Both sides had the opportunity to air their views, however indirectly. Before she left London Mrs. Iselin told the reporters who had assembled in a large room named after a production of Richard D’Oyly Carte that she would urge her husband’s Senate committee to investigate the Labour Party of Great Britain, as she had assembled documentary proof that it was a nest of Socialists and crypto-Communists and that this political party could, if returned to power, “smash the alliance upon which the friendship of our two great nations has been based and, under the guise of honest difference of opinion, sabotage the great American purpose before the world.” It was as though the great glacier had slid down from the top of the world and enveloped the hotel. Sixty men and women stood staring at her, their chins resting comfortably on their chests, mouths wide open, eyes glazed. One gentleman of Fleet Street threw his full glass of whisky and water backward over his head in a high arc to crash in the corner of the large room rather than drink it, which is criticism indeed from a newspaperman of any country. He said, “Madame, my name is Joseph Pole of the Daily Advocate-Journal. I repudiate you, your husband, and your most peculiar son.” He turned to a lady journalist on his left and took the highball from her hand. “May I?” he asked. Then he threw the contents of the drink onto Mrs. Iselin’s ankles.

Raymond knocked him right through the throng. At this juncture, that portion of the journalistic group which had objected to Raymond in the first place for having attacked the profitable institution of Motherhood in his column, took this chance to strike out at him, while the group which had secretly approved Raymond’s utter public rejection of his mother now saw their chance to have at her themselves, and were led forward by female colleagues brandishing raised umbrellas. The result was a melee. Mrs. Iselin swung chairs, water carafes, and broken whisky bottles, doing most painful damage but emerging physically unharmed. Raymond laid about him with his extraordinary strength and his natural antipathy. The news photographers present very nearly swooned with ecstasy over the turn taken, for, from every British newspaper-reader’s point of view, here was Iselinism in action with British righteousness whacking it over the head.

Beginning with the very next editions, the British press indulged in its own sort of good-natured London journalists’ fun, which could be described by the subject of their reporting as being an experience not unlike falling nude into a morass of itching powder while two sadistic dentists drilled into one’s teeth at the instant of apogee of alcoholic history’s most profligate hang-over. The ultimate end of all of these combative news stories was that when Mrs. Iselin and her son needed to journey to Southampton to embark for home, some one hundred and fifteen London policemen, whom the world knows affectionately as “bobbies” after their founder, Sir Robert Peel, needed to bludgeon a path through the howling mass of outraged citizenry to get them out of their hotel, following which a semimilitary motorcade was formed to race them to the ship. The entire incident was a stiff test of Anglo-American relations, beyond a doubt, and somewhat scored John Iselin’s own lack of popular favor in the British Isles.

While Raymond had been in Paris, in late June, a member of the French Chamber of Deputies who was co-leader of the political party having the record of greatest resistance to the government then in power, was assassinated in his hôtel particulier on Rue Louis David in the sixteenth arrondissement, baffling police and security agencies.

While Raymond was in London, on the evening before his mother’s famous debate with the British press, a peer who was greatly admired for having articulated a liberal, humanistic, and forward-looking life as publisher of a chain of national newspapers and periodicals, Lord Morris Croftnal, was murdered while he slept. There was not a clue as to the identity or motivation of his killer.

Seventeen

RAYMOND’S SHIP DOCKED IN NEW YORK ON A Wednesday in late August, 1959. He reported for work at The Daily Press early Thursday morning. Marco called him and made a date to meet him at four o’clock in Hungarian Charlie’s, the saloon across the street from the paper, saying he would be bringing two of his side-kicks with him if Raymond wouldn’t mind. Raymond didn’t mind.

The four men sat a table far in the rear of the saloon, which was a solid, practical saloon set up to sell a maximum amount of booze and, with careful attention to unsanitary-seeming décor—a little dirt here, a little grease there—a minimum amount of food, which, after all, has a tendency to spoil after a week or so and can be a loss. The air was nearly gelid from the huge air-conditioning unit that looked big enough to chill an automobile assembly plant. A giant juke box, manufactured by The Giant Juke Box Company of Arcana, Illinois, was belting everything living right over the head with a loudly lovable old standard out of Memphis, Tennessee, in which the rhyme of the proper name Betty Lou and the plural noun shoes were repeated, in a Kallikakian couplet, over and over again. A giant juke box is constructed to make a sound like two full-sized, decibel-pregnant juke boxes going at top volume at the same time, but two separate juke boxes each playing a different tune, each in a different tempo, and, if possible, in a different language. The joint was noisy from opening to closing because Hungarian Charlie liked noise and was, in every vocal manner, very much like a giant juke box himself.

After minimum hand-shaking and ordering a highball for Amjac and Lehner and beers for Raymond and himself, Marco went right to business by asking Raymond to tell his version of the battle action, which Raymond did forthwith and in detail, utilizing only the future tense in verb forms. Lehner carried the tape recorder in a shoulder sling.

“You sound as though you got those nightmares straightened out. In fact, you look it,” Raymond said warily, not sure whether it was proper to talk about such things in front of these house-detective types. Marco looked great. He had gained the weight back.

“All over.”

“Did you—was it—did that thing we were talking about help any?”

“The court-martial?”

“Yeah.”

“The way it worked out, it wasn’t necessary but I still have you and only you to thank for losing those nightmares. We got a different kind of an investigation started, just the way you said it had to be, and the nightmares were gone. Forever. I hope.”

“Did you investigate the medal?”

“Sure. What else?”

“Any progress?”

“Slow, but good.”

“Is it working out the way we thought?”

“Yeah. Right down the line.”

“The medal is a phony?”

“It certainly looks that way.”

“I knew it. I knew it. Raymond looked from Amjac to Lehner, shaking his head in awed disbelief. “How about that?” he asked with mystification. “Will you tell me why a lot of Communist brass would want to steal a Medal of Honor for a complete stranger?”

Amjac didn’t answer. He seemed embarrassed about something. Raymond became aware of his silence and stared at him coldly. “It was a rhetorical question,” he said haughtily.

Amjac coughed. He said, “It scares hell out of us, if you want the truth, Mr. Shaw. We have run out of ideas and we don’t know where else to look, if that gives you some idea.” Raymond swung his gaze to Lehner, who had a head like a gourd, a small mustache, and eyes like watermelon seeds, and Lehner stared him down.

“Have you talked to Al Melvin?” Raymond said. The voice of a sick child whined out of the giant juke box behind them as though trying to escape the hateful noises behind it. “You know, Ben, Al. In Alaska.”