Shall We Tell the President? (2 page)

‘In 1949, President Harry S. Truman
announced that the
United
States
stood ready with all its might and
resources to defend the forces of freedom wherever they might be endangered.
Today, some would say that this act of magnanimity has resulted in failure,
that
America
was, and is, too weak to assume the full burden of world leadership. In the
face of repeated international crises, any American citizen might well ask why
he should care about events so far from home, and why he should feel any
responsibility for the defence of freedom outside the
United States
.

‘I do not have to answer these doubts in my
own words. “No man is an island,” John Donne wrote more than three and a half
centuries ago. “Every man is a piece of the continent.” The
United States
stretches from the Atlantic to the
Pacific and from the
Arctic
to the Equator. “I
am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.”‘

Edward liked that part of the speech. It
expressed so well his own feelings. He had wondered, though, whether the
audience would respond with the same enthusiasm as they had greeted
Florentyna’s
flights of rhetoric in the past. The
thunderous applause assaulting his ears in wave after wave reassured him. The
magic was still working.

‘At home, we will create a medical service
that will be the envy of the free world. It will allow all citizens an equal
opportunity for the finest medical advice and help. No American must be allowed
to die because he cannot afford to live.’

Many Democrats had voted against
Florentyna
Kane because of her attitude towards Medicare.
As one hoary old GP had said to her, ‘Americans must learn to stand on their
own two feet’ ‘How can they if they’re already flat on their backs?’ retorted
Florentyna
. ‘God deliver us from a woman President,’
replied the doctor, and voted Republican.

‘But the main platform of this
administration will be in the field of law and order, and to this end I intend
to present to Congress a bill that will make the sale of firearms without a
licence illegal.’

The applause from the crowd was not quite
so spontaneous.

Florentyna
raised her head. ‘And so I say to you, my fellow citizens, let the
end of this century be an era in which the United States leads the world in
justice as well as in power, in care as well as enterprise, an era in which the
United States declares war - war on disease, war on discrimination, and war on
poverty.’

The President sat down; in a single motion,
the entire audience rose to its feet.

The sixteen-minute speech had been
interrupted; by applause on ten occasions. But as the nation’s Chief Executive
turned from the microphone, now assured that the crowd was with her, her eyes
were no longer on the cheering mass. She scanned the dignitaries on the
platform for the one person she wanted to see. She walked over to her husband,
kissed him on the cheek, and then took his arm before they were accompanied
from the platform by the briskly efficient usher.

H. Stuart Knight hated things that didn’t
run on schedule, and today nothing had been on time. Everybody was going to be
at least thirty minutes late for the lunch.

Seventy-six guests stood as the President
entered the room. These were the men and women who now controlled the
Democratic party. The Northern establishment who had decided to back the lady
were now present, with the exception of those who had supported Senator Ralph
Brooks.

Some of those at the luncheon were already
members of her cabinet, and everyone present had played some part in returning
her to the White House.

The President had neither the opportunity
nor the inclination to eat her lunch; everyone wanted to talk to her at once.
The menu had been specially made up of her favourite dishes, starting with
lobster bisque and going on to roast beef. Finally, the chef’s
piéce
de resistance
was produced, an iced
chocolate cake, in the form of the White House. Edward watched his wife ignore
the neat wedge of the Oval Office placed in front of her. ‘That’s why she never
needs to slim,’ commented Marian Edelman, who was the surprise appointment as
Attorney General. Marian had been telling Edward about the importance of
children’s rights. Edward tried to listen; perhaps another day.

By the time the last wing of the White
House had been demolished and the last hand pumped, the President and her party
were forty-five minutes late for the Inaugural Parade. When they did arrive at
the reviewing stand in front of the White House, the most relieved to see them,
among the crowd of two hundred thousand, was the Presidential Guard of Honour,
who had been standing at attention for just over an hour. Once the President
had taken her seat the parade began. The State contingent in the military unit
marched past, and the United States Marine Band played everything from Sousa to
‘God Bless America’. Floats from each state, some, like that of Illinois,
commemorating events from
Florentyna’s
Polish
background, added colour and a lighter touch to what for her was not only a
serious occasion but a solemn one. She still felt this was the only nation on
earth that could entrust its highest office to the daughter of an immigrant.

When the three-hour-long parade was finally
over and the last float had disappeared down the avenue, Janet Brown,
Florentyna
Kane’s Chief of Staff, leaned over and asked the
President what she would like to do between now and the first Inaugural Ball.

‘Sign all those cabinet appointments, the
letters to the Heads of State, and clear my desk for tomorrow,’ was the
immediate reply. ‘That should take care of the first four years.’

The President returned directly into the
White House. As she walked through the South Portico, the Marine band struck up
‘Hail to the Chief’. The President had taken off her coat even before she
reached the Oval Office. She sat herself firmly behind the imposing oak and
leather desk. She paused for a moment, looking around the room. Everything was
as she wanted it; behind her there was the picture of Richard and William
playing touch football. In front of her, a paperweight with the quotation from
George Bernard Shaw which Annabel quoted so often: ‘Some men see things as they
are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.’ On
Florentyna’s
left was the Presidential flag, on her right
the flag of the
United
States
. Dominating the middle of the desk
was a replica of the Baron Hotel,
Warsaw
,
made out of
papier
mache
by
William when he was fourteen. Coal was burning in the fireplace. A portrait of
Abraham Lincoln stared down at the newly sworn-in President while outside the
bay windows, the green lawns swept in an unbroken stretch to the
Washington
Monument
. The President smiled. She was
back at home.

Florentyna
Kane reached for a pile of official papers and glanced over the
names of those who would serve in her cabinet; there were over thirty
appointments to be made. The President signed each one with a flourish. The
final one was Janet Brown as Chief of Staff. The President ordered that they be
sent down to the Congress immediately. Her press secretary picked up the pieces
of paper that would dictate the next four years in the history of
America
and
said, ‘Thank you, Madam President,’ and then added, ‘What would you like to
tackle next?’

‘Always start with the biggest problem is
what
Lincoln
advised, so let’s go over the draft legislation for the Gun Control bill.’

The President’s press secretary shuddered,
for she knew only too well that the battle in the House over the next two years
was likely to be every bit as vicious and hard-fought as the Civil War Lincoln
had faced. So many people still regarded the possession of arms as their
inalienable
birthright
. She only prayed that it all
would not end the same way, as a House Divided.

Thursday evening, 3 March

(two years later)

5:45 pm Nick
Stames
wanted to go home. He had been at work since seven that morning and it was
already 5:45pm. He couldn’t remember if he had eaten lunch; his wife, Norma,
had been grumbling again that he never got home in time for dinner, or, if he
did, it was so late that her dinner was no longer worth eating. Come to think
of it, when did he last find time to finish a meal? Norma stayed in bed when he
left for the office at 6:30 am. Now that the children were away at school, her
only real task was to cook dinner for him.

He couldn’t win; if he had been a failure,
she would have complained about that, too, and he was, goddamn it, by anybody’s
standards, a success; the youngest special agent in charge of a Field Office in
the FBI and you don’t get a job like that at the age of forty-one by being at
home on time for dinner every night. In any case, Nick loved the job. It was
his mistress; at least his wife could be thankful for that.

Nick
Stames
had
been head of the Washington Field Office for nine years. The third largest
Field Office in America, although it covered the smallest territory - only
sixty-one square miles of Washington, DC - it had twenty-two squads; twelve
criminal, ten security. Hell, he was policing the capital of the world. Of
course, he must be expected to be late sometimes. Still, tonight he intended to
make a special effort. When he had the time to do so, he adored his wife. He
was going to be home on time this evening. He picked up his internal phone and
called his Criminal Co-ordinator, Grant
Nanna
.

‘Grant.’

‘Boss.’

‘I’m going home.’

‘I didn’t know you had one.’

‘Not you, too.’

Nick
Stames
put
the phone down, and pushed his hand through his long dark hair. He would have
made a better movie criminal than FBI agent, since everything about him was
dark - dark eyes, dark skin, dark hair, even a dark suit and dark shoes, but
the last two were true of any special agent. On his lapel he wore a pin
depicting the flags of the
United States
and of
Greece
.

Once, a few years ago, he had been offered
promotion and a chance to cross the street to the Bureau Headquarters and join
the Director as one of his thirteen assistants. Being an assistant chained to a
desk wasn’t his style, so he stayed put. The move would have taken him from a
slum to a palace; the Washington Field Office is housed on floors four, five,
and eight of the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the rooms
are a little like
railroom
coaches. They would have
been condemned as slums if they had been
sited
in the
ghetto.

As the sun began to disappear behind the
tall buildings, Nick’s gloomy office grew darker. He walked over to the light
switch. ‘Don’t Be
Fuelish
,’ commented a fluorescent
label glued to the switch. Just as the constant movement of men and women in
dark sober suits in and out of the
Old
Post
Office
Building
revealed the
location of the FBI Washington Field Office, so this government graffito served
noticed that the
czars
of the Federal Energy
Administration inhabited two floors of the cavernous building on
Pennsylvania Avenue
.

Nick stared out of his window across the
street at the new FBI Headquarters, which had been completed in 1976, a great
ugly monster with elevators that were larger than his office. He didn’t let it
bother him. He’d reached Grade 18 in the service, and only the Director was
paid more than he was. In any case, he was not going to sit behind a desk until
they retired him with a pair of gold handcuffs. He wanted to be in constant
touch with the agent in the street, feel the pulse of the Bureau. He would stay
put at the Washington Field Office and die standing up, not sitting down. Once
again, he touched the intercom. Julie, I’m on my way home.’

Julie
Bayers
looked up and glanced at her watch as if it were lunchtime.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, sounding
disbelieving.

As he passed through the office he grinned
at her. ‘
Moussaka
, rice pilaf, and the wife; don’t
tell the Mafia.’ Nick managed to get one foot out of the door before his
private phone rang. One more step and he would have made it to the open lift,
but Nick never could resist the ring of a phone. Julie rose and began to walk
towards his office. As she did so Nick admired,
as h
e always did, the quick flash of leg. ‘It’s all right,
Julie. I’ll get it.’ He strode back into his room and picked up the ringing
telephone.

‘
Stames
.’

‘Good evening, sir. Lieutenant Blake,
Metropolitan Police.’

‘Hey, Dave, congratulations on your
promotion. I haven’t seen you in .. .’ he paused, ‘... it must be five years,
you were only a sergeant. How are you?’

‘Thank you, sir, I’m doing just fine.’

‘Well, Lieutenant, moved into big-time
crime, now have you? Picked up a fourteen-year-old stealing a pack of chewing
gum and need my best men to find where the suspect has hidden the goods?’

Blake laughed. ‘Not quite that bad, Mr
Stames
. I have a guy in
Woodrow
Wilson
Medical
Center
who wants to meet the head of the FBI, says he has something vitally important
to tell him.’

‘I know the feeling, I’d love to meet him
myself. Do you know whether he’s one of our usual informers, Dave?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Angelo
Casefikis
.’
Blake spelled out the name for
Stames
.

‘Any description?’ asked
Stames
.

‘No. I only spoke to him on the phone. All
he would say is it will be worse for
America
if the FBI doesn’t listen.’

‘Did he now? Hold on while I check the
name. He could be a nut’

Nick
Stames
pressed a button to connect him with the Duty Officer. ‘Who’s on duty?’

‘Paul Fredericks, boss.’

‘Paul, get out the nut box.’

The nut box, as it was affectionately known
in the Bureau, was a collection of white index cards containing the names of
all the people who liked to call up in the middle of the night and claim that the
Martians had landed in their back yards, or that they had discovered a CIA plot
to take over the world.

Special Agent Fredericks was back on the
line, the nut box in front of him.

‘Right, boss. What’s his name?’

‘Angelo
Casefikis
,’
said
Stames
.

‘A crazy Greek,’ said
Fredericks
. ‘You never know with these
foreigners.’

‘Greeks aren’t foreigners,’ snapped
Stames
. His name, before it was shortened, had been Nick
Stamatakis
. He never did forgive his father, God rest his
soul, for anglicising a magnificent Hellenic surname.

‘Sorry, sir. No name like that in the nut
box or the Informants’ file. Did this guy mention any agent’s name that he
knows?’
^l
No
, he just wanted the head of
the FBI.’

‘Don’t we all?’

‘No more cracks from you, Paul, or you’ll
be on complaint duty for more than the statutory week.’

Each agent in the Field Office did one week
a year on the nut box, answering the phone all night, fending off canny
Martians, foiling dastardly CIA coups, and, above all, never embarrassing the
Bureau. Every agent dreaded it. Paul Fredericks put the phone down quickly. Two
weeks on this job and you could write out one of the little white cards with
your own name on it.

‘Well, have you formed any view?’ said
Stames
to Blake as he wearily took a cigarette out of his
left desk drawer. ‘How did he sound?’

‘Frantic and incoherent. I sent one of my
rookies to see him, but he couldn’t get anything out of him other than that
America
ought
to listen to what he’s got to say. He seemed genuinely frightened. He’s got a
gunshot wound in his leg and there may be complications. It’s infected;
apparently he left it for some days before he went to the hospital.’

‘How did he get himself shot?’

‘Don’t know yet. We’re still trying to
locate witnesses, but we haven’t come up with anything so far, and
Casefikis
won’t give us the time of day.’

‘Wants the FBI, does he? Only the best,
eh?’ said
Stames
. He regretted the remark the moment
he said it; but it was too late. He didn’t attempt to cover himself. ‘Thank
you, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘I’ll put someone on it immediately and brief you in
the morning.’
Stames
put the telephone down. Six
o’clock already - why had he turned back? Damn the phone. Grant
Nanna
would have handled the job just as well and he
wouldn’t have made that thoughtless remark about wanting the best. There was
enough friction between the FBI and the Metropolitan Police without his adding
to it. Nick picked up his intercom phone and buzzed the head of the Criminal
Section.

‘Grant.’

‘I thought you said you had to be home.’

‘Come into my office for a moment, will
you?’

‘Sure, be right there, boss.’

Grant
Nanna
appeared a few seconds later along with his trademark cigar. He had put on his
jacket which he only did when he saw Nick in his office.

Nanna’s
career had a storybook quality. He was born in
El Campo
,
Texas
,
and received a BA from Baylor. From there, he went on to get a law degree at
SMU. As a young agent assigned to the Pittsburgh Field Office,
Nanna
met his future wife, Betty, an FBI stenographer. They
had four sons, all of whom had attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute: two
engineers, a doctor, and a dentist.
Nanna
had been an
agent for over thirty years. Twelve more than Nick. In fact, Nick had been a
rookie agent under him.
Nanna
held no grudge, since
he was head of the Criminal Section, and greatly respected Nick - as he called
him in private.

‘What’s the problem, boss?’

Stames
looked up as
Nanna
entered the office. He
noted that his five-feet-nine, fifty-five-year-old, robust, cigar-chewing
Criminal Co-ordinator was certainly not ‘desirable’, as Bureau weight
requirements demanded. A man of five-feet-nine was required to keep his weight
between a hundred and fifty-four and a hundred and sixty-one pounds.
Nanna
had always cringed when the quarterly weigh-in of all
FBI agents came due. Many times he had been forced to purge his body of excess
pounds for that most serious transgression of Bureau rules, especially during
the
Hoover
era,
when ‘desirability’ meant lean and mean.

Who cares, thought
Stames
.
Grant’s knowledge and experience were worth a dozen slender, young athletic
agents who can be found in the Washington Field Office halls every day. As he
had done a hundred times before, he told himself he would deal with
Nanna’s
weight problem another day.

Nick repeated the story of the strange
Greek in
Woodrow
Wilson
Medical
Center
as it had been
relayed to him by Lieutenant Blake. ‘I want you to send down two men. Who’s on
duty tonight?’

‘Aspirin, but if you suspect it might be an
informer, boss, I certainly can’t send him.’

‘Aspirin’ was the nickname of the oldest
agent still employed in the WFO. After his early years under
Hoover
, he played everything by the book,
which gave most people a headache. He was due to retire at the end of the year
and exasperation was now being replaced by nostalgia.

‘No, don’t send Aspirin. Send two
youngsters.’

‘How about Calvert and Andrews?’

‘Agreed,’ replied
Stames
.
‘If you brief them right away, I can still make it in time for dinner. Call me
at home if it turns out to be anything special.’

Grant
Nanna
left
the office, and Nick smiled a second flirtatious goodbye to his secretary. She
was the only attractive thing in the WFO. Julie looked up and smiled
nonchalantly. ‘I don’t mind working for an FBI agent, but there is no way I
would ever marry one,’ she told her little mirror in the top drawer.

Grant
Nanna
returned to his office and picked up the extension phone to the Criminal Room.

‘Send in Calvert and Andrews.’

‘Yes, sir.’

There was a firm knock on the door. Two
special agents entered. Barry Calvert was big by anybody’s standards,
six-feet-six in his
stockinged
feet and not many
people had seen him that way. At thirty-two, he was thought to be one of the
most ambitious young men in the Criminal Section. He was wearing a dark green
jacket, dark nondescript trousers, and clumpy black leather brogues. His brown
hair was cut short and parted neatly on the right. His tear-drop aviator
glasses had been his sign of nonconformity. He was always on duty long after
the official check-out time of 5:30 and not just because he was fighting his
way up the ladder. He loved the job. He didn’t love anybody else, so far as his
colleagues knew, or at least not on more than a temporary basis. Calvert was a
Midwesterner by birth and he had entered the FBI after leaving college with a
BA in sociology from
Indiana
University
and then took the fifteen-week course at
Quantico
, the
FBI
Academy
. From every
angle, he was the archetypal FBI man.