Hillary

by D. W. Buffa

  “What is it?” he asked. There was another long silence and Burdick was afraid he was going to lose him. “I’ll be in Washington tomorrow. Just tell me where you want to meet.”

  And so here he was, sitting in the middle of Union Station, waiting for someone he would not have recognized if he were standing right in front of him. It struck him funny now, that he did not know what Bauman looked like. Bobby Hart had mentioned something about his age, but all he had said about his appearance was an offhand remark about the way that, like other agents of the Secret Service, Bauman was someone who could easily pass unnoticed in a crowd.

  Burdick checked his watch. Bauman had said to meet him in the station lobby at two-thirty in the afternoon, and it was now ten minutes after three. He was not coming; he had changed his mind. It was just a short walk to the Capitol. The Senate was still in session. Instead of calling Bobby Hart later that night to tell him that he had reached Richard Bauman and that, after some initial reluctance, the agent had agreed to meet him but then had not shown up, he would try to see him now.

  He checked his watch again. It was quarter after. Bauman was not going to come. A train had just arrived and the lobby was full of noise. Burdick got up and started toward the doors and the street outside. Just as he got there, someone took hold of his arm.

  “You forgot this.” Burdick stopped and turned around. A stranger, a middle-aged man, was holding a thick manila envelope. “You left it on the bench next to you when you left. I’m sure it’s something important.”

  Burdick started to explain that the package was not his, that someone else must have left it on the station bench. Then he saw his own name written across the front of it.

  “As I say, I’m sure it’s something you wouldn’t want to lose.”

  They exchanged a glance. The station was crowded, people coming in and out, people all around them. Richard Bauman pushed open the door and, with Burdick right behind him, headed toward a long line of taxicabs waiting at the curb.

  “You were late; I didn’t think you were coming,” remarked Burdick as the cab they had climbed into pulled away. “I waited forty-five minutes.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Bauman without apology. “I was there when you arrived.”

  “You were there when…? Then why did you wait until I was ready to give up?”

  Bauman was bending forward, watching out the window as if he were looking for an address. He did not reply.

  “Turn right at the next street,” he told the driver. “You can drop us halfway down the block.”

  As the taxi driver made the turn, Bauman looked back over his shoulder. There was nothing casual in the way he did it. His gaze was too intense for someone who was just trying to get his bearings, remember where he was going from the familiar surroundings of where he had been.

  “You think you’re being followed?” asked Burdick. “Or do you think I was? Is that the reason you let me sit there like that—to see if someone was following me?”

  They had turned onto a busy commercial street filled with small shops and restaurants, the kind frequented mainly by people who lived in the neighborhood and did not want to spend much money.

  “Any place here,” said Bauman as he took out his wallet and handed the driver twice what he was owed. He grasped the door handle, ready to get out. “Someone knows what you’ve been doing. Frank Morris was murdered just after you saw him; your apartment was broken into just before you got back to New York.”

  “How did you know that?” asked Burdick. But it was too late. Bauman had opened the door and was getting out of the cab.

  Burdick caught up with him on the sidewalk. Bauman’s eyes were moving quickly side to side, searching, as it seemed, for anything that was unusual, anything out of place, the way, as Burdick imagined, he must have done every time he was at work, guarding the president from the threat of assassination. Burdick clutched under his arm the package he had been given, wondering at the thick bulk of it and what it must contain. They walked to the corner, crossed the street, and then started down the other side. They stopped in front of a dismal-looking café with a dust-covered window and a neon sign that barely flickered. Bauman held the door open, and, as Burdick passed in front of him, darted a glance first in one direction, then the other, before he followed him inside.

  “I don’t live far from here,” explained Bauman as they took a table in back.

  The place was quite empty, all the other tables not only deserted but without any sign that they had recently been used. The soft hum of the air conditioning underscored the dull oppressive silence. It was dark, the only light what came through the grimy front window from the street outside. The waitress, who doubled as the short-order cook, flashed a girlish smile, all that was left of her long-vanished youth, and started to recite the specials of the day. Bauman nodded gently and told her they just wanted coffee.

  Burdick reached for the package that he had set next to him on the table. Bauman reached across and held him by the wrist.

  “No, not yet; tell me about Hart. I know what you said on the phone—that you’d trust him with your life. That isn’t what I want to know.”

  The waitress brought their coffee. Burdick stirred in milk and sugar, tasted it, and then added a little more milk. There were some things about which he was always precise.

  “What is it you want to know?”

  Bauman did not even look at his coffee. He shoved the cup to the side and hunched forward on his elbows. It was insufferably hot outside, but he had worn a coat and tie, a habit that not even this vile weather could break.

  “Is he as good as they say he is?”

  It seemed a strange question to ask; one, moreover, Quentin Burdick was not certain how to answer. With a reporter’s instinct, he grinned and answered with a question of his own.

  “How good do they say he is?”

  Bauman looked at him with grudging admiration. Burdick was smart and, better than that, because there were a lot of smart people, knew how to get to the heart of things.

  “I was seven years with Constable, from when he ran the first time to the night he died. I never once heard him say anything good about him—Hart, I mean.”

  “And that led you to think that…?”

  “That he was someone he couldn’t handle, someone he couldn’t bullshit,” said Bauman, his wispy brown eyebrows inching upward with each new phrase. “Someone he couldn’t con into doing what he wanted.”

  “All that may be true, but it doesn’t explain why Constable would have been afraid of him.”

  With a pensive expression, Bauman stared down at the floor. He began to swing his foot, slowly, methodically, like someone keeping time.

  “We’re like potted plants, or wallpaper, part of the room itself. We stand there, silent, barely moving. After a while, the people you’re guarding forget you’re even there; not forget, really—it’s more like they forget you’re human, with a mind of your own, remembering what they say, making the same kind of judgments anyone would who heard the kind of things that were said.”

  Bauman stopped swinging his foot. He raised his eyes, not all the way, but far enough that Burdick could see the rueful expression, the almost savage mockery, that danced inside them.

  “Seven years! Can you imagine all the things I heard, all the things I saw?” His eyes met Burdick’s waiting gaze with a candid, harsh appraisal that, more than words could have done, told the contempt he felt. “He was afraid of Hart—they both were: he and that wife of his. I’m not sure why. Maybe because of what I said before: that they couldn’t get to him, couldn’t force him to fall in line. Constable was always making some disparaging remark about him. Maybe he was just afraid of the comparisons people made. You know, how Hart never cheated on anything, and that’s all Constable ever did. That’s why I asked if Hart was really as good as they say he is.”

  “Yes, he’s that good; better than that, really. There are a lot of people who think he should have been president, a lot of
people who think he still might be.”

  “You know him pretty well, then?” asked Bauman with more than idle curiosity. He seemed to Burdick intensely interested in the answer.

  “Yes, I’d say so. I’ve known him since he first came to Congress.”

  “You know him well enough to warn him? Would he believe you if you told him something, even if it seemed not just unbelievable, but impossible?”

  “Impossible? What are you talking about?”

  Richard Bauman put his left elbow on the shabby faded tablecloth, opened the fingers of his hand, and then closed them into a fist, and then did it again, and again after that, a steady drum-like repetition. His gaze became distant, remote. He turned his hand, made a fist again, sideways this time, and tapped the hollow end softly, patiently against his chin.

  “I would have taken a bullet for him,” he said in the way of someone coming to terms with himself. “He may not have deserved it, but he was the President of the United States and I’ll be goddamned if I would have let someone kill him. That’s what we sign up for, what we swear to do: save the president, no matter what the cost, take the bullet, because if someone has to die it’s better that it’s you.”

  “I know you were there; I know you were in the room,” said Burdick, certain he understood what the agent was trying to say.

  “No, I was in the other room, the way I always was, sitting there without a damn thing to do, just outside the bedroom. I didn’t know he had someone in there. Don’t misunderstand, I was not surprised he had a woman with him—I would have been surprised if he hadn’t—but I tried not to think about it. I tried to tell myself that it was none of my business. It was, of course, and that was my—that was our—mistake. But that’s the way he wanted it, what we had to let him do.”

  Burdick sipped on his coffee. He wanted Bauman to take it slow, to tell him everything that had happened that night, and after that night.

  “Then you heard something, knew the president was in trouble, and that’s when you went in, that’s when you found her?”

  To Burdick’s astonishment, Bauman vigorously shook his head.

  “The door was locked! I should have known right away that something was wrong, that he had not just had a heart attack. Look,” he went on, angry with himself, “we let him get away with it, let him give a key to any woman he wanted, but we never let him lock a door. That was one rule we would not let him break. He understood that. He knew it had to be that way, and that we’d never just walk in on him. And I forgot that—forgot to even think what it meant—when I heard him cry for help and I started pounding on the door. It was locked. She opened it.”

  “The woman, the one he was with, the one who—?”

  “Opened it like she was scared to death, half out of her mind with fear and no idea what to do! One minute she’s in bed with the president, the next minute the president is dead. Why wouldn’t she be scared?”

  “This woman, the one you saw that night, the one who killed him—what did she look like? Can you describe her for me?”

  Bauman’s mouth pulled back into a tight, corrosive look. His eyes flashed with what seemed to Burdick bitter, angry disillusionment. He nodded toward the package that lay unopened on the table. Burdick picked it up, eager to see what was inside. He remembered that Hart had told him that Bauman had worked with a sketch artist to get the girl’s likeness, but instead of a drawing, a second-hand rendering of what she looked like, Burdick pulled out a black and white photograph, and not just one, but half a dozen of them. He did not even try to hide his surprise.

  “But how? When?”

  Bauman was still sitting there, he had not moved, but part of him seemed to disappear, vanish into the darkened corner of the vacant café, as if the answer, or rather what lay behind the answer, had come at a cost greater than he could bear.

  “I’m no longer with the Secret Service. Two days ago, the director told me that because of what had happened it was decided that I should take early retirement. I wasn’t given a choice. He wanted me out. He tried to tell me he was doing it for me, that it was the only way to prevent a serious sanction, a black mark on my record, for what I had done, letting that woman, that assassin, go. I believed him; I thought he was telling me the truth. I mean, what I did—deciding that it was more important to protect the president’s reputation, save his family from the embarrassment, instead of just doing my job—there should have been sanctions for that. But then I remembered something. It did not mean much at the time. I thought he was just trying to cover his ass a little, that he didn’t want Hart to think he wasn’t on top of things.”

  With a quick, puzzled smile, Burdick twisted his narrow head slightly to the side.

  “Hart?—You’re talking about when he met with Clarence Atwood? What happened?”

  “I told Hart everything I knew; I answered every question. I told him the truth, and then Atwood lied. It did not seem that important. What difference did it make that he had not done it yet; I was sure he would have me do it right away. It’s like I said, Clarence was just trying to protect himself.” Bauman’s eyes became hard, resentful, and full of disappointment, though, it seemed to Burdick, mainly with himself. “Clarence was always good at that,” he muttered, staring off into the distance.

  “What did he lie to Hart about? What was it you thought he was going to have you do?” asked Burdick with an insistence that brought Bauman back to himself.

  “The drawing, the one you thought was there,” he replied, gesturing toward the manila envelope that lay open on the table. “There never was a drawing, an artist’s sketch of what the girl looked like, never. I was never asked to do it. I wasn’t asked to describe to anyone—anyone except Atwood—what she looked like. Atwood lied about it to Hart, and he lied when he told him that he had given copies of it to the FBI. I was still so shaken by what had happened, by what I had done—that instead of protecting the president I had helped his murderer get away—that I didn’t understand how that lie meant that he had lied about that other thing as well.”

  Bauman’s eyes, trained to search a crowd for the least little thing unusual, to move in a constant, relentless circuit, watching, waiting for something to happen, did not move at all. They stared straight ahead, empty, bleak, disconsolate, two hollow orbs sunk in a black depression. Burdick coaxed him out of it.

  “That other thing?” he asked in a friendly, sympathetic voice. “Tell me what it was. It’s important, isn’t it?”

  “What?” Bauman blinked his eyes. “Yes, it’s important. I don’t know why it didn’t seem that important when I heard him say it to Hart. It wasn’t just lying about a picture, a drawing of what the girl looked like, something we could have done the next day or even that night. He told Hart that copies of the drawing had been given to the FBI, and that the bureau had started an investigation. That’s what I remembered when Atwood told me I was finished, that I had to leave, that it was the only way I had to protect myself from public embarrassment when the truth came out that the president had been murdered and that I had helped the killer get away. There was no picture; nothing had been given to the FBI. Do you understand: Nothing had been given to the FBI—Atwood had never talked to them!”

  “But he’s the one who told you that the president had not died of a heart attack, that he had been murdered. Why wouldn’t he tell the FBI? Why wouldn’t he want them to start an investigation right away?”

  Bauman turned to make sure they were still alone, and then bent forward.

  “When he told me, when he called me into his office the day after the president died and said there had been an autopsy and that some drug had been used, I thought the investigation had already started. I asked him who I was supposed to talk to, who was in charge. He said he’d let me know, that there were some other things that had to be worked out first. He didn’t tell me what they were, and I was so distracted, so upset, I didn’t think to ask. It was only later, after he talked to Hart, after I began to realize what he had li
ed about, after he told me I was finished, after more than a week had gone by and everyone was still talking as if the president had died of natural causes, it was only after all that, that I decided to find out. I broke into his office.” He nodded toward the package and what it held inside. “It’s Atwood’s file.”

  “You took the file; you didn’t—?”

  “No, I made copies of everything; he doesn’t know I have it. His office is just down the hallway from mine. I was there late at night, cleaning out my things.”

  Burdick tapped his finger on the cover.

  “Is this the only copy?”

  “No. There’s someone else I thought might need it.”

  Burdick glanced at the black-and-white photograph. She was more than good-looking, she was extraordinary, with large, bold eyes and a mouth that seemed somehow both vulnerable and defiant at the same time. He wondered why Bauman had thought to include several copies of the photograph instead of just one. Then, when he put down the first and picked up the second, he realized that they weren’t the same photograph at all; that they, and the four others as well, showed her not just in different outfits and different poses, but with such completely different looks that she could have passed for six different women. He put them down and searched Bauman’s eyes

  “This is the girl, the woman you saw that night, the one who murdered the president?”

  “That’s not a face I’ll ever forget.”

  “But how—how did Clarence Atwood get a photograph, six photographs, of her? How did he even know what she looked like, if you didn’t work with a sketch artist?”

  “Don’t you get it? She was working for us. Clarence Atwood hired her. The head of the Secret Service hired the woman who murdered the President of the United States!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  They sat in a kind of stunned silence, neither of them wanting to believe what they both knew was true. Bauman had been right: It was more than unbelievable, it was impossible; impossible that anything like this could have happened, impossible that the president of the United States had been murdered on the order of the head of the very agency sworn to protect the president’s life. It was more than betrayal, it was treason.