The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  Thus it was that once a month a team of Company specialists came by the three-bedroom colonial to sweep it for listening devices, and the telephone in Austen’s study was equipped with a government-issue scrambler. He even had a wall safe, but he had never been stupid enough to leave anything there; nothing was ever committed to paper long enough to require storage.

  The remaining contents of the study were prosaic enough: a small table supporting a heavy glass ashtray that had never seen service; a couple of chairs, one of them a thronelike affair of oak veneer and naugahyde; a bookcase filled with the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century novels that had been Austen’s principal recreation ever since college; and, on the inlaid leather desktop, a framed photograph identical to the one on the desk in the Oval Office. Written in the corner, just above the signature, was “Facilis descensus averno”—easy is the descent into Hell. A wedding present, Dottie’s only half-joking suggestion for the family motto. Perhaps, after all, they should have had it inscribed in letters of fire over the front door.

  So while her husband sat alone in the study of their empty house, watching the pale green telephone on his desk as if he expected it to explode, he was not entirely without companionship. Dottie was there with him, repeating over and over again the warning with which she had begun their married life: easy is the descent into Hell.

  Of course, she was always issuing warnings. It was part of her style. “Daddy called this morning,” she had said only the evening before. They sat on opposite sides of a circular glass kitchen table, over a pair of Chinese TV dinners and a bottle of rather good German white wine; it was uncharacteristically cozy and intimate, the way it had been that whole last year of his bachelorhood, when Dottie used to smuggle herself up to his one-room apartment for beer and pizza and heavy breathing. But that had all been a long time ago. It was difficult now to believe it had ever happened.

  He didn’t say anything. He merely looked attentive and waited. It was an old and settled grudge between those two, and he had learned from experience how much he had to lose from seeming to take sides.

  “He wanted to talk about you, naturally. We started out with the routine about how he missed his baby girl and just wanted to hear the sweet sound of my voice, but he got around to the other fast enough. It seems you’re to be the new Secretary of State, so what’s the problem?”

  She leaned forward on her elbows, resting her head on the backs of her hands, and her large, lustrous brown eyes grew even larger, giving her pixyish face a faintly mocking expression. In the old days it might have been a come-on, but now it was simply a challenge for him to sally forth and do battle yet once more for his sworn liege, the Wicked King Simon. That was why she hated him, because he had pledged his faith not only to her but to her father as well, and it seemed that the two loyalties could never be reconciled.

  “I’m a spy, not a diplomat,” he said finally, picking up the amber wine bottle and making something of a show of seeing whether there was enough left for another couple of glasses. There was. Apparently the period of truce was over, or perhaps he had misunderstood from the beginning and it had never really begun. In either case, he was weary in advance.

  “But it’s not just that, is it?” She picked up her glass, holding it delicately around the rim with just the tips of her thumb and first finger, and peered inside as if she expected to see her reflection in the wine. Then she set the glass down again and seemed to forget all about it; it was one of those little actions that appear to have some sort of meaning and don’t, that are only something to do when, for the moment, you don’t want to mean anything.

  She glanced up at her husband suddenly, giving the impression that she had momentarily forgotten he was there in the room with her, and smiled. It wasn’t a very encouraging smile. “He wants something more, doesn’t he. And you don’t want to give it to him. That must be a novel experience for you both.”

  “He wants me to succeed him. State will give me better visibility with the voters while the party figures out that I’m the one Simon wants them to nominate next time. There—I thought that would surprise you.”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment. In fact, neither of them even moved; they might both have been listening for some faint sound from the outside. And then, very gradually, by a process that didn’t seem to involve discernible change, Dottie’s face grew rigid with contempt.

  “I doubt if he thinks that much of you. It must be one of his practical jokes; he just doesn’t think you’re either that smart or that tough.”

  “I’d agree with him—and with you. I’m not either one. But that’s what he says he wants.” Austen shrugged his shoulders and took a sip of the wine. He seemed hardly to taste it at all.

  “And you’ll do it, won’t you. You’ll stall, but you’ll go through with it just the same. Even to this you won’t say no.”

  In his study, alone in the house, Austen shook his head and smiled at the photograph of his wife, the way he hadn’t been able to when she was really there in front of him. “This time, baby,” he murmured, “this time it’ll be no.”

  He had forgotten to put a coaster under his ginger ale, and beads of condensation were running down the sides of the glass onto his leather desktop. It would make a ring and the cleaning lady would be furious. He smiled and took out his handkerchief to wipe up the water.

  He was almost ready to put in the call himself when, finally, the telephone registered a muffled buzzing sound. He picked up the receiver and put it to his ear but didn’t speak.

  “Frank? Is that you, Frank?”

  “It’s me, George—how did they turn out?” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and looked out through the picture window at the leafless trees that stood along the river’s edge, frighteningly aware that he had just reached the absolute turning point in his life, and perhaps in the life of the whole nation.

  “Perfect,” came the reply. “This clinches it. We could even prove our case in a court of law, God forbid.”

  “It’ll never come to that. It can’t be allowed to come to that. Put the stuff in deep storage and tell Mike to come home. We’ll have to give him a medal or buy him lunch or something. He’s done good work.”

  There was one of those unpleasant pauses, about a second and a half in which you know you have said something terribly wrong, and Austen found himself actually holding his breath.

  “Mike isn’t coming home,” George said slowly, almost as if the words were being extorted from him one at a time. “I got the word an hour ago from one of our people in Justice. The Oroville police sent in a request for fingerprint identification this morning; no details, just a John Doe murder victim. The switch was made, and they’ll get the card on one of those Mafia apes that dropped out of sight last year. I guess they must have zapped him right after he made his drop.”

  “Yeah.”

  But you didn’t sit around and chat about your fallen comrades—it was against the etiquette of the profession—and certainly not over the phone. Even with the scrambler, the conversation was supposed to be as unspecific as possible, so they observed about five seconds of respectful silence before George asked for his instructions.

  “Bury the stuff good,” the director found himself saying. “You know the drill—assume they’ll have you by the balls within the hour. I’ll know where to look. Good night, George.”

  He replaced the receiver on its cradle and sank back into his chair, suddenly very sorry for everybody. Sorry for Mike, who was dead out in California. Sorry for George, whose special protege Mike had been. Sorry for the whole fucking rest of the world. Sorry, in fact, for everyone except himself. In his case, it would turn out to be nothing more than simple justice.

  His wife, staring at him from her brass and walnut frame, caught his eye and seemed to direct him to the warning she had left out in plain sight for him. Facilis descensus averno. Well, she had been right about that—the road down had been easy enough.

  Part One - THE ROAD DOWN

&
nbsp; It had all started twelve years ago with a plane ride.

  In those days the air fare from San Francisco to Los Angeles was $21.90, or just about one-fifth of all the money Frank Austen had left in this wide world after paying his next two weeks’ room rent, but there was what looked like a pretty fair shot at a job with one of the better­ connected Wilshire Boulevard law firms if he could just get his ass down there by four o’clock that afternoon. At least, they had made it sound like a pretty fair shot.

  Austen had shaved, showered, gotten his one and only suit back from the dry cleaners, driven himself over to the airport from his third-floor Berkeley walk-up, and picked up his ticket all within about an hour and three quarters. His flight left at two minutes after twelve—lots of time.

  So instead of standing in some snack-bar line for a wilted, overpriced sweet roll and a paper cup of watered orange juice, he had found himself a seat in the passenger lounge, where, after the compulsory but hopeless effort to interest himself in the book on courtroom procedure he had brought along for window dressing, he resigned himself to the only topic that seemed capable of commanding his attention at all anymore, the bleakness of his prospects. It was like a litany of desperation: has our boy Frank made a mess of his young life? Yes indeed, he certainly has.

  Six months out of the army and, if this afternoon fell through, he had his nose right up against the wall. He couldn’t seem to get it together; he had already failed the bar exam twice, once the month before he had been drafted and now again, six weeks ago. To be honest, he had never been a particularly distinguished student of jurisprudence. Things had come to such a pass that he had begun to consider whether he ought to reenlist. The army had been sort of fun—at least there he had known where he was.

  Probably because he hadn’t passed his bar exam, his application for posting to the inspector general’s office had been ignored, and he found himself a second lieutenant in the military police, assigned to counterintelligence. Maybe they had known something he hadn’t, because it was like a very sophisticated game of cops and robbers, and he learned quickly enough that he had a certain flair for it. He spent a little over two years in Saigon, setting up wiretaps on visiting congressmen and cutting deals for information with the Chinese opium traders who crossed back and forth over the border into Cambodia exactly as if the Vietcong didn’t exist. When he was ready to be sent home, it took him a full two weeks to introduce his successor to his network of snitches. While it lasted, it was a rich, full life.

  But it was a long stretch to lie fallow. He had taken the more important volumes of his law library with him when he was shipped overseas, but somehow there never seemed to be much time—the truth was, perhaps, that he hadn’t wanted there to be time—and he discovered, while packing up his footlocker the night after his noisy farewell dinner at Madame Nang’s frowsy little brothel just off the Street of the Red Flowers, that the bindings were rotted through and infested with little insects that fell to the floor in showers like fine dust if you hit the covers against the edge of a table. He ended up wrapping the whole bunch of them in a plastic garbage bag and leaving them in the back alley with the melon rinds and the empty catsup bottles.

  As he sat by himself in the PSA flight lounge, he was the victim of very mixed feelings indeed. Officially, he wanted this slot at Barton & Cambiner so bad he could taste it; it would be just what he needed to pull his act into shape. There was, however, a part of him that dreaded this final wedding to prosperous, impregnable respectability.

  But the dark powers always seem to provide us with the means for surrendering to our lesser selves. In this case their instrument was Pete Freestone. Apparently it had to be that way, because suddenly there Pete was, as if he had been implied in the dawning of creation, dressed in an appalling kelly-green sport coat, smiling and waving a pudgy hand at Austen from in front of the cigarette machine. That they should just happen to run into each other on that particular morning, that they should find themselves booked on the same flight to Los Angeles, was something that Austen had long since given up ascribing to the time and chance that happeneth to us all.

  Poor Pete. He was one of the nicest guys in the world, about as earnest and unsinister a person as it was possible to imagine. They had known each other ever since college when, one dark night in the middle of exam week, this fat kid from the Daily Californian had come around to Austen’s dorm room to interview him for an article on student reaction to the free speech movement and the attendant riots, about which, of course, Austen cared less than nothing. They had talked until after two in the morning—about everything but the free speech movement, as it turned out.

  In those days Pete, like everybody else, had worn his hair almost to the shoulders, and he had made quite a picture, sitting there on the foot of the bed, his eyes seeming to bulge out of his round face, carrying on the conversation with his whole body and sweeping that great mane of lank brown hair out of his face every few seconds the way someone might open a pair of curtains.

  They met again in Saigon, where Pete was a staff correspondent first for U.S. News & World Report and then for the Los Angeles Times. There the relationship had broadened—and so, predictably, had Pete.

  When it had happened to be in both their interests, they would sometimes trade scraps of information, and they learned, in the process, that within certain reasonable limits they could trust each other. A wary respect developed between the squeaky-clean reporter with the double chins and the angular MP whose work was carried on without much reference to the law. It was the sympathy of opposites.

  And now here he was. Like a genie out of a bottle.

  Austen waved back and, after the obligatory shoulder slapping was over, arranged to have their seating assignments together on the flight down.

  “You still with the Times?”

  “Yeah.” Pete Freestone smiled and made a gesture of comic resignation. “They’ve got me on local politics—I think the idea is I’m supposed to decompress slowly after ’Nam. I got sick of Thieu’s press conferences, but mostly I got sick of the food, I think. I left about a month after you did. You still with the army?”

  Austen shook his head. “Believe it or not, I’m on my way to get interviewed for a job with a law firm.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Neither do I.”

  The plane began boarding, and Pete, in his preoccupied, roundabout way, got on a rather rambling story about what he had been doing up in San Francisco.

  “I can hardly credit the guy,” he was saying as the stewardess wheeled by with her stainless-steel water wagon and he ordered himself a drink—probably just for the sake of the little tin of peanuts that came with it. Austen settled for a complimentary ginger ale. “He’s up to his eyebrows in this thing and so far, except for me, nobody seems to have noticed. He’s on the ballot for the primary next month—unopposed, I might add, except for some horse’s ass of an L. A. city councilman no one’s ever heard of—and there’s every chance in the world, what with the way they love the man down in Orange County, he might even be able to beat Simon Faircliff. Who knows?—with a little luck, instead of sending a great man to the Senate next November, California might just elect its first full-fledged labor racketeer. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “Is Simon Faircliff a great man, then?” Austen smiled. It had been an axiom in Saigon that politicians were Yahoos, a kind of degenerate subspecies that smelled bad and liked to throw dirt. If you were a cop, or even a reporter, you were supposed to have figured out a long time ago that there were no heroes in the world.

  Pete didn’t even look embarrassed.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding his head the way someone does in assenting to a self-evident proposition. “Yes, I think it’s safe to say that Simon Faircliff is a great man; at least, he might develop into one if he ever gets the chance. He’s done a good job in Congress, and he seems to think there might be one or two things in the world more important than just hanging onto his office. Yes, he’s
like a breath of fresh air. You—”

  “All right. Okay.” Austen raised his hands in surrender. “Congressman Faircliff is a regular prince, and his opponent is a fink and a gangster. Fine. So if you know all this, why don’t you blow the whistle on the little creep? I thought that was what newspapers were for.”

  Freestone pressed himself back into his seat and stared sullenly at the vodka and tonic on the little fold-down tray in front of him.

  “That’s the part I like best. I know it all, but I can’t prove a word of it. My paper tells me it doesn’t particularly want to get sued. I even know, at least I’m pretty sure, that there’s to be a meet sometime in the next two weeks where he’ll be with the man himself, but what am I supposed to do—follow him around in my tinny little blue Volkswagen until he slaps a court order on me to leave him alone? My paper won’t provide the manpower for a full-scale, twenty-four-hour-a-day blanket over the guy—we wouldn’t even know how to do a thing like that without getting caught—and I can’t tell them exactly where or when. So probably, unless I get ridiculously lucky, he’ll slip through and I might as well never have known about it in the first place. You sure you’re out of the cloak-and-dagger business, Frankie?”

  They laughed—it was a big joke—and Austen nodded and said yes, he was sure. “Besides,” he went on, “we’re in the States now. All that kind of thing’s illegal over here. I mean, actually against the law, like precious little ever was in Saigon. I could go to jail. So could you.”

  “Yeah. I suppose so. Hey, is that the ground down there? God, I hate landings—they’re the worst part.”

  But the plane didn’t crash, and they separated in front of the terminal building. Somebody was there to pick up Freestone; Austen thought he would have time enough to wait for a bus instead of shelling out for the cab fare, so they promised each other they would get together again sometime or other.