by D. W. Buffa
The more Bauman thought about it, the angrier he became. This awful secret had been locked up inside him for days, with no one he could talk to, no one he could trust. For more than twenty years, he had done what he had been told. Like a soldier in a war, he had understood that his job was to react, not think for himself. And now, suddenly, he had to decide on his own what he was supposed to do. He knew he had to do something; he could not just forget what he had discovered. He had helped a murderer, an assassin, get away. He was not about to let the man who hired her go free.
But who should he tell? This was not something that Clarence Atwood had done alone. If he hired someone to kill the president, it was because someone told him to. He could take what he had to the FBI. He had friends there, people he had worked with in the past. But what if he made a mistake, told the wrong person what he knew? The risk was too high, the danger too great. He was not just thinking about himself, though he knew how easy it would be to put him out of the way; the real danger, the one he worried about, was what might happen if these people, whoever they were, got away with it, murdered the president and no one ever found out what they had done. The more he thought about it, the less certain he was about how to proceed. Each alternative seemed less promising than the last. And then he thought of it, and wondered why he had not thought of it before.
“Hart,” he mumbled to himself.
“Hart? What about him?” asked Burdick.
Lost in his own reverie, Bauman had not realized he had spoken out loud. He looked up from the table, blinked his eyes, and then remembered.
“I was going to tell him, but then you called. I thought I could trust him. Atwood lied to him, which meant that Hart could not have known, could not have been a part of it.”
But the question about whom he could trust, whom he could safely tell, was secondary to a deeper concern, one that had troubled him from the time he first read what was in the file he had stolen from Atwood’s office, troubled him so much that he had scarcely slept at night. It was still there, gnawing at him, driving him a little more crazy each time he went back through what had happened and how he had been made a part of it, an unwilling accomplice in a conspiracy to murder. Suddenly, all that pent up emotion exploded, and he hit the table with the flat of his hand so hard that the waitress, sitting on a stool next to the cash register in front, jolted sideways with the noise. When she saw it was nothing, the startled glance vanished and she turned back to the newspaper that lay spread out on the counter in front of her.
“That explains it, doesn’t it?” insisted Bauman, his eyes aflame. “Why Atwood didn’t have me work with a sketch artist, why he didn’t want an investigation. He arranged it, he organized the whole thing: the murder, the cover-up—everything!”
Burdick smiled patiently. He understood the pressure Bauman was under, the guilt he must feel, but still he had to wonder why, despite all that, he had not seen the flaw; why, despite his emotions, he had not realized his mistake.
“But Atwood is the one who told you that Constable had been murdered,” he reminded him in a quiet, sympathetic voice free from any hint of criticism. “If he hadn’t told you that, you wouldn’t have known there was anything to investigate.”
Burdick thought this would cause Bauman to hesitate, to reconsider what he had said, but instead Bauman dismissed the objection out of hand.
“He didn’t have any choice; not after I had seen the girl.” Bauman’s eyes were eager, alive, filled with a certainty so complete that it was impossible to doubt that he had thought it all through and was utterly convinced he was right. “It didn’t go the way they thought it would: Constable didn’t die quietly, he didn’t just pass out from that injection. He cried out for help. Maybe he saw the needle, maybe he saw what she was going to do; maybe when he first felt it he struggled to get away. Whatever happened, he made enough noise that I went running for the door. She had to open it; she could not just hide behind that locked door. Everyone on the floor would have been alerted and she never would have gotten away. She knew that, she had to know that. She had to open the door; she had to go into that act of hers: pretend she was scared, panic-stricken, that in the middle of having sex with the president he had had a heart attack and died!”
Burdick waited, expecting more. Bauman seemed momentarily transfixed by the certainty of his own account; sufficient, it seemed to him, to remove every question, every doubt. Burdick gave him a puzzled glance.
“But that still doesn’t explain why he told you that Constable had been murdered. You saw the girl, but you didn’t know then that she was pretending anything. You believed her when she told you what happened. That was the reason you…the reason you did what you did.”
With a brief nod, Bauman acknowledged the truth of what Burdick said. Then he gestured toward the package.
“It’s all in there: the autopsy, the report. There had to be one, but Atwood made sure it was carried out in private, as few people as possible involved. It probably never occurred to him that anyone would notice a small puncture wound, and if that hadn’t been discovered there wouldn’t have been any reason to look for evidence of a drug. It would have been a simple case of heart failure, exactly what you would expect to find, given his age and his history.”
But even as he said it, Bauman now seemed uncertain. Despite his seeming confidence, he was bothered by a latent suspicion that would not go away.
“Or maybe it did occur to him,” he ventured after a pause. “Maybe that’s what he was counting on; maybe that’s what he wanted: a way to prove that it was not a heart attack, that it was murder.”
“What do you mean? If he hired her, if Atwood hired someone to kill the president, what reason could he have to want anyone to know that the president had been murdered?”
A look of contempt shot across Bauman’s troubled mouth.
“Why would he want it known that the president had been murdered?—I guess that would depend on who he wanted to blame.”
Leaning on his elbow, Burdick rubbed his chin as he seized on that fugitive thought and tried to follow it through to all its awful consequences. If Bauman was right, if Atwood had hired someone to kill the president, the obvious question was why. It was more than doubtful—it seemed to him an absurdity—to think that Atwood could have had any reason of his own to want the president dead. Robert Constable had made him head of the Secret Service: that seemed to rule out the possibility of some deep sense of disappointment, the kind that required revenge. But if it was not personal, then Atwood had to have been acting at the direction of someone else, someone who had something to gain from the death of Robert Constable, something they could not have so long as Constable was still alive. And not just that, it had to be someone who could convince Clarence Atwood that it was worth his while to betray his office—betray his country, if you will—and risk his own life, to say nothing of his reputation, on a charge of conspiracy to murder the President of the United States. Burdick was almost afraid to ask.
“Who put Atwood up to this? Who is he working for? Do you know?”
Bauman began to scratch the back of his heavily veined hand. Staring blindly into the distance, he kept scratching at it, scratching it as if it were the only way to erase from his memory what he wished he had not learned.
“It’s all in there,” he said finally, though even now he refused to shift his gaze, to look back at the package that now belonged to Burdick. “Every rotten, dirty part of it.” Slowly, and as if with a conscious effort, his eyes came back round. He looked straight at Burdick. “You won’t believe it, the first time you go through it. You’ll think it’s all a pack of lies. You’ll want to destroy it, throw it in the fire and burn it, hope that once you’ve done that it will leave you alone and you won’t remember it,” he remarked in a strained, hopeless voice. “It’s sort of like being told that someone you love is dead. I lost my wife a couple of years ago; she died in an accident. There’s a moment when you think that if you can just go back a few minutes,
even just a few seconds, you can start all over and that what you’ve just been told won’t happen. But you can’t, can you?—And then you know with that awful, perfect certainty that nothing is ever going to be the same again.”
Looking somehow much older than he had just an hour earlier, when Burdick had first seen him, Richard Bauman stepped out from behind the table with the threadbare tablecloth and the tarnished silverware and stood for what seemed a long time in the darkened silence of the deserted café. Finally, he put his hand on Burdick’s shoulder and told him that whatever the consequences, no matter who it might hurt, it all had to come out, and that he trusted Burdick to make sure that it did.
“The country deserves the truth.”
“Where are you going to be?” asked Burdick. “How do I get in touch with you?”
“I’ll try to reach you, but right now, I’ve got to disappear.” He glanced one last time at the package, the tale of horrors he had found in Clarence Atwood’s private office. “Read that; you’ll see what I mean. And be careful. No one is safe.” And then he turned and headed out the door, into the streets of Washington and the hoped for anonymity of the city.
Burdick watched him go, struck by the cautious efficiency of the way he moved, the pigeon-toed gait that former fighters and former football linemen had, the clean discipline of the athlete, trained to strength and quickness, who knows as little about hesitation as he does about fear. If he was not certain of it before, he was certain of it now: Bauman was not bragging when he said he would have taken a bullet for Robert Constable. It was who he was.
After the door swung shut and Bauman was somewhere safe outside, Burdick asked the waitress for another cup of coffee and, measuring in the right amount of milk and sugar, began to examine the contents of the stolen file. He started with the photographs. The longer he looked at them, the more unlikely the young woman seemed for the part of a killer. She looked too young, too alive, too innocent, really, to have anything to do with death. But then perhaps that was why she was so good at what she did, why she found it so easy to get close to the men she killed. That was one point on which Burdick was quite clear: this woman who appeared to be still in her twenties had done this kind of thing, not just once or twice before, but probably dozens of times. You did not hire an amateur to murder the president of the United States.
He put the six photographs to the side and discovered a kind of ledger listing a series of payments made into a Swiss account, four separate transactions spread over six months, each one in the amount of one million two hundred fifty thousand dollars, for a total of five million. The last payment, he noted, had been made the day after Constable died. It listed the payments and the dates on which they had been made, but there was nothing to indicate where they had come from, or who, if it had not been Atwood, had made the arrangement to hire her in the first place. The next several documents had to do with the president’s itinerary, every place he had been scheduled to be, starting the month before the assassination. That seemed to mean that the time and place of the assassination had been left up to the killer. The woman hired to do it had first to get close to him, meet him somehow, let him know she might be available, that she understood the game and knew how to be discreet, that he could take her to bed and trust that she would not talk about it.
Burdick riffled through the next several pages, but there was nothing about when she finally met Constable or what happened between them when she did. If the evidence, or the lack of evidence, was any indication, she did not make reports. It occurred to him that perhaps she did not have any contact at all with those who hired her, that she simply did what she was paid for and then vanished out of sight. But that, he realized immediately, would not explain the photographs and the fact that they were in Atwood’s possession. She could not have been a hired assassin in the sense in which that was usually meant: someone who worked for anyone, someone who would kill anyone for a price. Someone like that would never allow anyone to know what she looked like, much less let them have half a dozen photographs of her.
She was a hired killer—there was no question about that—but a hired killer who worked for only one kind of employer, the kind that had a regular need for the service she performed. That meant the government, and perhaps other governments as well; intelligence agencies that shared with each other not just information but the means by which to eliminate someone seen as a threat. Whatever laws were on the books against political assassination, everyone understood that it was sometimes necessary to choose the lesser of two evils.
Burdick turned the page, and then he turned another, and each time he did it, turned to the next page in Atwood’s secret file, he did it with reluctance, worried what he was going to find, a feeling followed almost immediately by a strange sense of relief when, instead of a shattering revelation of the sort Bauman had talked about, it was another fairly pedestrian report, an account of expenditures, a reckoning of costs. Then he found it, a chronology of what had happened, a list of everyone involved, a detailed account of the first, and every subsequent, meeting where the matter had been discussed, debated, and decided.
He had not finished the first paragraph when his mouth went dry and his stomach started to churn. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick. Bauman’s words echoed in his brain, not just about not wanting to believe it, but what he had said about Bobby Hart, when he asked if he trusted the senator enough to tell him something that was not just unbelievable, but impossible. Because that was what this was: impossible. It could not have happened, not here, not in our lifetime; but it had. The impossible had happened, and with what he had in this file he could now prove it.
Quentin Burdick had read enough. He pulled out his cell phone and called Bobby Hart. There was no answer and all he could do was leave a message that he had to see him right away. He was not sure what to do next. Then he remembered what he had been going to do earlier, when he was sitting at the station and thought Bauman was not going to show up. The Senate was in session. He could talk to Hart when he finished on the floor. He left the waitress a sizeable tip and caught a cab.
Clutching the package in his arms, Burdick found himself watching the passing sights of Washington with new eyes. All the old, familiar landmarks had taken on a strange and different meaning, almost as if the country had been taken over by a foreign power. The buildings, the monuments, the vast open avenues—none of that had changed, but instead of a tribute to the nation’s greatness, it now seemed to represent something important that was in imminent danger of being lost.
Burdick got out in front of the Russell Senate Office Building and hurried inside. The receptionist told him that the senator was not available; David Allen told him the senator was in New York.
“She’s new,” explained Allen as he led Burdick through the narrow passageway to his small backroom office. He removed a pile of documents from the only other chair and then went round to his desk. “Is that for him?” he asked, nodding toward the package Burdick held in his lap.
“No. I mean yes…well, sort of. It’s something I wanted to talk to him about. But you say he’s in New York. I just came down this morning.”
He looked around the cluttered room, books and papers everywhere; the plain wooden desk behind which David Allen somehow functioned, a mountain of what looked like debris, but which Burdick knew from experience was actually organized in a scheme that only Allen could understand, a method that allowed him, and no one else, to find anything he needed. It gave a certain antic, almost magical quality to the otherwise humdrum exercise of filing papers, the ability to find a needle in a haystack without so much as the bother of a search. Despite everything he had been through that day, despite everything he had learned, Burdick could not quite suppress a smile.
“When do you expect him back?”
“I thought tonight, maybe tomorrow; but now—he just called a few minutes ago—I don’t really know.”
“Can you find out? I have to see him; it’s very important
.”
Allen had known Burdick a long time; not well, it is true, but in the way someone who worked on the Hill, someone who dealt with the press on a daily basis, would know a reporter. He knew him well enough, or at least he thought he did, to detect a nervous anxiety he had not seen before. Quentin Burdick was smart, insightful, with a judgment about people and events that went as deep as anyone and deeper than most. He had covered politics and government since the year before Richard Nixon was elected and he could still rattle off the names of those who had served in the cabinet of Lyndon Johnson as easily as he could give you the name of the present secretary of state. Burdick had seen everything, from Watergate to war, enough to know that most of what the current crop of politicians thought new and innovative was little more than a pale imitation of things that had been tried before. Nothing surprised him; nothing made him lose the calm, unflappable demeanor that Allen had often marveled at and sometimes envied; nothing, that is, until now.
“What is it?” asked Allen. “You look like you’re ready to come apart.”
Pressing his lips, Burdick spread his long tapered fingers and began to tap them together. Then he locked his fingers and tapped his thumbs, and then, shaking his head, he threw up his hands in frustration. With a quick glance, and a brief, apologetic smile, he let Allen know that it was not something he could talk about.
“Not yet, anyway; there are some things I still need to do.”
“Like talk to Bobby?”
“Yes, as soon as possible. He knows what it’s about.” Burdick looked away, struck by how incongruous that now sounded. “No, he doesn’t know what it’s about. He’ll think he does, but he doesn’t.”
He realized that it made no sense, that Allen could not possibly know what he meant. He felt a strange giddiness, a compulsion to laugh out loud; what he might have felt listening to an argument about who was going to win the World Series, or the next election, after just learning that the world was going to end the day after tomorrow. He did not laugh—he had not lost quite that much control—but a stupid grin hung for what seemed forever on the ruined simplicity of his mouth.
