Democracy

1

ON the occasion when Dwight Christian seemed to me most explicitly himself he was smoking a long Havana cigar and gazing with evident satisfaction at the steam rising off the lighted swimming pool behind the house on Manoa Road. The rising steam and the underwater lights combined to produce an unearthly glow on the surface of the pool, bubbling luridly around the filter outflow; since the air that evening was warm the water temperature must have been, to give off steam, over one hundred. I recall asking Dwight Christian how (meaning why) he happened to keep the pool so hot. “No trick to heat a pool,” Dwight Christian said, as if I had congratulated him. In fact Dwight Christian tended to interpret anything said to him by a woman as congratulation. “Trick is to cool one down.”

It had not occurred to me, I said, that a swimming pool might need cooling down.

“Haven’t spent time in the Gulf, I see.” Dwight Christian rocked on his heels. “In the Gulf you have to cool them down, we developed the technology at Dhahran. Pioneered it for Aramco. Cost-efficient. Used it there and in Dubai. Had to. Otherwise we’d have sizzled our personnel.”

A certain dreaminess entered his gaze for an instant, an involuntary softening at the evocation of Dhahran, Dubai, cost-efficient technology for Aramco, and then, quite abruptly, he made a harsh guttural noise, apparently intended as the sound of sizzling personnel, and laughed.

That was Dwight Christian.

“Visited DWIGHT and Ruthie (Mills College ’33) CHRISTIAN at their very gracious island outpost, he has changed the least of our classmates over the years and is still Top Pineapple on the hospitality front,” as an item I saw recently in the Stanford alumni notes had it.

On the occasion when Harry Victor seemed to me most explicitly himself he was patronizing the governments of western Europe at a dinner table on Tregunter Road in London. “Sooner or later they all show up with their shopping lists,” he said, over rijstaffel on blue willow plates and the weak Scotch and soda he was nursing through dinner. He had arrived at dinner that evening not with Inez but with a young woman he identified repeatedly as “a grand-niece of the first Jew on the Supreme Court of the United States.” The young woman was Frances Landau. Frances Landau listened to everything Harry Victor said with studied attention, breaking her gaze only to provide glosses for the less attentive, her slightly hyperthyroid face sharp in the candlelight and her voice intense, definite, an insistent echo of every opinion she had ever heard expressed.

“What they want, in other words,” Frances Landau said. “From the United States.”

“Which is usually nuclear fuel,” Harry Victor said, picking up a dessert spoon and studying the marking. He seemed to find Frances Landau’s rapt interpolation suddenly wearing. He was not an insensitive man but he had the obtuse confidence, the implacable ethnocentricity, of many people who have spent time in Washington. “I slept last night on a carrier in the Indian Ocean,” he had said several times before dinner. The implication seemed to be that he had slept on the carrier so that London might sleep free, and I was struck by the extent to which he seemed to perceive the Indian Ocean, the carrier, and even himself as abstracts, incorporeal extensions of policy.

“Nuclear fuel to start up their breeders,” he added now, and then, quite inexplicably to the other guests, he launched as if by reflex into the lines from an Auden poem that he had been incorporating that year into all his public utterances: “ ‘I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.’ W.H. Auden. But I don’t have to tell you that.” He paused. “The English poet.”

That was Harry Victor.

My point is this: I can remember a moment in which Harry Victor seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember a moment in which Dwight Christian seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember such moments about most people I have known, so ingrained by now is the impulse to define the personality, show the character, but I have no memory of any one moment in which either Inez Victor or Jack Lovett seemed to spring out, defined. They were equally evanescent, in some way emotionally invisible; unattached, wary to the point of opacity, and finally elusive. They seemed not to belong anywhere at all, except, oddly, together.

They had met in Honolulu during the winter of 1952. I can define exactly how winter comes to Honolulu: a kona wind comes up and the season changes. Kona means leeward, and this particular wind comes off the leeward side of the island, muddying the reef, littering the beaches with orange peels and prophylactics and bits of Styrofoam cups, knocking blossoms from the plumeria trees and dry fronds from the palms. The sea goes milky. Termites swarm on wooden roofs. The temperature has changed only slightly, but only tourists swim. At the edge of the known world there is only water, water as a definite presence, water as the end to which even the island will eventually come, and a certain restlessness prevails. Men like Dwight Christian watch the steam rise off their swimming pools and place more frequent calls to project sites in Taipei, Penang, Jedda. Women like Ruthie Christian take their furs out of storage, furs handed down from mother to daughter virtually unworn, the guard hairs still intact, and imagine trips to the mainland. It is during these days and nights when sheets of rain obscure the horizon and the surf rises on the north shore that the utter isolation of the place seems most profound, and it was on such a night, in 1952, that Jack Lovett first saw Inez Christian, and discerned in the grain of her predictable longings and adolescent vanities an eccentricity, a secretiveness, an emotional solitude to match his own. I see now.

I learned some of this from him.

January 1, 1952.

Intermission at the ballet, one of those third-string touring companies that afford the women and children and dutiful providers of small cities an annual look at “Afternoon of a Faun” and the Grand Pas de Deux from the “Nutcracker”; an occasion, a benefit, a reason to dress up after the general fretfulness of the season and the specific lassitude of the holiday and stand outside beneath an improvised canopy drinking champagne from paper cups. Subdued greetings. Attenuated attention. Cissy Christian smoking a cigarette in her white jade holder. Inez, wearing dark glasses (wearing dark glasses because, after four hours of sleep, a fight with Janet, and telephone calls from Carol Christian in San Francisco and Paul Christian in Suva, she had spent most of the day crying in her room: one last throe of her adolescence), pinning and repinning a gardenia in her damp hair. This is our niece, Inez, Dwight Christian said. Inez, Major Lovett. Jack. Inez, Mrs. Lovett. Carla. A breath of air, a cigarette. This champagne is lukewarm. One glass won’t hurt you, Inez, it’s your birthday. Inez’s birthday. Inez is seventeen. Inez’s evening, really. Inez is our balletomane.

“Why are you wearing sunglasses,” Jack Lovett said.

Inez Christian, startled, touched her glasses as if to remove them and then, looking at Jack Lovett, brushed her hair back instead, loosening the pins that held the gardenia.

Inez Christian smiled.

The gardenia fell to the wet grass.

“I used to know all the generals at Schofield,” Cissy Christian said. “Great fun out there. Then.”

“I’m sure.” Jack Lovett did not take his eyes from Inez.

“Great polo players, some of them,” Cissy Christian said. “I don’t suppose you get much chance to play.”

“I don’t play,” Jack Lovett said.

Inez Christian closed her eyes.

Carla Lovett drained her paper cup and crushed it in her hand.

“Inez is seventeen,” Dwight Christian repeated.

“I think I want a real drink,” Carla Lovett said.

During the days which immediately followed this meeting the image of Inez Christian was never entirely absent from Jack Lovett’s mind, less a conscious presence than a shadow on the scan, an undertone. He would think of Inez Christian when he was just waking, or just going to sleep. He would summon up Inez Christian during lulls in the waning argument he and Carla Lovett were conducting that winter over when or how or why she would leave him. His interest in Inez was not, as he saw it, initially sexual: even at this most listless stage of his marriage he remained compelled by Carla, by Carla’s very lethargy, and could still be actively aroused by watching her brush out her hair or pull on a shirt or kick off the huaraches she wore instead of slippers.

What Jack Lovett believed he saw in Inez Christian was something else. The picture he had was of Inez listening to something he was telling her, listening gravely, and then giving him her hand. In this picture she was wearing the gardenia in her hair and the white dress she had worn to the ballet, the only dress in which he had ever seen her, and the two of them were alone. In this picture the two of them were in fact the only people on earth.

“Pretty goddamn romantic.”

As Jack Lovett said to me on the Garuda 727 with the jammed landing gear.

He remembered that her fingernails were blunt and unpolished.

He remembered a scar on her left wrist, and how he had wondered briefly if she had done it deliberately. He thought not.

It had occurred to him that he might never see her again (given his situation, given her situation, given the island and the fact that from her point of view he was a stranger on it) but one Saturday night in February he found her, literally, in the middle of a cane-field; stopped to avoid hitting a stalled Buick on the narrow road between Ewa and Schofield and there she was, Inez Christian, age seventeen, flooding the big Buick engine while her date, a boy in a pink Oxford-cloth shirt, crouched in the cane vomiting.

They had been drinking beer, Inez Christian said, at a carnival in Wahiawa. There had been these soldiers, a bottle of rum, an argument over how many plush dogs had been won at the shooting gallery, the MPs had come and now this had happened.

The boy’s name was Bobby Strudler.

Immediately she amended this: Robert Strudler.

The Buick belonged to Robert Strudler’s father, she believed that the correct thing to do was to push the Buick onto a cane road and come out in daylight with a tow.

“The ‘correct thing,’ ” Jack Lovett said. “You’re a regular Miss Manners.”

Inez Christian ignored this. Robert Strudler’s father could arrange the tow.

She herself could arrange the tow.

In daylight.

Her feet were bare and she spoke even more precisely, as if to counter any suggestion that she might herself be drunk, and it was not until later, sitting in the front seat of Jack Lovett’s car on the drive into town, Robert Strudler asleep in the back with his arms around the prize plush dogs, that Inez Christian gave any indication that she remembered him.

“I don’t care about your wife,” she said. She sat very straight and kept her eyes on the highway as she spoke. “So it’s up to you. More or less.”

She smelled of beer and popcorn and Nivea cream. The next time they met she had with her a key to the house on the Nuannu ranch. They had met a number of times before he told her that Carla Lovett had in fact already left him, had slept until noon on the last day of January and then, in an uncharacteristic seizure of hormonal energy, packed her huaraches and her shorty nightgowns and her Glenn Miller records and picked up a flight to Travis, and when he did tell her she only shrugged.

“It doesn’t change anything,” she said. “In point of fact.”

In point of fact it did not, and it struck Jack Lovett then that what he had first read in Inez Christian as an extreme recklessness could also be construed as an extreme practicality, a temperamental refusal to deal with the merely problematic. The clandestine nature of their meetings was never questioned. The absence of any foreseeable future to these meetings was questioned only once, and that once by him.

“Will you remember doing this,” Jack Lovett said.

“I suppose,” Inez Christian said.

Her refusal to engage in even this most unspecific and pro forma speculation had interested him, even nettled him, and he had found himself persisting: “You’ll go off to college and marry some squash player and forget we ever did any of it.”

She had said nothing.

“You’ll go your way and I’ll go mine. That about it?”

“I suppose we’ll run into each other,” Inez Christian said. “Here or there.”

By September of 1953, when Inez Christian left Honolulu for the first of the four years she had agreed to spend studying art history at Sarah Lawrence, Jack Lovett was in Thailand, setting up what later became the Air Asia operation. By May of 1955, when Inez Christian walked out of a dance class at Sarah Lawrence on a Tuesday afternoon and got in Harry Victor’s car and drove down to New York to marry him at City Hall, with a jersey practice skirt tied over her leotard and a bunch of daisies for a bouquet, Jack Lovett was already in Saigon, setting up lines of access to what in 1955 he was not yet calling the assistance effort. In 1955 he was still calling it the insurgency problem, but even then he saw its possibilities. He saw it as useful. I believe many people did, while it lasted. “NOT A SQUASH PLAYER,” Inez Christian wrote across the wedding announcement she eventually mailed to his address in Honolulu, but it was six months before he got it.

It occurs to me that for Harry Victor to have driven up to Sarah Lawrence on a Tuesday afternoon in May and picked up Inez Christian in her leotard and married her at City Hall could be understood as impulsive, perhaps the only thing Harry Victor ever did that might be interpreted as a spring fancy, but this interpretation would be misleading. There were practical factors involved. Harry Victor was due to start work in Washington the following Monday, and Inez Christian was two months pregnant.

The afternoon of the wedding was warm and bright.

Billy Dillon was the witness.

After the ceremony Inez and Harry Victor and Billy Dillon and a girl Billy Dillon knew that year rode the ferry to Staten Island and back, had dinner at Luchow’s, and went uptown to hear Mabel Mercer at the RSVP.

In the spring of the year, Mabel Mercer sang, and this will be my shining hour.

Two months to the day after the wedding Inez miscarried, but by then Harry was learning the ropes at Justice and Inez had decorated the apartment in Georgetown (white walls, Harvard chairs, lithographs) and they were giving dinner parties, administrative assistants and suprêmes de volaille à l’estragon at the Danish teak table in the living room. When Jack Lovett finally got Inez’s announcement he sent her a wedding present he had won in a poker game in Saigon, a silver cigarette box engraved Résidence du Gouverneur Général de l’Indo-Chine.

2

IN fact they did run into each other.

Here or there.

Often enough, during those twenty-some years during which Inez Victor and Jack Lovett refrained from touching each other, refrained from exhibiting undue pleasure in each other’s presence or untoward interest in each other’s activities, refrained most specifically from even being alone together, to keep the idea of it quick.

Quick, alive.

Something to think about late at night.

Something private.

She always looked for him.

She did not really expect to see him but she never got off a plane in certain parts of the world without wondering where he was, how he was, what he might be doing.

And once in a while he was there.

For example in Jakarta in 1969.

I learned this from her.

Official CODEL Mission, Dependents and Guests Accompanying, Inquiry into Status Human Rights in Developing (USAID Recipient) Nations.

One of many occasions on which Harry Victor descended on one tropic capital or another and set about obtaining official assurance that human rights remained inviolate in the developing (USAID Recipient) nation at hand.

One of several occasions, during those years after Harry Victor first got himself elected to Congress, on which Inez Victor got off the plane in one tropic capital or another and was met by Jack Lovett.

Temporarily attached to the embassy.

On special assignment to the military.

Performing an advisory function to the private sector.

“Just what we need here, a congressman,” Inez remembered Jack Lovett saying that night in the customs shed at the Jakarta airport. The customs shed had been crowded and steamy and it had occurred to Inez that there were too many Americans in it. There was Inez, there was Harry, there were Jessie and Adlai. There was Billy Dillon. There was Frances Landau, in the same meticulously pressed fatigues and French aviator glasses she had worn the year before in Havana. There was Janet, dressed entirely in pink, pink sandals, a pink straw hat, a pink linen dress with rickrack. “I thought pink was the navy blue of the Indies,” Janet had said in the Cathay Pacific lounge at Hong Kong.

“India,” Inez had said. “Not the Indies. India.”

“India, the Indies, whatever. Same look, n’est-ce pas?”

“Possibly to you,” Frances Landau said.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t quite see why you decided to get yourself up like an English royal touring the colonies.”

Janet had assessed Frances Landau’s fatigues, washed and pressed to a silvery patina, loose and seductive against Frances Landau’s translucent skin.

“Because I didn’t bring my combat gear,” Janet had said then.

Inez did not remember exactly why Janet had been along (some domestic crisis, a ragged season with Dick Ziegler or a pique with Dwight Christian, a barrage of urgent telephone calls and a pro forma invitation), nor did she remember exactly under what pretext Frances Landau had been along (legislative assistant, official photographer, drafter of one preliminary report or another, the use of Bahasa Indonesian in elementary education on Sumatra, the effects of civil disturbance on the infrastructure left on Java by the Dutch), but there they had been, in the customs shed of the Jakarta airport, along with nineteen pieces of luggage and two book bags and two tennis rackets and the boogie boards that Janet had insisted on bringing from Honolulu as presents for Jessie and Adlai. Jack Lovett had picked up the tennis rackets and handed them to the embassy driver. “A tennis paradise here, you don’t mind the ballboys carry submachine guns.”

“Let’s get it clear at the outset, I don’t want this visit tainted,” Harry Victor had said.

“No embassy orchestration,” Billy Dillon said.

“No debriefing,” Harry Victor said.

“No reporting,” Billy Dillon said.

“I want it understood,” Harry Victor said, “I’m promising unconditional confidentiality.”

“Harry wants it understood,” Billy Dillon said, “he’s not representing the embassy.”

Jack Lovett opened the door of one of the embassy cars double-parked outside the customs shed. “You’re parading through town some night in one of these Detroit boats with the CD 12 plates and a van blocks you off, you just explain all that to the guys who jump out. You just tell them. They can stop waving their Uzis. You’re one American who doesn’t represent the embassy. That’ll impress them. They’ll back right off.”

“There’s a point that should be made here,” Frances Landau said.

“Trust you to make it,” Janet said.

Frances Landau ignored Janet. “Harry. Billy. See if you don’t agree. The point—”

“They’ll lay down their Uzis and back off saluting,” Jack Lovett said.

“This sounds like something Frances will be dressed for,” Janet said.

“—Point I want to make is this,” Frances Landau said. “Congressman Victor isn’t interested in confrontation.”

“That’s something else he can tell them.” Jack Lovett was looking at Inez. “Any points you want to make? Anything you want understood? Mrs. Victor?”

“About this friend of Inez’s,” Frances Landau had said later that night at the hotel.

Inez was lying on the bed in the suite that had finally been found for her and Harry and the twins. There had been a mix-up about whether they were to stay at the hotel or at the ambassador’s residence and when Harry had insisted on the hotel the bags had to be retrieved from the residence. “We always put Codels at the residence,” the junior political officer had kept saying. “This Codel doesn’t represent the embassy,” Jack Lovett had said, and the extra rooms had been arranged at the desk of the Hotel Borobudur and Jack Lovett had left and the junior political officer was waiting downstairs for the bags with a walkie-talkie and one of the ten autographed paperback copies of The View from the Street: Root Causes, Radical Solutions and a Modest Proposal that Frances Landau had thought to bring in her carry-on bag.

“Which friend of Inez’s exactly,” Inez said.

“Jack whatever his name is.”

“Lovett.” Janet was examining the curtains. “His name is Jack Lovett. This is just possibly the ugliest print I have ever seen.”

“Batik,” Frances Landau said. “A national craft. Lovett then.”

“Frances is so instructive,” Janet said. “Batik. A national craft. There is batik and there is batik, Frances. For your information.”

Frances Landau emptied an ice tray into a plastic bucket. “What does he do?”

Inez stood up. “I believe he’s setting up an export credit program, Frances.” She glanced at Billy Dillon. “Operating independently of Pertamina.”

“AID funding,” Billy Dillon said. “Exploring avenues. Et cetera.”

“So he said.” Frances Landau dropped three of the ice cubes into a glass. “In those words.”

“I thought he was in the aircraft business,” Janet said. “Inez? Wasn’t he? When he was married to Betty Bennett? I’d be just a little leery of those ice cubes if I were you, Frances. Ice cubes are not a national craft.”

“Really, the aircraft business,” Frances Landau said. “Boeing? Douglas? What aircraft business?”

“I wouldn’t develop this any further, Frances,” Harry Victor said.

“I’d definitely let it lie,” Billy Dillon said. “In country.”

“It’s not that clear cut,” Harry Victor said.

“But this is ludicrous,” Frances Landau said.

“Not black and white,” Harry Victor said.

“Pretty gray, actually,” Billy Dillon said. “In country.”

“But this is everything I despise.” Frances Landau looked at Harry Victor. “Everything you despise.”

Inez looked at Billy Dillon.

Billy Dillon shrugged.

“Harry, if you could hear yourself. ‘Not that clear cut.’ ‘Not black and white.’ That’s not the Harry Victor I—”

Frances Landau broke off.

There was a silence.

“The four of you are really fun company,” Janet said.

“This conversation,” Frances Landau said, “is making me quite ill.”

“That or the ice cubes,” Janet said.

When Inez remembered that week in Jakarta in 1969 she remembered mainly the cloud cover that hung low over the city and trapped the fumes of sewage and automobile exhaust and rotting vegetation as in a fetid greenhouse. She remembered the cloud cover and she remembered lightning flickering on the horizon before dawn and she remembered rain washing wild orchids into the milky waste ditches.

She remembered the rumors.

There had been new rumors every day.

The newspapers, censored, managed to report these rumors by carrying stories in which they deplored the spreading of rumors, or, as the newspapers put it, the propagation of falsehoods detrimental to public security. In order to deplore the falsehoods it was of course necessary to detail them, which was the trick. Among the falsehoods deplored one day was a rumor that an American tourist had been killed in the rioting at Surabaya, the rioting at Surabaya being only another rumor, deplored the previous day. There was a further rumor that the Straits Times in Singapore was reporting not only an American tourist but also a German businessman killed, and rioting in Solo as well as in Surabaya, but even the existence of the Straits Times report was impossible to confirm because the Straits Times was said to have been confiscated at customs. The rumor that the Straits Times had been confiscated at customs was itself impossible to confirm, another falsehood detrimental to public security, but there was no Straits Times in Jakarta for the rest of that week.

Inez remembered Harry giving a press conference and telling the wire reporters who showed up that the rioting in Surabaya reflected the normal turbulence of a nascent democracy.

Inez remembered Billy Dillon negotiating with the wire reporters to move Harry’s press conference out in time for Friday deadlines at the New York Times and the Washington Post “I made him available, now do me a favor,” Billy Dillon said. “I don’t want him on the wire so late he makes the papers Sunday afternoon, you see my point.”

Inez remembered Jack Lovett asking Billy Dillon if he wanted the rioting rescheduled for the Los Angeles Times.

Inez remembered:

The reception for Harry at the university the night before the grenade exploded in the embassy commissary. She remembered Harry saying over and over again that Americans were learning major lessons in Southeast Asia. She remembered Jack Lovett saying finally that he could think of only one lesson Americans were learning in Southeast Asia. What was that, someone said. Harry did not say it, Harry was too careful to have said it. Billy Dillon was too careful to have said it. Frances Landau or Janet must have said it. What was that, Frances Landau or Janet said, and Jack Lovett clipped a cigar before he answered.

“A tripped Claymore mine explodes straight up,” Jack Lovett said.

There had been bare light bulbs blazing over a table set with trays of sweetened pomegranate juice, little gold chairs set in rows, some kind of trouble outside: troops appearing at the doors and the occasional crack of a rifle shot, the congressman says, the congressman believes, major lessons for Americans in Southeast Asia.

“Let’s move it out,” Jack Lovett said.

“Goddamnit I’m not through,” Harry Victor said.

“I believe some human rights are being violated on the verandah,” Jack Lovett said.

Harry had turned back to the director of the Islamic Union.

Janet’s hand had hovered over the sweetened pomegranate juice as if she expected it to metamorphose into a vodka martini.

Inez had watched Jack Lovett. She had never before seen Jack Lovett show dislike or irritation. Dislike and irritation were two of many emotions that Jack Lovett made a point of not showing, but he was showing them now.

“You people really interest me,” Jack Lovett said. He said it to Billy Dillon but he was looking at Harry. “You don’t actually see what’s happening in front of you. You don’t see it unless you read it. You have to read it in the New York Times, then you start talking about it. Give a speech. Call for an investigation. Maybe you can come down here in a year or two, investigate what’s happening tonight.”

“You don’t understand,” Inez had said.

“I understand he trots around the course wearing blinders, Inez.”

Inez remembered:

Jack Lovett coming to get them in the coffee shop of the Borobudur the next morning, after the grenade was lobbed into the embassy commissary. The ambassador, he said, had a bungalow at Puncak. In the mountains. Inez and Janet and the children were to wait up there. Until the situation crystallized. A few hours, not far, above Bogor, a kind of resort, he would take them up.

“A hill station,” Janet said. “Divine.”

“Don’t call it a hill station,” Frances Landau said. “ ‘Hill station’ is an imperialist term.”

“Let’s save the politics until we get up there,” Jack Lovett said.

“I don’t want to go,” Frances Landau said.

“Nobody gives a rat’s ass if you go or don’t go,” Jack Lovett said. “You’re not a priority dependent.”

“Isn’t this a little alarmist,” Harry Victor said. Harry was cracking a boiled egg. Jack Lovett watched him spoon out the egg before he answered.

“This was a swell choice for a family vacation,” Jack Lovett said then. “A regular Waikiki. I wonder why the charters aren’t onto it. I also wonder if you know what it would cost us to get a congressman’s kid back.”

Jack Lovett’s voice was pleasant, and so was Harry’s.

“Ah,” Harry said. “No. Not unless it’s been in the New York Times.”

Inez remembered:

The green lawn around the ambassador’s bungalow at Puncak, the gardenia hedges.

The faded chintz slipcovers in the bungalow at Puncak, the English primroses, the tangles of bamboo and orchids in the ravine.

The mists blowing in at Puncak.

Standing with Jack Lovett on the green lawn at Puncak with the mists blowing in over the cracked concrete of the empty swimming pool, over the ravine, over the tangles of bamboo and orchids, over the English primroses.

Standing with Jack Lovett.

Inez remembered that.

Inez also remembered that the only person killed when the grenade exploded in the embassy commissary was an Indonesian driver from the motor pool. The news had come in on the radio at Puncak while Inez and Jack Lovett sat in the dark on the porch waiting for word that it was safe to take the children back down to Jakarta. There had been fireflies, Inez remembered, and a whine of mosquitoes. Jessie and Adlai were inside the bungalow trying to get Singapore television and Janet was inside the bungalow trying to teach the houseman how to make coconut milk punches. The telephones were out. The radio transmission was mainly static. According to the radio other Indonesian and American personnel had sustained minor injuries but the area around the embassy was secure. The ambassador was interviewed and expressed his conviction that the bombing of the embassy commissary was an isolated incident and did not reflect the mood of the country. Harry was interviewed and expressed his conviction that this isolated incident reflected only the normal turbulence of a nascent democracy.

Jack Lovett had switched off the radio.

For a while there had been only the whining of the mosquitoes.

Jack Lovett’s arm was thrown over the back of his chair and in the light that came from inside the bungalow Inez could see the fine light hair on the back of his wrist. The hair was neither blond nor gray but was lighter than Jack Lovett’s skin. “You don’t understand him,” Inez said finally.

“Oh yes I do,” Jack Lovett said. “He’s a congressman.”

Inez said nothing.

The hair on the back of Jack Lovett’s wrist was translucent, almost transparent, no color at all.

“Which means he’s a radio actor,” Jack Lovett said. “A civilian.”

Inez could hear Janet talking to the houseman inside the bungalow. “I said coconut milk,” Janet kept saying. “Not goat milk. I think you thought I said goat milk. I think you misunderstood.”

Inez did not move.

“Who is Frances,” Jack Lovett said.

Inez did not answer immediately. Inez had accepted early on exactly what Billy Dillon had told her: girls like Frances came with the life. Frances came with the life the way fundraisers came with the life. Sometimes fundraisers were large and in a hotel and sometimes fundraisers were small and at someone’s house and sometimes the appeal was specific and sometimes the appeal was general but they were all the same. There was always the momentary drop in the noise level when Harry came in and there were always the young men who talked to Inez as a way of ingratiating themselves with Harry and there were always these very pretty women of a type who were excited by public life. There was always a Frances Landau or a Connie Willis. Frances Landau was a rich girl and Connie Willis was a singer but they were just alike. They listened to Harry the same way. They had the same way of deprecating their own claims to be heard.

It’s just a means to an end, Frances said about her money.

I just do two lines of coke and scream, Connie said about her singing.

If there were neither a Frances nor a Connie there would be a Meredith or a Brooke or a Binky or a Lacey. Inez considered trying to explain this to Jack Lovett but decided against it. She knew about certain things that came with her life and Jack Lovett knew about certain things that came with his life and none of these things had any application to this moment on this porch. Jack Lovett reached for his seersucker jacket and put it on and Inez watched him. She could hear Janet telling Jessie and Adlai about the goat milk in the coconut milk punches. “It’s part of the exaggerated politeness these people have,” Janet said. “They’ll never admit they didn’t understand you. That would imply you didn’t speak clearly, a no-no.”

“Either that or he didn’t have any coconut milk,” Jack Lovett said.

Frances did not have any application to this moment on this porch and neither did Janet.

Inez closed her eyes.

“We should go back down,” she said finally. “I think we should go back down.”

“I bet you think that would be the ‘correct thing,’ ” Jack Lovett said. “Don’t you. Miss Manners.”

Inez sat perfectly still. Through the open door she could see Janet coming toward the porch.

Jack Lovett stood up. “We’ve still got it,” he said. “Don’t we.”

“Got what,” Janet said as she came outside.

“Nothing,” Inez said.

“Plenty of nothing,” Jack Lovett said.

Janet looked from Jack Lovett to Inez.

Inez thought that Janet would tell her story about the coconut milk punches but Janet did not. “Don’t you dare run off together and leave me in Jakarta with Frances,” Janet said.

That was 1969. Inez Victor saw Jack Lovett only twice again between 1969 and 1975, once at a large party in Washington and once at Cissy Christian’s funeral in Honolulu. For some months after the evening on the porch of the bungalow at Puncak it had seemed to Inez that she might actually leave Harry Victor, might at least separate herself from him in a provisional way — rent a small studio, say, or make a discreet point of not going down to Washington, and of being at Amagansett when he was in New York — and for a while she did, but only between campaigns.

Surely you remember Inez Victor campaigning.

Inez Victor smiling at a lunch counter in Manchester, New Hampshire, her fork poised over a plate of scrambled eggs and toast.

Inez Victor smiling at the dedication of a community center in Madison, Wisconsin, her eyes tearing in the bright sun because it had been decided that she looked insufficiently congenial in sunglasses.

Inez Victor speaking her famous Spanish at a street festival in East Harlem. Buenos días, Inez Victor said on this and other such occasions. Yo estoy muy contenta a estar aquí hoy con mi esposo. In twenty-eight states and at least four languages Inez Victor said that she was very happy to be here today with her husband. In twenty-eight states she also said, usually in English but in Spanish for La Opinión in Los Angeles and for La Prensa in Miami, that the period during which she and her husband were separated had been an important time of renewal and rededication for each of them (vida nueva, she said for La Opinión, which was not quite right but since the reporter was only humoring Inez by conducting the interview in Spanish he got the drift) and had left their marriage stronger than ever. Oh shit, Inez, Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor in Wahiawa on the thirtieth of March, 1975. Harry Victor’s wife.

3

AERIALISTS know that to look down is to fall.

Writers know it too.

Look down and that prolonged spell of suspended judgment in which a novel is written snaps, and recovery requires that we practice magic. We keep our attention fixed on the wire, plan long walks, solitary evenings, measured drinks at sundown and careful meals at careful hours. We avoid addressing the thing directly during the less propitious times of day. We straighten our offices, arrange and rearrange certain objects, talismans, props. Here are a few of the props I have rearranged this morning.

Object (1): An old copy of Who’s Who, open to Harry Victor’s entry.

Object (2): A framed cover from the April 21, 1975, issue of Newsweek, a black-and-white photograph showing the American ambassador to Cambodia, John Gunther Dean, leaving Phnom Penh with the flag under his arm. The cover legend reads “GETTING OUT.” There are several men visible in the background of this photograph, one of whom I believe to be (the background is indistinct) Jack Lovett. This photograph would have been taken during the period when Inez Victor was waiting for Jack Lovett in Hong Kong.

Objects (3) and (4): two faded Kodacolor snapshots, taken by me, both showing broken rainbows on the lawn of the house I was renting in Honolulu the year I began making notes about this situation.

Other totems: a crystal paperweight to throw color on the wall, not unlike the broken rainbows on the lawn (dense, springy Bermuda grass, I remember it spiky under my bare feet) outside that rented house in Honolulu. A map of Oahu, with an X marking the general location of the same house, in the Kahala district, and red push-pins to indicate the locations of Dwight and Ruthie Christian’s house on Manoa Road and Janet and Dick Ziegler’s house on Kahala Avenue. A postcard I bought the morning I flew up from Singapore to see Inez Victor in Kuala Lumpur, showing what was then the new Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Subang. In this view of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport there are no airplanes visible but there is, suspended from the observation deck of the terminal, a banner reading “WELCOME PARTICIPANTS OF THE THIRD WORLD CUP HOCKEY.” The morning I bought this postcard was one of several mornings, not too many, four or five mornings over a period of some years, when I believed I held this novel in my hand.

A few notes about those years.

The year I rented the house in Honolulu was 1975, in the summer, when everyone except Janet was still alive and the thing had not yet congealed into a story on which the principals could decline comment. In the summer of 1975 each of the major and minor players still had a stake in his or her own version of recent events, and I spent the summer collecting and collating these versions, many of them conflicting, most of them self-serving; an essentially reportorial technique. The year I flew up to Kuala Lumpur to see Inez Victor was also 1975, after Christmas. I remember specifically that it was after Christmas because Inez devoted much of our first meeting to removing the silver tinsel from an artificial Christmas tree in the administrative office of the refugee camp where she then worked. She removed the tinsel one strand at a time, smoothing the silver foil with her thumbnail and laying the strands one by one in a shallow box, and as she did this she talked, in a low and largely uninflected voice, about certain problems Harry Victor was then having with the Alliance for Democratic Institutions. The Alliance for Democratic Institutions had originally been funded, Inez said, by people who wanted to keep current the particular framework of ideas, the particular political dynamic, that Harry Victor had come to represent (she said “Harry Victor,” not “Harry,” as if the public persona were an entity distinct from the “Harry” she later described as having telephoned her every night for the past week), but there had recently been an ideological rift between certain of the major donors, and this internal dissension was threatening the survival of the Alliance per se.

Inez smoothed another strand of tinsel and laid it in the box. The walls of the office were covered with charts showing the flow of refugees through the camp (or rather the flow of refugees into the camp, since many came but few left) and through an open door I could see an Indian doctor in the next room preparing to examine one of several small children. All of the children had bright rashes on their cheeks, and the little boy on the examining table, a child about four wearing an oversized sweatshirt printed OHIO WESLEYAN, intermittently cried and coughed, a harsh tubercular hack that cut through the sound of Inez’s voice.

The Alliance qua Alliance.

Add to that the predictable difficulties of mobilizing broad-based support in the absence of the war.

Add further the usual IRS attempts to reverse the Alliance’s tax-exempt status.

Add finally a definite perception that the idea of Harry Victor as once and future candidate had lost a certain momentum. Momentum was all in the perception of momentum. Any perception of momentum would naturally have suffered because of everything that happened.

I recall seizing on “everything that happened,” thinking to guide Inez away from the Alliance for Democratic Institutions, but Inez could not, that first afternoon, be deflected. When the momentum goes, she said, by then plucking the last broken bits of tinsel from the artificial needles, the money goes with it.

The child on the examining table let out a piercing wail.

The Indian doctor spoke sharply in French and withdrew a hypodermic syringe.

Inez never looked up, and it struck me that I had been watching a virtually impenetrable performance. It was possible to construe this performance as not quite attached, but it was equally possible to construe it as deliberate, a studied attempt to deflect any idea I might have that Inez Victor would ever talk about how she left Honolulu with Jack Lovett.

4

I AM resisting narrative here.

Two documents that apply.

I was given a copy of the first by Billy Dillon in August of 1975, not in Honolulu but in New York, during the several days I spent there and on Martha’s Vineyard talking to him and to Harry Victor.

UNIT ARRIVED AT LOCATION 7:32 AM 25 MARCH 1975. AT LOCATION BUT EXTERIOR TO RESIDENCE, OFFICERS NOTED AUTOMATIC GATE IN “OPEN” POSITION, AUTOMATIC SPRINKLERS IN OPERATION, AUTOMATIC POOL CLEANER IN OPERATION. OFFICERS NOTED TWO VEHICLES IN DRIVEWAY: ONE 1975 FORD LTD SEDAN (COLOR BLACK) BEARING HDMV PLATE “OYL-644” WITH US GOVERNMENT STICKER AND ONE 1974 MERCEDES 230-SL (COLOR LT. TAN) BEARING HDMV PLATE “JANET.

”

OFFICERS ENTERED RESIDENCE VIA OPEN DOOR, NOTED NO EVIDENCE OF DISARRAY OR STRUGGLE, AND PROCEEDED ONTO LANAI, THEREBY LOCATING FEMALE VICTIM LATER IDENTIFIED AS JANET CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER LYING FACE-DOWN ON CARPET. FEMALE VICTIM WAS POSITIONED ON CARPET NEAR LAVA-ROCK WALL LEADING TO SHALLOW POOL IN

WHICH OFFICERS OBSERVED ASSORTED PLANTINGS AND KOI-TYPE FISH. FEMALE VICTIM WAS CLOTHED IN LT. TAN SLACKS, WHITE BLOUSE, LT. TAN WIND-BREAKER TYPE JACKET, NO STOCKINGS AND LOAFER STYLE SHOES. A LEATHER SHOULDER STYLE PURSE POSITIONED ON LEDGE OF LAVA-ROCK POOL CONTAINED FEMALE VICTIM’S IDENTIFICATION, ASSORTED CREDIT CARDS, ASSORTED PERSONAL ITEMS, AND $94 CASH AND WAS APPARENTLY UNDISTURBED

.

OFFICERS NOTED MALE VICTIM LATER IDENTIFIED AS WENDELL JUSTICE OMURA LYING ON BACK NEAR SOFA WITH APPARENT GUNSHOT WOUND UPPER ABDOMEN. MALE VICTIM WAS CLOTHED IN LT. TAN SLACKS, ALOHA TYPE SHIRT, COTTON SPORTS JACKET, WHITE SOCKS AND SNEAKER STYLE SHOES

.

MALE VICTIM EXHIBITED NO PULSE RATE OR RESPIRATORY ACTIVITY

.

FEMALE VICTIM EXHIBITED LOW PULSE RATE AND UNEVEN RESPIRATORY ACTIVITY

.

AMBULANCE UNIT AND FIRE DEPARTMENT INHALATOR SQUAD ARRIVED CONCURRENTLY AT 7:56 AM, ALSO CONCURRENT WITH ARRIVAL OF MRS. ROSE L. HAYAKAWA, 1173 21ST AVENUE, WHO IDENTIFIED SELF AS REGULAR PARTTIME HOUSEKEEPER AND STATED SHE LAST SAW FEMALE VICTIM PRECEDING DAY AT

1

PM WHEN FEMALE VICTIM APPEARED IN GOOD HEALTH AND SPIRITS. MRS. ROSE L. HAYAKAWA STATED THAT SHE WAS FAMILIAR WITH MALE VICTIM ONLY AS SPEAKER AT RECENT NISEI DAY BANQUET HONORING ALL-OAHU HIGH-SCHOOL ATHLETES OF JAPANESE DESCENT INCLUDING INFORMANT’S

SON DANIEL M. HAYAKAWA, SAME ADDRESS (NOT PRESENT AT LOCATION)

.

AMBULANCE CARRYING FEMALE VICTIM DISPATCHED TO QUEEN’S MEDICAL CENTER AT 8:04

AM

.

APPARENT BLOODSTAINS REVEALED BY REMOVAL FEMALE VICTIM ALTERED SIGNIFICANTLY WHEN MRS. ROSE L. HAYAKAWA ATTEMPTED TO APPLY COLD WATER TO CARPET. OFFICERS PERSUADED MRS. ROSE L. HAYAKAWA TO TERMINATE THIS ATTEMPT

.

MALE VICTIM PRONOUNCED DEAD AT LOCATION AND RESUSCITATION ATTEMPT TERMINATED AFTER ARRIVAL DEPUTY MEDICAL EXAMINER FLOYD LIU, M.D., AT

8:25 AM. REMOVAL OF BODY PENDING ARRIVAL INVESTIGATING OFFICERS AND OTHER MEDICAL EXAMINERS AT APPROXIMATELY 9

AM

.

COPY TO: CORONER

COPY TO: HOMICIDE

.

I was shown the second document, a cable transmitted from Honolulu on October 2, 1975, by its recipient, Inez Victor, when I saw her that December in Kuala Lumpur.

VICTORY STOP THINKING OF YOU IN OUR HOUR OF TRIUMPH STOP (SIGNATURE) DWIGHT

.

Despite the signature this cable had been sent, Inez said, not by Dwight Christian but by her father, Paul Christian, on the morning he was formally committed in Honolulu to a state facility for the care and treatment of the insane.

5

IT was Billy Dillon who told Inez.

In the kitchen of the house at Amagansett.

To which he had driven, two hours in the rain on the Long Island Expressway and another hour on the Montauk Highway, flooding in the tunnel first shot out of the barrel and then construction on the L.I.E., no picnic, no day at the races, directly after he took the call from Dick Ziegler.

Dick Ziegler had called the office and tried to reach Harry.

Dick Ziegler was not yet on the scene, Dick Ziegler had been on Guam for two days trying to run an environmental-impact report around the Agana-Mariana Planning Commission.

Janet was not dead.

It was important to remember that Janet was not dead. Janet had been gravely injured, yes, in fact Janet was on life support at Queen’s Medical Center, but Janet was not dead.

Wendell Omura was dead.

Inez must remember Wendell Omura, Inez would have met Wendell Omura in Washington, Wendell Omura was one of those Nisei who came out of the 442nd and went to law school on the G.I. Bill and spent the next twenty years cutting deals on a plane between Washington and his district. Silver Star. D.S.C. Real scrappy guy, had a triple bypass at Walter Reed a few years back, a week out of the hospital this spade tries to mug him, Omura decks the kid. The kind of guy who walks away from the Arno Line and a triple bypass, not to mention the spade, he probably didn’t anticipate buying the farm on Janet’s lanai.

Eating a danish.

Go for broke, see where it gets you.

The details were a little cloudy.

Don’t ask, number one, how Wendell Omura happens to be on Janet’s lanai.

Don’t ask, number two, how Paul Christian happens to be seen leaving Janet’s house with a.357 Magnum tucked in his beach roll.

The paper boy saw him.

The paper boy happened to recognize Paul Christian because Janet’s paper boy is also Paul Christian’s paper boy. Don’t ask how the paper boy happened to recognize the.357 Magnum, maybe the paper boy is also a merc. There we are. Paul Christian has definitely been placed on the scene, but nobody can locate Paul Christian.

Paul Christian was the cloudy part.

Paul Christian was a fucking typhoon, you ask Billy Dillon.

Inez remembered listening to all this without speaking.

“I left word in Florida for Harry to call as soon as he checks in,” Billy Dillon said. “Of course it’s on the wire, but Harry might not hear the radio.”

Inez lit a cigarette, and smoked it, leaning on the kitchen counter, looking out at the rain falling on the gray afternoon sea. Harry was on his way to Bal Harbour to speak at a Teamster meeting. Adlai was with Harry, earning credit for what the alternative college in Boston that had finally admitted him called an internship in public affairs. Jessie, at this hour in Seattle, would be just punching in at King Crab’s Castle, punching in and putting on her apron and lining up the crab-cups-to-go, shredded lettuce, three fingers crab leg, King Crab’s Special Sauce and lemon wedge on the side. Inez knew Jessie’s exact routine at King Crab’s Castle because Inez had spent Christmas with Jessie in Seattle. Jessie had cut her hair, gained ten pounds, and seemed, on methadone, generally cheerful.

“I was kind of thinking about going somewhere and getting a job,” Jessie had said when Inez asked if she had given any thought to going back to school, possibly a class or two at NYU to start. “I understand there are some pretty cinchy jobs in Vietnam.”

Inez had stared at her.

Jessie’s information about the jobs in Vietnam was sketchy but she supposed that they involved “cooking for a construction crew, first aid, stuff like that.”

Inez had tried to think about how best to phrase an objection.

“I got the idea from this guy I know who works for Boeing, he hangs out at the Castle, you don’t know him.”

Inez had said in as neutral a voice as she could manage that she did not think Vietnam a good place to look for a job.

Jessie had shrugged.

“How’s the junkie,” Adlai had said when Inez walked back into the apartment on Central Park West a few days after Christmas.

“That’s unnecessary,” Harry had said.

Inez had not mentioned the jobs in Vietnam to either Harry or Adlai.

“Dick calls, he’s still on Guam,” Billy Dillon said. He had found a chicken leg in the refrigerator and was eating it. “He says he ‘thinks’ he can get a flight up to Honolulu tonight. I say what’s to ‘think’ about, he says Air Micronesia’s on strike and Pan Am and TW are booked but he’s ‘working on’ a reservation. He’s ‘working on’ a fucking reservation. A major operator, your brother-in-law. I said Dick, get your ass over to Anderson, the last I heard the Strategic Air Command still had a route to Honolulu. ‘What do I say,’ Dick says. ‘Tell them your father-in-law offed a congressman.’ ‘Wait a minute, fella,’ Dick says. ‘Not so speedy.’ He says, get this, direct quote, ‘there’s considerable feeling we can contain this to an accident.’ ”

Inez said nothing.

“It’s Snow White and the Seven Loons down there. ‘Contain this to an accident.’ ‘Considerable feeling.’ Where’s this ‘considerable feeling’ he’s talking about? On Guam? I try to tell him, ‘Dick, no go,’ and Dick says ‘why.’ ‘Why,’ he says. A member of the Congress has been killed, Dick’s own wife has been shot, his father-in-law’s been fingered, his father-in-law who is also lest we forget the father-in-law of somebody who ran for president, and Dick’s talking ‘containment.’ ‘Dick,’ I said, ‘take it on faith, this one’s a hang-out.’ ”

Inez said nothing. She had located a telephone number chalked on the blackboard above the telephone and begun to dial it.

“We’re on the midnight Pan Am out of Kennedy. There’s an hour on the ground at LAX which puts us down around dawn in Honolulu. I told Dick we wouldn’t—”

Billy Dillon broke off. He was watching Inez dial.

“Inez,” he said finally. “I can’t help noticing you’re dialing Seattle. I sincerely hope you’re not calling Jessie. Just yet.”

“Of course I am. I want to tell her.”

“You don’t think we’ve got enough loose balls on the table already? You don’t think Jessie could wait until we line up at least one shot?”

“She’ll read about it.”

“Not unless it makes Tiger Beat.”

“Don’t say that. Hello?” Inez’s voice was suddenly bright. “This is Inez Victor. Jessica Victor’s mother. Jessie’s mom, yes. I’m calling from New York. Amagansett, actually—”

“Oh good,” Billy Dillon said. “Doing fine. Amagansett to King Crab.”

“Jessie? Darling? Can you hear me? No, it’s a little gray. Raining, actually. Listen. I—”

Inez suddenly thrust the receiver toward Billy Dillon.

“Never open with the weather,” Billy Dillon said as he took the receiver. “Jessie? Jessie honey? Uncle William here. Your mother and I are flying down to Honolulu tonight, we wanted to put you in the picture, you got a minute? Well just tell the crab cups to stand easy, Jess, OK?”

“Oh shit,” Billy Dillon said on the telephone in the Pan American lounge at the Los Angeles airport, when Dick Ziegler told him that Paul Christian had called the police from the Honolulu YMCA and demanded that they come get him. “Oh Jesus fucking Christ shit, I better let Harry know.” By that time Harry Victor had already spoken to the Teamsters in Bal Harbour and was on his way to a breakfast meeting in Houston. Billy Dillon had hung up on Dick Ziegler and tried three numbers in Florida and five in Texas but Harry was somewhere in between and there was no time to wait because the flight was re-boarding. “Oh shit,” Billy Dillon kept saying all the way down the Pacific, laying out hand after hand of solitaire in the empty lounge upstairs. Inez lay on the curved banquette and watched him. Inez had watched Billy Dillon playing solitaire on a lot of planes. “Why not trot out the smile and move easily through the cabin,” he would say at some point in each flight, and the next day Inez would appear that way in the clips, the candidate’s wife, “moving easily through the cabin,” “deflecting questions with a smile.”

“I have to admit I wasn’t factoring in your father,” Billy Dillon said now. “I knew he was a nutty, but I thought he was a nutty strictly on his own case. In fact I thought he was still looking for himself in Tangier. Or Sardinia. Or wherever the fuck he was when he used to fire off the letters to Time demanding Harry’s impeachment.”

“Tunis,” Inez said. “He was in Tunis. He moved back to Honolulu last year. A mystic told him that Janet needed him. I told you. Listen. Do you remember before the Illinois primary when you and Harry and I were taken through the Cook County morgue?”

“Twenty-eight appearances in two days in Chicago and those clowns on advance commit us to a shake-hands with the coroner, very definitely I remember. Some metaphor. What about it.”

“There was a noise in the autopsy room like an electric saw.”

“Right.”

“What was it?”

“It was an electric saw.” Billy Dillon shuffled and cut the cards. “Don’t dwell on it.”

Inez said nothing.

“Don’t anticipate. This one isn’t going to improve, you try to look down the line. Think more like Jessie for once. I tell Jessie Janet’s been shot, Janet’s in a coma, we’re not too sure what’s going to happen, you know what Jessie says? Jessie says ‘I guess whatever happens it’s in her karma.’ ”

Inez said nothing.

“In … her … karma.” Billy Dillon laid out another hand of solitaire. “That’s the consensus from King Crab. Hey. Inez. Don’t cry. Get some sleep.”

“Watch the booze,” Billy Dillon said about three A.M., and, a little later, to the stewardess who came upstairs and sat down beside him, “I’m only going to say this once, sweetheart, we don’t want company.” When first light came and the plane started its descent Billy Dillon reached across the table and took Inez’s hand and held it. Inez had told Billy Dillon in Amagansett that there was no need for anyone to fly down with her but flying down with Inez was for Billy Dillon a reflex, part of managing a situation for Harry, and he held Inez’s hand all the way to touchdown, which occurred at 5:37 A.M. Hawaiian Standard Time, March 26, 1975, on a runway swept by soft warm rain.

6

I WAS trained to distrust other people’s versions, but we go with what we have.

We triangulate the coverage.

Handicap for bias.

Figure in leanings, predilections, the special circumstances which change the spectrum in which any given observer will see a situation.

Consider what filter is on the lens. So to speak. What follows is essentially through Billy Dillon’s filter.

“This is a bitch,” Billy Dillon remembered Dick Ziegler saying over and over. Dick Ziegler was still wearing the wrinkled cotton suit in which he had flown in from Guam and he was sitting on the floor in Dwight and Ruthie Christian’s living room spreading shrimp paste on a cracker, covering the entire surface, beveling the edges.

Billy Dillon remembered the cracker particularly.

Billy Dillon could not recall ever before seeing a cracker given this level of attention.

“A real bitch. This whole deal. She was perfectly fine when I left for Guam.”

“Why wouldn’t she have been,” Inez said.

Dick Ziegler did not look up. “She was going up to San Francisco Friday. To see the boys. Chris and Timmy were coming up from school, she had it all planned.”

“I mean it’s not a lingering illness,” Inez said. “Getting shot.”

“Inez,” Dwight Christian said. “See if this doesn’t beat any martini you get in New York.”

“You don’t exhibit symptoms,” Inez said.

“Inez,” Billy Dillon said.

“I add one drop of glycerine,” Dwight Christian said. “Old Oriental trick.”

“She’d already made a dinner reservation,” Dick Ziegler said. “For the three of them. At Trader’s.”

“You don’t lose your appetite either,” Inez said.

“Inez,” Billy Dillon repeated.

“I heard you the first time,” Inez said.

“What’s the trouble here,” Dick Ziegler said.

“About Wendell Omura,” Inez said.

“Ruthie’s on top of that.” Dwight Christian seemed to have slipped into an executive mode. “Flowers to the undertaker. Something to the house. Deepest condolences. Tragic accident, distinguished service. Et cetera. Ruthie?”

“Millie’s doing her crab thing.” Ruthie began spreading crackers with the shrimp paste. “To send to the house.”

“That’s not just what I meant,” Inez said.

“I hardly knew the guy, frankly,” Dick Ziegler said. “On a personal basis.”

“Somebody must have known him,” Inez said. “On a personal basis.”

Dwight Christian cleared his throat. “Adlai still a big Mets fan, Inez?”

Inez looked at Billy Dillon.

Billy Dillon stood up. “I think what Inez means—”

“Jessie still so horse crazy?” Ruthie Christian said.

“Horse crazy,” Billy Dillon repeated. “Yes. She is. You could say that. Now. If I read Inez correctly — amend this if I’m off base, Inez — Inez is still just a little unclear about—”

Billy Dillon trailed off.

Now Ruthie Christian was arranging the spread crackers to resemble a chrysanthemum.

“This is a delicate area,” Billy Dillon said finally.

Inez put down her glass. “Inez is still just a little unclear about what Wendell Omura was doing on Janet and Dick’s lanai at seven in the morning,” she said. “Number one. Number two—”

“Tell Jessie we’ve got a new Arabian at the ranch,” Dwight Christian said. “Pereira blue mare, dynamite.”

“—Two, Inez is still just a little unclear about what Daddy was doing on Janet and Dick’s lanai with a Magnum.”

“Your father wasn’t seen on the lanai,” Dick Ziegler said. “He was seen leaving the house. Let’s keep our facts straight.”

“Dick,” Inez said. “He said he was on the lanai. He said he fired the Magnum. You know that.”

There was a silence.

“You should get Inez to show you the ranch, Billy.” Ruthie Christian did not look up. “Ask Millie to pack you a lunch, make a day of it.”

“Number three,” Inez said, “although less crucial, Inez is still just a little unclear about what Daddy was doing at the YMCA.”

“If you drove around by the windward side you could see Dick’s new project,” Ruthie Christian said. “Sea Ranch? Sea Mountain? Whatever he calls it.”

“He calls it Sea Meadow,” Dwight Christian said. “Which suggests its drawback.”

“Let’s not get started on that,” Dick Ziegler said.

“Goddamn swamp, as it stands.”

“So was downtown Honolulu, Dwight. As it stood.”

“Sea Meadow. I call that real truth-in-labeling. Good grazing for shrimp.”

“Prime acreage, Dwight. As you know.”

“Prime swamp. Excuse me. Sacred prime swamp. Turns out Dick’s bought himself an old kahuna burial ground. Strictly kapu to developers.”

“Kapu my ass. Kapu only after you started playing footsie with Wendell Omura.”

“Speaking of Wendell Omura,” Inez said.

“If you went around the windward side you could also stop at Lanikai.” Ruthie Christian seemed oblivious, intent on her cracker chrysanthemum. “Give Billy a taste of how we really live down here.”

“I think he’s getting one now,” Inez said.

Dwight Christian extracted the lemon peel from his martini and studied it.

Dick Ziegler gazed at the ceiling.

“Let’s start by stipulating that Daddy was on the lanai,” Inez said.

“Inez,” Dwight Christian said. “I have thirty-two lawyers on salary. In house. If I wanted to hear somebody talk like a lawyer, I could call one up, ask him over. Give him a drink. Speaking of which—”

Dwight Christian held out his glass.

“Dwight’s point as I see it is this,” Ruthie Christian said. She filled Dwight Christian’s glass from the shaker on the table, raised it to her lips and made a moue of distaste. “Why air family linen?”

“Exactly,” Dwight Christian said. “Why accentuate the goddamn negative?”

“Kapu my ass,” Dick Ziegler said.

Since Billy Dillon’s filter tends to the comic his memory may be broad. What he said some months later about this first evening in Honolulu was that it had given him a “new angle” on the crisis-management techniques of the American business class. “They do it with crackers,” he said. “Old Occidental trick. All the sharks know it.” In his original account of that evening and of the four days that followed Billy Dillon failed to mention Jack Lovett, which was his own trick.

7

I ALSO have Inez’s account.

Inez’s account does not exactly conflict with Billy Dillon’s account but neither does it exactly coincide. Inez’s version of that first evening in Honolulu has less to do with those members of her family who were present than with those who were notably not.

Less to do with Dick Ziegler, say, than with Janet.

Less to do with Dwight and Ruthie Christian than with Paul Christian, and even Carol.

In Inez’s version for example she at least got it straight about Paul Christian’s room at the YMCA.

The room at the YMCA should have been an early warning, even Dick Ziegler and Dwight Christian could agree on that.

Surely one of them had told Inez before about her father’s room at the YMCA.

His famous single room at the Y.

Paul Christian had taken this room when he came back from Tunis. He had never to anyone’s knowledge spent an actual night there but he frequently mentioned it. “Back to my single room at the Y,” he would say as he left the dinner table at Dwight and Ruthie’s or at Dick and Janet’s or at one or another house in Honolulu, and at least one or two of the other guests would rise, predictably, with urgent offers: a gate cottage here, a separate entrance there, the beach shack, the children’s wing, absurd to leave it empty. Open the place up, give it some use. Doing us the favor, really. By way of assent Paul Christian would shrug and turn up his palms. “I’m afraid everyone knows my position,” he would murmur, yielding.

Paul Christian had spoken often that year of his “position.”

Surely Inez had heard her father speak of his position.

He conceived his position as “down,” or “on the bottom,” the passive victim of fortune’s turn and his family’s self-absorption (“Dwight’s on top now, he can’t appreciate my position,” he said to a number of people, including Dick Ziegler), and, some months before, he had obtained the use of a house so situated — within sight both of Janet and Dick’s house on Kahala Avenue and of the golf course on which Dwight Christian played every morning at dawn — as to exactly satisfy this conception.

“The irony is that I can watch Dwight teeing off while I’m making my instant coffee,” he would sometimes say.

“The irony is that I can see Janet giving orders to her gardeners while I’m eating my little lunch of canned tuna,” he would say at other times.

It was a location that ideally suited the prolonged mood of self-reflection in which Paul Christian arrived back from Tunis, and, during January and February, he had seemed to find less and less reason to leave the borrowed house. He had told several people that he was writing his autobiography. He had told others that he was gathering together certain papers that would constitute an indictment of the family’s history in the islands, what he called “the goods on the Christians, let the chips fall where they may.” He had declined invitations from those very hostesses (widows, divorcees, women from San Francisco who leased houses on Diamond Head and sat out behind them in white gauze caftans) at whose tables he was considered a vital ornament.

“I’m in no position to reciprocate,” he would say if pressed, and at least one woman to whom he said this had told Ruthie Christian that Paul had made her feel ashamed, as if her very invitation had been presumptuous, an attempt to exploit the glamour of an impoverished noble. He had declined the dinner dance that Dwight and Ruthie Christian gave every February on the eve of the Hawaiian Open. He had declined at least two invitations that came complete with plane tickets (the first to a houseparty in Pebble Beach during the Crosby Pro-Am, the second to a masked ball at a new resort south of Acapulco), explaining that his sense of propriety would not allow him to accept first-class plane tickets when his position was such that he was reduced to eating canned tuna.

“Frankly, Daddy, everybody’s a little puzzled by this ‘canned tuna’ business,” Janet had apparently said one day in February.

“I’m sure I don’t know why. Since ‘everybody’ isn’t reduced to eating it.”

“But I mean neither are you. Dwight says—”

“I’m sure it must be embarrassing for Dwight.”

Janet had tried another approach.

“Daddy, maybe it’s the ‘canned’ part. I mean what other kind of tuna is there?”

“Fresh. As you know. But that’s not the point, is it.”

“What is the point?”

“I’d rather you and Dwight didn’t discuss my affairs, frankly. I’m surprised.”

Tears of frustration would spring to Janet’s eyes during these exchanges. “Canned tuna,” she had said finally, “isn’t even cheap.”

“Maybe you could suggest something cheaper,” Paul Christian had said. “For your father.”

That was when Paul Christian had stopped speaking to Janet.

“Send him a whole tuna,” Dwight Christian had advised when Janet reported this development. “Have it delivered. Packed in ice. Half a ton of bluefin. Goddamn, I’ll do it myself.”

Paul Christian had stopped speaking to Dwight a month before, after stopping by his office to say that the annual dinner dance on the eve of the Hawaiian Open seemed, from his point of view, a vulgar extravagance.

“ ‘Vulgar,’ ” Dwight Christian had repeated.

“Vulgar, yes. From my point of view.”

“Why don’t you say from the point of view of a Cambodian orphan?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I could see the point of view of a Cambodian orphan. I could appreciate this orphan’s position on dinner dances in Honolulu. I might not agree wholeheartedly but I could respect it, I could—”

“You could what?”

As Dwight Christian explained it to Inez he had realized in that instant that this particular encounter was no-win. This particular encounter had been no-win from the time Paul Christian hit on the strategy of coming not to the house but to the office. He had come unannounced, in the middle of the day, and had been cooling his heels in the reception room like some kind of drill-bit salesman when Dwight Christian came back from lunch.

“Your brother’s been waiting almost an hour,” the receptionist had said, and Dwight had read reproach in her voice.

As tactics went this one had been minor but effective, a step up from turning down invitations on the ground that they could not be reciprocated, and its impact on Dwight Christian had been hard to articulate. Dwight Christian did not believe that he had mentioned it even to Ruthie. In fact he had pushed it from his mind. It had seemed absurd. In that instant in the office Dwight Christian had realized that Paul Christian was no longer presenting himself as the casual victim of his family’s self-absorption. He was now presenting himself as the deliberate victim of his family’s malice.

“I could buy the orphan’s point of view,” Dwight Christian had said finally. “I can’t buy yours.”

“Revealing choice of words.”

Dwight Christian said nothing.

“Always trying to ‘buy,’ aren’t you, Dwight?”

Dwight Christian squared the papers on his desk before he spoke. “Ruthie will miss you,” he said then.

“I’m sure you can get one of your Oriental friends to fill out the table,” Paul Christian said.

Later that day the receptionist had mentioned to the most senior of Dwight Christian’s secretaries, who in due course mentioned it to him, that she found it “a little sad” that Mr. Christian’s brother had to live at the YMCA.

That was January.

At first Dwight Christian said February but Ruthie corrected him: it would have been January because the invitations to the dance had just gone out.

The dance itself was February.

The Open was February.

In February there had been the dance and the Open and the falling-out with Janet over the canned tuna. In February there had also been the Chriscorp annual meeting, at which Paul Christian had embarrassed everyone, most especially (according to Ruthie) himself, by introducing a resolution that called for the company to “explain itself.” Of course the newspapers had got hold of it. “Unspecified allegations flowed from one dissident family member but the votes were overwhelmingly with management at Chriscorp’s annual meeting yesterday,” the Honolulu Advertiser had read. “DISGRUNTLED CHRISTIAN SEEKS DISCLOSURE,” was the headline in the Star-Bulletin.

The Chriscorp meeting was the fifteenth of February.

On the first of March Paul Christian had surfaced a second time in the Advertiser, with a letter to the editor demanding the “retraction” of a photograph showing Janet presenting an Outdoor Circle Environmental Protection Award for Special Effort in Blocking Development to Rep. Wendell Omura (D-Hawaii). Paul Christian’s objection to the photograph did not appear to be based on the fact that the development Wendell Omura was then blocking was Dick Ziegler’s. His complaint was more general, and ended with the phrase “lest we forget.”

“I’m not sure they could actually ‘retract’ a photograph, Paul,” Ruthie Christian had said when he called, at an hour when he knew Dwight to be on the golf course, to ask if she had seen the letter.

“I just want Janet to know,” Paul Christian had said, “that in my eyes she’s hit bottom.”

He had said the same thing to Dick Ziegler. “An insult to you,” he had added on that call. “How dare she.”

“I respect your point,” Dick Ziegler had said carefully, “but I wonder if the Advertiser was the appropriate place to make it.”

“They’ve gone too far, Dickie.”

After the letter to the Advertiser Paul Christian had begun calling Dick Ziegler several times a day with one or another cryptic assurance. “Our day’s coming,” he would say, or “tough times, Dickie, hang in there.” Since it had been for Dick Ziegler a year of certain difficulties, certain reverses, certain differences with Dwight Christian (Dwight Christian’s refusal to break ground for the mall that was to have been the linch-pin of the windward development was just one example) and certain strains with Janet (Janet’s way of lining up with Dwight on the postponement of the windward mall had not helped matters), he could see in a general way that these calls from his father-in-law were intended as expressions of support.

Still, Dick Ziegler said to Inez, the calls troubled him.

He had found them in some way excessive.

He had found them peculiar.

“I may not be the most insightful guy in the world when it comes to human psychology,” Dick Ziegler said, “but I think your dad went off the deep end.”

“Fruit salad,” Dwight Christian said.

“That’s hindsight,” Ruthie Christian said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Dwight Christian had stopped drinking martinis and lapsed into a profound irritability. “Of course it’s hindsight. Jesus Christ. ‘Hindsight.’ ”

“Janet loves you, Inez,” Dick Ziegler said. “Don’t ever forget that. Janet loves you.”

8

DURING the time I spent talking to Inez Victor in Kuala Lumpur she returned again and again to that first day in Honolulu. This account was not sequential. For example she told me initially, perhaps because I had told her what Billy Dillon said about the crackers, about talking to Dwight and Ruthie Christian and to Dick Ziegler, but it had been late in the day when she talked to Dwight and Ruthie Christian and to Dick Ziegler.

First there had been the hospital.

She and Billy Dillon had gone directly from the airport to the hospital but Janet was being prepared for an emergency procedure to drain fluid from her brain and Inez had been able to see her only through the glass window of the intensive care unit.

They had gone then to the jail.

“I suppose Dwight’ll be breaking out the champagne tonight,” Paul Christian had said in the lawyers’ room at the jail.

Inez had looked at Billy Dillon. “Why,” she said finally.

“You know.” Paul Christian smiled. He seemed relaxed, even buoyant, tilting back his wooden chair and propping his bare heels on the Formica table in the lawyers’ room. His pants were rolled above his tanned ankles. His blue prison shirt was knotted jauntily at the waist. “You’ll be there. I’m here. You can celebrate. Why not.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Actually I’m glad you’re here.” Paul Christian was still smiling. “I’ve been wondering what happened to Leilani Thayer’s koa settee.”

Inez considered this. “I have it in Amagansett,” she said finally. “About Janet—”

“Strange, I didn’t notice it when I visited you.”

“You visited me in New York. The settee is in Amagansett. Daddy—”

“Not that I saw much of your apartment. The way I was rushed off to that so-called party.”

Inez closed her eyes. Paul Christian had stopped in New York without notice in 1972, on his way back to Honolulu with someone he had met on Sardinia, an actor who introduced himself only as “Mark.” I can’t fathom what you were thinking, Paul Christian had written later to Inez, when I brought a good friend to visit you and instead of welcoming the opportunity to know him better you dragged me off (altogether ignoring Mark’s offer to do a paella, by the way, which believe me did not go unremarked upon) to what was undoubtedly the worst party I’ve ever been to where nobody made the slightest effort to communicate whatsoever …

“Actually that wasn’t a party,” Inez heard herself saying.

“Inez,” Billy Dillon said. “Wrong train.”

“Not by any standard of mine,” Paul Christian said. “No. It was certainly not a party.”

“It wasn’t meant to be. It was a fundraiser. You remember, Harry spoke.”

“I do remember. I listened. Mr. — is it Diller? Dillman?”

“Dillon,” Billy Dillon said. “On Track Two.”

“Mr. Dillman here will testify to the fact that I listened. When your husband spoke. I also remember that not a soul I spoke to had any opinion whatsoever about what your husband said.”

“You were talking to the Secret Service.”

“Whoever. They all wore brown shoes. I’m surprised you have Leilani’s settee. Since you never really knew her.”

Billy Dillon looked at Inez. “Pass.”

“Everyone called her ‘Kanaka’ when we were at Cal,” Paul Christian said. “Kanaka Thayer.”

Inez said nothing.

“She was a Pi Phi.”

Inez said nothing.

“Leilani and I were like brother and sister. Parties night and day. Leilani singing scat. I was meant to marry her. Not your mother.” He hummed a few bars of “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” then broke off. “I was considered something of a catch, believe it or not. Ironic, isn’t it?”

Inez unfastened her watch and examined the face.

“My life might have been very different. If I’d married Leilani Thayer.”

Inez corrected her watch from New York to Honolulu time.

“That settee always reminded me.”

“I want you to have it,” Inez said carefully.

“That’s very generous of you, but no. No, thank you.”

“I could have it shipped down.”

“Of course you ‘could.’ I know you ‘could.’ That’s hardly the point, you ‘could,’ is it?”

Inez waited.

“I’m through with all that,” Paul Christian said.

Billy Dillon opened his briefcase. “You mean because you’re here.”

“That whole life,” Paul Christian said. “The mission fucking children and their pathetic little sticks of bad furniture. Those mean little screens they squabble over. That precious settee you’re so proud of. That’s all bullshit, really. Third-rate. Pathetic. If you want to know the truth.”

Billy Dillon took a legal pad from his briefcase. “I wonder if we could run through a few specifics here. Just a few details that might help establish—”

“And if you don’t know what this did to me, Inez, making me beg for that settee—”

“—Establish a chronology—”

“—Humiliating me when I’m down—”

“—Times, movements—”

“—Then I’m sorry, Inez, I don’t care to discuss it.”

During the next half hour Billy Dillon had managed to elicit the following information. Some time between 6:45 and 7:10 the previous morning, from a position midway between the koi pool and the exterior door on Janet’s lanai, Paul Christian had fired five rounds from the Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum he was carrying in his beach roll. He had then replaced the Magnum in the beach roll and made one call, not identifying himself, giving the police emergency operator Janet’s address.

He had been aware that Wendell Omura was on the floor, yes.

He had also been aware that Janet was on the floor.

Yes.

It would be quite impossible for either Inez or Mr. Dillman to understand how he felt about it.

When he left Janet’s house he went not to the borrowed house in which he had been living but directly downtown to the YMCA. He had swum fifty laps in the YMCA pool, thirty backstroke and twenty Australian crawl.

“Be sure you put down ‘crawl,’ ” he said. “I believe they call it ‘freestyle’ now but I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“ ‘Crawl,’ ” Billy Dillon said. “Yes.”

After swimming Paul Christian had breakfasted on tea and yoghurt in the YMCA cafeteria. There had been “a little incident” with the cashier.

“What kind of incident,” Billy Dillon said.

“Somebody says ‘have a nice day’ to me, I always say ‘sorry, I’ve made other plans,’ that usually puts them in their place, but not this fellow. ‘You’re quite a comedian,’ this fellow says. Well, I just looked at him.”

“That was the incident,” Billy Dillon said.

“Someone speaks impertinently, you’re better off not answering.”

“I see,” Billy Dillon said.

Paul Christian had gone then to his room, and spent the rest of the day packing the few belongings he kept there. He attached to each box a list of its contents. He made a master list indicating the disposition of each box. He wrote several letters, including one to Janet in which he explained that he “stood by his actions,” and, early that evening, just before calling the police and identifying himself, left these letters and instructions for their delivery with the night clerk downstairs. There had been “a little incident” with the night clerk.

“He spoke impertinently,” Billy Dillon said.

“Completely out of line. As were the police.”

“The police were out of line.”

“They treated me like a common criminal.”

“Which you’re not.”

“Which I most assuredly am not. I told them. Just what I told Janet. I told them I stood by my actions.”

“You told the police you stood by your actions.”

“Absolutely.”

“Just as you told Janet.”

“Exactly.” Paul Christian looked at Inez. “You’re being very quiet.”

Inez said nothing.

“Am I to interpret your silence as disapproval?”

Inez said nothing.

“Now that I’m jailed like a common criminal you’re going to administer the coup de grace? Step on me?” Paul Christian turned back to Billy Dillon. “Janet and I have always been close. Not this one.”

There was a silence.

“You’re going to miss Janet,” Billy Dillon said.

Paul Christian looked at Inez again. “I should have known you’d be down for the celebration,” he said.

After Paul Christian was taken from the room Inez lit a cigarette and put it out before either she or Billy Dillon spoke. Billy Dillon was making notes on his legal pad and did not look up. “How about it,” he said finally.

“Quite frankly I don’t like crazy people. They don’t interest me.”

“That’s definitely one approach, Inez.” Billy Dillon put the legal pad into his briefcase and closed it. “Forthright. Hard-edge. No fuzzy stuff. But I think the note we want to hit today is a little further toward the more-in-sorrow end of the scale. Your father is ‘a sick man.’ He has ‘an illness like any other.’ He ‘needs treatment.’ ”

“He needs to be put away.”

“That’s what we’re calling ‘treatment,’ Inez. We’re calling it ‘treatment’ when we talk to the homicide guys and we’re calling it ‘treatment’ when we talk to the shrinks and we’re calling it ‘treatment’ when we talk to Frank Tawagata.”

“I don’t even know Frank Tawagata.”

“You don’t know the homicide guys, either, Inez. Just pretend we’re spending the rest of the day on patrol. I’m on point.” Billy Dillon looked at Inez. “You all right?”

“Yes.”

“Then trot out the smile and move easily through the cabin, babe, OK?”

9

“I DON’T need to tell you, Frank, Harry appreciates what you did for him in Miami,” Billy Dillon said at two o’clock that afternoon in Frank Tawagata’s office. Billy Dillon and Inez had already seen the homicide detectives assigned to the investigation and they had already seen the psychiatrists assigned to examine Paul Christian and by then it was time to see Frank Tawagata. In fact Inez did know Frank Tawagata. She had met him at the 1972 convention. He had been a delegate. He was a lawyer, but his being a lawyer was not, Billy Dillon had said, the reason for seeing him. “This is a guy who truly believes, you want to get your grandma into heaven, you call in a marker at the courthouse,” Billy Dillon had said. “Which is his strong point.”

“You went to the wire for us in ’72,” Billy Dillon said now. “Harry knows that.”

“Harry did one or two things for Wendell.” Frank Tawagata did not look at Inez. “Anything I did for Harry I did for Wendell. Strictly.”

“Harry knows that. Harry appreciates your position. Push comes to shove, you’re on Wendell’s team here. Which is why we’re hot pushing, Frank. You talk to Harry or me, you’re talking in camera. Strictly.”

“Strictly in camera,” Frank Tawagata said, “I still can’t help you.”

“You can’t, you can’t. Just say the word.”

“I just said it.”

Inez watched Billy Dillon. She was tired. She had not eaten since breakfast the day before in Amagansett. She did not know what it was that Billy Dillon wanted from Frank Tawagata but she knew that he would get it. She could tell by the slight tensing of his shoulders, the total concentration with which he had given himself over to whatever it was he wanted.

“Wendell was a very well-liked guy,” Billy Dillon said. “In the community. I know that.”

“Very well-liked.”

“Very respected family. The Omuras. Locally.”

“Very respected.”

“Not unlike the Christians. Ironic.” Billy Dillon looked out the window. “One of the Omuras is even involved with Dwight Christian, isn’t he? Via Wendell? Some kind of business deal? Some trade-off or another?”

Frank Tawagata had not answered immediately.

Billy Dillon was still looking out the window.

“I wouldn’t call it a trade-off,” Frank Tawagata said then.

“Of course you wouldn’t, Frank. Neither would I.”

There was a silence.

“Wasn’t your wife an Omura?” Billy Dillon said. “Am I wrong on that?”

“No,” Frank Tawagata said after a slight pause.

“Your wife wasn’t an Omura?”

“I meant no, you’re not wrong.”

Billy Dillon smiled.

“So there would be a definite conflict,” Frank Tawagata said, “if you were asking me to work on the defense.”

“We’re not talking ‘defense,’ Frank. We’re talking a case that shouldn’t see trial.”

“I see.”

“We’re talking a sick man. Who needs help.” Billy Dillon glanced at Inez. “Who needs treatment. And is going to get it.”

“I see,” Frank Tawagata said. “Yes.”

“Look. Frank. All we need from you is a reading. A reading on where the markers are, what plays to expect. You know the community. You know the district attorney’s office.”

Frank Tawagata said nothing.

“I wouldn’t think there was anybody shortsighted enough to see a career in playing this out in the media, but I don’t know the office. For all I know, there’s some guy over there operating in the bozo zone. Some guy who thinks he can make a name going to trial, embarrassing the Christians.”

Frank Tawagata said nothing.

“Embarrassing Harry. Because face it, the guy to get is Harry.”

“I would say ‘was’ Harry.”

“Run that down for me.”

“Harry’s already been got, hasn’t he? In ’72?”

“Free shot, Frank. You deserve it. One of Wendell’s cousins, isn’t it? This deal with Dwight Christian?”

Frank Tawagata picked up a silver pen from his desk and poised it between his index fingers.

Inez watched Billy Dillon’s shoulders. Killer mick, Harry always said about Billy Dillon, an accolade.

Billy Dillon leaned forward almost imperceptibly.

It occurred to Inez that the reason Harry was not himself a killer was that he lacked the concentration for it. Some part of his attention was always deflected back toward himself. A politician, Jack Lovett had said at Puncak. A radio actor.

“Didn’t I see something about this in Business Week?” Billy Dillon said. “Just recently? Something about the container business? Is that right? One of Wendell’s cousins?”

“One of Wendell’s brothers.” Frank Tawagata replaced the pen in its onyx holder before he spoke again. “My wife is a cousin.”

“There you go,” Billy Dillon said. “I love a town this size.”

By three o’clock that afternoon it had been agreed, and could be duly reported to Harry Victor, that Frank Tawagata would sound out the district attorney’s office on the most discreet and expeditious way to handle the eventual commitment to treatment of Paul Christian.

It had been agreed that Frank Tawagata would discuss the advisability of this disposition with certain key elements in the Nisei political community.

It had been agreed that Frank Tawagata would make his special understanding of both the district attorney’s office and the community available to whatever lawyer was chosen to represent Paul Christian at what would ideally be mutually choreographed proceedings.

“You’re not visualizing a criminal specialist,” Frank Tawagata said.

“I’m visualizing a goddamn trust specialist,” Billy Dillon said. “One of the old-line guys. One of those guys who’s not too sure where the crapper is in the courthouse. I told you. We’re not mounting a criminal defense here.”

All that had been agreed upon and it had been agreed, above all, that no purpose would be served by further discussion of why Wendell Omura had introduced legislation hindering the development of Dick Ziegler’s Sea Meadow, of how that legislation might have worked to benefit Dwight Christian, or of what interest Wendell Omura’s brother might recently have gained in the Chriscorp Container Division.

“How exactly did you know that,” Inez said when she and Billy Dillon left Frank Tawagata’s office.

“Just what I said. Business Week. Something I read on the plane coming down.”

“About Dwight?”

“Not specifically.”

“About Dick?”

“About some Omura getting into containers. Two lines. A caption. That’s all.”

“You didn’t even know it was Wendell Omura’s brother?”

“I knew his name was Omura, didn’t I?”

“Omura is a name like Smith.”

“Inez, you don’t get penalties for guessing,” Billy Dillon said. “You know the moves.”

10

BY the time Inez and Billy Dillon got back to Queen’s Medical Center that first day in Honolulu it was almost four o’clock, and Janet’s condition was unchanged. According to the resident in charge of the intensive care unit the patient was not showing the progress they would like to see. The patient’s body temperature was oscillating. That the patient’s body temperature was oscillating suggested considerable brainstem damage.

The patient was not technically dead, no.

The patient’s electroencephalogram had not even flattened out yet.

Technical death would not occur until they had not one but three flat electroencephalograms, consecutive, spaced eight hours apart.

That was technical death, yes.

“Technical as opposed to what?” Inez said.

The resident seemed confused. “What we call technical death is death, as, well—”

“As opposed to actual death?”

“As opposed to, well, not death.”

“Technical life? Is that what you mean?”

“It’s not necessarily an either-or situation, Mrs. Victor.”

“Life and death? Are not necessarily either-or?”

“Inez,” Billy Dillon said.

“I want to get this straight. Is that what he’s saying?”

“I’m saying there’s a certain gray area, which may or may not be—”

Inez looked at Billy Dillon.

“He’s saying she won’t make it,” Billy Dillon said.

“That’s what I wanted to know.”

Inez stood by the metal bed and watched Janet breathing on the respirator.

Billy Dillon waited a moment, then turned away.

“She called me,” Inez said finally. “She called me last week and asked me if I remembered something. And I said I didn’t. But I do.”

When Inez talked to me in Kuala Lumpur about seeing Janet on the life-support systems she mentioned several times this telephone call from Janet, one of the midnight calls that Janet habitually made to New York or Amagansett or wherever Inez happened to be.

Do you remember, Janet always asked on these calls.

Do you remember the jade bat Cissy kept on the hall table. The ebony table in the hall. The ebony table Lowell Frazier said was maple veneer painted black. But you can’t have forgotten Lowell Frazier, you have to remember Cissy going through the roof when Lowell and Daddy went to Fiji together. The time Daddy wanted to buy the hotel. Inez, the ten-room hotel. In Suva. After Mother left. Or was it before? You must remember. Concentrate. Now that I have you. I’m frankly amazed you picked up the telephone, usually you’re out. I’m watching an absolutely paradisical sunset, how about you?

“It’s midnight here,” Inez had said on this last call from Janet.

“I dialed, and you picked up. Amazing. Usually I get your service. Now. Concentrate. I’ve been thinking about Mother. Do you remember Mother crying upstairs at my wedding?”

“No,” Inez had said, but she did.

On the day Janet married Dick Ziegler at Lanikai Carol Christian had started drinking champagne at breakfast. She had a job booking celebrities on a radio interview show in San Francisco that year, and by noon she was placing calls to entertainers at Waikiki hotels asking them to make what she called guest appearances at Janet’s wedding.

As you may or may not remember I’m the mother of the bride, Carol Christian said by way of greeting people at the reception.

I’d pace my drinks if I were you, Paul Christian had said.

I should worry, I should care, Carol Christian sang with the combo that played for dancing on the deck a Chriscorp crew had just that morning laid on the beach.

Your mother’s been getting up a party for the Rose Bowl, Harry Victor said.

Carol’s a real pistol, Dwight Christian said.

I should marry a millionaire.

It was when Janet went upstairs to change out of her white batiste wedding dress that Carol Christian began to cry. Not to blame your Uncle Dwight, she kept repeating, sitting on the bed in which she had fifteen years before taken naps with Inez and Janet. Our best interests at heart. Not his fault. Your grandmother. Cissy. Really. Too much. Anyhow, anyhoo. All’s well that ends in bed. Old San Francisco saying. I got my marvelous interesting career, which I never would have had, and you got—

Inez, heavily pregnant that year, sat on the bed and tried to comfort her mother.

We got married, Janet prompted.

Forget married, Carol Christian said. You got horses. Convertibles when the time came. Tennis lessons.

I couldn’t have paid for stringing your rackets if I’d taken you with me.

Let alone the lessons.

Forget the little white dresses.

Never mind the cashmere sweater sets and the gold bracelets and the camel’s-hair coats.

I beg to differ, Janet Christian, Mrs. Ziegler, you did so have a camel’s-hair coat.

You wore it when you came up for Easter in 1950.

Mon cher Paul: Who do you f— to get off this island? (Just kidding of course) XXXX, C.

Neither Inez nor Janet had spoken. The windows were all open in the bedroom and the sounds of the party drifted upstairs in the fading light. Down on the beach the bridesmaids were playing volleyball in their gingham dresses. The combo was playing a medley from My Fair Lady. Brother Harry, Inez heard Dick Ziegler say directly below the bedroom windows. Let the man build you a real drink.

Where’s Inez, Harry Victor said. I don’t want Inez exhausted.

Enough of the bubbly, time for the hard stuff, Dick Ziegler said.

Excuse me but I’m looking for my wife, Harry Victor said.

Whoa man, excuse me, Dick Ziegler said. I doubt very much she’s lost.

Upstairs in the darkening bedroom Janet had taken off her stephanotis lei and placed it on their mother’s shoulders.

I should worry, I should care.

I should marry a millionaire.

Inez did remember that.

Inez also remembered that when she and Janet were fourteen and twelve Janet had studied snapshots of Carol Christian and cut her hair the same way.

Inez also remembered that when she and Janet were fifteen and thirteen Janet had propped the postcards from San Francisco and Lake Tahoe and Carmel against her study lamp and practiced Carol Christian’s handwriting.

“Partners in a surprisingly contemporary marriage in which each granted the other freedom to pursue wide-ranging interests,” was how Billy Dillon had solved the enigma of Paul and Carol Christian for Harry Victor’s campaign biography. The writer had not been able to get it right and Billy Dillon had himself devised this slant.

Aloha oe.

I believe your mother wants to go to night clubs.

Nineteen days after Janet’s wedding Carol Christian had been dead, killed in the crash of a Piper Apache near Reno, and there in the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen’s Medical Center Janet was about to be dead. Janet had asked Inez to remember and Inez had pretended that she did not remember and now Janet had moved into the certain gray area between either and or.

Aloha oe.

Inez had touched Janet’s hand, then turned away.

The click of her heels on the hospital floor struck her as unsynchronized with her walk.

The sound of her voice when she thanked the resident struck her as disembodied, inappropriate.

Outside the hospital rain still fell, and traffic was backed up on the Lunalilo Freeway. On the car radio there was an update on Janet’s guarded condition at Queen’s Medical Center, and on the numbers of congressmen and other public officials who had sent wires and taped messages expressing their sympathy and deep concern about the death of Wendell Omura. Among the taped messages was one from Harry, expressing not only his sympathy and deep concern but his conviction that this occasion of sadness for all Americans could be an occasion of resolve as well (Inez recognized Billy Dillon’s style in the balanced “occasions”), resolve to overcome the divisions and differences tragically brought to mind today by this incident in the distant Pacific.

“Not so distant you could resist a free radio spot,” Inez said to Billy Dillon.

At five o’clock that afternoon, when Inez and Billy Dillon arrived at Dwight and Ruthie Christian’s house, the first thing Inez noticed was a photograph on the hall table of Janet, a photograph taken the day Janet married Dick Ziegler, Janet barefoot on the beach at Lanikai in her white batiste wedding dress. The photograph did not belong on the hall table, which was why Inez noticed it. The photograph had always been on Ruthie Christian’s dressing table, and now it was here, its silver frame recently polished, the table on which it sat recently cleared of car keys and scarves and lacquer boxes and malachite frogs. The photograph was an offering, a propitiatory message to an indefinite providence, and the message it confirmed was that Janet was available to be dead.

“I called St. Andrew’s this morning and told Chip Kinsolving what we want,” Dwight Christian was saying in the living room. “When the time comes. Just the regular service, in and out, the ashes to ashes business. And maybe a couple of what do you call them, psalms. Not the one about the Lord is my goddamn shepherd. Specifically told him that. Dick? Isn’t that what you want?”

“Don’t anticipate,” Dick Ziegler said. “How do I know what I want. She’s not dead.”

“Passive crap, the Lord is my shepherd,” Dwight Christian said. “No sheep in this family.”

“I’ll tell you what I want,” Inez heard herself say as she walked down the few steps into the living room. She was remotely aware, as if through Demerol, of the vehemence in her voice. “I want you to put that picture back where it belongs.”

At this moment when Inez Victor walked into the living room of the house on Manoa Road she was still wearing the short knitted skirt and the cotton jersey and the plumeria lei in which she had left the airport ten hours before.

She had not yet slept.

She had not yet eaten.

She had not yet seen Jack Lovett, although Jack Lovett had seen her.

Get her in out of the goddamn rain, Jack Lovett had said.

11

THIS much is now known about how Jack Lovett had spent the several months which preceded Inez Victor’s arrival in Honolulu: he had spent those months shuttling between Saigon and Hong Kong and Honolulu. There had been innumerable details, loose ends, arrangements to be made. There had been exit paperwork to be fixed. There had been cash to be transferred. There had been end-user certificates to be altered for certain arms shipments, entry visas to be bought, negotiations to be opened and contacts to be made and houses to be located for displaced Vietnamese officers and officials (even this most minor detail was delicate, in those months when everyone knew the war was ending but everyone pretended that it was not, and Jack Lovett handled such purchases himself, with cash and the mention of overseas associates); the whole skein of threads necessary to transfer the phantom business predicated on the perpetuation of the assistance effort. That there is money to be made in time of war is something we all understand abstractly. Fewer of us understand war itself as a specifically commercial enterprise, but Jack Lovett did, not abstractly but viscerally, and his overriding concern during the months before Inez Victor reentered the field of his direct vision (she had always been there in his peripheral vision, a fitful shadow, the image that came forward when he was alone in a hotel room or at 35,000 feet) had been to insure the covert survival of certain business interests. On the morning Jack Lovett watched Inez arrive at the Honolulu airport, for example, he also watched the arrival and clearance from Saigon and immediate transshipment to Geneva via Vancouver of a certain amount of gold bullion, crated and palleted as “household effects.” When he later mentioned this gold bullion to Inez he described it as “a favor I did someone.” Jack Lovett did many people many favors during the spring of 1975, and many people did Jack Lovett favors in return.

As a reader you are ahead of the narrative here.

As a reader you already know that Inez Victor and Jack Lovett left Honolulu together that spring. One reason you know it is because I said so, early on. Had I not said so you would have known it anyway: you would have guessed it, most readers being rather quicker than most narratives, or perhaps you would even have remembered it, from the stories that appeared in the newspapers and on television when Jack Lovett’s operation was falling apart.

You might even have seen the film clip I mentioned.

Inez Victor dancing on the St. Regis Roof.

Nonetheless.

I could still do Inez Victor’s four remaining days in Honolulu step by step, could proceed from the living room of the house on Manoa Road into the dining room and tell you exactly what happened that first night in Honolulu when Inez and Billy Dillon and Dick Ziegler and Dwight and Ruthie Christian finally sat down to dinner.

I could give you Jack Lovett walking unannounced into the dining room, through the French doors that opened onto the swimming pool.

I could give you Inez looking up and seeing him there.

“Goddamn photographers camped on the front lawn,” Dwight Christian would say. “Jack. You know Inez. You know Janet’s husband. Dick. You know Billy here?”

“We were both in Jakarta a few years back.” Jack Lovett would be speaking to Dwight Christian but looking at Inez. “Inez was there. Inez was in Jakarta with Janet.”

“Inez was also in Jakarta with her husband.” Billy Dillon’s voice would be pleasant. “And her two children.”

“The reason the vultures are on the lawn is this,” Dwight Christian would say. “Janet’s not cutting it.”

“Don’t talk about Janet ‘not cutting it,’ ” Dick Ziegler would say. “Don’t sit there eating chicken pot pie and talk about Janet ‘not cutting it.’ ”

“A change of subject,” Dwight Christian would say. “For Dick. While I finish my chicken pot pie. Jack. What would you say if I told you Chriscorp was bidding a complete overhaul at Cam Ranh Bay?”

“I’d say Chriscorp must be bidding it for Ho Chi Minh.” Jack Lovett would still look only at Inez. “How are you.”

Inez would say nothing, her eyes on Jack Lovett.

“Do you want to go somewhere,” Jack Lovett would say, his voice low and perfectly level.

A silence would fall over the table.

Inez would pick up her fork and immediately lay it down.

“Millie has dessert,” Ruthie Christian would say, faintly.

“Inez,” Billy Dillon would say.

Jack Lovett would look away from Inez and at Billy Dillon. “Here it is,” he would say in the same low level voice. “I don’t have time to play it out.”

Well, there you are.

I could definitely do that.

I know the conventions and how to observe them, how to fill in the canvas I have already stretched; know how to tell you what he said and she said and know above all, since the heart of narrative is a certain calculated ellipsis, a tacit contract between writer and reader to surprise and be surprised, how not to tell you what you do not yet want to know. I appreciate the role played by specificity in this kind of narrative: not just the chicken pot pie and not just the weather either (I happen to like weather, but weather is easy), not just the way the clouds massed on the Koolau Range the next morning and not just the clatter of the palms in the afternoon trades behind Janet’s house (anyone can do palms in the afternoon trades) when Inez went to get the dress in which Janet was buried.

I mean more than weather.

I mean specificity of character, of milieu, of the apparently insignificant detail.

The fact that when Harry and Adlai Victor arrived in Honolulu on the morning of March 28, Good Friday morning, the morning Janet’s body was delivered to the coroner for autopsy, they were traveling on the Warner Communications G-2. The frequent occasions over the long Easter weekend before Janet’s funeral on which Adlai found opportunity to mention the Warner Communications G-2. The delicacy of reasoning behind the decision that Harry and Adlai, but not Inez, should call on Wendell Omura’s widow. The bickering over the arrangements for Janet’s funeral (Dick Ziegler did after all want the Lord as Janet’s shepherd, if only because Dwight Christian did not), and the way in which Ruthie Christian treated the interval between Janet’s death and Janet’s funeral as a particularly bracing exercise in quarter-mastering. The little flare-up when Inez advised Dick Ziegler that he could not delegate to Ruthie the task of calling Chris and Timmy at school to tell them their mother was dead.

“Frankly, Inez, when it comes to handling kids, I don’t consider you the last word,” Dick Ziegler said. “Considering Jessie.”

“Never mind Jessie,” Inez said. “Make the call.”

The little difficulty Saturday morning when Chris and Timmy flew in from school and the airport dogs picked up marijuana in one of their duffels. The exact text of the letter Paul Christian drafted to the Advertiser about the “outrage” of not being allowed to attend Janet’s funeral. The exact location of the arcade in Waianae where Jack Lovett took Inez to meet the radar specialist who was said to have seen Jessie.

Jessie.

Jessie is the crazy eight in this narrative.

I plan to address Jessie presently, but I wanted to issue this warning first: like Jack Lovett and (as it turned out) Inez Victor, I no longer have time for the playing out.

Call that a travel advisory.

A narrative alert.

12

THE first electroencephalogram to show the entirely flat line indicating that Janet had lost all measurable brain activity was completed shortly before six o’clock on Wednesday evening, March 26, not long after Inez and Billy Dillon arrived at the house on Manoa Road. This electroencephalogram was read by the chief neurologist on Janet’s case at roughly the time Inez and Billy Dillon and Dick Ziegler and Dwight and Ruthie Christian sat down to the chicken pot pie. The neurologist notified the homicide detectives that the first flat reading had been obtained, called the house on Manoa Road in an effort to reach Dick Ziegler, got a busy signal, and left the hospital, leaving an order with the resident on duty in the unit to keep trying Dick Ziegler. Ten minutes later a felony knifing came up from emergency and the resident overlooked the order to call Dick Ziegler.

This poses one of those questions that have to do only with perceived motive: would it have significantly affected what happened had the call come from the hospital before Inez got up from the dinner table and walked through the living room and out the front door with Jack Lovett? I think not, but a call from the hospital could at least have been construed as the “reason” Inez left the table.

A reason other than Jack Lovett.

A reason they could all pretend to accept.

As it was they could pretend only that Inez was overwrought. Ruthie Christian was the first to locate this note. “She’s just overwrought,” Ruthie Christian said, and Billy Dillon picked it up: “Overwrought,” he repeated. “Absolutely. Naturally. She’s overwrought.”

As it was Inez just left.

“You could probably take off the lei,” Jack Lovett said when they were sitting in his car outside the house on Manoa Road. Most of the reporters on the lawn seemed to have gone. There had been a single cameraman left on the steps when Inez and Jack Lovett came out of the house and he had perfunctorily run some film and then retreated. Jack Lovett had twice turned the ignition on and twice turned it off.

Inez took the crushed lei from around her neck and dropped it on the seat between them.

“I don’t know where I thought we’d go,” Jack Lovett said. “Frankly.”

Inez looked at Jack Lovett and then she began to laugh.

“Hell, Inez. How was I to know you’d come?”

“You’ve had twenty years. To think where we’d go.”

“Well sure. Stop laughing. I used to think I could always take you to Saigon. Drink citron pressé and watch the tennis. Scratch that. You want to go to the hospital?”

“Pretend we did go to Saigon. Pretend we did it all. Imagine it. It’s all in the mind anyway.”

“Not entirely,” Jack Lovett said.

Inez looked at him, then away. The cameraman on the steps lit a cigarette and immediately flicked it across the lawn. He picked up his minicam and started toward the car. Inez picked up the lei and dropped it again. “Are we going to the hospital or not,” she said finally.

Which was how Inez Victor and Jack Lovett happened to walk together into the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen’s Medical Center when, as the older of the two homicide detectives put it, Janet’s clock was already running.

“But I don’t quite understand this,” Inez kept saying to the resident and the two homicide detectives. The homicide detectives were at the hospital only to get a statement from one of the nurses and they wanted no part of Inez’s interrogation of the resident. “You got a flat reading at six o’clock. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Correct.”

“And you need three. Eight hours apart. Isn’t that what you told me? This afternoon? About technical death?”

“Also correct.” The resident’s face was flushed with irritation. “At least eight hours apart.”

“Then why are you telling me you scheduled the second electroencephalogram for nine tomorrow morning?”

“At least eight hours apart. At least.”

“Never mind ‘at least.’ You could do it at two this morning.”

“That wouldn’t be normal procedure.”

Inez looked at the homicide detectives.

The homicide detectives looked away.

Inez looked at Jack Lovett.

Jack Lovett shrugged.

“Do it at two,” Inez said. “Or she goes someplace where they will do it at two.”

“Move the patient, you could confuse the cause of death.” The resident looked at the detectives for corroboration. “Cloud it. Legally.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the cause of death,” Inez said.

There was a silence.

“I’d say do it at two,” the older of the two homicide detectives said.

“I notice you’re still getting what you want,” Jack Lovett said to Inez.

They did it at two and again at ten in the morning and each time it was flat but the chief neurologist, after consultation with the homicide detectives and the hospital lawyers, said that a fourth flat reading would make everyone more comfortable. A fourth flat reading would guarantee that removal of support could not be argued as cause of death. A fourth flat reading would be something everyone could live with.

“Everybody except Janet,” Inez said, but she said it only to Jack Lovett.

Eight hours later they did it again and again it was flat and at 7:40 P.M. on Thursday, March 27, Janet Christian Ziegler was pronounced dead. During most of the almost twenty-four hours preceding this pronouncement Inez had waited on a large sofa in an empty surgical waiting room. During much of this time Jack Lovett was with her. Of whatever Jack Lovett said to Inez during those almost twenty-four hours she could distinctly remember later only a story he told her about a woman who cooked for him in Saigon in 1970. This woman had tried, over a period of some months, to poison selected dinner guests with oleander leaves. She had minced the leaves into certain soup bowls, very fine, a chiffonade of hemotoxins. Although none of these guests died at least two, a Reuters correspondent and an AID analyst, fell ill, but the cook was not suspected until her son-in-law, who believed himself cuckolded by the woman’s daughter, came to Jack Lovett with the story.

“What was the point,” Inez said.

“Whose point?”

“The cook’s.” Inez was drinking a bottle of beer that Jack Lovett had brought to the hospital. “What was the cook’s motive?”

“Her motive.” Jack Lovett seemed not interested in this part of the story. “Turned out she was just deluded. A strictly personal deal. Disappointing, actually. At first I thought I was onto something.”

Inez had finished the beer and studied Jack Lovett’s face. She considered asking him what he had thought he was onto but decided against it. After this little incident with the cook he had given up on housekeeping, he said. After this little incident with the cook he had gone back to staying at the Duc. Whenever he had to be in Saigon.

“You liked it there,” Inez said. The beer had relaxed her and she was beginning to fall asleep, holding Jack Lovett’s hand. “You loved it. Didn’t you.”

“Some days were better than others, I guess.” Jack Lovett let go of Inez’s hand and laid his jacket over her bare legs. “Oh sure,” he said then. “It was kind of the place to be.”

Occasionally during that night and day Dick Ziegler came to the hospital, but on the whole he seemed relieved to leave the details of the watch to Inez. “Janet doesn’t even know we’re here,” Dick Ziegler said each time he came to the hospital.

“I’m not here for Janet,” Inez said finally, but Dick Ziegler ignored her.

“Doesn’t even know we’re here,” he repeated.

Quite often during that night and day Billy Dillon came to the hospital. “Naturally you’re overwrought,” Billy Dillon said each time he came to the hospital. “Which is why I’m not taking this seriously. Ask me what I think about what Inez is doing, I’d say no comment. She’s overwrought.”

“Listen,” Billy Dillon said the last time he came to the hospital. “We’re picking up incoming on the King Crab flank. Harry takes the Warner’s plane to Seattle to pick up Jessie for the funeral, Jessie informs Harry she doesn’t go to funerals.”

Inez had looked at Billy Dillon.

“Well?” Billy Dillon said.

“Well what?”

“What should I tell Harry?”

“Tell him he should have advanced it better,” Inez Victor said.

13

I SHOULD tell you something about Jessie Victor that very few people understood. Harry Victor for example never understood it. Inez understood it only dimly. Here it is: Jessie never thought of herself as a problem. She never considered her use of heroin an act of rebellion, or a way of life, or even a bad habit of particular remark; she considered it a consumer decision. Jessie Victor used heroin simply because she preferred heroin to coffee, aspirin, and cigarettes, as well as to movies, records, cosmetics, clothes, and lunch. She had been subjected repeatedly to the usual tests, and each battery showed her to be anxious, highly motivated, more, intelligent than Adlai, and not given to falsification. Perhaps because she lacked the bent for falsification she did not have a notable sense of humor. What she did have was a certain incandescent inscrutability, a kind of luminous gravity, and it was always startling to hear her dismiss someone, in that grave low voice that thrilled Inez as sharply when Jessie was eighteen as it had when Jessie was two, as “an asshole.” “You asshole” was what Jessie called Adlai, the night he and Harry Victor arrived in Seattle to pick her up for Janet’s funeral and Jessie declined to go. Jessie did agree to have dinner with them, while the Warner Communications G-2 was being refueled, but dinner had gone badly.

“The crux of it is finding a way to transfer anti-war sentiment to a multiple-issue program,” Adlai had said at dinner. He was telling Harry Victor about an article he proposed to write for the op-ed page of the New York Times. “It’s something we’ve been tossing back and forth in Cambridge.”

“Interesting,” Harry Victor said. “Let me vet it. What do you think, Jess?”

“I think he shouldn’t say ‘Cambridge,’ ” Jessie said.

“Possibly you were nodding out when I went up there,” Adlai said, “but Cambridge happens to be where I go to school.”

“Maybe so,” Jessie said, “but you don’t happen to go to Harvard.”

“OK, guys. You both fouled.” Harry Victor turned to Adlai. “I could sound somebody out at the Times. If you’re serious.”

“I’m serious. It’s time. Bring my generation into the dialogue, if you see my point.”

“You asshole,” Jessie said.

“Well,” Harry Victor said after Adlai had left the table. “How are things otherwise?”

“I’m ready to leave.”

“You said you weren’t going. You have a principle. You don’t go to funerals. This is a new principle on me, but never mind, you made your case. I accept it. As a principle.”

“I don’t mean leave for Janet’s funeral. I mean actually leave. Period. This place. Seattle.”

“You haven’t finished the program.”

“The program,” Jessie said, “is for assholes.”

“Just a minute,” Harry said.

“I did the detox, I’m clean, I don’t see the point.”

“What do you mean you did the detox, the game plan here wasn’t detox, it was methadone.”

“I don’t like methadone.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Jessie had said patiently, “it doesn’t make me feel good.”

“It makes you feel bad?”

“It doesn’t make me feel bad, no.” Jessie had given this question her full attention. “It just doesn’t make me feel good.”

There had been a silence.

“What is it you want to do exactly?” Harry had said then.

“I want—” Jessie was studying a piece of bread that she seemed to have rolled into a ball. “To get on with my regular life. Make some headway, you know?”

“That’s fine. Good news. Admirable.”

“Get into my career.”

“Which is what exactly?”

Jessie was breaking the ball of bread into little pellets.

“Don’t misread me, Jessie. This is all admirable. My only point is that you need a program.” Harry Victor found himself warming to the idea of the projected program. “A plan. Two plans, actually. Which dove tail. A long-range plan and a short-term plan. What’s your long-range plan?”

“I’m not running for Congress,” Jessie said. “If that’s what you mean.”

There seemed to Harry so plaintive a note in this that he let it go. “Well then. All right. How about your immediate plan?”

Jessie picked up another piece of bread.

Something in Harry Victor snapped. He had been trying for the past hour to avoid any contemplation of why Inez had walked out of Dwight Christian’s house the night before with Jack Lovett. Billy Dillon had told him. “You have to think she’s overwrought,” Billy Dillon had said. “I have to think she’s got loony timing,” Harry Victor had said. Early on in this dinner he had tried out the overwrought angle on Jessie and Adlai. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your mother were a little overwrought,” he had said. Adlai had put down the menu and said that he wanted a shrimp cocktail and the New York stripper, medium bloody, sour cream and chives on the spud. Jessie had put down the menu and stared at him, he imagined fishily, from under the straw tennis visor she had worn to dinner.

Jessie had stared at him fishily from under her tennis visor and Adlai had wanted the New York stripper medium bloody and Inez had walked out of Dwight Christian’s house with Jack Lovett and now Jessie was tearing her bread into little chicken-shit pellets.

“Could you do me a favor? Jessie? Could you either eat the bread or leave it alone?”

Jessie had put her hands in her lap.

“I’m still kind of working on the immediate plan part,” she said after a while. “Actually.”

In fact Jessie Victor did have an immediate plan that Thursday evening in Seattle, the same plan she had mentioned in its less immediate form to Inez at Christmas, the plan Inez had selectively neglected to mention when she described her visit with Jessie to Harry and Adlai: the plan, if the convergence of yearning and rumor and isolation on which Jessie was operating in Seattle could be called a plan, to get a job in Vietnam.

Inez had not mentioned this plan to Harry because she did not believe it within the range of the possible.

Jessie did not mention this plan to Harry because she did not believe it to be the kind of plan that Harry would understand.

I see Jessie’s point of view here. Harry would have talked specifics. Harry would have asked Jessie if she had read a newspaper lately. Harry would not have understood that specifics made no difference to Jessie. Getting a job in Vietnam seemed to Jessie a first step that had actually presented itself, a chance to put herself at last in opportunity’s way, and because she believed that whatever went on there was only politics and that politics was for assholes she would have remained undeflected, that March night in 1975, the same night as it happened that the American evacuation of Da Nang deteriorated into uncontrolled rioting, by anything she might have heard or seen or read in a newspaper.

If in fact Jessie ever read a newspaper.

Which seemed to both Inez and Harry Victor a doubtful proposition.

When word reached them in Honolulu on the following Sunday night, Easter Sunday night 1975, the night before Janet’s funeral, that three hours after the Warner Communications G-2 left Seattle, bringing Harry and Adlai Victor down to Honolulu, Jessie had walked out of the clinic that specialized in the treatment of adolescent chemical dependency and talked her way onto a C-5A transport that landed seventeen-and-one-half hours later (refueling twice in flight) at Tan Son Nhut, Saigon. “Maybe she heard she could score there,” Adlai said, and Inez slapped him.

14

SHE did it with no passport (her passport was in her otherwise empty stash box in the apartment on Central Park West) and a joke press card that somebody from Life had made up for her during the 1972 campaign. This press card had failed to get Jessie Victor at age fifteen into the backstage area at Nassau Coliseum during a Pink Floyd concert but it got her at age eighteen onto the C-5A to Saigon. This seems astonishing now, but we forget how confused and febrile those few weeks in 1975 actually were, the “reassessments” and the “calculated gambles” and the infusions of supplemental aid giving way even as they were reported to the lurid phantasmagoria of air lifts and marines on the roof and stranded personnel and tarmacs littered with shoes and broken toys. In the immediate glamour of the revealed crisis many things happened that could not have happened a few months earlier or a few weeks later, and what happened to Jessie Victor was one of them. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut should have been detained there, but Jessie Victor was not. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut with no passport should not have been stamped through immigration on the basis of a New York driver’s license, but Jessie Victor was. Clearly an American girl with no passport, a New York driver’s license and a straw tennis visor should not have been able to walk out of the littered makeshift terminal at Tan Son Nhut and, observed by several people who did nothing to stop her, get on a bus to Cholon, but Jessie Victor had done just that. Or so it appeared.

By the time Jack Lovett arrived at the house on Manoa Road that Easter Sunday night with the story about the American girl who appeared to be Jessie, the blond American girl who had left a New York driver’s license at Tan Son Nhut in lieu of a visa, Inez and Harry Victor were speaking to each other only in the presence of other people.

They had been civil at the required meals but avoided the optional.

They had slept in the same room but not the same bed.

“You’re overwrought,” Harry had said on Friday night. “You’re under a strain.”

“Actually I’m not in the least overwrought,” Inez had said. “I’m sad. Sad is different from overwrought.”

“Why not just have another drink,” Harry had said. “For a change.”

By Saturday morning the argument was smoldering one more time on the remote steppes of the 1972 campaign. By Saturday evening it had jumped the break and was burning uncontained. “Do you know what I particularly couldn’t stand,” Inez had said. “I particularly couldn’t stand it at Miami when you said you were the voice of a generation that had taken fire on the battlefields of Vietnam and Chicago.”

“I’m amazed you were sober enough to notice. At Miami.”

“I’d drop that theme if I were you. I think you’ve gotten about all the mileage you’re going to get out of that.”

“Out of what?”

“Harry Victor’s Burden. I was sober enough to notice you didn’t start speaking for this generation until after the second caucus. You were only the voice of a generation that had taken fire on the battlefields of Vietnam and Chicago after you knew you didn’t have the numbers. In addition to which. Moreover. Actually that was never your generation. Actually you were older.”

There had been a silence.

“Let me take a leap forward here,” Harry had said. “Speaking of ‘older.’ ”

Inez had waited.

“I don’t think you chose a particularly appropriate way to observe your sister’s death. Maybe I’m wrong.”

Inez had looked out the window for a long time before she spoke. “Add it up, you and I didn’t have such a bad time,” she said finally. “Net.”

“I’m supposed to notice the past tense. Is that it?”

Inez did not turn from the window. It was dark. She had lived in the north so long that she always forgot how fast the light went. She had gone late that afternoon to pick up the dress in which Dick Ziegler wanted Janet buried and the light had gone while she was still on Janet’s beach. “You pick a dress,” Dick Ziegler had said. “You go. I can’t look in her closet.” After Inez found a dress she had sat on Janet’s bed and called Jack Lovett on Janet’s antique telephone. Jack Lovett had told her to wait on Janet’s beach. “Listen,” Inez had said when she saw him. “That pink dress she wore in Jakarta is in her closet. She has fourteen pink dresses. I counted them. Fourteen.” She had been talking through tears. “Fourteen pink dresses all hanging next to each other. Didn’t anybody ever tell her? She didn’t look good in pink?” There on the beach with Jack Lovett in the last light of the day Inez had cried for the first time that week, but back in the house on Manoa Road with Harry she had felt herself sealed off again, her damage control mechanism still intact.

“I think I deserve a little better than a change of tense,” Harry said.

“Don’t dramatize,” Inez said.

Or she did not.

She had either said “Don’t dramatize” to Harry that Saturday evening or she had said “I love him” to Harry that Saturday evening. It seemed more likely that she had said “Don’t dramatize” but she had wanted to say “I love him” and she did not remember which. She did remember that the actual words “Jack Lovett” remained unsaid by either of them until Sunday night.

“Your friend Lovett’s downstairs,” Harry had said then.

“Jack,” Inez said, but Harry had left the room.

Jack Lovett repeated the details of the story about the American girl at Tan Son Nhut twice, once for Inez and Harry and Billy Dillon and again when Dwight Christian and Adlai came in. The details sounded even less probable in the second telling. The C-5A, the press card. The tennis visor. The bus to Cholon.

“I see,” Harry kept saying. “Yes.”

Jack Lovett had first heard Jessie’s name that Sunday morning from one of the people to whom he regularly talked on the flight line at Tan Son Nhut. It had taken five further calls and the rest of the day to locate the New York driver’s license that had been left at immigration in lieu of a visa.

“I see,” Harry said. “Yes. Then you haven’t actually seen this license.”

“How could I have seen the license, Harry? The license is in Saigon.”

Inez watched Jack Lovett unfold an envelope covered with scratched notes. Lovett. Jack. Your friend Lovett.

“Jessica Christian Victor?” Jack Lovett was squinting at his notes. “Born February 23, 1957?”

Harry did not look at Inez.

“Hair blond, eyes gray? Height five-four? Weight one-hundred-ten?” Jack Lovett folded the envelope and put it in his coat pocket. “The address was yours.”

“But you didn’t write it down.”

Jack Lovett looked at Harry. “Because I knew it, Harry. 135 Central Park West.”

There was a silence.

“Her weight was up when she got her license,” Inez said finally. “She only weighs a hundred and three.”

“The fact that somebody had Jessie’s license doesn’t necessarily mean it was Jessie,” Harry said.

“Not necessarily,” Jack Lovett said. “No.”

“I mean Jesus Christ,” Harry said. “Every kid in the country’s got a tennis visor.”

“What about a tennis visor?” Inez said.

“She was wearing one,” Adlai said. “At dinner. In Seattle.”

“Never mind the fucking tennis visor.” Harry picked up the telephone. “You got the Seattle number, Billy?”

Billy Dillon took a small flat leather notebook from his pocket and opened it.

“I have it,” Inez said.

“So does Billy.” Harry drummed his fingers on the table as Billy Dillon dialed. “This is Harry Victor,” he said after a moment. “I’d like to speak to Jessie.”

Inez looked at Jack Lovett.

Jack Lovett was studying his envelope again.

“I see,” Harry said. “Yes. Of course.”

“Shit,” Billy Dillon said.

“There’s a kid who flew in this morning from Tan Son Nhut,” Jack Lovett said. “A radar specialist who’s been working Air America Operations.”

“Her aunt, yes,” Harry said. “No, I have it. Thank you.” He replaced the receiver. He still did not look at Inez. “Your move,” he said after a while.

“This kid is supposed to have seen her,” Jack Lovett said.

“Did he or didn’t he?” Harry said.

“I don’t know, Harry.” Jack Lovett’s voice was even. “I haven’t talked to him yet.”

“Then it’s not relevant,” Harry said.

“She only weighs a hundred and three,” Inez repeated.

“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” Harry said. “It’s about as relevant as this radar specialist of Lovett’s. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’ll tell you what it means,” Dwight Christian said. “It means she’ll fit right in.”

Harry stared at Dwight Christian, then looked at Billy Dillon.

“Welcome to hard times, pal,” Billy Dillon said. “Try mentioning Sea Meadow.”

“In fact she’ll outweigh nine-tenths of them,” Dwight Christian said. “Nine-tenths of the citizenry of Saigon.”

“I knew you could dress that up.” Billy Dillon looked at Harry. “You want to make a pass through State? Usual channels?”

“Usual channels, Mickey Mouse,” Dwight Christian said. “Call the White House. Get them to light a fire under the embassy. Lay on some pressure. Demand her release.”

“Her release from what?” Harry said.

“From the citizenry of Saigon,” Billy Dillon said. “Follow the ball.”

There was a silence.

“I may not phrase things as elegantly as you two, but I do know what I want.” Dwight Christian’s voice had turned hard and measured. “I want her out of there. Harry?”

“It’s not quite that simple, Dwight.”

“Not if you’re from Washington,” Dwight Christian said. “I suppose not. Since I’m not from Washington, I don’t quite see what the problem is.”

“Dwight,” Inez said. “The problem—”

“I had a foreman taken hostage on the Iguassú Falls project, I didn’t phrase things so elegantly there, either, not being from Washington, but I goddamn well got him out.”

“—The problem, Dwight, is that nobody took Jessie hostage.”

Dwight Christian looked at Inez.

“She just went,” Inez said.

“I know that, sweetheart.” The hardness had gone out of Dwight Christian’s voice. “I just want somebody to tell me why.”

Which was when Adlai said maybe she heard she could score there.

Which was when Inez slapped Adlai.

Which was when Harry said keep your hands off my son.

But Dad, Adlai kept saying in the silence that followed. But Dad. Mom.

Aloha oe.

Billy Dillon once asked me if I thought Inez would have left that night had Jack Lovett not been there. Since human behavior seems to me essentially circumstantial I have not much feeling for this kind of question. The answer of course is no, but the answer is irrelevant, because Jack Lovett was there.

Jack Lovett was one of the circumstances that night.

Jack Lovett was there and Jessie was in Saigon, another of the circumstances that night.

Jessie was in Saigon and the radar specialist who was said to have seen her was to meet Jack Lovett at the Playboy Arcade in Waianae. This radar specialist who had or had not seen Jessie was meeting Jack Lovett in Waianae and an electrician who had worked on the installation of the research reactor at Dalat was meeting Jack Lovett in Wahiawa.

The research reactor at Dalat was a circumstance that night only in that it happened to be a card Jack Lovett was dealing that spring.

Jack Lovett did not see any immediate way to get the fuel out but he wanted to know, for future calculation, how much of this fuel was being left, in what condition, and for whom.

The research reactor at Dalat was a thread Jack Lovett had not yet tied in his attempt to transfer the phantom business predicated on the perpetuation of the assistance effort, which was why, on that Easter Sunday night in 1975, he took Inez first to meet the radar specialist at the Playboy Arcade in Waianae and then across Kolekole Pass to meet the electrician at the Happy Talk Lounge in Wahiawa.

The off-limits Happy Talk in Wahiawa.

The Happy Talk in Wahiawa across the bridge from Schofield Barracks.

Where Inez stood with her back against the jukebox and her arms around Jack Lovett.

Where The Mamas and the Papas sang “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”

The radar specialist had been on the nod.

“I don’t need the hassle,” the radar specialist had said.

The electrician had already left the Happy Talk but had left a note with the bartender.

Da Nang going, that dude at Dalat definitely a wipe-out, the note read.

On the screen above the bar there were the helicopters. There were the helicopters lifting off the roof of the American mission and there were the helicopters vanishing into the fireball above the ammo dump and there were the helicopters ditching in the oil slick off the Pioneer Contender.

“Fucking Arvin finally shooting each other,” the bartender said.

“Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said. “Harry Victor’s wife.”

“Listen,” Inez said. “It’s too late for the correct thing. Forget the correct thing.”

Which is how Jack Lovett and Inez Victor happened that Easter Sunday night in 1975 to take the Singapore Airlines flight that leaves Honolulu at 3:45 A.M. and at 9:40 A.M. one day later lands at Kai Tak, Hong Kong.

Recently when I took this flight I thought of Inez, who described it as an eleven-hour dawn.

Inez said she never closed her eyes.

Inez said she could still feel the cold of the window against her cheek.

Inez said the 3:45 A.M. flight from Honolulu to Hong Kong was exactly the way she hoped dying would be.

Dawn all the way.

Something to see, as Jack Lovett had said at the Happy Talk about another dawn in another year. Something to behold.

It occurs to me that Inez Victor’s behavior the night she flew to Hong Kong may not have been so circumstantial after all.

She had to have a passport with her, didn’t she?

What does that suggest?

You tell me.