The bellows made the fire jump, and now the Old Man put it away and sat down.
“Wilkie understands because his father understands,” the Old Man continued, “while you, on the other hand, choose blindness. Why is that?”
“You’re ranting.”
“Instead of clarity and action,” the Old Man said, “what we have now is steering committees. It’s an extension of the chaos under Kennedy, God rest his soul. His father stole the election in 1960—sit down. Grant it for now; think with me as if, if that makes you happier. He felt no legitimacy—Kennedy did—since he was accountable to his father and not the American people. It made him passive. He let the Reds have their orgy in Asia. He tried to substitute the illusion of action in Cuba for real and decisive steps elsewhere. Failure was inevitable. And still, even with all those mistakes, all is not yet lost: there remains a bulwark in Asia, ein feste burg. Vietnam is the choke point—the narrow bridge. It is Thermopylae.”
“The better comparison,” Hillsinger said, “is Napoleon and Moscow.”
“They have no winter in Vietnam.”
“They are the winter. The Viet Minh dug a hundred miles of trenches at Dien Bien Phu.”
“More than anything else,” the Old Man said, “what I want is for you to come out into the light. You’ve already been broken once on the wheel of Vietnam. Sit down. In this room we speak the truth. They painted you as a quietist and then they pushed you out.”
“Who told you that?” Hillsinger said.
“Someone who knows,” the Old Man said.
Hillsinger was entertained: this piece of wrong intelligence so proudly displayed by his father—that he had left the CIA over a policy dispute in a region wholly outside his portfolio—was a lie that would have had to come initially from the CIA Director himself. It was an elegant lie, one in the classic style: make a small, forgivable charge—that Hillsinger was a pacifist—to disguise the larger, catastrophic one. Given the circumstances, it could almost be seen as an act of generosity.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” the Old Man continued. “Something similar happened to Allen Dulles himself. He built the CIA with his own hands, but then he lost his ability to see the future. Vision is not, however, your problem: on the contrary, I believe you see the problem very clearly. Your problem is will. You want to be comfortable. Call me a sentimentalist, but I think of Catta, a wonderful child, affectionate, thoughtful, loves the island, loves the woods; on the other hand, he’s too quiet for his age, and he’s got a girl’s name because his mother took Latin once. Lila runs after him. Diana runs after him. He’s a bright boy—he sees all this—but the limitation of his world is exactly the problem. You reject my interpretation of the past. Fine. You reject my interpretation of military tactics. Fine. But let me tell you what’s coming—yes, that’s right—old men know the future. Sooner than you think, little Catta, charming Catta, will face a savage, remorseless Red wave coming from Europe, from Asia, even from Africa and South America. They will surround us, slowly, and then they will act. The Reds will cut Catta’s head off and mount it on the Kremlin gate and it will be your fault. Yours. Because you lack the proper will.”
“May you live forever, Dad.”
“Ha! I’ll have to, because of you and the idiot Democratic party.”
9
Lila returned to the living room, and all conversation stopped. She smiled and crossed the room, sat on the arm of her husband’s chair, and placed her hand on top of his to form a still life of domestic bliss. In Washington, in the CIA circles, this sort of thing happened all the time.
“James was on edge tonight,” she said.
“You were at the Cottage?” Jim said.
“For five seconds.”
“It’s after midnight,” the Old Man said.
“The children were up,” Lila said. “Billy was reading them Treasure Island.”
“Why?” Jim said.
“There was some disagreement; I suppose he thought it would help.”
“QED,” the Old Man said darkly.
“I wonder if the timing …” Wilkie said, or rather he continued, it seemed to Lila, along the thread of a lapsed conversation. Wilkie was good like that; he knew that silence was far deadlier than any speech, although in this particular case he trailed off. She could see that Jim and his father were on the same side of a question, and it obviously concerned her somehow. She did not know what was at stake here—the late-night conversation at the Hill House could range widely—but she was ready for whatever came. She was used to living among warriors.
When they were in Warsaw, certainly, Lila had seen herself as standing on the front line. She was watched everywhere she went by the Polish security services, and then also, as a well-dressed American woman, she was simply conspicuous. She had embraced the minor theater of her role, opting for a sort of diplomatic grand manner, a slightly shorter Grace Kelly come to the Eastern Bloc: chaste, elegant, and disdainful of the enemy. She shopped in the empty markets with their empty shelves, and asked the KGB men following her to light her cigarettes. For a while it was exhilarating that their lives resonated on such a grand scale, and as far as mandates went, chaste and elegant were both relatively easy for her—for both of them. Where she and Jim differed, however, was that only she had broken.
Jim was, it seemed, a sort of prodigy of this work—he could endure more and see farther. His mind and body were not like other people’s. If anything, the unending malevolence of the other side had energized him. But he was not alone in a foxhole, and, as far as Lila could tell, one either participated in the foresight and preoccupation demanded by life in enemy territory, as Jim and his colleagues did, or one suffocated, as Lila and so many of the other wives and children did. And then, when they came back to the States, it was worse. There had been bloody betrayals and public hearings, Kim Philby and Joe McCarthy, and then traitors were said to be everywhere. Jim stayed up for hours every night, making notes of each of the day’s conversations in case he were accused. The CIA was operating in a state of internal siege.
When Hannah died, Lila felt nothing. She had been under such strain for so long that she had no reserves left whatsoever. Her sister was gone, and her life, as measured by the basic tenor of her days, was exactly the same, as if the enormity of the Soviet threat had strangled her ability to experience anything other than itself. She panicked. She let herself sleep with Billy Quick once, and then again, and then several more times, and she thought of those episodes as isolated attempts to retrieve her own ability to feel. She was discreet. Never in Washington, not on Seven, always with a good alibi. It was, after all, only Billy Quick. Even her breakdown had had an air of responsibility to it.