Walter Groteschele awoke at precisely 5:30 A.M. He did not awake at the sound of an alarm clock and, indeed, he did not even wear a wrist watch. Despite this he was certain of the time. He was awake fully. As he swung out of bed his mind began to block out the day. It was a quick, neat process, something that occupied him only from his bed to the bathroom. By 6:10 he would be showered, shaved, dressed, nourished by one cup of instant coffee, and waiting for the train at Scarsdale. An hour to La Guardia—8:30. An hour to Washington (and his second cup of coffee, at 10,000 feet)—9:30. At the Pentagon by ten minutes to ten.
The checklist was complete. The day was under control.
Groteschele stepped on the bathroom scales—185. He had weighed 165 when he was twenty-one. He knew some men who refused to weigh themselves, were afraid to get the bad news. Groteschele weighed himself every day of his life. As he stepped off the scales he even forced himself to think what the additional fat meant. Face reality, he told himself with a quiet pride. Facing reality was what had gotten him where he was.
As he showered, rubbing his body with a rough natural sponge, he ran over the physical differences between twenty-one and forty-eight. Then he had been lean and muscular. Now there was an overlay of fat about the torso. Not gross, but noticeable in a suit. Softer. Around the waist the flesh was a bulge. Where it showed most was in his neck and face. His collars were usually tight and bit into the flesh, making his face slightly pink. As he shaved he calculated whether or not it would be possible to exercise the fat off. The calculation did not take long.
He did not have time for exercise.
Only once during his five-stage (car, train, taxi, plane, taxi) trip from Scarsdale to Washington did Groteschele’s mind relax and think of anything except the briefing he would present. It was in the taxicab from Grand Central to La Guardia. There was something about the luxury of a taxicab, to ride alone while others rode in buses, that made Groteschele think of his youth. Briefly he permitted himself the luxury of letting his mind wander.
Groteschele’s father was a tough, brilliant, and hard-working physician, a highly skilled surgeon. He was also a Jew, unfortunately in Germany. Early in the 1930s he had seen what was coming. He had argued with other Jews in his native Hamburg that there were only two alternatives: arm and fight, or leave Germany. The great majority of his friends and relatives, anchored by their possessions and inured to the prospect of suffering, stayed in Germany. Many of them died in gas ovens.
Walter Groteschele was fifteen when his father abandoned his medical practice and moved from Hamburg, via London and New York, to Cincinnati. Before his father could practice medicine in America it was required that he take two years of residency and pass a series of examinations. He was never able to get enough money ahead to do the two years’ residency. Emil Groteschele worked first as a ditchdigger for a utilities company. He could not, however, stand the calluses and the coarsening of his surgeon’s hands. Eventually he wound up as a butcher in a kosher butcher shop. This was an irony, for Emil Groteschele was a Reform Jew and anything but devout. But the work did allow him to use his hands in somewhat the fashion for which they had been exquisitely trained.
Emil Groteschele was not an embittered man. He had understood clearly what his prospects were when he left Berlin. He was saving his life and the lives of his family. Nothing more. One of the few times that his son had seen him angry was when the subject of the Diary of Anne Frank came up. Emil Groteschele had offended the Jews of Cincinnati by arguing that Anne Frank and her family had acted like imbeciles. Rather than hiding in an attic and clutching their Jewishness to them they should have made plans to escape. Failing that, they should have been prepared to fight the Nazis when the final day came. “The steps leading up to that miserable attic should have been red with Nazi blood—and that of the Frank family,” Dr. Groteschele argued bitterly.
“If each Jew in Germany had been prepared to take one SS trooper with him before he was sent to the camps and the gas ovens, precious few Jews would have been arrested,” Emil Groteschele argued. “At some point Hitler and the SS would have stopped. Face it. If every Jew who was arrested had walked to the door with a pistol in his hand and started shooting at the local heroes, how long would the Nazis have kept it up? At around a few hundred they would have started to think twice. At a few thousand they would have started to shake a bit. If it got to twenty thousand, they would have called it off. But the first Jews who shuffled quietly off to death camps or hid like mice in attics were instruments of destruction of the rest.”
Groteschele knew that his father considered all of life a battle. He was a complete Darwinian; so much so that he never expressed self-pity for his fall from master surgeon to journeyman butcher.
“It’s a new environment. I’m not as efficient as the Americans,” the muscular determined man said in a pitiless voice, as if he were talking of someone else. “The American was bred for this environment; the weak ones disappeared long ago. I was bred for a softer environment: Jewish ladies with too much fat, rabbis with ulcers, people who ate too much sour cream, lox, matzoth balls.” He stared at his son. “Every group protects itself, just as the individual does. Don’t waste time whining. Be good enough to get into the group you want.”
His son had taken the advice seriously. He attacked knowledge as if it were an enemy. By the time he was a senior he had won every academic honor in the Cincinnati public schools.
When Groteschele went off to a small Ohio college he had three separate scholarships and not the slightest notion of what he wanted to study. His first year he took liberal-arts courses and studied his classmates. It was reassuring. They were uncertainly motivated, pleasant, anxious about dates, inattentive to lectures, obsessed with material objects—cashmere sweaters, convertibles, record players, stolen college banners. They were the new Jews, Groteschele thought, binding themselves with the invisible links of possessions, but they lacked the drive and ability to absorb punishment that the real Jew had.
Groteschele majored in mathematics. He went about making the choice systematically. He learned nothing from talking to his classmates. Instead he sought out the brightest professors on the campus and questioned them. He pushed them on what American industry would be like in five years. Their advice was unanimous. The nation would be at war or finishing a war and science would be going through a new surge of progress. It would be sparked by mathematics. He was a Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and summa cum laude at graduation; and did not, literally, know the names of more than a dozen of his classmates.
Before Groteschele could find a job, waves of Japanese planes swept over Pearl Harbor and changed all of our lives. By now Groteschele had developed a prescience, a hard intuition, about what would happen in the future. He did it by the elimination of hopes and the substitution of the calculation of realities. He applied his father’s Darwinism in a methodical and tough manner. He was no Cassandra but he tended always to look carefully and cautiously at where he would be in five years and to move with what was inevitable. His calculation led him to volunteer at once for military duty.
He was selected for OCS and when he finished he was assigned to a group of officers who interviewed German prisoners as part of their processing before being sent to POW camps throughout the country.
At first the job had a delicious undertone of vengeance to it and Groteschele did not deny this to himself. Day after day the men who had bullied Jews in the comfortable little towns of Germany, had swaggered in their party uniforms, had roared and lusted for war, now paraded in front of him. They were bitter-eyed, frightened, uncertain, homesick. Groteschele found them a disappointment and he was surprised at his own reaction.
After a few weeks the interviewing became dull. It was impossible to stay angry at lines of potato-fat men with vacuous eyes who were slack and weary from the Atlantic crossing, who always whined their ignorance of concentration camps. “Konzentration camps, ach nein, Herr Leutnant,” eyes bulging with fake surprise. “Impossible. I never heard of it.” And then the inevitable statement about being a little man, a man in the ranks, a man who carried out orders, a man who did his duty, a man who was secretly anti-Nazi.
After a few months Groteschele, because of his skill in German, was able to get himself transferred to the section which interviewed SS troopers. These interviews were longer, more concentrated, more meaningful. The interviewing officer could, in fact, question an SS man as long as he wished. Groteschele always guided the conversation to the Jewish question. The SS men stared back at him, unafraid and their faces expressionless, and said, “Rabbits. The Jews are like rabbits, but without the speed of a rabbit.” Always it was a rabbit or an undernourished rat or a mouse to which they compared the Jews.
It was during this time that Groteschele found himself trimming off excess weight and taking daily exercises. Finally he was doing hours of barbell exercises, pushups, and road-work every day. He became as physically tough as the SS troopers, his belly as flat, his face as expressionless. Always, just before the interview was over, Groteschele let slip the fact that he was a Jew. Never as a direct admission, always slyly and as if the prisoner had known from the start.
It was the only thing that made the SS troopers crack, even a little. They would stare at Groteschele’s well-muscled body, his inscrutable face, his hard eyes. Then, for a moment in time, Groteschele could see fear in their eyes. It was gone instantly, the eyes shut, the expression lost. But it was enough for Groteschele. They had seen a different kind of Jew and it frightened them.
By the time the war was over Groteschele had developed a new interest. It was the study of politics. Americans had mastered technology and the scientist would continue to be a hero for some time. But the real decisions, the real power would lie with those who understood politics. Competence in politics would be the ultimate sanctuary, although partisan elective politics would be as volatile as ever. He must, he reasoned, be an expert in politics but not subject to popular opinion. He calculated that with the GI Bill and the money he had saved he would be able to get a Ph.D. at an Ivy League college and still be a few thousand dollars ahead.
His father had only one piece of advice. “If you are going to become a professor change your name to Groth,” he said. “American universities have too many German Jews. They will lose their tolerance for them.”
Groteschele had not changed his name. It was the first time he had rejected his father’s advice, but now he was surer than his father about some things: the character of Americans, for instance, and the favorable attitude toward the Jewish intellectual in the academic world. This did not mean that he was insensitive to names. In fact he found them fascinating. He had, for example, noticed that his name was considered by most to be German and he knew that his appearance was not distinctively Jewish. He considered the possibility that he might even suffer somewhat from anti-German feeling, but he also remembered the guilty conscience which Americans had had over their anti-Germanism after World War I. All in all, when everything was added up, he calculated that he would benefit by sticking with his name and identity.
Once this decision was made the plan was simple. He knew that it would take some luck, but he was also determined to do everything possible to minimize the importance of that element.
The first thing was to become a protégé of Tolliver.
Groteschele sensed that Tolliver had en ego of formidable proportions. This was what led him to work in the area of great sweeping diplomatic moves, intricate military strategies, and it was also what led him to an instantaneous and ferocious defense of his views.
For the first year in graduate school Groteschele made no move toward Tolliver. He sat quietly in his classes and read every book and article the man had written. He watched the other graduate students as they slowly learned of the pitfalls and terrors of the academic world. By the end of the first year none of them regarded it as “the ivory tower” any more. By then they had learned it was more like Kafka’s Castle: a place of enormous tension, the scene of ununderstood conspiracies, a place of stalking and frantic flight from an unseen enemy. Groteschele watched some of the others break and remained impassive. Groteschele was certain that he would not be one of those who broke. He had been prepared for the fact that the big beautiful buildings and the book-lined studies and the quiet seminar rooms would really be scenes of battle.
At the end of the first year Groteschele’s chance came. Tolliver published a book called Models for the Future War. The title had been a mistake. It suggested that Tolliver was, somehow, advocating war. The reviews of the book were generally negative, some of them scathing. Groteschele read the reviews carefully. Finally he found one in a liberal monthly in which it was clear that the author had not read the whole book but had skimmed the first few chapters and then used that much as a platform to expound his own theories about “the rising tide of militarism.”
Groteschele wrote a 2,000-word letter to the magazine. It was a model of careful and biting analysis. The editor of the monthly, in a spasm of regret, sent Groteschele a check for $25 and published the letter as an article.
Groteschele wisely did not send Tolliver a copy of the article, but inevitably Tolliver read it. He never thanked Groteschele for the article, in fact, he never mentioned it. But in his second year of graduate work, Groteschele received a written invitation from Tolliver to be his research assistant. Groteschele never worked so hard in his life. His eyes constantly burned from reading in bad library light. He had no time for exercise and could feel his body go slack, the fat start to gather, the hard muscularity he had liked disappear.
Carefully and patiently Groteschele read all of the memos which Tolliver, as a long-time consultant to the Pentagon, received from Washington. By studying the memos and by careful questioning of Tolliver, Groteschele found what he wanted: a public gap in American military thought. Stretching over a generation, the notion had arisen that America would never start a war. Even the most hardened of the military people cautiously skirted around this question. As a result a mood had grown up which made a discussion of America striking first impossible. A few officers had mentioned it in “off-the-record” briefings and had promptly been branded warmongers and their careers carefully altered so that they disappeared from the public eye. Even among themselves the military had developed a theory and lexicon and strategy which always skirted the idea of the United States starting a war.
In his Ph.D. dissertation Groteschele attacked this taboo. He provided a respectable language and theory within which the “first strike” or “preemptive war” could be discussed. The name of the dissertation was The Theory of Counter-Escalation Postures in a Thermonuclear World. He gave Tolliver five copies of the first draft of the dissertation. Tolliver knew why he had received extra copies. He sent them along to Washington.
Groteschele curbed his hopes. He knew the copies of the dissertation might well disappear in the labyrinths of Washington. Or the central idea might be attacked by a powerful person, or, even more damaging, be dismissed as trivial or nutty. But his luck held. One day the phone call came.
“Dr. Groteschele, this is Colonel Stark of the Air Force in the Pentagon,” a calm voice said. “We have read your dissertation with great interest and wonder when you can come to Washington to discuss it.”
Technically Groteschele was not yet a Ph.D., but he sensed this was not the time to point out that fact.
“Colonel Stark, my schedule is fairly full for the next five or six days,” Groteschele said cautiously. “Maybe some time next week.”
Stark cut in abruptly. There was an edge of irritation in his voice, but there was also something of respect.
“Doctor, down here we consider this rather urgent,” Colonel Stark said. “After all, the security of the country is involved.”
“Can you schedule the meeting for tomorrow afternoon?” Groteschele asked abruptly.
The colonel could and did. That afternoon meeting was not easy. For the first time since the captured SS troopers had made the remarks about Jews being like rabbits, Groteschele felt isolated. He was seated at the end of a long table. The other seats were occupied by six generals, five colonels, four civilians, and a secretary who was operating a Stenotype machine. Groteschele glanced at Stark. Stark’s face was completely expressionless. Groteschele did not bother to look at the others. He knew that none of them were yet committed.
Quite suddenly Groteschele lost his nerve. The whole situation was preposterous. He was only a student who had once been an Army lieutenant and he was talking to professionals who had devoted their lives to the conduct and strategy of war. He sensed that he was about to make a fool of himself. Quickly, and with the telescopic capacity of the tragic moment, he saw the rest of his life. He would slide, slide, slide, always downward. He smiled woodenly down the table as he calculated where he would end, what the academic equivalent of his father’s butcher-shop job would be. He would be a grade-school teacher to a bunch of idiot children.
With a terrible self-hatred he was aware of how he had physically declined, was no longer taut and trim. To them, these men of power and elegance around the table, he must look like a fattening, white-grub academic. He looked at Stark, started to ask to be excused.
“Excuse me, Colonel Stark,” Groteschele said and then paused. To his astonishment his voice came out cold and steady, without a tremor. His mouth was dry, his mind a shambles, his fingers had a quiver—but his voice was rock-hard. The decision was made for him. He would read the paper just as he had written it, using the one physical attribute that was still in control: his voice. Later, reading, he realized that his paper was a wild gamble. He reviewed alternative theories of modern thermonuclear war and, with all the deliberateness of a machine gunner, shredded them to pieces. Inevitably he must be damaging some of the men in the room. The knowledge made his fingers tremble even more. His mouth went cottony, but somehow the words continued to pour out with even more control. When he finished his review of “obsolete alternatives” he sensed that he had probably bruised every man in the room. There was nothing to do but go on.
When he came to his own theory his voice became sharper, more incisive, although the words were more ambiguous. Without smiling, using his new vocabulary, he presented the alternative of the United States striking first. However, he never quite used those words. He took the people around the table to the edge of the abyss, forced them to look over the edge. Then, his language still cold, he described a situation in which the abyss was not threatening, but was in fact a magnificent and glowing opportunity. The whole presentation took one hour and ten minutes. He was not interrupted once.
When he had finished and had squared his papers in front of him on the table Groteschele stared straight ahead.
The first person to speak was an elderly, white-haired man in uniform at the far end of the table. He had a deep and authoritative voice that emanated from a face made of leather, and four stars decorated each shoulder. Groteschele had not noticed him before, but sensed at once that he was the senior officer in the room. He was, in fact, in charge of strategic plans for the Air Force and had deliberately not identified himself with any single point of view. Ruthless on weak logic and thin evidence, he had the reputation of listening with an open mind to any proposal that was sensibly presented.
“Dr. Groteschele, speaking for myself only, I congratulate you on an extremely clear and lucid presentation of a complex problem,” the general said. The general looked at his hands, smiled, and went on. “Your alternative is a difficult one. I believe it might be the right one. At the least it should be thoroughly discussed.”
Groteschele relaxed. He was safe. He hardly heard the other voices as they murmured various reasons for approving Groteschele’s paper.
When the briefing broke up, Stark invited him to dinner. Groteschele smiled, aware that the invitation had come after the briefing rather than before. He accepted. The dinner was small, but Groteschele knew that the men there were powerful. And he was the prize, the sought-after expert. Eyes turned to see him when he spoke. Others broke off their conversations to listen.
“My God, did you hear the Old Man say that Dr. Groteschele might have ‘the right one’?” Colonel Stark said. “That’s the closest he has ever come to a commitment.”
They stared at Groteschele. He did not smile. Calmly he went on to describe some of the implications of his position.
That had been the start.
Soon he was practically commuting to Washington. Conference followed conference. Discussion papers appeared at regular intervals. Each trip, each conference, gave Groteschele access to new and valuable information. He was cleared for access to top-secret material. He had free communications with the experts working on the fantastic frontiers of defense developments.
His doctoral dissertation was published under the title Counter-Escalation. It was instantly reviewed by Hanson Baldwin in The New York Times Sunday book-review section, and was the lead. Walter Millis reviewed it for the Herald Tribune. For a book of its type it sold very well, over 35,000 copies. Its reputation spread everywhere. Liberal journals attacked the book. A pacifist group burned it in Marin County, California, and then had second thoughts about book-burning and apologized to a nonlistening public. The book was discussed on two national television panel shows. People who had never read it had violent opinions about it.
With a speed that startled him he now became a public personage outside the defense and academic communities. He analyzed the reasons for his success and finally satisfied himself. There was a morbidity about his subject matter which somehow flowed over onto Groteschele and gave him an aura. He was extremely careful never to discuss classified information in public, but even so he could draw a picture of how the United States would look after a thermonuclear first strike, the awful seductions of surrender, the number of children who would suffer malignant genetic defects from radioactivity. Looking coolly at a room full of people he would tell them how many decades it would take the survivors of a thermonuclear war to regain the standard of living of medieval days. He could see the audience stiffen, tongues licking at the corners of their mouths, the signs of nervousness and fascination multiply.
Groteschele knew that he was regarded as a magician. The awesome powers on which he was expert, the facts of life and death and survival, the new cabalistic language of the nuclear philosophers and high scientists of physics, were merely matters of fact. But the layman, the rich socialite, the industrialist, the politician, endowed Groteschele with control of the things he described.
The attention and the flattery were deeply pleasing to Groteschele. He did not disguise the fact from himself. He handled the incidental aspects of fame easily. There was more money, lots more money, and Groteschele turned it over to an expert business manager. He learned to dictate into portable dictating machines while riding taxicabs or airplanes. He learned that it was dangerous to get drunk the night before an important meeting. He became a consultant to various foundations and business firms, but selected them with great care. He wanted nothing to impair his relationship to the Federal government, for he knew full well that his status in Washington and the information which he obtained there were the sources of his power. Groteschele went through three different administrations without threat. Many of the high military officers and policy-makers did not agree with him, but he was a valuable commodity. He was an innovator, a barb, an egghead with a steel-trap mind, and even those who disagreed with him violently knew they were dutybound to consider the alternatives which his thinking produced.
Groteschele had been, after the success of his book, besieged by academic offers. He evaluated them very carefully. He finally chose a distinguished university close to Washington which agreed to give him half-time duties for a single semester, but to pay him a full salary. The university also had bought a commodity, a name, a reputation, and knew it.
***
So much had changed for Groteschele so quickly. He thought briefly of his relationship with women. He was not handsome or attractive sexually, and he never had been. He had always explained it to himself by saying that women who were otherwise attracted to him were repelled by his mind. But this, too, had changed. When he walked down the long corridors of the Pentagon, groups of secretaries stared at him with tight little fascinated smiles. He nodded but did not speak. To his surprise, brilliant and beautiful women sought him out. If he wanted, so it seemed, he had only to stand still at a cocktail party, scan the women speculatively, settle on one… and then let the situation develop at the woman’s initiative. The course often led him to her bed.
Groteschele was married and had a fifteen-year-old daughter. Wife and daughter were strangely identical: slight, nervous, possessed of a thin prettiness. His daughter was a brilliant student and it was her academic record which Groteschele found most attractive about her. Like the wives of many busy and successful men, his wife had faded away into a cool domestic haze. He had married her in Cincinnati years ago and at the time she had had the freshness of youth and it had seemed an appropriate union. Groteschele never took her on trips and when he was home their conversations were brief and perfunctory. She sensed that his sexual life was extramarital, but the knowledge gave her relief. She had never really enjoyed sex, and after Counter-Escalation there had been something about her husband’s sexual behavior which disturbed her. She felt ravished and quite impersonal even when locked together with him—as if she were nameless to him, an anonymous figure upon whom he exploded a deep rage. She tried to convince herself it was passion, but knew it was not.
Passion had recently led Groteschele to an experience that shocked him profoundly in that it revealed so starkly the wellsprings of his power. It had started at one of those frequent off-the-record discussions with a group of high-level businessmen and political leaders. This one had been in Washington, the Metropolitan Club. Only a highly selected group were present that evening, about twenty-five men and women altogether. During drinks, one woman had stood out. Elegant, slim and lithe, she was a woman from a world he did not know. He sensed that she had a competence with men that had become almost arrogance. He had seen a few others like her. They gave off the subtle signs of wealth, family background, education and boredom. It was like a number of elegant odors in the air. It also had something to do with the smile: such women smiled infrequently and never at women. When they smiled at a man it was like a congratulatory handshake; it had nothing of the simper or of the coquette in it. Men for such women were not a diversion, they were a necessity. Groteschele sensed this and felt somehow threatened. He avoided such women.
The speech went well. It was a variation of the same one he gave them all. They never wanted to hear anything new, they just wanted to hear it from him. Afterward, over more drinks, little groups came up to present pet arguments. He looked around the room, wondering when they would start to break up. No sign yet. He could not leave too early. Part of his $750 fee involved just this sort of boredom. There was a slight tug at his elbow. He turned around. It was his hostess and just to the side the woman, the elegant one.
“Evelyn, this is Walter Groteschele, our famous guest; Evelyn Wolfe. Evelyn has been dying to meet you. She’s made me promise to take a small group to a bar so she can hear you at closer range,” the hostess said, and fled.
“She overdid it a bit, but I would like to talk to you,” Evelyn Wolfe said.
Eight of them wound up in one of those countless chic hotel bars of Washington. Evelyn Wolfe sat next to Groteschele and in a few moments he had the bewildering sensation that they had somehow been cut off from the others at the corner table, almost as if some barrier to sound had been drawn around him and Evelyn Wolfe. Groteschele slowly began to realize that this was an extraordinarily attractive woman. She was intelligent, she was poised, mannered, informed, and intense, but he had met at least a score of women that possessed these qualities. What she possessed in addition was a kind of burning intensity, a hard focusing of all of her emotions on some undefined objective. She did not converse. She aimed at a target. By the time they had had four scotch and waters Groteschele realized that the target was himself. Normally he would have been flattered. But this time he felt a slight shiver of apprehension. This woman had an almost cobra-like manner of following what he said. Her beautifully coifed head, her face marred only by a mouth that was too small, actually wove back and forth with slight undulations as Groteschele talked about war games, the strategy of surrender, megatons, and Doomsday systems.
Most people, especially women, listened to Groteschele’s description of American and Soviet tactics with a kind of unconcealed look of either bafflement or horror. Groteschele could not make out the look on Evelyn Wolfe’s face. He only knew that her concentration was enormous. She spoke very little. When he described the Doomsday system, hinting that it was semiclassified, she closed her eyes for a moment and a slight smile started at the corners of her mouth.
Just that single word unaccompanied by an expression of horror or astonishment or dismay. For a moment Groteschele’s careful poise was broken. He went on automatically talking about the likeliest survivors of an all-out thermonuclear war, his way of giving a droll ending to his macabre description, of letting people down easily. They would be the most hardened of convicts, those in solitary confinement. Another group likely to survive would be file clerks for large insurance companies, because they would be housed in fireproofed rooms and insulated by tons of the best insulator in the world, paper.
“Then, my dear Miss Wolfe, imagine what will happen,” Groteschele said, feeling himself regaining his poise. “The small group of hardened criminals and the army of file clerks will war with one another for the remaining means of life. The convicts will have a monopoly of violence, but the file clerks will have a monopoly of organization. Who do you think will win?”
Evelyn Wolfe looked straight at Groteschele. Then she shook her head. Groteschele was confused.
“I would like you to take me home now,” Evelyn Wolfe said, and she was up on her feet and into her mink coat before he responded. She did not say good-bye to the rest of the group, but they all looked up as she and Groteschele left.
They were in Groteschele’s car and three blocks from the bar before Evelyn Wolfe spoke.
“You were being mischievous about the war between the convicts and the file clerks,” she said, leaning her head back against the seat. “In fact, you know that no one will survive the Doomsday system. That is the beauty of the whole thing.”
“No one, Miss Wolfe, has ever called it beautiful before,” Groteschele said with a laugh.
“They have been afraid to,” she said. “But that is what they feel.”
“You mean that everyone is possessed by the death-wish?” Groteschele asked in his best professorial manner.
“No, damn it, don’t be so deliberately stupid,” she said sharply. “Everyone knows they are going to die. What makes you fascinating and what makes your subject fascinating is that it involves the death of so many people. Quite literally everyone on earth.” She paused a moment and then spoke savagely. “Damn it, I wish I were a man and a man who could push the button. I would not push it, you understand that. But the knowledge that I could.” She shivered in her mink coat.
As Groteschele turned off of Massachusetts Avenue and threaded through Rock Creek Park, he felt a sudden hard understanding cross his mind. It was not he, Groteschele, the physical man, who was attractive to women. It was Groteschele, the magic man, the man who understood the universe, the man who knew how and when the button would be pushed. He was a master of death and somehow that gave him potency.
“Why wouldn’t you push it?” Groteschele asked softly. “There it sits. More power in that button than anyone in all time has ever possessed. But it’s never used until you push the button. Why not push it?”
“Because I would die along with everyone else,” Evelyn Wolfe said.
Her voice came to a queer faltering halt. Groteschele felt a very deep excitement.
“That is one statement you do not really believe,” he said with authority. “Do you think that life is the most important thing to a person? You don’t think it for a moment. You know I don’t. I can name a dozen ways of living to which you would prefer death.”
She was leaning back against the seat, her eyes closed, the lacquer of sophistication dissolved from her face. She looked curiously young. Like a hungry young girl.
“Go on,” she said. It was the first time that night she had implored him.
“Knowing you have to die, imagine how fantastic and magical it would be to have the power to take everyone else with you,” Groteschele said, spinning out what he had never said to himself. “The swarms of them out there, the untold billions of them, the ignorant masses of them, the beautiful ones, the artful ones, the friends, the enemies… all of them and their plans and hopes. And they are murderees: born to be murdered and don’t know it. And the person with his finger on the button is the one who knows and who can do it.”
The sound Evelyn Wolfe made was not a moan. It was the sound of wonderment that a child makes… even if the child sees cruelty.
“Stop in one of those little side roads,” Evelyn Wolfe ordered.
Groteschele obeyed.
The moment that he turned off the motor her neat trim head struck at him. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before. She kissed him violently and then whispered words in his ear at the same time that her hands moved over his body. In one way he felt raped, attacked by someone stronger than himself. At the same time her words were words of the most extreme submission, bringing out every bullish impulse in his body.
He never recalled perfectly his feelings. It was too quick a mixture of self-revelation, of shame, of wonderful obscenity, of feeling a child under his hands and knowing she was a woman, of her words ending and her hoarse breathing beginning, of a savage pride that his softening body was capable of so much, of all this happening in the little universe ringed round by gearshift and leather seats and instrument panel, of soft little hands that arched into claws, of the sound of cloth ripping, of expensive perfumes mixed with the smell of her, and, chiefly, that this was a complete surrender.
When finally he placed her small body in the corner of the car he knew she was satisfied. But he was wrong. Her eyes still glittered and she came back across the seat at him. She took his hand and raised it to her lips. She kissed the palm of his hand and then taking his little finger in her mouth she softly sucked it and then bit it so sharply that he jerked.
Suddenly, in a way from which he had always protected himself, Groteschele realized that in his own person, convoluted and intertwined, were two knowledges of death. In one way, the public way, he was a respectable high priest of civic death. This dialogue he had raised from a secretive conversation to a respectable art. It was a game at which he was exquisite. Almost by his own single-mindedness and wit he had introduced to a whole society the idea that a calm and dispassionate and logical discussion of collective death was an entertainment. By refinements and logical innovation he had made municipal death a form of style and a way of life.
But now, with his body aching and sweat soiling his shirt, he realized that in him there was also a personal beast of death. He realized that he had always feared women because in each of them there was the buried but inextinguishable desire to love a man to death. Evelyn Wolfe was simply more obvious and direct about it than the others. She would, without mercy and as if it were her due, draw the energy and juices and fluids and substance from his body through the inexhaustible demands of pure sex.
Groteschele realized that he had never in his life distinguished between sex and love. And now it was too late.
He pulled his hand away from Evelyn Wolfe’s mouth, started the car, and, accelerating wildly, shot through Rock Creek Park. He roared a single great peal of laughter as the car left the park. The black internal beast of death he would never recognize again. And he would not have to, for he had the other great and public death as his amulet. It was enough for any man. And it was more than most had ever had.
When they got to Evelyn Wolfe’s house, she leaned toward him and invited him in. He reached over and gave her a short savage slap across her open mouth. She did not recoil, she did not cry, she did not even move. She simply sat silently for a moment, her eyes crystalline with a sense of loss. She waited a full fifteen seconds and then opened the door and walked firmly up to her house.
***
At ten minutes to ten, Groteschele entered the Pentagon without haste or any sign either that he had exerted himself to get there or that he worried about what lay ahead. In the four hours and twenty minutes that he had been awake, he had organized the briefing he would give that day, anticipated the reactions of certain secretaries and generals, and decided upon the arguments he would hold in reserve to counter their possible challenges.
It was going to be a more than usually satisfying day.