she liked returning an age-old, slow measured glance that rebuffed and invited at the same time. Even Dan
ny Miller, most faithful of husbands, gave her the occasional appreciative look. They were seeing a good deal more of each other now as a result of their common involvement in the Columbus Bank of the Western Reserve, which was prospering as a result of Morgan’s amazingly good advice as a management consultant. Morgan flirted a little with Danny—nothing much: a flash of thigh, a smile, a physical delight in his jokes. Afterward, lying abed, she felt that he might have made a move, if he were anyone but Danny and she were anyone but Jack’s wife.

  And then what? Alone in the dark, she imagined it in detail.

  3 Though there was no way to be certain, short of submerging him in a diving bell, we had the impression that Jack was living a more orderly sex life. He no longer had his call-in show, and his mobility and privacy had been greatly diminished by the constrictions of high office. Now that he was the governor, he was accompanied at all times by bodyguards. As a precaution against his turning them, JFK-style, into companions of the bedchamber, Morgan took over the job of interviewing and hiring them. Every one she selected was a devout, born-again Christian family man who abhorred sin. This was Jack’s first close-up experience with prudery, but being Jack, he found a way around the problem by arranging daytime rendezvous with seemingly respectable females in the privacy of his office, by combining nighttime political events with quick encounters in parking lots, or by slipping out of the house in the early hours of the morning to jog and then meeting women in the offices of Miller, Adams & Miller before the doors opened.

  Also, quite early in the game he hit on the happy idea of hiring female bodyguards. To prepare the ground for this new personnel policy, he planted stories in the press demanding women’s rights in law enforcement and responded to these stories by announcing that he would set an example by hiring women as guardians of the governor’s person. Applications poured in. On Jack’s instructions to the mail room, the ones with photos attached were routed directly to him. Most of those hired were young, pretty, and eager for promotion. He also had the power to appoint a large number of state officials, and the markedly higher standard of pulchritude among secretaries, clerks, tax collectors, and even judges soon became a running joke in press rooms and political back rooms.

  “What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Morgan asked Jack.

  “I thought you wanted me to appoint women to office,” he said.

  “Women, yes,” said Morgan. “A harem, no.”

  “Morgan, what a strange and suspicious mind you have. I am compelled by laws lobbied by your own clients to appoint women to every feasible post.”

  “What are you going to do when one of them sells her story to the tabloids? THE GOVERNOR SUCKED MY GUN. I WAS A SEX SLAVE IN A STATE TROOPER UNIFORM. Not that they spend much time in their cute little outfits, if I know you. And I do.”

  “Look at the files,” Jack said. “Every one of these women is a good Christian girl.”

  “And you know them all in the biblical sense.”

  This development did little to calm the turbulent waters within Morgan. She was, at thirty-seven, a woman at the apex of her sexual life cycle. Her newly revealed beauty had made a sex object of her while doing her no sexual good. She had not had a rendezvous with the Georgian since the makeover in Palm Beach. But beyond that she was outraged because Jack had outwitted and outmaneuvered her yet again. Her tantrums over the risks Jack was taking with the operation—her operation—became more frequent and more violent as the intensity of her jealousy increased in lockstep with her frustration. Jack saw this, she knew he did; he understood it. He did nothing to allay it because, by the ground rules laid down by Peter, it had nothing to do with him.

  On a spring night, after a bank board meeting, Morgan came back to the mansion to find Jack, as usual, absent. She was unable to sleep and unable to do anything for herself that would be an aid to sleep. She decided to go down to the office to do some work in her safe room.

  The door was rigged so that all the lights went on when the latch was lifted. Stepping over the threshold she found herself in the presence of a naked Jack, who was entwined on the library table with a ripe young bodyguard. The woman’s shiny pistol harness lay on a bank box full of laundered currency, beneath her gray trooper’s Stetson with its big chrome badge. Her perma-polished boots were crossed in the small of Jack’s back. She had one leg out of her whipcord trousers, and true to Jack’s ritualized methods, she still wore her skewed panties. They were white, sleazy, lacy. She screamed when the lights came on. Jack continued as if hypnotized, undaunted by the light or maybe unaware of it in his single-mindedness. The girl gazed at Morgan with frantically rolling eyes—stupid with fright. Morgan had seen the same look in the eyes of rutting dogs.

  All this was happening, remember, in Morgan’s room—the holy of holies, the refuge, the safe place, the inner sanctum to which only she knew the entry code. A sense of angry violation seethed in Morgan’s breast. How did he get in?

  The girl trooper was trying to push Jack off. He seemed unaware of her resistance. In a piercing voice, staring wildly into Morgan’s furious face, she cried, “Jack! Jack!”

  Jack did not seem to hear her. She tried to slither from beneath him, scooting backward across the tabletop. With astonishing agility, refusing to withdraw, he pursued her across the table, pumping rhythmically. Morgan, fascinated—it was like being Jack to observe him in this state—saw that his eyes were tightly closed and realized that he really did not know that the lights were on, that he really could not hear voices, that all his senses were concentrated on the single part of his body that he was thrusting into the wild-eyed girl. She was now backed into the wall, forced into a sitting position, unable to move. Her eyes stared, but into space; she groaned. Morgan realized that in spite of all the distractions, she was having an orgasm.

  Morgan was seized by rage as if by an enormous primeval animal that shook her, suffocating her, blurring her vision. She snatched up the trooper’s revolver. It was a .357 Magnum Colt Python with a six-inch barrel, a most intimidating weapon. Shrieking in primal fury, she fired all six rounds in the cylinder, rapid-fire, into the wall above the girl’s tousled head. Morgan was an excellent pistol shot, highly trained. The bullets landed very close, in a tight pattern.

  The girl screamed in terror. Jack finished. This seemed to restore his hearing. Still on his hands and knees, still one flesh with his lover, he looked over his shoulder and said, “Jesus Jumping Christ, Morgan.”

  Morgan broke open the revolver, ejected the shells, plucked a fresh load from the pouch on the trooper’s harness, and snapped the cylinder shut. White-faced, teeth clenched, wild-eyed with an anger that she all too plainly did not wish to control, she cocked the weapon, click-click, and pointed it at the girl. She was now sitting on Jack’s lap, her body between him and the gun. She struggled to escape, but Jack’s arms were locked tightly around her waist.

  Frozen by terror, the girl said, “No, no, please.”

  Morgan said, “Get off my husband’s cock and get your white-trash ass out of here before I blow another hole in it.”

  “Oh Mary, Mother of God!” cried the girl. She struggled to escape from the death grip in which Jack held her, but he would not let go, and they both tumbled off the table. The girl leaped to her feet, took one running step, became entangled in her whipcord breeches, and went sprawling. Morgan kicked her hard on the seat of her twisted panties. She crawled rapidly through the door, sobbing.

  Morgan closed the door behind her. Hand steady as a rock, she pointed the revolver at Jack’s still-glistening member.

  “I’m only going to ask this question once,” she said. “How did you get in here?”

  Jack’s teeth chattered. “Seven-three-eight-three-seven,” he responded.

  “I know what you know. How did you know?”

  “Just guessed.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Jack. How did you know the combination?”

  “Well, Jesus, Morg, it didn’t take a rocket scientist. What’s your
biggest secret? The numbers on the keypad spell ‘Peter’ backwards and forwards.”

  Morgan threw the cocked revolver at him. A fully loaded Colt Python weighs almost four pounds. It hit him on the scalp, opening a tiny but gushing wound, and went off at the precise same moment, sending one more high-velocity, metal-jacketed round slamming into the wall.

  In the tiny moment of consciousness left to him, Jack thought he had been shot. Was this his fate, to be murdered by a madwoman he had been forbidden to fuck? To be blown away by a jealous wife who was no wife?

  4 When Jack awoke, he found Danny Miller standing over him, his arms around Morgan, who was hysterical.

  Danny said, “Hi. How do you feel?”

  Jack touched his scalp and looked at his hand. “Jesus, the blood,” he said.

  “Just a scalp wound.”

  Danny was calm, reassuring, smiling over Morgan’s shuddering shoulder. He handed Jack a set of car keys.

  “Take my car. I’ll catch a ride with Morgan.”

  After Jack left, Danny attempted to comfort Morgan. She was crying again, sobbing, beating her fists against the soft panels of the soundproof walls. She wore a pleated knee-length skirt that swung prettily with the movements of her body. Danny gazed at her mismatched legs—so like his own, except that each of Morgan’s was perfect in its own way. He was aware, too, of the beauty of the rest of her body, and of her ravaged but lovely face. The transformation of the frigid drab he had known for years into this wildly sobbing homicidal beauty was profoundly disorienting.

  Feeling his eyes on her, Morgan turned to him, looked long into his eyes, and then uttered a loud sob and held out her arms. The heartbroken sound she was uttering seemed to come not from the Morgan who stood before him but from some much earlier and much smaller and much younger and vulnerable Morgan. A Morgan who could hide nothing from him.

  Moments later, with the feral scent of Jack and the trooper still faintly present in the stale air of the sealed room, the inevitable happened. Then again, and again. Morgan poured a dozen years of frustration, anger, and lust for revenge—not to mention her Swallow wisdom—into a frenzied marathon of sex that lasted until dawn. By then Danny was in the grip of what he knew was a sexual obsession from which the richly aromatic, nude, and purring Morgan, regarding him with an air of satisfied ownership, would never let him escape. As for Morgan, she found that she was strangely excited by Danny’s wounds, aroused by the pornographic rush of making love to a man who had lost his perfect body in battle against the Viet Cong. It gave her a wonderful sense of power, as if he were her prisoner.