Preserve and Protect (35 page)

“No,” Hal said somberly, thinking of his father-in-law, the Senate Majority Whip, Stanley Danta of Connecticut, devastated and disheartened by what had happened to his daughter at the convention. “That pretty well threw him for life, I’m afraid.”

“But it hasn’t you,” Beth said, giving her son a sudden shrewd glance. He shrugged.

“I’m young. You know it did for a while, but—I guess you can adapt to almost anything when you’re our age. Knowing we can have another helps, of course. It would be pretty awful without that.”

“How’s Crystal been this past week?”

“Better,” he said slowly. “Much better. She’s still … afraid.”

“Coming here won’t help,” Beth said. “This town isn’t very safe, right now.”

“What place is?” Hal asked. He gave her a sudden shrewd look that was an exact copy of her own. “What kind of deals is Dad going to have to make to get this nomination?”

“Why should he have to make any?”

“He may,” Hal said. “He may …”

“None have been proposed and none have been offered,” Beth said.

“But they will be,” he suggested. “And what he does then will tell a lot of things.”

“Do you doubt him?” she asked, and they might have been alone in a desert instead of in the middle of the hurrying concourse, so intent were they upon their conversation.

“I never have,” he said finally.

“Then don’t now.”

“Okay … if you say so.”

“If you believe so,” she said. He stared at her for a long moment and again said:

“Okay.”

“I think your bags are coming along now,” she remarked, her tone becoming businesslike. “That’s Dolly’s car out there, ask the chauffeur to help you. I’ll go get the others and we’ll get on home. You’ll be wanting to see your father.”

“Yes,” he said, his smile suddenly warm. “I will.”

“Bob,” Helen-Anne said, “would you do me a favor? I can’t seem to reach their house and the city desk doesn’t seem to be able to find anybody who can help me at the moment. Would you go to the hotel for me while I go to the house?”

“Damn it, Helen-Anne,” he said, “stop being noble and use sense. You’re not going to a neighborhood where there may be bloodshed if we can’t head it off, and let me go to a nice, safe hotel. Now, be sensible, damn it. I’ll go to T Street,
you
go to the Hilton. Okay?”

“But there’s no point in exposing you to—” His expression stopped her.

“Stop being Fearless Girl Reporter and start being scared, will you?”

“All right,” she said with a sudden meekness that indicated more than words how scared she really was. “Why don’t you call me at the paper around three? I’ll go back there as soon as I know everything’s all right.”

“I will,” he promised. She started to turn away and then stopped abruptly and fished in her handbag.

“Here,” she said hurriedly, holding out a sheaf of folded copy paper. “Keep these for me until—until we see each other again.”

“Oh, now,” he began, “don’t—”

“Just keep them for me,” she said. “Okay?”

“All right,” he said slowly, putting them in his breast pocket. “Be careful.”

A sad expression touched her face.

“Be careful,” she echoed, a bitter twist to her lips. “It’s getting to be the password of the age.”

And now he realized that he must be prepared for unpleasantness, as he turned the familiar corner in the empty corridor of the Old House Office Building and came to the massive door that bore the once-magic words (and still magic, in spite of all the disillusioning years that had passed since he first saw them):

MR. HAMILTON

California

On the other side of them today sat trouble. Or rather, as he saw in a glance as he entered his office, noted the frightened expression in his receptionist’s eyes, and became aware of the tall, rangy figure near the window, stood—talked—paced—glared—trouble.

Deliberately he paid it no mind at first, asking his receptionist with a fair show of matter-of-factness, though his voice trembled slightly, “Any calls for me?”

“A few,” she said. “The Agriculture Department wants you to call on that Hempstead matter. The Secretary of State has been trying to reach you—”

“Oh, well, then—” he began, moving toward the phone, but she held up a hand.

“No, I told him you were expecting a—a visitor—and he said don’t bother, he’ll call later.”

“That was after you told him who the visitor was,” LeGage suggested with a sour smile, and she lifted her head defiantly and gave him stare for stare.

“Yes,” she said. “Assuming it’s any of your business.”

“Why don’t you invite your old buddy Orrin over, Cullee?” LeGage suggested, deliberately turning his back on her. “Us old buddies might have a real cozy chat together. The damned war maker!”

“Maybe you’d better come on in my office and get your vomiting over with,” Cullee said coldly, “so I can get back to my work. Get on in there!” he added sharply as LeGage gave him a furious scowl and hesitated. But finally he shook his head with an angry impatience and stepped swiftly inside. Cullee followed and closed the door.

“Now,” he said, leaning back against it and looking his ex-friend, ex-political adviser, ex-Howard University roommate, thoughtfully up and down, “why in hell don’t you try to act civilized, black boy too big for your britches? Or are you still getting your kicks from doing the jungle bit?”

For a moment he thought LeGage might spring at him and he could feel his muscles tense instinctively for it, welcoming it, wanting it, hoping ’Gage would give him the opportunity to administer a beating that would somehow assuage all the unhappiness and pain he felt because of Sue-Dan’s leaving him and going to LeGage, because of ’Gage’s opposition and dislike and all the bitter-hurtful things that had grown from their once-close friendship. But as always in their arguments, LeGage was too clever to give him the excuse. Instead he turned away with a contemptuous disgust and flung himself into a chair.

“Not the only black boy who’s too big for his britches,” he remarked, staring out at the tourists straggling through the stately trees and gentle lawns of Capitol Plaza. “Not the only black boy who needs setting down. Could be old Better-Than-Anybody Cullee needs a lesson too.”

“You and your trash tried to give me one,” Cullee said, moving to his desk, sitting down, propping his legs up on a corner of the desk. “Didn’t take.”

“There could always be another,” ’Gage observed. Cullee abruptly dropped his legs to the floor, swung around full-face and leaned forward across the desk, staring intently at the clever, sullen face across from him.

“You won’t be happy until you kill me, will you?” he asked softly.

“I don’t want to kill you,” ’Gage said. “You’re worth too much to us, if you’d just decide to be with your friends instead of against them.”

“Friends!” Cullee echoed bitterly. “Crazy Fred and Lump-Head Rufus! Is that what you’re calling your friends nowadays? Seems a long way to come from the old days.”

“Oh, I had a friend once,” LeGage said with a sort of brooding thoughtfulness. “Helped him get elected to Congress, had us some big dreams, thought he might be Senator, Governor, even Vice President someday, maybe, if everything went right. Had us some grand dreams, all right, until he went off with Whitey.”

“And his old pal went off with his wife,” Cullee said harshly. ’Gage gave him an odd look, somewhere between sadness and smirk.

“I didn’t make that little Sue-Dan come to me,” he said. “She just got bored with you, Cullee baby. You just weren’t man enough for her. That little gal needs lots of man, sure enough.”

“Well, she knows by now she doesn’t have it in you,” Cullee snapped, and again for a second he thought his old friend-enemy might swarm across the desk. But after an angry glare for a moment he sank back and looked both tired and sardonic.

“I know you won’t understand it,” he said, “but she really believes in what we’re doing in our campaign. She doesn’t like me as much as she likes the idea. She knew she wasn’t ever going to get anything but empty talk from you, so she went where the action is. We’ve got it, baby, in case you don’t know it.”

“Yes, I know it,” Cullee said grimly, “and a hell of a fine action it is, tearing up your own country and ruining America—”

“Is
that
your hang up?” ’Gage demanded with an elaborate surprise. “Is
that
what’s got you crying, poor old Congressman Hamilton Our Black White Hope? Well, well. Well,
well.”

“What are you getting out of it?” Cullee asked, and he really wanted to know. “You hoping to be the Black Commissar for the United States or something?”

’Gage uttered a contemptuous snort and turned again to stare out at the beautiful lawns, the peaceful trees.

“That’s typical,” he said. “That’s so damned typical. We’re going to break this country down, and you and your whitey friends go around mouthing phony slogans like ‘black commissars’! My God! Don’t you
know
what’s going on in your own country, Cullee? Don’t you know what’s happening in your own race?”

For several moments the Congressman simply stared at him, chin on hand, expressionless. Finally he shrugged.

“I know fools like you have been talking like that for quite a few years now,” he said, “and you’ve done a lot of damage and misled a lot of innocent people who haven’t known any better. But I’m damned if I see what you’ve done for the Negro race except stir up a lot of white hatred and make things even tougher. But I guess that’s what you want, isn’t it? To make ’em so tough that when the big reaction comes it will all go smash and everything will be ruined for everybody. Then maybe you can crawl out and be king of the ruins.” He sighed and concluded with a puzzled shake of the head and a genuine bafflement that couldn’t possibly have infuriated LeGage more: “Poor, sick fool.”

“Oh I am, am I?” LeGage shouted, leaping to his feet and beginning to pace up and down before the window, so angry he could hardly see. “So I’m a poor, sick fool, am I? And what are you, Mr. Pompous-Self-Satisfied-Know-It-All stooge for Whitey? If you aren’t the saddest son of a bitch that ever pretended to be a black man—”

“At least I’m not a murderer,” Cullee snapped, getting on his feet, too, and planting himself solidly beside his chair. “At least I’m not a bloody betrayer of my own country who goes around beating up pregnant women and trying to burn down everything for everybody. Now, you listen to me, Mr. High-and-Mighty-Pompous-Self-Satisfied-Know-It-All, yourself! You haven’t got a patient man in the White House any more, or one who’s scared of you or of anybody’s ‘opinion.’ You’ve got a hard-nosed old son of a bitch who’s every bit as tough as you are, and when Orrin Knox succeeds him you’ll find he’s the same. They’ve got your number, and they’re fed up and they mean business. And I’m here to tell you, you’d damned well better cool it, and fast. Take that back to your crazy boyfriends and see how they like it!”

“So that’s it,” LeGage said, pausing abruptly at the edge of the desk. “So that’s the damned game! You’re supposed to pass the word and scare us off. Good Christ! You have no more idea what’s being planned for this country—”

“I suppose Ted has told you just what to do!” Cullee said with a deliberate innocence and instantly an expression of scowling contempt came over LeGage’s face.

“Ted! That pathetic egomaniac! Ted has no more idea—” Then his expression changed again, the crafty curtain came down. He shrugged. “Ted is quite a boy, all right. But you!” he said, beginning to generate steam again. “We’re talking about
you,
you—”

“Listen,”
Cullee interrupted, and he put into the word such a weight of anger and dislike that ’Gage stopped in mid-sentence. “I’m saying one thing to you, smart boy, and that is that whatever your pretense of helping your own race, and however much you can sell the pretense to the white fools you want to destroy, what you’re really out to do is bring down America. And it isn’t going to work, because this society wants to survive and it isn’t going to let a minority throw it down the drain. It may take a while for it to really resist, but, brother, watch out when it finally does. You’ll be consumed.”

“Maybe,” LeGage said softly. “But I plan to do a little consuming, first.”

“I was asked to warn you,” Cullee said with equal softness, “and I have. What you do now is your own problem.”

“Just watch me,” LeGage said with the same almost singing softness. “Just you watch.”

After that, the ringing of the telephone came as something of an anticlimax; and even Orrin’s message, which Cullee could not resist passing along triumphantly to ’Gage, did little to change it. LeGage was set on some collision course from which nothing would deflect him, and his reaction was much like Lady Maudulayne’s. With one last stagey, but nonetheless ominous, warning that Cullee “had better not walk alone through Capitol Plaza after dark,” he swung angrily out of the office and went away. Cullee called the White House, conveyed his congratulations to the President, who seemed pleased to have them, and reported the discouraging outcome of the visit.

“One interesting thing, though,” he said. “Whatever is in the wind, Ted apparently doesn’t know about it.”

“He thinks he does,” the President observed.

“That’s a tribute to his ego, not his sense. He doesn’t.”

“Should we try to warn him again?” the President asked in an idle tone that indicated how little he thought of the idea. Congressman Hamilton made an equally skeptical sound.

“He’s been warned enough. I’m through having anything to do with him.”

“Suits me,” the President said. “See you at the Committee meeting tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there. Is everything ready?”

“I think we’re in pretty good shape,” the President said, “or will be, after my announcement at the opening.” Then he added, in a reflective tone born of many and many a hectic battle in the House, “But of course, you know, you can never be sure of anything in this world.”

Which was just as well; for it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, and by nightfall, on certain days in Washington, quite a lot can happen.

Certainly it was happening for Bob Leffingwell, who even then was nearing his destination on T Street, Northwest. He was not alone, for he had prudently stopped at a precinct house and picked up a policeman, and now as the patrol car moved cautiously along through the hurrying traffic, the boy was talking earnestly about the situation in the country. Bob was gratified to find that he was not a follower of DEFY, nor a hater of the whites, nor a worshiper of false gods foreign or domestic. Instead he was a quiet, determined and worried youth who took his life in his hands every time he stepped out the precinct door, but who went ahead and did his duty because he had some concept of America and his responsibility toward it which told him he should. It was enough to make a man cry, Bob told himself, to see the gap between the gallantry and decency that could exist below, and the cupidity, ambition, reckless hatred and greed for power that flourished in the upper levels he had just come from. In fifteen minutes he had moved out of one city into the other; except, of course, that the two cities were always and eternally one.