“I don’t know. But we have to find out.” Marco stood up. “Before I take this first step, before I leave here, I’d like to hear you say that you understand that I’m going to explode this whole thing with a court-martial, not because—not to save myself from those dreams—”

“Ah, fuh crissake, Ben! Whose idea was it! Who gives a goddam about that?”

“Let me finish. This is an official statement because, believe me, pal, I know. Once I get that court-martial started—my own court-martial—it can get pretty rough on both of us.” He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “My father—well, it’s a good thing my father is dead—with me starting out to make a public bum out of a Medal of Honor man. Shuddup! But I have to do it. Security. What a lousy word. I look right into the horrible face of something that might kill my country and the only word for the danger is a word that means the absolute opposite. Security. Well, as you said—with stakes like that I’m expendable. And so are you, Raymond pal. So are you.”

“Will you stop? Who thought it up? Me. Who practically made you agree to do it? Me. And you can shove that patriotic jive about saving our great country. I want to know why a bunch of filthy Soviet peasants and degraded Chinese coolies would dare to confer the Medal of Honor on me.”

“Raymond. Do me a favor? Tell me about the action again. Please.”

“What action?”

“Come on! Come on!”

“You mean go on from where I was?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Well—you will throw up another flare but you’ll throw it about twenty yards ahead of me at maybe twelve o’clock, at maybe dead center of the line, because you will figure I’ll be moving across the terrain up that ridge so—”

“Man, oh man, this is something.”

“What?”

“Each time you talk about the action you even tell it as though it hadn’t happened yet.”

“That’s what I’m saying! That’s the way I always think about it! I mean, when some horrible square comes out of nowhere at a banquet, the paper makes me go too, and he starts asking me about it. Come on, Ben. You made your point. Let’s go meet your girl.”

Marco ran his fingers through his thick hair on both sides of his head. He put his elbows on his knees and covered his face with his hands. Raymond stared down at him, almost tenderly. “Don’t be embarrassed if you feel like you’re going to cry, Ben,” Raymond said gently.

Marco shook his head. Raymond opened another can of beer.

“I swear to sweet, sweet God I think I am going to be able to sleep,” Marco said. “I can feel it. There isn’t anything about those crazy voices and those fast, blurring colors and the eyes of that terrible audience that frightens me any more.” He took his hands away from his face and reflexively reached over to take Raymond’s can of beer out of his hand. Raymond reached down and opened another. Marco fell asleep, sitting up. Raymond stretched him out on the sofa, brought him a blanket, put out the lights, and went into his office to listen to the river wind and to read a slim book with the highly improbable title of Liquor, the Servant of Man.

Marco was still asleep when Raymond left the apartment the next morning. Eugénie Rose Cheyney called him soon after he reached his office. She asked if Marco had been sleeping quietly. Raymond said he had. She said, “Oh, Mr. Shaw, that’s just wonderful!” and hung up.

Thirteen

RAYMOND’S MOTHER CALLED HIM FROM THE Idlewild Airport. She wanted him to have lunch with her. He tried to think quickly of somebody whom he could say he had to have lunch with but she said he was not to stall her, that she was well aware that he disliked people too much to be stuck for an hour or more at a luncheon table with one, so he could damn well show up wherever they let ladies eat luncheon at the Plaza Hotel at one o’clock. He said he would be there. Beyond having acknowledged that his name was Raymond when she had first spoken, it was all he said to his mother.

She was hard at work making a scene by bossing the maître d’hotel, a table captain, and two waiters at a table that faced the park in the big corner room when he arrived at the Plaza at ten seconds before one o’clock. She motioned him to stand beside her chair until she finished her oration about exactly how they were to stuff the oysters into a carpetbag steak and that she would not tolerate more than eleven minutes of broiling on each side, in a preheated grill, at four hundred degrees. The waiters bowed and left. Raymond’s mother gave the maître d’ the full glare of her contempt for an instant, then spoke to Raymond. “I ask you to imagine a restaurant,” she said, “which does not list Clos de Lambrays or a Cuvée Docteur Peste!” She waved the man away, with bitterness. She permitted Raymond to kiss her on the right cheek, ever so lightly, then motioned him to his chair at the table for four, not at her right or directly across from her, but at her left, which made it impossible for either of them to look out of the window at the park.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“As am I. Not that you asked.”

“When I heard you ordering a steak stuffed with oysters I had a clue.”

“The steak will be mainly for you.”

“Sure.”

“Johnny is fine.”

“You mean his physical health, I presume?”

“I do. And everything else.”

“Is he in a jam?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Why are we here?”

“Why are we having our annual meeting?”

“I am your mother, which is a sufficient reason. Why did you ask if Johnny is in a jam?”

“It occurred to me that you might have decided that you would have use for my column, which has so carefully disqualified itself from ever printing Johnny’s name despite the fact that he is an assassin, pure and simple. An assassin of character and the soul. He reeks of death, you know?” Raymond exceeded his own gifts for being obnoxious and impossible when he was with his mother. His brushing gesture worked for him almost all the time, punctuating his haughtiness and scorn. His posture was as attenuated as liquid being drawn up through a drinking straw.

His mother closed her eyes tightly as she answered him. “My dear boy, one more column of type in this weltered world spelling out Johnny’s name would not be much noticed.”

“I’ll remember that.”

She opened her eyes. “What for?”

Raymond, when he was with his mother, always felt a nagging fear that he was gaping at her beauty. As they spoke, whenever they met, his eyes searched each millimeter of her skin for a flaw and weighed each of her gestures, anxious that he might discover some loss of grace, but to no avail. He was dismayed and gratified to fall back upon the mockery of her pretense at disappointment because there had been no Clos de Lambrays or Cuvée Docteur Peste, which so failed to find harmony with the fact that Johnny Iselin drank bourbon with his meals.

“Mother, in God’s name, where did you ever hear of a thing like a carpetbag steak? Johnny found it, didn’t he? Johnny had to find it, because in the world’s literature of food there couldn’t be a dish which expresses his vulgarity better than a thick, contemptuously expensive piece of meat pregnant with viscous, slippery, sensual oysters.”

“Raymond, please! Watch your language.” She leered at him.

“It’s disgusting and he’s disgusting.”

“The reason I asked you to lunch today, Raymond,” his mother said smoothly, “is that I have not, actually, been entirely well and my doctor has suggested a trip to Europe this summer.”

“What’s the matter with you?” He stretched out the diphthongs of the drawl until its sounds reverberated nasally into his soft palate, thinking: Has there ever on God’s earth been a liar like this woman? Does she at any square inch of her mountainous vanity, conceive that I can be had through the delicate health appeal? Will she produce a forged electrocardiogram? Will a malpracticing doctor with an even gaze suddenly happen to discover that we are lunching here? She would never pull anything as crude as a faint, but she could play a great scene with any given kindly old physician who had been coached in his lines.