Acts of Mercy (16 page)

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

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 Claire’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—

—until he was awake again.

There was no disorientation this time; he was immediately aware of where he was, and of the fact that he was once more lying on his back, no longer touching Claire. The darkness in the compartment was heavy, complete except for faint shadow images dancing on the walls: reflections of passing landscape filtered through the partially shaded windows. Augustine turned his head to look at Claire, saw her as a dim silhouette beneath the blankets. He reached out to touch her hip again, felt the sleek material of her gown instead of bare flesh, and then realized that his own pajama bottoms were snug around his waist.

He could not remember having pulled them up. Had Claire done that for him? On impulse, he put his face close to hers. She was also resting on her back, mouth open, making faint snoring sounds; the position of her body, Augustine thought, was almost exactly as it had been after she had come into the berth with him.

Looking at her, he felt a sudden unease. What if she had not, after all, come awake during the time he was making love to her? What if she failed in the morning to bear witness to his success, even questioned that it had happened at all? What if she considered it a kind of wish-fulfilling dream on his part?

What if she was right?

The thought was abrupt and jarring. He rejected it instantly—and yet, while he recalled the sensations of the act clearly, the physical details were blurred, as in a memory of something which took place long ago. As in a dream—

The sensations.

He slid a hand beneath the covers, touched the front of his pajamas. And felt dampness, a faint stickiness. No, he thought, not at my age, not after all those nights of failure.

But it was true and he knew it.

A dream. It had all been nothing more than a wet dream ...

Justice sat in his dark compartment and told himself he ought to go to bed, get some sleep, because it was after midnight now and he would have to be up at six. But he did not move, only continued to look out the window at the black shapes of mountains and cutbanks and tree-covered ridges: the Presidential Special was moving now through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, somewhere northeast of Stockton. High running clouds obscured the moon and part of the sky, but stars winked here and there like tiny watching eyes.

There’s just nothing I can do, he thought. Mr. Harper shouldn’t have come to me, he shouldn’t have tried to put any of the burden on me. It’s not
up
to me, I’m just a Secret Service bodyguard, a civil servant with no authority and no influence. What can I do to help the President that I haven’t already done?

He kept on sitting there, watching the eyes in the sky that seemed to be watching him.

The observation car is empty when we come into it from the club car, but through the door-window opposite we can see the dark silhouette of a man standing outside on the platform, the red-embered tip of a cigar like a hole burning in the darkness beside him. Wexford? It must be, we think. We have been to his compartment in one of the forward cars and found it empty, and we have not located him anywhere else on the train.

We cross to the door, slide it open. Cold night air surges against our face, spiced with the fragrance of spruce and pine, and the magnified clacking hum of steel on steel buffets our ears. The man at the far railing turns, and in the outspill of light behind us we can see him plainly. The muted thunder of the wheels seems to lift into a throbbing, wailing cadence, like a voice in the night.

Wex-ford, Wex-ford, Wex-ford...

We close the door, walk over next to him at the railing. He is wearing an overcoat buttoned to the throat and his hair is rumpled from the wind. Night-shadowed, his florid face has a waxy cast. He does not look dangerous, he only looks old and meek, like a benign grandfather. False illusion. We know him for what he really is, and our hatred for him glows as bright as the tip of his last cigar.

“Oh,” he says, “it’s you.”

“Yes,” we say. Like him, we have raised our voice in order to be heard above the chanting of the wheels.

“Train upsets my stomach so I can’t sleep,” he says. “I thought some fresh air might help. Couldn’t you sleep either?”

“No. Not yet, anyway. Not for a while.”

“It’s pretty cold out here. You ought to have a coat.”

“I don’t mind the cold. It’s the heat that bothers me.”

“Heat?”

“Yes,” we say, “the heat.”

Wexford frowns slightly, raises his cigar and draws on it until the tip shimmers cherry red and the wind strips away its dead ash. We can see the glow of it reflected in his eyes.

The car lurches as the train moves into a long curve and we put out a hand to grasp the rail. Our fingers brush the back of Wexford’s hand; we jerk them away because we do not want to touch him, not that way. As we look at him his mouth puckers and his throat works—a silent belch, as if the sudden lurch-and-sway has made him nauseous. He peers distastefully at his cigar, then flicks it out over the railing where the wind catches it and hurls it into the night amid a shower of sparks. His mouth opens and we watch him breathe deeply several times.

Then we say, “You don’t like trains, do you?”

“No. I never have.”

“They’re an integral part of American history, you know.”

“I suppose so.”

“Just like treachery,” we say.

That startles him. “What?”

“There have been traitors in Washington for two hundred years,” we say calmly. “You’re not the first and you won’t be the last.”

“Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

“You know what it means. You’re a traitor, Julius—just as Briggs was. But you’re even worse because you’ve hidden your treachery behind a mask of friendship and personal trust.”

He glares at us, his mouth pinched with aggrieved anger. “What kind of wild talk is that?” he says. “I won’t stand for it.”

We shrug. “The truth is always painful.”

“I demand an apology.”

“Demand all you like.”

He stands flustered, at a loss for words. “We’ll see about this,” he says finally, and starts to move past us.

The voice of the train says,
Wex-ford, Wex-ford, Wex-ford.
We look back through the door-window; the observation car is still empty. In the darkness, then, we take from our jacket pocket one of the train’s standard White House heavy glass ashtrays which we had picked up in our compartment. We cup it upside down in our palm, holding it along our hip where he cannot see it.

“We have a little something to make you sleep,” we say.

He hesitates, half-turning toward us. “What’s that?”

“To make you sleep,” we say again, and we thrust the ashtray straight up against the bridge of his nose with such force that pain erupts in our armpit and chest.

A sharp cracking thud, a gasp that strangulates almost instantly in his throat. Wexford’s hands flutter up toward his face, spasm, then fall limply as his legs give way and he drops bull-like to his knees. We sidestep quickly, watch him topple over against the railing and lie still, lie silent.

Lie dead.

Another execution, another act of mercy completed.

We check the observation car another time, but no one has come inside in the past few seconds. Then we hurl the ashtray into the night, bend to grasp Wexford under the arms. In death his features seem to have softened, to have lost form and definition like gray wax melting. The skin of his face is cold against our bare wrist; but we don’t mind it now because we are not touching
him,
we are only touching a lifeless shell.

He is much heavier than Briggs was and it takes us a minute or two of straining effort to lift him across the railing so that most of his bulk is tipped forward and hanging down toward the tracks below. We step back then and take his ankles, heave up once, push once—and he slides away from us and is gone.

We lean forward on the railing, trying to see where he has landed. We seem to see him bounce and roll across the tracks, off the right-of-way, but the train is moving so rapidly and the night is so dark that we cannot be sure. Not that it matters. On or off the tracks, he’ll be found eventually by searchers; this is not a wilderness area of gorges and deep ravines that might hide forever the body of an old traitor. The main thing is, his death, too, will appear to have been a tragic accident.

The wind is chill on our face, but it is also somehow soothing; we continue to stand looking down at the black steel ribbons appearing and retreating beneath us—so close beneath us that we imagine we can reach down and touch them. The voice of the wheels shrieks in our ears, only we realize abruptly that it is no longer saying
Wex-ford.
We close our eyes, listening.

And the words become clear.
You-too,
the train is saying now.
You-too, you-too, you-too.

We do not find this strange, nor does it frighten us. We have thought of suicide before: the utter peace of death is appealing. But this is not the time or the place, and we do not want to lie out there with Julius. We must continue to be strong until the conspiracy has been completely and irrevocably destroyed.