The Day of the Donald (13 page)

J
immie watched from the sidelines as the president fielded questions from the pool of reporters.

“So what if England was our friend? Think how boring it would be if the Yankees and Red Sox were friends. Snoozefest. People like a healthy rivalry. Though I wouldn’t call England the Red Sox. Maybe more like the Twins.”

That got a surprisingly large laugh from the press corps. Jimmie surveyed the journalists, all of whom were fenced inside a wire pen. He recognized a couple. Keith Olbermann, who was on his sixth time around with ESPN. Joe Buck, from Fox Sports. Vin Scully, the former Dodgers play-by-play announcer. In fact, more than half of the journalists appeared to be from the world of sports. This was, apparently, standard practice for days when the Donald took the podium. They didn’t want questions from anyone who’d done too much research.

Jimmie smiled as a feeling of superiority swelled in his chest. Not because he was better than them, but because he was probably making twice what they were making. Maybe that was the same thing—it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that amongst the fifty or so reporters of varying degrees of triviality was Cat Diaz, whose hand was held high.

Trump called on her.

“Mr. President, do you plan to respond to Prince Charles’s latest comments?” Cat asked. She had her clear thick-rimmed glasses on today, the ones that did funny things to Jimmie.

“I assume you mean that clown’s speech before Parliament, where he called me an embarrassment to swine,” Trump said. “We’re meeting to determine a really primo insult to send back across the pond.”

“Could you give us a preview of some of the names being discussed?” Cat asked.

“That’s classified, sorry,” Trump said. “You gotta keep an eye on my Twitter feed. I will say this, though. He’s a very ugly man—I mean, I’ve seen elephants with smaller ears. He’s an ugly man who married way, way above his station in the looks department, married a total fox, and then he cheated on her. So the man’s clearly an idiot. I would never have cheated on Lady Di. Never. And I cheat on everybody.”

There was more laughter from the sports reporters as Trump ended the session and left the room.

Jimmie hopped into the press corps pen and waded through the sea of journalists, who were packing their notebooks away. He made a beeline for Cat. Come to think of it, though, he’d never seen a bee fly in a straight line. Usually they zigzagged around, looking for the right flower to bang.

Cat took one look at Jimmie and turned the other way.

She had no interest in being his flower.

Or maybe—just maybe—she was playing hard to get.

“Wait up,” he said, reaching out for her. His hand landed on her shoulder. Immediately, he realized this was a poor decision on his part. She dropped her notebook and gripped his wrist with both hands. She gave his arm a twist, which he felt all the
way up to his shoulder. He spun down to the ground and found himself pinned to the floor with his arm bent unnaturally back in a
kimura
lock.

“You’ve been working out,” he said through the pain.

“You haven’t been,” she said.

That much was true. He wasn’t going to turn the tables on her. None of the other journalists seemed to even take notice that she had him writhing in pain on the carpet. Working in the Trump White House, they’d probably seen violent outbursts before. Rumor was, on Wednesday nights, the Bush Room transformed into a fight club.

Jimmie had no choice but to say his safeword: “E. L. James.”

C
at released Jimmie. While the press corps had pretty much cleared out except for a few stragglers, prying eyes and ears could be anywhere. In the potted plants. In the luxury umbrella stand. In Cat’s phone.

“Can we talk?” he said. “Somewhere private.”

“You cost me my job, you idiot,” she said. “And just how drunk were you last night at the State Dinner?”

Her
job? Following the Ted Cruz sex tape lawsuit, she’d been the one who’d fired
him
. He eyed the logo on her badge. “You’re still with the
Daily Blabber
, though.”

“I was demoted to the presidential beat,” she said. “You think I enjoy being penned up in here with these losers?”

Michael Strahan gave her a little wave, and Cat fake-smiled back. When he passed, the warmth once again drained from Cat’s face.

She said, “You want to talk, Jimmie? I’ve got about five minutes until I have to be on the South Lawn golf course for Trump’s big foreign policy speech.”

“I’m headed there too,” Jimmie said, although this was the first he’d heard about it. He really needed to start reading the daily e-mail with the president’s schedule.

He followed her through the winding maze of hallways that he assumed would become second nature to him. If he stayed at the White House long enough.

“What are you doing tonight?” Jimmie said, opening the door for her to the back lawn. Two dozen rows of chairs were quickly filling for the soon-to-be-historic speech. “Let me take you out to dinner. As an apology for all the trouble I caused you.”

“There’s not a restaurant in this city expensive enough to make up for all the trouble you’ve caused me,” she said.

Likewise
, he thought.

“Do you have your phone on you?” he asked.

“What’s this really about?”

“Just answer the question.”

“It’s at my desk.”

“Good,” he said, lowering his voice. “Because I need to talk to you about Lester.”

“Are you still angry about that? If I remember correctly,
you
were the one who proposed that we ‘take a break.’”

“So that means you go sleeping around on me?”

“That’s
exactly
what that means.”

Okay, so maybe she had a point. Things had been moving kind of fast between them at the time. They’d gone from sleeping together to living together in under a month. That, coupled with working together, had spooked Jimmie. So, yeah, he’d suggested they take a break from each other. He thought he’d move back into his own apartment. Maybe go to a movie on a Friday night by himself. He hadn’t expected to be replaced by Lester fucking Dorset.

Jimmie asked, “When’s the last time you spoke to Lester?”

She ignored him and picked up her pace.

“He was working as Trump’s ghostwriter,” Jimmie said, jogging after her. “A job that I’ve been hired for, as of Monday.”

“You’re both idiots for working with that guy. He’s a racist, a sexist—”

“That’s just a bunch of talk. He seems okay in person.”

Except for when he asked his Secret Service detail to shoot me
, Jimmie thought. But he could see why Cat wouldn’t like him: Her father was Mexican (one of the good ones, but still). That, plus the fact that she was a woman, meant she wasn’t exactly Trump’s target market.

“Well, have fun while it lasts,” Cat said. “I hear Trump likes to fire people.”

“Lester wasn’t fired.”

“So he quit,” she said. “So what? We split up a while back. I don’t keep tabs on him.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Know
what
?”

Jimmie lowered his voice: “He’s dead.”

Cat stopped abruptly, and Jimmie slammed into her.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” he said.

Her bottom lip quivered. He shouldn’t have sprung this on her here. There was a time and a place to tell your ex-girlfriend that her dickhead boyfriend was dead, and this wasn’t it.

“I haven’t spoken to him in months,” Cat said. “June? Earlier, maybe. I don’t know. We didn’t see each other around the
West Wing too often—Corey keeps the press corps on a pretty tight leash to prevent anyone from leaking real news to us. I just . . . I can’t believe it. I would have heard if something happened to him. Are you sure?”

Jimmie nodded.

“How did he die?” she asked.

He shook his head. “He last signed in to the White House on Independence Day. I have reason to believe that was also the day he died. I can’t say more now . . . but could you just meet me tonight? Or even after this event. Maybe we could grab a drink.”

She was quiet for a long time.

Finally, she said, “Did they give you his old office? He didn’t . . . leave anything behind, did he?”

“Like . . .”

“Like, duh,
nudes
,” she said.

“You let him take nude pictures of you?”

“We got one of those instant cameras and took some glamour shots in the vice president’s office. Biden left behind his beanbag chair, where we—” She paused. “You know what, let’s just meet Friday. I need a few days to process this. It’s just . . . I can’t believe it.”

“Of course,” he said.

“Oh, and another thing, before you even ask,” she said. “I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“That’s good, because I wasn’t going to ask,” he said.

Cat disappeared into a row toward the back, and Jimmie took a seat up front.

She suspected he wanted to sleep with her. Ha! Part of him did—
that
part—but he had another, more pressing motive,
one that he would spring on her over dinner. He needed her help.

Jimmie had three solid suspects for Lester’s murder. If he could establish a prior relationship between Lester and one of them, he would save some time. That would help narrow his investigation—and possibly keep him alive, if he could sort out friends from foes inside La Casa Blanca.

Figuring out the
whodunit
was only step one. For step two, he needed a platform. With the FCC’s ruling on net neutrality limiting the reach of small blogs, he couldn’t just publish this story—no matter how big—by himself online and expect traction. The
Cigar Aficionado
editor had stopped returning his e-mails. With his name still blackballed across the industry, selling an exclusive to the
Daily Blabber
was his only hope. And this time, he wouldn’t get slapped with a lawsuit. He’d get slapped with a Pulitzer. Then, and only then, would he ask to sleep with her. If she said yes, he might actually do it, too.

“P
ee-wee Paul Ryan says the lawmaking process in this country is broken, and for once I agree with him,” Trump said. “Maybe we should do things a little more like our good friend Russia. What is it you do over there, Vlad? You write it down and hand it to a bird, right?”

Putin, seated beside the president, nodded. “Is owl.”

“That’s right,” Trump continued. “You write the law down—say, no more abortions after the fourth trimester—hand it to the owl, and send the owl out into a snowstorm. If it stops snowing within twenty-four hours, the bill becomes law. If not, you just try again, I guess?”

“We have many owl,” Putin said with a tight-lipped smile.

The president was just over ten minutes into his remarks, but already Jimmie’s mind was wandering. He looked down at his open notebook. He hadn’t taken a single note so far during the event, unless you counted the sketch of the first family’s wiener dog. It had shown up, humped the leg of a Secret Service agent for three minutes, and then chased off after a squirrel into the Rose Garden. Opulence was probably humping the poor squirrel right now.

“I’m issuing all these executive orders, but there’s no funding for any of them. They’d just sit there if I didn’t find creative
ways to fund them. Whoever thought about opening a Chase business card for the United States before? I was the first to do it. We’re getting a very, very good rate, too. Plus Amazon rewards!

“Unfortunately,” Trump continued, “there’s this little document called the
Constitution—
”

A chorus of boos momentarily drowned Trump out.

“Settle down, settle down,” he said, raising his voice. “The Founding Fathers can’t hear you—they’re dead! What do they care if the entire legislative branch is a joke?

“The pressure’s on Congress now. I shouldn’t have to go begging to them every time I want a few billion bucks or want to declare war on a bunch of tea-drinking pansies. If they don’t give me the authority I want, maybe I’ll just give it to myself. What do you think?”

Cheers from the audience. Jimmie glanced around to see who among the press corps was cheering—turned out, nobody. It appeared Trump had filled in the empty seats with ringers outfitted in Trump gear. One woman three rows behind Jimmie was wearing a shirt with a cartoon drawing of Prince Charles and several rather robust women, with the caption “PRINCE OF WHALES.”

“The new process—and this could change—is that I’ll write the bills myself and sign them. Then I’ll hand them to my bald eagle courier, who will fly them to Massachusetts, where a Mayflower descendent will seal them into law by chiseling them into the Plymouth Rock. If that doesn’t work out for whatever reason, we can always—”

“BEAR!”

Jimmie craned his neck around to see who’d interrupted the president. People were standing, row by row, and exiting in
a panic. They were being split down the middle, like a parting sea. All hell was breaking loose in slow motion.

“Bear?” Trump said. “No, we’re going to use an
eagle—
”

Jimmie heard the great beast before he saw it. The creature’s deep, bass growl rumbled across the green, like thunder across the Midwest plains of Jimmie’s youth. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention, even as he was frozen in place.

“What in the hell is going on out there? I’m not finished!” Trump yelled into the microphone. “I’m not finished!”

Trump’s demand fell on deaf ears. People were fleeing the seating gallery haphazardly, tipping their folding chairs over. Cat ran past Jimmie on her way back into the White House, where everyone seemed to be headed for cover.

That’s when Jimmie finally saw the animal cutting its way through the middle of the crowd.

It was no bear.

It was a giant panda.

Which was technically a bear, Jimmie supposed.

He also recognized this one: Mei Xiang, the adult female from the National Zoo. Not only had she survived Trump and Putin’s hunt, but she’d escaped! Maybe they’d released the animals from their cages and made the hunt a little more sporting than Jimmie had first thought.

The panda batted chairs to the left and to the right with its massive tree-trunk arms, roaring all the while. Its dark eyes blended into the black patches of fur that encircled them, but Jimmie was sure he could see more than a flicker of rage in them. This creature was out for blood. This creature was out for
revenge
.