Acts of Mercy

by Bill Pronzini

  “Point of what, sir?”

  “Julius Wexford,” Harper said.

  “stir?”

  “Why the blank look? Don’t tell me you haven’t talked to the President in the past couple of hours? I was under the impression he discussed everything of any consequence with you lately.”

  Justice said, “I haven’t talked to him at all since we boarded the train,” and then frowned and asked, “Has something happened, Mr. Harper?”

  “Certainly something has happened. The President and Wexford had a confrontation earlier this afternoon.”

  Justice was momentarily confused. “You mean here, on the Presidential Special? I thought Mr. Wexford was in Saint Louis ...”

  “So did we all,” Harper said. “The fact is, he came on behalf of the National Committee—to demand the President’s resignation.”

  Stunned, Justice said, “Resignation?”

  “You heard me; I don’t need to repeat myself.”

  “But why?”

  “That should be obvious even to you,” Harper said. “They’re afraid he has lost enough credibility to destroy the party at the polls in November; they want to sweep him out so they can quote reestablish public faith unquote and elect Peter Kineen in his place.”

  “Mr. Wexford said this to the President?”

  “That, and a great deal more. Augustine believes him to be the guiding force behind the movement against him. Along with Kineen, of course.”

  “Then he didn’t agree to the demand—?”

  “Of course not. He intends to fight; he still believes he can win renomination.”

  “Can he?” Justice asked softly.

  “It hardly looks promising. The National Committee plans to mount an all-out campaign for Kineen’s nomination, which means there will be strong in-party attacks on the President as well as vicious opposition attacks. His credibility is liable to plummet even further, and if that happens even his staunchest backers will abandon him for fear of losing their jobs to Kineen partisans. And those of us who are too deeply committed to the President to effectively switch sides will suffer even more; the party will excommunicate us, we’ll never work in government again at a national or even a state level.”

  Justice felt cold. “Isn’t there anything that can be done, Mr. Harper? Isn’t there any way to make Mr. Wexford and the National Committee reconsider?”

  “That, Justice,” Harper said, “is a damned good question. The question, in fact.”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s the reason I’m here talking to you.”

  “I don’t understand ...”

  “For Christ’s sake, are you really as dense as all that? I’ve been sitting in my compartment for the past three hours trying to come up with a solution, a plan, a viable countermeasure. Much as it pains me to admit it, I’m stymied. And the reason for that may be that I attack a problem from the intellectual point of view and what is needed here is a more direct and basic approach. Do you understand now?”

  “You want my help?” Justice said, astonished.

  “I want an opinion from you, damn it.” Anger—or maybe a kind of self-deprecating embarrassment—shone in Harper’s eyes. “Come on, Justice, you’re as involved in this as I am; the President has seen to that. Tell me what the common man, the man of action, thinks ought to be done.”

  Justice shook his head. He understood just how grave the situation must be for a proud, aloof genius such as Harper to come seeking help from someone such as himself. But he had no alternative answers to offer; his mind was as blank in this moment as an erased slateboard. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I just ... I don’t know.”

  Harper gave him a look of disgust, got abruptly to his feet. “Behold the common man, the product of two centuries of struggle and pain since the French Revolution—totally incapable of creative thought or action.”

  “I want to help, Mr. Harper,” Justice said, “but I don’t know how. I’m not a thinker or a planner, I’m just a man who follows orders—”

  But Harper had already turned and was walking away.

  Nine

  And now we are sure of another one, a second part of the conspiracy, a second cell of the cancer which must be destroyed. He has been a major suspect all along, of course, especially for the past few days, but still there is an element of shock in unmistakable knowledge. The truth is always difficult, revelation carries its own small clout of pain, because for a long time we trusted him, we believed in him, and it is always painful to come face to face with deceit and your own misjudgments.

  But that is not important. All that is important is that he is a traitor. The evidence is damning, the verdict is in, and sentence has been passed: he is a traitor, and he must die.

  Tonight.

  He must be executed tonight ...

  Ten

  Dinner in Claire’s drawing room: the two of them alone, the lights turned down and a pair of slim tapers burning in silver holders, good cuisine and a good bottle of estatebottled pinot chardonnay, the wind whispering beyond the shaded windows and combining with the steady hum of the train wheels to form a kind of muted background music, Claire in a sheer white dressing gown and with her hair brushed into long smooth waves the way he liked her to wear it.

  All the ingredients were there, Augustine thought, but the dinner was not what it could have been, what it should have been on the Presidential Special. There was no intimacy, no sense of peace or contentment. Claire seemed rested tonight, after her nap, but she was still quiet and withdrawn; and he was nearly exhausted and his head ached from the bourbon he had drunk too much of and his mind kept working, working, stuttering from one thought to another. They had said little to each other, and yet there was a strained atmosphere that seemed to linger between them, as if Claire had difficult things to say to him just as he had difficult things to say to her. Which made the dinner little more than an excuse for delay.

  Augustine picked at his roast beef and watched her across the table. She had stopped eating—had barely touched her food anyway—and was looking now into her wine glass. Her eyes were dark, unreadable, somewhat distant; she looked in that aspect to be deep in a kind of spiritual meditation. In the flickering light from the candle flames her face had a distinctive, almost haunting beauty, like that of a woman seen and coveted but never known.

  At length he put down his own fork, dabbed at his mouth with the linen napkin. Might as well get it over with, he thought. He cleared his throat.

  Claire blinked, focused on him again. “Yes, Nicholas?”

  “There’s something you should know,” he said, “something that happened this afternoon.”

  A soft sigh. “About Julius Wexford, you mean.”

  “You know he’s here on board?”

  “Yes. He came to see me after he spoke to you.”

  “Oh he did, did he. Then I suppose he told you about the National Committee’s decision.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  So the difficult things plaguing both of them were the same. He ran a hand through his hair. “What else did he say?”

  “He begged me to ask you to reconsider.”

  “I’ll bet he did. For my sake and for the sake of the party and the country—is that how he put it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he also tell you he thinks I’m deteriorating mentally, heading for a breakdown?”

  She winced. “Yes.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him I didn’t want to listen to that kind of talk. I told him I found his and the National Committee’s opinions distasteful and their tactics unforgivable. If they had met with you personally, been frank and open with you instead of going behind your back—”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Augustine said. He studied her closely. “Damn it, Claire, you didn’t let him convince you my position is as hopeless as they claim.”

  “I didn’t let him convince me of anything.”

  “But you t
hink it just might be hopeless, don’t you.”

  “Nothing is hopeless,” she said.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Nicholas, it’s just that with party unity behind Kineen, you’re facing an awesome struggle—a vicious and painful one—and I can’t help but worry what it might do to you.”

  “It won’t do anything to me except put me back in the White House for another four years. We’re going to beat them, Clare, I promise you that. Together we’re going to beat them.”

  Claire rotated her wine glass, silent.

  “Together,” he said again.

  “Yes,” she said, “together.”

  Augustine nodded. “We’ll begin the campaign as soon as we return to Washington. I’ve got several ideas on how to proceed. But the first thing is to appoint a new campaign chairman and I’ve been thinking about Ed Dougherty. How do you feel about him?”

  “He might be a good choice, yes.”

  “Then again, maybe Maxwell Harper would be an even better one.”

  “No,” Claire said immediately.

  “Well, he’s a brilliant man. In the past his advice—”

  “I don’t want to hear about Maxwell’s advice,” she said, and there was a vehemence in her voice that surprised him. “I don’t care about his advice. I don’t want you even to consider him as a campaign chairman.”

  “Why not? My God, you sound as though you no longer like or trust him.”

  “I don’t.”

  “But why?”

  “Nicholas, please. Let’s just drop the subject of Maxwell Harper.”

  “All right,” he said. “For now. But I just don’t understand this sudden animosity toward him.”

  She was silent again.

  Frowning, Augustine massaged his temples. “Do you want to hear my ideas for the campaign,?”

  “Wouldn’t you rather rest now? You hardly slept last night and you look exhausted. You can tell me your ideas at The Hollows.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I should get to bed right away.” He paused. “Do you want to join me?”

  “A little later, if you’d like.”

  “I would. I’d prefer not to sleep alone tonight.”

  He stood and stepped around to kiss her. Then he went to the connecting door between their compartments, opened it and stepped through. Before he reshut the door he looked at her again. The candlelight played across the soft planes of her face—and he was struck once more by the haunting beauty of her in that aspect, by the vaguely unsettling feeling that even after twenty years of marriage, he did not really know her at all.

  The feeling stayed with him even after he was in bed and waiting for sleep to come and carry him away.

  Eleven

  Restless, unable to sleep, Harper paced the floor of his compartment in small widening circles, returning to the center of the room when the circles increased enough to bring him up against walls and furnishings. He tended to do that when he was brooding, perhaps because it was an objective correlative for the way in which his mind worked: begin at the center, forage outward from a central idea or conception.

  But the pacing did him little more good now than it had earlier. He still could not come up with an effective strategy for counteracting the crisis. And he still could not find answers to the hidden aspects of it, to the strange behavior of Claire and the reticence of the President.

  He berated himself again, yet again, for going to Justice and humbling himself in front of the man. It had been a foolish error in judgment, a lapse in the strict control by which he lived and functioned. He had succeeded in doing nothing except demean himself. How could he have thought that a cipher like Justice could contribute anything in the way of positive action if he himself could not?

  Well, it was a measure of his frustration and his apprehension, he supposed. Apprehension not only for Augustine but for himself; his career was as much on the line as was the President’s.

  His career. A doctorate in political science from Harvard, four years at the Institute of Policy Studies, twelve years on the faculty at Harvard and then the Wilson chair at Northwestern, the Pulitzer Prize nomination for his biography of Millard Fillmore, and finally his appointment as domestic affairs advisor. No small accomplishments, any of these. And yet he had always considered his greatest achievements to lie ahead of him: the contributions he would eventually make, not only politically but to history and to American letters, would be the true realization of his capabilities.

  But now it seemed probable that his future held little more than bitter unfulfillment and the relative anonymity of the vanquished. That he would be overtaken by that very history which should have enshrined him. And all because he had made the one fatal error of tying himself too tightly to a man he had believed strong but who had turned out to be weak. And vulnerable.

  The unfairness of it was galling.

  And I can’t let it happen, he told himself grimly. I must not let it happen. In that sense he was like Augustine: unable to give up, unable under any circumstances to passively accept defeat. It was a matter of honor and dignity and pride, a matter of utter belief in the rightness of himself and his role in the power structure of government.

  So he would fight. He would stand behind the President and fight, and maybe, just maybe, they could win the struggle. Would win it, had to win it. There had to be ways to find answers to muddled equations, ways to turn things around.

  Harper stopped pacing, stood listening to the rumbling clatter of the train. The compartment was beginning to have a claustrophobic effect on him, he realized; it preyed on his senses, made him irritable and dulled his thought processes. And perhaps he was spending too much time alone in here; perhaps he ought to get out and do something instead of pacing around and thinking about something to do. Talk to the President again? No, not tonight. Tomorrow would be better, after Augustine had had a night’s sleep and was more alert and less inclined to be emotional.

  Talk to Wexford?

  Yes, he thought, Wexford. A calm, rational discussion. Find out just how strong party sentiment was against the President; find out if there were any compromises that could be made. Find some sort of direction. That was what he should have done in the first place, for God’s sake, instead of stupidly seeking out Justice.

  Quickly Harper left the compartment and went in search of the attorney general.

  Twelve

  In the night Augustine awoke and for a disoriented moment did not know where he was. Then he heard the smooth comforting rhythm of the train wheels, and the faint contrapuntal rhythm of the wind outside and of Claire’s breathing beside him, and the confusion passed and left him dully aware of his surroundings.

  He shifted position on the berth so that he was lying on his back. What had awakened him? A dream, perhaps, although he could not remember dreaming; a sudden lurch as the Presidential Special negotiated a curve; a sound penetrating from somewhere in the night. Whatever it was, it was not important. What was important was recapturing sleep, the good deep sleep he had fallen into before Claire joined him and then again afterward. He reclosed his eyes, turned his cheek into the pillow.

  But sleep did not come at all this time.

  He waited a long while for it and it did not come.

  He lay poised on the rim of consciousness, listening to the train, feeling the sway of it and its faint vibrations in the mattress beneath him. Gentle, insistent, throbbing. Throbbing. An assault both on the body and on the senses. Throb-and-sway. Throb-and sway ...

  It gave him an erection.

  Not all at once but in small pulsing surges—and he lay still, expecting it to diminish and leave him flaccid again. Instead the surges increased until the erection was complete. A dim elation moved through him. His first full erection in weeks, and one as achingly rigid as any he had had in the viril days of his youth. The sensations in his groin were exquisite.

  In careful movements he turned onto his side and put a hand on Cl
aire’s warm hip. “Claire,” he whispered. “Claire?”

  She moaned softly but did not wake up.

  Augustine tugged his pajama bottoms down, freeing himself, and then drew Claire’s gown up over her buttocks. She stirred, lifting her body to help him, but in a reflexive way that told him she was still asleep. He rolled the gown over her stomach and above her breasts, moved close to her and raised her leg atop his thigh, turning and fitting her body tightly to his, pressing against the warmth of her abdomen.

  He caressed her, kissed the pulsebeat in the hollow of her throat. The sensations grew demanding, and when he lowered a hand to touch her he felt that she, too, was ready. He said her name again—and entered her.

  She made another moaning sound, one which seemed to him to be approving, but he could not see her face in the darkness, could not tell if her eyes had come open.

  He began to move within her, consciously setting his rhythm to that of the train. Throb. Sway. Her hips answered his movements, matched them in perfect unity, and he heard the tempo of her breathing increase; when he said her name yet another time, though, she did not answer. He clutched at her breasts, traced his lips along the line of her jaw. Urgency spiraled inside him, and the thrust of his hips became more rapid, and all around him the train hummed and vibrated.

  Throb, sway, throb sway, throbsway, throbsway throbsway throbswaythrobswaythrobsway ...

  Orgasm overtook him, intense and ecstatic, wringing soft cries from him and from Claire. It seemed to last a long time, so long that it approached the level of pain. When it finally ebbed his body spasmed once and went lax; he lay quiescent, they both lay quiescent, still joined, and he felt languor flowing through him in slow gentle sweeps.

  Good, he thought fuzzily, it was really good again. Then the languor deepened and he began to drift on it and on the motion of the train, and after a while he slept. And dreamed about Briggs and a coffin being lowered into the ground in Arlington Cemetery amid a circle of laughing faces. The dream was unsettling, despite its lack of detail or cohesion; he withdrew from it in stages, like someone backing slowly out of a dark movie theater—