Actually, the increased income took the edge off the promotion for Raymond but, the way he would handle it, he figured the money would be the bank’s problem, not his.

Raymond was distraught over the murder. He had had great regard for the old man and a fondness that was unusual inasmuch as he felt fondness for only two other people in the world, Marco and Jocie, and Jocie should not be included in the category because the feeling for her was vastly different again. He just could not get it through his head that anyone would want to murder Mr. Gaines. He had been a kind and gentle and helpless old man, and how could anyone do such a thing? Mr. Downey expressed the police opinion that it must have been some mentally unstable political crank. “Holly was one of the oldest friends I had left,” Mr. Downey said sadly, mourning for himself.

“Is the paper going to post a reward?”

Mr. Downey rubbed his chin. “Hm. I guess we should, at that. We certainly should. Can charge it to promotion if we ever have to pay it.”

“I want to pledge five thousand dollars of that reward,” Raymond said hotly.

“You don’t need to do that, Raymond.”

“Well, I want to, goddammit.”

“Well, O.K. You pledge five and we’ll pledge ten, although the board’ll have to O.K. it of course, and I’ll call Centre Street soon as I get back to the office so they can send out paper on it. By God, we’ll pay for a general alarm, too. The dirty bastard.” Downey was doubly upset because he hated to spend the paper’s money and he knew damned well that Holly Gaines, wherever he was, wouldn’t approve of a goddam, boyscout, grandstand play like that, but, what the hell, there were certain things you pretended you had to do.

Marco came in to see Raymond the same afternoon. “Jesus, you look like hell,” Raymond said from under his head bandage and traction equipment. “What happened?”

Marco looked worse than that. The old sayings are the best, and Marco looked like death warmed over. “What do you mean, what happened?’ he said. “I’m not in a hospital bed, am I?”

“I just mean I never saw you look so lousy.”

“Well, thanks.”

“What happened?”

Marco ran his hand across his face. “I can’t sleep.”

“Can’t you get some pills?” Raymond said tentatively—having a narcotics addict for a mother, he had developed an aversion to drugs. Also, it was difficult for him to understand any kind of a sleeping problem, since he himself could have fallen asleep hanging by one ankle in a high wind.

“It’s not so much that I can’t sleep. It’s more that I’d rather not sleep. I’m walking around punchy because I’m scared. I keep having the same nightmare.” Raymond, lying flat on his back, made the flicking gesture with his right hand.

“Is it a nightmare about a Soviet general and a lot of Chinese and me and the guys who were on the patrol?” Marco came out of the chair like a tiger. He stood over Raymond, gripping the cloth of his pajama jacket in both fists, staring down at him with wild eyes. “How did you know that? How did you know that?” His voice went up and up like an eccentric stairs in front of a hilltop summer beach house.

“Take—your—hands—off—me.” With that sentence Raymond’s voice fell back into his horrid drawling manner; into his repulsive, inciting, objectionable voice that he used to keep the rest of the world on the other side of the moat surrounding the castle where he had always lain under the spell of the wicked witch. It was curdlingly unfriendly, and so actively repellent that it drove Marco backward into the chair, which was a good thing because Marco had gone into a sick yellow-ivory color, his breathing was shallow, and his eyes shone with an ever so slight sheen of insanity as he had reached out to take the shape of his oppression into the muscles of his fingers and hands and punish it for what it had been doing to his dignity, which is man’s own inner image of himself.

“I’m sorry, Raymond.”

Raymond became Marco’s friend again instantly, as though there had been no lapse.

“Please tell me how you knew about my nightmare, Raymond.”

“Well, you see, I didn’t really. I mean, it’s just that Melvin—you know: Al Melvin, the corporal on the patrol—he wrote me a long letter about a week ago. I was naturally surprised to hear from him because—well—as you know, I was never much one for fraternizing, but he said in the letter that I was the only one he knew how to reach—he sent the letter to Johnny because everybody certainly knows how to reach him—because he had to tell somebody in the patrol about this nightmare or he was afraid he would lose his mind and—”

“Please tell me about the nightmare, Raymond.”

“Well, he dreams that the patrol is all sitting together. He says he dreams about a lot of Soviet officers and some Chinese brass and us being on the patrol. What is such a nightmare about that?”

“Where’s the letter? Do you have the letter?”

“Well, no. I mean, I never keep letters.”

“Is that all he wrote? Is that all about the nightmare?’

“Yeah.”

“It just stops right there?”

“I guess so.”

“Man!”

“Is it like your nightmare?”

“Yeah. As a matter of fact, mine is a lot like that.”

“You guys ought to get together.”

“Right away. You don’t know what this means to me. I just can’t explain to you what this means to me, Raymond.”

“Well, you can’t see him right away, though, Ben. He lives in Wainwright, Alaska.”

“Alaska? Alaska?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus. Wainwright, Alaska. You have to be kidding!”

“No. I wish I was, Ben. I’m not. But, so what? What’s the difference?”

“What’s the difference? I told you I can’t sleep. You told me I look like hell. Well, I feel like hell and I’m shaking all to pieces and I think sometimes I should kill myself because I’m afraid of going insane, and then you tell me like you were talking about the weather that another man who was on the patrol is having the same delusions that I was afraid were driving me crazy, and you tell me he lives in some place called Wainwright, Alaska, where I can’t sit down and talk to him and find out if he’s cracking up like I am and how we can help each other, and you say what’s the difference.”

Marco began to laugh hysterically, then he put his face forward into his large hands and wept into them, squeezing tightly at his cheekbones, his heavy shoulders moving grotesquely and causing the four rows of his decorations to jump up and down. He made such tearing sounds that the two Soviet Army nurses on the floor came running in. After six or seven minutes of Marco’s reckless, unrelieved, and shocking sobbing, at which Raymond stared helplessly, they hit him with a hypo to calm him down and get him the hell out of there.

All in all, Raymond had had a most ironic hospital stay, what with a visit from the wife of America’s most gallant and noisy anti-Communist to a hospital operated by the Soviet secret police, what with a U.S. Army Intelligence officer breaking down and embarrassing the staff of the same place, what with contributing five thousand dollars to a reward for his own capture, and what with learning that two grown men were capable of behaving like children over a perfectly harmless, if repetitious, dream.

Ten

JOHNNY HAD BECOME CHAIRMAN OF THE Committee on Federal Operations and chairman of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, with a budget of two hundred thousand dollars a year and an inculcating staff of investigators. He grew sly, in the way he worked that staff. He would sidle up to a fellow senator or another member of the government placed as high and mention the name and habits of some young lady for whom the senator might be paying the necessities, or perhaps an abortion here, or a folly-of-youth police record there. It worked wonders. He had only to drop this kind of talk upon five or six of them and at once they became his missionaries to intimidate others who might seek to block his ways in government.