The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

The son-of-a-bitch had known.

  VI

  In one of the unfurnished rooms on the seventh floor of the Palmer House, Frank Austen leaned against a wall and waited. Downstairs, and in hotel rooms scattered all over Chicago, people were lying around in an abject stupor, watching the results come in from the Illinois primary and looking forward to their first straight six hours of sleep in three weeks. For the moment their work was finished, Austen reflected sourly. But he was still up here, far away from the bowls of pretzels and the comfortable sofas and the sweetness of victory; he was still waiting for Julius Danzig to show up so they could negotiate Harry Kramer’s surrender.

  At seventeen minutes after eight the door swung noiselessly open and Danzig stepped inside. He was a big, solidly built man, nearly six foot three and bulging out of his pearl-gray suit; his curly black hair was falling into his dark face, and he looked like he hadn’t had much sleep lately either.

  “Were you followed?” Austen asked. The question was merely for form’s sake. Danzig shook his head.

  “What do you want, Frank?” The impatience in his voice was nothing more than fatigue; the two men were on friendly terms, and both of them understood that, as professionals, they were supposed to be immune from the rancor of the campaign. After all, they weren’t children.

  “I want to know Kramer’s price for a nice, heartwarming show of party unity tomorrow morning.”

  “Come on, Frank.” Danzig made an impatient little gesture. “All this is a trifle premature, isn’t it?”

  “Not really. The early returns have Faircliff with sixty-three per cent—”

  “Right—the early returns. That’s just the Chicago vote. You know as well as I do that you’ll lose downstate.”

  “Yes, but not by enough to pull us below fifty-six percent, and we’re beating your brains out in the rest of the country.”

  For a long moment they simply scowled at each other. They both were familiar with the arithmetic. It was just that the habits of rivalry die hard.

  “It wasn’t a very elevating campaign, was it?” Danzig said finally, dropping his gaze to the floor, where he seemed to regard the paper walkways laid down for the painters with considerable personal resentment. “You guys didn’t pull many punches.”

  “Spare me, Juley—we weren’t any nastier than you or anybody else. We were just more skillful. Now, tell me, what does Kramer want?”

  “The vice presidency.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Then we’ll fight you right down to the wire.”

  Austen smiled, both because he knew Juley Danzig was bluffing—and knew that Danzig knew that he knew—and because it was the right time to be accommodating.

  “Come on, pal,” he said softly, almost caressingly. “You know they can’t stand each other. Your man can have anything he likes—so long as it’s outside of Washington, D.C.”

  “Yeah, well. . . I’ll see.” Danzig shrugged, as if the problem no longer interested him. But they both knew what he meant. There was a question of pride to be considered; the governor would wait until, say, Saturday to climb on the bandwagon. Everybody needed time to lick their wounds.

  “What about you, Juley?” Austen smiled again, trying to keep it from sounding like he was handing out alms. “We can always use quality people, and you’d be wasted down there in Pensacola, hustling newspaper space for the orange growers. Why don’t you come in with us and help rule the world.”

  But Julian Danzig merely shook his head. “No thanks, Frank. I’ve had my brush with the big time, and I just don’t seem to have the stomach for it.”

  And that was how it ended. They didn’t have much left to say to each other, and after a few more minutes Danzig went upstairs, presumably to tell his employer the bad news, and Austen was left alone to consider the fact that the last obstacle between Simon Faircliff and the Democratic presidential nomination had now been removed. There was nothing left except the triumphal march. And it had all been so much easier than he had ever expected.

  But he found that his accomplishment—and it was very largely his accomplishment—was peculiarly beside the point. All he really cared about just at that moment was going back downstairs and getting some sleep. Maybe by the next morning, if he were lucky, he would have stopped asking himself, over and over again, just where along the line he had stopped liking Frank Austen.

  . . . . .

  But the next day, once again, he was back on the road. The Faircliff campaign was no longer working out of a couple of hotel rooms. Within the limits of the federal election laws, they had all the money they knew what to do with. After the convention in Miami there would be a new ceiling and a whole new budget, but theoretically they were still in the nominating phase and there was plenty of cash lying around to make the California effort, where Faircliff would now be alone on the ballot, into an unprecedented show of strength.

  Austen had sold the idea that California and the West were going to be the keys to the November election, so he wanted to use the last round of primaries as the real start of the fall campaign. He wanted to make a strong impression early so that the Republican nominee—officially the name was still to be filled in, but he knew in his heart of hearts it was going to be Clayton Burgess—would come to regard any serious assault on Simon Faircliff’s home turf as an exercise in futility. After all, what you had you had.

  So he set up shop on the second floor of an office building on Market Street, within walking distance of the old senatorial offices on Powell, and he went to work. He had a budget of about a million and a quarter and all the staff he could ask for, and he flew back and forth to Los Angeles sometimes as often as three times a week. He was in the big leagues now; it was almost as if they had their hands on the government already.

  All he had to do was stay alive to enjoy it.

  An hour after he had gotten back to Manchester all those weeks ago, as soon as he could get Howard Diederich alone without being too terribly obvious about it, he had made a great show of confiding his suspicions.

  “I think the guy was trying to nail me, Howard. You should have seen the hole in my tire—it was such a perfect rectangle it looked like someone had cut it out with a knife.”

  Diederich had sat on the edge of the sofa in Austen’s room, looking as gray and immovable as ever, one of his enigmatic half-smiles playing over his face. You might have supposed he was listening to someone describing the action of a movie.

  “Frank, why would anyone want to kill you?” he said finally, his fingers laced together and resting in his lap.

  “I don’t know. What do you think? Should I report it to the police?”

  “No.” He shook his head, his voice hardly more than a purr. “I mean, I hate to sound selfish, but that sort of thing isn’t going to make Simon look very good in the newspapers. People will ask what his aides can be up to if people are trying to kill them with bombs.”

  “I suppose you’re right. But if I see that guy again, then I think I’ll have to, Howard. After all, I can’t turn myself into a target just to save the boss a little embarrassment.”

  The message had gotten through. Possibly Faircliff had put two and two together himself and given out the word that he wasn’t going to allow his son-in-law to be struck off just to please Mr. Diederich, but the implied threat hadn’t hurt any either. In the two months since New Hampshire there had been no repetition.

  Which still, of course, left Austen with the same problem he had had to begin with. It didn’t seem to be enough to have safeguarded his own life—if, in fact, he had even done that much, because Howard Diederich was still exactly where he had been before.

  One of these dark nights Howard was going to do something that would destroy everything. He wouldn’t get to keep on playing outside the rules forever—sometime or other, somebody would catch him at it.

  And then Simon Faircliff, and God only knew who or what else, would come crashing down like the weight of the world.

  But Howard Died
erich was not an insoluble problem. It was simply a question of means. And there were always means. Perhaps now, having seen his son-in-law come staggering in after a near-fatal automobile crash—and perhaps having figured something out—Faircliff had learned his lesson and decided to rein Howard in. There were signs of that.

  . . . . .

  By mid-May the polls were making it pretty clear that it was going to be Faircliff against Burgess in November, and Faircliff brought his two top lieutenants over to his San Francisco apartment, a tiny two­bedroom affair he maintained only to satisfy the residency requirements of the California election laws, and the three of them spent an evening kicking around various approaches to the problem of the senator from Connecticut.

  Howard knew exactly what he thought should be done. “We’ve had good success with it before,” he said, abstractedly feeling around with one finger in the cuff of his right trouser leg. “We put people into his organization, Frank here digs until he finds the inevitable skeletons in the family closet, we create a few additional scandals of our own, if need be. We burrow from within. Frank is very good at that kind of thing.”

  But Frank wasn’t nodding his agreement. Frank was scowling at his ginger ale as if it were so much carbonated hemlock.

  “Well, Frank? What do you say? Come on, Frank—what do you say?”

  “I’ll tell you what I say, Simon. I say that if you start up with Clayton Burgess like that it’s going to cost you the election. I say if we don’t stop fucking around that way we’re going to blow it—that’s what I say.”

  Simon Faircliff regarded his son-in-law and chief thug with the expression of a man trying to overlook a calculated insult. “Perhaps you’d care to expand on that?” He raised his eyebrows and smiled patiently; children must be allowed their moment of attention, apparently.

  “Yes, I wish you would,” Howard echoed, also smiling. He leaned forward, having forgotten all about the interesting contents of his trouser cuff.

  But for a long few seconds, Austen simply continued to stare sulkily at the ice in his glass. “All right,” he said finally. “I think it’s necessary for us to grow up and face a few facts. Certain things are possible in local races that you can’t get away with in a national election. And you can’t run against Clayton Burgess by pretending that he’s just some creep who got into public office as an alternative to stealing hubcaps. I’ve made the man the object of very close study for several years now—it’s not as if none of us saw this one coming, you know—and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that we can use against him. In 1964 he got a parking ticket while he and his wife were having an ice cream cone at the Carvel’s in Bridgeport, and that is it. Believe me, Burgess is so clean he hurts your eyes.”

  “Very well, then, throw a little dirt on him,” said Diederich softly. In that one moment, Austen came close to something very ugly. He could feel it, a cold sensation that seemed to knot itself tight in the exact center of his chest. When he could bring himself to answer, he didn’t even look at Howard. It was as if he were alone in the room with Faircliff, as if it had been Faircliff who forced him to explain the obvious.

  “You don’t get to do that kind of thing anymore, chief. Between now and November, every move we make is going to be all over all three networks, and if we screw up—or somebody tumbles to one of Howard’s bright ideas here—we’re going to get to watch it on television that very night.”

  “My God—it sounds like Frank’s been favored with a religious conversion. “

  “Howard. . . “

  “All right, Howard. We don’t need any of that.” Simon Faircliff rose out of his chair. He seemed to fill the room, and, as always, the effect was to cut everyone off while they waited for him to have his say. Even Howard lapsed into a studied quiescence.

  “I think Frank is right,” he said, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his green and tan tweed jacket as his eyes searched angrily over the living room carpet. “If the campaign is anything other than completely disinterested and aboveboard, I’m not sure the voters would ever forgive us. It’s the best way, under the circumstances, and Frank’s seen it clearly, I think. This time, we don’t really have any choice.”

  . . . . .

  The meeting broke up just a few minutes after nine that evening, and Austen, who found himself without any motive for going back to the room he was renting at the Glover Residence Hotel on Stockton Street—after all, what was he supposed to do there all by himself, stare at the ceiling?—simply walked. For some reason he had missed dinner, so he had a vague idea that perhaps he would stop in at one of the Hofbrau houses south of Union Square and then, when he had fortified the inner man, find an all-night movie and let himself be lulled to sleep by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something. He didn’t have any better ideas.

  At that time of night, as usual, everything south of Post had the appearance of that species of harmless depravity that was always the tourist’s chief impression of life in San Francisco. People were ready to sell you anything—silver jewelry, pornographic novels, the future, your name engraved on the edge of a Lincoln-head penny, anything you wanted. Every door was open—you could take a steam bath or watch naked girls dance or have your trousers pressed, or any combination of the above—and the streets pulsed with the music from bars and pool halls and the huge portable radios a few adolescent blacks carried around pressed against the sides of their heads, and whores of all five sexes paced back and forth with tiny, dancelike steps on nearly every corner, trying to catch your eye or win your heart or just get you to slow down.

  Somehow Austen found himself down on Market Street—force of habit, he imagined—and looked up to discover a light from one of the windows above the “Faircliff for President” sign. He supposed it was probably the cleaning lady, but he thought he just might go up and visit his office for a couple of minutes and have a look. It would be a chance to say a couple of words to somebody; even a “Hello, how are you?” from the sixty-year-old Mexican woman who did the floors would be better than nothing. He unlocked the front door and walked across the dark lobby to the elevator. But there was just the light burning in an empty room.

  The office had a WATS line, so he wouldn’t be costing anybody any money, but after all it was well after midnight in Washington; Dottie was probably fast asleep and, in any case, wouldn’t appreciate a phone call from her faithful Frank—those days, apparently, were gone.

  But it would be all right. Everything would still be fine if Simon could just shake himself free of Howard Diederich’s influence and be everything that he could be. Clayton Burgess was a good man, one of the best, but Simon had a capacity for greatness, and that was something more. He could be one of the outstanding Presidents of modern times if he would simply allow himself to follow his own nature. And perhaps now he was beginning to do just that. The private happiness of two little people seemed a small enough sacrifice to make for such an end, so he would stick with Simon Faircliff and be glad of the chance.

  And Dottie. . . Well, perhaps finally Dottie could be brought to understand that her husband’s motives weren’t so entirely contemptible as she imagined. Not every exile lasted forever.

  . . . . .

  At that moment in the apartment on Miller Place, a very different sort of destiny was shaping itself.

  When the party broke up, Howard Diederich left first. He waited in the shadow of a doorway while Austen stepped out onto the sidewalk and started his solitary wanderings down from Nob Hill, and, when at last that unhappy figure was out of sight, he crossed back to the other side of the street and returned to the apartment.

  “He took long enough,” Diederich said, removing his coat and putting it carefully over the back of a chair. “What did you two have to say to each other?”

  “He advises me to get rid of you, or at least prune you back enough to keep you from getting us into trouble. He thinks you’re dangerous. Are you?”

  Diederich’s only answer was a bored sigh as he sank bac
k into the sofa cushions. The expression on his face was one of simple annoyance, as if he suspected that someone was about to ask him to exert himself.

  “Simon, do you think I could impose on you for a cup of tea? It was cold out there, and my feet are like ice.”

  For a long moment Faircliff hardly seemed to move at all. It was as if he were making up his mind about something. Then, very slowly, his right hand closed itself into a loose fist.

  “You know, Howard, I’d hate to think you had anything to do with that ‘accident’ of Frank’s back in New Hampshire. I’d hate to think that was anything more than just what it seemed. If I thought that, I’d. . .”

  “You’d what, Simon?” No one ever looked less intimidated than Howard Diederich as he rested the point of his chin against his right palm. His very stillness was an act of defiance. “Just exactly what would you do?”

  “Just be advised. Nothing is to happen to my son-in-law.”

  “What would ever happen to Frank, Simon?” Diederich asked, smiling. “Could I have that cup of tea now?”

  A few minutes later, Simon Faircliff came back from the kitchen with a single teacup balanced in his huge hand. He set it down on the coffee table in front of his guest and resumed his own seat. Diederich picked up the cup and took a tentative sip.

  “I couldn’t remember whether you used sugar—is it all right?”

  “It’s fine.” Diederich smiled thinly and then took another sip. “But we are going to have to do something about Frank. I suggest you fire him.”

  “That’s precisely what we can’t do. Howard, do you honestly think he’d just recede tamely into the background? Don’t kid yourself. You give him a reason to go after you and may God help you. May God help us both. No, as long as he works for us, we can keep some control over him.” Faircliff shrugged his shoulders, as if resigning himself to the inevitable. “After all, he still thinks he’s on my side. He’s worried that you’ll estrange me from my higher self.”

  “All right. But you realize, of course, that that commits us to following this Mr. Clean campaign strategy of his; we can hardly do anything else with him around.”