flowers and brass bands, it’s like when your syndicate big shots take one of the boys for a ride, right? Got to have a big show, after the bump-off-to feel less guilty, and fool the gullible fucking public. You must feel at home.”
“Now that you mention it,” I said, “it’s not the first time I’ve been at this kind of affair.”
She touched my sleeve with a black-gloved hand. “Jim liked you. I’m sure he didn’t show it, but you were one of his favorites. He felt you were a man’s man … sometimes he felt his … intellectual pursuits were less than … I don’t know … manly.”
“You and Jim turned out a couple of handsome boys.”
“Nate, you may not believe this, but Jim and I loved each other, in our way. I will never forgive those shits for …” And she slipped a hanky-in-hand up under the veil and caught a sob.
“Jo …”
“… never forgive them for sending me out of town. When they killed him. Do you know how that made me look? ‘Mrs. Forrestal was in Paris when her husband fell to his death.’ Cold, heartless bitch. They’re the cold, heartless ones. I told the cocksuckers-you can have your gangster’s funeral, but I’ll have no part of it.”
“You better keep those thoughts to yourself, Jo.”
She smirked beneath the veil. “Why, ’cause I’ll be the next lunatic they stick on the sixteenth floor, near an open window?”
“… Yes.”
She thought about that for a moment, turning her gaze toward the Potomac. From this knoll on the heights of Arlington, we could see in the distance on this clear morning the great dome and the magnificent white marble temples of our nation’s capital.
“Funny, isn’t it?” she said. “What men in public life will do, in the name of the people.”
Then I walked her back to her sons, who stood at the grave-side, standing, heads lowered, at the edge of where the casket had been lowered. That was when it occurred to me: this was the first time-in all the years I’d known them, in the various jobs I’d done for our late Secretary of Defense-I had ever seen Jim and Jo Forrestal together.
The suicide of Dr. Joseph Bernstein-no surviving relatives-was buried in the back pages, with no mention that he had been one of James Forrestal’s psychiatrists, in fact no mention that he had worked at the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda. Nobody, not even Drew Pearson, picked up on the amazing coincidence of the two interrelated suicides in one night.
Nobody questioned me. Whether they suspected me or not, who can say? I had wiped my fingerprints from the few surfaces I had touched in Bernstein’s dream house, and had driven Maria’s Studebaker back to the hospital parking lot, wiping it clean of prints. No one seemed to have seen me leave the car there, and get in my own and drive away.
The biggest risk had been leaving the bullet that killed Maria behind; it was lodged, no doubt, somewhere in the woodwork of that house, having traveled at close range through her brain. If anyone had thought to check with the Chicago police department, or probably the FBI-who had that thick file on me, remember-a ballistics match to my weapon might have been possible. The nine-millimeter was a gun I had carried since my father’s suicide, and it had left its own fingerprints, here and there.
I wasn’t worried about it, not when the newspapers carried no word of Maria’s death. She had vanished, like a magician’s assistant. Bernstein, in that harassed way, got mentioned; a psychiatrist was too high-profile to just disappear. A nurse was far less significant. She could do a vanishing act.
That gave me the worst nights, thinking about the family she must have had, somewhere. We never spoke of it, but hell-even I’d had a mother and father. What he had the government told them about their daughter’s death? Where, if anywhere, had her remains been interred? Not on an oak-studded knoll in Arlington, I’d wager.
The only conversation I had with a government official bearing at all on Forrestal’s death was a rather oblique one with onetime Capone nemesis and former Secret Service chief Frank J. Wilson, the evening before the big funeral. The meeting-he’d asked to meet me for a cocktail in the Ambassador’s High Hat Cocktail Lounge-was ostensibly a social one; but soon it revealed itself as business, pertaining to Wilson’s consultant role with the Atomic Energy Commission.
Chatting over beers, Wilson and I sat in a back booth, with the privacy only a boisterous public place can provide. In his dark blue suit and dark-rimmed glasses, and with that stern cleft-chin countenance of his, he didn’t look much like a guy out for a night on the town.
“You should know that the Commission is aware of your inquiries at Walker Air Base,” Wilson said, “and in Roswell…. I understand you were poking around for Drew Pearson, about that so-called flying saucer crash.”
“That’s right.”
“We’d just as soon not see any further attention drawn to that. The incident had its flurry of press interest, at the time, which has long since died down.”
“Since when is the Atomic Energy Commission concerned about little green men?”
He twitched a smile, sipped his beer. “I can clear some things up for you-if you’ll agree to keep quiet. You can’t give this to Pearson. Not to anyone, Nate-not your priest, not your best girl.”
My best girl had been recently shot and killed, and lately everybody had been reminding me I was a Jew; so none of that seemed a problem.
“Okay, then, Frank-just between us girls.”
He held his glass of beer with both hands, as if it were something precious, leaning forward, ever so slightly. “Obviously, that was no flying saucer. There’s a top-secret project … no, that’s not quite right. Actually it’s classified Top Secret A-1, the same national security rating as the Manhattan Project.”
My forehead frowned and my mouth smiled. “And you’re telling me about it? In the cocktail lounge at the Ambassador Hotel?”
“I’m not going to tell you in detail. But the material Major Marcel recovered
“Weather balloon, yeah. Hell, like Daffy Duck says, ‘That’s no military secret.’ The government’s been peddling that sliced baloney since two hours after the saucer story broke.”
Wilson shook his head, no; his expression grave, his voice hushed. “This isn’t a weather balloon … it’s not one balloon at all, but a train of as many as twenty-three balloons, a massive affair designed to climb to high altitudes, for intelligence-gathering purposes.”
“Okay,” I said, as if accepting all that. “If the Atomic Energy Commission is involved, then I can probably guess the kind of intelligence-gathering you’re talking about.”
“You probably can. As for some of the descriptions you no doubt heard, of the strange debris, this balloon train included a very sophisticated new aluminum material, with rubberized backing.”
“Which accounts for the tales of crumple-proof metal from outer space. What about these so-called hieroglyphics people say they saw?”
“That’s a funny story.” And Wilson smiled, having cued himself. “Apparently the radar reflectors were contracted from a toy company, who used some tape they had on hand for reinforcement purposes-with flowers, diamonds, circles, other childish designs … ‘hieroglyphics.’ As for the unbreakable ‘beams,’ they were balsa wood treated with a special-formula glue.”
I sipped my beer. “That is a funny story, Frank. Almost as funny as trained Army Air Force personnel mistaking that stuff for a crashed flying saucer.”
His eyebrows climbed his endless forehead and then made the long trip back down. “That I can’t explain, other than that some of these materials were sophisticated, and differed greatly from the run-of-the-mill balloons that would have commonly come down in the Southwest, which those Air Force people would have immediately recognized…. And that’s all I can say, Nate-other than, as a friend, to ask you to try, to the best of your ability, to quash Pearson’s interest in the Roswell story. It might draw … unwanted attention.”
The implication, of course, was Soviet attention; and my assumption was that these balloons were gathering the data that, oddly enough, Major Marcel at SAC was lately interpreting and collating, regarding whether or not the Russians were engaging in the testing of atomic weapons.
I went along with this, though I’ve always wondered whether straight-arrow Frank Wilson had knowingly passed disinformation along to me. The only way that train of weather balloons might have been involved in the Roswell crash was if that experimental aircraft codesigned by Germans and Japanese had collided with it-which I supposed was a possibility.
