There was a groan on the other end. “Geedeon. Ivan told me you are now the boyfriend of one of the girls. Is this true?”
“Well now, I think ‘boyfriend’ would be putting it rather…I have undertaken to minister to her. Poor little soul. She is young and very far from home.”
“Geedeon. Are you fucking this putana?”
“What a thing to say, Massimo! And you an intimate of His Holiness! Shame on you, sir, shame! This conversation is over. Good day to you, sir!”
Gideon hung up and wiped his brow and patted his vest pocket, which once again bulged reassuringly with his gold watch, returned to him by his darling.
He considered. He must tell Olga not to discuss their relationship with others. He was planning to make “this putana”-as Massimo had so coarsely put it-Mrs. Gideon Payne. But he preferred that announcement come in the newspaper, in the wedding pages-or news pages-and not bruited about from the lips of that truncheon-wielding Cossack Ivan or whatever his actual name was. Dear, dear…and now he must depart. He was speaking this very noon to the Greater Lower Mississippi Anti-Stem Cell Research Association. Then there was the creationist dinner in Pascagoula and after that the ribbon cutting of the new casino in Biloxi. My, my, my. What a busy whirl these presidential campaigns were. They left no time at all for prayer and reflection.
The man on the other end of the line identified himself simply as “Jerome.”
He sounded genuinely nervous. He also sounded genuinely smitten with Cass, and that made her nervous. He wanted to meet with her personally, and that made her especially nervous.
“I just want to shake your hand,” he said. “And give you these documents personally. I know that you’re in danger, Miss Devine. Believe me. But it would be such an honor. I don’t lead a very interesting life, you know. Do you know what I did yesterday? I tabulated how much we have spent this quarter over last quarter on incontinence pads. I wouldn’t mind just a little excitement in my life.”
“I…” Cass hesitated. He sounded real, anyway. Who could have made that up?
“Please?” Jerome begged.
Cass said, “I’ll call you back at this number in three hours.”
“Oh, Miss Devine, it will be an honor. Such an honor.”
She called Terry, breaking security. She said simply, “Call me at the other number in half an hour,” and hung up. The “other number” was code for the next pay phone on their list.
“Jesus, Cass,” Terry said when he called. “Careful.”
She explained. He said, “I don’t know. Could be a trap.”
“I don’t see that we have a choice,” Cass said. “He’s not going to hand over the documents unless it’s face-to-face. He read me a few lines from them. They sound pretty authentic to me.”
“Maybe we should call Speck? He scares me, too, but this is sort of his kind of thing, isn’t it? Lurking in the shadows with a sniper rifle. The Clancy thing-”
“No, no, no. I don’t want to involve Randy in this.”
“He’d involve you, if it were him,” Terry snorted. “Guarantee it.”
“I need to think this through,” Cass said. “I’ll call you back.”
Cass walked down Bourbon Street, past obese tourists and drunks, past barkers, street performers, and prostitutes, wondering just how to proceed. Then, crossing Toulouse Street, she saw a man with a YALE T-shirt and suddenly knew what to do. Perhaps, after all, you didn’t need to attend to get the education.
“Mr. Cohane?”
“Yes?”
“This is Al Witchel.”
The name didn’t ring an immediate bell. But Witchel, whoever he was, had Frank’s ultraprivate cell number. “Who?”
“I work for Mr. Wheary.”
Wheary was head of security for Cohane Enterprises.
“Oh yes,” Frank said, annoyed by the lapse of protocol. Why was a subordinate of Wheary’s calling him? “What is it?”
“Can I call you back on a land line?”
“All right.”
Witchel called Frank right back.
“We were doing a routine computer scan of the Elderheaven corporate telephone calling patterns, just part of the normal procedure, due diligence on the confidentiality agreement. We detected an anomalous pattern. We pursued it. It would seem, sir, that there’s a leak.”
Chapter 40
She reflected, looking about her, that it was an apt venue for this rendezvous. The thought hadn’t occurred to her until just now.
Cass had proposed to her curious whistleblower, Jerome, that they meet at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in West Potomac Park, south of the Mall in Washington. Not because FDR was the president who had created Social Security, the system with which Cass was at war, but because the design of the memorial, sprawling over seven and a half acres, allowed for multiple exits in the case of an ambush.
It was late afternoon. There was still daylight, which they needed. She had instructed Jerome to meet her by the statue of FDR in his wheelchair. When she and Terry did their preliminary reconnaissance, he had taken one look at the depiction of FDR, with opaque bronze eyeglasses, upturned hat, and sitting on his almost invisible wheelchair, and said, “He looks like that Irish writer, James Joyce, sitting on a toilet.”
Now she stood, waiting.
A voice said, “Miss Devine?”
Cass wheeled. She’d instructed Jerome not to call her that. But one look at him reassured her that it was, in fact, Jerome. He looked like a Jerome.
He was carrying an attachй, surprisingly sophisticated: leather, with straps; not something that looked as if it also contained a brown-bag lunch, milk carton, and banana.
“Gosh,” Jerome said nervously, looking around. “This feels like a movie or something.” He whispered, “Shouldn’t we move off to the side, out of sight?”
“No,” Cass said.
Twenty yards away, in another section of the memorial, but with telephoto-lens line of sight of Cass and Jerome, stood Terry and a Tucker technical employee, operating a tripod-mounted videocamera and parabolic microphone.
Jerome patted the attachй and said to Cass, “It’s all here.”
“And what are these documents, exactly?” Cass said.
Jerome seemed puzzled by the question. “What I told you over the phone.”
“Tell me again,” Cass said.
At that moment, a National Park Service ranger saw Terry and his cameraman. He approached, all business.
“Hey. Excuse me?”
“Hm?” Terry said.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like we’re doing?”
“You can’t film here.”
“Why not?”
“You need a permit.”
Jerome said to Cass, “The documents pertaining to the sale of the actuarial prediction software by the Cohane company to Elderheaven Corporation.”
“I see,” Cass said, nodding like some TV reporter doing an on-camera interview. “And what exactly does it do?”
Jerome seemed nonplussed. “Do? It, well, predicts with great accuracy how long someone is going to live. Elderheaven uses it to decide whom to admit to their nursing homes. This way, they can only admit people who aren’t going to live very long. But they still have to basically hand over their life savings in order to be admitted. And under the terms of the sale, ten percent of Elderheaven’s increased profits get kicked back to Cohane.”
“Fascinating,” said Cass, nodding away. “Fascinating.…”
“You need a permit to film on these premises, sir.”
“It’s a documentary,” Terry said, leading the Park Service ranger away from the microphone. “About how people react to the memorial. In particular to that statue.”
“That’s not the issue, sir.”
“Some people think he looks like that Irish writer James Joyce? They say he looks like he’s taking a dump.”
“Sir, you’re going to have to stop filming. Now.”
; As the befuddled Jerome continued with his explanation of the contents of the attachй, two men approached. One of them Cass recognized as-her father.
“Hello, Cass.”
“Hello, Frank.”
Frank Cohane stared at Jerome, who reflexively clutched the attachй to his chest. He said to Jerome, “You’re in a world of shit, pal. That’s stolen property.” Jerome blanched. Frank turned his attention back to Cass. “As for you, you’re in a universe of trouble, young lady.”
Cass said, “What are you going to do? Ground me?”
Frank said to Jerome, “Hand it over.”
“Sir, if you don’t stop filming right now, I’m going to have to call the park police.”
“I was just kidding you,” Terry said. “We have a permit.”
“Let me see it,” said the park ranger suspiciously.
Terry patted his pockets. “It’s in the car. C’mon, I’ll show you.”
“Sir, tell your person there to turn that camera off. Now. Or I am calling the police.”
“It’s in the car, right over there. I’ll show you.”
The stricken Jerome began to hand the attachй to Frank. Cass intercepted it.
“Frank,” she said in an oddly declamatory sort of voice, “what would people say if they knew that the president’s own campaign finance chairman had sold software to someone running against the president? Software that allows him to get rich by only admitting people into his nursing homes who are about to die? What would you call such an arrangement?”
Frank, alerted by Cass’s peculiar tone, swiveled. He saw the camera twenty yards away, aimed right at him.
“Shit!” he said. He barked at his companion, a Cohane security man, “Get the goddamn case!”
The man stepped forward and grabbed it out of Cass’s grip. She wasn’t about to get in a wrestling match with him. She let it go. The man and Frank turned to leave.
“Frank,” she said. Her father turned. “Would you call such an arrangement…morally repellent?”
“Okay, okay,” Terry said to the ranger, “if you’re going to make a federal case out of it.” He signaled his assistant to stop. They had what they needed. As they walked off, Terry said to the ranger, “You know, he does look like James Joyce on a toilet. You ought to get the sculptor down here and do something about it. It’s embarrassing. He was a great president, and look what you’ve done to him.”
Epilogue
The resignation of Frank Cohane as finance chairman of the Committee to Reelect President Peacham was a surprise, coming as it did on the eve of the general election.
The terse announcement said only that he had “fulfilled his mission,” that he was confident that the president would be reelected “in a landslide,” and was eager to get back to skippering his yacht Expensive in the upcoming America ’s Cup race.
The next night, Mrs. Cohane was observed screaming at Frank furiously at the tony Georgetown restaurant Cafй Milano and then abruptly getting up from the table and storming out. This fact was duly reported in the Post’s “Reliable Source” column the next day. The Cohanes put their house up for sale and departed for California a few days later. Mrs. Cohane was still apparently out of sorts, as several people witnessed her in the waiting room of the private aviation terminal at Dulles International Airport barking at her billionaire husband.
The president lost another top aide a few days later when Bucky Trumble, his longtime political counselor, was rushed to George Washington Hospital with a bleeding ulcer. The doctors advised him not to return to the rigors of the campaign.
In a speech in Bangor, Maine, President Peacham announced that he was personally instructing the attorney general to vacate the federal fugitive warrant on Cassandra Devine. Normally, the White House affected a posture of not interfering with supposedly independent actions of cabinet agencies. In this case, the president seemed, if anything, eager to point out that this was his decision and not the AG’s.
At a press conference the next day, he said, “If young people want to go burning their damn”-it was the first instance of a president saying “damn” in public-“Social Security cards, that’s their business. The whole system is so screwed up as it is, that’s not going to make it any worse.” He then announced to an already stunned press corps that if he was reelected, he would appoint Cassandra Devine commissioner of Social Security. “And good luck to the lady if she accepts. And good luck to me if I win. There are times, I have to say, when I almost hope the voters don’t return me to office in November.”
This was fresh, honest talk of a kind rarely if ever heard, and the people responded.
President Riley Peacham won reelection by a narrow margin. When he took the podium to declare victory, it was not altogether clear that he was happy to have won.
Senator Randolph K. Jepperson made a strong showing in the popular vote, less so in the electoral college, the system devised by the Founders in their infinite wisdom occasionally to prevent the right person from winning the presidency. Randy, with Cass and Terry at his side on election night, limped out onto the stage and congratulated President Peacham. He refrained from holding his prosthesis over his head and spent the rest of his speech describing his agenda for the future and why he would make an ideal candidate for president in four years, or eight, or whenever. Whatever.
Frank Cohane’s yacht competed fiercely in the America ’s Cup that fall. On the final race, Expensive suddenly lost steering power on the downwind leg and rammed and sank the French yacht Formidable. The bureau of inquiry found no evidence of damage to Expensive’s steering prior to the accident. The case is proceeding in the French and U.S. courts and the international court at The Hague. Mrs. Cohane subsequently left Frank for the skipper of the Italian yacht Scuzzi-the dashing billionaire industrialist Dino Filipacci, of Milan. No mention of this or the ramming incident can be found on Google.
Gideon Payne’s attempts to portray Elderheaven’s purchase of actuarial software as “a means of ensuring the very best level of care for our beloved senior residents” did not meet with success with the electorate. He came in seventh in the popular vote. Yet he took his fall from grace in stride. Some thought he appeared almost jubilant conceding the election to President Peacham. A month later, he announced that he was stepping down from the leadership of SPERM in order to marry a Russian national, Olga Marilova, a self-described “hospitality worker.” They would retire, he said, to the country and raise a family, “a large family.”
In January, President Peacham nominated Cassandra Devine to be the youngest commissioner of Social Security in U.S. history. ABBA and other Baby Boomer lobbies fiercely opposed the nomination on the grounds that she would “sabotage” Social Security payments to retired Boomers. Her nomination is being championed in the Senate by Senator Randolph K. Jepperson of Massachusetts, in conjunction with a vigorous public relations effort mounted by her former employer and mentor, Terry Tucker.
Massimo Cardinal Montefeltro is currently rector of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Prompt Succor in Rome. Among the Vaticanisti who handicap papal elections, he is rumored to be on the short list of possible future pontiffs after the reign of Jean-Claude I.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Jonathan Karp, for brilliant editing and splendid collaboration, our sixth; Binky Urban of ICM; Nate Gray at Twelve; Harvey-Jane Kowal at Hachette Book Group USA; Sona Vogel, once again, for superb copyediting; Greg Zorthian for Spider Repellent™; John Tierney, LF; Allen Snyder, Esq., worth every penny; Steve “Dutch” Umin; Jean Twenge, PhD, author of Generation Me; William Butler Yeats; Jolie Hunt (STFU!); Lucy, always; Cat and Conor; and the faithful hound Jake, who never left the author’s side and the tin of Milk-Bone biscuits.
– Washington, D.C.
July 13, 2006
About the Author
Christopher Buckley was born in New York City in 1952, which means he will be eligible for Social Security benefits in the year 2017. If, however, millions of people buy this, his
twelfth book, he will consider going away sooner and leaving everyone alone. He is editor of ForbesLife magazine and contributes to The New Yorker. His best-selling novel Thank You for Smoking was adapted for the screen and directed by Jason Reitman.
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