Bill Pronzini - Acts of Mercy

“Certainly not,” the President said. “I defy any man not to show fear in a similar situation.”

“How do you think you might have reacted, sir, if it had been you instead of the Vice-President?”

“If you mean by that would I have retaliated in some way, the answer is yes.”

“In what way, sir?”

Augustine smiled impishly. “Why, I would have unzipped my fly and pissed on the lot of them,” he said.

The room became suddenly and awkwardly silent. The reporters shifted in their chairs, looking at each other, looking at the President. Briggs sat forward, the burning stub of a cigarette in one hand and an unlighted cigarette in the other; his expression was one of shock. Justice felt himself frowning, but not so much at the President’s remark as at the others’ reaction to it.

“After all,” Augustine said lightly, “fire should be met with fire and water with water.”

The silence held. When the reporter from Commentary coughed into the back of his hand, the sound seemed unnaturally loud. No one moved.

The President’s smile faded as he looked at the reporters. At length he tapped his pipe against an ashtray, as if calling for their attention, and then laid it aside. “That was a joke,” he said. “Surely you recognize a joke when you hear one.”

The man from the Post cleared his throat. “It’s hardly a joking matter, Mr. President.”

“I suppose you think it was in poor taste then.”

The reporter said nothing.

“Or do you attach more significance to it than that?” the President said. His voice was low-pitched, mild, but Justice recognized an undercurrent of irascibility in the tone. “Maybe you think it was foolish, deliberately offensive?”

There was an uneasy silence this time. Justice worried his lower lip; he could feel the mood in the room shifting back to one of hostility, knew that the President must feel it too. And yet Augustine seemed to be offended by their attitude- with cause, Justice thought, because the joke had not been all that improper-and unwilling to let the issue pass. As a result of that, if not of the joke itself, all the goodwill he had established in the past hour seemed threatened.

“No comment, eh?” the President said. “Well then, maybe the press secretary has something to say. How about it, Austin? What’s your opinion of my little joke?”

Briggs was startled. “Mr. President?”

“You heard me, Austin. What’s your opinion?”

The three reporters had turned to look at Briggs. He glanced at them nervously, said, “I have no opinion, sir.”

“No? Do you think we ought to make it an off-the-record comment?”

“Well… that might be best, yes-”

“I agree,” Augustine said. “We wouldn’t want these distinguished writers to pass it along to their readers and risk a misinterpretation of its meaning and intent. Not that they would misinterpret it themselves, of course.”

Briggs looked down at his burning cigarette, stubbed it out in the ashtray beside him without speaking.

The President nodded and sat back in his chair. “Now that that’s settled,” he said to the reporters, “shall we go on to another topic?”

They had been exchanging looks again, and Justice could tell from their profiles that Augustine had lost them. The woman from Time said stiffly, “I don’t believe we have any more questions at this time, Mr. President.”

“I see.” Augustine’s voice had turned cool, distant. “All right, then we’ll consider the interview terminated. Thank you for your attendance. Mr. Briggs will show you out.”

When the reporters were gone, and Briggs was gone, the President picked up the toy locomotive and sat studying it as if looking for flaws in its construction. Justice watched him for a time and then got to his feet and crossed to stand in front of the desk.

“Mr. President?” he said. “Do you want me to leave too?”

Augustine did not look up. “Yes, Christopher, I’d rather you did.”

“Yes sir,” Justice said, and wanted to say something else, something comforting. But what words could someone like him offer that would have any meaning?

He turned reluctantly and left the President alone.

Maxwell Harper had been looking for the President for thirty minutes before he finally found him: strolling through the rose garden with his bodyguard, Justice, and humming one of those damned railroad folk songs.

Augustine stopped humming when Harper came up to them, squinted his eyes against the glare of the lateafternoon sun. It had been one of those sultry Washington false-summer days, temperature in the eighties, seventy percent humidity, and Augustine had loosened his tie and shed his suit jacket. His shirt was heat-rumpled and damp with patches of perspiration. There was a thin gleam of sweat on his forehead as well. His eyes and his mouth were solemn.

Harper said, “We have to talk, Mr. President.”

“All right, Maxwell. Go ahead.”

“In private.”

“We can talk in front of Christopher,” Augustine said. “He’s on our side, you know.”

“I think it would be best if we spoke alone.”

Justice moved his feet in a self-conscious way. Unlike the President, he still wore his jacket and his tie was crisply knotted. He said to Augustine, “I can wait for you inside, sir…”

“Nonsense. I prefer to have you here.”

Harper felt his hands clenching, an old habit when he was upset and one he hated in himself. But how could he be expected to maintain rigid control in the face of a crisis that, in spite of him, grew graver by the day? He wanted to say that this was hardly a matter to be discussed in front of a Secret Service bodyguard, of all people, but he curbed the impulse. There was no sense in arguing the point.

“Very well,” he said. “I suppose you know about the UPI story that broke a little while ago.”

“Yes,” Augustine said, “I know about it. I had a call from Senator Jackman just before I came out here.”

“How accurate was their quote?”

“Fairly accurate. They paraphrased, of course.”

“Then you really did say you would have urinated on those dissidents in Phoenix?”

“No, I said I would have pissed on them.”

“What?”

“Don’t look so shocked, Maxwell,” Augustine said. “I realize the word piss is still considered a little vulgar at Harvard and the Institute of Policy Studies, but it really isn’t, you know. It’s just a word. Besides, I was making a joke.”

“Joke?”

“Exactly. Isn’t that so, Christopher?”

“Yes sir,” Justice said.

Augustine nodded. “A harmless little joke.”

Harper stared at him. For an instant he felt as though he were standing there with a pair of ciphers instead of just one; that all of the President’s intellect had been abrogated, reducing him to a witless figurehead who prattled on about semantics and making jokes.

Trying to keep his tone reasonable, he said, “Mr. President, didn’t you realize the repercussions of a statement like that?”

“Belatedly,” Augustine said, but there was no apology in his tone. “Which is why I specifically stated that the comment was to be taken off the record.”

“Off the record? Then how did it leak out to UPI? Unless it was the Post reporter…”

“It wasn’t the Post reporter. I’ve known him for years and he can be a bastard at times, but he would never betray a direct Presidential request. Neither would the other two.”

“Then who was responsible?”

“There was only one other person present besides Christopher,” the President said. “I shouldn’t have asked him to sit in, I was a damned fool for doing it, but I thought it would be a psychological advantage to have him there, let him see how I was going to handle the media.”