The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  . . . . .

  These symptoms, needless to say, had not gone unobserved. The Senator from California was sufficiently disturbed by them that, as soon as he could get away from his Sunday golf game with the Vice President and a couple of wealthy constituents, he drove over to pay a late afternoon call on his new senior aide, whom he found in his apartment, assembling the cabinetwork for an intimidatingly complex stereo system. The two men sat down together at opposite ends of a sofa that looked as if it would probably have to be cleaned after its journey from one coast to the other, and Howard Diederich listened with the collected gravity of a priest hearing confession.

  “I just don’t know, Howard.” Faircliff shrugged his massive shoulders as he leaned more heavily against the arm of the sofa. “I wonder whether I didn’t make a mistake by sending him up to New York. Maybe I should have gone myself.”

  Howard Diederich shook his head. “No, you did the right thing. The less you concern yourself with that side of things the better; we simply can’t afford to have you compromised at this stage. Besides, I checked the package and it hadn’t been tampered with, so what could he either know or suspect that can be of the slightest danger to us now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then what are you worried about?”

  “You don’t know him,” Faircliff announced, apparently to the neutral tan of the carpet. “He’s very clever; I could tell you stories. . . I don’t know what games you’ve been up to, and I don’t want to know, but if Frank ever gets it into his head. . . he’s just not the type to let go very easily, is all.”

  “I thought you liked him. I thought you said he was so very capable and loyal and would be of such use. Have you changed your mind?”

  “I do like him. If I could have had a son. . .” Faircliff got up, simply because he couldn’t bear being still another moment, and went over to look at the disassembled pieces of Howard Diederich’s record turntable, laid out in some incomprehensible order on the floor.

  Diederich simply smiled. He appeared not to have moved a muscle anytime within the last week, but he smiled. “You’re going to have to get used to it, Simon. In five years you’ll be President of the United States; that’s the plan. And you’ll have to deal with all kinds of very clever people who won’t be in on our various little secrets—a whole government full of them. We’ve got to use people, Simon. We simply won’t have any choice.”

  He was quiet again, as motionless as an idol. The effect was somehow very calming, and Faircliff resumed his seat, leaning back into the sofa cushions and closing his eyes, like a man accepting defeat. “Then what do we do about Frank?” he asked, his voice almost without expression, as if the subject had ceased to interest him.

  “Didn’t you tell me he was sleeping with Dottie?”

  It was an unexpected question. Faircliff seemed to come back to life with a jolt; he twisted around to face Diederich, and his whole attitude suggested a certain belligerence, a willingness to take offense.

  “What of it?”

  “It seems a simple enough solution.” Diederich cocked his head a little to one side, his immobility shading off imperceptibly into the faint irony that seemed somehow the essence of the man. “It’s something I learned a long time ago: personal loyalty is nothing unless it is supported by self-interest. You say that Frank Austen is loyal to you, and now you seem to want to qualify that, implying that there might be limits. Very well—tie him closer. Give him something to lose. Let him marry Dottie.”

  His smile emerged again, like a thing almost exhausted by the labor of being born. “Certainly it should provide him with something else with which to occupy his mind.”

  . . . . .

  And that was how, quite unexpectedly one day, Frank Austen found that the issue of his future had been settled for him. He simply discovered that he was faced with two facts. The first of these was that Diederich, after the initial week or so, seemed to retreat into the middle distance, that his own position with their boss had suddenly become even stronger.

  The other was not so much a fact as an event. He arrived back at his apartment one evening, about a week after he had figured out that he was once more head boy, and found Dottie sitting in the armchair in his living room, her feet curled up under her and her arms held close to her body, as if she was anxious to take up as little space as possible.

  “Daddy and I have come to an understanding,” she said. In the artificial light of the only lamp she had thought to turn on, her brown eyes took on a darkness, almost a lifelessness, like those of a figure carved out of black marble. “It seems that our getting married is to be the price of your rise in the world. He didn’t put it in so many words, but he plans to come down very hard on you if we don’t.”

  Austen set his briefcase to rest on a table. Otherwise, he hardly moved.

  “It’s not something I have to be flogged into doing—you know that, Dottie. We’ve talked about it before.”

  “It’s not you he’s worried about. He seems perfectly sure you’ll jump just the right way; it’s me he thinks he’s got to bring into line.”

  It was odd how she appeared visibly to sag at that moment. Austen came over and knelt beside her chair, covering her hands with his own.

  “How long have you been sitting here, Dottie?” he asked, but she only looked at him—almost through him—as if surprised and saddened by the stupidity of such a question.

  “Will you tell me something, Frank? I’ll marry you anyway—I don’t think we really need anything but the truth—but will you tell me? If I asked you to quit, without giving any reasons, if I just asked you to chuck it and go to work for somebody else, would you do that for me, Frank?”

  He shook his head. She seemed to have a right to the truth. “Not without a reason, sweetheart. I can’t believe that would do us any good.”

  “No, perhaps not.”

  Part Two - THE BREAD OF SECRECY

  “It’s not very complicated, Simon. If you want the nomination, you’ve got to win the Senate big next time. If we want the Presidency, we’ve got to take California like San Juan Hill.”

  Such was the gospel according to Frank Austen, delivered over lunch in the Senator’s Washington offices about six weeks after Austen had returned from a brief honeymoon in Bermuda. The senator agreed.

  “Fine, Frank,” he said, stirring a packet of artificial sweetener into his coffee; he was going through one of his more or less regular phases of being very concerned about his weight. “You see to it, okay? I want you to run that show.” He smiled, and Austen suddenly realized that he had just condemned himself to spending the next two years of his life aboard transcontinental planes.

  But it wasn’t such a bad time. Dottie would drive out and pick him up at the airport—he discovered that it made a difference, having someone to come home to—and sometimes, when he had to be gone for more than a few weeks, she would go with him and stay at her aunt’s in Pacific Grove, where they could see each other at least once in a while. The aunt was very fond of Dottie and always kept her room for her, where, if you left the window open at night, you could listen to the waves breaking.

  They were in California for their second anniversary, and Austen drove up from Los Angeles to San Francisco and they spent the weekend at the Mark Hopkins and had dinner on the big night at a Japanese restaurant called Mingei-Ya, because Dottie was absolutely wacko about sitting around on the floor and eating raw fish and something called O-Mitsutaki.

  “My feet are asleep.”

  “That’s perfectly ridiculous. People all over Asia sit around like this all the time without their feet going to sleep.”

  “Nevertheless. . .” He tried to move and managed to bang his toes against a table leg. “Oh God! Now it’s awake with a vengeance.”

  And then she started to laugh. “Poor Frank—I’m sorry, but if you could see the expression on your face. . . I really am sorry. Here, have some more bean curd. You poor darling.”

  “Will you still l
ove me if I want to eat with a knife and fork tomorrow night?”

  “Yes, baby, I promise I’ll still love you—even then.”

  When she didn’t come along, he would bring her home pineapples and boxes of See’s chocolate truffles and loaves of sourdough French bread, all the things she missed, carried in plastic shopping bags and balanced on his knees between San Francisco and Washington.

  In San Francisco, Austen rented a little one-bedroom apartment, simply because he was there often enough to make it cheaper than staying in hotels, and sometimes Dottie would phone him at odd hours of the morning and they would talk for ten or fifteen minutes and then say goodnight, and Austen would roll over in bed and go back to sleep.

  He wondered sometimes, with a certain amusement, whether perhaps she wasn’t checking up on him, but she needn’t have worried. Probably, if asked, he would have described himself as a very happily married man. And if he stayed away from other women, it wasn’t because he was worried about getting caught—if the idea had occurred to him, he would have thought it was ludicrous—but from a kind of emotional fastidiousness. Other women weren’t Dottie, and therefore he didn’t really seem to want them.

  So together or apart Mr. and Mrs. Austen lived in peace. They had even managed, somehow, to sustain a truce for the time being about his work for her father. About her father, period. He might have been leaving the house every morning to go stand around the bus terminal soliciting dimes.

  Nevertheless, the business of getting Simon Faircliff reelected went on with relentless efficiency. By January of that political season the shape of things had become clear, and Austen, having assembled the mechanism, went back to Washington to submit his analysis and make his recommendations. On his second night in town, he picked up Howard Diederich at the Watergate and together they drove over to Chevy Chase to sit in Faircliff’s living room and settle the shape of the campaign.

  “Okay, Frank,” Faircliff began, handing him a glass from the portable bar his manservant had set up before being sent off to the movies. “You’ve got your goddamned ginger ale, so lay it out for us.”

  Austen held up the fingers of one hand, wiggling them in the air like the characters in a puppet show. “It comes down to this,” he said quietly. “My snitches tell me that we’ve got a good possibility of up to four serious contenders for the Republican nomination—the more the merrier, but I think four is the most we can reasonably hope for. Two of them have already announced; Turnbill has got his committee in place, so we can count on him unless something really drastic happens to make him chicken out at the last moment, and Harry Arnott wants to but probably requires a nudge to get him to take the risk.”

  “Who the hell is Harry Arnott?” Faircliff asked, his face wrinkling in distaste. “Do we know him?”

  “He’s an assemblyman from Orange County, and he’s got delusions of grandeur. You know the type—a little to the right of Genghis Khan—but he has a certain following among the bomb-shelter set. He’s not insignificant and can be counted on to call everybody a lot of lousy names. He should be encouraged.”

  Howard Diederich raised a finger and smiled faintly. He was sitting on one end of the sofa, his right foot hooked in behind the opposite knee, like a marble statue of patience. “So what do you propose?” he asked, his voice barely audible.

  “I propose that we feed the fires of discord.” Austen allowed his eyebrows the privilege of arching slightly. “I propose we make all the trouble we can for Boothe and Warnke, since it’s short odds one of them will be running against us in the fall. God, I wish somebody would just tell Congressman Boothe to go away and leave us alone; it would give me hives to have to go up against that smoothie. I propose we nourish Turnbill and Arnott and hope all four of them have a lot of fun this spring and summer and come out of it with no end of battle scars and bad temper. I’ve got pipelines into all of them, so I can maybe steer things to some degree, but it’ll also take money.”

  “I’ll see to it you have all the money you need, Frank, starting as soon as you like.” Diederich smiled again as he spoke, and the two men shared a silent moment of understanding, a kind of treaty between enemies. Then Austen smiled too, raising his glass of ginger ale in salute.

  “Howard, one of these dark nights I’m going to have to ask you where you come up with all those envelopes full of hundred-dollar bills.”

  “I’ve never heard any complaints from—”

  “We can worry about that later,” Faircliff broke in, shooting Austen a pointed glance. “Go on, Frank. You’ve set the dogfight going among the opposition, and I suppose they’re more or less guaranteed to cut themselves to pieces before either Warnke or Boothe gets nominated. Just by the by, which do you think it will be?”

  “Boothe.” Austen made a sour face. “Sorry, chief, but that’s what it looks like.”

  “Well, you never know . . .” Howard Diederich sighed wearily, which, with him, could have been interpreted to mean anything at all.

  “And then what happens?”

  “And then. . .” Austen took a sip of his ginger ale and paused; it was his little surprise, something he had been saving, and he watched the changes in Simon’s face with a good measure of personal satisfaction. “And then you run unopposed.”

  “But what about Hannah—I thought. . .”

  “No.” Austen set down his glass on the coffee table, shaking his head with a kind of playful gravity. “No, I had lunch with the governor last week and explained the facts of life to him—it’s about time somebody did. It seems he’s been having quite a time for himself with his secretary, and last month, at the Western Governors’ Conference in Hawaii, somebody put a tape recorder under his bed. The conversation gets a little muddled in places, but my impression is that the lady performs certain services for him that aren’t available at home. I don’t really suppose, these days, that the voters would care, but his wife would. Mrs. Hannah, I’m told, is something of a holy terror and, besides, she’s the one who’s got the money.”

  Faircliff brought the flat of his hand down to his leg with a smack. He was ready to laugh out loud, except that he was too startled to make a sound. “Frank, where the hell did. . . Jesus.”

  “Simple. The secretary came to me, all of her own free will and with the tape reel in her handbag, a very foxy lady with a score to settle.” A glance passed between Austen and his father-in-law. No, Simon, I haven’t got anything going on the side, not with this one or any other. So you can stop pretending to worry about the domestic happiness of your little girl.

  “I guess she doesn’t like him or something—apparently, he doesn’t appreciate her spiritual qualities.” He picked up his ginger ale, held it absent-mindedly for a moment, and then set it down again, making a face. The charm had gone out of everything.

  “Anyway, I gave Hannah a copy of the tape over dessert and told him to take it somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed and see how he liked it. He phoned the next morning and pledged his unqualified support.”

  For perhaps as long as a full minute, the three of them maintained a morose silence, rather as if they had all witnessed something shameful and were waiting for the impression to pass a little so they wouldn’t have to mention it. Then the senator rose and went over to the bar and mixed himself another light scotch and water. He glanced at the others, raising his eyebrows in inquiry, but Diederich shook his head—he had barely touched his drink—and Austen was too preoccupied to notice.

  “Anything else?” Faircliff asked, sitting down again. When there was no answer, he looked more directly at his son-in-law and frowned. “Frank, anything else you want to say? Any other little messages from home?”

  “Just one.” Austen shifted uncomfortably in his seat, wondering why all of a sudden he felt so damn mean.

  “I think it would be very helpful,” he said slowly, as if weighing each syllable, one at a time, “if you would get off this foreign policy jag of yours. The war’s over, Simon—people don’t want to hear about Southeas
t Asia. We’ve got double-digit inflation and bad unemployment, especially down around Los Angeles, where they’ve lost all those aerospace contracts lately. People want to hear about that; they want a little sympathy and a sense that you’re as pissed off about their problems as they are. They don’t care a tinker’s damn about Indochina, and all you’ve talked about for the past six months is some little slant-eyed military dictator.”

  Faircliff had listened without apparent emotion, but that didn’t mean anything. When he lapsed into those motionless, impenetrable silences, he became as unpredictable as a cobra. But finally he shrugged his shoulders, stretching the corners of his mouth into a thin, irritated smile. “It’s important, Frank. This U Ba Sein is headed for a fall, and if we’re not careful he’ll take us down with him. It has got to be discussed. “

  “It can wait, Simon; it can wait until after the election. Hell, half the people I talked to had never even heard of Kyauktada.” Austen leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and his voice took on an almost pleading quality. “I know it’s important, boss. But so is your reelection. All I’m asking you to do is to make a few less speeches about the yellow peril and a few more about the price of groceries. Okay?”

  “Okay, Frank.” The senator nodded and smiled a little more warmly, as if he were indulging the whim of a child.

  All the while, Howard Diederich had been staring vacantly at the bricks in the fireplace, slowly smoothing down the fabric of his trouser cuff. He waited until he had managed, in that mysterious way of his, to draw all attention to himself, and then he turned to Austen.

  “Then I take it,” he began in a languid, toneless voice, “that if we follow your recommendations we can regard reelection as a given; the only question will be the size of the victory. I’d be interested to have Frank’s thinking on what kind of showing we’ll need to have a respectable chance two years from now.”