Free Acts of Mercy by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg

construction. Justice watched him for a time and then got to his feet and crossed to stand in front of the desk.
    “Mr. President?” he said. “Do you want me to leave too?”
    Augustine did not look up. “Yes, Christopher, I’d rather you did.”
    “Yes sir,” Justice said, and wanted to say something else, something comforting. But what words could someone like him offer that would have any meaning?
    He turned reluctantly and left the President alone.

Fifteen
     
    Maxwell Harper had been looking for the President for thirty minutes before he finally found him: strolling through the rose garden with his bodyguard, Justice, and humming one of those damned railroad folk songs.
    Augustine stopped humming when Harper came up to them, squinted his eyes against the glare of the lateafternoon sun. It had been one of those sultry Washington false-summer days, temperature in the eighties, seventy percent humidity, and Augustine had loosened his tie and shed his suit jacket. His shirt was heat-rumpled and damp with patches of perspiration. There was a thin gleam of sweat on his forehead as well. His eyes and his mouth were solemn.
    Harper said, “We have to talk, Mr. President.”
    “All right, Maxwell. Go ahead.”
    “In private.”
    “We can talk in front of Christopher,” Augustine said. “He’s on our side, you know.”
    “I think it would be best if we spoke alone.”
    Justice moved his feet in a self-conscious way. Unlike the President, he still wore his jacket and his tie was crisply knotted. He said to Augustine, “I can wait for you inside, sir...”
    “Nonsense. I prefer to have you here.”
    Harper felt his hands clenching, an old habit when he was upset and one he hated in himself. But how could he be expected to maintain rigid control in the face of a crisis that, in spite of him, grew graver by the day? He wanted to say that this was hardly a matter to be discussed in front of a Secret Service bodyguard, of all people, but he curbed the impulse. There was no sense in arguing the point.
    “Very well,” he said. “I suppose you know about the UPI story that broke a little while ago.”
    “Yes,” Augustine said, “I know about it. I had a call from Senator Jackman just before I came out here.”
    “How accurate was their quote?”
    “Fairly accurate. They paraphrased, of course.”
    “Then you really did say you would have urinated on those dissidents in Phoenix?”
    “No, I said I would have pissed on them.”
    “What?”
    “Don’t look so shocked, Maxwell,” Augustine said. “I realize the word piss is still considered a little vulgar at Harvard and the Institute of Policy Studies, but it really isn’t, you know. It’s just a word. Besides, I was making a joke.”
    “Joke?”
    “Exactly. Isn’t that so, Christopher?”
    “Yes sir,” Justice said.
    Augustine nodded. “A harmless little joke.”
    Harper stared at him. For an instant he felt as though he were standing there with a pair of ciphers instead of just one; that all of the President’s intellect had been abrogated, reducing him to a witless figurehead who prattled on about semantics and making jokes.
    Trying to keep his tone reasonable, he said, “Mr. President, didn’t you realize the repercussions of a statement like that?”
    “Belatedly,” Augustine said, but there was no apology in his tone. “Which is why I specifically stated that the comment was to be taken off the record.”
    “Off the record? Then how did it leak out to UPI? Unless it was the Post reporter ...”
    “It wasn’t the Post reporter. I’ve known him for years and he can be a bastard at times, but he would never betray a direct Presidential request. Neither would the other two.”
    “Then who was responsible?”
    “There was only one other person present besides Christopher,” the President said. “I shouldn’t have asked him to sit in, I was a damned fool for doing it, but I thought it would be a psychological advantage to have him there,