Talk diminished from roar to hubbub to mutter, and then silence. Satterthwaite caught Lime’s eye and beckoned; Lime moved forward and took the chair Satterthwaite indicated, behind and below the presidential podium. The Vice-President and the Attorney General and several other dignitaries filed into the room and took seats on either side of Lime. Attorney General Robert Ackert gave Lime a tight brief smile of recognition; he looked tense and wary like a pugilist who had been hit too hard and too often in the head.
They all sat in a row behind the podium, facing the reporters below. It made Lime distinctly uncomfortable. He kept crossing and uncrossing his legs.
On the monitor screen he saw one of the network anchormen, talking with earnest sincerity into the camera. Now the scene cut to the unoccupied presidential podium and Lime saw his own face in the screen; it startled him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
President Brewster’s leather heels clicked on the hard floor. He came in from the side and immediately seemed to dwarf the room: eyes looked Brewsterwards and the President gave the reporters his grave nod as he stepped up behind the Great Seal and touched one of the microphones with his right hand while he laid a small sheaf of papers on the slope of the podium in front of his belly.
The President looked into the television eye for a silent moment. He was a very tall man, rangy, tan, his face not unattractively lined — a big face, deep square brackets creasing it right down past the mouth into the big dependable jaw. He had a full bush of hair, still a deep rich brown — dyed, probably, for his hands were veined and beginning to show age spots. Flesh was heavy under his big jaw but he had a muscular way of moving which bespoke hours in the White House pool and steam room — an expensively taken-care-of body. He had a beaky nose and small well-set ears; his eyes were paler than their surroundings. He always dressed impeccably. Mute, as he was now, he projected warmth, looked sincere and intelligent; but when he spoke with his rough-edged twang he somehow seemed, regardless of the words he spoke, inarticulate. The accent was folksy, right for overalls on a sun-grayed clapboard porch with a jug of corn and a hunting dog.
It was mainly sham — both the polished appearance and the down-home voice. You had the feeling Howard Brewster really existed only in public. It occurred to Lime that ever since the election Brewster’s face had turned steadily and remotely bitter, the outward sign of his rage and disappointment at the nation’s failure to drink from him.
The President began to speak with the customary My-Fellow-Americans-let-us-suffer-together eulogy over the towering and distinguished Americans who had been lost. Lime sat with dismal detachment listening not so much to the words as to the rise and fall of the President’s voice. Brewster was not a master rhetorician and his writers conformed to his own style; there were no ringing truths, no soaring aphorisms that might crystallize this moment in a phrase. Brewster’s talk was soothing with the old familiar vagaries; it was calculated to give people an antidote to shock and rage — a speech of warm regret, quiet sorrow, and the promise that in spite of tragedy there was well-being ahead. There was a call for sorrow but not for alarm, a need for reappraisal but not for reactive fury. Let us not lose our heads, he said. Calm, he said, and the rule of law. The perpetrators have been captured, thanks to the alert initiative of Deputy Assistant Director David Lime of the Secret Service...
Momentarily the lights were fixed on Lime; he squinted into them and nodded into the cameras. The President gave him the benediction of a paternal sad smile before he turned back into the cameras and the lights swiveled away from Lime, and that was that for his part of it except that he had to remain in his seat for the duration of the President’s talk.
It was so easy to give the people heroes nowadays, he thought. You strapped a man into a seat and shot him to the moon, and made him a hero. You put him on a horse in front of a camera, or you hired a dozen keen wits to write his speeches. Heroism was a packaged mass-market commodity, the ultimate cynicism.
People needed their myths, their heroes, and there was no room left for the real thing so you had to contrive fakes for them. It simply wasn’t possible for a new Lindbergh to emerge: technology had gone beyond the individual. Those who persisted in facing individual challenges — the ones who rowed singlehanded across the Atlantic, the ones who climbed mountains — were relegated to the status of harmless fools because what they did was fundamentally meaningless, technology had demeaned it: you could always fly the Atlantic in three hours, you could reach the mountaintop by helicopter in a painless swoop.
The President was talking tough now, carrying a big stick. The perpetrators were in hand, they would be tried, the trial would be a firm example for the world and for those who sought to impose anarchic violence upon the freely elected governments of the world. Justice and law would be served. Our equanimity was not to be taken for equivocation; our tranquillity should not be mistaken for submission, our coolness for passivity. America’s patience had been sorely tried, it was at its limit.
“Let our enemies, within and without, take warning.”
The President concluded his address and left the room without opening the floor to any questions. Lime gave the reporters the slip and made his way back to the Executive Office Building. The streets were quiet; the drizzle continued, very cold, and beyond the curtailed pools of street lamplight the shadows were oppressively opaque. Street scene from a Sydney Greenstreet picture, he observed, and went into the building.
Tuesday,
January 4
5:15 A.M. EST Mario was grinning. “Man we have gone and filled the New York Times from the headlines right through to the classified section.”
The newspaper rattled like small-arms fire when Mario turned the pages. “We really trashed them. Listen here: ‘At midnight the toll stood at 143 dead, of whom 15 were U. S. Senators and 51 were Congressmen, and at least 70 journalists. Approximately 500 victims have been admitted to hospitals and emergency clinics, but nearly 300 of these sustained superficial injuries and have been released. At latest count 217 men and women and four children are hospitalized. Twenty-six remain on the critical list.’” Mario took a long breath and let it out with a nod of satisfaction. “Now talk about off the pigs!”
“Keep it down.” Sturka was in the corner of the motel room with the radio turned down low. He sat within reach of the telephone, waiting for it to ring. Alvin wearily listened and watched; Alvin felt wrung out, pain throbbed between his ears, his stomach bubbled sour.
Sturka looked like a television gangster, stripped down to his shirtsleeves with a shoulder holster strapped tight around his chest. Cesar Renaldo was asleep in his clothes on the couch and Peggy lay across the bed smoking a Marlboro and drinking coffee out of the motel bathroom’s plastic cup.
Big trucks snored by; the occasional semi-rig gnashed in and out of the truck-stop café in front of the motel. Peggy looked at Sturka. “Don’t you get tired?”
“When I get tired I hear Mao saying a revolution is not a tea party.”
Alvin slid back in the chair and went limp, eyes drifting half shut. Cesar on the couch was eyeing Peggy with a slow carnal stare. He kept his eyes on her too long: it made Peggy roll her head around, look at him, get up and go into the john. Its door slammed; Cesar smiled lazily. Cesar had moved in with Peggy two weeks ago but they had ended it quickly at Sturka’s command. The privatism of establishing couples inhibited total collectivization. It was counterrevolutionary. It was an oppressive relationship, it led right back into everything they were struggling against: the capitalist orientation toward bourgeois individuality. The pig philosophy of separating one person from the next, encouraging the individual to assert himself at the expense of his brother.