Acts of Mercy Read Online Free PDF Page A

sinus condition; the familiar ambiance of old books was pleasant. And yet tonight he could not quite relax, could not seem to isolate himself, as he usually could in bookstores like O’Hare’s, from the responsibilities of the presidency—responsibilities which were his own by inference and because of his duty.
    The plain truth was, he was worried about the President.
    Outwardly Augustine was the same sensible, forthright figure he had always been, but at the edges, Justice thought, he was beginning to weaken. Six months ago he would not have made those remarks on Israel, as essentially reasonable as they had been. They were politically damaging and upsetting to the influential Jewish electorate, as Maxwell Harper, in his superior fashion, had pointed out that morning. Six months ago the President had not been so bothered by attacks in the press. Hadn’t he gone on national television several times to quietly and eloquently defend himself and his administration on controversial issues? Hadn’t he laughed publicly at the disparaging comments in Newsweek about his “neurasthenic habit” of mumbling distractedly to himself from time to time, his “obsession with railroads” and his “adolescent predilection” for humming and sometimes informally singing folk ballads such as “John Henry” and “The Wreck of Old 98”?
    Lost in thought now, Justice turned abruptly out of the stacks and climbed the stairs to the bookstore’s street level. Six months ago the President had not seen fit to spend an average of ten days a month at The Hollows—nor, for that matter, had he found it necessary to unburden himself to a Secret Service bodyguard. Six months ago it had looked as though renomination and reelection were certainties; but now, with his popularity under forty-five percent in all the polls, not only the press but several prominent Washington political figures were saying that the Peter Kineen coalition would, after all, be able to take the nomination away from him in Saint Louis—
    “Two dollars,” the clerk at the front counter said.
    “Excuse me?”
    “This book. It’s two dollars plus tax.”
    “Oh,” Justice said, “sure.” Embarrassed by his abstraction, he paid the man quickly and took the copy of Murder on the Calais Coach into the muggy night.
    As he made his way through the crowds, past the sidewalk flower vendors and the sellers of beads and trinkets and leather goods, he thought about Peter Kineen. Kineen was a reactionary, considered by many to be a dangerous man: a latter-day Ronald Reagan. If he was able to wrest the nomination from Augustine in Saint Louis, the party might be in serious trouble. And the country would surely be in serious trouble, because even if Kineen lost the election, the minority-party candidate would almost certainly be Elton Kheel, the governor of Illinois, who was an old-line machine politician and who was reputed to be a closet hawk on foreign policy despite his avowals to the contrary.
    Justice was hardly an expert on politics, but his close proximity to the President had given him a certain inside knowledge; it seemed obvious to him that the only hope for the future lay with Nicholas Augustine. Which meant that the President had to draw himself together, seal off vulnerability, rally the party around him as he had done four years ago.
    And he will, Justice told himself. You had to have faith, that was all.
    You had to have faith.

Five
     
    Claire was lying on her back in the canopied rosewood bed, the covers pulled up to her breasts and her hands resting palms up at her sides, when Nicholas Augustine came through the door that connected their two bedrooms. It was dark in the room, except for a pale shaft of moonlight that filtered through the south window and lay across the edge of the bed at her feet, as though it had prostrated itself there. Her eyes were closed, but Augustine could not tell if she was asleep.
    He hesitated, holding the edge of the door with his