The President was willing, at first, to dismiss the man and his claim as mildly eccentric, but twice during the same dinner—once by another congressman, once by a contributing business executive—it had been confided to the leader of the free world that all his questions about the future could be answered at the same small ranch.
The President cleared his throat noisily. "Do you—do you think there's anything to this?"
"To fortune-telling?" Smith retorted skeptically.
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"When you put it that way, no. Of course not. But—"
"But what?"
"Well, my wife believes in this stuff. In fact, she spends a lot of time in the Red Room talking to Eleanor Roosevelt."
"Claiming to talk to Eleanor Roosevelt, you mean," Smith said.
"Er, sometimes I listen at the door," the President said guardedly. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. "Sometimes I hear two voices. What do you think of that, Smith?"
"Not much," Harold Smith said truthfully. "And I would steer your political allies away from Ranch Ragnarok, if I were you," he added.
Repeating CURE's directive to avoid political entanglement, Smith excused himself and hung up.
For a long time after he had replaced the receiver, Smith's hand continued to grasp the warm red plastic.
He had his answer. The cryptic scrawl in the corner of that first check had been no joke. Reputable people with something to lose were willing to risk public ridicule to travel to the Truth Church ranch.
For a glimpse into the future.
At long last Smith released the receiver and pushed the desk drawer silently back into place.
He spun his chair toward the window behind him and stared at the silent, black waters of Long Island Sound.
For the first time that evening, he noticed that night hud fallen.
Chapter Ten
Michael "the Prince" Princippi had been out of politics for a decade, and although most Americans were relieved by this prolonged absence there were some—granted, a very small minority—who longed for the Prince of Massachusetts politics to return to the public spotlight. There was no one who held this view more strongly than Mike Princippi himself.
His rise to the head of the presidential pack a decade before had been both surprising and meteoric. He was far from flamboyant, but not deliberate enough in his demeanor to be considered reserved. He was, quite frankly, dull.
No one thought Princippi would get the nomination of his party during the 1988 presidential contest and, therefore, no one in his party campaigned much against him.
After the dust of the primary battles had settled, the other contenders were shocked to find out that their previous year of squabbling and backstabbing had effectively handed over the presumptive nomination to a man with the charm of a haddock and the charisma of a bucket of chopped ice. A broken space heater projected more warmth, the party chairman had lamented.
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Princippi had staked his claim to the White House by touting the exploding economy he had presided over as governor of Massachusetts, and he was right in singling out his stellar achievement. What he failed to tell the nation was that the real miracle in his home state was the fact that the makers of red ink were able to produce enough of the stuff to keep up with Prin-cippi's wild spending spree. This was the secret Michael Princippi effectively hid from the voters for so long: although he was an experienced technocrat with a penchant for knowing where all the paper clips in the governor's office were, his administration blew through money like a thresher through a field of autumn wheat.
For much of the race, it seemed that the voters would overlook Princippi's obvious shortcomings.
That was until the question.
It was at the second debate. He was up against the then vice president, and Barney Shea, the cable anchorman, had asked a personal question that the reporter hoped would help the governor dispel the silly notion that he lacked passion.
"Governor Princippi," the anchorman began, "Kiki Princippi is decapitated and her twitching body violated by four sweating stevedores. What do you do?"
Kiki. His wife. As the cameras whirred away, as the satellites beamed the small man's image to millions of homes across the country, Michael Princippi paused for dramatic effect, pondering the question.
At long last the man who would be president spoke.
"I'd identify the body, obviously, Barney—well, at least the head...."
The full text of the response, though telecast almost
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daily up until election day, was irrelevant. The Prince had screwed the pooch.
Princippi lost the race in a landslide.
When his party surged ahead four years later, retaking 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the first time in twelve years, Michael Princippi had gone on the few talk shows that would have him and pontificated his opinion that the then president-elect's victory was a ratification of Princippi's own abortive campaign. Four years after his dream had gone down in flames, Michael Princippi was still claiming victory. Something deep about having lost the battle but won the war.
During the most recent presidential race, his party had treated him like a poor relation. His calls to offer assistance to the national committee headquarters in Washington had gone unreturned. He'd gone full cycle from being courted to becoming a pariah.
He swore for the absolute last time, as he had so many times in the past, that his career in the fickle world of politics was at a definite end.
And this time his resolution held, until he heard through his remaining political connections of a place out west where all questions could be answered...and all answers were guaranteed to come true.
It was after midnight when Michael Princippi arrived in Thermopolis, Wyoming. The battered Volkswagen Beetle he had driven since his days in law school coughed clouds of thick exhaust into the warm spring air.
The former governor's excessive personal frugality had been fodder for the stand-up comedians during the heady days of the '88 campaign, and the rickety old
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car had borne the brunt of many an attack. While the worst of the barbs were flying, Michael Princippi's only concern was that the ridicule would force him to go out and buy a new car. After all, this one only had 190,000 miles on it and forty-eight oil changes.
Ten years later, with the odometer a few miles shy of its fourth restart, Michael Princippi chugged past the sleepy Thermopolis houses with their Re-elect Senator Jackson Cole signs tapped arrow-straight in their neatly tended lawns.
He remembered with some bitterness that Jackson Cole had been a friend of his opponent during the presidential race and he briefly considered aiming the Volkswagen across a few of the tidier lawns that displayed the senator's owlish visage. But back in Ohio, he had been forced to bind the rusted-out muffler in place with his shoelaces, and he was afraid the jostling would snap them loose.
Princippi left the images of Cole behind him as he passed through the far side of town. A few miles out he came upon the flashing amber light that was suspended above the twisting paved road, and he turned left onto the well-marked dirt path that led to Ranch Ragnarok.
He drove several miles into the thickening woods before his washed-out headlights caught sight of armed patrols. At each twist in the path where he saw them, the Ragnarok guards would pause briefly—like deer mesmerized by the flash of light from the oncoming vehicle—before resuming their march through the cluster of trees.
Princippi passed through the gate without incident. Either no one recognized him after so many years out