Acts of Mercy Read Online Free

patted her hand. Dougherty and Elizabeth looked at each other and then down at their wine goblets. Briggs opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and finally put a forkful of potato inside it. Claire watched him steadily, neither surprised nor shocked, merely attentive.
    Augustine said, “No? Well how about the one where the two old Jews—old enemies who have hated each other for forty years—meet on a railroad platform in Czarist Russia?” He finished his wine. “These two old Jews, you see, hadn’t spoken to each other for years, but finally one of them is unable to hold his silence and he says to the other, ‘Moshe, where are you going on this fine day?’ And Moshe, you understand, is a stubborn man, he doesn’t want to give his old enemy the satisfaction of a quick answer; so he considers for a time and then he says, ‘Well, Schmuel, to tell you the truth, which is more than you deserve, I am going this fine day to the province of Minsk.’ Schmuel looks at him then, shrewdly, and he says, ‘I know what you are, Moshe; you are a liar whose word can never be trusted; you would betray me at every opportunity. You hope to deceive me into thinking you are really going to the province of Pinsk, but I know you so well that the truth is, you are obviously going to Minsk after all.’ ”
    Augustine burst out laughing. None of the others joined in, although Claire seemed to smile faintly; they continued to stare at him.
    “Do you understand?” Augustine said. “Schmuel says,
    ‘You think I am to believe you are not going to Minsk, where you say you’re going, but to Pinsk, but I know you lie so you must really be going to Minsk.“’
    Silence.
    Augustine shrugged. “I believe I’ll have a little more wine,” he said, and motioned to Edmund, the staff waiter, who was standing quietly to one side. Edmund approached and poured more beaujolais into Augustine’s glass.
    Briggs said stiffly, “Mr. President, I hope you don’t intend to tell either of those stories publicly ...”
    “Oh, for God’s sake, Austin, they’re jokes. Wry comments on the nature of the Hebraic mind.”
    “And very funny, I’m sure,” Rachel Wexford said.
    Augustine thought: Christ, she’s a twit.
    Wexford wiped his hands carefully on his napkin, put the napkin down, and took a long, careful sip of water. He was a heavyset man, florid, jowly, wearing a dark suit with a patterned red tie; his face had taken on more color, so that it seemed now to have achieved a hue remarkably similar to that of the beaujolais. The two of them, Julius and Rachel, made quite a pair, Augustine thought. One of them gray, one of them red.
    Wexford said, “Well I hardly think either story is funny, Mr. President. They seem more like racial slurs—”
    “They are not racial slurs,” Augustine said. “Why does anybody who tells an ethnic joke automatically become guilty of a racial slur? And by extension, of bigotry?”
    “The Jewish people are very important to us,” Wexford said sententiously. He took a cigar from his coat pocket, rolled it between his fingers, and then put it away again when his wife frowned at him. “In terms of the demographics of the vote, and because they contribute disproportionately well to their actual percentage of the population—”
    “I am not demeaning the Jews,” Augustine said. He was beginning to lose his temper. “I fully understand their political importance, Julius, and their racial importance, and the public record makes it clear that I am not an anti-Semite. I’m only trying to make a damned point here—”
    Claire reached across to touch his hand with cool fingers. “I think you’ve made it, Nicholas,” she said quietly. “Don’t get yourself upset.”
    “I’m not upset,” Augustine said, and put his hand on top of hers, squeezed it briefly and then pushed it away. “Damn it, what’s wrong with a little honesty? A few years back Moynihan made a comment about ‘benign neglect’ where