My heart grew a size at that. I made a mental note to buy a couple copies of Becoming and leave them in the waiting room at my dentist’s.
“Hope you liked it,” I said.
He nodded. “The way you took that train home every night, all the way from DC just to be with your kids. That was cool, man. Nobody’d walk two blocks down the sidewalk for me.” He laughed like it didn’t hurt to say that, but I could see it hurt. Hurt to say. Hurt to hear.
“If you were my son,” I said, “I’d take an Amtrak round the world and back for you.”
He smiled like he thought I was full of it, but I meant it. I really did. Kid like that, I just wanted to take him home with me to Jill and the grandkids, let him spend some time with the Bidens, see what a real family was like.
“Here.” Shaun tried to hand my aviators back to me. “Thanks.”
“Keep ‘em,” I said with a wink. “I got a spare.”
Michelle came back and Shaun returned to his post, aviators on, looking like a junior Secret Service agent. “Wish I could stick around, but I’ve got to be going,” she said. “Brunch with Oprah. I know you’re leaving later today, but I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to catch up this summer.”
“Or you could skip brunch and hang out now.”
She flashed me a look of severe incredulity, a look she’d flashed me hundreds of times over the years.
“Kidding,” I said with a grin. Then, more seriously: “Is she here?”
“You don’t think all this security is for me and Barack, do you?”
I’d never met Oprah before, so I had no idea what kind of security she rolled with. She’d recently done a couple fundraisers for Democrats. There was chatter she might even make a run for president. If that happened, I was going to be in for a dogfight.
After Michelle was gone, I listened to Caruso, my back against the wall. His hair was long and braided. He was tall as a cornstalk in August, and spoke with a slow Midwestern drawl that turned his words into poetry.
“…the gulf between the richest and poorest in this world is greater than it’s ever been at any point in the history of recorded humanity. In the United States alone, the average CEO earns 563 times what the average worker earns. Meanwhile, the average worker’s spending power has dwindled over the past forty years, causing the American middle class to crater. We’re not alone. Around the world, poverty…”
I caught myself nodding along with the audience. The kids outside with signs weren’t protestors, I realized—they were fans. Not necessarily of President Obama, but definitely of the man onstage. I wanted to hear more of his speech. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get Oprah out of my mind. She wasn’t listed as a conference speaker. She didn’t live in Chicago these days. Was she here to meet with Caruso as well? One thing was certain: Oprah was here for more than two-for-one mimosas.
4
I’d been on the road for the past eighteen months, stumping for Democratic candidates and promoting my book with a series of town-hall-style events. A trial balloon for 2020 that fooled nobody. I’d been back to Delaware for a couple weeks following the midterms, but ever since hitting the road again in January, I’d spent only a handful of nights in my own bed. A quick sojourn with Jill in St. Croix had only reminded me of the distance between us.
If family was a slowly fading memory kept alive by Facebook and Skype, then friends were ghosts of the past. Barack and I still kept in touch, but he knew that I had to keep the pedal to the metal. There wasn’t time to hang out like in the old days, when we’d met weekly for lunch. The last time I’d seen him was a ski trip around Christmas. President W. had been in Aspen as well, and even joined us on the slopes for an hour or two before retiring to the clubhouse with Michelle for hot cocoa with marshmallows.
I hadn’t planned on seeing Barack until this summer, when our families would be vacationing together at Rehoboth Beach. I was in Chicago for one day, with no expectations that our schedules would sync up. When Michelle had said there was a chance I could catch him in the green room, however, my heart started racing. He had that effect on me.
He had that effect on everyone.
Unfortunately, when I entered the green room, Barack wasn’t there. My first clue should have been the lack of Secret Service agents at the door. Some detective I was. I thanked Shaun and sent him on his way. He had to get to work. Plus, he’d already been introduced to President Obama earlier that morning.
Like most makeshift green rooms, this one was a small conference room dressed up with a portable clothing rack and a few couches. There was also a cloth-covered banquet table with the requisite cheese and fruit spread. No crackers, though. There were never any crackers.
I picked up a copy of the conference schedule. There was a VIP reception that evening in the Crown foyer. Twenty-fifth floor. I hadn’t been invited, even though I was the guy who put the “VP” in VIP. Not that it mattered. My plane would be taking off as it started. It was back to Delaware—
A flash of movement underneath the banquet table caught my eye. I spotted the soles of two black shoes poking out from beneath the draped tablecloth. A terrorist planting a bomb?
There was a grunt from under the table. The shoes started backing up. Whoever was under there was coming out. I balled my hands into fists and put my dukes up, ready to rumble.
“Come out slowly, with your hands in the air,” I said. “No funny business.”
The creeping creeper paused. The shoes were large, the slacks tan and pressed. I caught a glimpse of tall socks, decorated with shamrocks and mugs of green beer.
“I can’t back up with my hands in the air.” Though muffled, the deep baritone was unmistakable.
I lowered my fists. “Come on out, Mr. President.”
Barack Obama stood and brushed off his slacks and matching tan suit jacket. When he’d worn the same ensemble as president, he’d been ridiculed by both the right and the left. It was too casual, too bland. An ophthalmologist wrote an op-ed warning that the suit’s pancake-batter coloring “was an affront to the optic nerve” that could “trigger neurogenic inflammation in susceptible individuals.” One House member went so far as to say the suit was a national security risk. I’m not kidding, folks. Seeing Barack in the suit again, I was surprised to discover it wasn’t as hideous as I’d remembered it.
It was worse.
“Hey, Joe,” Barack said, smothering me in a bear hug. I patted him on the back. The bromance was alive and well. “Nice scarf. Where’d you bury the body of the leprechaun you stole it from?”
“Really? You’re going to lecture me on my sartorial choices while—”
A huffing, puffing Secret Service agent barreled into the room. Unlike the rest of the agents, this one was a known quantity. Steve. I’m sure he had a last name—he was no Cher—but I’d never known anyone to use it. Last I’d heard, he’d been promoted to the White House’s tactical detail. I wasn’t surprised to see him back on Obama’s detail, though. I’d had a feeling he wasn’t going to last long inside the current administration. Nobody does.
“Steve.” I started to go in for a hug but decided on a handshake.
He ignored my outstretched hand. “What the hell is going on?” he fumed. “I relieved the agent outside the door, poked my head in, and there was nobody in here. I spent the past five minutes hunting for a missing POTUS, and I get back here and—”
“Slow down, Steve,” Barack said. “Nobody’s missing. Nobody got hurt.”
“There’s scuff marks on the knees of your pants, sir,” Steve said. “Were you wrestling on the floor?”
“You still on the whole low-carb diet?” I asked Steve.
His expression went from angry and perplexed to just plain angry. “I was never on a low-carb diet. It was a zero-carb diet. It wasn’t sustainable. I’ve gone paleo.”
“The caveman diet.”
“It’s not all raw saber-tooth-tiger steaks and mammoth burgers.”
“Got some pterodactyl hot wings, too,”
I joked.
He stared at me. “Pterosaurs were extinct by the Paleolithic Era.”
“So that’s a no.”
“That’s a no,” he said. He exited with a slam of the door. When he was gone, I asked Barack what in Samhain he’d been doing on his hands and knees under the catering table.
“I misplaced my BlackBerry.”
“Under the table?”
“I don’t know where I misplaced it. If I knew, then it wouldn’t be misplaced.”
“You’ve got the numbers for every world leader in your phone.” I paused. “And Bradley Cooper.”
“He changed his number.”
“Without telling you?”
He closed his eyes and massaged his temples. “I was supposed to give up my phone for Lent. I was good for a couple of weeks, but then I started sneaking it out to check basketball scores. And then read the paper. And pretty soon I’d fallen off the wagon completely.” He looked over at me. “Maybe this is God’s way of helping me get back on the wagon.”
“Lent? Trying to reconnect with your Irish ancestors?”
“More like trying to reconnect with my family. Michelle wanted me to try going a month without it. Said she ‘wanted her husband back.’”
Not only had I not realized it was St. Paddy’s this Sunday until the cabbie mentioned it, but I hadn’t given anything up for Lent this year. When you don’t drink or smoke, you don’t have much to give up. I couldn’t even give up coffee because the last time I’d partaken of the roasted bean was in college. I could give up ice cream, though I’d rather give up breathing. Still, I had to marvel at Barack: he was a better Irish Catholic than Joe Biden.
A vibrating phone broke the silence, startling me half out of my penny loafers. I patted my pocket. The buzz wasn’t coming from my phone. It was coming from a checkered suit jacket on the clothes rack.
“It’s someone else’s phone,” Barack said. “I already checked.”
“Have you checked your own pockets?”
Barack cocked his head.
“One time I thought I lost my wallet,” I said. “Looked all over the damned Eisenhower for it. You know where it was?”
“Where was it, Joe?”
“In my front pocket!” I said with a laugh. “See, I usually put it in my back pocket. I’d had it the whole time, but in the wrong pocket. I have no idea how it got there, either.”
“Maybe you put it there.”
He might have been right.
He usually was.
Barack explained that the last time he’d seen his phone was that morning, when he’d set it down in the green room next to the fruit and cheese tray. Michelle had come in, and he’d stuffed it under a plate. Then he’d gone to the prayer breakfast. He hadn’t remembered the phone until later. By that time, any number of people could have come and gone from the room.
“Let me see your phone, Joe,” he said. “If I can log onto the BlackBerry website, I can pinpoint the phone’s location and…”
His voice faded as I showed him my phone.
“A flip phone? Every time I see you, Joe, you look the same, but your phone gets older and older.”
“It’s got a couple of apps. An Internet browser from the last century. The whole thing’s harder to work than a damn VCR, if you ask me. That’s how I like it, though.”
He poked his head outside and asked Steve to find him a laptop.
“There’s a whole platter of cheese here,” Barack said, returning. “Have at it.”
“They expect you to eat all that? With no crackers?”
“Oh, Lord, no. Oprah was in here earlier, but she didn’t touch a thing. Pastor Brown, now there’s an eater. He can eat even you under the table—except he didn’t eat much at breakfast either, come to think of it. Too bad. They had these bagels, the hard kind that you can only find at New York delis. The kind you like.”
It was for the best that I hadn’t crashed the breakfast. I wouldn’t have been able to work up much of an appetite around Barack’s tan suit. It was too close in color to baby spit-up.
“Oprah was in here,” I said absently.
“That’s right. Everything OK, Joe? You seem distracted.”
“Was she in here before or after your phone went missing?”
“You think Oprah stole my phone,” he said. “Oprah.”
Barack didn’t appreciate my obvious joke. Besides, even if we discovered the smoking gun in Oprah’s handbag, no jury would ever convict her. Privately, I wondered if she was as big a saint as everybody believed she was. Heck, plenty of people thought I was some sort of boy scout, when in reality my farts stunk like everyone else’s. Sometimes worse than everyone else’s. I should have never had that battered onion plate last night.
Steve knocked on the door. He’d found us a desktop computer upstairs.
Barack glanced at his watch. “It took you twenty minutes. In the Tribune Tower. Isn’t there, like, an entire floor filled with newspaper reporters with computers?”
“There is,” Steve said, “but if I marched you into the newsroom, it would take the rest of the afternoon to muscle you out of there. You know how the media loves you, sir.”
I nodded. “They sure do.”
Barack frowned at me.
“Don’t pretend to be mad,” I said.
Barack sighed. “Caruso told me he’d stop in here after his presentation. Probably got held up signing autographs. In the meantime, you want to tag along with me, Joe? Shouldn’t take too long. I know you’re something of a detective these days.”
He was ribbing me about Murder on the Amtrak Express, which I would never admit to him to having picked up. He didn’t understand the appeal of pulp fiction. “Low-brow,” he called it. He was fond of saying he had a big brain and needed to feed it big food. We both knew that if I’d been a real detective, I wouldn’t have gotten us both almost killed two summers ago. If I’d been a real detective, I would have solved the mystery of my friend Finn Donnelly’s death before more bodies piled up around Wilmington. I was no flatfoot; I was a politician.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t game for some Hardy Boys hijinks.
5
The president’s BlackBerry is missing.
If this were a potboiler-of-the-week starring Charles Bronson, those five words would have kicked off a city-wide manhunt for the culprit. But this was real life. This was No Drama Obama. His phone might have been missing, but he was as cool, calm, and collected as ever. Over the years I’d seen his thick veneer crack only a handful of times, when there was much more on the line than a missing phone.
“Can you think of any enemies, anyone who would want to steal your phone?” I asked in the elevator.
Barack twisted his mouth to the side. “Come to think of it, I was wondering what Sean Hannity was doing here.”
“Forget I said anything.”
He laughed. “You’re getting worked up over nothing, Joe. I bet Michelle swiped it, to teach me a lesson. I’ll log onto the website, track it, and I bet you eighty-three dollars that it’s around the corner where she’s having brunch.”
“Eighty-three dollars?”
The elevator stopped on the first floor.
“That’s how much I have in my wallet,” Barack said.
Steve led us to the lobby. He was a few paces ahead.
“Feels good to get the ol’ gang back together,” I said. “You, me, well, we’re more like a two-man gang, aren’t we?”
“Unless you count Steve,” Barack said.
“Sure,” I mumbled.
“He’s the lead agent on my detail now,” Barack said. I didn’t like being babysat at my age, but the Secret Service was nice to have around sometimes. Like when you needed to make change for a twenty.
We arrived at a small room off to the side of the lobby. One of two desks was occupied by a middle-aged woman with curly hair and dark roots. She looked up from her screen and then returned her gaze to whatever she was working on. Then she did a double-take.
“You wanted a computer.”
The woman—fully flushed now—was staring at the president, mouth agape. A sparrow could’ve flown right into that maw, laid a couple of eggs, and flown out again without her noticing.
“Checking the basketball scores,” Barack said breezily as he sat down across from her. Steve gave her the stink eye and she left in a hurry. He pressed a finger to his earpiece and then turned to us. “That was the front desk. Nada. They’ll call if someone turns it in.”
“Did you tell them whose it was?” Barack asked. “We don’t want to turn this into a scene.”
“I told them it was Joe’s,” he said, winking at me.
“Ha-ha,” I said. Barack smirked, but we both knew my days of being a national punchline were long past. I hadn’t made a public gaffe in at least a week.
I took the seat at the woman’s desk and jiggled the mouse. The screensaver went away. “Think I can check my email from here? It’s not my WhiteHouse.gov account,” I said, then added under my breath, “I don’t have access to that anymore.”
“These are public computers,” Barack said. “You don’t know who has been using them. There are probably just as many viruses on the keyboards as there are in the operating system—”
“I’m in,” I said as my Yahoo inbox popped up.
I scrolled through the messages—the spam, the scams, and, I guess, a few emails worth reading. Nothing from Jill or the kids. A pleading message from my spokesman, telling me he couldn’t hold off the press much longer regarding my 2020 plans. It was time to fish or cut bait.
“That can’t be right,” Barack said. His brow was furrowed.
I craned my neck to peek at his computer. A red dot pulsated on East Sixty-third Street. A large area labeled NORFOLK SOUTHERN RAILROAD YARD covered the lower half of the map. A freight yard. One of dozens in Chicago. And yet it set off a silent alarm in the back of my mind.
“It says here it’s on the South Side,” he explained.
Hope Rides Again Page 2