Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  DeFord, twisting the doorknob, said, “I’d like to see them hang that lawyer while they’re at it.”

  They went inside and the woman at the desk gave them her equitably chilly smile. Lime followed on into DeFord’s office.

  DeFord sat down and tugged at the slack in his amply fleshed throat. “I, ah, had a telephone call from a gentleman named Walberg a few hours ago. The twins’ father. He’s just flown into Washington. I gather he’s tried to see his children and nobody wants to talk to him.”

  Lime nodded. “He can’t comprehend that his children could possibly have had anything to do with it. There must be some mistake—a misunderstanding or a frame-up. Or maybe under the influence of bad companions. But it can’t be their fault.”

  “You already talked to him, then.”

  “No.”

  “Eh. Well. I’m sure that’s the way I’d feel if I were in his place.”

  “I’m sure it is.” Lime was thinking of Sandra Walberg. A determined up-yours resenter, that girl; how anyone could go on believing in her innocence——

  “David, I’m sorry but I told the man you’d explain things to him.”

  “You did.”

  “He’s, eh, waiting down in your office. I thought I ought to tell you.…” DeFord trailed off, turning an apologetic hand over, palm up.

  “You damn fool.” Lime’s anger intensified the meaning of the drab words.

  He walked out of the office and instead of slamming the door he pulled it shut with a quiet reproachful click.

  Walberg had the lugubrious face of a professional mourner. His cheeks and hands were covered with freckles; his thin ginger hair was carefully combed across the baldness of his scalp. He appeared more doleful than indignant. Soft as a Number One pencil, Lime thought.

  “Mr. Lime, I’m Chaim Walberg, I’m the fa——”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Walberg.”

  “It’s kind of you to see me.”

  “It wasn’t my choice.” Lime went around his desk, spun the chair, sat. “Specifically what do you want to ask me to do?”

  Walberg inhaled deeply. If he’d had a hat he’d have been rotating it in his hands. “They won’t let me see my children.”

  “I’m afraid they’re the Government’s children right now, Mr. Walberg. It’s a security matter.”

  “Yes yes, I understand that. They don’t want people leaking messages to or from the prisoners. They told me that. As if they think I’m in league with anarchists and assassins. In the name of God, Mr. Lime—I swear.…”

  Walberg stopped to compose himself. Now he summoned dignity. “There has been an error, Mr. Lime. My children are not——”

  “Mr. Walberg, I haven’t the time to be your wailing wall.”

  It stung Walberg. “I was told you are a cold man but people think you a fair one. Evidently that was not correct.”

  Lime shook his head. “I’m only a faceless assistant to an assistant, Mr. Walberg. They shunted you onto me to get you out of their hair. There’s nothing I can do for you. My job consists mainly of making out reports on the reports other people have made out. I’m not a cop, I’m not a prosecutor, I’m not a judge.”

  “You are the man who arrested my children, aren’t you?”

  “I’m responsible for the arrests, if that’s what you wanted to hear.”

  “Then you can tell me why.”

  “You mean why I singled out your son and daughter?”

  “Yes. What made you believe they were guilty of anything? Were they running? Because my children have had misunderstandings with officers, they’re afraid of the police—you know how the young people are. But to run away from a uniform and a gun—is this proof that——?”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions, Mr. Walberg, but I’m not at liberty to divulge the Government’s case. You’d have to see the Attorney General, but I doubt he’d tell you very much. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you old enough, Mr. Lime, to remember the days when you could tell good from evil?”

  “I’m afraid I’m very busy, Mr. Walberg.” Sorry, the number you have dialed is not a working number. Lime walked to the door and held it open.

  Walberg stood. “I’m going to fight for them.”

  “Yes. I think you should.”

  “Where has morality gone, Mr. Lime?”

  “We still eat meat, don’t we.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Walberg.”

  When Walberg was gone Lime emptied his In box. Intermittently for a half hour or so he thought of Walberg’s stupefying naiveté: the twins had posted plenty of storm warnings, they hadn’t rotted overnight, but the handwriting on the wall was always a message for someone else. Not my children.

  Lime’s son was eight years old this month, an Aquarius, and it was vaguely possible to hope Bill would be allowed to reach maturity alive and without finding it necessary to explode buildings and people. Until two years ago Lime had enjoyed fantasies about the things he would do with his son as he grew up; then there had been a point to it but now the boy lived in Denver with Anne and her new husband and Lime’s visiting privileges were severely curtailed not only by court order but also by the distance to Denver.

  He had been out just before Christmas. On the airplane he had dozed with his head against the window and at the airport the three of them had met him—Bill and Anne and the fool Dundee who hadn’t known better than to tag along: a thin hearty Westerner who told the same jokes time and time again and manipulated fortunes in shale oil leases and evidently didn’t trust Anne out of his sight with her ex. An awkward weekend, Anne forever smoothing down her skirt and avoiding everyone’s eyes, Dundee bombastically fathering Bill and calling him “Shorty,” both of them covertly eyeing Lime to make sure he was getting the point—that they had established a “real home here for the boy,” that “He’s much better now, David, with a full-time father.”

  Bill surrounded by ten thousand acres of grass and a herd of real cowponies had been singularly unimpressed by the toys Lime had bought at the last minute on his way to the airport. Last summer he had taken Bill camping and there had been rapport of a kind but this time in ankle-deep snow there was no place to take the boy except for an afternoon’s ice skating and a Disney movie on East Colfax.

  Sunday night at the airport he had pressed his cheek to the child’s and rocked his head so that his whiskers scraped Bill; the boy had squirmed away and Anne’s eyes had been filled with a glacial rebuke. She had presented her cheek for his ritual kiss with Dundee standing by, watching; she had smelled of cold cream and shampoo; and whispered savagely in his ear, “Keep it up, David, keep it up.”

  He was an unpleasant complication, she wanted him to stay away, but she wouldn’t send the boy to him—Lime had to come to her if he wanted to see Bill. It was a way of keeping him on her leash. She was a possessive woman.

  She had been a tall girl with cool hazel eyes and straight blonde hair, more comfortable than challenging; they had got married because there hadn’t seemed any overpowering reason not to. But it had quickly got so each of them was bored with knowing what the other was going to say before he said it. In time that became the trouble with their marriage: they never talked about anything at all.

  It became too much for both of them and finally she had walked out, walking heavily on her heels, leading the boy by the hand.

  They had lived in one of those towns the existence of which was defined in terms of how many miles it was from Alexandria. He had kept the house six months and then moved to the city, a two-room walk-up.

  Now the Executive Office Building was emptying and he did not want to return to the two-room walk-up. There was always Bev. But he went to the bar of the Army-Navy Club.

  A vodka martini, very dry. Once, he had found comfort in bars, dim impersonal chambers where football and old movies provided conversational sustenance.

  Lime had developed a passion for old movies: he could name character act
ors who had been dead for twenty years and all you needed was one fellow film buff to kill an evening with enjoyable trivia. “Eugene Pallette in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” “No that was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” “I thought that was Claude Rains.” “It was. They were both in that one.” Remember the beautiful cloaked melodrama of Mask of Dimitrios, Greenstreet and Lorre and was Claude Rains in that one too? He was in Casablanca with them but was he in Dimitrios? I don’t know but it’s running on one of the UHF late shows next week, I saw it in TV Guide.…

  A slough of boredom. Halfhearted anger toward the rutting man and woman who had accidentally given him his ticket into the world. Too young, during the war, for anything but Dave Dawson novels and radio melodramas and sandlot baseball and junior rifleman badges. Too old, afterward, to join the concerned generation: Lime had graduated from college without ever asking his roommate’s politics.

  He had known too many bars. They had become too familiar. He left the club.

  In the Fifties the Cold War had seemed real and he had enjoyed matching himself aganst the best the other side had to offer. Are you old enough, Mr. Lime, to remember the days when you could tell good from evil?

  In those days American Intelligence was an infant modeled on the British system and things went on in a peculiarly arcane British fashion, as if nuclear superpowers could be treated in the same way as internecine Balkan intrigues of the Twenties. But gradually cynicism set in. Courage became suspect. It was fashionable to plead cowardice. If you chose to face danger for sheer thrill you were singled out as a case of masochistic guilt. No one was supposed to look for risks. Bravery became contemptible: if you did something dangerous you were expected to say you did it for the money or for a cause. Not because you liked it. To prove you were normal you had to boast you were chicken. They had effectively outlawed courage. Crime, and driving cars recklessly, had become just about the only outlets left.

  Lime had an ungrammatical talent for picking up foreign tongues and they had used him in the field for fifteen years, mostly in North Africa but once for eighteen months in Finland. Gradually he had begun to detest dealing with his own kind—not only his opposite numbers on the other side but his allies as well. They were warped people playing a meaningless game and the computers had taken the thrill out of everything. What was the point of risking his life?

  In the end Lime had used what little influence he had to post himself into an office where nothing was required of him, where sometimes he forgot what the business was all about.

  He was a GS-11, he earned fourteen thousand dollars a year or at least collected it, he ran an office which investigated a thousand threats on the President’s life every month and found all but three empty—an office in which lazy irresponsibility could masquerade as duty—and he had retirement to look forward to: a job as chief security officer for a corporation somewhere, with fate presiding over him like an expectant mortician.

  It was all he deserved. When you reached the point where it was just a job you could switch off at five o’clock—when you no longer did it believing in it—you had been in it too long. You went through the old motions but it was like saying the same words over and over until they lost all meaning.

  The evening gloom was chilly. He walked home, up the sooty row of turreted gingerbread Victorian houses, up the outside stair into his rooms. The steam radiators made a dense heat and the air was close—stale, as if it hadn’t moved for a long time. The blown lamps had reduced the rooms to a grayish half-light and the demons of the place were on the prowl. Abruptly and uneasily he lifted the telephone and dialed.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi.”

  “Caro mio. How is it today?”

  “Dreary,” he said “Have you had dinner?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Heavy silence clung to them. She said finally, “I tried to reach you but you didn’t answer.”

  “I stopped in for a drink somewhere.”

  “You’re not drunk.”

  “No.”

  “Well come over and I’ll fix you something to eat.”

  “Not if you’re feeling that way about it.”

  She said, “Don’t be a fool David.”

  “I’m not the first and I won’t be the last. I’m in good company.”

  “All right, you’re a fool. But come over.” Her voice underwent a thickening humid modulation that evoked his awareness of her sexuality: “Come on, David, I want you to.”

  Wondering which of them was the greater fool he went around to get his car. He wished he had thought better of calling her. He wanted to see her but last year there had been a tawdry affair with a banal woman from St. Louis and he didn’t want to get embroiled that way again, not even with Bev; this time it was he who had nothing to offer.

  But he drove out of the garage and let the avenue suck him into its flow. It took him north into the Palisades area—fashionable houses, pedigreed dogs, chic thin women and fat children.

  Senators and Cabinet members lived around here and normally there would be two or three boiled-shirt dinner parties getting under way. Tonight there were none because of the bombing. But it would not be long before the parties resumed. Everyone would wear mourning black and armbands and everyone would be solemn and judiciously angry, but the dinners would resume quickly because the Government still had to run and a great deal of its work was done at these dinner gatherings.

  He passed Dexter Ethridge’s house. The windows were quietly alight; the front window reflected the glow of a color TV within. Lime was gratified to see the signs of normalcy—in a vague distant way he had responsibility toward the Vice-President-elect, having spoken the warning to him on the Capitol steps: it created a kinship, an Oriental sense of obligation.

  Bev’s apartment building was an ultramodern tower of glass. She made good money as the Speaker’s adminstrative assistant; she knew how to spend it tastefully. The front room was spacious—off-white walls, Beri Rothschild sketches, solid furniture in solid colors but uncluttered. Lime knocked, let himself in with his key, threw his coat on a chair and called her name.

  She didn’t answer. He prowled the apartment; it was empty; he went into the kitchen and mixed two drinks and was taking them into the living room when Bev came in, dressed for the weather, carrying a heavy brown grocery bag.

  “Hi.” She had a merry look. When he took the parcel she tipped her face and he tasted her breath in his mouth.

  He carried the groceries into the kitchen. Bev was pulling off her gloves with little jerks, drawing her cloak off her shoulders, taking off her scarf and shaking out her hair. It fell straight to her shoulders and curled upward at the bottom.

  She espied the drinks and took a long swallow before she came into the kitchen, shoved him imperiously aside and started unloading the paper bag. Lime rested his shoulder against the doorframe. “Leftovers would have done.”

  “If I’d had any.” She was on tiptoe putting something into the refrigerator, the long calf muscles tensed, dress stretched tight across ribs and breasts. When she turned and caught him watching her like that she gave him a quick up-from-under look.

  “Get out of here,” she said, laughing at him, and he smacked her rump and went back to the couch and picked up his drink.

  She clicked and clanged furiously for several minutes; then she appeared bearing place mats and silverware.

  “I thought you ate.”

  “I’ll have dessert. I’m in a sinful mood.” She was setting the table. “Wienerschnitzel with an egg on it—Holstein. All right?”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  She came to the coffee table and bent down for him to light her cigarette: he looked down along the curve of her throat to the thrusting dusky separation of her breasts. She was watching him—smiling, eyes half closed, warm and lazy. She straightened up and blew smoke at the ceiling, took her drink to her mouth: ice clinked against her teeth. “Well then.”

  He closed his eyes slowly to slits and she took on a
sort of surrealistic substance limned in red. When she moved toward the kitchen he closed his eyes and heard the click of the refrigerator door, the rattle of things.

  “Come on, Rip Van Winkle.”

  He opened his eyes. The room was dim; she had extinguished the lights, she had two candles burning on the table. He grunted and heaved himself upright and she laughed at him with wild abandon; it disturbed him. She took his hand and guided him to the table. “It’s Nineteen forty-seven Warner Brothers, but I just felt like it.”

  “The wine?”

  “The setting, stupid. The wine’s a Moreau.”

  “Chablis with veal?”

  “Why not? I’m having sardines.”

  “Sardines for dessert.”

  “I told you I’m in a wild mood.”

  He tasted the veal. “Damn good.”

  “Of course. It has to be.”

  “You’re dropping clues like size-twelve shoes. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

  “Nothing, I’m just teasing you.” She leaned forward with her wine in both hands. Soft warm glow against her eyes and skin. “What’s happened to that wonderful cojones humor of yours? Remember when you filled out the GS transfer papers for DeFord—date of birth June 29, 1930; weight seven pounds two ounces; height twenty-one inches?”

  “That was before I knew DeFord.”

  “What about those hundreds of introductory-subscription cards you filled out with DeFord’s name and address? He must have started getting two hundred magazines and book-club books in the mail every week.”

  “I thought he needed to be better informed.”

  “You haven’t done anything like that for a year.”

  “I suppose you get tired of it,” he said.

  “You’re saying you outgrew it.”

  “I just got bored with it.”

  “You just got bored.”

  “All right.” He pushed his plate away empty and reached for the wine to refill their glasses.

  “At least you’ve got a good appetite.” She lifted her glass in a gesture of toast that hadn’t been used since Charles Boyer stopped playing romantic leads: eyes half-lidded, lips moist and parted. Suddenly she laughed. “I’m a little tight. Or high—I never got the distinction straight. I saw a movie on TV last night and I’ll bet I can stump you. The Great Sioux Uprising. Do you know who wrote the screenplay?”