Len Ryan was among the news people in the waiting room. There were eleven of them, a modern baker’s dozen, sitting on the worn and tired-looking plastic chairs, talking and joking with one another when I walked in. Ryan was off in a corner by himself, writing in a thick notebook. He threw me a look that was halfway between suspicion and contempt.
“Don’t any of the news chicks in this town work late anymore?” I cracked, putting on my professional smile.
“They were all at the airport interviewing the First Lady,” said the guy nearest me. He was grossly overweight, not the type you’d expect to chase ambulances. I hadn’t known him when I’d worked for the Globe, but he looked older than I. New in town, I figured.
It was a small room. I stepped into it a few paces and they all stood up expectantly. The floor tiles had been patterned once, but now the colors were all but obliterated from years of people’s frightened, weary pacing. The lights were too bright. The heat was up too high. Through the two sealed windows I could see cars whizzing by on Storrow Drive, and the river beyond them, and MIT beyond the river. I wished I could be out there someplace, anyplace, away from here.
“What’s going on, Meric?” asked Max Freid of UPI. We used to call him “Hotdog Max,” because he was always shooting for the spectacular story. “Why all the hustle with the Secret Service? Who’s the stiff?”
“Take it easy,” I said, making slowdown motions with my hands. “Don’t get yourselves excited. Apparently some wino staggered into the alley behind Faneuil Hall tonight and keeled over from a heart attack.”McMurtrie can arrange with the local FBI office to slip a real wino who really died tonight into the Mass General files. “The police patrolling the area found him and alerted the President’s security team. They are very protective guys, as you may have noticed, and they had the body shipped here immediately. Just routine precaution, that’s all.”Better get those two Boston patrolmen sent to Washington or otherwise put on ice. If these wiseasses get their hands on them, the story’ll pop out in fifteen minutes. The meditechs were Army people, from what McMurtrie said. Check on it.
“Seems like a helluva lot of overreaction for one dead wino.”
I nodded at them. “Yeah. I suppose so. But that’s the way these security people react. Nobody’s hit a President—or even a candidate—in a lot of years. Right?”What about tonight! Was it an attempt? Did it succeed?
They muttered reluctant agreement.
“Listen, fellas.” Now I had to throw the strike-out pitch. “I spoke to the President on the phone just before I came over here. I suggested, and he agreed, that I ask you guys not to print anything about this little incident…”
“I knew it!”
“Come on, Meric. For Chri…”
“Hear me out!” I raised my voice. When they stopped grumbling, I went on. “I don’t like to ask you to do this, and the President was even more hesitant…”
“Then why ask?” It came from Len Ryan.
“Simply because it was just a harmless incident that shouldn’t be blown up out of proportion. And because everytime there’s been a news story that even hints at an assassination attempt, every kook in the country turns violent. You know that. I don’t have to tell you about it.”
“What about the President’s terrific security team? Are they scared of a little exercise?”
“Wise up!” I snapped. “The Man’s got the best protection in the world. But why invite trouble? Why put the idea in some nut’s head? Because a drunk dropped dead in an alley? Come off it.”
“How’d he get back there? Wasn’t there a police net around the Hall?”
That’s right, I realized. How the hell did he get into that alley? But my mouth was getting very clever. “That’s just my point. No security system is perfect. Thank God it was just a harmless drunk.”
“I’ll have to ask my city editor about this,” said one of the men in the back of the room. “We can’t guarantee not to print it.”
“Listen! Remember the attempt on Jackson’s life, back in the eighties?”
“The poor slob never got within a hundred yards of Jackson.”
“Sure.” I said. “But the following week that mental patient killed eleven people in Sacramento, right? And the sniper in Dayton, right after that?”
“You can’t prove that a news story made them go berserk.”
“I don’t have to prove it,” I said. “I just want you guys, and your editors, to understand what’s at stake here. You make a story out of this incident and you might set off a new Boston Strangler.”
“Jesus Christ!” somebody muttered. “Might as well blame us for Jack the Riper.”
It took a lot more talk. And phone calls to a half-dozen sleepy, short-tempered editors. I called right from the hospital’s main switchboard, while they clustered around me. It was past two in the morning when the last one of them agreed to sit on the story.
I was dead tired. The reporters filed out of the hospital, too frustrated to complain about spending the night for nothing.
“Still going to the airport in an official limousine?”
It was Ryan. He was the last one left, as I stood in the hospital’s entrance corridor. Nobody else there except him and me, and the near-invisible security man leaning his back against the wall.
“I stalled you,” I admitted. “I’m sorry about it. They found a corpse in the alley and everybody got a little fidgety.”
He nodded, a compact little jerk of his head. He had a bull neck and looked as if he could be very stubborn when he wanted to be. And idealistic. He reminded me of myself at that age. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like him.
“I can still drive you to the airport,” he said.
“No. Thanks, anyway. I wouldn’t want to take you out of your way. I’ve asked enough of you for one night.”
That brought a smile out of him. “It’s on my way. My pad’s in Winthrop. Come on… you look beat.”
Reluctantly, I let him lead me out to the parking lot and I got into his car. Ryan didn’t say a word while we drove to the airport. I must have dozed for a few minutes. The next thing I remember is pulling up in front of the terminal building where the staff jet was still parked.
“Thanks for the lift,” I said as I started to haul myself out of the Toyota Electric.
“Any time.”
Being careful not to bump my head, I finally squeezed out onto the sidewalk, like the last drop of toothpaste coming out of a rolled-up tube. Ducking back inside, I shook Ryan’s extended hand.
“I’ll call you in a couple of days,” he said. “I think I’d like to come to Washington to interview you. Now.”
I banged my head on the door top as I pulled away from him.
There were several strange men trying to look inconspicuous as they guarded the terminal entrances, the corridor, and the ramp gate near the staff plane. FBI, I assume. They didn’t have the air of McMurtrie’s people.
The plane was warm and comfortable and filled with sleeping people. Most of the staff had been inside all night, since The Man’s speech ended. The lights were so dim I could barely make out their sleeping forms, curled up or stretched out in the plush swivel seats.
McMurtrie wasn’t asleep, though. He was sitting up forward, with a tiny worklight making his seat and folding table an island of wakefulness in the darkened plane. I went up to him and saw that he was doing nothing, just sitting there and staring off into infinity.
The engines began to whine into life. The seat-belt sign flashed on. I took the chair next to McMurtrie, leaned across the space separating us, and asked, “Anything new?”