The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  “I hear Morrison offered you twenty-five if you’d walk across the aisle and be chief dog robber for him, Frank—why didn’t you take it?”

  “You’re going to wind up President and he isn’t. When you get there, you can appoint me to the Supreme Court for services rendered.”

  It was all a big joke.

  From the very first he had never even considered the possibility of working for anyone except Simon Faircliff. They both knew that, and they knew that it had almost nothing to do with personal ambitions. Austen was that happy person who had discovered for himself the loyalty of a lifetime; he understood his man through to the bone, knew all his little quirks and personal vanities, and didn’t give a damn. Simon Faircliff was at once his personal property and his hero on earth. Don Quixote had found his Sancho Panza and vice versa.

  So it was a reasonably tranquil and contented Frank Austen who strolled across the grass in his employer’s backyard in the third year of his tenure as the gray eminence behind the throne. The chief was giving a garden party, with no reporters invited, for once, and the Chairman of the Federal Securities and Exchange Commission, who had gotten pretty thoroughly sozzled on piña coladas earlier in the afternoon, had just been pushed into the swimming pool for having annoyed somebody’s husband. He was being helped out by a lobbyist from ITT, and a waiter hired for the occasion had just come rushing from the house with a towel. Austen, who had reasons of his own for not loving the Chairman, was wondering how the old fart would enjoy arriving home in his sodden Dacron suit to find Jack Anderson sitting on his doorstep, asking whether he had any statement. All that would have been necessary was to walk into the senator’s bedroom and pick up the phone, but this after all was a private party and there were dangers to making people too afraid of you. Just this once, he would let it ride.

  Simon Faircliff was what passed for an honest politician, but he had been married to a very wealthy woman and could therefore, as the saying goes, afford to be honest. The backyard of his house covered about an acre and a quarter of very choice Chevy Chase real estate, and there were something like two hundred people standing on it, most of them clustered in little knots around the swimming pool and within convenient reach of the bar.

  These tended to be rather staid affairs and, as a consequence, none of the ten or twelve unattached young women who had been invited largely for window dressing had as yet pulled off her clothes to go skinny dipping or decided to do a striptease at the end of the diving board. Probably no one was getting his rocks off in the bathhouse, and, aside from the one incident with the SEC Chairman, there hadn’t been anything even approaching a fistfight.

  Over near the ceramic birdbath, slightly away from everybody else, Faircliff was standing with a drink in his hand, talking with a particularly handsome couple, both in their mid-forties. The man looked like a college athlete who had simply gone a little gray, and on top of the good looks he had the perfect assurance of manner that constitutes political star quality. He was also smart enough to thrill the fuzzy-haired intellectuals and was the darling of the right-of-center moderates. He was Clayton Burgess, who, barring the unforeseen, would doubtless end up with the GOP Presidential nomination in another five years. The guy was also squeaky clean, but Austen had lately started a file on him, just in case.

  Impressive as Senator Burgess was, Simon appeared to be concentrating most of his attention on Mrs. Burgess. This wasn’t very difficult to understand; she was a beautiful woman, slim and elegant, with masses of black hair, and Simon had a very discriminating eye for that kind of beauty. Austen watched the conversation with faint uneasiness. He decided he had better mention to his Number One that it would be better if he weren’t quite so obviously appreciative.

  “You look like you’re measuring Clayton Burgess for a shroud,” said a voice behind his right shoulder. He turned around to see a small blond woman in her early twenties, pretty in an interesting way, with large, intelligent eyes in the sort of face that would probably always look disarmingly young. He smiled, genuinely pleased, as if someone had just given him something.

  “How can you say so? Senator Burgess is Lohengrin—everybody knows that.” The smile stayed on his lips, perhaps tightening just a shade as he observed the odd, speculative way she was looking at him.

  “You’re Frank Austen,” she said at last, as if something had suddenly recalled the fact to her mind.

  “I know—I’ve known for years.” He turned away. There wasn’t time in this life for groupies, even the ones who looked like they might know how to touch a nerve. He had almost forgotten her by the time she spoke again.

  “What are you going to do to Burgess anyway?” She was even closer now, almost pressing against him with a kind of aggrieved intimacy. “Are you going to spread stories about how he seduces little boys, or will you settle for just sending in an anonymous tip to the IRS and then feeding him raw to one of your tame sharks at the Post? Which is it to be, Mr. Austen—hmmm?”

  All at once, he found, he was deeply stirred; and he couldn’t have said why, because the lady was talking a lot of dreadful rubbish. Nevertheless, one’s glands did not always obey the commands of logic.

  “Why do I get the feeling that you don’t like me?”

  “Oh, I like you fine, Mr. Austen. It’s your employer I have a certain amount of trouble with.”

  “But not enough to keep you away from his parties.” He smiled, but it was obvious the dart hadn’t gone home. “And you’re very high on Clayton Burgess?”

  “I’ve known him since I was sixteen. There isn’t a better man in Congress, and that includes your illustrious Senator Faircliff.”

  It was said with such conviction that he had to stop smiling. Besides, there was nothing funny about the way her tanned arms looked against the pale blue silk of her sleeveless cocktail dress. “And what would you know about my illustrious Senator Faircliff?”

  “Why, Mr. Austen, I’m surprised at you,” she warbled mockingly, tilting her head a little to one side so that her cap of yellow hair bounced enticingly. “I thought you would have recognized me from that awful picture he keeps on his desk. I’m the prodigal Dottie.”

  “I see. Well, you’ll have to forgive me; it isn’t a very good likeness.”

  “No, it isn’t. Now I’m sorry; have I embarrassed you?”

  He shook his head, aware that she was guying him.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want you to go around worrying that you’d gotten in wrong with the boss’s daughter.”

  “Don’t let it bother you, sweetie,” he murmured, showing his teeth in a nice ratty grin. “I don’t have to worry about where I stand with the Senator, and besides, they haven’t exactly caught me with my hand up your dress, so we can both relax.”

  After that, somehow, he managed to get away from her. The sun was just beginning to set over the back trellis, and he was looking around for his host so he could say goodnight, when he saw him shaking hands with the Burgesses by the little garden path that led around the other side of the house to the circular driveway in the front. When they were gone, Faircliff turned back toward the pool, and his faithful retainer intercepted him about halfway to the bar.

  “Your tongue’s hanging out, Senator.”

  Faircliff’s head snapped around in a little start, and then he smiled wanly and put his hand on Austen’s shoulder. “ Jesus, Frank, was I that obvious? I don’t know, I must be getting old. I’m even thinking maybe I should get married again.”

  “Fine. Great. But not to that one; she’s already got a husband. The voters won’t love you if you break up America’s happiest couple.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” He let his hand slide lovingly down Austen’s arm, in that way politicians have, and then suddenly slapped him on the shoulder blade. It was just a playful blow, but Austen found it advisable to take a sudden deep breath. Say, did you meet my little girl?”

  “Yes, I met your little girl. What’s she doing here? I thought she was back in California, livi
ng with your draconian sister-in-law.”

  The senator laughed, and his aide, just as a precaution, dodged out of range.

  “You don’t miss much, do you, Frank?” He laughed again, this time a little more quietly, and looked down at the toes of his Gucci loafers, which still glowed like obsidian. “Well, I talked her into coming out here for a few months. I don’t know, maybe she’ll like it and stay. Maybe she’ll get a job here. I’d like that. I’ve hardly seen her at all since her mother died.”

  Austen didn’t say anything. He simply stared into the glare off the swimming pool and wondered whether his employer was getting restive and whether that would be likely to create problems. Leching the competition’s old lady, kids, talk of marriage—he didn’t know. Maybe he should hunt around for some nice juicy forty-year-old widow for him; maybe that would settle him down. After all, perhaps he was lonely. He’d been on his own for six years now, and at his age you probably got tired of sport fucking sooner. Maybe having the daughter around would do the trick, too, provided she was a good girl and didn’t bring them all to grief one way or another.

  “You want me to stick around and help pour the drunks into their roadsters?”

  “No, Frank. You go on home. The party’s just about over.”

  . . . . .

  On the drive back into DC he tried not to think about anything at all. He just wanted to look out for the cops and the lunatics and get home in one piece; he wanted to spend the rest of the night in front of the television set, eating his Dinner-in-a-Pouch turkey slices and watching the Annette Funicello Film Festival like the rest of the human race. But there wasn’t a chance in hell of his doing either one. That was another big difference—in Saigon you could switch it off once in a while, but Washington turned you into a perpetual intriguer.

  He tried to remember whether he still had any chocolate ripple ice cream at home and, deciding that the chances were not very good, turned into the parking lot of a Quik-Way grocery store.

  It always gave him a peculiar sensation to enter these places, as if in a well-ordered world his mother would still be doing all the shopping for him and his father at the Safeway on Belburn Avenue, just as she had all through the years of his childhood. On some purely inconsequential level, he still equated his paychecks with the fifteen-dollar-a-month allowance he had received in high school, and the whole business of dividing them up into rent and car payments and money for clothes and food and newspaper subscriptions inevitably struck him as unreal and slightly pretentious, as if he were laying claim to an adult dignity and self-sufficiency to which he had no more right at thirty than he had had at fourteen. He picked up a couple of frozen pizzas and a can of creamed corn and stood in line behind a pair of teenage girls who were buying movie magazines, reading the headlines of the National Enquirer—”Doctors Reveal New Super Diet,” “Peter Sellers’ Shocking Childhood”—and wondering whether anything ever again would make any sense at all.

  Well, doubtless this too was just a phase he was going through. Tomorrow would be Sunday, and on Monday morning he would go to work to discover that some boob in the House was calling for an investigation of congressional travel expenses. There was something he would be able to feel the reality of.

  In the line of little covered parking spaces that passed for a garage to his apartment building, he noticed an unfamiliar tan Karmann Ghia, the driver of which went unrecognized for several seconds before he pulled in next to her.

  “You were very rude to me,” Dottie Faircliff announced as she leaned out over her door. “But I’ve decided to give you a chance to make it up.”

  “And how do I do that, take you up to my apartment and jump on your bones?”

  “Well, you might feed me first.”

  She looked very beautiful with her large eyes and her fluffy blond hair, and the nicest part of all was that she wasn’t being the least little bit coy. If she had been anyone except Simon Faircliff’s daughter, he would have found himself wondering what it was she was hoping to buy with her delicious young body. He found himself wondering that anyway.

  “Then isn’t it lucky I just bought an extra pizza.”

  “Yes, isn’t it. Today seems to be your lucky day.”

  V

  Whether Simon Faircliff had any idea that summer and autumn that his little girl was spending a good share of her off hours in Frank Austen’s bed was a matter of conjecture. Dottie had decided to stay in Washington at least for the time being, and perhaps—if he knew why—her father regarded her continued residence with him as just another instance of a difficulty his superlatively competent aide had been able to smooth away. But in any case, no word on the subject ever passed between the two men.

  Dottie, of course, hadn’t a doubt in the world. “Sure he knows,” she told Austen once. She had gone into the kitchen, stark naked, oblivious to the open window, to make herself a cup of Sanka.

  “For a while there he was having me followed, and then I stopped seeing the same little brown Volvo in my rearview mirror all the time, so I guess the man must have told Daddy it was only you, and Daddy probably breathed a sigh of relief and paid him off. With you, at least, he knows he isn’t going to have anybody coming down on him for blackmail or anything, and beyond that I don’t imagine he cares. After all, I’m twenty-three.”

  “Wonderful.” Austen dropped a bathrobe over her shoulders and went back into the bedroom to finish dressing.

  He wished he could put so happy a construction on the matter, but he knew Faircliff well enough to be reasonably sure that if he was keeping his mouth shut it was only because, perhaps right then, he didn’t feel there was much of anything he could do. He could fire Austen, of course, but that wouldn’t change anything; Austen would simply put in a couple of phone calls around town to kick off the bidding and come up before the end of the afternoon with a five­thousand-dollar-a-year hike in salary, which would hardly be much of a move toward ending the affair. But now or later, if he didn’t appreciate Austen’s screwing his daughter, he would find a way of letting him know about it.

  Faircliff was no prig—he was as free and easy as the next guy about the weaknesses of the flesh—but some men aren’t entirely rational on the subject of their own daughters. Austen knew Faircliff probably as well as anybody, but the domestic side of his character was a closed book to him.

  And Dottie? Well, it was always a nice question what she really believed or wanted. Maybe she was just out to get to the old man through his trusted lieutenant, to sow a little dissension just for the pure pleasure of doing mischief. That was perfectly possible; Austen didn’t really have any idea how, at bottom, she felt about him, and her relationship with her father was certainly composed of enough conflicting elements of hatred and love, defiance and desire for reconciliation, to push her to almost anything.

  And there it was. Faircliff was Austen’s career, his life’s work, the way another man’s might be spreading the gospel in the jungles of Lower Borneo, and Austen had discovered, much to his own surprise, that he was in love with Dottie. They were the two people he cared about most in the world, and they were in some sort of obscure feud that he couldn’t possibly hope to understand but that certainly, one way or another, was going to number him among its victims.

  In fact, he couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t already. From about the middle of September on—it wasn’t the sort of thing he could date with much precision, since he couldn’t even be sure it was actually happening—a peculiar kind of reserve had crept into his relationship with Simon. Nothing appeared to have changed; his was still the first voice the senator would hear in all matters great and small, and every week they still had lunch together out of brown paper bags in Simon’s office. It was more a matter of tone than of substance, and, since it coincided with the introduction of a new face in the Faircliff organization, it might not have had anything to do with Dottie at all.

  Simon had waited until the last possible moment, on the plane back to Washington just before the en
d of the summer recess, to tell him. “I fired Marty Eilberg,” he said quite suddenly, while he was staring out his window and probably wondering whether the wing wasn’t about to drop off. Flying was the one thing the senator seemed genuinely afraid of; he usually spent the twenty-four hours before embarkation popping tranquilizers like jelly beans. “He’s a lousy analyst. He probably would have cost us the election last time if you hadn’t happened along. I phoned him and gave him the word last night. The son-of-a-bitch told me I could take my job and stick it; how do you like that?”

  “You want me to start scouting the talent pools?” Austen asked, not terribly surprised or grieved by the loss of Marty Eilberg, who was a jerk and a screw-up and who had once gotten falling-down drunk at a reception for the new junior Senator from California. When he then had to be driven home, Eilberg had thrown up all over the rear seat of Austen’s car. Austen did, however, wish that Simon would consult him about these matters first; like all courtiers, he disliked surprises.

  Faircliff only shook his head. “No. In fact, that’s the only reason I let the little piss-ant go so suddenly; I got a chance to hire somebody I’ve been looking at for years.”

  He turned from the window, glanced around him nervously, smiled, and flagged down the stewardess to order a vodka gimlet—his third that flight, and they were only over Kansas. Austen, who had long ago learned that his employer was least to be trusted when he was most glib, experienced a sinking feeling that he was reasonably sure had nothing to do with the altitude.

  “Who is he?”

  “Oh, a fellow who helped me a lot when I ran for Congress the first time,” he answered, just a little too airily. “He went into advertising—he’s a vice president with Bate & Palmer down in Los Angeles—but he’s made his pile and wants to join up. His name’s Howard Diederich. “