The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  There was no way he could beat Simon Faircliff, especially after this Kyauktada thing, but he could make it close. He could cut down the margin of victory enough to make things very awkward when Faircliff declared for the Presidency. He could dim the luster, and that they didn’t need.

  Austen turned around when he felt a hand on his arm; it was Pete, smiling in amusement.

  “He’s not going to be struck by lightning,” Pete said, still smiling as he shaded his eyes and looked up at the skyline. “Too nice a day—there isn’t a cloud anywhere. Come on, rest your killer instinct for a while. Let’s have lunch.”

  The restaurant wasn’t crowded, so they got a table over by the window and had a view of almost the whole waterfront area. But neither of them was there to admire the scenery. Over drinks it was, no, the senator didn’t really care whom the Republicans nominated, since he expected to stand on his record and trust to the good sense of the voters. Over the crackling rice soup it was, no, the senator hadn’t really had time to think about the Presidency; although he wasn’t foreclosing any options, he had been much too busy running for reelection and, incidentally, trying to bring some coherence to American foreign policy after this Asian disaster. Austen didn’t have any illusions about being believed; the moves on both sides were dictated by an etiquette no less complicated and strict than that which prevailed at the court of the Manchus, and doubtless it was better so. If your job required you to lie to your friends, at least this way there was no question of deception.

  About halfway through the pressed duck and the sweet-and-sour fish, without a word, they declared an armistice—sort of. They could speak their minds, within limits, and there would be nothing for quotation.

  “How’s it going with you and Diederich?” Pete asked over his third bowl of rice (he hadn’t gotten any skinnier over the last five years). “I hear all kinds of rumors. He was a real tiger in the ad business; a lot of people were glad to see the back of him. How about it, Frank—you boys hitting it off?”

  A smiling Chinese waiter in a red jacket came up and asked them in that gracious, noiseless way Chinese waiters have, whether everything was fine, whether there was anything they needed. Austen smiled back and shook his head—no, everything was perfect and they were packed to the eyeballs, thank you very much—and the waiter slipped away like a ghost.

  “Howard minds the store in Washington and takes care of the money.” He put down his chopsticks and tried to shake the cramp out of his hand, wondering what anatomical advantage Asians had with the damn things and how he was ever going to manage if, once Faircliff was President, he were sent to China as ambassador. “He stays out of my bailiwick, and I stay out of his. We get along fine.”

  “Okay. Just wondering.”

  When the waiter came back to start clearing away the dishes, Austen began to get restless. He hated to sit around at the table after a meal; his tail always began to ache. But Pete decided he had to try the coconut ice cream, so they stayed for dessert. Austen didn’t find the idea of coconut ice cream even slightly tempting, but with careful handling his fortune cookie could be made to last almost forever.

  When finally they were finished it was, astonishingly, only two­fifteen. Pete decided he would tag along to the gourmet shop and watch Austen buy big flat loaves of peasant bread and hundred-count boxes of teabags. It wasn’t very long before he got a shopping basket himself and started stripping the place of candied fruits, tins of date pudding, wine splits, imported English trifle mix, and every other sort of trash you could imagine.

  “These places are my downfall,” he said as they waited in the checkout line; his tab, in the end, came to around thirty-six dollars.

  Austen smiled.

  “Every place is your downfall.”

  “I’ll bet your Senator loves this Kyauktada thing. I watched him on TV yesterday afternoon; he was terrific, like he’d been practicing for months. If it keeps up past the summer, he should be unbeatable in November.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Hey, Frank.” Freestone put his hand on Austen’s sleeve, his face suddenly very smooth and serious, the way it used to be in college when he talked about the grape boycott or, sometimes, the war. “Frank, how could he have known? I’ve been down in the morgue, going over his old interviews, and it’s like he looked into his crystal ball and saw somebody was going to put a bullet in U Ba Sein’s ear before the year was out.”

  Austen just laughed and took a couple of mint patties out of a plastic container next to the cash register while the girl was figuring his change. “He keeps a pack of tarot cards in his desk. Here, you want one of these?”

  The grip on his arm only tightened. “Don’t shit me, pal. You remember what we did together once? Faircliff must have known—did you tell him, Frank?”

  It was an odd moment, standing there in the enclosed patio next to the escalators, people streaming around them as if they were just a couple of blocks of wood. Austen experienced something of a shock when he realized that Freestone was absolutely serious.

  “He couldn’t possibly have known, Pete,” he said slowly. “What are you talking about? He couldn’t possibly have known.”

  . . . . .

  Austen spent almost the whole of the last month before the primaries in Washington. He almost managed sometimes to forget about the election for a while; the Senator, on his advice, was concentrating on the Asian hearings and leaving the political spotlight to the Republicans so everyone back home could watch them undisturbed while they tore each other to pieces. Besides, the senator needed help prepping. They spent hours together examining staff reports and the thousands of pages of testimony that had accumulated by then. It was awesome, a kind of dry run for what it would be like if they ever really did make it to the White House.

  But eventually it was necessary to go back. He wanted to be in California for at least the last week before the vote. He wasn’t worried about the nomination—there weren’t any challengers—but he just wanted to be there to keep a rein on his own people, lest the opposition tempt somebody into doing something stupid. So he packed his bag and booked two seats aboard United, and Dottie phoned her aunt and told her to expect some visitors. He figured it was a kind of semi-vacation; all he had to do, really, was be vaguely around, so he would probably be able to spend about half his time in Pacific Grove helping Dottie collect pieces of driftwood. He needed a rest.

  The only big event was the statehouse reception, where he had to wear a black tie and try to keep Governor Hannah from drooling on his shoes in front of the civilians. All the party grandees were there—plus selected members of the press—and you were supposed to strut around and act confidently modest about how well everybody was going to do in the primaries, which were four days later. Needless to say, Dottie had categorically refused to attend.

  By ten o’clock Austen was catatonic with boredom. He hated these huge parties, and the state politicians and their wives put him to sleep. It would have been insupportable if Pete Freestone hadn’t been there; they kept bumping into each other, more or less at random, like a couple of ping pong balls in a college physics experiment.

  Pete was planning to leave in about another half hour and drive straight down to San Francisco; he was trying to talk Austen into coming with him, and Austen was weakening fast when a waiter came up and murmured something into Pete’s ear about a telephone call.

  “It’s the night desk.” He shrugged his shoulders, allowing the gesture to extend itself all the way up into his face until it hit his eyebrows. “They probably want to know whether they can put the paper to bed or whether I’ve caught anybody dancing naked in the fishpond. I’ll only be a second.”

  He was gone a little longer than that. Austen got another ginger ale and considered whether perhaps he really shouldn’t just pick up his bag at the motel and drive back that night with Pete. It was a settled issue with him by the time he saw Pete coming back through the potted palms that were supposed to camouflage the shor
t corridor leading to the powder rooms and the broom closet with five telephones that had been turned over to the press. He was thinking about sandy beaches and tide pools in the lava rocks and big tangled patches of seaweed thrown up by the waves, and then he saw the expression on Pete’s face and forgot all about them.

  “What the hell happened? Did Los Angeles crack off and start drifting away with the current? What is it?”

  Pete just took a swallow of something that looked like it went down hard. It was several seconds before he could bring himself to say anything.

  “Ted Boothe was killed in a car crash three hours ago.”

  III

  The next morning’s newspapers carried all the details. It seemed the Congressman and his wife had been on their way to a fund-raising dinner from their home in Pacific Palisades when something went wrong with the steering linkage on their Cadillac Eldorado and they went over a hundred-fifty-foot embankment, rolling and burning every inch of the way. It would require an autopsy to establish whether the Boothes had been killed by the impact or the fire, since it had been some time before the highway patrol could get a crew down to the crash site, and the bodies weren’t in the best possible condition. There was no suspicion of foul play. It was simply a terrible accident, one of these grotesque, meaningless catastrophes that overtake people sometimes, reminding us all that we are merely mortal.

  Howard Diederich sat in the lobby of the Huntington Sheraton Hotel in South Pasadena, a copy of the Los Angeles Times spread out over his knees. He read through the article on the accident twice and then turned to a piece on the editorial page, in which the consequences of Ted Boothe’s death on the race for the Republican senatorial nomination were anxiously discussed—the Times had endorsed Boothe—and he carefully refolded the paper, set it down on the end table next to his chair, and went out to the front entrance to order his rented car.

  He had to be fairly cautious in Los Angeles; he had lived there for years, and there was always the chance that he might run into someone who would recognize him. But Los Angeles, after all, was big. People hardly looked at you, and there were enough little districts and suburbs shading off into one another that you could take your pick of protective colorations. And besides, he was a native; he could always account for what had brought him there on any given day, so it wouldn’t matter so much even if he did get spotted. In the end he settled on Eagle Rock, a depressing triangle of laundromats, lawnmower repair shops, supermarkets, and one-family stucco houses with brown front yards the size of postage stamps, wedged in between Pasadena and Glendale. It seemed unlikely that anything would bring his rich and powerful friends from Bate & Palmer to such a place.

  Tucked into the waistband of his trousers he carried a little six­shot .45 automatic, chosen for its small size and intimidating caliber and concealed inside the metal frame of his suitcase so that airport security wouldn’t catch it if they X-rayed his luggage. He hadn’t gone armed since World War II, and it made him feel ridiculous and strangely exhilarated at the same time. He wondered whether he wasn’t beginning to get carried away by the pure melodrama of the thing.

  There was a decrepit A & W Root Beer stand on York Boulevard; you sat out back on picnic tables—that was one nice thing about Los Angeles, it hardly ever rained—and there was a men’s room to afford a moment of privacy. Diederich had remembered the place from an earlier occasion; he drove past just to make sure it was still there and then stopped in at a pharmacy to place his call. He would pick the time and the place; and he was in no frame of mind to start trusting anyone.

  Twenty minutes later a dark blue Plymouth crept into the parking lot and came to a stop in one of the rear slots. The man who climbed out was perhaps as much as an inch less than average height and obviously very solid under his light tan suit; he had thinning black hair and a straight black moustache, and his eyes were little more than slits. One had the impression that he was a tough, resourceful, dangerous man, and that that was precisely the impression he wanted to convey. Diederich happened to know he was forty-seven years old.

  He came and sat down across from Diederich at one of the picnic tables. There was a white paper bag between them, and Diederich opened it up and took out something wrapped in a piece of waxed paper.

  “Here,” he said quietly. “Have a hamburger; we’re supposed to look like we’ve come here to eat.” The other man unwrapped the thing and peered at it through his narrow eyes as if it constituted an affront to his personal dignity. Apparently he couldn’t bring himself to taste it, because it continued to lay untouched in front of him.

  “The papers have Mr. Boothe listed as an accident—is there any reason to imagine they might have to change their minds?”

  “No.” The man smiled slightly, which had the curious effect of making him look as if something were hurting him somewhere. His voice sounded unnaturally harsh, almost like the grating of coarse sandpaper. “The device that caused the steering to lock was a tiny plastic thing that would have burned up in the fire. I crowded him a little around a turn and he went right over. No witnesses.”

  Diederich appeared not to have been listening. For several seconds he merely stared off into a corner of the parking lot, and then all at once his attention seemed to snap back into place. Under cover of the table, his right hand now held the .45 automatic, and it was pointed directly at the other man’s belt buckle. He was perfectly prepared to fire; he had once read an extremely detailed dossier on this particular maniac, and he absolutely wasn’t going to start fooling around with him.

  “That’s fine,” he said, his face empty of expression. “You’ve done very well; I hope we can continue to work together. But before we get down to terms, you and I are going into the men’s room back there and I’m going to satisfy myself that you aren’t wired—no, do the smart thing and keep your hands up where I can see them. I’d hate to have to kill you just now.”

  The other man didn’t attempt to move. His name was Yates, and he had soldiered as a mercenary in the civil war in Zaire. Before that he had been a pilot with Air America in Laos for the CIA and had been wounded in the neck after being shot down near the Cambodian border, which was what had paralyzed one of his vocal cords and given the peculiar pained quality to his smile.

  “How do you know I wasn’t wired the first time?” Yates asked as he heard the lavatory door swing shut behind them. Without being told, he leaned against the far wall, his hands up over his head and his feet wide apart.

  “Because the first time was in an airport.” Diederich ran his free hand slowly and carefully over the man’s whole body, going through his pockets, feeling for any rectangular object, or perhaps a wire. “If you’d had anything on you then, you would have tripped a metal detector. Besides, you hadn’t killed anyone yet, so you might not have felt the necessity of retaining a little life insurance of your own.”

  There was nothing, not even a pack of cigarettes. Yates was clean, which was reassuring. “Now perhaps we can go back outside.” Diederich pocketed the automatic and opened the door for him. “I hope you don’t resent a reasonable precaution.”

  “Would you care?”

  “No.”

  “I rather thought not.”

  What happened next was as predictable as the movements of a ballet. Diederich had figured on something of the sort, and he was ready when Yates suddenly lurched toward him, twisting from the waist as he attempted to drive a fist into his solar plexus. Diederich managed to parry the strike—it surprised him a little that he should still remember how after all these years—and just allowed the flow to carry him on from there, hooking a foot in behind Yates’s knee to take him even more off balance and, as the other man started to fall, catching him in the side of the head with his elbow. It was all he could do, while Yates lay face down on the lavatory floor, hovering somewhere between consciousness and oblivion, to restrain himself from finishing the job. A single sharp, snapping blow to the base of the skull and—

  But he caught himself
in time. He still needed Yates; he forced himself to remember that this wasn’t some sort of training exercise but the real thing, and he needed Yates alive and functioning.

  It wasn’t going to hurt, however, if the stupid thug learned who was in charge. It was a lesson worth impressing.

  Yates was bleeding a little through his nose, so he pulled him up into a sitting position—he might have broken the damn thing, and it wouldn’t do to have him strangle in his own gore. Then he stepped away and waited.

  It was perhaps a minute and a half before Yates came around. A kind of shudder passed over him and he groaned, even before he opened his eyes; he must have been hurting in a dozen places at once. But all the fight seemed to have gone out of him—he wouldn’t be any more trouble.

  “You came to me very highly recommended, Mr. Yates, but that was a stupid thing to do,” Diederich said evenly, a dim smile pulling at one corner of his mouth. “I can’t imagine what you expected to accomplish.

  “I don’t like. . .” And then a twinge seemed to pass through the side of his face, and he put his hand up to cover his cheekbone. “Ah, forget it. You’re right—it was stupid. It won’t happen again.”

  The smile was allowed to come to some faint semblance of life.

  “No, I’m sure it won’t. Now—shall we go back and finish our delicious lunch?”

  While Yates wiped the blood from his upper lip and checked in the bathroom mirror for damage, Diederich went outside alone. Surprisingly, it was still only the middle of the afternoon; somehow he had expected that hours had passed, that it would be the dead of night. When he touched his hamburger, he was astonished to find that it was still warm.

  And he was hungry. The discovery came to him with all the force of revelation; probably it was nothing more than nerves. By the time Yates came back out, Diederich had finished everything, even the French fried potatoes, which looked and tasted as if they had been carved from bamboo.