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Authors: The President Vanishes

Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #General, #Presidents, #Political Kidnapping

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BOOK: Rex Stout
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The focus of the excitement, of course, the center toward which these radii of fervor and fear converged, was the Capitol building. The police, mounted and on foot, kept clear
only those spaces which had been roped off. They tried to show forbearance, but now and then a skull got rapped or a horse stepped on a biped’s foot. No gray shirts were visible; there were many coat collars turned up, but of course it was legal for even a good citizen to turn up his coat collar. The throng increased in both size and unruliness, and the police got a little rougher. When the Chief of Police arrived on the scene around half-past eleven he was more relieved than alarmed; from the reports he had suspected worse. He even began to think he might finish the day without the army as he got out of his car and started a round of visits to his officers on their various posts at strategic points. Any in his path who did not promptly make way for him were brushed aside with vigor; he was plenty big enough and his contempt was very real. At a quarter to twelve, fifteen minutes before the scheduled time for the arrival of the President, he brought up at the foot of the steps to the west entrance, directly in front of the delegation of the Women’s League for Peace. They looked tired, excited, and grim, their banners erect on high poles; more than a hundred of them, surely.

The Chief spoke to one in front, apparently the leader: “You ladies look out of place huddled here.”

“We are not huddling!” She was indignant. “We want the President to see us. Is there a better place?”

The Chief shook his head and strode on, toward a spot where a little whirlpool was gathering around a man who had started to make a speech.

2

Inside the Capitol, in the House chamber, another mob had gathered. More precisely, three others. There were the visitors’ galleries, packed to the last inch; the press gallery, with no absentees; and the floor.

In the first there were wives of Senators and Representatives, embassy men, lobbyists, an ex-President’s widow, society bell-cows, an A. F. of L. vice-president, judges’ wives, a miscellany of government officials from bureaus, commissions and boards, and a small scattering of those who can, alas, be called merely people. The chatter was deafening, since the
session had not yet been called to order; and it was uncommonly high-pitched, for all were taut with expectancy, even those whose sophistication was of the variety that confuses itself with indifference. It was a knowing crowd; it knew the line-up in the House, the Senate war bloc, the spot where the President would stand below the presiding officers; it knew everyone by sight; it knew that Mrs. Stanley had not yet made an appearance; and above all it knew that not only a great nation but an entire world, the whole of an immense tortured civilization, was holding its breath in expectancy of what this knowing crowd’s ears would hear and eyes would see before all others.

The occupants of the press gallery, not onlookers but characters in the drama and thoroughly aware of it, moved restlessly about, talking, watching, disappearing below and coming up again. A few scribbled on pads. The bureau heads were there, the stars, and all the irregulars who had been able to get in.

On the floor a majority of the lawmakers and warmakers were in their seats; groups were in the aisles; members drifted in from the cloakrooms and out; pages walked and ran. Among the veterans and leaders, Reid stood by a wall with Representative Morton, listening with a frown, Corcoran talked with a group on the Clerk’s platform which included Speaker Horner and the Vice-President, Sterling and Jackman, anti-war champions, conferred where the former sat, Allen and Wilcox were not visible, and Tilney sat motionless with his chin on his chest and his eyes closed. Everyone was nervous and tense, even the lowly of the herd who knew how they had to vote no matter what happened. They, like the supers in a stage spectacle, shared only in the excitement, leaving the glory for their betters, but at least no one could deprive them of that.

At three minutes past noon the Speaker and the Vice-President mounted to their rostrum, the latter banged his gavel, mumbled something and glared, and the session was convened. The vocal clatter died down gradually, members hastened or sauntered to their seats according to temperament, the gavel banged again, and silence began to emerge. The Clerk of the House read something which nobody listened to. A Senator arose halfway back, was recognized, and launched into what was apparently a discussion of the geography of the
United States. Stragglers were wandering in from the cloakrooms.

The discussion continued. The Vice-President was observed to lift himself in his chair and raise his brows at someone; the speaker on the floor hesitated a moment and then went on with the geography. It was twenty past twelve. Up in the gallery Sally Voorman whispered to her husband, “Is the bum working up suspense for his entrance?” There was other whispering; it increased, gradually, to an audible murmur. They had waited for the show long enough; they were in no mood for a late curtain.

At twenty-five minutes to one a page appeared from the side, leaped up the steps, and handed a slip of paper to the Vice-President. There was a rustle throughout the chamber. So; of course, a telephone message that the President was leaving the White House; another quarter of an hour then. But to the surprise of everyone, amazement even on the floor and in the press gallery, the Vice-President, after leaning across to mutter something to the Speaker, rose from his chair, descended from the platform, and left the chamber at the side the page had come from. There was a buzz all over. The Speaker banged the gavel and demanded order. The Senator was still doing geography.

In not more than three minutes the Vice-President returned. Instead of resuming his place, he crossed the floor to the head of an aisle and beckoned to Senator Corcoran, who hurried from his seat to join him. The Vice-President spoke in an undertone; those close enough saw that his face was white and that Corcoran, as he listened, stiffened and set his jaw. The conference, with every eye above and below focused on it, went on for minutes; finally Corcoran turned and went back down the aisle. He stopped to direct a glance at Reid which apparently had a meaning, for Reid nodded in reply, and then returned to his seat.

The Vice-President mounted the rostrum again. The Speaker handed the gavel to him, and he took it. He did not sit down, but stood with his lips tight. The Senator speaking from the floor faltered, left a predicate without an object, and resumed his seat. The Vice-President cleared his throat and spoke to a breathless stillness:

“I have an announcement to make. Information had been received that the President has suffered an indisposition and
is unable to come before us. It is therefore necessary to postpone the purpose of this session.”

The silence hung in the air an instant, then was broken by a gasp of astonished dismay from floor and galleries. Before the Vice-President had finished Corcoran was on his feet. The Vice-President said, “Senator Corcoran.”

“I move we adjourn.”

Half the members were up from their seats; a dozen were shouting for recognition, the loudest Senator Allen; one of them was a second for Corcoran. The Vice-President brought the gavel down, shouted a brief sentence into the upturned faces of the joint session of Congress, and left the rostrum, taking the Speaker with him.

All that was left was bedlam: indignation, alarm, bewilderment, chaos.

The man seated next to Bronson Tilney, Collins of Vermont, yelled in his ear, “It’s a dirty clever trick, but he’ll pay for it.” Tilney, his eyes more exhausted than ever, paid no attention to him.

A quarter of an hour later Mrs. Richard Arthur Coulter, homeward bound in her limousine with her friend Diana Freeman, evolved an idea that might have prevented the contretemps, “You know, my dear, I think a President should have an understudy, like an opera singer. Don’t you?”

3

Of the reports which circulated through Washington that Tuesday afternoon, it was more than ordinarily difficult to sift the facts from the rumors. For three hours perhaps a hundred thousand citizens thought the President had been assassinated; where that one started was not known, but it traveled all over the city, and beyond. That was what the afternoon was like. President Stanley wanted more time to make up his mind; or he had a nervous breakdown; or he was drunk; or he had been assassinated by a Red or a Gray Shirt or a Jap; or he had put over a fast one on Congress. The odd thing was that these uncertainties were passed around and discussed not only by the common folk who are often permitted to learn only what is supposed to be good for them anyway, but even
by persons who were accustomed to expect more prompt and definite information. The Senate and House leaders, the first rank ambassadors, the chiefs of the press bureaus, for all their frantic efforts, were left with nothing better than their choice among the morsels of wild conjecture which were clogging the telephones and telegraph wires of the country.

At half-past three it became known definitely that the Cabinet members had been summoned to the White House. At four, the Secretary of State appeared in the room in the Executive Offices maintained for the representatives of the press, announced brusquely that no information would be given until the Cabinet meeting had ended and he could not tell when that would be, and departed. The press howled at his back.

It was more of a let-down, perhaps, for the groups gathered in the Capitol grounds for the purpose of demonstrating this and that, than it had been for the lawmakers in the chamber. Characteristically not only of them but of the two-footed race they belonged to, they at first regarded it as a low trick designed primarily for their frustration. They howled, and began to look around for a head to crack or somebody to trip up. But the police got earnest, and it soon became evident that the anticlimax and the uncertainty had caused the temper of the demonstrators to deteriorate from sacrificial ardor to plain ill-nature. That was easier to deal with, and they were scattered ignominiously; the grounds were cleared and the streets patrolled with no worse results than a few busted jaws and a broken bone or two.

It was exactly three o’clock when the truth of the matter became known to anyone beyond Mrs. Stanley, Harry Brownell, the President’s secretary, and two Secret Service men. At that hour the members of the Cabinet, summoned by Brownell by telephone, had assembled in the room ordinarily used for their meetings during the Stanley administration—the library on the second floor. They were all there, including the Vice-President; Billings, Secretary of Agriculture, called from a conference with the Federal Trade Commission, had been the last to arrive. Some seated, some standing, they were waiting. For the President? They did not know; Brownell had said come. They talked in low tones, as if in the presence of death; their nerves were on edge and there was nothing to say.

When the door opened they jerked about to face it. Mrs.
Stanley entered, and those seated arose. Secretary Brownell followed her and closed the door behind him. Mrs. Stanley came forward, stopped, and looked around as if counting them. She, who always smiled, was not smiling. She seemed out of breath, her hair was untidy, and she had put her hand on the back of a chair as if she needed it there. She said, “Be seated. Please do.” Alex Liggett, the urbane Secretary of State, went to manipulate her chair for her. She shook her head, then changed her mind, nodded her thanks and sat down. Secretary Brownell stood beside her; the other men took chairs.

She said, “I have had a problem, gentlemen. I can keep it for my own no longer; it is yours and the country’s. The President has been kidnapped.”

They stared at her as if she had suddenly begun skipping the rope or standing on her head. She went on: “The news has been withheld, even from you, for five hours. That may have been ill-advised—I don’t know—it was done by me and the responsibility is mine.”

“I share it.” Brownell spoke sharply. “Officially, I take it and welcome it.”

There were ejaculations. Three or four were on their feet. Billings, an old friend of the Stanleys, looked like a cretin with his mouth open. Liggett, Secretary of State, exclaimed idiotically, “Kidnapped, how, who?” Vice-President Molleson, hunched forward in his chair, was regarding the President’s wife with a shocked and suspicious stare. The quiet composed voice that cut through the confusion belonged to Lewis Wardell, Secretary of the Interior.

“Suppose you tell us about it, Mrs. Stanley.”

Brownell asked, “Shall I?”

She shook her head. “Thank you, Harry.” Her hands were folded tight in her lap; her voice was strained but steady. “The President had breakfast a little after eight o’clock, alone. We had house guests and I breakfasted with them earlier. About half-past eight he called to me from the hall that he was going outside to look at the morning and would afterwards return to the library—this room—I understood that he did not intend to go to his office, as he was leaving before twelve for the Capitol and had no appointments. That was the last I heard or saw of him.”

She swallowed.

“A little before ten Mr. Brownell telephoned to me. He
said that there was something of great importance which he wished to tell the President. He had supposed that the President was in his study, or the library, working on his message to Congress; and he had phoned to those extensions, first the study, then the library, and there had been no answer. He had made inquiries and had concluded that the President was with me, and when I said no, Mr. Brownell was concerned and came at once to see me. We went together to the study and the library, and other places. He went outdoors. He thought we should ask as few questions as possible … I continued the search inside, but I did not find my husband … I knew, gentlemen …”

She faltered and stopped. After a moment she looked up and nodded at Brownell, who stood beside her. Brownell spoke:

“I picked up a Secret Service man who was on duty outside. We learned that the President had not been seen to reenter the house, and we found evidence that alarmed us. I consulted Mrs. Stanley. I issued orders that no one was to be permitted to leave or enter the house or grounds on any pretext, without reference to her or to me. I closed the communication with the Executive Offices. Outgoing telephone calls were stopped, and incoming calls were routed to a man I selected. We continued our investigation. The results were meager, but they led definitely to the conclusion Mrs. Stanley has announced to you. The President has been kidnapped.”

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