That was what Pete had called him, all those years ago. A great man, provided he ever got the chance. Well, Austen had seen to that chance, time and again, and he would go on seeing to it. And the right hand would go on not knowing what the left hand did.
The second spool began with the announcement for the House of Representatives. Austen ran through all that as quickly as he could, until he came to what he suddenly discovered he had been looking for all along—the obituary notice on Mrs. Faircliff
January 15, 1970-FAIRCLIFF, Mildred Louise. . . Beloved wife and mother. . . After a short illness. . . No flowers, by request.
On the next page, a grainy photo of Simon, with Dottie on his arm —her face was in shadow and it could have been anybody, but he assumed it had to be Dottie at that age—coming down the steps of the front entrance of the Washington Square Methodist Church.
So at that moment, at least, as they walked away from the funeral together, she couldn’t have formed the idea yet that her father had been cruel to her mother, that he was anything except. . . Except, well, her father. All that must have come later.
But from where? That was the interesting question.
. . . . .
He arrived back in Pacific Grove about one-fifteen the following afternoon, blessedly too late for lunch, which usually consisted of the ladies’ latest experiment in vegetarian cuisine—zucchini casseroles, that sort of thing. He pulled into the carport, wondering who had taken the Rover, and found his answer when he saw Aunt Nina down on her hands and knees along the flower border, pulling out slender wisps of rye grass with the swift, darting precision of a bird hunting for insects.
“Dottie’s gone into town,” she announced without looking up. He had the impression she was addressing herself not so much to him as to his shadow, which slanted across the grass like a dark thumbprint, stopping just beside her. “She’s got it into her head we’re all going to have a cookout on the beach tonight, and she went to pick up some crabs and sweet corn.”
All that was visible of Aunt Nina was the rear view of a pair of extremely faded jeans, rolled up to about mid-calf, and the crepe soles of her heavy, mud-stained gardening shoes. That, and the rim of the floppy straw hat she always wore outside because her nose had a tendency to begin peeling like an onion if she got too much sun. In her mid-sixties, she was an American Gothic with a six-figure income and a sense of humor, the sort of woman who had read Thoreau early in life and had never recovered.
The widow of a pleasantly alcoholic painter who had drunk himself to death in 1955, just too soon to witness the sudden flowering of his reputation—or to cash in on the warehouse full of watercolors he left behind—she had lived her whole adult life in the beach house at Pacific Grove, chasing the seagulls out of her vegetable garden and conducting long and passionate arguments about modern poetry and radical politics and the proper management of one’s diet with the down-at-heel bohemians who regularly trooped through the place in search of comfortable sofas and free food, and from among whom she had chosen the painter as the one love of her life. To him, through the thousand provocations of their ramshackle marriage, and even through her endless bereavement, she had been entirely faithful, maintaining a cranky, unadvertised celibacy. With the exception of her immediate neighbors, everyone liked her tremendously.
Austen liked her too, which was why, when he sat down on the wide wooden steps that led up to the front veranda, he wasn’t sure whether he shouldn’t simply forget the whole thing and take a walk on the beach.
“Tell me about Dottie’s mother,” he said finally, his voice hardly more than a murmur. Aunt Nina looked up from her weeding and frowned; her severe, birdlike face creased around the mouth and eyes.
“Tell you what? She liked peppermint-stick ice cream, she thought Ladies’ Home Journal was the gospel according to St. Matthew, and she’d get hysterical if she didn’t get to the beauty parlor twice a week.”
“That isn’t quite what I meant.” He smiled thinly, shrugging his shoulders. “How did she get along with her husband? Were she and Dottie particularly close? That sort of thing.”
Sitting back on her heels like a Chinese coolie, Aunt Nina lifted off her straw hat and fanned herself with it meditatively, giving the impression she was trying to decide whether or not she should become angry.
“What are you after, Frank?” she asked finally, her eyes narrowing. She still hadn’t made up her mind, apparently. “Is all this something that man you work for has cooked up?”
“That man isn’t an ogre, Nina—he’s a United States senator. And no, he hasn’t cooked up a thing. I just want to know for myself. I’ve got a certain stake in all this, and I just want to understand. What happened when Dottie’s mother died?”
“Dottie was in school back in Massachusetts when Mildred took sick. It didn’t take but about a day and a half for my little sister to die, and it was all over by the time Dottie got home.”
“That isn’t quite what I asked.”
It had all at once turned rather cold. The bushes that maintained a precarious existence along the edges of the sandstone cliffs were beginning to tug slightly at the landward wind, and out over the ocean ominous-looking clouds had started to pile up. It was possible they wouldn’t be having a cookout on the beach after all. And Aunt Nina, the last of her tribe, continued to crouch there beside her flowerbed, hugging her shoulders in response to some inner drop in temperature.
Quite unexpectedly, her eyes filled up with tears. “You can think what you like,” she began, lowering her gaze as she seemed to retreat for safety into herself. “I suppose I never should have said anything—I should have carried it with me to my grave. But I saw her face before she died, my baby sister, and she was so afraid.”
“She’d had a massive stroke. From what I understand, she’d only just barely survived that one; who the hell wouldn’t be afraid?”
Aunt Nina stood up and began brushing the dirt from her knees with the tips of her fingers. When she spoke again, she had returned to her usual crisp, unemotional self. “Look, Frank. I nursed a husband and both my parents through their last illnesses, and I knew my sister Mildred. She wasn’t the wisest woman in the world, but she was no coward. I’ve seen the fear of death often enough to know what that’s like, and Mildred wasn’t afraid of dying. Not just of dying.”
“Of what, then?”
“I don’t know. She wasn’t able to speak a word, so she couldn’t tell me, could she? It’s possible she didn’t even know herself. But she still had just strength enough left in one hand to hold onto mine, and she didn’t want to let go. I could see it in her eyes—she didn’t want me to leave her alone.”
“Wasn’t her husband there?”
Aunt Nina stared down at the ground, her face rigid, like Cassandra in old age.
“Yes, he was there. Him and his henchman, the one with ice water in his veins.”
“Diederich? Diederich was at the hospital?”
“Yes. Mildred had always hated him. I think she was more afraid of him. . . I can’t explain it, really—it was just a feeling. He never came near her room—at least, not any time while I was there—but it was as if she could feel him prowling around through the corridors.
“And then I did leave her. Only to make the arrangements for Dottie to come back home, just for an hour. And when I returned, Mildred was dead.”
V
On the last weekend before its never-sufficiently-to-be-damned presidential primary, New Hampshire was trying to shake itself loose from the aftermath of a blizzard. In Manchester the sidewalks were piled six and seven feet high with crusted, filth-streaked snow, and when you ventured off the curb you usually found yourself well over your ankles in what seemed to turn into slush the instant it came in contact with any object warmer than fifteen degrees above zero.
Frank Austen had spent the better part of the last year commuting back and forth from Washington on an almost weekly basis, and he had discovered that, innocent California boy th
at he was, New England was not the place for him. Ever since October, the whole state had been freezing cold, and for that alone he had learned to loathe it with a peculiar intimacy.
But it was a good political state. Starting from absolute scratch, he had built up a very solid organization of people who had worked for la causa all the way back to the days of Eugene McCarthy, and for the most part they knew what they were doing. Some of them were so good he had already put them on the payroll and, when it became obvious they had this one locked away, shipped them down to Massachusetts for the next big round. Faircliffh had hired himself a first-class campaign manager once things got rolling, and now that the backers could smell victory there was more money coming in than they knew what to do with.
That final Sunday, at least for types like Austen, was the season for cutting one’s post-primary deals—provided you could get away from the working press long enough. Reporters were about one to the square yard, and by now all of them knew Austen and all the other principal players by sight, so if you showed up in the lobby of Howard Johnson’s when your man was staying at the Fireside Inn they would be all over you, wanting to know whose throat you had come to cut.
“I’m just partial to their French toast, boys; after all, it’s seventhirty in the morning.” And you would grin and wave, and they would follow you up in the elevator anyway. There just wasn’t any trust left in the world.
So you had your meetings in laundromats and the men’s rooms of restaurants and the backs of taxis, anywhere you could snatch a few moments of privacy. Frank Austen and Verne Hardcastle had theirs in the parking structure behind the Holiday Inn.
It didn’t take long. Hardcastle knew he would come in a distant third, and he was almost out of money anyway. He just wanted to get something for himself before he went back to El Paso and braced for the uphill fight to keep his House seat.
“It isn’t over yet,” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He didn’t like the cold either. “Harry Kramer could still take it away from your man if I threw my support that way. It isn’t over yet.”
“It’s over for you, Congressman.”
“Look, all I want is some help back in Texas. Faircliff could afford to be a little generous—a couple of lousy campaign appearances.”
“And maybe, if you don’t happen to make it, a nice soft job in the administration until your federal pension matures? You weren’t by any chance thinking of that, were you, Congressman?”
Hardcastle smiled that cunning good-ol’-boy smile that perhaps worked wonders for him west of the Pecos, but seemed to grate like sandpaper on the sensibilities of the good people of New England.
“Wouldn’t hurt, sport. Wouldn’t hurt one bit.”
“Fine. You make your announcement on Wednesday. I suppose I can guarantee the appearances—and maybe a little extra something for the war chest—but I don’t know about the job. That’ll be up to Simon. It might help if it comes out sounding right when you throw in the sponge.” The same sort of conversation was taking place all over town.
But Hardcastle wasn’t even the main item of interest that morning. Austen had nearly forgotten him and was busy thinking about the meeting he would have that afternoon with Clayton Burgess up in Berlin when, as he turned the corner of the stairway and started out through the automobile entrance on his way back to his hotel, he was nearly run down by a light gray Mercedes with New York license plates. There was a loud screech of rubber on concrete, and the car just missed clipping him as he walked past. He was so startled that he almost reached out to steady himself against the right front fender.
And when he looked up, who should be behind the wheel, staring at him like a man who had just seen his name written in blood across the bedroom wall, but the noted financier and frequenter of strip joints, the eminent deliverer of parcels.
“Chester Storey.”
He could hear the words forming in his mind, although he hadn’t the faintest idea whether or not he had actually spoken them out loud. For just a split second the two men simply gaped at each other through the windshield of the Mercedes. It was obvious that for both of them recognition had been instantaneous, for all it had been five years since the last and only time they had met. Austen, of course, didn’t have any idea how he looked, but Storey’s mouth actually dropped open.
And then the split second was over, and the car lurched past him and was up the ramp and out of sight. It was really tearing—over and over, each time more faintly than the last, Austen could hear the tires squealing around one corner after another. The man was scared to death, apparently, and couldn’t think of anything except getting free. If anybody was up there trying to get to his car and happened to get in the way before Storey made it to the roof, it was going to be too damn bad.
Austen walked the five blocks back to the lot where he had left his rented Buick, wondering at this strange reemergence and trying to figure whether there wasn’t some way he could find out what it might mean.
But except in the broadest outline, there wasn’t a chance of that. Obviously the man had been summoned—he wouldn’t have come up to Manchester just for the thrill of it—and Howard Diederich, who was occupying a room next to Faircliff’s at the Sheraton Wayfarer in Bedford, tended to be pretty tight with his little secrets.
. . . . .
Berlin, New Hampshire, resting in the northern extremity of the state, was hardly a garden spot. After the picture postcard charm of the White Mountains, you came down into this sooty little industrial smear, the approaches to which were guarded by huge factory smokestacks as thick as stockade posts against the dingy winter sky.
It was an early Sunday afternoon, so the factories had the forlorn look of ruined, forgotten antiquity. The downtown too was almost deserted; one had the feeling that people here, when they weren’t working in the dark satanic mills, hardly existed at all.
Austen found his hotel without any trouble. A room had been reserved there for him under the name of Davenant, and he was to wait in it until Clayton Burgess came down from his own room on the seventh floor and rang the buzzer. It had all been arranged in advance, a little subterfuge to have a few quiet words without the two of them appearing the next day as an item in the New York Times. It was simply part of the inherent inconvenience of political life.
He carried a suitcase, mostly because he didn’t want to attract attention by checking in without one, and as soon as he had put it on a rack and hung up his overcoat and his jacket in the closet he stretched out on one of the twin beds, cradled his head in his left elbow, and tried to fall asleep. It was no use—he was too tired. And his stomach was beginning to give him trouble, which was hardly a paralyzing surprise. Too many peanut butter sandwiches and too much tea. It was a wonder he wasn’t dead from malnutrition.
At quarter to two he was awakened with a start by the buzz of the doorbell. For an instant, while sleep and consciousness were still mixed up together, he thought he was being electrocuted—what else could that awful zapping noise be?—and then he remembered and rolled over to the edge of the bed to get up and open the door.
“My God, Frank—you look like the sole survivor.”
“Don’t be snide, Senator; we can’t all campaign out of our backyard. Come on in and pull up a beanbag.”
The distinguished Senator from Connecticut, looking, as always, extremely distinguished indeed, stepped over the doorframe and allowed Austen to lock up behind him. He at least didn’t seem like a fugitive from the press, but then he probably could have robbed a candy store and made it into something resembling an imperial procession. It was a question of style.
At forty-eight, Burgess still possessed the grace and appearance of a much younger man; nothing but the little tufts of gray that had collected here and there around his temples and a certain natural gravity saved him from being referred to as “boyish” in the Washington social columns. He was the only man Austen had ever known who could have worn a blue blazer and a yachting cap witho
ut looking like a horse’s ass, though he never had, so far as anyone knew. Beside him, even Simon looked like a peasant.
Burgess took his seat on one of the hotel’s ugly little wood-frame chairs and smiled, making you feel like his kid brother. “How’s Dottie?” he asked, deftly tugging his trouser legs as he crossed one over the other. “I haven’t seen her in an age.”
“Neither have I. By the time I get Simon into the White House, she’ll probably have forgotten my name.”
Burgess laughed politely. You had the uncomfortable feeling that nothing but good manners kept him from pointing out that you weren’t going to get Simon into the White House. And then the polite smile that went with the polite laughter disappeared, and he became politely serious. It was time to talk business.
“Simon wants a truce,” Austen began, leaning forward from the corner of the bed where he was sitting and resting his elbows on his knees. He figured he would do the man the courtesy of dispensing with the fancy footwork. Burgess, after all, was one of the grownups. “We agree to tone down the hostilities until, say, after Illinois. By then both of you will have shaken off the weak sisters, but in the meantime all this sharpshooting in the newspapers isn’t getting anybody anywhere. After all, you and Simon aren’t going to be running against each other for another five months.”
“Don’t tell me Simon’s worried; the polls show he could go as high as forty percent on Tuesday.”
“Simon worries about nothing. I do it for him.”
They weren’t more than six or seven feet apart, and Austen was beginning to feel uneasy. More and more lately, it occurred to him that he was brokering for the Presidency of the United States, for the greatest concentration of power that could be put into a single individual’s hands, and it was beginning to weigh on him. They weren’t fucking around anymore. He let his hand dangle between his knees, as if someone had cut the nerves, and looked up into Burgess’s face with a weary smile.
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