Ian Slater: WW III

Believing he still loved her, Lana had tried to tough it out, hoping he would settle down. She even performed for him in ways disgusting to her but which he insisted upon. He kept upping the ante during the foreplay, an extended ploy which, though she didn’t realize it at the time, was a vicious psychological game he couldn’t lose. If she refused to debase herself further, he told her he could claim sexual incompatibility, a label he made it clear he was personally unconcerned about but one that he could easily use with his army of lawyers to smear her in every scandal sheet and tabloid he owned, and even in some of those he didn’t. It was a label, a potential smear campaign that, for her family’s sake, Lana dared not risk. The very idea of having such things revealed in public was unthinkable to her, so that suing for divorce was simply not an option.

Not long after Mrs. La Roche had left Shanghai, Lana told him she was leaving. While Mrs. La Roche had been there, her son had reined in his more outrageous sexual habits, such as having everything from young schoolchildren to “perfectly clean” whores flown in from Tokyo and Hong Kong.

For Lana, things deteriorated when Mrs. La Roche returned to the States. Jay seemed bent on a catch-up orgy of sexual indulgence the likes of which she had never even imagined and which, she now understood, was one of the reasons why he favored Shanghai and Hong Kong. The Communist police were in his pocket, and the Beijing government needed his hard foreign currency as much as any of his other customers. So confident was he that no challenge she could make would stand up in court unless she was prepared to debase herself in the witness box as well, that he became increasingly contemptuous of her protestations. Her fear only drove him to further cruelties. He had all the money, all the power. He told her he would sue for libel if she said a word, and ruin her family as well in the process.

The end of the marriage came late one night when he had returned home high on a mixture of cocaine and booze, taking her into the bathroom and insisting she do what she could not do, and the beating began. In the morning, still drunk but knowing he’d gone too far, that if she was seen in public like this, his business might suffer, probing questions asked, he had his best cosmetician brought in — the one who had worked on a lot of film stars in his virtually tax-free Hong Kong studios, where his tax loophole umbrella of production companies churned out films for the Chinese market, all about upstanding Communist heroes of the revolution overcoming corruption. The cosmetician spent six hours on Lana, so that by the time the dark-windowed Mercedes took her to Shanghai Airport, her transit through customs and past a sleepy PLA guard merely a formality guaranteed by Jay’s power, Mrs. Lana La Roche, with sunglasses and high scarf to hide the rope burn, was looking none the worse for wear.

He had said he’d send her enough that she could live well on condition that she keep her mouth shut. She said she didn’t want his money.

“All right,” he’d told her. “Then you won’t get it. But—” and then he’d lifted her chin with his lily-white, perfumed hand “—remember this, Lana. You say a word, one word, I’ll have Mommy and Daddy Admiral in the National Enquirer. I’ll make it look like you left me but I wouldn’t eat your shit.” He dropped her head. “Bon voyage. I love you.”

It was even more disgusting than what he’d made her do. Yet, hateful as he was, she somehow knew that the moment he had said it, he had actually meant it.

She stayed by herself in the Manhattan apartment to give herself enough time for the bruises to disappear but knowing she was going to need a lot more time before she made any contact with her parents, with anyone she knew. Unable to sleep, she went to see a doctor, who prescribed sleeping pills. It was the darkest period of her life, and more than once she had the vial of Seconal in hand, staring at the person in the mirror she no longer recognized. Even so, a faint voice, from where she did not know, always stayed her hand.

On Major Tae’s calendar hanging on his Quonset hut office wall, beneath the old black-and-white of him as a young ROK lieutenant in the honor guard for JFK, Major Tae had marked the next day, August 15, in red: Liberation or Independence Day for the South. Apart from Chusok (Thanksgiving), Independence Day was the most important holiday of the year, full of parades, color, and pride as dancers in traditional costumes, exotic dragons, and military march-pasts celebrated not only the republic’s birth in 1945 after thirty-five years of Japanese occupation, but also South Korea’s astonishing progress in the league of industrial nations.

Turning his gaze from his sector of the two-and-a-half-mile-wide demilitarized zone that snaked for 152 miles west to east, the small, slim, immaculately uniformed ROK intelligence officer for Panmunjom pushed the “play” button on his VCR to watch a rerun of the day’s meeting, the 917th between the North Koreans and the UN delegation since the cease-fire way back in 1953. Flipping open his notepad, he prepared to take direct quotes from the North Korean delegation, part of his daily report to ROK-U.S. HQ in Seoul.

The meeting had started badly, the tension from the long-forgotten war in which fifty-four thousand Americans and three million Koreans had died as palpable as the muggy summer heat that hung low and sullenly, smelling of dung, in the valley around Panmunjom. As the first frames flickered on the TV screen, the North Korean delegation was already in the process of accusing the UN commission of the “ninety-eight thousand one hundred and fifty-third ‘violation’ “ of the DMZ. Apparently a child’s kite, its string broken, had been found by the North Koreans on their side of the DMZ twenty-five miles east of Panmunjom, near what on the Americans’ map was called Pork Chop Hill. The aides to the head of the North Korean delegation, Major General Kim, were charging that a microcamera had been found mounted under the kite “to take pictures of ‘militarily sensitive areas’ in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

“That is ridiculous,” replied the UN head of the commission, U.S. Army Gen. George C. Cahill, who sat in the middle on the south side of the long, emerald-baize-covered truce table, his arms folded, right forefinger hooked about the stem of a briar pipe. Unlike the red and blue circle of the South’s flag, its halves joining, a symbol of harmonious duality between opposites— the um and the yang, male and female, night and day, fire and water — everything in the negotiating room stood in hostile opposition to one another. The uniforms alone were strikingly different: The NKA’s — North Korean Army’s — General Kim and his four-man contingent, sitting rigidly on the northern side of the table, were in stiff, high-necked white summer uniforms with red and yellow collar tabs. Kim was unblinking, his only discernible movement a short, studied ejection of a Sobrainie cigarette butt from a white bone holder before lighting another, acrid bluish smoke rising and curling back off the ceiling. Opposite him, on the southern side, the UN uniforms were of a mix. The American general, Cahill, a tall, thick-set man, appeared more relaxed, smoking his pipe, sitting back in open-necked and short-sleeved summer khaki. His South Korean compatriot on his right, more formal-looking, wore the ROK’s light blue air force uniform with tie, while to Cahill’s immediate left a British brigadier sat resignedly in dark green summer drill. The green-baize-covered table between the two sides was itself marked by division, an inch-wide white ribbon running its full length, the line continuing as a meticulously painted strip up each wall.