It was Toby who was perhaps the least confounded as they climbed the subway steps and emerged into Union Square. Of all of them, he was the least attached to the world as it had been twenty-four hours before; the least wedded to who he was, to the life that had been, and the life that might be to come. He would have been the first to admit that, up to this point in his life, he had not devoted excessive thought to any of the wider sufferings of the world; only since meeting Hélène again had he been confronted by that other reality. And, without knowing how to express it, he had been moved by it. Knew, too, that emotion was always in the driving seat, that everything is about something else, and that in his own case his decision was somehow tinged with the vague hope of regilding a tarnished life. Even, perhaps, of placing himself on a different footing with Hélène Hevré. But the previous evening, in Estelle’s bar, he had committed to doing his best to be swayed only by what good might be done, and if this also helped him salvage something of himself then he would consider it a bonus. And, having so determined, he shouldered aside irrelevance as best he could, trusting all else to the man by whose side he walked as the five of them made their way to the West Village.
All of this mental and emotional luggage and more was carried up the four flights of stairs to Seema’s apartment at the end of that long, cold afternoon. And, at one time or another during the course of the evening that followed, there was not one of them who did not think of the warmth and ease that could have been theirs, lounging companionably on the couch or on one of the gorgeous coloured rugs, watching the fire blaze behind the glass doors and enjoying all the conviviality of good wine and the gathering of friends.
No one was in any hurry to return to the subject, and for a few minutes something like an ordinary conversation struggled bravely on: Seema was asked about how she had found the apartment, and about getting the wood for the stove up the four flights of stairs. Stephen said something about creeping gentrification. Hélène wanted to know about the rugs. Even Michael said something about trying to find time to play chess in Washington Square. But it could not last. And it was Toby, sitting warming his hands at the stove, who led them all back: ‘Small suggestion. Why don’t we drop the abstract stuff for a bit and talk about the nitty-gritty? Might help?’
The others, either welcoming the proposal or too exhausted to challenge it, acquiesced. And so it was that details began to be worked out before any decision in principle had been made.
Toby, cupping both hands round a mug of tea, turned away from the stove. ‘So, maestro, shall we take it from the top?’
Michael looked up into the loft space above, ordering his thoughts. The skylight was dark now except for a few stars in the bitterly cold night.
‘The opening gambit would be pretty straightforward. One of the samples goes into a left-luggage locker, say in Grand Central. The key then gets delivered to the target with a letter setting out the demand and a statement that we’re saying will go to the New York Times and the Washington Post, along with a second sample, if the demand isn’t met.’
‘Specifics, mate.’ Toby was also staring up at the skylight. ‘Delivered to whom?’
‘We’d have to make that call.’ Michael grasped a finger. ‘But, first off, it has to be someone who can be predicted to go more or less straight to the top without going through a whole bunch of intermediaries.’
‘Cut the risk of panic.’ Hélène glanced at Seema as she spoke.
‘Right.’ Michael had already moved on to the next finger. ‘Second, the circumstances of delivering the letter have to be such as to exclude any possibility of it being opened by anyone else. And third, it has to be someone we can get it to without any possibility of it being traced back to us.’ The general assent needed no voice.
Toby had begun to play with a cigarette. ‘So, some big enchilada who lives alone, whose private address we know, and who doesn’t know any of us. Does it have to be New York?’
‘No, but it would be favourite.’
Stephen was brisk, impatient. ‘I think you may already have a candidate in mind, Michael?’
Michael glanced at Seema. ‘I was interested in the UN guy you mentioned last night, Seema. The one that student of yours is doing research for? You said something about a house in Sutton Place?’
‘A few blocks up from the UN.’ Seema’s voice was dead, suggesting that contributing this information in no way constituted acquiescence.
Michael continued to look at her, pained by the trouble in her face. ‘I looked him up in the UN staff book. There’s only one Assistant Secretary General with US nationality based in New York. His name is Camden Hughes.’
‘That’s the guy,’ said Seema, still reluctant to participate.
‘Appointed by the Secretary General six months ago. Washington nominee. Career civil servant. Also happens to serve on the Federal Advisory Committee at the Centers for Disease Control, which might be handy. And you think he lives alone?’
Seema hesitated, but eventually responded as if the question had been asked in some ordinary context. ‘Yes. Apparently his wife died a while back. It was after that he moved to New York.’
‘Know the number in Sutton Place?’
‘No, but I know which house.’
‘Okay, let’s check him against the criteria again—’
‘Excuse me, Michael.’ Seema had spoken very softly, but she had quietened the room. ‘I’m not comfortable with this. I don’t agree with Toby that getting down to the specifics will help us come to a decision. I think it helps us drift into it.’
Toby raised a guilty hand. ‘Quite right, sweetie. Sorry. Cart pulling the horse along nicely there for a minute.’
Stephen looked at Seema dubiously over his spectacles. ‘And may we take it you are voting against?’
Seema held his eyes. ‘It’s not going to be a vote, Stephen. If any one of us can’t go along with this thing in principle then the same principle demands putting a stop to it.’
Stephen addressed his question to the wall. ‘And how would you propose to effect such a unilateral decision?’
Michael replied for her. ‘By exposure. And Seema’s right. If any one of us can’t go along, we’d all be bound to do the same.’
Stephen wagged his head from side to side as if analysing the issue at some more complex level. ‘I suppose that works. The truly illogical position would be abstention.’
‘So we’ve each got ourselves a veto?’ Toby looked towards Michael.
‘Each has a veto.’
When Seema realized that the others were all still looking at her, she glanced at each in turn, ending with Michael. ‘My doubts come down to one thing. I’m not sure we’re not taking too much on ourselves.’ She ignored Stephen’s facial contortions, expressing infinite patience, and stared instead at the flames. ‘I’m wary about people who put too much faith in their own rightness – moral, political, religious, ideological. Wary of certainty, I suppose. It too often leads to misjudgement and imposition, quite often with an ugly outcome. A fine line, I think, between certainty and Fascism. Being uncertain, a little hesitant about one’s own judgements, isn’t always a sign of weakness.’
Stephen eventually spoke. ‘And how much time do you think you might need?’
Seema replied immediately, but quite calmly. ‘I don’t know, Stephen. And I won’t accept any deadlines.’
Soon afterwards, by unspoken agreement, the evening ended in a subdued shuffling of coats and gloves.
On the landing Seema detained Michael for a moment, placing a hand on his arm as the others descended towards the street. Michael turned towards her, not knowing what to make of the look in her eyes.
‘Michael, are you sure? Are you serious?’
After a moment he leaned forward to kiss her cheek. ‘You know me, Seema. I’m always serious.’
17 | The young master
No one even really knew where the man lived. Some said it was a shelter for the homeless in the Bowery, others that he belonged
to a commune living in a cellar on the Lower East Side. All that was known for sure about Bilbao Benny was that every morning he set up shop by one of the stone chessboards in Washington Square, unpacking a vintage Russian chess clock, a quart bottle of some cloudy fruit juice and a pack of Marlboro Lights. Where the name came from was also a mystery. He was of African origin, but equally clearly had Arab blood. There was a rumour that, despite the soubriquet, his first language was Portuguese. In the summer months, if the days were hot and business slack, he would bring an old Spanish guitar and play haunting, lyrical, compositions under a huge, dirty umbrella that had obviously once belonged to a hot-dog stall. The music – ‘played on the heartstrings’ was how Benny described it – reminded some of the norma tradition of Cape Verde. His playing tended to draw crowds, but there was no upturned fedora or propped-open guitar case. Benny was just passing time until another client took the chair on the opposite side of the chessboard. Nor was he a hustler. His rules were simple: you put your five dollars under the clock to sit down and play. What happened to your five dollars when you won, if legend was to be believed, no one had ever found out.
Michael Lowell had been just fourteen years old when he had first sat down opposite Bilbao Benny. Although not a prodigy, he had been a fine high-school chess player and in his sophomore year one of his teachers had suggested lessons with a US Chess Federation Master. Michael had put the idea to his father and not long afterwards Dr Lowell Senior had taken Michael with him on a business trip to New York where, on a fine spring morning, he had sat him down at one of the boards under the trees in Washington Square.
It would be fair to say that, up to that point in his young life, Michael Lowell had known very little outside the white, privileged world of the Berkshires and he had been a little alarmed to find himself playing chess with a six-foot-four-inch rake-thin African with bloodshot eyes who was shod in filthy sneakers with a hole cut in one side to accommodate a misshapen toe. The first seven or eight moves had been played in silence. After that, Benny had begun to murmur morsels of advice in an argot that Michael could scarcely follow. But it hadn’t taken long to figure out that his father had brought him to Washington Square to learn about more than chess.
Thereafter, he had sought out Benny whenever he had accompanied his father to the city. And, more than twenty-five years later, he still tried to fit Washington Square into the busy itinerary of his visits to New York.
On the morning of Sunday, February 1st, 1981, he arrived in the southwest corner of the square at around ten o’clock. He had intended to call on Seema and invite her for breakfast. But before he reached Charles Street he had changed his mind. She might still be asleep, or sleepless and exhausted. Instead he headed first for Washington Square. At least with Benny you knew what kind of problems you would be facing.
‘Well, if it ain’t the young master.’
Michael sat down and unfastened the Gladstone bag. As always in the winter months, Benny was wearing a black woollen beanie pulled over his brow and a down-filled vest over the top of an old raincoat fastened with a schoolboy’s snake belt. Michael took out a cellophane-wrapped pack of 200 Marlboro Lights and placed it on Benny’s table next to the Zippo lighter. ‘Duty frees.’
‘Duty frees,’ said Benny. ‘Due-to-freeze. Always did like the sound of that.’ The board was already set up and a wave of the hand invited Michael to take white and start the clock. There was no small talk. Chess was the only game in Benny’s town.
For the next twenty minutes, Michael pushed aside tiredness and summoned concentration, not in the hope of beating his man but out of a determination to make him concentrate. Putting aside other concerns as best he could, he brought to the table all that Benny had tried to teach over the years. ‘The moment’ had always been Benny’s mantra. The moment to take the game to the opponent. The moment to do the unexpected, always discriminating between what was soundly unconventional and what was just ‘eee-rratic’. The ‘berserker’, as Benny termed it.
After thirteen moves his opponent’s clock had crossed the five-minute mark and, though his own dial was already showing seventeen minutes, Michael knew he had Benny thinking. He tipped his head back to stare up at the bare trees breaking into the winter sunlight. He would call by the apartment. Maybe invite her to brunch. A fingerless gloved hand pushed a pawn forward and then Benny leaned back, scratching the side of his neck and lifting his face to the morning sun, letting Michael know that if there had been any cause for concern it was now over. After four more moves, Michael found himself up against his own flag and settled for a pawn sacrifice that he knew represented a failure to resolve. He felt Benny’s eyes flicker upwards.
‘College-boy move, huh?’
Benny closed and opened his eyes in slow, sarcastic assent. Two minutes later, he was taking Michael’s five-dollar note from under the clock and pushing it into the lining of his coat.
‘If I ever got my five bucks back I think I’d have it framed.’
‘I estimate I’ll most likely spend this one.’
For a few moments the two of them sat in silence, Michael also lifting his face towards the sun. Above the square, silhouetted squirrels were making their stop-start progress along impossibly fine branches. On the corner, a chestnut vendor had set up stall. Sighing with apparent content, Benny unstopped the bottle on his table and took a deep swig of the cloudy liquid. The benefit of a quart of fruit juice every day was one of the few things he would enthuse about.
‘The young master wanna go again?’ he said eventually.
Michael had never been sure whether it was an ironic reference to his abilities at chess or to the contrast in their situations in life, but from the day when his father had first sat him down here a quarter of a century ago Benny had addressed him as ‘the young master’. Whatever the reason, the forty-two-year-old Michael found it as disconcerting as the fourteen-year-old schoolboy had done.
‘Catch you later. Got some errands to do.’
18 | Better than anyone I know
Toby had taken a cab and picked up Hélène on the way. Stephen had walked the mile from 23rd Street. By the time Michael arrived, Seema was handing round coffee and bagels.
For the first minutes the conversation was sustained by short-lived exchanges about all the different kinds of bagel, about the cold, and about the down-and-outs spending the night in the cardboard cities under the bridges. But when these topics had run their course and the last bagel had been politely left by them all, a silence had fallen.
It was Seema who took the plunge. ‘Okay, before we go on – or back – there’s something I want to ask Michael.’ She was rocking slightly in the planter’s chair. ‘Yesterday you said there’d only be one roll of the dice. So why the three containers?’
‘To give us the option …’ Michael hesitated for a moment and started over. ‘If it succeeded, if we got the commitment, the danger is it wouldn’t be sustained. It has to be for the long haul …’
Seema stopped the rocking movement of the chair. ‘I want all the cards face up, Michael. What you’re saying is we might have to do it all over again.’
‘Maybe. It would be down to us to make the call at the time.’
‘So it’s not just “one roll of the dice”. It might have to be twice, even thrice?’
Michael shook his head. ‘Let me back up aways. What I meant is … we stop at first base. If it doesn’t work, if we don’t get the commitment, then that’s it. We tried. We failed.’
Seema nodded, acknowledging that there had been no intention to deceive.
Stephen’s face had assumed its thoughtful position. ‘How long is it viable for?’
Michael sipped his coffee. ‘Freeze dried, it’s pretty stable as viruses go, even outside of a fridge. A few months, even a few years. Truth is, we don’t know.’
Toby spoke with his eyes closed, resting his head on the back of the sofa. ‘I’ve got a little question as well. I’d like to ask why we’re proposing to put the squeeze
only on the US of A?’ He opened his eyes and looked around at the group. ‘I mean, why not all those other governments that Hel’s been talking about. It’s their kids, after all. And most of them seem to have cash to splash on fancy hospitals, like Hel said, not to mention a lot of very unpleasant weapons, plus scraping a few bucks together for some pricey real estate not a million miles from where we sit. I’m thinking of the place Seema pointed out last night.’
Seema nodded. ‘Nigeria House on 42nd.’
Stephen’s mouth turned down as Toby returned his cup to the table and warmed to his argument. ‘There’s a bloke I know, client actually, merchant banker, nice chap, told me a dozen families in Nigeria could pay off the national debt twice over just with what they’ve got sitting in their Swiss piggy banks. So I’m just asking – why only the poor old US of A?’
Michael could not help smiling. ‘Because, Toby, only the poor old US of A has what it takes to twist enough arms up enough backs in enough countries to get the job done. We’re talking dollars, sure, but we’re also talking leverage, commercial clout, defence deals, aid programmes, trade treaties, diplomatic recognition, and a whole bunch of other stuff.’
‘Point taken, so long as we’re clear it’s not because all the ills of the world are down to Uncle Sam.’
‘Oh, that’s just so naïve!’ Stephen was unable to sustain his air of patient forbearance. ‘Don’t you get it yet, Toby? It’s “poor old Uncle Sam” that props up all these venal little regimes, gives them all the moral and material support they want. We’re talking protection for US investments. We’re talking access to cheap raw materials. We’re talking making the world safe for capitalism. We’re talking markets for US exports and weapons. Weapons, we might add, that are always sold for “defence” but always end up being used against internal movements that might show the slightest leaning towards any kind of progress for the masses …’
The Kennedy Moment Page 13