Supreme Courtship (25 page)
“That may be, sir, but four states legislatures are about to—”
“Make fools of themselves.”
“Agreed. All I’m just suggesting is that we . . . that a little tactical ambiguity would go a long way toward—”
“ ‘Tactical ambiguity’? Charley. Is that what you think of me?”
“No, sir. Never mind.”
“I appreciate what you’re doing for me, Charley. I do. I know it’s an unusual campaign.”
“When you go out onstage, you’ll walk toward each other, meet midstage, shake hands, go to your respective podiums. Now, he may try to pat you on the back or the shoulder. We have made it clear to his people that we do not want any pitty-patting, but I don’t trust them. So when you shake his hand, do it face on so he can’t reach your shoulder.”
“Why don’t I give him a kiss,” the President said. “Full, on the lips. Our tongues melting into each other’s, our bodies touching, becoming as one, heaving . . .”
Charley stared.
“I read that in a book when I was fifteen years old,” President Vanderdamp said. “It was a spy novel. Not a very good one. Pretty awful, actually. But at the time I thought it was the sexiest, steamiest thing I could ever imagine. Now, my Lord, you can’t turn on a television without seeing bodies writhing. I love this country, Charley, but I worry for it. What young people today see. . . . Well,” he smiled, “I’ll try to restrain myself from making mad, passionate love to President Lovebucket.”
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“This campaign, honestly? It’s the most bass-ackward thing I’ve ever worked on. I don’t get it. But however it turns out, I want to say, it’s an honor working for you. You’re a decent guy.”
“Well, thank you, Charley,” the President smiled. “In the unlikely event they ever give me a statue, I’ll have that put on it. A decent guy.”
An aide opened the door and said, “Ready, Mr. President.”
President Vanderdamp stood, buttoned his jacket, patted his necktie.
“Battle stations. I used to say that in the navy. Course, those were only exercises, but it always gave me goose bumps.
Battle stations
. . .”
“Oh, on that . . .”
“Um?”
“The
Nimitz
thing? Maybe best to avoid . . .”
“
Yes
, Charley,” the President said.
I
KNEW THIS
was going to lead to dessert,” Pepper said. “Man does not live by entrée alone.”
They were in a hotel. A nice one, in out-of-the-way Foggy Bottom. Pepper, having a net worth approximately twenty times Declan’s, had made the reservation on her credit card. They had arrived half an hour apart so as to avoid being spotted together. If it had a furtive aspect—and it did—it was for a reason: photographers, alerted by the item about their cozy dinner at Stare Decisis, had begun staking out Declan’s Kalorama apartment and Pepper’s on Connecticut Avenue near the zoo, in hopes of getting a shot of the two of them emerging together early in the morning; perhaps holding hands or sharing a foamy latte.
“Does this feel at all . . .
dirty
to you?” Pepper said.
“I can’t quite put my finger on it,” Declan said. “But it certainly feels strange.”
“Feels ‘strange’ to me, too. Well, shall we get out legal pads and analyze it?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to be here,” Declan said, staring out the window. “I mean I’m practically bursting with intent.”
“There’s just nothing sexier than making love to a lawyer. Makes me all over quivery.”
Declan blanched.
“What’s wrong?” Pepper said.
“Tony said something like that to me once. And I couldn’t”—his cheeks now filled with color: red—“perform.”
“Honey, she was gay. I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself.”
“Maybe we should analyze it. Maybe a little discovery
is
in order.”
“Maybe a little getting under the covers is in order. Baby?”
“Yes?”
“Are you going to take off your overcoat? Feels like making it with a flasher.”
“Good point. Jesus, Pep,” he sighed soulfully.
“Keep taking off the coat. That’s it. Now how about the jacket? There you go. . . .”
“Six months ago I was happily married.”
Pepper rolled her eyes. “Married, okay. Happily? Let’s look at it. But could we maybe be in the now instead of the then?”
“Sorry, I’m so damned awkward sometimes. Do you like the top or the bottom?”
Pepper stared. “This ain’t summer camp, and I ain’t a bunk bed. Now look here, Chiefy, we are two grown adults, we are colleagues, we have discovered a mutual attraction. We are neither of us cheating on anyone, inasmuch as our spouses filed for divorce. We are both heterosexual—”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a statement of fact intended to differentiate myself from your prior partner for the purpose of putting you at ease so as to . . . oh, c’mere . . . initiate foreplay . . . um . . . yes . . . so as to stimulate the . . . mmmm . . . stim . . . u . . . late . . . the senses in such a manner as . . . oh,
yes
. . . yes . . . see, you haven’t forgotten how to make a girl happy . . . oh . . . ohh . . . in such a . . . mmmm . . . lost my place . . . where was I . . . oh, yes . . . oh, yes . . . oyez . . .”
“Did you just say oyez?”
“Oh, yes.”
I
felt good about that,” Dexter said to Bussie Scrump and a half-dozen campaign operatives aboard the Freedom Express, the Mitchell campaign’s official bus, on its way from Memphis to Little Rock.
“You should. You were great. But this is an unusual situation. Attacking a guy who who just stands there going,
Fine, don’t vote for me.
You were good on defense, good on energy. On the Colombian situation, if it comes up again, and it will, maybe not do send-in-the-
Nimitz
. It felt a little flat. On border mining, I’m a little nervous about it. Maybe ease back on the throttle there.”
Dexter shook his head. “No, no, no. No. The nums, Buss, the nums. Eighty percent. The vast majorities of the people in the border states
want
mines on the border. The federal government has failed them. A government that can’t do
borders
? The people are frustrated. They’re angry. They want to hear
boom
-
boom!
They want to see wetbacks flying into the air. Is it a perfect solution? No. Is democracy messy? Sure. But it’s time to end the highfalutin philosophical discussions and come down off the Acropolis and get real. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. Tot it up. Ninety electoral votes. Out of the two-seventy needed to win. Who am I to say to the good, hardworking, decent—
legal—
residents of these states, ‘Uh-uh. Forget it. You’re just going to have to live with
millions
of foreigners swarming across the border, tromping across your lawns, crapping in the flower beds, having babies in your hospitals, sending their kids to your schools for free English lessons, smashing into your car without insurance.’ Oh, fuck it. Border-mining is never going to happen, so where’s the harm in being for it? It’s a freebie.”
An aide came back and handed Dexter a printout. “Minnesota ratified the term limit amendment fifteen minutes ago!”
“Excellent.
Excellent
news. What are we up to now? Twenty- five?”
“Twenty-six. Eight to go.”
Dexter considered. He asked for privacy with Bussie.
“Call Billy Begley,” he said. “Tell him to call the senate majority leaders and the speakers of the house in Rhode Island, Delaware, Wyoming, Oregon. Hell with it—tell him to call all eight. Tell them: on day one of the Mitchell administration, the
OPEN FOR BUSINESS
sign is going back up on the White House. Whatever they want. Dams, eel farms, Institute for the Study of How Many Gerbils Fit Up a Hollywood Actor’s Ass, a Museum of Lint, whatever. But Buss—tell Billy: we need the amendment now. Not after the election.
Now.
Tomorrow. Yesterday would be even better.”
“I’m on it,” Bussie said, flipping open his cell phone.
“Buss,” Dexter said. “We’re not the von Trapp family. Let’s not yell this from the mountaintop. And this did
not
come from me. What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
“Pussy?”
“The second most, then. Discretion, Buss. How do we spell it? D-i-s-c-r-e-t-i-o-n.”
“
Dex
. It’s my middle name.”
“Your middle name is Ellrod, Buss. But make the call.”
SUPREME DISARRAY: COURT BESET BY LEAKS, FBI INVESTIGATION, AND NOW, INTERJUDICIAL ROMANCE
I
n
tra
, surely,” Declan said to Pepper. “Creeping illiteracy. And in the so-called ‘newspaper of record.’ ”
As front-page headlines go, it was not what a Chief Justice desires to wake up to in the morning. The third paragraph noted that public confidence in the Supreme Court as an institution was “sharply” on the decline. The story ended predictably with a reference to “
quis custodiet
.”
By noon, Justice Santamaria had dispatched to the Chief Justice’s chambers a memo as blistering as one of his legendary opinions.
Under the circumstances, I feel, nor am I alone in this dolorous excogitation, that the Court would best be served were you to resign as CJ, conceding frankly and straightforwardly and for the good of all, not least the country, that developments have overwhelmed your abilities to cope with them.
My feelings in this regard have nothing to do at all with—let me speak directly—the depravity that your recent rulings have condoned, nay embraced, from gay marriage (enough said) to the abominations inherent in
Swayle
and now
Peester
. But your insistence on calling in the FBI to deal with what should have been a family matter . . . this finally has shaken my confidence to the bone and cast a sickly-hued pall over this (once and pray, future) noble institution. And now this openly, flagrantly adulterous liaison with a colleague? What further degradations do you have planned for us? Orgies? Baccanales? Ecstasy raves in the Great Hall? Have you, Declan, finally, no shame?
May God save the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
Yours sincerely,
Silvio Santamaria, Associate Justice
“I think Silvio missed his true calling,” Declan said to Pepper. “Grand Inquisitor.”
“My takeaway,” she said, “aside from you and me being hell-bound adulterers, is that he’s the one who must’ve leaked
Swayle
. Think about it. Silvio’s idea of Utopia is the FBI banging down the door if they hear someone opening a pack of condoms on the other side. Why would he be so hot up about a legit FBI investigation? He’s had it in for me from the git-go. Hated me for coming on the Court. Hated me for
Swayle
. Hated me for dissing him in the conference. Hadda be him.”
“No,” Declan said, “there’s some undistributed middle here. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Silvio’s not the only one who’s up in arms over the fact that I called in the ‘gestapo.’ The only one who hasn’t harangued me is Paige, and that’s only because Paige doesn’t get upset about anything. It’s that New England Yankee sangfroid. The end of the world could be at hand and they’d just look up at the sky and mutter, ‘Looks like rain. . . .’ ” He stared at Silvio’s letter. “I wonder how long before this ends up on the front page?”
“If it does,” Pepper said, “that would seem to cinch it that he was behind the
Swayle
leak. Well, Chiefy, what’s the next step here?”
“Well,” the Chief Justice said, “my inclination is to sock him in his big fat Jesuit nose. But seeing as he worked his way through law school boxing professionally and has fifty pounds on me, I’m not certain that’s the way to go. This term is going to be hard enough without having to wear a neck brace. Well, to work. Industry is the enemy of melancholy.”
“Rochefoucauld or refrigerator magnet?”
“William F. Buckley Jr.”
F
OUR MONTHS BEFORE
the November general election, and President Vanderdamp was in a funk because his poll numbers had been improving. He now trailed front-runner Dexter Mitchell by only eight points.
“Charley,” the President said, “what in the name of heck is going on with these darn numbers?”
“Well, sir,” Charley said, by now inured to these syllogistic conversations with his client, “apparently the people are responding to your clear signal that you don’t want to be reelected. They understand that you’re in it for the principle of the thing. They find it refreshing. Unusual.”
“All right, but what do you suggest?” the President said with a touch of asperity.
“How do you mean, sir?”
“The numbers. How do we—there must be some way of . . . tamping them down. Surely.”
Charley stared. “You want your poll numbers to go . . . down?”
“Well, I sure as heck don’t want them going up. At this rate I’m going to be neck and neck with Lovebucket on Election Day.”
It was a dilemma that had been keeping the normally sound-sleeping President awake nights. On the one hand, the thought of Dexter Mitchell ascending to an actual U.S. presidency was more than he could bear to contemplate. On the other hand, the thought of another four years . . . made him want to take the mother of all sleeping pills, but the National Security people had told him if he did, he was honor-bound to alert them so that they could summon the Vice President in the event they couldn’t wake the President to cope with a critical situation.
Charley nodded sadly. The far-off look came into his eyes. “I don’t know, sir. Maybe if you started sounding like you
wanted
to win? We could do a massive media buy on the theme of experience and steady hand on the tiller. Make it look like you actually—no.” Charley brightened. “No. I’ve got it. Yes. Announce a shake-up of the campaign. Fire me. Fire all the top people.”
“Why would I do that? You’re doing a perfectly good job, especially considering what I’ve given you to deal with.”
“It would send a signal of desperation!” Charley said, more animated than he had been in months. “A signal that you
want to win.
That you think the campaign isn’t going the way it—”