“And you think I’d enjoy being handed around.”
“Forgive me. Yes.”
“No,” I said.
“Aw! Come on!”
“Comrade Stolkov!” said Blotskie, gutteral with excitement. “Vant voman! Vhy cannot I have voman?”
“It’s a question of nuance,” said Stolkov, not quite looking at him. “You have sloppy nuances. Well?”
“Do it, Wordy.”
I looked at her. Burned a look at her. Her eyes were glazed.
“You would no longer be under suspicion,” said Stolkov. “You know you are acquiring the profile of a cutpurse. You could snatch your reputation and your future out of the fire. The bailiff would release you your savings. All on the turn of a card.”
Blotskie spread the deck face-up, gathered it, shuffled, cut, shuffled, spread it face-down. “More wodka?” he asked me.
My eyes held hers.
“You might win!” said Stolkov.
“Darling, do it!”
My stare went neutral. I was seeing her for the first time.
“Shall I go first?” He leaned forward, pushed a card away and tipped it on its back. A king.
“Oh!” he said, sitting back with Alberta. “There goes that. I’ve been crude, haven’t I, it’s my own fault.”
No matter how polished they get they never get subtle, my look told her. “Good night,” I said, getting up. I turned to the door, took a card as I did so and tossed it behind me on the table. “Thanks for the vodka.”
“As I am a Christian!” said Battersby.
“Is gift!” cried Blotskie.
I was already gone.
Well, I mean it was time to walk away. The night air felt good. It felt good!
So much for my little experiment in altruism. The President was screwed now anyway, there was nothing I could do. Ditto Alberta.
It was time to steal away. I had connected with three women that night, surely one of them was good for a plane ticket. Get to Mexico, fly out of there.
I went about a block and hailed a taxi. I know you won’t believe me, I have already asked you to accept things as true perhaps against your better judgment, but bear with me here. I actually stepped to the curb and raised my hand, a taxi stopped and the guy let me in and asked me where I wanted to go. It was easy! Things were already looking up!
I don’t know why I get involved this way, I know how it’s going to end. The high on the way in, measured by electron bombardment, is exactly equal to the pain on the way out. Best to just cut and run.
“The Watergate,” I told him. Get the suits, make a few calls.
He put it in gear and someone rapped on the rear fender. “Hey,” she said, “wait for me!” The guy thought we were being attacked or something.
She yanked the door open and bounced in. “Were you really going without me?”
I nodded at him and take off pressed us back in the seat. “Does this mean I won?” Joy was beyond me.
“Of course you won. You always seem to. They had to find something for me to take the money in.” She showed me the bag, the cassette. Her.
“Too bad. There goes your white night.”
“Well you did try. You threw me away with such relish I’m not sure you didn’t want it that way. Would you like to have watched?”
“I can wait for the movie.”
“I don’t know why you should be so shirty. I knew you’d win. And if you hadn’t I thought you’d find some way to win me back! If I can’t trust you who can I trust?”
“Very nice. Now I feel bad.”
“I suppose you do. You’ve been tailgating Gerda all night, you must feel wretchedly apologetic.”
I took my pulse. “No, I don’t feel wretchedly apologetic.”
“Well you should. You’re all so obsessive, and I know what you’re obsessive about!” She slapped herself on the bottom line. “I have to work with what I’ve got.”
“It was certainly brave of you.”
“Brinksmanship is the game around here, I thought you’d grasped that. We had to do something.”
“How much material have you got on this?”
“Besides, a man that age under all that pressure. He’d never have been able to.”
“Well I’m sure he’d be gentleman enough not to blame you.”
Her lip trembled and she looked out at the lights.
I rolled my head to the side and watched her. She really knew how to hustle me. Her ambition encompassed me and then some. I was in the presence of a superior and I like to think I was big enough to admit it.
“Well,” I sighed, “I blew it with Bibi. I may as well settle for you.”
“Oh, Wordy,” she whispered, “I’m so far away from you now.”
15.
She had me coming and going, really.
That night in bed she was a sexual prize. Tremulous-under-the-victor’s-hands sort of thing. Winnings.
I mean, okay, you can fantasize whatever you want, I was kind of digging it, but then sometimes she turned me her prisoner-of-sadness profile and I didn’t know where I was. Bitch.
We were at it until fade-out and when I woke up the next day my ideas hadn’t clarified. The rift didn’t feel healed and we had already moved on someplace where I didn’t have the bearings.
Maybe it was just the champagne and vodka. I was feeling a little puffy.
The apartment had a post-bankruptcy look to it. Unmaintained. The bedroom was a kind of clearning we camped in with trails through the encroaching mess to the cookhouse and the latrine.
I got up and dragged myself through the purification ritual. In the living room, dressed and restored to normal voice, I called the FBI building and made an appointment to see Lewman. We had enough money now to have a lawyer do it but I figured keep it simple, get it over fast. I made tea and sat down to wait for Alberta to get ready.
There was little choice but to take the bag of bills along and when the taxi dropped us I had with me everything of significance in my life. My woman, my money and the tape. I had come to appease Justice.
We announced ourselves and stood around waiting in the lobby. Too nervous to sit. We had succeeded. We had won. It felt unsettled.
Lewman came out to us looking wary. Surprised. “Hello,” he said, guardedly.
“Here’s the tape.” I held it out.
He looked at it. At me. At Alberta. “The tape?”
“Yeah. Here it is.”
He stared at me like I was some kind of new animal.
“The tape of Mr. Wallace’s first interview with the President,” Alberta clarified. “Don’t you remember? You kept us here all night and deprived us of our money, property and reputation because you supposed we intended to blackmail the President with this. We went to a lot of trouble to find it. Not to say get it back.”
“Here it is,” I said.
He didn’t take it.
I looked at Alberta. She shifted impatiently.
“Will you come upstairs?” he said.
“Don’t tell me we’re under arrest!”
“I’d like to know a little more about this. We’ll be more comfortable upstairs.”
“Are you going to separate us again? I want a lawyer.”
“We won’t separate you,” he said. “Please.” He led the way.
The elevator, the hall, the small room. He sat us down and went out and when he came back he had his partner with him. He took a chair and pulled it up facing us and the partner perched on a desk.
Lewman said, “Now, as I understand it, you have obtained the missing recording of your meeting with the President and now wish to turn it over, is that right?”
“No wonder the country is so unsafe. It’s being policed by mental incompetents. We were going to just leave!”
“Just as well you didn’t,” said the partner. “We’ve had agents on you.”
“Well in that case you know perfectly well what we’ve been doing and you have no need to harass us with these questions.�
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“You want the tape or not?” I said.
“The real article, uh?” Lewman smiled at his partner. “We got the real article here. Wordsworth, at a conservative estimate there are now a dozen or more copies of that tape.”
“Including ours,” said the partner.
“Half the surveillance people in Washington have been following it around with long-distance microphones, the Russians ran one off before they gave it to you and the piece they played was picked up by every bugging device in the place. There are as many copies of that tape as there are interested agencies.”
“Well then what have we been doing?” said Alberta.
“That’s more or less what’s on my mind. What have you been doing?”
“Trying to get their money back,” said the partner.
“Certainly we want our assets released. What’s ours is ours. We’d like our reputation back too, though I suppose it’s too late for that. But Mr. Wallace is presently the world’s foremost fortune-teller and money is not a pressing problem. Show them, Wordy.”
I didn’t want to. There was a funny tone to this, I didn’t like the way this was going.
But Lewman followed her glance and unzipped the bag by my chair. He looked at the partner. “What’s this, Wordsworth, pocket money?”
“You will understand that we hesitated to put it in a bank.” She dripped acid. “I know you find this difficult to believe but we were trying the help the President.”
Lewman poked around at the money, looked at the partner, at me. “Doing your bit for democracy, hey Wordsworth?” He checked it again. Couldn’t quite get over it. “Is this true, Wordsworth? You a boy scout? This can’t be true, Wordsworth.”
“It’s not my favorite pose,” I said.
They looked at one another. The partner shrugged. I didn’t like this at all.
“All right,” said Lewman, “let’s go for it. Set the room up.
The partner went out and Lewman sat back and one-eyed us. After a minute he said, “I think we can make a deal.”
“A deal?” Did not like it.
“You want to help the President? We are going to give you a chance to help the President.”
“How?”
“I’m proceeding on the absolutely wild assumption that you’re sincere about this. Crazy, don’t tell me. But even if I’m wrong you still may be able to help.”
“Yeah,” I said, “fine. How?”
“You want me to tell you?”
“Tell us,” said Alberta.
The partner poked his head in, said “Lou?”
“Come with me.”
We got up and followed him along the hall to a darkened room with metal chairs and styrofoam cups on the floor. The partner was playing with a bar-size video screen. We sat down and Lewman turned his chair to face us.
“All right, now what you are about to see is strictly classified top-drawer eyes-only confidential, am I getting through? Can you keep a secret, Wordsworth? Mrs. Haines?”
“Well that’s what we’ve been trying to do!”
“Maybe you shouldn’t show us,” I said. My throat was tight. I didn’t know what they were going to lay on us but it could only be another step in the story of my progressive entrapment.
He ignored me. “We strongly suspect that there is a plot in motion to discredit the President. Not by divulging improper behavior he may have engaged in, I don’t mean that. As far as we know he has never committed any such behavior, and until your tape went missing there was nothing like that to bring forward.
“No, this is something subtle. Something insidious. This is a program of image assassination. The people we are dealing with have mounted a deliberate covert campaign to make the President look bad.
“Now: why? Of course it’s anyone’s inalienable right to do that, don’t get me wrong. This is America. But we don’t even have an election coming up!
“No. What we do have on our plates right now is the arms talks. These people, whoever they are, are trying to undermine the arms talks.
“How do we know this? Because word is filtering back from the tables that the Russians are raising questions about the responsibility of American leadership. They’re being difficult about certain things and if they can raise questions about the responsibility of American leadership they’ll have grounds to refuse to negotiate in those areas, you follow?”
Snow and static. The President waving from the door of Air Force One. Steps out and, lifting his arms as for flight, flops head-first out of frame. We pick him up in a clutch-and-grab bounce-and-slide front-rolling descent that deposits him at the foot of the steps.
Here was that clutziness that, fairly or unfairly, had become associated with him. He’d be out on the dance floor at some fund-raiser plugging into himself as it were and someone would grab him and apply the Heimlich manoever. Couldn’t get the top off the childproof aspirins, that sort of thing.
“I’ve seen this,” I said.
“Oh yeah? Let’s have another look.”
Rewind. The President waves in slow motion, though at this speed it’s obvious his eyes are on his smile coach, steps outside and freezes.
“See this?” Lewman pointed with his pen.
And, yes, the President’s toe slowly disappears between the stair truck and the door and does not re-emerge until he is well into his dive.
“The driver swears he had it in flush with the aircraft. Nothing else in his record. Left the brake on and got out to watch the President. Of course there was a crowd, anybody could have reached in.”
The slow-motion plunge, the underwater scramble, the bobsled run. The President on his back. Then, like a bug that always lands that way he executes some awkward semi-backward maneuver for getting over frontways and looks up, still smiling.
An unsteady shot from a shoulder camera of someone with his back to us, elbow out. As we move in it becomes clear that it is the President picking his nose, fishing for something that keeps slipping off the hook, twisting in to the second knuckle and palpitating the nostril. He catches sight of the camera and, smiling, hides his hand in his pocket, the finger wiggling visibly.
“That wound up on CBS News. We don’t know who took it.”
The President officiating at a function. Amid beaming onlookers he stretches forward to cut a vast and ornate cake and, so quickly it seems like an edit, is lying face-down in it. Unsure how to extricate himself he finally sinks hand-shaped holes in the icing and resurrects as something monstrous and human-eyed. He licks his lips.
“Butter on the floor. Smeared in a box-X pattern.”
Arlington Cemetery. A military burial. As the coffin is lowered into the grave the President salutes and brings his hand down with a grim snap. A gun salute goes off behind him and he jumps, loses his footing, slips into the grave.
“No carpet,” said Lewman. “Where’s the carpet? Where’s the astroturf?”
Invisible until the camera advances to the edge of the hole, the President is covered in blue clay and trying not to stand on the casket, a delicacy that frustrates attempts to pull him out. A coat is lowered and the President grapples up on it until it tears and his foot goes through the lid of the casket, wedged between the metal panels. He is unable to pull it out. When he does it is without the shoe. He kneels on the casket and, reaching in to the shoulder, gropes for the shoe.
“He’s certainly an oaf,” said Alberta.
“That’s just it!” said Lewman. He held his palms up and jerked them. “Nobody’s that stupid!”
The President waving from Air Force One. Smiles, steps onto the platform, wavers. The stairs are rolling away and he is caught, still smiling, with a foot on each landmass, does wobbly splits as the gap grows, strains for the receding handrail and, a kneeling Secret Serviceman holding each foot, hangs hammocked between the door and the railing. When he must finally release the latter he hangs upside-down, a wriggling starfish.
“Doesn’t like planes,” I said.
Talking-h
ead shot. “We’re certainly following through on our current initiative on this and, while I can’t promise an early resolution one can at least hope to temper optimism with the realization of our long-term commitment to the more meaningful aspect of our participation in the process of—” He stops and studies the teleprompter.
Lewman shook his head.
Other shots, other scenes. Clips from speeches, sentences the President starts along and then gives up on, the sort of grammatical gaffes he was known for. I mean he makes it up as he goes along just like everybody, right?
“No,” said Lewman. “It’s al1 written on the roller.”
A state dinner. The President bites into a cherry tomato and squirts it on the bosom of the British prime minister’s wife.
“Who put cherry tomatoes on his plate? Nobody else had cherry tomatoes!”
Edit. He moves to the podium and as the applause dies puts his hand in his pocket for his notes. He puts his other hand in his other pocket. He puts his first hand in his hip pocket, his coat pocket, his breast pocket on the other side. He puts his other hand in his other hip pocket, his other coat pocket, his other breast pocket on the other side. He looks at the camera. “Heh heh.” He puts his hand in his pocket…
Edit. The prime minister at the podium rebuking critics of his policies. “You can tell a fool by his laugh,” he says. The President laughs.
New shot. The President is distracted as he sips, pours beer on his shirt, puts the mug down so hard he smashes it through a glass coffee table and tries madly to catch the pieces. When he stands his tie is caught in his fly. His eyes pop and he rips the crotch out of his pants.
But he was supposed to be a little maladroit, that was part of his image! And there was a conspiracy-theory gleam in Lewman’s eye as he watched, I couldn’t be sure.
On the other hand he had a case. When the material was assembled like this a pattern did seem to emerge. Either the President was being deliberately embarrassed or he was an incredible zero.
There was this drum salesman I used to see in India, walked around with all these drums tied to him. Sat down with some awkwardness and if he fell over it sounded like a cartoon accident. That was the President.
The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy Page 18