Rex Stout (9 page)

“Yes. You don’t seem particularly disconcerted.”

Skinner shook his head. “I quit having hysterics a long time ago. Tell me about it.”

Wardell told him succinctly, in less than two minutes, all that he knew. When he had finished the Chief of the Secret Service just looked at him, with raised eyebrows, not only saying nothing, but apparently with no intention of saying anything. Wardell said impatiently, “Well, when you’re through staring …”

“Excuse me.” Skinner let his eyebrows down. “Maybe I’ll have hysterics after all. I don’t remember ever hearing a worse cockeyed story, Mr. Secretary.”

“Cockeyed?”

“Yeah, cockeyed. The President of the United States disappears, and for five precious hours, goddam precious, his secretary treats it like a family game of hide-and-seek, and for two more hours the Cabinet sits around and plays who’s-got-the-button. Maybe that’s what you’ve got to expect from a Cabinet, but if I’m supposed to butt in on this—am I supposed to butt in?”

“Go on.”

“I wouldn’t bother much about anything else until Mr. Brownell told all about those five hours.”

Wardell nodded. “That is in prospect. The bothering will be done by me. You understand that?”

“Yeah. Davis said to follow you, you’re in charge.”

“Good.” Wardell turned to the secretary. “I’ll finish with you, Brownell, and you can get back to your office and feed the newspaper wolves. If you’ll handle them I’ll appreciate it. Let me have that handkerchief.” The secretary took a paper bag from his pocket and handed it over; Wardell opened it, sniffed inside, nodded and laid it on the desk. To Skinner: “Chloroform. Smell it.” To Brownell: “Why did you suppose, until noon, that the President would appear at the Capitol?”

The Secretary replied promptly, “I didn’t say I supposed that. I said we thought we had reason to suppose it.”

“And the reason?”

“It will sound fantastic. Last Thursday Tremaine of Allentown Steel told me that he would find a way of having a talk with the President in advance of a public commitment on the war. He said, in spite of hell. He had been trying to see the President for a month.”

“Fantastic enough. Do you mean you thought Tremaine had carried the President off just to have a talk with him, and when he was through talking he would drive him around to the Capitol?”

“No. Not like that. There were other things, many of them; Sunday the President told Mrs. Stanley that before taking his stand he would like to hear one able and intelligent presentation of the other side, and that although Tremaine was a hyena he had ability and intelligence. Many things; damn it, the President was gone, and we had to think something!”

“All right.” Wardell appeared to accept it. “From twelve-thirty to two-thirty you pursued another line. What?”

“An idea of Mrs. Stanley’s. She went to see Sally Voorman, the wife of Voorman the steel lobbyist.”

“What for?”

“To play bridge—no, I guess it was checkers. What the hell do you suppose for?”

“I don’t know. Not to try to catch her husband in a morning amour, I imagine. I’m asking you.”

Brownell got up from the chair. He was controlling himself. He jerked away a step, stopped and turned, shut his lips tight and looked down at Lewis Wardell a moment, and then sat
down again. He said, “You’re wasting time, Wardell. Of course what you want is to learn why I waited till half-past two to notify someone and start some action. That’s easy. Because I didn’t know whom to notify. Look here. Suppose someone—a munitions man or a patrioteering maniac like Caleb Reiner—has carried off the President and intends to hold him until Congress has been driven and pushed and bribed into war, or until Molleson has temporarily assumed the office and achieved the same result? Suppose the job of finding the President is placed in the hands of the Attorney-General or the Chief of the Secret Service—it doesn’t matter who—anyway, a man whom the munitions crowd owns or the maniac controls? Guess how much chance there would be of his being found until the purpose was achieved! That was the situation that confronted Mrs. Stanley and me this morning. We had no fear that the President had been seriously harmed, or that he would be. We acted as his proxies and lieutenants, in the manner that we thought best calculated to preserve the policy dearest to his heart. Damn it, we love him! We love him and belong to him! She does of course—well, I do too. We acted and shall continue to act
in his interest.
First, we surmised that the people playing this incredibly bold game would have perfected their plans for an immediate coup: they would expect that the absence of the President would become public news by noon, when Congress would meet, and in the excitement, doubtless by a well-arranged sequence, they would get their war. So we fooled them on that; we waited until Congress met and adjourned. Then Mrs. Stanley wanted to try one thing, one stab through a curtain, and I let her; it was without result. We next spent an hour together in the President’s study, deciding on a man who must have two qualifications: he must be sufficiently high in authority to stand a chance of being placed in charge, and he must be as completely reliable as possible. Close to the President as we were, we knew only too well that not a single highly-placed man in Washington could be regarded as beyond suspicion. We knew that the Cabinet would never stand for me.”

The secretary’s eyes were boring at Wardell. “We decided on you. Billings we knew better, but there was too much straw in him. We picked you. I phoned Billings to come early to the meeting, and primed him to put you up. So you’ve got a job. Find the President. You’ll find him. They won’t dare to hurt him. Essentially you’ll have to do the job alone, because
I swear to God there’s not a man you can trust implicitly; not a cop, not even a White House Secret Service man, not a member of the Cabinet. The munitions gang has got its bloody claws in places you’d never suspect; the bankers have sent billions abroad but they know how to use money at home too; the patrioteers that are the most dangerous are the ones who make the least noise; and the Gray Shirts are about as silly and harmless as Hitler’s mob was in nineteen-thirty. Find the President, Wardell, find him and bring him back to the White House with his policy still clean and intact in his hands, and then let them tear it away from him if they can. And trust no one except yourself.”

Brownell turned, suddenly whirling, and put his eyes on the head of the Secret Service. “What about you, Skinner? What are you like?”

Skinner’s gray doubting eyes met the secretary’s. He said quietly, “Oh, average. Ornery and suspicious and sometimes honest. But when I’m getting paid for a job I never make a mistake about who I’m working for.” He looked at Wardell. “It might be a good plan to get started on this little case before the week’s out.”

Brownell asked, “Do you want me any more?”

Wardell shook his head. “No. Two orations in one day is enough. Thanks for the hints. I can get you.”

Brownell went. After the door had closed behind him Wardell said, “Well, Chief. First, what do you think of Secretary Brownell?”

“Not so bad,” Skinner replied. “I rather like some of his ideas, for instance about not trusting anyone. That’s why I was thinking it might be a good plan to send three or four men over to account for all the cubic inches in the White House.”

Wardell nodded. “We’ll do that.”

Lewis Wardell had never done any sleuthing. Previous to his appointment to the Cabinet he had been a practicing attorney in Indiana, active in politics on the liberal side. He had a sharp flexible mind, a skeptical but tolerant philosophy, and a pertinacity notable even among the stubborn Hoosiers. He
had, in short, unusual abilities; but he had never done any sleuthing, and that fact was in large part responsible for the mistake he made that Tuesday evening and failed to correct for forty-eight hours: he attempted to carry on the action on all sectors at once and to retain personal command of each sector. The results were that confusion and delay hampered the most valiant efforts of his men, many lines of inquiry were left suspended without either abandonment or conclusion, and he all but collapsed at his desk on Thursday afternoon.

It was not that he disdained help. When the shrewdest inspector in the New York Police Department arrived with twenty picked men from the Detective Bureau at one o’clock Tuesday night, his offer of assistance was eagerly welcomed. Similar offers from other cities were declined only because no use could be made of them. Before dawn Wednesday morning the hunt was well organized and a hundred highways, alleys and tunnels of possibility were being explored. Many scores of the citizens known to the newspapers as “denizens of the underworld” had been rounded up and were being held, and hundreds of Gray Shirts, including their national leader, Lincoln Lee, who had been found sleeping in a room in the apartment of a Representative from Texas. All persons known to have been in or near the White House or its grounds on Tuesday morning had been questioned, and six of them—a servant, two clerks, the two gardeners, and the messenger from the Department of State—had been locked up pending further inquiry. Five men from the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of State were in the offices of the telephone company, checking all long distance calls from Monday morning on. The movements of the car which had brought plants to the gardeners had been verified for every minute of the day. The sentry who had been at the rear entrance was under arrest, likewise the guard who had been in that portion of the grounds and the two men of the White House squad of the Secret Service who had been on duty. The origin of the chloroformed handkerchief—linen, fair quality, not new, hemstitched, no laundry marks—was being investigated by a dozen men, and a dozen more were getting druggists and their clerks out of bed all over the city, inquiring into sales of chloroform for the past several days. Men with electric searchlights from the War Department were examining each inch of the terrain—lawn, pavement, and gravel—of the grounds south of the White House. A small
army was combing the city, divided into sections, with orders to question anyone and inspect any premises offering the slightest promise or the slightest suspicion. By three o’clock in the morning Lewis Wardell had reconsidered the tenders from other cities of the assistance of trained and picked men, and was telephoning Baltimore and Philadelphia and Boston to send them on.

Another line was being pursued by a special group of Assistant Attorneys-General, Department of State investigators, and a miscellany selected by Wardell and Billings. These were invading the homes of the great and near-great, official and lay, in many cases rousing them from sleep, and talking things over with them. They were combining suavity with inquisitiveness and making it a point not to offend, chiefly hoping for a careless hint, an unguarded word, that might present a clue.

And by three o’clock a sort of help that was of course inevitable and, however bothersome it might be, could not safely be ignored, was already arriving in volume and threatened to become an avalanche. The telegraph and telephone wires were humming with advice, clues, and suspicions from thousands of alert and sleepless citizens, from counties in every state. When the first such had arrived around seven o’clock Lewis Wardell had issued emphatic instructions that every communication received was to be reported to him! Eight hours later, not yet daylight, six men were doing nothing but receive them—five on telephones and one slitting telegrams—in a room of another bureau of the Department of Justice commandeered for that purpose.

The men, regular Secret Service, assigned to the trails originating in the White House and grounds scored the first hit.

At four o’clock in the morning Lewis Wardell, in Chief Skinner’s room which he had appropriated for his headquarters, was drinking black coffee, reading copy for a telegram to be rushed to all officers of the law in the United States, talking on the telephone to an Assistant Attorney-General, and listening to the man who called himself Lincoln Lee,
who, handcuffed, was seated in a chair at the corner of the desk. When he had hung up the receiver he turned to face Lee.

“Now repeat that.”

Lee, for one, had not relinquished his gray shirt, though a coat mostly concealed it. Above its open collar the cords of his neck showed hard like tubes of steel; he sat with his backbone strong and straight, poised, if not for action that instant or that night, in any case for action. His wrists on his lap were neither accepting nor resisting the handcuffs; they too were action in suspense.

His voice was contemptuous, assured, and coldly unyielding. “You asked what are my personal ambitions. I said I have none. Do you mean the petty ambition of a bureaucrat like yourself? That is for small men. I am not pursuing ambition, I am following destiny. What I am, I am, I need not become; I need only make myself known to others and I shall be recognized. If the President was kidnapped for political reasons, those who did it are political infants; they are not strong, they are merely desperate. If they kill him, the reaction will defeat and destroy them; if they return him, he will defeat them himself.”

“You said you would kill him.”

“Of course. If my destiny led me to that. Of course. It is a child’s question. But my destiny is not in Washington, not yet; it is in the villages and towns and cities of America. When it leads me here, and I act, there will be no mystery as to the author of the event.”

“You would seem to be in Washington now.”

“A recruiting tour. Not for action, only a passage of the prelude to action.”

“Then why did you sit at a table for two hours Monday night discussing a map of the city of Washington with three of your lieutenants?”

The only perceptible acknowledgment by Lincoln Lee of the impact of that shot on its target was a faint lowering of the twist at the corner of his mouth. He said, “Before I could explain that I would have to remember that it happened.”

“I’ll do the remembering for you.” Wardell’s tone tightened. “And is it only a coincidence that Callahan’s grocery trucks are kept in the Maryland Avenue Garage?”