Acts of Mercy (5 page)

This was the sixth time in succession and the fifteenth or twentieth time in three months that he had failed her, failed himself. For years he had been able to keep this part of his life wholly segregated, unaffected by political pressures; now he seemed to have lost that ability. Impotent, he thought, and the word lay bitter and ugly in his mind. Where did all the power go: the potency, the strength? He was the same man he had always been, and yet things kept happening that intimated he might not be.

Maybe he should see Doctor Whiting, his personal and now the White House physician. But Whiting was a somewhat supercilious little man who thought exercise and a proper diet were the answers to most medical problems and that mental strain could better be relieved by positive thinking than by any medicinal aids. No, there was nothing Whiting could do—and he would have been embarrassed discussing impotency with him in any case. What he needed more than anything was another few days at The Hollows—to be home again in California, to lie with Claire in the big brass bed with the springs that could sing like train wheels in the night ...

He realized that she had moved to him again; she caught his hand in hers. “Is there anything you want me to do, dear?”

“No,” Augustine said, “it’s just not going to work tonight.” He felt irritable; his headache was worse now. He drew his hand away. “You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you.”

“Of course not-”

“You don’t have to pretend, Claire. You
are
disappointed in me, and not just because of what didn’t happen a minute ago.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you? I saw the look you gave me at dinner, after you put Austin in his place. You were telling me the same thing you told him, that maybe
I
ought to get out because I can’t handle the presidency anymore.”

She was silent for a time. “Yes,” she said finally, “you’re right that I don’t think you should run for reelection. But it’s not because I believe you can’t handle the presidency. It’s because of what the office is doing to you. Do you honestly feel you can go through another exhausting campaign, another four years without ...”

She broke off.

“Without what?” Augustine said.

“Without suffering any more. Without ruining your health. You’ve changed in these last few months, Nicholas. You’ve ... changed.”

The irritability increased. “You’re like all the rest of them,” he said. “Pushing me with one hand and pulling me with the other. You all want something and when you can’t have it or you’ve got it and you’re afraid of losing it, you put the blame on me.”

“Have I ever said or done anything in the twenty years we’ve been married that wasn’t in your best interests?”

Her voice was soft, patient, reasonable; she was always so imperturbable, so in command of her emotions that at times like this it made him feel frustrated, inadequate. “What about
your
best interests?” he said. “I suppose you had no ambitions of your own, you never wanted to be the First Lady, the wife of the President of the United States.”

“I wanted to be the wife of President Nicholas Augustine, yes. But you’ve given four important, productive years; isn’t that enough work and sacrifice for one person? You’re not a machine, Nicholas. You’re a fifty-six-year-old man who—”

“Who is starting to lose his grip?”

“—who deserves a rest and a chance to live the remainder of his life in peace and privacy. It’s not as if you would be leaving politics altogether; you would still have influence, you could—”

“I’ve heard enough of this,” Augustine said. He swung out of bed, caught up his bathrobe.

“Nicholas ...”

“Good night, Claire,” he said, and walked out and shut the connecting door behind him.

Alone in his own bed, head throbbing, mind working like an engine that coughed and stuttered and would not shut down, he found himself listening to the faint noises that houses make in the night. Harry Truman had once said that the White House cracked and popped all night long, and that you could imagine that old Jackson or Andy Johnson or some other ghost was walking. It was a nice prison, he said, but a prison nevertheless. No man in his right mind would want to come here of his own accord.

And maybe he was right, Augustine thought. Restoration hadn’t changed the old place any; it was still a prison full of the ghosts of long-dead presidents, wandering through the vast halls, whispering to the man who now occupied the premises, telling him things that he could not hear and dared not listen to if he could. Telling him that one day he would join them and add his voice to theirs, because no matter what he did from now on he was one of them: the presidency was a life sentence, an eternal sentence, and there was no way he was ever going to get out.

We are still not quite sure of the identities of the traitors, but the evidence is beginning to mount strongly against one man in particular. Is he the leader of the conspiracy among those close to the President, of the turncoats who hide behind the guise of friendship and trust? We are beginning to believe that he is.

We must have more conclusive evidence before we can act—but we sense it will not be long until this final damning proof is revealed to us, until he stands before us fully exposed. And when that time comes, we will act immediately and without compunction. The conspiracy must be stopped at all costs; the traitor must be eliminated.

But we must be careful too. The President’s safety and the President’s future are in our hands; we must carry out our mission not only with dispatch but with caution and premeditation. There are those who would not understand our methods, those who would try to prevent us from acting if they suspected our intention.

Soft, then. Soft and cunning.

Death to the traitor on cat’s paws.

At precisely nine o’clock Wednesday morning, Maxwell Harper knocked on the door of the Oval Study upstairs and then opened it and stepped inside. The room was empty. His immediate reaction was one of annoyance; he had called the President an hour earlier to request a private appointment, and Augustine had told him to come here at nine instead of to the Oval Office, and if there was one thing Harper detested it was a lack of punctuality.

He crossed the room and sat in one of the leather armchairs before the fireplace, placing his briefcase carefully on the floor beside him. The drapes were drawn across the windows that looked out on the south lawn, and the room seemed dark, oppressively cluttered. Too much furniture, haphazardly arranged; and too much emphasis on trains. Augustine’s collection of railroadiana—a dozen different types of switch-stand lanterns, locomotive headlamps, an early telegrapher’s outfit, a ticket-validating machine, glass cases filled with brass baggage checks and advertising memorabilia and dime novels and popular fiction dealing with railroads—made it look more like an obscure museum than a White House study. Harper himself was a neat, fastidious man whose bachelor apartment near the French embassy was a model of functional conservatism; he had always felt out of place here.

As he waited, his annoyance modulated into determination. Things, he had decided, were approaching a serious crisis point: the Israel gaffe, Augustine’s inattention to the Indian problem in Montana, his decision to run off still again to The Hollows were all danger signals not to be treated lightly. The President was backing himself into a political corner, and that did not bode well for the country or for anyone in his administration.

He was badly worn out, which was understandable because the man had worked like a demon for the past three and a half years; but that was a symptom, not an explanation. The fact was, it was not Augustine who was responsible for what was happening, it was those with whom he had surrounded himself in responsible, influential positions. Men such as Franz Oberdorfer, and perhaps Julius Wexford and Austin Briggs—men Harper had not approved of from the beginning. They had given the President poor advice or not enough advice, used him to further their own careers, even circumvented him entirely like that demagogue Oberdorfer; and Augustine, never a forceful leader, had begun to buckle under the pressure and the dissension.

This close to the convention, a wholesale firing of these people was impossible because it would completely undermine public faith in the President. What could be done, what
had
to be done, was to make Augustine realize both the danger and his own fallibility and then to take steps to rectify matters. Rifts with the press had to be sutured, a strong and vocal reelection campaign had to be implemented, concessions to the National Committee and to certain special-interest groups and to the Jewish electorate had to be made that would induce them to remain in the President’s corner. Then, after renomination and reelection, Oberdorfer and the others could be systematically replaced—

The door to the Monroe Room across the study opened, interrupting Harper’s reverie, and he glanced up. But it was not the President who entered; it was the First Lady.

Harper rose immediately. “Good morning, Mrs. Augustine,” he said.

She hesitated for a moment, looking at him, and then came slowly across the room. She wore a beige pantsuit that accentuated the slim lines of her body, and her hair was done in a casual ponytail tied with a blue velvet ribbon. Harper felt the palms of his hands turn moist; she never failed to have that effect on him.

“Good morning,” she said, and stopped a half-dozen paces away from him. Her tone was cool and curiously dull, and he realized in the dim light that she looked as tired as the President: small lines beneath her eyes, a pinched look to the corners of her mouth. He wondered if she understood the seriousness of Augustine’s position. Surely she did understand, as intelligent and perceptive as she had always been.

He said, “I had a nine o’clock appointment with the President, so I came straight up. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t mind ... Maxwell.”

“He’s ten minutes late,” Harper said. “Do you know where he is?”

A loose strand of hair had fallen away from her temple and she brushed it back into place in that absent, caressing way some attractive women had, both conscious and unconscious of its sensuality. “He had a meeting at eight o’clock with the security affairs advisor,” she said. “I imagine he’ll be here shortly.”

She seemed to want to say something else, but did not; Harper had the impression that she was vaguely ill at ease. She was usually so poised, so self-assured, and yet in his presence she was oddly subject to fluctuating moods. Sometimes she seemed cold and distant, as if she did not like or trust him completely; at other times she was open and friendly in a way that bordered on affection. It occurred to him now, as it had before, that she intuited his carefully concealed attraction for her and perhaps responded to it. That under different circumstances she might have been receptive to him as an intimate.

Or as a lover? he thought.

Pointless thinking, damn it.
Pointless.

At length she said, “If you’ll excuse me, I have some things to do.”

“Of course, Mrs. Augustine.”

Harper watched her walk across to the hallway door, the play of her hips beneath the suit pants. When she got there, she paused and looked back at him, as if she still wanted to say something more; but again she did not speak. And a moment later she was gone.

Frowning, he returned to the chair by the fireplace and sat down again. He wished he understood her better, what motivated her, what went on behind that dispassionate public facade. Did Augustine himself understand her? Did anyone? She was the President’s wife, she had by everyone’s testimony more to do with this administration than any First Lady since Mrs. Woodrow Wilson—and yet, could it be that she was not working with the President so much as using their collaboration as cover for some sort of personal cachet?

He could not quite shake the pervasive feeling that she was something more and something less than what she seemed to be.

The press secretary’s office was down the hall from the West Wing Reception Room, and as Christopher Justice turned the corner toward it a few minutes past noon, on an errand for the President, two men just emerged from the office were walking shoulder to shoulder and talking animatedly. Even though they had their backs to Justice, he recognized them: Attorney General Wexford and Peter Kineen.

Justice paused, looking after them. There was probably some innocuous reason for them to be together, but it struck him as odd that Kineen, the President’s bitter rival, should be here in the White House; that he should be so intimate with the attorney general, who was also chairman of the President’s reelection campaign. And odd, too, that both men had been together with Austin Briggs (whom Justice didn’t particularly like because he sometimes seemed to use questionable judgment in his comments to the press).

Thoughtfully, he continued to the press secretary’s office. When he entered he saw that there was no one at the outer reception desk: Briggs’s private secretary had evidently gone to lunch. The door to the inner office stood ajar, and Justice crossed to it and knocked and then pushed it inward.