Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [40]
“Yes, sir,” I said. “And our wives, of course.” I meant it.
He gave a mighty groan. “That is the one thing you should not have said to me,” he said.
“Sir—?” I said.
“You ninny, you Harvard abortion, you incomparably third-rate little horse’s ass,” he said, and he arose from his chair. “You and Clewes have destroyed the good reputation of the most unselfish and intelligent generation of public servants this country has ever known! My God—who can care about you now, or about Clewes? Too bad he’s in jail! Too bad we can’t find another job for you!”
I, too, got up. “Sir,” I said, “I broke no law.”
“The most important thing they teach at Harvard,” he said, “is that a man can obey every law and still be the worst criminal of his time.”
Where or when this was taught at Harvard, he did not say. It was news to me.
“Mr. Starbuck,” he said, “in case you haven’t noticed: We have recently come through a global conflict between good and evil, during which we grew quite accustomed to beaches and fields littered with the bodies of our own brave and blameless dead. Now I am expected to feel pity for one unemployed bureaucrat, who, for all the damage he has done to his country, should be hanged and drawn and quartered, as far as I am concerned.”
“I only told the truth,” I bleated. I was nauseated with terror and shame.
“You told a fragmentary truth,” he said, “which has now been allowed to represent the whole! ‘Educated and compassionate public servants are almost certainly Russian spies.’ That’s all you are going to hear now from the semiliterate old-time crooks and spellbinders who want the government back, who think it’s rightly theirs. Without the symbiotic idiocies of you and Leland Clewes they could never have made the connection between treason and pity and brains. Now get out of my sight!”
“Sir,” I said. I would have fled if I could, but I was paralyzed.
“You are yet another nincompoop, who, by being at the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said, “was able to set humanitarianism back a full century! Begone!”
Strong stuff.
8
SO THERE I SAT on the bench outside the prison, waiting for the bus, while the Georgia sun beat down on me. A great Cadillac limousine, with pale blue curtains drawn across its back windows, simmered by slowly on the other side of the median divider, on the lanes that would take it to the headquarters of the Air Force base. I could see only the chauffeur, a black man, who was looking quizzically at the prison. The place was not clearly a prison. A quite modest sign at the foot of the flagpole said only this: “F.M.S.A.C.F., Authorized Personnel Only.”
The limousine continued on, until it found a crossover about a quarter of a mile up. Then it came back down and stopped with its glossy front fender inches from my nose. There, reflected in that perfect fender, I saw that old Slavic janitor again. This was the same limousine, it turned out, that had set off the false alarm about the arrival of Virgil Greathouse somewhat earlier. It had been cruising in search of the prison for quite some time.
The chauffeur got out, and he asked me if this was indeed the prison.
Thus was I required to make my first sound as a free man. “Yes,” I said.
The chauffeur, who was a big, serenely paternal, middle-aged man in a tan whipcord uniform and black leather puttees, opened the back door, spoke into the twilit interior. “Gentlemen,” he said, with precisely the appropriate mixture of sorrow and respect, “we have reached our destination.” Letters embroidered in red silk thread on his breast pocket identified his employer. “RAMJAC,” they said.
As I would learn later: Old pals of Greathouse had provided him and his lawyers with swift and secret transportation from his home to prison, so that there would be almost no witnesses to his humiliation. A limousine from Pepsi-Cola had picked him up before dawn at the service entrance to the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan, which was his home. It had taken him to the Marine Air Terminal next to La Guardia, and directly out onto a runway.