The President's Henchman

by Joseph Flynn

  Being careful not to disturb either the precise arrangements of the undergarments or his client’s sensibilities, McGill checked for store labels and sizes. It occurred to him that the intruder might also have done so. Perhaps even before he’d bought the thong he left for Chana. That way he’d get the size right, and he’d have the thrill of knowing he’d shopped where she did.

  It was a place to start.

  When he finished, he went downstairs to Chana’s office, found her sitting at her desk, and closed the sliding doors.

  McGill took the comfortably worn leather reading chair that Chana directed him to; she sat on a black, upholstered, ergonomically correct secretary’s chair in front of her workstation. A late-model Wintel computer sat on the desktop behind her. A ceramic mustachioed bandito pointed his pistola at the machine. Appended to the bandito’s sombrero was a homemade dialogue bubble. Crash even once, and I keel you!

  On the wall over her work area were four framed photos. A gray-haired man whose intelligent eyes and engaging smile showed a clear resemblance to his daughter. Two portraits of toddlers, maybe eighteen months old. At first McGill thought they were both of Chana, but then he realized the child on the left had blue eyes. A fraternal, near-identical twin? Last was a team picture, the UCLA women’s softball squad. A banner placed before the smiling group of athletes said NCAA National Champions.

  “What position did you play?” McGill asked.

  “I pitched, played first when my arm needed a rest.”

  McGill nodded, looked around again.

  “You don’t give dinner parties?”

  “Hardly even go to any.”

  McGill could identify with that.

  He smiled, and told her, “We’ve had only one state dinner at the White House since the president took office. If the next one’s not for a long time, that’s fine with me.”

  “But you’d never let the president host one without you.”

  McGill shook his head. “That’s covered by the ‘For Better or Worse’ clause of our vows.”

  Chana picked up a pen and pad of paper from her desk and scribbled a note.

  “Something I should know,” McGill asked, “or just an item on your grocery list?”

  “Idea for a project some years from now: Ask you and the president how you made it through your White House years. Looking back. After politics are no longer a consideration.”

  “That’s the kind of thing you want to do?”

  “What I want, just between us, is to be Bill Moyers. And by the time the president leaves office, especially if it’s two terms, it’s what I’ll need to do.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at him like he was pulling her leg. “You really don’t know?”

  McGill shook his head.

  “Because the next ‘Most Fabulous Face on TV’ is in journalism school right now,” Chana said. “Or high school. And I’ll be over the line by then.”

  “What line is that?”

  “The ‘Gray-and-Gone’ line. As in, if you’re gray, you’re gone.”

  McGill thought about it. He couldn’t recall seeing a single female broadcaster, at least on a national level, who appeared on camera with gray hair. Men, sure. Lots of them. Women, not a one. But the thought of Chana’s being in front of a camera turned his thoughts back to the intruder.

  It was a delicate subject to raise, the idea that had occurred to him earlier, but he did his best. “When I asked you before if you’d found anything in this room that didn’t belong here, I’d thought of an alternative theory of how someone might know of your private life.”

  “My sex life, you mean.”

  “Yes. The idea’s fairly disturbing, but it’ll have to be checked out.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “What is it?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a former lover who betrayed your confidence,” McGill said.

  Chana looked puzzled.

  “Maybe,” McGill said, “someone planted a tiny video camera in your bedroom. I looked and didn’t find one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one somewhere in the room.”

  Far from being upset, Chana relaxed visibly and shook her head.

  “That’s not it,” she told McGill.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I know,” she said, “because I don’t do any entertaining at home.”

  McGill gave her a look. She didn’t make love at home? Why not? Too messy? McGill knew his curiosity was obvious even if it remained unspoken. But this time it was the reporter who had no comment.

  Freshman Representative Brun Fleming (R-OH) was in the well of the House playing to the C-SPAN camera. The only other member present was the chair, Aeneas Papandreou, (R.-FL), eighty-two, who’d fallen asleep as the young fool in front of him droned on about the crisis facing the nation’s millet farmers, and how if price supports were not increased for these stalwart Americans, the republic’s very food supply might soon be imperiled.

  “Millet is not a glamour crop like wheat, corn, or soybeans,” Brun said. “After all, what is millet but a small, edible seed? I’ll tell you what: It’s the foodstuff for the livestock that end up on family dinner tables as steaks, chops, and roasts across this country and around the world. Its nutritional content will become essential once the FDA bans all these awful antibiotics from animal feed that are giving everybody cancer.”

  Brun wasn’t sure he had the science behind that last claim exactly right, but there were plenty of millet farmers in his district and not a single chemical company. He glanced at that old cracker from Florida asleep on the podium. It’d wake that doddering SOB right up if he suggested they divert some of his sugar-subsidy money to the millet folks. A wave of frustration and anger suddenly swept over the young congressman. It would take years for him to gather enough power to pluck the money tree for his constituents, and who knew if they’d return him to office often enough to grab that power. It just wasn’t fair.

  It was enough to … make him sing opera.

  Brun broke into Fin ch’han dal Vino from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Right there in the well of the House. On C-SPAN. He sang in a rich baritone the likes of which no one, including Brun himself, ever suspected he possessed. He didn’t miss a note. He sang with the power and projection he’d only dreamed of as a younger man … of Pavarotti in his prime. But where Maestro Mozart directed that the part be sung fortissimo, Brun, aided by the microphone on his lapel, rendered it molto fortissimo.

  Old Aeneas Papandreou levitated right out of his chair, not only waking up but experiencing a fatal heart attack as his backside plummeted back onto its red-leather seat.

  The poor freshman representative later claimed to have no recall of his performance. But C-SPAN had it on a digital file. And the whole world marveled at it.

  Chapter 10

  Galia Mindel received an invitation from Senator Roger Michaelson (D-OR) to a private lunch in his office in the Richard Russell Senate Office Building. She was assured that the meal would be kosher. In terms of the food, anyway.

  Galia arrived punctually and was met at the door to Michaelson’s suite by the senator himself. He ushered her in, and she saw that not a single staffer was present. Lunch already awaited them on a serving table, so no one from food services would bother them either. Michaelson closed the door behind her as she stepped into his personal office.

  Had Galia been twenty years younger, she would have worried that the senator had designs upon her person. Things being what they were, she knew it was the president he wanted to screw.

  Roger Michaelson had been the candidate Patricia Darden Grant had defeated in her first run for the House from Illinois. Worse for him, he’d been the heavy favorite before she got into the race. A schoolboy all-American in basketball from Oregon, he’d been recruited to play point guard at Northwestern. On the court, his physical gifts were only average, but his competitive zeal was unexcelled. He lifted his team, often the conference doormat, to fourth-place, third-place, and second-pl
ace finishes in successive years. As a junior, he was named to the All–BigTen Team. He was an academic all-American in each of his first three years. It was thought — dreamed — that he’d lead Northwestern to a conference championship in his senior year.

  In the month before the season began, however, he suffered a serious motorcycle accident. He hadn’t been foolish enough to get on a Harley; he’d been struck by one as he crossed a downtown Evanston intersection. He’d crossed with the green light; the cycle had come racing around the corner, running a red.

  The impact slammed Michaelson to the ground, fracturing his right femur and his left hip. The kid on the cycle had been drinking and wasn’t wearing a helmet. After a flight of forty-five linear feet with an apogee of more than two stories, according to witnesses, the biker landed on his head, fracturing his skull and turning all seven cervical vertebrae to mush. Death was judged to be instantaneous.

  It was also judged by many to be too kind a fate for the fool who had put the university’s star player in a wheelchair, albeit temporarily. What was permanent was Michaelson’s retirement from high-level competitive sports.

  For his part, the injured hero showed uncommon grace. He was rolled into the funeral home for the wake of the young man who’d struck him, expressed his sorrow to the bereaved mother on her terrible loss, asked everybody to think twice before ever operating a motor vehicle after drinking, and suggested that all his fans turn their anger into support for the players who would be on the court for Northwestern that year.

  All very touching. Except Galia had heard the whispers of how Michaelson had told his best friend on the team that since he wouldn’t have the pleasure of stomping that lump of shit to death himself, he was determined to get something out of the accident that had robbed him of his basketball career.

  What Roger Michaelson got was a ton of good publicity. His gesture of forgiveness was covered widely and editorialized glowingly. His beginning the school year from his wheelchair and graduating with honors were also news. Acceptance to the university’s law school passed without notice, but taking a job with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office instead of taking a lucrative job in private practice received public notice.

  So did the high-profile cases the young prosecutor handled in the coming years. Roger Michaelson was as aggressive at putting criminals behind bars as he was at feeding the ball to the open shooter. It was only natural, some years later, that the county Democrats put his name on the ballot when the North Shore congressional seat came open. A local sports hero, forgiving victim, and crime-fighting prosecutor, Michaelson was considered a mortal lock.

  Until the Republicans, at the last minute, came up with a name that had even bigger marquee value: Patti Darden, onetime supermodel and movie star, matured to be Patricia Darden Grant, wife of philanthropist Andrew Hudson Grant, and a champion in her own right for society’s less fortunate.

  Politically, there wasn’t much daylight between the two candidates. There couldn’t be. The North Shore’s political views ranged from moderately liberal to liberally moderate. People in the district already had theirs and believed that everyone else should have at least a few of life’s amenities. Hondas if not BMWs.

  The race would be decided on personal impressions. And there Roger Michaelson was at a twofold disadvantage. From puberty onward, by inclination and coaching, he had been someone who believed in drawing first blood. He was called a slasher in his hoop days. Such a temperament played well in both sports and the courts, but it looked like bullying when a man displayed aggression against a woman. That made things hard for him because Patti Grant pissed him off. She was trying to deprive him of a big prize after the damn accident had already cost him one.

  Did anyone really think he’d gone into public service for altruistic reasons? Well, of course, they did. That was what he wanted them to think. But anyone who was the least bit wised up knew what the score was. He’d been paying his dues. And he expected a payoff for himself. But here came this rich broad, a dilettante, never had to do a real day’s work in her life.

  Every time Michaelson saw her, he could hear a Harley coming around the corner.

  As a result, it took all of his self-control not to snap at her when they had their debates, not to vilify her when a reporter asked him to characterize his opponent. He never actually stuck his foot in his mouth, but his body language was enough. In the arenas where he’d competed, it was necessary to show the opposition they had reason to fear you. In his campaign against Patti Grant, all his advisors told him, he was turning off women voters right and left.

  He was losing men almost as fast. If most of them didn’t actually want to jump his opponent’s bones, they wanted to hear her tell them how wonderful they were. Roger Michaelson was certain he was every bit as smart as Patti Grant, but even he had to admit she was more verbal. More glib. As if she’d internalized all that smart dialogue she’d spoken in the movies and could conjure it at will. Meanwhile, he had to watch his every word to make sure he didn’t offend anyone and come off like an ogre. What he came off like was a stiff.

  God, he hated that woman.

  He hated her enough to consider using a smear attack against her. In the desperate final days of the campaign, somebody suggested, gee, it’d be too bad if everyone found out that Miss Prim-and-Proper had gotten knocked up out there in Hollywood — by a guy who had VD and probably used drugs, too — and had gotten rid of the baby with an abortion. Wouldn’t that be a shame?

  What it wouldn’t be was the truth. Michaelson’s people had dug into every corner of Patti Grant’s life, and there was no dirt to be found. That didn’t mean, of course, that some couldn’t be manufactured. Lying about your opponent was hardly new to Illinois politics.

  Before the dire plan could be put into effect, however, the other side found out. A spy had betrayed Michaelson, and a consultant from the opposition passed the word that if lies were spread about Patricia Grant, the truth would be told about Roger Michaelson.

  Namely, that in at least three of his big headline-grabbing convictions as state’s attorney, he had suppressed exculpatory evidence, sending three innocent men to jail, one of them to death row. Not only was Michaelson not going to smear Patti Grant, he was told, after she beat him senseless in the election, he was going to announce that he’d “discovered” the exculpatory evidence in those cases. Or the facts would be forwarded to the U.S. Attorney for consideration.

  Consideration such as making Roger Michaelson the subject of his own criminal investigation.

  Michaelson killed the smear plan, lost the election, and got out of town. He left it to underlings to clear the three men. He went back home to Oregon. Ever combative, though, he got himself elected to the U.S. Senate two years later.

  It wasn’t direct revenge, but he felt pleased that he was in the Senate, “the world’s most exclusive club,” while Patti Grant was one of 435 drones who called themselves representatives.

  That sense of superiority turned to ashes in his mouth when his old nemesis became president, an eventuality Roger Michaelson couldn’t have imagined. Not until she was nominated by her party, anyway. Then he knew better than anyone she would win the White House.

  That was when he began to plot against her.

  And now he was meeting with the hired gun who had planted the spy in his congressional campaign ten years ago. Galia Mindel.

  “Galia, how nice to see you again,” he said, shaking her hand. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Senator,” Galia said with a smile phonier than her eyelashes.

  “Wait until you see the feast I’ve laid on for you,” he said. He removed the cover from the serving tray with a flourish. A mélange of childhood aromas all but lifted Galia off her feet. Brisket of beef. New potatoes. Pickled beets. Applesauce. Mouthwatering, all of it.

  The very meal she would beg her mother to make every week.

  She’d sooner eat McGill’s donuts than take any of it from Roger Michaelson.


  “Senator, how very thoughtful of you. But I’m sorry to say I just can’t eat that way anymore. My stomach, you know. All the pressure of working in the White House. I’m afraid this is about all I can handle these days.”

  She took a plastic cup of plain yogurt from her purse.

  Michaelson silently replaced the cover of the serving tray. He offered Galia a silver spoon for her yogurt.

  “I’ll give the food to my people when they return,” he said.

  “Where are your people?” Galia asked.

  “Donating blood. We’re having a drive here on the Hill.”

  He waved Galia to a chair and sat opposite her. “Please. Enjoy your yogurt.”

  Galia took the senator at his word and ate her yogurt at a leisurely pace. She seemed to delight in every spoonful. In fact, she was taking pleasure in testing Roger Michaelson’s patience. He didn’t say a word and kept his face impassive, but he couldn’t keep his eyes from burning brighter as his anger mounted.

  She put the empty cup back in her purse, dabbed the corners of her mouth with a tissue, and returned Michaelson’s spoon to him. He twiddled it through the fingers of his right hand like a magician doing a trick with a coin, and just like magic the spoon was bent in half when he finished. Without looking, he tossed it over his shoulder. It landed cleanly in a wastebasket in a corner of the room.

  Galia was tempted to applaud, but instead she asked, “Are we ready to talk now?”

  “I had occasion to speak with General Altman, the Air Force chief of staff, recently,” Senator Michaelson said.

  “He came to you, or you went to him?”

  “I meet as a matter of course with any number of our nation’s top military officers.”

  “In your capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.”