In the second place Inez seemed, that summer and fall after she left Honolulu with Jack Lovett, emotionally inaccessible. She seemed to have renounced whatever stake in the story she might have had, and erected the baffle of her achieved serenity between herself and what had happened. It’s the summer monsoon and quite sticky, you don’t want to visit during the monsoon really but I’m sure Harry and Billy between them can sort out what you need to know. Excuse haste. Regards, Inez V.
This was the response, scrawled on a postcard showing the lobby of the Hotel Equatorial in Kuala Lumpur, to the letter I wrote from Honolulu in July of 1975 asking Inez if she would see me. Since the “summer monsoon” in Kuala Lumpur is followed immediately by the “winter monsoon,” which in turn lasts until the onset of the next “summer monsoon,” Inez’s response was even less equivocal than it might seem. In October, from Los Angeles, I wrote a second letter, and more or less promptly received a second postcard, again showing the lobby of the Hotel Equatorial, where incidentally Inez was not staying: What you mention is all in the past and frankly I’d rather look ahead. In other words a visit would be unproductive. I.
This card was postmarked the second of November and arrived in Los Angeles the fifteenth. Ten days later I received a third communication from Inez, a clipping of a book review, in which my name was mentioned in passing, from a month-old International Herald-Tribune. The note stapled to the clipping read Sorry if my note seemed abrupt but you see my point I’m sure, Inez. It was one week after that when Inez called my house in Los Angeles, having gone to some lengths to get the number, and asked me to come to Kuala Lumpur.
Actually she did not exactly “ask” me to come to Kuala Lumpur.
“When are you coming to K.L.,” was what she said exactly.
I considered this.
“I wouldn’t want to miss you,” she said. “I could show you around.”
At the time I thought that she had decided to talk to me only because Jack Lovett’s name was just beginning to leak out of the various investigations into arms and currency and technology dealings on the part of certain former or perhaps even current overt and covert agents of the United States government. There had even been hints about narcotics dealings, which, although they made good copy and were played large in the early coverage (I recall the phrase “Golden Triangle” in many headlines, and a photograph of two blurred figures leaving a house on Victoria Peak, one identified as a “sometime Lovett business associate” and the other as a “known Hong Kong Triad opium lord”), remained just that, hints, rumors that would never be substantiated, but the other allegations were solid enough, and not actually surprising to anyone who had bothered to think about what Jack Lovett was doing in that part of the world.
There had been the affiliations with interlocking transport and air courier companies devoid of real assets. There had been the directorship of the bank in Vila that put the peculiarities of condominium government to such creative use. There had been all the special assignments and the special consultancies and the special relationships in a fluid world where the collection of information was indistinguishable from the use of information and where national and private interests (the interests of state and non-state actors, Jack Lovett would have said) did not collide but merged into a single pool of exchanged favors.
In order to understand what Jack Lovett did it was necessary only to understand how natural it was for him to do it, how at once entirely absorbing and supremely easy. There had always been that talent for putting the right people together, the right man at the Department of Defense, say, with the right man at Livermore or Los Alamos or Brookhaven, or, a more specific example with a more immediately calculable payout, the Director of Base Development for CINC-PAC/MACV with Dwight Christian.
There had always been something else as well.
There had been that emotional solitude, a detachment that extended to questions of national or political loyalty.
It would be inaccurate to call Jack Lovett disloyal, although I suppose some people did at the time.
It would be accurate only to say that he regarded the country on whose passport he traveled as an abstraction, a state actor, one of several to be factored into any given play.
In other words.
What Jack Lovett did was never black or white, and in the long run may even have been (since the principal gain to him was another abstraction, the pyramiding of further information) devoid of ethical content altogether, but since shades of gray tended not to reproduce in the newspapers the story was not looking good on a breaking basis. That Jack Lovett had reportedly made some elusive deals with the failed third force (or fourth force, or fifth force, this was a story on which the bottom kept dropping out) in Phnom Penh in those days after the embassy closed there did not look good. That the London dealer who was selling American arms abandoned in South Vietnam had received delivery from one of Jack Lovett’s cargo services did not look good. It seemed clear to me that the connection with Inez would surface quite soon (as it did, the week I came back from Kuala Lumpur, when the WNBC tape of Inez dancing with Harry Victor on the St. Regis Roof temporarily obliterated my actual memory of Inez), and I assumed that Inez wanted to see me only because Jack Lovett wanted to see me. I assumed that Jack Lovett would find during my visit a way of putting out his own information. I assumed that Inez was acting for him.
In short I thought I was going to Kuala Lumpur as part of a defensive strategy that Inez might or might not understand.
This was, it turned out, too easy a reading of Inez Victor.
3
ONE thing she wanted to tell me was that Jack Lovett was dead.
That Jack Lovett had died on the nineteenth of August at approximately eleven o’clock in the evening in the shallow end of the fifty-meter swimming pool at the Hotel Borobudur in Jakarta.
After swimming his usual thirty laps.
That she had taken Jack Lovett’s body to Honolulu and buried it on the twenty-first of August in the little graveyard at Schofield Barracks. Past where they buried the stillborn dependents. Beyond the Italian prisoners of war. Near a jacaranda tree, but the jacaranda had been out of bloom. When the jacaranda came into bloom and dropped its petals on the grass the pool of blue would just reach Jack Lovett’s headstone. The grave was that close to the jacaranda. The colonel who had been her contact at Schofield had at first suggested another site but he had understood her objection. The colonel who had been her contact at Schofield had been extremely helpful.
Extremely cooperative.
Extremely kind really.
As had her original contact.
Mr. Soebadio. In Jakarta. Mr. Soebadio was the representative for Java of the bank in Vila and it turned out to be his telephone number that Jack Lovett had given her to call if any problem arose during the four or five days they were to be in Jakarta.
Jack Lovett had not given her Mr. Soebadio’s name.
Only this telephone number.
To call. In case she was ill, or needed to reach him during the day, or he was in Solo or Surabaya and the rioting flared up again. In fact she had been thinking about this telephone number at the precise instant when she looked up and saw that Jack Lovett was lying face down in the very shallow end of the pool, the long stretch where the water was less than a foot deep and the little children with the Texas accents played all day.