Acts of Mercy (3 page)

The President was on the telephone in the Oval Office; he waved Harper to one of the chairs before his desk. Harper took the closest of them, moving it so that it paralleled to the right corner, and listened for a moment to what Augustine was saying into the receiver. But it was nothing of significance: he was talking to Austin Briggs, the press secretary, about dinner that night, telling him to issue invitations to Attorney General and Mrs. Wexford and to congressional liaison Ed Dougherty.

Waiting, Harper noticed that the lines in Augustine’s face were deeply etched, that the skin of his neck had a loose, wattled appearance. He recalled his own image in the restroom mirror: carefully trimmed black mustache; romanesque nose, shrewd gray eyes, clear and unlined skin. We’re the same age, he thought, but he looks sixty-five and I look forty-five. He’s an old man, he’s grown into an old man.

Harper shifted his gaze to the desk, felt a faint distaste at the disorganized spread of papers there. The framed photograph of the First Lady in her inaugural gown caught his attention then, and in spite of himself he let his eyes linger on it. She was one of the most beautiful and alluring women he had ever known; even in that photograph she radiated an aura of restrained sensuality that was unmistakable. Fortytwo years old now—and married to a fifty-six-year-old man who looked sixty-five and who was starting to flounder in office, perhaps seriously. Was Augustine starting to flounder elsewhere as well, in his private relations with Claire ... ?

Harper dug his nails into his palms, pulled his head away from the photograph. Claire Augustine was the wife of the President; it was indecent, and foolish and pointless, to think of her in any sort of intimate way. Strict control; at all times, in all circumstances, strict control.

Augustine finally said good-bye to Briggs and replaced the telephone handset. Then he reached across the desk for one of a dozen pipes in a circular rack, put it between his teeth without filling it, and immediately picked up and began fondling one of the railroad collectibles that cluttered his desk and the office. Railroadiana, Augustine called them. Harper had always considered the President’s passion for trains to be a childish and undignified hobby; but then, that same passion had apparently endeared him to the electorate during his campaign for the presidency. It was generally conceded among political experts that Augustine’s use of his privately owned train, the California Special (since redubbed the Presidential Special, of course) to conduct an anachronistic cross-country whistle-stop campaign, the first national politician to do so since Harry Truman in 1948, had won him as many grass-roots votes as his “New America” platform.

“All right, Maxwell,” the President said at length, “I suppose you’re going to jump on me like everybody else.”

“I have no intention of jumping on you,” Harper said. “I think you made a mistake yesterday and I think you had better take steps to rectify it, but that’s all I’m going to say. My area of expertise, after all, is domestic affairs.”

“So it is.”

“Did you read those briefs?”

“Briefs?” Augustine replaced the railroad collectible and folded his hands in front of him. “You mean the Indian situation in Montana?”

“Of course that’s what I mean.”

“I glanced at them, yes.”

“Glanced at them? Nicholas, this is a serious domestic issue,” Harper said, and he could not quite keep the exasperation out of his voice. “And in less than an hour you have a meeting with Governor Hendricks and Walter Sandcrane and Leo Wade from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”

“Sandcrane? Oh yes, the Indian spokesman. Well, don’t worry about it, Maxwell. I can handle the arbitration. There won’t be any Indian takeover of the Crow reservations in Montana.”

“Cheyenne,” Harper said. “For God’s sake, it’s the Cheyenne who are threatening to take over their reservations.”

“All right, yes, the Cheyenne.” Augustine leaned back, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again. “Do you have any idea how tired I am, Maxwell? How tired I really am?”

“We’re all tired these days,” Harper said. “But that doesn’t excuse a lack of preparation or errors in diplomacy.”

“Meaning Israel or the Indian problem?”

“Both, as a matter of fact.”

“I told you, I’ll handle things.”

Harper was silent.

“But then I’ve got to have a rest,” Augustine said, “even if it’s only for a few days. What I think we’ll do is go out to The Hollows at the end of the week. On Sunday.”

“Again? We were just out there ten days ago—”

“I know that, don’t you think I know that?”

“Nicholas, the media is already accusing you of spending a disproportionate amount of time in California. The Post editorial this morning—”

“To hell with the
Post.
The Western White House is the only place I can relax, you know that.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call The Hollows the Western White House,” Harper said. “It’s the same phrase Nixon used for San Clemente, as the press has been so fond of pointing out.”

Augustine made an impatient gesture. “It’s my ranch and I’ll call it any damned thing I please. The point is, I need another few days of relaxation, Maxwell; I
need
them. We’re going to The Hollows on Sunday and that’s all there is to it.”

Harper just looked at him. The Hollows again, he thought. Only a few days this time. Again. This time ...

Nicholas Augustine sipped wine from his crystal goblet and looked around the table and wished fervently that he and Claire had decided to dine alone tonight. The evening had begun amiably enough with cocktails in the Green Room, but once they had all come in here to the State Dining Room for dinner, conversation had inevitably gotten around to Israel. It was Briggs who had brought up the subject, over the consommé, and of course Wexford had had to have his say over the salad; only Dougherty and Claire’s secretary, Elizabeth Miller, had remained silent on the topic, although it was apparent how the two of them felt. By the time the chateaubriand was served, silence had mercifully resettled—but Augustine had long since lost his appetite for anything except the wine.

A damned shame too, because he liked chateaubriand. He even liked the State Dining Room, with its restful green colors and its oak paneling. Claire preferred to eat here instead of in the Family Dining Room, which was why they had company for dinner most evenings; it would hardly have been appropriate, she said, for them to dine here alone. But if they
had
dined alone, damn it, he might have been able to enjoy his meal and to unwind a bit, instead of suffering a fresh onslaught of aggravation.

Why wouldn’t they leave him alone, all of them, for just a little while?

Out of the tail of his eye he saw the huge portrait of Abraham Lincoln that hung over the fireplace, and he smiled wryly. You and me, Abe, he thought, and raised his glass in a small silent toast.

He took another sip of wine and put the goblet down; but as he did so it struck the edge of his plate, making a sharp ringing sound that cut heavily into the silence. Everyone looked at him as though he had rapped for attention—Claire, Austin Briggs, Julius Wexford, Ed Dougherty, Elizabeth Miller, and Wexford’s gray little wife Rachel. Rachel blinked at him like a startled bird; her eyes were as gray as her hair, as her complexion, and the white evening gown she wore only served to complete the colorless study. In contrast, even Elizabeth, an angular brunette in her middle thirties, wearing a dark blue gown and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses that gave her a properly secretarial air, seemed attractive. And Claire, Augustine noted with some pride, looked even more stunning than usual: blonde hair done up with a jeweled comb, china-blue eyes alert and inquisitive, skin so smooth it seemed translucent; gracious and poised as always, although she seemed somewhat subdued tonight. Her dress was blue-green, the same color as her eyes, and it seemed to flow against her when she moved, like seawater.

She said, “Yes, Nicholas?”

Well, Augustine thought, I might as well have my say too; Briggs had the consommé, Wexford had the salad, and I’d better take the chateaubriand before Dougherty does. The evening is ruined anyway. As if there had been no fiveminute lull in the conversation, he said, “Have any of you heard the story about the old Jew, filled with poverty and misfortune, who one day shakes his fist at the heavens and says, ‘God, I know we’re Your chosen people, but will You please, for Your own sake, choose someone else.’ ”

Rachel Wexford made a small choking sound, covered her mouth with a napkin. Wexford scowled and patted her hand. Dougherty and Elizabeth looked at each other and then down at their wine goblets. Briggs opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and finally put a forkful of potato inside it. Claire watched him steadily, neither surprised nor shocked, merely attentive.

Augustine said, “No? Well how about the one where the two old Jews—old enemies who have hated each other for forty years—meet on a railroad platform in Czarist Russia?” He finished his wine. “These two old Jews, you see, hadn’t spoken to each other for years, but finally one of them is unable to hold his silence and he says to the other, ‘Moshe, where are you going on this fine day?’ And Moshe, you understand, is a stubborn man, he doesn’t want to give his old enemy the satisfaction of a quick answer; so he considers for a time and then he says, ‘Well, Schmuel, to tell you the truth, which is more than you deserve, I am going this fine day to the province of Minsk.’ Schmuel looks at him then, shrewdly, and he says, ‘I know what you are, Moshe; you are a liar whose word can never be trusted; you would betray me at every opportunity. You hope to deceive me into thinking you are really going to the province of Pinsk, but I know you so well that the truth is, you are obviously going to Minsk after all.’ ”

Augustine burst out laughing. None of the others joined in, although Claire seemed to smile faintly; they continued to stare at him.

“Do you understand?” Augustine said. “Schmuel says,

‘You think I am to believe you are not going to Minsk, where you say you’re going, but to Pinsk, but I know you lie so you must really be going to Minsk.“’

Silence.

Augustine shrugged. “I believe I’ll have a little more wine,” he said, and motioned to Edmund, the staff waiter, who was standing quietly to one side. Edmund approached and poured more beaujolais into Augustine’s glass.

Briggs said stiffly, “Mr. President, I hope you don’t intend to tell either of those stories
publicly
...”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Austin, they’re jokes. Wry comments on the nature of the Hebraic mind.”

“And very funny, I’m sure,” Rachel Wexford said.

Augustine thought: Christ, she’s a twit.

Wexford wiped his hands carefully on his napkin, put the napkin down, and took a long, careful sip of water. He was a heavyset man, florid, jowly, wearing a dark suit with a patterned red tie; his face had taken on more color, so that it seemed now to have achieved a hue remarkably similar to that of the beaujolais. The two of them, Julius and Rachel, made quite a pair, Augustine thought. One of them gray, one of them red.

Wexford said, “Well I hardly think either story is funny, Mr. President. They seem more like racial slurs—”

“They are not racial slurs,” Augustine said. “Why does anybody who tells an ethnic joke automatically become guilty of a racial slur? And by extension, of bigotry?”

“The Jewish people are very important to us,” Wexford said sententiously. He took a cigar from his coat pocket, rolled it between his fingers, and then put it away again when his wife frowned at him. “In terms of the demographics of the vote, and because they contribute disproportionately well to their actual percentage of the population—”

“I am
not
demeaning the Jews,” Augustine said. He was beginning to lose his temper. “I fully understand their political importance, Julius,
and
their racial importance, and the public record makes it clear that I am not an anti-Semite. I’m only trying to make a damned point here—”

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.”