By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

  “They sure did kill a lot of people when they missed the president,” Cooper said.

  “They didn’t miss him, Coop.”

  “Well, they didn’t kill him.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “What’d you say, Charley?” The saloonkeeper turned. He looked as though he were going to bring his beer down to where Dresden sat.

  “Nothing, Coop. See you later.”

  “Tonight?”

  Charley had brought the unfinished commercial for the amusement park home, having convinced himself of the lie that he was actually going to work on it.

  “Sure. Tonight.”

  Dresden’s small house was on the mountain side of the back road, set well back against the slope and adjoining an old cemetery, long since filled. He parked the roadster haphazardly on the grass of the front yard, leaving the top down. Inside, he went first to the long living room that took up the rear half of the house, dropping his briefcase, pouring himself more whiskey at his old mahogany bar, and then going to the old red velvet Victorian chair in the corner. It was by a picture window that overlooked the cemetery, and was his favorite sitting place in a house filled with them.

  Charley slumped down in the chair, stretching his long legs to prop his heels upon the old miner’s trunk he kept beneath the window. The view was of the road and creek and some of the town buildings beyond, as seen through the hanging vines that drooped from the old oaks of the cemetery. The grave markers were wooden, and only a few remained, none of them fully upright. Most of those buried there were children, victims of the myriad plagues and diseases that wandered the West in the mid-nineteenth century. A last shaft of sunlight caught one of the markers now, slanting in through a defile in the opposite ridge line. In Santa Linda, it would not be sunset for another hour. Here, it would come soon.

  He went out the back door and up the path that led through the flower garden behind the house. He managed to keep it presentable with the help of a woman friend fond of flowers. Set into the mountainside just above the garden was a creaky old latticed, brick lanai, equipped with a brick grill and a refrigerator that no longer worked, furnished with a few old rusting lawn chairs and a long porch swing. He settled into that, pushing it into motion with his feet as he let his gaze travel up and down the valley. He had brought many women up to this swing to be in love with over so many—too many—years. Never Maddy Anderson, though. Hers was a place in his life not in keeping with this house. He brought his glass to his lips and set to imagining her lying with him among the pines and mesquite of the mountain behind him, drinking rough wine and watching stars, sometimes shooting stars, as he had done with other women. Too soft, her skin; too gentle, her soul, for Tiburcio.

  His mind, impatient, was interested in something else. The unanswered question that had itched at him all afternoon returned. Not whether the president was truly dead. He still had no doubt of that. But what possible reason there could be for not saying so. Of what use to anyone was a dead president?

  The sun went down before he wished. After his simple meal he returned to the living room, but found he could not listen to music with much contentment. He stood and moved about the long room, ultimately pacing it. He opened his old trunk, rummaging through a thick packet of old photographs in the untidy memorabilia there until he found, as though miraculously, his favorite of Maddy Anderson. He stared at it a long while. She was lovely in it, but his memories of her physical presence, of the touch of her slender hand at the back of his head, of the loveliness of her scent, were better.

  He put on his suit coat again and hurried out to his car. Dresden still dressed with the formality of his native East, an idiosyncrasy that had gained him the undeserved reputation as Tiburcio’s only gentleman. He had even been elected mayor once, an honor he had hastily resigned upon discovering it tended to involve him in the settlement of often violent domestic disputes, especially in the Tiburcio Saloon and Grocery, which served in lieu of a town hall.

  There were no disputes underway when Dresden entered. There was no one there but Coop and the tiny figures on the television screen. The saloonkeeper quickly made clear his interest in Dresden’s presence there that night. He wanted to go into Santa Linda and needed someone to watch the store and tend bar until his sister Belinda returned. Obviously, Coop wanted to be well on the way to Santa Linda before she did. Coop had a new girlfriend, a widow who ran a taco stand.

  Charley had no objection. He had done this many times before.

  After Cooper left, his lurching pickup truck moving off with a clattering roar, Dresden set about reordering the place more to his liking—turning off and unplugging the television set, turning on the gas log in the huge fireplace, closing the always gaping doors to the rest rooms, and depositing a couple of quarters from Coop’s back bar change in the jukebox. He chose mostly from a few selections that the Coopers had kept on the machine for years, in part for his benefit—Ray Charles’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” Ramsey Lewis’s “Memphis in June,” Michel LeGrand’s “A Man and a Woman”—old songs, scratchy echoes of old times.

  He made himself a large, carefully mixed Manhattan, brought it to a chair by the fireplace, and relaxed, tilting back against the wall. The huge old room was full of ghosts, bizarre specters of gloriously bizarre times.

  Dresden had become the blood brother to a Yaqui Indian in this room, had danced Greek dances and picked up full bottles of beer from the floor with his teeth, had won and lost thousands of dollars at poker, had shot a man, had seduced sweet girls and knowing older women.

  Time had run all together now. The young girls, wherever they were, were well on the way to middle age, but in Charley’s memory-filled mind they were still fresh and tender. He could be holding Maddy Anderson’s hand at this moment, if he closed his eyes, as he had so often at odd, gentle times, quiet times like this.

  Maddy Anderson was now thirty-two. Dresden nearly thirty-six. The happy-forever he had found in Tiburcio was turning out to be merely his lifetime, and it was slipping away. If he persisted here, he would soon be old Charley Dresden, just another peculiar character at the bar, drinking in private sadness amidst an ever-increasing crowd of strangers.

  Poe had written:

  Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

  In a strange city lying alone

  Far down within the dim West,

  Where the good and the bad and the worst

  and the best

  Have gone to their eternal rest.

  There shrines and palaces and towers

  (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)

  Resemble nothing that is ours.

  Around, by lifting winds forgot,

  Resignedly beneath the sky

  The melancholy waters lie.

  Poe had died at forty.

  Dresden finished his drink and rose from the chair, gladdened by the sound of a car approaching. It went by, but another shortly after slowed and turned with a flare of headlights into a parking space near the saloon’s front door. It was Danny Hill, an aerospace engineer who lived in a small cabin next to the firehouse and dressed like a sourdough. He had been hired back from his company’s last recession furlough, but his money still went mostly for alimony payments and the upkeep of his Porsche, the one expensive possession he permitted himself.

  Dresden bought him a beer. Hill had worked on Dresden’s Armstrong-Siddeley the previous weekend—without pay and without success, but with considerable effort.

  Hill glanced at the darkened television screen. He wore the kind of haircut that pilots did in the early 1960s and smoked a pipe. He was a man who listened to opera on his phonograph, sometimes all through the night, and threw rocks at his neighbor’s cats. He was Dresden’s best friend, in Tiburcio.

  “Anything new on the president?”

  Dresden shook his head.

  “He’s a lucky stiff, ain’t he?”

  Dresden paused. As was usually the case when he was broke, Hill had been depressed and irri
table for several days. Charley didn’t want to provoke an argument or fight—not with a friend.

  “You don’t think they might have killed him?”

  As the words came out, he found himself beginning to tire of them.

  “Charley, old mate, if he were killed he’d be dead. And they’d be playing Bach fugues on the radio. Last thing I heard on the way home was Willie Nelson.” He put down fifty cents on the bar. “Give me one of those boneless chicken dinners, will you? I skipped lunch.”

  Dresden reached to the basket behind him and set a hard-boiled egg and a napkin in front of his friend. It was likely all the man might eat that night.

  He picked up the half dollar, but opened another beer for Hill and paid for it himself.

  Another flare of headlights announced additions to their evening—old Ed Farber and his wife stopping in for a beer on their way home, en route from other bars where they had stopped for a beer on their way home. A short while later, the Amadeo sisters arrived—Audrey, who was still considered one of the most attractive women in the canyon, and her twin sister, Annette, who at two hundred-forty-some pounds was not. Audrey ordered a Southern Comfort and Coca-Cola, as always. Annette merely sat, waiting for the time when someone would get drunk enough to buy her a drink or ask her to dance. Whenever someone did Cooper usually cut him off from further drinks shortly afterward. It was one of the mysteries of Tiburcio how Audrey could stay so slim on Southern Comfort and Coke and Annette could maintain her bulk on nothing.

  Curly Lewes came in, a technician at the aerospace firm where Hill worked, a woman-hungry man with troubled, sometimes murderous eyes and a bad leg from a free-fall parachuting accident. He asked if he could drink on his tab, and Dresden nodded. Lewes was the man Dresden had shot. They had been arguing, but the gun had discharged by accident, wounding Lewes glancingly in a hard roll of belly muscle. Lewes had sworn to kill him after that, but now loved to show off the scar to women.

  Belinda, Cooper’s sister, entered with a wide swing of the door. Though it happened a half dozen times a day, her arrival was always an event. She was a large, blowsy, but majestic red-haired woman, this night wearing a somewhat ratty mink stole over a somewhat dated black cocktail dress. In her tow was another imposing character, Roy Larson, her lover and the county sheriff. Their affair was a long-standing one, but tended to wane in the periods when he was out of office. Some said Belinda had simply found an inexpensive way to deal with Tiburcio’s lack of a police force. Belinda said there were too many evil minds and nasty tongues in Tiburcio. Dresden always sided with Belinda.

  Charley came out from behind the bar and unplugged the jukebox, to much angry consternation. “Police business,” he said. The television picture came on slowly, revealing an automobile flying through the air. The networks had returned to entertainment programming, as had the San Jose and Salinas stations, but Channel Three was running a special on the assassination attempt, a tearfully blinking Jack Laine interviewing Senator George Calendiari, a bald yet very handsome man with dark eyes and a bandit’s mustache. His family owned one of the largest wineries in California, and additional fortunes in real estate.

  Dresden stared unhappily. Calendiari was Maddy’s husband.

  Calendiari expressed his shock and concern and then sat back, waiting for Laine to ask something intelligent. The director would be running the tape footage soon.

  “Roy,” said Charley to the sheriff. “They’re going to put on the tape of the president getting shot. I’d like you to look at it.”

  “Already saw it, Charley.”

  “Take another look, a close look.”

  On the screen, Bonnie Greer died yet again.

  “You’ve seen a lot of people get shot, Roy. You’ve seen every kind of corpse. Look at him, Roy, and tell me if our president isn’t a dead man.”

  Except for the television, the bar had become eerily quiet. Everyone but a pawing couple in one of the back booths was listening to them, watching the screen. The regulars wondered if they might be on the brink of another Tiburcio entertainment—an argument leading, with luck, to a brawl, and with the sheriff.

  The footage of the president came and went in a virtual instant.

  “All right,” said Dresden. “Dead or alive?”

  “Alive,” said Larson.

  “Roy, did you see his face? That expression? He wasn’t just wincing!”

  “Charley, I could spin you around and jab you a good one in a kidney. Your expression would be ten times worse than his was.”

  Belinda snapped off the set, marched to the jukebox, restored it to operation and full volume, and marched back. “Come on, Charley. Happy times.”

  Dresden shook his head in resignation. The raucous frivolity returned. He let himself succumb to the general contagion. By the time he drove home shortly after two A.M., he actually was happy, if quite thoroughly drunk.

  His mood improved still further. In his front yard was a white Triumph TR-6. Gloom there might be in Washington and all the land, but in Tiburcio, California, in the glorious domain of Charles A. Dresden, there would be jubilation and celebration. Zack was back.

  Charlene Zack was doubtlessly the most attractive woman who had ever set foot in Tiburcio. Much of Dresden’s local status derived simply from her. Tall and sandy-haired, she had legs that might have earned her a considerable income as a model, if she had any inclination to rent herself out in that fashion, which she did not. The daughter of a low-ranking navy officer, her childhood spent at a variety of grubby naval bases around the country, she had graduated from high school in Vallejo and married almost immediately thereafter, as though finally to anchor herself. Yet she had divorced almost immediately after that. Though under age at the time, she had been able to lie with enough skill to gain a job as a cocktail waitress, a California tradition for young women in her predicament. It led to another marriage—and another divorce, happily for Dresden.

  She had been working for a local public relations agency when Dresden had met her, though in two bouts of hard times since she had been compelled to take up the waitress tray again. He had met her not through his work but at a beach down the coast from Santa Cruz, on a warm, sunny winter’s day. He’d been walking along the line of surf without another human in view when he glanced up and saw her in the doorway of a public cabana, her naked torso exposed as she changed clothes. The door had blown open but she didn’t close it; just stood there, returning his gaze, challenging him to move on, or stay. Finally, he turned away, hurrying to his car. He followed her Triumph to a noisy bar down the coast road, and that night he saw her naked torso again.

  Charlene was now a fairly well-paid blackjack dealer in Lake Tahoe, where she’d been working for several weeks. A highly intelligent but badly educated person, she was driven by a curiosity that others mistook for restlessness. She’d become the same kind of migratory creature she’d been as a child, but a voluntary one. At intervals of a year or two, she’d slip away from the Bay Area to Southern California, and then drift back again. Occasionally, she might find reason to live for a time up in Portland or Tahoe—even Honolulu once. Dresden’s house in Tiburcio was her one permanent place. They had a very firm understanding about their separate lives and wide-ranging freedom, but this was Charlene’s home. It was she who had kept up the garden behind the house. It was because of her that Dresden now took other women who came into his life elsewhere, even if that meant the back storeroom of Cooper’s saloon.

  She was asleep, lying facedown in the large Victorian bed that mostly filled the small bedroom. Charley removed all his clothes and slipped in beside her, running his hand along her back.

  “So,” he said, “there’s a Zack in my sack.”

  She grumbled happily, stirring beneath his touch.

  “Get your own Zack,” she said. “This one’s taken.”

  “By whom?”

  “By the sandman. I need some Zs, you oversexed Kraut bastard. I’ve been hours and hours on the road. There was snow in t
he mountains.”

  “What brings you back? Looking for clean underwear?”

  “Don’t wear any.”

  “I know.”

  “I made my stake, Charley. I had some bloody good luck at the casino across from ours. I called you, but you were out, or drunk. I’ve got more than six thousand in cash in that purse over there. I’m going to be around awhile.”

  “Do you want to try public relations again? You can work out of my office if you like.”

  “Not tonight. Private relations tonight.”

  She turned over and looked at him, appreciatively. His happiness passed all quantifying. He had Tiburcio and he had Zack back. Now it truly didn’t matter who the president was, or what happened to him.

  Copley and Walt Kreski had put together a motorcade of five cars, racing them from Gettysburg down through Maryland with sirens shrieking and all lights flashing. The soldiers at Camp David would at least have some fair idea that they were not the Russians, if that still mattered.

  It was not the army who stopped them when they at last entered Catoctin Mountain Park on the road from Thurmont, however. The uniforms were those of the Maryland State Police. The men in the raincoats with them were Kreski’s Secret Service.

  “The president’s people put us under military orders, sir,” said Agent Hammond, after he’d come to the open window of Kreski’s car.

  “I heard your radio transmission,” Kreski said. “At least they’re using us.”

  “It’s a job these state troopers could handle on their own, director. Our mission is to stop all vehicular traffic at this point. I guess yours, too, sir.”

  “Has anyone been allowed through?” Copley asked.

  “Just one car—with escorts. It was Mrs. Hampton. In a limo. Agent Coates recognized her.”

  “No one else?”

  “No one they’d let come up. A lot of press. We let them camp out here, but some MPs came by and ordered them all back to Thurmont. There’s been a lot of helicopter traffic, director. For a while it was almost constant.”