Johnny had taken a riding in the Senate cloak room after he had changed the figures for the second time, in the Senate speech, and he was as sore as a pup at having been made to look silly in front of his pals. When Raymond’s mother told him he was to drop the figure to one Communist, to one Communist from two hundred and seven in less than a month, he rebelled bitterly.

“What the hell do you keep changing the Communist figures for, all the time?” he asked hotly just before the press conference was to open. “It makes me look like a goddam fool.”

“You’ll be a goddam fool if you don’t go in there and do as you’re told. Who the hell are they writing about all over this goddam country, for crissake?” Raymond’s mother asked. “Are you going to come on like a goddam expert, all of a sudden, like you knew what the hell you were talking about, all of a sudden?”

“Now, come on, hon. I was only—”

“Shuddup! You hear? Now get the hell out there!” she snapped at him—so Senator Iselin had to face a battery of microphones, cameras, and questions, as big as ever had been assembled for any President of the United States, to say: “I am willing to stand or fall on this one. If I am wrong on this one I think the subcommittee would be justified in not taking any other cases I ever brought up too seriously.”

If the scorecard of working Communists in the Defense Department seems either tricky or confusing, it is because Raymond’s mother chose to make the numbers difficult to follow from day to day, week to week, and month to month, during that launching period when his sensational allegations were winning Johnny headlines throughout the world for two reasons. First, it was consistent with one of Raymond’s mother’s basic verities, that thinking made Americans’ heads hurt and therefore was to be avoided. Second, the figures were based upon a document that a Secretary of Defense had written some six years before to the Chairman of a House committee, pointing out that, at the end of World War II, 12,798 government employees who had worked for emergency war agencies had been temporarily transferred to the Defense Department, then that group had been reduced to 4,000 and “a recommendation against permanent employment had been made in 286 cases. Of these, 79 had actually been removed from the service.” Raymond’s mother’s subtraction of 79 cases from 286 cases left 207 cases, the number with which she had had Johnny kick off. She had made one other small change. The Secretary’s actual language had been “recommendation against permanent employment,” which she had changed to read: “members of the Communist party,” which Johnny had adjusted to read: “card-carrying Communists.”

Sometimes it tended to get a little too confusing until Johnny came at last to refer to it as “the numbers game.” On one edgy day when Johnny had been drinking a little before he went on the Senate floor to speak, things got rather out of hand when he began to switch the figures around within the one speech, reported in the Congressional Record for April 10, in which he spoke of such varying estimates as: “a very sizable group of active Communists in the Defense Department,” then referred to “vast numbers of Communists in the Defense Department.” He recalled the figure of two hundred and seven, then went on to say, almost immediately following: “I do not believe I mentioned the figure two hundred and seven at the Secretary’s press conference; I believe I announced it was over two hundred.” He thereupon hastened to claim that “I have in my possession the names of fifty-seven Communists who are in the Defense Department at present,” then changed that count at once by saying, “I know absolutely of one group of approximately three hundred Communists certified to the Secretary of Defense in a private communication who have since been discharged because of communism,” and then at last, sweating like a badly conditioned wrestler, he sat down, having thoroughly confused himself.

He knew he was going to catch hell when he got home that night, and he did. She turned on him so savagely that in an effort to defend himself and to keep her from striking him with a blunt object he demanded that they agree to stay with one goddam figure he could remember. Raymond’s mother realized then that she had been taxing him and making his head hurt so she settled on fifty-seven, not only because Johnny would be able to remember it but because all of the jerks could remember it, too, as it could be linked so easily with the fifty-seven varieties of canned food that had been advertised so well and so steadily for so many years.

Within three months Johnny bought Raymond’s mother a case of gin for making him the “most famous man in the United States,” and he was doing just as well all over the world. The whole thing was so successful that within five months after his first charges a Senate committee undertook a special investigation of Johnny, a public investigation that produced over three million words of testimony, of which Johnny claimed, later on, to have produced a million of those words himself.

Some important individuals refused to tolerate Johnny and said so publicly, and other bodies of elected public servants seemed to disagree with him, but when they came up to it, in the end, they equivocated because by that time Johnny had generated an extraordinary amount of fear, which he beamed directly into the eyes of all who came close to him.

Nine

A SHORT MAN WITH DARK HAIR AND SKIN, BLUE eyes, and blond eyebrows called for Raymond at his apartment at ten-seventeen the morning of July fourteenth, 1956, the day after the investigating committee had published their report on Johnny, and a hot Saturday morning it was. The man’s name was Zilkov. He was Director of the KGB, or Committee of State Security, for the region of the United States of America east of the Mississippi River. The MVD, or Ministry of Internal Affairs, is much larger. The MVD had very wide powers and functions but they hold to a jurisdiction of a somewhat more public nature inside the Soviet Union. The KGB, however, is the secret police. Its director has ministerial rank today and is a much more feared personality than Gomel, the present MVD head. Zilkov was proud of the power he represented.

Raymond opened in response to the door bell, and stared coldly at the strange man. They disliked each other instantly, which was nothing against Zilkov because Raymond disliked almost everyone instantly.

“Yes?” Raymond drawled obnoxiously.

“My name is Zilkov, Mr. Shaw. As you were advised by telephone this morning, I have come to drive you to the Swardon Sanitarium.”

“You are late,” Raymond told him and turned his back to walk toward his baggage, leaving the man to decide whether he would enter or wait in the corridor.

“I am exactly two minutes late,” the short man snapped.

“That is late, isn’t it? An appointment is an oral contract. If we should happen to have any other business in the future, try to remember that.”

“Why do you have three bags? How many bags do you think you will need in the hospital?”

“Have I asked you to help me with the bags?”

“That is not the point. An accident case is not admitted to a hospital with three pieces of baggage. At the most you may bring some necessaries in an attaché case.”

“An attaché case?”

“You do know what that is?”

“Of course I know what that is.”

“Do you have one?”

“One? I have three!”

“Please to place your necessaries into one of your three attaché cases and we will go.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I will get there myself. I was told absolutely nothing about having to pack only the bare necessities into a leather envelope. I was told absolutely nothing about having to have to cope with a minor functionary of an obscure little hospital. That will be all. Return to your work. I will handle this myself.” Raymond began to close the door in Zilkov’s face.