There wasn’t any trouble about picking the lock downstairs; in the army he had learned to do that kind of thing so fast that to the casual observer it looked like he was simply letting himself in with a key. The lobby was barely large enough to fall down in; he turned a corner and found he had a choice—the elevator or the stairs. He took the elevator.
“This Tilson’s place?” he asked, glancing quickly at a slip of paper he had taken from his shirt pocket for just that purpose (it was the receipt for his pump can). The policeman, who was holding his hands together behind his back, looked at him blankly.
“You got a key? The owner says he wants the bugs smoked out before the guy comes back—I guess nobody’s home.”
“I have to come with you,” the policeman announced, holding up the key. His tone was apologetic. “It’s a rule. I could lose my job.”
“Sure. “
He started in the kitchen, spraying along the baseboards and coughing every once in a while behind his paper mask for dramatic effect. The compound in his pump can was a concentrated version of something the Vietnamese used for keeping the ticks off their cattle and was every bit as pungent as advertised. The cattle had never seemed to mind, but it wasn’t very long before the attorney general’s sentry service took out a handkerchief and began wiping his eyes.
“Is that stuff safe to breathe?” he asked after a couple of minutes. He was already standing in the kitchen doorway, as far away as he could decently manage without actually leaving Austen alone in the room.
“Not if you’re a cockroach.” Austen looked over his shoulder and grinned at him, readjusting his mask with his free hand. “I suppose so; it makes some people throw up, though. It’s somethin’ new.”
“Well, I’ll just. . .” The rest of it was lost in his retreat. He went back outside to the hallway and resumed his post, leaving the front door open about half an inch, apparently as a salve to his professional conscience.
Well, what the hell. The plan was a veritable success. Austen drew a pair of thin plastic gloves out of his back pocket and slipped them on. If he was a nice quiet boy and didn’t do anything to make his friend at the door nervous, he figured he had about five minutes. Plenty of time.
A quick check of the premises established that there were exactly three telephones: one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen, and one in what seemed to be Tilson’s office. In each case, Austen unscrewed the earpiece from the receiver, knocked out the little speaker, and inserted a tiny microphone transmitter about the size and shape of a dime. The little darlings had adhesive backs and would stick to the inside of the hollow plastic shells forever. Everything was back together again in about twenty-five seconds. There were also three larger bugs, like poker chips, that went in the bedroom, up under the metal frame of the bed where the cleaning woman would never find it in the course of her dusting, and under the desk in the office, and against the back of one of the ornamental fireplace logs in the living room—one could only hope that Tilson wouldn’t fall prey to an unaccountable urge to toast marshmallows anytime that summer.
The hard part was the amplifier. By themselves, the ears would only transmit over fifty or sixty yards, fine if you happened to be next door, but a trifle impractical otherwise. The amplifier would pick them up and boost the signal enough to allow for nice clear reception at up to three miles, but it was about the size of a cigarette case. He pried it out of the inside cuff of his boot and looked around the living room for a good spot.
He thought about inside the TV set, but settled on the bookcase. He picked out a copy of The Collected Short Stories of Henry James—obviously a gift and showing no signs of ever having been read—cut the centers out of pages 82 through 203 with a razor knife he had brought along against just such an emergency, and inserted the amplifier into the cavity, letting about two inches of wire antenna come out through the back of the volume.
“I turned on the air conditioning in there—that ought to carry off the smell in about three hours. You might just duck in and switch it off before you go home.”
The policeman nodded and smiled and waved farewell as Austen stepped into the elevator and disappeared, his heart pounding like a hammer. He couldn’t understand why burglars weren’t found dead of cardiac arrest more often.
The girlfriend’s apartment was easier. There was only one phone—in the bedroom, naturally enough—and a single microphone in the living room seemed plenty. They had agreed that the girlfriend was an outside chance; unless he was a perfect shit, Tilson wasn’t likely to involve his little sweetie with a number like Salvarini.
“So that’s it?” Pete Freestone asked as they waited for a couple of meatloaf specials at a diner just off Olympic Boulevard. For a moment Austen only stared at him; he was keeping his head propped up with his hands and, now that the adrenaline had stopped pumping so hard, was in serious danger of falling asleep.
“No, that’s not it. Now we’ve got to rent a motel room within easy range of both amplifiers, and then you and I have to stand watch over the receiver for as long as it takes until Tilson gets his summons.”
“But everything’s wired.”
Austen only shook his head, smiling unpleasantly. “Not quite, pal. As soon as our boy gets back from his travels, I’ve got to figure out a way to bug his car.”
III
Tilson was very cooperative about that. He was so eager after all those weeks out wowing the electorate that he didn’t even bother about going home first; he called his lady love directly from the airport.
Austen saw the little red light start up on his receiver, which meant that somebody’s phone was ringing, put on his headset, pressed down the “record” button on the portable tape recorder, and made a note of the time. He hadn’t expected anything to happen for at least another hour; he had even let Pete go off to Chicken Delight to fetch them something to eat, taking the car with him.
The conversation only took about forty-five seconds, and he thought he might just drop dead from a stroke before he heard a key in the motel room door and saw Pete enter, balancing a couple of paper cups of Coca-Cola on top of a two-gallon drum of fried chicken.
“Dinner’s going to have to be delayed,” he announced calmly. “The attorney general flew in horny. If we step on it maybe we can still make the distance before he does.”
Pete set his burden down on the television set and simply stood there, as if not quite certain what he should do next. His eyes kept drifting over to the chicken, with all the longing of lost opportunity.
“Do I need to explain? This’ll be the perfect chance to wire his car, but I’ve got to know what it looks like first.” He unplugged the receiver from its wall socket and slipped it into a TWA flight bag with the tape recorder. “Come on, come on—starting now one of us has got to be hooked up to this gizmo every minute.”
Eleven minutes later, in the underground garage of the lady’s apartment building, his legs were just beginning to go to sleep as he crouched behind a gigantic black Lincoln Continental when something a little smaller, like a Jaguar Mark IV, pulled smoothly into a space near the door to the lobby. There was nothing like practice.
Like anyone else in the state who had watched the local news anytime in the past three months, Austen knew Edward Tilson by sight. He looked older standing under the light by the lobby door while he sorted through his keys for the right one; his hair seemed a little thinner and his craggy, hawklike face a little puffier around the throat. But it was him. Austen waited until he was inside and the door had snapped shut behind him before he stood up, his knees crackling like dry wood in a fire, and felt in his pocket for the microphone.
Two and a half minutes later he was outside on the street. He got about forty yards before Freestone’s Volkswagen pulled up alongside him.
“How did it go?”
“Easy.” He pulled the door shut and allowed himself to sink back against the upholstery. “Tilson was in such a tearing hurry that he didn’t even bother to lock the goddam car
door. He must imagine that girlfriend of his is really terrific stuff. I thought the fires were supposed to bank a little after fifty.”
“I don’t know. Maybe divorce does that to some guys. Where did you hide the mike?”
“Up under the dash.” Austen stared out the window, his face a weary, resigned mask, as if he had just forsaken the last illusions of his youth. “I imagine by now the chicken’s probably stone cold.”
. . . . .
It was, and all the ice in the paper cups had melted, rendering the Coca-Cola about as tasty as rain water. But they would eat things a lot viler over the next five days while they waited in their motel room, taking the headset in four-hour shifts. Except when the maid came to do the room and they drove the Volkswagen in huge circles around West Hollywood so the receiver, which had an adapter plug for the cigarette lighter, wouldn’t run the battery down, they almost never went outside. Doubtless the management had begun entertaining some very unflattering conjectures about what they could be up to, locked away together hour after hour in that little room, but Pete Freestone had paid a week in advance and Los Angeles is a city celebrated for its tolerance.
Austen spent most of the time reading about Simon Faircliff in the newspapers. The Times hated him—no wonder they weren’t so wild about having Pete pull the rug from under Edward Tilson—but the San Francisco Chronicle had arrived at the conclusion that he was Moses, come to lead us out of the wilderness. And it wasn’t all just hype, either; the man clearly had something to him.
Once they happened to catch him on the eleven o’clock news. It was just a thirty- or forty-second clip; the congressman was delivering a speech in Berkeley, and the crowd, which seemed to be mainly kids from the university, kept breaking in on him with applause after every sentence. They loved it. The war was still an active proposition, even if everyone knew that at least our part in it would be over within another couple of months, and probably three-quarters of Faircliff’s listeners still had draft cards to burn.
And then some clown with a Fu Manchu moustache and his hands stuffed into the pockets of an army fatigue jacket pulled a little away from the mob and asked whether the congressman would favor abolishing the selective service, and the crowd cheered like they already knew the answer—hell, Faircliff was a California liberal and had first made a name for himself by attempting to get the state Bar Association to come out against the war.
“No,” he announced calmly. Everyone was so stunned that you could actually hear the wind blowing across the grass behind him. “There is such a thing as the legitimate use of force; if you don’t believe me, just ask Ho Chi Minh. I fought in World War II, and I’ve never learned to be ashamed of that. When this war is over, we will still need an army. We have real enemies in the world, nations that constitute real threats to our freedom, even our existence. It just so happens that North Vietnam isn’t among them.”
And then the camera froze on Faircliff’s face. He looked exactly like a lion, like he didn’t give a damn how the voters felt.
Well, doubtless that sort of thing probably played pretty well with the Veterans of Foreign Wars, but they weren’t going to line up behind him anyway—their hearts belonged to Edward Tilson. And, doubtless, sitting in a motel room somewhere with his campaign staff, Faircliff might be forgiven for wishing the question had never come up. But it had, and he had answered it, possibly without thinking first and foremost about what the answer was going to cost him.
It was only a moment on the television screen, something fitted between the sports report and a human interest piece about some old fart with the world’s largest collection of tin ashtrays, but it made you understand why Pete Freestone professed such admiration for the congressman from San Francisco.
But you couldn’t read newspapers endlessly, and for the rest their watch was rather like the experience of combat—long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of breathless excitement. Every time Tilson’s phone rang, you felt your heart right there between your teeth.
Tilson used the phone a lot. Most of the calls were just routine, but some of them were interesting in various ways. Together they were a paradigm of the human condition, a rough study of the texture of one man’s life. Tilson was clearly not a man built to the heroic scale. The attorney general had a wife and a girlfriend and a lot of other problems; he was up against it.
“The poor bastard,” Pete would murmur, listening at the headphones while he made machinelike progress through a bag of cheese puffs. “The poor pathetic bastard.”
Of course, it wasn’t all The Days of Our Lives. There was a lot of hard, usable information, the sort of thing that, had they not themselves been waiting around for the length of rope with which they planned to hang him, would have been worth something to someone.
For instance, they heard it direct from the lips of Tilson’s own campaign manager that he had a man in the Faircliff organization, somebody named “Curtis,” who was sufficiently well placed to have access to the minutes of staff meetings, and even to the congressman’s personal appointments lists.
And they also learned of the almost irresistible pressure Tilson was feeling over the Salvarini matter, that he was almost more afraid of his own subordinates than he was of the unlovable Mr. Salvarini. In fact, the troops had just about served notice that if the case were not allowed to move ahead they would see to it that enough dust was kicked up to keep Edward Tilson out of office—any office—for as long as the memory of man. They meant business, apparently. They could smell blood.
But it was the private drama that was most affecting. Austen had always known that Pete Freestone was a soft touch for the sufferings of humanity. In Saigon Pete had been a perfect maniac for war orphans and the withered-up old women who used to flood in from the Delta after every post-monsoon offensive, but Austen had never imagined that the personal problems of a well-nourished politician would have evoked such sympathetic interest.
“That woman is a bitch,” Pete would mutter, playing back a tape of Mrs. Tilson’s most recent conversation with her guilt-ridden husband. He was always playing them back; once he woke Austen out of a sound sleep for a rebroadcast of one of her more outstandingly nasty performances. What will you do if you lose, Edward? she purred. What will that adolescent clinging vine of yours think if in six months you’re nothing but a middle-aged lawyer? How will you deal with that, Edward? She thinks you’re such a great man now. Whatever will you do then? So perhaps it was no miracle that he was so desperately smitten with his young lady, who really was young and sounded like an amiable enough simpleton.
And so it stood. What way the lover and the public servant and the possessor of a compromising secret would finally jump was an open question, probably to no one more than to himself.
For five days Frank Austen and Pete Freestone listened. They ate cold pizza and drank warm soda and waited for the game to start while they learned what the stakes would be. They listened while Tilson carried on his public and private negotiations over the telephone, and they listened while he sat alone in his one-bedroom apartment watching Johnny Carson.
“Can we be sure Salvarini will call him at home?” Pete would ask when he was oppressed by thoughts of how much money he was laying out and what his boss would say if he came back from his unexplained absence without a story. “Maybe we’ve figured it wrong. Maybe he’ll send the guy a letter or something. Maybe they’ve already made contact.”
“Salvarini won’t put anything in writing because he’s not that stupid, and if he wants to talk he’ll call Tilson at home. You can’t imagine he’d call him at the office, can you? But beyond that there aren’t any guarantees. Relax. Take a nap. Go out and get me a bottle of ginger ale if you’re feeling restless. But shut up.”
On the fifth night, at a little after four forty-five in the morning, an hour after Austen had gone to bed imagining he wouldn’t be able to stand another day of this nonsense, the telephone in Tilson’s apartment rang. The voice on the other end of the line was
thick and gravelly; from the first syllable it was impossible to believe it could belong to anyone except Giancarlo Salvarini.
Rise and shine, bright boy. You know who it is.
“Frank, wake up. For God’s sake, Frank, wake up.”
There was this terrific racket, which turned out to be Pete Freestone’s knuckle thumping away on the top of his skull. He opened his eyes, but not before he felt himself being pulled out of bed by the sleeve of his pajamas.
“Wake up—he’s made the call.”
“I’m up.”
For an instant he imagined that Salvarini and Tilson must be in the motel bathroom together, because why else was everybody whispering? And then he began to take his bearings and saw, in a flash of panic, that with all the excitement Pete had forgotten to turn on the tape deck, and he almost broke his leg stumbling over a chair to get to the “record” button. He thought he must have set the world’s indoor speed record for twelve and a half feet from flat on your back.
. . .you think? I was just bein’ nice? You cheap slob, you figure a way. One hour—the end of Elvida Street, off the Coldwater Canyon Road. You be there.
They played it back twice, the whole quarter of a minute of it—even down to the click when the connection was broken—and Austen found Elvida Street on their Standard Oil Company map of Los Angeles.
“If we push it a little, we can get there in twenty minutes,” he said, shoving his legs into his trousers as he tried to remember what else people generally wore in public.
Actually, they made it in a little under sixteen.
. . . . .
Assuming that his first consideration was privacy, Salvarini had picked his spot with care. Elvida Street ran the length of a housing development that was still under construction; beyond the pavement the ground fell away quickly into the canyon, a desolate landscape of raw ground and scrub.
The President's Man Page 5