Scruff

by Robert Ludlum

  Not to her satisfaction.

  “In all honesty, what I provided was unlimited funds for both campaigns. The preconvention and the election; beyond whatever the party could raise. Under a dozen different labels, of course. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what I did.”

  “That’s the ‘how,’ Mr. President. Not the ‘why.’ As I understand you.”

  Phyllis now watched the old banker. Baldwin wanted his answer; his eyes pleaded.

  And Baldwin was right, of course. The how was relatively inconsequential. But God, it has been insane, thought Phyllis. Limousines arriving at all hours of the day and night, extra phones installed, endless conferences—Barnegat, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Houston; Andrew had plunged into the eye of a hurricane. Eating, sleeping, resting: they were forgotten.

  She forgotten. The children forgotten.

  “You’ve read all that, Frank.” Her husband was smiling his shy smile, which Phyllis had come to suspect. “I meant what I said in all those speeches. I felt I was qualified to weld together a great many conflicting voices; that’s not a good metaphor. I guess one doesn’t weld voices. Perhaps ‘orchestrate’ is better; reduce the dissonance. If the level of shouting was lowered, we could get at the root causes. Get to work.”

  “I can’t fault that, Mr. President. You’ve succeeded. You’re a popular man. Undoubtedly the most popular man the White House has had in years.”

  “I’m grateful for that, but more important, I think it’s all working.”

  “Why were you and Ambassador Hill frightened?” Phyllis found herself asking the question without thinking. Andy looked at her, and she knew he would have preferred her not to pursue the subject.

  “I’m not sure, my dear. I find that the older I get, the less sure I am about anything. Billy and I agreed on that less than a week ago. And you must remember, we’ve always been so positive.… Oh, why were we frightened.” A statement. “I imagine it was the responsibility. We proposed a subcommittee chairman and found we’d unearthed a viable candidate for president. Quite a jump.”

  “But viable,” said Phyllis, now concerned by the sound of old Baldwin’s voice.

  “Yes.” The banker looked at Andrew. “What frightened us was the sudden, inexplicable determination you displayed … Mr. President. If you think back, perhaps you’ll understand.”

  “It wasn’t my question, Frank. It was Phyl’s.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. It’s been a difficult day; Billy and I won’t have our lengthy debates anymore. No one ever won, you understand. He often told me, Andrew, that you thought as I did.” Baldwin’s glass, at his lips, was nearly empty, and he looked at the rim; he had used the President’s first name and obviously was sorry that he had.

  “That’s a superb compliment, Frank.”

  “Only history will confirm that, Mr. President. If it’s true.”

  “Regardless, I’m flattered.”

  “But you do understand?”

  “What?”

  “Our concerns. According to Billy’s reports, Bobby Kennedy’s machine was a Boy Scout troop compared to yours. His words, incidentally.”

  “I can bear them,” said Andrew with a half-smile on his lips. “You were offended?”

  “We couldn’t understand.”

  “There was a political vacuum.”

  “You weren’t a politician …”

  “I’d seen enough politicians. The vacuum had to be filled quickly. I understood that. Either I was going to fill it or someone else was. I looked around and decided I was better equipped. If anyone else had come along to alter that judgment, I would have bowed out.”

  “Was anyone else given the chance, Mr. President?”

  “They—he—never appeared.”

  “I think,” said Phyllis Trevayne somewhat defensively, “my husband would’ve been very happy to have gone scot-free. As you say, he’s not basically a politician.”

  “You’re wrong, my dear. He’s the new politics, in all its pristine glory. The remarkable thing is that it works! Utterly and completely. It is a far greater reformation than any revolutionist could conceive of—right, left, or up the middle. But he knew he could do it. What Billy and I could never understand was why he knew he could.”

  There was silence, and Phyllis realized, once again, that only her husband could reply. She looked at him and saw that he would not respond. His thoughts were not for display, even for his old friend, this wonderful old man who had given him so much. Perhaps not even for her.

  “Mr. President.” Sam Vicarson walked rapidly into the room, his expression denying any emergency, and by so doing, giving the message that an emergency existed.

  “Yes, Sam?”

  “The confirmation on the media exchange came through. From Chicago. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Can you locate the principals?” Trevayne’s words shot out quietly, sharply; on the edge of abrasiveness.

  “In the process, sir.”

  “Get them.”

  “Three lines are working on it. The call will be put through downstairs.”

  “You’ll pardon me, Frank. I haven’t taught Sam the corporate procedure of procrastination.” Trevayne rose from the chair and started out of the room.

  “May I fix you another, Mr. Baldwin?”

  “Thank you, young man. Only if Mrs. Trevayne …”

  “Thank you, Sam,” said Phyllis, holding out her glass. She was tempted to ask the presidential aide to disregard the “usual” and pour her some whiskey, but she didn’t. It was still afternoon; even after all the years, she knew she couldn’t drink whiskey in the afternoon. She’d watched her husband as he listened to Sam Vicarson. His jaw had tightened, his eyes momentarily had squinted, his whole body stiffened, if only for an instant.

  People never understood that it was these moments, handled with such ease and apparent confidence, that sapped the energies of the man. Moments of fear; incessant, unending.

  As with everything he ever engaged in, her husband drove himself beyond the endurance of ordinary men. And he had finally found the job in which there was no surcease. There were times when Phyllis thought it was slowly killing him.

  “I mourn an old friend whose time had come, my dear,” said Baldwin, observing Phyllis closely. “Yet the look on your face makes me somewhat ashamed.”

  “I’m sorry.” Phyllis had been absently staring at the hallway. She turned to the banker. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “I’ve lost my friend. To the perfectly natural finality of his long life. In some ways, you’ve lost your husband. To a concept. And your lives are so far from being over.… I think your sacrifice is greater than mine.”

  “I think I agree with you.” Phyllis tried to smile, tried to make the pronouncement lighter, but she could not.

  “He’s a great man, you know.”

  “I’d like to believe that.”

  “He’s done what no one else could do; what some of us thought was beyond doing. He’s put the pieces back together again, let us see ourselves more as we can be, not as we were. There’s still a long way to go, but he’s provided the essentials. The desire to be better than we are; and to face the truth.”

  “That’s a lovely thing to say, Mr. Baldwin.”

  Andrew looked at Sam Vicarson, who’d just shut the study door. They were alone. “How far has it gone?”

  “Apparently all the way, sir. Our information is that the papers were signed several hours ago.”

  “What does Justice say?”

  “No change. They’re still researching, but there’s not much hope. They restate their original thesis. The purchase—or absorption—simply can’t be traced to Genessee Industries.”

  “We traced it, Sam. We know we’re right.”

  “You traced it, Mr. President.”

  Trevayne walked to the study window and looked out. To the terrace and the water below. “Because it was one thing they didn’t have. One thing we kept from them.”


  “May I say something, sir?”

  “Two years ago, I doubt you would have asked. What is it?”

  “Isn’t it possible that you’re overreacting? Genessee has acted responsibly; you’ve controlled … them. They support you.”

  “They don’t support me, Sam,” said Trevayne softly, harshly, without looking at Vicarson, his eyes still on the water. “We have a nonaggression pact. I signed a nonaggression pact with the twentieth-century syndrome. The no-alternative holy ghost.”

  “It’s worked, Mr. President.”

  “You may have to keep that judgment in the past tense.” Andrew turned and stared at the lawyer. “The pact is broken, Sam. It’s no longer tenable. It’s smashed.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure. I won’t allow Genessee to control a large segment of the American press. And a chain of newspapers is exactly that. It can’t be tolerated.” Trevayne walked to his desk. “Newspapers … then will come magazines, radio, television. The networks. That they will not have.”

  “Justice doesn’t know how to stop them, Mr. President.”

  “We’ll find a way; we have to.”

  The telephone hummed; it did not ring. Vicarson swiftly crossed to the desk beside Andrew and picked it up.

  “President Trevayne’s office.” Sam listened for several seconds. “Tell him to stay where he is. The Man’s in conference, but we’ll get back to him. Tell him it’s priority.” Vicarson hung up. “Let him stew until you’re ready, sir.”

  Sam walked away as Andrew nodded his appreciation. Vicarson knew instinctively by now when the President wanted to be alone. This was one of those moments. He spoke as Trevayne sat down at his desk.

  “I’ll head back to communications.”

  “No, Sam. If you don’t mind, go up and keep Phyl and old Baldwin company. I don’t imagine it’s easy for either of them.”

  “Yes, sir.” For two or three seconds the young aide just watched the President of the United States. Then he abruptly left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Andrew picked up a pencil and wrote out a sentence in clear, precise letters. “The only solution is in the constant search for one.”

  Big Billy Hill.

  And then he wrote one word: “Horseshit.”

  Paul Bonner.

  And then he added: “?”

  He picked up the telephone and spoke firmly.

  “Chicago, please.”

  Fifteen hundred miles away, Ian Hamilton answered.

  “Mr. President?”

  “I want you out of that merger.”

  “Perhaps it’s academic, but you have no viable proof that we’re involved. The little men from your Justice Department have been nuisances.”

  “You know. I know. Get out.”

  “I think you’re beginning to show the strain, Mr. President.”

  “I’m not interested in what you think. Just make sure you understand me.”

  There was a pause. “Does it matter?”

  “Don’t press me, Hamilton.”

  “Nor you us.”

  Trevayne stared out the window, at the ever-moving waters of the sound. “There’ll come a day when you’re expendable. You should realize that. All of you.”

  “Quite possibly, Mr. President. However, not in our time.”

  1

  The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying.

  Two abrupt explosions pierced the sounds of the sea and the wind and the vessel’s pain. They came from the dimly lit cabin that rose and fell with its host body. A man lunged out of the door grasping the railing with one hand, holding his stomach with the other.

  A second man followed, the pursuit cautious, his intent violent. He stood bracing himself in the cabin door; he raised a gun and fired again. And again.

  The man at the railing whipped both his hands up to his head, arching backward under the impact of the fourth bullet. The trawler’s bow dipped suddenly into the valley of two giant waves, lifting the wounded man off his feet; he twisted to his left, unable to take his hands away from his head. The boat surged upward, bow and midships more out of the water than in it, sweeping the figure in the doorway back into the cabin; a fifth gunshot fired wildly. The wounded man screamed, his hands now lashing out at anything he could grasp, his eyes blinded by blood and the unceasing spray of the sea. There was nothing he could grab, so he grabbed at nothing; his legs buckled as his body lurched forward. The boat rolled violently leeward and the man whose skull was ripped open plunged over the side into the madness of the darkness below.

  He felt rushing cold water envelop him, swallowing him, sucking him under, and twisting him in circles, then propelling him up to the surface—only to gasp a single breath of air. A gasp and he was under again.

  And there was heat, a strange moist heat at his temple that seared through the freezing water that kept swallowing him, a fire where no fire should burn. There was ice, too; an ice-like throbbing in his stomach and his legs and his chest, oddly warmed by the cold sea around him. He felt these things, acknowledging his own panic as he felt them. He could see his own body turning and twisting, arms and feet working frantically against the pressures of the whirlpool. He could feel, think, see, perceive panic and struggle—yet strangely there was peace. It was the calm of the observer, the uninvolved observer, separated from the events, knowing of them but not essentially involved.

  Then another form of panic spread through him, surging through the heat and the ice and the uninvolved recognition. He could not submit to peace! Not yet! It would happen any second now; he was not sure what it was, but it would happen. He had to be there!

  He kicked furiously, clawing at the heavy walls of water above, his chest burning. He broke surface, thrashing to stay on top of the black swells. Climb up! Climb up!

  A monstrous rolling wave accommodated; he was on the crest, surrounded by pockets of foam and darkness. Nothing. Turn! Turn!

  It happened. The explosion was massive; he could hear it through the clashing waters and the wind, the sight and the sound somehow his doorway to peace. The sky lit up like a fiery diadem and within that crown of fire, objects of all shapes and sizes were blown through the light into the outer shadows.

  He had won. Whatever it was, he had won.

  Suddenly he was plummeting downward again, into an abyss again. He could feel the rushing waters crash over his shoulders, cooling the white-hot heat at his temple, warming the ice-cold incisions in his stomach and his legs and.…

  His chest. His chest was in agony! He had been struck—the blow crushing, the impact sudden and intolerable. It happened again! Let me alone. Give me peace.

  And again!

  And he clawed again, and kicked again … until he felt it. A thick, oily object that moved only with the movements of the sea. He could not tell what it was, but it was there and he could feel it, hold it.

  Hold it! It will ride you to peace. To the silence of darkness … and peace.

  The rays of the early sun broke through the mists of the eastern sky, lending glitter to the calm waters of the Mediterranean. The skipper of the small fishing boat, his eyes bloodshot, his hands marked with rope burns, sat on the stern gunnel smoking a Gauloise, grateful for the sight of the smooth sea. He glanced over at the open wheelhouse; his younger brother was easing the throttle forward to make better time, the single other crewman checking a net several feet away. They were laughing at something and that was good; there had been nothing to laugh about last night. Where had the storm come from? The weather reports from Marseilles had indicated nothing;
if they had he would have stayed in the shelter of the coastline. He wanted to reach the fishing grounds eighty kilometers south of La Seyne-sur-Mer by daybreak, but not at the expense of costly repairs, and what repairs were not costly these days?

  Or at the expense of his life, and there were moments last night when that was a distinct consideration.

  “Tu es fatigué, hein, mon frère?” his brother shouted, grinning at him. “Va te coucher maintenant. Laisse-moi faire.”

  “D’accord,” the brother answered, throwing his cigarette over the side and sliding down to the deck on top of a net. “A little sleep won’t hurt.”

  It was good to have a brother at the wheel. A member of the family should always be the pilot on a family boat; the eyes were sharper. Even a brother who spoke with the smooth tongue of a literate man as opposed to his own coarse words. Crazy! One year at the university and his brother wished to start a compagnie. With a single boat that had seen better days many years ago. Crazy. What good did his books do last night? When his compagnie was about to capsize.

  He closed his eyes, letting his hands soak in the rolling water on the deck. The salt of the sea would be good for the rope burns. Burns received while lashing equipment that did not care to stay put in the storm.

  “Look! Over there!”

  It was his brother, apparently sleep was to be denied by sharp family eyes.

  “What is it?” he yelled.

  “Port bow! There’s a man in the water! He’s holding on to something! A piece of debris, a plank of some sort.”