by Alon Preiss
She nodded and took a sip of champagne. She was still drunk. “But instead, I’m going to kill him.” She paused for a moment, listening in the silence to the words she had just spoken. “Can I borrow your gun?”
“If you want,” Timur said. “But I wish you wouldn’t. Tonight is for celebrating, not for killing.”
“All right,” she said. “But he deserves to die, you know.”
Timur nodded. “If you want him dead, he can be killed,” he said evenly. “One hundred U.S. dollars, plus round trip air fare from Moscow to New York. But it need not happen tonight. He’s not going anywhere. He’s easy to find, and he can be killed anytime. A mood like this cannot be recreated.”
“OK,” she said agreeably. “But are you kidding, Timur?”
“Of course not. I would do anything for you. You know?”
“I know.”
“I’m sure of this, Irina: I will always protect you. You never need to worry about anything. No matter what, I will always be there to help and protect you.” He pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and placed it, unlit, in his mouth.
She smiled. “Thank you, Timur. For promising to protect me forever.”
At 3:30 in the morning, Solomon still sat in his hotel room, trying to keep himself awake. But he had begun to realize that Irina was not going to come visit him. Had she even intended to? He wondered why he had invited her. Did he miss Joyce right now? Perhaps now, but not an hour earlier, entranced by the lure of exotic fish and exotic women in an exotic land. He picked up the phone and called his wife, who was sitting in their house in New York state, staring idly out the window. She seemed quietly drunk, and she did not have much to say. “Good night, old lady,” he said gently. That had once been an affectionate nickname, but it wasn’t funny anymore, and she hung up without saying goodbye. He wondered where Joyce was, exactly where: over the Formosa Strait, or the Philippine Sea? And of whom was she dreaming, right now: that man, the one who was in her bed the night before when Solomon called?
It had been embarrassing, that was all, and nothing about which Solomon could summon his usually reliable, self-righteous rage. It had just been embarrassing. He arrived in Bangkok, pushed his way through the disorganized crowd in the airport, and found a pay phone in the corner. He immediately called Joyce. She laughed, her voice heavy and sluggish. “My darling,” she said. “I’m in bed with another man. And you’ve woken us both.”
“Are you joking?” Solomon asked.
“I could put him on the phone if you want.”
“No, better not.”
“You’re still my number one, you know,” Joyce said sincerely. “You know that. But I have these needs, you know. I’m hopelessly human.”
“Is your boyfriend listening to this?”
“Yeah. He knows it, too.” She whispered: “He wants me to marry him.” Then Solomon heard her giggle, and the joke seemed directed not at him; perhaps Joyce was sharing a light moment with the man in her bed.
“What’s funny?” the senator asked.
“It’s something he did,” she said. “He just did something funny. A visual thing.”
“Ah.”
“I’d love to talk, darling,” Joyce said. “But that would be rude, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. I’ll just see you tomorrow, in Thailand. I love you, little Joyce.”
“Me too,” she said, suddenly discrete. “Me too.”
The Venetian blinds were open just a crack, and blue moonlight flooded Joyce’s bedroom. Charlie’s suit was tossed on the floor, not a testament to sudden, irresistible passion, but to his untidy nature. Joyce’s clothing was folded neatly in the rocking chair that creaked gently beside the bed. Joyce was on the telephone, and Charlie, grinning, was kissing her elbow.
When Joyce hung up the phone, Charlie rolled over and whispered in her ear: “I know who this man is.”
“No, you don’t,” she replied. “There’s no way you could possibly know.”
“But I know,” he said.
“Stop it, Charlie. You don’t know. I told you, it’s impossible.”
He smiled, a rather irritating, mischievous smile. She flipped over on her side, her back to him.
“Care to make a little wager?” he asked.
“No,” she replied, “because even if you were right, I wouldn’t tell you. And, anyway, you’re not right, so don’t bother.”
“It’s Senator Solomon,” Charlie said.
Joyce’s breathing came to a complete stop. Then resumed, self-consciously calm. “I told you,” she said, “I’m not answering your questions.”
“It’s him,” Charlie said, laughing. “Because if it wasn’t Senator Solomon, you would just say, ‘No, it’s not Senator Solomon.”’
“I won’t play your little game.”
“Just say it. ‘No, it’s not Senator Solomon.”’
“If you really believed it was Senator Solomon, wouldn’t you just be shocked? If I could put you to one side for someone reputed to be such a cold fish?”
“What do you mean ‘reputed’? You mean you know better?” He ran a finger down her arm. “I’ve gotten over the shock,” he said. “I figured that it couldn’t be someone more charming than me, because such a thing doesn’t exist. I guessed it had to be someone powerful and icy.”
“So you just made this up?”
He shook his head.
“So where did you hear it was Senator Solomon?” she asked.
“I knew it!”
“I didn’t say – ”
“Why are you asking where I heard it? Because you wonder how the truth got out?”
“No,” Joyce said. “I wonder why people would say such a thing when, you know, it isn’t …” Her voice trailed off.
“When it isn’t true?” Charlie asked. “Is that what you’re going to say?”
Joyce didn’t move. “I told you,” she said, unhappily, “I’m not falling into your little traps.” Charlie looked up at the ceiling and laughed.
“I heard a story about Senator Solomon,” Charlie said. “I don’t know if it’s true. Doesn’t matter to me. Political thing, which I find boring. Hobbs told me all this in detail, and he had to repeat it over and over for my benefit. The story only interests me because the woman I love is sleeping with the main villain.”
“What is it?”
“Well, the U.S. supported an old Cambodian Prince named Sihanouk for many years because he was anti-Communist – he was fighting against these Communist rebels in the jungle, so, on second thought, I guess it’s not that he was an anti-Communist, but that the anti-Sihanouks happened to be Communists. You know, he was the enemy of our enemies. Then we overthrew him because Stephen Solomon decided he wasn’t anti-Communist enough, and we installed one of his generals. So the Prince joined up with the Communist rebels, and the rebels won the civil war. They were led by a guy named …” He hesitated.
“Pol Pot,” she said.
“Right. Pol Pot. He took over the government, imprisoned the old Prince in his palace, killed three million people, right? Incredibly vicious Communist dictator. Then he attacks Vietnam, Vietnam invades, expels him, and appoints their own puppet dictator. Oh, this is just a crazy conspiracy story.”
“Go ahead, Charlie. You’re teasing me.”
“Solomon flies to Cambodia to meet with the new puppet leader. Solomon imagines himself as sort of the new, unofficial prince of Cambodia. He’s read everything about the place, he’s deposed one ruler – he expects a little respect. But the puppet leader doesn’t realize this. Fatal mistake. Anyway, that’s what I heard.”
When his plane touched down in Phnom Penh, Stephen Solomon, a freshman senator, felt as though he were returning home. So much had changed in a matter of days: Vietnam had invaded Cambodia, and Pol Pot vanished, making himself invisible, people said, and now drifting through his country on the rough winds that preceded the monsoon. As the Cambodian survivors trudged through the jungle, they thought they heard his voice still whisper
ing deadly proclamations, or saw his curiously unthreatening face, smiling gently at them from the shadows.
After a few hours to wash and nap, a government car took Solomon from his room at the Hotel Cambodiana to Prince Sihanouk’s former palace where the new leader of Cambodia awaited him in a gilded room. The handsome one-eyed Prime Minister seemed solid and intense. In his slender frame and thoughtful persona he was Sihanouk’s polar opposite. But he seemed too young for this position of authority, physically and spiritually drowning.
The Prime Minister never looked at Senator Solomon, and instead spoke directly to his interpreter, another dark, intense young man. He did not ask Solomon about his flight or his accommodations and instead began with a brief, pessimistic remark. “We are trying to rebuild, senator. But we are like a patient who is almost dead, who has been rescued from catastrophe perhaps too late. When I was a boy, I watched the American planes fly overhead, I saw little children destroyed by your bombs. I wondered why America hated us. Why was America trying to murder Cambodia?”
“Very dramatic, Prime Minister,” Solomon said, containing his anger. “Very dramatic indeed.”
“All I ask is for some level of autonomy, and some small amount of help in rebuilding a little nation that America has done so much to destroy.” His voice was a near whisper. Solomon could barely tolerate this hypocrisy. This man, installed by the Vietnamese, who now allowed Vietnamese soldiers to patrol the country, was speaking of autonomy!
“Why don’t you look at me, you stupid bastard?” Solomon said. “I’ll tell you why we did it, why we lost tens of thousands of brave young Americans over here. We were fighting Communism. We were doing it for you, for all of you ungrateful bastards.”
After the Vietnamese invasion, Prince Sihanouk traveled to North Korea, where he moved into a 40-room mansion beside a man-made lake. He happily spent his time watching romantic old films with his gracefully ageing wife and was trying to forget who he was, where he had come from. Cambodia was a closed book to him. But after adequate lower level contacts, Senator Solomon flew to North Korea to speak with Sihanouk face-to-face. The Prince looked almost unchanged by his experience except, oddly, he seemed shorter now, a great deal shorter. “I wanted to hear you tell me this thing,” Sihanouk said, a strange, mock-hospitable smile on his face. “I really wanted to hear you tell me that you want me to join again with the Khmer Rouge.”
“It’s good to see you, your highness,” Solomon said. His voice echoed in the domed reception room. He sat down, without being invited. “For obvious reasons, I could not accept your last invitation to visit you in your Phnom Penh palace, but I can’t imagine that it is more lovely than this.”
“Everything is more beautiful in my country,” Sihanouk said, “because it is my home.”
“It could be your home again, your highness.” And he explained to the exiled Prince the nature of the “Solomon Doctrine”: he and the United States administration had determined that the best means of countering the new Cambodian government and its rather unfriendly, anti-American, anti-Solomon leader would be to revive the Khmer Rouge as an effective fighting force, then ally them with Prince Sihanouk to give the force international respectability, mix in some aid from China and set them loose. The Prince frowned quizzically at the senator.
“Once you supported me against the Khmer Rouge, because you were against Communism. Then you supported the generals against me, because you were against Communism. Now you want to support me and the Khmer Rouge because ... why, again? I don’t believe I understand. “
“As the most effective counterweight to the Communists,” Solomon explained.
Sihanouk shook his head in disbelief. “The Khmer Rouge killed five of my sons and daughters and fourteen of my grandchildren. Pol Pot personally approved of each of these murders. And you want me to join with him in an alliance?”
“That was five years ago, your highness. It’s time to let bygones be bygones for the good of your country.”
“No. It is impossible. I am a human person, after all.” He sighed. “I have my life, still alive. My sons Ranariddh and Chakrapong have survived. Here, the Korean government bankrolls my films. I can make movies again, beautiful movies, plein d’amour, de mystère, all things that life, I have learned, sadly lacks.” Now laughing loudly, he bellowed, “A man like you, Senator Solomon, could never be in one of my movies! Never!”
“Prince Sihanouk,” Solomon said, “if you do not join this struggle, you will live the rest of your life in a beautiful mansion in a cold, alien nation, making films in the Korean language.” He paused for a moment, and then he revealed his secret weapon. “The United States is prepared to support the Khmer Rouge, with or without your help. If you don’t join us, your countrymen will forget you. Pol Pot will be the prince.”
Sihanouk’s wife escorted Senator Solomon to the door, where a car awaited him. Solomon sat for three days in a comfortable hotel room in the heart of Pyongyang before an armed soldier bearing a sealed envelope arrived at the door. Cambodia needs Sihanouk, the note said. Cambodia needs a prince to cheer for, to love. Cambodia needs me, and I cannot refuse my children.
An army van drove Solomon to a secret meeting with the North Korean leader, a cheery, talkative man with a lump the size of a baseball growing out of the right side of his face, who granted his approval in exchange for a promise that some of the U.S. aid would be deposited in his own personal Swiss bank account. “Done all the time,” Solomon boasted. He then flew ultra-secretly to the Thai-Cambodia border to meet with Brother Number One, Pol Pot himself.
They sipped tea in a comfortable cottage surrounded by armed guards. Pol Pot was dressed in a white shirt with sleeves down to the elbows, and blue slacks. Something about him seemed familiar.
“I am more than happy to work together with the Prince once again,” the Khmer Rouge leader said softly. He seemed to enjoy the musical quality of his own voice. He had a gentle little laugh, and his eyes were half-closed, as though he were at peace with the world and himself. Pol Pot was an exceptionally pleasant man, a chubby, cherubic, endearing and likable fellow, and Solomon expressed his feelings out loud. “Quite frankly, sitting here before you, I cannot believe that you are capable of the sorts of crimes of which you have been accused.”
“The stories were lies spread by the Vietnamese,” Pol Pot said reassuringly, touching the senator softly on the hand. “Many died when the Vietnamese invaded. They displayed the bones of their victims and blamed us for the deaths. And then these stories were picked up in the west and disseminated widely.” He shook his head sadly. “How can we combat such skillful propaganda from a position of weakness, under siege, here in the jungle? We cannot. And so their lies become the truth.”
Solomon patted him on the arm.
“We all have problems with the press,” he said. “Don’t let it bother you.”
Upon Solomon’s urging, Congress quickly approved an aid package to the coalition, and the Khmer Rouge was once again unrestrained. Sometimes, Solomon would wake up screaming in the night. This had never happened to him before, never in his life, and in the morning, he could not remember the dreams that now haunted him. He could not understand his own restlessness; he told himself that he was devoted to this cause, to peace and democracy in Asia, and he believed that everything he did was absolutely justified in pursuit of his goal. He would not, as he often insisted, shrink from a fight.
One morning, Daniel took the subway to Bowling Green, then walked the ten blocks to work through a light drizzle and arrived a little bit late at his law firm. He nodded to the receptionist. Somewhere along the winding path that led to his office, Daniel smiled at the surviving founding partner, Robinson Tierney, and said good morning in a familiar yet respectful manner.
Retreated to his office. Hung up his coat. Drafted some letters. Reviewed some correspondence. Dictated some memos. Walked out to his secretary’s desk, asked her to print out the Responses to Plaintiff’s First Set of Interrogatories.
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br /> “My word-processor seems to have crashed,” she said. They stared together at the computer monitor. The words FATAL ERROR flashed on the screen, over and over again.
The firm’s computer team was baffled, just baffled. They replaced the computer with a new one. The day went on.
That day, Daniel received various documents relating to the Edward Bear Plastics factory, intended for production to the Environmental Protection Agency after review by Daniel or some qualified younger associate. Buried somewhere in the middle of the pile was a decade of company magazines. Daniel stared at them for a moment, then began reading. Wedding congratulations. News of the softball tournament. Death announcements. Cause of death, Daniel noted, was never mentioned. A piece of fiction in which several colorful characters talked about safety procedures in the plant. In 1969, the president wrote an editorial bluntly discussing the company’s stalled growth. “Our profits are neither increasing nor decreasing. We are a family, however, and we will stay a family. Every American has two families: his family at home, and his family at the plastics factory. We must look forward to rising profits in the 1970s, and we must look forward to all the aforementioned as a family, working together through it all, the good and the bad. Concurrently, morale in the country at large seems to be stagnating. Our young boys are returning from the war either as heroes or in caskets. Over all, things in the country are not really getting better. On the other hand, I must point out, they are not getting worse, either. Whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, or neither good nor bad is a judgment I will leave to the historians of the 1970s, or the 1980s. However, things will not improve in the United States if we do not stand together as Americans. Certainly, no less could be said of the plastics industry. I wish you all the best and true happiness for the coming year.”
The same issue wished Jack Connors a “speedy return to health” from some unmentioned ailment. The Edward Bear Plastics Christmas party received extensive coverage. Smiling engineers with thick dark glasses raised a toast to the common factory workers, and everybody danced with everybody else’s wife.