Rex Stout (6 page)

For three hours she sat around at the Lindquists’ and drank claret lemonade and listened to people talk. There was always an informal procession at that house: lobbyists with ideals, musicians, a Representative or two, assistant Bureau chiefs,
Russian embassy people. Carl Lindquist, who had inherited a paper mill in Minnesota, was under no necessity to work but did a lot of thinking and had selected Washington as the proper scene for that activity. Alma liked his wife and didn’t mind him much.

That evening she stayed late, after midnight. The group had thinned until only four or five were left, sprawled in the comfortable chairs with the highballs et cetera which were their reward for giving Lindquist something to think about. A man whom Alma did not know, whose name she had caught as Birch or Bartsch or something, was off on a bypath of the only road the conversation had traveled that whole evening, the war.

“There are lots of reasons why Stanley can’t help it,” he was informing them. “If he doesn’t go into that war he’ll find himself in one anyway, right here at home. I say that not so much on account of the unrest and the scattered rioting of the past few days; that is perhaps merely a fugitive aspect of the immediate question, whether to enter the war now. I say it’s a law of physics, it’s bound to erupt, and then look out! You have no idea—I myself have only a vague and incomplete one—of the amazing extent to which doctrines of hatred and counsels of destruction have seeped into every stratum of our social and economic structure. Do you know what I heard today, for instance? It’s incredible. I was told—and the source, while not unquestionable, was worthy of consideration—I was told that among the White House squad of the Secret Service there are two Gray Shirts. The President’s own bodyguard! How’s that for a commentary on the state of things?”

Florence Lindquist snorted and said, “Oh well. Now I’ll make up one.” Her husband had probably acquired plenty of material for thought for one evening, for he chose to take it lightly too. He shook his finger ponderously at Alma. “Anyway, I hope your friend Chick Moffat isn’t one of them. I’ll wager he is. How do we know you didn’t even make his shirt for him? What are you trying to do, bore from within?”

Alma made him some sort of answer. A little later, seeing that it was half-past twelve and feeling both restless and bored, she got up and distributed her good nights and went home. Walking alone the short four blocks through the mild April night, she was irritated and depressed beyond any warrant she could think of. Certainly the nonsense at the
Lindquists’ did not deserve it. She wondered if there was any chance that Chick had called up again, or might yet do so. This was the first time he had ever broken an appointment with her.

At two o’clock in the morning there were still five men left in Senator Allen’s office. It was really a room in the Senate Office Building which had been assigned to the committee investigating the munitions propaganda, but since Allen was chairman of the committee the room was in effect, for the time being, his.

The room was filled with stale smoke and was in a good deal of a mess, for forty men had gone in and out that night. The smoke had got into the corners and was settling down to stay. During the past couple of hours Senator Tilney had several times opened a window, but his colleague Wilcox, allowing a minimum interval for courtesy, had each time closed it again. The five left were all Senators: Reid, slim and wiry, almost diminutive, still alert, frowning with disgust, was erect in a committeeman’s chair; Corcoran, tall and loose-jointed, wearing the famous Windsor tie with his evening clothes, sat on an edge of the long table and yawned; Tilney stood at a window with his back to the room, the exhausted brown eyes looking, perhaps, in the April night for what they had failed to find in the blue eyes of Sally Voorman, or in the thick smoke dully floating in the committee room, or anywhere else; Allen, big and slick and wary, well-made and well-tailored, wandered around humming to himself; Wilcox, from the West, youngest of the five, who had shown during his first term that he knew how to follow and would not let his shrewd deep eyes show the bitterness of the waiting for his chance to lead, stood in front of Corcoran and appealed to him, but as an equal. Nearly, at least, as an equal, nearly—soon, more!

He said, “For God’s sake let’s go home.”

Corcoran wearily shook his head. “Not till Tilney sends us. We’ve got to give him all he wants.”

“But I tell you we don’t need him.” Wilcox was snapping. “We need sleep, not him.”

Reid spoke from his chair; his voice was as alert as his appearance, without fatigue. “You only tell a man you don’t need him when you have to bluff. It isn’t necessary to try to bluff Tilney. He knows what we have; you’re missing the point.” He turned toward the man at the window. “Tilney, you know all the arguments as well as I do. You could brief the case on either side. Will you commit yourself? That’s all. You know what the assurance of a united front will mean to us. It will save a dog-fight. Give us your word now. I think you’ll be with us on the roll-call anyway, but we want it now. We ask you to give it to us, with no prejudice on any of the issues on which you foresee future disagreement.”

Tilney had turned. The exhausted brown eyes were again blinking at the smoke. He walked across the room, and, paying no attention to Reid, stopped in front of Corcoran and said, “Wilcox is right. What we need is sleep. I’m going home. Your war bloc looks good, Jim. I think you’ve got it.”

Corcoran got off of the table. He was well over six feet, inches above Tilney, who was not small. “Come with us, Bronnie.” There were three men in Washington who called Bronson Tilney “Bronnie.” “Damn it, what is it? Loyalty to Stanley? He’s not expecting it. Hatred of war? Maybe you think I love it. Reid does and Wilcox does. Let them. I hate it. During these twenty years in Washington I guess you and I have learned to choke down hate. What is it? Do you think you can stop the tide? Not a chance. What is it?”

“It’s just a belly-ache, Jim.” Tilney reached up and patted the other’s shoulder. “I’ve got the belly-ache, that’s all.” He turned and got his eyes around to the other three, Wilcox to Allen to Reid. “Gentlemen. I shall not decide what to say about your war until I have heard the President tomorrow. That’s final. I should have made it final two hours ago. At present no one knows what the President will say. If after he has spoken my conscience will permit it, you will find me as ready to swallow bitterness as you are to feast on gall.”

Wilcox snapped, “Good. That’s that.”

Reid said, cold but friendly, “Don’t try to fight us, Tilney.”

Allen was sarcastic and not friendly at all. “Leave your conscience at home. It’s less trouble that way.”

Tilney, disregarding them, was muttering something to Corcoran, and the latter was shaking his head. “No,” he said
when Tilney had finished, “we can’t do it. It has to be before adjournment tomorrow. Today. We’re committed. Come with us, Bronnie. Take your time. I’ll wait here all night for you.”

Tilney, not bothering with another no, moved away. “Goodnight, Jim.” He nodded vaguely in the general direction of the others, walked slowly and not very steadily across to the door, and went through it, leaving it open behind him.

Wilcox said, “He’s dead on his feet.”

“He won’t be at noon,” Reid observed, pushing back his chair and getting up. “Going my way, Jim?”

Corcoran had moved around the table and stopped in front of Allen, looking down wearily at his slickness. There was venom in his tired voice. “If you find yourself smothering some day, buried under Bronson Tilney’s conscience, don’t yell for me.”

Reid said, “Forget it. We’re all sitting on the same keg of powder. Let’s get some sleep.”

On a day when the President is to appear in person before a joint session of the Congress, Washington on the lazy Potomac assumes outwardly, not without a touch of self-consciousness, a little of the air of a world-capital. This, the least self-made of cities, built by the most violently self-made men in the world, is ordinarily and obviously content with its rôle of celestial rooming-house for the hordes whose heaven is a public office and whose salvation is the national pay-roll; but now and then it arouses itself reluctantly to a half-hearted realization of its position as the nucleus of the most potent and dynamic among the world’s half-dozen imperial atoms. The quadrennial Inaugural Day is such an occasion; New Year’s Day, for obscure and indefinable reasons, is one; another, in much smaller degree, is a day when the President talks to the Congress. The visible evidences of the difference from any other day are next to imperceptible: more police on Pennsylvania Avenue, more people on the sidewalks, and more costly limousines headed for the Capitol; but the difference is somewhat greater where it really exists, in the psychological tone of the inhabitants. The air is by no means as electric as it is in Cleveland or St. Louis on the opening day of a baseball World Series, but there are sparks and currents which commonly are absent.

This particular Tuesday, though, this day of a President’s visit, began early to show promise of more than something a little different—possibly, even, something unique. At ten o’clock in the morning Major General Francis Cunningham stood looking out of a window in the office of the Secretary of War and growled, without turning around, to that official:

“What the hell does this town think it is, Paris changing cabinets?”

The Secretary, reaching for a telephone, made no answer.

The police were still in control. The army, uniformed, trucks, gas-bombs and guns handy, was ready at its base, but it was not yet active. The question was still open. The first clash had taken place shortly after dawn, when a group of Communists five hundred strong, out near the Marine Barracks,
had started marching west up Virginia Avenue, and a police captain who had read about Napoleon had disregarded the general orders and had decided that the Reds should wait a while. A few had been hurt, the Communists’ orderly march had been turned into a stampede, and the captain had been dressed down. Later, from the top of a building near Garfield Park, bricks and stones had begun to fall on the same Reds; a few had tried throwing them back again, but their leaders urged them out of range and they went, leaving a few comrades in a truck bound for a hospital. Police mounting to the roofs caught three men in gray shirts, all that remained in sight.

Throughout the early morning there were minor skirmishes here and there, mostly southeast, some north of the Union Depot. After an affair on Second Street from which everyone had scattered before the arrival of the police, a Gray Shirt was found stretched on the pavement with the side of his head smashed in like a dropped flower-pot. That was the only fatality reported; they were not really killing yet, only rehearsing for it. All details were being relayed from police headquarters to the office of the Secretary of War, against the moment when the army might have to step in.

When the Secretary turned away from the telephone Major General Cunningham asked him, “Well, what does our good-hearted President say?”

“It’s up to me.” The Secretary rubbed his ear. “Funny. I’m to decide if and when it’s necessary. I didn’t get the President, but Brownell said that’s final. He’s sending it over in writing.”

“Well?”

The Secretary shook his head. “Wait till we hear again from Tanner.”

Tanner, Chief of Police, in his own office, not so private, was beset. He hated trouble. Burglaries and traffic violations and even an occasional murder were not trouble; they were affairs of business and to be expected; but the Communists and Gray Shirts and that kind, while their activities seemed to him plainly criminal and that was that, had roots that sneaked underground into so many pockets of political subsoil that it was necessary to treat them almost as if they possessed the rights of ordinary citizens. That was confusing and certainly made trouble. And they weren’t the only ones. He had just hung up the telephone receiver after talking to a lieutenant
who had reported that at the corner of Fourteenth Street and New York Avenue a bunch of women, a hundred or more, were demanding permission to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. They were members of the Women’s League for Peace, the lieutenant said; well-dressed, determined, and carrying anti-war banners as big as bedsheets. When the Chief of Police had instructed the lieutenant to tell them to go home, and the lieutenant had replied that it would take a squad to handle them, the Chief had yelled into the transmitter, “All right, let the damn fools march!”

A similar request which arrived around eleven o’clock was too much for him; he told the captain who phoned it in to call up the Secretary of War and report it direct. At the War Office the call was put through to the Secretary himself. Cunningham was still there. The Secretary listened to the captain on the phone, asked a question or two, and then said, “Hold the wire.” He turned to the general: “Here’s a tale for you. Three hundred Grey Shirts are in an alley down by Twelfth Street and Pennsylvania. Their leader says they’re going to march to the Capitol. The police captain says they’re not. And how do you like this, the leader shows him a permit signed by Commissioner Forrest!”

Cunningham’s eyes opened. “No!”

“Yes.”

“It’s forged.”

“The captain says he knows the signature. Has Forrest a legal right to sign such a permit?”

“I think so. I don’t know. Who’s the leader? Lincoln Lee?”

“No. A tall man with black hair.”

Cunningham snapped, “Arrest him. Chase them.”

“Arrest him for what?”

“For not being Lincoln Lee. What’s the difference? Any way, don’t let them parade. Chase them.”

The Secretary hesitated a moment, then spoke into the telephone and gave the order. When he had finished he turned back to the general: “What do you know about Forrest?”

The reply was incisive. “I don’t know a single damned thing about a single damned soul. It’s a good thing I’m a soldier and not supposed to, it saves me embarrassment.”