“Not quite. He was in the process of disappearing.”
“How long were you face-to-face with him?”
“Seconds. When I got into the car I found the tape hooked to my jacket with a fishing fly.”
“Which you immediately recognized as a Mickey Finn.”
“No, McGraw told me its name.”
“McGraw did? Remarkable fellow.” Stooping slightly so as to be at the same eye level as Macalaster, Julian gazed into his face with the kindly interest of a nephew humoring a senile uncle. “When did this encounter in the parking lot happen? What time, what day?”
“About half an hour before I came to see you and you gave me the rest of the story.”
“Odd you didn’t mention it when it was fresh in your mind.”
“I didn’t want to burden you with it.”
“I see. And now, because in my innocence I let you see my diary, you think I put Palmer St. Clair up to this cloak-and-dagger delivery of the purloined tape.”
“Have I said that?” Macalaster was on the defensive.
“No, you’ve described what sounds like a fraternity initiation prank or something out of a bad movie. I can see why you didn’t share this vignette of a journalist’s life with your readers. Have you talked to anyone else about this?”
“No.”
“You haven’t been in touch with Hammett?”
“No.”
“It’s just as well. He wouldn’t be amused.”
“Does he know Palmer St. Clair?”
“Very possibly, given the incriminating nature of their mutual past as old Calhounians, but it’s the sort of question that wouldn’t amuse him. It doesn’t amuse me much, either, to be honest with you, Ross. Do you really think I went around bugging the President of the United States when I was the beneficiary of his trust? Obviously you’ve talked to McGraw about this so-called brush contact with Palmer St. Clair, if that’s who it was.”
Neither man was smiling pleasantly now. Macalaster said, “That’s who it was, Julian.”
“Remarkable that you’d be so sure when your glasses fell off and you only saw this fellow’s face for seconds—Ah, look!”
The bittern had lurched into motion and was stumbling forward, flapping its enormous wings. After a few steps it took ponderous flight and rose above the trees. Flying over the river with its neck stretched out, it looked like a pterodactyl. Julian watched it out of sight in affectionate admiration. “Wonderful,” he said. Turning back to Macalaster, he made a kindly face and said, “Are you going to write about this? Because if you do, the people who don’t like you—for instance Patrick Graham, who has the idea that you stole his story—are going to be quite unkind about your ethics and methods.”
“Gee, that’s scary, Julian.”
Julian said, “Forgive my frankness; I was just speaking as a friend.”
Macalaster said, “How frankly do you think Palmer St. Clair would talk to me if I dropped in on him?”
“Oh, I don’t think he would talk to a journalist at all,” Julian said. “I’d certainly advise him not to. It always leads to misunderstanding.”
“Is that what all this is, Julian? A misunderstanding?”
“That’s my impression. Because you’ve never understood, Ross. When you write what you’re told, you’re doing what you’re told and you take what you get. If I were you, I’d just let well enough alone.”
Something in Macalaster’s face must have touched Julian’s sympathies because he suddenly smiled and put a comradely hand on his shoulder. He seemed even taller than usual because he stood a little above Macalaster on the pine-needle slope, antique binoculars poised in his uplifted hand as he awaited another sighting.
10
“Let me make sure I understand this,” Lockwood said to Olmedo. “You want me to stand up in front of the United States Senate and say I’m the victim of a conspiracy of Whiffenpoofs?”
“No,” Olmedo replied, unsmiling. “But if they’ve done what they appear to have done, we have reason to wonder what they’re planning to do next.”
“I told you that tape is bullshit.”
“And I believe you, Mr. President,” Olmedo said. “But the Senate is a jury like any other, and it’s the jury that must believe you.”
“They’re not fools, Alfonso. They know me, and they know I didn’t steal the election. They know I didn’t know it was being stolen if it was stolen. What’s more, I don’t know to this day that it actually was stolen and neither does anybody else. All that the world knows about it is what the man I beat has told them, but even Mallory doesn’t think I had anything to do with it.”
Olmedo held up a hand, silently asking Lockwood for the impossible: patience. “Let me put a fundamental question,” he said. “What do you want out of this process?”
Lockwood grimaced. “I’ll make it real simple,” he said. “I want my innocence established.”
Olmedo nodded. “In other words, you want to use your appearance before the Senate to prove the negative—to establish that you yourself did not steal the election even if it was in fact stolen.”
“Correct.”
“Do you also want to keep the presidency?”
Lockwood’s patience was exhausted. “Jesus Christ, Alfonso, that’s the whole idea!” he shouted. “Do you think I’m putting myself through this ordeal in order to run away with my tail between my legs, so’s I can go down in history as a piece of trash who stole a presidential election? You’re damn right I want to keep the presidency.”
Olmedo paused for a moment, his face as placid as Lockwood’s was agitated. Then he said, “What makes you think you can do both?”
“Both what?”
“Establish your innocence and keep the presidency.”
Through clenched teeth, Lockwood said, “Alfonso, what are you trying to tell me?”
“That you are in a position, sir, in which you must destroy yourself by telling the truth. You can only prove your innocence of election fraud by establishing that others committed that fraud without your knowledge and consent. But there’s a catch: acquittal on such grounds would mean giving up the presidency, because to prove you aren’t guilty you must admit that you were not elected.”
Standing with his back to the fire, Lockwood did not reply for a long moment. The Lincoln sitting room was lit only by the flames and by a small night-light, so that the two men could barely see each other’s faces. Finally Lockwood said, “What does that have to do with the damn tape?”
“Everything,” Olmedo replied. “The purpose of leaking the Ibn Awad tape was not to impeach you as President, but to impeach you as a witness. Don’t you see, Mr. President? Even if the FIS killed Ibn Awad behind your back, the tape suggests that you condoned the offense after it came to your knowledge by lying to the American people.”
Lockwood held up a hand. “That’s enough.”
“Let me finish, please. You put your finger on the problem with your remark about the Whiffenpoofs. The same applies to your version of the conversation with Philindros and Julian Hubbard about Ibn Awad. Your enemies have put you in a position in which you cannot tell the truth without sounding like a liar or a madman. Mr. President, it’s Hobson’s choice. If you win, you lose.”
Lockwood absorbed this, his battered face turning crimson. Suddenly he roared, “Mr. Olmedo, do you want to withdraw from this case?”
“No,” Olmedo replied, “I want to win it. But I can’t do so unless I know why the man you trusted most in the world and the man you appointed Chief Justice of the United States on his recommendation seem to be hell-bent on destroying you with the help of the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. We must destroy their credibility if we are to save yours. That is the key.”
Lockwood threw up his arms. “The key?” he said. “The key is that Julian and his brother are trying to save their Yankee asses, that Hammett has always been a little funny in the head, and that Buzzer Busby is a natural-born damn fool.”
; Olmedo drew closer and put a hand on Lockwood’s forearm. He had not touched him since they shook hands on being introduced weeks before, and the gesture had a strong effect. “Mr. President,” he said. “I urge you to consider the possibility that there is more to it than that.”
“Alfonso, these are the people who supposedly stole the election to keep Franklin Mallory from being President. If I go down, Mallory takes over the country. The whole thing makes no sense. None. Not a particle.”
“Not yet,” Olmedo said. “Conspiracies seldom do, except to the conspirators.”
Lockwood said, “What time is it?” He wore no watch, carried no money, remembered no names, feared no enemies—princely habits instilled by Julian Hubbard.
Olmedo said, “Two-twenty, and Carlisle Blackstone is waiting to see you.”
Lockwood was not pleased. “What does he have for me?”
“A list of possible courses of action under the Constitution.”
“What for? The only course of action I’m interested in is what I just told you.”
“I understand,” Olmedo said, “but your enemies may have other ideas. I think you should hear what he has to say.”
“I haven’t got the patience,” Lockwood said. “If you ask Spats what time it is, he tells you how to build the damn watch.”
“It might be wise to give him a few minutes, Mr. President.”
“I can’t make myself do it,” Lockwood said. “What’s wisdom got to do with anything?”
11
By now rumors of conspiracy, of something afoot within the Cause, made the whole town hum. This amused Baxter T. Busby. The simple fact, he said, was that everything that had happened to the Old Guard since Inauguration Day had happened as a consequence of its own falsity and corruption. True, Attenborough, Lockwood, and ultimately Mallory were being brought down by high-minded men and women who were able to put party loyalty aside and act on their convictions. Certainly everything Busby himself had done had been done in good faith and right out in the open. No hidden enemy could possibly have invented the dilemma the good old boys had contrived for themselves.
In the interim between sessions of the Senate trial, Busby explained all this to Slim Eve at a fund-raiser for the Cause at the spartan downtown headquarters of the Womonkind Coalition. They were by themselves in a corner of the room and they were getting along extremely well. In this severely radical milieu Slim wore dark colors, an ankle-length skirt, and perverse low-heeled shoes with laces, like the ones Busby’s maiden aunts had worn in photographs taken of them as Red Cross nurses in France during the First World War. In spite of this costume, she was by far the best-looking woman in the room. Her sensitive face with its enormous deep-blue eyes was deathly pale, and she listened intently to every word he spoke.
“Not only did they do it to themselves, with no help from Reds under the bed or the Greens or radicals or feminists or subversives in the news media, but they earned it,” he told her. “The whole affair is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Vietnam and Watergate.”
In her throaty, Jean Arthurish voice, Slim said, “Maybe it was naïve to think that a corrupt system can produce virtuous leaders.”
“Do you believe it never can?”
“What do you think? Look what happened to Vice President Williston Graves. You do know how he died?”
“An embolism, I heard.”
“Incurred while sexually abusing a young lawyer on his staff.”
Busby was wildly amused by this revelation. He put on a serious face. “A lawyer? Willy? I’m amazed.”
“I don’t see why,” Slim said. “My point is, maybe they’re all alike. The system makes them that way.”
Slim was ready to turn back to the main topic, but Busby’s curiosity was fully aroused. Graves was a famous quickie artist who had been hopping on secretaries and lady constituents in his office for years. Had Horace Hubbard, that sly dog, known something about this down in the Grenadines when he asked those questions about the cause of Graves’s death? Busby had to be sure this story was true. He said, “Just a minute. How do you know this about Graves and the lawyer?”
“The victim belongs to the same feminist support group for rape victims as me. She told us.”
“And she worked for Willy Graves? Strange bedfellows.”
“She used to do worse than that; she worked her way through law school as a receptionist at a Morning After Clinic. But she saw the light.”
“Thank goodness.”
“Yes,” Slim said, a trifle impatiently. “As I was saying, I admired Frosty Lockwood. I believed in him because I was told it was all right to do so. So did everyone else I knew, until a day or two ago. I can’t help feeling that if Lockwood is destroyed, we lose something we may never be able to get back.”
“The right to be naïve about the corrupt system?” Busby asked teasingly.
Slim detected a sexist, all-women-are-naïve undertone in this remark, and acknowledged it and ignored it with one tiny smile. “We put him in office because we thought he was one of us.”
“And he betrayed your trust. But history moves in mysterious ways. Painful as this process has been, it may be all to the good. It opened everything up, ripped off the masks, gave the good people the chance to start over again clean. My advice is, Get out of bed in the morning and get to work. You can be damn sure Mallory will go to the mat on this one because he knows it means the end of him, too.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Don’t you?”
“Intellectually I’m beginning to, I guess,” Slim said. “Emotionally it’s not so simple. What bothers me even more than the idea of Mallory taking power is the thought of Attenborough becoming President of the United States. Of course I have subjective reasons for feeling as I do. But is that possible?”
“Oh, yes,” Busby said. “But tomorrow is another day.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I can’t say more.” Busby’s air was mysterious, but in fact he had nothing more to say because he had not thought beyond Attenborough to the ultimate solution of the problem of the presidency. All he knew, really, was that this time, somehow, anyhow, the office had to be placed in the right hands, and he was not about to say that aloud.
“I won’t ask you to say more,” Slim said. “But you’ve given me an opportunity to tell you that I’ve been working on this problem.”
“What problem is that?”
“The succession. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.” She looked around them, leaned closer, and said, “You did get the message over the Old Blue network?”
Busby betrayed nothing, but in fact he had come to this party on Shelleyan orders. Very early that morning he had received a call from the third Shelleyan in his cell—Horace Hubbard, of course, being the other. The call came from overseas on a hyperfrequency circuit. After the usual pleasantries concerning the object that Trelawny had snatched from the funeral pyre at Viareggio, Five-Three said, “A sky-lark tells me you’ve been invited to a reception at the Womonkind Coalition tonight.”
“Good Lord, have I? I don’t see how I can make it.”
“It was hoped that you could turn up and have a private word with the guest of honor. She’s more than just a victim of a beastly act.” Five-Three meant this as a joke; his sensibilities had been formed in the Eisenhower era, and as a venture capitalist with a huge clientele among the primitive capitalists of the new Far East, he had no incentive to raise his consciousness. He continued: “It’s said she’s an interesting woman. Brilliant lawyer. From Yale Law School.”
“This town is full of interesting women who are brilliant lawyers.”
“Buzzer,” said Five-Three in the tone of fatigue often adopted by those who knew Busby well, “I ask this in the name of the Poet.”
“Ah, that’s a horse of a different color,” said Busby.
“I have something for you,” Slim said.
She had backed herself into a corner and positioned Busb
y in front of her, with his back to the room. Now, concealing the gesture behind the screen of his body, she produced a computer diskette from the pocket of her skirt and pressed it into his hand. It was one of a new type, about the size of a matchbook cover. “It’s all on this; I researched it, drafted it, and keyboarded it myself, and only one other person has knowledge of its existence.”
“Who’s that?”
“My principal.”
Busby did not ask who her principal might be; he already knew it was a fellow Shelleyan.
“Considering what else is going on in your life, I wonder you could do it at all.”
Slim touched his hand briefly and coolly. Busby felt a small thrill. It was not an uncomplicated reaction. This woman was not only beautiful, she was highly intelligent and maybe even a little crazy—everything that was attractive. No wonder Attenborough had gotten in over his head. Busby moved backward a step. Slim looked downward at the diskette—disapprovingly because Busby still held it openly on his upturned palm, and stepped toward him, closing the gap between them. “I hope you’ll find what’s on that interesting,” she said. “The only other person I’ve discussed it with thinks that it may be the solution to everything.”
“He does?” Busby said. “My goodness, whatever can it be?”
“A hidden wonder of the Constitution,” Slim said. She covered the diskette with her own hand. “As I said, it’s all on the diskette.”
Slim took her hand away, but slowly. Busby looked downward at her long forefinger, which still rested ever so lightly upon the diskette, as if on a part of his body.
“That’s a little vague,” Busby said. “What if I don’t quite understand the contents and need to discuss it?”
“Then you can call me,” Slim said. “The number is on the diskette.”
“Is it a work number?”
“It’s a twenty-four-hour number,” Slim replied. “Don’t hesitate to use it. I’m perfectly familiar with all the details and with my principal’s thinking.”
“Then I may have to call you,” Busby said.
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