“Tomorrow? I’ll need to make a reservation, I’ll need…”
Pearce slowly got to his feet.
“No, we’ll take a private plane. It’s better that no one knows we’re going.”
“You’re coming, too?”
“Of course! Don’t you remember?-I know Jean de la Valette; you’ve never met him. It won’t seem unusual if the two of us happen to be in Paris, consulting about the mutual interests of France and the United States.”
“But tomorrow-?”
“I don’t see how we can wait-do you? We don’t know what he’s planning, and this business about the president’s death…”
That reminded Hart that he had to talk to Burdick. It was late, but Burdick answered on the first ring.
“What did he say?” asked Pearce after Hart ended the call.
“He was down in Washington. He’s just gotten back. He asked me if I could meet him right away. He said he discovered something. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, only that-and he sounded worried when he said it-it ‘changed everything.’”
–
Chapter Fourteen
Quentin Burdick was not sure what to do. He felt a little like a fool, waiting for someone who was already half an hour late, someone who had probably changed his mind and was not coming at all. It would have been bad enough if he was meeting him in New York, but he had come all the way to Washington to talk to the agent who had been in charge the night Robert Constable died. Richard Bauman had been reluctant even to talk to him on the phone and was on the verge of hanging up when Burdick told him that Senator Hart-“Bobby Hart”-had given him his name and suggested he ought to give him the chance to tell his side of the story before he published his account of what had happened that night in the hotel. There had been a long pause, and Burdick had the sense that Bauman wanted to talk, but that something, or someone, was holding him back.
“I trusted him,” said Bauman finally. There was another, shorter, pause, tentative and full of meaning. “Do you?”
Burdick immediately understood that something had happened, and that it was not what had taken place in that hotel room; it was something that had happened after that. Burdick told him the truth: that the senator had never lied to him and that he would trust Bobby Hart with his life.
“Talk to me,” Burdick urged him. “I’ll come to D.C.; we can talk there, wherever you like. I won’t use your name, I’ll protect your identity. But we both know what happened, and we both know that it’s going to come out.”
Bauman then said something that made Burdick sit up and take notice, something that made him wonder if somewhere along the line he had made a mistake, failed to understand the story he thought he knew inside and out.
“Are you sure you know what happened?” There was a bitter, cynical edge to Bauman’s voice, as if he knew something that Burdick did not, something that would change everything if only Burdick knew it too.
“What is it?” he asked. There was another long silence and Burdick was afraid he was going to lose him. “I’ll be in Washington tomorrow. Just tell me where you want to meet.”
And so here he was, sitting in the middle of Union Station, waiting for someone he would not have recognized if he were standing right in front of him. It struck him funny now, that he did not know what Bauman looked like. Bobby Hart had mentioned something about his age, but all he had said about his appearance was an offhand remark about the way that, like other agents of the Secret Service, Bauman was someone who could easily pass unnoticed in a crowd.
Burdick checked his watch. Bauman had said to meet him in the station lobby at two-thirty in the afternoon, and it was now ten minutes after three. He was not coming; he had changed his mind. It was just a short walk to the Capitol. The Senate was still in session. Instead of calling Bobby Hart later that night to tell him that he had reached Richard Bauman and that, after some initial reluctance, the agent had agreed to meet him but then had not shown up, he would try to see him now.
He checked his watch again. It was quarter after. Bauman was not going to come. A train had just arrived and the lobby was full of noise. Burdick got up and started toward the doors and the street outside. Just as he got there, someone took hold of his arm.
“You forgot this.” Burdick stopped and turned around. A stranger, a middle-aged man, was holding a thick manila envelope. “You left it on the bench next to you when you left. I’m sure it’s something important.”
Burdick started to explain that the package was not his, that someone else must have left it on the station bench. Then he saw his own name written across the front of it.
“As I say, I’m sure it’s something you wouldn’t want to lose.”
They exchanged a glance. The station was crowded, people coming in and out, people all around them. Richard Bauman pushed open the door and, with Burdick right behind him, headed toward a long line of taxicabs waiting at the curb.
“You were late; I didn’t think you were coming,” remarked Burdick as the cab they had climbed into pulled away. “I waited forty-five minutes.”
“Yes, I know,” said Bauman without apology. “I was there when you arrived.”
“You were there when…? Then why did you wait until I was ready to give up?”
Bauman was bending forward, watching out the window as if he were looking for an address. He did not reply.
“Turn right at the next street,” he told the driver. “You can drop us halfway down the block.”
As the taxi driver made the turn, Bauman looked back over his shoulder. There was nothing casual in the way he did it. His gaze was too intense for someone who was just trying to get his bearings, remember where he was going from the familiar surroundings of where he had been.
“You think you’re being followed?” asked Burdick. “Or do you think I was? Is that the reason you let me sit there like that-to see if someone was following me?”
They had turned onto a busy commercial street filled with small shops and restaurants, the kind frequented mainly by people who lived in the neighborhood and did not want to spend much money.
“Any place here,” said Bauman as he took out his wallet and handed the driver twice what he was owed. He grasped the door handle, ready to get out. “Someone knows what you’ve been doing. Frank Morris was murdered just after you saw him; your apartment was broken into just before you got back to New York.”
“How did you know that?” asked Burdick. But it was too late. Bauman had opened the door and was getting out of the cab.
Burdick caught up with him on the sidewalk. Bauman’s eyes were moving quickly side to side, searching, as it seemed, for anything that was unusual, anything out of place, the way, as Burdick imagined, he must have done every time he was at work, guarding the president from the threat of assassination. Burdick clutched under his arm the package he had been given, wondering at the thick bulk of it and what it must contain. They walked to the corner, crossed the street, and then started down the other side. They stopped in front of a dismal-looking café with a dust-covered window and a neon sign that barely flickered. Bauman held the door open, and, as Burdick passed in front of him, darted a glance first in one direction, then the other, before he followed him inside.
“I don’t live far from here,” explained Bauman as they took a table in back.
The place was quite empty, all the other tables not only deserted but without any sign that they had recently been used. The soft hum of the air conditioning underscored the dull oppressive silence. It was dark, the only light what came through the grimy front window from the street outside. The waitress, who doubled as the short-order cook, flashed a girlish smile, all that was left of her long-vanished youth, and started to recite the specials of the day. Bauman nodded gently and told her they just wanted coffee.