Acts of Mercy

by Bill Pronzini

  Those reporters still standing took chairs. When they were all seated, Tanaguchi returned to the study for half a minute, then came out a second time and claimed a chair for himself. The room was completely silent now—an anticipatory, almost eager hush.

  It was another sixty seconds before the President appeared; the First Lady was at his side. He wore a suit and tie, as he seldom did at The Hollows, and carried a small sheaf of notes. To Justice, his presence seemed a commanding one; but when he put the notes down on the podium and gripped its edges, his hands might have been trembling a little. Mrs. Augustine stepped behind him to his right, and although there was a chair behind her she did not sit down. She folded her hands at her waist and her eyes did not once leave the President. Her expression was unreadable.

  Augustine cleared his throat. “Thank you all for coming, ladies and gentlemen,” he said in clear, strong tones. “I won’t keep you long because the statement I have to make is brief and I will take no questions at this time. When I return to Washington later this week I will call a major press conference at which I will respond to all questions pertaining to the statement I am about to make, and to other matters as well. Please bear with me on this.”

  As a body the reporters seemed to lean forward.

  The President cleared his throat again. “It is my belief,” he said then, “that I have been a good President, that in some ways I have taken the office beyond politics and instilled in it a frank humanism generally lacking in previous administrations. It seems, however, that many of you and many of your colleagues, as well as the opposition party, certain members of my own party, and a large segment of the country-at-large do not concur with these personal beliefs. So be it. I make no apologies, I offer no excuses for anything I have done or said during my term in office. But neither do I wish to endure the continued disfavor of the evident majority of my fellow American; neither do I wish to foment divisiveness by pursuing at length the paths of endeavor which my heart and my love for this nation have told me were the right ones.”

  Surprise and excitement rippled through the crowd. Justice’s chest felt tight, as if a hand had bunched all the muscles there into a ligature. He was aware of Harper sitting on the edge of his chair, hands fisted whitely on his knees; aware of the tense expressions on the faces of the other aides. Behind the President, the First Lady still stood immobile and emotionless.

  Augustine raised his eyes from his notes, and as if reciting from painful memory he said, “That being the case, ladies and gentlemen, after long and prayerful consideration I have decided to withdraw my name as a candidate for reelection to the presidency. Under no circumstances will I seek or accept my party’s nomination at the forthcoming convention in Saint Louis. I intend during the final seven months of my administration to devote all my time and all my energies to the execution of the duties of my office, with particular reference to domestic affairs ...”

  There was more, but Justice did not hear it. A sense of numbness had come over him; he seemed to be hearing the President’s voice as if from a great height or distance. He saw the reporters moving in their seats like people straining against invisible bonds, ready to surge upright as soon as they were released. He saw Mrs. Augustine close her eyes, open them again—her only movement, her only reaction. He saw Harper sitting in such a rigid posture that he might have undergone some sort of seizure. He saw the President finish speaking and stack his notes neatly in front of him, looking both melancholy and relieved, like a minister who has just delivered a poignant eulogy.

  He saw all of these people, all of these things, without really seeing them, and he thought: No. Just that one word. No.

  The President gathered up his notes and started to turn from the podium. One of the reporters, unable to restrain himself, called out, “Mr. President, you can’t just deliver a statement as momentous as that without—”

  “No questions at this time,” Augustine said firmly. “I made that quite clear.” And with the First Lady at his side, he walked out quickly through the study door.

  As soon as he was gone the room came alive with swarming movement. Everyone was on his feet: Harper and Dougherty and Tanaguchi and the other aides hurrying to the study door to escape the reporters, some of the press milling around and others rushing for the outside exit. But Justice only sat immobile in his chair, listening to their voices pound against his ears, the words indistinguishable but the sense of them reaching him clearly.

  “He did it by God never thought he’d actually do it the pressure finally got to him it finally wore him down never thought he’d do it...”

  Ten

  Augustine went straight through the study to the hall door, saying to Claire, “I don’t want to talk to any of the staff. Tell them I’ll call a meeting later today or tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Nicholas,” she said. “Where will you be?”

  “In our bedroom.”

  She nodded, looked at him for a moment with eyes that told him nothing of what she was thinking, what she was feeling. Then, as the conference room door opened to admit a wave of noise and the first of his aides, she turned and started over to it. Augustine hurried out into the hall and shut that door sharply behind him.

  When he came into the master bedroom, the mirror over Claire’s dressing table gave him an immediate and unwanted image of himself. Face composed, carriage erect, hands steady now. But his eyes made a lie of the calm exterior; unlike Claire’s, they were naked—they revealed exactly what he was feeling, they told the absolute truth.

  He put his back to the mirror, took off his jacket and tie and opened the collar of his shirt. Then he went into the bathroom and washed his face in cold water, patted it dry with a towel. In the bedroom again he sat on the rough Indian blanket that covered the big brass bed, to wait for Claire.

  And sitting there he thought: Did I handle it wrong? Should I have waited until we were back in Washington? Should I have taken questions out there? No—I did it the only way I could. It’s the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life, but I did it and it’s finished.

  Finished.

  There was a dampness in his eyes now and he felt like weeping. But he did not, would not. Any more than he had been able to go all the way and resign, give in to the goddamn National Committee and turn the country over to Conroy for the next seven months. He had been a decent President, he had done nothing to be ashamed of; resignation was shame, tears were shame—admissions of guilt or folly or weakness.

  They had taken everything else from him but he would not let the bastards have his soul.

  Eleven

  We cannot believe it. We are confused, stunned by what we have just heard the President say to the assembled reporters—so confused and so stunned that we feel our very concealment from me, the singular self, to be threatened. The conspirators have won; there are too many of them, their combined efforts were too great for us alone to overcome. They have insidiously drained Nicholas Augustine’s will to fight, they have brought him down, they have beaten him into submission. He is lost and we are lost with him.

  Or is he?

  Or are we?

  What if it is not too late, even now, to save him? The rest of the plotters could still be exterminated, the conspiracy could still be crushed. And the President would then be free to rescind his manipulated decision to withdraw; he is not bound by it, after all, not yet.

  Yes. Yes! We must not abandon hope, nor abandon our mission. We must be strong. We must rip the tendrils of pain and confusion and defeat—weapons of the conspirators—from our mind, cement the fusion of our purpose. It is not too late.

  We are not sure of how many other conspirators there are, or of their identities. But we have suspicions about at least one, and those suspicions are enough. No time now for gathering more evidence; time now only to act, time now only for the giving of mercy to the besieged President. Act and mercy. Act of mercy.

  Today, tonight, before this day is done, a third traitor must die.

 
; Twelve

  As soon as the President left the conference room, Harper pushed his way through the milling reporters and went straight out to the garage barns and commandeered one of the Cadillacs. Everything about The Hollows had become unbearable now; unless he got away from there, if only for a little while, it seemed as though he would suffocate.

  He drove through the main gate and along the access road at a steady fifty miles an hour. There was an impulse in him to drive faster, drive recklessly, but it was checked by his innate caution and by the looming presence of trees and mountains. Two cars jammed with press people passed him; he paid no attention to them, kept his eyes locked on the roadway.

  Inside him there was a cold gray void: no bitterness, no resentment, no anger, nothing at all. He had known on an intellectual level since yesterday morning that the end was near, but it was like knowing you had a terminal illness. You weren’t dead yet and as long as you were alive there was that tiny spark of hope for a miraculous recovery. But now, now it was over; the end had come at last. Just like that, with one incredible, pathetic statement delivered by an insipid old fool. Career, future, everything meaningfuldead.

  Harper took the Cadillac across the western ridge, down into the first valley past the station and the railroad tracks and the Presidential Special like a waiting funeral train, onto a blacktopped country road and finally into the village of Greenspur. After that there were other country roads, a four-lane state highway that followed the course of the Yurok River, still another county road, a string of lumber mills, two more villages. And always the oppressive wilderness of trees and mountains and valleys, green and brown, green and brown, shadowed and shining in the warm May sunlight....

  It became as unbearable after a while as The Hollows. What now? he thought dully. Drive all the way to Washington? Ridiculous. Drive several hundred miles to San Francisco and then take a commercial airline to the Capital? Repellent. There was nothing for him in Washington anyway, not now; there was nothing anywhere. But he did not want to go back to The Hollows either. He did not want to see Augustine, or talk to him, or see and talk to anybody else—

  Except Claire?

  No. Especially not her. Why should he want to see her? But the thought stayed with him, and because he was tired of driving and sick of the open countryside, because he had to go somewhere and he had no place to go, he turned the car around finally and started back. Got lost twice, but did not stop to ask directions. Found his way to The Hollows by trial and error, by instinct—he didn’t need anyone, he would never trust anyone again.

  It was almost five o’clock when he reached the front gate and was admitted to the ranch complex. He drove to the garage barns, left the Cadillac there, and without conscious choice found himself walking straight across toward the main house. I don’t want to see her, he thought—and came around a curve in one of the south-garden paths and saw her.

  He stopped instantly. Unaware of him, she was bending over a bed of flowers, clipping a bouquet of yellow-andpurple lilies with a pair of shears. She wore a blue bandanna around her hair, and gardening clothes, and there was a smudge of dirt on one cheek. Beautiful, Harper thought. His hands were moist. She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.

  “Mrs. Augustine,” he said. “Claire.”

  She came erect in a jerky motion, shaded her eyes against the sunglare. “What is it, Maxwell?” Cold voice, distant, always so distant and unknowable.

  “Where is the President?” he asked.

  “Resting.”

  “Yes, of course. After what he did this morning he needs all the rest he can get.”

  She moistened her lips: little pink tongue glistening, flicking sensually at soft pink lips. “He did what had to be done,” she said.

  “Did he?”

  “You know he did.”

  “I don’t know anything,” Harper said. “But I can see how delighted you are. If it had been up to you, you’d have had him resign, wouldn’t you.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why? What motivates you?”

  “Nicholas motivates me.”

  “That’s all? Just Nicholas?”

  Uneasiness had crept into her eyes. “Why are you talking to me like this, Maxwell? What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing is the matter with me,” he said, and thought: Why am I talking like this? I don’t have any right to say these things. Control, control—but that was gone too and he did not seem to care. And the words kept coming out of him, out of the gray void. “I just want to know you, Claire. I want to know what you’re really like inside that beautiful head of yours.”

  “I think I’d better go-”

  “No,” he said. “Not just yet. Why won’t you open yourself up to me? Why are you afraid of me? Is it because you find me hateful and repulsive?”

  She shook her head, shook it again, and began to back away from him.

  “Or is it because I’m an intellectual and you think I’m incapable of understanding, that I’m just a political machine with no human feelings?”

  “I never thought of you as a machine—”

  “I think you did,” Harper said. “I think that’s exactly how you and Nicholas and everyone else have always felt about me. But you’re wrong, all of you. I have deeper feelings than any of you ever imagined.”

  She kept backing away, seemed about to turn and flee—and compulsively he moved toward her, caught her wrists in his hands. The touch of her skin, the silky warmth of it, made him catch his breath, sent little tremors through him. He had not touched her in a long time, had never touched her except for impersonal handclasps; he had never been this close to her, had never had the scent of her heady in his nostrils, had never looked into the depths of her eyes.

  “Please,” she said, and ducked her face away from him.

  “Please, Maxwell, let me go.”

  “I don’t want to let you go,” he said. Words still coming out of the void, and he could not stop them, did not want to stop them. “I’ve always wanted to touch you, Claire.”

  Her eyes on him again, flashing messages that he could not read. “Don’t. Don’t-”

  “I’m a person after all, you see that now, don’t you? I’m capable of normal desires, I’m capable of love.”

  “Please,” she said again.

  And he heard himself say, “I’ve been in love with you for a long time, Claire.”

  She made a sound in her throat, wrenched out of his grasp, and ran through the garden to the house.

  Harper just stood there. Feeling empty, feeling awed at himself and what had been hidden away inside him all these years. Thinking: I shouldn’t have done it, I shouldn’t have done it—but Nicholas shouldn’t have done it either.

  Thirteen

  At nightfall, beneath another full moon and a sky heavy with stars, Justice prowled here and there, back and forth—and a voice in his mind kept repeating: If it’s going to happen it will happen tonight; the killer will go after his third victim in the next few hours.

  He could not get rid of the feeling. Every nerve in his body was sensitive with it. But where would it happen? Who was the intended target this time? Could it actually be the President, for some reason connected to his stunningly tragic withdrawal statement this morning? Justice had no intuitive answers; there was no way he could begin to fathom the workings of a deranged mind. He felt only that someone else was scheduled to die. Tonight.

  Tonight.

  And he could not be everywhere at once. He was only one man, one man alone. He wanted desperately to spend the night inside the manor house, at the President’s side; to talk to him again, try to make him accept the danger. But when he had gone there just before dusk, the housekeeper, Mrs. Peterson, had told him the President was not seeing anyone and had adamantly refused to carry a message to him. On impulse Justice had asked for an audience with the First Lady, and had been told that she was not seeing anyone either.

  There had been nothing for him to do then except eit
her to barge into the house—which might have angered and upset the President enough to make him not only refuse to listen but to have Justice confined to quarters—or to go on patrol. So he had gone on patrol, concentrating his vigil on the manor house, the guest cottages, the security and staff quarters. Whenever he encountered another agent on duty, or any of The Hollows’ private security police, he stopped and suggested carefully that they be extra watchful tonight; the President’s bombshell at the press conference might bring out part of the lunatic fringe, he said, you never knew how people would react to news like that. That was as far as he could go, and it did nothing at all to ease the fear and tension inside him.

  He moved now through the gardens behind the manor house. The lights in the President’s study were on, he saw, and the idea came to him to hail Augustine from outside, get in to talk to him that way. Justice crossed to the window, stood close to it and then called out, “Mr. President? It’s Christopher Justice, sir. I’d like to speak with you.”

  No response.

  “Mr. President?”

  No response.

  Justice listened. There was a faint electric whirring from within: Augustine’s toy train outfit. So the President was inside; at least he knew that much. Amusing himself with his toy trains and not responding even out of curiosity to summonses from outside.

  Just stay there, sir, Justice thought. Don’t leave the house or respond to any other summonses.

  Grimly, he turned away.

  Fourteen

  Inside the study Augustine sat in front of the train board and stared at a 1927 Ives locomotive dragging a string of tankers and coal gondolas around the tracks. I should have gone into railroading instead of politics, he thought. I should have become a highballing engineer on the last of the steam locomotives on the Southern Pacific or the AT&SF. The smell of cinders and burning coal and hot cylinder oil; the pound of the 2-10-4s and the 4-6-2s and 2-8-0s; the roundhouses and the freight yards, the high mountain runs and the desert crossings, the close-knit fraternity of railroaders. To hell with trying to shape the destiny of the world. To hell with the thankless futile eviscerating world of politics. Give me anonymity and freedom and dignity. Give me a little joy.