“Mr. President—”
Cooper Wallace shook his head, cutting off Reverend Manton Roberts. He leaned back on the couch in the president’s study and looked over at Roberts balanced on the cushion edge.
“Please don’t call me that. As long as Tom McCormack has a chance to recover, he’s still the president of the United States.”
Roberts raised his stubby, fat-creased hands. Wallace wasn’t sure whether it was in defense or in surrender. Roberts stretched them higher, palms up, and then looked heavenward. “And I pray every moment for his recovery.”
“What I need, and the reason I asked you here, is that I need you to pray with me and to give me guidance.”
Roberts lowered his arms. “I’m honored.”
Wallace felt the presence of Billy Graham in the room. A dozen presidents had sat where he sat now, bowing their heads as the evangelist spoke, but none of them faced the decision that he would have to make.
“But to do that will require that I disclose some matters that demand not just discretion on your part, but absolute confidentiality.”
“Of course I—”
“Not so fast. At some point it may mean going to jail.”
Roberts’s brows furrowed. “You haven’t committed a crime, have you?”
Wallace shook his head. “Not yet. It’s more in the realm of state secrets, but eventually there may be—there will be—hearings about my conduct. What I knew. When I knew it. Who stood to gain. Who stood to lose.”
“Maybe you should go to Congress now. Isn’t there some procedure—”
“There’d be too much danger of triggering precisely what I’m trying to avoid.”
Roberts shifted his body more toward Wallace, who felt the couch sag and rebound under his weight. “You’re being a little too cryptic.”
Wallace nodded. “According to Milton Abrams…” He watched Roberts struggle to repress a display of disgust. “We are on the verge of an attack on our economy.”
“Why should you believe Abrams?”
The distain in Roberts’s words made it sound to Wallace as if Roberts had asked, Why should you believe the Jew? For all his biblical wisdom, Wallace recognized that one of Roberts’s failings was that he loved Jews only in the abstract, in the way one pities stray dogs awaiting euthanasia at the pound: precious, but doomed to the terrors of the Apocalypse. In the concrete present, in the flesh and blood and black hair and dark eyes and Semitic noses, they were unredeemed Christ killers.
“We’ve confirmed most of what he’s saying.”
“Most?”
“Most. If I knew for certain, I’d have already found a way out of this and acted on it.”
“I see.”
Roberts pointed at the carpet under Wallace’s feet and they slid down to their knees.
“Dear Lord, please guide your servant Cooper Wallace as he faces the challenges of his office. Thou has created the great United States and it has grown according to Thy will and Thou has sent this good and courageous man to lead it. May he be as confident as a sleepwalker led by Thee through a minefield toward the Promised Land. Thou has always granted victory to those most worthy. Though we see but through the glass darkly, Thou sees all.”
Roberts paused for a long moment, and then said, “Amen.”
Wallace eased himself back onto the couch. Roberts pushed his hand down onto the edge of the cushion, struggling to jack his body up from the floor. He grunted as he pulled one knee up. Wallace stood and reached down a hand. Roberts accepted it and then rocked forward, leveraging himself high enough to slide onto the cushion. He leaned back and straightened his suit jacket. Wallace unbuttoned his.
“In… the end,” Roberts said, his breathing heavy from the exertion, “all… we can do… is let the invisible hand of God… work through us.”
Wallace gazed at the bulbous red face—one not of a holy man, but of a glutton—and felt a natal rage rising within him and an inarticulate thrashing: at himself for not listening to President McCormack, and at the sudden meaninglessness of the world, his faith, and the faith of his father, now seeming more like fog, than light.
“And if we’re wrong,” Wallace said, “He forces us to walk into hell on a road we’ve paved with our good intentions.”
Roberts smiled his Sunday-morning-let-us-read-from-Scripture smile. “That’s what our faith is for, to bear us forward in the face of our doubts.” He raised a finger. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me.”
Wallace stared and stared and stared at Roberts until his beatific smile faded into one of awkward uncertainty, and then asked, “The question is not whether God is with me, Manton. But whether you are.”