“Sit up. Come on, I’ll help you.” She got her arm under his shoulders and he obeyed, levering himself upright with sluggish concentration. She pushed at his chest and he slumped back against the wall, sitting on the cot sideways with his knees straight, looking like a small boy. His face was bloodless and his eyes were pouched and unrevealing.
She glanced at the others. Alvin stood guard in the doorway and Sturka was preparing the tape recorder; Cesar sat on the cot beside Fairlie and said in a reasonable tone, “Talk for a while, mister pig. Talk to us. Tell us about all the good people you’ve persecuted. Tell us about the fascist system back home.”
The hollow eyes settled painfully on Cesar.
Sturka was clicking controls on the tape recorder. Cesar said, “Can you read, pig?”
“… Of course I can read.”
“I mean aloud. Read to us, pig.” Cesar held up the speech they had written for Fairlie.
Fairlie’s eyes tried to focus on it but his head went back against the wall and his mouth slacked open. “Tired,” he muttered. “Can’t see very well.”
Too much, Peggy thought. They’d dosed him too much. She turned in anger toward Sturka. “He’s out of it, can’t you see that?”
“Then bring him around. Give him a shot of adrenaline or something.”
“I haven’t got any. What do you think I’ve got in that little kit, a whole drugstore?”
Sturka’s head lifted a little. She couldn’t see his face under the hood but she knew those awful eyes were burning into her. “Lady, your concern for the pig isn’t touching, it’s out of place. You’re forgetting who he is—what he is.”
She blanched. “He’s no use to us like this. That’s all I’m saying. I let you talk me into it but you can see he can’t handle the dose. We’ll just have to wait for it to wear off.”
“How long will that be?”
“I don’t know. It has a cumulative effect—he’s got an awful lot of it in his system. It may take three or four days for the whole thing to wear off. Maybe by morning he’ll be able to talk for you.”
She knew the trouble; it would cut things awfully fine. But it’s your own stupid fault. You just had to shoot the poor bastard full of stuff because he had the guts to stand up to you.
Cesar said, “Maybe he’s acting. Maybe he’s a lot wider awake than he looks.” He slapped Fairlie’s cheek and the handsome face rolled limply to the side; Fairlie blinked slowly and painfully.
“He’s not acting,” Peggy said. “Christ he’s had enough junk poured into him to knock an elephant on his ass. Acting? He hasn’t got any inhibitions left to play games with. Look at him, will you?”
There were flecks of white saliva in the corners of Fairlie’s slack mouth.
Sturka switched off the recorder and picked it up. “All right. Morning.”
They left Fairlie on the cot and went outside and closed the cell door. Peggy said, “I’ll try to get him to eat something later. A lot of coffee might help.”
“Just don’t bring him too wide-awake. We can’t have him resisting this time.”
“A few more cc’s of that junk and he’d be dead. He wouldn’t resist at all then. Is that what you want?”
“Talk to her,” Sturka said mildly to Cesar, and went ahead of them up the stairs.
“You’re getting to sound like a deviationist,” Cesar said. Alvin squeezed past them to go up the stairs; a blank look at Peggy and he was gone.
She slumped against the wall and listened with half her attention to Cesar’s voice. She made the proper responses mechanically and it seemed to satisfy Cesar. But under it all she knew they were right about her. She was sliding. She was worried about Fairlie—she was a nurse and Fairlie was her patient.
Fairlie had been extraordinarily gentle with her. It didn’t make her trust him. But it made him very hard to hate.
4:45 P.M. EST The Secret Service men were numerous: silently present, indifferent but not inconspicuous. They watched Andrew Bee enter the President’s office.
Brewster’s face had a gray haggard look. “Thanks for coming over, Andy.” It was meaningless courtesy: you didn’t ignore a presidential summons. Bee nodded and muttered a “Mr. President” and took the indicated chair.
Brewster’s head tipped sideways toward the side door. “Winston Dierks just left. We’ve been having a string of conferences here all afternoon. I reckon it’ll go on half the night, so you’ll have to forgive me if what I say to you comes out sounding like a set-piece speech.” The big lined face poked forward; Brewster’s lips pulled back slowly in a smile. “I guess I could have asked for a joint session and talked to everybody at once, but it just ain’t the kind of thing you can do that way.”
Bee waited patiently. His grief-stung eyes lay against the President’s face; he felt at once reproachful and sympathetic.
The President glanced at the television set in the corner. Bee didn’t remember having seen a television set in this office since the departure of Lyndon Johnson; it must have been brought in today. The sound was off and the picture was a still shot of a bathroom product. Brewster said, “The seven prisoners will be landing in Geneva in the next hour or so. I thought I’d watch.”
“It hurts you to have to do that, doesn’t it Mr. President?”
“If it’ll get Cliff Fairlie back I’m all for it.” The President halved his smile. “It’s what happens if we don’t get him back that I’d like to talk to you about, Andy.”
Bee nodded without surprise and the President said, “I suppose you’ve been giving it some thought too.”
“Everybody has. I doubt there’s another subject of conversation anywhere in the country today.”
“I’d like your views.”
“Well they’re probably not the same as yours, Mr. President.” Bee grinned a bit. “They rarely are.”
“I do value your advice, Andy. And I reckon the differences between you and me get to looking pretty small when you compare them with some others.”
“Like Senator Hollander?”
“Like Senator Hollander.”
The President looked unhappy as a soaked cat, Bee thought.
Brewster was waiting for him to speak. With an effort Bee summoned his thoughts. “Mr. President, I don’t have a great deal to offer right now. I do think we’re between a rock and a hard place. If you think of yourself as any kind of liberal at all, you just don’t have any place left to stand. I’ve watched the troops move in all day. I gather every city in the country’s the same way—like a state of siege. I understand they’re arresting anybody who looks cross-eyed.”
“That’s kind of an exaggeration.”
“It may not fit the facts but it suits the mood of things. I think people in this country feel as if they’re in occupied territory. A lot of people are being arrested, or at least watched to the point where they’ve got no privacy left.”
“And you’d like to defend their rights?”
“There was a time when I would have. I’m not so sure now. I think to defend their rights would be to hasten their destruction, the way the country’s temper is right now. Frankly I think most of the radicals are showing admirable restraint.”
“Sensible, maybe. They know they’d get massacred if they tried to resist.”
“That’s just it. It seems to me when we deny them their rights we’re hastening another kind of destruction. The destruction of everybody’s liberties.”
“There haven’t been any mass arrests, Andy, whatever you may have heard.”
“There’ve been enough arrests to cause a great deal of alarm.”
“Fifteen or twenty known radical leaders, that’s about the size of it. I might point out there’ve been enough bombings and kidnappings to cause a great deal of alarm too.”
“I can hardly dispute that, can I.” Absently Bee massaged the right knee that had been shattered four years ago and mended with steel and bone grafts. It still gave him arthritic stabs of pain. “Mr. President, I’d like to say I think your administration has showed admirable restraint too. I know what it must be like for you, with Hollander and that bunch keeping the pressure up all the time for lunatic reprisals.”