“Well I——”
Satterthwaite waited for McNeely to wrench his thoughts onto the new subject. In the end McNeely said, “Hang on a minute, I’ll get it,” in a faraway tone.
In a short while McNeely was back on the line. He spoke seven digits and Satterthwaite wrote them down on the cover of the directory by the phone.
“That all you wanted Bill?”
“Yes, thanks. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
“It’s all right. I wasn’t about to sleep tonight.”
“I’m—wait a minute, Liam, I think you can help me.”
“Help you do what?”
“I can’t talk on the phone. Are you dressed?”
“Yes.”
“I’m in the Executive Office Building. The conference room across the hall from the NSC boardroom. Can you get over here right away? I need someone to help me do some telephoning. A lot of calls to make.”
“I don’t know if I’d be much good talking to anyone tonight, Bill. I hate to cop out on you but——”
“It’s for Cliff Fairlie,” Satterthwaite said, “and it’s important.”
By the time McNeely arrived—improbably natty in a mohair suit and Italian shoes—the clean-up crew had finished in the boardroom. Satterthwaite took him inside and closed the door. “I’m glad you could come.”
“Very mysterious. What the hell have you got in mind?”
They were not exactly friends although they had had a great deal of contact since the election. It had been taken for granted McNeely would assume Satterthwaite’s role in the new administration.
“You’ve been thinking about Fairlie I’m sure.”
“Yes.”
“There’ll be rumors Brewster had him killed.”
“I suppose there will. There always are, when one man benefits from another’s death.”
“Those rumors will have no basis in fact,” Satterthwaite said. “I have to clear that up with you before we go on.”
McNeely’s one-sided smile was merely polite. “We called him a lot of names in the campaign but I don’t think any of them was murderer.”
“He’s a surprisingly honest man, Liam. To use an archaic turn of phrase he’s a man of goodwill. I realize from your point of view he’s too much a prisoner of old-fashioned political values, but you’ve got to credit his integrity.”
“Why are you saying all this to me?”
“Because more and more I’ve become convinced it’s wrong that a President who’s been defeated should be permitted to succeed himself.”
“Come again?”
“Sit down, take your coat off. I’ll explain it as best I can.”
Krayle arrived at twenty before two, a lumpy man in a rumpled topcoat. “What is it, Bill?”
“You know Liam McNeely of course.”
“Sure. We campaigned together.”
“I’m’ no expert on congressional regulations,” Satterthwaite said. “I need facts from you about the breakdown—the table of organization. The chief officer in the House is the Speaker, is that right?”
“Sure, sure.” Krayle looked very tired. He moved to a chair and rubbed his face and propped an elbow on the long table.
Satterthwaite glanced at McNeely. The slim New Yorker was watching them both with keen intensity.
“This could be damned important to all of us,” Satterthwaite said. “When Milton Luke died why wasn’t a successor elected immediately? Why were you installed as Acting Speaker?”
Krayle shook his head. His mouth made a wry shape. “I see what you’re getting at. You’re a strange one to ask me that question—one of Brewster’s own boys?”
“Go on then,” Satterthwaite said.
“Well I’m a little new to the job of course. They needed somebody to fill the interim post and I was handy. I’m not really qualified for it. I haven’t got much seniority—there are a lot of people ahead of me. Mostly Southerners.”
“Why didn’t they elect a permanent successor to Luke?”
“Two reasons. First we don’t have a full head count. We lost a lot of people in the various bombings if you recall.” Very dry. Krayle didn’t have a reputation for caustic sarcasms; it must have been his way of throwing up defenses against the chain of traumatic shocks that had affected them all.
“Maybe you don’t know everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours,” Krayle said. “We had to drag a hundred Congressmen back to Washington. A lot of them went home for the funerals of their friends. Until this evening we didn’t have a quorum in the chamber. We’ve lost seventy-two Congressmen. Fourteen others are still in the hospitals. Thank God none of them’s still on the critical list. But the point is, we’re eighty-six bodies short—and the majority of the dead ones were Democrats. You get my point?”
“You mean the Democrats couldn’t scrape up a majority if you tried to seat a new Speaker right now.”
“Something like that. There’s been a lot of agitation. Some of the Southerners seem quite willing to switch sides of the aisle unless we agree to compromise on a Dixiecrat for Speaker. A group of us talked it over—both parties but Northerners mainly. We decided it would be better to wait until special elections have been held or governors’ appointments made, to fill the vacant seats. Presumably that would more or less restore the solid Democratic majority from before. Also it would prevent anybody from accusing us of railroading something through while we didn’t have a full contingent on hand.”
“That didn’t seem to stop you from reelecting Howard Brewster last night,” McNeely said.
“My God nobody believed Fairlie would die—and besides, you know what the alternative was.”
Satterthwaite said, “You still haven’t explained it to my satisfaction. The Speaker of the House, if there were one right now, would be next in line for the Presidency. Ahead of Hollander, even ahead of Brewster. So why didn’t you elect a new Speaker and let him become President?”
“That was the first thing we thought of. But the law doesn’t work that way. The line of succession applies only to officers who’ve held office—and let me quote—‘prior to the time of death, resignation, removal from office, inability, or failure to qualify.’ I mean you can see the point. You simply can’t go and appoint a new Speaker of the House who’s really being appointed to the Presidency after the fact. The only Speaker of the House who was fully entitled to take Cliff Fairlie’s place was the man who held that office prior to the time when Fairlie was kidnapped. That was Milton Luke and of course he’s dead.”
McNeely said, “That doesn’t make sense to me.”
Krayle looked at him. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t know of any law that says you can’t elect a new Speaker whenever an old Speaker dies or retires. You don’t have to wait for the beginning of the next session of Congress to do that.”
“It’s true we can elect a new Speaker any time we want to, but whoever we elect now is someone who will have been elected to the Speakership after the fact. Don’t you see? Fairlie’s already dead. The law says ‘prior to the time of death,’ etcetera etcetera.”
“But Fairlie isn’t the President. Never has been.”
“The law applies equally to a President-elect. Section Three, Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution. Also the Presidential Succession Act, Three U.S.C. Nineteen seventy-one. Don’t think we haven’t done our homework.”
McNeely collapsed into a chair. He waggled a hand toward Satterthwaite. “Well it was worth a try.”
“You should have known that idea would have occurred to a lot of other people besides you,” Krayle said. “What the hell.”
Satterthwaite said, “I’m not ready to give it up. It appears to me the law applies to people who hold office at the time when the vacancy occurs in the Presidency. There’s no vacancy until noon tomorrow when Brewster’s term ends.”
“There’s one trouble with that position,” Krayle said wearily. “The laws are worded so that the President-elect occupies a sort of quasi-office. When he dies the Vice-President-elect becomes President-elect. When he dies the incumbent Speaker becomes President-elect for all practical purposes. That takes place at the time of death, not the time of vacancy in the White House. I’m not trying to pretend it’s simple or even cut-and-dried, but that’s the way it appears to work. The minute Dexter Ethridge died, Milton Luke was for all practical purposes the President-elect of the United States. That’s the law.”