Trevayne (61 page)

He agreed, and showed her the money. He didn’t give it to her, he only showed it.

He wasn’t Genessee Industries’ “keystone” for nothing.

But he had one last purchase to make from the filthy bartender before he left with the young, large-breasted girl.

The filthy bartender at first hesitated, but his hesitation disappeared when James Goddard produced another hundred-dollar bill.

The old Victorian house was everything the girl said it would be. He was given a room; he carried the briefcases himself; he wouldn’t let anyone touch them.

And she did calm down; and she did come to his room. And when he’d finished, when he’d exploded in an explosion he hadn’t experienced in twenty-five years, she quietly left, and he rested.

He was finished resting now. He sat on the bed—a bed of such memory—and looked at the four briefcases piled on a filthy table. He got up, naked except for his knee-length socks, and walked to the table. He remembered precisely which briefcase held the final purchase he’d made from the filthy bartender.

It was the second from the top.

He lifted the first briefcase off the stack and placed it on the floor. He opened the next.

Lying on top of the cards and the papers was a gun.

It had begun.

This doomed land, this Armageddon of the planet, this island of the power-damned where the greeds had fed upon themselves until the greatest good became the greatest evil. For the land belonged to the power-damned.

And the insanity was abruptly, shockingly made clear with a single act of horror.

Andrew Trevayne sat at the dining-room table in front of the large picture window overlooking the water, and his whole body trembled. The morning sun, careening shafts of blinding light off the surface of the ocean, did not herald the glory of morning, but offered, instead, a terrible foreboding. As if flashes of lightning kept crashing across the horizon through the bright sunlight.

An unending daytime of hell.

Trevayne forced his eyes back to the newspaper. The headlines stretched across The New York
Times
, roaring the impersonality of objective terror:

The act was ludicrously simple. The President of the United States was showing newsmen the progress of the Christmas decorations on the White House lawn when in a holiday spirit he greeted the last contingent of tourists leaving the grounds. James Goddard had been among
them; as recalled by the guides, Goddard had made numerous tours of the White House during the past several days.

Merry Christmas, Mr. President.

The inside pages were filled with biographical material about Goddard and speculative conjectures about the atrocity. Interviews hastily written, hysterically responded to, were given un-thought-out importance.

And in the lower-right-hand corner of the front page was a report, the obscenity of which caused Trevayne to stare in disbelief.

It had begun.

And Andrew Trevayne knew he could not let it continue. He could not bear witness to the cataclysm without raising an anguished voice, without letting the country know.

But the country was in panic; the world was in panic. He could not compound that hysteria with his anguish.

That much he knew.

He knew also that he could not react as his wife had reacted, as his children had.

His daughter. His son.

The lost, bewildered guardians of tomorrow.

The girl had been the first to bring the news. Both children were home for the holidays, and both had been out separately: Pam involved with Christmas shopping, Steve with other young men his age, regreeting one another, exaggerating their first semesters. Andy and Phyllis had been in the downstairs study quietly making plans for getting away in January.

Phyllis insisted on the Caribbean; a hot country where Andy could spend hours on his beloved ocean, sailing around the islands, letting the warm winds ease the hurt and the anger. They’d take a house in St. Martin; they’d use some of their well-advertised money to help heal the wounds.

The door of the study was open, the only sound the hum of the wall vacuum being used by Lillian somewhere upstairs.

They’d both heard the crash of the front door, the hysterical sobs through the cries for help.

Cries for a mother and father. For somebody.

They’d raced out of the study, up the stairs, and seen their daughter standing in the hallway, tears streaming down her face, her eyes afraid.

“Pam! For heaven’s sake, what’s the matter?”

“Oh, God!
God!
You don’t
know?
”

“Know?”

“Turn on the radio. Call somebody. He was killed!”

“Who?”

“The President was killed! He was killed!”

“Oh, my God.” Phyllis spoke inaudibly as she turned to her husband and searched his face; Andrew instinctively reached for her. The unspoken statements—questions—were too clear, too intimate, too filled with agony and personal fear to surface the words.

“Why? Why?”
Pamela Trevayne was screaming.

Andrew released his wife and silently, gently commanded
her to go to their daughter. He walked rapidly into the living room, to the telephone.

There was nothing anyone could tell him but the terrible facts, the unbelievable narrative. Nearly every private line he knew in Washington was busy. The few that weren’t had no time for him; the government of the United States had to function, had to secure its continuity at all costs.

The television and radio stations suspended all broadcasts and commercial breaks as harried announcers began their fugues of repetition. Several news analysts wept openly, others betrayed angers that came close to outright condemnation of their vast, silent audiences. A number of the self-hustlers—second rate politicians, third-rate journalists, a few pompous, pontificating articulators of academia—were by chance “in the studios” or “on the other end of the line,” ready to make their bids for immediate recognition, spreading their tasteless perceptions and admonitions on a numbed public only too willing to be taught in its moment of confusion.

Trevayne left a single network station—the least irresponsible, he thought—on several sets throughout the house. He went to Pam’s room, thinking Phyllis would be there. She wasn’t. Pam was talking quietly with Lillian; the maid had been weeping, and the girl was comforting the older woman, conversely regaining her own control as she did so.

Andrew closed his daughter’s bedroom door and walked down the hall to his and Phyllis’ room. His wife sat by the window, the light of early night filtering through the woods, reflected up from the water.

Darkness was coming.

He went to her and knelt beside the chair. She stared at him, and he knew then that she knew what he was going to do before he did.

And she was terrified.

Steven Trevayne stood by the fireplace, his hands black with ash, the poker beside him, resting on the brick below the mantel. No one had thought to light a fire, and the fact seemed to annoy him. He had mixed new kindling
with nearly burnt logs and held the Cape Cod lighter underneath the grate, oblivious to the heat and the dirt of the fireplace.

He was alone and looked over at the television set, its volume low, on only to impart whatever new information there might be.

The Vice President of the United States had just taken his hand off a Bible; he was now the world’s most powerful man. He was President.

An old man.

They were all old men. No matter the years, their dates of birth. Old men, tired men, deceitful men.

“That’s a good idea. The fire,” said Andrew quietly, walking into the living room.

“Yeah,” answered the boy without looking up, turning his head back toward the expanding flames. Then, just as abruptly, he stepped away from the fireplace and started for the hallway.

“Where are you going?”

“Out. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. It’s a time to do nothing. Except, perhaps, think.”

“Please cut the bromides, Dad.”

“I will if you’ll stop being childish. And sullen. I didn’t pull the trigger, even symbolically.”

The boy stopped and looked at his father. “I know you didn’t. Maybe it would have been better if you had.…”

“I find that a contemptible statement.”

“… ‘even symbolically.’ … For Christ’s sake, then you would have done
something!
”

“That’s off-base. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“ ‘Off-base’? What’s
on
-base? You were there! You’ve been there for months. What did you
do
, Dad? Were you on-base? On target?… Goddamn it.
Some
body thought. Somebody did a terrible, lousy, rotten, fucking thing, and everybody’s going to pay for it!”

“Are you endorsing the act?” Trevayne shouted, confused; he was as close to striking his son as he could ever recall.

“Jesus, no! Do
you?
”

Trevayne gripped his hands in front of him, the muscles in his arms and shoulders taut. He wanted the boy to leave. To run. Quickly.

“If that hurts, it’s because that killing took place in your ball park.”

“He was insane, a maniac. It’s isolated. You’re being unfair.”

“Nobody thought so until yesterday. Nobody had any big files on
him; he
wasn’t on anybody’s list. No one detained him anywhere; they just gave him millions and millions to keep on building the goddamn
machine.
”

“That’s asinine. You’re trying to create a label out of one warped clump of insanity. Use your head, Steve. You’re better than that.”

The boy paused; his silence was the stillness of grief and bewilderment. “Maybe labels are the only things that make sense right now.… And you lose, Dad. I’m sorry.”

“Why? Why do I lose?”

“Because I can’t help thinking that you—or someone like you—could have stopped it.”

“That’s not so.”

“Then maybe there’s nothing left. If you’re right.” Steven Trevayne looked down at his ash-black hands and rubbed them on his dungarees. “I’ve got to wash my hands.… I’m sorry, Dad; I mean, I’m really sorry. I’m scared.”

The boy ran into the hallway; Trevayne could hear him descend the stairs toward the study and the terrace.

 … 
maybe there’s nothing left
.

No.

No, he couldn’t react like that. He couldn’t allow himself the indulgence others gave vent to. Even among his family; within his family.

Not now.

Now he had to make himself felt, where it counted. Before the continuity was irrevocably established.

He had to jolt them, all of them. Make them realize he was serious. They could not be allowed to forget he held—held firmly—the weapons to depose them all.

And he would use those weapons, for they did not deserve to run the country. The nation demanded more.

“… maybe there’s nothing left.”

But there
was
something. He would provide it.

Even if it meant using Genessee Industries. Using Genessee properly.

Properly.

Use it or destroy it once and for all.

He picked up the phone. He would stay on it until he reached Senator Mitchell Armbruster.

The smoothly tarred surface of the road abruptly stopped and became dirt. At this point on the small peninsula the township’s responsibility ended and the private property began. Only now it was under the jurisdiction of the federal government as well; watched, guarded, isolated, as it had been for eighteen months now.

High Barnegat.

The Connecticut White House.

The row of five automobiles sped through the gates of the Greenwich toll station without stopping. The guards on duty saluted as the motorcade went by; a patrolman inside the first booth received a signal from a man standing outside and picked up a telephone. The normal flow of traffic could continue now. The President’s column had turned off onto the Shore Road exit, where the local police had cleared the area into the peninsula. The patrolman gave the release order to the Westchester station, waved to the man outside, who waved back, then climbed into a waiting automobile.

The 1600 Security men had dispersed throughout the property in teams of two. The Secret Service agent named Callahan had checked the beach area with his partner, and both men were walking up the steps to the terrace, their eyes professionally scanning the sloping woods as they did so.

Callahan had protected four presidents. Nearly twenty years of service; he was forty-six now. Still one of the best men 1600 had, and he knew it. No one could hold him responsible for the Darien business three years ago—that phone call from 1600 pulling him off duty at the hospital. Jesus! That’d been such a top-level fuck-up, he never did learn how it happened. How someone else had gotten the codes. He didn’t ask, either; not after he’d been taken off
the hook. And he was nowhere near the White House when the assassination took place. Everyone on that detail was relieved. Strange: he’d been reassigned to Trevayne and wrote in his surveillance report that his subject had met with James Goddard a week before the killing of the President. No one paid much attention, and he never brought it up afterward. Weird that nobody else did, though.