Keating recalled how one afternoon while walking Via Condotti with a group from the college, Gisela had impulsively taken his hand and pulled him to a gelati vendor in Piazza de Spagna. She purchased a cone of the rich Italian ice cream and insisted he have some.
Keating was head-turningly handsome, with the black curly hair and ruddy complexion of the Irish seamen who were his ancestors. He looked right into her eyes and licked at the chocolate-flavored gelati.
“I think we should forge our alliance gradually—” Gisela said. She noticed the soft gelati was running down the waffled cone onto her fingers, slipped one between her bowed lips, and slowly sucked it clean. “We’ll share simple pleasures — first,” she went on suggestively, offering Keating an ice-creamed fingertip — which he seriously considered, then declined.
Keating almost smiled at the recollection — the friendship she had suggested was indeed a fast one. But she had blown the consensus; very tempted by her, he was also very married.
When he returned to Washington, Keating told the story of Pomerantz’s advance, and his wobbly retreat to his best friend, Jim Hilliard, who was, at that time, the junior senator from Illinois. They had been classmates at the University of Chicago Law School, and Keating served as best man when Hilliard married Janet Davidson, his childhood sweetheart. He cried with him at her funeral.
Now, in the Presidential Library at Camp David, Keating was meeting with the man whom he had helped win the presidency. “Never forget, do you?” he asked.
“Not when history’s on the line,” Hilliard replied. “Pomerantz is a screaming hawk, Phil; the potential stumbling block to the smooth progression of the talks. And nothing, nothing’s going to endanger the capstone of this presidency.”
Hilliard stood, circled his chair, and came around the table to Keating.
“One day, Phil, schoolchildren, when asked who’s responsible for nuclear disarmament — for leading the world from the brink of atomic annihilation to days of peaceful coexistence — are going to—”
“Are going to answer, President James Hilliard,” Keating interjected, completing the President’s sentence. “I wrote that speech. Remember?”
Hilliard smiled and nodded.
“Damn good one, too,” he replied.
The President settled for a moment, then leveled a forthright look at Keating.
“I may have blown the economy, Phil,” he said, “and God knows Central America’s far from licked, but I’m going to pull off arms control. And if it means you shacking up with Gisela Pomerantz, so be it.”
Keating nodded tight-lipped and, with a straight face, said, “Promise me one thing, Jim—” Despite their long friendship, he called the President by his first name infrequently, and only when alone.
“If it’s in my power,” the President said, equally serious.
“Promise me,” Keating went on, “that no classroom full of kids will ever be asked, ‘Who shacked up with Germany’s deputy minister for strategic deployment?’”
Hilliard broke into hearty laughter.
Keating laughed along with him, thinking that he’d said it jokingly but he really meant it.
It was evening in Moscow, and cold. Twenty-five degrees below zero cold.
Three men who shared a very different view of President James Hilliard’s place in history were meeting in the office of the Soviet Premier in the green-domed Council of Ministers Building, the eighteenth-century headquarters of the Soviet government inside the walls of the Kremlin.
Premier Dmitri Kaparov, a stooped, wizened man with a puffy face and jaundiced skin, sat at his leather-topped desk, turning the pages of a maroon briefing book. Chief Disarmament Negotiator Mikhail Pykonen and Cultural Minister Aleksei Deschin sat opposite him; Vasily Moskvin, the Premier’s longtime aide, off to one side taking notes.
The room was stifling hot, kept that way due to the Soviet Premier’s failing health. On a pedestal next to his chair, and centered beneath the vigilant portrait of Lenin, stood a portable dialysis machine. Two blood-filled, clear plastic cannulas snaked from ports on the machine to a shunt that had been surgically implanted in the underside of the Premier’s left forearm. The plastic loop protruded through a slit made in the seam of his jacket sleeve.
The highly sophisticated machine that had taken over the work the Premier’s shriveled kidneys could no longer perform hissed softly while the three men spoke.
“Well done, Mikhail,” Kaparov said, closing the large volume. “Your usual inventiveness and thorough preparation are clearly in evidence.”
Pykonen dabbed at the space between his upswept brows with a handkerchief, wondering why the cultural minister had been included in an arms control briefing. “Thank you, sir. I’m confident we’ll attain an equitable position by the time the talks in Geneva are completed.”
Kaparov shifted the weight of his disease-riddled body, and smiled with a radiance he rarely exhibited since becoming ill. “Good,” he replied. “Because Minister Deschin and I have a way to guarantee it will be even more than equitable my friend — much more.”
The Premier often made such inflated statements, Pykonen thought; a device to create the impression an assignment was of vital importance, even when it wasn’t. But disarmament was the dying Premier’s obsession; so Pykonen knew this wasn’t one of those times.
Kaparov placed a hand atop Pykonen’s shoulder. “You’d think by now, Mikhail, there’d be nothing about your government you wouldn’t know, hmmm?”
Pykonen let a thin smile tighten his lips.
“Even my wife still surprises me once in a while,” he said with a mischievous twinkle.
Deschin and Kaparov chuckled heartily.
“Well,” Deschin said, taking over, “let’s begin with something you do know. It’s been over twenty years since Comrade Khrushchev placed the highest priority on establishing a missile base in the Western Hemisphere.”
“Cuba,” Pykonen grunted solemnly. “That I know.”
“It was sound thinking, Mikhail,” Deschin went on. “We had enormous psychological and strategic pressures created by American missiles in Europe to overcome, as well as the limited accuracy of our own. Our guidance system technology was terribly primitive at the time.”
“It still leaves something to be desired,” Premier Kaparov added, shaking his head in dismay.
“I recall those days very well,” Pykonen replied. “The U-2s were driving the Defense Ministry crazy. The minute we shot that one down over Sverdlovsk in sixty, we knew that our missiles would be detected no matter where we deployed them—as we deployed them.” He paused, considering the propriety of what he was going to say next. “If I may,” Pykonen resumed gently. “We knew deployment in Cuba was doomed from the start. I never could fathom why we went ahead with it.”
“Because your Premier came up with a brilliant idea,” Deschin replied. “And I happened to know an agent of influence whom we induced to cooperate. With typical Soviet ingenuity, we turned adversity to asset.”
Pykonen’s eyes were wide with curiosity, now. He leaned forward in his chair, hanging on every word.
“You see, Mikhail,” Kaparov explained, “we deployed knowing goddamn well we were going to get caught. In fact, we counted on it.”
Pykonen looked at them with disbelief. “You mean, the missiles, the warheads, the launching complexes, the maintenance equipment, they were all — a ploy?” he asked, amazed by the concept.