The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  Austen found a place to park about half a mile away and well out of sight. They walked back, carrying their equipment with them, and set up on the second floor of an unfinished three-bedroom structure in which the walls were only half up on the side that faced the street. They could lie there on the floor, in what would someday be the master bedroom, and make their tape recordings and take their photographs and be perfectly invisible. The distance was about two hundred yards—they didn’t dare risk anything closer—but Pete had a telephoto lens on his camera, and, once the sun came up, they would even have the light behind them.

  At seventeen minutes before six, Tilson’s car came to a stop against the railings at the very end of the turnaround. He got out and closed the door behind him, and they saw that he was wearing a tan raincoat, although there wasn’t a hint of a cloud and the temperature was already up into the middle seventies. He kept his hands in his pockets and waited, staring down at the asphalt.

  “We’re in luck,” Austen murmured, as much to himself as to Pete. “He’s left his window halfway open—if they don’t go wandering off, we’ll be able to get every word.”

  Six minutes later a black Mercedes pulled up beside Tilson’s Jaguar, and Salvarini himself opened the door, handed his dead legs through the opening, and rose up behind his shining aluminum crutches. Tilson hardly even looked at him.

  Salvarini was a huge man, an impression somehow enhanced by the ponderous slowness with which he dragged himself forward, seeming to hate the very ground because he couldn’t get over it any faster. He wore a shiny black sharkskin suit and, except for the absence of a hat to cover the bald spot that sat like a target in his tarnished gray hair, looked every inch the successful hoodlum.

  Austen became aware of a faint clicking sound beside him and saw that Pete had begun snapping his pictures. He turned on the tape recorder, pressing one cup of the headset against his ear so he wouldn’t have to wear the stupid thing. Their subjects might as well have been performing on a sound stage.

  It was then that he began to entertain a vague and unpleasant suspicion. He reached over and touched Freestone on the arm, and for a moment the clicking stopped.

  “Whatever happens,” he said calmly, “whatever you see, don’t make a sound, and don’t stop shooting. Get every frame of it.”

  Pete nodded, seeming a little uncertain about what he was agreeing to, and then turned back to his camera, and the clicking resumed .

  . . . s’pose I care if it costs you your ass? You’re bought and paid for, Tilson. You’re just so much dead meat if I get pissed and decide to carve you up, you little shit. I want it dropped, and I don’t give a fuck how bad it smells for you—you smell pretty bad already. How you think the voters’re gonna feel when they hear about that little jam of yours back in ‘sixty? Huh? It was at once a ludicrous and tragic performance. Salvarini was really enjoying himself, like a sick little boy with a new white mouse to torture. His voice was rising higher and higher in a kind of ecstasy of frustrated savagery.

  And all the while Tilson said nothing. Most of the time he kept his eyes turned to the ground, only looking up now and then, giving the impression that he was trying to settle with himself how much more he could stand. It was an endurance contest, and he bore it with his hands pressed into the pockets of his raincoat as if he were hanging on for dear life.

  You stupid bastard, Austen thought to himself as he listened to the rising tide of Salvarini’s obscene and violent eloquence. You big stupid bull, you shouldn’t ever have come here alone.

  And then all at once it happened. Salvarini never stopped yelling; he might not even have noticed when Tilson began slowly bringing his right hand out of his raincoat pocket. If he saw anything, even a flash of light off the gun barrel, he never had a chance to let anyone know about it.

  They were just tiny figures down on the road, like dolls. And yet the shot Austen heard through his earphone sounded like the announcement of Armageddon.

  “Get it all, Pete,” he whispered, and the click, click, click of the camera shutter went on with hardly a pause.

  Salvarini was pitched backward by the impact of the bullet. At that distance it was impossible to tell where he had been hit, but he spun around in a half-turn as he fell and landed across the railing that marked the edge of the canyon and the end of the road. It was obvious that he was dead, even before he started to go down. Tilson didn’t have to fire a second shot.

  He simply stood there for a moment, still pointing the gun at the spot where Salvarini had been standing, and then, when Austen had almost begun to wonder whether he had lost the power of independent movement, he returned the gun to his raincoat pocket. He took his time, as if the action marked some definite conclusion, like the actor’s final line before the curtain rings down.

  Immediately afterward he was all business. He rushed forward and pushed Salvarini’s body over the railing, pulling him up by the leg and letting him slip down behind until he disappeared from sight down the landfall, throwing the crutches after him. Then he went back to his car, got in, backed up to turn around, and drove away.

  Pete started to get up, but Austen threw his arm across his back and held him down. “Not yet. Let him get safely away. Remember, he’s the johnnie with the gun.”

  Afterward they went down and had a look. The bullet had made a neat hole through the left lapel of Salvarini’s suitcoat; there was hardly any blood, but his eyes were open and the expression on his face was still twisted with rage. Obviously he never knew what hit him.

  “I wonder whether Tilson thinks he got away with it,” Pete said as he stepped backward a few yards to snap a picture of the body.

  “Why shouldn’t he? If any of Salvarini’s people know whom he came up here to meet, they won’t tell anyone. They’ll want to see whether there isn’t some way they can use it. Besides, who would believe them? The interesting question would be whether or not Tilson cares.”

  They climbed back up to the road. Salvarini had rolled about twenty feet before he got hung up on a clump of bushes, and it was dusty work.

  “What happens now?”

  “You mean to us?” Austen shrugged and bent down to brush some dirt from his trouser leg. “Nothing much. We go back to town, you get your pictures developed, and I find someplace to copy the tapes. Then we pretend we’ve never heard of each other. On Monday morning, you call your editor and he calls the cops. Tilson’s going to be very surprised when you run all this on the front page.”

  . . . . .

  Four hours later Austen was on a plane to San Francisco, with twenty-eight nine-by-eleven black-and-white photographs and three cassettes of tape in a large manila envelope he carried balanced across his knees. He wasn’t going to let it out of his sight until he was ready to deliver it to its destination.

  The plan had come into his mind as a completed thing, settled down to the most trivial detail, even before he had left his message with the switchboard operator at the Times. He had kept the telephone number of Simon Faircliff’s local congressional offices on a slip of paper in his wallet and had been following the candidate’s movements through the newspapers. Austen would track him down if he had to go after him with bloodhounds.

  But like so much else in this whole peculiar business, it was destined to be much easier than that. Where the gods wish us to damn ourselves, they strew our path with rose petals. All Austen had to do, once he had retrieved his suitcase from the luggage carousels, was put a dime in the pay phone and call.

  “Faircliff for senator.” It was a deliciously feminine voice. Austen allowed himself a deep breath and braced himself against the glass wall of the phone booth.

  “I’d like to speak to the congressman. It’s very important.”

  “I’m sorry, Congressman Faircliff is unavailable at the moment. If you’d care to leave a message, stating the nature of your business and leaving your name and number, I’m sure he’ll get back to you as soon as he’s free.”

  “My business is wi
th the congressman only. It’s very important. Please tell him that if I can have fifteen seconds of his time he’ll find it rewarding.”

  He could hear the murmur of something like an argument in the background, and he closed his eyes and whispered the secular version of a prayer. He discovered that he had to remind himself to breathe.

  Probably about a quarter of a minute elapsed, but it felt much, much longer.

  The voice he heard next was masculine, deep and musical, and familiar to him from the evening news. “All right, this is Faircliff. You’ve got your fifteen seconds.”

  “Congressman, nine days ago, at a meeting of your senior staff, the vote was six to four that you should publicly disassociate yourself from your earlier support of the Property Tax Reform Bill. You decided not to follow the recommendation. The decision was also made not to endorse the likely Democratic Presidential nominee until after the Miami convention—are you still listening?”

  “Where did you find that out?” Faircliff asked quietly. You might have thought it was of only the remotest interest to him; you had to admire the man’s cool.

  “Have you got a man on your staff named ‘Curtis’?”

  “Yes—Paul Curtis. He’s on my fund-raising staff. He’s engaged to my secretary.”

  “Then your secretary hasn’t been very discreet.” He paused for a moment, discovered that the receiver was getting slippery in his hand, and transferred it to the other while he took a couple of deep gulps of air. “ But Paul Curtis is just small change; you can have him as a token of my good faith. The rest you don’t get over the phone, but I promise you’re going to hang on my every word.”

  “What do you want, Mr. . .”

  “Austen, Frank Austen. I want half an hour of your time, and it has to be today. It isn’t going to cost you a cent.”

  “All right, Mr. Austen. Can you be here in an hour?”

  He could be there in an hour, but just barely. The city was jammed, he couldn’t find a place to park, and then he had to walk five blocks up Powell Street, which was as steep as the Matterhorn. But he made it and was shown into Faircliff’s office immediately.

  He hadn’t realized how huge the man was. Faircliff stood up from his desk to offer him a hand and blocked out the wall behind him.

  “What is it you have to tell me, young man?” The tone was delicately poised somewhere between an invitation and a threat. Austen sat down on a small leather-covered chair, exactly as if it were wired to twenty-two hundred volts and provided with leg cuffs.

  “You expect to run against Edward Tilson after the primaries. You won’t. Tilson’s going to self-destruct; until this morning he was a creature of Giancarlo Salvarini—I’m sure you’ve heard the name—and about six hours ago he liberated himself from that embarrassment by shooting Salvarini through the heart.” He tossed the manila envelope onto Faircliff’s desk. “Take a look at the photographs. Get a cassette player and listen to the tapes. It’s all there, and Monday afternoon it’ll be on page one of the Los Angeles Times. You can forget all about Mr. Tilson.”

  Faircliff said nothing. For a long moment he was motionless and silent, like a stone idol; the impression of weight and gravity was enormous. Then, very slowly, he placed his hand over the envelope and slid it toward himself across the desk . His eyes never left Austen’s face.

  With each photograph the lines around his eyes and mouth seemed to deepen. Finally he put all the photos back inside the envelope, turning down the flap and closing the clasp with great care. “My God,” he whispered, apparently only to the back of his hand. “He’s destroyed himself. The poor bastard.”

  Yet again Austen experienced a certain surge of admiration for the man. To his credit, what seemed to impress him first was the pure tragedy of the thing.

  “I don’t think I need to hear the tapes,” Faircliff said quietly. He had that trick of seeming to be soft-spoken, although anyone could have heard him from anywhere in the room. He looked up at Austen again, and his face hardened. “I think you’d better tell me how you’re involved in this. This isn’t some prank, you know—Edward Tilson, as far as I’m aware, was always a decent man. I think you’d better tell me what you’ve done to him.”

  “I haven’t done anything to him; he’s done it to himself. Let’s just say that I arranged to be a witness. Tilson’s going to blow up, and all I’m doing is allowing the bomb to go off of its own accord. You won’t be involved, and neither will I.”

  “What is it you want from me, young man?”

  “I want a job, Congressman.” Austen allowed himself the luxury of a deep breath and a look at Faircliff’s face. What he saw wasn’t terribly encouraging; the man seemed to be chiseled out of granite.

  “I deliver this to you for nothing,” he went on, bracing himself for the final effort. “Consider it a small sample of the sort of thing I’m capable of getting done. I think you’re an ambitious man, Congressman—I think you have a right to be. I admire you a great deal more than I’d ever be able to make convincing just at this moment; I think you may be just what this country needs. But we can’t all be star gazers, and if you’re really going as far in the world as doubtless you’re planning to, you’re going to need somebody at your elbow who knows that the other side of the moon is dark.”

  IV

  Edward Tilson never came to trial. The last person known to have seen him alive was his mistress. He stopped by her apartment for a few minutes that Saturday morning to explain that something had come up quite suddenly and that he would have to be out of town for a few days; if she noticed anything peculiar in his manner she never mentioned it to anyone. Late Monday night, within a few hours after the police issued their warrant for his arrest, he was found shot to death in his car on Interstate 40, about fifteen miles from the Arizona border. The presumption was suicide; it was impossible to determine whether he had seen that day’s paper or heard any news broadcasts on the radio.

  Simon Faircliff went back to Washington that autumn as the newly elected senator from California, and Frank Austen went with him, which was very much to his satisfaction.

  It would be many years before he learned to think about his role in the destruction of Edward Tilson with anything like discomfort. That was something reserved for a later period, after he had ceased to marvel at his luck and the brilliance of the life that had suddenly been offered to him. During his first several months in Washington, however, he was too busy to be anything except completely happy. He was Simon Faircliff’s bright-eyed boy, and the senator was introducing him to the unrivaled pleasures of power.

  The first thing Faircliff did was assign him to spend his evenings studying for the California bar exam. “You’re going to be a senatorial aide,” he said. “It’s important, for me and for you, that you have a certain standing.”

  So while Faircliff breezed through the campaign, Austen spent his days learning about constituencies and how to run an office staff and his nights boning up on the civil code. Now that he could pursue the thing with relative peace of mind—and now that it no longer really seemed to matter very much—he found he could manage without any great difficulty. In January he flew back from Washington to sit the exam, and when the results were published several weeks later, he found he had finished in the top quarter. He was a lawyer now, and he was Simon Faircliff’s hatchet man, and it was all the biggest joke in the world.

  For the rest, he reorganized and ran the senator’s offices and kept the lobbyists at bay. He worked up the option analyses and wrote the speeches; Faircliff was great on delivery and very good when he was speaking off the cuff, but if he sat down with a pencil and a yellow legal pad and tried to come up with something on his own for the League of Women Voters or the opening of a new post office in Stockton, it came out sounding like a cross between a legal brief and the Book of Revelation.

  Austen was the tailor-made assistant, always there and always ready, and the senator was properly appreciative. But what he appreciated even more was that share of
Austen’s duties that was conducted after business hours. The senator’s new boy had discovered fairly quickly that Washington wasn’t so very different from Saigon and had started laying down his pipelines. Like Saigon, Washington was filled with rootless, frightened women; just out of college or fresh from the rice paddies, it didn’t appear to make much difference—they all seemed to wear their clothes too tight and they all seemed to need something to hold on to. So his love life was very well stocked and, while he lay on his side in all those darkened bedrooms, things kept being whispered into his ear. And if once in a while a few hundred dollars disappeared from petty cash because some typist over in the minority whip’s office had to have a favor, nobody was going to ask any embarrassing questions about it.

  It was like a food chain: you caught the flies to fatten up the spiders, and you fed the spiders to the birds and the birds to the cats. If you worked on the principle that it was always necessary to get more than you gave, you did all right. You made friends with a reporter you had met at a party in some girl’s apartment and you heard all about how some new giant transport plane the army had contracted for was running way over budget; the senator could use information like that, so you told your new friend about how the Secretary of Defense, who was a Republican anyway, was very worried about his son’s business dealings with a Nicaraguan company owned by the dictator. The reporter went away happy, and the contact tended to extend itself more or less forever. The same principle could be applied to diplomats, civil service workers, even other senatorial aides. It constituted the one real difference between the only two cities in which Austen had ever found proper scope for his talents—where Saigon ran on money, Washington ran on gossip.

  All the gossip that came Austen’s way ended up in the briefing papers Senator Faircliff read with his crescent roll and his coffee first thing in the morning, making him the envy of Capitol Hill, where he cut his own deals, and making Austen, at eighteen thousand dollars a year, the most underpaid man in the Senate office building.