Acts of Mercy

Ten

Augustine went straight through the study to the hall door, saying to Claire, “I don’t want to talk to any of the staff. Tell them I’ll call a meeting later today or tomorrow.”

“Yes, Nicholas,” she said. “Where will you be?”

“In our bedroom.”

She nodded, looked at him for a moment with eyes that told him nothing of what she was thinking, what she was feeling. Then, as the conference room door opened to admit a wave of noise and the first of his aides, she turned and started over to it. Augustine hurried out into the hall and shut that door sharply behind him.

When he came into the master bedroom, the mirror over Claire’s dressing table gave him an immediate and unwanted image of himself. Face composed, carriage erect, hands steady now. But his eyes made a lie of the calm exterior; unlike Claire’s, they were naked-they revealed exactly what he was feeling, they told the absolute truth.

He put his back to the mirror, took off his jacket and tie and opened the collar of his shirt. Then he went into the bathroom and washed his face in cold water, patted it dry with a towel. In the bedroom again he sat on the rough Indian blanket that covered the big brass bed, to wait for Claire.

And sitting there he thought: Did I handle it wrong? Should I have waited until we were back in Washington? Should I have taken questions out there? No-I did it the only way I could. It’s the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life, but I did it and it’s finished.

Finished.

There was a dampness in his eyes now and he felt like weeping. But he did not, would not. Any more than he had been able to go all the way and resign, give in to the goddamn National Committee and turn the country over to Conroy for the next seven months. He had been a decent President, he had done nothing to be ashamed of; resignation was shame, tears were shame-admissions of guilt or folly or weakness.

They had taken everything else from him but he would not let the bastards have his soul.

Bill Pronzini Barry N. Malzberg

Acts of Mercy

Eleven

We cannot believe it. We are confused, stunned by what we have just heard the President say to the assembled reporters-so confused and so stunned that we feel our very concealment from me, the singular self, to be threatened. The conspirators have won; there are too many of them, their combined efforts were too great for us alone to overcome. They have insidiously drained Nicholas Augustine’s will to fight, they have brought him down, they have beaten him into submission. He is lost and we are lost with him.

Or is he?

Or are we?

What if it is not too late, even now, to save him? The rest of the plotters could still be exterminated, the conspiracy could still be crushed. And the President would then be free to rescind his manipulated decision to withdraw; he is not bound by it, after all, not yet.

Yes. Yes! We must not abandon hope, nor abandon our mission. We must be strong. We must rip the tendrils of pain and confusion and defeat-weapons of the conspirators-from our mind, cement the fusion of our purpose. It is not too late.

We are not sure of how many other conspirators there are, or of their identities. But we have suspicions about at least one, and those suspicions are enough. No time now for gathering more evidence; time now only to act, time now only for the giving of mercy to the besieged President. Act and mercy. Act of mercy.

Today, tonight, before this day is done, a third traitor must die.