Acts of Mercy

Four

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.

Tucking it under his arm, he continued to browse. The air in the bookstore was musty and comfortably moist, unlike the atmosphere of the White House which seemed always to be dry, the kind of air that could give someone a sinus condition; the familiar ambiance of old books was pleasant. And yet tonight he could not quite relax, could not seem to isolate himself, as he usually could in bookstores like O’Hare’s, from the responsibilities of the presidency-responsibilities which were his own by inference and because of his duty.

The plain truth was, he was worried about the President.

Outwardly Augustine was the same sensible, forthright figure he had always been, but at the edges, Justice thought, he was beginning to weaken. Six months ago he would not have made those remarks on Israel, as essentially reasonable as they had been. They were politically damaging and upsetting to the influential Jewish electorate, as Maxwell Harper, in his superior fashion, had pointed out that morning. Six months ago the President had not been so bothered by attacks in the press. Hadn’t he gone on national television several times to quietly and eloquently defend himself and his administration on controversial issues? Hadn’t he laughed publicly at the disparaging comments in Newsweek about his “neurasthenic habit” of mumbling distractedly to himself from time to time, his “obsession with railroads” and his “adolescent predilection” for humming and sometimes informally singing folk ballads such as “John Henry” and “The Wreck of Old 98”?

Lost in thought now, Justice turned abruptly out of the stacks and climbed the stairs to the bookstore’s street level. Six months ago the President had not seen fit to spend an average of ten days a month at The Hollows-nor, for that matter, had he found it necessary to unburden himself to a Secret Service bodyguard. Six months ago it had looked as though renomination and reelection were certainties; but now, with his popularity under forty-five percent in all the polls, not only the press but several prominent Washington political figures were saying that the Peter Kineen coalition would, after all, be able to take the nomination away from him in Saint Louis “Two dollars,” the clerk at the front counter said.

“Excuse me?”

“This book. It’s two dollars plus tax.”

“Oh,” Justice said, “sure.” Embarrassed by his abstraction, he paid the man quickly and took the copy of Murder on the Calais Coach into the muggy night.

As he made his way through the crowds, past the sidewalk flower vendors and the sellers of beads and trinkets and leather goods, he thought about Peter Kineen. Kineen was a reactionary, considered by many to be a dangerous man: a latter-day Ronald Reagan. If he was able to wrest the nomination from Augustine in Saint Louis, the party might be in serious trouble. And the country would surely be in serious trouble, because even if Kineen lost the election, the minority-party candidate would almost certainly be Elton Kheel, the governor of Illinois, who was an old-line machine politician and who was reputed to be a closet hawk on foreign policy despite his avowals to the contrary.

Justice was hardly an expert on politics, but his close proximity to the President had given him a certain inside knowledge; it seemed obvious to him that the only hope for the future lay with Nicholas Augustine. Which meant that the President had to draw himself together, seal off vulnerability, rally the party around him as he had done four years ago.

And he will, Justice told himself. You had to have faith, that was all.

You had to have faith.