The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  “Are you ready to hear my proposition now?”

  Yates came down heavily on his bench seat, and his narrow eyes rounded in surprise. It was like watching a snake dazzled by a strong light.

  “Do you still have one?” he asked.

  Diederich nodded. “I hope neither of us is unreasonable enough to hold a grudge. A moment of temper. . . well, perhaps you were right to resent it—perhaps I was a trifle cavalier.” He indulged in another of his wintry, almost imperceptible smiles. “After all, we’re soldiers on the same side. We have the same enemy.”

  “So what is it you want me to do?” Yates was leaning forward on his elbows, visibly more relaxed. The moment of danger had passed, it seemed.

  “I want you to recruit an army.” He was silent for a moment. He wiped his fingers on one of the thin paper napkins provided by the management and waited for what he had said to sink in—Yates’s reactions were important. And Yates liked the idea.

  “An army?”

  “Well, perhaps not an army. Let’s say a platoon. And why not? You’ve fought the communists all over the world; why not fight them here as well, where it might be made to matter? Find a dozen or so of the right kind of men. . . specialists. You’ll know where to look. We want the sort who will do their work and not be inclined to probe too deeply into what it means. As I said, you’ll know where to look.”

  “And what am I supposed to do with this—this army?”

  “We’ll think of things.” The faint, ironic smile was allowed to broaden into something almost like a grin. “There’ll be plenty of money, so get the very best. And the world is full of men like Congressman Boothe. We’ll manage to keep you occupied.”

  IV

  On the night of November second, while Simon Faircliff was in San Francisco waiting for the moment of his triumphant appearance before the frenzied, joyful riot of his supporters in the ballroom of the Saint Francis Hotel, Frank Austen was alone in Aunt Nina’s bedroom in Pacific Grove, watching the election returns on television. The strategy he had mapped out so many months before was an overpowering success; almost without drawing a deep breath, they had captured 59 percent of the vote.

  No one was surprised, although the margin of victory was a full two points higher than the Field poll had predicted only the week before, but everyone knew they were watching the emergence of the Democratic front-runner, the anointing of the standard bearer, the real beginning of the next presidential campaign. The crowds at the Saint Francis knew it; they were wild, drunk with exultation. In a way it was fearful, as if they could think of nothing beyond this moment of almost pagan joy—as if they didn’t want to.

  Austen watched it all from a safe distance, not knowing what to think or feel. He had worked his guts out toward no other end. The senator was well on his way. The Kyauktada hearings had made him a national figure, almost a national idol, and now he had walked over the opposition like they weren’t even there. Barring the unforeseen—and Austen had the unaccountably uncomfortable feeling that now even the unforeseen would somehow be tailored to Simon Faircliff’s advantage—the way to the nomination would be like a ticker-tape parade. Faircliff would just ride by, and the crowds would stand along the sidewalks and cheer. It would be as simple as that.

  At ten o’clock Austen decided that Aunt Nina would probably want her bedroom back to go to sleep in, so he turned off the set and went out into the kitchen, where that lady and his wife were seated at the breakfast table, drinking coffee and talking in murmurs.

  “Did you see enough?” Dottie asked, perhaps only a little maliciously.

  “Yes, plenty.” He smiled weakly and pushed his way through the door to the veranda and then down the steps to the beach. He wanted to be alone for a while. He simply didn’t want to talk to anybody.

  Most of the neighboring houses, of which there weren’t very many to begin with, were only weekend places, and apparently their owners were back in the city earning the money to keep them up, because all of them were dark. Once you stepped out of the penumbra of light from Aunt Nina’s kitchen window, you might as well have been alone on a deserted island. Here and there a line of waves might catch an obscure glimmer from somewhere, enough to impart to them a kind of satanic luster. He could hear the waves hissing up on the sand, and he could hear his own footfalls, but for the rest the world seemed empty.

  He would have the week off. He was due back in Washington on the tenth, but until then he was just supposed to take it easy and repair the damage from the campaign. Senator Faircliff knew what he owed to Frank Austen, and he was very grateful. A week in the sun—the fruits of victory.

  He sat down facing the ocean and tried to see whether he could make out the line of the horizon. He wasn’t sure.

  “I brought you out your sweater.” Dottie was directly behind him; he hadn’t heard her coming, hadn’t expected her, but he discovered he wasn’t in the least surprised. She dropped his heavy brown cardigan over his shoulders and crouched down beside him. “It’s nearly winter—you must be cold.”

  “I hadn’t noticed but, yes, I suppose I am.” It made him feel better to have her there with him, and he put his arm around her and forgot all about looking for the horizon. It didn’t seem so important now.

  “You’re still thinking about Ted Boothe, aren’t you.”

  “Ted Boothe was an accident. Pete and I went over every inch of that together and came up with exactly nothing. The police checked the wreckage. It was either mechanical failure or else maybe Boothe had had one too many and misjudged the turn. There’s no evidence of anything else.”

  “But you’re really not satisfied with that,” she murmured, covering his forearm with her hand where he held her. “You don’t really think it was an accident at all.”

  “It was an accident.”

  The wind must have picked up, because suddenly he really was cold. In Washington it would be raining like hell and in the forties, but out here you just put on a sweater if you happened to go out for a walk in the middle of the night. Somehow, all at once, he missed Washington. He would have liked to be lying in their bed at home, falling asleep and listening to the rain as it dropped softly on the roof.

  It was odd how one could sense changes in the emotional atmosphere; without a word being said or a muscle moved, in the time it takes to draw in a breath, he knew somehow that Dottie had ceased to be simply his wife, sitting beside him on a stretch of moonless California sand, and had become that other thing she was from time to time, in the bad periods when their marriage seemed curiously beside the point, when she was just Simon’s child—or, more accurately, Simon’s dead wife’s daughter, a sort of reversed Electra.

  “But doesn’t it at least give you a certain sense of déjà vu?” she asked calmly, as if they had been discussing the most neutral subject in the world. “Doesn’t it ever strike you as odd how unlucky Daddy’s political opponents have always been?”

  “People who lose always think they’ve been unlucky.”

  Even in the darkness he could see that she was smiling at him contemptuously, as if he were being deliberately stupid. And perhaps she wasn’t so very far off the mark, he thought to himself; he knew very well what she had meant.

  “The first time he ever ran,” she went on, just exactly as though he had never spoken, “the very first time, when nobody thought he had a chance in hell of beating an incumbent, Brian Chabot, the esteemed congressman from the Fifth District, suddenly found himself fighting a tax fraud indictment. It cost him the election, and he ended up spending eighteen months in prison. And then there was Edward Tilson—but of course you know all about that, don’t you, Frank—and now Ted Boothe. One supposes that Chabot should consider himself lucky; at least he’s still alive.”

  “I never laid a finger on Edward Tilson, Dottie; he didn’t require anybody’s help to ruin himself. And Simon didn’t have a thing to do with it, didn’t even know it was going on until it was all over.”

  “No? No, of course not. ‘Sim
on’ always comes out of everything smelling of soap, doesn’t he.”

  Austen restrained himself from pointing out the obvious—that it was just possible Simon Faircliff always retained the appearance of innocence precisely because he hadn’t done anything wrong. Presently all this might pass and they would be back where they had started.

  “And then there’s always the small matter of my mother. You can’t say he didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Come on, Dottie,” he said quietly, bringing his hand up to rest on her shoulder. “You make it all sound like something out of a Sax Rohmer novel—are we back to that? What do you think he did, manufacture a blood clot? Even if he could, do you really think he would have?”

  Dottie shrugged, seeming to brush him away with the motion.

  “Sometimes. “

  “Look, sweetheart, he isn’t Fu Manchu. He isn’t. . .”

  And suddenly he felt the absurdity of the thing. As if Simon Faircliff, who was a decent and respected man, needed to be defended like that. And it made him feel somehow strangely threatened, as if he had been teetering hazardously close to the crumbling edge of his own reason.

  And just as suddenly he understood that it was Dottie who was at hazard. Dottie, who now sat with her hands folded together in her lap, not quite withdrawn but no longer touching him. Dottie, who was able to say, in the most reasonable voice in the world, “Are you really so sure he isn’t just exactly that?”

  . . . . .

  Parents and children.

  It was a relationship with which Frank Austen could claim very little recent experience. His mother, whom he had loved as much as young men generally loved their mothers, had died of cancer while he was still in law school, and his father was a pleasant enough man who tended his vegetable garden down in Anaheim and took very little interest in anything else. He corresponded with his son at irregular intervals—mostly about how the tomatoes were doing—and they saw each other for a couple of days perhaps once every eighteen or twenty months. A comfortable indifference existed between them.

  For about half a minute he considered broaching the subject to Simon, but there wouldn’t have been any point. Simon had probably always been rather casual about being a parent—after all, that was one of the things you had wives for—and his experience at the other end was even more meager than Austen’s, since both his parents had been killed in an automobile accident in 1938, during his first term in college.

  “They went off one of those crummy little wooden bridges they have up there—they were on a fishing trip; the goddamned thing didn’t even have a guardrail—and either the fall knocked them both cold or they panicked and couldn’t get the doors open in time, because they both drowned. In seven feet of quiet water, people who had been swimming in mountain rivers ever since they were babies. You’d hardly think it was possible.” He had told Austen the story, in more or less the same words, probably half a dozen times. It touched him so little, apparently, that it had become the sort of anecdote that was trotted out after dinner as simply a curious episode, like something he might have read about years ago in Field and Stream. No, there was no point in discussing Dottie’s problem with Simon.

  So the following Thursday, after cooking up an excuse to explain his absence, Austen did what was dictated by character and professional training and drove up to San Francisco to drop in on Pete Freestone at the offices of the Chronicle.

  “Let me see your morgue file on Faircliff and I’ll buy you dinner,” he said, hoping Pete wouldn’t ask him why. What was he supposed to answer with, the truth?

  I think my wife is in the process of slipping her cable. She seems to be under the impression that her old man, the respected Senator from California, goes around murdering people, and I just want to make sure of my ground before I start calling in the witch doctors. That would have gone over big with the boys in the city room.

  “Sure.” Pete smiled so wide his cheeks almost succeeded in closing his eyes. “You’re not getting together a new campaign bio already, are you? Such an eager beaver!”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  And then they could both laugh, because it was such an enormous joke, and Pete clapped him on the shoulder and took him downstairs to a huge basement room that was nothing but filing cabinets with a couple of microfilm scanners set up in a corner. He opened a drawer, took out three small cardboard boxes with Faircliff printed in heavy black lettering on the top flap and held together with a rubber band, and tossed them to Austen.

  “You know how to use one of these monsters?” he asked, pointing to the scanners. Austen nodded. “Good. Well, I’ll be up in my office when you get bored. Frascati’s sound good to you? I’ve developed this thing lately about fettuccini.”

  “Sure, terrific.” Austen smiled tensely, wishing his friend Pete, whom he loved like a brother, would get the hell out of there and leave him alone with all those yards and yards of microfilm. “I’ll only be about an hour.”

  As soon as the door was closed, he took the spool out of the box marked “One: 1937-1968” and clipped it on the left-hand spindle and threaded the film through the guides and onto the empty spool on the right-hand spindle. The thing was really childishly simple to operate; you just flipped on the light and turned the two little hand cranks that drove the film until whatever it was you were looking for was projected against the screen.

  Austen might have been trying to disarm a bomb. By the time he was ready to start grinding through to page 1, he had to wipe his hands dry. They left huge dark stains on his trouser legs—he was scared, he realized with something like surprise—although of what, he couldn’t have said. And he didn’t even know what he was looking for.

  The first page was simply a little eight-line squib about how the Oroville Badgers—presumably the high school football team—had won the state championship. The date was November 28, 1937, and the team captain and quarterback was Simon Faircliff.

  Odd that he had never known Simon to take any interest in football.

  The next clipping was a little longer: “February 20, 1944-CALIFORNIA MAN RECEIVES SILVER STAR. Marine First Lieutenant Simon Faircliff of Oroville was decorated today by Major-General Holland M (“Howling Man ‘‘) Smith for conspicuous gallantry during the recent action at Tarawa Island. Also honored were. . . “

  There was nothing more until September 15, 1950, and that was only a place in the list of those passing the California bar exam. Faircliff had finished third in the whole state after graduation from Stanford Law in June, where he had come after completing the senior year at Yale that the war had interrupted.

  “One goddam semester,” Austen had heard him say often enough. “I come out of the Marines, I’m a captain, and I’m twenty-five years old. And I’ve got to go all the way back to New Haven for one goddam semester. I can’t get my degree until I pass the course in probability and induction. Well—maybe it was just as well.”

  And then the following year, the wedding.

  It was a big affair, splashed all over the front page of the society section, because the bride and her family were charter members of the old San Francisco aristocracy, dating back to the days when D. E. Chambers had stood with Hopkins and Stanford and Charles Crocker as one of the great capitalist barons of the gilded age.

  Miss Mildred Louise Chambers, if you could judge anything at all from a twenty-seven-year-old newspaper photo, looked to be a wistfully pretty little creature, so maybe Simon’s motives hadn’t been totally mercenary. The first thing that struck Austen was how much the new Mrs. Faircliff reminded him of Dottie, and the second thing was how odd it was that he had never seen her face anywhere before.

  Dottie just wasn’t the picture type. She didn’t carry around any snapshots in her wallet; her affection for people simply didn’t take that particular turn. Austen had had to browbeat her for weeks to get a copy of her college yearbook photo for the desk in his study. And besides, she had still been in her teens when her mother died, well
before the age at which people normally thought of collecting big studio portraits of their parents. So with Dottie it was perfectly understandable.

  But Simon was a regular trophy hunter. He practiced a certain austerity in his Senate offices, but the wall of his den at home was solid with framed certificates and photographs of Senator Faircliff with everybody from the chairman of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to the President of the United States. That wall constituted a kind of informal history of his public and private life.

  Except that there was no Mrs. Faircliff.

  Austen simply couldn’t account for the fact that he had never noticed so obvious an omission before. Of course, there could be all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe he had never really cared for the lady, or maybe he had cared for her a great deal and simply didn’t like to be reminded of what he had lost. In any case, since Simon wasn’t very likely to unburden himself on such a subject any time soon, Austen figured he would just have to learn to live with that particular ambiguity.

  So hello, Mrs. Faircliff—and what will we ever know about what it is that seems to torment your unhappy daughter?

  The rest of the spool simply reviewed Simon Faircliff’s rise through his profession. The antitrust suit against American Petroleum was a textbook case; the brief was a work of genius that Austen had read about in law school. The Lyle perjury trial, Montclair vs. Liddel, the Peruggi investigation—that had been a lark, the young corporate lawyer’s personal crusade against one of the biggest chemical companies in the nation, years before “ecology” was anything more than a piece of jargon among biologists. And the speech against the war Simon had made when they elected him vice-president of the California Bar Associaton; more than anything, probably, that had been what had propelled him into politics. Austen knew it all. The public record had become his bible, his source of solace, that to which he could return in moments of doubt—and who was so inhumanly perfect as to be above doubt?—when he needed to remind himself that, if sometimes he had to do something a little raw, at least it was in the service of a great man.