By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

“Why did you let me stay on so late?”

  She had kept her hand on the doorknob. “A number of reasons, Charley. Let’s just say I was curious. I wanted to see if you’d changed any, or if I’d remembered you wrong.”

  “And?”

  “You haven’t really changed one bit, Charley.” She looked down at the nearly empty brandy glass in his hand. “Not one drop. If you’re desperate tonight, there’s a bar in the family room next door. Don’t take any more of the good scotch. George will ask. And, please, be out of here as early as possible.”

  “That’s all? That’s it for us?”

  “Washington’s my real home now. I’ll be there tomorrow, where I really belong. It’s been grand seeing you again, Charley. Just like old times.” She smiled, as she might have when she had been a model during college. “Good night. And good-bye.”

  And she was gone.

  He gulped down the last of the brandy, then waited a discreet minute or two before going into the next room and taking a bottle of the most expensive whiskey he could find, a rare, unblended scotch with an unpronounceable Gaelic name on the label. He thanked Calendiari silently. Then, after a sip of the smoky, foul stuff, he thought better of gratitude. A second sip was only slightly better. He could hear water running somewhere upstairs.

  Returning to the guest room, he turned out the lights, undressed, and pulled a chair up to the window, which faced east. Trees and shrubbery obscured any view of the bay itself, but there was a diamond dust of lights on the opposite shore and enough of rising moonlight to limn the distant ridgeline.

  The drinking had made him slightly giddy, appropriate for the absurdity of his situation. His “Jimmy Moon Show” appearance had been black comedy, rendering him ridiculous. He would be spending the night alone in the house of the most alluring of his long-lost loves—to no purpose, separated by an entire floor. He’d have Charlene’s and doubtless Calendiari’s anger to contend with nonetheless. His only consolation was this connoisseur’s whiskey he could not abide and a sweep of night beauty outside his window he was too sleepy to appreciate.

  The sheets were silk or satin—in any event, blissful. He sank his head back against the pillow. But before his eyes had fully closed he heard the click of the door opening and looked to see the silhouette of a woman’s form just as it closed again. He heard the sound of her robe slipping from her body.

  He started to speak, but she moved her hand to cover his lips. He pulled her head to him and kissed her gently, as she had liked to be kissed when still a girl in college. His hand went to her breast. Then he fell back.

  “Maddy, I’m sorry. I’ve had so much to drink.”

  “Don’t you worry, Charles Dresden,” she said, sliding over him and sitting back as she rubbed his chest with her hands. “Madeleine Margrit Anderson will attend to your every lovely little care and need. Miss Anderson has managed to learn some very interesting things in her years. It’s one of the niceties of married life, the many interesting things you can learn.” She moved her hands farther down his body. “You just leave everything to your enchanting blue-eyed Ophelia.”

  The night beauty filled his mind as he closed his eyes, tightly, his senses overwhelmed by the ultimate intoxication. He tumbled and flew and drifted through a soft darkness. He almost slept.

  “There then,” she said, finally, lying closely against him. “It’s done. The happy ending.”

  “I love you.”

  He held her tightly, his nostrils full of the scent of sex and her perfume and her cleanliness, a great happiness derived from the warmth of her small breasts against his chest, the coolness of her cheek against his, the gentleness of her hair against his brow. What a perfect creation she still was. Exhibit A in his case against mortality. He stretched out his body full against her and let his head fall slightly back against the pillow.

  “You’re a wanton,” he said, stroking her cheek.

  She murmured, “Only on very rare occasions.”

  “This was all too rare an occasion.”

  “It’s the only one there’s going to be. Let’s go to sleep now, Charley.”

  “We can’t. I want to talk to you.”

  She murmured again. “In a little bit.”

  “A little bit is all there is. If we fall asleep now it will be morning before we know it. You’re going to Washington. Please.”

  “It means I won’t be able to fall asleep in your arms. I used to fall asleep in your arms in that apartment in San Francisco.”

  “Most usually with all your clothes on.”

  “Not now.”

  “Not now. I took a bottle of scotch. I’m going to have another drink. Do you want one?”

  “You truly think me wanton. God, Charley, the way you drink. The liver’s our most forgiving organ, but when it finally turns on you, I’m told there’s nothing more horrible.”

  “I made a promise to myself that if a doctor ever tells me my life is threatened by it I’ll stop drinking.”

  “And?”

  “One of these years I must see a doctor.”

  He poured them both whiskeys. She took hers without further objection.

  “I asked you why you let me stay so long,” he said. “Now I have another question.”

  “Why I’m here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I more or less told you before, Charley. For a long time now I’ve wondered if I’d cheated myself out of something when I left you to marry George. You two are the only men I ever had, and you were so long ago.”

  “And George is getting rather bald.”

  “You’re being rude and loutish, Charley. George was and is a very attractive man, more agreeable than you in many ways. It was always understood that I was going to marry him. I could think of no logical reason not to. Then along you came out of nowhere and upset everything, kicked everything sky-high. It was the craziest time of my life. Gloriously romantic. But it was very unpleasant too. That time with you was very disorderly, and painful. When we had our falling out it only made sense to go back to George.”

  “You two were married within a week.”

  “Yes. All very hasty. To Henry’s consternation, completely unarranged. We just drove up to Stateline. Eloped. From time to time, though not very much in recent years, I’ve wondered if I was too hasty, made a mistake. If, as I said, I cheated myself. If there was something between us, something in you, I should have tried to hold on to. I went through this whole miserable evening now trying to decide whether I really wanted to find out.”

  “And did you?”

  He could sense her smile. “George is the better lover, whiskey or no, cherie. He really works at it. But there is a tenderness in you, Charley. Something a little poetic. I really did cheat myself, I think. Maybe a lot. I’m glad I found out. I don’t know why you were bent on being such a rakehell when you were young. Going through so many women. Being such a swine sometimes.”

  “I’ve tried to find a way to apologize to you for that awful night with your roommate. I’ve forgotten her name.”

  “You bounder. It was Corrinne.”

  “Whatever happened to her?”

  “After a couple of years of sitting on men’s laps, and other places, she got on a plane for Las Vegas one day with no money and a fifth of gin in her purse. I guess she survived, but I hate to think how.”

  “And the other roommate, the one who was going to marry that folk singer?”

  “She didn’t. He kept her a little while after he became famous, and then he stopped.”

  “There was another girl. The nicest. Very worldly. I used to sit on the edge of the tub and drink martinis while she bathed.”

  “She lives in the San Jose suburbs. Barbecue, cable television, four children, the lot.”

  “And you are Mrs. Senator George Calendiari.”

  Maddy stood up, stared out the window a moment, then looked down at him. “Very much so.” She eased herself onto his lap, and drank, without coughing. “I’ve never cheated on my hu
sband until now, if you’ll believe that. Me a Washington wife and all. I never have. He’s cheated on me. I don’t mean sex really, though out on the campaign trail I’m sure that’s happened once or twice. He cheats in the usual congressional way, by living this separate political life that takes up so goddamn much time, days and days sometimes, weeks. He even goes on those funeral trips abroad with the vice president. Very seldom do I get to come along.”

  She nestled against Dresden’s shoulder.

  “There’s life in the old dame yet, Charley, but I think I’m down a quart. I worked it out, worked it up in my mind that I owed myself a fling, one fling, c’est tout. Rien de plus. Now, while I’m still in flower, and not when I’m older and haggard and someone’s doing me a favor—or looking for one through me from my husband.” She paused, rubbing her head against his cheek. “That it could be with you, Charley, the only other man there’s ever really been in my life, that made it just about perfect.”

  “And safe. The past, not the future.”

  “I think I probably had my mind made up the moment I let you in the door.”

  “You had a guest.”

  “That poor woman. Her husband is more obsessed with his job than George is. Stephanie gets what’s left over, and it isn’t very much. She sells real estate, plays tennis, drinks a fifth a day, reads a novel a day, and sleeps with almost anyone who comes along.”

  “How do you cope?”

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps I really haven’t until now.”

  “Are you in love with me?”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice? No, Charley. I just wanted a happy ending. That’s all we get, isn’t it? Endings. All we can ask is that they’re happy ones. We had no happy ending, you and I. I walked into that kitchen all those years ago and walked out and wanted to throw things and throw up and scream.”

  “And a week later, I read about your elopement in the Santa Linda Press-Journal. They tried to treat it as a normal society wedding. The bride wore peau de sois and tennis shoes. I laughed.”

  “No, you didn’t. You cried. Confess.”

  “Yes. I cried.”

  “Happy ending, Charley. Happy memory. Happy night.” She kissed him, sweetly and gently.

  “And for this we must thank the president for getting killed.”

  She gripped his arm. “I think that whole idea of yours is ghastly and ghoulish and appalling and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She studied him, the blue in her eyes very evident in the brightening moonlight. She still wore her hair ribbon and the color was the same. “I don’t want to think of you as someone on ‘The Jimmy Moon Show.’”

  “I’m not. I’m someone on the Charley Dresden Show. I just wish I knew how it was going to come out.”

  She leaned forward to kiss him again, but he held her back.

  “Wait,” he said, and reached and untied the hair ribbon, pulling it gently away from her head and folding it in his hand. “Something of you.”

  “All right. You may have it. A souvenir of the past, brought up to date. But nothing to do with the future, Charley.”

  “‘And all I loved I love alone.’”

  “What?”

  “Something from Poe.”

  “You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand. Sadly.”

  Another kiss, then she held him closely, her loosened hair against his face. “Good night, Charley. That’s all there is. There isn’t any more.” She slipped away, pausing at the door. “Good-bye, Charley. I’m going to have a very pretty sleep now. Please be gone when I awake.” She vanished in silence.

  When she had left he dressed hurriedly, slipping the hair ribbon in his suit coat pocket. He took the whiskey. He felt quite heady, a smitten schoolboy.

  The front door clicked, locking behind him, causing a momentary pang, but he hurried on. Despite the cold, he left the MG’s top down. He wanted to stay heady, but also awake. The car’s engine started sluggishly, but once all cylinders were functioning, he gunned it vigorously, reversing the roadster up the drive and onto the road with great clamor, then roaring off into the mountainous night, leaving sound and echoes to dwindle in her hearing until there was nothing but silence and emptiness and sleep.

  Dresden drove rapidly, using the danger as another spur to his alertness. It was an unfamiliar road, and he was constantly steering hard to make the curves. There were a number of cutoffs that led down to the broad freeway that followed the shore of the bay below, but he ignored them to remain on the heights, sustaining his ecstatic lover’s mood with the sweeping view and whiskey. He turned on the radio, not minding the loud music it produced, even turning the volume nearly to maximum.

  He’d managed more than forty miles before the radio racket was interrupted by a scheduled newscast, the announcer’s voice booming loudly over the engine noise. The lead story was about the president. For an instant Dresden harbored the egocentric notion that it might have something to do with his “Jimmy Moon” broadcast, but it was something more consequential than that. For the first time since the shooting the president of the United States had granted a radio interview. That’s what the newscaster said. It had been conducted over the telephone with a pool reporter from one of the networks. The president’s voice had a painful croak to it, but it was his. The man that Charley Dresden had just sworn was dead to several hundred thousand television viewers was suddenly there in the dashboard, chatting warmly with the American people—in pain, he said, but alive and getting better.

  Charley stared, horrified, at the radio dial, for too long. The MG hurtled onto the shoulder and the right front fender caught the guardrail and crumpled, the light from the headlamp disappearing. There was a great screeching and scraping from the side of the car, and the sound of the rear bumper falling off. Then the guardrail ended. By the time the MG bumped to a stop in the slender, sloping ditch that came after, the radio was no longer working.

  9

  Vice President Atherton did not simply pace his White House office, he prowled it like a zoo creature, making a circuit, moving around his desk, striding back and forth in front of the fireplace, sitting and rising, consumingly impatient. He ordered in Shawcross, Neil Howard, and Mrs. Hildebrand, singly and together, issued them commands, countermanded the commands, ordered them out, ordered them back again. Through it all, he placed phone calls, to nearly every member of the cabinet, to Admiral Elmore at the CIA, to the telephone number he’d been given for the president’s makeshift command center at Thurmont, Maryland, and even to the Pentagon war room, where he tried to get patched through to Camp David, with no success.

  At length, as Mrs. Hildebrand was making shorthand notes of a rambling stream of objections he was going to raise when and if he ever made contact with the presidential party, a buzzer sounded and the red light on his scrambler phone began flashing. It was Bushy Ambrose, who had had himself patched through the Pentagon war room to reach the vice president on the scrambler.

  “Let me introduce myself,” said Atherton. “I am the vice president of the United States. I’m one of the fellows who carries around a ‘Gold Codes’ card that lets me start nuclear war if the notion takes me. I’m the fellow who, according to your representatives, is in charge here at the White House. I have asked politely and otherwise to speak with the president for I don’t know how many days now, but have been told it’s utterly impossible because of the state of his health and for reasons of national security. So what do I hear at seven thirty-five A.M. this morning on CBS radio? The president of the United States chatting merrily away with some reporter! The government of the United States can wait. Interviews come first!”

  Ambrose was uncharacteristically calm. “It was one reporter selected as pool, Mr. Vice President. It was over the telephone. The tape was made available to everyone. It was early in the morning because that’s when the president has been at his best and this morning he said he was up to it. He felt it was imperati
ve that he do this as soon as possible to reassure the American people he was all right. Like Ronald Reagan signing that legislation in the recovery room.”

  Atherton realized he was so agitated he was breathing like an asthmatic. He sat down behind his desk and waved Mrs. Hildebrand out of the room. He took two deep breaths, then resumed speaking, much more in control of himself.

  “There are rumors that the president made calls around the Hill yesterday.”

  “He made one call. To Senator Rollins, who is one of his closest friends.”

  “A nice chummy chat. Did he find time to talk about the farm bill? The farm lobby’s taking the Capitol by storm, and we haven’t been able to raise a finger. How about the spending bills? Four of them came through conference yesterday with twenty-two billion dollars added.”

  “Senator Rollins is in command of the situation.”

  “Senator Rollins is preoccupied with the party leadership fight.”

  “He is looking out for the president’s interests.”

  Atherton stood up. “So am I. I presume the president’s interests include the talks in Geneva. The Soviets have asked if we don’t want to suspend them. Our ambassador has asked Crosby for permission to come back for consultations.”

  “Telex him to stay put. We don’t want the American people thinking the arms control talks are going to break down because of this.”

  “But they are breaking down because of this! And it’s not exactly been quiet in Central America, either. Have you had any access up there to the cable traffic out of Honduras lately? They killed more than a dozen people in Tegucigalpa last night. Assassinations. Leftists. One of those Hughes Five Hundred black job helicopters we have down there dropped another crater bomb on the Managua airport. Someone firebombed two villages in El Salvador.”

  “Mr. Vice President. It was the understanding that we were to handle national security matters from up here. The secretary of defense …”

  “Do you want me to shut down the State Department? We’re getting official protests! Cuernavaca’s not the only place Managua sends telegrams, you know!”