Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn Read online

  "For God sakes, help me," he shouted again, his voice suddenly lost in the din of movement as the noise of the street resumed. He tried hanging onto a moving car, releasing his grip when it accelerated, and falling backward only to be stopped in mid-fall by another car. He knew that it would be only a few seconds more before the boy's knifepoint would find him again. He had begun to feel the pain from the first wound, and a spreading bloodstain added terror to his nightmare.

  Still plunging frantically among the cs, he was aware of questions forming beyond the panic. Why was he trying so hard to survive? Why should he expect help? Maybe, after all, he deserved the execution.

  He could feel his strength ebbing. He would stop moving and wait for the knife to find some vulnerable organ and pick the life from him. Suddenly he was out of the street and stumbling toward a barbershop around which a group of black men huddled. They made way for him as he panted across the sidewalk and reached for the doorway. He gripped the doorknob and turned. Locked. He saw it all quickly, the flicking of the latch, the pulling of the shade, the dead end. He backed into the storefront, looked down at the dirty tiles at his feet, and sank into a sitting position.

  The boy was standing over him, knife poised, the sweat pouring from his face.

  "Muvvafucka," he screeched, like some repetitive cry of a jungle bird. "Muvvafucka."

  Sully wondered if, perhaps, he could remember the litany of the last rites. "To hell with it," he whispered. There was no flashing of his life before his eyes, no history, no nobility.

  But the blow did not come. One of the black men had flicked the knife out of the boy's hands.

  "Get yo ass outa here," he heard someone say, and, looking up, he saw the boy was gone. He sat for a few minutes more.

  The door latch clicked open, the shade was raised, the black men began to mingle again, and all was as before.

  "Go home, old man," someone said. He tried to raise himself. A gnarled black hand reached out; he grabbed it, let it lift him. A wave of nausea engulfed him. He started unsteadily down the street, every step a chore. Brushing against a garbage can, he peered into it and vomited.

  ———— *13* ARAM felt himself slithering upward through oozing lubricity into semiwakefulness. He knew instantly that he was emerging out of one of those rare natural deep sleeps that occur only when the

  brain decides to roll itself into a cocoon.

  Enhancing his sense of well-being were all the exquisite sensations of full sexual consciousness. He was in full erection, and Sandra was caressing his penis with tongue and hair and fingers in expert, languorous movements. He dared not open his eyes but let himself succumb instead to the delicately structured joy of this spontaneity. He signaled his wakefulness by a rising movement of his pelvis as he lifted his hard penis into a deep penetration of her mouth.

  There was a strong oral letch in Sandra's nature that gave a special novelty to their sex lives, especially when it gripped her with its full force. Aram knew its power and the requirement that he fully surrender to it, knowing, too, that he must let it run its full course, without activity on his part until she had induced him to a kind of orgasmic hysteria that would set off her own very powerful multiple response.

  Her enthusiasm for the process and the expertness that came from her special feelings about it had intimidated him in the early years of their relationship. Later, after they talked about it and he accepted its importance to her, it became a ritualized necessity, almost a proof of her interest in him, one of the many measures of his security in their relationship.

  Yet he was not entirely secure. Her money, of course, was still intimidating.

  "It's there, let's use it," she had said when they first talked of his going into politics.

  "It makes me feel helpless," he argued. "I know it's my own hang-up."

  "We could waste it, but we're not going to. We're going to use it on meaningful things. Your future in politics could be meaningful."

  He hated that word. It seemed such a relative term, since the things that were meaningful to her were not quite as meaningful to him.

  "Money without power is shit," she told him.

  "Money is power."

  "Powerful. I'm talking about political power."

  "You sound like Alby."

  "Alby knows. Political power plus the money. That's real power. To do od. To help people. The helpless and disenfranchised need people like us, Aram. People who care. We have the means to pull it off, Aram. My money can help at least to begin the process."

  "And me?"

  "You?" She looked at him always with a special kind of bemused wonder. "You are a gift. You have a gift. The ability to move people. Make people like you instantly, without any effort."

  "I'm not as special as you think." He really did not see himself as special, and he cursed himself for that. "Why the hell do I always feel so fucking inadequate?"

  He always asked that rhetorical question, half hoping that she would answer, with irrevocable forcefulness, "Because you _are_ inadequate, you dumb Armenian bastard." Instead, she said nothing.

  Sandra was growing more passionate, salivating and moaning with pleasure, and he was drawn back to the present. He reached down and caressed her hair, her face, her ears. She moaned again, in response, and he opened his eyes and watched her sliding her mouth up and down on his shining penis. Her eyes were closed as she lavished the full power of her sexuality on it.

  She removed her mouth from his penis and began to titillate the underside with her tongue, instinctively pursuing the final stage. Reaching the tip again, she brought it again deep into her mouth and began the final pumping stage that would bring him to climax. He felt the intense pleasure of her actions, and then he felt the orgasm lift and the twitching of his organ as he spurted the semen into her mouth. She moaned with pleasure as she enjoyed the force of her own climax. He watched her in its throes, a mystic force beyond his experience.

  The afterglow was always a special moment for them, a coming together of the mind. Their healthy bodies relaxed now, the tensions dissipated. It was seven A.M., and the grayness around the blinds indicated that the day would not be bright with sunlight. But since they both were morning people, this time of day was still their moment, a time for languorous drifting and sleepy partial conversations, a time for quiet ruminations, individually and together. After a while Sandra spoke.

  "I have great plans, Aram. Great plans for us."

  "I know."

  "Do you think I'm an ambitious bitch?"

  "Yes."

  "It's important to me to be important."

  "I know."

  "We could change things. That's something."

  "I suppose."

  "I see us in a big house, Georgetown surely. We'll entertain. Ambassadors, Senators, powerful people. We'll get into the power stream, the main tributary. We can do it, Aram. It only takes guts and money. We could pull it off. Together."

  "First things first. We've got to beat Sullivan."

  "We'll beat him."

  "What makes you so sure?" But now there was only silence from Sandra.

  Aram knew the answer. All the stops were out. Alby's calculating, methodical planning. Sandra's money. Was he really needed? Couldn't they do it with anyone? Hadn't Alby said that all it takes is money, lots of money well spent?

  It had begun with an errant thought launched by Alby into the air like a blown feather, to ride the eddies. It had begun that casually, a chance item in a sea of banalities. But Alby knew immediately that it had reached a receptiveness. It was a probe with possibilities.

  "Me run for Congress?"

  "You can win."

  Silence.

  "You can win," Alby repeated with growing certainty.

  Aram had taken some satisfaction in pursuing the law as a career. His firm had been good to him, especially when part of his mother-in-law's business had been brought to the firm. He had become a full partner and could look forward to the emoluments and prestige that w
ere associated with prosperous lawyers.

  But something had been missing. He had discussed it with Sandra. Being wealthy and middle-class left something to be desired. It was a kind of bottomless void, where the mind floated in a pleasant vacuum, moving listlessly from nowhere tnowhere. No matter how much he looked backward to that place from which he had come, it was still not enough. Sandra was also vulnerable.

  She had always itched for more, had been through the traditional rebellions of rich Jewish girls until she finally perceived that the thing from which she had been running, money, was in the end the thing that could bring about her salvation. Money was, after all, a means.

  So Alby's errant thought was a match to dry timber.

  "Sullivan is not only vulnerable, he's an irrelevancy," Alby had argued. "There's no political infrastructure. The district is in disarray and may take years to reform. You'll slide in during the transitional period."

  "Why couldn't I start less ambitiously? Assemblyman. State senator. Why Congress?"

  "The size of the stage is what matters, and there's a big one available."

  "I'm an unknown. I'd have no chance."

  "With your wife's money, your chances are superb."

  "How much will it cost?" he asked.

  "At the outside … two hundred thousand dollars."

  "It's no problem, Aram," Sandra interjected. "We could do it."

  Aram had, of course, given it time to sink in, mulled it, turned it over in his mind. But Sandra would not let it die.

  "What can you lose?"

  One night they met Alby for dinner at a restaurant. As soon as their drinks were ordered, Alby handed Aram an envelope.

  "Read it," he said. "It's a confidential report on Sullivan. He's a moral disaster. His personal life's in shambles. He's a deadbeat. Doesn't pay a bill. His son's queer. He's living with his secretary. He drinks too much. A man with those pressures can be defeated. Especially in the district he claims to represent. He's not black or Puerto Rican. His base is totally eroded."

  "I'm not either, if you haven't noticed."

  Alby ignored the comment. "It's an interim stage for you. A watershed. You've got maybe two terms."

  "And then?"

  "The Senate. Beyond. It can be programmed."

  It was his vast respect for Alby's mind and his own mental projection of what it would be like to be a political figure that finally convinced Aram. And there was that marvelous fantasy in which he identified somehow with the fallen President.

  "I'll do it," he said later during the dinner, loudly, a sudden intrusion into a totally unrelated conversation. They were talking about travels, places like Spain and Italy. He hadn't listened to a word of it.

  "What the hell," he said, and Sandra kissed him on the cheek. Alby gripped his hand, and he was the candidate.

  Now that he had seen how effective the campaign was, he had begun to think of himself in the third person, as Sullivan and his people might view him. This meant inserting himself into the mind of a man he had never met, although interminable dossiers had begun to flesh out a human being suffering from perfectly human weaknesses — excessiveness, hypocrisy, dissimulation. The man had, indeed, walked into their well- planned blitzkrieg. Alby, with Norman's help and Sandra's funds, had worked out a program of systematic destruction. Long before Sullivan could emerge from the security of Washington, he was a victim, programmed and prepackaged like portion-cut beef. They had even managed to generate a little hate for him.

  "The man's a bastard," Sandra told Aram one night.

  "How so?"

  "He has no right to represent that district. I'd hate to have to depend on him if I was poor and black."

  "But you're not."

  "I have feelings for people."

  "Doesn't Sullivan?"

  "I doubt it."

  Norman, too, had begun to vocalize his hate.

  "He thinks we're dumb. Fills us up with horseshit and pats us on our cotton heads. Bullshit. Sullivan, we're going to kickyoass."

  "Come on, Norman, don't fantasize. About the only thing you have in common with those poor souls is the color of your skin."

  "That's a pretty heavy common denominator."

  "You're a class snob, anyou know it."

  "Well, I'm unveiling my origins. And my guts say Sullivan must go."

  "Why don't we just hire a hit man and get it over with?" Aram said facetiously.

  "Too good for the bastard," Norman said. "I'd rather see him turn slowly on the spit."

  "I'm glad you're on my team."

  "He'd stick it to you if he could. Just remember that. It's important

  to remember that. He'd give you no quarter. He's a ruthless hardheaded Irishman."

  Aram had, of course, let himself be programmed and found that he, too, could articulate a lethal attack on Sullivan. And since it was only a name in a newspaper or a confidential report, what did it matter?

  Aram was fully rested now, and he sat up in the bed beside Sandra and blinked at the gray light coming through the window. He got out of bed and dressed while Sandra continued to drowse. The morning had been laid out by Alby and Norman for head-to-head politicking. He was to meet the chief of the Democratic state central committee and a union boss. In the afternoon, he was to do a walking tour through one of the broken-down shopping areas that crisscrossed the district. Shoe-leathering, they called it.

  When he arrived at Alby's library, the secretaries had already started the coffee pot going. Alby came in looking tired and pasty.

  "You look like hell."

  "Norman and I were up nearly all night."

  "Problems?"

  "Not really. We were doing scenarios, figuring out Sullivan's response. We think we've got him on the ropes. After this morning, his maneuverability will be gone. He's run out of money already. That we know. He's got no grass-roots support, which means little except that he now has no pool of workers. The facade of his invincibility is pierced. His credibility went down the drain with the revelation of the Fountain research. In short, he's reeling."

  "No rabbits in the hat?" Aram asked.

  "Not that we can see, but that in itself is troubling. It means we have to work harder to figure out a possible response."

  "But you say there isn't any response left."

  "None that we can see."

  "You and your goddamned scientific mind."

  "It's a curse, Aram, a curse." Alby smiled, one of his rare toothy smiles. Aram noted that his teeth were beginning to yellow.

  "Mr. Kessler is here," a woman's voice said from somewhere behind them. Aram looked up. She was a tall girl, thin, with bad skin and unruly, tight curly hair.

  "Thanks, Lynn," Alby said.

  Frank Kessler was head of the Democratic state central committee. He was enormously fat, with endless chins running down his shirtfront, giving him, when he was deep in thought, the look of a frightened blowfish. Aram knew instinctively before he saw it that the man was never without a cigar. In fact, he held one in his pudgy fingers, which he now plunged into rubbery lips to free his hand for shaking. Sitting down at the polished table, Kessler puffed deeply, exhaling the smoke through flattened nostrils, a belligerent symbol of some ancient sporting combat.

  "So this is the hotshot Yomarian," he said as he settled in his chair, removing his cigar again and waving its glowing tip in Aram's face. "You sure are killing old Sully."

  "Nobody lasts forever," Alby said.

  "We try. We try."

  "I've heard an awful lot about you, Mr. Kessler …" Aram began, fully conscious of his unctuousness and, at the same time, annoyed by it. But Kessler loved it. He seemed energized by being fawned over.

  "I've been following the campaign very carefully," Kessler said, pointedly repeating the line for emphasis, "very carefully." Frank Kessler took himself very seriously. Aram immediately found the cadence of the script.

  "Any conclusions?" he said.

  "I have made my evaluation." The words were less sp
oken than intoned, like a blessing. "And it was not without some emotion that I have come

  to a conclusion. Not without emotion." He was silent for a moment as he explored Aram's eyes. Araheld the stare for a moment, then looked away. "After all, Sully is the most senior man in our delegation. It is no mean feat to have been elected thirteen times. Twelve times. That is no mean feat."