by Joe Haldeman
“Jesus Christ,” Braxn slid the old-fashioned horn-rims off his face and knuckled an eye in a well-known gesture. “Mana.”
“Sir?”
“I’ve got mana. Anthropologist’s word.” Fred looked at Braxn in a subtly different way. You ignored old Harriman while you were Ashby’s right hand; surprised to find out that he might be more than just a harmless puppet? “He wants to be first in line while the magic’s still fresh…or—something, I read about it somewhere.” He looked thoughtfully at Fred’s image. He knows I’m backing off. Does he know I know he knows— “Hell, send him in. Call the plant and have ’em turn the airco all the way up. Make it as noisy as possible.” He grinned sweetly at the screen. “Maybe the old bastard forgot his hearing aid!”
A Secret Service man conspicuously armed with a high-energy laser tube opened the old thick oak door and ushered in Arthur Tweed. He was an old man who in the right light could have looked like an old woman, shoulder-length stringy silver hair against wrinkled, craggy features. But he never stood in the light that way, not in public, any more than he would allow his shoulders to slump or his gait to falter.
He strode through the door not at all like an octogenarian kept up six hours past his bedtime. He crinkled a smile at Braxn that lasted until the door whispered shut. Then eighty-three years dropped like a mantle on his frail body, and the grin became a winsome spinster’s smile. Braxn ignored this as he had ignored the college-boy routine. Just another part of the act; the old man knew that not even politicians were immune to pity.
“Good of you to see me at this hour, Ross.”
Braxn raised an eyebrow. Tweed had known Harriman for eighteen years, and had never used his first name before. He waited just a fraction of a second longer than was polite, before replying, “My pleasure…Senator. Please pull up a chair.” Purely rhetorical; the man looked as if he couldn’t pull up a weed without keeling over. He perched himself on the edge of an overstuffed chair to Braxn’s right.
“I’ve already offered you my official condolences, but please let me…” Braxn cut him short with a wave of the hand.
“Skip it. You didn’t like the old bastard any more than I did.”
“Uh…huh!” The senator slid back in the chair. “Huh! Huh!” It took Braxn a second to realize he was laughing. “That’s what I like—huh! huh!—a man who speaks his mind—huh!”
Just what you don’t like, you old trickster. Tweed reached into his vest pocket and extracted a short black Toscani cigar. The sulphurous vapor from the wooden match was balm to the nose, compared to what followed. Providentially, the airco cut in at just the right moment, loudly. Tweed looked at him through narrowed eyes.
“Can’t be feeling the heat, Ross?”
“No.” He pushed an immaculate silver ashtray across the desk to Tweed. “Just a social visit, or…”
“Mnh. Well. No. That is. A bill, the Selective Service renewal, Ashby was going to sign it tomorrow…”
“Really?” Braxn smiled.
“Yes, damn it!” He shot forward and leaned back again. “He…we talked him into it.”
“Tripling the draft call?”
“Of course. If we don’t, West Pakistan’s bound to go under.”
“Bullshit.” Braxn took a cigarette out of the ornate case on the desk and waved it alight. “Ashby never believed that. If you believe it, you’ve been listening to your own speeches too uncritically.”
“Huh! Nevertheless. I think you may want to reevaluate your own position, Ross.”
“Cut-and-dried, Arthur. It’s another Vietnam. We’re pulling out as soon as—”
“Ross, you were a military man, weren’t you?”
“You know damn well I was. West Point.”
“Oh yes. Purple Heart. Silver Star. For bravery. In Vietnam.”
“That’s right.”
“You were a real crackerjack combat officer.”
“Get to the point.”
“Yes.” He blew a leisurely ring that floated a foot and broke up in the air currents. “A man has to have military service before he can even think of running for office. It’s the American way. Combat, preferably. I was in Korea, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Yes. A, uh, man came to my office tonight. With a series of photographs.”
“How intriguing.”
“The man was your copilot, Ross. On the mission when your helicopter went down and you won the Silver Star, defending it.”
“And?”
“The photographs indicate that you were not shot down, but were grounded by mechanical failure. And that your wound was self-inflicted.”
“Get out.”
“Now just a minute, Ross…I don’t for a second believe…”
“Out.”
“I was just…”
“Listen, Tweed. Any military doctor can look at that wound, even after thirty years, and tell you that it came from a .50-caliber machine-gun bullet. A man can no more ‘self-inflict’ a .50-caliber wound than he can shoot himself with a howitzer.”
“Ross, Ross, I know that. I told you, I don’t for a moment believe him. But you know as well as I that once the accusation is made, any—”
“What do you, does he, want?”
“He’s a fanatic militarist, Ross. He wants you to sign the draft bill.”
Braxn laughed, one short bark. “I’ll think about it. Tell him I’ll think about it.” He rose and glowered down at the little old man. “It was a pleasure speaking to you, Senator.”
Tweed levered himself out of the chair and laid the smoldering cigar in the little silver bowl. “I hope you’ll…be in touch with me.”
“Good-bye, Senator.” When the man had disappeared behind the mass of oak, Braxn punched the phone. “What do we have on the old Tweed?”
“Almost nothing, sir. He has a mistress, but he’s had her for thirty years. She’s ugly as sin.”
“That’d gain him more votes than it’d cost him. Put some of the staff to work on him. Then you get some sleep. I’m going to do the same.”
Braxn left his office and, accompanied by the ubiquitous Secret Service guard (not even the White House was considered safe, after the audacious Agnew assassination attempt), retired to his personal quarters. At least the guard stayed outside the door.
“Thanks, Roger.” He closed the door gently so as not to awaken Harriman’s wife, presumably asleep in the master bedroom. They wouldn’t be moving upstairs to the executive apartments, of course, until Elizabeth Ashby had moved out.
He went into the study and sat at the huge desk. The antique overstuffed swivel chair groaned and squeaked a pleasant fugue of old bearings and new leather. He started at the top of the big stack of papers in the in box.
“Ross?” Standing in the door, in the half-light from the desk lamp, Linda Harriman looked almost pretty. She stepped closer, and the illusion vanished.
“Morning, darling.” Braxn watched her approach, putting on Harriman’s smile of genuine affection. Thirty years before, people had whispered “political suicide” when Ross went out and married the homeliest girl in Madison society. But the years that had blunted the fragile beauty of her contemporaries had been kind to her, softening planes and juts into gentle curves.
“You shouldn’t be up.” She took the cigarette from his mouth and laid it in the ashtray. “It’s going to be a hard day tomor—today.”
“I got a nap earlier.” He half turned back to the desk.
She tugged a curl of his hair. “Liar.” She smiled. “Try to get some sleep before you jump into the fray again.”
“Okay.” He chuckled and squeezed her hand good-bye.
When she was gone, Braxn started to riffle through the hundred pages of synopses Ashby’s staff had prepared: summations of bills, personal requests, appointments, all needing action in the next week or ten days. Luckily, Harriman had a reputation for being a fast reader (with regrettably shallow comprehension).
In a half hour he had mem
orized the synopses and decided on tentative courses of action. He reached for the phone and tapped out Fred’s combination.
An unfamiliar face peered out at him and seemed about to phrase a nasty comment, then saw who he was. “Oh! Mr. President—Let me get Mr. Aller.”
“Don’t wake him up on my account. Just checking on something.”
“He’s awake, sir, I’ll get him.” After a minute, Fred Aller filled the screen with his unkempt sparse white hair, salt-and-pepper stubble, and piercing grey eyes.
“Damn it, Fred, I told you to get some—”
“I know, sir. Something big came up.”
“About what?”
“Might be something we can use on Tweed.”
“And I wasn’t called?” Braxn growled.
“Mr. President, I thought you were asleep, too; you need it as much as I do.” His eyes clicked that quarter of an inch out of line that showed he was staring at the screen. “Maybe you didn’t need it as much. Still have TV makeup on?”
“No, hell no. Got some uppers from the doc. What’s the scoop on Tweed?”
“Same thing he wants to pull on you. Of course we have spies—”
“What!”
“—not in your office, sir, in his. Holographic infrared laser bug, with its optical locus in the glass over an eighteenth-century painting that he thinks has been hanging in front of his desk since the Roosevelt administration. The first, Teddy.”
“Same thing…his war record?”
“That’s right, sir, but in his case it’s more or less true. He was commanding a frontline infantry platoon in Korea, and got fragged, hit by a—”
“—grenade, yeah, I know what ‘fragged’ means.”
“Rifle grenade. Anyhow, he was evacuated to the rear for treatment, where they taped him up and then sent him to a hospital in Japan, diagnosing neuresthenia.”
“Shell shock?”
“Right. That could cost him a few vet votes right there. Lots of people think that shell shock is just a nice word for cowardice. This isn’t on his medical record, by the way: he covered his tracks pretty well.
“But that’s not half of it. He lounged around Japan for a month—whoring it up—and then got transferred back Stateside, where he got a Pentagon job, reporting to Walter Reed once a month for examination.”
“I don’t know,” Braxn said, “it’s good stuff, but it’s too diffuse. An awful lot of people wouldn’t see anything particularly reprehensible about any of that.”
“Ah, sir, but the clincher…the way he got out of Japan. The second-in-command in that hospital was his uncle—whom he later got appointed to a high place in the Public Health Service…a post he held for only three months before being discharged for gross incompetence and dishonesty.”
“Hah!” Braxn slapped a palm on the desk. “That might do it. Can you get me a package of evidence? Xeroxes and such, before noon?”
“Already made up, sir.”
“Wonderful. Call the old bastard’s secretary and tell him…the president desires the senator’s company for lunch tomorrow.”
The White House chef had prepared a mild Chicken Kiev, in deference to Tweed’s aging entrails, which the two men washed down with a white Bordeaux, 1983; a good year, but not quite as good as the most junior senator would have gotten, had he belonged to the president’s party.
Both men were in formal black, as, soon after lunch, they would have to get into their respective black limousines and join the cortege bearing Ashby’s remains down Pennsylvania Avenue Mall (cleared of pedestrian traffic for the occasion), twisting around to the Lincoln Memorial, and across the bridge to Arlington Cemetery. Braxn reflected that Tweed wouldn’t have any trouble looking appropriately sad, once he saw the contents of the manila folder sitting in the backseat of his waiting limousine.
After lunch Braxn escorted Tweed to the secluded atrium that Ashby had had built, just after his inauguration. It was a pleasant green place to go to relax and was incidentally filled with disruptors and noise generators in every frequency, making it theoretically impossible to bug. The slight hiss and hum where the little watchdogs spilled over into audible frequencies was nicely masked by a soothing miniature waterfall.
Braxn produced brandy and offered the old man a Havana.
“No thanks, Ross. I used to smoke ’em—before you were getting started in politics…but Castro. Had to lose my taste for them.” He accepted the brandy, though. Braxn lit up a Havana and Tweed ignited a black-rope Toscani.
“A pity to rush a good cigar,” Braxn said, taking a deep puff and letting the smoke trickle out of one corner of his mouth. “But I suppose we have some business.”
“Business, yes. Yes.”
“Your, uh, your photographer friend…”
“Yes, hum, he says he’s having bids submitted by TIME/LIFE and—”
“Damn!” Braxn jumped out of his chair.
“Calm down, calm down, Ross. You aren’t implicated yet. All they know is that it’s a scandal involving a ‘high government official.’ They’ll be bidding against the Times, WPI, and Scanlan Syndicate.”
“And if I comply with your—his demand, what does he tell the firm that wins the bid?”
Tweed chuckled, a sound somewhere between a death rattle and a pant. “Don’t worry, Ross. We have an alternate—”
“To throw to the wolves. So another Liberal Democrat, instead of me, gets the gaff. An unattractive dilemma, Senator.”
“No, no, no…not a Lib, Ross. One of my own.”
“Not Sam!”
Tweed answered with a death’s-head grin wreathed in grey smoke.
“God! You are—you’re the most…” Braxn sat down and puffed his cigar back to life. He spun around to stare at the manicured lawn and smile.
He came back around, puffing away, staring at Tweed through a blue fragrant nimbus…then he jerked the cigar out of his mouth and laughed, one explosive cough. Tweed jumped.
“Tweed. Oh, Tweed…I don’t know how many really big mistakes you’ve made in your career, but this one has got to take the prize. You don’t lean on a president, not this way.”
“On the contrary,” he said quietly, “I’ve made a career of it.”
“There’s a manila folder on the seat of your limousine. You go down and read it, and then decide whether you—”
Tweed smiled. “Bribery?”
“What a coarse word. No, no money involved, just a trade. Something similar to the commodity you hold.”
“Impossible, Ross. There’s no way for you to trade your political future for mine. I won’t be running next—”
“Bullshit. You’ve been threatening to retire for twenty years. You could no more stop running than an animal caught in a forest fire.”
Tweed finished off his brandy in one gulp and stood up. “You young…look, Ross, you’re out of your league. Why don’t you just—”
“Why don’t you just read the damn thing, and we’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Maybe. I may have an appointment with the ladies and gentlemen of the press.” Tweed turned on his heel and stalked out.
Braxn felt a coldness in the pit of his stomach and was startled to realize that it was fear. He’d never been afraid before, and now he was afraid of this decrepit old man. He swallowed some brandy, and the fire fed the coldness.
“Mr. President?”
“Ah, come in, Fred. Have a drink: it’s going to be a long ride.”
“Thank you, sir.” He poured a couple of fingers and sat in the chair Tweed had just vacated. “I’ve made up a list, here, you’ll want to check.” He handed Braxn a sheet of paper. “No banquet, of course, after the state funeral. These are just the people we’re inviting to dinner.”
Braxn tried to study the list, the representatives of some twenty countries. But he couldn’t seem to focus his mind on it. Suddenly the world split, and he knew what his father had been talking about. It was as if only the left side of his body was here in the atrium, talking to Fre
d—and the right side was walking down the steps in front of the White House, inhabiting an old body full of aches and twinges, looking at the cherry blossoms with a rheumy, jaundiced eye, nose and mouth full of bitter Toscani cigar smoke.
That young upstart that pup Harriman he thinks he can scare me, ME for shit’s sake I ought to—
Chauffeur opening rear door, touching his cap. “Thank you, Harry.”
“God knows I’d like to invite Ramos,” Fred was saying. “But if Cuba comes, then what are we going to do with Germany? And if Germany and Cuba get together—”
Tweed took a deep sniff of the musty felt smell and was grateful for the thousandth time that he had had that nasty fake leather upholstery taken out. The crisp yellow envelope violated the grey fuzzy calm of the interior. I’m not going to look at it. I’m not. We’ll just go ahead the way we planned and the devil take…
“I don’t see why we can’t have two dinners,” Braxn said, “or a tea and a dinner. They’re all political realists, they can appreciate the situation we’re in—look, we can have a tea right after the funeral, with Cuba, Britain, Canada—here, the ones I put an X by, the ones who are unequivocally—”
Tweed picked up the envelope and broke the plain seal on it. The engine started. Hell, might as well see—
“—and then the dinner would be a formal protocol affair; the unaligned, the sceptical, the ones who are outright enemies—”
“You know, sir, it’s unconventional, but it might just—”
—my uncle Jesus Christ I didn’t know he was my wife’s uncle until after I got out and he came and told me he’d blow it all up if I didn’t give him—
“I know it’d work, God damn it…sorry, Fred, I’ve been under a terrific—”
—and he fucked up and I had to get rid of, quick court-martial, insane asylum, covered my tracks so well hadn’t even thought GOD MY ARM—“Harry!—Stop—my—arm—”
“What’s wrong, sir, what—”
“Nothing, Fred, a, a…spasm, in my arm, fatigue—”
Paralyzing pain creeping past the shoulder, crawling Oh Jesus Jesus God another heart attack stop smoking fuck drinking Jesus fuck “God—Harry—”