Preserve and Protect (34 page)

“Who the hell do you think you
are?”
he demanded, his voice edging toward the high, hysteric whine it acquired so often on the Senate floor, “you pious, pompous, pathetic son of a bitch? Just who do you think you are, you two-bit pantywaist who hasn’t got the guts to stand up and fight for what he believes in, you double-crossing, lily-livered, worthless, two-timing
tramp?”

“Bob,” Helen-Anne said warningly, and her companion managed a smile, though a tense one.

“I know,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

“Let me tell you something, you poor pathetic bastard,” Fred went on, “you have a hell of a nerve to come in this office about anything, after what you’ve done to the greatest fighter for peace this world has ever known—”

“We call him the Prince,” Bob Leffingwell said, his sense of humor suddenly reviving in a way that startled him, it seemed so outside himself. Instantly Senator Van Ackerman leaped to his feet and began striding up and down behind the desk, face suffused, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.

“You!”
he said. “I might expect some kind of smart-ass humor like that from
you!
What are they going to do for you, Bobby boy, now that you’ve betrayed Ted and gone over to dear, precious Orrin? Thirty pieces of silver wouldn’t be enough for you, would they?” he demanded, his face contorted in a contemptuous sneer. “How about thirty-six?”

For a long moment Bob Leffingwell fought obviously for self-control; achieved it with a great effort; managed to respond quietly.

“You always try to create a diversion, don’t you, Fred? We aren’t here to talk about me—”

“No,” Fred erupted savagely, “but
I’m
here to talk about you. And a sorrier subject for discussion I can’t think of. I didn’t mind you crapping out on the Foreign Relations Committee, the silly bastards don’t deserve anything better from anybody, but then to have you turn on the only candidate who really wants peace, the only one who offers any hope for the world—why, hell! And
you
come here to lecture
me!”

“Fred,” Helen-Anne said quietly, “I know about that meeting.”

“And as for you, you damned busybody,” Senator Van Ackerman said, swinging around the desk with an air that made Bob half-rise to his feet as Fred stopped scarcely a foot from her, “I’ve had just about all the crap from you that I’m going to take. You’ve been out to get me ever since I came to Washington—”

“And maybe this is the time I’m going to do it, too!” she snapped with an anger so sudden that it made him pause in mid-sentence. “You get back behind that desk,” she went on in a furious tone, “and don’t you come near me again, you hear?”

“Well, well,” he said, stepping back involuntarily. “Well, well, listen to Little Miss Scoop.”

“I’m warning you, Fred,” she said, more quietly. “You’re not the only one who’s had all the crap she can take. So have I, up to here. I’ve got a story ready to go—”

“Who’s going to print it?” he asked contemptuously, returning to his chair, leaning forward with one hand on the arm, elbow out, head lowered, scowl on his face. “Who in the hell is going to touch your damned pipe dreams? Not the
Star,
certainly. They’ve got too much sense.”

“They aren’t pipe dreams,” she said quietly. His exaggerated contemptuous smile deepened.

“Oh, no? Who’s got the proof, Weak-Willed Willie, here?”

“Bob doesn’t know anything about it.” She paused. “Yet. I asked him to come with me as a witness, and for my protection. Frankly I didn’t know what insane thing you might do.”

“So now I’m crazy,” he said, turning away with a gesture that invited the world to marvel at such imbecility. He snorted. “Like a fox.”

“Like a sick fox,” she said. “That’s the pity of it.”

But, as always with Fred, one could never be sure how he would react. Instead of going through the ceiling as she expected, he gave her a quizzical stare and said, “Pity! My God, pity! If anybody needs pity, it’s you, girlie, spreading these wild rumors all over town—”

“I haven’t spread any rumors,” she said, “but I’m sure as hell going to spread a story all over the papers, buster, unless you think maybe it would be wiser to call off the things you have planned.”

“Oh, ho,” he said softly. “You hear that, Bob? I thought I was the one who threatened, but lo and behold! It’s Miss Purity of the Press. You’re the witness, Bob, that’s what you’re here for. You heard her.”

“I think you’d better listen,” Bob Leffingwell suggested. Senator Van Ackerman’s mouth twisted in a thin, sarcastic line.

“What game are you two up to, anyway? Is this some sort of blackmail?”

“You ought to recognize it,” Bob Leffingwell said swiftly, but again, Fred baffled them. Instead of going into a ranting rage he simply sat back and laughed, with a complete and apparently genuine scorn.

“If you two don’t take the cake!” he said. “If you don’t win all the prizes in town! Coming here with some phony cock-and-bull story, trying to scare me with these phony threats! Me!
Me!
Don’t you know better than that?”

“Fred,” Helen-Anne said earnestly, as to a fractious, willful child, “you must pay attention to what I am saying, because I do know that there was a meeting at the Hilton after Patsy Labaiya’s party at which you—and LeGage Shelby—and Rufus Kleinfert—and Ted Jason—and probably a fifth party—”

“But you aren’t absolutely sure of it, are you?” Fred interrupted with a cold spitefulness. “You’re just fishing, like all you damned reporters. Why don’t you stop this and run along?”

“You and Rufus and LeGage and Ted,” Helen-Anne repeated, “and you sat down with an enemy of this country and you planned—”

But this time Fred did react, his face suddenly livid, his voice snarling upward, his body shaking with the quivering rage they had seen him display in moments of crisis on the Senate floor.

“Now, see here, you prying bitch!” he said. “You don’t know anything about any damned meeting, you don’t have any proof of any damned meeting—do you?” he demanded quickly as Helen-Anne despite her best efforts was unable to suppress a flicker of expression. “Do you? God damn it,” and he jumped suddenly out of his chair and again started around the desk,
“do you?”

“Stand back!” she shouted, jumping up and raising her enormous handbag ludicrously above her head as Bob also surged to his feet, “Stand back,
you raving maniac!
Yes, I
do
have proof. Yes, I
do
know who was there. Yes, I
am
going to print it unless you call it off. Now, damn you,
sit down!”

“I think you’d better, Fred,” Bob Leffingwell said quietly into the silence; and presently, glaring at them both and breathing like the heavy in an early film, he did so. For several minutes he stared at them, his expression gradually changing from rage to his usual one of settled contempt for the world in general and them in particular.

“Let me get this straight,” he said presently in quite an ordinary voice. “Somebody has come to you with some crazy story about a meeting, and you haven’t anything better to write about, so that’s the project for today. Now, who”—and his eyes and voice became speculative in a way that suddenly made Helen-Anne’s skin crawl—“could have told you a fairy-tale like that?”

“I’ve got my sources,” she said hurriedly, “and they’re no concern of yours.”

“Somebody,” he said thoughtfully. “Now, who—?”

“What I want to know is,” she said loudly, “are you going to call it off or aren’t you?”

But Fred was in some private world of his own, the clever, crooked mind working like lightning.

“Who—?” Then suddenly the speculative look was gone, his expression was instantly bland and innocent.

“I think what you’d better do is just forget it,” he said, not unkindly. “And you, too, Bob. Somebody must have had some kind of delusion. There wasn’t any meeting. You’d be better off too, Helen-Anne, if you just didn’t think about it anymore. Thinking too much isn’t healthy,” he said with a sort of amiable inanity. “We all know that, in this town.” He stood up.

“I warn you, Fred,” Helen-Anne said loudly. He waved her absently to her feet.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get over to the floor.”

“Then you aren’t going to do anything to stop it?” she asked, and to her intense annoyance sounded almost pleading. Fred smiled, a smile that for once seemed genuine and quite satisfied.

“What’s to do,” he inquired innocently, “when it’s all a figment of your imagination, anyway?”

But when they had left he turned at once to the telephone; and outside in the corridor Helen-Anne looked frantically around for a public booth. His call went through at once. Hers took ten minutes, while Bob Leffingwell stood by with a worried frown and held her handbag.

“You know,” Beth said thoughtfully as they stood by the window and watched the beautiful and terrible machines roar in and out, “I’ve been a little leery of watching planes land ever since—”

“Now, now,” Dolly said firmly. “Calm, constructive thoughts, please. It rarely happens and when it does there’s usually a reason.”

“What, I wonder? Have you people heard anything definite?”

Dolly shook her head.

“Only the usual rumors. The dead man with the pistol, the two subversives on the ground crew, the Army mess boy in the cabin with the blank-faced little wife he married in Albania—”

“That I hadn’t heard,” Beth said.

“Oh, yes. If you could add it all up, it could prove very interesting. But of course with the great, instinctive American disbelief in plots—nobody’s
that
bad, you know, although of course they have been, for a very long time—it probably wouldn’t be accepted. It would just start another book and play industry—”

“Thereby putting dollars to work, helping the economy, and contributing substantially to the Gross National Product,” Beth remarked. “It’s probably worth doing, for that alone.”

“How cynical you’ve grown in Washington’s sunny climes. I believe that must be the kids, just taxiing in.”

“I believe so,” Beth agreed, looking pleased.

“How are they?” Dolly asked. “Should I be prepared to—”

“Just be prepared to be yourself. It’s always more than enough.”

“I don’t know whether I quite understand that or not,” Dolly said. Beth laughed.

“Persiflage and hyperbole.”

“Hmm,” Dolly said thoughtfully. “That may be the ticket the National Committee is looking for: Rutherford B. Persiflage and Oscar W. Hyperbole. ‘So Good They’re Unbelievable.’”

“Now you’re being nonsensical.”

“No,” Dolly said. “Just a little excited at seeing your wandering chicks again.”

“If you’re excited,” Beth said, “guess how I feel.”

But when Hal and Crystal came along the ramp, Crystal walking a little slowly, Hal supporting her with a protective arm around her waist, Beth was all brisk, comfortable good-humor, just as always. For a second both the children looked as though they might cry, but Beth and Dolly promptly smothered them with kisses and jolly welcomes and the moment became like any other warm family homecoming. Except that of course it wasn’t, quite.

“How are you feeling, Crystal?” Dolly asked quietly when Beth and Hal had gone to see about the luggage. Crystal managed a reasonable facsimile of a smile.

“Not too bad. The doctor says I can have another baby, you know, so—

“Oh,
wonderful,”
Dolly said. “I am so pleased for you all. That ought to make recuperation a breeze.”

“Yes,” Crystal said, the smile fading, “except that we seem to be coming back to just—more of the same. At least before there was some consolation that it had all been settled in the convention, but now because of poor Uncle Harley, we have it all to do over again.”

“I don’t think your father-in-law needs to worry about the outcome,” Dolly said firmly. Crystal’s eyes darkened with the thought of many things.

“It’s not the outcome,” she said. “It’s what happens while you’re getting there. A funny thing happened on the way to the—” And suddenly her eyes began to fill with tears and Dolly said hastily and sharply, “Stop that. Now, stop it!”

“I try to,” Crystal said, “but it keeps coming back.”

“Well—” Dolly began, and fell silent, unable at the moment to think of anything to say that would erase the horrible memory of that swirling fog-bound night outside the Cow Palace in San Francisco only ten days ago.

“I’m sorry,” Crystal said presently. “How do things look here?”

“About what you’ve been reading in Carmel, I imagine. Unpleasant, there’s no use in pretending. The Knox house is under guard, and so are we. Lucille Hudson is staying in the guest house, and the very night she moved in somebody got over the wall on the park side and threw a bucket of sewage all over the front door—”

“Oh,
no.”

“Oh, yes,” Dolly said grimly. “That’s the kind of people we’re dealing with in America these days. If they don’t kill you, they defile you.…So,” she went on, more gently, “I’m afraid, my dear, that you’re quite right. You’re going to have to be careful here, too. All of you. But I still believe the prospect for Orrin is bright. The National Committee is under great pressures, but I think it’s moving his way.”

“Dear Dolly,” Crystal said, a grateful smile returning. “You’re always so kind to us poor old beleaguered Knoxes. And, in fact, to everyone.”

“I’m sure I’m right,” Dolly said firmly.

“I want to think so,” Crystal said. “Maybe it’s because Daddy’s been in the Senate twenty years and I’ve been around politics all my life, but I just don’t feel as optimistic as you do.” She smiled again, rather wistfully. “I’ll try, though. I really will try, Dolly.”

And at the luggage counter Hal was trying, too, though a lifetime of growing up in politics was making it as difficult for him as for his wife. Nor was his mother’s practicality much assistance. Beth, as always, was shrewd and objective about her husband and his chances.

“How’s Dad doing?” Hal asked as soon as they had left the others and started through the crowded concourse.

“Fairly well.”

He frowned.

“That all? Only fair?”

“The Committee’s being very close-mouthed,” Beth said. “Actually, some of them are plain scared. But inevitably, things come out. There’s the same Jason group there was at the convention, led principally by Roger Croy of Oregon and Esmé Stryke of California, and they’ve made quite a bit of headway in the preliminary sparring. The Knox forces, as usual”—and despite her quite genuine air of pragmatic humor, a little expression of pain and annoyance did come into her eyes—“are well-meaning, hopeful, busy and disorganized.” She smiled dryly. “Mary Baffleburg and Lizzie McWharter aren’t exactly the world’s most dynamic leaders, you know. And so far, nobody much has come forward from anywhere else to get things moving. Stanley’s done a little work, sounding people out, but his heart isn’t in it anymore.”