“So,” she said when the drink came. “Seen any good movies lately?”
He stared glumly at the table.
“What was that all about?” she said.
“I apologize,” Hardwether said hoarsely. “Can we just leave it at that? I haven’t been thinking very clearly.”
“Sure. But the conference room?”
“The ceiling in my office was too high.”
“Oh. Would have made for one heck of a headline.”
“Undoubtedly.”
They sat in silence.
“Is it that bad?” Pepper said.
“I just tried to kill myself,” he said. “Res ipsa loquitur.” [25]
“The wife thing?”
He stared into his drink. “The life thing. You won’t mention this to anyone, will you?”
“I’m not the Court leaker.”
“No, that’s right. Oh, what a… mess.”
Pepper said, “Reason I went to see you in the first place was Crispus gave me a whuppin’ today in the cafeteria about feeling sorry for myself. I could recycle his lecture if you want.”
“It’s not self-pity. It’s an admission of failure. Two different things entirely.”
“We back on oral argument?”
“No.” He rubbed the livid red line around his neck.
“You might consider a turtleneck tomorrow,” Pepper said. “Or one of them high Edwardian collars. You’d look good in those. You’ve already got that stuffy owl sort of look.”
“All I ever wanted to be was this,” he said. “And now I’m in a bar, with abrasions around my neck. There’s a Yiddish proverb. Want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans. ’Nother round?”
“Do you really need more depressants? Come on,” she said. “I’ll drive you home.”
The Chief Justice was now living not in a multimillion- dollar mansion in McLean but in a nice-but-nothing-fancy apartment building in Kalorama, which means “beautiful view” in Greek, a name dreamt up by a nineteenth-century Washington developer.
Pepper pulled up in front of his apartment building. The Chief Justice stared vacantly through the windshield, making no move for the door handle. They sat in silence.
Pepper said, “You don’t want to be alone tonight. Do you?”
“No. I suppose not.”
“You got a couch?”
“I think so. Yes. I have a couch.”
“Okay then,” she said, “I’ll take the bed.”
“Fair enough,” he said.
CHAPTER 23
It was a light day for Dexter on the set of POTUS. He had only a short scene in which the CIA would reveal that National Security Director Milton Swan had been poisoned by radioactive borscht at a Kremlin state banquet. Dexter hadn’t convinced Buddy or Jerry to add the subplot about Swan being a Russian double agent.
A production assistant came to his dressing room with the word that his wife, Terry, was on the phone and that it was “extremely urgent.” (Personal cell phones had to be turned off on the set, a strict rule.)
“Dexter,” Terry said, “something very strange has happened.”
Dexter’s stomach tightened.
“Oh?” he said, trying to sound casual while looking over his lines. “But Milton was like a son to me! At least until he started porking the First Lady.” Dexter made a mental note to ask Jerry if “porking” was presidential. These writers…
Terry said, “I gave Lee Tucker from the bank the go-ahead to wire the down payment to the broker. He called me back and said, quote, ‘There’s not enough in the account. Not nearly enough.’ Do you know anything about this?”
Dexter took a deep breath. “I was going to call you.”
A frosty silence befell. “About what, Dexter?”
“I had to make this other payment,” Dexter said.
“Payment? For what? To whom?”
“Just… some people in DC.”
“Dexter,” said Terry, her temperature dropping like a Canadian cold front. “We’re talking about five hundred thousand dollars. That’s half a million dollars.”
Dexter chuckled. “Yes. Yes. Like Ev Dirksen [26] used to say-God rest his soul-‘A million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.’ Ha-ha. They don’t make them like that anymore, do they?”
“Dexter. What have you done with our money?”
“Well, honey,” he laughed, “technically my money. But sure, of course, ours…”
“Dexter.”
“Terry, when I agreed to take on this new assignment, it was with the expectation, and the understanding that-”
“No, no, no, no. No speeches, Dexter. This isn’t the Iowa caucus and it’s not the New Hampshire primary. What. Have. You. Done. With. The. Money. Dexter? The money that was the down payment money for the maisonette.”
“That must be, what, a French word?”
“Dexter.”
“Terry, honey, lambie, listen to me for one minute, okay?”
“I am listening, Dexter. And I’m not liking what I’m hearing.”
“That money is a down payment. But on a different residence.” Yes, Dexter thought. Good. Brilliant!
There was a silence, as the Book of Revelation would say, for the space of about half an hour-the kind of silence that generally precedes rains of fire and blood and other unpleasant things, some of them on horseback.
“What,” Terry said, “in God’s good name are you talking about?”
“The White House, Terry. The best housing in America. Makes that maisonette or whatever the hell it’s called look like a mud hut. And no monthly maintenance charges, either. Terry? Honey? Sweetie? Hello?”
There was the sound of a telephone being violently cradled.
Well, Dexter thought, that was a success. He returned to his script.
“We’ll bury him at Arlington with full honors. In a lead-lined coffin so the pallbearers won’t get cancer. And once we’ve sounded taps over the corpse, then I will deal with President Gennady Barranikov. Get me the Russian translation for ‘No more Mr. Nice Guy.’ And tell Admiral Murphy to signal the Nimitz to stand by.”
THE PRESIDENTIAL TERM LIMIT AMENDMENT was proceeding toward ratification. Eight states, so far, had approved it-states whose legislatures were peeved at “Don Veto” Vanderdamp for having denied them federal spending monies for, variously: a dam, a highway “enhancement,” a wind farm, a Museum of Gluten, an underground storage facility for used fast-food restaurant cooking grease, an Institute for the Study of Gravel, a postoperative transgender counseling center, and an electric eel farm “alternate energy source initiative.” Eight states down, twenty-four to go.
“Your campaign manager called again,” Hayden Cork said to the President in the Oval Office. “He wondered if he might actually meet with you sometime before Election Day next year.”
“What else have you got for me?” the President said, barely looking up from his desk.
“You might at least call him,” Hayden said. “If only as a courtesy.”
“He knows what to do,” Vanderdamp said, scribbling. It was a personal letter to the Russian prime minister suggesting that the recent assassination of the prime minister of Ukraine, performed with in-your-face blatancy by the Russian secret services, might not have been in the best interests of international comity.
“Yes,” Hayden said, “still, it might be nice for him to hear from you some, I don’t know, message. ‘A steady hand on the helm’? ‘Putting people first’? Something…”
“He knows my message. ‘More of the same.’ ”
“Well, I’m sure they’ll find that invigorating at campaign headquarters. Mr. President, if I may-”
“No, Hayden, you may not.”
“Very well, sir,” Hayden said, a bit stiffly.
“Was there anything else?”
“Yes. I know how you hate foreign policy crises, but Elan Blutinger called and wants to brief you on developments in Colombia. At the earliest opportunity.”
“ Colombia? Crisis? Headache, maybe, crisis, I doubt. What is it?”