(1964) The Man (67 page)

Otto Beggs saw the White House across the street. He screeched around a car, slowing for the red light on Pennsylvania Avenue, roared across the thoroughfare, and braked as he entered the Northwest Gate.

He began to show his pass, but a grinning White House policeman waved him through. “Hi, Otto. How come the VIP entrance? You being decorated again?”

“Yeh, decorated!” he shouted back. Yeh, with thirty pieces of silver, he thought.

He rode up the driveway, jerkily parked, came out of the car fast. He realized that he was still tieless, and that would draw attention, but there was no time to put on the necktie stuffed in his pocket. He must make haste without causing a commotion, without letting himself be waylaid by press or colleagues. He must get where he was going quickly, yet without creating panic, lest he be exposed for a fool over a false alarm.

Striding to the West Wing lobby, he glanced at his watch. If the timepiece was correct, it was five thirty-two.

As ever, at this hour, the press foyer with its three telephone booths was teeming with reporters. He shoved past them, ignoring their curiosity at his disheveled appearance. He swallowed the last of his peppermints, hurried into the Reading Room, keeping his back to the Secret Service offices to the right, curtly acknowledging the greeting of the blue-uniformed policeman at the desk to the left. He swung off, past the reporters lolling about on their leather sofas and chairs, past Tim Flannery’s office, and into the corridor with its black-and-white checkered floor.

Alone at last, now unobserved, he ran heavily past the Cabinet Room door and Miss Foster’s door, until he reached the open corridor entrance, with a chain across it, leading into the President’s Oval Office, where Agent Winkler stood guard.

“Hey, Otto,” the agent called out, “where you been?”

“I got a special message for the President. Where is he?” He poked his head into the office. It was empty.

“Left five seconds ago for upstairs.”

Beggs unfastened the chain with one hand as he unbuttoned his coat with the other. “Got to see him, important message,” he said, flipping the end of the chain to his colleague.

Moving swiftly, for his size, Beggs bounded across the President’s office toward the one French door that was still open to the Rose Garden.

Outside, heart hammering, he halted, and in the gloomy dusk of late afternoon scanned the L-shaped colonnaded terrace walk that led from the West Wing offices, past the indoor swimming pool, to the ground-floor entrance into the White House proper. He did not see them at first, and then, at once, he did, as they emerged from behind a white pillar. They were close together as they moved ahead, first President Dilman, then the new young fellow, Agent Ross, a short man, shorter than the President, a half stride behind.

The scene was peaceful and serene, the activity as familiar and routine as every five-thirty stroll he himself had enacted with Dilman in the last two months. Nothing unusual, nothing unexpected, nothing sudden.

False alarm, thank God, Beggs reassured himself, sagging with relief. His pleasure was mitigated only by the anger he had hoarded against that bitch of a colored girl, who had put him through a quarter of an hour of hell simply to be rid of him.

About to turn back into the office, he saw that the President had stopped to point out something concerning the barren hedges that separated the cement walk from the historic garden.

Automatically Otto Beggs’s trained eyes examined the leafless hedges, then lifted to inspect the White House Rotunda and Truman Balcony across the way, then lowered to study the bushy Andrew Jackson magnolia tree, then casually took in the depleted flower beds, the group of empty metal patio chairs around the outdoor table, the busy gardener in olive-drab overalls on his knees digging a hole with his trowel for a new plant, the rectangle of the Rose Garden itself off to the right, the—and then it came to him—the unusual and unexpected.

Beggs’s neck stiffened. His gaze shifted back to the gardener, the gardener in olive-drab overalls, their color almost blending him and losing him against the magnolia tree. The gardener straightened, stood up, rubbing his back, then reached down to pick up his plant, and slowly began working his way from the magnolia tree, unobtrusively, diagonally, across the carpet of lawn toward the spot where the President and Ross still stood, absorbed in their horticultural conversation.

As if propelled by instinct, Beggs stealthily moved to his left across the cement walk, toward the corner turn, toward the ramp leading down to where the President and Ross were talking. Beggs’s narrowed eyes never left the gardener. From eighty feet, he could not make out the laborer clearly, except to see that he was a squat, husky Negro carrying a plant, to all outward appearances absorbed in his work, going toward the chrysanthemum bed and naked hedges and white colonnades.

An innocent and customary pastoral scene, a prosaic scene to be observed daily from his post outside the President’s office, the gardeners, their plants, their tools, something that went on in the daylight and sun of repeated mornings and afternoons. But—Beggs’s mind wondered, as he moved: oddity one, an unfamiliar Negro gardener, he could not remember a Negro, the opposite in build of this husky person, yet Dilman, being Negro, could certainly have hired another recently; oddity two, a gardener at work in the dusk, scant minutes before night, a gardener alone when all the regulars had gone home, a gardener planting at an hour when planting was never done, impossible.

Beggs had arrived, unseen, at the corner colonnade that now separated the two on the walk from himself. Straight ahead of Beggs, Dilman and Ross were still talking, Dilman listening to the new Secret Service agent, and the new agent, his back to the garden, unaware that there was anyone else nearby. And even if Ross should turn, and the walk to the ground floor be resumed, the agent was too unfamiliar with the personnel and routine to realize that this was an unknown gardener who was engaged in planting at an unlikely hour. There they conversed, the unsuspecting pair, there straight ahead, to the left of the corner colonnade. And to the right of the colonnade, at the center of the garden, fifty feet away, the Negro gardener had strangely halted, put down his plant, was reaching inside his overalls.

Overcautious or not, Beggs had a pattern he must follow, one spurred by a foolish warning from a colored chippy and reinforced by a suspicion born of the unusual.

He started down the ramp, then called out, “Hey, Ross! Ross!”

President Dilman looked up, startled, as the new agent started to whirl around.

Beggs cupped his hand to his mouth. “That gardener behind you—check him. Who is he?”

Neither Ross nor the President had been listening when he began to give his order, and now as if by reflex action, to Beggs’s petrified amazement, the new agent quickly left Dilman and started toward Beggs, head cocked, one finger tipping his ear forward.

For a split second, Beggs was too horrified to speak. It was understandable, that reflex to catch more distinctly what had been called out, to draw nearer, but it was a lapse that broke the cardinal rule of Presidential protection. By his action, Ross had left Dilman momentarily alone and unguarded.

“What?” Ross called back, as he came toward Beggs. “What is it?”

Infuriated by a freshman’s stupidity, Beggs sprinted down the sharp decline, shaking his fist. “Dammit, you’re not supposed to leave the President! I told you to check on—” And then, as he was almost upon Ross, the corner of his eye caught the flash of motion, the
suddenness
of motion.

The Negro gardener had yanked some object from inside his overalls, and at once, from an easygoing planter he had become transformed into a purposeful aggressor, springing forward, dashing across the remaining lawn and flower bed, rapidly closing the distance that separated him from the President.

Beggs’s response was instantaneous, as swift, as positive, as mindless as it had been that memorable frozen night in Korea. Beggs clutched Ross by the shoulder, forcibly flung him aside, sent him pancaking against the wall.

As his free hand plunged to his holster, whipping out his revolver, Beggs stumbled, recovered his balance, and then he raced down the walk toward the President. Ahead, Dilman, hand massaging his forehead in bewilderment, remained inert, as if hypnotized by Beggs’s incredible action. To the right, converging on the President as he himself was, Beggs could make out the Negro gardener running, slipping on the wet grass but retaining his footing and bounding toward the President. The object in his fist, shockingly vivid now, was a Luger that seemed to grow monstrously large.

“Down! Drop down!” Beggs screamed at Dilman.

The President’s head spun from the charging Beggs to the sound of the running on his left. As he saw the looming black figure with its weapon, unmistakably an assailant waving a gun, hurtling from the lawn across the flower bed in order to take dead aim in the near-darkness, Dilman’s strangled throat cried out, “No!” and his arms went up to cover his face.

“Down!” Beggs roared again.

Rooted by fear, Dilman turned only his head and torso from the attack, helpless and a perfect target. Beggs was fifteen feet away when the burly assassin landed in the flower bed, pointing his Luger, sinking in the soft turned soil just as he pulled the trigger.

The explosion, so near, was like a clap of thunder against Beggs’s eardrums. He could see the erratic, tilted shot go high, ripping the cement and plaster above the President’s head.

In a frozen moment, imprinted on Beggs’s mind, there was the tableau of their coming together—murderer, victim, protector. Frozen, and insanely joyous, the white eyes and gold and white teeth of the matted dark Halloween head, over the hedge. Frozen, as unready and incredulous as a defenseless yearling about to go down, the wide, red-flecked eyes of the President, the lifted and ineffectual arms of the President with the sleeves too short and ridiculous. Frozen, Beggs himself, the length of a man’s length away, the length of mortality, his one leg high, high off the walk, his other driven against the cement, his catapult, the Corvallis Beggs, the Korea Beggs, the has-been who would-never-be, the faded physique glued and pressed into the scrapbook page.

The frozen moment heaved and blew sky-high, as the eruption and detonation came simultaneously.

Beggs erupted, vaulted into the air, knees and legs smashing the President’s chest. The assassin’s pistol, at the end of his wavering arm, the barrel an accusing and avenging metallic finger, came over the hedge and discharged its point-blank, vehement, deafening blast.

For an infinity, Beggs felt himself being lifted higher and higher by the blast, and then he was plummeting downward, legless, as if the folding body beneath him were his lower limbs. He heard Dilman groan as they crashed to the cement walk, Dilman beneath and doubled over, and himself atop Dilman.

Trying to rise, Beggs teetered on the rim of a deep invisible canyon, swaying, knowing he must fall. It was all feeling now, feeling and nerve ends, feeling the moist blood on Dilman’s cheekbone, the soaked blood that had pasted his own trousers to his own leg, feeling the security of the metal in the grip of his right palm.

The reverberations from the assassin’s blast still pounded inside his head. He came around on his side, lightning-fast, trying not to expose the President. He came around as the assassin above shook his gun, raised it unsteadily, as if unsure that he had killed the President and determined to try again, determined to find an opening. All this in the shaving of a second. As the other’s gun came up, steadying itself, Beggs’s wrist snapped the revolver in his palm upward. His proud Medal of Honor reflex. His forefinger tugged the trigger as immediately and gently as once it had pulled the thumb from his infant son’s mouth. The response, the report from his revolver, was as quiet and as firm as his finger’s reproof. There was a muffled metallic cough, a swooshing, humming sound.

He was not surprised to see the assassin’s black face let go its venom, open and broaden in wonder. He was not surprised to see the assassin’s fingers fan outward, like those of a mechanical doll, until the Luger was released and clattered to the cement walk. He was not surprised to see the person above touch both hands to his chest, as if to open the overalls at the reddening stain, and then drop his chin, and then gradually surrender life, and then fold downward and downward into a lumpy heap behind the stark branches of the hedge.

Beggs turned his head at the footsteps, so many hurrying footsteps. Sluggishly, with disinterest, he watched them coming from everywhere, from everywhere, it seemed, from the guardhouse, the Oval Office, the entrance above the ramp, and probably from the ground floor behind him. His vision was poor. There were police, Ross and Prentiss and a half-dozen others of Gaynor’s boys, Miss Foster, Flannery, Talley, countless more.

He heard the babel of voices, the shouts, the yelling, the commands.

“Get the physician—get Oates—right through there, around the corner!”

“Move Beggs—move him—lift him off!”

“The President—is he dead?”

It was pleasant for Beggs, all the hands, all the attention. He found himself on a blanket, on his back, staring up at blurred faces and the overhang above them.

From a distance he heard Ross’s voice. “—the gardener fired, missed, then Beggs jumped on the President and bowled him over as the colored guy fired again. Then Beggs rolled over and just shot him dead. . . . The body’s over there, Chief—”

He thought that he heard Admiral Oates’s voice nearby. “Mr. President—Mr. President—” Then silence. “He’s alive—I don’t think he’s been touched—the blood’s not his—here, nurse, give me the spirits of ammonia—Mr. President, there now, that’s better—”

Then he heard President Dilman, weak but irritable. “I’m all right. Leave me alone. Beggs, he took the shot instead of me. Get over there and help him.”

Beggs opened his eyes. What was wrong with them? Nothing was distinct. Admiral Oates’s face floated into his vision, a face less grouchy because it was not clear. He was saying, “Easy, Mr. Beggs, let me have a look—oh yes, yes—see here, it’s his right leg—really chewed up—Miss Foster! Get an ambulance to take him to Walter Reed Hospital at once! Beggs, do you feel any pain? No, I suppose not. Shock. I’ll give you a shot—”