Winter Kills (33 page)

Pa went into a towering rage that night in the presidential apartments.

“How did you ever get yourself involved with that crazy Guinea broad?” Pa shouted.

“She isn’t a Guinea broad, Pa,” Tim said in his un-ruffled way, puffing on a long, thin cigar. “She’s a West Texas broad whose father, Z. K. Dawson, is one of your more cherished enemies.”

“She’s the wife of a ranking Italian diplomat. That means she has to be invited wherever other key diplomats are invited. She’s out of her mind. You didn’t see the worst of it, because the detail made you disappear thank God.”

“It was pretty rough on Bijou Kanaawarili,” Tim said. “I mean, it’s bad enough being black and having to live in Washington.”

“The Deboles have to be shipped back home. No two ways about it,” Pa said.

“That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Tim said, “if any of us survived after we did it. If she ever thought she was being sent back to Italy—where she never came from—because of me, I swear I think she’d shoot me at the next reception.”

“That’s a possibility,” Pa said. “I mean she might take it so big that she’d round off to the Italian press, and they’ll print anything.”

“What do we do?”

“We’ll have to get Lola her decoration. But they’ll have to give it to her in Rome. Lola will have to insist that the Debole woman goes to Rome with her to give her moral support, and they’ll have to go by boat. The day they go, Luigi Debole will have to be promoted to some cockamamie job in the Italian foreign ministry and fly home. Then he’ll meet the boat and break the news to his wife, and we’ll have her safe in Italy.”

“Not bad, Pa. When?”

“I’ll see Lola tonight. I’ll see the ambassador tomorrow and set the decoration. Then we’ll allow two weeks for Lola to get Mrs. Debole to agree to sail with her on the
Conde di Locarno
, which goes on the twenty-fifth. Say three weeks at the outside.”

“Okay. I’ll visit the fleet in Hawaii, then some work at Palm Springs, then an inspection of the guerrilla training in Panama. That’ll fill it.”

There were two complications. The first was that Lola took the signora to New York to introduce her to the wonderful little doctor on Ninety-seventh Street who had the power to make people so happy by the simple injection of vitamins. Lola figured correctly that if the signora was very, very happy and relaxed to the point of being zonked out of even remembering who Tim Kegan was, she might be all the more willing to voyage with Lola to Italy. The signora took to the vitamin shots in the most maximum kind of way. When they left New York, Lola had arranged for the doctor to make up an enormous travel kit, then to send like a year’s supply in a crate to go out with Lola in the pouch. The signora took doubles and triples. She really zonked Tim right out of her mind.

The second complication was that in her third month in Italy, almost eight months since she had been with Tim, Signora Debole became pregnant. Lola’s erection lessons and his share of the enriching vitamin shots from the little happy-doctor on Ninety-seventh Street had made it possible for Signor (actually a marchese) Debole to have sex with Signora Debole. However, through some quirk of need in her neurosis, which through the strain of the rejection by Tim and by passing through the sieve of the massive vitamin injections (which turned out to contain quite a bit of methadrine as part of their recipe) had evolved into psychosis, Signora Debole became convinced that the child she was going to have was Tim’s.

Luigi Debole knew his wife had wandered away from sanity. He had her attended by two of the best professors of medicine and psychiatry, respectively, then she was taken quietly by ambulance and plane to the very best psychiatric clinic in the Canton of Zurich, where she was slowly taken off the miraculous vitamins and where an obstetrician consulted with the medical and psychiatric doctors who were treating her.

She got stronger. Her mind became much clearer and more sure of itself. The great obstacle to her full recovery was her conviction that she had burdened the great American President with the shackles of tragedy that would forever keep him from breaking free into the sprint to glorious achievement. She had utterly forgotten Bijou Kanaawarili’s finding love in the Secret Service loo. She could think only of what she had cost Tim and the world, because that kind of feeling was the sort of massive punishment she deserved to match the dimensions of the sin she had committed. Now she was bearing Tim’s son. He had the right to know that he had fathered a son. That knowledge could force him to light a torch that would light up the world so that his boy could live beyond the present darkness. She wrote to tell him. She addressed the letter to Lola Camonte at Palm Springs, then enclosed a sealed envelope within that envelope for Tim.

It arrived two days after Lola had taken the Treaty of Palm Springs to Tim at Pa’s house. Lola had always believed that she had been touched by the Hand of God, which had given her access to wonder and to privilege remotely beyond any opportunities shown to any other people, but she had not believed in any of the essences of justice as that concept might have been taught in the civics classes or in the Sunday schools. But, as if from the Hand of God again, here was her right to justice held in her hand. Everything came to her in its final shape. She saw her armies assembled on the plain, as it were. She thought she was inventing the
domino theory, by which if she could move this crazy lady now in Switzerland in the right direction, that lady was rich enough and crazy enough to give it to Kegan right where he deserved to get it. She flew east with her makeup man, who was also her bodyguard, in last year’s Gulfstream II, because it could go farther faster, to check everything out with Frank Mayo, because this wasn’t something she wanted to make a mistake about twice. The essence of Don Francisco’s considered judgment was, “Listen, that prick took two million dollars from us and did nothing for it. If you got it figured out as close as this, I say it can’t do us any harm and can only do us a lotta good.”

So Lola went into her files and got some samples of Rockrimmon stationery. She had a studio printer copy a few sheets. She fooled around with a couple of drafts, then she typed out the letter to the signora in Switzerland, and copying his signature from notes in her files, she signed it “T.” The letter said:

Signora:

A long time ago we had some pleasure together—good, wholesome, light-hearted fun. Apart from the fairly sick scene you made at the reception I haven’t set eyes on you in about seven months. Now from your booby hatch in Switzerland you write me that diseased letter to tell me that I am to be the father of a child you are expecting. For once and for all, I am sorry you are ill, I hope you recover in good time. If you continue with these wild allegations I will feel that they must be reported to your physicians. I am sorry for you, but I will not be victimized by a silly, deluded woman.

Sincerely,

T

On the second day of its life the Debole infant was
strangled to death by its mother in the Rütliberg Clinic. No charges were pressed, due to the weight of psychiatric evidence. Luigi Debole entered a petition for the annulment of his marriage by the Church. Z. K. Dawson had his daughter flown to the family ranch, which was six hundred and ten miles in the interior of Venezuela. Because he was a very busy man he left her mostly in the care of the devoted man who had been assigned to her as a companion and counsel ever since childhood, William John Casper.

For as long as she could remember, Billy John Casper had been there to help. He had no kin of his own. He had been Daddy’s right hand for thirty years. He was sort of given to her when she was a little girl because Daddy wanted her to have a good, strong man to lean on whenever she needed one. They had long talks. They did a lot of riding. She had a chance to cook again, and since there was nothing for almost six hundred miles that she could complicate, she just kept getting better and better until, when the time came that Daddy had to be in Libya and Lola invited her to Palm Springs, she just couldn’t bear it to have everything so quiet anymore, so she went. Daddy had left a little Dassault Fan Jet behind in case she wanted to go shopping in Puerto Rico or cut over to see the bulls at Cali, so she had Billy John lay a couple of pilots on, and they worked their way over to Panama, then up to Acapulco, then straight on in to Palm Springs and Lola.

It wasn’t the same old Lola. She was glum. She was upset. The house was just empty of people, and that just wasn’t normal. They had a quiet dinner together with Lola hardly speaking at all, then finally, when they were sitting out in the patio staring at the pool, she said to Lola abruptly, “Say, what’s the matter with you?”

“I’m all upset.”

“Well,
tell
me about it.”

“That’s why I’m so upset, honey. I feel I gotta tell you about it, but I can’t do it.”

“I am just going to make you tell me. I never saw you like this. You’ve got yourself all worked up.”

“I’m just torn in half. I mean, you know how hard the truth can be. I have this great feeling for Tim because he is the President, but much more than that you are my dearest friend, and right is right.”

“What about Tim?”

“He has been calling me about you for about two months. Ever since—about the time you sent him that letter from Switzerland through me.”

“What does he say when he calls you?”

“It got so bad I began to make tapes of the calls. I just couldn’t believe it and I just couldn’t stand it.”

“Stand what?”

“Before I could believe it was him saying it I had to go over to his father’s when they were out here and stand up in front of him and hear him say it.”

“
Say what
, Lola?”

“Well, he uses you for the cheapest kind of laughs.”

“
How
?”

“He says things like you’ve been trying to blackmail him into marrying you. He said you were the joke of Washington and that somebody had started a pool to bet how many times you could call him in a single day.”

“
No
!”

“I’m sorry, baby. But I had to tell you.”

“How could I blackmail him into marrying me? I was married to an Italian who could never agree to a divorce. Tim pleaded with me to marry him. He asked me a dozen times last fall. He said he couldn’t live without me, Lola—he wanted to throw the Presidency away because he said he couldn’t go through with it without me to give him strength. It was like going to a play! I see it now. It was just like watching a performance in a play.”

“Do you want to hear the tapes of his calls?”

“Yes!”

“No. I’m sorry I asked. You mustn’t hear them. Getting yourself sick over him isn’t worth it.”

“I have to hear them, Lola. I have to
know
what he is saying about me.”

“I can’t stay here. I can’t sit through them again.”

“Just show me how to turn the machine on. Just show me.”

Lola rolled the playback out. She slipped a set of headphones over her friend’s head on either side of the wild eyes so filled with fear, then she pressed the
PLAY
button and withdrew into the house. What Lola had done was as easy as editing tape anywhere, from the White House to Watergate. She had recorded telephone conversations of Tim talking about four hundred women in the past six years. It had once been a breakfast ritual with which he had started the day. The worst things he had had to say about the stupidest, dullest and most aggressive women had been edited by Lola into one relentless tape.

The tape rolled and spoke. Signora Debole wept. After a while she stopped weeping. Her eyes stopped looking wild and fearful. Her eyes became dry and hard. She thought of everything Daddy had done for her and how this man had shamed him. Any man who could do a thing like that to her daddy just didn’t deserve to live.

She slipped off the headphones and walked slowly back into Lola’s house.

***

The next morning she called Billy John in Venezuela and asked him to meet her at the apartment in Dallas. Daddy was still in Libya. She left Lola’s and got out to the Palm Springs airport before Lola woke up. She flew straight to Dallas. Billy John got in two hours later flying his own Riley Dove, which had a twelve-hundred-and-ninety-mile range but which he insisted on
flying anyway, even if he did have to stop to refuel between Caracas and Dallas.

She had taken a pretty good-sized traveling kit of the special vitamins away from Lola’s, but this time nobody but she and the little happy doctor were going to know that she was back taking treatments again. They made her feel simply sensational. She knew what she had to do as clearly as if it were just a walk to the schoolhouse. When Billy John got in she told him everything. She told him what she had meant to the President and what the President had done to her because she had chosen to remain at her husband’s side in Italy. Billy John was horrified that any man would dare to do and say such things to Z. K. Dawson’s only daughter.

“He deserves to die, Billy John,” she said evenly.

“I have been saying that for a very long time,” Billy John said, “and so has your daddy and every other loyal Texan. And I don’t mean just Texas. There are plenty in Oklahoma too.”

“Well, we are going to have him killed,” she said.

Billy John had taken orders from the Dawson family for over thirty years. Z. K. Dawson did not encourage independent thinking and neither did his daughter. Billy John had never thought himself to be very bright, but he knew enough to know that these two were just about the most brilliant people who ever lived. The kind of money they had proved it. This little ole girl might be Number Two Thousand in the line of people who said Tim Kegan ought to be shot, but it was characteristic of the Dawson leadership that she was going to be the first one to do something about it.

“What can I do to help?” he asked.

“Remember when Neiman’s had that Italian Week and we all came down here and one Sunday we were out to Judge Sissons’ spread and they had that big-money rifle competition?”