I said nothing, wondering why I was still alive.
“You’re wondering why you’re still alive, aren’t you, Mr. Heller? Maybe I’d like a few moments to gloat. You certainly subjected me to enough humiliation.”
“Gloating can be dangerous.”
The dazzling white smile flashed in his pale handsome face. “Yes. Look where it led you. Now you’ve helped me kill two people. We make quite a team. Or I should say, ‘made.’”
“Better kill me with the first shot.”
The scorched odor of cordite was mingling with the smell of blood. I didn’t dare look at her, afraid of what the rage might make me risk; I needed just the right opportunity….
“I appreciate the friendly advice, Mr. Heller. I must admit, you displayed a remarkable ability to gather disparate information and form an unlikely, albeit largely accurate, whole. There are tiny aspects you’ve misunderstood, or gotten incorrect-but yours is an extraordinary, if limited, intellectual capacity.”
“Fuck you, you sick bastard.”
“You were right before-I’m not a Nazi. I was a party member only because it was a political necessity; all of us, von Braun and the rest, were ushered into the SS only as a formality … I wore the uniform a mere handful of times, at official functions.”
“Too bad. I bet you looked spiffy as hell. What else did you do as a political necessity? Suck off Adolf?”
The psychiatrist shook his head. “What a sad, pathetic man you are. Do you really think it was my choice to see Jew and Russian prisoners treated as subhumans? But once these creatures were marked for death, their destinies decided by those above me, why not use them for research, for the furtherance of science, and medicine? Why not give these pitiful martyrs some purpose for having lived and died, some meaning to otherwise meaningless existences? The things we discovered, because of having disposable specimens, will make life better for all the rest of us, and our children, and their children.”
“You should be getting that Nobel Prize in the mail any day now.” I grinned at him, and it unsettled him, I could see. “You’re trying to figure it out, aren’t you?”
“Figure what out, Mr. Heller?”
“How to stage this. How to kill me. It’s got to look right to your superiors. If they think you murdered Maria and me to cover something up, you’ll have some fancy explaining to do. I mean, there’ll be suspicions about Forrestal’s convenient exit, already. How do you explain two corpses in your kitchen?”
His mouth formed something that was half smile, half sneer. “Maybe the bodies won’t be in my kitchen. Maybe you’ll drag Nurse Selff out to my garage and put her in the trunk of my car.”
I nodded at the wisdom of this. “Yeah, then you could shoot me, push me in there, dump us both somewhere. Maybe make it look like a murder/suicide … lover’s quarrel. Not bad for a beginner, Doc.”
Bernstein stood. Gestured at me with the gun. I came around the table, on the side where Maria wasn’t, and he stood facing me, leveling the gun at my chest, maybe eight inches separating us.
“You know, Doc, you may know a lot about the human mind, but you don’t know jack shit about guns.”
“I know how to squeeze a trigger.”
“Not with a broken finger you don’t.”
And I grabbed the muzzle of the nine-millimeter and twisted it, hard; his howl of pain as his trigger finger broke, jamming against the metal trigger guard, was music to my ears. But he hadn’t let go of the weapon, so I jammed the slide back.
Then his hand loosened and I snatched the gun away as he fell to his knees, clutching his hand, the finger bent at an impossible angle.
“You see, the Browning nine-millimeter is a recoil-operated weapon, Doc. Everything has to be locked together for it to fire, everything has to be lined up perfectly-kind of like the human brain.”
By grabbing the nine-millimeter’s slide and pushing it back, I’d made a jammed weapon out of it. So I slapped its magazine, racked the slide and the weapon was good as new again. Ready to fire. But I had a better idea.
Bernstein sat on the floor, grasping his hand, whimpering, tears streaming down his face.
Kneeling at an angle that kept the fallen, sniveling psychiatrist in view, I took the opportunity to spend a moment beside my beautiful Maria. The vulnerable girl, the hard-as-nails woman, nurse, spy, lovely even in death, even with the black-and-red dime-size pucker in her forehead; I closed her eyes, kissed her cheek and whispered, “Forgive me.”
Then, rubbing the tears out of my eyes, I stood. “Jeez, Doc, we’re both crying. Real couple of he-men, huh?”
Bernstein, cheeks flushed-funny, his face finally had some color in it-looked up at me, the icy eyes red and blinking. “What … what now?”
Keeping the weapon trained on him, I moved to the stove, dropped open the door.
“Now, Doc?” I shrugged, walking back to where he sat, shivering with pain. “Now I’m going to embrace my Jewish side.”
The barrel of the nine-millimeter caught him across the forehead, knocking him out, and I dragged his unconscious form over like a bag of grain and shoved the top half of him into the oven.
Then I turned on the gas.
22
On a clear, sunny morning in May, after a nineteen-gun salute, the boom of howitzers playing bass drum to the Naval Academy Band’s rendition of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” the Old Glory-draped caisson bearing the casket, drawn by seven gray horses, accompanied by an honor guard made up of all three services, wound its way up the serpentine drive of Arlington National Cemetery.
There, on the Wednesday following his fatal fall, James Vincent Forrestal received full military honors at a ceremony attended by President Truman, the cabinet, an array of Congressional leaders, the diplomatic corps and several thousand friends and associates. A crowd of interested citizens numbering at least four thousand stood behind a velvet rope at the end of the white marble amphitheater, in the chapel of which the President, Vice President and pallbearers including former president Herbert Hoover, Generals Marshall and Eisenhower, Bernard Baruch and Forrestal’s friend Ferdinand Eberstadt, attended the service itself, with Bishop Conkling from Chicago presiding.
Jo Forrestal did not attend. She and her sons Peter and Michael, young men in their early twenties, both of whom had echoes of their father in their faces, waited a few hundred yards away, at the gravesite, for a ceremony reserved for family, relatives and close friends.
I’d been invited-by Eberstadt-and was among this fairly small group. Forrestal, of course, had been physically rather small, and the size of his casket reflected this, and was little bigger than a child’s coffin-like the coffins the Air Force had tried to buy from Glenn Dennis at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell.
The air was sharply cool, almost cold, and I stood at the back-immediate family seated on folding chairs, no tent-as Bishop Conkling read from First Corinthians. The little casket was lowered, and the sons threw in the symbolic clumps of earth. We were on an oak-studded knoll overlooking the tranquillity of the gray-blue Potomac and the panorama of government buildings beyond.
A slender, fragile, elegant-looking pale figure in mesh-veiled, stylish black (had Mainbocher designed her a funeral gown?), Jo Forrestal-looking more than ever like Charles Addams’ creation-drifted among the gathering of friends and relatives with her sons in attendance, making introductions when necessary. I shook hands with both boys, who had appropriately shell-shocked expressions.
Jo said to me, “You should have felt at home here today, Nate.”
“Well, uh, yes, you mean with Bishop Conkling presiding …”
“No, I mean Jim got a regular Chicago-style send-off, don’t you think?”
She took me by the arm and walked me a few steps away from her boys; I couldn’t smell any drink on her, but then I never could-vodka was kind to the breath, after all.
“I don’t quite get your drift, Jo …”
Her eyes glittered under the veil; her voice had a brittle edge. “All the pomp and goddamn circumstance,
