Irving Wallace - The Man

Beggs, tears trickling down his cheeks, whispered, “I’ll be there, you bet. Thank you, Mr. President.”

The room was emptying now, and Gertrude herded the boys against the wall and held back, as the President went to join Flannery, who was waiting for him.

It was then, as Dilman and Flannery were about to leave, that Beggs remembered something he had meant to tell the President.

“Mr. President,” he called out. “May I speak to you for a moment, sir?”

“Why, yes, of course-”

Dilman nodded for Flannery to go outside, and then he came back to the bed and stood beside Beggs.

“Mr. President, I just have to tell you one incident I wasn’t going to tell anyone,” Beggs said in an undertone. “Zeke Miller himself, and some fellow named Wine, they were here last night. They sort of sneaked in. They tried to get me embittered about being crippled, tried to work me up against you-but what they were really after was a signed affidavit from me for the trial-a statement confessing that I saw you with Miss Wanda Gibson, behaving like they pretended you behaved-and claiming that I saw you drinking from time to time-and that I saw you, overheard you, at Trafford University talking to your son about the Turnerites. Know what I told them?”

President Dilman waited, silently.

Beggs said, “I told them to get the hell out of here before I knocked their crooked heads together and dropped them both out the window.” Solemnly, he stared at the leg suspended in traction. “You see, Mr. President, men like that don’t understand the first thing about the Secret Service. If they did, they’d have known my responsibility is to protect the President of the United States from every harm including assassination, even if it’s character assassination. I guess they didn’t know I was still on duty-and always will be. That’s all I wanted to assure you of, Mr. President.”

It was the President’s turn, Beggs could see, to be emotionally moved, much as Dilman was trying to hide it.

“Thank you, Mr. Beggs.”

“Nothing to thank me for. Like I said-I was doing my job.”

The moment the President was gone, Beggs wanted to be alone, but there were Gertrude and Otis and Ogden rushing toward him. Gertrude was over him, smothering him with her thin kisses, sniffling and wheezing, while the boys fought to clasp his free hand in panting joy. All Beggs could find to say to Gertrude, keep mumbling to her, was that now, with his promotion, there would be a sizable raise in salary, and now she could start hunting seriously for a different house, something in the suburbs where the Schearers lived, a house in a neighborhood that would make her happier. And she kept saying that it wasn’t a snob neighborhood that she would look for, only a larger place, a ranch-style house with sun, something roomier, that offered better surroundings for the boys. And he kept saying, wearily, that the task was in her department, and he was sure she would find something, and maybe it wouldn’t hurt if she left some time for herself to shop for a new dress or two, maybe that wouldn’t hurt.

When the nurse pried them apart, and led Gertrude and the children out of the hospital room, Otto Beggs was thankful to be by himself at last. There was a good deal to think about, the gold medal in his hand, its luster dimmed and its size diminished only by his bandaged hulking leg in traction. There was that, and the new executive job with its higher salary, and the new house in a classier neighborhood, and the family with their new respect and new clothes, and yet his mind touched each of these wonders briefly, then impatiently left it behind.

He turned his eyes toward the modest violet plant standing on the medicine table beside him.

Upon this, his thoughts lingered at length.

Otter.

He wondered what it would have been like, when he was still a man of action…

“I WONDER,” said Leroy Poole, “what’s keeping the President. It’s twenty minutes already. I’m sick of looking at that stupid fish.”

Poole grimaced at the fish mounted on the board above the fireplace of the White House reception room, then glanced at Mrs. Gladys Hurley.

Gladys Hurley, seated straight, her shoulders back, mouth pinched, continued to look at the carpet and said nothing.

Fretfully, Poole wandered to the desk, picked at the museum-piece typewriter that was supposed to have been used by President Woodrow Wilson (another overrated fink, half his Cabinet members Southerners, ordering Negro Federal employees in Washington to be segregated, so busy trying to make the world safe for democracy he’d let sixty-nine lynchings take place in one year of his administration). Then irritably, Poole returned to the center table, yanked up a chair, and squatted in it, drumming his pudgy fingers on the tabletop.

He tried to keep his mind from imagining how Jeff Hurley felt this late afternoon, in his debasing prison garb, in his chilly deathrow cell in the State Penitentiary. It made Poole tremble to think what Jeff Hurley himself might be thinking this minute: in six days from this day, this hour, he would be strapped into the big lethal chair, held helpless while the cyanide capsules dropped, and he would be gassed until dead because of kidnaping for ransom and murder. He would be dying for a crime that was not his own but America’s crime, an innocent saint rubbed off the earth because the guilty who remained did not want to hear his accusations. This minute this good giant, this Gulliver pinioned by pygmies, was helpless, voiceless, impotent. Noble Jeff, great Jeff, poor Jeff, lost to life and the future, unless the two of them in this reception room, his protesters by proxy, could save him.

This was it. They were it.

Leroy Poole wished that he had obeyed his instinct and traveled down to see Jeff Hurley for himself. When he had proposed the visit, through Hurley’s lawyer, he had learned that Hurley would not have it. Hurley’s sole request of Poole had been to give his mother in Louisville a few bucks to make the trip to Washington, and there to help in building up the appeal for clemency-clemency desired not out of fear of death but out of fear of leaving his scattered but militant armies leaderless.

There had been little enough of the Turnerite funds left to work with, that for sure. Just recently, Poole had learned to his dismay that Frank Valetti had produced no more than half of the war chest for Hurley’s New York defense lawyer, and had skipped off to his Commie friends behind the Iron Curtain with the rest.

Poole’s own available funds had been meager. Except for a hundred bucks sent him by Valetti before taking off, except for what Burleigh Thomas (the ignorant numbskull with his stupid assassination attempt) had left behind for Hurley, delivered to Poole by that sister, Ruby (who had disappeared from town fast enough), there had been only his own dwindling bank account, the blood money, the last of the advance against the future royalties from the Dilman biography, which he had not yet had either the time or the interest to complete.

Poole had spent the Turnerite money and his own savings with care, as if every paper bill contributed another year to his beloved Jeff Hurley’s life. Poole had allotted some of the money for the New York lawyer, and used some for his own side trips and payoffs in order to gather the fresh evidence needed for the appeal. He had doled out some cash in treating influential Negro correspondents in the capital to dinner, bending their ears with the injustice mounted against Hurley, and a good deal of the press space his pleadings obtained had been gratifying, had whipped up further sympathy for Hurley among the Negro population, had even provoked one petition for clemency signed by eight hundred Northern Negroes. Then, when time had all but run out, and the money, too, Leroy Poole had purchased the round-trip bus ticket for Mrs. Gladys Hurley, mailed it to her in Louisville, brought her here to Washington yesterday, put her up in his hotel, all to have her on hand for this last, last climactic act.