Preserve and Protect Read online

  “For God’s sake be careful,” she said, her voice also dropping cautiously, her own worries forgotten for the moment in concern for this good friend. The Congressman smiled again, a little more relaxed.

  “Oh, I will. I’m not exactly standing still and waiting for it. But it’s just there, in our country right now, and any of us who dares oppose it is fair game, I suppose. Who’re you waiting for?”

  She looked at him thoughtfully for a second and then decided to tell the truth.

  “Bob Leffingwell.”

  “Good place for a rendezvous,” Cullee observed with a smile. “If anybody looks suspicious, you can always join a tour.”

  “I could lead one,” she said, “I’ve heard that routine so many thousands of times.”

  For a minute or two they stood silent, looking around the enormous echoing room, a little sentimental expression in their eyes at the thought of this old building in which so much of their lives had been spent.

  “Who are you going to see?” Cullee asked quietly, and after a moment she told him that, too; adding quickly, “You don’t want to come along, do you?”

  “I would like to,” he said, looking somber again. “I really would like to talk to that slimy son of a bitch. But I can’t, unfortunately. I’m going to be seeing another one. I’m just on my way to the House, and then to my office, right now. He’ll be there, if he doesn’t chicken out.”

  “Be careful,” she said, her voice still low. “I think he’s a very dangerous man. I think they’re all very dangerous.”

  “Why do you want to see Freddie?” he asked.

  “Why do you want to see LeGage?”

  “Scare him off,” he said grimly. “If I can. And you?”

  “Confirm something, and scare him off. If I can.”

  “We can’t,” he said with a grimly sardonic smile. “What do you want to confirm?”

  “I’ll tell you if I confirm it.”

  “All right,” he said. “Just don’t take any chances, though. If you’re really onto something, the more people you tell the safer you’ll be, in this climate. Don’t wait to get a scoop in the Star. It isn’t worth it.”

  “You’re asking me to go against the training of a lifetime,” she said with an attempt at lightness that didn’t quite come off.

  “Don’t take chances,” he said earnestly. “That’s an order, Helen-Anne.”

  “You’re sweet to worry,” she said, “but I think I’ll be all right.”

  “Just watch it.”

  “I will,” she said. “Here comes Bob.”

  “Hi,” Cullee said, holding out a hand. “I understand you’re on a secret mission. I’d join you if I could.”

  “I wish you could,” Bob Leffingwell said, his voice also instinctively lowered as another group of tourists straggled by. “I don’t really know what it’s all about, but Helen-Anne commanded, and here I am.”

  “As you should,” Cullee said. “I’ve been telling her,” he said, his amiable expression fading and his voice confidential, “to be damned careful. I want you to take care of her.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Bob Leffingwell said, equally low-voiced.

  “How strange it is,” Helen-Anne said with an odd, distant thoughtfulness, “that a United States Congressman, a distinguished public servant and a Washington newspaperwoman should feel they have to lower their voices and talk like conspirators in the rotunda of the United States Capitol. What are we all afraid of?”

  “Nobody knows,” Bob Leffingwell said. “And that’s why everybody’s afraid.”

  “Take care, you two,” Cullee said. “I’ve got to run. Be careful.”

  “You, too, for heaven’s sake,” Helen-Anne said. “He’s going to see LeGage,” she confided as they watched his tall, powerful figure go swiftly away with the college athlete’s lightness of stride that he had never quite lost. “He’s the one who needs protection.”

  “More than we do, with the character we’re going to see?” Bob asked with a humorous wryness. “Helen-Anne, don’t overestimate the power of a woman.”

  “Sweetie,” she said, “I don’t. My feeling, most times nowadays, is: God help us all.”

  Whether God was on the job today, however, was something of a moot point. Certainly He was rather far from both the presence and the thoughts of the ominously scowling individual who sat in his office on the fourth floor of the New Senate Office Building and waited for his visitors. Fred Van Ackerman, junior Senator from the State of Wyoming, was not in the mood to waste much time on what he regarded as two feather-headed, hysterical boobs. Helen-Anne had been a pest ever since his first run-in with her. She had begun digging around in his personal affairs soon after he took office, and although she never really found anything, she had put a couple of things in her column that had probably helped to start the trail of vindictiveness that had led to his censuring by the Senate at the time of the Leffingwell nomination. As for Bob himself—that mealy-mouthed, hypocritical pantywaist for whom Fred had done so much during the nomination battle was now deserting Fred’s candidate and thus was deserting not only Fred himself but that crusade for world peace and justice that the junior Senator from Wyoming conceived to be his particular mission in life.

  The Leffingwell nomination! It had happened more than a year ago, and still its bitter divisions and suspicions were racking the Senate and influencing in a thousand subtle ways the conduct of American policy. It was amazing how such an event could continue to eat away at the American system like some constantly recurring cancer that one had thought to be excised but which apparently possessed a life of its own. So major a tangle of emotions, ambitions, likes, dislikes, ideals, nobilities, cupidities, braveries, cowardice, took a long time dying in Washington. There had been a few such back down the decades, great legislative battles that had split the Senate, the government and the country, and it was usually not until the major participants had passed from the scene that the ramifications and repercussions died away. In this instance, most of the major participants were still very much alive and kicking.

  Out of the spiteful inability of some of them to accept the fact that he and Ted Jason really represented a major section of the country’s thinking had come many of the bitter aspects of the fight over the visit of Terrible Terry to the United States and the United Nations. Out of them had come most of the bitter hostility to Ted and his cause at the San Francisco convention. And now, finally, there came still the adamant and implacable opposition of such men as the President as Ted was about to try again in the National Committee for the prize that history, simple justice and the desperate need of the world said should be his.

  It was what you could expect of the sort of half-assed, half-baked minds that were coming to see Fred today. Certainly the fact of his own political survival was proof enough that the cause he espoused was the right one. For a time, true enough, it had seemed to be nip and tuck, but he appeared to have won out quite all right. Maybe he had been a little harsh on poor old AC-DC Brigham Anderson, and certainly no one could have foreseen that the pathetic little weak sister would commit suicide under pressures that Senator Van Ackerman regarded as no more than legitimate political hazing. After all, if a guy wanted to play around with the boys on the beach in Hawaii, he deserved what he got, in Fred’s book. Fred had enough brains to be discreet, and he didn’t have much respect for someone who didn’t.

  There had been a fearfully bitter reaction in the Senate when his part in blackmailing Brig to the point of suicide had become known, but, hell! They had censured him, and even now he could sometimes brood in furious anger on the dreadful injustice of that, but, hell! Bob Munson and Warren Strickland had raised the rafters with stern warnings about what they would do to “get him,” but, hell! They hadn’t really dared to lay a finger on him, in actual practical fact: the tradition of the Senate kept them from being too harsh on a member, even a member in disgrace, because there was always the uneasy feeling that his constituents, after all, ha
d elected him, and the Senate couldn’t really overrule them until they had a chance to pass on him again. And more than that, the practical political fact of it was that he spoke for a group so powerful in the country that Bob and Warren and all the rest of them just didn’t have the guts to defy it.

  He would admit that this year they had scrounged around Wyoming until they had come up with Representative Harvey Elrod, a young sucker who was taking on the task of trying to beat Fred in his campaign for re-election. But it wasn’t going to work, for a simple reason: more people in rich, comfortable, cotton-padded America liked the easy Nirvana of peace, any kind of peace, than liked the hard choices and harsh sacrifices of war. Lenin had said, in effect, that the dollar would be the death of them, because they’d do anything to get it and keep it, and maybe he had been right. Certainly it made a great many of them suckers for the type of peace campaign he and Ted and their friends were conducting now.

  And why shouldn’t they be, anyway? Was there anything wrong in wanting to put a stop to these endless petty wars that were draining away the substance, the unity and the purpose of America? He had thought a year and a half ago that Bob Leffingwell was really going to be the man to do it, and that was why he had fought for him so viciously in the Senate and why he had really, for a while, had such faith in him. This had held firm even through the disclosure that Bob had lied to the Foreign Relations Committee, because, hell! Anybody could lie to protect himself in politics. Fred did it all the time. One little lie or another wasn’t going to affect a man’s abilities to lead the crusade for final peace. He survived: Bob could have survived, if he hadn’t tuned out to be such a two-bit weakling and traitor to everyone who believed in him.

  Fred didn’t have any respect for weaklings who let their effectiveness be destroyed by moral considerations. It was a tough game these days, particularly if you were right out there on the firing line, and you couldn’t afford to let niceties cripple you.

  This was what he often told his friends in the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce. COMFORT had seemed to come from nowhere to support him in the nomination fight, and even now he didn’t know exactly where all its money came from, but he knew it was an invaluable ally and a perfect sounding board for him in the crusade for peace. One thing he liked about it was that he didn’t have to spend any time persuading COMFORT to be tough: it was tough, as witness these demonstrations its members were joining in now all over the country. He liked that. None of this damned wishy-washy hesitating round-and-round-the-mulberry-bush Bob Leffingwell type of thinking about what was right and what was wrong. COMFORT, like DEFY and KEEP, meant business.

  And why shouldn’t they? Their aim was peace, and what higher aim was there? It justified everything. The alternatives were so frightful that it justified anything that had to be done to stop the damned destroying fools who were leading the country and the world down the road to doom.

  So he rationalized it, and for him it was an adequate rationale. So adequate, in fact, that sometimes he could almost forget the rest of it. He could right now, that was for sure, as his phone rang and his secretary announced his visitors.

  He stood up and waited impassively behind his desk as she ushered them in, making no attempt to smile or speak or indicate the slightest warmth of greeting. He had long ago found this to be an effective trick, and apparently it was effective with them, for he was pleased to see that Bob Leffingwell looked openly annoyed, and Helen-Anne, for all her attempt to hide it, decidedly flustered. He decided he wouldn’t even offer them a chair and see how they liked that, the war-loving, reactionary bastards. He didn’t permit his inner glee to show at all when Bob Leffingwell finally remarked in a frigid voice, “I assume we are to be allowed to sit down.”

  Then he finally spoke, with that cruelly humorous over-expansiveness he loved to display to his opponents on the Senate floor.

  “Why, bless your hearts,” he said with a fleering, exaggerated cordiality, “of course you can sit down. Anywhere you please. On the floor, Bob, if you like.”

  To this they made no reply. Instead Helen-Anne looked at Bob and said, “I’m sorry I inflicted this on you. I shouldn’t have.”

  “Oh, yes, you should,” he said grimly. “It’s a good study in abnormal psychology, if nothing else. But we’ll leave if you—”

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly, sitting down in one of the two armchairs facing the desk. “My idea.…We’ll see it through.”

  “Yes,” Bob agreed, taking the other. “I think we should.”

  “When you two get through playing your little word games,” Senator Van Ackerman remarked in a bored voice, slumping into his own chair behind the desk, “maybe we can get to it. What’s this all about?”

  “It’s about a country,” Helen-Anne said, and added immediately, “Oh, hell, that’s too damned pompous. It’s about your meeting at the Hilton and what’s going to happen if the plans aren’t changed.”

  “Oh?” Fred Van Ackerman said, and a dangerous sound came into his voice, deliberately menacing, deliberately soft. “What meeting was that?”

  “I suppose there are so many you don’t want to admit to—” Bob Leffingwell began with a dry sarcasm, and at once Fred was off into one of the rages that his Senate colleagues knew so well and could never quite analyze, some, like Lacey Pollard of Georgia considering them “Fred’s damned phony stunts,” and others, like Powell Hanson of North Dakota, saying with genuine alarm, “That fellow ought to be committed.”

  “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 pau
se 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.