The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  “He was always very high on Burgess,” Diederich said, leaning a few inches forward as if straining to see something that refused to come all the way into focus. “I wonder what he could be up to.”

  . . . . .

  “Well, he’s cleared the slate quite effectively, don’t you think? Or perhaps you still don’t see the pattern. Have you got yourself so hypnotized that you can be blind to what he’s doing? Even now?”

  “Boothe and Burgess—that doesn’t make a pattern; that makes a coincidence. Maybe God’s got it in for politicians whose names begin with a B.”

  “Very funny.”

  They said a great many other things to each other that night—some things neither of them would be able to forget until the ends of their lives.

  Dottie had flown in from Washington the morning after Clayton Burgess’s attack. She just packed a bag, got a ticket on the red-eye special, and landed at San Francisco International at six-twenty in the morning.

  Austen was there to meet her, and they drove down the coast road toward her aunt’s. It wasn’t a very happy reunion for either of them.

  “I haven’t heard any news since I left. Is he. . ?”

  “He’s still alive,” Austen said calmly, staring ahead at the road with cold, expressionless eyes. “But just barely. They say they won’t know for another twenty-four hours whether or not he’ll make it.”

  “Good God. . .”

  At that hour of the morning, once they got off the Bayshore Freeway, they seemed to have the world to themselves. They didn’t talk; they just drove. Up over Route 92 to Half Moon Bay, splitting the clean white fog like a knife, and then south, always within sight of the Pacific, like a great gray blanket you wanted to pull up around your shoulders to keep you warm. All that way, through a landscape of split-rail fences and black earth and fields of grass and soft yellow flowers, all blurred by the fog into something as unspecific as a dream, and they hardly noticed it; they hardly looked at it at all.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said finally, when they were almost to Santa Cruz and the sun had broken through and brought everything back to its usual ruthless clarity. “I just heard the one report on the news; there were hardly any details.”

  “He collapsed.” Austen continued to look only at the road ahead; his voice was as empty as he could make it. “He was in a motorcade, and he keeled over. It was a massive heart attack; he was already unconscious when they got him to the hospital, and apparently there’s so much damage that he’ll never really recover. They thought for a while he might not even wake up again, but he did.”

  “But he won’t be able to run for President.”

  “Oh, no,” he answered, shaking his head. “He won’t even be able to go back to the Senate. Even if he lives, he’ll never return to public life—it’s a goddamned shame.”

  “I’ll bet it just tears you apart.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. He prided himself on being a cynical man, but it hadn’t occurred to him that his own wife would think so ill of him as to imagine he was glad for what had happened.

  “Come on, baby,” she said, slipping her hand inside his elbow. “Get out of it before you’re so sucked in you don’t even know which end is up. Maybe you can’t stop it, but you don’t have to be in on it—and you’re that now, even if you turn your eyes away and pretend not to see. If you let yourself go along with it, then you take your share.”

  “Are we back to the conspiracy theory? Simon Faircliff as the scourge of God? You’re out of your fucking mind, Dottie. I was with him when he heard the news. Somebody brought it in from one of the wire services, and I saw his face. He just isn’t that good an actor.”

  “So maybe it isn’t Daddy,” she answered finally, as if, after great effort, she had reached one of the important conclusions of her life. “But it’s something. One after the other—one way or another—all the obstacles are being cleared from his path. He’s running in an election, so his opponents either disgrace themselves or die. He needs to be a big man in the media, so some little Asian dictator he’s been hyping goes out and gets himself conveniently assassinated. My mother is cracking up—and we wouldn’t want anything like that to embarrass the newly fledged congressman, oh no—so all of a sudden she dies of a stroke. It’s a pattern. Somebody is going around murdering people so that my father can be President of the United States.”

  “Time and chance, baby. Time and chance. It’s just the way things have been breaking for him.”

  “Sure.”

  “Anyway, that doesn’t automatically make him a murderer.”

  “Maybe not directly, but he accedes to it, doesn’t he? He’s got eyes—he can see what’s going on. Just like you can.”

  Great. So now it was Simon the spider king, with everybody from Edward Tilson to Clayton Burgess to poor old U Ba Sein caught in the coils of his web. He could even arrange for a suicide cadre to go in and gun down one of the world’s better-protected military despots. There was just no limit to the man’s power.

  “You’re crazy, Dottie. I may have to have you locked away for your own good.”

  And that was how they had parted. Naturally, they both had a lot more to say first—all the way down the coast road, about as ugly a business as you could imagine. When they reached Pacific Grove, Dottie got out of the car, slamming the door behind her, and Austen drove back to San Francisco, where that afternoon he caught a flight down to Los Angeles. He had never told her what happened on that road in New Hampshire—what would he have gained?

  So he went to Los Angeles and checked in at the Beverly Hilton. He talked to the members of Burgess’s staff who were still there, waiting to know whether their leader would pull through before they gave up on their great crusade and went home. He visited the hospital, went over the physicians’ list until he found the name of a fellow he had known in college, and asked him.

  “It’s a heart attack, man—what can I tell you? A heart attack, pure and simple. It happens to people every day.”

  The primary came and went. Faircliff won. Burgess won—apparently a big sympathy vote. Austen barely noticed. Four days later he phoned Dottie and laid it out for her. It was a heart attack. Not a vast conspiracy, but a simple, garden-variety heart attack.

  Dottie listened to what he had to say and then hung up without saying another word.

  . . . . .

  Four weeks after her husband’s seizure, Sylvia Burgess was still spending most of her time reading magazines in the tiny cubicle of a waiting room on the fourth floor. But there were consolations; at least Clay had recovered enough to be moved to a private room. Intensive Care, with its bare little curtained-off cots and the constant jittering of the oscilloscopes, had been a terrifying place. Now it was possible to believe that he really might not die after all.

  Still, she was only allowed to visit him for half an hour at a time, and every night she was driven back to her hotel room to watch television and stare through the darkness at the shadowed ceiling and listen for the telephone to ring.

  Everyone was being very nice. Simon had even flown down from San Francisco and spent the whole afternoon sitting with her while they waited for Clay to wake up from his nap. Simon really was an awfully nice person and had been so sweet; he had seemed genuinely concerned and upset.

  That was right after Clay’s attack. It had been awful when she thought he might really die, just like that, from one second to the next. What would there be left, how could she possibly get through the rest of her life, if Clay died? But today he seemed so much better.

  “How are you, sugarplum?” he had asked, smiling and reaching out for her with his large brown hand. It was difficult to imagine him as anything except the strong, healthy, vigorous man she had loved ever since she was nineteen. “God, breakfast was awful this morning. Cream of Wheat, if you can imagine. I haven’t eaten Cream of Wheat since I reached puberty.”

  Their fingers laced together and she returned his smile, trying very hard not
to let the tears break through. Clay hated it when she cried, but she almost couldn’t believe how much she loved him at that moment.

  He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and it was possible to guess the degree to which he had been ravaged over the past four weeks. He would never get all the way better, the doctors said. Even now, at this distance from his crisis, she could hardly make up her mind to believe that the life hadn’t flickered out and left his dear face nothing but a mask.

  But the eyes opened once more, and she could feel the warmth of his hand, and her fear rushed from her. “How are you feeling?” she asked, smiling again.

  “Much better.” His smile turned into a grin. He was like a small boy who was getting away with something. “Tomorrow, they’ve promised me, I can get out of bed and walk around a little bit—maybe even give myself a shave.”

  VIII

  Three days later, Clayton Burgess was dead.

  Austen heard the news on his car radio, in the middle of an impenetrable traffic jam on the Washington Outerbelt. It was like the resolution of a well-plotted novel where the hero, for good or evil, finally meets his fate. First there was surprise, and then, as the thing was absorbed, the feeling that it couldn’t have worked out any other way. The direction of events had proceeded with all the neat simplicity of a straight line.

  Sitting in his car, watching the exhaust from a thousand stalled cars drifting past his window, Austen wept for the first time in his adult life. The tears streamed down his face unnoticed as he stared through his windshield, seeing nothing, as motionless as an icon or a corpse.

  Those were busy times—the nominating convention was only a few weeks away—but when he finally did make it home at night and sat in the kitchen over his sweetened tea and Stouffer’s frozen lasagna, he certainly enjoyed the necessary solitude in which to think things through. Perhaps that was what Dottie had intended with her prolonged visit to Pacific Grove, although other interpretations were possible.

  Somehow Clayton Burgess’s death had changed things.

  Austen even went so far as to draw up a letter of resignation, dated for the day after the close of the convention and effective immediately, and for close to a week he kept it in the safe in his study, taking it out a couple of times every evening to have another look at it. But finally he tore it up and flushed the pieces down the john.

  We have to be practical, he kept thinking to himself. There was simply too much at stake for anyone to indulge in any sentimental gestures. Barring an act of God—and not much less than that would serve—Simon Faircliff was going to be the next President of the United States. If something was going on, then Simon was as much its victim as anyone.

  But a President with a problem like that was a danger to more than just himself, and the important thing was to get him free of it. That wasn’t the sort of thing that could be done from a front porch out in California. Austen wasn’t going to achieve anything, probably not even his own personal salvation, by retiring to private life.

  He had played the scene through in his mind a thousand times. He would simply show up one day on the doorstep in Pacific Grove—or, better yet, he would go down to the beach and encounter Dottie on one of her solitary strolls, with her arms full of driftwood. It would be just a few minutes before sundown—that was the best time, while the sky was beginning to turn to a pale gray and the tops of the waves were as red as blood—and she would look up suddenly and there he would be, as if he had materialized out of thin air.

  I chucked it, he would say. I quit this morning and flew straight out. You were right all the time. It would be highly romantic, like the last three minutes of a Ronald Coleman movie, and it would make him feel just terrific.

  Except that what the hell business did he have feeling terrific? Having walked out on something that was his responsibility—his, probably, more than anyone’s—he would have to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life. And when the crash came—if there ever was a crash; if all this wasn’t just some kind of sick fantasy—how would he feel about that? How would he like it when the Simon of his private moments rose up in front of him like Banquo’s ghost to ask, Where the hell were you, kid? When I needed you, where the hell were you?

  So he made up his mind to do the right thing and stick by his job, and he knew he should have felt just no end of noble about it. Except that he also knew in his heart of hearts that he really didn’t want to do anything else. So he had something to balance against his feelings of heroic self-sacrifice; he still had the luxury of wondering whether it wasn’t all just a double-blind so he could continue to hang on to his precious life’s work. Dottie, Dottie, Dottie—the course of true love never did run smooth.

  God, he couldn’t even remember the last time they had had it on together. Yes, he could. . . No, actually, he couldn’t, because they had spoiled that one for each other too.

  It had been right after New Hampshire, when Simon had packed him off to Washington to take a couple of days off and let his arm heal. He was to report in at the Boston headquarters bright and early Monday morning, but in the meantime he could get ten hours of sleep every night.

  Dottie made a great fuss over him. The bruises on his left shoulder were a dramatic blackish blue and looked as if they had been painted on with a three-inch brush, so he was Mommy’s official poor little boy. He loved every minute of it.

  “Shouldn’t you get a shot or something for that?” she asked as she sat beside him at the foot of their bed, after he had spent a careful three minutes removing his shirt. “Do you want me to phone Dr. Bilson? You look terrible!”

  “I’m fine. The doctor in New Hampshire gave me antitetanus, penicillin, and cortisone. It was all very disagreeable, believe me.”

  “You must feel like hell. Would you like me to make you some chicken bouillon?”

  “Not to worry, I’m still man enough to lift a fork with my good arm, and besides, I’m starving. Do you imagine that if I whimper plaintively enough you might whip up some of your veal paprika for tonight? A little of that and some—ow, dammit! You’ll have to learn to be affectionate from my other side.”

  She had actually cried when she opened his suitcase and found the sportcoat he had been wearing when it happened. It was a tan hounds tooth and showed the blood well, and there had been lots of blood.

  “Now come on, honey—you get cut in the face and you always bleed a lot. It really wasn’t anything very serious.” But she hadn’t believed him. All the rest of that afternoon and evening, her eyes followed him anxiously around the room, and that night she lay beside him with her head pressed against his good shoulder, holding him by the wrist with one hand as she slept.

  He couldn’t sleep very well that first night. The pain kept him awake most of the time, because the thing really did hurt like a bugger. But that didn’t matter. He was very happy just to lie there and listen to her breathing.

  And then, just when everything seemed to be going along so well, it all suddenly went sour.

  Over dinner on his second night home he had given her a carefully edited version of his crack-up. He didn’t want to make it sound any more alarming than necessary, and naturally he didn’t want her to know about the man with the serpentine eyes. “So then this guy drove me to the nearest town. I sat on the front seat next to his wife, who looked like a sumo wrestler; her big worry in life seemed to be that I might get the upholstery dirty. I think Mr. Furbrick must have gotten quite a lecture on the evils of being a good Samaritan after they dropped me off.”

  “And the car was wrecked?”

  “Oh, yes. The rental company was very nice about it, though. I rather suspect they were worried I might sue.”

  “You should. You could have been killed.”

  “Well. . .” Austen smiled and shrugged, hoping he sounded more convincing than he felt. “It’s not really the sort of thing you can prove.”

  Dottie smiled too, in an abstracted sort of way. It was a smile meant purely for public consumption—her ga
ze kept wandering up to the cut on his forehead, which was still covered with a translucent plastic bandage that made him look like the Spirit of ‘76.

  “You were lucky,” she said suddenly. “Have you thought maybe somebody was trying to tell you something?” It was a joke, presumably, but he experienced a slight shudder anyway—it was a little too close to the truth. “You aren’t going to be up to much of anything by Monday. Why don’t you take a couple of weeks off? We could take a trip—maybe go back to Bermuda for a second honeymoon.”

  “Can’t do it, sweetheart. I don’t want your old man to get the idea he can live without me.”

  He knew as soon as the words were spoken that he had made a mistake. He could see it in the way Dottie’s face contracted, almost as if she had felt a sudden twinge.

  “He can live without you now,” she answered with bland irony. “He’s got Howard. Howard, I’ve no doubt, will answer his present needs just as well.”

  It escalated from there. The next morning, a Thursday, he phoned the airport and booked an afternoon flight to Boston. There wasn’t any point in waiting around.

  And as he sat in his empty kitchen all those months later, with his wife a continent away, he felt what he recognized as a perfectly irrational resentment, as if Dottie should have understood by osmosis that life wasn’t easy for him either, that he was doing the best he could. She wasn’t being fair, he thought. She had no idea of the seriousness everything had assumed. She shouldn’t have stayed away.

  . . . . .

  In fact, Dottie didn’t return to Washington until just before the Democratic convention in Miami. Austen was already down there. The nomination, to be sure, was in the bag, but he wanted to arrive early to make certain there were no screw-ups in communications and to see whether he couldn’t cut a few deals to lessen the dog fighting over one or two of the minority reports coming out of the platform committee. Also, just by the way, he didn’t particularly want to play the part of the welcoming husband; she had been gone for weeks, without so much as a phone call, so she could damn well take a taxi home from the airport.