Three Days Before the Shooting ... (18 page)

Yes, but just the same
, I thought,
each and every one of them, even the most charming, statesmanlike, and endearing—even that lovable Senator Barkley, everybody’s uncle, is probably somebody’s secret candidate for a blasting
.

There came a sound of opening doors, and a slender young nurse, graceful in her white uniform, stepped from the elevator carrying a tray covered with a towel and went past me with averted eyes. She moved with a lilting walk of clicking heels, her white-capped golden head erect, and I could hear the gentle swishing of her garments fade as she went past old Hickman, who was nodding. I watched her until she reached the security man and moved on into the light beyond. Then, I saw vividly in my mind’s eye the runner that flawed the right silk hose of her shapely calf.
Sweet angel of mercy, thou art fair
, I thought.
Thou art gentle, too, I hope
. Then my mind resumed its musings:
Blasting? You mean that symbolically, don’t you?

Perhaps, but I’m not too sure…
.

Well, while it’s true that we are terribly excitable, we are nevertheless a very peaceful people. Perhaps this is the true form of our national courage, since we have more than most to irritate us
.

Yes, that’s true. And though dedicated to the democratic dream of our fathers, we know pragmatically that some must possess more democracy than others. For instance, that old Negro down there punishing that chair has certain built-in disadvantages
.

Yes, there’s no denying it. I faced that fact twenty years ago—or at least I tried for a while
.

And you realize too, and without bearing a grudge, that our forefathers’ accomplishment was not so much a break with the power that went with kingship as the achievement of a multiplication of the number of possible kinds, and a transformation and multiplication of kingly styles
.

Do you mean that you consider Sunraider the possessor of a “kingly” style?

Hell, no!

Fullbore?

He would like to think so, but with him it’s a matter of having been corrupted by reading Sir Walter Scott during his senior year in college … a year in England … his realization that he’ll never be President
.

Don’t kid. What was that about our peaceful nature?

I’m not—who could kid at a time like this? Perhaps we’re so peaceful because deep down we are bound by an agreement, by an unspoken but nevertheless sacred pact, based on an instinctive knowledge which the shooting and our reaction to it is already verifying
.

What kind of knowledge?

Well, intuition. The intuition that we are held together by a delicate system of alliances and agreements as to the nature of reality, based on the recognition that whenever someone becomes rash enough or desperate enough to shoot one of these powerful figures, strange, furious forces will break free from behind their restraining walls and take us over
.

It’s quite possible…
.

Possible? Isn’t that why you’re sitting here full of strange doubts, feeling that you’ve participated in the downfall of someone sacred—if not your father, then a rowdy, rascally, buffoon of an uncle?

What? Sunraider? That’s outrageous! That … that …

I looked up to see a tall physician moving swiftly up the corridor, bouncing along on white, ripple-soled shoes. He had just reached old Hickman when I heard the big voice again.

“Doctor, how’s he doing?”

The physician paused briefly, shaking his head.

“Well, you tell him for me that I’m waiting,” Hickman said. “And, Doctor, tell him also that I’m praying and that I’ll keep on praying until he pulls
through. And if he needs blood you can call on me. I’m strong and healthy, and I have never had the yellow jaundice or been sick a day in my life.”

What on earth is this all about? I
asked myself. And suddenly I began to shake again. My hands trembled, and I felt as though the floor had dropped away, leaving me suspended there in white space. And yet I could still see old Hickman hulking before me, and down the corridor the security man standing his post. I felt light-headed. I tried to shake it away by concentrating on old Hickman’s clothing: his soft pongee shirt with maroon bow tie, his straw-colored suit, his white suede shoes. He sat in tranquil stillness, like a huge stone, his legs crossed and his white socks revealing a clock of dark design. A white panama hat rested brim-down on the floor beside him, and it came to me that he was dressed as no minister that I’d ever seen. Yet, his clothing reminded me of the costume of someone I’d seen quite recently—but who? Actually, he looked like a wealthy man attired for a summer party at Newport which had taken place some thirty years ago. No, Hickman’s clothing didn’t tell me a thing; instead, it increased my sense of confusion.

How long would the Senator be in surgery? I wondered. What was the state of his health? Then my mind leaped back to M. Vannec’s letter, but now, with the Senator shot and my nerves in an uproar, I wondered how I could have been flattered by its contents, its shower of questions. Yes, and with Hickman not only praying for Senator Sunraider’s life but offering to donate blood, it was as though M. Vannec had been playing a joke on me. I took out the letter and looked at it, and the longer I looked, the more the conviction grew that the letter was indeed linked to what had happened. It was part of a whole, tied not to the shooting itself—for that would have been either sheer insanity, or inescapable evidence of an international incident pregnant with war—but nevertheless connected to it in some way I couldn’t understand. This was wild, but who was to say that Vannec hadn’t plotted his moves so that I would be reading his letter during the very moment when the string was pulled or the button was pushed that released the towering monkey house of outrage which exploded with the shooting?

No
, I thought,
it isn’t the shooting itself which has me shaking, but something far more insidious. Something which accounts for that old Negro sitting there beside the door
. For after all, events may be shattering, shocking, violent, comic, tragic even, all in themselves. Or all of these at one and the same time, it depends mainly upon the observer’s point of view, his prior conditioning. I knew, because I had seen enough of violence and general human foolishness to be immune from simple shock. That’s what one gained from dealing with facts unemotionally, and I had learned as early as 1939 that human beings are capable of anything and everything—especially betrayal in the name of honor. I knew all this, but here Vannec’s letter got into it with its questions.

The questions which arise immediately after a traumatic event—
these
cause the maximum confusion. They envelop us like the smoke of a horrifying fire and remain active and torturous long after the event which gave them birth has become formalized history or been forgotten—which amounts, perhaps, to the same thing.

Now, who knows this better than Monsieur Vannec? In his own country he is famous for raising those profound questions of a political-philosophical nature which upset wise men and ordinary citizens alike. He is forever explaining the meaning of everything—events, art, politics, stray blasts of torpid air. He informs the world with brain-rattling, spine-chilling eloquence just what is implied by historical developments, cultural fads, styles, costumes, slang, manners—all matters which usually leave me baffled. This is one reason I have admired him for so long. He gives me an assurance that logic is still a dominant force in human affairs, even though he frequently confuses me. As when he questions the existence of Europe and then expands the concept of Europe to include New York, Chicago, and Hollywood. As when he views the United States as European and then insists that the only really
united
states are those of Europe. As when he denies that Hitler left any effect on the political life of the postwar continent and yet wears a silver plate in his skull from a wound suffered fighting in the Resistance,
and
drives a Volkswagen.

Yet the fault was mine. M. Vannec is possessed by a fury to have everyone live with that extreme consciousness and ultrasensitivity to events which marked his own sensibility. And for a time I had tried to follow him, but I simply wasn’t gifted enough. I had to settle for reading his articles now and then. Still, I had lost none of my admiration. But now the juxtaposition of the shooting, the Senator and Hickman, and Vannec’s letter, his ability to make meaningful patterns of apparently unrelated events suddenly seemed sinister. It threatened me from afar. Could it be that he had kept an eye on me during all the years since the war—when I had first laid eyes upon him—and had plotted and waited to post his letter at the precise moment when it would do me the greatest damage? Could it be that he waited until the shooting was set to occur before firing his questions?

Oh, I knew that this was less than rational, but with the old Negro having called me “boy,” sitting there in his pongee shirt, questions of mere rationality were no longer binding…. I was swept along. In my mind I could see M. Vannec, impressive and grave (he was up to his neck in the Algerian trouble), turning from his affairs of State to divert himself with his plot against me. I tried to shake it, but a stream of images now pursued me like the scene from a movie which I had seen as a child, a scene of hell into which the lost souls, stripped to their loincloths, girdles, can-can panties, and brassieres, were made to enter by standing on their heads upon a large manhole cover which flipped over and plopped them screaming into a huge pit of fire,
smoke, and sleek black pitchfork-wielding devils. I had dashed bawling from the theater then, but now there was no escape. I was struck by a fantasy in which I could see a great room cluttered with exquisite paintings and sculptures, objets d’art and fetishes, tapestries and leather-bound volumes—a virtual pirate’s treasure of the world’s art and literature—in which M. Vannec sat at his desk day after day, winter and summer, spring and fall, consulting his calendar from time to time and thinking of me. Finally, the fateful moment having arrived, he smiles knowingly and I could hear him say to himself,
“Alors
, McIntyre, you chose to forget me for all these years but I willed to
remember you
, and now, since you’ve devoted your best energies to reporting facts and describing appearances, let us have a little testing. Agreed, McIntyre? Yes? No? Very well, within a few hours I shall put to you a few questions—then let us see what you make of the facts!” He then calls a servant, a small evil-looking man with thin hair and thick glasses, who whines and sniffles like Peter Lorre, a villain out of Dickens, and the Karamazovs’ bastard brother, all in one, and has him post the letter….

Oh, it was wild, like the world of dreams; yet, there was a certain reality underneath, in that the circumstances which led to my initial encounter with M. Vannec were decidedly mysterious.

It was during the Battle of the Bulge, when the ship on which I served as purser was anchored in the Seine below Rouen. I had gone ashore for a stroll in the town when, moving along the blacked-out quay, I had come upon three American infantrymen attacking one of my shipmates. It was a fierce, wordless struggle in which bottles flashed, glinted, and flew, and I had joined in. Then, when the fight broke up at the approach of a group of white-helmeted MPs, I had half-carried my shipmate as we escaped into the dark. A blow to the head had left him quite groggy, but when, standing close to a wrecked building in the dark, I had suggested that we stop at the military-base hospital to have a doctor look after his wound, he declined, explaining that he had to keep an urgent appointment up in the town.

He was still quite rocky, but when I offered to go along until his head cleared, he insisted that he could make it alone. Then, moving away, he had gone a few yards when I saw him plunge to his knees, a dark shape in the dark, starting to crawl, and I had run up and helped him to his feet. Then, despite his protests, I had insisted on going along. He was angry, and as we started off he charged me with meddling—which wasn’t, I admit, entirely untrue.

All during the journey across the Atlantic, I had sensed some mystery about the man, some undefined aura of wealth and comfortable living. Actually, he seemed more the type who’d have sought a commission as a cadet officer, as other wealthy young men had done. Instead, he’d signed on as an able-bodied seaman. On a small vessel a purser gets to know all of the crew,
but before that night I had never gotten more than a few words out of him. There was something profoundly detached about him. Nothing on board seemed to interest him except books. He did his work and that was it. No argument among the crew seemed to arouse him, no union matter, no scuttlebutt. No talk of music or sports, no comparison of adventures with women in strange ports, nothing aroused his slightest participation.

“Where are we headed?” I said.

“To the cathedral,” he said. “And I can get there by myself.”

“Not the way you’re stumbling,” I said. “You’re apt to get hit by a truck.”

He still protested, but now my curiosity was aroused. Why the cathedral? Surely he didn’t plan to meet a girl there; the waterfront cafés were the place for that. Nor did he appear to be the type who dealt in the black market. Certainly he wasn’t bent upon a pilgrimage—unless for aesthetic motives, and even so the night was so dark that most of the time we couldn’t see our hands before us. But whatever his motive, I sensed that his need was urgent.

We were going uphill now, and as his head cleared he pulled away from my assisting arm, and as we went staggering up the hill past the old Hall of Justice in the dark, I had to hurry to keep abreast. It was hot and the going was rough. Broken masonry and shattered glass lay over the road, and twice I had to help him to his feet. Then we were moving through the old marketplace and on beneath the great medieval clock (knocked awry by bombs and shell fire), and heading toward the square.