This is not happening to me!
The last time Miranda Sullivan and Darlene Lefebure had seen each other — in fact the only time they had ever seen each other — they had both been off their heads. They had also been horizontal in a state of wanton undress on the same large, red-sheeted circular bed on the first floor of the big old house in the Haight District of San Francisco owned by Johnny Seiffert, and at different times that night they had both had very rough sex with Darlene’s black boyfriend. The last time Miranda had seen Darlene she was running out of the house in tears and Miranda herself had just been violently sick, mostly in her then much longer hair and over her feet.
That had been on the night of the war.
Thirteen months later both women were so changed in appearance from that night that they ought not to have instantly recognised each other; and yet in the way of these things they knew each other instantly.
Darlene Lefebure had shed her girlish puppy fat, trimmed down to a busty leanness, her complexion was unspotted, her hair was muddy brown, cut to dance on her shoulders and she was wearing a plan cream frock which pinched in to her much narrowed waist. The clumsy pretty girl of over a year ago had blossomed into womanhood.
For her part Miranda had abandoned the long blond siren’s hair, was dressed in a natty trouser suit, abandoned the rings and bangles on her fingers and wrists, and ceased to be the person she had been that dreadful night in Johnny Seiffert’s house on Haight Street.
The two young women stared at each other.
Each in their own way was too stunned to speak for some seconds.
Miranda recovered first.
“I think the room is a little crowded,” she said, not recognising her own voice. “If Lieutenant Brenckmann and I could speak to Miss Lefebure alone please?”
Chapter 18
The United States Attorney General had a copy of that morning’s Washington Post on his desk when Nicholas Katzenbach walked into his office. The two men had had their differences, they were temperamentally unalike in many respects and in any true meritocracy their respective positions and status in the Administration might easily have been reversed. However, both men were practical political animals who understood that they lived in a World in which fairness and natural justice had not, and never would be a given of the human condition. It helped that on a personal level — when they were not locking horns about Department of Justice or other ‘political’ issues — they had always got on well; and that although they were hardly close friends they were allies theoretically committed to similar agendas. Most important, they realised that they needed each other.
“I didn’t know you had a thing for brunettes, Nick?” Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy chuckled as he waved for his right hand man to take a chair opposite him in front of his desk. Outside the rain beat against the windows, as if to reflect the darkening mood of the capital city. Things had been getting out of hand for some time and there was a general feeling that the moment when any one individual member of the Administration could do anything about it had long passed. Political bravura prevented a Cabinet member coming out and saying it in public; but hardly anybody at the top table retained a good feeling about the way the country, and its deteriorating relations with what was left of the World was headed. Over everything there hung a darkling cloud, as if there was a general consensus that it was only a matter of time before something dreadful overtook America.
These infrequent private meetings between the two men were rare opportunities for them to relax, to let down their guard and to stop pretending that the Government of the Unites States was actually in control of events.
“Director Hoover didn’t waste any time,” the United States Deputy Attorney General guffawed. “I warned my wife that this was coming but I still feel a little bit guilty putting Claude Betancourt’s girl through this shit.”
“We need to keep the old faggot away from Jack at the moment,” the younger Kennedy brother shrugged.
“You should have told me the ‘big initiative’ was the ‘Moon thing’,” Nick Katzenbach observed dryly, sidestepping any discussion of why exactly he and his boss needed to keep J. Edgar Hoover and his jackals ‘away’ from the President.
He had been in on the secret that the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America suffered from, among other things, an incurable and potentially disabling disease, Addison’s, for some months. Moreover, by going along with the cover up he was knowingly committing several offences, Federal felony counts for which if found guilty, he would surely face long sentences of imprisonment. But then sometimes adhering to the strict letter of the law and doing the right thing were mutually incompatible; and thus far his conscience was clear.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy had first been diagnosed with Addison’s disease in London in 1947, aged thirty, shortly after he was elected to represent the 11th Congressional district in Massachusetts. He had probably suffered from Addison’s all his life; and at the very least it had complicated and exacerbated the injuries he had suffered during his war service in the Pacific. The symptoms of the disease included any or all of — usually most of — the following: severe and sometimes incapacitating pains in the legs, back and abdomen, random attacks of vomiting and diarrhoea, hypoglycaemia, fevers and at the extreme end of the spectrum, convulsions, psychosis and syncope.
Katzenbach had been told by Bobby Kennedy that his elder brother had suffered most of the symptoms at one time or another since assuming the Presidency, and during the last awful year several of them in combination leading to short periods of bed-bound incapacity. Before the October War the President had met foreign leaders and ambassadors while experiencing minor manifestations of Addison’s; including confusion, slurred speech brought on by low blood pressure and sudden terrible bouts of lethargy.
Within hours of his return from Houston to deliver the ‘Moon Speech’ Jack Kennedy had suffered a near total physical collapse.
Such was the dysfunctionality of the Administration that the Vice-President had not been informed that the President was hors de combat; White House insiders simply assumed that Lyndon Johnson would be ‘fully in the picture’ because LBJ was the ultimate Washington insider, and in the past it had proven well nigh impossible to keep secrets from the former ringmaster of Capitol Hill. Nevertheless, Katzenbach was of the view that the Vice-President ought to have been ‘formally’ notified of the President’s ‘indisposition’ long before now. He was old-fashioned enough to think that the United States Constitution was probably the only thing that stood between the Union and anarchy, and that any man who knowingly trammelled its provisions was courting disaster.
While Nick Katzenbach agreed in principle that the President had to be protected; nearly a week later the protection of the President was no longer, in his mind, the main issue.
The Presidency was not a Kennedy clan fiefdom and the one hundred and seventy-seven or seventy-eight million — that was a guess, only a full census would establish the full cost of the October War — surviving citizens of the United States of America deserved better than to be ruled by an absentee landlord. Back in 1776 the American people had risen in revolution against another absentee landlord, mad George III of England, and that was a lesson a man forgot at his peril.