Dill’s patron and rabbi, or perhaps abbot, on the three-member subcommittee was its ranking (and only) minority member, the Child Senator from New Mexico, who had been called the Boy Senator from New Mexico until someone wrote an apparently earnest letter to The Washington Post charging that Boy Senator was sexist. A syndicated columnist had seized on the issue and got a column out of it by suggesting that Child Senator might be far more fitting in these troubled times. He also had consoled the Senator with the observation that he would all too soon outgrow the appellation. However, the new nickname had stuck and the Senator wasn’t at all unhappy about the space and the air time it had earned him.
The Child Senator’s name was Joseph Ramirez and he was from Tucumcari, where he had been born thirty-three years ago. His family had money and he had married more. He also had a law degree from Harvard and a B.A. from Yale, and he had never worked a day in his life until he was named assistant county attorney a year out of law school. He made a local name for himself by helping send a county commissioner to jail for accepting a bribe that allegedly amounted to $15,000. And although everyone had known for years that the commissioner was bent as bobwire, they were still surprised and impressed when young Ramirez actually sent the old coot to jail. The kid’s a comer, they had agreed, and it was generally conceded that with all that Ramirez money (and don’t forget the wife, she’s got money too) the kid might go far.
Ramirez went to the State Senate and then leapfrogged into the U.S. Senate in his thirty-second year. He now made no secret of his desire to be the first Latino President of the United States, which he figured would be around 1992 or 1996 or maybe even 2000, when “we beaners will make up the majority of the electoral vote anyhow.” Not everyone thought the Child Senator was kidding.
To Benjamin Dill the corridors of the Carroll Arms still reeked of old-style tag-team politics, and of its cheap scent and loveless sex and hundred-proof bourbon and cigars that came wrapped in cellophane and were sold for a quarter one and two at a time. Although he considered himself a political agnostic, Dill liked most politicians — and most laborskates and consumer fussbudgets and civil rights practitioners and professional whale watchers and tree huggers and antinuke nuts and almost anyone who would rise from one of the wooden folding chairs at the Tuesday night meeting in the basement of the Unitarian church and earnestly demand to know “what we here tonight can do about this.” Dill had long since despaired that there was not much anyone could do about anything, but those who still believed there was interested him and he found them, for the most part, amusing company and witty conversationalists.
Dill walked through the door marked 222 and into the cluttered reception room where Betty Mae Marker ruled as major domo over the subcommittee’s limited precincts. She glanced up at Dill, studied him for a moment, and then let sympathy and concern flood across her dark-brown handsome face.
“Somebody died, didn’t they?” she said. “Somebody close passed on.”
“My sister,” Dill said as he put down his suitcase.
“Oh, Lord, Ben, I’m so sorry. Just say what I can do.”
“I have to fly home,” Dill said. “This afternoon.”
Betty Mae Marker already had the phone to her ear. “American okay?” she asked as she started punching the number.
“American’s fine,” Dill said, knowing if a seat was available, she would get him on the flight and, in fact, would get them to bump someone off if it was full. Betty Mae Marker had worked on Capitol Hill for twenty-five of her forty-three years, almost always for men of great power, and consequently her reputation was impressive, her intelligence network formidable, and her fund of political due bills virtually inexhaustible. Bidding for her services was often spirited, even fierce, and many of her cronies had wondered why she let the Child Senator lure her over to that do-nothing subcommittee stuck way off down there in the Carroll Arms.
“Coattails, sugar,” she had replied. “That man’s got the longest, fastest-moving set of coattails I’ve seen up here since Bobby Kennedy.” After Betty Mae Marker’s assessment got around, the Child Senator’s political stock crept up a few points on the invisible Capitol Hill index.
Dill waited while Betty Mae Marker murmured softly into the phone, giggled, scrawled something on a scrap of paper, hung up, and handed the scrap to Dill. “Leaves Dulles at 2:17, first class,” she said.
“I can’t afford first class,” Dill said.
“They’re overbooked on coach, so for the same price they’re gonna stick you up there in first class with all the free liquor and the youngest stews, which I thought might cheer you up a little.” The genuine sympathy again swept across her face. “I’m so sorry, Ben. You all were close, weren’t you? — I mean, real close.”
Dill smiled sadly and nodded. “Close,” he agreed, and then gestured toward one of the two closed doors — the one that led into the office of the subcommittee’s minority counsel. “He in?”
“Senator’s with him,” she said, picking up the phone again. “Lemme break the news and then all you’ve gotta do is poke your head in, say hello, and be off about your own sad business.”
Again, Betty Mae Marker murmured into the phone in that practiced contralto, which was pitched so low that Dill, standing only a yard away, could scarcely make out what she was saying. She hung up, nodded toward the closed door, smiled, and said, “Watch.”
The door banged open. A big blond man of around thirty-six or thirty-seven stood there in his shirtsleeves, loosened tie, and a belt that he wore down almost below hip level so his gut would have room to hang out over it. On his face he wore an expression of pure Irish grief.
“Goddamnit, Ben, I don’t know what the hell to say, except I’m goddamn sorry.” He wiped hard at the bottom half of the plump, curiously handsome face, as if to wipe away the display of grief, although it stayed firmly in place. He then shook his head sorrowfully, nodded toward his office, and said, “Come on in here and we’ll drink about it.”
The man was Timothy A. Dolan, the subcommittee’s minority counsel and a furloughed lieutenant late of one of Boston’s frequent political wars. His share of the spoils had been the job of minority counsel. “Two years down in Washington there, that won’t spoil the lad none,” it was decided up in Boston. “And then we’ll see. We’ll see.” Dill had long been convinced that Boston was to American politics what the Aberdeen Proving Grounds were to armaments.
As Dill followed Dolan into the office, the Child Senator rose and held out a hand. The expression on the young-looking face was one of deep concern. And again Dill thought what he always thought when he saw Ramirez: Smart as a Spaniard.
Senator Joseph Luis Emilio Ramirez (D.-N.M.) looked taller than he really was, probably because of his plumb-line posture and the beautifully tailored pin-striped suits he favored. Dark-brown hair swept down in a lock over a high forehead, and he kept brushing it away from glittering black eyes that sometimes seemed a mile deep. He had a perfect nose, light olive skin, and a wide mouth with a touch of overbite. His chin had a deep cleft that made most women and some men want to touch it. He was actor handsome, not quite genius smart, extremely rich, and at thirty-three he looked twenty-three, possibly twenty-four.
The voice went with the rest of him, of course. It was a low baritone with a memorable husk. He could make it do anything. He now made it offer his condolences.