Collected Short Fiction, page 968
I was at City Hall the customary time the next day, and by half past nine I had my latest batch of memos ready for the mayor. I sent them in. A little after ten, my intercom bleeped and a voice said that Deputy Mayor Mardikian wanted to see me.
There was going to be trouble. I felt it intuitively as I went down the hall, and I saw it all over Mardikian’s face as I entered his office. He looked uncomfortable—edgy, off center, tense. His eyes were too bright and he was chewing at the corner of his lip. My newest memoranda were spread out in pattern on his desk.
He said, hardly looking up at me, “Lew, what the hell is this garbage about Ricciardi?”
“It’s advisable to remove him from his current job.”
“I know it’s advisable. You just advised us. Why is it advisable?”
“Long-range dynamics dictate it,” I said, trying to bluff. “I can’t give you any convincing and concrete reason, but my feeling is that it’s unwise to keep a man in that job who’s so closely identified with the Italian-American community. Lewisohn’s a good neutral nonabrasive figure who might be safer in that slot next year as we approach the mayoralty election, and—”
“Quit it, Lew.”
“What?”
“Knock it off. You aren’t telling me a thing. You’re just giving me a lot of noise. Quinn thinks Ricciardi’s been doing decent work, and he’s upset about your memo, and when I ask you for supportive data, you just shrug and say it’s a hunch. Now also—”
“My hunches have always—”
“Wait,” Mardikian said. “This Louisiana thing. Christ! Thibodaux is the antithesis of everything Quinn has been trying to stand for. Why in hell should the mayor haul his ass all the way down to Baton Rouge to embrace an antediluvian bigot and espouse a useless and controversial and ecologically risky dam-building project? Quinn’s got everything to lose and nothing visible to gain from that, unless you think it’ll help him get the redneck vote in 2004 and you think the redneck vote is going to be vital to his chances, which God help us all if it is. Well?”
“I can’t explain it, Haig.”
“You can’t explain it? You can’t explain it? You give the mayor a highly explicit instruction like this, or like the Ricciardi thing, something that obviously has to have been the product of a whole lot of complicated thinking, and you don’t know why? If you don’t know why, how are we supposed to? Where’s the rational basis for our actions? You want the mayor to be wandering around like a sleepwalker, like some sort of zombie, just doing as you say and not knowing why? Come on, kid! A hunch is a hunch, but we’ve hired you to make rational comprehensible projections, not to be a soothsayer.”
Quietly I said, after a long wobbly pause, “Haig, I’ve been going through a lot of bad stuff lately, and I don’t have much reserve of energy. I don’t want to have a heavy hassle with you now. I’m just asking you to take it on faith that there’s logic in the things I propose.”
“I can’t.”
“Please?”
“Look, I realize that having your marriage fall apart has really ripped you up, Lew, but that’s exactly why I have to challenge what you’ve handed in today. For months now you’ve been giving us these weird trips, and sometimes you justify then convincingly and sometimes you don’t; sometimes you give us the most shamelessly cockeyed reasons for some course of action, and without exception Quinn has ultimately gone along with all your advice, frequently against his own better judgment. And I have to admit that so far everything has worked out surprisingly well. But now—but now—” He looked up, and his eyes drilled into mine. “Frankly, Lew, we’re starting to have some doubts about your stability. We don’t know if we ought to trust your suggestions as blindly as we have in the past.”
“Jesus!” I cried. “You think that breaking up with Sundara has destroyed my sanity?”
“I think it’s taken a lot out of you,” Mardikian said, speaking more gently. “You yourself used the phrase about not having much reserve of energy. Frankly, Lew, we think you’re under a strain, we think you’re fatigued, weary, groggy, that you’ve overtaxed yourself seriously, that you can use a rest. And we—”
“Who’s we?”
“Quinn. Lombroso. Me.”
“What has Lombroso been saying about me?”
“Mainly that he’s been trying to get you to take a vacation since last August.”
“What else?”
Mardikian looked puzzled. “What do you mean, what else? What do you think he’d say? Christ, Lew, you’re sounding awfully paranoid all of a sudden. Bob’s your friend, remember? He’s on your side. We’re all on your side. He told you to go up to so-and-so’s hunting lodge, but you wouldn’t. He’s worried about you. We all are. Now we’d like to put it a little more strongly. We feel you need a rest, Lew, and we want you to take one. City Hall won’t fall apart if you aren’t around for a few weeks.”
“Okay. I’ll go on vacation. I could use one, sure. But one favor, first.”
“Go on.”
“The Thibodaux thing and the Ricciardi thing. I want you to put them through and have Quinn do them.”
“If you’ll give me some plausible justification.”
“I can’t, Haig.” Suddenly I was sweating all over. “Nothing that would sound convincing. But it’s important that the mayor go along with those recommendations.”
“Why?”
“It is. Very important.”
“To you or to Quinn?”
It was a shrewd shot, and it hit me hard. To me, I thought, to me, to Carvajal, to the whole pattern of faith and belief I’ve been constructing. Had the moment of truth come at last? Had I handed Quinn instructions that he would refuse to follow? And what then? The paradoxes sprouting from such a negative decision dizzied me. I felt sick.
“Important to everybody,” I said. “Please. As a favor. I haven’t given him any bad advice up to now, have I?”
“He’s hostile to this. He needs to know something of the projective structure behind these suggestions.”
Almost panicky, I said, “Don’t push me too hard, Haig. I’m right at the brink. But I’m not crazy. Exhausted, maybe, yes, but not crazy, and the stuff I handed in this morning makes sense, it will make sense, it’ll be perfectly apparent in three months, five, six, whenever. Look at me. Look me right in the eye. I’ll take that vacation. I appreciate the fact that you’re all worried about me. But I want this one favor from you, Haig. Will you go in there and tell Quinn to follow those memos? For my sake. For the sake of all the years we’ve known each other. I tell you, those memos are kosher.” I halted. I was babbling, I knew, and the more I said, the less likely it was that Haig would risk taking me seriously. Did he already see me as a dangerously unstable lunatic? Were the men in the white coats waiting in the corridor? What chance was there, actually, that anybody would pay heed to this morning’s memos? I felt pillars tumbling, the sky falling.
Then Mardikian said, astonishingly, smiling warmly, “All right, Lew. It’s nutty, but I’ll do it. Just this once. You get yourself off to Hawaii or somewhere and sit on the beach for a couple of weeks. And I’ll go in there and talk Quinn into firing Ricciardi and visiting Louisiana and all the rest. I think it’s crazy advice, but I’ll gamble on your track record.” He left his desk and came around to me, towering above me, and, abruptly, clumsily, he pulled me to him and gave me a hug. “You worry me, kid,” he muttered.
34.
I took a vacation. Not the beaches of Hawaii—too crowded, too hectic, too far away—and not the hunting lodge in Canada, for the snows of late autumn would already be descending there; I went off to golden California, Carlos Socorro’s California, to magnificent Big Sur, where another friend of Lombroso’s conveniently managed to own an isolated redwood cottage on an acre of clifftop overlooking the ocean. For ten restless days I lived in rustic solitude, with the densely wooded slopes of the Santa Lucia Mountains, dark and mysterious and ferny, to my back, and the broad breast of the Pacific before me, five hundred feet below. It was, they had assured me, the finest time of the year in Big Sur, the idyllic season that separates the summer’s fogs from the winter’s rains, and indeed it was so, with warm sunlit days and cool starry nights and an astonishing purple-and-gold sunset every evening. I hiked in the silent redwood groves, I swam in chilly, swift mountain streams, I scrambled down rocks thick with cascading glossy-leaved succulents to the beach and the turbulent surf. I watched cormorants and gulls at their dinners, and, one morning, a comical sea otter, swimming belly-up fifty meters off shore as he munched on a crab.
But peace eluded me. I thought too much about Sundara, wondering in a blank, baffled way how I had come to lose her; I fretted about dreary political matters that any sane man would have banished from his mind in such stunning surroundings; I invented complex entropic catastrophes that might occur if Quinn failed to go to Louisiana. Living in paradise, I contrived to be twitchy and tense and ill at ease.
Yet slowly I allowed myself to feel refreshed. Slowly the magic of the lush coastline, miraculously preserved throughout a century in which almost everything else had been spoiled, worked itself on my stale and tangled soul.
Possibly I saw for the first time while I was in Big Sur.
I’m not sure. Months of proximity to Carvajal hadn’t yet produced any definite results. I knew now the tricks Carvajal used to induce the state, I knew the symptoms of an oncoming vision, I felt certain that before much longer I’d be seeing, but I had had no certain visionary experience, and the harder I tried to attain one, of course, the more distant my goal appeared. But there was one odd moment late in my stay in Big Sur. I had been to the beach, and now, toward the end of the afternoon, I was climbing swiftly up the steep trail to the cottage, getting tired fast, breathing hard, enjoying the heady dizziness that was coming over me as, I deliberately pushed heart and lungs to their limits. Reaching a sharp switchback, I paused for a moment, turning to look back and down, and the glare of the dipping sun reverberating off the surface of the sea hit me and dazzled me, so that I swayed and shivered and had to clutch at a bush to keep from falling. And in that moment it seemed to me—it seemed, it was only an illusory sensation, a brief subliminal flicker—that I was staring through the golden fire of the sunlight banner rippling above a mighty concrete plaza, and the face of Paul Quinn looked at me out of the center of the banner, a powerful face, a commanding face, and the plaza was full of people, thousands of them jammed together, hundreds of thousands, waving their arms, shouting wildly, saluting the banner, a mob, an immense collective entity lost in hysteria, in Quinn-worship. It could just as easily have been 1934, Nuremberg, a different face on the banner, weird hyperthyroid eyes and stiff black mustache, and what they were shouting could just as easily have been, Sieg! Heil! Sieg! Heil! I gasped and fell to my knees, stricken by dizziness, fear, amazement, awe, I know not what, and I moaned and put my hands to my face, and then the vision was gone, then the afternoon breeze swept banner „ and mob from my throbbing brain, and nothing lay before me but the endless Pacific.
Did I see? Had the veil of time parted for me? Was Quinn the coming fuhrer, was he tomorrow’s duce? Or had my weary mind conspired with my weary body to spawn a quick paranoid flash, crazy imaginings and nothing more? I didn’t know. I still don’t. I have my theory, and my theory is that I saw, but never have I seen that banner again, never have I heard the terrible resonating shouts of that ecstatic mob, and until the day of the banner is actually upon us I will not know the truth.
Eventually, deciding that I had sequestered myself in the woods long enough to re-establish my standing at City Hall as a stable and trustworthy adviser, I flew home to New York, to my dusty, untended flat on 63rd Street. Not much had changed. The days were shorter, now that November had come, and autumn’s haze had yielded to the first sharp blasts of the onrushing winter, slicing crosswise through the city from river to river. The mayor, mirabile dictu, had been to Louisiana, and to the displeasure of The New York Times’ editorial writers had advocated construction of the dubious Plaquemines Dam, had been photographed embracing Governor Thibodaux: Quinn looked sourly determined, smiling the way a man might smile who had been hired to hug a cactus.
Next I went out to Brooklyn to visit Carvajal.
It was a month since I had seen him, but he looked very much more than a month older—sallow, shrunken, eyes dim and watery, a tremor in his hands. He hadn’t seemed so wasted and worn since our first meeting, in Bob Lombroso’s office, back in March; all the strength he had gained in the spring and summer now was gone from him, all the sudden vitality which perhaps he had drawn from his relationship with me. Not perhaps: surely. For, minute by minute, as we sat and talked, color returned to him, the gleam of energy reappeared in his features.
I told him what had happened on the hillside in Big Sur. “Possibly a beginning,” he said softly. “Eventually it has to start. Why not there?”
“If I did see, though, what did the vision mean? Quinn with banners? Quinn exciting a mob?”
“How would I know?” Carvajal asked.
“You haven’t ever seen anything like that?”
“Quinn’s true time is after mine,” he reminded me. His eyes reproached me mildly. Yes: this man had less than six months to live, and knew it, down to the hour, to the moment. He said, “Possibly you can remember how old Quinn seemed to be, in your vision. The color of the hair, the lines in the face—”
I tried to remember. Quinn was only 38 now. How old was the man whose face had filled that great banner? I had recognized him instantly as Quinn, and so the changes couldn’t have been great, lowlier than the present Quinn? The blond hair graying at the temples? The lines of that iron grin more deeply incised? I didn’t know. I hadn’t noticed. Only a fantasy, perhaps. Hallucination born of fatigue. I apologized to Carvajal; I promised to do better the next time, if I were to be granted a next time. He assured me there would be. I would see, he said firmly, growing more animated. He was more vigorous the longer we were together. I would see, no doubt of that.
He said, “Time for business. New instructions for Quinn.”
There was only one thing to convey this time: the mayor was supposed to start shopping around for a new police commissioner, because Commissioner Sudakis was shortly going to resign. That started me. Sudakis had been one of Quinn’s best appointments—effective and popular, the closest thing to a hero the New York Police Department had had in a couple of generations, a solid, reliable, incorruptible, personally courageous man. In his first year and a half as head of the department he had come to seem a fixture; it was as if he had always been in charge, always would be. He had done a beautiful job transforming the Gestapo that the police had become under the late Mayor Gottfried into a peace-keeping force once again, and the job was not yet done: only a couple of months ago I had heard Sudakis tell the mayor he would need another year and a half to finish the cleanup. Sudakis about to quit? It didn’t ring true.
“Quinn won’t believe it,” I said. “He’ll laugh in my face.” Carvajal shrugged. “Sudakis will not longer be police commissioner after the first of the year. The mayor ought to have a capable replacement ready.”
“Maybe so. But it’s all so damned implausible. Sudakis sits there like the rock of Gibraltar. I can’t go in and tell the mayor he’s about to quit, even if he is. There was so much static over the Thibodaux and Ricciardi businesses that Mardikian insisted I take a rest cure. If I go in there with something as wild as this, they might have me put away.”
Carvajal stared at me imperturbably, implacably.
I said, “At least give me some supporting data. Why does Sudakis plan to quit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would I get any clues if I approached Sudakis myself?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. You don’t know. And you don’t care, do you? All you know is that he’s planning to leave.”
“I don’t even know that, Lew, Only that he will leave. Sudakis may not know it himself yet.”
“Oh, fine. Fine! I tell the mayor, the mayor sends for Sudakis, Sudakis denies everything, because as of now it isn’t so.”
“Reality is always conserved,” said Carvajal. “Sudakis will resign. It will happen very suddenly.”
“Must I be the one to tell Quinn that? What if I don’t say anything? If reality is truly conserved, Sudakis will leave no matter what I do. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that?”
“Do you want the mayor to be caught unprepared when it happens?”
“Better that than to have the mayor think I’m crazy.”
“Are you afraid to warn Quinn about the resignation?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think would happen to you?”
“I’ll be put in an embarrassing position,” I said. “I’ll be asked to justify something that makes no sense to me. I’ll have to fall back on saying it’s a hunch, only a hunch, and if Sudakis denies he’s going to quit, I’ll lose influence with Quinn. I might even lose my job. Is that what you want?”
“I have no desires whatever,” said Carvajal distantly.
“Besides which, Quinn won’t let Sudakis quit.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. He needs him too much. He won’t accept his resignation. No matter what Sudakis says, he’ll stay on the job, and what does that do to the conservation of reality?”
“Sudakis won’t stay,” Carvajal said indifferently.
I went away and thought about it.
My objections to recommending that Quinn start looking for a successor to Sudakis struck me as logical, reasonable, plausible, and unarguable. I was unwilling to crawl into so exposed a position so soon after my return, when I was still vulnerable to Mardikian’s skepticism about my stability. On the other hand, if some unforeseen turn of events would force Sudakis to quit, I’d have been derelict in my duties if I had failed to give the mayor the warning. In a city forever on the edge of chaos, even a few days’ confusion about lines of authority in the police department could bring matters close to anarchy in the streets, and one thing Quinn really didn’t need, as a potential presidential candidate, was a resurgence, however brief, of the lawlessness that had roiled the city so often before the repressive Gottfried administration and in the time of the feeble Mayor DiLaurenzio. And on the third hand, I had never before refused to be the vehicle of one of Carvajal’s directives, and it troubled me to defy him now. Imperceptibly Carvajal’s notions of reality-conservation had become part of me; imperceptibly I had accepted his philosophy to an extent that left me fearful of tampering with the inevitable uncoiling of the inevitable. Feeling a bit like someone who was climbing aboard an ice floe heading downstream in the Niagara River, I found myself resolving to bring the Sudakis story to Quinn, misgivings or no.
