Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [98]
“Yeah.”
“Then stop doing that to my ear. So, as soon as they’ve all gone, I’ll get on my bike. I could be in Hazeborough by elevenish. Where shall I meet you?”
“Frankie, what the hell’re you on about? C’mon, let’s do it now. The Bomb could drop at any minute. Please, Frankie.”
She leaned away from him and took his head in her hands. She studied him with immense seriousness, as if they were about to part forever and she was memorizing his face. She bit her lip.
“Please, Frankie.”
“No,” she said. “I’m . . . I’m not ready.”
“What d’yer mean? You just said —”
She silenced him with a tongue-in kiss that undid his knees. When it was over, he went for second helpings, but she stopped him.
“Where shall I meet you? In Hazeborough?”
Clem moved away from her, turned his back, sulkily. Put his hands in his pockets, adjusting himself.
“Christ, Frankie. You drive me nuts. You really do.”
“I know I do. I’m sorry.”
She waited.
“There’s sod all in Hazeborough, really. There’s two ways down onto the beach. The second one’s next to a caff. Sort of like a wood shack. It’ll be closed this time of year.”
“I’ll meet you there, then. You will wait for me, won’t you? In case I’m late?”
LATE ON SATURDAY night, in the White House, an exhausted but sleepless John F. Kennedy sat in his private quarters watching one of his favorite movies: Roman Holiday, starring that sexy little thing Audrey Hepburn and the comically wooden Gregory Peck. It was comfort food for the brain: warm, familiar, and bland. He needed it. The day had not gone well. It might actually be easier to fight a war than chair those damned ExComm meetings.
His bowel griped and he shifted in the chair, painfully, to break wind.
He was beginning to think he could see a way through this thing. Khrushchev’s last letter, yesterday, was full of the usual bluster and bull, but what it came down to was that he was prepared to do a deal. Maybe the fat little bastard wasn’t, after all, totally insane. Maybe he’d looked at it all and decided that fifty million, minimum, dead Russians was too high a price to pay for a propaganda stunt in the Caribbean. But Khrushchev couldn’t pull his missiles out if it looked like a defeat. To save his fat face — maybe to save his life, because they played pretty rough in the Kremlin — he’d need to make it look like he’d got something out of it. Like he’d extracted a price. Won. And the price was, Kennedy thought, incredibly cheap. What Khrushchev was saying, it seemed, was that he’d disarm the Cuban missiles if the U.S. removed its Thor missiles from Turkey. And promised not to invade Cuba.
Losing the Turkish Thors was not, in Kennedy’s view, a problem. They were obsolete, anyway. “A heap of junk,” Bob McNamara had called them. So the thing to do was dismantle the Thors, publicly. Then station a Polaris submarine, with up-to-date nukes, off the Turkish coast and make sure the Russians knew it was there. And as for not invading Cuba, well, Jesus, even that foul-mouthed moron Shoup had to admit that at least five thousand marines would die before even one made it onto the beach. And that estimate was based on the Russians not using their nuclear battlefield weapons. Kennedy knew that public opinion would turn against him when the blood started to flow. That was the one immutable law of politics.
So it seemed to him that the Turkey trade-off might be a way out.
It brought problems with it, though. Like Khrushchev, Kennedy had to come out of it looking good. He’d have to put some smart political spin on the deal. It couldn’t look like the Russians had suckered him, had used Cuba to force him to back down in Europe. He’d have to say to Khrushchev, “Okay, Nikita, you take the nukes out of Cuba; I take the nukes out of Turkey. But it’s a secret deal, all right? You can crow about it to those