Bill Pronzini: Acts of Mercy

Claire reached across to touch his hand with cool fingers. “I think you’ve made it, Nicholas,” she said quietly. “Don’t get yourself upset.”

“I’m not upset,” Augustine said, and put his hand on top of hers, squeezed it briefly and then pushed it away. “Damn it, what’s wrong with a little honesty? A few years back Moynihan made a comment about ‘benign neglect’ where blacks are concerned, and right away people twisted his words into something totally alien to what he meant. That is exactly what is happening to me right now: I’m being convicted of a crime I didn’t commit on the basis of semantics. The truth is, what I said in yesterday’s press conference is absolutely defensible.”

“Anything is defensible, Mr. President,” Dougherty said. He was a thin deliberate man in his early forties, like Briggs a bachelor, though not for much longer if Elizabeth Miller had her way: they had been keeping steady company for the past year. “But certain defenses create more complications than others.”

“Yes,” Briggs agreed, “and with the convention only two months ahead at that.”

“History has a way of accelerating nowadays,” Elizabeth said. “This will all be forgotten news by the time we convene in Saint Louis.”

“Will it?” Wexford shook his head. “I doubt it.”

“What do you think I ought to do then, Julius?” Augustine asked with forced calm.

“What I said earlier. Call a meeting with members of the Jewish community-the senators from New York and Connecticut, the heads of B‘nai B’rith and the Council of Rabbis and the United Jewish Appeal. Issue a clarification.”

“There’s nothing to clarify, how many times do I have to tell you that? Any so-called clarification is going to look defensive, as if we’re conceding fault. We’d lose all respectall self — respect.”

Briggs said, “We’ve got to have something to give to the press. They’ve been relentless, and all I’ve had to say to them are no-comments or referrals to previous statements. I’m beginning to feel a little like Ron Ziegler and I can’t say I like that very much.”

Augustine looked at him with increasing dislike. Young (thirty-seven, wasn’t it?), boyish-looking with his overlong hair and his freckles, glib most of the time, but with a nasty penchant for whining in moments of stress; the kind of man who, if he had been on a derailed train, would have rushed to save himself first and to hell with everyone else. Augustine wondered what the hell possessed him to give Briggs the press secretary’s job in the first place.

As if interpreting his thoughts, Claire said to Briggs, “If you don’t like your position, Austin, you can always resign.” Her voice was soft, pleasant, but there was an undercurrent of toughness in it that Augustine knew well.

Briggs seemed taken aback. “Excuse me?” he said.

“After all, Austin,” she said, “you don’t have to run the Presidential press office if you’d rather not. You could certainly go back to work for the Los Angeles Times, if that’s what you’d prefer, and the deputy press secretary could assume your duties. I’m sure Frank Tanaguchi would be delighted at the promotion.”

Briggs blushed, coughed, and lowered his gaze to his water glass; he had been put in his place and he was intelligent enough to realize it.

Claire turned to look at Augustine, a long, searching look that seemed to have some meaning he could not quite grasp. Then she smiled and said, “Now I think this discussion has gone far enough for one evening. This is supposed to be a quiet dinner party, not a shouting match. Why don’t all of you sleep on the matter and discuss it again tomorrow?”

The anger inside Augustine faded. Claire had always had a calming effect on him. She was a strong woman; sometimes he thought she was stronger than he was, and more stable, and more perceptive. Sometimes she intimidated him just a little, because he never knew exactly what was going on inside her head, while she always seemed to know what was going on inside his.

He said, “I suppose you’re right.”

Wexford nodded reluctantly, and Ed Dougherty said, “Yes, we might as well table it.”

“Fine,” Claire said. “Then we’ll have coffee and dessert. Edmund.”

But she kept on looking at Augustine, and it was only after the table was cleared that she took her eyes from him and then leaned forward to say something cheerful about current fashions to Rachel Wexford. Who blinked and bobbed her head and kept her chin tucked against her thin breast.

And with sudden belated insight, Augustine understood the meaning in his wife’s eyes, understood that it was not only Austin Briggs whom she had put in his place, but Augustine himself; that she had been telling him he did not have to run the presidency either if he would rather not. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen…

Edmund brought in a cart bearing a silver coffee service and silver dishes of cake. Claire said, “Black Forest cherry cake, Nicholas-your favorite.”

Augustine poured himself another glass of wine.

Off-duty at six o‘clock, Christopher Justice drove his three-year-old Ford sedan from the White House to Georgetown, ate a light supper in a sidewalk cafe on M Street, and then strolled to Thirty-first Street, where there were several new and used bookstores that stayed open in the evenings. It was a hot night and the tree-shaded streets were crowded, but in the bookstores it was cool and quiet-particularly in the basement of O’Hare’s, an antiquarian bookseller who maintained a substantial and dusty stock of hardcover and paperback mysteries.

Reading and collecting mystery novels was Justice’s one and only hobby. He enjoyed fishing and an occasional game of tennis, but by nature he was a solitary man who did not make friends easily; a member of the Secret Service staff, in any case, seldom had the opportunity for socializing. He was one of those men totally devoted to his job, taking his greatest pleasure as well as his sustenance from that work. And maybe that was the reason he had never married, never been seriously involved with any of the women he had known over the years.

He had gotten interested in mysteries while he was still on the Washington police force, and had begun collecting them on a small scale almost immediately. In his apartment in Alexandria-which he used only on his days off; when he was on duty he occupied a small room in the West Wing of the White House-he had several hundred editions of British and American crime novels. He especially liked the early English mysteries: they had a slow, measured pace; they were peopled with old colonels who had fought in India for British imperialism, and proper ladies and even more proper gentlemen, and eccentric detectives and exotic foreigners, and high-strung nieces and nephews who were interested in archeological excavations or inheritances from dead or dying relatives; they dealt with genteel puzzles and bloodless murders and polite investigative techniques. They were self-contained, mentally challenging, and far-removed from his own experiences, and they served him in the same way that the games of chess or bridge served other thoughtful policemen of one type or another.

Justice moved slowly, browsing, among the library-type stacks. On one of the “C” shelves he found a battered exlibrary copy of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Calais Coach, third American edition, and took it down and opened it. He had developed an interest in trains since he had been assigned as the President’s bodyguard and had had the opportunity to travel with Augustine on the Presidential Special between Los Angeles and The Hollows in Northern California; and Murder on the Calais Coach, with its fascinating Orient Express background, was one of the classic train mysteries. He had a paperback reissue of the book in Alexandria, but it had been a long time since he had read it. He decided he wanted to reread it and that he would buy this copy instead of driving across the Potomac for the softcover edition.