Burdick reached for the package that he had set next to him on the table. Bauman reached across and held him by the wrist.
“No, not yet; tell me about Hart. I know what you said on the phone-that you’d trust him with your life. That isn’t what I want to know.”
The waitress brought their coffee. Burdick stirred in milk and sugar, tasted it, and then added a little more milk. There were some things about which he was always precise.
“What is it you want to know?”
Bauman did not even look at his coffee. He shoved the cup to the side and hunched forward on his elbows. It was insufferably hot outside, but he had worn a coat and tie, a habit that not even this vile weather could break.
“Is he as good as they say he is?”
It seemed a strange question to ask; one, moreover, Quentin Burdick was not certain how to answer. With a reporter’s instinct, he grinned and answered with a question of his own.
“How good do they say he is?”
Bauman looked at him with grudging admiration. Burdick was smart and, better than that, because there were a lot of smart people, knew how to get to the heart of things.
“I was seven years with Constable, from when he ran the first time to the night he died. I never once heard him say anything good about him-Hart, I mean.”
“And that led you to think that…?”
“That he was someone he couldn’t handle, someone he couldn’t bullshit,” said Bauman, his wispy brown eyebrows inching upward with each new phrase. “Someone he couldn’t con into doing what he wanted.”
“All that may be true, but it doesn’t explain why Constable would have been afraid of him.”
With a pensive expression, Bauman stared down at the floor. He began to swing his foot, slowly, methodically, like someone keeping time.
“We’re like potted plants, or wallpaper, part of the room itself. We stand there, silent, barely moving. After a while, the people you’re guarding forget you’re even there; not forget, really-it’s more like they forget you’re human, with a mind of your own, remembering what they say, making the same kind of judgments anyone would who heard the kind of things that were said.”
Bauman stopped swinging his foot. He raised his eyes, not all the way, but far enough that Burdick could see the rueful expression, the almost savage mockery, that danced inside them.
“Seven years! Can you imagine all the things I heard, all the things I saw?” His eyes met Burdick’s waiting gaze with a candid, harsh appraisal that, more than words could have done, told the contempt he felt. “He was afraid of Hart-they both were: he and that wife of his. I’m not sure why. Maybe because of what I said before: that they couldn’t get to him, couldn’t force him to fall in line. Constable was always making some disparaging remark about him. Maybe he was just afraid of the comparisons people made. You know, how Hart never cheated on anything, and that’s all Constable ever did. That’s why I asked if Hart was really as good as they say he is.”
“Yes, he’s that good; better than that, really. There are a lot of people who think he should have been president, a lot of people who think he still might be.”
“You know him pretty well, then?” asked Bauman with more than idle curiosity. He seemed to Burdick intensely interested in the answer.
“Yes, I’d say so. I’ve known him since he first came to Congress.”
“You know him well enough to warn him? Would he believe you if you told him something, even if it seemed not just unbelievable, but impossible?”
“Impossible? What are you talking about?”
Richard Bauman put his left elbow on the shabby faded tablecloth, opened the fingers of his hand, and then closed them into a fist, and then did it again, and again after that, a steady drum-like repetition. His gaze became distant, remote. He turned his hand, made a fist again, sideways this time, and tapped the hollow end softly, patiently against his chin.
“I would have taken a bullet for him,” he said in the way of someone coming to terms with himself. “He may not have deserved it, but he was the President of the United States and I’ll be goddamned if I would have let someone kill him. That’s what we sign up for, what we swear to do: save the president, no matter what the cost, take the bullet, because if someone has to die it’s better that it’s you.”
“I know you were there; I know you were in the room,” said Burdick, certain he understood what the agent was trying to say.
“No, I was in the other room, the way I always was, sitting there without a damn thing to do, just outside the bedroom. I didn’t know he had someone in there. Don’t misunderstand, I was not surprised he had a woman with him-I would have been surprised if he hadn’t-but I tried not to think about it. I tried to tell myself that it was none of my business. It was, of course, and that was my-that was our-mistake. But that’s the way he wanted it, what we had to let him do.”
Burdick sipped on his coffee. He wanted Bauman to take it slow, to tell him everything that had happened that night, and after that night.
“Then you heard something, knew the president was in trouble, and that’s when you went in, that’s when you found her?”
To Burdick’s astonishment, Bauman vigorously shook his head.
“The door was locked! I should have known right away that something was wrong, that he had not just had a heart attack. Look,” he went on, angry with himself, “we let him get away with it, let him give a key to any woman he wanted, but we never let him lock a door. That was one rule we would not let him break. He understood that. He knew it had to be that way, and that we’d never just walk in on him. And I forgot that-forgot to even think what it meant-when I heard him cry for help and I started pounding on the door. It was locked. She opened it.”
“The woman, the one he was with, the one who-?”
“Opened it like she was scared to death, half out of her mind with fear and no idea what to do! One minute she’s in bed with the president, the next minute the president is dead. Why wouldn’t she be scared?”
“This woman, the one you saw that night, the one who killed him-what did she look like? Can you describe her for me?”
Bauman’s mouth pulled back into a tight, corrosive look. His eyes flashed with what seemed to Burdick bitter, angry disillusionment. He nodded toward the package that lay unopened on the table. Burdick picked it up, eager to see what was inside. He remembered that Hart had told him that Bauman had worked with a sketch artist to get the girl’s likeness, but instead of a drawing, a second-hand rendering of what she looked like, Burdick pulled out a black and white photograph, and not just one, but half a dozen of them. He did not even try to hide his surprise.
“But how? When?”
Bauman was still sitting there, he had not moved, but part of him seemed to disappear, vanish into the darkened corner of the vacant café, as if the answer, or rather what lay behind the answer, had come at a cost greater than he could bear.
“I’m no longer with the Secret Service. Two days ago, the director told me that because of what had happened it was decided that I should take early retirement. I wasn’t given a choice. He wanted me out. He tried to tell me he was doing it for me, that it was the only way to prevent a serious sanction, a black mark on my record, for what I had done, letting that woman, that assassin, go. I believed him; I thought he was telling me the truth. I mean, what I did-deciding that it was more important to protect the president’s reputation, save his family from the embarrassment, instead of just doing my job-there should have been sanctions for that. But then I remembered something. It did not mean much at the time. I thought he was just trying to cover his ass a little, that he didn’t want Hart to think he wasn’t on top of things.”