Rex Stout (18 page)

Chick was beside her. “Alma, I’m all right, don’t, I’ll be all right in a minute …” She opened her hand and showed him the wrist watch: “It was on the floor, he had it, they must catch him.” Chick’s face was above her so she could not see it, but she felt his hand on the receiver pulling at it, and he was saying in a voice suddenly alert and sharp, “Cut it. Ring off.” But she was saying to the transmitter: “Tell him it’s Alma Cronin, a man that was just here had the President’s wrist—”

Chick’s hand had pushed down the hook and cut the connection. She grabbed at it. “Chick! Are you crazy?”

“No. Turn loose, Alma. I’ll explain.”

“You can explain later—they must catch him—are you crazy?”

“Here—listen—”

“No. Chick! They must catch him!”

“They don’t need to catch him. That watch didn’t fall out of his pocket, it fell out of mine. I tell you, drop it! I’ll explain.”

Alma stared at him, at the grimness of his jaws and the hardness of his eyes. She did not see the trickle of blood on his temple, trickling to his cheek. Her own face went white. She stared, and finally said: “Out of your pocket, Chick.”

“Yes. And I was wrong, Alma. I can’t explain. You’ll have to trust me.”

She would not have dreamed his eyes could be so hard. She made her own voice hard: “Mr. Wardell will have to trust you.” She had the receiver again; the hook was up; she gave the number of the Department of Justice. Chick said, “Alma, for God’s sake. Alma, please.”

“Whatever happens, Chick, I am going to tell Lewis Wardell that I found that watch on my floor. Secret Service Bureau? This is Alma Cronin, my message for Mr. Wardell …”

She could not see Chick, who had stepped behind her. She could not see the desperate resolve on his face, nor his double fist drawn back. Certainly after the fist had been driven against her jaw she could see nothing, for it had been
scientifically directed and propelled for a “sleeper.” As she crumpled up Chick caught her in his arms before she could go to the floor.

He hardly looked at her, unconscious in his arms. He was losing no fraction of a second. He laid her on the bed, left the room and ran down the flight of stairs. In the lower hall he departed by the rear, crossed the garden-court, and went through a passage between two houses into the other street. There, parked under a tree, was his sedan. He got in and started it, drove to the corner and turned, down a block and again a right turn. Two hundred feet brought him in front of the entrance of Alma’s house; he stopped, and left the engine running. Out on the sidewalk, he looked around, twice in every direction; the street was quiet, there was no light for some distance, and no army patrol in sight. He entered the house and ran upstairs and into Alma’s room, meeting no one. She was still quiet, dead quiet, on the bed. He took a dark coat from the closet and wrapped it around her, got her in his arms, crossed and opened the door a crack, and listened. There was no sound save a faint hum of voices from the floor above; the way seemed clear. He entered the hall, not bothering to turn off the light, and closed the door behind him. With his burden he could not run down the stairs, but he made good time. In the hall below he turned the light off and then opened the street door. A couple were passing on the sidewalk; he waited; a woman came along; he waited. It seemed clear, and he ventured to the stoop. No one was in sight within a hundred yards. He dashed for it.

He shut the door of the sedan. She was inside, on the floor in the back, with the coat for a pillow. He opened the front door and got behind the steering-wheel, shoved the gear, started. If only the moving and jolting didn’t rouse her! It could not be done in less than twelve minutes. If only she would sleep that long! Alma … my beloved Alma … for God’s sake sleep!

Ordinarily a hundred men rule the United States. The statement is subject to numerous and complicated qualifications. The hundred rulers have their advisers, lieutenants, and influential followers; they act with varying degrees of awareness and responsibility in their rôles; they are organized loosely and informally and often defeat their own ends by their contradictions and jealousies. But in the large, they rule; against a majority of them no major policy can be pursued; against their united opposition any program or design is without hope. They have developed a complex and fascinating technique for the assertion of their will; unlike the kings of divine right, who had merely to command openly the obedience which was due to them by common consent, these modern princes conceal their scepters under all the disguises which necessity may suggest and ingenuity can invent. But though the scepter has relinquished its gilt and its ceremonial function as a royal toy, it has abandoned none of its power.

By noon of Thursday seventy or more of those hundred men were in the city of Washington. They came from Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, Kansas City, Boston, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New York. They arrived by automobile, train, and airplane. It was not especially noteworthy that they were for the most part in a state of astonishment, indignation, alarm, and bewilderment, for such a condition is habitual with rulers and masters of men; it is apparently an occupational peculiarity induced by the constant impingement of large and grave affairs.
Uneasy lies the head
would cover that. What was remarkable about their condition was their impotence. It was unprecedented and outrageous. They had arranged for war, and when rulers arrange for war that is traditionally what they get. Not that they had expected war as one expects interest coupons on a bond; simply it had happened that way. Many of them regretted the necessity; but when their loans to belligerents were endangered, their shiploads of munitions stopped or destroyed, their foreign investments wiped out, their profits annihilated and their market holdings reduced to pitiful
fractions, war was inevitable. Too bad, but inevitable. They had forthwith communicated with the persons who exist for that purpose: editors, legislators, radio executives, clergymen, professors, patriots. Good; that was arranged. But there had been exasperating delays, one after another. They were not confronted with any open and organized resistance, except from inconsequential groups of fanatics here and there, but there appeared to be an amazing quantity of reluctance that came from nowhere and everywhere. They had one point of disaffection spotted: President Stanley. He did not openly oppose them, but they knew what was going on. He was soft; he was beset with sentimental squeamishness in the face of the sterner realities of the national need and the national honor. They accepted his weapons, and refrained from open attack; they undermined him. On the Monday afternoon before the Tuesday of the joint session D. L. Voorman had prepared a list of 304 Representatives and 59 Senators safe for war. Thank God; it was arranged at last, and barely in time. They all knew it was arranged, and were confidently and feverishly preparing for the sequel, the cyclone of steel and blood they had ordered. They had their breasts against the tape. Then the wires and the wireless brought the news of the adjournment—another delay, when destiny had begun to count not only hours but minutes; and then, incredibly, the word that President Stanley had been kidnapped. It was intolerable, a ridiculous and fatal disaster; no other President had ever been kidnapped; trust that sentimental ass to let it happen to him at this terrible juncture vital to the welfare and honor of the country!

They rushed to Washington.

They found there a situation without precedent and beyond calculation.

Reviewing from this vantage-point the activities of the rulers on that Thursday, them and their lieutenants, advisers, followers, and opponents, the chief impression one gets is that of a chaotic and helpless lunacy; but that view is far too uncharitable. It was not the case, as it might superficially
appear, that confronted by a unique crisis they were all suddenly reduced to imbecility; on the whole their composure, their fertility of resource, their audacity, their bellicosity, their tactical talents did not desert them. But they were unequal to the situation because they did not know what it was. The most important element in it was a question mark. Had they known President Stanley was dead, it would have been simple. Had they known where he had been taken and by whom, it would have been equally simple. Had they even known but one thing, that it was certain the President would not be returned for forty-eight hours, the situation would have been handled with dispatch and when the President was returned it would have been as the Commander-in-Chief of an Army and Navy at war. But of the President they knew nothing and could learn nothing, and by that uncertainty many of them were paralyzed and the remainder frustrated. On account of that uncertainty, because at any moment of the day or night the word might come that the President was found, rescued, on his way back to the White House, no one would commit himself to a course or compromise himself by an action; Molleson would not move, Attorney-General Davis would not decide, Senators and Representatives would not speak. In a hundred offices, libraries, and hotel rooms the rulers threatened, exhorted, cajoled, and cursed; to no avail.

It could not be said that the legislators and high officials were in revolt against the rulers. It could not even be said that they were standing firm on principle or in loyalty to an absent leader. They were merely reflecting the temper of the country as evidenced by telegrams, air-mail letters and telephone messages from their constituents, reports from their observers at home, newspaper dispatches, all the sensitive threads of feeling, opinion, and prejudice which form the enormous nation-wide web having Washington for a center. The people had loved their President. Latterly doubts and strictures had begun to find expression—no matter how they came; the fabric of his popularity had worn thin; but they had loved him. Now they wanted him back; they wanted him back and until they got him they wanted nothing else; to hell with corn-planting, trial balances, monthly bills, leaky faucets and war, until the President was found. Especially, for the moment, to hell with war; they were sick of hearing about it anyway. The feeling was overwhelming, from ocean to ocean and lakes to gulf, and they let Washington know it. It
was enhanced by the one of the thousand contradictory rumors which had gained most credence and had in many communities supplanted all others: that the President had been kidnapped by an international banker and was being held in the basement vault of a Wall Street building until he would agree to war. Negotiations were supposed to be going on behind the scenes.

Representative Binns of Georgia was funny. That is, he was a wit. Thursday morning he said to a group of his colleagues:

“It looks to me perfectly obvious. Who has profited by it? The pacifists. Tuesday afternoon Congress would have voted war no matter what the President said; if the question got to the floor today not one would dare to vote at all, they’d duck and run to a man. Of course, if and when he comes back it might be different again, but as long as he’s gone there’s not a chance. It certainly looks obvious. Gentlemen, I’ll tell you where he is: the Women’s League for Peace has got him. They’ve got him at their headquarters, sitting on him. And I don’t blame Wardell for not storming the place and rescuing him; personally, I would prefer to paddle a canoe across the Pacific and attack a Japanese battleship.”

They laughed, a little. Not much, and not long.

Binns’s logic was used, seriously and more to the point, an hour later by Senator Corcoran. He was talking to Lewis Wardell. After repeated requests, by phone and messenger, Wardell had given him fifteen minutes. Since his victory at the Cabinet meeting the afternoon before, Wardell had grown more irritable, more frantic, and more humble. He had delegated various important lines of inquiry to Assistant Attorney-General and men from the State and Treasury Departments, with instructions to report to him nothing but results. He had listened to Chief Skinner and taken his advice. He had sent Grinnell and Voorman and a score of others equally prominent to jail, and had so far refused to see them, but they were soon to be released as part of a new strategy devised by Skinner. A hundred men were to be placed in the central offices of the telephone company; all
calls from and to a long list of numbers were to be listened to. More experienced detectives were on their way from the nearest cities; all persons, including Brownell and Lincoln Lee, who had been apprehended, were to be set free and kept constantly under surveillance. Skinner’s point was that nothing could be learned from a man under detention who would not talk; free but observed, betrayal sooner or later was certain. He would, he said, try a little talk with Lee himself before he let him go.

Wardell was not disheartened, he was only frantic. He would not have believed it possible. The most intensive search, for two days and two nights, by the largest and most expert body of investigators ever assembled, aided by the unanimous ardor and determination of the citizens, had failed to discover the trail. The mass of details they had collected sifted into nothing so far as the main objective was concerned. Brownell had, or had not, bought chloroform; it had or had not been his own handkerchief. Wardell had seen him again, Wednesday midnight, with the Secretaries of State and War present, and Brownell had stuck to his assertion of innocence and ignorance and demanded to be released. Liggett and Oliver had agreed that there was sufficient evidence to warrant holding him. Hundreds of people had been found who had seen the truck at various points on the streets of the city, but in no case was there any positive proof that it had not been another of the Callahan trucks, and there had been so many conflicting descriptions of the driver that all of them were useless. All persons who had seen the truck, or thought they had, had been given a look at Val Orcutt; the dozen or so who claimed to identify him had not been sufficiently convincing to invalidate Val’s own story. The sentry at the entrance, who had at first claimed to have seen the driver leaving as well as arriving, and who had later admitted he could not definitely remember the leaving, had Wednesday night confessed that he had not seen the truck leave at all; he had merely heard it; he had been watching a flock of pigeons. The man in the receiving room of the White House basement had seen or heard nothing unusual. He had not gone outdoors at all that morning after arriving at work; he had taken the delivery from Val and given him the empty baskets, and had gone on, whistling, arranging things on his shelves.