The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  “You’ll really kill him?” she asked. “You owe him everything; he loves you as if you were his own son.”

  “Have you got any ice?”

  “What?”

  “Ice.” He glanced impatiently around the room.

  “Yes—all you need. Why?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  She went into the kitchen and came back a few moments later with a silver bucket, full to the brim. It had been a kind of test; Austen had made a point of knowing the location of every phone in the house and had followed along behind her, listening beside the pantry door for the grinding of a dial, but there had been nothing. She had, in fact, come back. There had been no slamming of a side door as she ran for a neighbor’s house, so perhaps she really was ready at last to wait and see.

  She gave him the bucket, and he placed it on top of the bar and watched her wiping her hands on the skirt of her dress, as if she had lost all interest in how she looked or how much the thing might cost to dry clean. So simple an action—and yet a woman’s way of declaring a state of emergency.

  “Don’t forget this,” he said, picking up the transistor radio from where she had left it on the love seat. She nodded and put it in a hidden pocket of her skirt. “ All you have to do is turn it on.”

  “All right.”

  Neither of them made a move to sit down, so they stood there together in the center of the room for the next twenty minutes, until they heard the sound of the presidential limousine grinding over the gravel driveway.

  “What’ll he do about his driver?” Austen asked, his hand tightening on the butt of the .357.

  “Nothing. The car will let him out in front of the house and then go. He phones when he’s ready to leave.” She lowered her eyes to the floor. The tacit admission that she was Simon Faircliff’s mistress was apparently more than she could face.

  Austen glanced away, giving her a moment in which to compose herself. “When he rings the bell, answer it. Let him in and close the door behind him. After that, your part in this business is over.”

  “It’ll never be over—for either of us.”

  Austen didn’t reply. He changed the cassette and hit the record button on the portable tape recorder in his briefcase and closed the lid. There was nothing left to do.

  A visitor would walk straight through the entrance hall into the living room, which was at right angles. So there was no problem about remaining concealed; all you had to do was stand in the middle of the carpet and wait.

  When the doorbell chimed, they both started.

  It was perhaps the longest moment of Frank Austen’s life as he listened to the door being opened, to the murmur of voices, and finally, to the sound of the door closing. And it took every fiber of resolve he had to step out into the entranceway and point his huge weapon at Simon Faircliff’s chest.

  The great man, to give him his due, never even blinked. He just looked at the revolver, and looked at Sylvia Burgess, and smiled.

  “Good evening, Frank,” he said.

  . . . . .

  Even after Sylvia Burgess had gone upstairs the two men stood where they were in the entranceway, so still they hardly seemed to be breathing.

  “May I take my coat off?” Faircliff asked finally, bringing his fingers up to touch the surface of his lapels.

  “No, you may not. Just come into the living room and sit down, and keep your hands out where I can see them.”

  Faircliff laughed quietly, as if the melodrama of the situation amused him—or, perhaps, to imply his embarrassment over this newly discovered streak of shabby heroics in his trusted lieutenant—and started forward, his arms slightly raised, seeming to mock Austen’s caution.

  “Would you like to tell me what this is all about?” He sat on the love seat, exactly the spot Sylvia Burgess had occupied, his fingers laced together in his lap.

  “You know what it’s about, Simon. The old man didn’t die in that nursing home fire of yours. We’ve still got him, and we know the whole story.” Austen checked his watch. It was twelve minutes after nine. “Diederich will have been arrested by now. It’s all over.”

  There was a short, stunned silence, and then the President of the United States merely raised his eyebrows as if to say, Well, what do you know?

  “And what are you going to do, now that it’s all over?” A faint smile played on Faircliff’s lips as he spoke. “What’s the plan, Frank? Are you going to drag me onto the Senate floor so they can impeach my ass? I’d love to see that show.”

  “No, Chief. I’m just going to kill you. And tomorrow I’ll acquaint the new President with the Soviet Union’s real strategic posture, and he can do what he likes with your precious treaty.”

  For a moment—in fairness it must be said, only a moment—someone might have imagined that Simon Faircliff was afraid. But it passed off quickly enough, leaving no trace. Another, lesser man might have needed some sort of prop, a cigarette perhaps, something to steady his hand and give him a chance to show his indifference, but not Faircliff.

  “Et tu, Brute?” The smile was allowed to become fixed, and he shook his head slowly. “No, I haven’t any right to be surprised. You would have been the one to figure out our little intrigue. Howard always told me it would be you. It looks like I’ve been harboring a viper in my bosom.”

  “Are you trying to make me feel bad, Simon? Okay, I feel bad, but that doesn’t change anything.”

  “Yes, I believe you do,” he said, the smile dissolving into a sad, knowing kindness.

  And it had its effect. Austen sat down, simply because he had to, and the huge revolver rested flat on his knee. He looked at Faircliff, who had betrayed every claim to loyalty—his own numbered among them—and he felt like Judas Iscariot.

  “God damn you, you bastard. I ought to blow you away one piece at a time. I. . .”

  But he found it impossible to go on. His voice was choked with a strange compound of emotions, ranging all the way from hatred to a kind of aggrieved tenderness for this man who had somehow assumed a father’s right to plague his conscience and his love. Perhaps at that moment Faircliff could have risen from his seat, walked the three or four steps that separated them, and taken the gun from his hand. And perhaps he knew as much.

  In any case, he never moved.

  “Don’t think too badly of me, Frank. It’s the easiest thing in the world to lose control over your own life. It happens all the time.”

  The hands that had been lying knitted together in his lap came apart, with the palms up, as if weighing out the good and the evil that had become the sum of his experience and finding them more or less equal. It was a curious, caressing gesture, as if the apology—or explanation, or whatever it was—was being rendered more for Austen’s sake than for his own.

  “I just wanted to be President,” he went on, his open hands slowly curling into fists. “It was something I had to have, or I couldn’t be everything I had inside me. I don’t know whether I wanted it for them, or for this country, or just for myself—or maybe even trying to say it like that, or to explain it at all, makes it into a lie by assuming it can be simplified into something like wanting. But you’ve got to believe me, Frank, that I really thought I could do good things. Probably that was where I went wrong, where Howard always had the advantage over me. He understood exactly what he was doing.”

  “What was he doing? Where was it all leading, Simon?”

  Slowly, in such subtle increments that there seemed to be no real change at all, Faircliff’s expression altered until he seemed almost stricken. His face seemed to grow thick, as if it had become a mere mask of lifeless, unfeeling flesh. And then, all at once, he touched his forehead with the back of his hand and held it there for a few seconds, and the impression was dispelled. He even managed his peculiar sad smile again.

  “You know what the wonderful thing about democratic governments is, Frank? They limit the men who lead them so that treason becomes almost impossible. Maybe that’s the secret of the
ir survival.

  “It could never be just me and Howard, up there putting the fix in; every move we made was the common property of dozens of good, patriotic public servants, anyone of whom would have screamed his goddamned lungs out if he thought his President was betraying the national interest. The truly corrupt man is rarer than you would imagine. We discovered we were watched every minute, that everything we did had to seem to make perfect sense, had to seem to be part of a grand plan we had worked out with State and Defense and the NSC—our hands were tied. It’s astonishing, isn’t it? The Russians plant two of their men in the Oval Office, and they’re helpless. Well, they were going to change all that.”

  Frank Austen shifted uneasily in his chair, wondering whether he dared to listen to the confirmation of his own worst fears.

  “The treaty—they wanted a first-strike capacity?”

  Faircliff nodded. “Very good, Frank; you were always a quick study. That’s what they wanted. And eventually, within a few years, they would have gotten it. They had it all worked out, just what I was supposed to do for them in my second term, how I was to use all that wonderful new power to implement the goddamned thing. In another two, maybe three years, you would have been standing there nearly naked.

  “I don’t know whether they would have been prepared to use it—to go for broke like that. They would have sustained some damage in a nuclear war, but perhaps not more than they could have lived with. Or maybe they just wanted it for blackmail. I don’t know.”

  He shook his head, and that haunted look that Austen had seen only two or three other times returned to his eyes. “You’ve got to believe me, Frank. I never wanted it to come to anything like this. I’m almost glad. . .”

  “Get real,” Austen murmured, his voice low but brutally cold as he leaned forward, the .357 righting itself in his hand. “Don’t go soft on me now. You made this particular mess all by yourself, Simon, with just a little help from poor suckers like me. Don’t try to hang it all on them or us or anybody else.”

  Faircliff seemed by turns surprised, and then wounded, and then defiantly angry, almost proud—almost arrogant. Austen was left to wonder why he had spoken, why it had seemed so important to him that in the last few minutes of his life Faircliff should not seem to be broken by regret. Did it really matter if this man, to whom he had given what seemed like his whole adult life, if Simon Faircliff went not gently into that good night? Yes, it really did.

  “Good—you’re right.” Faircliff let his hands fall cupped over his knees, and he grinned, almost demonically. “I did, didn’t I. And I almost pulled it off, too.”

  “Yes—you almost did.”

  “Did I? I wonder.” His eyes narrowed, and he tilted his head to one side. “How long have you known, Frank?”

  Austen’s face looked as if it had turned to wood; even his eyes seemed lifeless. He seemed to have lost forever the power of independent movement. “Not quite two and a half years.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You did a lot of damage when you turned that report of mine over to your friends. We had to repair the leaks.”

  “I have to hand it to you, Frank; you played it very well.”

  “Thanks.” Austen looked down at the gun he had been holding so long it seemed to have become an extension of his arm, to be roused a few seconds later by the sound of Simon Faircliff politely clearing his throat. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who had decided it was time to get to the point.

  “Okay—what happens now?” There was a smile on Faircliff’s face, as if he were determined to take the matter with a good grace.

  “Now you have a choice.”

  Austen rose out of his chair, surprised at the stiffness of his knees. He must have been holding himself as rigid as a board, never even realizing it. He crossed over to the portable bar, set down the revolver, and dropped a couple of ice cubes in the glass he had prepared earlier. The stuff was supposed to work faster if it was in a cold solution. There were half a dozen bottles of mixer on a shelf underneath. He took a bitter lemon—Simon’s favorite, what the hell—pried off the cap, and poured it into the glass.

  “You have a choice,” he repeated, picking up the revolver again as he carried the glass over to the table in front of the love seat. “You can have a drink, and that will be the end of that, or you can force me to shoot you. Either way, you’re dead. What you get to choose is what happens after you die, and I suppose you’re bright enough to figure out the consequences either way.”

  Faircliff regarded the glass with distaste—it would have been unfair to characterize the reaction as fear—and the palms of his hands slid down his thighs, as if he were trying to wipe them off. “I assume the idea is that it should look like a natural death; even at the last you’re thinking of my public image, aren’t you, Frank?” He raised his eyes to his son-in-law’s face; the expression in them was not friendly. At last he allowed himself to point to the glass. “What have you got in there?”

  “You’ll have a stroke,” Austen replied. “There’s a mild sedative mixed in, so you won’t even be awake when it happens. It’s the latest wrinkle; it’s undetectable, and you’ll never feel a thing.”

  “And I suppose if I force you to use that gun of yours you’ll make it as nasty as you can manage. Am I right?” His eyes retained their mixture of hostility and contempt.

  Austen shook his head. “I wasn’t trying to insult you, Simon; it never entered my mind that you’d be very intimidated by the idea of physical pain.”

  “Well, thanks for that anyway.”

  Quite unexpectedly, Faircliff smiled again. It was a nice smile, the sort that said, Don’t worry about it, pal. I understand it isn’t anything personal. “How long does it take?”

  “I haven’t any idea—not more than a few minutes.”

  “A stroke, you say?” The smile seemed to have taken up permanent residence; now he was afraid. “ A nice old-fashioned cerebral hemorrhage—how delightful.”

  “That’s right, Mr. President. Just like the one you arranged for your late wife.” Austen had been surprised by the sound of his own voice. In that first moment he would have given much for the words to have been left unsaid—Simon Faircliff went almost white. Around the nose and mouth, he looked like he was dead already.

  “How did you find out about that?” he asked, the words coming slowly and after a long silence.

  “Just a lucky guess.” Austen hardened himself to go on, loathing himself, sick of the very air he breathed. “Why not? You killed Boothe, and Burgess. We got Yates too, you know, and he sang for us like Pavarotti. You killed Pete Freestone, or maybe he was such an unimportant little schmuck that Howard Diederich had him taken off without even bothering to mention it to you. You tried to kill Yegorov—you even tried to kill me once. Why not your wife? Why should I believe that anyone dies from natural causes around you? What happened, Simon? Did she hear something she wasn’t supposed to, or did you just get tired of her?”

  Simon Faircliff looked like a sick man. Tiny beads of sweat were beginning to break out on his forehead, and his hands, for the first time, were shaking—at least, they would have been shaking if he had dared to lift them from where they rested on his thighs. In a matter of twenty or thirty seconds, it seemed, his flesh had accepted the fact of its own mortality.

  “Does Dottie have any idea?” It was the first time he had mentioned his daughter, and his eyes, no longer defiant or humorous or forgivingly ironic, were large and moist with a terrible anguish.

  “No.”

  In the moment that passed, perhaps they both understood the solid reality of the lie and the reason for it. Or perhaps it was nothing more than imagination—or guilt, or wishful thinking—that made Austen somehow feel that Faircliff now regarded himself as having passed into his son-in-law’s debt.

  “Well, I suppose I can be grateful for that.” He drew a deep breath and let it out, exactly as if he expected it to be his last. “I won’t look for excuses. Everything you say is
perfectly true—except about you, Frank. Howard didn’t tell me until it was too late. Maybe he was jealous; anyway, he’s always hated you. But Mildred? No, I wasn’t tired of her. I did what I had to.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, whether to see something more clearly or to blot it out there was no way of knowing, but when he opened them again he was once more in control of himself.

  “I don’t know—maybe it’s impossible to live with someone for next to nineteen years and keep a secret like that from them. She found out. Not everything, but enough. Don’t ask me how; she just found out. She confronted me with it one day—‘You’re not who you say you are. You’re somebody else.’ I thought my blood was turning to ice water. And she wouldn’t leave it alone; she went over it and over it, crying and carrying on until I thought she’d drive herself mad. She didn’t leave me any choice at all.”

  “So you killed her. “

  “So I killed her. Howard provided the means—Howard could always be counted on to provide the means—and I killed her.” Faircliff nodded. “And now that you’ve had your full pound of flesh, you’ve got to promise me something, Frank. I want your word that Dottie will never know.”

  “She’ll never hear it from me.”

  But Faircliff seemed to have lost interest. Instead he was looking at the glass as if he were trying to face that down too. With no warning, he picked it up, brought it to his lips, and drained off about three quarters in what seemed like a single swallow. He put the glass back on the table with a smack.

  “You see?” he said, his eyes blazing. “I can keep my part of the bargain, even if you never asked it. Oh God! I think I can feel it already.”

  “I don’t suppose so, Simon. It’ll take a little longer than that.”