The General's President (58 page)

Arne had already assigned authority to his attorney and to Ed Ruud to handle any problems in publication if he wasn't able to himself.

FIFTY-SIX

It was 0950 on a sunny, late September morning. At the sound of the door chimes, agent Frank Shapiro put down his magazine and stood up, not to answer, but be ready. A minute later, John Zale came into the room from an inner hall, carrying a package. "The galley proofs for the chief's book," he said, holding it up. "The courier's here to get them."

Shapiro nodded, but he stayed on his feet, going to a window from which he could see the courier's parked car. The Haugens had been staying pretty much secluded. When they'd first arrived back in Duluth, the ex-president had granted an interview to a local TV station, and another to the newspaper, but since then, nothing.

Shapiro had been aware that something was wrong with Haugen's health, but he hadn't known what until he'd overheard Haugen's daughter talking with
her
daughter. Lou Gehrig's disease. He'd looked it up then. Arne was going to get weaker and weaker, bit by bit losing control of his body, dying slowly. Shapiro wasn't looking forward to the next couple of years, especially the last one.

Although Arne still looked pretty good. He'd shrunk a bit, as if he'd been cutting down on the calories, but he no longer swam, or worked out at all as far as Shapiro knew. And he'd lost his old vigor, and that hard, strong look the White House detail had commented on to each other when he'd first come to Washington.

It was Lois who'd lost ground conspicuously. The world knew of her cancer now, had known since they'd gone to Maui. She'd been in the hospital again, two weeks earlier, for another brief round of therapy. Just before that, she'd sent off her own manuscript—the story of the White House domestic staffs, she'd told him, dating back to Jefferson.

Frank wasn't looking forward to watching her weaken and die, either. Lois and Arne were as well-liked by the agents as any first family had been—better than most.

He saw the courier go down the short sidewalk, get into the car, and drive down the horseshoe drive to the road. In his mind's eye, Shapiro tried to visualize the yard deep in snow, the temperature far below zero; he was from Sarasota, Florida.

"You'll like winter here," Zale had told him. "Once we've had a pair of touring skis on you, you won't want to leave."

Arne said it was winter here by Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving was only two months away. It had already been freezing at night.

One evening the week previous, the agents on duty had donned sweaters and jackets and gone out on the front lawn with the Haugens, to sit quietly on lawn chairs and watch the aurora borealis, their non-alcoholic drinks almost forgotten in their hands. It was an evening Shapiro would remember the rest of his life; it had left a sense of closeness with the Haugens that he never expected to feel again with someone he was assigned to protect.

A door knob moved behind him, and Shapiro turned. Arne and Lois came into the room. "Frank," Arne said, "we need to talk to you and Gil. Is he in the front hall?"

Gil was in charge of the Haugen detail. Frank spoke into the small radio he carried clipped to his belt, and a minute later, Gil came into the room.

"Why don't we all sit down," Arne said.

They did, the agents somehow ill at ease.

The ex-president smiled at them. "Guys," he said, "Lois and I have talked it over, and we want you to go back to Washington. We like every one of you, but it's time for us to be on our own. Anything you want to say about that?"

"Yes sir," Gil answered matter-of-factly. "Crainey Branard isn't the only nut in the world who might decide you ought to be killed. That's why we're here. And—" He paused, then went on. "You're more vulnerable now; you don't get around physically the way you did a year ago."

Arne nodded. "All too true. Lois and I have considered both those facts, but we've decided to take our chances."

"There's another thing," Gil said.

"Yes?"

"We're not authorized to leave you. If you ordered us off the premises, we'd leave, but we'd still try to keep the place covered from the street or wherever."

"We understand that too; we assumed that's the way it was. So what I'd like you to do is phone Secret Service headquarters in Washington. Get me connected with whoever I need to talk to to get protection discontinued."

Gil thinned his lips. "Before I do that, Mr. Haugen, is there something we can do about whatever's bothering you? About having us here? Maybe we can talk it out."

Arne Haugen grinned. "Gil, Frank, you're friends of the family. And more considerate than some friends might be. But—" He shook his head. "We've made up our minds. We'd like to be alone, unwatched. We'd like to be able to go somewhere, if we want, without you fellows following."

Gil nodded unhappily. "Okay, sir. I'll place the call for you." He went to the phone on a nearby table and, Arne Haugen standing by, dialed a sequence of digits. On this particular line, it connected him with the Protective Division of the Secret Service.

"Mr. Kossuth, please," he said. "This is Agent Rogers in Duluth, Minnesota." The screen went blank. After a moment, a man's face flicked onto it. "Mr. Kossuth, this is SAIC Rogers, with the Haugen detail in Duluth. Mr. Haugen would like to talk to you."

Arne repeated his wish to Kossuth, who at first assumed, as Gil had, that there'd been some friction or annoyance. When Haugen had made clear that this wasn't the case, Kossuth transferred his call to the director. Again, patiently, the ex-president repeated his request, answering essentially the same questions. The director too was less than happy, but the ex-president was within his rights. It was agreed that the detail would be discontinued at noon, central daylight time.

When the conversation was over, Haugen called the other agents at their local residences, and Gil and Frank phoned their wives. The Haugen cook, forewarned and assisted by the Haugens, prepared a lunch worthy of one of the better restaurants—a mini-smörgåsbord. Then, along with the Haugens and Zales, the agents and their wives enjoyed a farewell meal.

While they were eating, Valenzuela phoned. The Secret Service had called, telling him of the Haugens' request, and Arne explained to him too. "Arne," Val said, "you are a national resource." But he didn't press.

That afternoon, when the agents had left, Arne Haugen dictated letters of commendation for each of them, and Zale ran them off on Haugen's elegant bond stationery. Afterward, Lois typed two letters to Arne's dictation—instructions to his lawyer with a copy for Ed, and a short one to Jumper Cromwell. Arne's typing was clumsy these days; his coordination was slipping more than his strength. And these were letters that were not for Zale to know about. When they came out of the printer and Arne had added his now-crabbed signature, she addressed and stamped the envelopes and sealed the letters in them, and Arne put them out for the mailman to pick up when he came by the next noon. He specifically told the housekeeper not to mail them on her way home. He didn't want them delivered prematurely.

Lois also typed a long letter from both of them to each of their children.

That evening the couple went off by themselves for a late supper in the Skyview Restaurant atop the four-year-old Saint Croix Hotel, overlooking Lake Superior. The restaurant's walls and roof were seamless molded Duluth Thermoglass, a Haugen product. They'd reserved one of the small, semi-detached rooms. Again the aurora was superb, from the recent solar flare activity. When they'd finished their meal, he turned the light off and they sat quietly watching, hands clasped loosely atop the table.

***

The next morning they drove up the north shore. The sky was clear, the view softened by autumn haze. The breeze was offshore, and only modest waves broke upon the beach. Here and there, gulls wheeled, mewling.

They stopped at a highway restaurant just outside Silver Bay, for midmornmg coffee, and took a table facing out a window, that they might not be spotted for who they were. The waitress recognized them, but Arne pressed ten dollars in her hand and said they wanted privacy. She nodded. He suspected that silence would not be easy for her.

As they waited, they looked down the hill at the big taconite refinery, with a huge ore ship at the dock. Shipments had increased to near full capacity, he'd read, and people thought of the depression as over. Unemployment was at eight percent "and falling," much of it in tourism; people hadn't gotten back into vacationing much yet.

Some locals were drinking coffee and eating pie, talking and laughing. Pulpwood contracts were being let in the jackpine and aspen up north of Isabella, and logging had started on a big sale of fir and spruce on the Tofte District. Arne enjoyed listening to them. They weren't too unlike the men he'd known as a youth, although had he spoken Scandinavian to them, or Finnish, probably none would have understood a word of it.

When the Haugens walked to the cash register, one of the men glanced at them and his eyebrows raised, but he said nothing just then. A lanky blond man, aproned, came out of the kitchen to take their money, and he obviously recognized them too. Outside, holding Lois's car door open for her, Arne was aware of faces at the windows, staring out, and he grinned without looking up at them.

North of Silver Bay, the highway took them higher, winding along the contour of steep and sometimes cliffy slopes well above the shore, and across occasional small gorges whose streams cascaded and foamed and plunged their way down from the plateau to join their clear waters with the icy lake. Farther north, the highway came down close to shore level again, sometimes within sight of the water, at others bordered by forest on both sides.

Before long they saw a large rustic wooden sign ahead, the letters routed into it announcing "Bjerke's Resort." Arne turned off there, the driveway taking them through birch and balsam and spruce. The lodge was built of lathe-turned pine poles, neatly fitted at the corners. A smallish stream, quiet here so near its mouth, flowed past to join the nearby lake. A row of cabins faced the stream, a dozen yards back from its edge. Rowboats were tied along the bank.

Arne parked and they entered the lodge, where a tall, rawboned man with iron-gray hair and a large mustache watched them in from behind the counter.

"Hallå Haugen!"
he said.
"Er dette faktiskt din kone?"
["Is this one really your wife?"]

"Ja visst!"
["Yeah, sure."]

The man grinned. ["That's what you said about the other ones."]

["No, this one is really her. We're on our honeymoon."]

Bjerke looked at Lois. "Well," he said, "good luck with him. He ain't so bad when you get to know him." He took a key from the array on the wall. "You folks got cabin number two. Why don't you let me take your bags for you? While you go in and order dinner."

"No," said Arne, "I'll take them." He grinned. "I'm not that old yet."

The two small suitcases Arne took to the cabin were even lighter than they appeared. He put them on the luggage stands without opening them, and after a bathroom break, they went back to the lodge for dinner, a term applied here to the midday meal. One of the Bjerke granddaughters waited on them, young, blond, and pretty, pink-cheeked through her tan. When the food arrived, he and Lois ate slowly, saying little, but often their hands touched.

When they'd finished, they went back to the cabin. Lois lay down to rest, while Arne went out and looked over the boat that went with the cabin rental. It was graceful, clinkerbuilt, with tholepins for two rowers.

The cabin had a tiny shed built on. Haugen unlocked the door and checked the gas in the outboard motor there. It was full, they always were, and so was the can. Sig Bjerke didn't overlook things like that.

As Arne closed the shed door, his mind went to Stephen Flynn. Steve would not approve, not at all. But then, Steve operated with certain fixed beliefs. Haugen wondered if, at some subliminal level, the Jesuit knew what they were doing—felt conscious discomfort and wondered what it was from.

I'll know more about things like that before the sun comes up again
, he told himself.
Probably a lot more. That or nothing.

In the cabin, Lois lay with her eyes closed, but she opened them when her husband came in. He went to the television and turned it on, then looked at the card and dialed to the local time and weather channel. The forecast hadn't changed. He turned it off again, and smiling, lay down beside Lois, putting out his arm as a pillow. She lay her head on it.

"Are you ready?" he asked softly.

She looked at him. "Yes," she said, and smiled. They'd talked about this years ago, discussed it months before on Maui, had made their plans then and gotten used to them. It felt comfortable to be here.

"Then I suppose we ought to get started."

Without saying more, they both got up, took wool sweaters from their bags, and waterproofs. Lois turned the TV back on while Arne went out and lugged the outboard motor to the boat, clamping it to the stern. Next he brought down the oars, which looked little used, and the can of outboard motor fuel.

Lois came out of the cabin and held up an envelope with "Sig" written on it. It held twenty one-hundred-dollar bills, and an explanatory note she'd written in advance. Handwriting too was difficult for Arne these days. The boat and motor were worth perhaps half the two thousand, in the money of the time, but the amount seemed appropriate.

They went back into the cabin, and while Arne was in the bathroom, Lois put the envelope on the table. Then they stood watching the local forecast one more time. After that, holding hands, waterproofs under their opposite arms, they walked down to the boat and got in. Arne started the motor and steered them down the current, past the gravel bar deposited by storm waves, and onto the lake. Now beach waves lifted and dropped the bow, splashing. There was no clear sign of the storm yet, but the wind was picking up a bit, out of the west.

Farther from shore, he steered on a heading of east southeast. A hundred or so miles that way lay the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He looked at Lois; she smiled at him and he smiled back. It would be a joke on them if they got that far. But their gas wouldn't last, and the disease had stolen too much of his strength for him to row more than briefly. Though he'd give it his best, if the storm hadn't already swamped them.