(1964) The Man

by Irving Wallace

  It was pleasant for Beggs, all the hands, all the attention. He found himself on a blanket, on his back, staring up at blurred faces and the overhang above them.

  From a distance he heard Ross’s voice. “—the gardener fired, missed, then Beggs jumped on the President and bowled him over as the colored guy fired again. Then Beggs rolled over and just shot him dead. . . . The body’s over there, Chief—”

  He thought that he heard Admiral Oates’s voice nearby. “Mr. President—Mr. President—” Then silence. “He’s alive—I don’t think he’s been touched—the blood’s not his—here, nurse, give me the spirits of ammonia—Mr. President, there now, that’s better—”

  Then he heard President Dilman, weak but irritable. “I’m all right. Leave me alone. Beggs, he took the shot instead of me. Get over there and help him.”

  Beggs opened his eyes. What was wrong with them? Nothing was distinct. Admiral Oates’s face floated into his vision, a face less grouchy because it was not clear. He was saying, “Easy, Mr. Beggs, let me have a look—oh yes, yes—see here, it’s his right leg—really chewed up—Miss Foster! Get an ambulance to take him to Walter Reed Hospital at once! Beggs, do you feel any pain? No, I suppose not. Shock. I’ll give you a shot—”

  He felt the sting of the needle and its extraction, but no pain; then he was diverted by Chief Gaynor’s voice behind him somewhere. “Mr. President—you all right, sir? Just wanted to tell you the assassin’s cold dead. Beggs got him with one shot straight through the chest. His wallet here—Burleigh L. Thomas, twenty-eight—truck driver’s license—the clippings—Turnerite stuff—that’s it, I’m sure . . . This, this is the regular map of the guided tour through the White House. You can see the line he drew in red ink. See? Followed the ground-floor tour upstairs, then into the State Dining Room, and when the others went on to the Red Room, he must have hung behind, slipped into the Family Dining Room—something we’ve always been afraid of—hid out then, apparently had the overalls inside his suit coat or jacket, changed, picked up two plants—Hawkins says he saw a colored man carrying plants downstairs around three-thirty—he must have kept himself busy but out of sight until the regular gardeners left—then kind of blended himself with the magnolia, puttered around, waiting for you. . . . What? No, Mr. Flannery, not yet, give us a chance to cover the grounds. We’ll have something definite for the press in the morning. Just tell them the attempt was made, the President is fine, just fine, and the assailant was shot dead.”

  Beggs heard Dilman’s voice, shaky but loud. “Tim, you see that Otto Beggs gets all the credit—you hear? All the credit. Admiral, I want him to receive every bit of care available to—”

  Someone was shouting, “That’s spelled B-u-r-l-e-i-g-h, yeh, Burleigh, Burleigh Thomas.”

  Miss Foster’s voice, he thought, distinct but so far off. “The ambulance is on its way, Admiral! How is poor Mr. Beggs? Will he—?”

  He heard Oates’s distant voice. “He’s a brave man. Thank God for men like that.”

  He felt soothed, no pain, too tired and sleepy to listen.

  He thought: You hear that, Gertrude? You hear that, Otis, Ogden? Brave man.

  He thought: You’re right, Ruby, your Otter here is impo’tant. Brave man.

  He thought: Ruby Thomas, Burleigh Thomas. Fair enough, Ruby, all square.

  He thought: Am I dying? To save a nigger? Dirty, lousy trick, goddam.

  He thought: History books’ll say a President, he saved a President. Not bad, not bad, eh, Gertie girl?

  He thought: Dear God, be merciful to me a sinner . . . dear Lord Jesus, see this, greater love hath no man than this . . . dear Saviour, cast me not into darkness . . . lemme live, please lemme live to fill the scrapbook, please, thank you, amen.

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

  Office of the White House Press Secretary

  * * *

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  * * *

  ADMIRAL OATES, PERSONAL PHYSICIAN TO THE PRESIDENT, ANNOUNCED TODAY THAT, EXCEPT FOR SEVERAL HEAD BRUISES AND A GENERAL CONDITION OF FATIGUE, THE PRESIDENT IS IN EXCELLENT HEALTH, FOLLOWING YESTERDAY’S ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT. ALL OF THE PRESIDENT’S APPOINTMENTS HAVE BEEN CANCELED, AND HE HAS BEEN CONFINED TO HIS ROOMS FOR “A MUCH-NEEDED REST.” HE WILL ATTEND THE CHANTILLY CONFERENCE IN FRANCE AS SCHEDULED.

  ADMIRAL OATES ALSO ANNOUNCED THAT OTTO BEGGS, WHITE HOUSE SECRET SERVICE AGENT WHOSE ACTION SAVED THE PRESIDENT’S LIFE, REMAINS ON THE “CRITICAL” LIST AT WALTER REED GENERAL HOSPITAL. DECISION WILL BE MADE IN NEXT FORTY-EIGHT HOURS WHETHER BEGGS’S INJURED LEG CAN BE SAVED OR WHETHER AMPUTATION WILL BE NECESSARY.

  COMPLETE TEXT OF ADMIRAL OATES’S MEDICAL BULLETINS ONE AND TWO ARE ATTACHED.

  * * *

  EDNA FOSTER sat alone in a shadowy recess of the faintly lighted Promenade Lounge of the Mayflower Hotel. She was the small and elegant room’s single occupant in this pre-cocktail hour, lost in thought as she prepared to finish her third vodka Gibson.

  She was to have met George Murdock here, their favorite secluded and somewhat-beyond-their-means meeting place when either of them needed a lift, at a quarter to six. Normally she would have finished her day’s work, and taken a taxi up Connecticut Avenue, and arrived here nearly on time, to find George waiting.

  However, today had been anything but normal. Because the President had been indisposed, suffering acute hypertension (if the truth were known) induced by the horror of last night, and was confined to his quarters, Edna’s work load had diminished and her workday had been curtailed. Dilman’s usual engagements had been shunted off to the occupants of other offices, and her own duties had been distributed to other White House secretaries. By four-thirty in the afternoon her desk had been clean. She had telephoned the second floor, and the President had insisted that she close shop and go home early. She had found it too late to go to the apartment first, before meeting George, and too early to time her arrival at the lounge with his own. She had decided to go by foot, by some roundabout route, to the Mayflower, to use up the extra time. Once outside, she had found the air too nippy, the sky too bleak, for her thin skin and frayed nerves, and she had immediately altered her plan. She had known, then, what she wanted. Alone or not, she wanted to be drunk.

  Now, forty-five minutes later, her little finger excessively crooked as she downed the last of her third Gibson, she was warm and resolute and nicely drunk.

  A waiter in a red jacket, a servant gray and smooth as an old British family retainer, glided in from the adjacent Presidential Room, hovered a moment, then came forward and removed her long-stemmed cocktail glass.

  “Another, ma’am?”

  She was tempted, but then she might forget what she had so carefully rehearsed for George. “I think I’ll wait, if you don’t mind. I’m expecting a friend.”

  After the waiter had gone, she took out her compact to prepare for her friend. She peered into the mirror with distaste. That’s what came of buying cheap compacts with cheap mirrors, she told herself. The cheap reflecting glass was always grainy, always gave you lines you did not deserve. But then, she was too inebriated for deceit. It was a good compact, the best she had ever owned, the gift of her generous aunt in Madison. The looking glass was flawless. The lines belonged to her, fact, no argument, and for those new creases engraved on her forehead, under her eyes, around her mouth, she blamed not time but her employer.

  A person did not age that much in a couple of months, any scientist would tell you that, except if there was a reason, like the way you read of some person’s hair turning white overnight because of what they’d been through. She had her reason, and his initials were Douglass Dilman. If you were not inhuman, if you had half a heart, if you empathized with even a dumb animal, you had to suffer while being around that colored President eight to ten hours a day. It was like, as if, Dilman was William Tell’s son and she had to hold the wormy apple on his head, and all the Gesslers, or whatever their names, were shooting arrows to knock the apple off—we-ll, nobody was really aimi
ng for the apple, everybody was aiming for him, President Tell, and lots of them missed and naturally hit her, because she was there holding the apple. Like perfect example last night. That Thomas brute-murderer with his surplus-sales gun. Bang. Bang. Bang. Missed Dilman. Hit Beggs. Hit her. Poor Dilman, vomiting afterwards. How must it feel always going around with an apple on your head? Poor Beggs, too. For that salary. She must remember to send over those foreign stamps to his boys. Most of all, poor Edna, she herself, personal secretary to a target, getting hit so often that the compact mirror finally showed it.

  She wondered why three drinks had not made her drunk. She knew. They made profits serving domestic vodka, which was as potent as bottled water. At those prices, yet. What a gyp!

  There was the cheap grainy mirror, still. She powdered her forehead, nose, chin, then combed her messy brown hair, then tried to give herself lips, then gave up, closed the compact and put it away.

  She lifted her head and there was George, talking to the waiter. He was neat as always, but had grown shorter—was it possible? Yes, because maybe he had worn out his shoe lifts. He stooped and kissed her caked forehead, and squeezed her hand, and sat across from her, pushing the table lamp aside.

  “Have you been here long, honey?” he wanted to know.

  “George,” she said, “I’m quitting.” She hiccuped. “I’m quitting next week after I come back from Paris.”

  Poor George looked not stricken exactly, but sort of moody. “Edna, we’ve been through this two times already—”

  “And three times is out. The President can call me out.”

  George Murdock, possessing the impatient air of one who had wanted to speak about himself but had first politely inquired how-are-you, and then had had to listen to his companion at length, said, “What is it now, Edna?”

  “Don’t you read the papers, George? Huh? Last night. Most secretaries put the cover on their typewriters, lock the files, wash out the coffee cup and go home like anybody. Me, I have to be scared out of my wits, right outside my office, the President lying there, Otto Beggs half dead, that—that Thomas completely dead, a corpse. They never taught me that was part of it in secretarial school. I couldn’t sleep most of the night, George. I took three sodium butisols and had ten nightmares. That’s why I look so haggard.”

  He reached out and touched her hand. “No matter how you feel, honey, you look great.”

  “Thank you, George, but I mean it.”

  His fingers left her hand, and began pinching his pitted cheeks. She wished that he wouldn’t. He said, “Edna, these things happen. They’ve been happening ever since that Lawrence fellow, the house painter, took a pot shot at President Jackson in 1835, and practically in the same place. That’s part of being President, knowing certain people will be sore at you and some of them are nuts. I’m sure Dilman was not surprised. That Burleigh Thomas was an out-and-out extremist, and he decided Dilman was hindering the Negro cause. So he took matters in his own hands. No one approved of it. Even the anti-Dilman press was dismayed.”

  “Hypocrites, the papers, George. Forgive me. Next week they’ll resume their hate campaign and inflame some other assassin. No, George, this time I mean it. Don’t try to stop me. The first time, I wanted to resign because I missed T. C. and didn’t see how I could work for a stranger. Last time, I was just getting too sorry for Dilman, sickened by the hate he was suffering from. This time it’s different. He’s in danger, and so is everyone around him, and I’m scared.”

  “Well—” said Murdock. He shrugged, then sat back, resigned and waiting, as the waiter served the Gibson and the Scotch-and-soda.

  They both took their drinks and sipped them, and then, worrying about his displeasure, she said, “Don’t be mad at me, George.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” he said curtly. “I’m mad at myself.”

  She was too befogged to understand him. She said, “Why do you want me staying on that miserable old job? It’s not as if I’ve been able to be of any help to you, like a real girl friend should. Each time I want to give you a tip, without hurting security, I choke up, because I know so much, too much. I’m a detriment to you, that’s what. You see, you’ll be better off when I’m somewhere else. Pa called from Milwaukee this morning. Can you imagine? First time in all this time. Even he wanted me to quit.”

  “I’m not saying you should stay on, Edna.” He drank, coughed, put down the Scotch. “I was just trying to buy a little time for us. If I thought you were in danger, I’d bodily remove you from that office, you believe me.”

  She felt comforted, but determined. “Thank you, George. I—I just don’t think you can see the position I’m in like any ordinary person would. You’re a newspaperman, and it’s natural for you to—to look on what happened like a story—like part of a play that isn’t real—but if you’d been in the garden last night, not as a reporter—”

  “Edna,” he said.

  The quavering urgency in his tone made her stop. “What?”

  “Edna, I’m not a newspaperman or reporter any longer. I’m unemployed. I haven’t had a chance to tell you.”

  Her concern with herself, tied to her dream of their future, popped like a pricked balloon and disappeared into thin air. She stared at him. “Oh, George.” Her hands went to his sleeve. “No,” she said. “Did they fire you?”

  He clutched to self-esteem as firmly as he now held his highball glass. “Not exactly, although it might look that way.” Involuntarily, his thin nostrils quivered. “Tri-State lost another of my papers. That brought me down to eight, and the low-paying ones at that. Weidner called and said carrying the column was a losing proposition—like hell it is, but that’s what he said—and unless I wanted to continue on a so-much-per-published-inch rate, making me virtually a stringer, he was taking on one of the more established names. So I told him, in effect, not on your life, you skinflint. I was even a little abusive about his ingratitude.”

  “Good for you, George.”

  “Then he backed down a bit and said—” Murdock hesitated. “Aw, what’s the use. Let’s have another round. I can use it.” He held up his glass, called the order, and finished his drink.

  “What do you mean, he backed down?” Edna asked. In her heart she knew what was coming and wanted to run away from it, but this was too important, her whole life in the balance.

  “You won’t like it, so never—”

  “Please, George.”

  “He said, ‘Of course, there’s still that so-called friend of yours right on the inside. If she’d become a source for you, one like all the name columnists have, and you’d promise to deliver a couple of whoppers in the next few weeks, we’d reconsider.’ I said, ‘Not on your life, Weidner, I don’t mix business with my personal life,’ and so I quit, two days ago I quit.”

  Edna had been holding her breath. She let it go in a gasp. “George, why didn’t you tell him yes? Really, if I had known this before—how serious—George, I can help without hurting the President or my job. After all, what can hurt him or me any more? Look, George, maybe I can tell you some real exclusive things nobody has about the assassination attempt, or when we go to Chantilly and Versailles, maybe I can see if—”

  “You’re sweet, darling. No use, now. I wouldn’t know what to do with the copy. I told you I quit. I’m out of work. I don’t have a column.” He considered her. “Don’t look so—so tragic, Edna. You can take the newspaper away from a boy, but you can’t take a boy away from the newspaper. I’ve got my lines out. There are some big people who think more of me than that crumb-bum hayseed in the Midwest does. You yourself heard Reb Blaser tell me how much his publisher thinks of my writing.”

  “You wouldn’t work for them?”

  “I’d work any place where I could be independent and write as I please. That includes the Miller chain or any other. What the hell, Edna. I’d rather be reporting for a reactionary paper where I can get a chance to give them a breath of fresh air, proselytize, than a paper whose readers believe what
I believe and know what I know.”

  As ever, George’s infallible logic subdued Edna. “You’re right, I guess,” she said.

  The fresh drinks came. They drank in silence. It was wonderful, she thought, despite all this, how positive and clearheaded she felt.

  “Let’s enjoy ourselves,” George Murdock was saying. “Rome hasn’t burned yet. Leave it to your Georgie. I’ll find another spot.”

  “And I’ll help you!” she cried out. “This time I will, I promise. It’s only right. This time, every evening, I’ll tell you what I can about what goes on in the President’s office.”

  “Edna, I repeat, no need for that. Besides, you’re quitting, too, next week. Did you forget?”

  “Oh,” she said, and slumped. “That’s right.”

  He kept looking at her, until she was uneasy, and then he kept looking at the Scotch, and then he said quietly, “Edna, when big things happen to you, your life sort of changes—know what I mean? You’re forced to take stock—and that’s what I’ve been doing myself these last two days, taking stock. I have a better picture of myself. I’ve been too conservative, not taking any chances, and to get anything out of life you’ve got to—well—stick your chin out and say to yourself and everybody, I’m me, I’m somebody, I deserve more out of life, out of my career and out of life, and I’m going out and get my share of life, no matter what. Know what I mean?”

  Her mind had gone blank, but she said dutifully, “Yes, George.”

  “I’m making a fresh start from tonight on. That’s what I decided. Like the next job. No more looking for anything second-rate. I’m shooting straight for the top. And like us, the two of us, no more waiting for the big doubloons at the end of the rainbow. Live for today, that’s all there is to be sure of, and if you have to make good, somehow you make it, and meanwhile you’re getting something out of life. Do you understand, honey?”