Acts of Mercy Read Online Free Page B

took her eyes from him and then leaned forward to say something cheerful about current fashions to Rachel Wexford. Who blinked and bobbed her head and kept her chin tucked against her thin breast.
    And with sudden belated insight, Augustine understood the meaning in his wife’s eyes, understood that it was not only Austin Briggs whom she had put in his place, but Augustine himself; that she had been telling him he did not have to run the presidency either if he would rather not. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen....
    Edmund brought in a cart bearing a silver coffee service and silver dishes of cake. Claire said, “Black Forest cherry cake, Nicholas—your favorite.”
    Augustine poured himself another glass of wine.

Four
     
    Off-duty at six o‘clock, Christopher Justice drove his three-year-old Ford sedan from the White House to Georgetown, ate a light supper in a sidewalk café on M Street, and then strolled to Thirty-first Street, where there were several new and used bookstores that stayed open in the evenings. It was a hot night and the tree-shaded streets were crowded, but in the bookstores it was cool and quiet—particularly in the basement of O’Hare’s, an antiquarian bookseller who maintained a substantial and dusty stock of hardcover and paperback mysteries.
    Reading and collecting mystery novels was Justice’s one and only hobby. He enjoyed fishing and an occasional game of tennis, but by nature he was a solitary man who did not make friends easily; a member of the Secret Service staff, in any case, seldom had the opportunity for socializing. He was one of those men totally devoted to his job, taking his greatest pleasure as well as his sustenance from that work. And maybe that was the reason he had never married, never been seriously involved with any of the women he had known over the years.
    He had gotten interested in mysteries while he was still on the Washington police force, and had begun collecting them on a small scale almost immediately. In his apartment in Alexandria—which he used only on his days off; when he was on duty he occupied a small room in the West Wing of the White House—he had several hundred editions of British and American crime novels. He especially liked the early English mysteries: they had a slow, measured pace; they were peopled with old colonels who had fought in India for British imperialism, and proper ladies and even more proper gentlemen, and eccentric detectives and exotic foreigners, and high-strung nieces and nephews who were interested in archeological excavations or inheritances from dead or dying relatives; they dealt with genteel puzzles and bloodless murders and polite investigative techniques. They were self-contained, mentally challenging, and far-removed from his own experiences, and they served him in the same way that the games of chess or bridge served other thoughtful policemen of one type or another.
    Justice moved slowly, browsing, among the library-type stacks. On one of the “C” shelves he found a battered exlibrary copy of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Calais Coach, third American edition, and took it down and opened it. He had developed an interest in trains since he had been assigned as the President’s bodyguard and had had the opportunity to travel with Augustine on the Presidential Special between Los Angeles and The Hollows in Northern California; and Murder on the Calais Coach, with its fascinating Orient Express background, was one of the classic train mysteries. He had a paperback reissue of the book in Alexandria, but it had been a long time since he had read it. He decided he wanted to reread it and that he would buy this copy instead of driving across the Potomac for the softcover edition.
    Tucking it under his arm, he continued to browse. The air in the bookstore was musty and comfortably moist, unlike the atmosphere of the White House which seemed always to be dry, the kind of air that could give someone a