Democracy (19 page)

At one point I tried to work out a chronology for what Inez remembered of this period, and made the chart that still hangs on my office wall. The accuracy of this chart is problematic, not only because Inez kept no record of events as they happened but also because of the date line.

For example I have no idea whether Inez meant that the day Jessie landed in Los Angeles was the fifteenth in Los Angeles or the fifteenth in Hong Kong.

In either case the fifteenth seems doubtful, because Jack Lovett had been with Jessie in Saigon forty-eight hours before, promising her a John Wayne movie and bruising her arm, and many people believe Jack Lovett to have been in Phnom Penh for a period of some days (more than one day but fewer than five) between the time the American embassy closed there on the twelfth and the time the Khmer Rouge entered the city on the seventeenth. The report placing Jack Lovett in Phnom Penh after the embassy closed was one of the things that caused the speculation later, and eventually the investigation.

2

W
HEN
novelists speak of the unpredictability of human behavior they usually mean not unpredictability at all but a higher predictability, a more complex pattern discernible only after the fact. Examine the picture. Find the beast in the jungle, the figure in the carpet.

Context clues.

The reason why.

I have been examining this picture for some years now and still lack the reason why Inez Victor finally agreed to talk about what she “believed” had happened (“I believe we were in Jakarta,” Inez would say, or “let’s say it was May,” as if even the most straightforward details of place and date were intrinsically unknowable, open to various readings) during the spring and summer of 1975.

At first she did not agree.

At first I talked to Billy Dillon and to Harry Victor and to Dwight Christian and even briefly to Jessie and to Adlai and to Dick Ziegler, each of whom, as I have suggested, had at least a limited stake in his or her own version of events, but Inez remained inaccessible. In the first place the very fact of where she and Jack Lovett seemed to be ruled out any pretense of casual access. I could call Dwight Christian and say that I just happened to be in Honolulu, but I could not call Inez and say that I just happened to be in Kuala Lumpur. No one “happens to be” in Kuala Lumpur, no one “passes through” en route somewhere else: Kuala Lumpur is en route nowhere, and for me to see Inez there implied premeditation, a definite purpose on my part and a definite decision on hers.

In the second place Inez seemed, that summer and fall after she left Honolulu with Jack Lovett, emotionally inaccessible. She seemed to have renounced whatever stake in the story she might have had, and erected the baffle of her achieved serenity between herself and what had happened.
It’s the summer monsoon and quite sticky, you don’t want to visit during the monsoon really but I’m sure Harry and Billy between them can sort out what you need to know. Excuse haste. Regards, Inez V
.

This was the response, scrawled on a postcard showing the lobby of the Hotel Equatorial in Kuala Lumpur, to the letter I wrote from Honolulu in July of 1975 asking Inez if she would see me. Since the “summer monsoon” in Kuala Lumpur is followed immediately by the “winter monsoon,” which in turn lasts until the onset of the next “summer monsoon,” Inez’s response was even less equivocal than it might seem. In October, from Los Angeles, I wrote a second letter, and more or less promptly received a second postcard, again showing the lobby of the Hotel Equatorial, where incidentally Inez was not staying:
What you mention is all in the past and frankly I’d
rather look ahead. In other words a visit would be unproductive. I
.

This card was postmarked the second of November and arrived in Los Angeles the fifteenth. Ten days later I received a third communication from Inez, a clipping of a book review, in which my name was mentioned in passing, from a month-old
International Herald-Tribune
. The note stapled to the clipping read
Sorry if my note seemed abrupt but you see my point I’m sure, Inez
. It was one week after that when Inez called my house in Los Angeles, having gone to some lengths to get the number, and asked me to come to Kuala Lumpur.

Actually she did not exactly “ask” me to come to Kuala Lumpur.

“When are you coming to K.L.,” was what she said exactly.

I considered this.

“I wouldn’t want to miss you,” she said. “I could show you around.”

At the time I thought that she had decided to talk to me only because Jack Lovett’s name was just beginning to leak out of the various investigations into arms and currency and technology dealings on the part of certain former or perhaps even current overt and covert agents of the United States government. There had even been hints about narcotics dealings, which, although they made good copy and were played large in the early coverage (I recall the phrase “Golden Triangle” in many headlines, and a photograph of two blurred figures leaving a house on Victoria Peak, one identified as a “sometime Lovett business associate” and the other as a “known Hong Kong Triad opium lord”), remained just that, hints, rumors that would never be substantiated, but the other allegations were solid enough, and not actually surprising to anyone who had bothered to think about what Jack Lovett was doing in that part of the world.

There had been the affiliations with interlocking transport and air courier companies devoid of real assets. There had been the directorship of the bank in Vila that put the peculiarities of condominium government to such creative use. There had been all the special assignments and the special consultancies and the special relationships in a fluid world where the collection of information was indistinguishable from the use of information and where national and private interests (the interests of state and non-state actors, Jack Lovett would have said) did not collide but merged into a single pool of exchanged favors.

In order to understand what Jack Lovett did it was necessary only to understand how natural it was for him to do it, how at once entirely absorbing and supremely easy. There had always been that talent for putting the right people together, the right man at the Department of Defense, say, with the right man at Livermore or Los Alamos or Brookhaven, or, a more specific example with a more immediately calculable payout, the Director of Base Development for CINC-PAC/MACV with Dwight Christian.

There had always been something else as well.

There had been that emotional solitude, a detachment that extended to questions of national or political loyalty.

It would be inaccurate to call Jack Lovett disloyal, although I suppose some people did at the time.

It would be accurate only to say that he regarded the country on whose passport he traveled as an abstraction, a state actor, one of several to be factored into any given play.

In other words.

What Jack Lovett did was never black or white, and in the long run may even have been (since the principal gain to him was another abstraction, the pyramiding of further information) devoid of ethical content altogether, but since shades of gray tended not to reproduce in the newspapers the story was not looking good on a breaking basis. That Jack Lovett had reportedly made some elusive deals with the failed third force (or fourth force, or fifth force, this was a story on which the bottom kept dropping out) in Phnom Penh in those days after the embassy closed there did not look good. That the London dealer who was selling American arms abandoned in South Vietnam had received delivery from one of Jack Lovett’s cargo services did not look good. It seemed clear to me that the connection with Inez would surface quite soon (as it did, the week I came back from Kuala Lumpur, when the WNBC tape of Inez dancing with Harry Victor on the St. Regis Roof temporarily obliterated my actual memory of Inez), and I assumed that Inez wanted to see me only because Jack Lovett wanted to see me. I assumed that Jack Lovett would find during my visit a way of putting out his own information. I assumed that Inez was acting for him.

In short I thought I was going to Kuala Lumpur as part of a defensive strategy that Inez might or might not understand.

This was, it turned out, too easy a reading of Inez Victor.

3

O
NE
thing she wanted to tell me was that Jack Lovett was dead.

That Jack Lovett had died on the nineteenth of August at approximately eleven o’clock in the evening in the shallow end of the fifty-meter swimming pool at the Hotel Borobudur in Jakarta.

After swimming his usual thirty laps.

That she had taken Jack Lovett’s body to Honolulu and buried it on the twenty-first of August in the little graveyard at Schofield Barracks. Past where they buried the stillborn dependents. Beyond the Italian prisoners of war. Near a jacaranda tree, but the jacaranda had been out of bloom. When the jacaranda came into bloom and dropped its petals on the grass the pool of blue would just reach Jack Lovett’s headstone. The grave was that close to the jacaranda. The colonel who had been her contact at Schofield had at first suggested another site but he had understood her objection. The colonel who had been her contact at Schofield had been extremely helpful.

Extremely cooperative.

Extremely kind really.

As had her original contact.

Mr. Soebadio. In Jakarta. Mr. Soebadio was the representative for Java of the bank in Vila and it turned out to be his telephone number that Jack Lovett had given her to call if any problem arose during the four or five days they were to be in Jakarta.

Jack Lovett had not given her Mr. Soebadio’s name.

Only this telephone number.

To call. In case she was ill, or needed to reach him during the day, or he was in Solo or Surabaya and the rioting flared up again. In fact she had been thinking about this telephone number at the precise instant when she looked up and saw that Jack Lovett was lying face down in the very shallow end of the pool, the long stretch where the water was less than a foot deep and the little children with the Texas accents played all day.

It had been quite sudden.

She had watched him swimming toward the shallow end of the pool.

She had reached down to get him a towel.

She had thought at the exact moment of reaching for the towel about the telephone number he had given her, and wondered who would answer if she called it.

And then she had looked up.

There had been no one else at the pool that late. The last players had left the tennis courts, and the night lights had been turned off. Even the pool bar was shuttered, but there was a telephone on the outside wall, and it was from this telephone, twenty minutes later, that Inez called the number Jack Lovett had given her. She had sat on the edge of the pool with Jack Lovett’s head in her lap until the Tamil doctor arrived. The Tamil doctor said that the twenty minutes she had spent giving Jack Lovett CPR had been beside the point. The Tamil doctor said that what happened had been instantaneous, circulatory, final. In the blood, he said, and simultaneously snapped his fingers and drew them across his throat, a short chop.

It was Mr. Soebadio who had brought the Tamil doctor to the pool.

It was Mr. Soebadio who worked Jack Lovett’s arms into his seersucker jacket and carried him to the service area where his car was parked.

It was Mr. Soebadio who advised Inez to tell anyone who approached the car that Mr. Lovett was drunk and it was Mr. Soebadio who went back upstairs for her passport and it was Mr. Soebadio who suggested that certain possible difficulties in getting Mr. Lovett out of Indonesia could be circumvented by obtaining a small aircraft, what he called a good aircraft for clearance, which he happened to know how to do. He happened to know that there was a good aircraft for clearance on its way from Denpasar to Halim. He happened to know that the pilot, a good friend, would be willing to take Mrs. Victor and Mr. Lovett wherever Mrs. Victor wanted to go.

Within the limits imposed by the aircraft’s range of course.

The aircraft being a seven-passenger Lear.

Halim to Manila, no problem.

Manila to Guam, no problem.

Honolulu, a definite problem, but with permission to refuel on certain atolls unavailable to commercial aircraft Mr. Soebadio believed that he could solve it.

Say Kwajalein.

Say Johnston.

Guam to Kwajalein, thirteen hundred miles approximately, well within range.

Kwajalein to Johnston, say eighteen hundred, adjust for drag since the prevailing winds were westward, still within range.

Johnston to Honolulu, seven hundred seventeen precisely and no problem whatsoever.

Mr. Soebadio had a pocket calculator and he stood on the tarmac at Halim working out the ratios for weight and lift and ground distance and wind velocity while Inez watched the Tamil doctor and the pilot lift Jack Lovett onto the back passenger seats in the Lear and get him into a body bag. Before he zipped the body bag closed the Tamil doctor went through the pockets of Jack Lovett’s seersucker jacket and handed the few cards he found to Mr. Soebadio. Mr. Soebadio glanced at the cards and dropped them into his own pocket, still intent on his calculator. Inez considered asking Mr. Soebadio for whatever had been in Jack Lovett’s pockets but decided against it. Somebody dies, you’d just as soon he didn’t have your card in his pocket, Jack Lovett had told her once. The zipper on the body bag caught on the lapel of the seersucker jacket and Mr. Soebadio helped the Tamil doctor work it loose. Another thing Inez decided not to ask Mr. Soebadio was where the body bag had come from.

The cotton dress she was wearing was soaked with pool water and cool against her skin.

She smelled the chlorine all night long.

At Manila she did not get out of the Lear.

At Guam she was half asleep but aware of the descent and the landing strobes and the American voices of the ground crew. The pilot checked into the operations room and brought back containers of coffee and a newspaper.
WHERE
AMERICA’S DAY BEGINS
, the newspaper had worked into the eagle on its flag.