Preserve and Protect (27 page)

“Yes,” Helen-Anne said. “So how about it?”

“Well, you see, dear—” Patsy began carefully.

“What’s he doing, hiding under the sofa?”

“He’s in his room at the moment,” Patsy said with dignity. “What do you want to talk to him about, anyway? Can’t it wait?”

“It could,” Helen-Anne said, “except that I want to print it and I want to check it out with him and get his comment on a few things.”

“Oh?”

“Oh.”

“Print what?”

“Never you mind,” Helen-Anne said. “Just put me through, please. And don’t listen on the line.”

“I will if I please.”

“Be prepared for a shock, then,” Helen-Anne told her calmly. “Big Brother has been up to no good.”

“Well! WELL!”

“Yes, ‘Well, WELL!’ Now will you get him to the phone?”

“No,” Patsy said with sudden decision. “No, I won’t. He’s getting ready to go to the White House—”

“Why do you think the President wants to see him?” Helen-Anne inquired. “Because I’ve already talked to the President, that’s why. Don’t be naïve all your life, Patsy. Jasons are smarter than that. They’re some of the smartest people I know. Only, one of them doesn’t know what’s good for him, that’s all.”

“Well, you can’t talk to him right now,” Patsy said coldly, “I’m sorry.”

“You will be sorry,” Helen-Anne said, “and so will he. Because I’m going to go ahead and print it as I understand it. One of my distinguished and able colleagues of the press,” she added with a scathing sarcasm, “isn’t sure yet whether his outfit is going to or not, but I think the good old
Star
will back me to the hilt.”

“What is it?” Patsy inquired with an equally scathing sarcasm. “Have you caught one of his assistants in the men’s room?”

Helen-Anne snorted.

“Oh, Christ, that old chestnut! No, I have not caught one of his assistants in the men’s room. It’s a little more important than that. But you don’t want me to talk to him, so that’s that. Read the
Star.
It’ll be in there.”

“Print and be damned,” Patsy said.

“How grand,” Helen-Anne observed. She gave a sudden ribald hoot and used the patronizing tone she knew would infuriate Patsy the most. “You poor Jasons, You’ll destroy yourselves yet, if the world will just give you enough rope.”

“I am so tired of you,” Patsy remarked coldly. “I am so TIRED, Helen-Anne.”

“Kiddo,” Helen-Anne assured her, “you aren’t in it with me. You tell Big Bud that I’m not going to let up on this story, either. I’m going to stay right with it to the end. His end, I hope.”

“Well, I hope it’s yours,” Patsy said viciously. “I just hope so, Helen-Anne!”

“I know you do, love,” Helen-Anne said lightly. “But I’m afraid you’re all of you just not going to have that satisfaction.”

But when she had slammed down the receiver and was staring with an angrily triumphant air around the empty newsroom, puffing a little, looking characteristically disorganized, one strand of hair straggling down over her right eye, another askew on top of her head, she did not feel so confident. For the first time in all her years as a Washington correspondent, in fact, she felt uneasy and perhaps even a little afraid. Great wealth had ways of taking care of difficult matters and never being connected with them at all.

Very big and very ugly things were involved here, and little Helen-Anne, she told herself, was going to have to be careful. Migh-ty careful.

Sometimes, he reflected with a certain somber amusement, a reputation for bluntness could be very helpful when one planned to be the opposite. When his visitor was announced he remained for a moment with his back to him, hands clasped, shoulders hunched, head lowered, staring at the Washington Monument perfect in the night. Then he swung about, stood up, held out his hand with a pleasant smile.

“Governor,” he said, “thanks very much for coming to see me at this ungodly hour.”

“Your command,” Ted Jason said with a smile equally pleasant, “my wish.”

“Glad of that,” the President said amicably. “Guess if it wasn’t your wish, the command wouldn’t matter much, right?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Ted said, his smile steady.

“Let’s sit over by the window,” the President suggested, leading the way to a couple of armchairs facing one another comfortably across a coffee table on which cups and a steaming percolator were already set out. “You’ve no idea how nice it is to get away from that desk. Already. You may not believe it, seeing as how you and some others regard it as the most attractive piece of furniture in the world, but it’s a fact. Less than a week, and I’m already glad to sit somewhere else.”

Governor Jason smiled and took the proffered chair.

“As long as you retain the option,” he said, “That’s what makes the difference.”

“Coffee?”

“Black, please,” Ted said. He looked thoughtfully around the room while the President poured. “Are you going to have it redecorated?”

“Don’t imagine so,” the President said. “I’ll add a few of my own pictures, of course—I’ve got about a thousand still up there in the Speaker’s office. Going to take me a week or two to dismantle that. Then I’ll settle in for a while. I imagine you have a very attractive office in Sacramento?”

“Very pleasant,” the Governor said politely.

“Good,” his host said, stirring in cream and sugar gently and watching his visitor with a friendly smile while silence grew. Presently Ted put down his cup with a little laugh and leaned forward.

“Mr. President, am I supposed to crack psychologically, or something? Is that the idea?”

“Not at all,” the President said blandly. “Not at all! Why on earth would I want you to do that?”

“I really don’t know,” Ted said calmly. “I really don’t. But I thought you might.”

“No, indeed.”

“Then why am I here?”

“I expect you know,” the President said.

His visitor gave him an easy, relaxed smile.

“Pat tells me Helen-Anne Carrew says it’s all her doing. The face that launched a thousand inaccurate columns, its owner moving like a noisy gray eminence through the secret paths of government, swaying men to her ruthless desires. See them hop! Senators, Speakers, Governors, Presidents—”

“Not always inaccurate,” the President said with an equally relaxed and comfortable smile. “Helen-Anne hits it on the button nine times out of ten, I’ve found. She’s hard-working, clever and astute, and often has the luck that seems to be attracted by those attributes. For instance, she was lucky tonight when she decided to go to the twelfth floor.”

“Now what cock-and-bull story has she told you about the twelfth floor?” the Governor inquired humorously. “‘The Twelfth Floor.’ It sounds like a good mystery story or a bad novel about big business. Which is it?”

“Neither,” the President said, also humorously. “It’s just a nice big front-page story by Helen-Anne involving several interesting people.”

“Which the
Star
isn’t going to print,” the Governor said, “because it’s only her word, and that can easily enough be knocked down.”

“She had company, you know. One of her colleagues was along.”

The Governor laughed.

“You won’t see a line of it in their pages. Now, if it had been Orrin, whom they don’t like, there would have been column after column of sinister speculation. You know how these things are done, Mr. President. But since it’s me, whom they do like—Anyway, there was no meeting—nothing sinister—nothing. So what proof does she have?”

“She says she took some pictures of you as you came out.”

“No one took any p—” Ted started quickly, and as quickly stopped, while the President gave him a hard, inquisitive stare. “Anyway,” he continued after a moment, “it’s her word, unsupported, and there is no proof. I doubt very much that the
Star
will print it, with no confirmation from any other source.”

“Governor,” the President inquired with the quiet curiosity of one who really wanted to know, “why are you still running with that shoddy crew? Don’t you see the terrible dangers to you and to the country in what they’re doing? Don’t you see you’re giving them an option on you, even if you only stopped in for two minutes to say hello? They can claim all sorts of things about your approval and your endorsement—maybe even your complicity, for that matter.”

“Complicity in what?” Ted Jason demanded sharply. The President shrugged.

“How do I know? Whatever they plan to do. For all I or anyone outside that room knows, you might have been plotting to kill the President. It’s been done.”

“Not by sane men,” the Governor said. The President made an impatient sound.

“Who said we’re discussing sane men? Look, Governor”—and he leaned forward and turned on the full impact of Mr. President and Mr. Speaker combined—“there must come a halt to this sort of thing if you wish to survive in American politics, or maybe just if you wish to survive, period. Nobody I know is going to kill you, but your newfound friends might. These things backfire. Violence feeds upon itself; presently all order and all certainty are swept away. You cannot control these forces. I thought you learned that at the convention.”

“You and your friends certainly did your best to instruct me!” Ted said with a sudden flash of anger. The President returned him cold look for cold look.

“Somebody had to,” he said bluntly. “You refused to learn otherwise. Now I say to you this: I don’t know what happened in that room, and I don’t know what Helen-Anne is going to print about it—if she does. But I do know that you are betraying yourself—and the people who believe in you—and this republic—if you do not once and for all, unequivocally and forever, repudiate violence as a method of conducting the public business, foreign policy and social progress of the United States of America.” He leaned back in his chair and stared out at the Monument with a tired little sigh. “This is so obvious to me,” he said quietly, “and, I think, to all sane men who want their country to survive, that I don’t see why it has to be spelled out to a man of your intelligence. I really do not.”

“You really have it rationalized, don’t you?” Governor Jason asked with an equal quietness, an equal wonderment; which, if it was not sincere, was a masterpiece of acting, the President thought. And perhaps it was sincere: he could not tell, so earnestly was it presented. “You really have the world turned around so that the policies of this Administration have nothing at all to do with the excesses of protest that have occurred in the last few days.”

“‘Excesses of protest,’ my God!” the President exclaimed, bringing a fist down hard on the arm of his chair. “Is the sort of thing that happened in Arlington an ‘excess of protest’? Is the sort of organized disruption we’re seeing all across the country these days just an ‘excess of protest’? How neatly you rationalize, yourself. How neatly”—his eyes narrowed—“and how well-designed to win you the political support of the disrupters.”

“Mr. President,” Governor Jason said, “I am willing to concede that there are some forces—”

“Including those you met with earlier this evening.”

“Some forces,” Ted continued, unmoved, “which are involved in these things, and which are not sincere or genuine or perhaps even loyal to the country. But there are many, many millions more who honestly and earnestly and sincerely deplore and abhor the policies your Administration is following in world affairs. Now, these people are not,” he said carefully, “kooks. They are not crackpots. They are not wild-eyed radicals or subversive Communists. They are decent Americans, deeply and genuinely disturbed. Am I to repudiate them, when they look to me for voice? Am I to say to them, ‘Sorry, run along. I agree with Big Daddy, everything’s 100 per cent okay and you’re just a bunch of disloyal rats’? I cannot do that, Mr. President. I don’t believe it to be true.”

“What do you believe?” the President asked, as others had asked, and would ask, his handsome visitor. “That’s what I don’t understand. Perhaps if I could, I’d understand better where you think you’re going, and what you think you’re trying to do.”

“I think, if you will forgive me,” Governor Jason said quietly, “that I am going right to that desk over there. And I think what I am trying to do—”

“Is get there.”

“Partly that,” he agreed, “but even more, I think, I am trying to give these people a voice and an instrument to work out a foreign policy that will really lead this country and the world toward genuine peace—”

“The clichés of peace!” the President interrupted.

“As worn as the clichés of violence,” Ted responded quickly.

They gave one another stare for stare until the President finally spoke in a tired, musing tone.

“I wish I could believe you were sincere, Ted. I wish I could believe you know what you’re doing, when you run with that pack. I wish I could honestly think your method would bring us through. I might get out of your way if that were the case. But I cannot for the life of me believe you to be anything but overly ambitious, taking desperate chances with the very fabric of the nation, flirting and perhaps even conniving with forces whose capacities for destruction you just don’t understand. I think you’re the product of your upbringing. I think you think that just because your name’s Jason, you can ride any whirlwind, control any holocaust, put any genie back in the bottle. And my friend,” he concluded quietly, “I just don’t think you can.”

“I thank you for worrying about me,” Governor Jason said dryly.

“Oh, not you,” the President said. “I don’t give a damn about you. But quite a lot of my fellow-Americans are involved in what you do—possibly the fate of the country itself is involved. And that makes it a worrisome matter, for me. You have the power to lead or mislead. Right now, you’re misleading, in my estimation, because you’re misled. By ambition and greed for office and people who are taking advantage of those two weaknesses to trap you into being a stalking-horse for their own purposes.”

For a moment Ted did not reply. When he did, it was in a tone of cold and level anger.

“You really think I am nothing more than a stalking-horse for someone else. You really think so.”

“That is the most charitable thing I can conclude,” the President said calmly. “I wouldn’t want to think you were knowingly and deliberately conspiring to bring down your own country.”