The Man

little whore-”

He spun around, snatching up his coat and holster, and strode to the door.

She cried out, “Otter, I did tell you aforehand-you ain’ sayin’ I didn’t tell you-don’t let them hurt him, please, Otter-!”

He slammed the door on her, hastily buckling on the holster, then yanking on his coat as he went down the stairs two at a time. As he rushed outside, his first instinct was to locate a telephone booth, call Gaynor or Agajanian or Prentiss, any of the Detail, and warn them to keep the President in his office, and throw up a double-a triple-guard, and search for Ruby’s hophead friends. Then, suddenly, he realized it was impossible for him to make such a call. They’d ask him who and what-and how had he got his tip? What could he say? He had a hunch? He’d overheard something? He’d got a crank note with a lead? He possessed no instant evidence-except the truth-Ruby-and if he dared mention her, and she was hauled in, and they found out that he had not been sick, had been trying to have an affair with her, a colored girl, he’d be cooked, through, his present a scandal, his future no more. He’d lose the Secret Service, and Gertrude and the kids. No, the call was out. He’d have to do it himself.

He had been moving fast, now half running, all the while he had been thinking. He arrived at the alley behind the Walk Inn, with its parking slots, leaped into the Nash Rambler, started it, backed up, shifted, and wheeled out of the alley into the street. He gunned the car, running a yellow light, and twisted the vehicle toward the White House.

He drove fast, fast as he could over the route that he had traveled so many days of his life, jumping lights, beating the changing signals, weaving in and out of traffic, knowing he must be there before the President left his Oval Office. If a policeman flagged him down, he’d have to flash his Secret Service badge and bellow emergency. He drove on the brink of recklessness, ignoring the angry horns and curses that chased him briefly and then died away.

There were intervals of lucidity. He had sobered, he knew, but his breath still reeked of gin. If he came into the West Wing lobby like a madman, like some fugitive from a cops-and-robbers television show, and there was nothing there, and Ruby Thomas’ story was a cock-and-bull story, he would not only be the laughingstock of the Service but in real trouble for being drunk in public. Anticipating this, determined to prevent it, he dug into his pocket for the peppermints that he always carried and sucked on after having a beer or two, and was grateful that there was still a half roll. His nail loosened and freed three of them, and he popped them into his mouth.

With difficulty, as he neared his goal, he tried to organize his thoughts. Had that black bitch lied to him, fed him that whopper of a tale? It was possible, if she was some kind of psychopathic nut, a schizo, a fruitcake. Another possibility: maybe-and he hated this, hated the comment on his manliness-maybe she had led him on, for the kicks of it, and then, when the chips were down, had backed off, not wanting to go the distance with him, wanting to go so far for kicks and no farther, wanting to be rid of the whiteboy. There were women like that- teasers. And so she had pulled this wild story out of left field to get rid of him. Maybe. But, unhappily, that made little sense. After all, Beggs remembered, he had got her onto the subject of Dilman, challenged her opinion, changed her, touched the emotional part of her femininity and Negro feeling, and then she had done the about- face, the confessional. More than that, it was unlikely that she would invent so dramatic and serious a lie, knowing as she did that he could cause her so much trouble with the authorities.

Unless she was a psycho-she did not look like one, behave like one, except that Jelly Roll idiocy, and playing around with a white man like himself, who was respectable and married and could offer her nothing-well, there was no other explanation for what had happened except the worst one. And the worst one was: she was telling the truth. Someone she knew personally was plotting to hurt the President, and had used her to divert the best shot in the Secret Service.

The possibility that she had spoken the truth sickened him, and automatically made him thrust his foot harder against the gas pedal as his car rattled and shook out of another turn. My God, he thought, in five minutes it could happen, be happening, whatever it was, and he, Otto Beggs, Medal of Honor winner, Secret Service bodyguard, would not only be absent, derelict in his duty, unable to protect the President’s life, but would have innocently collaborated, in a way, with those who would be harming the President.

For a second he was tempted to skid to a halt, run to a telephone, and, since he could not admit he was calling, place an anonymous call. Then he knew that time had run out for that. There were always so many crank calls, and they were sifted and checked, and before his could be treated seriously, the five-minute leeway, less now, would be gone. Besides, even if there was time, supposing the President had been delayed in his office, Beggs knew that he would be no good at disguising his voice. He was no actor (the word actor was associated in his mind immediately with John Wilkes Booth, to whom he was uncomfortably close in infamy this moment), and it was no use. He kept the Rambler speedometer at fifty-five miles per hour.

The possibility of a real assault on the President, even an assassination attempt, grew on him, refused to go away, and became a firm conviction. These were bad, unsettled times. In Beggs’s experience, he had never known so many people to speak out viciously-not chidingly or satirically or with irritation, but viciously-against a Chief Executive of the land. Perhaps in no rooms of the 132 rooms in the White House was this savagery felt, or known, as thoroughly as in the rooms occupied by the Secret Service. Never in its history had the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service been so overworked. Since President Dilman had outlawed the Turnerites, since he had vetoed the minorities bill, there was evidence that eight out of every ten Americans were against him, and half of the threatening and obscene letters that had poured in recently, and had been referred to the Protective Section, were still unread, a mounting pile of anonymous letters to be analyzed and broken down by geography, writing habits, vocabulary tricks, so that the potential killers could be identified and observed or apprehended.

Whenever Chief Gaynor thought that his agents were becoming complacent and sloppy about routine, he made them read a sampling of the letters. Most, he would admit, were harmless, penned by ordinarily rational citizens letting off steam. But some, he would remind them, came from paranoid personalities, with little hold on reality, with obsessive beliefs that with one tug of a trigger they could right the wrong and save the nation. These were the ones, they existed. Oh, they existed, yes. Remember them, Gaynor would warn, remember Richard Lawrence, John Wilkes Booth, Charles J. Guiteau, Leon F. Czolgosz, John Schrank, Giuseppe Zangara, Oscar Collazo, Griselio Torresola, even the puzzling Lee Harvey Oswald-remember them and do not be deceived by the preponderance of foreign names. Enough of them were Americans, Gaynor would say, Americans who read the papers, went to amusement parks, shopped for groceries, celebrated holidays, saved their money, ate their meals, voted at election time, slept and woke, and walked crowded city streets, and carried instruments of destruction to bring great men down to their size and to their feet, to settle grievances. They existed. They acted. Expect the unexpected, Gaynor would say, never go slack, be ready and prepared for suddenness.

Otto Beggs saw the White House across the street. He screeched around a car, slowing for the red light on Pennsylvania Avenue, roared across the thoroughfare, and braked as he entered the Northwest Gate.

He began to show his pass, but a grinning White House policeman waved him through. “Hi, Otto. How come the VIP entrance? You being decorated again?”

“Yeh, decorated!” he shouted back. Yeh, with thirty pieces of silver, he thought.

He rode up the driveway, jerkily parked, came out of the car fast. He realized that he was still tieless, and that would draw attention, but there was no time to put on the necktie stuffed in his pocket. He must make haste without causing a commotion, without letting himself be waylaid by press or colleagues. He must get where he was going quickly, yet without creating panic, lest he be exposed for a fool over a false alarm.

Striding to the West Wing lobby, he glanced at his watch. If the timepiece was correct, it was five thirty- two.

As ever, at this hour, the press foyer with its three telephone booths was teeming with reporters. He shoved past them, ignoring their curiosity at his disheveled appearance. He swallowed the last of his peppermints, hurried into the Reading Room, keeping his back to the Secret Service offices to the right, curtly acknowledging the greeting of the blue-uniformed policeman at the desk to the left. He swung off, past the reporters lolling about on their leather sofas and chairs, past Tim Flannery’s office, and into the corridor with its black-and-white checkered floor.

Alone at last, now unobserved, he ran heavily past the Cabinet Room door and Miss Foster’s door, until he reached the open corridor entrance, with a chain across it, leading into the President’s Oval Office, where Agent