The chairs, the desks, the file cabinets had all disappeared, taken back to wherever chairs and desks and file cabinets went when there was no more use for them.
The cartons were his only concern. Trevayne had told him to oversee their crating and removal into the truck. The truck that would take them to Trevayne’s house in Connecticut.
Why in God’s name would he want them?
Who would want them?
Blackmailers, perhaps.
But these weren’t the important files. The Genessee files.
Those had long since been removed from the Tawning Spring basement; sealed in wooden crates, with locks and guards and—as he understood it—driven directly to the underground vaults in the White House.
Cop-out.
Trevayne had copped out; they’d all copped out.
Trevayne tried to tell him that he hadn’t; that the decisions made were for—what were the fatuous words?—the «greater good.» Trevayne had forgotten that he, himself, had termed such words «the twentieth-century syndrome.»
Cop-out.
He wouldn’t have believed it a month ago. He wouldn’t have considered it possible.
And, goddamn it, a man—a young man—had to look out for himself.
He had the options; Christ, did he have options! Trevayne had secured him offers from half a dozen top corporate firms in New York—including Walter Madison’s. And Aaron Green—pretending to have been impressed with him at the Waldorf—had said he would go to work next week as the head of his agency’s legal department.
But the best of all was right here in Washington. A man named Smythe, chief of the White House staff.
There was an opening.
What could look better on a résumé than the White House?
James Goddard sat on the thin, hard bed in the dingy rented room. He could hear the breathy wail of a woodwind—a primitive recorder, perhaps—and the intermittent, discordant twang of a Far East string instrument—a sitar, he thought. The players were on drugs, he knew that much.
Goddard wasn’t a drinker, but he’d gotten drunk. Very drunk. In a filthy bar that opened early in the morning for the filthy, glassy-eyed drunks who had to have that drink before they went to their filthy jobs—if they had jobs.
He’d stayed in a back booth with his four briefcases—his precious briefcases—and had one drink after another.
He was so much better than anyone else in the bar—everyone could see that. And because he was better, the filthy bartender made it a point to be solicitous—which, God knew, he should have been. Then several of the filthy bar’s filthy clientele had wandered over and been respectful—solicitous—also. He’d bought a number of drinks for the filthy people. Actually, he’d had no choice; the bartender said he couldn’t change a hundred-dollar bill, so the natural solution was to purchase merchandise.
He’d mentioned to the filthy bartender that he wouldn’t be averse to having a woman. No, not a woman, a young girl. A young girl with large breasts and firm thin legs. Not a woman with sagging breasts and fat legs, who spoke with a nasal twang and complained. It was important that the young girl with the large breasts and firm thin legs speak pleasantly—if she spoke at all.
The filthy bartender in the filthy apron found him several young girls. He’d brought them back to the booth for Goddard to make his selection. He chose the one who unbuttoned her blouse and showed him her large, pointed breasts. She actually unbuttoned her blouse and pushed her breasts above her brassiere and smiled at him!
And when she spoke, her voice was soft, almost melodious.
She needed money in a hurry; he didn’t ask why. She said if she had money she’d calm down and give him a work-out he’d never forget.
If he gave her money, she’d take him to a wonderful old house in a quiet, old section of Washington where he could stay as long as he liked and no one would find him. And there were other girls there; young girls with large breasts … and other wonderful things.
She’d sat down beside him in the booth and reached between his legs and held his organ.
His wife had never, never done that. And the girl’s voice was soft; there wasn’t the harsh hostility he’d put up with for nearly twenty-five years; there was no inherent complaint, only supplication.
He agreed, and showed her the money. He didn’t give it to her, he only showed it.
He wasn’t Genessee Industries’ «keystone» for nothing.
But he had one last purchase to make from the filthy bartender before he left with the young, large-breasted girl.
The filthy bartender at first hesitated, but his hesitation disappeared when James Goddard produced another hundred-dollar bill.
The old Victorian house was everything the girl said it would be. He was given a room; he carried the briefcases himself; he wouldn’t let anyone touch them.
And she did calm down; and she did come to his room. And when he’d finished, when he’d exploded in an explosion he hadn’t experienced in twenty-five years, she quietly left, and he rested.
He was finished resting now. He sat on the bed—a bed of such memory—and looked at the four briefcases piled on a filthy table. He got up, naked except for his knee-length socks, and walked to the table. He remembered precisely which briefcase held the final purchase he’d made from the filthy bartender.
It was the second from the top.
He lifted the first briefcase off the stack and placed it on the floor. He opened the next.
Lying on top of the cards and the papers was a gun.
53
It had begun.
This doomed land, this Armageddon of the planet, this island of the power-damned where the greeds had fed upon themselves until the greatest good became the greatest evil. For the land belonged to the power-damned.
And the insanity was abruptly, shockingly made clear with a single act of horror.
Andrew Trevayne sat at the dining-room table in front of the large picture window overlooking the water, and his whole body trembled. The morning sun, careening shafts of blinding light off the surface of the ocean, did not herald the glory of morning, but offered, instead, a terrible foreboding. As if flashes of lightning kept crashing across the horizon through the bright sunlight.
An unending daytime of hell.
Trevayne forced his eyes back to the newspaper. The headlines stretched across The New York Times, roaring the impersonality of objective terror:
PRESIDENT ASSASSINATED:
SLAIN IN WHITE HOUSE DRIVEWAY
BY BUSINESS EXECUTIVE
Pronounced Dead at 5:31 p.m.
Assassin Takes Own Life; James Goddard, Pres., San Francisco Div. of Genessee Industries, Identified as Killer.
Vice President Sworn into Office at 7:00 p.m. Calls Cabinet Meeting. Congress Reconvened.
The act was ludicrously simple. The President of the United States was showing newsmen the progress of the Christmas decorations on the White House lawn when in a holiday spirit he greeted the last contingent of tourists leaving the grounds. James Goddard had been among them; as recalled by the guides, Goddard had made numerous tours of the White House during the past several days.
Merry Christmas, Mr. President.
The inside pages were filled with biographical material about Goddard and speculative conjectures about the atrocity. Interviews hastily written, hysterically responded to, were given un-thought-out importance.
And in the lower-right-hand corner of the front page was a report, the obscenity of which caused Trevayne to stare in disbelief.