The First Lady Escapes

by Verity Speeks

  Woozy, Funck pressed the blood-soaked strips of cloth to his scalp wound and unsteadily climbed onto his bed. He propped a pillow under his head. “No ambulance!” he yelled at Pricker. “No fucking sirens!”

  With the cold metal of the gun against her scalp, Moon glanced at Funck’s bloated naked body sprawled on the bed, blood staining his pillow. It occurred to her that maybe he really was the reincarnation of Louis XIV, France’s powerful, greedy Sun King. She had once read that Louis XIV died an agonizing death when he was seventy-seven. Funck was seventy-four. I hope he won’t hang around for another three years, she thought, but that his death will be just as agonizing.

  Chapter 28

  The White House

  December 18, 3:15 a.m.

  “Get this son-of-a-bitch off of me!” Funck squirmed on his bed as Moon sat beside him pressing a sterile gauze pad to his head wound. “I want my doctor!”

  “You made your doctor Secretary of Labor, Daddy,” said Gretchen, walking over.

  “I did?”

  “Or maybe it was Secretary of Defense.”

  “Fuck!” He waved Moon away, but she wouldn’t budge from the bed.

  “We have to make sure the bleeding’s completely stopped before I stitch you up, sir,” she said softly.

  “You’re not touching me!”

  “Daddy, please,” said Gretchen. “This…person…is a registered nurse. He…she does stitches all the time.”

  “I don’t give a shit! He’s a freak!”

  “Daddy, I don’t know how many times I need to repeat—”

  “What?”

  “The only people who can know about what happened here tonight are the people in this room. That means me, this…nurse, and your bulldog.” She glanced at Pricker, who was sitting on a sofa, hunched over his laptop.

  Moon tuned out the argument between the President and his daughter. She was relieved that his head wound had stopped gushing blood before Gretchen arrived, five minutes after Pricker summoned her on his walkie-talkie. In the case of an emergency that involved the President’s sex life, she had learned from eavesdropping, Gretchen was the first call. Funck feared leaks to the press even more than he feared germs. He didn’t trust the Secret Service, the Attorney General, or the CIA. He trusted the FBI least of all. The only person he trusted, beside himself, was his favorite child.

  The first thing Gretchen had done when she arrived in what she moaned looked like a combat zone was to turn to Moon and say: “I don’t give a rat’s ass right now who you are or what you are, or where the hell the real FLOTUS is. But swear on your mother’s life you are a Registered Nurse.”

  “My mother’s dead, olav ha sholom, but I swear on her grave,” Moon said.

  “And that you can stitch up Daddy’s wound without assassinating him!”

  Moon had sworn on her mother’s grave that she could do that too. Given the circumstances, she wasn’t about to admit that though she was an RN, her specialty was hospice care. She was skilled at dispensing morphine, whispering tender words of encouragement, and holding the frail hands of people who were dying of cancer or old age. She couldn’t exactly tell Gretchen, “I’m the best hospice nurse in Miami, even though all my patients end up dead.” The truth was this: The last time Moon had sutured a wound was when she was in nursing school.

  The second thing Gretchen had done after she entered the bedroom, once she realized that her father was not going to croak, was to motion for Pricker to tighten his chokehold on Moon. Moon had claimed it was unnecessary, but he would not relax his hairy forearm pressing against her neck. “Go ahead, strangle me,” she gasped. “I’m proud to admit the First Lady escaped by impersonating me and that her hairdresser and best friend, Angel Garcia, helped her.”

  Angel and Natalia had told Moon to say that if she were found out. She was relieved that they hadn’t told her where they were headed. She happily swore to Gretchen on her mother’s grave that she didn’t know their destination. She didn’t mention that Natalia had mistakenly said the name, “Vaclav,” before they left, and that Angel had told Moon to forget she ever heard it. She wished she had forgotten it. She didn’t know who Vaclav was, but she vowed that she would never reveal his name, even under pain of death.

  Moon then had helped Gretchen dress Funck in a clean bathrobe and position him on the bed with his head raised on a fresh pillow. Gretchen had eyed her black-satin nightie and yelled, “That’s obscene! Put something on over that! And put your fucking wig back on!” Moon had donned her wig and selected one of the dozen men’s terrycloth bathrobes she found hanging on the mirrored walls in Funck’s cavernous bathroom. His shower had mirrored walls too, she noticed, with windshield wipers to keep them clear during a shower and double the number of showerheads as in the First Lady’s bathroom. She bet the President watched himself in the mirror when he beat off, or humped his mistresses, in the shower.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” said Gretchen.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Moon stood up from the bed and handed the gauze pad to her. “Keep this on the wound, but lightly. Don’t press too hard.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Gretchen grumbled.

  Moon walked over to the first-aid kit on the coffee table. Pricker had rushed it into the bedroom from the first-aid station down the hall. She reached out to open it but realized that she was still wearing the latex gloves with which she’d started this evening’s “adventure.” They were speckled with Funck’s dried blood. She walked toward the bedroom door, past where Pricker was sitting on a sofa. On Gretchen’s orders, he was googling Angel Garcia and looking for a clue about where Angel took Natalia.

  When the Secret Service agent saw Moon with her hand on the bedroom door, he pulled his gun. “Forgetabout it!”

  She shrugged her shoulders and held up her blood-spattered latex gloves. Pricker grudgingly walked over to the bedroom door, opened it a crack, and peered out. Seeing the hall was empty, he grabbed the box of latex gloves from the side table, handed it to her, and closed the door.

  “Thank you.” She peeled off her soiled gloves and dumped them into a garbage can.

  Moon cleaned her hands with the Purell hand sanitizer on the coffee table, one of many bottles of it in the room, then shoved her left hand into a new sanitary glove. Natalia’s 15-karat diamond snagged on the latex. For an instant, the glimmer on the mega-diamond, a reflection from the chandelier, looked to her like a smile. The diamond ring is laughing at me, she thought.

  Moon put her finger into her mouth and sucked hard on the rings, saliva oozing onto her lips. She walked over to the bed, where Funck and Gretchen were talking quietly. “You better take these,” she mumbled.

  Gretchen noticed that she had something in her mouth and was sucking on her finger. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Moon spat the rings into her hand.

  Gretchen gagged. “Eeeewww!”

  Funck stared at the rings, which glistened with Moon’s spittle. “You stole Natalia’s rings!”

  “She gave them to me.” Moon pulled a handful of tissues from a Kleenex box on the nightstand and nestled the rings in them. “And now I’m giving them to you.” She reached out to hand him the package.

  Gretchen intercepted and stowed it in the pocket of her sporty black-leather jacket. “Stitch up Daddy’s head so he can get some sleep and you can go to hell!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Moon walked back to the coffee table. Donning fresh latex gloves, she put on a face mask and unwrapped the sterilized items in the first-aid kit. One by one, she laid them out on the sterile tray that Pricker also had fetched from the first-aid station: first, the suture pad, then suture needles, nylon monofilament sutures, two scalpels, a mayo suture holder/driver and forceps/pickups and scissors, plus a dozen packages of hydrogen-peroxide-soaked cloths. She had only a vague memory of what to do with each. Too bad I can’t watch a how-to-suture You Tube video, she thought. She noticed a plastic-wrapped sterilized syringe and a bottle of Lidocaine. Y’know
what’s really too bad? she added to herself. That I can’t skip the painkiller before sewing him up.

  “I got the security-area video footage,” Pricker called to Gretchen and Funck. “It shows FLOTUS’s hairdresser leaving the White House with this trans woman in a pink-streaked black wig. Like, dude, it’s unbelievable! You’d never guess the trans was FLOTUS.”

  “That’s not the point!” Gretchen said. “Save the video footage on your laptop but delete it from the security monitors. No one else can see it!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Sew him up, whatever your name is!” Gretchen got up from the bed and walked over to a desk.

  “Moon Kusnetsov,” she said, but Gretchen was oblivious, tapping on her phone. She walked back to the bed and set the tray of sterile instruments on the nightstand. As she leaned over to inspect the dried blood caked on Funck’s hair, he squeezed his eyes closed, as if her gaze sickened him. “I’m afraid I’ll have to cut away some of the Presidential locks to get to the wound,” she said.

  “You will not touch a hair on my head,” he muttered with closed eyes.

  “But, it’s unsanitary to—”

  “Not one fucking hair!”

  “Got it, not one hair.” She used forceps to carefully lift strands of hair on Funck’s head. Despite all the dried blood, she saw that she was holding his comb-over. It reminded her of the two-days-dead pet hamster that she had discovered in its cage when she was a little boy; she had wept over it.

  She could see that Funck’s head wound was on a large bald spot. Unable to resist teasing him, she lifted up her wig and patted her own bald head. “See?”

  “What?”

  “We’re twins!”

  He opened his eyes and glowered at her. “Shut the fuck up!”

  “The good news is, you only need three or four stitches.”

  “Then how come there was so much blood?”

  “You were hot to trot, Mr. President. Sexual arousal can raise your blood pressure.”

  “I was not sexually aroused!”

  Moon struggled to keep a straight face.

  Gretchen walked over, her cell phone to her ear. “I’m putting you on speaker, Ingrid, so Daddy can hear,” she said into the phone. She motioned for Moon to get up, then sat on the bed beside her father.

  Natalia’s mother’s voice was shrill on the phone: “Mr. President, it’s the middle of the night! Is my daughter okay?”

  “You tell me,” he sneered. “She’s gone.”

  “What?” Ingrid paused, then blurted out, “Hovno! That stupid suka! Ó môj bože! I’ll strangle her myself!”

  Gretchen’s voice sharpened. “Ingrid, you know the house in Palm Beach Daddy bought you? And your $250,000-a-year membership to Beau Rivage? Not to mention the first-class airplane tickets every time you go visit your loser son in Slovakia!”

  “I’m very grateful for everything my beloved son-in-law has given me and Papa, may he rest in peace,” said Ingrid. “I’m sure Natalia is very grateful too!”

  “You’re sure, huh?” Funck’s face reddened with such fury that Moon worried his head wound would start bleeding again.

  “You can tell no one about this, Ingrid, but you better help us find your whore of a daughter,” said Gretchen. “Where did she go? Is she cheating on Daddy?”

  “My daughter is not the cheating spouse!”

  “Watch your tone, bitch!” yelled Funck.

  “Think hard, Ingrid,” said Gretchen. “I know Slovak women are better known for their beauty than their brains, but think about where Natalia went or you will be on the next flight to Slovakia. And you won’t be flying first class!”

  “Wait,” said Ingrid. “There was an old boyfriend. Natalia got…” She stopped herself. “He was her first love.”

  “‘First love?’” Gretchen snorted. “What does ‘first love’ mean in Slovakia? They fucked when they were ten?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Close enough. We’re going to track his ass down. What’s his name?”

  Moon’s heart dropped. She knew Natalia’s mother would say “Vaclav.” She hoped that Natalia would find Vaclav before the White House did.

  Chapter 29

  Dallas, TX

  December 18, 10:00 a.m.

  Angel pulled the Mustang up in front of a gleaming white-marble, high-rise building. Natalia nervously twisted the bangs on her wig. “Can’t we stop at a Hilton? Or a Sheraton?”

  “Chica, this is one place we know they’ve got FOX News blasting in every bar, restaurant, and bathroom twenty-four/seven,” he said. “We gotta make sure that Moon got away from the White House last night and see what the fuck they’re doing about it.”

  A young parking attendant ran over to the car and opened Natalia’s door. “Welcome to Funck Hotel Dallas,” he said.

  She climbed out of the car and stretched in the blazing sunshine. The valet parker stared at her, his eyes sweeping from her ample cleavage down to her bulging crotch. His smile faded. “Uh…have a nice stay.”

  “Glad to be here.” Glad you can’t tell who I really am, she thought. She also was glad she hadn’t totaled the car last night while Angel took a siesta. After he woke up, he had driven here from Memphis while she napped. If they kept up this pace, she would be with Vaclav in Rosarito Beach on schedule.

  She followed Angel through the ornate portico into the hotel. Because the Funck International Hotel in Washington, D.C., was set in an historic government building, Rex’s interior design team had been forced to keep the style historic. In this new hotel, the look was modern/flashy, with gold-trimmed contemporary furniture and garish gold chandeliers. Rex sure loves gold, she thought.

  Angel nodded to a restroom sign. “Gotta take a piss.”

  “Me too.” Her footsteps echoed after his down a marble corridor. He entered the men’s room; she walked into the ladies’ room.

  She glimpsed herself in the gold-trimmed wall mirror. It startled her to see that she was looking at a trans woman with a pink-streaked black wig, false eyelashes, and glittery purple eye shadow. Above her reflection, a TV screen was set into the mirror. What Natalia saw on TV was even more startling:

  On FOX News, Shana Wiley, a voluptuous blonde anchor, was sitting with Darren Roberts, a graying White House correspondent. They were discussing the official First Family Christmas photo that had been released to the public minutes ago. The photo was blown up on-screen behind them.

  In the picture, President Funck was standing in front of the White House Christmas tree flanked on both sides by his children, their spouses, and his grandchildren. His arm was around the First Lady, who was clad in the red-beaded Valentino gown, a red-choker scarf around her neck. She was gazing admiringly at the President, smiling broadly.

  “It certainly looks like POTUS and FLOTUS are getting into the Christmas spirit,” said Shana. “They look as happy as newlyweds!”

  Roberts chimed in. “I’d say she is giving the President his best Christmas present ever. Forgiveness!”

  In the hotel ladies’ room, Natalia trembled. Moon was still in the White House, impersonating her. How was that possible? She stared at the photo on TV: The First Lady looked exactly like her, but she knew in her head and her heart that it was Moon. And yet…

  Suddenly dizzy, her heart pounding, she braced herself against the sink. Her eyes darted back and forth between FLOTUS in the White House photo and her face in the mirror. The person in the mirror wasn’t her, but the FLOTUS in the photo wasn’t her either.

  She gasped. This is what it must feel like to have an out-of-body experience, she thought.

  She burst out of the ladies’ room just as Angel burst out of the men’s room. “You saw it?”

  “Chingados! Fuck me!”

  “Me too!”

  “We’re outta!” He hustled her toward the hotel exit. “We gotta move!”

  Chapter 30

  Azusa, CA

  December 18, 11:00 a.m.

  “Mom? I’m home!�
�� Phil called out, the way he had done when he was a teenager living with his mother in an historic Greene and Greene craftsman house in Pasadena, two blocks from the Rose Bowl. He pictured the sprawling, six-bedroom, redwood-and-brick mansion shaded by ancient California oak trees. It wasn’t really their house. Betty, Phil’s mother, whose grandparents had come to California as impoverished migrant Oakies during the 1930s Dust Bowl, was the maid and cook. She and Phil lived in the servants’ quarters above the garage. But when the Hendersons, the Pasadena banker and his wife who owned the house, were at their condo on Maui, Phil would burst into the kitchen after a day at Pasadena High School. “I’m home,” he would call out to his mother, as if the place were theirs.

  Sometimes she was in the butler’s pantry, polishing the family silverware, or upstairs in the master bathroom, scrubbing the tiles. At the sound of his voice, Betty would cheerfully call back, “Did you have a good day at school, dear?” Phil never did. At Pasadena High, he was one of the nerdy losers who played Nintendo alone during lunch and was last picked for the baseball team. But he always answered, “Yes.”

  “Philip, dear, you don’t have to scream! I’m right here!” His mother’s voice wrenched him back to the present. She opened the squeaky door to her mobile home. Phil walked in. Betty had lived in this $250-a-month rental ever since the banker retired in Maui. It galled him that the Hendersons didn’t pay his mother Social Security all those years. The mobile home was all she could afford now on what she made as an aide in an Azusa nursing home. Phil never told his mother what he really thought of Azusa, a motley collection of strip malls, mobile-home parks, and nursing homes, fifteen minutes east of Pasadena. Someone had come up with the name “Azusa” because it was a town with “everything from A to Z in the USA.” What a joke, he thought.

  “Mom, you look great!” He embraced her, inhaling her familiar sweet Dove soap scent and feeling her brittle gray hair against his cheek. She seemed smaller and more fragile in his arms than the last time he saw her. Had it been a year? Two? He felt a twinge of guilt, as if her deterioration was his fault. “Are you okay?”