Capable of Honor (11 page)

“Oh, I will,” her husband said. “I will. I just wonder what prompts this sudden contact, that’s all.”

“Go find out,” she suggested. “He won’t bite.”

He chuckled.

“Maybe I’ll bite him.”

She smiled.

“I’m sure. But try to find out what’s on his mind, at least.”

For the first few moments of their conversation, however, this remained a mystery to the Secretary. For his part, Walter Dobius was not in any hurry to enlighten. An intriguing thought had hit him in the midst of his writing, he had taken up the telephone and acted upon it at once. Beth Knox had been surprised and puzzled and had not made any attempt to sound particularly pleased, though he knew she must be at this show of interest from one whom the Knoxes, he was sure, regarded as an enemy. It pleased him to play the part of unsuspected friend now, particularly in the cause of so shrewd a jest. He had not believed Beth when she said the Secretary was out. He could imagine their fear of him, their puzzled concern, their worried discussion, their pleased conclusion that he must be leaning toward Orrin and so, finally, the Secretary’s decision to call back. It all lent an extra edge of confidence to his voice, the unctuously kindly and patronizing note that was, though he did not know it, among his most infuriating characteristics to those who were not quite as overawed by Walter Wonderful as Walter Wonderful sometimes supposed.

At first, however, the Secretary managed to conceal this. His own tone was politely interested and quite correct.

“It’s always good to hear from you, Walter. How’s the snow out your way? Pretty heavy?”

“About six or seven inches, I’d say. I’ll have a devil of a time getting in to catch my plane to New York tomorrow.”

“Oh, are you going?”

“Yes. I was planning to go up to the UN to see Prince Terry and his cousin—”

“Not together, I hope,” Orrin interrupted. Walter uttered a cordial, knowing little laugh.

“Hardly. Also, Vasily Tashikov called and invited me to lunch, and so all in all—I really hope I can get up there. It should be very interesting.”

“Yes, I suppose,” the Secretary said, thinking, I’ll be damned if I’ll invite you to fly up with me, no matter how you hint. “Are you going to cover the debate in the Security Council, too?”

“What’s going to happen in that debate, Orrin? Is there anything I should be looking for?”

Aware that his slightest change of tone was being listened to by an expert, the Secretary deliberately made his voice as noncommittal as possible.

“The usual thing, I suppose. A lot of words—some more mud-slinging at us—a postponement without a vote—a gradual frittering away later in the General Assembly.”

“Is that what you expect?” Walter asked in some surprise. “I’ve been hearing over in your department that there may be something much more dramatic than that in the wind.”

“Drama’s relative,” Orrin said, sounding as bored as possible. “But I imagine your talks with Terry and his cousin, and your lunch with Tashikov, will more than compensate for any official dullness. You seem to be rather partial to Terry’s cousin these days, I notice.”

“I regard Prince Obi as a remarkable young man,” Walter Dobius said.

“So are they both.”

“Yes, but Prince Obi, I think, rather more than Prince Terry. Particularly now that he seems to have a really genuine popular uprising behind him.”

“Oh, Walter, stop being ridiculous,” the Secretary said, provoked to annoyance despite his plans by this dutiful parroting of the line Walter himself had done so much to create in his columns and speeches. “You know that little freebooter has nothing behind him but Soviet and Chinese Communist money. He’s depending on mercenaries, Walter. I thought you established the principle in the Congo that nobody should like mercenaries.”

“I fail to see that the situations have anything in common,” Walter said stiffly. Orrin snorted.

“You don’t? Well, look hard. The resemblances are there.”

“Are they?” Walter demanded. “A vigorous and democratic young leader—an oppressed people—a spontaneous rebellion breaking out against centuries of oligarchical rule—”

“You said exactly the same thing six months ago about Terry. Now, didn’t you?”

“I thought at that time he deserved them,” Walter Dobius said sharply. “Now I do not believe he does.”

The Secretary grunted.

“Walter, have you ever been to Africa?”

“I was invited to speak a year ago to the Conference of Unaligned Nations in Accra, as you know perfectly well.”

“Yes, I remember,” the Secretary said. “You gave the United States quite a kicking around, as I recall. They were very pleased. Tell me, do you ever have a good word to say for your own country?”

“Now, that isn’t fair,” Walter said, a real anger in his voice. “That simply isn’t fair. You know perfectly well that I—”

The Secretary gave an impatient sigh.

“I know, I know. It wasn’t fair, and I apologize. We seem to be arguing again. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“I wanted to ask you and Beth to come to lunch on Thursday. But I suppose we would only argue more.”

“Undoubtedly,” Orrin said, allowing a little more humor to come into his tone, “but I imagine Beth and I can make it. I’ve been wanting to have a real talk with you for some time. When do you want us?”

“Noon, I think,” Walter said, quite calm and correct again, the anger beginning to subside as he reflected who he was talking to, after all: just Orrin Knox. “If that suits your schedule.”

“I’ll make it fit,” the Secretary said.

“Very well, then. In the meantime, I assume I’ll see you at the UN tomorrow?”

“I think I’m probably going up,” Orrin said. “But it’s not entirely definite yet. I’m going to put in a call to Lafe and Cullee in a few minutes and see what they advise.” He remembered Walter’s luncheon date with Tashikov and decided abruptly that Walter might be a bridge between the two worlds, at that, if the situation in the Security Council got bad enough. “Where will you be staying?”

“I’ll be at the Waldorf-Astoria, but only overnight. I have to go on to Cleveland to make a speech on Wednesday.”

“We may have a lot to talk about at lunch Thursday. Beth will be pleased.”

“I, too,” Walter said, the pomposity returning, the conversation back on his own ground again, Orrin, difficult as he was, once more in the implicit role of supplicant, as they both understood. “I have some important decisions to make soon. I want to discuss things with you before I make them.”

“I appreciate your courtesy,” the Secretary said. His voice became wry. “I can’t say my views have changed much since the last time you disapproved of them, but it may be helpful for you to get a refresher.”

“The decisions to be made are important,” Walter repeated without humor, “and I feel I must weigh everything very carefully if I am to do the job the country expects of me.”

“So must we all,” Orrin agreed, trying not to sound ironic. “Until tomorrow, then, and Thursday.”

“I shall be looking forward to it,” Walter Dobius said, thinking as the Secretary hung up. Little do you know how much I will be looking forward to it.

“There’s a puzzler,” Orrin said as he returned to the living room and started to poke up the fire. “He wants us to come to lunch on Thursday.”

“Alone?” Beth inquired. He paused, the poker dangling from his hand, and gave her a surprised and thoughtful stare.

“He didn’t say. I assumed so, but—he didn’t say. Anyway, it’s what you and Harley have both told me to do today—go talk to Walter. So I am going to go and talk to Walter. Coming?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” she said with a smile. “Somebody has to keep you from chopping his head off in the first five minutes.”

“I’m afraid I already have,” he confessed with a rueful little chuckle, “He began giving me this Noble Young Leader routine on Obifumatta Ajkaje, and I’m afraid I got a little short with him. That’s one of the things I can’t stand about Walter and his crowd, their damned hypocrisy. They can moon all over a bright young good-for-nothing like Terry as long as he’s doing what they want him to—namely, kicking the United States in the teeth—and then the minute he stops that, they drop him and find somebody else to give the big buildup to. They tell the public such damned lies about these people. That’s what I can’t stand.”

“Well,” Beth said firmly, “I’d suggest you keep things like that to yourself, Mr. Secretary. You aren’t going to change them, and pointing out their hypocrisy is the surest way to make them hate you forever. And that we don’t want when you’re on the verge of running for President again. Right?”

“I suppose so,” he agreed with a grin, “but I must confess I like to twist Walter’s tail once in a while. Somebody ought to, or he’ll get even more insufferable than he is already.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure that Walter isn’t about to twist your tail,” she remarked thoughtfully. “In which case, lunch on Thursday should be great fun.”

“Well,” he said, “Thursday will have to be Thursday’s problem. Right now I’ve got to call Cullee and Lafe, who no doubt are having great fun themselves at Selena Jason Castleberry’s party for Free Gorotoland. They’re having fun, and Selena’s having fun, and Prince Obi’s having fun, and all of Obi’s friends and admirers in New York are having fun. What more felicity do you want in the world?”

She chuckled.

“The felicity of a cautious tongue, if you must know,”

He tossed her a cheerful grin as he started out of the room to make his call to New York.

“It wouldn’t be me. And think how dull that would be!”

“How will we ever know?” she called after. “It’s never going to be tried,”

But he didn’t answer, and after a moment she returned with a quizzical expression to her book, though not before deciding to put in a call a little later to someone who might know Walter’s plans, or at least would know enough of how his mind worked to come up with an educated guess about them.

“Darling,” cried the gaunt, diamond-drenched woman with the hacked-off gray hair and the gasping eyes—Mrs. Jason Castleberry that was, Mrs. Roger Castleberry that had been, Selena Jason that was, had been, and always would be—“I do want you to come over here and meet Prince Obifumatta Ajkaje. He’s a mad,
mad
character and so utterly delightful in his understanding of this whole mad situation in Africa.” She glanced quickly around the hectic, shouting, bulging living room of her modest little twenty-room hideaway on Sutton Place and lowered her voice to a hurried whisper. “Not at all like
our
Negroes, you know. In spite of the great danger he’s in personally because of this wonderful enterprise he’s leading, bringing freedom to his poor downtrodden people in Gorotoland,
he
has a sense of humor about it all, you know. It makes
him
so much easier to talk to. Now,
then,”
she cried triumphantly as she shoved forward her companion, the earnest little man from the Nation,
“here
he
is!
His Royal Highness Prince Obi—Prince Obifumatta, that is. Darling, where
ever
did you get such a delightful name?”

The tall young Negro who loomed above her in his gorgeous red and green robes smiled down with a beneficent gaze reminiscent of his cousin, Prince Terry, except that underlying Prince Obi’s smile there was, at present, a terrible tension that grinned like the smile of death through his outward cordiality. Neither his hostess nor her guests, most of them filled to slopover with liquor, love, and liberalism, seemed to notice this, though it did not escape the two Americans, one white and one black, who stood together at the side of the rocking room. Cullee Hamilton, Representative in Congress from the State of California, and Lafe Smith, junior Senator from the State of Iowa, members of the U.S. delegation to the UN, were under no more delusions about Prince Obi than they had been six months ago about his cousin. Only the emphasis had changed, as though a kaleidoscope had been given half a turn and everything had come up at right angles to where it used to be. It still meant trouble for them and their country.

“My name?” Prince Obifumatta repeated in the clipped, guttural Afro-British accent of his education and upbringing. “I made it up. I knew that someday I would be a famous man and I wanted a name that people could neither pronounce nor forget. So I chose Obifumatta.

“Actually,” he said, giving again the nervous thrust of his savage smile, “it’s been in my family for seven hundred years, give or take a few.”

“That’s what I mean, darling,” Selena Castleberry said, giving the arm of the
Nation
’s earnest little man an excited squeeze. “Such a sense of humor. Such a
doll.”

“What is your reaction to this American attempt to suppress your battle to bring freedom and democracy to Gorotoland, Your Highness?” the
Nation
’s little man inquired earnestly. Prince Obifumatta thumped him so fiercely on the back that he staggered.

“Call me Obi!” he directed. “Everybody does. I really have no comment at all, you know I am happy with everyone. I am not annoyed with anyone. Life is wonderful, do you not agree?”

“I do,” the
Nation
’s little man assured him hastily, “but I was just wondering if you cared to express a comment—”

“Now, express a comment. Obi, dear,” Selena admonished him with a shriek of laughter. “That’s exactly why I’m giving this Aid-to-the-People’s-Republic-of-Free Gorotoland party you know, so that all these darling people of the press, television, and radio, all these
molders
of American
opinion,
can see you and find out what you think.” She gave a coy hoot. “It might make headlines, you know! It just might, now!”

“Headlines are nothing to me,” Prince Obifumatta said with a sober air. “Absolutely nothing.”

“Oh,
doll!”
Selena cried. “Isn’t he just a doll, now?” she demanded of the horned-rimmed glasses, the ivory cigarette-holders, the portentous martini glass, and the thoughtful, important pipes that swam before her in the dancing room. “He is a doll, a doll, a
doll!
And of course,” she added with an abrupt transition to complete solemnity, “one of the Truly Great Men Of Our Time.”