Edge of Eternity (113 page)

As soon as she reached the main street she knew what had happened.

The noise was caused by tanks. They were rolling along the street, slowly but unstoppably, their caterpillar tracks making a hideous din. Riding on the tanks were soldiers in Soviet uniforms, most young, just boys. Looking along the street in the gentle light of dawn, Tania saw that there were dozens of tanks, perhaps hundreds, the incoming line stretching all the way to the Charles Bridge and beyond. Along the pavements small groups of Czech men and women stood, many in their nightwear, watching with dismay and stupefaction as their city was overrun.

The conservatives in the Kremlin had won, Tania realized. Czechoslovakia had been invaded by the Soviet Union. The brief season of reform and hope was over.

Tania caught the eye of a middle-aged woman standing next to her. The woman wore an old-fashioned hairnet like the one Tania’s mother put on every night. Her face was streaming with tears.

That was when Tania felt the wetness on her own cheeks and realized that she, too, was weeping.

*  *  *

A week after the tanks rolled into Prague, George Jakes was sitting on his couch in Washington, in his underwear, watching television coverage of the Democratic convention in Chicago.

For lunch he had heated a can of tomato soup and eaten it straight from the pan, which now stood on the coffee table, with the red remains of the glutinous liquid congealing inside.

He knew what he ought to do. He should put on a suit and go out and get himself a new job and a new girlfriend and a new life.

Somehow he just could not see the point.

He had heard of depression and he knew this was it.

He was only mildly diverted by the spectacle of the Chicago police running amok. A few hundred demonstrators were peacefully sitting down in the road outside the convention centre. The police were wading into them with nightsticks, savagely beating everyone, as if they did not realize they were committing criminal assault live on television – or, more likely, they knew but did not care.

Someone, presumably Mayor Richard Daley, had let the dogs off the leash.

George idly speculated on the political consequences. It was the end of non-violence as a political strategy, he guessed. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had both been wrong, and now they were dead. The Black Panthers were right. Mayor Daley, Governor Ronald Reagan, presidential candidate George Wallace, and all their racist police chiefs would use violence against anyone whose ideas they found distasteful. Black people needed guns to protect themselves. So did anyone else who wanted to challenge the bull elephants of American society. Right now in Chicago the police were treating middle-class white kids the way they had always treated blacks. That had to change attitudes.

There was a ring at his doorbell. He frowned, puzzled. He was not expecting a visitor and did not want to talk to anyone. He ignored the sound, hoping the caller would go away. The bell rang again. I might be out, he thought; how do they know I’m here? It rang a third time, long and insistently, and he realized the person was not going to give up.

He went to the door. It was his mother. She was carrying a covered casserole dish.

Jacky looked him up and down. ‘I thought so,’ she said, and she walked in uninvited.

She put her casserole in his oven and turned on the heat. ‘Take a shower,’ she ordered him. ‘Shave your sorry face and put on some decent clothing.’

He thought of arguing but did not have the energy. It seemed easier just to do as she said.

She began clearing up the room, putting his soup pan in the kitchen sink, folding newspapers, opening windows.

George retired to his room. He took off his underwear, showered, and shaved. It would make no difference. He would slob out again tomorrow.

He put on chinos and a blue button-down shirt then returned to the living room. The casserole smelled good, he could not deny that. Jacky had laid the dining table. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Supper’s ready.’

She had made King Ranch chicken in a tomato-cream sauce with green chillies and a cheese crust. George could not resist it, and he had two platefuls. Afterwards, his mother washed up and he dried the dishes.

She sat with him to watch the convention coverage. Senator Abraham Ribicoff was speaking, nominating George McGovern, a last-minute alternative peace candidate. He caused a stir by saying: ‘With George McGovern as President of the United States, we would not have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.’

Jacky said: ‘My, that’s telling them.’

The convention hall went quiet. The television director cut to a shot of Mayor Daley. He looked like a giant frog, with bulging eyes, a jowly face and a neck that was all rolls of fat. For a moment he forgot he was on television – just like his cops – and yelled vituperatively at Ribicoff

The microphones did not pick up his words. ‘I wonder what he said?’ George mused.

‘I can tell you,’ said Jacky. ‘I can lip-read.’

‘I never knew that.’

‘When I was nine years old I went deaf. Took them a long time to figure out what was wrong. Eventually I had an operation that restored my hearing. But I never forgot how to lip-read.’

‘Okay, Mom, prove it. What did Mayor Daley say to Abe Ribicoff?’

‘He said: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch,” that’s what he said.’

*  *  *

Walli and Beep were staying in the Chicago Hilton, on the fifteenth floor where the McCarthy campaign had its headquarters. They were tired and dispirited when they went to their room at midnight on the last day of the convention, Thursday. They had lost: Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president, had been chosen as the Democratic candidate. The presidential election would be fought between two men who supported the Vietnam War.

They did not even have any dope to smoke. They had given that up, temporarily, for fear of giving the press a chance to smear McCarthy. They watched TV for a while then went to bed, too miserable to make love.

Beep said: ‘Shit, I’ll be back in class in a couple of weeks. I don’t know if I can face it.’

‘I guess I’ll make a record,’ Walli said. ‘I’ve got some new songs.’

Beep was dubious. ‘You think you can patch things up with Dave?’

‘No. I’d like to, but he won’t. When he called me to tell me he had seen my folks in East Berlin, he was real cold, even though he was doing a nice thing.’

‘Oh, God, we really hurt him,’ Beep said sadly.

‘Besides, he’s doing fine on his own, with his TV show and everything.’

‘So how will you make an album?’

‘I’ll go to London. I know Lew will drum for me, and Buzz will play bass: they’re both pissed at Dave for breaking up the group. I’ll lay down the basic tracks with them, then record the vocals on my own, and spend some time adding overdubs, guitar licks and vocal harmonies and maybe even strings and horns.’

‘Wow, you’ve really thought about this.’

‘I’ve had time. I haven’t been inside a studio for half a year.’

There was a bang and a crash and the room was flooded with light from the hall. Walli realized with incredulity and terror that someone had beaten the door in. He threw back the sheets and jumped out of bed, yelling: ‘What the fuck?’

The room lights came on and he saw two uniformed Chicago policemen entering through the wreckage of the door. He said: ‘What the hell is going on?’

By way of reply one of them hit him with a nightstick.

Walli managed to dodge, and instead of hitting his head the truncheon landed painfully on his shoulder. He yelled in agony and Beep screamed.

Grasping his injured shoulder, Walli backed towards the bed. The cop swung his stick again. Walli jumped back, falling on the bed, and the club hit his leg. He roared in pain.

Both cops lifted their clubs. Walli rolled over, covering Beep. One nightstick smashed into his back and the other his hip. Beep screamed: ‘Stop it, please, stop, we haven’t done anything wrong, stop hitting him!’

Walli felt two more excruciating blows and thought he would pass out. Then suddenly it stopped, and two pairs of heavily booted footsteps sounded across the room and out.

Walli rolled off Beep. ‘Ah, fuck, it hurts,’ he said.

Beep knelt up, trying to see his injuries. ‘Why did they do it?’ she said.

Walli heard, from outside the room, sounds of more doors being broken down and more screaming people being dragged from their beds and beaten. ‘The Chicago police can do anything they like,’ he said. ‘It’s worse than East Berlin.’

*  *  *

In October, on a plane to Nashville, Dave Williams sat next to a Nixon supporter.

Dave was going to Nashville to make a record. His own studio in Napa, Daisy Farm, was still under construction. Besides, some of the best musicians in the business were in Nashville. Dave felt that rock music was becoming too cerebral, with psychedelic sounds and twenty-minute guitar solos, so he planned an album of classic two-minute pop songs, ‘The Girl of My Best Friend’ and ‘I Heard it through the Grapevine’ and ‘Woolly Bully’. Besides, he knew that Walli was making a solo album in London and he did not want to be left behind.

And he had another reason. Little Lulu Small, who had flirted with him on the All-Star Beat Review tour, now lived in Nashville and worked as a backing singer. He needed someone to help him forget Beep.

On the front page of his newspaper was a photograph from the Olympic Games in Mexico City. It was of the medal ceremony for the two hundred metres race. The gold medal winner was Tommie Smith, a black American, who had broken the world record. A white Australian took silver, and another black American bronze. All three men wore human rights badges on their Olympic jackets. While ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ was being played, the two American athletes had bowed their heads and raised their fists in the Black Power salute, and that was the photo in all the papers.

‘Disgraceful,’ said the man sitting next to Dave in first class.

He looked about forty, and was dressed in a business suit with a white shirt and a tie. He had taken from his briefcase a thick typed document and was annotating it with a ballpoint pen.

Dave normally avoided talking to people on planes. The conversation usually turned into an interview about what it was really like to be a pop star, and that was boring. But this guy did not appear to know who Dave was. And Dave was curious to know what went on in the head of such a man.

His neighbour went on: ‘I see that the president of the International Olympic Committee has thrown them out of the games. Damn right.’

‘The president’s name is Avery Brundage,’ Dave said. ‘It says in my paper that back in 1936, when the games were held in Berlin, he defended the right of the Germans to give the Nazi salute.’

‘I don’t agree with that either,’ said the businessman. ‘The games are non-political. Our athletes compete as Americans.’

‘They’re Americans when they win races, and when they get conscripted into the army,’ Dave said. ‘But they’re Negroes when they want to buy the house next door to yours.’

‘Well, I’m for equality, but slow change is usually better than fast.’

‘Maybe we should have an all-white army in Vietnam, just until we’re sure American society is ready for complete equality.’

‘I’m against the war, too,’ the man said. ‘If the Vietnamese are dumb enough to want to be Communists, let them. It’s Communists in America we should be worried about.’

He was from a distant planet, Dave felt. ‘What line of business are you in?’

‘I sell advertising for radio stations.’ He offered his hand to shake. ‘Ron Jones.’

‘Dave Williams. I’m in the music business. If you don’t mind my asking, who will you vote for in November?’

‘Nixon,’ said Jones without hesitation.

‘But you’re against the war, and you favour civil rights for Negroes, albeit not too soon; so you agree with Humphrey on the issues.’

‘To hell with the issues. I have a wife and three kids, a mortgage and a car loan; they’re my issues. I’ve fought my way up to Regional Sales Manager and I have a shot at National Sales Director in a few years’ time. I’ve worked my socks off for this and no one’s going to take it away from me: not rioting Negroes, not drug-taking hippies, not Communists working for Moscow, and certainly not a soft-hearted liberal like Hubert Humphrey. I don’t care what you say about Nixon, he stands for people like me.’

At that moment Dave felt, with an overwhelming sense of impending doom, that Nixon was going to win.

*  *  *

George Jakes put on a suit and a white shirt and a tie, for the first time in months, and went for lunch with Maria Summers at the Jockey Club. It was her invitation.

He could guess what was going to happen. Maria had been talking to his mother. Jacky had told Maria that George spent all day moping in his apartment doing nothing. Maria was going to tell him to pull himself together.

He could not see the point. His life was wrecked. Bobby was dead and the next President would be either Humphrey or Nixon. Nothing could be done, now, to end the war or to bring equality for blacks or even to stop the police beating up anyone they took a dislike to.

All the same, he agreed to have lunch with Maria. They went back a long way.

Maria was looking attractive in a mature way. She wore a black dress with a matching jacket and a row of pearls. She projected confidence and authority. She looked like what she was, a successful mid-level bureaucrat at the Department of Justice. She refused a cocktail and they ordered lunch.

When the waiter had gone, she said to George: ‘You never get over it.’

He understood that she was comparing his grief for Bobby to her own bereavement over Jack.

‘There’s a hole in your heart, and it doesn’t go away,’ she said.

George nodded. She was so right that it was difficult not to cry.

‘Work is the best cure,’ she said. ‘That and time.’

She had survived, George realized. Her loss was the greater, for Jack Kennedy had been her lover, not just her friend.

‘You helped me,’ she said. ‘You got me the job at Justice. That was my salvation: a new environment, a new challenge.’