The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

“You’re probably right.” He managed a weary smile. “You’ll have to forgive me; I’ve never poisoned myself before.”

  After a few seconds he grew calmer. Austen wondered whether perhaps that wasn’t the effect of the sedative.

  “You know where I grew up, Frank?” he said at last, leaning back against the cushions of the love seat. And then he laughed softly. “Neither do I. In some home for ‘the children of enemies of the state.’ I haven’t the faintest idea where it was, and I can’t remember having lived anywhere before that. Maybe my folks were killed in the revolution. Anyway, when that guy came to bring me to Leningrad, I thought they were going to kill me too. ‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘Now it’ll be my turn.’ Not a bad guess for a little kid, right?”

  And he laughed again. By now he was visibly sagging; he seemed to be using his arms to keep himself braced up. Austen rose from his chair, leaving the revolver behind him on the seat—no one would need it anymore—and knelt down beside him as, slowly, he began to slip sideways. He lifted Faircliff’s feet from the floor, helping him to lie down.

  “You won’t leave me alone, will you, Frank?”

  “No. I’m right here.”

  Twenty minutes later, when Sylvia Burgess came down from her bedroom, she found him still kneeling there, holding Simon Faircliff’s dead hand in his own.

  “I couldn’t hear anything anymore. The radio. . . My God, I couldn’t believe. . . It’s all true; it’s. . . I thought. . .”

  But Austen didn’t answer.

  VIII

  It had begun raining about two-fifteen that afternoon. Sitting in his study, Austen could hear the steady drumming on the roof, and his big picture window simply swam, distorting the world outside like a mirror in the fun house.

  Four months had passed since President Faircliff’s funeral. He was buried in Arlington Cemetery, about a hundred feet from the Kennedy gravesite, and that Tuesday morning had turned out to be the last of the fine weather. It had seemed to rain every day that winter.

  But at least it had been a nice morning for the procession.

  Austen had walked with his wife behind the gun carriage bearing the President’s body. The sun was shining and there was no wind; the three miles of the march route had been almost a pleasure. Dottie had hung on his arm the entire distance, and the world, which had seen her over live satellite broadcast, had been suitably impressed with the calm, almost Roman dignity of her bearing. When the show was over, he had driven her to the airfield at Langley, where she boarded a Company plane to take her to California. That had been the price of her performance. He hadn’t seen her since.

  Everyone has a limit, and Dottie, on the night of her father’s death, had apparently reached hers. Austen hardly felt himself to be in a position to criticize.

  . . . . .

  Sylvia Burgess had known just what she was supposed to do. She had waited fifteen minutes to give Austen a chance to get away unseen, and then she phoned the duty officer at the White House to tell him that Simon had been taken with some kind of seizure and appeared to be dead. Austen made it back to the road, where George Timmler picked him up and brought him home. He had to be there when the inevitable telephone call came.

  He still carried his briefcase—with the things it contained, it was hardly the sort of item he wanted to leave lying around in Sylvia Burgess’s front room—and he put it on the desk in his study and went into his bedroom to stretch out on the bed. He was so tired his teeth ached. It was close to eleven; Dottie was downstairs watching the tail end of a Richard Widmark movie on television.

  He wasn’t even aware that he had closed his eyes when the phone jolted him awake. According to his alarm clock, the time was eleven­fourteen. It was Bruce Wilders, the Assistant Chief of Staff and one of Diederich’s boys.

  “Frank? Can you come over here right away? We’ve got a problem, and I can’t raise Howard anywhere.”

  “What is it? What’s going on?”

  “Is this a secure line, Frank?” You could almost see Wilders glancing nervously over his shoulder; he was probably a lot more worried about the Post than about foreign spies.

  “Just tell me what the problem is, Bruce,” Austen snapped.

  “I don’t know how to break it to you, Frank. The Chief is dead.”

  There was a long pause. Austen counted off the seconds on his watch, wondering what the normal lag time for paralyzed surprise could be. He settled on six. “What happened?”

  “He just died. He was over at that Burgess woman’s place, and he died. We don’t know anything more about it than that. I don’t know what to do—I can’t get hold of Howard.”

  “The first thing you do, stupid, is get him back into his own bed at the White House. Send a car and a couple of people you can trust to keep their mouths shut and fetch him home. I don’t want my wife reading in the papers how her father died in flagrante. Where’s the Vice President?”

  “He’s home in Minnesota, Frank. We didn’t know this was going to happen.”

  “You’re a horse’s ass, Bruce.”

  He hung up the phone and went into the hallway. There was a band of light showing under Dottie’s bedroom door.

  It was a purely nervous reaction—for days now he had had very little sleep, and the strain, of course, was somehow always worse at the end. And less than an hour and a half ago he had murdered the President of the United States. Suddenly he found he had to put an arm against the wall to keep from falling over. For a moment his whole body felt as if it weighed about four hundred pounds. The backs of his hands were tingling.

  But what oppressed him most was the almost irresistible desire to run downstairs, get in the car, and drive away. Dottie had to be told, but he would have given several fingers from either hand not to be the one to tell her.

  “Come on,” he whispered to himself. “Don’t crack up on me now.”

  The distance was about fifteen feet. Austen paced it off, keeping careful track of the number of steps, and pushed open the bedroom door. Dottie was seated at her vanity table, brushing out her hair for the night.

  “Something I can do for you?” she asked. Austen went over and sat down on the corner of the bed; they weren’t more than four or five feet apart. He laced his fingers together and rested the points of his elbows on his knees. “I got a call a couple of minutes ago. It was from Bruce Wilders at the White House.”

  “Well?” She was twisted around, peering into his face. After eight years of marriage, she knew her husband well enough to see that something was very wrong; you could read that knowledge in her eyes. “Well?” she repeated. “What’s the matter, Frank?”

  “He says your father died a few minutes ago. I’m sorry, Dottie.”

  It was impossible to predict how people were going to react to that kind of news, and in this case the situation was grotesquely complicated. Anything was possible.

  Other things would come later, but in that moment Dottie’s face contracted with grief, the lines around her mouth deepening, and her eyes filled with very real tears. It was painful to witness. Her shoulders hunched forward in a way suggestive of an almost physical suffering.

  “I’m sorry.” Austen put his hand out and, as she grasped it, pulled her toward himself. In a moment they were sitting with their arms around each other, and both of them were crying.

  “I have to go in,” he murmured finally. “I can’t take you with me—I wish I could. Will you be okay by yourself for a while? Would you like me to call someone? I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

  “No.” She shook her head, as if trying to drive the tears from her eyes. “No, really. I’ll be fine. I understand—you go ahead.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. You go ahead.”

  She was making it so easy for him; he felt like a perfect monster. All he could think of on the drive into Washington was the fact that he was guilty of murder, that he had betrayed both father and daughter, that he had killed every possibility of trust. The walls betw
een himself and his wife were too thick to be torn down now, and they were entirely of his own design and construction. Reasons hadn’t the slightest importance; that was just the way things were.

  Naturally, everything at the White House was in a perfect turmoil. Austen arrived just in time to watch his father-in-law’s corpse being carried up to the East Wing bedrooms in a blanket.

  Bruce Wilders was practically in tears, but one gradually realized that this was more because his real boss wasn’t there to tell him what to do than because he was concerned for either the country or Simon Faircliff.

  He’s Howard’s pet monkey, not mine, Simon had said once, shaking his head in amused resignation. I’m sure Howard finds a use for him.

  “I don’t understand what’s happened to Howard,” Wilders kept saying. He was a slight, natty little man, with tortoise-shell glasses and short blond hair that he kept carefully combed, but the strain of the last hour was doing bad things to him. For starters, he was sweating so much that he seemed to find it necessary to keep his handkerchief ready in his hand every minute. “I just don’t understand—it’s like he’s dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “Forget about Howard. Howard’s going to be out of a job when the new President finds his feet.” The idea seemed to hit Wilders like a clenched fist. He blinked a couple of times and then felt compelled to wipe his face all over again.

  At quarter to two they were notified that Air Force One was about to take off from Minneapolis. Donovan had already been administered the oath of office by his father, who was a retired federal appeals court judge, and everyone who was anyone—and who cared about their position in the new scheme of things—would be at Andrews Air Force Base to meet him when he touched down in Washington.

  By two-fifteen, the executive offices were almost up to full staff. Austen wandered into one of the little rooms where people took their coffee breaks and found Jerry Gorman sitting with his hands wrapped around a cup of hot soup. From the expression on his face, he was another one who was considering the bleak prospects of his career in the federal service. They were alone, so Austen closed the door behind himself. The sound of the lock clicking shut made Gorman look up.

  “Frank? Why isn’t Howard here? I can’t figure it—nobody can reach him.”

  “Does that bother you, Jerry? You don’t have to be chained to Howard Diederich, you know.”

  In the moment of silence that followed, Jerry seemed to come to a complete new understanding of himself. You could read it in his face; he saw a chance to survive.

  “What should I do, Frank?”

  “What you should do is remember that you’re the appointments secretary. What you should do is make sure that I’m the first person who sees the new President tomorrow morning. The very first person. If that happens, then things can go on very happily for you. Am I making myself clear, Jerry?”

  “Very clear. Are you going to wait around here for Donovan to arrive?”

  “No. I’m going home.”

  But what he did was go over to the living quarters in the East Wing. There was only a single Marine guard on the President’s bedroom door.

  Within five hours of his death Simon Faircliff seemed to have been completely forgotten. Between now and the moment after Bob Donovan returned to Washington and the official announcement was made, Simon Faircliff would be consigned to that limbo inhabited by the merely mortal. He was stretched out on the bed, still wearing his dark blue pinstripe suit, and his hands were folded together over his belt buckle. No one had even thought to close his eyes, so his son-in-law performed that service for him.

  Strangely, it was only with Faircliff that Austen could experience any peace of mind. He drew up a chair and sat down, studying the dead face and realizing that probably for as long as he lived he would be nothing more than an attenuated version of this man whom he had loved and served and, finally, murdered. The bond of loyalty remained unsevered; there simply wasn’t a thing in the world he could do about it.

  It was ridiculous—the dead were dead—but he came away from that room with the distinct feeling that he had been forgiven.

  No hard feelings. I, at least, understand. You couldn’t have done anything else.

  . . . . .

  He found Dottie sitting in the chair in his study. His briefcase was lying open. The revolver, like some nasty little animal taking its ease, was nestled on the towel in which Austen had so carefully wrapped it, and the tape recorder was out on the desk. He could see that the spools in the cassette were still turning; she hadn’t even thought to turn the thing off.

  Yes, of course—he should have foreseen that this would happen. It would be part of the judgment on him.

  Austen hit the stop button and rewound the cassette. For a long moment, the only sound was the insectlike humming of the machine.

  “It’ll have to be played once more,” he said finally. “The new President will have to hear it, and then maybe we can bury the secret forever. I hope so. It would have been better if you’d never known about any of this.”

  But she merely stared at him, her brown eyes large and uncomprehending, the expression on her face a mixture of confusion, fear, and distaste. He might have been a man from Mars or a cave dweller; clearly she had lost all sense of him as a human being like herself.

  He reached out his hand, trying to touch her on the shoulder, but she shrank away from him with so frank and automatic a revulsion that he drew back almost at once.

  “I did what I had to, Dottie. You’ll see finally—I just didn’t have any choice.”

  “No?” Her voice had the exhausted quality associated with prolonged physical suffering; she sounded as if she hadn’t uttered a syllable in days. “You imagine not?”

  For a long time Austen remained standing and his wife sat in his chair, her arms drawn about her shoulders, her gaze fixed on nothing at all, as if she were still alone in the room. Finally she rose and left. A few seconds later he heard the bedroom door slam shut, and he knew it would be a serious mistake to go after her.

  There was no sense in going to bed. He had to be at the White House at the crack of dawn, and besides, how would it be possible to sleep? So he sat in his study chair for the rest of the night, trying to figure out just exactly where along the line things could have gone so drastically wrong.

  Around five in the morning he went into his bathroom to take a shower and shave. When he had finished dressing and gone downstairs to get some breakfast, he found Dottie sitting at the kitchen table, apparently waiting for him. She was wearing the same charcoal-gray suit she had worn the day he left for California and Pete Freestone’s funeral. It was difficult to believe that was only a little over a week ago.

  “I’ll stay until after the funeral,” she said. “I don’t want to make trouble for anyone, so I’ll do what’s required, but I want you to see to it that I’m in California by that night.”

  Austen nodded. “If it’s what you want.”

  “I don’t see that what I want has anything to do with it.”

  He sat down in the chair opposite. Dottie looked very haggard. The pouches under her eyes were heavy and dark, and her temples seemed to have shrunken in a single night. “I’m not passing judgment,” she went on, seemingly as calm as if she were discussing a misfortune in the lives of strangers. She held a set of car keys in her hand and was absentmindedly using the flat edge of one of them to scrape the polish from her left thumbnail. Somehow it was a cruel thing to watch. “You and Daddy always had your own rules; I gather he didn’t hold it against you. Maybe you really didn’t have a choice. I just don’t see that there’s any chance we can continue living together after this.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t understand. There’s. . .”

  When he saw the way she was looking at him, the words seemed to die in his throat. He couldn’t even remember what they were supposed to have been. She was right, of course–words, reasons, anything he could say now meant nothing.

  “You knew,
” she said finally, as if it were something she had only just discovered. “You knew. You’ve known for years, and you never said a word to me. You let me go on. . . You let us. . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it that important?”

  Implied in the question was the assumption that it couldn’t have been—that nothing could have been.

  “Yes. It was that important.”

  “Damn you, Frank.” Slowly her hands curled into fists until the knuckles turned white. The keys must have been cutting her palm, but she didn’t seem to notice. “God damn you, Frank. You’ve done it for both of us.”

  After a minute or two, he got up from the table and went outside. The sun was up, and already the men from the Secret Service were sitting in a pair of light gray government cars parked along the curb. They must have been there most of the night.

  And that was the end of it.

  . . . . .

  Soon she would be in her aunt’s house in Pacific Grove. Austen didn’t find it at all difficult to imagine that he might never see her again.

  But for that first terrible day at least, there were still plenty of things to keep a growing boy from brooding too much on his domestic troubles. For one thing, the new President of the United States had to be told that his predecessor in office had been a Russian agent. It took some explaining—that sort of thing isn’t easily come to terms with—but after some documentary preparation, a playing of the tape that had convinced Dottie convinced Bob Donovan as well.

  He sat staring at Austen from the other side of Simon Faircliff’s desk—he had only been back in town for four hours and hardly even knew where the men’s room was yet—and it was obvious that the first thought in his mind was how his own position was affected by this appalling disclosure. It was Donovan’s great weakness that he could never see beyond his own political self-interest.

  “It’s hard to believe,” he said, running a hand through his curly silver-and-black hair. His eyes glittered nervously. “It’s goddamn near impossible to believe.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s true.”