Underworld by Don DeLillo
“Good. It’s good for you. Getting mad cleans the blood,” I told her. “According to my Irish mother.”
“You have a mother. This is encouraging.”
“Get mad. Be mad,” I told her.
I didn’t want her looking at me while she drove but sometimes I looked at her and invited a look back.
“I want everything that happens to happen to both of us,” she said.
“So do I,” I said, and meant it, at the time, truly.
She felt the weight of the gaze and looked across at me on the empty road with a mountain of lavender tailings rising above the old sheds that marked a mineworks and it was a look so intimate and reaching, so deep in things we’d done that it became a crazy kind of dare, a form of drag-strip chicken—which one of us would break the lovers’ gaze and look away first to see if the car had wandered into the eastbound lane, with a shiny-eye pickup approaching, half a second from dazzling death.
“Who’s strange?” I said.
“You stay awake and watch me when I sleep. I know you do. I feel it in my sleep.”
“I’m strange or you’re strange?”
“You followed me into a ladies’ room.”
“No, wait wait wait wait. You can feel me watching you while you sleep and you think I’m strange? Who’s strange?” I said.
And there were times when you detached yourself from the steepest breathing, even, and felt a kind of white shadow, a sliding away into a parallel person, someone made of mind-light who seemed to speak for you.
Or, “You can’t make me do this,” she’d say, running her hand up the seam of my fly, and I’m trying to drive the car.
And once when I was alone for a day and a night, not playing the radio or reading the newspaper and driving around aimlessly for hours, I finally stopped and parked and took a walk in a picnic grounds where there were white-barked trees and garbage cans for food scraps and a man who looked disturbed sitting on a bench, outside Fresno somewhere, but maybe he was only deep in thought, or worried about something, and I felt a sadness I could not exactly locate, a feeling that could have been mine or could have been theirs, the little families with food on paper plates, the unhappy man slouched on the bench, the place itself, the bench itself, the trash cans that didn’t have lids.
I bought a postcard to send her after she went her way and I went mine, a card that showed a picnic table in the trees, and I slipped it in a book inside my bag until I had time to figure out what kind of message I would write.
4
* * *
NOVEMBER 28, 1966
The first man stood by the window of his stately suite at the Waldorf. He watched the yellow cabs sink into soulful dusk, that particular spendthrift light that falls dyingly on Park Avenue in the hour before people take leave of the office and become husbands and wives again, or whatever people become in whatever murmurous words when evenings grow swift and whispered.
The second man sat on the sofa, legs crossed, looking at Bureau reports.
Edgar said, “Of course you packed the masks.”
The second man nodded yes, a gesture that went unseen.
“Junior, the masks.”
“We have them, yes. I’m looking at a security memo that’s a little, actually, rankling.”
“I don’t want to hear it. File it somewhere. I feel too good.”
“Protest. Outside the Plaza tonight.”
“What is it the bastards are protesting? Pray tell,” Edgar said in a tone he’d perfected through the years, a tight amusement etched in eleven kinds of irony.
“The war, it seems.”
“The war.”
“Yes, that,” the second man said.
They were staying at the Waldorf, which was J. Edgar Hoover’s hotel of choice during his sojourns in New York, but the party was taking place, the ball, the fête, the social event of the season, the decade, the half century no doubt—the ball was in the ballroom at the Plaza.
Edgar changed the subject, if only in his mind. He gazed far up Park, where the earth curved toward Harlem. Maybe the deep and fleeting light was making him nostalgic, or the noise perhaps, the muted clamor of taxi horns below, a sound at this protected distance that was oddly and humanly happy, little toots and beeps that seemed to carry a pitch of celebration.
He said, “Where were you when Thomson hit the homer?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Where were you?”
“Yes?”
“Never mind. An idle thought, Junior.”
Clyde Tolson, known as Junior, was Edgar’s staunchest aide in the Bureau, his dearest friend and inseparable companion.
They were getting on, of course. Clyde was five years younger than Edgar but not so sharp as he used to be, his flash-card memory a little less prodigious now. But where Edgar was pug-nosed and compact, with brows like batwings, Clyde was long-jawed and tallish, sort of semidebonaire, a fairly gentle fellow who liked conversation—again, unlike his boss, who thought you gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.
Edgar held a tumbler of scotch. He checked the glass for smudges, then sniffed and sipped, feeling the charred fumes prickle his tongue. The complimentary suite, the soothing booze, the presence of Junior in the room, the party that everybody’d been talking about for months, famous long before it happened, the uninvited lapsing into states of acute confusion, insomniac, unable to function—yes, Edgar was feeling pretty good tonight.
Talkative or not, he loved a good party. He loved celebrities in particular and there would be an abundance of mammal glamour at the Plaza tonight. Personage and flair and stylish wit. A frail schoolboy still crouched inside the Director’s pudgy corpus and this lonely crypto-child came to robust life in the presence of show people and other living icons—child stars, ballplayers, prizefighters, even Hollywood horses and dogs.
Celebrated people were master spirits, men and women who spiked the temper of the age. Whatever Edgar’s own claim to rank and notoriety, he found himself subject to anal flutters when chatting with a genuine celeb.
Clyde said, “And this, of course, as well.”
Edgar did not turn to see what the second man was reading. He studied the carpet instead. The carpets at the Waldorf were thick and lush, nesting grounds for bacteria of every sort. If you knew anything about modern war, you knew that weapons utilizing pathogenic bacteria could be every bit as destructive as megaton bombs. Worse, in a way, because the sense of infiltration was itself a form of death.
Clyde said, “I knew it was a mistake to publicize our methods regarding organized crime figures.”
“What methods?”
“Ransacking their garbage.”
“Makes good copy.”
“And creates a copycat mentality. Now we have a situation that’s a public relations nightmare. To wit, a so-called garbage guerrilla is targeting guess whose garbage, Boss?”
“Please. I’m enjoying my drink. A man enjoys a drink when the day winds down.”
“Yours,” Clyde said.
Edgar could not believe he’d heard the fellow correctly.
“This is what our confidential source tells us.” And Clyde rattled the page he was reading for maximum nuisance effect. “Team of urban guerrillas planning a garbage raid at 4936 Thirtieth Place, Northwest, Washington, D.C.”
It was the end of the world in triplicate.
“When is this supposed to happen?”
“More or less momentarily.”
“You’ve posted guards?”
“In unmarked cars. But whether we arrest them or not, they will find a way to make public theater of your garbage.”
“I won’t put the garbage out.”
“You have to put it out, eventually.”
“I’ll put it out and lock it up.”
“How will the garbage collectors collect it?”
When FBI agents stole off in the night with some mobster’s household trash, they substituted fake garbage, to alla
“Or do this,” Edgar said. “Put out simulated garbage. Bland bits and pieces. Unnewsworthy.”
“We can’t use conventional methods, however clever, on these people. Because what they’re doing flies in the face of ordinary confrontation. And no matter how well-guarded the premises, sooner or later they’ll snatch a trash can and make off with it.”
Edgar walked over to another window. He needed a change, as they say, of scene.
“Confidential source says they intend to take your garbage on tour. Rent halls in major cities. Get lefty sociologists to analyze the garbage item by item. Get hippies to rub it on their naked bodies. More or less have sex with it. Get poets to write poems about it. And finally, in the last city on the tour, they plan to eat it.”
Edgar could see part of the east facade of the Plaza, about a dozen blocks away.
“And expel it,” Clyde said. “Publicly.”
The great slate roof, the gables and dormers and copper cresting. How odd it seemed that such a taken-for-granted thing, putting out the garbage, could suddenly be a source of the gravest anxiety.
“Confidential source says they will make a documentary film of the tour, for general release.”
“Do we have a dossier on these guerrillas?”
“Yes.”
“Is it massive?” Edgar said.
In the endless estuarial mingling of paranoia and control, the dossier was an essential device. Edgar had many enemies-for-life and the way to deal with such people was to compile massive dossiers. Photographs, surveillance reports, detailed allegations, linked names, transcribed tapes—wiretaps, bugs, break-ins. The dossier was a deeper form of truth, transcending facts and actuality. The second you placed an item in the file, a fuzzy photograph, an unfounded rumor, it became promiscuously true. It was a truth without authority and therefore incontestable. Factoids seeped out of the file and crept across the horizon, consuming bodies and minds. The file was everything, the life nothing. And this was the essence of Edgar’s revenge. He rearranged the lives of his enemies, their conversations, their relationships, their very memories, and he made these people answerable to the details of his creation.
“We’ll arrest them and charge them,” Clyde said. “That’s all we can do.”
Edgar turned from the window, smiling.
“Maybe I can sympathize with the Mafia over this.”
Clyde smiled.
“You were always half a gangster,” he said.
They laughed.
“Remember the tommy-guns we carried,” Edgar said.
“When photographers were around.”
They laughed again.
“You were right there alongside me, posed heroically.”
“Edgar and Clyde,” said Clyde.
“Clyde and Edgar,” said Edgar.
Where the current of one’s need for control met the tide of one’s paranoia, this was where the dossier was reciprocally satisfying. You fed both forces in a single stroke.
“I liked the thirties,” Edgar said. “I don’t like the sixties. No, not at all.”
The desk at the end of the room was out of the thirties in a way, equipped with items fashioned to Edgar’s specifications. Two nibbed black pens. Two bottles of Skrip Permanent Royal Blue Ink, No. 52. Six sharpened Eberhard Faber pencils, No. 2. A pair of 5×8 linen-finish writing pads, white. A new 60-watt bulb in the standing lamp. The Director did not want to breathe the dust of old bulbs used to illuminate the reading matter of total strangers. Newspapers, guidebooks, Gideon bibles, erotic literature, subversive literature, underground literature, literature—whatever people read in hotels, alone, thumbing and breathing.
Clyde checked his watch. Dinner first, the two of them, alone, a practice spanning the decades—then the short ride to the Plaza.
It was called the Black & White Ball. A godlike gathering of five hundred, a masked affair, invitation only, dinner jacket and black mask for men, evening gown and white mask for women.
The party was being given by a writer, Truman Capote, for a publisher, Katharine Graham, and the factoidal data generated by the guests would surely bridge the narrowing gap between journalism and fiction.
Edgar had not been invited, initially. But arranging an invitation was not difficult. A word from Edgar to Clyde. A word from Clyde to someone close to Capote. They were in the files of course, a number of those involved in planning the event—all catalogued and dossier’d up to their eyeballs and none of them eager to offend the Director.
Clyde took a call from the desk. The mask lady was coming up for a fitting.
Edgar noticed that Clyde was wearing a necktie with a driblet design. The little figures made him think of paramecia, sinister organisms with gullets and feeding grooves. At home Edgar sat on a toilet that was raised on a platform, to isolate him from floorbound forms of life. And he’d ordered his lab people to build a clean room at the Bureau with unprecedented standards of hygiene. A white room manned by white-clad technicians, preferably white themselves, who would work in an environment completely free of contaminants, dust, bacteria and so on, with big white lights shining down, where Edgar himself might like to spend time when he was feeling vulnerable to the forces around him.
She walked in the door, Tanya Berenger, in a maxidress and thrift shop boots, once a well-known costume designer, now ancient and frowzy, living in a room in a sad hotel off Times Square, a place where the desk clerk sits behind a grille eating a tongue sandwich. People tracked her down, three or four times a year, to do masks for special occasions and she found fairly steady work doing sadomasochistic accessories for a private club in the Village.
The two men, as always with a female in the room, someone they didn’t know, and without others present, and lacking an atmosphere of sociable cheer—well, they tended to become stiff and defensive, as though surprised by an armed intruder.
Clyde did not stray from Edgar’s side, sensing a potential for wayward behavior on the woman’s part. She wore heavy makeup she might have poured from a paint can and cooked. And Clyde noted how one pocket on her dress drooped just a bit, becoming unseamed.
She spoke to Edgar with a sort of rueful affection.
“You know I can’t let you wear one of my masks, dear man, without a consultation. I must put my hands on the living head. Bad enough I had to create my objet from a set of written specifications, like I’m a plumber installing a sink already.”
She had a European accent slashed and burned by long-term residency in New York. And her hair had the retouched gloss of a dead crow mounted on a stick.
Of course Clyde had been briefed on Tanya Berenger. She was in the files in a fairly big way. She’d been accused at various times of being a lesbian, a socialist, a communist, a dope addict, a divorcee, a Jew, a Catholic, a Negro, an immigrant and an unwed mother.
Just about everything Edgar distrusted and feared. But she did exquisite masks and Clyde had been quick to commission her for the job.
He hurried into Edgar’s bedroom and fetched the mask.
When she held it in her hands she looked at Edgar and looked at the mask, weighing the equation, and the Director experienced a queer tension in his chest, wondering whether he was worthy.
She held the object at eye level, six inches from her face, and looked through the eyeholes at Edgar.
And Edgar in turn looked at the mask as if it had a life, an identity of its own that he might feel ballsy enough to borrow for a single midnight on the town.
It was a sleek black leather mask with handlebar extensions and a scatter of shiny sequins around the eyes.
Tanya said, “You want to put it on or have a conversation with it?”
But he wasn’t quite ready.
“Be brave.”
Tanya said, “Leather. It’s so real, you know? Like wearing someone else’s face.”
She fitted the mask over Edgar’s head, the padded band not too tight and the leather alive on his skin.
Then she took him by the shoulders and turned him slowly toward the mirror over the desk.
Clyde took the whiskey glass from his hand.
The mask transformed him. For the first time in some years he did not see himself as a tenant in an old short popover body with an immense and lumpish head.
“I can call you Edgar—this is okay? I can tell you how I see you? I see you as a mature and careful man who has a sexy motorcycle thug writhing to get out. Which the spangles give a crazy twist, you know?”
He felt creamy, dreamy and drugged.
She made a slight adjustment in the fit and even as he cringed at her touch Edgar felt himself tingle thrillingly. She was insidious and corrupt and it was like hearing your grandmother talk dirty in your ear.
“You are a butch biker to me, you know, riding into town to take over leadership of the sadists and necrophiles.”
Clyde watched in civilized alarm as a cockroach crawled out of Tanya’s pocket and moved slowly down her flank. It was Spanish-Harlem-sized, with antennae that could pick up the BBC.
“It’s a lovely fit, darling. You have savage cheekbones for a full-figure man. I would love to do the total face, you know? Highlights and shadows.”
Clyde took her gently by the arm, concealing her roach side from Edgar’s view.
“In fact, shall I tell you something? The ball tonight is a perfect setting for you. Because you are very black and white to me. So you’ll be totally in character, yes?”
When she was gone the men busied themselves with practical preparations. Clyde made dinner reservations and set out their evening clothes. Edgar set the mask on a tabletop and took a bath.
When he was finished he put on his fluffy white robe and stood by a window sipping the rest of his drink. He heard a sound above the beeping traffic, something strident rising in the night. New York was less genial than it used to be when the saloons and supper clubs were hangouts for lively and charming women and for gentlemen-bums with a comic flair.