“When I first arrived in Washington twenty-three years ago,” he was saying, “this was a very different place from the one it is now…”
Unlike, say, any other place on the planet? Jesus, Dex. Please. Someone-for the love of God-ask a question…
“But whatever Washington has become, I feel-at least, I’d like to be able to feel-that I’ve made some small difference. Some contribution. I believe it was Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul ’s Cathedral over there in London…”
“Over there in London ”? Put a sock in it, Dex.
“… whose epitaph reads…”
No, no. Do not compare yourself to the architect of St. Paul ’s Cathedral…
“ ‘If it’s monuments you want, just look around.’ Well,” Dexter continued with transparently insincere self-deprecation, “I certainly don’t merit a marble bust. But I am darn proud to leave behind some solid pieces of legislation. In particular-”
“Senator-?”
Oh, thank you. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart…
Dexter, halted in mid-self-adulation, said with a trace of irritation, “Yes, Judy?”
“What about these reports that you wanted to stay on in the Senate while doing the TV show?”
Fucking Clem.
“Oh… no. No, no. No. I mean, there were-we had-there was… there may have been some very theoretical… discussion. But no. Well, there were those who wanted me to stay on, but-”
“Such as who?”
Dexter laughed. “Well, now, we don’t need to get into all that. Myself, I never thought that was realistic. Being in the Senate is a full-time job. A more than full-time job. Just ask my life’s partner, here. Aack.”
Terry stalwartly grinned. You’re such a dick, Dexter.
“And it’s a full-time honor, let me add. So I… That never really made much sense as an option. Yes, Candy?”
“Is it true you’re getting fifty thousand dollars per episode?”
Fucking Buddy.
“Well now-aack-I don’t-there’s no point in… Someone else is handling all that. But I can tell you this much-on an hourly basis, it pays a little better than the Senate. But let me talk for just a moment here about some of the things I’m proudest of having accomplished during my years in the-”
Someone-please-ask him another question.
“Is it true Ramona Alvilar has been cast to play the First Lady?”
“My understanding,” Dexter said, “is that those negotiations are ongoing. You’d have to ask Buddy Bixby. Of course, from my perspective, it would be wonderful if she were to be my wife.” Dexter stopped and looked over at Terry. “I think I just said the wrong thing.”
Laughter. Terry smiled. “Yes, honey. You did.” You ass.
More laughter.
“But if I might get back to some of the judiciary reform initiatives that I’m proudest of… let me point to the Uniform Appellate Modification Act of-”
“Senator, this presidential one-term limit amendment that just cleared the House and looks to be approved overwhelmingly by the Senate.”
“What about it?”
“How do you feel about it?”
That cocksucker Vanderdamp deserves everything he gets.
“Well, I guess it’s no secret that President Vanderdamp and I have had our differences. Is it fair to punish future presidents because of one disastrous… Well,” Dexter grinned, “I didn’t come here today to criticize the President. I’ll let the historians do that.”
“Will you be voting in favor of the amendment?”
“It has some merit to it, I believe. On the other hand, who knows, I might find myself in a position one day where I’d like to be able to have a second term. Aack.”
Terry looked stricken.
“Are you saying that you plan to run for president again?”
“I…” Dexter looked over at Terry, whose eyes had gone cold as liquid nitrogen. “The only presidency I’m interested in at the moment is Mitchell Lovestorm’s.”
“Who came up with that name, anyway?”
“The name?” Dexter said. “Well… the writers. That’s what they… but it suits me. Yes. It conveys a lot about this President. He’s a strong man, a passionate man, with…”
Terry wondered, He’s already talking about himself in the third person.
“… a man who’s been through the fire, but who has heart. Yes. Lovestorm. A perfect Lovestorm. Ha-ha. Like that movie…”
Dexter looked over at his life’s partner, who was sending him a message that decoded: Wrap it up right now or I will Super-Glue your lips shut tonight while you sleep.
“Thanks for coming,” Dexter said, giving his audience a valedictory salute. “Thank you. This has been a tremendous experience. I like to think that I’m not really leaving you. Just moving to another channel. Don’t forget to tune in Monday nights.”
CHAPTER 17
Pepper was nervous, going into her first conference. Her stomach felt like a butterfly farm.
Justices vote in order of seniority, so she’d go last. As the justices began voting on Swayle, she prayed that there would be a clear majority before it got to her. Not today. The Hardwether Court was as divided as the Korean peninsula. When Crispus cast his vote against, it became 4-4. All eyes were on Pepper.
“Justice Cartwright?” the Chief Justice said gently. He didn’t seem comfortable calling her “Pepper.”
“I…”
She felt sixteen eyeballs boring into her like drills. Paige Plympton had warned Pepper beforehand that Hardwether didn’t go in for lengthy debate in conference. “He runs a pretty swift ship,” she said. This was not a debating society.
Every atom in every fiber of Pepper Cartwright screamed at her to vote against Jimmy James Swayle. Rule in favor of a bank robber who felt aggrieved because his gun didn’t fire? If it had been Courtroom Six, Buddy would have had workmen in building a gallows to hang the sumbitch from before the first commercial break. But it wasn’t Courtroom Six, and she found herself, oddly, thinking that the sumbitch actually had a case on the technicalities of the thing. Awkward, but there it was.
“I… uh…” she stammered, “for the motion.”
“You’re finding in favor?” Hardwether said.
“Uh-huh. Yes.”
Justice Santamaria let out an exhalation that would have billowed the sails of a four-masted schooner. He tossed his pencil onto the conference table with disgust. Paige gave Pepper a look of bemused curiosity.
“It’s just that I thought the South Dakota Supreme Court’s decision in Mortimer v. Great Lakes Suction seemed to… uh, speak to the validity of Swayle’s argument,” Pepper said.
Silence.
“Well,” she added, “it is a bitch, but that’s kind of where I came down.”
Justice Santamaria muttered something that sounded to Pepper like “Jesus wept.” He let out another majestic sigh, leaned back, looked at the ceiling, and rolled his eyes.
Pepper said, “Justice Santamaria, do you have something to say to me? Or are you waiting for one of your clerks to come put drops in your eyes?”
There was a general intake of breath around the table. Santamaria’s head turned toward Pepper like a tank turret swiveling to fire. Before he could get off a round, Chief Justice Hardwether, suppressing a smile, said, “In that case, Justice Cartwright, will you write for the majority?”
Pepper froze. “You want me to write the opinion?”
“If you would.”
“Uh, okay. I mean, yes.”
“Silvio,” Hardwether said, “I assume you’ll handle the dissent.”
Silvio snorted assent.
After the conference, Paige stopped by Pepper’s chambers. “Well,” she said, “you certainly don’t hold back.”
“I shouldn’t have popped off like that. But I couldn’t take any more of that high dudgeon crap from him. His eyeballs were going like tumblers in a Vegas slot machine. And I’m a little tired of him yammering off to
the nearest passing reporter about what a featherweight I am.”
“Oh, he’s a big boy. It’s not him I’m worried about,” Paige said.
“All right,” Pepper said. “Let’s have it. You think I voted wrong?”
Paige had voted against Swayle. “It’s not that. But I had the feeling back there that you were voting against your instincts.”
“It’s not about instincts, is it?” Pepper said. “It’s about the law. Right?”
“Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?”
Paige stood to go. “Sandy O’Connor kept a needlepoint cushion in her chambers. It said, ‘Maybe in error. Never in doubt.’ ” She smiled. “I look forward to reading your opinion. Good luck with it.”
MR. PRESIDENT. We’ve just intercepted a coded signal from Chinese Naval Command Shanghai.”
“Go ahead, Admiral.”
“The Wung Fu, their fast frigate-it’s armed with specials. Nuclear-tipped missiles.”
The President’s face darkened. “Goddammit. They lied. Their premier looked me straight in the face. And lied.” He slammed his fist on the Situation Room table.
The Secretary of State said, “Sir, we don’t know that for an absolute fact. All we know for sure is that when you met with him, Li Pu Fang was making moves to consolidate his power base with Xiang Zhu.”
“Goddammit, Brad-he lied. What the hell kind of proof do you need? A mushroom cloud over San Francisco?”
The room fell silent. All eyes turned to the President.
“All right,” said the President. “No more Mr. Nice Guy. Send in the Nimitz. Maybe a carrier battle group will get their attention.”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense exchanged fraught glances.
“Sir,” said the Admiral, “they’ll take that as a provocation.”
“You having a hard time with the English language today, sailor? I gave you an order.”
“Aye, sir,” the Chairman replied. He nodded to his chief of operations and said gravely, “You heard the President. Send in the Nimitz.”
The Secretary of State said, “Sir, I beg you. This could lead to-global annihilation.”
“You had your chance, Brad. I’m sorry. Better pull your people out of Beijing.”
“But-there’s no time!”
“Then they’ll have themselves a ringside seat at the barbecue. Sorry, Brad, but this is my call.”
“One more day, Mr. President. Give us just one more day.”
The President shook his head. “I told those little yellow bastards not to-”
“Cut.”
President Mitchell Lovestorm turned to the director. “What’s the matter? I thought we were doing fine.”
The director, a man named Jerry, said, “It’s going great, Senator. Terrific. The line is ‘I told those bastards,’ not ‘I told those little yellow bastards.’ Okay? Let’s take it from-”
Dexter said, “I think it’s better my way. Tougher…”
“You could be right,” Jerry said. “But let’s trust the material.”
“That’s how they talk in Washington. Behind closed doors, anyway. Trust me. I’ve been in the room.”
Jerry nodded. “I don’t doubt it. But-”
“We want this to be realistic, right?”
“Absolutely. But let’s trust the script. Okay? All set…”
“I mean,” Dexter persisted, “they’re threatening the United States with nuclear weapons. You think in the Situation Room at the White House everyone’s going to stop and go, ‘Oh, gosh, oh, dear me,’ because the President, in a moment of-justifiable-stress, calls them a name? I don’t think so.”
Jerry glanced over at Buddy, who was perched in his producer’s chair, looking as though he were conducting an silent one-man Socratic dialogue on the ethics of racist epithets.
“Samsung is a sponsor,” Buddy said softy. “ Toyota is a sponsor. Will they be comfortable with ‘little yellow bastards’? I’m guessing not. I could be wrong.”
“Those are Korean and Japanese,” Dexter said. “They hate the Chinese. Are you kidding? They’ll lap it up.”
“It’s tempting, but let’s save it for season two.”
The makeup lady dabbed at Dexter’s forehead. He said poutingly, “I thought the whole idea was to be edgy.”
“Edgy? You’ve just ordered in the Nimitz. Three pages from now, you’re going to send a B-2 bomber over Shanghai, giving one point three billion little yellow bastards a case of the shits. I call that edgy. So, we good to go? I’d love to wrap the scene where you tell the Speaker of the House to fuck off before we break for lunch.”
“All right. Where do we-what’s the line?”
The script assistant said mechanically, “ ‘I told those bastards not to screw around. Now they are going to get a taste of their own cooking, and it will make hot and sour soup taste like Cream of Wheat.’ ”
“Okay, everyone. Places. Scene six, take four. Action…”
Dexter managed to get to the end of the scene without further denigrating one-seventh of the human race. He was doing better than credible work as President Mitchell Lovestorm, especially for a nonprofessional actor. Buddy’s casting instincts had not failed him: a senator who yearns to be president brings verisimilitude to the role.
Buddy had been screening the first three episodes of POTUS for the media, and indications were favorable. They were amused by its camp aspect. In the opening episode, Mitchell Lovestorm-at the time, vice president-is reluctantly thrust into history’s spotlight when the President is accidentally killed by a foul ball during opening day. His wife, Consuela “Connie” Lovestorm, played by the steamy Ramona Alvilar, is a panther in pantsuit who will stop at nothing to advance her husband’s fortunes, but who is unable to deny-much less control-her ardor for National Security adviser Milton Swan. Icy blue-eyed Gore Peckermann of the TV show St. Paul Trauma brought a cool ambivalence to his role as the former Navy SEAL turned National Security adviser, who must balance his loyalty to President Lovestorm and the country with his burning desire to throw the First Lady over his desk and brief her until dawn.
CHAPTER 18
Pepper was in a sweat. She had an opinion to write, and since it proclaimed the right of criminals to sue gun manufacturers when their holdup weapons misfire in the middle of a crime, it needed to be good. Really, really good.
Her clerk, Sandoval, had offered to do “a draft” of it for her. Some justices let their clerks do pretty much all the “drafting” of their written opinions. But Pepper was determined to do her own even if it meant pulling all-nighters. She’d had enough problems in the media already without reading a snippy item in the Washington Post about how Judge Lightweight was relying on her clerks to do her heavy lifting. She didn’t doubt Sandoval’s discretion or loyalty, but clerks were a gossipy bunch who these days talked to reporters and authors and sometimes even wrote their own clerk-and-tell books.
After ten p.m. on what was shaping up to be her second sleepless night, Pepper was at her desk trying to figure out how to make the Swayle opinion sound like something Moses left behind on Mount Sinai along with the commandments. There was a knock on the door and in walked Justice Ishiguro “Mike” Haro.
“Busy?” he said.
It was a curious statement to make to someone who was in her office after ten p.m., looking like hell while staring desperately at a computer screen.
“Kind of. I’m working on the Swayle opinion,” Pepper said. “It’s been a while since I…”
“That’s why I came by.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“Thought you could use some help.”
This struck Pepper as falling somewhere between a breach of etiquette and an outright insult. Though new here, she was pretty certain justices didn’t go around offering to help each other write opinions.
“I think I’ve got it under control. But thanks for the offer.”
Justice Haro stood awkwardly. He was in his early forties but
looked ten years younger and had about him a mild air of contemptuousness, as though the world did not measure up to his standards.
“I liked the way you gave it to Santamaria at the conference,” he said. “Pompous prick.”
Eager as Pepper was for peer approval, collegiality predicated on a shared dislike of a third colleague was off to a false start.
“I shouldn’t have run my mouth like that,” she said. “I wrote him an apology.” She made a mental note to do that after Haro left.
“You don’t owe him an apology,” Haro said. “Not after the things he’s said about you. And not just in print.”
Was this an invitation to say, What things?
“I better get back to this.”
“Do you like wine?”
“Generally. Not right now.” Something made her add, “I’m more of a beer girl.”
“I have eight thousand bottles in my cellar.”
“Sounds like quite some cellar.”
“Yes, it is. Maybe I’ll show it to you sometime.”
Haro turned to leave. As he did, he said, “By the way, Mortimer isn’t the key to this case. But I’ll take care of it when your draft circulates.”
Pepper wondered if the woman who’d poured out her ex-husband’s wine and replaced it with grape juice was available, and went back to her Augean stable.
She finished the opinion late the next day and sent it out for comments by the four other justices in the majority. She felt as though she were back in school, hoping to find an “A” in red ink at the top of the returned term paper.
One morning a few days later she logged on to SupremeNet, the Court’s secure Intranet, and found the opinion in her inbox. There was no grade on it, but it was full of comments by the justices. Next to one section she found a “Good-DH.” Chief Justice Hardwether was not known to be liberal with his compliments, so she purred to find this. The pleasure was short-lived. On the next page, he had struck out a line in which she had used the Texas phrase “more confused than a cow on Astroturf”-a sentiment she had felt condign enough in a case like Swayle-and written, “Let’s try to keep it dignified.” Ouch.
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