When it was over, the medical staff wanted to tell Raymond that the explorations had been entirely successful, on the grounds that he was able to accept suggestion with his conscious mind, but Marco overruled that. He said he would tell Raymond that he was beyond their reach, that he was going to be directed entirely by the enemy, that they could not help him but that they had to stop him and that they would stop him. Marco wanted Raymond to stay scared, as much as he disbelieved that Raymond could sustain any feeling.
After that first afternoon when Marco had poured it on him in Hungarian Charlie’s, Raymond had dug in to what he was determined to maintain as a fixed position. He was a lucid man. He knew he was in excellent health, mental and physical. He knew Marco’s health was a long way from what it had once been. He knew it was Marco who had been having the nightmares and breakdowns and that for unknown reasons, probably relative to the phrase “the Army takes care of its own,” his commanders had decided to humor Marco. Well, Raymond decided, I will outhumor and outbless them. Marco is closer to me than any one or all of those uniformed clots. Raymond accordingly formed his policy. It deployed his imagination like the feelers of an insect, advancing it ahead of him wherever his mind, which moved on thousands of tiny feelers of prejudice, took him in its circuitous detour that would allow him to avoid exposing himself to himself as a murderer, a sexual neutral, and a man despised and scorned by his comrades. He put his back into the performance. He used all the tricks of the counterfeiter’s art he could summon to project all of the surface emotions which their little playlets seemed to require of him. He bent, or seemed to bend, into their intentions to halt what he saw as a comic-book plot in which a sinister foreign power, out to destroy America, would achieve its ends by using him as an instrument. They wanted him to be scared. He would seem, when under observation, to be scared, and he worked hard for an effect of seeming as distressed and as aware as game running ahead of guns.
Fortunately, he remembered that the vegetable substitute for benzedrine, which he had taken at one time to lose weight, always gave him hand tremors, so that helped. He knew that a double dose or more of it could produce an authentic crying jag in him, with uncontrollable tears and generally distraught conduct, so that helped.
Marco’s surveillance teams duly reported his purchases of this drug and the unit’s psychological specialists confirmed the side-effects they would produce, so Marco was not deceived by Raymond’s somewhat piteous conduct from time to time. He was very proud of Raymond, however, because he could see that Raymond was going to intolerable trouble, for Raymond, to meet Marco’s urgent requirements, but the discouraging and depressing fact remained that all of them were armless in their attempt to stave off shapeless disaster.
However, there was one relentless, inexorable strength on Marco’s side: in combination or singly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Army Intelligence, and the Central Intelligence Agency represented maximum police efficiency. Such efficiency suspends the law of averages and flattens defeat with patience.
Eighteen
EUGÉNIE ROSE WAS IN BOSTON WITH JUSTIN’S new musical show, which, secretly, had been based upon a map of the heavens issued by the National Geographic Society two years before. Marco planned to join her the next day. She and Marco talked on the telephone at odd hours. They were still dedicated to an early marriage and seemed more than ever convinced that, in a world apparently so populated, no one else existed.
It was Christmas Eve. Raymond had invited Marco for dinner, telephoning him from the office to say that he had given Chunjin the night off and that Chunjin had resisted. Marco said that was because Chunjin was undoubtedly a Buddhist and not a celebrant at Christmas. Raymond said he was sure Chunjin was not a Buddhist because he left books by Mary Baker Eddy around the pantry and kitchen and was forever smiling. Marco said he felt a sense of disappointment at that news because he had figured if he sent Chunjin a Christmas card, Chunjin would then be obligated to send him a card on Buddha’s birthday, or lose face.
Marco arrived at Raymond’s apartment at seven o’clock and brought two bottles of cold champagne with him. Unfortunately for the hang-overs the following day, Raymond had also put two quarts of champagne in the refrigerator. They decided they would sidle toward food a little later and settled down in Raymond’s office behind the big window, and with commendable seasonal cooperation it began to snow large goose feathers, a present from the Birthday Boy himself, in lieu of peace on earth.
After two goblets of the golden bubbles, Raymond reached under his chair and, stiffly, handed Marco a large, gift-wrapped package.
“Merry Christmas,” he said. “It has been good to know you.” Raymond, saying those words, sounded more touching than anyone else who could have said them because, while Raymond had been marooned in time and on earth and in all the pit-black darkness of interstellar space, Marco was the only other being, except Jocie, who had acknowledged he was there.
Marco ripped away the elegant gold and blue paper, revealing the three volumes of Fuller’s A Military History of the Western World re-bound in limp morocco leather. Marco held onto the books with one hand and pounded the embarrassed, grinning Raymond with the other. Then he put the books upon the desk and reached into his pocket. “And a merry, merry Christmas to you, too, young man,” he sang out, handing Raymond a long flat envelope. Raymond started to open the envelope, slowly and with wonderment.
“Wait, wait!” Marco said. He hurried to the record-player, shuffled through some albums, and slid out a twelve-inch record of Christmas carols. The machine conferred silvered voices upon them singing “We Three Kings of Orient Are.”
“O.K., proceed,” Marco said.
Raymond opened the envelope and found a gift certificate in the amount of fifty dollars to be drawn on Les Pyramides of middle Broadway, the Gitlitz Delicatessen. The frosty carol swelled around them as Raymond smiled his always touching smile at the gift in his hands.
“We three Rings of Orient are,
Bearing gifts we traverse afar,
Field and fountain, moor and mountain,
Following yonder star.
O, Star of wonder, star of night,
Star with royal beauty bright,
Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us to the perfect light.”
Marco thought of their own three kings of Orient: Gomel, Berezovo, and that old, old Chinese who had handed Raymond the gun to kill Bobby Lembeck. Raymond said, “What a wonderful present. I mean, who else in the world but you could even think of such a wonderful present? This—well—well, it’s simply great, that’s what it is.” They sat down again, fulfilled by giving. They watched the snow, listened to the Männergesangsverein, finished the first bottle of wine, and overflowed with Christmas spirit. Raymond was opening the second bottle when he said, steadily, “Jocie’s husband died.”