19

IT WOULD TAKE TWO WEEKS BEFORE I FOUND OUT WHY SHE HAD BEEN SO distraught on her return. Now that we were lovers, Modene told me less about herself than in our two short meetings for drinks. We could talk about her childhood and mine, about singers and bands, movies and a book or two—she did think The Great Gatsby was overrated (“The author doesn’t know anything about gangsters”) and Gone with the Wind was a classic, “although it took the movie to convince me of that.”

I hardly cared. If we were married, her taste might be a hurdle of the first order, but then it occurred to me that I had never asked myself how much I admired The Great Gatsby. One was not supposed to wonder about that. Not at Yale. It was like asking yourself whether you were moved by St. Francis of Assisi.

We agreed, at any rate, on The Catcher in the Rye—“Heaven,” said Modene, “although not a great classic,” and that was enough to do with books. We ate and drank well. She knew every good restaurant in southern Florida. Whenever I had a day off, and there was more time now that HEEDLESS was up to date, we would (despite her long fingernails) go waterskiing or scuba diving in the Keys and spend Saturday night in the bars of Key West. It was amazing I did not get into fights. At bottom, I felt so green in the role of squire to an incredibly lovely girl that I would be on battle-alert whenever anyone looked at her. Hardly confident of my mastery of martial arts—the stint at the Farm had obviously not been enough—I was covertly measuring every conceivable opponent until I came to learn that one seldom got into a fight before one’s woman provoked one. Modene forestalled such possibilities. I did not know exactly how she managed, but processing ten thousand or more people a year on an airplane may have had something to do with it. She was pleasant to strange men but not accommodating, and made it clear that I was her date for the evening and she was with me. So, I survived. I prospered. I may even have looked a little more formidable than I felt. I was, in any event, ready to die before I would ever yell, “You can have her, you can have her,” and knew I would wonder forever if Dix Butler had been telling the truth.

We also drove to Tampa, and to Flamingo in the Everglades. If we would spend a day together as preparation for our night, part of the joy was to be together in a car. She loved convertibles. Soon, I was renting them. I had a principal I could never touch until I was forty which consisted of bonds issued by the City of Bangor in 1922. It had been passed on to me by my paternal grandfather, and I could use the interest, although by family protocol, I was not supposed to. Who knew why our family did what it did? I, at any rate, good Hubbard, always predeposited such interest. Now parsimony would screech at me through each pole vault into the heaven of Modene Murphy. I was beginning to suffer so much from the gap between my richest and stingiest impulses that Tom Field began to dip into Harry Hubbard’s accumulating interest to splurge on splendid meals and a rented white convertible.

How Tom and Mo loved to drive! Our weather was hot, rainy season was on, and I came to appreciate a South Florida sky. That sky could rest weightless upon you for a splendid morning, its bowl empty and blue over the Everglades like the great empyrean of the American West, but if Florida lands were flat, flat as water level, the sky had its own mountainous topography. Torrents of rain could approach as quickly as sunlit ravines fall into the unforgiving shadow of their cliffs. The changing shape of a cloud was, therefore, never to be ignored or you would not get the top up in time. Some cumulus sailed into one’s attention off the spinnaker bellows of a tropical gust; other puffs curled on themselves like hooks prepared to gouge the fabric of the sky. Under a black ceiling of atmospheric wrath, storm clouds massed above one another in ranges and ridge lines that the land below could never offer, and insects were whipped by one’s car stream into dark expectorations against the windshield, their small, exploded deaths still pitting the glass after gouts of rain.

How water could fall in southern Florida! One moment I might be close to doubling the speed limit, my highway no more than a long white arrow launched against the horizon; then, clouds would appear like hooded strangers. Ten minutes later, curtains of downpour would force me to the shoulder. A celestial rage, as intimate but almighty as a parent’s wrath, would beat upon the metal skin of the car. When the rain ceased, I would drive through southern Florida with her head upon my arm.

We never talked about what had happened in Los Angeles. She did not refer any longer to Jack or to Sam. They seemed to have disappeared, and, given the size of her wound, I was not about to approach such questions. Sorrow and silence were her sensuous companions. I, well used by now to mourning for Kittredge, could ride beside Modene without speaking for an hour at a time. I lived with the lover’s optimism that silence brought us nearer. It was not until I began to suspect that her thoughts could wander while making love, that I came to realize how much of the beloved candidate remained with us. Sometimes, in the middle of the act, I could sense her mind going far away from me, and I would feel the subtle sense of pall that comes over a party when it has just passed its peak.

About this time, a letter came in from my father by way of the Quarters Eye pouch. It is characteristic of him that with the variety of means open for communication within the continental United States—prearranged pay phone to pay phone, Encoder-Decoder, special shunt code line, secure phone, standard Agency phone, and a number of other modes too technical to enumerate—my father employed an old OSS means. He wrote a letter, sealed it in an envelope, girded it about with three-quarter-inch strapping tape (half as strong as steel), stuck it in the daily pouch to wherever it was going, and was done with it. While it might have taken two experts half a week to steam loose such a chastity belt and restore the envelope, there were more brutal methods of interception. The letter called attention to itself and could simply be stolen. Not once in his career, my father would boast, had he ever lost a communication by this means of sending it—no, he would correct himself, once he did; the plane carrying the pouch went down—therefore, he was damned if he was about to give up dispatching his messages without the feel of his hand on a pen sending out his own words directly.

I read:

Dear Son,

I’m going to be in Miami on Sunday, and this abbreviated communication is to say that I would like to spend it with you. Since I don’t want to get off on a wrong note, let me issue in advance the unhappy news that wife Mary and I, one year short of our silver wedding anniversary, are now, after six months of separation, entering the process of getting a divorce. The twins, I fear, have lined up on her side. I have assured Roque and Toby that the schism is, under the circumstances, comparatively friendly, but they seem bitter. She is their mother, when all is said.

We need not dwell on this news during my day in Miami. Just wanted to alert you. Let’s kick up our heels and get to know one another again.

Fondly,
Cal

I had been looking forward to a day with Modene, and under the changed circumstances, even thought of introducing her to my father except (1) I was afraid he would steal her, and (2) I was pleased that he was going to give me this much private time—it seemed unique in our annals that he would spend that many hours with me.

Then Modene solved my problem by deciding to work that Sunday, and I was able to greet him alone when he came off the plane. He was looking gray under his tan, and spoke little for the first hour. It was only ten in the morning and he wanted to go directly to the beach. “I need a run,” he said, “to get the office cramps out of my gut.” I nodded glumly. “We do what you want to do,” I said, and knew he was going to push me into a race. He always did. Ever since I had turned fourteen, he had engaged me in serious runs every time we were together, and every time I lost; I sometimes thought the greatest event in my father’s life had taken place long before he was in the OSS or the Agency: It was that slot bestowed on him by the Associated Press as left halfback on the Second All-American Team of 1929. Of course, he never forgave himself for not making First All-American, but then, that was my father.

I had made friends with the pool guard at the Fontainebleau, and so I took Cal there and we used an empty cabana to change—I had had the foresight to bring extra trunks along—and then we went out on the beach for our run.

I was blessing Modene. If, among her charming contradictions, she maintained her long, silver fingernails at every cost to herself, there was also the lady who was competitive at sports. If I could introduce her to sailing and show her all sorts of improvements to her tennis game, she learned quickly, and high-board diving and speed swimming were proficiencies she could impose on me. When there was time, we would, at her insistence, run together on the beach. Short on sleep and always in the act of eliminating a little too much booze from my ducts, nonetheless I was more or less ready for a set of jousts with my fifty-three-year-old father, and he, I was both relieved and saddened to see, had the hint of an extra inch around his waist.

“We won’t go all out,” he said, “just jog for a while.”

So we set off to the north on the unending sand of Miami Beach, wide and packed and much too hot already. To our left, on the side of the land, were the monoliths of the big hotels, white, shining, monumental, monotonous. The sky began to revolve just a little under the heat, and a narrow band of protest soon tightened around my skull at the inhumanities I was visiting upon the civil society of my body; on we jogged, side by side, for a mile, his breath coming unashamed and heavy, his sweat lining the curves of his powerful hairy chest, and I stayed even with him, determined that on this day, fortified by the unseen presence of Modene, I was going to beat him at last.

We turned around after a mile and a half, both of us tired and panting, both of us going along stride for stride, but now we no longer spoke. He did not ask me any longer how the tarpon and sailfish were taking to the hook on the sport-fishing cruises, he did not mention the seven-hundred-and-eighty-pound tuna he had caught on the first day out of Key West on a fishing vacation eight years ago, no, now he was silent, and I was silent, and the level sand began to feel like the longest uphill grade I had ever climbed while the sky overhead began to seem as unstable as a dance floor to a drunk. I knew we would run until one of us fell, or we finished up back at the Fontainebleau, and since I wouldn’t quit, and he wouldn’t, we kept running on that level, side by side, up the endless grade of sand itself, and neither of us dared to break into the lead for fear there was no reserve to call upon—one might gain three steps on the other and collapse. Then, as we came into the last few hundred yards, the long curve of the Fontainebleau three hotels away, then two, then one, we spurted, which is to say we each churned in the sand and ran one modest increment faster, and all the world was in danger of turning black before I won by five yards and touched the railing of the boardwalk at the point where we had begun.

It took fifteen minutes of walking up and down the beach before we were ready for a swim, and when we came out of the water, the race still unspoken between us, my father began to spar with me. It was open-hand and allegedly not serious, but he was an awful man to spar with. He was clumsy, he was unorthodox, he was fast for a heavyweight of his age, and he could not really scale down his punches. I had learned enough at the Farm to be quick enough to avoid most of what he threw at me, although his jab when he caught you with an open slap did rattle one’s teeth, and when I made the mistake of replying with a slap-jab of my own, he began to throw rights. He was just slow enough, and enough of an old-fashioned boxer, to give clear warning each time, but that alert was crucial because his body could still coordinate itself into the full heft of the punch, and each of the rights I slipped, or ducked, went by like a freight train. I had to content myself with throwing medium-stiff replies into his solar plexus until—and this was much to my happy surprise—he held up his hands at last and hugged the life out of me. “Kid, you’ve learned how to box, I love you,” he said, and if he looked very pale under the tan, he was, with half of himself at least, honestly happy.

We finished by arm wrestling on one of the picnic tables at the boardwalk. This was pro forma. He always won with the right hand. No one in our family, or in the circle of our acquaintances, or for that matter in the Agency—at least by legend—had ever beaten him. I used to wonder what would happen if he and Dix Butler got together.

Now he disposed of me with the right hand and the left. We did it again, and he beat me without pain in the right, and took a little longer on the left. By the third time, I gained a draw with my left arm, and we were both content.

“I’m proud of you,” he said.

So, close to heat prostration, regurgitation, and stroke, we went for another easy swim, dressed, got back into my Company car—I did not dare to show him the white convertible I had leased on the interest of the Bangor bonds—and down we went to the Keys, going as far as Islamorada before our stomachs came back to us sufficiently to feel hungry. At a fish-house joint whose deck gave separate views of the Gulf and the Atlantic, we got down to stone crabs and beer, and I was able to realize that all of the four hours spent until now were as much a personnel recruitment test as an inquiry into the capacities of his oldest and, until this day, third-best-loved son. We just kept looking at each other, and smiling at each other, cuffing each other on the shoulder open-handed, and quaffing beer, digging with our two-tined forks into crabmeat about to be lathered with mayonnaise. God, we loved each other. “This damned Agency has done as much for you as I ever did,” he said.

“No, sir,” I said, “my father Cal Hubbard is not a fathead,” and the memory of the day I broke my leg skiing came over both of us at once. And we beamed at one another like explorers who have crossed a continent together and now share a view of a hitherto unglimpsed sea.

“Rick, I need an assistant down here,” he said, “and I expect you’re the guy. I was hoping you would be, and now I believe that you are.”

“I believe that too,” I said. I was thinking of Modene. I had never loved her more. I knew more about her than anyone else in the Agency, and I did not know anything about the lady other than that I adored her, and she had given me some kind of strength I had never quite felt before. “Give me a tough job,” I said, “and I’ll be there with you.”

“This one is tough enough,” he answered. “First of all, it is absolute hush-hush. So let’s start with that. I like everything about you, but for one element.”

“Name it.”

“Your friendship with Hugh Montague.”

I cannot pretend that I was not surprised, but all I said was, “I don’t know if we’re all that friendly these days.”

“Why was he having lunch with you at Harvey’s Restaurant, then?”

“I needed his help on exile welfare.” I went into explanations. My father’s eyes were hard on me all the way in much the way they had kept up with my movements as we boxed. I do not know if he was wholly satisfied when I finished, and I was rueful that our splendid beginning for this day had now been bent to this degree, and was doubly rueful at the collateral intelligence provided by simple Washington gossip: I knew my father well enough to understand that he wanted a vow from me. “Anything you say,” I told him now, “will not be repeated or in any way hinted at by me to Hugh Montague.”

He held out his hand and shook mine with the grip he used to get at the marrow in your finger-bones. “All right,” he said. “I’ll brief you on Hugh. He’s a great man, but at present, he worries the hell out of me. I can’t prove it, but Allen may be feeling the same way. Bissell, of course, just can’t abide Hugh Montague. They’re a built-in cockfight. The trouble is that Hugh knows too much about everything going on. God, he’s sitting on every crossroads in the Company. It’s Allen’s fault. Right from the start, Allen wanted one of us free and clear of all the others to keep an eye on everything, and report directly to Allen. That way Allen would have a hedge against our own bureaucracy running things without him. In consequence, Hugh has security overrides that allow him to pipe into what-all. His fief has become a goddamn spiderweb, an empire within the empire. And he is unalterably opposed to the Cuba op.”

“Well, I am for the Cuba op.”

“You damn well better be.”

I was debating whether to inform my father about the work I was doing for Hugh, and decided I would not. A new instinct, immediately and incredibly alert, was telling me to work with Hugh and Cal, work with them both—each in his own enclave. It might be the first time in my life I could lay claim to a driver’s seat. If I was appalled by the extradimensionality I was taking on for myself, I was also growing enamored—I confess this—with what might be the ultimate possibilities of myself. No, I had not fainted on the doorstep.

“In fact,” said Cal, “I’m so opposed to Hugh’s attitude at this point that when Allen asked me to take on a most special task, I told him that I would on the proviso that Hugh Montague not be given one whiff of it. Allen promised to go along with that.”

I nodded.

“The line of communication,” Cal said, “goes from Allen to Bissell to me. Now it’s going down to you. I do have a case officer working New York and Washington, but now I need one in Miami. I will add you to the team. Circumscribed, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yessir.”

He squinted at a fishing boat bucking a chop in the channel between two far-off Keys. “Rick, I must admit that I am feeling very respectful of this operation. I haven’t been off my feed as much since I was fourteen and knew I was going to start my first varsity football game at St. Matthew’s, the youngest student ever to make the first team varsity there, I’ll remind you. So, yes, if I wake up in the middle of the night, just between us, I’ll tell you—yes, I do gulp air. Because the core of the Cuban op—and I can give it to you in one sentence—is that Allen has now decided that Fidel Castro is definitely to be eliminated.”

Had he forgotten my secure telephone call to him? “That’s common gossip around here,” I said.

“Yes,” said Cal, “you’re dealing with Cubans. Any possibility, no matter how macabre or extravagant or sensational, is everyday gossip to them. But no Cuban believes deep down that he can knock Castro’s hat off. We can, however. We can do just that, and we will.”

“What about Toto Barbaro?”

“For now, ignore Barbaro. He has enough of a nose to want to get near to me. Follow no leads with him, therefore. Think of him as doubled. He probably is.”

“Yessir.” I paused. “Is there a timetable?”

“Castro is to be gotten out of the way by early November.”

“Before the election?”

He looked at me. “Exactly.”

“Can I ask how high up this goes?”

He shook his head. “Son, it’s a lifework to understand this Company. You never stop learning how the gears fit. But there’s one sense you must develop. We all gossip a little more than we should, and we are not above trying things out verbally to hear how they fall on someone’s ear. Only, there are certain inquiries not to make. Real security depends on a key, one simple key. Unless you are told where a project was initiated, don’t go looking for the source. You don’t want to know. Because when you get down to it, we cannot trust ourselves. So I don’t want to be informed whether this started with President Eisenhower, or Richard Milhous Nixon, or Allen himself. It’s come down with enough force for me to think Allen cannot be the initiator, and I would warrant it is not Bissell. He prefers to take a clear order and work out the filigree. All right, you say, if they are talking of November, it must be Nixon. He’s Action Officer for Cuba, after all, and he’s bound to win the election if Castro is off the board by then and we have Cubans fighting in the hills. Still, we don’t ask. Because it could be Eisenhower. When Patrice Lumumba came to Washington last month, the State Department treated him like Mr. Africa. They talked Ike into putting Lumumba up at Blair House—hoping to impress him with the fact that he was squatting in the shadow of the White House—but Mr. Lumumba is a revolutionary, and he didn’t feel all that impressed. He and his people smoked marijuana constantly, and left their butts smudged all over the State Department seal in the ashtrays. Then Lumumba had the consummate moxie to ask the State Department if they would provide him with a white prostitute, preferably blond. He wanted a little feminine company at Blair House. Well, Eisenhower is reported to have said, ‘Castro and Lumumba have to be right out of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Can’t someone do something about these people?’”

My father now shrugged. “That may have been all it took to kick off our Castro op, Nixon taking his cue off that remark, but all I have received from Allen is the go-ahead to talk to Bissell. And all I got from the latter worthy was that a decision had been made to work with underworld figures who have lost their casinos in Havana. Top hoods with an investment in Cuba would be likely candidates for such a job. No one outside our ranks would suspect that they were the trigger men for more than their own good and sufficient reasons. ‘All right,’ says Bissell, ‘fill in the blanks.’ ‘Wouldn’t care to send us a clue on how to start?’ I ask. ‘Up to you,’ says Bissell, ‘you know a good many people.’ Indeed I do, but are any in category? I had a ridiculous couple of days, Rick. I’ve been in the Far East so long that I can find you a Hong Kong mechanic adept at pulling out toenails a millimeter at a time, but the sad truth is that I have a paucity of skilled low-life contacts in the U.S. I didn’t know where to start. When it came down to it, I didn’t know the right Americans. I even thought—and I’ll disinherit you if you repeat this to anyone—that I might call on my old friend Lillian Hellman. She had an affair years ago with Frank Costello of which she is still very proud, and I thought maybe she would give me an introduction to the old tiger gangster boss. Lucky for me, I looked into it first. Costello is pretty much out of it these days. Along about then, I was called in by Bissell and handed the plumbing. I am to work with Bob Maheu, he tells me. Well, that’s another matter. You’re going to meet Maheu in Miami, I expect. Used to be FBI, now he’s Howard Hughes’ man. Has also done work for us. I teamed up with Bob Maheu years ago in the Far East and he’s one incredible fellow.” My father spent a moment contemplating his palms. “That’s about the size of it. Hierarchically, I’ve got all the responsibility; operationally, I sit on the sidelines and wait for Maheu to report to me. It’s not a situation I instinctively enjoy. And as for where it all started, well, Howard Hughes comes to mind as quickly as Nixon. But I can’t pretend that I’m happy. Hell, let’s get the bill and drive back.”

When we were on the road to Miami, he did expatiate a bit. “There are going to be a few meetings soon,” he said. “I may or may not attend them. Maheu has his down and dirty contacts but I, of course, have to maintain some hygiene.”

“Where is the role for me?” I asked.

“Harry, I can’t promise in advance whether this job will occupy you for an hour, a week, or whether it will consume you. I honestly don’t feel as if I have my own hands on it yet.”

“I’ve never seen you so pinch-mouthed about things,” I said. It was a large remark for me to make, but his gloom brought it forth.

“It’s hellish breaking up with Mary,” said my father.

We drove in silence for a while.

“It’s all my fault,” said Cal. “Mary had learned to live with my infidelities, but she couldn’t bring herself to forgive me after I took the maid into our bed in Tokyo one fine afternoon when I thought Mary would be out shopping until evening.”

“Christ Almighty,” I said. “Why did you ever do that?”

He sighed. “I guess sex without risk can get to be an uncomfortably intimate transaction. Besides, every Hubbard is one part mad. Know what I’m proudest of? On New Year’s Eve, just fourteen years ago, 1946, first New Year’s Eve of the peace, just before I turned forty, I had sexual intercourse standing up with a girl I’d met that night at a party at the Knickerbocker Club.” He paused, with enough pent-up confidence to extract my compensatory “Yes? What is so special about that?”

“We were doing it at four in the morning on the uptown end of the Park Avenue island that runs from 62nd to 63rd Street with about two thousand windows looking down on us, and I felt as strong as I have ever felt. A police car came along, and this Irishman stopped and stuck his head out the window and said, ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ and I answered, ‘Fornicating, officer. We’re fornicating till the cows come home, and a Happy New Year to you.’”

“What did he do?”

“Just gave one disgusted look—pure New York cop!—and drove on.” My father began to laugh with the sheer enjoyment this memory would never cease to radiate from his past into his future, and when he stopped, the road still went up from the Keys, and I could feel him brooding again about the rupture of his marriage. When he spoke, however, it was of something else.

“You know, son,” he said, “I happen to feel equal to what they’re asking on this job. Once in the OSS, I was obliged to do away with a partisan who had betrayed us. I ended up having to kill him with my bare hands. A gunshot would have been too loud. I never told anyone until today.” He looked at me. “Today is the day. Maybe I’ve lost a wife and gained a son.”

“Maybe you have.” I didn’t trust myself to say more.

“What I mean by I never told anyone is that I never spoke before of the sense of realization you can get killing another human, I mean, that intimately. I didn’t know if I was a good man or an evil man for a long time after. But, finally, I realized it didn’t matter—I was just a hellion. So it isn’t what we’ve got to do that gives me pause, it’s that I don’t have my hands on it. Not yet.”