“Michael, darling, can you forgive me for being so late?”
Michael Laylor turned to her. He had the face of an angeclass="underline" blue eyes, features that were almost too perfect in their regularity, lips slightly parted; the whole framed in a halo of blond hair that gave him an open, innocent regard.
Innocence was not, as Laila had had the grateful occasion to discover, an attribute of his. He circled his hand under her hair so that the nape of her neck was caught in the soft vise of his thumb and other fingers. With a languorous movement he drew her face down to his and held it there, their lips barely touching. Finally, reluctantly, be released her.
“I’d forgive you anything.”
Laila circled the banquette and slid down onto the cushion beside him.
Across the way a joint was moving from hand to hand. Michael reached for it and passed it to her. Laila, still shaken by her experience in the garage, inhaled a full breath, holding the smoke in her lungs every second she could before letting it glide out her nostrils. Michael started to pass it on, but before he did she grabbed it back and gulped another lungful. Then she sat back, eyes closed, waiting, praying for the gentle numbness to seep through her. She opened her eyes to see Michael staring down at her, a crooked half-smile on his face.
“Dance?”
As soon as they reached the dance floor, she hurled herself into the music, eyes closed, racing off alone along the crashing tide of sound, away from everything, the grass finally enclosing her in its protective cocoon.
“Black bitch!”
The shrill scream shattered Laila’s reverie. The young black she bad noticed on the way in was slumping to the floor, blood spurting from his temple, his mouth open in a prayer of pain from the blow, from the agonizing tear of his weird harness. His aggressor, a squat young white with a beer drinker’s belly and a floppy leather hat, planted a vicious kick in his groin before two bouncers could shove him away.
Laila shuddered. “Oh God,” she whispered. “How awful! Let’s sit down.” Her hand clutched Michael’s tightly as they started back to their banquette.
Dizzy from the grass, the scene on the dance floor, she leaned against him, raising her head toward his. Her eyes were glistening.
“What a hideous world we live in!”
Michael studied her. She seemed distant, distraught almost. Perhaps, he told himself, the new Mexican grass was too strong. He stroked her auburn hair as they sat down. He could see she was still far away, running down her own track.
“Why is it always the ones like him that get hurt?” she asked. “The weak, the helpless?” Michael didn’t answer; he knew she didn’t want an answer.
“For people like that there’s never any justice until they start to use the violence others use against them. And then there’s more violence and more violence and more violence.”
Hearing her own words, she trembled.
“You don’t believe that, Linda.”
“Oh yes I do. They”-she waved scornfully to the crowded dance floor-“never hear anything until it’s too late. They’re only interested in their bodies, their pleasures, their money. The poor, the homeless, the wronged-that doesn’t interest them. Until there’s violence, the world is deaf.” Her voice fell until it was barely a whisper. “You know, there’s a saying in our Koran. A terrible saying, really, but true: `If God should punish men according to what they deserve, he would not leave on the back of the earth so much as a beast.”’
“Your Koran? I thought you were Christian, Linda.”
Laila stiffened, suddenly wary of the grass. “You know what I mean. The Koran’s Arabic, isn’t it?”
From across the banquette someone waved another joint toward them. Michael pushed it away.
“Let’s go back to the studio.”
Laila cupped his face in her hands, her long fingers fondling the skin on his temples. She held him like that for a while, gazing at his beautiful face.
“Yes, Michael. Take me home.”
As they walked toward the door, a chubby paw beckoned to them out of the darkness.
“Linda, darling! You’re stunning, duh-voon!”
She turned to see the pudgy figure of Truman Capote, resembling a scaled-down Winston Churchill in a mauve velvet jumpsuit.
“Come meet all these lovely people.”
With the pride of a jeweler pointing out his choice baubles, he introduced them to the gaggle of Italian pseudo-nobles fawning over him.
“The Principessa’s giving a luncheon in my honor tomorrow,” he gushed, indicating a gray-haired woman whose taut facial skin was evidence of more than one visit to the fashionable plastic surgeons of Rio. “You must come.”
The bright eyes swept over Michael. “And do bring this lovely creature along.” Capote leaned over to her. “Everyone will be there tomorrow. Gianni is coming from ‘Iurino just for me.” His voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “Even Teddy’s coming. Isn’t that marvelous?”
With a kiss and a promise, Laila managed to extricate them from Capote’s grasp. Leaving, she heard his voice squealing through the shadows after them, its high timbre rising above the din of the club. “Don’t forget Tuesday lunch, darlings! Everyone will be there!”
“They’re here, sir.”
The words had no sooner drifted from Jack Eastman’s intercom than “they” were in his office, terrorist experts from State and the CIA: Dr. John Turner, head of the Agency’s Psychiatric Affairs Division; Lisa Dyson, the thirtyfive-yearold CIA officer who had what was referred to in the Agency as the “Libyan account”; Bernie Tamarkin, a Washington psychiatrist and a recognized world authority on the behavioral psychology of terrorists in stress situations.
Eastman scrutinized them all, noticing the faint flush on their faces, sensing the shortened rhythm of their breathing. Nervous, he thought.
Everybody peaks when they come to the White House.
As soon as they had sat down, Lisa Dyson passed out copies of an eighteen-page document. It was enclosed in an embossed white folder bearing the pale-blue seal of the CIA, a “Top Secret” stamp and the words “Personality and Political Behavior Study: Muammar al-Qaddafi.”
The study was part of a secret program run by the CIA since the late fifties, an effort to employ the techniques of psychiatry to study the personality and character development of a selected group of world leaders in intimate detail, to try to predict with some degree of certainty how they would respond in a crisis. Castro, Charles de Gaulle, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Mao Tse-tung, the Shah, Nasser, all had been put under the dissecting glare of the CIA’s analysts. Indeed, some of the perceptions turned up in the profiles of Castro and Khrushchev had been of vital help to John F. Kennedy in dealing with both men during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Each involved prodigious expense and effort. Everything about a “target”
was examined: what had influenced his life, what its major traumas were, how he had responded to them, whether he had developed certain characteristic defense mechanisms. Agents were sent all over the world to determine one precise fact, to explore just one facet of a man’s character.
Old military-schoolmates were hunted down and probed to find out if a man masturbated, drank, was finicky about his food, went to church, how he responded to stress. Did he like boys? Or women? Or both? Had be had a mother fixation? Trace him where you could through his oral, anal, genital stages. Find out if he had a large or small penis. If he had sadistic tendencies. Once a CIA agent had been smuggled into Cuba for the sole purpose of talking to a whore with whom Castro had often gone to bed when he was a student.