Raymond’s mother stopped a waiter and took his tray of four filled champagne glasses. She carried it off in the opposite direction from the library, followed stiffly by the senator, to the small room which was known to the domestic staff as “the Senator’s den” because Johnny liked to drink in there, unshaven.
It was a vivid room, vivid enough to make a narcoleptic sit up popeyed, with bright, white carpet, black walls, and shining brass furniture with zebrine upholstery. Raymond’s mother set the tray down upon the black desk with the shining brass drawer handles, then asked her neighbor to sit down as she closed the door.
“It was good of you to come over, Tom.”
He shrugged.
“I suppose you were surprised to learn that we had taken this house.”
“Surprised and appalled.”
“You won’t have to see much of us.”
“I am sure of that.”
“I would like to ask a question.”
“You may.”
“Will you carry this personal feeling you have for me and for Johnny over into other fields of practical politics?”
“What other fields?”
“Well—the convention, for example.”
His eyebrows shot up. “In what area of the convention?”
“Would you try to block Johnny if his name is brought forward?”
“You’re joking.”
“My dear Tom!”
“You are going to go after the nomination for Johnny?”
“We may be forced into that position. Your answer will help me to form the decision. A lot of Americans, you know, look upon Johnny as one of the few men willing to fight to the death for the preservation of our liberties.”
“Aaaaaah!”
“And I mean a lot of people. Votes. The Loyal American Underground is five million voting Americans. To say nothing of the wonderful work Frank Bollinger is doing, and with no urging from us. He says flatly that he will walk into that convention with a petition of not less than one million votes pledged for Johnny as a down payment on ten million.”
“You haven’t answered me. Are you going after the nomination for Johnny?”
“No,” she answered calmly. “We couldn’t make it. But we can make the vice-presidency.”
“The vice-presidency?” Jordan was incredulous. “Why would Johnny want the vice-presidency?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“Because he wants power and a big stage to dance on. There’s no power in the vice-presidency and the only place where there is more power than where Johnny is right now is in the White House. Why would he want the vice-presidency?”
“I answered your question, Tom, but you haven’t answered mine.”
“What question?”
“Will you block us?”
“Block you? I would spend every cent I own or could borrow to block you. I have contempt for you and fear for you, but mostly I fear for this country when I think of you. Johnny is just a low clown but you are the smiler who wraps a dagger in the flag and waits for your chance, which I pray may never come. I tell you this: if at that convention one month from now you begin to deal with the delegations to cause Johnny’s name to be put on that ticket, or if in my canvass of all delegations which will begin on my telephone tomorrow I learn that you are so acting, I am going to bring impeachment proceedings against your husband on the floor of the Senate and I will hit him with everything in my carefully documented book.”
Raymond’s mother came out of her chair, spitting langrel.
Twenty-Three
JOCIE LEFT A LONG LETTER FOR HER FATHER after she had changed and packed, before she and Raymond drove her car into New York. The letter told him that they were going to be married immediately and that they had decided to have it done quietly, even invisibly, for the entirely apparent political considerations. The letter also told him of how sublimely, utterly happy she was; it said they would return as soon as possible and beseeched her father to tell no one of the marriage because Raymond’s conviction was that his mother would use it at once to political advantage, and that he felt his mother’s political advantages were profitless, even detrimental, to anyone concerned.
Jocie and Raymond reached his apartment at three in the morning after driving into the city in Jocie’s car. They undressed instantly and reflexively and found each other hungrily. Jocie wept and she laughed with joy and disbelief that her true life, the only life she had ever touched because it had touched her simultaneously, had been given back to her. Such an instant ago he had paddled their wide canoe across that lake of purple wine toward a pin of light high in the sky which would widen and widen and widen while she slept until it had blanched the blackness. Another day would have lighted his face as he stood there before her. She had been dreaming. She had not been waiting so long for him, she had been dreaming. She had gone to sleep beside a mountain lake and she had dreamed that he had gone away from her and that they had waited, across the world from each other, until the dream had finished. He loved her! He loved her!
Raymond mailed a concise letter to Joe Downey of The Daily Press concerning his first vacation in four years, explained that his column had been written ahead for five days, and announced that he would return, without saying where he was going, in time to cover the conventions.
They drove her car to Washington and parked it in the Senate garage. They took the first flight out of Washington to Miami, using the names John Starr and Marilyn Ridgeway for the manifest, then an afternoon plane from Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
They were married in San Juan at 5:37 P.M., using their passports for identification in lieu of birth certificates; a condition which helped the justice to remember them two days later when the FBI office in San Juan responded to the Bureau’s general alarm for Raymond. They left San Juan via PAA at 7:05 P.M. and arrived soon after in Antigua, where the presentation of one of the many mysterious cards in Raymond’s wallet secured him credit and lodgings for their wedding night at the Mill Reef Club.
The following afternoon they set sail as the only passengers aboard a chartered schooner with a professionally aloof crew, on a honeymoon voyage through the islands of Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, Barbados, Grenada, Tobago, and Trinidad.
When Raymond’s mother returned to the library and found him gone, she panicked for the first time in her memory. She had to force herself to sit very, very still for nearly twenty minutes to regain control of herself. By then she needed a fix so badly that she nearly scrambled up the back stairs to get heroin and an arm banger. She changed from the costume of the dainty milkmaid, coked to the very retinas, and calmly slipped into something she could wear to the airport, thence to Washington. She leaned back and closed her eyes, her body allowing the serenity to wash over it, and she considered quite objectively what must be done to move through this catastrophe. Although she had the servants seek Raymond throughout the house and grounds and she checked his room herself, she understood best the intuition which told her that he must have fled from her, and that his mechanism had broken down. She knew as well as she could tell the time that, having been triggered by the red queen, when the red queen had been removed from his sight he would have remained in the locked room for the rest of his days in complete suspension of faculties if the mechanism had been operating as constructed. She had elaborate cause to panic.
Chunjin missed Raymond approximately two hours later than his mother did, but his alarm was relayed into the Soviet apparatus via a telephone tape recorder in Arlington, Virginia, immediately so that they knew about Raymond’s disappearance before his mother could reach Washington to tell them. They had panicked, too. A general order was issued to trace the fugitive through their own organizations, but as they confined their search within the borders of the continental United States they got nowhere as the days went on and on.