Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Street’s face twisted. “Damn!” he said. He whirled, turning his back to Cindy, and sneezed. Finally, he faced her and said, “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Fine, you’ve got sixty seconds,” Cindy said. “Danny gets a deal or I walk away and you’ve got nothing. No documentation. No witness. No case.”

  “You have documentation?”

  “I am in a strong position,” Cindy said. “What’s your answer?”

  Street said, “He’ll have to serve some time.”

  “All right, but the absolute minimum. And not in a bad place.”

  “He’ll have to testify.”

  “I don’t think he’ll do that.”

  “Then it’s no deal.”

  “You won’t need him. The governor will sing. And yes, there is a paper trail.”

  “You mean it when you say you’re in a strong position on that?”

  “Trust me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’ll tell you that when we have a deal.”

  Street said, “You’ve got the goods, haven’t you, Cindy?”

  She did not answer. She did not have to. Street knew that she had the goods, and that she was using them to buy back Danny’s life.

  He said, “Deal.”

  4 One fine day, the Soviet intelligence service announced to the world that Peter had destroyed it. Not in so many words, of course; voluntary confession in the bright light of day never was its style. But what it did do amounted to full disclosure: It had a clearance sale and closed up shop. The KGB, already calling itself by another name, began to sell off the booty it had accumulated during three quarters of a century of Bolshevik rule. Everything disposable that would bring hard currency went on the block: dachas, apartments in Moscow, works of art from secret vaults, every weapon in the Soviet arsenal—including the complete list of components of nuclear devices.

  Above all, gossip went on sale—suddenly, inexplicably, the deep dark secrets of the late world revolution became available to anyone who believed sufficiently in their genuineness to buy them, cash on the barrelhead. This was the signal I had been waiting for. It could mean only one thing: These treasures, this archive of the most extensive espionage enterprise in the history of the world, this chimera that had cost trillions of rubles and consumed millions of lives and kept the USSR in the Dark Ages, was no longer of any value to its owners. The only value the files had ever had was their secrecy. And Peter had already sold that to the CIA. The KGB was counterattacking. Thanks to Peter, the last traitor to the cause, the CIA knew all of its secrets? Fine, so would the whole world. Moscow would turn treasure into junk.

  Eager buyers flocked to Russia; nearly all went away with a macabre souvenir of the late lamented Socialist motherland. It waslike Zorba the Greek, the scene in which the old prostitute dies and while her corpse cools on the bed the villagers come into her house and strip the sheets and loot her house of all her pathetic treasures. Russian communism had become the dead whore of history—just as Peter had known it would.

  Only Peter had had the vision to steal the old harlot’s most valuable asset while she was still alive. He must act soon—sell short. But how, and to whom, and for how much?

  I began to look for him in earnest.

  5 Action proceeds from character. Peter had always believed that he could control any situation, dominate any human being or combination of people and events. He would not change now, no matter what outward changes the forgers and plastic surgeons of the CIA may have wrought. Next to intrigue he loved comfort, and next to comfort he loved beauty. As soon as his business with the CIA was over, Peter would go to a warm climate—not some backwater, but a place where the action was, a mecca for the young, the beautiful, and the lost who were the raw material of his art.

  That was why I was in Miami Beach. With its Art Deco revival, the very name of which suggested decadence—drugs, sex, mind-lessness—it was the Now Place. It was Peter’s kind of place, ready-made for his purposes, the spa of the rebellious children of the American Nomenklatura. And unlike Los Angeles, another likely destination, it was not a media center. Peter could not live without a circle of disciples—boys and girls, beautiful and willing to belong to him in mind and body. He did not have time to wait for them to come to him; he did not have the power in the USA, as he had had in the USSR, to send out scouts to bring them to him. He would go to where they already were and announce his presence with the party of the year. Then he would gather the sheaves. He was a born guru. Whatever he called himself, whatever he preached, wherever he was, disciples would gather.

  Identify the disciples and find Peter. Find out by watching them what Peter had in mind for Jack Adams. Those were my objectives. I was driven by a compulsion; I will not hide this from you. I no longer trusted the only Russian I had ever trusted, and I wanted to know the reason why.

  Every day or two I took a bus from Surfside, my blighted neighborhood, down Collins Avenue to South Beach and wandered along the oceanfront among the disciples-in-waiting. What a wonderful beach, what an amazing place; it was like reading Dante in blinding sunlight. How beautiful are American faces and bodies, how empty these souls, how arrogant American shame in its disguise as exhibitionism.

  I did not imagine that I would bump into Peter himself. Instead, I was looking for a sign of him, something I could follow to his lair. Sooner than I had hoped, I found it. I had had no idea that the sign would be such an unmistakable one: Igor. He was standing by the pool behind the Delano Hotel, talking to a tall girl in a bikini. Her skin, all but six square inches of it on display, was the color of honey, her hair a blue-black cape. Her eyes, which passed over me in contempt, were very large and blue, and had the epicanthic fold. Half Chinese, half Caucasian, with breasts grown in America and nowhere else in the known universe.

  I followed Igor and this goddess home, to a houseboat moored in the Intracoastal Waterway just a few blocks away. A week later I moved into an apartment in a high-rise that had an unobstructed view from its balcony of the houseboat, and a day or two after that, while sipping a glass of tea, I saw Peter. He emerged from the houseboat with the honey-colored girl by his side and got into a seventy-five-thousand-dollar BMW. She held the door for him.

  I studied them through binoculars. Same Peter. Tall, elegant, nonchalant. He belonged in Miami Beach as he belonged everywhere. No plastic surgery, not even a change in hair color. What was the point? The damage was done, and who in Moscow knew what might happen if they laid a finger on him and offended their new friends, the CIA? The apparatchiks were trying to forget him and get on with their new lives and marriages, not turn him into a ghost that would haunt them forever.

  6 At the party convention, Jack was nominated for the presidency on the first ballot after he offered second place on the ticket to the only one of his rivals cynical enough to accept it and throw his delegates to Jack. This man, a wealthy U.S. senator, accepted because, like most of his powerful friends in politics and journalism, he did not imagine that Jack could win or survive long in office if he did. In the latter case, he, the senator, would be president.

  “The vice presidency is like the last cookie on the plate,” the senator’s wife told Morgan in an extra-plummy Seven Sisters voice. “Nobody wants it, but somebody always takes it.”

  Morgan turned away without reply; she was not one to laugh at the class enemy’s jokes. Public appearances were another matter, so the two women, both young, slim, and comely, held hands on the convention stage—even danced a few steps of the exuberant dance that now went with the tune of “Jack, Jack, Jack!”

  All this ersatz excitement notwithstanding, the incumbent president looked unbeatable; his campaign was rolling in money. The popularity polls gave him a huge lead. Jack’s percentage of the vote was estimated at 35 percent or less.

  In private, in Morgan’s room, Jack was desperate. Even though his campaign would now receive tens of millions of dollars in federal funds and his party would be obli
ged for appearances’ sake to supply additional millions, Jack was in desperate financial straits. His own treasury was empty and he was millions of dollars in debt. Even with the nomination sewed up, frantic efforts to raise additional funds continued to fall short. Few big donors wanted to gamble large contributions on a sure loser—especially one like Jack, who was as slippery as a trout when it came to signing political IOUs. The smart money flowed to the Republican president and to candidates for Congress, not to this compulsively talkative outsider who had systematically concealed his true beliefs—assuming he had any—from voters and party leaders alike. All the world knew Jack’s face and voice; nobody knew Jack, even though he seemed to be willing to answer any question put to him, no matter how personal.

  Every day when they saw each other for the first time, Jack raised his eyebrows to Morgan, asking the silent question: Had Peter come back, bringing with him the millions he had promised? And every day Morgan shook her head no. Not yet.

  Then, to everyone’s astonishment except his own, Jack’s luck took a hand. The incumbent president had been seen by the conservatives in his party as not being conservative enough. A rump group of extreme right-wing voters—the same people who, as Dixiecrats, had in former times deserted the Democratic Party in periodic fits of racist pique—now deserted the Republicans and formed a third party. Few took this movement seriously. However, there was an almost immediate groundswell of support for the simplistic ideas of the third party’s nominee, a self-made billionaire who seemed to be in urgent need of psychiatric intervention. Jack called him “the Nutcase.” The Left loathed and feared this man and his movement. But Jack immediately understood that the mad tycoon was a good omen—that his, Jack’s, sardonic father in heaven had taken a hand in events.

  “This means we’re going to be elected,” he told his dispirited staff. “We can do it with forty percent of the vote if the Nutcase takes away enough votes from the president to deny him the electoral votes of states that he needs to win.”

  Few thought that Jack really believed this, but he did. Like JFK in 1960, he would concede certain states where his opponent was strong and concentrate his campaign in battleground states where a few thousand popular votes could decide the outcome. He knew he had found the door to the presidency; he was sure of this. But to unlock it he needed at least thirty million dollars more to spend on attack ads in battleground states in the last, vital days of the campaign.

  By now Morgan had absolute trust in Jack’s political instincts, if in nothing else about him. She saw the same opportunity Jack saw. She was frantic. Only a call from Peter could save them now. She carried the cell phone I had given her at our final meeting in the McDonald’s parking lot. She kept it on her person in waking hours; it recharged on her bedside table when she slept.

  It never rang. When would the promised messenger come, speaking the code words that meant rescue and power and possession of the U.S. government and the beginning of the end of evil in the world?

  As the hourglass of the campaign ran out, Jack asked Morgan that question every single day.

  “Soon,” she said.

  “It had better be damn soon,” Jack replied.

  7 On the morning after the nomination, in a rumpled bed in a hotel in California, Danny told Morgan about his conversation with Cindy. He had her full attention immediately.

  She said, “Why didn’t you tell me this right away?”

  “I wasn’t sure what she was going to do.”

  “But she’s gone to Merriwether Street?”

  “I’m not sure. I think she may have.”

  “Street is the biggest dumb shit in the country.”

  “Close. But he’s also the U.S. attorney.”

  “That’s right. And he hates Jack. And if he fucks around with us, he’ll lose.”

  Was Morgan as unworried as she seemed, as arrogant? Danny said, “Don’t be too sure of that, Morgan. I don’t know whether this has occurred to you and Jack, but practically everyone you know has become a felon in the process of trying to help you. The bank alone—”

  Morgan did not want to hear this. “The bank is cool,” she said. “It’s going to fail. The governor made some bad calls. It’s a judgment issue. He’ll walk away. Not our fault.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Danny, trust me. Are you going to rat on Jack?”

  “No, but—”

  “Okay, that’s the key,” Morgan said. “Go back to Columbus. Talk to Merriwether Street. Warn him to be careful. Tell him about your fight with Cindy.”

  Danny said, “It wasn’t a fight.”

  “Of course it was a fight. She’s got some wild idea that you and I are lovers, and this is the way she’s getting her revenge. Merriwether will never believe that Danny Miller, all-American, is capable of adultery. Especially if you’re married to Cindy. Have you ever noticed the way he looks at her?”

  Danny felt a pang of jealousy. “A lot of people look at Cindy.”

  “Danny, do as I ask. Please.”

  “I can’t do that to Cindy.”

  “Do what to Cindy? Save her from making a fool of herself in front of the whole world, of making an enemy of everyone who’ll want to get next to Jack when he’s president?”

  “She doesn’t see it that way.”

  Morgan said, “Then she’s got a real problem with her future, because that’s the way it’s going to be. Jack will be the most powerful man in the world and she’ll be an ex-prom queen.”

  “Morgan, come off it,” Danny said. “Jack’s not going to hurt Cindy.”

  “Not personally. If you care about her you’ll save her from herself. Merriwether Street is a right-wing prick who will do anything to get Jack. You really want him to use your wife to destroy your best friend and get yourself locked up for thirty years?”

  Danny was silent. Morgan said, “I remind you that Jack is running for president. That he’s the good guy and the other side are the bad guys. Think, Danny.”

  “I don’t know what to tell Street that would penetrate his skull.”

  “I just got through telling you. Cindy is making the whole thing up out of jealousy.”

  “That’s untrue. It’s simplistic.”

  “Simple is good. Simple works. Tell him.”

  “What am I supposed to tell him after I’ve told him Cindy is crazy?”

  “The truth. The bank is going to fail because it made some bad loans. You tried to give the governor a break, a new opportunity in life, but it just didn’t work out. He fucked up because he’s a born fuckup. We’re the real losers. We can live with that. Bad luck. End of story.”

  “It won’t fly,” Danny said. “Let me talk to Jack.”

  8 Back in Columbus, zealously but secretly, F. Merriwether Street had been pursuing his case against the Adamses. But because he did not yet have solid proof, and because he feared that left-wingers in the Department of Justice would tip off their masters in the party, if not Jack and Morgan, and also because he wanted all the credit for himself, he had not told Washington what he was doing. He had not even told his staff or his father or his uncle. Only he and Cindy, poring over documents in the cellar of the Victorian mansion in Tannery Falls night after night, were in on the secret. Their meetings resembled lovers’ assignations: cryptic phone calls,separate cars, lies, and an intimacy that was deepened by the thrill of the forbidden and the fear of discovery. Street had always known that Cindy was beautiful and desirable; as a result of their furtive hours together, these qualities were no longer an abstraction. There she was, within reach. Nothing happened between them, of course; nothing could.

  Nevertheless, their relationship troubled Merriwether Street’s conscience. He was a puritan, the heir to old money and old obligations. He believed strongly in the public trust as the highest expression of a Christian life next to fidelity in marriage and stern but loving fatherhood. He was a model of probity, a man who kept a tight rein on his appetites. He loved his wife and had never betrayed he
r with another woman and never would. In fact he had never had another woman even before marriage. He was a dutiful father, but in that respect as in so many others he was Jack’s opposite.

  With every passing day, Street was more and more certain that Jack and Morgan were criminals, that the bank was only the tip of the vast iceberg of their evil works, that it was not important in itself but for whatever larger criminal conspiracy it had been designed to cover up. At the same time he worried incessantly that Jack and Morgan, in their ruthlessness, would trump him again, that in spite of all he knew, in spite of his honor and sense of duty, they would win again and he would be the one who was destroyed.

  That did not deter him from his duty. While Jack’s triumphant homecoming parade was still in progress, Danny called on Street in his office in the federal courthouse. On the other side of the building, which faced the parade route, drums and bugles blared wind-snatched bars of “Jack, Jack, Jack!” as the bands marched past the reviewing stand where Jack and Morgan were waving merrily and the twins, in matching sailor suits, were snapping off salutes.

  Street listened without expression to Danny’s story. Then he asked a single question: Where did the twenty-seven-million-dollar deposit—the working capital that brought down the bank—come from?

  Danny did not answer.

  Street said, “You don’t know or you won’t say?”

  “It’s irrelevant. And anyway, it’s a confidential matter protected by lawyer-client privilege. I am here as the bank’s lawyer.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Danny said, “Good luck. But you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  For a while Street sat in heavy silence as if listening intently to Jack’s exuberant song. People were dancing in the streets. Mass foreplay. He had to admit that pinkos had more fun. Finally he said, “Okay, Miller, have it your way. You have the right to remain silent. And maybe that’s what you should do. But I know what kind of money that twenty-seven million was, and how it smelled. And you can tell your friends in the drug business that they’re going to go down, and that you and your co-conspirators are going to go down with them. That’s a promise.”