Night of Camp David

by Fletcher Knebel

  Green Turtle Cay, off the eastern flank of Great Abaco, lay like an emerald in the sun as the battered powerboat took Jim and Martha across three miles of sheltered water from the airstrip on the larger island. The white Bahamian boatman, his withered face the color of tobacco stain, rattled off the cay’s gossip since their last visit. Jim loosened his tie and turned his face to the warm wind as the boat cut into the harbor, crossed White Sound, and moored at the pier below the inn.

  The MacVeaghs were greeted as old friends by the proprietors of Bluff House, a lemon-yellow frame inn which sat atop a high hill amid a profusion of golden chalice vines, bougainvillea, coral hibiscus and yellow crotan shrubs. Jim changed into trunks and Martha into a swim suit, and they half ran down the coral rock path to the beach 100 yards below. Jim played porpoise in the water, nudging at Martha and pulling her under by grabbing at her heels. Then they lay on the powdery sand, feeling the sun pour into their bodies and listening to the breeze whipping at the madeira and ficus trees. Jim fell asleep and had to be wakened by Martha because his back was turning pink in the afternoon sun. They swam again in the salt-water pool beside the inn, and then there were cocktails with the proprietors and the four other guests, followed by a candlelit dinner, featuring coq au vin and a full red wine that left a rich taste on the tongue.

  The two other couples were both young, one a honeymooning pair who held hands furtively under the table and occasionally exchanged reverent glances when they thought they were unobserved. The second pair apparently was not married, for they had registered under the improbable name of Mr. and Mrs. “Godspeed,” which happened to be the name of a rakish racing sailboat at nearby Elbow Cay which they had just visited. Also Mr. Godspeed frequently responded to his name with a baffled and hesitant look. The non-Godspeeds were skin divers and spent most of their time brooding and bickering over a mountain of gear, including hoses, tanks, spears, masks and motors, which littered a good part of the pier. They were both bony, parched and leathery, and they carped so much over the care of their diving accessories that Martha speculated that the non-Godspeeds would soon be parted by a nondivorce.

  Martha was adding new spice to her theories about the skin divers that night while Jim buttoned his pajamas and prepared to slip into bed. He was drowsy and content, and he hadn’t thought about Washington since he toiled up the hill to Bluff House that afternoon. He knew he would fall asleep in five minutes. Martha wore a pair of sheer black lace pajamas, belted at her waist. She took Jim’s hand.

  “You’re not going to bed yet,” she said. “You’re coming with me.”

  “And where are you going, lady adventurer, at ten o’clock at night on this island? The only thing still up is the moon.”

  “Sometimes you talk too much, Jim,” she said. “Just shut up, put on your shoes, and come with me.”

  He did as bidden, and they walked out of their room hand in hand. Martha carried two towels in her free hand. The dome of the sky arched clear and fresh above them and millions of stars were strewn about like jewels on black felt. A crescent moon perched above the thicket of gumbo limbo and poisonwood trees as though pinned there as an ornament for a lawn party. Holding Jim’s hand, Martha picked her way down the path which led to the beach. When Jim stumbled once and cursed the coral outcropping, she shushed him. The pale night light shimmered thinly on sand and water. The ocean, placid now, nibbled at the shore with soft, suckling sounds.

  Martha undid her lace pajamas and let first the top and then the bottom drop to the sand. She stood before him nude and, placing one hand on her hip, she pirouetted slowly. Her nipples were taut and the breasts cast small shadows on her flesh in the moonlight.

  “Now, Jim,” she said, “you’ll have to admit this is more chic than Rita Krasicki’s basic foundation.”

  He stood watching her, fascinated, as she turned with a saucy toss of her head. As a husband, he felt a stab of guilt and remorse at the mention of Rita’s name, and he wondered what vagaries of emotion had swept him into unfaithfulness. But the man quickly took over from the husband, and he found himself challenged carnally by her comparison. Yes, he agreed that Martha, as she stood there under the moon and the stars, was an alluring sculpture in flesh. Her belly was trim and smooth, her white thighs gleamed in the fragile light, and her face wore a mocking smile.

  “Undress!” she commanded. The buoyancy of her tone startled him. What the devil…

  But she was beside him, fumbling feverishly at the buttons on his pajama top. He slid off the trousers himself, and she yanked at his hand, pulling him across the beach into the water.

  The cool night waves, rolling gently toward the shore, had the caress of velvet on his bare skin. Jim reached for Martha’s waist through the water, but she took several swift strokes, swimming away from him and kicking a bubbly froth in his face. The chase lasted several minutes. Each time he touched one of her limbs, she squirmed away and slid, dolphinlike, out of reach. At last he grasped her firmly about the shoulders and drew her to him. The sensuous merger of water and flesh, never before experienced, aroused a desire almost suffocating in its power. They stood in waist-deep water, lavishing each other with wet kisses and holding so tightly their arms ached. Then, as they laughed shyly at their surge of passion, Jim guided her to the shore. There, on the beach, they were one, and for long minutes they alternately fought for consummation and to thwart it, whispering feverishly like children and expending themselves wildly. Lust fired them as a fever, and Martha felt an immense, welling hunger for her man. At last, in the mysterious seizure of fulfillment, she uttered a sharp cry, and then they were both still.

  They lay mute and exhausted, clasped in an embrace in which sweat and sand mingled with the sting of drying salt water. And then, as quickly as the sudden breeze which whistled through the madeira trees, Jim felt an enormity of guilt for his long affair with Rita. In a swift tumble of thoughts, he castigated himself for sliding heedlessly into a liaison that carried his body and his mind to another woman and which robbed Martha of him for precious months. It was as though, in a fit of madness, he had looted his own home. Remorse ate at him like acid, then slowly ebbed away, engulfed in a wave of deep tenderness. He stroked Martha’s throat and he said softly: “Marty, please forgive me for what I’ve done. I love you.”

  To his surprise, she smiled, patted his face and got up quickly from the sand. She found the towels and threw him one.

  “Quit your mooning and rub hard,” she said, “or you’ll wind up with pneumonia.”

  They dressed in their pajamas again and sat hunched on the sand, looking across the sound to the little village of New Plymouth. Several lights still twinkled, and the cluster of single-story houses was framed faintly by the moonlight.

  Jim wondered at the transformation in Martha. Gone was the skittering, frothy, cluttered woman who slid from project to project like a bug on ice. Instead she seemed composed, poised, appearing as content as he felt.

  “Jim,” she said as though she had a window to his thoughts, “it was as much my fault as yours. No man should have to put up with a wife who races around chairing committees. He needs a woman in his home, and if he doesn’t have one, he’ll go out and find one.”

  “Aw, Marty—” he protested, but she cut him short.

  “I know I’m right,” she said. “But I know something else now. You’re my man, Jim MacVeagh, and I’m going to keep you any way I can.”

  They both stood up, and she brought her face close to his. Her close-bobbed hair was matted to her head in wet strands, and her face, bare of cosmetics, broke into a teasing grin.

  “Wouldn’t you like to keep me as your mistress, Senator? I think I’m good enough, don’t you?”

  He clutched her and smothered her again with kisses. “God, you’re wonderful, Marty. Anything, anything. What would you like?”

  She tilted her head and looked skyward. “Oh, just a few little things—in mink. Or
sable maybe. Nothing ostentatious, you understand.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “It’s not enough,” she replied. “You’ve got to worship me.”

  They laughed and then, hand in hand again, they walked up the winding path to the little inn, couched in its fragrant bed of flowering shrubs. Jim hadn’t felt so serene and happy in months.

  In the days that followed they became a rollicking, teasing pair, reveling in each other and in the glitter of Green Turtle Cay. Neither calflike nor somber like the honeymooners, they nevertheless seemed as fresh as a newly married couple to whom everything shone with a recently washed face. They fished. They sailed. They swam. They wandered through the hamlet of New Plymouth, which had been settled by refugee Tories from the United States during the Revolutionary War. They inspected the crumbling tombstones in the old graveyard, and they idled by the wharves to watch the inter-island schooners unload. They joked, they kidded each other unmercifully and once again they stole down to the beach near midnight. They found it difficult to keep their hands from each other, and Jim wondered at the waves of virility which swept over him time and again, unbeckoned. Once, after lovemaking, Martha broke into a fit of laughter.

  “We’ve got to stop this,” she said, “or I’ll be a nervous wreck when we get back home. Do you know how many times we’ve made love here?”

  “I never mix statistics with romance,” he said.

  “Nine.” She giggled. “Nine times. If I ever told that to the Senate wives, they’d make you start a harem.”

  He leaned over her with a look of mock rage. “Do you mean to tell me that while I’ve been lost in love you’ve been counting?”

  “I dote on higher mathematics.”

  “And the lower lusts too,” he said. “Marty, it’s plain concupiscence.”

  “Concu-what?”

  “Never mind. You know too damn much already. I’ve a good mind to tell your mother on you.”

  “Oh, Jim darling, I adore you.”

  And so it went through the blissful hours, and it was not until Monday afternoon, as they lay baking in the sun on the little beach, that Jim let his mind return to President Hollenbach, Aspen lodge, the tangled mysteries of the grand concept, and the President’s haunted charge that he was beset by a conspiracy of persecutors. What exactly, thought MacVeagh, should he do, now that he had this new perspective of distance and personal contentment? Somehow now it seemed that Fred Odium had been right. The proper course, the one he should have followed all along, was to do nothing. The best action was no action. There was no question that President Hollenbach was not “normal,” but precisely what did that mean anyway? Mark probably was suffering from some small, temporary disturbance, but didn’t everybody at one time or another? Take himself and Rita. No, he refused to think about her, and he found it easy to dismiss her from his thoughts.

  The sun beat down on Jim’s tanning body, and he fingered the warm, loose sand. Sure, of course, under the tensions of Washington, he had exaggerated. Here, in the lazy, lulling breeze, Hollenbach’s once hurtling speech seemed to slow and his jerky motions at Aspen lodge seemed to fade into familiar reactions. The President was imaginative, alive, certainly strange at times, but he wasn’t mad. Of course not. And even if he was somewhat abnormal, the infirmity would show itself to others soon. It couldn’t be hidden forever. And why should Jim MacVeagh be the lonely crusader? By what God-given right did he appoint himself the savior of the country and the umpire of the sanity of men’s minds? Yes, doing nothing—at least for some time—was really the wisest course. At the meeting with Zuchek in Stockholm there would be a score of State Department advisers to keep Mark in check. Jim had worried unduly about that. Odium and Gullion, the white man and the black man, weren’t so dumb. They were right. And Jim’s face, upthrust to the sun, relaxed with the effortless decision he was making.

  Martha, watching him idly, saw the change.

  “What are you thinking, honey?” she asked.

  “I was deciding,” he said. “I’ve decided to do no more on this Hollenbach business. If he’s off his rocker, and he’s probably not, somebody else will discover it soon enough. It’s not my job to psychoanalyze.”

  She traced a finger around his lips. “Of course, darling. I knew you’d understand finally.”

  He grinned. “The man has at last become as wise as his woman, huh?”

  “And, Jim, you weren’t being followed,” she said quietly. “You know that now, don’t you?”

  He sat bolt upright and sand showered from him. “No, damn it…” he began, but then he checked himself. Why argue with her now and stir up her latent fears? Of course he had been followed. For all he knew, a Secret Service agent was staying in the hotel in New Plymouth right now. The surveillance of Jim MacVeagh had been an observed fact, regardless of the accuracy of his surmises about Hollenbach. Still, there was no sense in upsetting Martha.

  “I was too being followed,” he said with a grin. “You were following me—to force me into sexual bondage.”

  “You make a handsome slave,” she said.

  “Never give me liberty—or death,” he said. And they kissed again.

  Another night and day slipped by, luxuriously carefree, and they decided to stay the remainder of the week. But on Tuesday night Jim got a call from Washington. The inn had no telephones, but the owner maintained a ship-to-shore phone on his power barge, and Jim walked down the hill to answer the summons of the Miami marine operator. The connection was bad. Rattles and squeaks decorated a wavering beat of sound which alternately boomed and faded. Jim had to strain to hear. It was Flip Carlson.

  “A couple of interesting things have happened, boss,” said Carlson. “I knew you’d want to be filled in.”

  “All right. Shoot.”

  “First,” said Carlson, “Colonel Josephs reported back to me today that Mr. H’s service record is missing from the microfilms of the Army service records in St. Louis.”

  “Missing?”

  “Yeah. A guy named Andrate from the Pentagon came out a couple of days ago and took the microfilm. Josephs wasn’t supposed to tell me that, but he did.”

  “Who’s Andrate?” asked MacVeagh.

  “Your memory’s failing in that tropic sun, boss. Butch Andrate is the confidential assistant to Mr. Defense, Sid Karper.”

  “Karper? You sure?”

  “Right,” said Carlson. “And here’s the other interesting thing. You didn’t tell me, but the head of the legislative reference service at the Library of Congress called you today, then talked to me. He says he still can’t get you the full packet on the subject of presidential disability because somebody else has it.”

  “Did he say who?”

  “Yes.” Carlson uttered a name, but the connection faded.

  “Who? Who?” asked Jim. “I couldn’t catch it.”

  “Karper. Sidney Karper.”

  Jim was seized by a quickly mounting excitement. Lethargy dropped away like a spent shell.

  “Flip,” he said, “we’ll fly back tomorrow. I’ll arrive on that late-afternoon plane from West Palm. Meet me at Dulles, will you?”

  “Sure, boss.” There was a pause. “You still won’t tell me what this is all about?”

  “Later, Flip.” Jim found that his nerves were quivering. “I can’t tell you right now. Pick us up at Dulles.”

  “Okay,” said Carlson, “and if you’re so interested in Karper right now, it’s good you’re coming back, because he’s slated to testify before your subcommittee on defense costs the day after tomorrow.”

  Jim walked rapidly up the hill to Bluff House but, fast as he went, his steps could not keep pace with his thoughts. Sidney Karper, probing into President Hollenbach’s service record and reading material on presidential disability? Could that mean…? Martha, waiting for him at the top of the hill, could tell by the absorbe
d look on her husband’s face that the second honeymoon was over.

  16.

  Cactus II

  At 10 A.M. Thursday Senator MacVeagh and two other senators, one Democrat and one Republican, seated themselves in black leather chairs at the head of the long, oblong table with green felt topping, traditional place of business for the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. Senate.

  A large wall mirror over the old-fashioned marble fireplace reflected the gathering group of officials. Senator MacVeagh, chairman of a subcommittee conducting a continuing study of defense costs, nodded a greeting to the Secretary of Defense, Sidney Karper, who eased his huge body into a chair several places down the table from the three senators. The bronze tint of Karper’s skin might blend with the metal nameplates on the committee table, but the seating protocol served as a tacit reminder to the Cabinet officer that in the halls of the Senate he was an alien on sovereign territory. Karper was neatly attired in a subdued pin-stripe suit, in contrast to the assistant at his side, whose clothes were rumpled and who had a pair of eyeglasses casually straddling the top of his head.

  A committee aide walked past the cluster of service flags on a side wall and hung a small sign, EXECUTIVE SESSION, on an outer knob of the main door. Then he closed and locked it.

  Jim MacVeagh, who had been studying Karper intently since the Secretary entered the room, rapped his gavel smartly.

  “No introductions are necessary here,” said MacVeagh. “We’re all old friends—or perhaps veteran acquaintances is a more appropriate term.”

  “Well, no,” said Karper. “My special assistant here, Carmine Andrate, is new to this particular group. However, he’s fully cleared for all security material, so there’s no problem there.”

  MacVeagh nodded. “I think it’s of a piece with Secretary Karper’s grasp of the defense establishment that he comes here on complicated matters with only one assistant. At some hearings here, the colonels outnumber the bulbs in the chandeliers.”