(1964) The Man (66 page)

Ruby seemed curiously chastened and troubled. “What you mean with that there talkin’, Otter? What you mean?”

Beggs was becoming increasingly furious at the time this was taking. “Okay, I’ll give it to you quickly, and then you promise, no more politics or Dilman?”

“ ’Course, Otter, I promise. But what you mean by—?”

“Remember that big speech he delivered the other night, vetoing the minorities bill everyone wanted? I was outside his open door, the door to his office, during it and afterwards. I could see and hear everything. You should have seen him after that speech, almost sick with nervousness and worry. Then there were a lot of phone calls, apparently from big shots in government and all over, and most of them must have been awful, calling him names, giving him hell. Anyway, later, I heard him on the phone with somebody who’s a friend of his, a lawyer from Chicago, and I heard Dilman saying—these aren’t the exact words, but something like this—‘Don’t kid me, Nat, they want to crucify me. There’s a whole race of people around here like them, not white or black, but selfish, thinking of themselves and no one else and not the country. I could’ve been popular, a little popular, by playing along the way I have all my life, but I figured just once I’d like to be myself and do what I think is right. I thought everyone would see I have nothing to gain by doing wrong. I don’t have to play politics, because I don’t have to worry about getting re-elected. I have only a short time to go, so I can afford to be honest. I figured everyone would see that, and kind of think twice about the veto, and sit down and talk out a real bill and not a bribe. I didn’t think they’d come down on me like this. I can’t repeat what I’ve been called tonight. How do you reach people like that? How do you reach anyone at all?’ And he went on, Ruby, not in those exact words, but like that. Well, Christ, I never felt sorrier for him than I did then, until the next—”

Beggs found that Ruby was holding his arm, clutching it. “Otter, that really did happen? I can’t—it’s sorta—”

“It happened, you bet it happened,” Beggs said. “It’s just more of the same. You read about the time he gave his first official dinner for the African President, and half the big guests never showed up? Can you beat that? It’s true. I was there.”

“Oh, no—” said Ruby. She released Beggs’s arm, reached for her drink, and took a long swallow of it.

Fascinated now by the way his words were upsetting her, feeling there was some strength and ascendancy to win over her in this way, Otto Beggs went on. “One more little thing I started to tell you. The next day, after the television speech, I happened to be alone with Dilman’s secretary, and she was kind of disturbed and unraveled from the way he was being beaten up on the phone and in the papers, and we got to talking about it. She’s a white girl, you know, from Wisconsin, and usually cool and steady, but she was kind of emotional, and when I said it was too bad the way the President was getting knocked around for his color, she said that I didn’t know the half of how he really felt.”

Ruby was staring at her drink, not at Beggs. “What—what she mean by that there talk, Otter?”

“Miss Foster, her name is. She said she’d never forget his first day as President. She was alone with him the first time, planning to hand in her resignation, and when she’d come in his office, there was one door open. She started to shut it, so they could be in privacy, and he wouldn’t let her close the door, he didn’t want it shut. She couldn’t understand, and then he said that Eisenhower once had a Negro adviser who found that white girls always left a door open when they came in to see him, sort of as protection, as if he was a lower animal or habitual rapist. And so Dilman took to the habit of being sure one door was left open whenever a white girl came in and—” To Beggs’s astonishment, Ruby had jumped up from the sofa and gone to the center of the room, her back turned to him. “Anyway,” he concluded lamely, “Miss Foster said she wanted to cry for him, and she shut that door and did not resign. So whatever your friends think about Dilman being evil—”

He halted, and listened.

It was incredible. Ruby’s shoulders were shaking, and her face was in her hands, and she was sobbing.

Utterly confounded, Otto Beggs left the sofa and hurried to her side. “Ruby, what the hell—” He grabbed her arms, and pulled her around, and then drew her hands from her eyes. She was crying, mascara running, and tears streaking her face. “Otter—Otter—Otter,” she kept repeating.

He shook her a little. “Ruby, what’s got into you?”

She swallowed, trying to control herself. “Otter, the devil’s in me an’ I’ll burn in front of Jesus if I don’t tell you—Otter, from what you told me, you swear it—”

“What I told you? I only told you the truth about—”

“Jesus in Heaven, I done did an awful an’ wicked act, I think I did, I think, I don’t know, but I’m worryin’, Jesus, I’m worryin’—’cause I don’t wan’ Pres Dilman hurt if he’s like you say.”

Beggs felt the blood coursing to his head. “What—what do you mean—?” A chill of apprehension, intensified by guilt and fear, crept across his chest and forearms, leaving goose pimples. “How—how could anything you do hurt him—the President?”

“Otter—listen—I didn’t know a thing, sep some certain cullud folk were wantin’ me to meet you long time ago from right after Dilman become Pres, ’cause they not likin’ his weaslin’ ’bout the Turners, so they bein’ my folk, I agrees. But meetin’ you, I fo’gits ’bout them, ’cause I gotta admits y’all been excitin’ to me—then when those there certain cullud folk, they see Pres Dilman killin’ off the Turners an’ Hurley, they gits to fussin’ an’ fumin’—an’ they remembers me—an’ come askin’ if I is still friendly-like with Otter Beggs, an’ I says I is, sorta, an’ they says for me to git you up here in my ’partment today, git you off the job today, ’cause they didn’t want you round when they see the Pres—I—Otter—I don’t pay no mind to who tell me this, don’t remember who told me—Otter—don’t look like that, Otter—only there’s some who hate the Pres like you don’t know, like I was tellin’—hate him from the start, hate him with real hate now—an’ wanna have a showdown with him—an’ figgerin’ it was hard to git to him exactly private-like, with you always there, a hero man like you readyin’ to shoot everybody—so they say for me to keep you busy till they can see the Pres when he finishes with his office workin’ today an’ goes up to—”

Beggs was violent with rage. “Goddammit, you little whore!” he shouted, wrenching her arms. “If you’re lying to me or not telling everything—!”

“Otter, Otter, don’t! You hurtin’ me—Otter, it’s true, every word I’m tellin’. Why should I tell, sep I sinned—I know I sinned—”

He could not release her arms. “Damn you, who are your friends—what are they planning—?”

“I don’t know—don’t know—swear to Jesus—”

He flung her arms down fiercely. “I ought to kill you—boy, I ought to kill you for making me such a sucker—”

“But I was likin’ you, Otter—truth, I swears it—”

He was no longer listening.

He looked at his watch. It showed sixteen minutes after five o’clock. Almost every afternoon President Dilman quit his office at five-thirty. Ruby’s friends wanted to see the President when Beggs was not around, when someone less experienced and able than Beggs was there, when someone new was there. It could mean but one thing, one horrifying, life-shattering thing. There were only fourteen minutes for him to intercept Dilman or alert Agajanian.

He looked up and saw that Ruby Thomas had retreated to her bedroom door, frightened, watching him wide-eyed.

“I ought to beat you to a pulp and drag you to the FBI!” he hollered. “My duty’s more important than you, you little whore—”

He spun around, snatching up his coat and holster, and strode to the door.

She cried out, “Otter, I did tell you aforehand—you ain’ sayin’ I didn’t tell you—don’t let them hurt him, please, Otter—!”

He slammed the door on her, hastily buckling on the holster, then yanking on his coat as he went down the stairs two at a time. As he rushed outside, his first instinct was to locate a telephone booth, call Gaynor or Agajanian or Prentiss, any of the Detail, and warn them to keep the President in his office, and throw up a double—a triple—guard, and search for Ruby’s hophead friends. Then, suddenly, he realized it was impossible for him to make such a call. They’d ask him who and what—and how had he got his tip? What could he say? He had a hunch? He’d overheard something? He’d got a crank note with a lead? He possessed no instant evidence—except the truth—Ruby—and if he dared mention her, and she was hauled in, and they found out that he had not been sick, had been trying to have an affair with her, a
colored
girl, he’d be cooked, through, his present a scandal, his future no more. He’d lose the Secret Service, and Gertrude and the kids. No, the call was out. He’d have to do it himself.

He had been moving fast, now half running, all the while he had been thinking. He arrived at the alley behind the Walk Inn, with its parking slots, leaped into the Nash Rambler, started it, backed up, shifted, and wheeled out of the alley into the street. He gunned the car, running a yellow light, and twisted the vehicle toward the White House.

He drove fast, fast as he could over the route that he had traveled so many days of his life, jumping lights, beating the changing signals, weaving in and out of traffic, knowing he must be there before the President left his Oval Office. If a policeman flagged him down, he’d have to flash his Secret Service badge and bellow emergency. He drove on the brink of recklessness, ignoring the angry horns and curses that chased him briefly and then died away.

There were intervals of lucidity. He had sobered, he knew, but his breath still reeked of gin. If he came into the West Wing lobby like a madman, like some fugitive from a cops-and-robbers television show, and there was nothing there, and Ruby Thomas’ story was a cock-and-bull story, he would not only be the laughingstock of the Service but in real trouble for being drunk in public. Anticipating this, determined to prevent it, he dug into his pocket for the peppermints that he always carried and sucked on after having a beer or two, and was grateful that there was still a half roll. His nail loosened and freed three of them, and he popped them into his mouth.

With difficulty, as he neared his goal, he tried to organize his thoughts. Had that black bitch lied to him, fed him that whopper of a tale? It was possible, if she was some kind of psychopathic nut, a schizo, a fruitcake. Another possibility: maybe—and he hated this, hated the comment on his manliness—maybe she had led him on, for the kicks of it, and then, when the chips were down, had backed off, not wanting to go the distance with him, wanting to go so far for kicks and no farther, wanting to be rid of the whiteboy. There were women like that—teasers. And so she had pulled this wild story out of left field to get rid of him. Maybe. But, unhappily, that made little sense. After all, Beggs remembered, he had got her onto the subject of Dilman, challenged her opinion, changed her, touched the emotional part of her femininity and Negro feeling, and then she had done the about-face, the confessional. More than that, it was unlikely that she would invent so dramatic and serious a lie, knowing as she did that he could cause her so much trouble with the authorities.

Unless she was a psycho—she did not look like one, behave like one, except that Jelly Roll idiocy, and playing around with a white man like himself, who was respectable and married and could offer her nothing—well, there was no other explanation for what had happened except the worst one. And the worst one was: she was telling the truth. Someone she knew personally was plotting to hurt the President, and had used her to divert the best shot in the Secret Service.

The possibility that she had spoken the truth sickened him, and automatically made him thrust his foot harder against the gas pedal as his car rattled and shook out of another turn. My God, he thought, in five minutes it could happen, be happening, whatever it was, and he, Otto Beggs, Medal of Honor winner, Secret Service bodyguard, would not only be absent, derelict in his duty, unable to protect the President’s life, but would have innocently collaborated, in a way, with those who would be harming the President.

For a second he was tempted to skid to a halt, run to a telephone, and, since he could not admit he was calling, place an anonymous call. Then he knew that time had run out for that. There were always so many crank calls, and they were sifted and checked, and before his could be treated seriously, the five-minute leeway, less now, would be gone. Besides, even if there was time, supposing the President had been delayed in his office, Beggs knew that he would be no good at disguising his voice. He was no actor (the word
actor
was associated in his mind immediately with John Wilkes Booth, to whom he was uncomfortably close in infamy this moment), and it was no use. He kept the Rambler speedometer at fifty-five miles per hour.

The possibility of a real assault on the President, even an assassination attempt, grew on him, refused to go away, and became a firm conviction. These were bad, unsettled times. In Beggs’s experience, he had never known so many people to speak out viciously—not chidingly or satirically or with irritation, but viciously—against a Chief Executive of the land. Perhaps in no rooms of the 132 rooms in the White House was this savagery felt, or known, as thoroughly as in the rooms occupied by the Secret Service. Never in its history had the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service been so overworked. Since President Dilman had outlawed the Turnerites, since he had vetoed the minorities bill, there was evidence that eight out of every ten Americans were against him, and half of the threatening and obscene letters that had poured in recently, and had been referred to the Protective Section, were still unread, a mounting pile of anonymous letters to be analyzed and broken down by geography, writing habits, vocabulary tricks, so that the potential killers could be identified and observed or apprehended.

Whenever Chief Gaynor thought that his agents were becoming complacent and sloppy about routine, he made them read a sampling of the letters. Most, he would admit, were harmless, penned by ordinarily rational citizens letting off steam. But some, he would remind them, came from paranoid personalities, with little hold on reality, with obsessive beliefs that with one tug of a trigger they could right the wrong and save the nation. These were the ones, they existed. Oh, they existed, yes. Remember them, Gaynor would warn, remember Richard Lawrence, John Wilkes Booth, Charles J. Guiteau, Leon F. Czolgosz, John Schrank, Giuseppe Zangara, Oscar Collazo, Griselio Torresola, even the puzzling Lee Harvey Oswald—remember them and do not be deceived by the preponderance of foreign names. Enough of them were Americans, Gaynor would say, Americans who read the papers, went to amusement parks, shopped for groceries, celebrated holidays, saved their money, ate their meals, voted at election time, slept and woke, and walked crowded city streets, and carried instruments of destruction to bring great men down to their size and to their feet, to settle grievances. They existed. They acted. Expect the unexpected, Gaynor would say, never go slack, be ready and prepared for
suddenness
.