“Then don’t you think we can get out of here?” Austen glanced around nervously, hoping for evidence of a mass defection. It seemed, however, that everyone was enjoying themselves immensely. “They’ve got to have an intermission pretty soon. We could make a break for it.”
“Not at forty dollars a ticket. But I will let you go out to the lobby and buy me a lemonade.”
So they stuck it out to the bitter end, which didn’t come until quarter to eleven. They caught a cab on Eighth Avenue.
“Listen, you go ahead and get ready for bed.” He was still holding the door key, smiling like a man with a guilty conscience. “I’ll just take a little walk. I’ll be back in a while.”
Dottie simply stood there for a moment. Then, very quietly, she sank down onto the corner of the bed. She stared at him first with surprise and then with a kind of resigned understanding.
“I just thought. . . I don’t know—I suppose it was silly of me.”
“It’s the job, sweetheart. It’s nothing you have to worry about. I’ll only be about forty minutes.”
They both were aware of the inadequacy of the explanation—she hated his job. It was nasty and unsharable; it was the obstacle that stood between them. And because he knew what it was that had really brought him all this way—and knew that she didn’t—he felt all the more a traitor.
“And I suppose I was just the decoy? All along?”
“I’ve got to go.”
“So go,” she answered quietly, her eyes devoid of expression. “No one is stopping you.”
It was the old unspoken argument again. Neither of them said another word for the five or ten seconds that he remained in the room, but the silence was almost deafening. She just continued to stare at him, and his face assumed the stony expressionlessness that over the years had become his only line of defense. Finally he slipped the key into his jacket pocket and left, closing the door quietly behind him.
Silence had become the condition of his life. And nothing was ever done for one purpose alone. He was stupid to have expected her to understand.
There were no suspicious types in the lobby, and no one seemed to be following him as he followed the dark sidewalk up Park Avenue.
But just to be on the safe side, he cut to the left, turning up to Madison, where he caught a cab.
“Metropolitan Museum.”
The driver looked at him quizzically through the rearview mirror. It seemed on the tip of his tongue to say that the museum had been closed for hours, but then he thought better of it, nodded, and popped the gearshift into drive. They traveled the nineteen blocks in silence.
He waited for the cab to leave, standing out of range of the floodlights that washed the museum’s facade and steps in pale yellow, and then started walking down Fifth, keeping the Park on his right side. When he got to Seventy-ninth Street he turned right, entering the park, and walked about half a block. Then he turned suddenly and took off into the underbrush, heading south at a dead run.
He had gone perhaps fifty or sixty yards when he stopped to conceal himself behind a tree and to listen. There was nothing. He waited another couple of minutes, just to be sure, and then went on. No one had followed him.
At the Conservatory Pond, where the smooth, oily water reflected the lights from the apartment buildings along Fifth, he found a dark alcove and sat down on a bench beside the bronze statue of Alice in Wonderland. After about two minutes another man stepped out from the surrounding woods and joined him. It was Chester Storey.
“What kept you?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “I’ve been here for three quarters of an hour—I was scared to death. This is a hell of a meeting place in the dead of night.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers. Now what was so important that it couldn’t be transmitted through Eilberg?” For about a second, Austen regarded the man with something close to real hatred. Chester Storey had ruined his weekend. If he went back to the hotel tonight and found the door bolted against him, he would know who to blame.
Storey didn’t seem to notice; perhaps it was too dark. He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a sheet of notepaper folded in half and handed it to Austen.
“I got that in the mail four days ago, and a phone call from Diederich the same night. I’m sorry for the delay, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.”
“With what? What is it?”
“A list of names. Eight names.” In the darkness Chester Storey shrugged as if denying any responsibility, except it was a little late for that. “Eight names, with the names of a city and a state in brackets after each one. I assume the cities are all birthplaces; my name is fifth on the list, and that’s what it is there.”
“You’re number five? And there are eight names? Have you ever heard of any of the others?”
“I know three of them by reputation. They’re all very successful, wealthy men. I’ve never met any of them.”
“And the list is from Diederich?”
“He didn’t say so. I think not—the postmark is New York City.”
“And what were your instructions from Diederich?”
“I was to discover the whereabouts of each one of them and approach the ones who had money, asking for a contribution—anonymous cash donations to the Faircliff Reelection Committee—except that I don’t suppose anyone on the committee will ever see a nickel of it. I wasn’t to accept less than half a million from any of them, and that was just for starters.
“Don’t you see?” Storey went on, his voice rising to a tense whisper and his right hand opening and closing with nerveless, machinelike regularity. “I looked up the three I knew—I couldn’t find anything about any of the others—and they were all born in 1921, and they all attended Ivy League universities. Don’t you see? Eight men born in remote little towns in the Southwest and West. I’ll bet every one of them lost his parents within a month after leaving for college. Dammit—they’re Soroka’s magpies.”
“And Diederich would make the ninth.”
“Yes. I don’t know who could have been the tenth. Maybe there wasn’t one, or maybe he’s dead.”
“Get out of here, Chester,” Austen said quietly. “Go on, get lost.”
Storey didn’t respond for a few seconds—it was as if he had been stunned—and then he nodded two or three times, got up from the bench, and retreated back into the darkness. For some time Austen could hear the crackling of twigs, and then the sound of a man’s shoes on an asphalt walkway. And then nothing.
He couldn’t really blame Storey, who after all was merely doing what was required to save his own neck—and who had brought him information that, sometime or other, he would need if there was ever to be an end to this mess. But it could have waited. How much could you have on your conscience at once?
For a long moment Austen continued to sit where he was, under the unseeing eyes of the Mad Hatter, thinking about the eight men whose names appeared on the list he still held in his hand, thinking of what was bound to happen to them now. It wasn’t a very pleasant reflection.
On the way back to his hotel, under a streetlamp on Seventieth Street, he took the slip of paper from his pocket and looked at it.
Harold C Anson (Centralia, Washington); Richard R. Crutwell (Sparks, Nevada); Chester A. Storey (Weatherford, Texas). . . And then, on the next line, Edward H. Tilson (Crescent City, California).
“My God,” he heard himself saying, whether out loud or not he couldn’t have guessed. So that had been the poor bastard’s guilty secret, the thing that had put him in Salvarini’s claws. Had Salvarini known it all, or just some little part, some pale reflection of the truth? It wouldn’t have had to be very much—not that there was much chance of anyone ever finding out now.
And one wondered what grotesque impulse had prompted Diederich to leave that name on the list. What was it supposed to be—a private joke? Perhaps a warning?
How could it have happened that Tilson could have found himself delivered into the hands of a man like Salvarini? Could
it really have been just a favor? Could he really have been that stupid and careless? That was Mrs. Tilson’s version, but poor Edward would have had to tell her something; there weren’t any guarantees that it would have been the truth. In fact, considering what the truth in this case was, that might have been the last thing he would think to tell her.
And there was always the other possibility. Perhaps Diederich, with his usual foresight and indirection, had simply hit upon Salvarini as a means of removing an obstacle. And if so, then Austen had been in it even before he had known there was something to be in. He too had played his part.
III
Pete Freestone had risen quickly within his profession, largely because of the thoroughness of his research—he just didn’t like to let a story go until he had all the answers. His presidential biography had been in the bookstores for three days already, and he still hadn’t finished with the subject. So when the Chronicle asked him to do a condensation for their Sunday supplement, with particular attention to Faircliff’s California roots, he jumped at the chance to take a couple of days off from a very dull election season and go back to Oroville and turn over a few more rocks.
Because there was still the inaccessibility of the private man—the widower with one daughter who is married to one of his principal lieutenants doesn’t make very exciting copy. Of course, everybody knew that Dottie Faircliff Austen didn’t get along very well with her father; she was hardly ever seen at social or political functions, even when Frank was there. But you couldn’t very well turn that into high domestic drama unless you happened to be writing a gossip column.
And Faircliff himself hadn’t been terribly helpful. His weaknesses as a father hadn’t come up in their interview—somehow you couldn’t ask; after all, the man was the President of the United States—but he had had little enough else to say, even about less irritated areas of his private life.
“Your parents—they died while you were in college?”
“Yes, a motoring accident.”
“What were they like?”
“My father owned the hardware store in town, and my mother was very musical—taught piano and played the organ in the Methodist Church.”
“Well, could you tell me a little bit more about what kind of people they were? How do you remember them?”
Faircliff had smiled, as if he were talking to an idiot, and started fiddling nervously with his left thumbnail. “They were good, solid people,” he had answered after a few seconds of consideration. “Everyone liked them. It’s. . . It’s difficult to describe without making them sound like Mr. and Mrs. Mainstreet America.”
It was all so wooden, like answers committed to memory. What was the circumference of the earth? Twenty-four thousand nine hundred miles. What was your father like? He owned a hardware store. What kind of an answer was that?
Mr. and Mrs. Mainstreet America. Well, there were one or two other versions of that truth.
“That woman led Ray Faircliff a life a dog wouldn’t have touched. She used to hide up in her bedroom, sometimes for a month at a stretch. I saw her burst into tears once in front of the meat counter at the A&P, for no reason under the sun. She did that all the time. Oh, she was a trial, believe me.”
That was what one heard from Miss Jessie Faircliff, an eighty-twoyear-old second cousin of the President’s who had lived in Oroville her entire life. Of course, she wasn’t someone upon whose unsupported word you wanted to put your total trust; she had the odd habit of constantly plucking at the hem of her dress while she sat in her front parlor talking to you, apparently on the theory that the real reason you were there was to have a chance to look at her legs. And she seemed to bear the whole family a grudge based on the fact that she had never been invited to the White House. But Pete Freestone had heard similar stories from others who remembered the Faircliffs, so there must have been some truth there somewhere.
So perhaps there were perfectly good reasons why Simon Faircliff was reluctant to discuss his parents. Perhaps he simply wished that they, like his daughter, be cloaked in a decent privacy. Perhaps, under the circumstances, his evasions were nothing more than filial piety.
Anyway, what the hell. It wouldn’t hurt to have another look, and it was better than listening to campaign speeches. He packed his bag and took off.
“Now you promise me you won’t break your diet? No pizza and beer lunches? You’ll take the time to go to a real restaurant and have a chef’s salad and a glass of iced tea?”
He promised. Sheila was the most wonderful woman he had ever known. Just a chubby little brunette who wore too much makeup over her acne scars, but they kept each other on the straight and narrow. And she really loved him. It was a new experience. She meant the end of going home to an empty apartment, of living just any which way because there wasn’t a soul on earth to take an interest.
So after Freestone checked into the Sky hawk Motel, the first thing he did was down three of his Melozets reducing wafers to help him get through the afternoon in a state of grace.
The second thing he did was visit the converted firehouse that had become the Simon A. Faircliff Museum.
God only knew what refurbishing that structure had cost the city fathers in unpaved roads and unbought baseball uniforms for the high school. Oroville didn’t seem like the sort of town that had a lot of civic-minded millionaires in residence. It had been a labor of love, obviously; the paint was so new it almost hurt your eyes.
Maybe they would even make some money out of it, if the level of tourism it seemed to attract didn’t fall through the floor as soon as the election was over. Certainly there were plenty of folks out that day sporting “Faircliff for President” buttons on the lapels of their downfilled hunting jackets. The whole town, in fact, was filled with people who wanted to be in the great man’s hometown when he swept into another term.
Around the walls in a series of glass cases there were photographs, a birth certificate bearing a two-inch-long footprint, artifacts from the Faircliff home—taken out of storage and donated to the city after his reelection to the Senate—campaign posters and buttons, yellowed newspaper clippings, a high school football trophy, and three pages of a handwritten essay for third-period English, dated December 3, 1936, on “The Allegory of The Scarlet Letter, “ in ink that had faded to a pale brown.
Freestone had been here several times, always trying to connect these fragments from an almost unimaginable past with the man whose present greatness had made them worth the trouble of preserving and who now seemed to preside over the destiny of the world. As always, he found himself unable to bridge the gap.
Perhaps there was no conservation of character. Perhaps Simon Faircliff’s only link with the youth enshrined here like some genteel butterfly collection was the fact that it had once been his own. But if so it had long since passed into someone else’s possession—in this case, the child did not seem father to the man.
The one thing that marked his presence was a letter on White House stationery, displayed as the final exhibit in the collection. There was the Simon Faircliff of popular myth—the firm, pointed, almost disturbingly forceful hand.
Outside, the sunlight was already beginning to grow pale. Listening to the local news on his car radio that morning, he had heard they were predicting a frost that night, and Freestone discovered that he was able to believe it. He turned up the collar of his raincoat and started walking back toward his motel, wondering where he would have dinner.
. . . . .
About a mile outside of town, there was an honest-to-God steakhouse, the sort of place that didn’t make you push your tray through a line, where there were white linen tablecloths and no sawdust on the floor. You could even get a drink before dinner, but Freestone decided to abstain because even a simple bourbon and branch water had a hundred calories and he thought he would prefer a pat of butter on his baked potato.
It was a nice place, and he would have liked it even better if it hadn’t been for the goon in the brown sui
t who was sitting about four tables away, over by the door where he could watch every move you made.
He wasn’t sure when he had picked up a tail, and he wasn’t sure whether this was one of the boys from his last trip; it was possible, but there wasn’t any way Freestone could be dogmatic about it. Last time, except for the clown whose picture he had snapped while walking back to his car from the museum, he had never had more than glimpses.
But this guy was on his case. Normally a tail tries to blend in with the wallpaper—a good one is a master of indirection; you just don’t see him—but this guy, with his bald head and his odd, simian nostrils, was so obvious he might as well have worn a sign around his neck.
That all this attention had something to do with Simon Faircliff he just had to accept as a fact. No one was without his flaws, even the President, and Freestone had long entertained the suspicion that his and the nation’s hero wasn’t always so terribly scrupulous in some of his political practices. There was no evading the fact that every one of Faircliff’s election campaigns had coincided with a rash of funny business—cars found with the distributor heads missing just before the start of a motorcade, elevators that suddenly jammed between floors so that the candidate was two and a half hours late for a press conference, contributors who suddenly developed cold feet and backed out of their pledges, sabotaged television transmissions—not a speck of which anyone had ever succeeded in pinning on the man himself. But there was still something. . .
Hell, Freestone had been followed before; it was the sort of thing that happened to political reporters. Not all the time, but often enough. Our elected officials were frequently the nervous type, and it wasn’t just the Mafia and the CIA that kept pavement artists on the payroll. The question with which you learned to concern yourself was, what made them think it was worth their trouble?
“Would you like some dessert?” The waitress smiled—she was probably all of about nineteen and working very hard to please—and her large brown innocent eyes widened even more as she stood beside his chair, poised and expectant, as if her every chance of happiness depended on the answer.
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