The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  Michael paused a moment. No matter how many times the plan had played out in his mind over the weeks, seeing Toby’s words on the page sent a chill crawling over his skin.

  This goal has already been endorsed by the government of the United States, along with the governments of almost every other nation in the world. It is defined as achieving routine immunization coverage of at least eighty per cent of children aged between twelve and twenty-four months against measles, tetanus, diptheria, whooping cough and poliomyelitis.

  In addition, we wish to make it clear that no public response by the President will be accepted as adequate if it does not also contain the precise text given below:

  Michael, surprised, read the last lines again. This had been no part of the plan. He turned the page.

  Twenty years ago, President John F Kennedy committed the United States to the goal of putting a man on the moon within a decade. Today, the United States commits itself to another great goal: a goal for our times; a goal to be achieved here on earth; the goal of immunizing all of the world’s children against the major killer diseases of childhood …

  This goal, too, can and will be achieved within a decade. And it too will be a giant step for mankind.

  Michael closed his eyes for a few moments, then read through the text of the letter again. Toby had seen the weakness. Seen that it would have been too easy to make some weasel-worded commitment, an opening gambit in a game of wait-and-see. But after such a statement, invoking the sainted name of Kennedy and carrying unmistakable echoes of that famous inaugural, it would be almost impossible to go back on.

  It will be achieved not by the United States acting alone but in partnership with all nations …

  Good, Toby, good …

  … to those countries across the globe struggling to break the bonds of disease … we pledge our support.

  After thinking for a few more moments, he returned the letter to the table and opened the accompanying press release. He had assumed it would need work, and probably some toning down. But again he had underestimated his man. Instead of opening with a dramatic threat, the statement began with a sober announcement of possession of the virus and a warning that ‘further action would be considered’ in the event of an inadequate response. The threatened press release went on to detail the demand and justify the action being taken, spelling out what the world was allowing to happen to millions of its most vulnerable citizens. Michael took a sip of wine as he read on, his excitement mounting.

  No earthquake, no famine, no flood, has ever killed thirteen thousand children in a single day. Yet diseases that vaccines can prevent are killing that number of children every day; yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Every single one of those millions was an individual child with a name and a nationality, a family and a future …

  He rapidly checked the figure. No exaggeration was in volved.

  The cost of preventing this tragedy would be approximately five hundred million dollars a year. It is an enormous sum. About as much as the world spends on its military capacity every eight hours.

  Another check for gross error. Military spending currently over five hundred billion a year. Near enough.

  Allowing this tragedy to continue when the means to prevent it are available and affordable is unconscionable. Nothing can justify it. And it shames and diminishes us all.

  Finally, we wish to point out that this action is being taken not in order to impose the will of a minority but to ensure that the governments of the world make good on promises they have already made on behalf of all the world’s people.

  Texts for Michael’s approval were a five- or six-times-a-week occurrence, and he was aware of a reputation for being difficult to satisfy. But there was nothing in Toby’s statement that he wanted to change. Night closed in as he remained in his chair, imagining the statement being read by those who would themselves have to imagine it appearing all over the media. As best he could, he worked through the likely actors in the scenes that lay ahead, on what each might say or do, on the risks and dangers, the contingencies and likelihoods, coming to dwell finally on the likely reactions of the others under the pressure he knew was in store, ending with Stephen Walsh.

  Eventually he went to his desk and took up a pen. Toby had made only one tiny error: a spelling mistake that most non-medical people might make. After another moment’s thought, he returned the pen to the desk.

  23 | Nothing could be simpler

  Entering Grand Central by the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance, Stephen was suddenly aware of how difficult it was to walk normally. He had chosen the busiest time of day, when commuters were concentrating on getting home. Passing the information booth, he speeded up – partly to avoid being jostled by those around him and partly because walking at a leisurely stroll through the main concourse of Grand Central Station at a quarter to six on a Friday evening would in itself have been conspicuous.

  He had entertained no doubts about nominating himself to make the drop, but had not anticipated the fear that he might bungle it, that something might go wrong, something silly like not being able to operate the left-luggage locker, or not having the right coins, or losing the key. In any case, a dummy run would do no harm.

  Asking where the left-luggage lockers were located might be a bad move. But on the other hand, walking around in circles might also attract attention. Descending the broad stone stairs to the lower concourse, he cut his way across the stream of commuters towards a Ho-Jo’s counter where he hoisted himself onto a stool and ordered a black coffee. There was no hurry, and it was fascinating watching the human tide ebbing out of Manhattan. Was it any wonder that false consciousness held sway, when this was what people’s lives were like?

  He swivelled around on the stool and there, on his left directly under a stone arch, were the lockers. Coffee in hand, he watched as a Hispanic woman hurried towards them, a backpack hanging from one shoulder. Without hesitating, she twisted the handle, pulled open the door, pushed the backpack inside, closed the door again, dropped a quarter into the slot, and turned the handle again – clockwise this time – allowing her to extract the key. A few seconds later she had disappeared into the crowd, unnoticed by anybody but himself.

  Nothing could be simpler.

  24 | The sender of this letter

  The opening moves were made more quickly than Michael had anticipated. Early on the Saturday morning, he was called with a request to stand in for the Director-General at a meeting in New York on inter-agency co-operation. Normally he would have groaned at the prospect of two days of discussions with similarly high-level representatives from the World Bank, UNDP, UNICEF, FAO, WFP, UNESCO and one or two of the smaller agencies, all discussing the need for co-operation while in country offices all over the world the turf wars continued much as before. But on this particular Saturday, the last-minute request to travel to New York was received with different emotions.

  Packing never took Michael more than a few minutes. Into the Gladstone went a no-crease business suit, one tie, two pairs of socks, two drip-dry, non-iron shirts, and two sets of underwear. Washing out shirt, socks and underwear in his hotel room ready for the next day was as much a part of his routine as brushing his teeth. But on this occasion there was something else he had to pack. Something that would take most of his Saturday morning.

  The shrink-wrapped pack of quarto paper, bought from a drug store near The Doral Inn on Lexington Avenue, was waiting in his desk drawer. Had it been purchased in Switzerland the size would have been A4, identifiably European. As he had explained to the others, fingerprints cannot be entirely removed from paper, and it was only after pulling on a pair of surgical gloves that he opened the pack and took out the old but almost unused Olivetti portable typewriter, bought as a present for his father just a month before his death. The open suitcase at his side, he slid the first sheet between the rollers and began typing a fair copy of Toby’s drafts.

  The sender of this letter is in possession …

  Each step was
unalarming in itself. Memorize the next few words, hit the right keys, check each word as it appears, don’t think too far ahead.

  … will result in the statement accompanying this letter being released to the media …

  But he could not long resist imagining the reaction of others reading this text. He knew the name of the next person who would see it. But not the person after that.

  … make a public commitment to head up a global effort …

  He finished typing both letter and attachment and read them through. Still wearing the surgical gloves, he unwrapped the pack of six manila envelopes bought from the same store and, selecting one, slid the typed sheets inside. After thinking for a moment he went to the kitchen for a sponge and a small bottle of Evian water. With these, he sealed the gummed flap.

  The last item of stationery, also brought back from New York, was the sheet of peel-off labels that he now fed into the Olivetti. Line up the label. Type the single line - ‘Personal – to be opened only by Camden Hughes.’ Peel the label. Place it in the centre of the envelope. All very mundane. He carried the package into the kitchen and wiped the surfaces and edges with surgical ethanol, just as he had done with the flasks and the inner plastic bags sitting in Seema’s apartment. Tearing off two more clear plastic bags from an unused roll, also bought in a New York drug store, he slipped the envelope inside one of the bags. He then wiped the outside of the bag and, with a little more difficulty, fitted it inside the second bag. Finally he laid the package flat between the two shirts at the bottom of the Gladstone bag. Only then did he remove the gloves.

  Toby’s original manuscript still lay on the table, waiting to be fed into the stove. He crossed to his bookcase. After a moment’s thought, he pulled out an early draft of the report to the 34th World Health Assembly – a version that had since moved on through several more iterations. From the Gladstone bag, he took out the pocket-book used for recording travel expenses.

  It took several hours to take each word of Toby’s text, find the same word in the draft report, and write out the numbers of the page, the line, and the position of the word in the line. It was a simple Arnold Cipher, unbreakable by anyone not in possession of the text on which it was based. When he was finished he returned the pocket book to the bag and sat for a moment wondering what he might say if he was asked why he was carrying a pocket-book with several hundred apparently random numbers scribbled over a dozen or so pages. The answer came to him with the memory of his old boss. They had been standing together in the departure lounge of Geneva airport, looking at a glass case in which was displayed a range of Swiss Army knives. DA had joked that he would consider buying one if there was an epidemiologist’s version. Waiting to board, they had discussed what special tools such a knife might have, eventually deciding on a pivot for spinning the knife in order to select a random direction, and a pull-out list of random numbers.

  Later that day, he fed Toby’s manuscript to the flames. The draft report to the World Health Assembly had been replaced on his bookshelf between two small statuettes from his collection: the first a wooden figure of Sopona, the smallpox deity of the Yoruba; the second a ceramic figurine of Sitata Mata, seated on a white donkey, to whom Hindus throughout the subcontinent had appealed over the centuries for protection against the disease.

  On the Sunday morning, with a few hours to go before leaving for the airport, he packed the work he had brought home for the weekend, intending to stop by the office to drop off several tapes of dictation. Just before lunchtime he placed the Olivetti typewriter on top of the Gladstone bag along with the rest of the bottle of Evian and a few tomatoes from the bottom of the fridge. On the corner of the Rue Delafléchère he bought a baguette and a small wedge of Vacherin, then descended the stone stairway to the marina where he rented a motor boat for the afternoon. By two o’clock he was out on the lake, well wrapped up in ski jacket, hat and gloves, engine cut, fishing for the local whitefish just off Prangins-Yvoire.

  The harbour wall was visible as a faint blur, more a disturbance than a shape, hovering between the misty lake and the almost indistinguishable sky. For a while he allowed himself to be mesmerized by the slow slapping of the lake on the boat, the ripples spreading out from his line and disappearing gently into the mist. The silence mocked his closeness to the town. New York a universe away. He would call as soon as he got in, perhaps even tonight. He was sure she would accept his invitation to dinner. But only because of what they had embarked upon. And he was not sure that they would be able to talk of anything else without it seeming trivial, irrelevant. Had he built a trap for himself? Was the relationship, whatever it might have become, now constrained, frozen inside the icy intimacy of their secret? He rested the rod on the bow of the boat, trapping the end under his foot, and began tearing off chunks of the baguette, breaking the cheese in his freezing hands, biting into the tomato, wishing he had brought coffee and a thermos.

  The sharp taste of the cheese and the sudden roughening of the water seemed to be telling him things did not stay the same, that it was impossible to look ahead envisaging every move. For a long period after that year in Oxford, his life had held few joys. But satisfaction had eventually been found again, in work, in colleagues, in challenges. And Seema Mir had slowly retreated to a safer distance, though many were the reminders that would bring her flooding back. He had supposed it was like an infection that was dormant, though he was sceptical of scientific concepts being used in loose, analogous ways. Just as he had been sceptical of the theory that he had sublimated his feelings into his sixteen-hour days. The float bobbed a few metres from the boat, the line pulling gently at the rod. There had been one or two other brief relationships, entered into with a view to seeing if it were true, as Toby had insisted, that he would be capable of loving someone else. But they had matured not into love but into steady friendships as he had realized that greater intimacy, instead of banishing Seema from his thoughts, brought her distressingly nearer.

  He threw the heel of the baguette into the lake and stared, mind in neutral for a few moments, as the ripples disappeared in the choppier waters of the afternoon. And in that moment he saw clearly that what he wanted was to shake that famed serenity, reach her at some level that was at least close to the way she disturbed his every waking moment. She had said she was with him. And that should be enough. If he had been unable to persuade this strange, often dreamy, even passive-seeming woman whose humanity and sensitivity of spirit would always be his touchstone, then he would not be doing this.

  He returned to harbour just after four o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, February 8th, minus the Olivetti. By five o’clock he was on his way to the airport, the Gladstone bag on the seat beside him.

  25 | The presence in the shadows

  The murals of the New York Public Library Catalog Room offer fine opportunities for distraction to the uncommitted reader. Seema’s favourite, directly opposite her this Monday morning, depicted the Ottmar Mergenthaler linotype machine that was perhaps America’s first great contribution to the technology of publishing. She had not expected things to happen so fast. Michael had said it would probably be a month or more before he could return, and after Hélène and Toby had gone she had gradually allowed herself to pretend, sometimes for hours at a time, that things were normal. But not this morning. Small wonder that the papers on the desk stared back at her unread.

  She had been out picking up a late supper when Michael had called from the Doral to say that he was unexpectedly back in New York. Had in fact just got in, and would she like to have dinner this evening? The message on the answering machine had also mentioned, after a pause, that he had brought her a letter from Toby. Would he want her to deliver the letter now, this week? She stared again at the mural. In the background, over Merganthaler’s left shoulder, a newsboy shouted a headline under the Brooklyn Bridge, another of the wonders of the age. She had not called him back at the hotel. It had been three o’clock in the morning, Geneva time, and she imagined he would hav
e gone straight to sleep. And by now he would probably be in a meeting. She had never invited anyone to dinner in the apartment before. She would make an exception for Michael. But any prospect of intimacy was quickly dispelled by the thought of the letter he would be bringing. The rules of the game between them, complicated enough before, were now so distorted that there was no working out of the right moves, no way of resolving whatever feelings they might have for each other. There would no doubt be practical matters to discuss, though the thought again filled her with an all-drenching dread that was new in her life.

  At a quarter past twelve she packed her papers and joined the other readers who had begun drifting out of the Catalog Room to make their way down the steps towards the various lunch spots around Bryant Park. She turned right and quickened her pace, intending to walk the thirty or so blocks back to the Village, stopping at a payphone on the way.

  Michael’s meeting had been switched at the last moment from UN headquarters to the conference room of UNICEF’s headquarters in the old ALCOA building on the corner of Mitchell Place and First Avenue. Here he had spent the morning sitting behind a laminated place-card bearing his name, title and agency, occasionally looking up at one of the giant barges slowly butting its way up the East River. As lunchtime approached and sandwiches were sent for, the meeting had become tired, even a little tetchy. Michael himself had contributed little, apart from having to defend WHO’s interest in what he had known was an essentially petty squabble with the UN Development Programme over ‘lead agency’ status in countries where the WHO had a regional office. He had been hoping to take a walk outside over the lunch hour, partly to wake himself up in the cold air, partly so he could stop at a payphone and call Seema. Probably he would have been more awake if he had known that, at that moment, Seema Mir was passing by the ALCOA building, having diverted via First Avenue on her way back downtown.