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The carpet pattern beneath his feet called to mind crests, seals, and caves. It was meaningless. Julia would’ve said it was only a design, and he was silly. She would’ve been right, but he saw it all the same, and a Biblical phrase swept through his sober, unhappy mind.
A den of roaring lions, seeking whom they may devour.
They would not devour him.
In his right hand he held a loaded Remington, the sturdy 1858 he’d picked up in the war. In his left he held a second cylinder, all its chambers loaded and capped. He had six more stuffed into his pockets, ready to go.
He stood very still and listened, because yes, it was coming.
Or anyway, someone was coming.
Footsteps in the hall, faster than a servant would run if decorum ruled the day. He clenched the gun, and slipped the last cylinder into his pocket to join the rest. Instinct told him the runner would knock, because the runner was not sneaking up on him. An assassin would move more quietly, if with no less urgency.
No. This was a message. A friendly one, if not a good one.
A series of swift raps upon the office door.
He answered: “It’s open. ”
And the door crept inward, letting in a long sliver of yellow light from the gas lamps in the hall. Were they lit already? It wasn’t that dark, was it? Well, the sun would be down in another two hours, and the halls of the White House were dark enough even when the days weren’t dreary.
His visitor was a young woman. She was familiar, but it took him a moment to place her. He finally recalled her a
s a member of the housekeeping staff, but couldn’t think of her name.
“Mr. President,” she gasped, her breath lost somewhere down on the first floor, on another wing. Had she run the whole way? He thought so, from her rumpled dress and loosened bonnet. “It’s Andrews. ”
He was honestly taken aback. Of all the subjects he’d expected to hear breathlessly broached, the old man was not among them.
“Andrews? What of him? He’s gone home to his wife by now. Or maybe not; have you checked the kitchen?”
She swallowed hard, shook her head, and only just then noticed the gun. She mustered a “Sir? It’s not that,” but didn’t ask if everything was all right. She knew otherwise, every bit as well as Grant did.
“Then what is it?” he prompted her.
“Sir, it’s a terrible thing—him and Helen both, sir. Murdered!”
He nearly dropped the gun on the floor. Only years of training prevented it. It was that training, rather than any conscious instructions he could muster, that guided him as he slipped the gun into his right pocket. “I’m sorry, you’ll have to … what do you mean, murdered?”
Grant heard the prickling pinpoints of hysteria in her voice when she replied, “Oh, Mr. President, I mean murdered with guns and knives! In their home. Helen made it out to the street for help, but then collapsed. ” She stepped inside the office and stood there before the door—still backlit, and casting a witchy puddle of shadow on the floor.
It wasn’t hysteria that he felt oozing through the surface of his thoughts, but something colder and more numb. Something familiar.
This is what happens when it begins, when the last domino is pushed. When the hammer has dropped. This is the sound when the fuse is lit.
“Andrews,” he said the man’s name, not really believing it. Not choosing to believe it. Why Andrews? What did he have to do with anything? And how could the White House function without him? The man was an institution. “And Helen, too,” he added, only then realizing that the woman’s name was all he knew about her. He’d seen her a handful of times, coming and going from the kitchen or laundry.
It hadn’t always been like that. He hadn’t always been the kind of man who knew nothing about the people who managed his life and home. Once he’d been a soldier, hadn’t he? A good one. A great one. A serving man of a different sort.
When did it get away from him? Had it been bought with this distancing ease? Too many years riding on the shoulders of others?
“Sir? What should we do?” she asked him.
A pitiful question, yet one he couldn’t answer. Send flowers? Console his family? Summon the authorities? A better suggestion, yes. “Have the appropriate authorities been called?”
Fiercely she nodded. “The police, sir. They’re coming to talk to you, I think. Almost unseemly, one of ’em said, that they’d bother interviewing the president about a nigger, but it was Andrews, sir. ” The note of pleading nearly broke his heart. “You’ll speak to them, won’t you? You’ll help them find out what happened?”
“Of course I will, and you mustn’t hold any questions or ill will against the police. When a man’s been murdered—any man—one must always investigate. Especially when he has such ties to … to government. To the president. ”
