The Evening News Page 5

  Partridge, through interviews with a series of people on the scene, managed to suggest that not only might Cronkite be wrong but that, well aware of his power and influence, the CBS anchorman had behaved, in one interviewee’s words, “like an unelected President and contrary to his own vaunted tenets of impartial journalism.”

  When Partridge’s piece reached New York it was discussed for hours and went to the highest CBA levels before a consensus was reached that to attack the national father figure of “Walter” would be a no-win gambit. However, unofficial copies of the Partridge report were made and circulated privately among TV news insiders.

  Partridge’s excursions into areas of heavy fighting usually kept him away from Saigon for a week, sometimes longer. Once, when he went underground into Cambodia, he was out of touch for nearly a month.

  Every time, though, he returned with a strong story, and after the war some were still remembered for their insights. No one, including Crawford Sloane, ever disputed that Partridge was a superb journalist.

  Unfortunately, because his reports were fewer and therefore less frequent than Sloane’s, Partridge didn’t get noticed nearly as much.

  Something else in Vietnam affected the future of Partridge and Sloane. She was Jessica Castillo.

  Jessica …

  Crawford Sloane, driving almost automatically over a route he traveled twice each working day, had by now turned off Fifty-ninth Street onto York Avenue. After a few blocks he swung right to the northbound ramp of the FDR Drive. Moments later, alongside the East River and free from intersections and traffic lights, he allowed his speed to increase. His home in Larchmont, north of the city on Long Island Sound, was now half an hour’s driving time away.

  Behind him, a blue Ford Tempo increased its speed also.

  Sloane was relaxed, as he usually was at this time of day, and as his thoughts drifted they returned to Jessica … who, in Saigon, had been Harry Partridge’s girlfriend … but in the end had married Crawford Sloane.

  In those days, in Vietnam, Jessica had been twenty-six, slim, with long brown hair, a lively mind and, on occasion, a sharp tongue. She took no nonsense from the journalists with whom she dealt as a junior information officer at the United States Information Agency (known as USIS overseas).

  The agency had its headquarters on Le Qui Don Street, in the tree-shrouded “Lincoln Library” which used to be the Rex Theater, and the old theater sign remained in place throughout the USIS tenure. Members of the press went to the agency sometimes more than they needed, bringing queries that they hoped might allow them time with Jessica.

  Jessica played along with the attention, which amused her. But in her affections when Crawford Sloane first knew her, Harry Partridge was firmly number one.

  Even now, Sloane thought, there were areas in that early relationship between Partridge and Jessica of which he had no knowledge, some things he had never asked about and now would never know. But the fact that certain doors had been closed more than twenty years ago, and had remained closed ever since, never had … never would … stop him wondering about the details and intimacies of those times.

  5

  Jessica Castillo and Harry Partridge were drawn instinctually to each other the first time they met in Vietnam—even though the meeting was antagonistic. Partridge had gone to USIS seeking information that he knew existed but that had been refused him by the United States military. It concerned the widespread drug addiction of American troops in Vietnam.

  Partridge had seen plenty of evidence of addiction during his travels through forward areas. The hard drug being used was heroin and it was plentiful. Through Stateside inquiries made at his request by CBA News, he learned that veterans’ hospitals back home were filling up alarmingly with addicts sent back from Vietnam. It was becoming a national problem, rather than just military.

  The New York Horseshoe had given a green light to pursue the story, but official sources had clammed up tight and would provide no information.

  When he entered Jessica’s cubicle office and broached the subject, she reacted in the same way. “I’m sorry. That’s something I can’t talk about.”

  Her attitude offended him and he said accusingly, “You mean you won’t talk because you’ve been told to protect somebody. Is it the ambassador, who might be embarrassed by the truth?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t answer that either.”

  Partridge, growing angry, bored in hard. “So what you’re telling me is that you, in this cozy billet, don’t give a goddamn about the GIs out in the jungle who are shit-scared, suffering, and then—for an outlet, because they don’t know any better—destroy themselves with drugs, becoming junkies.”

  She said indignantly, “I said nothing of the kind.”

  “Oh, but you said exactly that. “His voice was contemptuous. “You said you won’t talk about something rotten and stinking which needs a public airing, needs people to know a problem exists so something can be done. So other green kids coming out here can be warned and maybe saved. Who do you think you’re protecting, lady? For sure, not the guys doing the fighting, the ones who count. You call yourself an information officer. I call you a concealment officer.”

  Jessica flushed. Unused to being talked to that way, her eyes blazed with anger. A glass paperweight was on her desk and her fingers clenched around it. For a moment Partridge expected her to throw it and prepared to duck. Then, noticeably, the anger diminished and Jessica asked quietly, “What is it you want to know?”

  Partridge moderated his tone to match hers. “Statistics mostly. I know someone has them, that records have been kept, surveys taken.”

  She tossed back her brown hair in a gesture he would later become used to and love. “Do you know Rex Talbot?”

  “Yes.” Talbot was a young American vice-consul at the Embassy on Thong Nhut Street, a few blocks away.

  “I suggest you ask him to tell you about the MACV Project Nostradamus report.”

  Despite the seriousness, Partridge smiled, wondering what kind of mind dreamed up that title.

  Jessica continued, “There’s no need to have Rex know I sent you. You could let him think you know …”

  He finished the sentence. “… a little more than I really do. It’s an old journalist’s trick.”

  “The kind of trick you just used on me.”

  “Sort of,” he acknowledged with a smile.

  “I knew it all the time,” Jessica said. “I just let you get away with it.”

  “You’re not as soulless as I thought,” he told her. “How about exploring that subject some more over dinner tonight?”

  To her own surprise, Jessica accepted.

  Later, they discovered how much they enjoyed each other’s company and it turned out to be the first of many such meetings. For a surprisingly long time, though, their meetings remained no more than that, which was something Jessica, with her blunt, plain speaking, made clear at the beginning.

  “I’d like you to understand that whatever else goes on around here, I am no pushover. If I go to bed with someone it has to mean something special and important to me, and also to the other person, so don’t say you weren’t warned.” Their relationship also endured long separations, due to Partridge’s travels to other parts of Vietnam.

  But inevitably a moment came when desire overwhelmed them both.

  They had dined together at the Caravelle, where Partridge was staying. Afterward, in the hotel garden, an oasis of quiet amid the discord of Saigon, he had reached for Jessica and she came to him eagerly. As they kissed, she clung tightly, urgently, and through her thin dress he sensed her physical excitement. Years later, Partridge would remember that time as one of those rare and magic moments when all problems and concerns—Vietnam, the war’s ugliness, future uncertainties—seemed far away, so all that mattered was the present and themselves.

  He asked her softly, “Shall we go to my room?”

  Without speaking, Jessica nodded her consent.

  U
pstairs in the room, with the only lighting from outside and while they continued to hold each other, he undressed her and she helped him where his hands proved awkward.

  As he entered her, she told him, “Oh, I love you so!”

  Long after, he could never remember if he told her that he truly loved her too, but knew he had and always would.

  Partridge was also deeply moved by the discovery that Jessica had been a virgin. Then, as time went by and their lovemaking continued, they found the same delight in each other physically that they had in other ways.

  In any other time and place they might have married quickly. Jessica wanted to be married; she also wanted children. But Partridge, for reasons he afterward regretted, held back. In Canada he had had one failed marriage and knew that marriages of TV newsmen so often were disastrous. TV news correspondents led peripatetic lives, could be away from home two hundred days a year or more, were unused to family responsibilities and encountered sexual temptations on the road which few could permanently resist. As a result, spouses often grew away from each other—intellectually as well as sexually. When reunited after long absences, they met as strangers.

  Combined with all that was Vietnam. Partridge knew his life was at risk each time he left Saigon and, though luck had been with him so far, the odds were against that luck enduring. So it wasn’t fair, he reasoned, to burden someone else—in this case Jessica—with persistent worry, and the likelihood of heartbreak later on.

  He confided some of this to Jessica early one morning after they had spent the night together, and he could not have picked a worse occasion. Jessica was shocked and jolted by what she perceived as a puerile cop-out by a man to whom she had already given her heart and body. She told Partridge coldly that their relationship was at an end.

  Only much later did Jessica realize she had misread what, in reality, was kindness and deep caring. Partridge left Saigon a few hours afterward, and that was the time he went into Cambodia and was away a month.

  Crawford Sloane had met Jessica several times while she was in Harry Partridge’s company, and saw her occasionally in the USIS offices when he had queries that took him there. On all occasions Sloane was strongly attracted to Jessica and longed to know her better. But recognizing she was Partridge’s girl, and being punctilious in such matters, he had never asked her for a date, as others often did.

  But when Sloane learned, from Jessica herself, that she and Partridge had “split up,” he promptly asked Jessica to dine with him. She agreed to, and they went on seeing each other. Two weeks later, confiding that he had loved her for a long time from a distance and now with closer knowledge adored her, Sloane proposed marriage.

  Jessica, taken by surprise, asked for time to think.

  Her mind was a tumult of emotions. Jessica’s love for Harry had been passionate and all-consuming. No man had ever swept her away as he had done; she doubted if anyone ever would again. Instinct told her that what she and Harry had shared was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And she still loved him, she was sure of that. Even now Jessica missed him desperately; if he came back and asked her to marry him she would probably say yes. But, clearly, Harry wasn’t going to ask. He had rejected her and Jessica’s bitterness and anger lingered. A part of her wanted to … just show him! So there!

  On the other hand, there was Crawf. Jessica liked Crawford Sloane … No—more than that! … She felt a strong affection for him. He was kind and gentle, loving, intelligent, interesting to be with. And Crawf was solid. He possessed—Jessica had to admit—a stability that Harry, while an exciting person, sometimes lacked. But for a lifetime, which was how Jessica saw marriage, which of the two loves on different levels—one with excitement, the other with stability—was more important? She wished she could be positive about the answer.

  Jessica might also have asked herself the question, but did not: Why make a decision at all? Why not wait? She was still young …

  Unacknowledged, but implicit in her thinking, was the presence of all of them in Vietnam. The fervor of war surrounded them; it was all-pervading like the air they breathed. There was a sense of time being compressed and accelerated, as if clocks and calendars were running at extra speed. Each day of life seemed to spill in a precipitous torrent through the open floodgates of a dam. Who among them knew how many days remained? Which of them would ever resume a normal pace of living?

  In every war, throughout all human experience, it had been ever thus.

  After weighing everything as best she could, the next day Jessica accepted Crawford Sloane’s proposal.

  They were married at once, in the U.S. Embassy by an army chaplain. The ambassador attended the ceremony and afterward gave a reception in his private suite.

  Sloane was ecstatically happy. Jessica assured herself that she was too; determinedly she matched Crawf’s mood.

  Partridge did not learn of the marriage until his return to Saigon and only then did it dawn on him, with overpowering sadness, how much he had lost. When he met Jessica and Sloane to congratulate them, he tried to conceal his emotions. With Jessica, who knew him so well, he did not wholly succeed.

  But if Jessica shared some of Partridge’s feelings, she kept them to herself and also put them behind her. She reasoned that she had made her choice and was determined to be a good wife to Sloane which, across the years, she was. As in any normal marriage there were some midway conflicts and disruptions, but they healed. Now—incredibly, it seemed to all concerned—Jessica and Crawford’s silver wedding anniversary was less than five years distant.

  6

  At the wheel of the Buick Somerset, Crawford Sloane was midpoint in his journey home. The Triboro Bridge behind him, he was on the Bruckner Expressway and would shortly join Interstate 95, the New England Thruway, exiting at Larchmont.

  The same Ford Tempo that had followed him from CBA News headquarters was still behind.

  It was not surprising that Sloane had failed to notice the other car, either tonight or on other occasions during the past several weeks when it had followed him. One reason was that the driver—a young, thin-lipped, cold-eyed Colombian currently using the code name Carlos—was expert at stalking any quarry.

  Carlos, who had entered the United States two months earlier using a forged passport, had been involved in this stealthy surveillance for almost four weeks, along with six others from Colombia—five men and a woman. Like Carlos, the others were identified only by fictitious first names, which in most cases covered criminal records. Until their present task began, the members of the group were unknown to one another. Even now, only Miguel, the leader, who tonight was several miles away, was aware of real identities.

  The Ford Tempo had been repainted twice during the short period of its use. Also, it was just one of several vehicles available, the objective being not to create a detectable pattern.

  What had accumulated from the surveillance was a precise and detailed study of Crawford Sloane’s movements and those of his family.

  In the fast-moving expressway traffic, Carlos allowed three other cars to move up between himself and Sloane, though keeping the tailed Buick still in sight. Beside Carlos, another man noted the time and made an entry in a log. This was Julio—swarthy, argumentative and bad-tempered, with an ugly scar from a knifing down the left side of his face. He was the group’s communications specialist. Behind them, in the back seat, was a mobile cellular phone, one of six that linked vehicles and a hidden temporary headquarters.

  Both Carlos and Julio were ruthless, trained marksmen and were armed.

  After slowing down and negotiating a traffic diversion caused by a multiple rear-end collision in the Thruway’s left lane, Sloane resumed his speed and also his thoughts about Vietnam, Jessica, Partridge and himself.

  Despite his own great success in Vietnam and since, Crawford. Sloane had continued to worry about Partridge, just a little. It was why he was slightly uncomfortable in Partridge’s company. And on a personal level he occasionally wondered: Did Jessica e
ver think about Harry, remembering the privileged, private moments there must have been between them?

  Sloane had never asked his wife any truly intimate questions about her long-ago relationship with Harry. He could have done so many times, including at the beginning of their marriage, and Jessica, being Jessica, would probably have answered frankly. But posing that kind of question was simply not Sloane’s style. Nor, he supposed, did he really want to know the answers. Yet, paradoxically, after all these years those old thoughts came back to him at times with newer questions: Did Jessica still care about Harry? Did the two of them ever communicate? Did Jessica, even now, have residual regrets?

  And professionally … Guilt was not a word that preoccupied Sloane in relation to himself, but down in some private corner of his soul he knew that Partridge had been the better journalist in Vietnam, though he himself gained more acclaim and on top of that married Partridge’s girl … All of it illogical, he knew, an insecurity that need not be … but the visceral unease persisted.

  The Ford Tempo had now switched places and was several vehicles ahead of Sloane. The Larchmont exit from the Thruway was only a few miles farther on and Carlos and Julio, by this time knowing Sloane’s habits, were aware that he would exit there. Getting ahead of a quarry on occasion was an old trick of tailing. Now the Ford would take the Larchmont exit first, be waiting for Sloane when he turned off, then would fall in behind him once more.

  Some ten minutes later, as the CBA anchorman entered the streets of Larchmont, the Ford Tempo followed discreetly at a distance, stopping well short of the Sloane house which was located on Park Avenue, facing Long Island Sound.

  The house, befitting someone with Sloane’s substantial income, was large and imposing. Painted white under a gray slate roof, it was set in a sculptured garden with a circular driveway. Twin pine trees marked the entrance. A wrought-iron lantern hung over double front doors.

  Sloane used a remote control in the car to open the door of a three-car garage, then drove in, the door closing behind him.