Preserve and Protect (36 page)

Unconsciously he sighed, and at once the boy broke off in mid-sentence and said politely, “Sir?”

“I’m sorry,” Bob Leffingwell said. “I’m afraid I was momentarily distracted by my own thoughts.” He smiled. “I’m afraid that wasn’t very considerate.”

“It’s easy to do,” the boy said with an answering smile. “I find I do it a lot. There’s so much to think about nowadays.”

“Yes, there is. What were you saying when I drifted away from you, officer?”

“I was saying that I don’t really see where people like LeGage Shelby and some of these other radicals get away with saying the things they do about America,” he said, his smile fading and a troubled expression coming into the large dark eyes. “I just don’t understand how they
think.”

“I don’t either,” Bob Leffingwell confessed. “But, then, I’m white.”

“Well, I’m not,” the boy said belligerently, and then smiled again at his own vehemence. “As I guess you can see. And I don’t understand them. Mind you, I don’t say things are perfect, who’d be such a fool? But they’re—well, they’re bad and they’re not bad. I mean, there’s some hope, a lot of things have improved in recent years. We can make it if we just have the guts to stay with it.”

“Do many?” Bob Leffingwell asked, not sure just when he was going to dry up this flood of confidence with his questions, but thinking that he hadn’t started it, his companion obviously wanted, maybe had, to talk.

The boy frowned.

“Not as many as we need,” he said honestly. “Of course, it’s a big problem. You take people in some of the conditions we have here in this city, conditions like we have in Harlem and Detroit and Chicago and other places like that, and you can understand how they never get out of it and why something like DEFY appeals to them. They climb up a little, and just as they begin to make it they run into a wall of some kind. And they fall back. They don’t keep fighting. Or if they do, it’s just frustrated fighting, riots and snipers and mobs in the streets, and nothing but hate, hate, hate, all day long and all night, too.” He rubbed his forehead and squeezed his eyelids with a tired gesture. “I don’t know,” he said moodily. “Sometimes I think maybe I’m making a mistake to stick with society and law and order. Maybe I’d be better off out there on the other side of it, tearing down instead of trying to hold together and eventually build up. But then I think—I don’t really think that. It doesn’t add up to anything in the long run. Once the riot’s over, what have you got? A television set you looted from some store, maybe, and a lot more hatred from the whites. And just more frustration and more despair. And if Shelby has his way,” he concluded grimly, “just a new set of bosses. Black, maybe, but still pushing you around, just like before.”

“It seems to me,” Bob said cautiously, as they turned into R Street and headed west, planning to double back at Fourth and go up to T, “that someone like—oh, say, Congressman Hamilton from California, for instance—does more for your people than someone like Shelby.”

“Mr. Hamilton is a fine man,” the boy said promptly, “but he gets attacked too, all the time. I’ll bet you if you could see his mail and listen to his telephone calls, you’d find he takes a beating from Negroes nine-tenths of the time. A lot of people I know around the area here don’t think much of him; they think he’s too pro-white. But, Mr. Leffingwell, he only tries to be honest and do what he can to make things work. And things have got to work if any one of us is ever going to get anywhere. We’ve got the best country anybody ever handed a people, and we’ve got to preserve it and make it work, all of us together. We’ve
got
to.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Bob Leffingwell said, more moved than he cared to show—and yet, why not show it, wasn’t part of the trouble a timidity of communication, a fear of being honest? He held out his hand, and after a second’s surprise, the boy took it and they exchanged a solemn handshake. “I think you’re great,” he said simply. “Just great. Don’t ever change.”

“Oh, I expect I won’t,” the boy said, grinning suddenly and speaking more lightly. “My mother always says when I get on something I stick with it. She says I’m the hardest-headed child she’s ever known.”

“You stay hard-headed just the way you are,” Bob advised. “We all need you, just like that.”

“I’m going to,” the boy said. “Can’t say it’s always easy to do, but—oh, oh!” he said sharply as they turned into T Street, and suddenly he wasn’t a boy any more, but an officer of the law with every sense alert. “What’s going on down there?”

“It looks to me,” Bob Leffingwell said bleakly, for here was the world undone again, “like a fire.”

And so it was, smoke pillaring straight upward into the still, steaming air, flames already leaping high over the simple one-story dwelling they were relentlessly consuming. People were running, the street was becoming choked with traffic. The officer touched his siren and they started slowly through as a fire truck began to push noisily into the block from the other end.

“I think that’s the place we’re looking for,” Bob said, and the officer nodded and said quietly, “I believe it is.”

“They got here first,” Bob said with a sort of bitter tiredness, and again the officer nodded.

“I guess they did,” he agreed, and his eyes and voice were very sad.

When they were as near as they could safely go, he stopped the car and they got out. Bob Leffingwell was aware of shouts, screams, voices, heard from a couple jostling past, “—fellow say he from DEFY, he say we all better watch out, that what happen to enemies of DEFY—” “—heard from someone else—” “—believe they an old lady with arthritis still in there—” and was aware suddenly that his companion was no longer at his side but was running blindly, instinctively, headlong toward the flames.

“Come back!” he shouted frantically. “Don’t go in there! Officer! Stop him, somebody! Stop him!”

But all he got were blank, impassive looks.

And a heavy voice saying, “You crazy, man? That fuzz.”

And another heavy voice saying, “We don’t stop no fuzz, man.”

And a heavy, subdued, almost sullen chuckling, all around.

“There he is!” Helen-Anne cried as the taxi neared the trade entrance of the Hilton. “Driver, let me out! Quickly!”

And she thrust a dollar bill into his hand, yanked open the door, scrambled out, slammed it shut behind her and started hurrying toward the hotel.

As she did so the tall young Negro walking ahead of her suddenly lifted his arms convulsively, a bright pink flower bloomed in the air where his head had been, his body spun around once and fell to the sidewalk.

Helen-Anne, still running forward, her gray hair askew, her short legs churning, began to scream. Then the screaming stopped in a strange, choked gargle. And then the street became filled with the clatter of many feet, the clamor of many voices, and the sound America was coming to know too well, the heavy, insistent pulse of sirens, moaning in the hot, still air.

FAMED
STAR
COLUMNIST SHOT TO DEATH AT HILTON, the
Star
cried in an extra half an hour later. NEGRO BUS BOY ALSO SLAIN: BURNING OF HIS HOME MAY FURNISH CLUE IN MYSTERY KILLINGS; POLICEMAN DIES IN FUTILE ATTEMPT TO SAVE WOMAN IN HOUSE.

And in a small page in a box accompanying the main story, it noted:

“Police believe a laser gun was used to kill Helen-Anne Carrew,
Star
columnist, and a bus boy at the Washington Hilton Hotel this afternoon.

“Control of these silent long-range weapons has been under study by Congress ever since they began to find their way into private hands six years ago. Despite numerous hearings on Capitol Hill, no legislation to keep them out of the hands of unauthorized persons has been forthcoming.…”

Outside, somewhere faint and far off, he heard a sound of sirens and shivered a little, though the kind of world sirens represented always seemed very far away from the hushed, luxurious chambers of Mr. Thomas Buckmaster Davis. Now and again, usually prompted by some occurrence in the swarming Negro areas north of the Capitol, out toward R Street and beyond, an ambulance would race down past the Supreme Court, or a police car would race up. Occasionally when things were as quiet as they were this afternoon in the beautiful building, they could be heard, just faintly, inside: intimations of the world’s pain, mortality, love or hate, that always made the wispy little Justice pause for a second and feel uncomfortable before returning to his books, his papers, and his incessant telephoning.

The world was getting to be a horrible place, Mr. Justice Davis thought with a sigh, and there didn’t seem to be much the Court could do about it, except lessen the bonds of legal restraint more and more and hope that the innate goodness of human nature would re-establish those curbs upon man’s baser instincts which he and his colleagues simply could not uphold on any reasonable Constitutional grounds.

Now he wondered idly what drama lay behind the siren (actually, it was all very conventional and had happened a thousand times: a liquor store had been held up in Q Street and the proprietor, who had foolishly attempted resistance, had been shot in the stomach with a .45) and then put it briskly from his mind. Not his worry: he had troubles enough. Right now, he was expecting a visitor, and it was most important to give him the courage and the determination that Tommy Davis knew he needed on the eve of the climactic battle of his political career.

Tommy had no doubt that he was the man to provide the deciding element of spiritual comfort and encouragement required by the occasion, and that was why he had suggested the appointment.

Rather ironically, though keeping his feelings to himself because he knew Tommy carried great weight with the
Post,
Frankly Unctuous,
The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was,
Walter Dobius, the
New York Times,
and all the rest whose powerful support he had and needed—and because there was going to be a use for Tommy—Governor Jason had accepted.

That he should feel such irony was something the busy little Justice simply could not imagine. He had been such a vital and vigorous part of Washington’s political life for so many years that he honestly, by now, did not know how it could proceed without him. It is true that some people occasionally made a little fun of him, but when it came from his friends he could accept it for the affectionate joshing it was, and when it came from his enemies he could dismiss it for its obvious stupidity. Those who began by laughing usually ended by granting full recognition to his brains, resourcefulness and perspicacity.

He felt himself to be, and now and then was, one of the major figures in a landscape where most people consider themselves important and some are.

In the present instance, he had spent the past ten days worming his way into the center of things. Mr. Justice Davis, too, was one of the many who had been in contact with members of the National Committee. Ten or fifteen—and he congratulated himself that they were among the most influential—of that besought, besieged and bedazzled 106 had received a phone call, a little note, a confidential chat from Mr. Justice Davis. He was confident his activities had helped Ted greatly, and he was deeply gratified. For he was one of those who were sincerely, completely and absolutely convinced that the Governor of California was the only hope for world peace and the only political leader who could possibly prevent the final holocaust toward which the Administration, and above all Orrin Knox, were inexorably driving the nation.

There was nothing phony or sinister or self-serving in Tommy’s support for the Jason campaign. He believed in it; and now, with all the drive and devotion that his essentially lonely soul could muster for the causes to which it gave itself, he wanted to offer his services in any way he might be useful.

Promptly at four-thirty his secretary notified him that the Governor had arrived, and with a pleased little smile he came forward from his desk with hand outstretched.

“My dear Ted,” he said in his brisk, clipped fashion, “my dear boy! How delightful to see you, really how delightful.”

“My pleasure and honor, Mr. Justice,” Ted said. His host beamed in a fatherly fashion.

“Call me Tommy,” he directed. “Everybody does.” Then he gave a merry little laugh. “Well, almost everybody. There are some—including your distinguished opponent—who call me other things. On occasion. But even he, I am happy to say, calls me Tommy face to face.”

“But you don’t really like each other,” Governor Jason suggested with a smile, taking the chair toward which the Justice urged him.

“No, indeed,” Tommy said crisply. “I regard Orrin Knox as the greatest living danger to this country and the world. And he regards me as—what?” A mischievous twinkle came into his eyes. “A fussy little busybody? An inveterate meddler in areas where he has no business? A part-time Justice and full-time dabbler?”

“You’re quoting,” Ted suggested, and his host uttered a delighted little laugh.

“At one time or another in his Senate career,” he acknowledged, “Orrin said every one of those things about me. I wrote them all down in my diary and now and then I copy one and send it to him on my official stationery, without any comment, just my name on the letterhead.”

“That must amuse him.”

“It amuses me,” Justice Davis said. “I don’t care what it does to him. Well, then,” he said with a businesslike briskness, “so tomorrow is the big day. Are you ready for it?”

“I think so,” Governor Jason said calmly; and, noting his host’s crestfallen expression, added quickly, “But I think there is much that you can advise me about—Tommy. I need,” he said with a simple candor, “your help.”

“My dear boy,” Justice Davis said, brightening visibly, “that is exactly what I hoped you would say when I asked you to come here. I haven’t been idle you know, in these recent days. I’ve been talking to members of the National Committee, I’ve been planting a word here and there, I’ve been working for you. And gladly.”

“I appreciate it,” Ted said, “more deeply than I can say. I know I shall be needing your help even more in the next few weeks. May I rely upon it?”

“You may, my dear boy,” Tommy said gravely, “you may! You see before you one who is completely convinced of the worth of your cause and entirely ready to devote such poor energies as he may possess to it, in every way. I seem to detect, however, some uncertainty: you say ‘the next few weeks.’ You think it may be a little protracted, I gather.”