The Art of the Devil

by John Altman

  Then she turned, positioning her bundle carefully, and left the room for the last time.

  ‘Didn’t Jim Hagerty tell you the same thing? “Ike,” he said, “you can’t be such a stubborn damned fool any more; there’s too much riding on your shoulders for such obstinate behavior.” I know he said it because I heard it, during his visit just two days ago, with my own ears.’

  ‘You were eavesdropping?’

  ‘I was passing by.’ Angrily, Mamie reached for the stock pile of cards.

  ‘Goddamnit, woman. Hard enough being cooped up in this goddamned place without you watching me like a—’

  ‘We all know you’re depressed, dear. But there’s no reason to take it out on me.’ She discarded. ‘There’s no shame in it. Feeling blue after a heart attack is the most natural thing in the world. Rest assured: soon enough you’ll be downing salted peanuts and scotch and water like there’s no tomorrow. But for now, you’ve got to show some patience.’

  ‘So now I’m a glutton, eh?’

  ‘Just a mule, dear.’ A too-sweet smile. ‘Have you taken this morning’s Coumadin yet?’

  ‘Hell with this,’ muttered Eisenhower, throwing down his cards. ‘Nag, nag, nag.’

  Angrily, he pushed up from his chair and turned toward his easel, reaching for a brush. On the linen canvas, amateurishly rendered in oils, waited a half-finished facsimile of the grain silo he now faced, visible above the row of Norway spruce.

  Inside the Secret Service headquarters, Spooner waved Isherwood into a chair. ‘We need men we can trust,’ he said, ‘pronto.’

  Settling himself gingerly, Isherwood nodded. After a moment’s thought he said, ‘Mitch Carter. Elmo Gordon. Frank Carlo …’

  Spooner reached for the phone.

  The door opened. Bill Brennan came into the office, leading a tall young farmhand with full round cheeks, a mop of curly hair, and a handlebar mustache. Brennan looked piqued, but, as always, immaculately groomed. ‘Chief,’ he said, tipping an imaginary hat.

  Receiver in hand, Spooner paused.

  ‘I know I’m AIC these days in name only, sir.’ Brennan couldn’t resist shooting a sidelong glance at Isherwood as he said it. ‘But I think you might want to hear this.’

  Spooner raised his eyebrows expectantly.

  Elisabeth descended the stairs quickly and lightly, on the balls of her feet, favoring the sides of the risers, which were less likely to squeak.

  At the foot of the staircase, she stepped into a shadowed telephone nook from which she could see the parlor’s side door. Dunbarton’s muffled voice emanated from her office – checking in with the guard at the gate, from the sound of it, to see if Josette had left the farm during the night. The rest of the girls on the first floor remained gossiping in the kitchen, with Caroline Dreyfus taking the lead.

  Elisabeth focused on the north-facing window beside the door. After thirty seconds a guard appeared, heading clockwise around the house. When he had passed, she swiftly crossed the room. Before placing hand on knob, she briefly paused again. Breathe. Maintain control. She found the still, quiet place within herself.

  Turning the knob, she stepped out of the herdsman’s home, closed the door behind herself, and moved to the familiar oak. If caught, she would claim need of a cigarette and fear of Miss Dunbarton’s bloodhound nose. If anyone asked to inspect the bundle inside the coat, she would kill him.

  She sighted the perimeter patrol, up past the bullpen, walking away. From careful observation she knew that fifteen minutes would pass before the sentries came again into a position to see her. That left only the usual farm workers to worry about, and farmhands were not known, as a rule, for their vigilance.

  Her eyes roamed: past the corn crib, the Maternity Barn, a few strutting chickens pecking at cold mud, and an outdoor pen in which a handful of cattle enjoyed the fine, cool day. A man wheeled a barrow full of fertilizer, another lugged a bucket of feed, another carried a coarse sack and horse brush. They were focused on their work, and if she timed her movement carefully and walked with purpose, should pay her no attention.

  Her heart had stopped beating. She urged it back into action. Then she stepped away from the oak, carrying the rifle bundled in the pea coat flush against one leg, and moved with a measured tread toward the pine.

  She came to another stop inside a cone of dense needles. The unpleasant smells of manure and compost, half-deadened by frost, made her nose wrinkle. A steel gate clamped shut inside her mind. The corridor leading to victory lay shining before her; all she had to do was walk forward.

  She left the shaded pine. Between her current position and the grain silo, a last bit of cover was offered by the shed. But there were no agents in sight, and the nearest farmhand was a long stone’s throw away, paying no attention, so she forsook the cover. Instead, she headed directly for the silo, her movements swift but unhurried, as if she had every right in the world to be walking here in the midst of a sunny, late-autumn morning. In flashes between the Norway spruce she could see the sun porch, still occupied by Eisenhower.

  Twenty yards remained until she reached the silo. Fifteen. Once it was done, her reward would be waiting in the numbered account. Ten. She would have enough to buy true security; she need never look over her shoulder again. Five. Nothing could stop her now. JESUS LOVED HER, so there. The time of day was ideal, the sun hanging perfectly in the sky. The stars had aligned so faultlessly – in the case of the sun’s position, literally – that she hardly dared breathe for risk of breaking the spell. Two yards.

  She closed the distance.

  Reaching the silo door, she felt for the handle – and at that moment heard a voice calling out, echoing off low hills:

  ‘Hey!’

  Breath snagging in her throat, she halted.

  A frisson of panic moving down her vertebrae, she turned.

  A short, slim agent was hastening across the property from the herdsman’s home: hair slicked back with pomade, pique written across his narrow Semitic face.

  ‘Go on,’ urged Brennan. ‘Tell them what you told me.’

  The young farmhand shrugged muscular shoulders. Addressing both Spooner and Isherwood, he said, ‘Well, sirs, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. But in a nutshell: you know the girl that’s run off – Josie Brown?’

  Isherwood and Spooner traded a glance. ‘Run off?’ said Isherwood.

  ‘Missing since last night, sir. They think she’s gone to Hollywood, to get herself discovered.’

  Isherwood frowned. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Well, sir … nothing was written in stone, but we were … we got a little cozy with each other.’

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘James Weaving. I work in the barn, mostly.’

  ‘What have you got to tell us, Mister Weaving?’

  ‘That’s the devil of it, sir. Just a feeling. I tried to tell Agent Brennan here …’

  ‘Spit it out,’ said Brennan.

  ‘Her running off just doesn’t sit right. Anything’s possible, of course. But Josie’s got more talk than walk, if you know what I mean. And she grew up in this town. She’s got family here. Plus she had a good, steady job. And as much as she liked to gripe, I think she was pretty happy here, sir. Plus …’ He hesitated. ‘At the risk of tooting my own horn: I think she liked me. And I’m here. Even though we had agreed to, uh, see other people.’

  ‘Josie Brown,’ repeated Isherwood. He tried to picture her. Concentration proved difficult; pain and painkillers danced a leisurely waltz through his head, and an endless kaleidoscopic light-show seemed to play just outside of his field of vision.

  ‘Works in the herdsman’s home, sir. Pretty little thing. Wouldn’t kill her to, uh, reduce a bit.’ Weaving seemed about to add something else, and then stopped. With long fingers, he nervously stroked his mustache.

  ‘Go on, Mister Weaving. Spill.’

  ‘Sir … well, it’s awfully thin, sir.’

  ‘Might be nothing,’ put in Brennan. ‘But – permissio
n to speak freely – even though I don’t seem to have your ear any more, Chief, I wanted to run it past you, just to be sure.’

  ‘Go on, Mister Weaving,’ said Spooner.

  ‘I don’t like to go around pointing fingers for no reason, sir. When a man points at somebody, my mama told me, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing back at himself.’

  ‘We’ll take that into account.’

  Weaving paused to light a Parliament. ‘Josie had gotten awfully chummy with the new girl – the senator’s former housekeeper.’

  A long moment passed as Agent Zane crossed the low hills, drawing to within five feet of Elisabeth before stopping.

  The tension drew to a fine singing hum. Then he gestured at the rifle swathed in the coat, half-hidden behind her leg. ‘What’s that?’

  She sifted through possible replies. None would guarantee her safety if he got it into his head to inspect the bundle; and how could he not?

  Instead of answering, she took a step forward. Raising the gun slowly, unwrapping the pea coat, she revealed a glinting edge of metal barrel – which she then whipped up violently into his nose, even as he started to reach for his holster, sending an incongruous spurt of blood arcing into the sunshiny morning air.

  Grasping the rifle in both hands, she dropped the coat and plunged the butt-end of the weapon into Zane’s stomach, coaxing out a terrific whuff of breath. Fighting to regain his wind, he staggered backwards, dropping his pistol. She had all the time in the world to target the bridge of his nose and strike again, this time breaking the skin, sending him down to his knees.

  But he came promptly back at her: bouncing up like a coiled spring, eyes streaming with tears. Disoriented, he tried to land a punch. She easily stepped aside, jabbing with the rifle as she dodged – the urge to shoot him would, if indulged, bring agents swarming – aiming the jab at one red, watering eye. He turned his head, and as a result she missed the eye but connected with an ear, which caught against the leading edge of the metal barrel and tore half-free.

  He staggered back again; she moved in for the kill, bringing the stock around in a whistling arc. This time she hit him just below the pulped remains of his ear, solidly, at the base of the skull. A slick of bloody spit spilled out across his chin. He stumbled sideways and then pitched forward, rapping his temple hard against the silo.

  Breath raking out, Elisabeth raised the rifle again. She brought it down hard against the back of his head. The resulting sound was like a bursting pumpkin. Again she struck, and then again, splattering gore, even as some part of her insisted, You can stop now; it’s over; get inside, under cover.

  Finally, she moved away, leaning against the silo, breathing laboriously, sure she must have been seen; the encounter seemed to have taken forever. But as she kept breathing, and moments kept passing, slowly she came back to herself and realized that in fact it had taken very little time.

  Her macabre handiwork lay splayed before her. Freckles of the man’s blood and brains decorated the siding of the silo, the barrel of the gun, the bib and apron of her uniform.

  Hurry.

  Yes. The steel gate inside her mind had raised enough to let in cold light, but she slammed it back down.

  She looked around. Nobody was looking back. For the second time in four hours she bent, slipped her hands beneath a corpse, and pulled.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘New girl,’ repeated Isherwood, still frowning.

  ‘Elisabeth Grant.’ Weaving shrugged. ‘She replaced Barbie Cameron, after Babs took off. I get a bad feeling about her. Now, I can see how that sounds. Like so much tittle-tattle – like working folks just chinwagging. Not exactly a hanging offense. But now Josie’s all of a sudden gone, and I just got this feeling, sir—’

  ‘What senator?’ Isherwood interrupted.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You called her the senator’s former housekeeper.’

  ‘Libby used to work for … I think Josie said Senator Bolin. He recommended her for the position after Babs—’

  Moving as one, Isherwood and Spooner went for the door.

  Elisabeth pushed into the silo.

  With a creak, the door gave way. She stumbled into cobwebs, sacks of burlap, tubes of sealant. A ladder ran up the silo’s interior. In the dome overhead, a tiny platform poked out from the wall, with an inverted silage fork hanging on a nearby hook.

  After depositing the agent’s body among the burlap, she went outside again and recovered the rifle and pea coat. Back inside, she strapped the rifle over her shoulder. Wetting her lips, she looked up, at shafts of sandy light coming in through the dome’s ventilation slats.

  With her left hand, she took hold of the ladder. It felt sturdy.

  After a final moment to gird herself, she started to climb.

  Her arms were tired, almost trembling, from the melee. She could not shoot well with trembling hands. And so she paused, after having ascended about a third of the silo’s height, to rest for a moment. Breathing hard, heart hammering inside her chest. Slow down, she commanded furiously. Do it right.

  At last the threat of trembling in her hand subsided. She reached for the next rung and resumed climbing.

  The sun hung directly behind the silo, blazing.

  In battle, thought Isherwood as he piled from the office, high ground counts for everything.

  Chief Spooner followed his gaze. Judging from the clouds massing on the man’s brow, his thoughts ran in a similar direction.

  Their eyes met. With a jerk of his chin Isherwood managed to communicate an order. Get the President under cover.

  Spooner nodded. Isherwood struck off across uneven ground toward Farm Two, limping and swaying but moving with raw speed. Beyond his field of vision, the light show played on. Turn his head a few degrees past it and there would be only yawning, stretching, endless black. But despite the light show, the punctured lung, the fresh spotting on his bandage, the belated realization that his firearm was lost – back at the hospital, or the crash site – and the horrid crawling sensation of blood pouring like water down his flank, he felt again that sense of strange euphoria. Under fire he was his best and worst self simultaneously. This was the only Francis Isherwood that didn’t crave a goddamned drink.

  The rasp of ladder letting go of silo wall filled her ears.

  Adrenalin surged through her veins. Her feet kicked, propelling her up two more rungs. Then she was only four from the top – but the ladder kept groaning, starting to separate both from itself and from the wall.

  She scrabbled up, eyes fixed on her goal. A hand seemed to push from below, lifting her. And then somehow she had made it: collapsing across the small wooden platform, praying that the shelf itself did not give way.

  With her weight removed, the ladder ceased groaning. Looking down she saw wood hanging out from the wall with several exposed inches of nail showing, right and left side rungs spread apart like legs akimbo.

  She repaired the ladder as best she could while hanging half upside-down off her roost, banging it back into the wall until only a centimeter of nail showed, trying to coax the side rungs into something resembling parallel lines. After doing her best to assure a clear escape route, she unstrapped the rifle from her shoulder and prepared to complete her mission. The still, quiet place inside her mind expanded, soaking up everything else like a sponge. She felt calm, able, focused.

  Evidently, she was not the first to discover this unused perch – a few discarded cigarette butts littering the platform spoke of time wasted by idling employees. She faced west, toward the Eisenhower home, and from her pocket withdrew the magazine, which thumped solidly home inside the rifle’s stock.

  Biting her lip, ruffling her pale brow, she raised the rifle. Sticking the barrel through the ventilation slat facing the sun porch, she brought scope to eye.

  Shielding his eyes against the glare as he crossed through the Norway spruce, Isherwood fought to make out the silo rising before a lustrous sun.

  He could
see only a dark silhouette. But in the next moment the sun dimmed, obscured by a tendril of cloud drifting across the sky, leaving an after-image imprinted on his retina. He raised his gaze to the highest extreme of the towering grain silo.

  The barrel of a high-powered rifle poked out, like the snout of a steel wolf.

  She sighted on the President.

  Facing the silo, beside his easel, features set in an attitude of artistic contemplation, he could not have presented a better target had he actively tried. Socking the rifle butt into her shoulder, she moved the stock flush against her left cheek. One hand steadied the barrel. Her thumb formed a spot weld between face, hand, and gun. The rifle was an extension of her body, and vice versa. Beneath her, the platform jiggled threateningly; but it would remain secure for a few more instants, all she needed. The sponge in her mind had soaked away all thoughts of ruses and escape routes and numbered accounts. At this moment there was only target and gun. Target and gun. Target and gun.

  From the corner of her eye she sensed a presence rushing toward the sun porch. An intruder; a problem. But too slow, too late.

  In the cross hairs she lined up President Eisenhower’s familiar face: balding, framed by a fringe of sandy gray hair, and yet boyish, ruddy-cheeked, with uncanny blue eyes focused intently at the moment on his painting.

  She closed her own eyes and opened them again. The face hadn’t wavered.

  Deliberately, her finger tightened on the trigger.

  Francis Isherwood pushed into the silo.

  He tripped over the bloody, lifeless body of Philip Zane. Oh God, no. If not for Isherwood’s recommendation, the man would not have been here. Later.

  He plundered Zane’s body like any soldier plundering the dead, tearing open the dark jacket, ignoring his savage grief, finding the standard-issue Detective Colt still inside its holster, tearing the gun free. As he turned to look at the figure high above, the figure was also turning, at the sound of his entrance, to look down at him.

  As Isherwood took aim, the shooter fired down the length of the silo. He steadied his right hand with his left, ignoring the warning flare from the incision in his side. Pain was gone; confusion was gone. He had ceased breathing.