Grand Master (20 page)

“You were late; I didn’t think you were
coming,” remarked Burdick as the cab pulled away. “I waited
forty-five minutes.”

“Yes, I know,” said Bauman without apology.
“I was there when you arrived.”

“You were there when…? Then why did you wait
until I was ready to give up?”

Bauman was bending forward, watching out the
window as if he were looking for an address. He did not reply.

“Turn right at the next street,” he told the
driver. “You can drop us half way down the block.”

As the taxi driver made the turn, Bauman
looked back over his shoulder. There was nothing casual in the way
he did it: his gaze was too intense for someone who was just trying
to get his bearings, remember where he was going from the familiar
surroundings of where he had been.

“You think you’re being followed?” asked
Burdick. “Or do you think I was? Is that the reason you let me sit
there like that - to see if someone was following me?”

They had turned onto a busy, commercial
street, filled with small shops and restaurants, the kind
frequented mainly by people who lived in the neighborhood and did
not want to spend much money.

“Any place here,” said Bauman as he took out
his wallet and handed the driver twice what he was owed. He grasped
the door handle, ready to get out. “Someone knows what you’ve been
doing. Frank Morris was murdered just after you saw him; your
apartment was broken into just before you got back to New
York.”

“How did you know that?” asked Burdick. But
it was too late: Bauman had opened the door and was getting out of
the cab.

Burdick caught up with him on the sidewalk.
Bauman’s eyes were moving quickly side to side, searching, as it
seemed, for anything that was unusual, anything out of place, the
way, as Burdick imagined, he must have done every time he was at
work, guarding the President from the threat of assassination.
Burdick clutched under his arm the package he had been given,
wondering at the thick bulk of it and what it must contain. They
walked to the corner, crossed the street, and then started down the
other side. They stopped in front of a dismal looking café with a
dust covered window and a neon sign that barely flickered. Bauman
held the door open, and, as Burdick passed in front of him, darted
a glance first in one direction, then the other, before he followed
him inside.

“I don’t live far from here,” explained
Bauman as they took a table in back.

The place was quite empty, all the other
tables not only deserted but without any sign that they had
recently been used. The soft hum of the air conditioning
underscored the dull oppressive silence. It was dark, the only
light what came through the grimy front window from the street
outside. The waitress, who doubled as the short-order cook, flashed
a girlish smile, all that was left of her long-vanished youth, and
started to recite the specials of the day. Bauman nodded gently and
told her they just wanted coffee.

Burdick reached for the package that he had
set next to him on the table. Bauman reached across and held him by
the wrist.

“No, not yet; tell me about Hart. I know what
you said on the phone - that you’d trust him with your life. That
isn’t what I want to know.”

The waitress brought their coffee. Burdick
stirred in milk and sugar, tasted it, and then added a little more
milk. There were some things about which he was always precise.

“What is it you want to know?”

Bauman did not even look at his coffee. He
shoved the cup to the side and hunched forward on his elbows. It
was insufferably hot outside, but he had worn a coat and tie, a
habit that not even this vile weather could break.

“Is he as good as they say he is?”

It seems a strange question to ask; one,
moreover, Quentin Burdick was not certain how to answer. With a
reporter’s instinct, he grinned and answered with a question of his
own.

“How good do they say he is?”

Bauman looked at him with grudging
admiration. Burdick was smart and, better than that, because there
were a lot of smart people, knew how to get to the heart of
things.

“I was seven years with Constable, from when
he ran the first time to the night he died. I never once heard him
say anything good about him - Hart, I mean.”

“And that led you to think that…?”

“That he was someone he couldn’t handle,
someone he couldn’t bullshit,” said Bauman, his wispy brown
eyebrows inching upward with each new phrase; “someone he couldn’t
con into doing what he wanted.”

“All that may be true, but it doesn’t explain
why Constable would have been afraid of him.”

With a pensive expression, Bauman stared down
at the floor. He began to swing his foot, slowly, methodically,
like someone keeping time.

“We’re like potted plants, or wallpaper, part
of the room itself. We stand there, silent, barely moving. After a
while, the people you’re guarding forget you’re even there; not
forget, really - it’s more like they forget you’re human, with a
mind of your own, remembering what they say, making the same kind
of judgments anyone would who heard the kind of things that were
said.”

Bauman stopped swinging his foot. He raised
his eyes, not all the way, but far enough that Burdick could see
the rueful expression, the almost savage mockery, that danced
inside them.

“Seven years! Can you imagine all the things
I heard, all the things I saw?” His eyes met Burdick’s waiting gaze
with a candid, harsh appraisal that, more than words could have
done, told the contempt he felt. “He was afraid of Hart - they both
were: he and that wife of his. I’m not sure why. Maybe because of
what I said before: that they couldn’t get to him, couldn’t force
him to fall in line. Constable was always making some disparaging
remark about him. Maybe he was just afraid of the comparisons
people made. You know, how Hart never cheated on anything, and
that’s all Constable ever did. That’s why I asked if Hart was
really as good as they say he is.”

“Yes, he’s that good; better than that,
really. There are a lot of people who think he should have been
president, a lot of people who think he still might be.”

“You know him pretty well, then?” asked
Bauman with more than idle curiosity. He seemed to Burdick
intensely interested in the answer.

“Yes, I’d say so. I’ve known him since he
first came to Congress.”

“You know him well enough to warn him? Would
he believe you if you told him something, even if it seemed not
just unbelievable, but impossible?”

“Impossible? What are you talking about?”

Richard Bauman put his left elbow on the
shabby faded tablecloth, opened the fingers of his hand and then
closed them into a fist, and then did it again, and again after
that, a steady drum-like repetition. His gaze became distant,
remote. He turned his hand, made a fist again, sideways this time,
and tapped the hollow end softly, patiently against his chin.

“I would have taken a bullet for him,” he
said in the way of someone coming to terms with himself. “He may
not have deserved it, but he was the President of the United States
and I’ll be goddamned if I would have let someone kill him. That’s
what we sign up for, what we swear to do: save the President, no
matter what the cost, take the bullet, because if someone has to
die it’s better that it’s you.”

“I know you were there; I know you were in
the room,” said Burdick, certain he understood what the agent was
trying to say.

“No; I was in the other room, the way I
always was, sitting there without a damn thing to do, just outside
the bedroom. I didn’t know he had someone in there. Don’t
misunderstand, I was not surprised he had a woman with him - I
would have been surprised if he hadn’t - but I tried not to think
about it; I tried to tell myself that it was none of my business.
It was, of course; and that was my - that was our - mistake; but
that’s the way he wanted it, what we had to let him do.”

Burdick sipped on his coffee. He wanted
Bauman to take it slow, to tell him everything that had happened
that night, and after that night.

“Then you heard something, knew the President
was in trouble, and that’s when you went in, that’s when you found
her?”

To Burdick’s astonishment, Bauman vigorously
shook his head.

“The door was locked! I should have known
right away that something was wrong, that he had not just had a
heart attack. Look,” he went on, angry with himself, “we let him
get away with it, let him give a key to any woman he wanted, but we
never let him lock a door. That was one rule we would not let him
break. He understood that: he knew it had to be that way, and that
we’d never just walk in on him. And I forgot that - forgot to even
think what it meant - when I heard him cry for help and I started
pounding on the door. It was locked. She opened it.”

“The woman, the one he was with, the one who
-?”

“Opened it like she was scared to death, half
out of her mind with fear and no idea what to do! One minute she’s
in bed with the President, the next minute the President is dead.
Why wouldn’t she be scared?”

“This woman, the one you saw that night, the
one who killed him - what did she look like? Can you describe her
for me?”

Bauman’s mouth pulled back into a tight,
corrosive look; his eyes flashed with what seemed to Burdick
bitter, angry disillusionment. He nodded toward the package that
lay unopened on the table. Burdick picked it up, eager to see what
was inside. He remembered that Hart had told him that Bauman had
worked with a sketch artist to get the girl’s likeness, but instead
of a drawing, a second-hand rendering of what she looked like,
Burdick pulled out a black and white photograph, and not just one,
but half a dozen of them. He did not even try to hide his
surprise.

“But how? When?”

Bauman was still sitting there, he had not
moved, but part of him seemed to disappear, vanish into the
darkened corner of the vacant café, as if the answer, or rather
what lie behind the answer, had come at a cost greater than he
could bear.

“I’m no longer with the Secret Service. Two
days ago, the Director told me that because of what had happened it
was decided that I should take early retirement. I wasn’t given a
choice. He wanted me out. He tried to tell me he was doing it for
me, that it was the only way to prevent a serious sanction, a black
mark on my record, for what I had done, letting that woman, that
assassin, go. I believed him; I thought he was telling me the
truth. I mean, what I did - deciding that it was more important to
protect the President’s reputation, save his family from the
embarrassment, instead of just doing my job - there should have
been sanctions for that. But then I remembered something. It did
not mean much at the time. I thought he was just trying to cover
his ass a little, that he didn’t want Hart to think he wasn’t on
top of things.”

With a quick, puzzled smile, Burdick twisted
his narrow head slightly to the side.

“Hart? - You’re talking about when he met
with Clarence Atwood? What happened?”

“I told Hart everything I knew; I answered
every question. I told him the truth, and then Atwood lied. It did
not seem that important. What difference did it make that he had
not done it yet; I was sure he would have me do it right away. It’s
like I said, Clarence was just trying to protect himself.” Bauman’s
eyes became hard, resentful, and full of disappointment, though, it
seemed to Burdick, mainly with himself. “Clarence was always good
at that,” he muttered, staring off into the distance.

“What did he lie to Hart about? What was it
you thought he was going to have you do?” asked Burdick with an
insistence that brought Bauman back to himself.

“The drawing, the one you thought was there,”
he replied, gesturing toward the manila envelope that lay open on
the table. “There never was a drawing, an artist’s sketch of what
the girl looked like, never. I was never asked to do it. I wasn’t
asked to describe to anyone - anyone except Atwood - what she
looked like. Atwood lied about it to Hart, and he lied when he told
him that he had given copies of it to the FBI. I was still so
shaken by what had happened, by what I had done - that instead of
protecting the President I had helped his murderer get away - that
I didn’t understand how that lie meant that he had lied about that
other thing as well.”

Bauman’s eyes, trained to search a crowd for
the least little thing unusual, to move in a constant, relentless
circuit, watching, waiting for something to happen, did not move at
all. They stared straight ahead, empty, bleak, disconsolate, two
hollow orbs sunk in a black depression. Burdick coaxed him out of
it.

“That other thing?” he asked in a friendly,
sympathetic voice. “Tell me what it was. It’s important, isn’t
it?”

“What?” Bauman blinked his eyes. “Yes, it’s
important. I don’t know why it didn’t seem that important when I
heard him say it to Hart. It wasn’t just lying about a picture, a
drawing of what the girl looked like, something we could have done
the next day or even that night: He told Hart that copies of the
drawing had been given to the FBI, and that the bureau had started
an investigation. That’s what I remembered when Atwood told me I
was finished, that I had to leave, that it was the only way I had
to protect myself from public embarrassment when the truth came out
that the President had been murdered and that I had helped the
killer get away. There was no picture; nothing had been given to
the FBI. Do you understand: Nothing had been given to the FBI -
Atwood had never talked to them!”

“But he’s the one who told you that the
President had not died of a heart attack, that he had been
murdered. Why wouldn’t he tell the FBI? Why wouldn’t he want them
to start an investigation right away?”