Promise of Joy (26 page)

But that it had to enter his own house was something he resented intensely. In fact, when Sarah had come home from her first meeting of the Senate Ladies’ Club to hear from faithful old Maudie about the ominous phone call she had received, and had then called him, much upset, he had exploded with a wrath far from his easygoing manner.

“God damn it!” he had exclaimed, making his secretary jump. “Why the hell can’t that trash come and see me here, in the open, instead of sneaking around behind people’s backs? I guess,” he had added dourly, answering his own question, “it’s because that’s the only way they know how to operate, behind people’s backs.… I want you to be witness, Darletta”—his voice took on a sarcastic singsong as he listed the titles—“Mr.
LeGage
Shelby, chairman of Defenders of Equality for You—???
DEEFY—
and Mr. Rufus Kleinfert, Knight Kommander of the Konference on Efforts to Encourage Patriotism—KEEP—and Senator—ex-Senator Van Ackerman, thank the Lord, chairman of the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce—
COM
FORT—and also and incidentally, chairman of great old
NAWAC—
are coming to my house in half an hour. I don’t know what they want, but knowing that trash, I imagine it isn’t anything nice.”

“Do you want me to come along and take notes?” Darletta asked matter-of-factly, brisk and efficient as ever, which was why he had brought her from his modest offices in the House down to these much more stately and elaborate quarters he now occupied in the Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House.

“No, thanks. Sarah will be there, and so will Maudie, my good old maid. I just want you to note that the Vice President left his office at 4 p.m. to meet these characters. If I’m never heard from again, the world will know who saw me last.”

“I always thought,” she said with a sudden little twinkle, “that just being Vice President was enough to guarantee that nobody would ever hear of you again.”

He stood up with a chuckle and put on his coat.

“Girl,” he said, “movin’ downtown has made you right sassy, now—right sassy. Watch it, or I’ll stand on my dignity. I’m very dignified, you know.”

“Yes, sir,” she said cheerfully, scooping up the correspondence they had been working on together. “I’ll remember that.”

“You do it,” he said, as his chauffeur appeared at the door.

“Mr. Vice President,” he said, removing his cap and bowing low, “your car is ready, sir.”

“You see?” he demanded.

“I see,” Darletta said with a smile. Then her expression turned serious. “Be careful with those people,” she said, and he could see she was seriously worried. “They’re bad business.”

“Do I know,” he agreed somberly.
“Do
I know.”

And so here he was at the front door, guarded by Secret Service but otherwise as modest as any on the block. Inside there waited for him—what? He hoped to goodness Sarah and Maudie were away in their own parts of the house and not making any attempt to entertain his unwelcome visitors. Sarah, however, opened the door, her eyes and a certain hurried note in her voice revealing tension.

He kissed her quickly, whispered, “Where are they, in the living room? Have they been giving you a bad time?”—received her quickly nodded “Yes” to the first and “No” to the second—and feeling somewhat relieved, said in a normal, cheerful voice, “Why don’t you go back and help Maudie, and I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

“We’ll expect you in about fifteen minutes,” she answered with equal clarity. “We have to go over those plans for the party, you know.”

He mouthed, “Party?” with an exaggerated surprise, gave her a grin as she disappeared swiftly down the hall; straightened his shoulders, stepped forward quickly and opened the door to the living room. His visitors stared at him with varying degrees of expectation and insolence. ’Gage Shelby and Fred Van Ackerman, he noted, were doing pretty well on the insolence. Rufus Kleinfert was his usual stolid, dumpy self, his expression not indicating much of anything.

They also, quite deliberately, did not rise for him, which annoyed him further.

“Yes?” he said, unable to keep all the hostility out of his tone. His old Howard University roommate and buddy reacted with the split-second timing with which he had always reacted to Cullee’s moods.

“Yes,”
LeGage Shelby snapped.
“Yes,
Cullee, we’re here.”

“‘Mr. Vice President,’” he corrected coldly, his own temper, also, as fragile as ever, doubly so as there surged into his mind the loss of Sue-Dan and all the other scores he had to settle with ’Gage.

“We won’t get out, Mr. Vice President,” Fred Van Ackerman said, giving the title a deliberate insolence, “until we’ve said our piece. So settle down.”

“Yess,” Rufus Kleinfert agreed, in the thick Pennsylvania-Dutch accent that thirty years in Texas oil had never quite eradicated. “We have verry important matters to discuss.”

“Okay,” he said, dropping his massive frame into his favorite armchair, which they had somehow managed to overlook—if they had realized it was his favorite, he knew, damned ’Gage or smart-ass Van Ackerman would have had it already. “What can I do for you?”

“As if you will,” ’Gage said. “But maybe,” he added darkly, “you’d better.”

“What’s this?” he demanded, his tone deliberately bored, deliberately going into the lazy cadence of his native South Carolina, which he knew would infuriate ’Gage. “You-all threatenin’ me again, boy? You know that don’t cut no stuff with me, boy.”

“‘Boy’!”
LeGage exploded furiously; and then, with an obvious and mighty effort, forced himself back under control. “We didn’t come here to play games with you, Cullee—Mr. Vice President,” he corrected angrily as Cullee raised a casual but definitely warning hand. “We’re here to talk serious business.”

“Good,” Cullee observed in a pleased tone. “Being Vice President
is
serious business.”

“Why stop there?” Fred Van Ackerman inquired with the cheerful brashness he sometimes used to camouflage his more outrageous proposals.

For several moments, while he stared at them blankly, his eyes traveling slowly from face to face and back again, an absolute silence held the room. Finally he broke it, very softly.

“Just what are you driving at, Senator? Just what slimy thing are you thinking about now?”

For a split second a blind anger flared in the shrewd face across the room. Then, in one of the lightning changes of mood so characteristic of the ex-Senator from Wyoming, it was succeeded by an impudent smile.

“Not slimy at all,” Fred Van Ackerman said blandly. “Just a perfectly reasonable way for a deserving young black boy from South Carolina and California to ascend the ladder of political success to its very utmost, topmost, God-damned most-most rung. That’s all, Mr. Vice President. Just a chance for a little job advancement, if you handle it right.”

“There won’t be an election for four years,” Cullee said in a puzzled tone, playing it straight even as he wished desperately that there were some way to signal Sarah, to get a tape recorder going, to preserve somehow this fantastic conversation which was swiftly moving into areas far beyond anything most of their countrymen could ever dream.

“Won’t be an election,” LeGage agreed. “May be something else.”

“Yess,” breathed Rufus Kleinfert with a heavy expiration.

“Tell me about it,” Cullee suggested, his tone still puzzled, almost dazed. “I’m not sure I understand—”

“Oh, you understand, Mr. Vice President,” Fred Van Ackerman said calmly. “You understand very well.”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “I really don’t. Tell me.”

“All right,” Fred said coldly, deciding suddenly to go along with it. “Pay attention, now. Half-Ass Orrin is destroying the country—”

“And world peace,” Rufus Kleinfert interjected.

“—and world peace. If he stays in office we’re going to be in such a hell of a mess that nobody is ever going to get us out—
if
he stays in office.”

“So?” Cullee asked blankly.

“So we’ve got to get rid of him,” LeGage snapped.

“I suppose somebody could try to impeach him,” Cullee said with an innocent thoughtfulness, “but really—”

“Impeachment!” Fred Van Ackerman said scornfully, neither tone nor words extending charity to his former colleagues on the Hill. “Those lily-livered pantywaists! Even if they had the guts, which they don’t, impeachment would take months. Half-Ass is ruining the country in days.”

“Well, I don’t know, then …” Cullee said doubtfully. “I don’t think he would resign. I mean, even if I tried to persuade him—” He broke off with a deprecating laugh. “But of course I couldn’t, I’d have too much interest in it.”

“We all have an interest in it,” LeGage said sharply, “and we can’t afford to wait ‘months,’ either.”

“Of course, maybe,” Cullee said slowly, “if you-all in NAWAC keep up these mass demonstrations like you put on yesterday all over the country, then maybe—maybe he might just decide that he really should quit, you know?”

“Orrin Knox?” Fred Van Ackerman snorted. “He won’t quit until he’s carried out on a stretcher.”

“Which is exactly what you bastards want for him, isn’t it?” Cullee demanded with a sudden furious anger, abandoning pretense, speaking with all the revulsion he had always felt for this sleazy crew. “I ought to go to the FBI and have you all put away forever!”

“How could you?” Fred Van Ackerman demanded with an evil innocence of his own. “You haven’t got any witnesses that
we’ve
said anything. In fact, we haven’t. You said it, not us. Maybe they ought to put
you
away.”

“Now, you listen to me,” Cullee said, hunching forward in his chair, breathing heavily, stabbing the air with an emphatic hand as he spoke. “I don’t know what kind of an evil bargain you have in mind here—or rather, I know damned well—but it couldn’t ever work even if the world were as insane as you insane bastards seem to think it is. Because even if you got rid of Orrin, as I suspect you’ve gotten rid of some others, you’d still have me. And I wouldn’t change his policies one little bit, because I believe in them.
I believe in them.
I admire his principles, I admire his integrity, I admire his guts. I think he’s got the only way out of this mess, and I’m supporting him one hundred per cent. So what good would it do anybody to have me in there? Even if I—” He suddenly paused and his tone became absolutely calm and absolutely disgusted—“even if anybody on God’s green earth would enter knowingly into such a scheme as you three sickies have in mind. I repeat, you
are
insane—criminally insane.

“And when I think of all the innocent fools all over this country who tag along behind you thinking you’re really interested in peace and in the welfare of the United States of America—well”—he sat back with a disgust, a weariness and a frustration so deep that he could hardly articulate them—“I pity them. I pity us, the whole country, that we’ve gotten so far off the beam about this.”

“And who’s put us off the beam?” LeGage demanded with a sudden furious anger of his own. “Who’s extending the war, ruining the peace, making it impossible for us to talk to the Russians and the Chinese, making it impossible to get negotiations going, leading us back, back,
back
to old discarded things that have never worked and never will work? Who, I ask you, Mr. Big-Shot Vice President?
Who?
The damned President, that’s who! Damned Orrin Knox with his arrogance and his impatience and his know-it-all mighty superior ways and his damned stubbornness that’s going to send us all straight to hell in another week or two if we don’t stop him
now,
that’s who!”

“You sound like my ex-wife, boy,” Cullee said with a renewal of the lazy tone, knowing instinctively that the moment was over, he was back in command. “You seein’ much of that sexy little gal these days?”

“You leave Sue-Dan out of this!” LeGage snapped. “You leave Sue-Dan the hell out of this!”

“She’s my ex-wife,” Cullee pointed out in the same lazily infuriating way. “What’s the matter, is she your
ex-
girl friend? I thought you were a better swinger than that, boy. Used to be when I knew you.…Though you do have to be pretty busy to keep up with that little Sue-Dan, I’ll admit,” he added admiringly, never showing the knifelike pain that still shot through him at the thought of her. “Yes, sir, pre—tty busy.”

“Ah!” LeGage cried, a frustrated, infuriated, inarticulate sound, jumping to his feet and whirling away to a window in sheer exasperation. His movement gave Cullee the chance he wanted and he too rose slowly to his full six feet six and looked down at them as from a great height of disgusted judgment.

“Now, you scum,” he said softly, “get out of my house and don’t you ever—
ever—
come near me again. Any of you! Now,
git!”

And he walked across the room, opened the door to the hallway, turned back and gave them a somber glare.

For several seconds they returned it, ’Gage still quivering with fury, Fred smiling with the air of unimpressed insolence he usually managed to maintain, Rufus Kleinfert, as always, deceptively stolid and stumpy for one who must be shrewd, considering how many millions he had amassed in the slippery sludge of Texas oil.

“NAWAC,” Fred Van Ackerman promised pleasantly as he picked up his coat and slipped it on, “will get you for this, Mr. Vice President. You and your precious Orrin, too.”

“I said
git,”
Cullee said, “and I mean
git.
That way! Out!”

“You’re all wrong!” ’Gage cried bitterly, turning back for a moment in the door, his voice as urgent and woebegone as it used to be in climactic moments of their bitter pitched arguments over race and policy at Howard University, so long ago. “All wrong, Cullee!”

“I’ll chance it,” the Vice President said, just before he slammed the door upon them. “I’ll take that chance.”

“What did they want?” Sarah asked, coming swiftly to him along the hall, eyes wide with fear and worry.

“Crazy things,” he said, feeling suddenly heavy and burdened and old far beyond his forty years. “Crazy, crazy things. And they aren’t alone, either. That’s the awful thing. They aren’t alone.”