Donovan’s handsome face split into a lopsided, willfully charming smile, reminding you why Simon had always referred to him as “the matinee idol.”
“I don’t know why I don’t just have you arrested. Your precious Simon Faircliff may or may not have been a traitor, but in case it might have slipped your mind, you’ve just confessed to having assassinated him.”
“He was never a traitor. He was a deep-cover agent but still technically a Soviet citizen. You can’t betray a country that isn’t your own.”
The new President didn’t much seem to appreciate having the distinction drawn for him, but to hell with what he might or might not appreciate. Austen allowed himself to slouch contemptuously back in his chair. Donovan was such a lightweight he probably had to wear special shoes to keep from floating away.
“You know, Bob, I never thought you were very bright, but I would have given you credit for enough simple animal cunning to know not to foul your own nest. What do you think this is, some crummy little night court case? You’re the President now, remember? Just how do you plan to stay the President if it gets noised about that Simon was a Russian agent?”
“Are you threatening me, Frank?”
Austen would have laughed out loud if this donkey hadn’t been sitting in Simon Faircliff’s chair.
“No, I’m not threatening anyone.” Austen shook his head. “I’m just reminding you of the facts of life. If the way Simon died comes out, then it’ll become impossible to keep his secret, and it won’t be a matter of my exposing him to save my own hide; people are going to ask questions about a thing like that, and what I figured out somebody else can figure out. And then, pal, the institution of the presidency—and just by the way, your own personal standing; remember, it was Simon who raised you to glory—is going to be so compromised that you might as well just go home to Minnesota.”
Donovan leaned forward, resting his slender hands on the edge of the desk, and frowned. “So what happens now?”
“So now you kill the treaty.” Austen reached into his briefcase and pulled out a thick black briefing book. “There’s our true strategic position with respect to Russia,” he went on, dropping the briefing book heavily on the desk. “You read that and you’ll know where we are and where they are, and then you kill the treaty. And then we can all sleep safe in our beds.”
“And what about Simon?”
“What about him?” He stared at the man behind Simon Faircliff’s desk as if the individual words of his question made no sense. “We bury him. And we bury his nasty little secret with him.”
“Yes, but Howard. . .”
“Howard Diederich will put in a few selected public appearances—carefully supervised and up to his hairline in Thorazine if need be—and then, in about another week, he’ll be found dead in his bathtub with his wrists slashed.”
“Oh, God. . .” Donovan closed his eyes and turned his head away as if he could see the thing happening right in front of him.
“You asked, didn’t you?” Austen’s face was an impassive, brutal mask, and his voice harsh and unsympathetic. The fact was that he found he had used up his store of compassion. There just wasn’t any left for Bob Donovan’s moral qualms. “You’ll have to learn to live with it. I’ll just keep hold of the evidence myself,” he went on, picking up the tape recording and returning it to his briefcase. “No one but George Timmler and I will know where it’s hidden. You bear that in mind, pal; don’t get any bright flashes about raids on the vaults at Langley, because it won’t be there. In two or three months I’ll resign. I’d go now, but some smart investigative reporter might wonder why I’m being purged. You’ll appoint George Timmler my successor. He doesn’t care anything about politics, and he’ll do a good job for you.”
“You could stay, Frank, if you wanted to. You know that. The whole country is in your debt. . .”
“Don’t be corny.” Austen’s face shriveled with distaste; five minutes before, the clown had been threatening to have him thrown in jail. “You’ll be glad to see the back of me, and you know it—I don’t even blame you. Besides, I was Faircliff’s man. I lost my taste for all these games a long time ago.”
. . . . .
In the car, on the way back to Langley, he described to George the deal he had cut.
“How are your contacts with the Army Medical Corps, George? I think it might be the better part of valor if we saw to it that somebody took a print of Faircliff’s right foot when they do the autopsy. I’d feel a lot better having that little item in the National Archives, just in case.”
“No sweat.” Timmler nodded, continuing to look straight ahead. “Are you really going to take a walk, Frank?”
“Yes. You’ll get your precious Company back in the hands of the career spooks, George. That ought to make you happy.”
“Yeah, well. . . What’ll you do?”
“I don’t know.” Austen shrugged as if the matter had never crossed his mind, which, in fact, it hadn’t. “Maybe I’ll hang out my shingle and practice divorce law in Beverly Hills. Maybe some fool will make me president of a dog food company. Who gives a shit?”
They rode along in silence for a while, past the bleak autumn landscape—the gray buildings, the bare limbs of the cherry trees. It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning, and already the day seemed advanced in hopeless senility.
“Do you feel like paying a sick call?” Timmler asked finally. “Howard Diederich—we’ve got him at a safe house in Bethesda. He wants to see you, and he says he’ll make it worth your while.”
“Oh, God. . .”
. . . . .
Earl Rutledge opened the door for them. He was in his shirtsleeves, although the temperature outside was only in the middle forties. Once Austen got past the door, he could understand why—the house was like an oven.
It was cooler in the basement, where Howard Diederich occupied a corner of the floor, trussed up with a special set of padded chains that wouldn’t leave any marks. His arms went around his thighs, and his hands were sticking out between his shins just above the ankles. After fourteen hours it was probably a fairly uncomfortable position.
“Unlock him,” Austen told the man who was sitting at the foot of the stairs with a shotgun across his knees.
“Rutledge has got the key, sir,” he answered, without moving.
“Then go upstairs and get the key from Rutledge.”
Two minutes later Diederich was able to stretch his legs out at full length, and after the circulation returned to his feet he got up and walked around a little.
“Thanks, Austen—that’s good of you.” He smiled one of his curious, exhausted smiles and then bent over and let his arms dangle in an effort to touch his toes. He was about four inches short. After several seconds he straightened up again, his face pink from the blood that had rushed to his head and his mocking smile still in place.
Austen glanced at the man with the shotgun, who took the hint and retired back upstairs.
“I take it that Simon’s already dead,” Diederich said tonelessly as soon as they were alone. All during their conversation, he kept shifting his weight from one leg to the other, which might have been nerves or simply a reaction to his hours of sitting on the floor.
Austen nodded. “Since last night.”
“Who did it?”
“I did it.”
Diederich’s eyes widened slightly. “Well, I’m sure he appreciated all the personal attention. And you’ve told Donovan?”
Austen nodded a second time.
“And he didn’t wet his pants and send for the FBI?”
“As you see, I’m here.”
“Yes, you are, Frank,” Diederich answered, his smile having finally disappeared. “Yes, you certainly are.”
“What was it you wanted, Howard?”
“A deal—a chance to save my life.”
“It’s a bit late for that.”
“And besides, I haven’t got anything to deal with. Am I right?”
&nbs
p; The two men stood at opposite sides of the basement, in the dull yellow light from a single naked bulb, and Austen was suddenly struck by how little triumph the moment afforded him. He simply wanted to get away, as if from the scene of some personal humiliation. Toward Howard Diederich he felt nothing, nothing at all. It was like looking at a photograph of some stranger’s corpse.
“Then I take it you didn’t summon me here for any practical purpose.”
“No.” Diederich shook his head, and the trace of a smile returned to his lips. “I just wanted you to see me like this. So that when those two goons upstairs kill me, it won’t be just like canceling a stamp for you. You always had such a tender conscience, Frank—I just wanted you to remember me.”
Austen didn’t wait to hear any more. He turned on his heel and went back upstairs.
. . . . .
When the national shock waves had subsided a little and Austen could walk onto his front lawn without stumbling over an army of reporters, he turned his duties over to George Timmler and submitted his resignation. They didn’t really need him at Langley—for all practical purposes George had been running things since President Faircliff’s death—and his heart wasn’t in it.
He really didn’t have any idea what he would do with the rest of his life—it hardly seemed to matter. Simon was dead. Dottie was on the other side of the continent, and even further than that in the ways that counted. After Howard Diederich’s “suicide” there weren’t even any enemies left anymore. Like old Yegorov, who was still a prisoner at Fishing Bay—who would die there, certainly—he had become a captive by outliving the past in which he had had a place.
It was like being dead.
For a solid month after his retirement he sat in his study at home, watching the rain on the picture window, wondering whether there would ever come a point when whatever makes these decisions in a random universe would decide that he had done penance enough. He ate peanut butter sandwiches and drank tea, and once in a while he would go to a movie, where no one would recognize him and he could sit in the dark and watch fantasies about a full-color world in which the actions of people’s lives were bounded by dramatic convention and the four straight lines of the projection screen.
But mostly he just stared through his window, thinking of those ten boys. All that bright promise, to end up in unmarked graves, God only knew where, to have even their murders taken from them—because what else is it when a total stranger takes over your life and goes on living it in your place? And their parents, and all the rest. Dottie’s mother, and Mike Starkman, and Pete, and Ted Boothe and his wife, and Clayton Burgess, and. . . probably no one would ever know exactly how many more. All that death—and for not a goddamned thing.
Soroka had been mad, out of his mind. It had taken a madman to conceive of a thing like that. And he would die, someday, down in the cellars of the house at Fishing Bay, forgotten and alone. Maybe there was some kind of justice in that, but Austen found it hard to experience
any sense of it.
“Facilis descensus averno, “ the picture said. True enough. “I don’t think we really need anything but the truth,” Dottie had told him once. Bingo again.
And the truth was that Frank Austen needed his wife, needed her so badly that sometimes he thought he might just die of that alone. But standing in the wreckage of his life, he was still, in point of fact, alive—alive enough to know his own emptiness. I am in despair; therefore I am. And Dottie was alive too. Unlike so many others, they had at least survived.
“I’m tired of being dead.”
At first he didn’t recognize the voice. And then, with a disagreeable shock, he realized that it was his own.
“I’m tired of being dead,” he repeated, just to be on the safe side. So what the hell. He had been sitting around and feeling bad for four solid months; the worst she could do was slam the door in his face. She would probably do just that, but that wouldn’t kill either one of them. I don’t think we really need anything but the truth. It was possible that after all this time she might be ready at least to listen.
He went into his bedroom to throw a couple of shirts and some underwear into a suitcase. He would phone; there would probably be a plane out to California that night. It was worth a try.
About Nicholas Guild
Nicholas Guild published his first novel in 1975 and has been writing ever since. His books have been published around the world and several have been international bestsellers. He has written thrillers and historical novels. Early in his career he was recognized as a writer of abundant grace, power and technical agility. Publishers Weekly described him as “a master of timing, plot and style.” Phil Thomas, The Associated Press Book Editor, said, “Nicholas Guild writes extremely well. His sentences are tight and well-constructed, and, additional bonus, his plot and sub-plots cannot be faulted.” The Cincinnati Enquirer said, “Guild writes extremely well. He does the flashbacks so well you are unaware the action has stopped and the novelist is filling you in on the character’s past.” The New York Times Book Review said, “The almost languid grace of his writing also sets the measured pace of the storytelling, while wrapping the narrative in an atmosphere thick with sensuality.”
Visit his website at www.nicholasguild.com/
Discover other titles by Nicholas Guild at Amazon.com:
Blood Ties
Angel
The Assyrian
The Blood Star
The Berlin Warning
Chain Reaction
The Linz Tattoo
The Summer Soldier
Old Acquaintance
The Favor
The President's Man Page 38