Winter Kills (7 page)

He didn’t remember knowing either Pa or Tim until he was nine years old. For the seven years before that he had been a Thirkield, not a Kegan, because his mother had divorced Pa and had made him pay her a huge sum of money without a murmur. Whatever Pa had done to deserve the loss of such a lady (and all that money) must have been at least slightly disreputable.

Nick had known Tim for eighteen years. Then he subtracted the three years when he had been nine then twelve and Tim had been off to war. Then he subtracted one of the two years at the end of their time together, because he had fled Pa and America to go into the oil business in the Middle East when he was twenty-five. Tim was dead two years later. The salvaged single year had been made up of fragments of disconnected pieces of time—short bursts at the White House, at Palm Springs, at Camp David, at the Walpole, or on the yacht—and always it had been tacitly agreed that Pa wouldn’t be there. All told, he had known Tim for only fourteen years out of the forty-two of Tim’s life. Fourteen had been plenty. Tim was Pa and Pa was Tim. What had made Tim such a glorious achiever (Pa, always Pa) had made Nick faceless. Tim was gloriously dead at forty-two. Nick was merely indefinably
alive. Even Yvette Malone had never remembered him long enough to write him a letter spontaneously. True, she always answered his letters—which was a different thing altogether. Nick brooded that he might live to be twice Tim’s age and exist as a sort of vegetable unless he could master Tim’s knack for living so warily. But he’d be damned if he would, because it was a knack Pa also had. Pa’s idea of being lusty and alive was to fart at a state dinner, then nearly laugh himself into a hernia. He supposed that both he and Tim had been born with souls resembling Pa’s soul. Then, by a great stroke of luck, Nick’s mother had taken him away from Pa and he had been saved. After his mother had been killed in the car with Gabriel Thirkield, Pa had ordered Nick to come home, although Pa wasn’t there, because there was a war on and serious money to be made. Nick had been nine. To his great relief (and even greater joy after Tim got to the White House) Nick kept the name Thirkield, because Mama’s will said if Pa tried to change it back, Nick wouldn’t get one cent of her money (which had all been left to him). Pa deeply respected that kind of logic. Tim was off in the war. The head of the house at Palm Springs was Pa’s Chinese butler. It had been a big change from the leafy, green, temperate coolness of Harmonia, New York, to Pa’s fortress house in the desert. It was all like another planet.

The object Nick missed most was his mother’s dear old Rolls, which her father had bought for her in 1927. Mama had worked on it herself, fiddling with the engine, changing tires and oil, washing it like the family pet it was. Every other day Mama and he would drive the cook, who sat on the back seat, to the meat market in the village. The butcher would bring the meat out of the shop to the car on tray after tray so that Mama and the cook could look it over and choose. Then Mama would drive the Rolls back to Harmonia Hall, and the butcher’s boy would pedal out to deliver the meat, arriving an hour after them.

He remembered the epergne at the center of Mama’s table on which she would place the bowl filled with homemade caviar on the one day a month when she would invite the locals in to be enthralled by her music. Mama made caviar out of tapioca, fish broth, squid ink and lemon juice, which allowed each guest to have as much caviar as he or she wished. “It would be a cruel thing to give these good, provincial people a real caviar habit,” Mama had explained.

Tim had been twenty-four when he went into the war, in London, on the staff of Major General James Nolan, head of the socially blessèd Ultra action group, which plotted and wove behind locked doors that were themselves within a series of locked doors. No one but General Nolan knew what anyone in Ultra was doing. Long after the war it was finally revealed that Tim had been Nolan’s cryptanalyst. Nolan was a Texan and a West Pointer and a former roommate of Pa’s at Notre Dame. General Nolan awarded Tim a Presidential Citation for, he said in the accompanying recommendation, breaking a Spanish code that transmitted Spain’s African intelligence about weather conditions around the Ouagadougou region of French West Africa. Four months before the war ended, well after the invasion, Tim was transferred to General Patton’s (colorful) Third Army as aide-de-camp to Major General Anthony “Tuffy” Godwin. Here Tim had won, on General Godwin’s personal citation, the army’s Silver Star for leading a Tank Medium M4-A3-E8 into an action across the Rhine near Martonsburg in the Hilda Hess sector “at immeasurable personal risk in a feat of incomparable daring.” After the war Tuffy Godwin had joined Thomas Kegan’s bustling, belching rabbit warren of subornment in Washington as Procurement Officer in charge of Pentagon entertaining. Pa was very proud of Tim’s military decorations.

Tim had gone to Yale law school before the army, because lawyers screwed up the country best. After the war Pa okayed two years for him at the Yale drama
school, because the theater was good training for politics, but he made Tim finish off with a master’s degree in political science at Harvard nonetheless. Cross an American lawyer with a political scientist and you get a mad scientist, Tim told Nick.

Pa had had General Nolan made a papal count, and the General agreed to manage Rockrimmon, a Kegan estate in Connecticut, for all his years after the war. Rockrimmon was the one family property Nick had never been invited to visit. General Nolan was the one old family friend he had never met. Tim said General Nolan provided Pa with “disreputable diversions” there. Tim had used Rockrimmon now and then as a hideout when he attended out-of-town tryouts of musicals in New Haven (“Not since Woodrow Wilson has an American President shown his degree of passion for the American popular theater”) so he could take the young ladies of the casts to Rockrimmon and screw them.

By 1950 Tim had been elected to the House of Representatives. By 1955 he was in the Senate. At the end of his first week in the Senate, Pa opened Tim’s active campaign for the presidential nomination. Before Pa masterminded a presidential campaign, a successful candidate had pretended to wait for his party’s nomination to come to him. Pa said that was a lot of shit. He said Tim would have to go into a few primaries to make everything look good, but that was what the party system was for: to let the bosses handle the rest. He said it was a waste of time and money to run in all the primary convention states except where a candidate had to to keep up appearances. Sometimes winning a few primaries could punch up the whole script and fool all of the people all of the time, was how he felt. Pa believed in using his money and his power where it could count most—in nonprimary convention states where the political professionals really controlled their people. For three years Pa had been spending big money to find out, state by state, what it was that made each
key delegate jump. When he needed their votes for the first big ballot at the nominating convention, his supply of jumping beans proved to be inexhaustible.

The marvel of the Presidency, Tim told Nick over and over, was the dramatic acceleration of the action. By his records, until the time he had entered the House he had scored four hundred and seventy girls. By the time he entered the Senate, only five years later, he had scored nine hundred and three girls, which was pretty fantastic acceleration itself, Tim said, considering it had taken him a lifetime to make it to four seventy. However, from the day he had announced for the Presidency until the day he was inaugurated the score had soared to nearly sixteen hundred (three the morning of Inauguration Day)—which showed what the power of entering the highest political office could do. “Boy, when you enter, you really enter,” Nick had said admiringly.

Because of his interest in the theater and related arts Tim tended to screw actresses more than others, but his favorites had also included a Belgian princess, an Eastern chief of government, thirty-four heiresses, one hundred and fifty-three models, nine professional tennis players, many lady lawyers, doctors, astrologers and chiropractors, two hundred and ninety-one newspaper and television women, some ordinary taxpayers, a population of the wives of senators, ambassadors, congressmen and the more powerful businessmen, labor leaders and industrialists in the United States, Western Europe and the coastline cities of South America—and one lady astronaut.

When Nick was in his early twenties and Tim was in the White House manufacturing acutely dangerous missile crises during his first eleven months in office, Nick had counted and concluded that all the great leaders had done that sort of quantity copulating—Julius Caesar and Atatürk were examples. Nick was forty-one now, and he marveled at how little effect this consideration had had on him, thus separating him
from leadership, perhaps because he had not over-screwed. He calculated that he had slept with about twelve or sixteen women in his life—and he didn’t have any idea whether this was average or underaverage. He didn’t envy Tim, because of the prodigious complications arising from Tim’s copulations along the way, although Tim had said that most of the betrayed husbands felt honored. It was the goddam press, Tim said, that cost him the most ass. They had forced spectacular strains on Tim in making him try to find places to screw. Eluding the press had been a superhuman feat. Therefore, most of the time there was an air of catch-as-catch-can, of improvisation, about Tim’s sexual feats. Many times he would have despaired that he would ever meet the circumstances in which he could screw a lady when, suddenly, walking with her alone in a White House corridor and spotting an empty cloakroom, he would push her in there, enter her among the overcoats and furs, standing, then put them both together again and continue along the corridor to the reception, the lady almost unable to believe that such a thing had happened to her. The White House Secret Service detail learned to cooperate with maneuvers like that, although the Chief was ever nervous that one of those women could be a plant, and he would have borne the blame if the President had got himself stabbed or shot in some employees’ rest room.

Just the same, all the horrible difficulties notwithstanding, sometimes late at night while he tried to sleep under mosquito netting beside a field of pumping rigs four hundred miles from places only about eleven people had ever been to, knowing that the native women with their smells were not for him, Nick would become wistful. But when he got back to the cities he refused to make any big effort to get women into bed, because it made him feel Pa inside him, and he could not live with that. Early on, he had concentrated on the piano instead. It wasn’t a substitute, but it was a comfort.

10:05 A.M., MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 1974—ENROUTE TO GERMANY

He got off the plane to stretch his legs at New Delhi. He stayed in his seat at Beirut. When the plane was airborne to Frankfurt he decided to risk having a half bottle of champagne. After the wine he fell asleep, and slept until the plane reached Germany. In Frankfurt he marched the letter to Yvette straight to the airport post office and sent it as registered mail. He used registered mail only for love letters. As the plane headed out toward London he felt the old bafflement again—a permanent confusion of doors slamming in his face, lights going off, distant voices singing that there was absolutely nothing to worry about, all of it repeated over and over again until, manipulated and bored, he had turned away, along with most of the rest of the people, telling himself, as they had told themselves, that the Pickering Commission was the receptacle of the consciences of seven wise men, seven just men who had pored themselves almost blind over every scintilla of the evidence, which had at last filled twenty-six volumes. These great men had finally decreed, separately and together, that there had been no conspiracy, that there had been only one lone, mad killer. Repeat: no conspiracy. Repeat: no conspiracy. With the help of the reassuring press—that greatest single continuing conspiracy of modern civilization—life had gone on, the nonconspiracy untroubled. Nothing could change except the truth.

The plane began its descent into London.

TUESDAY MORNING, JANUARY 29, 1974—LONDON

David Carswell was easy to spot in the VIP lounge at Heathrow. He was the opposite of a jolly fat man. He was a mean fat man who explained away his fat by claiming he had diabetes. He was eating buttered sugar buns, slurping coffee and pouting like the spout of a pitcher when Nick came up to him. In greeting, after two years of separation, he said, producing an even more intense reaction than usual from his employer, “I am frightfully worried about this
Teekay
desertion.”

“You don’t look it,” Nick said.

“Your father isn’t going to like it at all. Not one bit.”

“We are not going to talk about it.”

“It took you five months to set it up, and now you just walk away from it.” His accent was plum-perfect Oxbridge with just a soupçon of Hammersmith.

“Aarrgghhh!” Nick said.

“I think that is a desperately unfriendly attitude to take, Nick. It is hurtful and really uncalled-for.”

“Did you bring my clothes?”

“Marian could not find the winter underwear in your flat.”

“Did you buy me some winter underwear?”

“The shops were not open. It was far too early.”

“You brought everything else?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Whether you think so or not, Nick, I am entitled to
an explanation about the
Teekay
.”

“If you had brought the winter underwear you would be entitled to an explanation.”

“You are being monstrous.”

“Do you have any silver?”

“Yes.”

“Call Marian. Send her to my flat. Tell her to look in the bottom drawer of the highboy in the second bedroom. Tell her to bring the underwear here.”

“Who will run the office?”

“I don’t care if it burns. Get me that underwear.”

Carswell got up. He waddled away three steps, then turned. “I can have them bring a telephone to me here.”