The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  The stewardess came back with the vodka gimlet and asked whether they were ready to be served dinner yet, and Austen nodded. You could have either Chateaubriand with scalloped potatoes or chicken Kiev with rice; it was always either Chateaubriand with scalloped potatoes or chicken Kiev with rice. They took the steak, having learned from experience that the chicken tasted like so much buttered whoopie cushion,

  For a long time they ate in perfect silence. The overhead cabin lights went off, and they shared a small bottle of dreadful New York State red wine. The subject of Faircliff’s new acquisition seemed to have been dropped.

  “When he comes, I’ll want him to take over day-to-day management of the office.” It was the first word Faircliff had spoken in nearly an hour. “I want you to start moving over more into policy formation and running that network of closet-skulkers of yours. You’ve been spreading yourself too thin for a long time now, Frank, and we have to think of the future. We’ve got an election coming up before you know it. “

  “That’s three years away. If you’ve hired this new boy to replace me as well, why don’t you just say so?”

  They regarded each other in the dim pinkish light from the overhead console with an approximately equal sharing of surprise and resentment, although after the first moment you would have thought the surprise was all the senator’s portion.

  “I’m amazed at you, Frank,” he said quietly, like a man whose feelings have been deeply wounded. “I thought you had more faith in my regard for you than that. I’d thought of this more as a sort of promotion, getting you out of the cheap-shit stuff and more involved with what’s important—and is going to get more important.” He paused and looked slightly away, as if peering into some indistinct, impalpable future. “I need advisors, Frank, not people to sharpen the pencils. I want you to start getting yourself ready for when we make our big play. I would have thought you’d have understood that.”

  Well, he could always manage a good speech; it was like turning on the hot water tap with him. He could always get you just where you lived, the bastard. Austen found that he had been suitably humbled, and in that peculiar way that belongs only to the masters, in which he felt valued and loved at the same time.

  “All right, okay. I’m sorry. But I work for nobody but you, Simon.” He clenched his fist and set it down quietly on the armrest between them. “You put this guy over my head, and I walk. It’s as simple as that.”

  FaircIiff smiled, since he had won, and then turned a little away and snagged the stewardess again—probably to order another vodka gimlet. “Sure, Frank,” he said, without really looking at him. “I understand that. You’ll never have any other boss but me; I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  And that seemed to settle the matter. They got in at Dulles airport at about eleven o’clock that night and, as arranged, someone was there from the office to pick them up. Austen was dropped off at his apartment first, since it was on the way to Chevy Chase, and when he went into his bedroom to unpack his suitcase he found Dottie sitting up in bed in a pair of his pajamas, reading one of his Fanny Burney novels.

  “How can you stand this tripe?” she asked, as if inquiring into a miracle. “It’s all about dippy little girls falling in love.”

  He hadn’t been expecting to see her until the next evening, and the sudden sound of her voice managed to startle the hell out of him.

  . . . . .

  Howard Diederich was supposed to arrive at the end of the month, but in the meantime there was enough to keep everybody occupied. For one thing, Marty Eilberg spent most of his first full week of unemployment trying to get Austen on the phone. He was sorry he had told the senator to shove it; it was strictly something that had happened in the heat of the moment, and he needed some help getting another job. Austen gave instructions to the switchboard girl that he was going to be either in conference or on another line or dead until Marty took the hint and left him alone, but he had underestimated the man’s tenacity.

  On his second Monday after returning from California, he looked up from the egg salad sandwich he was having for lunch in the employees’ cafeteria of the Senate office building, and there was our boy—dark, skinny, and mournful in a wrinkled black raincoat, standing in front of his table.

  “Leave me alone, Marty,” he said wearily. “I don’t owe you a fucking thing, and I’m not using up any favors to put you back on the federal payroll.”

  Marty simply pulled out the chair on the other side of the table and sat down, cradling his head on his hands. His huge knuckles, sticking out like so many fragile porcelain knobs, were somehow both obscene and pitiful, like an infirmity uncovered to cheat you of your sympathy. Austen found himself unable to overcome a feeling of shame; still, he would have liked to be able to kick the fellow in the shin.

  “I know, Frank,” Marty answered, sighing audibly. “I’m not asking for the world; I just wish you’d try to get Faircliff to write a better letter for me. I’m sick of politics. I’d like to see if I couldn’t get back into investment services, and a good letter would help.”

  “What did he say, just that you hadn’t been caught with your hand in the till?”

  Marty nodded.

  “You know as well as I do there’s not much chance of his turning the other cheek. You know how he is.”

  “I know, Frank. But he might if you asked him.” The wheedling eagerness in his voice was almost physically painful. Austen pushed his sandwich away, wondering why he couldn’t just tell the obnoxious little creep to fuck off.

  “All right, but don’t come near me again. If I get it I’ll mail it to you—just leave me the hell alone.”

  “Thanks, Frank,” Marty exploded, exactly as if he had been keeping the two words under pressure. “I’ll never forget this, pal. I owe you one.” He sprang out of his chair, and it was all Austen could do to avoid having his hand clasped in abject gratitude. And then, quite suddenly, he was gone.

  Fortunately, the senator was off touring some stupid water project in South Carolina and wouldn’t be back until Wednesday, so Austen could wait until then to think about the problems of the unemployed and to devote himself to what he considered the really interesting question of what they were all supposed to make of this Diederich person.

  It was a puzzle you could really get lost in: what makes a man throw over a successful career telling lies about underarm deodorants to sign on for sixteen thousand a year as a political operative and general office factotum with Simon Faircliff? You don’t buy a lot of Havana cigars for sixteen thousand a year. Hell, it was two less than Austen himself was drawing; he had seen the cheat sheets with his own eyes.

  A year or so before a big election, he could understand it. Bate & Palmer would give their boy a leave of absence to work his little miracle and he would be back in his corporate suite the first Wednesday in November. But Diederich was chucking the whole thing, and in the name of what? Even the next run for the Senate was three years off. It just didn’t figure.

  . . . . .

  “All I know is that my mother couldn’t stand the sight of him,” Dottie murmured, almost through her teeth. She had spent the whole evening, from about six-fifteen on, rolled up in nothing but a percale bedsheet; everything had been absolutely tremendous until Austen mentioned Howard Diederich.

  “When Daddy decided to give up his law practice and run for the House, he was just there, like a genie out of a bottle. She never wanted Daddy to run. Do you want some Sanka?”

  He shook his head and watched her swing her legs over the edge of the bed and feel for her tiny silk slippers, the only personal articles she ever left in his apartment. Except for the short hair, she might have been a Roman matron strolling out to the kitchen in her permanent­press toga. For a moment he lay next to where it was still possible to feel the warmth of her body on the crumpled blanket, and then, on an impulse, not really sure what he had in mind, he slipped into his bathrobe and followed her.

  “Why are you so down on him all the
time?”

  “Daddy?” She looked over her shoulder at him as she filled up his teapot with cold water. “Why should you care?”

  “Take my word for it.”

  She stood there, her back to him as the water ran, not moving, but he could sense a certain rigidness coming over her. It was as if she were nerving herself up for something.

  “All right, if you must know. Mommy didn’t want him to run, and then, not even a year after the election, she died.” She turned around, keeping her back to the sink. The hand that held the teapot was trembling slightly, but that might have been because the teapot was heavy.

  “I was at school most of the time; I didn’t see them much, but I know she was terribly unhappy. And not simply because she didn’t like Washington or anything like that—it was as if the whole world had come to an end for her. Even when we were all back in California together, sometimes she’d just start to cry, for no reason at all. And then she died. They said it was a stroke, but I don’t believe that. He just broke her heart. He as good as murdered her.”

  “Don’t you think that’s quite a bit to lay on him? Were you there when it happened?”

  She shook her head, smiling a sad cynical smile. “No, I wasn’t there, but neither were you. What’s the matter, Frank? Don’t you think your hero would be capable of driving his wife to her grave?”

  “I think he’d be capable of just about anything, but so what? She might really have had a stroke, you know—just a piece of plaque pulling loose from the inside of an artery, the sort of thing you get from eating too many plates of gateau d’abricot a l’orange. Politicians’ wives get depressed and go to pieces all the time—it’s something of an occupational hazard—and the two might not have had a thing to do with each other.”

  “Maybe not. But, once again, why should you care?”

  They stood looking at each other like enemies, almost the whole length of the kitchen between them, and then Dottie set the teapot down on the counter and folded her arms together in front of her, seeming to lose track of everything in some absorbing unhappiness. He came toward her and took her in his arms, forcing her to feel his body against hers, to notice that he was there in the room with her and would insist on being heard when he gave his answer.

  “Because we’ve got to tell him about us. It sounds dreadfully corny, I realize, but I love you and I’m tired of this hole-and-corner stuff. I want to get married—will you marry me, Dottie?”

  She raised her eyes to his face, and there were tears in them. But she was clinging to him now as if for dear life; her hands slipped inside his robe until they were almost all the way around his back.

  “You have a lousy sense of timing, Mr. Austen.” Her voice was no more than a whisper.

  “That’s not an answer. Would you like me to repeat the question?”

  “No.” She shook her head, and then she smiled at him in a way that made him melt inside. “No—yes. Yes, I’ll marry you, if it’s what you want.”

  “It’s what I want. Don’t be dense—of course it’s what I want.”

  “Then love me, Frank. Right now, right here, make love to me, Frank. If you want me, then take me.”

  “Kitchen floors are bad for the back,” he said, taking her face in his hands. “Not to mention the knees and the elbows.”

  But he could see she was serious, that she meant every word of it and wasn’t hearing a thing he said. She was pulling him down like a weight; her bedsheet already had slipped from her shoulders, and he let the two of them sink together. She opened her legs for him and wrapped them around his waist as he came inside, sobbing into his ear, whether on account of passion or from some mysterious grief of her own it was impossible to know.

  VI

  Simon Faircliff was back in his office Thursday morning, but before Austen could find the right moment to talk to him about Dottie a few other things got in the way.

  First there was the matter of Marty Eilberg’s letter, which had top billing in the folder of papers Austen slid across the boss’s desk at the beginning of their regular nine-fifteen routine business meeting. Faircliff opened the folder, adjusted the glasses that he would gladly have perished before owning to in public, read about a line and a half of the closely written single-spaced page, and looked up with an expression of calm astonishment, his eyebrows disappearing into his hairline.

  “This is a letter of recommendation for Marty Eilberg,” he announced, the way someone else might have informed you that one of the buttons on your coat sleeve was missing. “It makes him sound like a cross between Bismarck and Albert Schweitzer. What can you have been thinking of, Frank?”

  He pushed it aside and went on to what was underneath, which happened to be a memo on the proposed new campaign spending law and must therefore have been much more engrossing, because he hardly noticed when Austen rose a few inches out of his chair and deftly replaced the Eilberg letter.

  “Be big hearted and sign it. You won’t even have to lie—as you can see, I’ve already done all the lying for you. Give the guy a break, Simon, and get his ass off my front stoop before the landlady starts entertaining an idea that I’ve sublet the doormat.”

  Both the Senator’s hands were resting palm down on the desktop, with the fingers widely spread, which wasn’t usually a very promising sign, and then, quite without warning, he smiled one of his resigned, how-could-I-possibly-refuse-you-anything smiles and reached for his pen.

  “All right, just to show I don’t bear any ill will.” He handed the sheet back with a kind of subdued flourish, and then his eyes returned to the spending law memo. “I want you to take the train up to New York today,” he said after a little pause, but without seeming to have any attention for anything except what he was reading. “Stay overnight; make it look like you’re out on a razzle, if anyone should happen to be interested. “

  Oh Simon, you suave dog, what is it you’ve just bought yourself with Marty Eilberg’s pathetic little hide? Austen tried to conceal his admiration in the presence of all this smooth duplicity. So Simon wanted a little errand run for him—you wondered what it could possibly be about that he would feel the necessity of trading for it.

  “Sure. What do I do when I get there?”

  “Just meet a man in a bar,” Faircliff answered, finally glancing up from his absorbing sheet of paper and putting it away without, apparently, having noticed that the memo was continued on the other side. He smiled again, as if conscious of being involved in an absurdity. “I honestly don’t have the faintest idea what it’s about,” he went on. “But how bad can it be? All you’re doing is picking up a package and bringing it home.”

  . . . . .

  Austen went back to his apartment to pack a suitcase and write Dottie a little note that he pinned with a thumbtack to the bedroom door; it would be awkward to phone since, at that hour of the morning, he wouldn’t get anyone except the senator’s manservant, who kept an inventory of all calls. He toyed with the idea of taking along the Beretta automatic that had been lying at the back of a drawer ever since his return from the army, but it finally seemed a trifle melodramatic under the circumstances. After all, he wasn’t about to burn anybody down in the lobby of the Essex House just to protect some anonymous supporter’s clandestine contribution to the office entertainment fund.

  He was lucky with his train connections and was in Pennsylvania Station by one-twelve that afternoon. His appointment wasn’t until nine o’clock that night, so he checked into his hotel, hung his good suit up in the closet so the wrinkles would have a chance to fall out, washed his face, and took a taxi to Bloomingdale’s, which turned out to be only about five blocks away, to see whether he couldn’t find something nice to take back to Dottie.

  At half-past eight he was occupying a table not much larger than a manhole cover in a place on Seventh Avenue called the Peppermint Shack. He had eaten a very lovely, very filling, and quite indecently expensive meal at a French restaurant on Fifty-third Street—what the hell, it was on the offic
e credit card, and he was supposed to be giving a creditable imitation of a gentleman on the town—but he was beginning to wonder whether perhaps all that food hadn’t been something of a mistake.

  The big attraction at the Peppermint Shack was a line of skinny little girls who danced naked on a narrow stage that ran almost the whole length of the room, and who allowed nice men to tuck five-dollar bills all any which way into their G-strings. The lady behind the bar wore a transparent, mint-green baby doll nightie, but except for purposes of business hardly anyone noticed that she was there. The only thing you seemed to be able to buy was beer, which tasted like cow piss, gave you gas, and cost, with the tip, about twelve dollars per seven­ounce bottle, and if you didn’t get a refill at frequent enough intervals to suit them the waitresses, who dressed like members of a motorcycle gang, would start telling you in a very loud voice that you’d better get the fuck out and make room for the paying customers. Austen had been inside a thousand dives very like it in Saigon, except that perhaps none of them had been quite so stridently unpleasant.

  Its merits as a place of assignation, however, were obvious. It was as dark as the inside of a cow’s stomach—God knows, you wouldn’t have wanted to find out what strange substances were making the floor so sticky under your shoes—and you couldn’t have asked for a more private atmosphere: the men were only interested in the girls, and the girls were only interested in collecting money.

  By quarter to nine, Austen was into his fourth beer and had already been compelled to face the horrors of the men’s room twice. The dancers, between their performances on the stage, would drift around among the tables, smiling luridly and trying to catch your eye so you would invite them to sit down for a drink—several such interesting conversations were taking place in various dark corners; you had the impression these people had known each other simply forever—but after a few tries the poor little drabs got the message and left him alone.