Irving Wallace - The Man

Whenever Chief Gaynor thought that his agents were becoming complacent and sloppy about routine, he made them read a sampling of the letters. Most, he would admit, were harmless, penned by ordinarily rational citizens letting off steam. But some, he would remind them, came from paranoid personalities, with little hold on reality, with obsessive beliefs that with one tug of a trigger they could right the wrong and save the nation. These were the ones, they existed. Oh, they existed, yes. Remember them, Gaynor would warn, remember Richard Lawrence, John Wilkes Booth, Charles J. Guiteau, Leon F. Czolgosz, John Schrank, Giuseppe Zangara, Oscar Collazo, Griselio Torresola, even the puzzling Lee Harvey Oswald-remember them and do not be deceived by the preponderance of foreign names. Enough of them were Americans, Gaynor would say, Americans who read the papers, went to amusement parks, shopped for groceries, celebrated holidays, saved their money, ate their meals, voted at election time, slept and woke, and walked crowded city streets, and carried instruments of destruction to bring great men down to their size and to their feet, to settle grievances. They existed. They acted. Expect the unexpected, Gaynor would say, never go slack, be ready and prepared for suddenness .

Otto Beggs saw the White House across the street. He screeched around a car, slowing for the red light on Pennsylvania Avenue, roared across the thoroughfare, and braked as he entered the Northwest Gate.

He began to show his pass, but a grinning White House policeman waved him through. “Hi, Otto. How come the VIP entrance? You being decorated again?”

“Yeh, decorated!” he shouted back. Yeh, with thirty pieces of silver, he thought.

He rode up the driveway, jerkily parked, came out of the car fast. He realized that he was still tieless, and that would draw attention, but there was no time to put on the necktie stuffed in his pocket. He must make haste without causing a commotion, without letting himself be waylaid by press or colleagues. He must get where he was going quickly, yet without creating panic, lest he be exposed for a fool over a false alarm.

Striding to the West Wing lobby, he glanced at his watch. If the timepiece was correct, it was five thirty-two.

As ever, at this hour, the press foyer with its three telephone booths was teeming with reporters. He shoved past them, ignoring their curiosity at his disheveled appearance. He swallowed the last of his peppermints, hurried into the Reading Room, keeping his back to the Secret Service offices to the right, curtly acknowledging the greeting of the blue-uniformed policeman at the desk to the left. He swung off, past the reporters lolling about on their leather sofas and chairs, past Tim Flannery’s office, and into the corridor with its black-and-white checkered floor.

Alone at last, now unobserved, he ran heavily past the Cabinet Room door and Miss Foster’s door, until he reached the open corridor entrance, with a chain across it, leading into the President’s Oval Office, where Agent Winkler stood guard.

“Hey, Otto,” the agent called out, “where you been?”

“I got a special message for the President. Where is he?” He poked his head into the office. It was empty.

“Left five seconds ago for upstairs.”

Beggs unfastened the chain with one hand as he unbuttoned his coat with the other. “Got to see him, important message,” he said, flipping the end of the chain to his colleague.

Moving swiftly, for his size, Beggs bounded across the President’s office toward the one French door that was still open to the Rose Garden.

Outside, heart hammering, he halted, and in the gloomy dusk of late afternoon scanned the L-shaped colonnaded terrace walk that led from the West Wing offices, past the indoor swimming pool, to the ground-floor entrance into the White House proper. He did not see them at first, and then, at once, he did, as they emerged from behind a white pillar. They were close together as they moved ahead, first President Dilman, then the new young fellow, Agent Ross, a short man, shorter than the President, a half stride behind.

The scene was peaceful and serene, the activity as familiar and routine as every five-thirty stroll he himself had enacted with Dilman in the last two months. Nothing unusual, nothing unexpected, nothing sudden.

False alarm, thank God, Beggs reassured himself, sagging with relief. His pleasure was mitigated only by the anger he had hoarded against that bitch of a colored girl, who had put him through a quarter of an hour of hell simply to be rid of him.

About to turn back into the office, he saw that the President had stopped to point out something concerning the barren hedges that separated the cement walk from the historic garden.

Automatically Otto Beggs’s trained eyes examined the leafless hedges, then lifted to inspect the White House Rotunda and Truman Balcony across the way, then lowered to study the bushy Andrew Jackson magnolia tree, then casually took in the depleted flower beds, the group of empty metal patio chairs around the outdoor table, the busy gardener in olive-drab overalls on his knees digging a hole with his trowel for a new plant, the rectangle of the Rose Garden itself off to the right, the-and then it came to him-the unusual and unexpected.

Beggs’s neck stiffened. His gaze shifted back to the gardener, the gardener in olive-drab overalls, their color almost blending him and losing him against the magnolia tree. The gardener straightened, stood up, rubbing his back, then reached down to pick up his plant, and slowly began working his way from the magnolia tree, unobtrusively, diagonally, across the carpet of lawn toward the spot where the President and Ross still stood, absorbed in their horticultural conversation.

As if propelled by instinct, Beggs stealthily moved to his left across the cement walk, toward the corner turn, toward the ramp leading down to where the President and Ross were talking. Beggs’s narrowed eyes never left the gardener. From eighty feet, he could not make out the laborer clearly, except to see that he was a squat, husky Negro carrying a plant, to all outward appearances absorbed in his work, going toward the chrysanthemum bed and naked hedges and white colonnades.

An innocent and customary pastoral scene, a prosaic scene to be observed daily from his post outside the President’s office, the gardeners, their plants, their tools, something that went on in the daylight and sun of repeated mornings and afternoons. But-Beggs’s mind wondered, as he moved: oddity one, an unfamiliar Negro gardener, he could not remember a Negro, the opposite in build of this husky person, yet Dilman, being Negro, could certainly have hired another recently; oddity two, a gardener at work in the dusk, scant minutes before night, a gardener alone when all the regulars had gone home, a gardener planting at an hour when planting was never done, impossible.

Beggs had arrived, unseen, at the corner colonnade that now separated the two on the walk from himself. Straight ahead of Beggs, Dilman and Ross were still talking, Dilman listening to the new Secret Service agent, and the new agent, his back to the garden, unaware that there was anyone else nearby. And even if Ross should turn, and the walk to the ground floor be resumed, the agent was too unfamiliar with the personnel and routine to realize that this was an unknown gardener who was engaged in planting at an unlikely hour. There they conversed, the unsuspecting pair, there straight ahead, to the left of the corner colonnade. And to the right of the colonnade, at the center of the garden, fifty feet away, the Negro gardener had strangely halted, put down his plant, was reaching inside his overalls.

Overcautious or not, Beggs had a pattern he must follow, one spurred by a foolish warning from a colored chippy and reinforced by a suspicion born of the unusual.