The Manchurian Candidate

In the end, when all Marco’s questions had been answered, but not until the very end, did it become clear to Colonel Marco what they would have to do. Marco thought of his father and his grandfather and of their Army. He considered his own life and its meaning. He decided for both of them what they would have to do.

They walked away from the terrace, past the seal pond, through the bobbing flowers in the garden of toy balloons. They walked past the bars marked YAK—POEPHAGUS GRUNNIENS—CENT. ASIA and they moved out slowly through the gantlet of resters and lovers and dreamers toward the backside of General Sherman’s bronze horse.

At Sixtieth Street, on Fifth Avenue, Marco tried to anticipate the changing of a traffic light. He stepped down from the curb two steps in front of Raymond, then turned to hurry Raymond along so that they could beat the light, when the Drive-Ur-Self car, rented by Chunjin, hit him. It threw him twelve feet and he lay where he fell. A crowd began to collect itself out of motes of sunlight. A foot policeman came ru

Raymond changed clothes in Room 301. He entered the Garden through a door marked Executive Entrance on the Forty-ninth Street side, at five forty-five, during the afternoon recess while the building held only five per cent of the activity it had seen one hour before. The candidates’ acceptance speeches were scheduled to appear on all networks from ten to ten-thirty that night, and after that the campaign would start.

Raymond was dressed as he had been told to dress; as a priest, with a reversed stiff collar, a black suit, a soft, black hat, and heavy black shell eyeglasses. He smoked a large black cigar from the corner of his mouth and he carried a satchel. He looked overworked, preoccupied, and sour. Everybody saw him. No one recognized him. He walked across the main lobby just inside the Eighth Avenue gates and climbed the staircase slowly like a man on a dull errand. He kept climbing. When he could go no farther, he walked along behind the top tier of the gallery seats, now empty, not bothering to look down at the littered floor of the arena, six stories below him. Carrying the satchel, he went up the iron stepladder that was bolted to the wall, climbing twenty-two feet until he reached the catwalk that ran out at right angles from the wall and led to the suspended box that was a spotlight booth, used only for theatrical spectaculars. He let himself into the booth with a key, closing and locking the door behind him. He sat down on a wooden packing case, opened the satchel, took out a gun barrel, then the stock of a sniper’s rifle, and assembled the gun with expert care. When he was satisfied with its co

Twenty-Nine

MARCO WAS FIGHTING TO KILL TIME. HE stalled at every possible chance as they tried to help him dress. He needed time for Raymond to find his position, for the inexorable, uncompromising television schedule to pull all of the counters into play. Marco thought about the face of John Yerkes Iselin and he made himself do everything more slowly.

His right arm was in full sling; right hand to the left shoulder. The right side of his face seemed to have come off. The skin was gone and under the snowy bandage it was as black as the far side of the moon. Four ribs had crumpled on the left side of his spine, and he was tightly taped. He was under semi-anesthesia to keep the pain under control, and it gave him everything on the outside in parts of fantasy and parts of reality. Two men were dressing him as rapidly as he would allow them to progress, although no one there could tell that he was stalling.

Amjac and Lehner squatted on the floor around a tape playback machine and the only sound in the room, beyond Marco’s labored breathing and his quick, deep throat-sounds of pain, was the clear, impersonal sound of Raymond’s voice, backed up by children’s squeals and laughter, the roar of hungry cats, the honks and splats of seals, and the gentling undersound of two hundred red, green, and yellow balloons as they cut the air at a tenth of a mile per hour. Every man in the room was staring at the machine. It was saying:

“No, I don’t think the priest’s outfit is supposed to have any symbolic significance. My mother doesn’t think that way. Primarily, it will be good camouflage. She may have arranged to have me caught after I kill him, when, I suppose, I will be exposed as a Communist with a tailor-made record as long as a hangman’s rope. Then, of course, the choice of ecclesiastical costume will keep a lot of people enraged on still a different level, if they didn’t happen to plan to vote for the dead candidate. If I am caught I am to state, on the second day, after much persuasion, that I was ordered to undertake the execution by the Kremlin. Mother definitely plans to involve them, but I don’t think she will purposely involve me because she was really deeply upset and affected for the first time since I have known her when she discovered that they had chosen me to be their killer. She told me that they had lost the world when they did that and that when she and Joh

Marco’s voice, from the tape, said, “Did you say after they are hit? Did you use the word ‘they’?”

“Well, yes. I am ordered to shoot the nominee through the head and to shoot Joh