The Fourth K by Mario Puzo
On Thursday night the pickings were slim. But Kimberly was beautiful in this light, her blond hair glowing like a halo, her white powdered breasts, moonlike, rising none too shyly out of her green low-cut dress. A gentleman with sly good-humored charm, only faintly overladen with lust, brought his drink to her table and politely asked her if he could sit down. Blade watched them and wondered at the ironies of the world. Here was this well-dressed man, undoubtedly some kind of hotshot like a lawyer or professor or, who knows, some low-grade politician like a city councillor or state senator, sitting down with an ax murderer, and for dessert would get a bop on the head. And just because of his cock. That was the trouble. A man walked through life with only half a brain because of his cock. It was really too bad. Maybe before he bopped the guy he would let him stick it into Kimberly and get his nuts off and then bop him. He looked like a nice guy, he was really being a gentleman, lighting Kimberly’s cigarette, ordering her a drink, not rushing her, though he was obviously dying to get off.
Blade finished his drink when Kim gave him the signal. He saw Kim start to get up, fussing with her red purse, rummaging in it for God knows what. Blade left the bar and went out into the street. It was a clear night in early spring and the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers and onions frying on the grills of open-air food stands made him hungry, but he could wait until the work was done. He walked up Forty-second Street. There were still crowds although it was midnight, and people’s faces were colored by the countless neon lights of the rows of cinemas, the giant billboards, the cone-shaped glare of hotel searchlights. He loved the walk from Seventh Avenue to Ninth. He entered the hallway and positioned himself in the well. He could step out when Kim embraced her client. He lit a cigarette and took the blackjack out of its holster beneath the jacket.
He could hear them coming into the hall, the door clicking shut, Kim’s purse clattering. And then he heard Kim’s voice giving the code phrase: “It’s just one flight.” He waited for a couple of minutes before he stepped out of the well and hesitated because he saw such a pretty picture. There was Kim on the first step, legs apart, lovely massive white thighs uncovered and the nice man so well dressed, with his dick out and shoving it into her. Kim seemed to rise for a moment into the air, and then Blade saw with horror that she was still rising, and the steps were rising with her and then he saw above her head the clear sky as if the whole top of the building had been sheared off. He lifted the blackjack to beg, to pray, to give witness, that his life could not be over. All this happened in a fraction of a second.
Cecil Clarkson and Isabel Domaine had come out of a Broadway theater after seeing a charming musical and strolled down to Forty-second Street and Times Square. They were both black, as indeed were a majority of the people to be seen on the streets here, but they were in no way similar to Blade Booker. Cecil Clarkson was nineteen years of age and took writing courses at the New School for Social Research. Isabel was eighteen and went to every Broadway and off-Broadway play because she loved the theater and hoped to be an actress. They were in love as only teenagers can be, absolutely convinced that they were the only two people in the world. And as they walked up from Seventh Avenue to Eighth the blinding neon signs bathed them in benevolent light; their beauty created a magic around them which shielded them from the wino beggars, the half-crazed drug addicts, the hustlers, the pimps and the would-be muggers. And Cecil was big, obviously a strong young man who looked as if he would kill anybody who even touched Isabel’s body.
They stopped at a huge frankfurter and hamburger open-air grill and ate alongside the counter; they did not venture inside, where the floor was filthy with discarded paper napkins and paper plates. Cecil drank a beer and Isabel a Pepsi with their hot dogs and hamburgers. They watched the surging humanity that filled the sidewalks even at this late hour. They looked with perfect equanimity at the wave of human flotsam, the dregs of the city, rolling past them, and it never entered their minds that there was any danger. They felt pity for these people who did not have their promise, their future, their present and everlasting bliss. When the wave receded they went back into the street and started the walk from Seventh to Eighth. Isabel felt the spring air on her face and buried her face in Cecil’s shoulder, one hand on his chest, the other caressing his neck. Cecil felt a vaulting tenderness. They were both supremely happy, the young in love as billions and billions of human beings had been before them, living one of the few perfect moments in life. Then suddenly to Cecil’s astonishment all the garish red and green lights blotted out and all he could see was the vault of the sky, and then both of them in their perfect bliss dissolved into nothing.
A group of eight tourists visiting New York City for an Easter-week vacation walked down from St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, turned on Forty-second Street and sauntered toward where a forest of neon light beckoned. When they reached Times Square they were disappointed. They had seen it on TV on New Year’s Eve, when hundreds of thousands gathered to appear on television and greet the coming New Year.
It was so dirty, there was a carpet of garbage that covered the streets. The crowd seemed menacing, drunk, drugged, or driven insane by being enclosed by the great towers of steel through which they had to move. The women were garishly dressed, like the women in the stills outside the porno cinemas. They seemed to move through different levels of hell, the void of a sky with no stars, the streetlamps a puslike spurt of yellow.
The tourists, four married couples from a small town in Ohio, their children grown, had decided to take a trip to New York as a sort of celebration. They had completed a certain stage in their lives, fulfilled a necessary destiny. They had married, they had brought up children, they had been able to have moderately successful careers. Now there would be a new beginning for them, the start of a new kind of life. The main battle had been won.
The triple-X cinemas didn’t interest them, there were plenty in Ohio. What did interest and frighten them about Times Square was that it was so ugly and the people filling the streets seemed so evil. The tourists all wore great big red I Love New York buttons that they had purchased on their first day. Now one of the women took off her button and threw it into the gutter.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
The group turned and walked back toward Sixth Avenue, away from the great corridor of neon. They had almost turned the corner when they heard a distant boom and then a faint rustle of wind, and then down the long avenues from Ninth to Sixth came rushing a tornado of air filled with soda cans, garbage baskets and a few cars that seemed to be flying. With an animal instinct the group turned the corner of Sixth Avenue out of the path of the rushing wind, but were swept off their feet by a tumult of air. From far away they heard the crashing of buildings falling to the ground, the screams of thousands of dying people. They stood crouched low in the shelter of the corner, not knowing what had happened.
They had walked just outside the radius of destruction caused by the explosion of the nuclear bomb. They were eight survivors of the greatest calamity that had befallen a peacetime United States.
One of the men struggled to his feet and helped the others. “Fucking New York,” he said. “I hope all the cabdrivers got killed.”
The police patrol car that moved slowly through traffic between Seventh and Eighth avenues held two young cops, one Italian and one black. They didn’t mind being stuck in traffic, it was the safest place in the precinct. They knew that down the darker side streets they could flush thieves stealing radios out of cars, low-grade pimps and muggers making menacing moves toward the peaceful pedestrians of New York, but they didn’t want to get involved in those crimes. Also, it was now a policy of the New York Police Department to allow petty crimes. There had spread in New York a sort of license for the underprivileged to prey on the successful law-abiding citizens of the city. After all, was it right that there were men and women who could afford fifty-thousand-dollar cars with radios and music systems worth a thousand dollars, while there were thousan
The two police officers watched Blade Booker leave the Times Square Bar. They knew him well. One officer said to the other, “Should we follow him?” and the other said, “A waste of time, we could catch him in the act and he’d get off.” They saw the big blonde and her john come out and take the same route up toward Ninth Avenue. “Poor guy,” one of the cops said, “he thinks he’s going to get laid and he’s gonna get rolled.” The other cop said, “He’ll have a lump on his head as big as his hard-on.” They both laughed.
Their car still moving slowly by inches, both policemen watched the action on the street. It was midnight, their shift would soon be over, and they didn’t want to get into anything that would keep them out on the street. They watched the innumerable prostitutes stand in the way of pedestrians, the black drug dealers hawking their wares as boldly as a TV pitchman, the muggers and pickpockets jostling prospective victims and trying to engage tourists in conversation. Sitting in the darkness of the patrol car and gazing out on the streets bright with neon lights, they saw all the dregs of New York slouching toward their particular hells.
The two cops were constantly alert, afraid that some maniac would shove a gun through the window and start shooting. They saw two drug hustlers fall into step beside a well-dressed man, who tried to hurry away but was restrained by four hands. The driver of the patrol car pressed the gas pedal and drew up alongside. The drug hustlers dropped their hands; the well-dressed man smiled with relief. At that moment both sides of the street caved in and buried Forty-second Street from Ninth to Seventh avenues.
All the neon lights of the Great White Way, fabulous Broadway, were blotted out. The darkness was lit by fires, buildings burning, bodies on fire. Flaming cars moved like torches in the night. And there was a great clanging of bells and sustained shrieking of sirens as fire engines, ambulances and police vehicles moved into the stricken heart of New York.
Ten thousand people were killed and twenty thousand were injured when the nuclear bomb planted by Gresse and Tibbot exploded in the Port Authority Building on Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street.
The explosion was a great boom of sound followed by a howling wind and then the screaming of cement and steel torn asunder. The blast did its damage with mathematical precision. The area from Seventh Avenue to the Hudson River and from Forty-second to Forty-fifth streets was completely flattened. Outside that area, the damage was comparatively minimal. It was the mercy and the genius of Gresse and Tibbot that radiation was lethal only within that area.
All through the borough of Manhattan, glass windows shattered and cars in the streets were smashed by falling debris. And within an hour after the explosion the bridges of Manhattan were clogged with vehicles fleeing the city to New Jersey and Long Island.
Of the dead more than 70 percent were black or Hispanic; the other 30 percent were white New Yorkers and foreign tourists. On Ninth and Tenth avenues, which had become a camping ground for the homeless, and in the Port Authority Building itself, in which many transients were sleeping, the bodies were charred into small logs.
CHAPTER
15
The White House Communications Center received news of the atom bomb explosion in New York City exactly six minutes after midnight, and the duty officer immediately informed the President. Twenty minutes later President Francis Kennedy addressed the Congress. He was attended by Vice President Du Pray, Oddblood Gray and Christian Klee.
Kennedy was very grave. In the most crucial moment of his life, there was no time for anything but the most straightforward dialogue. Officially he was no longer President of the United States. But he spoke as if he still had full authority as chief of state.
“I come to you tonight without rancor,” he said. “This great tragedy, this great blow to our nation must unite us. You must now know that I took the right course. This is the latest blow in the terrorist Yabril’s plan, the one he thinks will make the United States of America sink to its knees, capitulate to his demands. We must now come to the conclusion that there is a far-reaching conspiracy against the United States. We are compelled now to gather our strength and act together. Surely now we must be in agreement.
“I therefore ask you to nullify your impeachment of me. But let me be honest, if you do not, I must still try to save this country. I will reject your act of impeachment, declare it unlawful and declare martial law to prevent any further damaging acts of terror. Let me inform you that this Congress, this glorious body that has protected the freedom of America throughout its lifetime, is now protected by six divisions of the Secret Service and an Army Special Forces regiment. When this crisis is over, you may again vote to impeach me, but not until then. This is the greatest danger that this country has ever faced, I cannot let it go unchallenged. I beg of you, do not let our great country be divided because of political differences. Do not let our country descend into civil war deliberately provoked by our enemies. Let us unite against them. Nullify your vote of impeachment.”
There rose a great murmur in the hall. The Congress realized that what Kennedy had told them was not only that they were safe, but that they were also at his mercy.
Senator Lambertino was the first to speak after Kennedy. He proposed that the vote be nullified and that both houses of Congress give their full support to the President of the United States, Francis Xavier Kennedy.
Congressman Jintz rose to second the motion. He declared that events had proven Kennedy to be in the right, that it had been an honest disagreement. He affirmed that the President and the Congress would go forward hand in hand to preserve America against its enemies. He gave his word on that.
The vote was taken. The previous vote to impeach the President was nullified.
Unanimously.
Christian Klee marveled at Francis Kennedy’s brilliant performance. There was no questioning his sincerity. But for the first time in all these years, Christian had caught Kennedy in an outright and conscious lie. He had told the Congress of the United States that Yabril was implicated in the atom bomb explosion. And Christian Klee knew that there was no such evidence. And Kennedy knew it was not true.
So he had been right, Christian Klee thought, he had divined what Francis had wanted him to do.
BOOK
IV
CHAPTER
16
President Francis Kennedy, secure in power and office, his enemies defeated, contemplated his destiny. There was a final step to be taken, the final decision to be made. He had lost his wife and child, his personal life had lost all meaning. What he did have was a life entwined with the people of America. How far did he want to go with that commitment?
He announced that he would run for reelection in November, and organized his campaign. Christian Klee was ordered to put legal pressure on all the big businesses, especially the media companies, to keep them from interfering with the election process. Vice President Helen Du Pray was mobilizing the women of America. Arthur Wix, who was a power in Eastern liberal circles, and Eugene Da
There was one crucial point: this time the people must elect a Congress solidly behind the President of the United States. What he wanted was a Congress that would do exactly what he wanted them to do.
So now Francis Kennedy had to perceive the innermost feelings of America. It was a nation in shock.
At Oddblood Gray’s suggestion, they traveled to New York together. They walked down Fifth Avenue to lead a memorial parade to the great crater made by the atom bomb explosion. They did this to show the nation that there was no longer any danger of radiation, that there was no danger of another hidden bomb. Kennedy performed his part of the memorial ceremony for the dead and the dedication of the land to build a park for all the people to remember. Part of his speech was devoted to the dangers of unrestricted freedom for the individual in this dangerous technocratic age. And his belief that individual freedom must be subordinated to further the social contract, that the individual must give up something to improve the life of the social mass. He said this in passing, but it was much noted by the media.
Oddblood Gray was overcome by a sense of repulsive irony when he heard the deafening cheers of the crowd. Could such a terrible act of destruction be so lucky for one man?