In the taxicab back to their apartment neither Black nor Betty had spoken. She had fallen asleep on his shoulder; her teeth grinding.
General Black snapped back to the present as the Cessna 810 approached Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington. Looking down on the water-veined flats of the Chesapeake Bay area, he regretted that the air approach to Andrews didn’t take him over Washington proper. He never ceased to be stirred by the splendor of the Washington Monument’s slim white spire, the awesome majesty of the Lincoln Monument The Pentagon, though, that was something else again. Its low, squat improbable shape was not designed to capture an airman’s fancy. It was more like a great, bureaucratic land battleship pulled up alongside the Potomac. That’s about what it was, mused Black, laying siege to the helpless flotilla of weaker bureaucratic ships across the Potomac.
Back to work, Blackie, boy-general, he said to himself. Life is earnest, life is real.
He brought the plane in for a skilled and effortless landing. Ten minutes later he was in a staff car and on his way to the Pentagon.
The President looked across the desk at Buck. Buck knew that the President did not see him. His eyes were slightly squinting. Buck twisted in his chair. The motion caught the President’s eye. His face suddenly hardened and he seemed to come back into the room.
“What do you think of that list, Buck?” he asked, pointing at the card that Buck still held. Buck hesitated, lifted the card as if it were very delicate, glanced again at the names. He felt like licking his lips, but resisted. His mind reached for an answer, something that would make sense. It was impossible.
“I only know them as names,” he said quietly. “A few I have never even heard of.”
He saw approval in the President’s face. Then the President was not seeing him any more, but was abstracted.
“Relax, Buck,” the President said. “We’re in an emergency, but we’ve got time, a little anyway. Time and a decision. That’s what an emergency is. Now the decision is what those people on the list have to help us with. The time we can’t control. It just passes.”
It sounded silly, but Buck knew that the President was not thinking what he was saying. His voice and his mind were operating on different levels. Then they came together and the President was seeing Buck again.
“Buck, that group sees one another all the time, day after day,” the President said. “They’ve probably talked over things so much that they’ve got a nice committee solution for everything. Right?”
“Yes, I imagine they have,” Buck said.
“The only problem is that this is something they have no solution for,” the President said. “Bogan told me that in Omaha they had no standard operating procedure for this kind of thing. So we’ve got a novel situation, something completely new.”
The President swung in his chair and looked at his secretary. Quite automatically her pencil lifted, moved toward the notebook.
“Blackie’s in the Pentagon group, isn’t he?” the President asked.
Buck’s eyes ran down the list
“There is a General Black, Mr. President,” he said. His throat felt dry.
“That’s Blackie,” the President said. “We went to college together.” He paused. “Blackie’s a bright boy, got guts and I’d trust him with almost anything. He can think on his feet, deal with a novel situation. Trouble is that either they’ll make a committee solution or they’ll all listen to someone like Blackie. He doesn’t talk much, except when he believes in something….” His voice dropped and he stared at the wall, not seeing it. Then be swung back to them, entirely in focus, speaking briskly. “Next we need someone who’s not a Pentagon person, but who knows his way around. Whom do you suggest?”
He asked the question of both Buck and Mrs. Johnson. Buck stiffened. His mind went flat, incapable of memory. He could, quite literally, not recall the name of a single person. His mother? Gypsy Rose Lee? Old Mr. Carmichael in the apartment below? He must be losing his mind.
Mrs. Johnson looked at the President, then flicked over a few pages in her notebook. “They’ve got that Professor Groteschele out there for the briefing,” she said. “He’s not one of them. I mean he doesn’t work at the Pentagon.”
The President rocked in his chair.
“lie doesn’t work for the Pentagon. That’s right,” he said slowly. “But that book of his almost made him one of them.” He paused. “O.K., Johnnie, he’ll add something to a bunch of people that have been seeing one another too often. Tell the Pentagon to include Groteschele in the advisory group. Tell Swenson that Groteschele is personally cleared by me and that he can say anything he wants on any subject.”
“As long as it’s relevant,” Mrs. Johnson said and smiled tightly.
The President grinned. “Swenson has a pretty well-developed sense of the relevant,” he said.
“I know that, Mr. President,” Mrs. Johnson said.
“I know that you know that, Mrs. Johnson,” the President said and made a mock bow.
She smiled, turned, and left the room.
Buck sat silently with the President of the United States. He knew they were waiting but he did not know what for.
Walter Groteschele awoke at precisely 5:80 A.M. He did not awake at the sound of an alarm dock and, indeed, he did not even wear a wrist watch. Despite this he was certain of the time. He was awake fully. As he swung out of bed his mind began to block out the day. It was a quick, neat process, something that occupied him only from his bed to the bathroom. By 6:10 he would be showered, shaved, dressed, nourished by one cup of instant coffee, and waiting for the train at Scarsdale. An hour to La Guardia—8:30. An hour to Washington (and his second cup of coffee, at 10,000 feet)—9:30. At the Pentagon by ten minutes to ten.
The check list was complete. The day was under control.
Groteschele stepped on the bathroom scales—185. He had weighed 165 when he was twenty-one. He knew some men who refused to weigh themselves, were afraid to get the bad news. Groteschele weighed himself every day of his life. As he stepped off the scales he even forced himself to think what the additional fat meant. Face reality, he told himself with a quiet pride. Facing reality was what had gotten him where he was.
As he showered, rubbing his body with a rough natural sponge, he ran over the physical differences between twenty-one and forty-eight Then he had been lean and muscular. Now there was an overlay of fat about the torso. Not gross, but noticeable in a suit. Softer. Around the waist the flesh was a bulge. Where it showed most was in his neck and face. His collars were usually tight and bit into the flesh, making his face slightly pink. As he shaved he calculated whether or not it would be possible to exercise the fat off. The calculation did not take long.
He did not have time for exercise.
Only once during his five-stage (car, train, taxi, plane, taxi) trip from Scarsdale to Washington did Groteschele’s mind relax and think of anything except the briefing he would present It was in the taxicab from Grand Central to La Guardia. There was something about the luxury of a taxicab, to ride alone while others rode in buses, that made Groteschele think of his youth. Briefly he permitted himself the luxury of letting his mind, wander.
Groteschele’s father was a tough, brilliant, and hardworking physician, a highly skilled surgeon. He was also a Jew, unfortunately in Germany. Early in the 1930s he had seen what was coming. He had argued withother Jews in his native Hamburg that there were only two alternatives: arm and fight, or leave Germany. The great majority of his friends and relatives, anchored by their possessions and inured to the prospect of suffering, stayed in Germany. Many of them died in gas ovens.
Walter Groteschele was fifteen when his father abandoned his medical practice and moved from Hamburg, via London and New York, to Cincinnati. Before his father could practice medicine in America it was required that he take two years of residency and pass a series of examinations. He was never able to get enough money ahead to do the two years’ residency. Emil Groteschele worked first as a ditchdigger for a utilities company. He could not, however, stand the calluses and the coarsening of his surgeon’s hands. Eventually he wound up as a butcher in a kosher butcher shop. This was an irony, for Emil GroteSchele was a Reform Jew and anything but devout. But the work did allow him to use his hands in somewhat the fashion for which they had been exquisitely trained.
Emil Groteschele was not an embittered man. He had understood clearly what his prospects were when he left Berlin. He was saving his life and the lives of his family. Nothing more. One of the few times that his son had seen him angry was when the subject of the Diary of Anne Frank came up. Emil Groteschele had offended the Jews of Cincinnati by arguing that Anne Frank and her family had acted like imbeciles. Rather than hiding in an attic and
