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The queen of diamonds showed as the fourteenth card in the first layout. Raymond listened with absorption to what his mother had to say. She questioned him and he gave her a detailed report on how and why and when he had disappeared from the house on Long Island, and she was so relieved that she laughed hysterically as he told her about Jocie’s costume and his total, eternal obedience to the queen of diamonds. When she had dried the tears of nervous joy from her eyes and had fired four more short bursts of hysterical laughter she got down to business and laid out his job of work.
She had been ordered to make a full test of his reflex mechanism and, because Senator Jordan was potentially so dangerous to Joh
Twenty-Four
MARCO DISCOVERED THAT RAYMOND WAS IN Washington very quickly. However, by appearing at the Press Club (where he had found himself, to his chagrin and resentment, exactly once before in the years of his political reporting) Raymond unwittingly eluded the men of Marco’s unit. The unit was out in force and in desperate earnest. They knew how to unlock the mystery, that is, they held the key in their hands, but now they could not find the lock. As each day had passed since the afternoon Raymond had rented the rowboat in Central Park, and Raymond had been beyond their reach, every element of responsibility in the unit, and in the direction of the nation, had watched and waited tensely, fearing that they might have arrived at the solution too late. By going to the Hill and to the White House on a Saturday afternoon in summer, Raymond kept showing up exactly where they did not expect him to appear, so they missed him again. Fifty minutes after he had left the Washington bureau of The Daily Press, and after the bureau chief had taken off for the weekend in an automobile with his wife and their parrot and the information as to where and how Raymond would spend the day, two men from Marco’s unit arrived to take up permanent posts waiting for Raymond to return to the office. At the White House Raymond duly registered the fact that he would be in Washington for the weekend but Hagerty said how the hell could he have time to have breakfast when there was a national convention opening Monday?
Because Raymond was known to detest his mother and stepfather under any normal circumstances and because Marco’s unit calculated that he would never speak to the Iselins again after the viciousness of Joh
Just before midnight, Raymond crawled into the back of the panel truck, stretched out, and went to sleep. It had started to rain. As the truck came out of the Lincoln Tu
Raymond’s mother had been merciful. She had understood completely the operation of the Yen Lo mechanism. She knew Raymond had to do what he was told to do, that he could have no sense of right or wrong about it, nor suspect any possibility of the consciousness of guilt, but she must have sensed that he had to retain a sense of gain/loss, that he would know when the time came, that by having to kill Senator Jordan he would be losing something, and that his wife, too (and so very much more dimensionally), would suffer an infinity of loss. So, out of mercy, she instructed Chunjin to let Raymond sleep until he arrived within a block of the Jordan house.
Chunjin stopped the truck on the far side of the street, opposite the house. It was raining heavily and they alone seemed to be alive in the city. Three other cars were parked in the block, an impossibly low number. Chunjin leaned over the seat and shook Raymond by the shoulder.
“Time to do the work, Mr. Shaw,” he said. Raymond came awake instantly. He sat up. He clambered to sit beside Chunjin in the front seat.
Chunjin gave him the gun, to which a silencer had been affixed, making it cumbersome and very nearly impossible to pocket. “You know this kind of gun?” he asked efficiently.
“Yes,” Raymond answered dully.
“I suggest you keep it under your coat.”
“I will,” Raymond said. “I have never felt so sad.”
“That is proper,” Chunjin said. “However, sir, if you do the work quickly it will be over for you, and for him, although in different ways. When the work is done you will forget.”
The rain was like movie rain. It streamed heavily against the windows and made a tympanous racket as it hit the roof of the truck. Chunjin said, “I circle block with car, Mr. Shaw. If not here when you come out you walk slowly toward next street, Third Avenue. Bring gun with you.”