“Let me go further. I don’t think there’s been such concentration of rascality and unscrupulousness under one dome since the worst days of the Roman Empire.
“Frankly, it feels darn good to get that off my chest.
“Now, since we’re speaking candidly, I’ll tell you something else. I hope I don’t win in November. I’m not the sort to hang around where I’m not wanted. But there’s a point to be made and, by gosh, I’m going to make it.
“I’ve got a swell family back home in Ohio. And some really swell grandkids I haven’t seen nearly enough of. I’ve got a dandy front porch with a swing chair on it. To be honest, my fellow Americans, I wouldn’t trade all that for four more years of the White House if you made me emperor for life and threw in the Hope diamond and a Las Vegas chorus line.
“I’m sorry it’s come to this, but here we are and here we go.
“And I’m sorry if I butted into your favorite TV show. Good night, my fellow Americans. God bless us, and God save the United States of America.”
There was a hush in the Oval Office after the President finished speaking. No one moved. Then one of the TV technicians began to clap and suddenly the whole room was applauding, even the Secret Service agents, who never, ever register emotion, much less applaud.
President Vanderdamp, frowning at this unexpected display, thought, Oh, shit.
CHAPTER 21
Amor, I have been a fool. But now I am yours. Totally yours-if you will have me. Take me, Meetchell. Take me. Send in the Neemitz. Now!”
“All right, Connie, but no more Mr. Nice Guy.”
“Cut.”
“Problem?” Dexter said grouchily, dropping the panting Ramona Alvilar onto the satiny sheets of the presidential bed on Air Force One.
“Five minutes, everyone,” Jerry the director called out. He and Buddy approached. “Everything okay, Dex?” Jerry said.
“Yes. Yes,” Dexter said a touch petulantly. “Everything’s fine. Why? Is it not fine for you?”
“No, no,” Buddy said heartily. “It’s fine. Great. I think it’s going totally great.”
“Really great,” Jerry echoed. “But I’m-maybe it’s just me-I’m not sensing a lot of heat. Buddy, does that sound fair?”
“Yeah,” Buddy said. “I think it sounds fair.”
“This is a hot, hot, hot scene here,” Jerry went on. “Ramona’s-Jesus-she’s on fire. We’re going to have to pack her in ice between takes. But when you hit the ‘No more Mr. Nice Guy’ line, it’s coming through like a-I don’t know-BlackBerry text message or something.” Jerry turned to Buddy. “Does that sound valid to you?”
“I think so,” Buddy said as if considering an amendment to Newtonian physics. “She was giving me an erection, and I’m ten yards away.”
Dexter sighed. “Fair enough. I’m sorry, guys. I’ve… I guess I’ve got a lot on my mind right now.”
“Is everything all right?” Buddy said solicitously. “Anything I can do?”
“No. No. It’s fine.”
It wasn’t, actually. The day before, Dexter had had another argument with Terry over the Park Avenue coop she wanted to buy-or as he now referred to it in conversations with her, “the fucking coop.” She’d found one she liked, on Park Avenue and Seventy-fourth Street, the most expensive latitude and longitude on the planet. It was the bottom floor of a vintage apartment building, something called a maisonette. Dexter assumed the word was French for “hideously expensive.”
“Four million? Four million dollars? Terry. Hail Mary, full of grace.”
“It’s New York, Dexter.”
“Thank you for clarifying that. I’d assumed you were talking about a diamond mine in South Africa.”
OKAY,” Dexter said to Buddy and Jerry. “Let’s do it again. I’ll rip her clothes off with my teeth.”
“Whoa, Tiger,” Buddy said, giving Dexter a manly shoulder punch. “That’s an original Carolina Herrera. But I love the energy. Throw her onto that bed, send in the ol’ Nimitz, and we’re out of here. Good to go, Mr. Prez?”
“Yes, yes,” Dexter said, sounding profoundly bored at the prospect of ravishing a woman voted by People magazine the third sexiest woman on planet Earth.
There was something in addition to the four-million-dollar maisonette that was taking up a lot of gigs on Dexter Mitchell’s hard drive: a poll that morning in USA Today. If the election were held today, who would you vote for? Answer: President Mitchell Lovestorm-by thirty points over the next most popular choice.
Dexter had shown the poll to his wife, palms moist with excitement. Terry had glanced at it in a bemused way, as if it were a postcard from Aunt Hattie in Bora-Bora. “That’s wonderful, darling. And isn’t it wonderful you aren’t running?”
“But Terry. Look at these numbers. Thirty points!”
“Dexter,” she said, “Mitchell Lovestorm is a television character.”
“So?” Dexter said. “We’re all television characters these days.”
“I’m not. Look, sweetheart, it’s a lovely compliment to what you’ve been able to do. And for a nonprofessional actor, too. We’re all so proud of you. But the poll is”-she laughed-“meaningless. Anyway,” she said brightly, like a mother trying to convince a recalcitrant six-year-old that he didn’t really want to go to the zoo today after all, “you’re already president.”
Dexter sighed. “It’s hardly the same thing, Terry. Have you ever heard of the term ‘synchronicity’?”
“Yes,” Terry said. “It’s when you suddenly have a lot of money and just the right apartment comes on the market.”
As soon as Dexter had wrapped the steamy reconciliation scene on Air Force One he went off to his dressing room and placed a call to Buster “Bussie” Scrump, the Washington pollster and political operative. It had been unkindly but accurately said of Bussie Scrump that his ethics were of a piece with Groucho Marx’s manifesto, “I’ve got principles. And if you don’t like them, I’ve got other principles.”
“Mis-ter President!” Bussie said jovially. They’d known each other for years. “How’s the Nimitz? I swear I get goose bumps every time I hear you say that.”
“Fuck the Nimitz,” Dexter said. “Now listen, Buss, this is between you, me, and the Holy Ghost.”
CHAPTER 22
The investigation into the Swayle leak, now in its fourth week, had so far failed to produce any result other than a deepening of the already sour mood within the marble palace.
A defiant and continuingly minty-breathed Chief Justice Hardwether had, true to his threat, called in the FBI, causing almost unanimous ill will. (For once the justices agreed on something.) Clerks asked to submit to polygraph examinations appealed to their various justices, who in turn registered Olympian proxy umbrage and fired off furious, copiously footnoted letters to the Attorney General, with ostentatious cc’s to their own Chief Justice. One such letter had been reprinted in full on the front page of the Washington Post.
The skies over Capitol Hill darkened with writs and subpoenas, but the Supreme Court being supreme, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot the Justice Department could do other than to stamp its feet and put out grumbly leaks on the theme of “supreme arrogance.” Juvenal’s quis custodiet was quoted so often on TV that three-year-olds became conversant in Latin. Court observers shook their heads in dismay. Not since Bush v. Gore [23] had the Supreme Court been held in such contempt by the country. Had Chief Justice Hardwether lost his grip? This never would have happened under Rehnquist. And these rumors that he was drinking. It was all so very sad.
At the epicenter of this fury and unpleasantness stood Justice Pepper Cartwright, the aggrieved party insofar as the leak went, yet increasingly perceived in the public eye to be the epicentric cause of all the problems. Editorials had begun to appear calling for her impeachment. Every now and then, as the saying goes, Washington needs to burn a witch.
[23] Untidy, still controversial case involving somewhat confused, largely Jewish, Democratic retirees in Palm Beach who in 2000 voted by mistake for Patrick Buchanan, an anti-Israel Republican, instead of pro- Israel Democrat Al Gore, eventually resulting in the presidency of George (not H.) W. Bush, 9/11, the Iraq War, a 40 percent decline of the U.S. dollar, the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008, a fatal tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo, and a Nobel Prize for Gore.