Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Not for long, of course. After a moment her old friend anger came to her rescue. Her eyes, still wet, rested on Trixie Wang, a woman twenty years younger than she, a stupid woman with a stupid name who looked like a stupid centerfold. Trixie enjoys clandestine meetings on Air Force One and kinky sex.

  Morgan said, “One question. Are you two fucking?”

  “Like mad,” Trixie replied. “It soothes the savage beast. Peter never makes the same mistake twice.”

  Jack shrugged, goodbye.

  5 On October 29, the government of the People’s Republic of China announced that the strong U.S. dollar, cynically foisted on the Third World by an arrogant and reckless administration, had created the conditions for a massive economic crash in East Asia. To avoid chaos and great human suffering, China had decided to intervene decisively.

  Ji De Lu, the hitherto obscure party official who had been chosen to make this momentous announcement, explained that China had accumulated massive gold reserves through Western central bank sales. This had happened slowly, over a period of years, and now China’s gold reserves were the largest in the world.

  But there was more. Beneath the desert of Xinjiang province, in the bed of an extinct underground river, Chinese engineers had made a major new find of gold. This discovery, kept secret for ten years for reasons of national security, was now being announced to the world. The new gold mine, called the Victory of Socialism Mine, was the richest in the world, and it was now fully developed. Through intensive use of the most modern methods (read “slave labor”), the Victory of Socialism Mine was producing more gold than all the mines of the former Soviet Union and Africa combined.

  “Therefore,” said the man Jack knew as Mr. Gee, “the government of the People’s Republic of China today announces the full convertibility of the Chinese renminbi, backed by gold at the ratio of one ounce of gold per twenty-four hundred renminbi, or three hundred United States dollars per ounce. We invite all neighbors of China on the rim of Asia to join with the Chinese people and their government in a Pacific Prosperity Zone, in which all their currencies will be pegged to the renminbi.”

  Within hours, all Southeast Asian countries, plus India and the Philippines, had accepted Mr. Gee’s invitation and linked their currency to the new gold-backed renminbi. Despite heavy American pressure, Japan tied the yen to the Chinese currency.

  This series of events, coming one after the other with sickening rapidity, meant that roughly half the world’s population had gone onto the gold standard over a single weekend.

  World currency and capital markets and the New York stock market crashed. It was the worst decline since 1929.

  On Tuesday, Jack Adams was elected president of the United States with a plurality of one twentieth of 1 percent of all popular votes cast, and with the slimmest possible margin in the Electoral College.

  He and Morgan listened to the returns in Tannery Falls. After the president conceded defeat in the wee hours of the morning, the first couple-elect appeared before a rally of thousands of dancing, singing supporters. Jack, who had lost his voice in the final hours of the campaign, was unable to say a word. While he held their sleepy twin sons in his arms, Morgan stepped up to the microphone. “I can’t say it as eloquently as my husband,” she said, “but at this great moment for our country and for all humanity, I can say what Jack Adams in his humility might not say—that the man and the hour have met at last, and that America and the world are going to be different and better and more just and generous because of it. God bless Jack Adams.”

  Smiling more luminously than ever, Jack handed his wife one of the twins, and while she gazed at him with what looked for all the world like adoration, he managed to croak out a single phrase: “God bless America.”

  The crowd sang his name. The twins saluted.

  A network commentator, one of the crustiest veterans of his craft, had the last word. “And so Jack Adams begins and ends with ‘God bless America,’” he said. “That may be a cliché, but clichés are clichés for a reason, and after all maybe there’s a certain poignant symbolism in all this. We can be sure it was a cliché from the heart. As most people know by now, Jack Adams is all heart. He wears it on his sleeve, he carves it on every rhetorical tree he passes. He’s not ashamed of heart, and neither should we be. Looking at Jack Adams, looking at Tannery Falls, Ohio, where he was born and raised, it’s just plain impossible not to believe another cliché—the one that says any American boy, no matter how humble his beginnings, can be president. We’d better believe it, because tonight he walks tall even if he cannot talk. Good night, Peter.”

  The old journalist was addressing a different Peter, but somewhere the real Peter was smiling as broadly as his asset.

  Five

  1 Now I had no one to turn to but Cindy. The day after the election I called her at Miller, Adams & Miller and asked for an appointment to discuss a delicate legal matter. Her voice was familiar to me from the tapes but clearer, more musical, over the phone.

  “I’m not taking on new clients at the moment,” Cindy said. “But I’d be happy to refer you to another lawyer.”

  I said, “Ms. Miller, I want to talk to you because I think I may be able to help your husband.”

  A silence. “Oh? In what way?”

  “You put me in a difficult position. But this is not a crank call. I mention the name Banco Amazones. I mention the sum of twenty-seven million dollars. I’ll talk to you in person about this. Not over the phone.”

  “Five-thirty today,” Cindy said crisply. “You know where we are?”

  “Yes.”

  I was punctual, a matter of training and long practice. The many photographs I had seen of Cindy and the many reports I had read did not prepare me for the reality. There is no beauty like American beauty. Whatever Europeans may say and write in their envy and rancor, there is more to this than diet and dentistry. You look at a former beauty who is Russian or French or English and you see an exile fleeing from lost looks. Life is over and pleasure an impossibility—she is Helen of Troy after Paris’s family lost everything. But American beauty is a palimpsest. The girl Cindy had been was visible in every lineament and gesture of the woman she had become. She could not possibly have been lovelier at eighteen than she was at forty: slim, with skin that glowed, eyes that shone with health, and the hands of a young girl. There was a little blue vein at her temple, faint wrinkles at the eyes. The physical being was not all. Her intelligence and honesty enveloped her like an electrical field. No wonder Morgan had hated her; no wonder fucking a creature like Jack had left this goddess dazed by shame.

  I am a far less impressive specimen. Besides, I could have come from Morgan. As an assassin. Partial as her knowledge was, such a thing was not beyond Cindy’s imagining. Naturally Cindy was suspicious, wary. She did not hide this. She met me herself at the outer door of the office; her secretary had left. We were alone. Nevertheless she seemed perfectly at ease, perfectly unafraid. With another woman I might have suspected a trap: a body wire, a camera in the clock, FBI agents in the next room.

  It didn’t matter. She led me into the book-lined conference room—neutral ground. We sat across the table from each other. She offered nothing to drink, no small talk.

  She said, “Shall we get right down to it?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “You will find what I am going to tell you strange. Even unbelievable. I ask you to keep an open mind, to hear me out to the end. Please do not interrupt. When I have finished, I will be glad to answer any question you care to put to me. Is that agreeable?”

  “All right,” Cindy said. “But on the condition that I may ask you to leave at any point and you will do so.”

  “Agreed.”

  I then told her, in short form, everything that I have told you in this memoir. As we went along, I showed her the corroborating evidence I had brought in a large sample case: The Heidelberg photos of Jack, from the first chilly coupling in the rain to the bank robbery. Tapes both audio and video of everyt
hing that had ever transpired in Morgan’s room, including her assignations with Danny. Tapes of our motel meetings, and of Morgan’s trysts with the Georgian. When she saw this man’s face, Cindy gasped, her only lapse from detached professional behavior. I presented various other proofs: Photocopies of twenty years of reports by Morgan, receipts for operating funds signed and thumbprinted by both Jack and Morgan. Videos of Jack and Mr. Gee together, taken from far away and therefore silent, but with a transcript provided by a lip-reader.

  Through it all, as she watched me undress the monster, she remained a lawyer: unruffled, calm, detached. At the end of it, she did nothing that could be regarded as punctuation, let alone response. No exchange of glances, no outlet of breath, not the slightest shake of the head to indicate incredulity or the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

  With steady gaze she said, “Why are you doing this?”

  The whole point was to tell her the truth and hope that she could understand it. I said, “Because they have betrayed communism.”

  “By selling out to the Chinese?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Chinese aren’t Communists?”

  “Not these Chinese.”

  Cindy examined me for many moments. Again, no flicker of expression.

  At last Cindy said, “All right. Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To the U.S. attorney. Isn’t that what you have in mind?”

  “Yes. He has a motive to believe all this.”

  “Good point,” Cindy said. “But if I were you, I’d think twice before telling Merriwether Street that you’re giving up Jack Adams to the legal system in order to save communism.”

  2 Although it was nine in the evening, F. Merriwether Street was still at his office, pondering the outcome of the election. It had been a heavy blow to him. He had seen Jack win before with smoke and mirrors. But now the American people in their mystical wisdom had lifted up this sociopath, this liar, this rapist, this hollow man beloved by lunatics and traitors, and made him the most powerful human being in the world. The outcome contradicted everything he had ever believed about the nature of democracy. Jack Adams had perceived what F. Merriwether Street was not even willing to consider, that you did not have to fool all of the people all of the time. If you were lucky, you only had to fool 40 percent of the ones who voted. And you only had to do so once.

  Street was not the only workaholic still at his post in the federal courthouse. I shivered to walk again down dim odorless corridorspast numbered squares of frosted glass lighted from behind. Who worked behind these opaque windowpanes, at what tasks, with what human consequences? F. Merriwether Street, a minor functionary in a minor city, must have had hundreds of underlings, more than the arch-prosecutor Vyshinsky had needed to carry out the Great Purge for Stalin. Vyshinsky had taught us what could be done with an apparatus like this one. That Americans had made this particular bureaucracy was irrelevant. It was what it was: a blind thing, designed to suspect, to investigate, to operate in secret, to seize, to prosecute, to punish. To divert its attention from criminals to enemies of the leader required only the simplest change in instructions.

  After a long walk we came to F. Merriwether Street’s large and imposing office. It was decorated with steel engravings of warships, with photographs of Street with every Republican president of his lifetime. He was a child in some of these pictures. The presidents had been friends of his father, his grandfathers. I did not expect to find a happy man behind the U.S. attorney’s massive oak desk. I expected agitation, anger; I found numbness.

  Street gave me hardly a glance. Without waiting for Cindy to introduce me, he said, “So he won.”

  Cindy said, “He sure did.”

  “And dumped Danny. Threw him to the wolves.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s all over. Jack’s home free. Danny will be indicted, you know. They’ll get him after I go. They’ll destroy him to protect Jack. They have to. I’ve lost the power to help you.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Cindy said. “Merriwether, this man has something to tell you.”

  “About what?”

  “About Jack. About Morgan.”

  “Why tell me?” Street asked. “I’m a lame duck. No matter what your friend has or thinks he has—and I don’t want to see it no matter what it is—I’ll be out on the street in three months, and one of Morgan’s twisted pinkos will be sitting in this chair. So thank you very much. Save your time.”

  “This is now. You’re still in that chair. You should take a look at what we have.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll have to see it to believe it.”

  “Ah, a copy of the contract with Mephistopheles?”

  A joke? No, not from Merriwether Street.

  Cindy said, “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what it is.”

  “Really?” said Street. “Then he’s brought it to the one place where it’s certain to be destroyed if it gets into the files. I won’t touch it.” He looked at me for the first time. “Take it away, sir—whatever it is, whoever you are.”

  His speech was slurred, his manner derisive. His eyes were red. Had he been weeping, actually weeping? He was not drunk; clearly not. But I was beginning to suspect tranquilizers. He had a certain self-mocking recklessness that comes with the loss of illusions. There was about him the aroma of a priest who has just lost his faith.

  Cindy said, “Merriwether, listen to me. This man is a colonel in the Soviet KGB. He was Jack’s case officer for twenty years. Morgan’s, too. That’s the evidence you won’t look at.”

  “Jack is a traitor?”

  “As defined by the Constitution,” Cindy replied. She then showed him everything, item by item, whether he wanted to see it or not.

  At the end, F. Merriwether Street raised bushy eyebrows, not in incredulity but as if to say, Of course. This was no surprise to him. Nevertheless, he shook his great equine head, emphatically. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s still out of the question.”

  “Out of the question?” Cindy said. “Please explain why.”

  “Gladly,” Street said. “I’m sure that what you tell me is true. It explains everything. Jack was born to sell out America.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Cindy said. “So why is it out of the question to expose him?”

  Street pointed a huge forefinger. “I’ll tell you why. No prosecutor ever born in the United States of America would act on this information. No one could. You want me to accuse the president-elect of the United States of being a lifelong secret agent of a foreign power? With a turncoat KGB man as my main witness? And adult videos as evidence? Are you crazy?”

  Cindy said, “But Jack and Morgan are lifelong traitors. And they’ve just changed masters in return for a thirty-million-dollar bribe and a plot to destroy the American dollar. That’s no adult video. There’s a paper trail. There has to be. They’ve sold the country to the Chinese Communists. We’ve got the transaction on tape. For God’s sake, Merriweather, don’t you see what’s at stake?”

  “God moves in mysterious ways,” Street replied.

  Cindy said, “What does God have to do with it?”

  “I believe that democracy is God’s work,” Street said. “Jack Adams may be exactly what you say he is. But he was elected president by the people, and the people is always right. It’s up to them to decide his fate.”

  Cindy said, “Merriwether, I want to be sure I understand. You believe it’s your patriotic duty to let a traitor, an agent in the pay of a hostile foreign power, become president of the United States even though you have the power to prevent that from happening. Is that what you just told me?”

  “You could put it that way,” Street replied. He smiled beatifically, eyes only, like a stunned peasant in the background of an Adoration tableau.

  Cindy said, “Do you want to know what I really think? I think you’re afraid that all this is just another one of Jack’s tricks, and afraid of looking like a fool again.”
/>
  “I can’t help what you think,” he said. “Of course you could always take what you have to the media. Maybe they’d like an opportunity to catch Jack Adams by the toe.”

  Cindy said, “You must be joking.”

  He shrugged. “I think God is the one who’s joking,” he said.

  3 Riding down in the elevator with a stunned and silent Cindy, I felt utterly alone. A matter of choice, I must confess. I felt the cell phone in my pocket. My mind fluttered back to Shanghai—to the old Shanghai of the maid and the civil servant, and to the new one in which they had met as grown-ups. I saw my friend’s face again, so greatly changed by suffering and time. Yet after the first moment it seemed unchanged to me, like the face of a beloved wife one has awakened to every day for the lifetime we had, in fact, been apart. Suppose, instead of asking the questions I had asked this woman, I had said, “Will we ever be together again?”

  But I did not ask this question, nor would she have known the answer if I had. There was no answer; it had died, like so many youthful secrets before it, in one of Mr. Gee’s many interrogation rooms. It was my friend’s young beauty, gone but still present, that I saw in Cindy’s perfect face.

  She said, “Poor Merriwether. The moral is pure Marxist prophecy. In the end the capitalists did sell you people the rope to hang us with.”

  I said, “Do you actually think so?”

  Her voice was toneless. “Okay, you supply the moral.”

  I said, “Okay. ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ Yogi Berra.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Cindy said.

  But it was a straw to grasp at, so she listened to what I had to say next. In the open air—standing in perfect safety on the sidewalk in front of a building full of federal agents—I told her, in minute detail, about Morgan’s brilliant operation against the Latin American guerrilla leader a quarter of a century before.