Acts of Mercy

by Bill Pronzini

  He smiled at Claire as they neared U.S. Car Number One, to let her know he felt cheered, but her answering smile was preoccupied and mechanical. Her mood had matched his in the past eighteen hours: withdrawn, silent, morose. Which was not like her at all, though understandable in the circumstances. Neither of them had mentioned Briggs since he had conveyed Justice’s report to her; and neither of them had slept much last night, nor on the flight from Washington this morning.

  When they reached the portable metal steps Augustine turned briefly to wave at the gaggle of photographers and reporters that had followed onto the station platform. Flash. bulbs popped; television cameras whirred. From out at the front of the station he could hear the voices of the wellwishers who had gathered to greet him when his limousine arrived from the airport—a much smaller crowd than even on his last visit ten days ago. But that would change once he got his campaign into full swing. They would come in droves then, as they had four years ago; all over the country they would come out in droves when the Presidential Special came whistling in.

  He noticed Justice standing a few feet away, looking as unobtrusive as always but with dark smudges under his eyes that said his night had also been mostly sleepless. They had exchanged but a few words this morning and none at all since leaving Washington; everything that needed to be said about Briggs had been spoken last night, and any further dialogue at this time would have been painful for both of them.

  Augustine stood a moment longer, smiling impersonally for the cameras, sniffing the good oily machine odor of railroad stations everywhere. Then he turned and helped Claire up the steps, boarded after her and followed her into the corridor of U.S. Car Number One. At the door of her compartment she stopped and turned to him, putting her hand gently on his arm.

  “I think I’ll lie down for a while, Nicholas,” she said.

  “Don’t you feel well?”

  “I’m just tired. You ought to rest too, dear.”

  “I will, a little later.”

  She nodded, turned as Elizabeth Miller came up and asked her something about a secretarial matter. Augustine left her with Elizabeth and went up the empty corridor to his office at the far end. Just as he reached it, someone—Maxwell Harper—called his name. He sighed softly, glanced back and waited for Harper to approach him.

  Maxwell had tried to get him alone at Dulles and again on Air Force One—plainly, he had something on his mindbut Augustine had been in no mood to listen to one of Harper’s lectures. Nor was he now, for that matter. A brilliant man, Maxwell, but you could not interact with him on an emotional level; he thought only in terms of facts and figures, causes and effects, and dry intellectual syllogisms. It was exactly for that reason that Augustine could never tell him about the Briggs decision. Harper would be appalled by it because he would be unable to see past the act itself, would be incapable of understanding the emotions which had precipitated it.

  Augustine said, “What is it, Maxwell?”

  “I’d like a few minutes of your time,” Harper answered in his dry precise voice.

  “Everyone wants a few minutes of my time. Can’t it wait?”

  Harper frowned slightly. “I suppose it can, but—” “Good. Come see me in thirty minutes or so. After we’ve gotten underway.”

  Augustine pivoted away from him, not giving him the opportunity to argue, and entered the office compartment. Facing inside, he drew the door shut behind him. When he heard Harper’s steps retreating in the corridor he crossed to his desk and sank into the wide leather chair behind it.

  The office was cool and dark: the Presidential Special was air conditioned, and the shades were already drawn across the windows. He sat quietly for a time, looking at the mahogany-paneled walls with their colorful display of railroad timetables and handbills and chromolithograph posters, the tufted red-velvet settee which had originally graced a Pullman drawing room on the old Erie Railroad in the 1880s, the hand-crafted bar cabinet from the Central Pacific car that had once belonged to Leland Stanford, the six-foot mahogany conference table with its satin-damask-upholstered chairs. God, it’s good to be back here, he thought, and smiled to himself, and felt again the stir of excitement. There was something about trains that got into a man’s blood, filled him with a sense of joy and adventure, sharpened his awareness of externals and of himself. And as he had many times before, he felt a fleeting wistful sadness that he had not ignored his father’s wishes and had gone into railroading instead of politics. If he had gone into railroading, who was to say that he would not be a happier and more fulfilled man than he was today?

  He began to hum “John Henry,” and as soon as he did that he had a vivid mental image of a huge black man swinging a ten-pound sheep-nose hammer in the heat and the smoky darkness of a mountain tunnel in West Virginia, the Big Bend tunnel on the C&O road more than a century ago. John Henry, driving drills into bare rock to make holes for the blasting charges, risking death from silicosis and suffocation and falling rock and cave-ins, finally dying not from any of these but from sheer exhaustion in an impossible confrontation with a steam drill. John Henry, steel-driving man.

  When John Henry was a little baby,

  Sittin’ on his daddy’s knee,

  Point his finger at a little piece of steel,

  Say, “Hammer’s gonna be the death of me,

  Lawd, Lawd,” say, “Hammer’s gonna be the death of me.”

  Augustine sang a second verse, and in the middle of a third the Presidential Special’s air horn sounded to announce departure—sounded loud and harsh and toneless, nothing like those grand old whistles of yore. Humming again, he stood and went to the bar cabinet. He had wanted a drink badly last night, after Justice had first left the Oval Study, but he had restrained himself; the worst time to reach for alcohol was when you were in the middle of a crisis. But a drink or two now would not hurt. In fact, they were called for: a toast to railroading and to the memory of steel-driving men like John Henry.

  While he was making himself a bourbon-and-soda, the train started to move—slowly, smoothly, the iron wheels creating small rhythmic sounds on the rails. Augustine raised his glass, drank from it, and then returned to his chair and lifted the shade on the nearest window. Outside, the network of tracks and strings of out-of-service cars slid by, shining in the hard glare of the sun; then they were gone and in their place were buildings and palm trees and the distant bluish shadows of hills and mountains.

  He smiled again and sang:

  O the cap’n he told John Henry,

  “I believe this mountain’s sinkin’ in”;

  John Henry he say to his cap’n, “O my,

  It’s my hammer just a-hossin’ in the wind,

  Lawd, Lawd, it’s my hammer just a-hossin’ in the wind.”

  The train picked up speed and the air horn echoed again, and Augustine experienced a familiar illusion of motionlessness, as if the Presidential Special were standing still and the world itself were rushing by. There was a curious sense of peace in that. He could imagine, at least for a while, that he had been relieved of the pressures of office, that the complexities of human society were under the influence of God alone.

  He filled a pipe, settled back with it and with his drink. I wish I’d known you, John Henry, he thought. I think we’d have gotten along. Yes, by God, I think we’d have gotten along just fine.

  Two

  Now, here on the train as it moves away from Union Station, an understanding comes to us: the execution of Briggs was our first act of mercy, but it must not be our last.

  He was only part of the conspiracy, perhaps its leader but more probably, in retrospect, its point man. There are still others involved, in any case, and before the plot can be effectively neutralized these others, too, must be eliminated. You cannot nullify a cancer by killing one of its cells; you must kill them all, every last one.

  But who are they? We are not quite sure yet; we can make educated guesses, but guesses are not enough—we must be absolutely certain. Peter Ki
neen is a major part of the conspiracy, of course; the President, however, recognizes him as an enemy, and he is not nearly so dangerous as those close to Augustine, such as Briggs, who are seeking to undermine and destroy him from within. Kineen must die, yes, but the others, the ones still hidden, must die first.

  We will be even more vigilant and cunning from now on. And when we become sure of each of the remaining traitors, we will strike as we struck with Briggs. Swiftly, vengefully, and in the name of righteousness.

  Oh yes, oh yes, our acts of mercy have only just begun.

  Three

  Harper made his way awkwardly along the swaying corridors from the club car toward the aides’ Pullman. Trains, he thought with distaste. Great lumbering anachronisms totally devoid of dignity, with no effective function in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Lower-class conveyances like buses and streetcars. Playthings for men such as Augustine who had never quite outgrown the toys and fascinations of childhood. All in all, a preposterous mode of transportation for the President of the United States, and for a man like himself whose sensibilities were offended by their superfluous nature.

  The motion of the train had given him a sour stomach, and the glass of plain soda he had consumed in the club car made him belch again, delicately. He had spent fifteen minutes in the club car, brooding at one of the tables and watching flickers of sunlight play stroboscopically on its surface, but then restlessness had brought him to his feet and sent him out of there, just as it had brought him into the car in the first place.

  Why had Augustine moved up the date of their departure for The Hollows from the weekend to today? Was it because of the media reaction to his ill-timed joke about the Vice-President’s problems in the West? Because of the Indian crisis and his inability to cope with it? Or had something else happened, something of which Harper had not yet been made aware? The suddenness of this change in plans-Harper had learned about it only this morning, when he arrived at the White House—carried suspicious overtones. As did Augustine’s refusal to talk to him in Washington and on the plane. As did the President’s haggard, moody aspect. As did the First Lady’s uncharacteristic reticence today, the bluish lines of fatigue under her eyes that she had not quite been able to conceal with makeup.

  There were more people in the corridors now—stewards (none of whom were black: a kind of reverse racism, Harper thought ironically), other aides, and Secret Servicemen who could not quite maintain either their regimentation or their inconspicuousness in these closed surroundings. He ignored them individually, still brooding. But when he neared his compartment, at the upper end of the aides’ Pullman adjacent to U.S. Car Number One, he saw through the connecting door glass that the First Lady was standing in the doorway of her private drawing room, talking to her confidential secretary, Elizabeth Miller. He hesitated, and then, on impulse, he walked through into Car Number One.

  As he entered, Elizabeth Miller was saying, “Do you want me to have a steward bring us some coffee, Mrs. Augustine?” Claire nodded, started to retreat into the drawing room. Harper called, “Mrs. Augustine,” and she stopped and seemed to stiffen, turning her head to look at him. Elizabeth paused, as if there was something she wanted to say to Harper, but he moved past her without a glance. He did not particularly care for the woman: she was another cipher like Justice.

  His first thought as he came to Claire was that even the marks of fatigue did not detract from her beauty. But then his eyes met hers—and what he saw reflected there reversed his smile into a startled frown.

  It was something that might have been fear.

  She looked past him at the secretary, said sharply, “Don’t just stand there, Elizabeth, see about the coffee,” and then put her eyes on him again as Elizabeth Miller left the car.

  Harper began, “Mrs. Augustine—”

  “I haven’t time to talk now ...”

  “But I was just—”

  “Please, not now,” she said, and before he could speak again she stepped back and pushed the door shut. Its lock clicked an instant later, like a protective barrier being snapped into place.

  Nonplussed, Harper stood alone in the corridor and listened to the monotonous rhythm of the train’s wheels, to the uneasy rhythm of his thoughts. Her reactions to him were sometimes mutable, yes, but never before had she seemed frightened of him. Her attitude just now made no sense. Why should she be afraid of him, of all people?

  Why should she be afraid of him?

  Four

  In his small compartment in the security’s Pullman, Justice sat trying to read the copy of Murder on the Calais Coach he had bought in Washington. And finding it dull and uninteresting. It was not the book itself, though; he knew he would have the same reaction to any mystery novel he tried to read today. After what he had done with Briggs’s body last night, the fictional exploits of criminals and detectives—the imaginary dilemmas of imaginary people—took on a kind of pallid irrelevency.

  Justice closed the book, rubbed at his tired eyes. Why hadn’t Briggs been found? he asked himself again. He had been waiting for that to happen all day, and yet it hadn’t or word would have come to the President immediately. Somebody had to find the body before long, that seemed sure: there were colleagues at the White House who would question his unexplained absence from work, friends who might investigate when appointments were not kept.

  And when Briggs was found, what then? Had he overlooked something after all in the Cleveland Park house that would tell the homicide detectives and the forensic experts that the press secretary had not died in his bathroom? If so, would they then suspect foul play? Christ, Justice thought, that would make things even worse for the President than if they had simply reported the death at the White House. The ultimate irony: an accidental death manipulated and mishandled so badly that it was thought of as homicide.

  But even if anything like that happened, the trail could lead only to him. Where it would end because he would never reveal the truth, would never betray the President or his oath of silence.

  Justice raised the novel again, looked at the spine, and then tossed it onto the seat opposite without reopening it. He wondered if he should go out of there, find something or someone to occupy his time and his mind. A drink in the club car, or a predinner snack from the buffet in the dining car, or a nap, or a look at the view from the observation platform, or conversation with some of the other Secret Service agents. Only none of these things appealed to him. He did not feel like doing anything at all.

  After a time he slid over next to the window, watched inanimate objects appear and disappear outside as the train sped northeast out of Los Angeles. Even the pleasure he usually felt at being on the Presidential Special was absent; he was merely riding on a transportation vehicle, like Air Force One earlier, that was taking him from one point to another. Taking all of them to The Hollows again as it had so many times in the past.

  When would Briggs be found?

  Had he overlooked something in the Cleveland Park house that would make the police suspect foul play?

  And the fear that had been born last night remained lodged like a bone inside him. The fear that did not yet have a name.

  Five

  There was a light but insistent rapping on the office door. Augustine was on his feet, about to approach the bar cabinet again because he had finished his drink and decided to permit himself a refill. He frowned as the knocking continued. Maxwell already? Well all right, he might as well get that over with; he felt relaxed enough now to deal with a lecture, if that was what Harper intended to deliver.

  He went to the door and drew it open. But it was not Harper who stood outside.

  It was Julius Wexford.

  Augustine stared at him, unable to understand for an instant how Wexford could be here. When he had thought at all about the attorney general in the past forty-eight hours, he had had him compartmentalized with the National Committee in Saint Louis. And Wexford had not been at Union Station in Los Angeles when Augusti
ne boarded the train; he must have arrived afterward, just before departure.

  “Hello, Nicholas,” Wexford said gravely. His suit was rumpled and he had a harried, bleak-eyed look about him. But there was none of the nervousness he had shown two days ago in the Oval Office; his florid face was dry and his eyes were steady and resolute. “You seem surprised to see me.”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “May I come in?”

  “I suppose you might as well.”

  Augustine moved aside to let him enter, reclosed the door. Wexford glanced at the red-velvet settee, glanced at the empty glass the President held, and then stood as if waiting for an invitation to sit down, an offer of a drink. Augustine gave him neither. Instead he went to his desk, set the glass down on it, rested a hip against its outer edge, and folded his arms across his chest.

  “All right, Julius,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

  “I received word early this morning that you were on your way to California, so I took the first available plane out of Saint Louis.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “There are things that have to be resolved,” Wexford said. “Now, not whenever you decide to return to Washington.”

  “Cabinet business?”

  “No. You know perfectly well what things I mean.”