Grand Master

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Blue Zephyr at Smashwords

Copyright © 2010 D.W. Buffa

www.dwbuffa.net

All rights reserved. Without limiting the
rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
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or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,
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publisher of this book.

CHAPTER ONE

Richard Bauman sat just inside the doorway to
the suite, one ankle crossed over his knee, annoyed that he was
reading for the second time that evening the sports section of a
day old paper. He was in the most expensive suite in one of the
most expensive hotels in New York, and all he could do was sit
there and let his eye wander down the box score of a game he did
not even know had been played. He tossed the paper on the coffee
table and walked over to the window and looked out at the moonlit
shadows dancing on Central Park. What it would be like, he
wondered, to have the kind of money, to be rich enough, to come
here on his own, and watch for as long as he liked the shifting
scene of the city’s endless magic.

The thought vanished as quickly as it had
come. His eyes began their habitual circuit round the room, over to
the double doors that led into the bedroom and back again. “Strange
business,” he said quietly, shaking his head.

Three or four times every month, they stayed
here, in this hotel, and always in this same suite. There was never
any reason given; everyone understood. It was a simple matter of
logistics, the easy convenience that did not even need the lie.
Another room on the other side of the suite, a door that could be
unlocked to add another bedroom or, which was the point here, kept
separate and apart. It was a way to get privacy with discretion, a
way to make sure that all the rumors remained only that; rumors
that, even if nearly everyone believed them, no one could actually
prove.

“Strange business,” Bauman repeated under his
breath as he checked his watch. Ten minutes past one in the
morning, ten minutes past one on a Saturday night. With a gruff
sigh, he sat down in the chair and started reading the sports
section he had read twice before.

He was just turning the page when he thought
heard something. He put down the paper. He heard it again, louder
this time, a brutal, gasping noise. He leaped out of the chair and
ran to the bedroom door. It was locked. He could hear someone
moving around inside. He pounded on the door. “Mr. President!” he
shouted. “Are you all right?”

No one answered; no one came to the door.
Then he heard it again, louder, more insistent, an unmistakable cry
for help.

“Mr. President!” screamed Bauman at the top
of his lungs, beating on the locked door.

The door flew open. A tall, thin woman in her
late twenties or early thirties, with raven colored hair and dark
frantic eyes, stood there, holding a sheet in front of her,
pointing toward the bed.

“We were…and then he just stopped, and pulled
away and got this strange, crazy look in his eyes, like something
had happened and he couldn’t figure out what it was, and then he
just rolled away and his eyes kind of…kind of went dead.”

Bauman pushed past her and ran to the bed.
Robert Constable, the President of the United States, was lying on
his back, staring at the ceiling with eyes that could no longer
see. Bauman checked the President’s wrist and then his throat;
there was no pulse. Robert Constable was dead.

“He had a bad heart, didn’t he?” asked the
young woman, clutching the sheet under her chin. Bauman looked at
her and told her to get dressed.

“You’re in the room next door? Get your stuff
and get out of here, get out of here now!” he ordered. His eyes
started moving all around the room. “Here,” he said with a little
more sympathy, “let me help you.” He picked up the few of her
things still scattered on the floor and handed them to her.

“Now listen to me, listen carefully. You
weren’t here. You understand me? You were never here. Go back to
your room. I’ll lock the door behind you. Pack your bag, whatever
you brought with you, and leave the hotel. Do it now,” he said as
he took her by the arm and led her to the door. “Get dressed and
leave. You have to be out of here in five minutes, because in five
minutes half of New York is going to be here. Now go!”

It had all been instinct, the immediate first
reaction: protect the President, even if it was to protect the
President against himself; but the moment the door shut behind her,
he began to wonder if he had done the right thing. He turned back
to the dead body lying on the bed. “What a waste,” he told himself.
“What a stupid thing to do.”

There would be speculation enough, all those
hollow-eyed talking heads on television, all those gossip hungry
fools, always full of news, most of which they invented on the
spot. Think what they would do with this. Robert Constable, the
President of the United States, screws himself to death with a
gorgeous young woman less than half his age. Bauman tried to clear
his mind. Had he forgotten anything? Had the girl left anything
behind? He checked the night stand next to the bed, and then the
bathroom. There was a trace of powder, white powder, next to the
sink.

“Crazy bastard,” he muttered, as he wiped the
counter clean. He caught a glimpse of himself in the shiny silver
mirror and for an instant thought he saw his conscience looking
out. He looked away, finished what he was doing and went back to
the bedroom.

The girl had not left any jewelry, and
nothing else that he could see. Then he remembered. He felt a
strange sense of impropriety, a violation of privacy, and not just
that of the President and the woman he had been with, but of his
own, as he searched beneath the pillows and then the corners of the
bed, on the chance that the girl had left her underwear behind.

It had been only a few minutes since he first
entered the room and found the President dead. He had done
everything he thought he needed to, at least everything he could do
alone. His eyes darted toward the body. It could not be left like
that, stark naked, with….Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Lipstick,
and not just on the President’s mouth.

“Damn it!” he exclaimed in a whispered, angry
shout, as he hurried into the bathroom where he scrubbed soap and
hot water into a washcloth.

He almost could not do it, wash away the
tell-tale signs of a grown man’s infidelity, a womanizer’s
last-time cheat. He taunted himself with being squeamish and, when
that was not quite enough, tried to remember that it was not as if
he had to deal with the disappointment he might have felt if this
had been someone he had once respected.

Everything was ready. He took one last look
around and then walked through the sitting room, opened the door to
the hallway and motioned to the agent standing just outside.

“You better come in. We have a
situation.”

James Elias, taller than Bauman and ten years
younger, had worked with him long enough to know from his tone of
voice that this was something serious.

“You want the others?”

“Not yet.”

Elias looked down the corridor to where two
other agents stood opposite the elevators, and then followed Bauman
inside. The doors to the bedroom were open. Though trained to
caution, Elias was shocked at what he saw.

“Jesus Christ! Have you called the
medics?”

Bauman was all business. “He’s dead. Nothing
anyone can do. We need to get him dressed, get some pajamas on
him.”

Elias respected Bauman; more than that, he
looked up to him, the way he thought he would have looked up to an
older brother had he had one. He had been willing to go along when
they had done other things to keep the President out of trouble,
but this was rearranging the scene of a death, and not just any
death, but the death of a president.

“I’ve taken care of everything else,”
explained Bauman who understood the younger man’s dilemma. “You
know what will happen if he’s found like this.”

Elias still did not move. He looked at
Bauman, but Bauman suddenly seemed exhausted, too tired to think
beyond the immediate present and the thing he had to do next.

“What about the girl?”

“What girl?”

“There was always a girl.”

Bauman did not answer; he turned and started
toward the bedroom. Elias did not follow.

“Look, what choice do we have?” asked Bauman,
his voice betraying some slight irritation. “We were supposed to
take a bullet for him, if it came to that. This isn’t quite as bad,
is it?”

Bauman himself was not sure how he would have
answered that question. There was something noble and heroic about
putting your life on the line for the man you were sworn to
protect; it was hard to find anything to brag about in cleaning up
the evidence of this last scene of almost Roman decadence: a
sex-crazed politician, dead in the middle of an orgasm, the only
witness to his final passing moments, not his family and friends,
but some coke-sniffing woman with the face of an angel and a
harlot’s heart, the kind who only sleeps with men who can sleep
with anyone because of who they are.

“Maybe I should have found out who she was,
but I didn’t,” he admitted with a weary, rueful glance.

“The room next door?” asked Elias, as they
pulled the pajamas up over the President’s dead-weight legs.

“Yeah; we better check it, make sure she
didn’t leave anything.”

“You see her before? She someone he…?”

“No; she was new. Young, gorgeous; a model,
maybe - I don’t know.” He paused, remembering something that made
him think. “She wasn’t scared. I didn’t pick up on it; there were
too many things going through my mind. But I’m sure of it. She
wasn’t scared. Her voice trembled a little, like she was - scared,
I mean; but her eyes - they didn’t move, the way the eyes of
someone really frightened would. She looked right at me, almost as
if she were trying to measure my reaction.”

Elias tied the pajama cord and stepped away
to see if everything looked the way it should.

“Wouldn’t surprise me, given the kind of
woman he seemed to like,” he said, tilting his head to the side to
look at what he had done from a slightly different angle.

“What wouldn’t surprise you?”

“That she didn’t look scared.” He nodded
toward the body of the President, his head propped up on a pillow,
now dressed in a pair of dark blue pajamas. “Maybe he’s not the
first guy who had a heart attack while he was banging her.”

An hour later, after the President’s personal
physician had been summoned, and several other calls had been made,
the body of the President was wheeled out the front entrance of the
hotel. A crowd had formed, and thousands stood in silence as the
body was placed inside a waiting ambulance and, with the siren
wailing, driven slowly away. While everyone stood watching,
wondering at the shame of such an early death, a young woman on the
other side of the street, opposite the hotel, spoke quietly on her
cell phone.

“There’s a problem. Someone saw me.”

CHAPTER TWO

Bobby Hart had been at funerals in other
places and paid his last respects to relatives and friends; he had,
years earlier, held his mother’s fragile, shaking hand and wiped
away a tear of his own, while they stood alone at the graveside as
his father was laid to rest. Those funerals had been real, the
final, last goodbye, the formal ritual of grief and resignation, in
which only those who knew, and even loved, the one who passed away,
are invited or allowed. This was different; a ritual, yes, but one
that instead of serving as a catharsis for the emotions was a
playhouse for a fiction, all the mourners certain in their roles,
wearing faces made to reflect a sense of tragedy and loss that most
of them at least did not feel.

Everyone who was anyone in Washington sat
crushed together in the pews, come to listen in solemn acquiescence
to the eulogy of a man many of them had privately despised. There
were those who had hated him because they thought he had taken what
they believed belonged to them, the office that, it is fair to say,
someone else would have taken from them had Robert Constable never
lived. There were others who disliked him because he had not given
them what he had promised - or seemed to promise, because he had a
genius for being vague - when he had asked if they would help in
what at the time seemed a long shot bid for the presidency. And
then there were those who, if they had not always acted properly
themselves, thought it still the mark of virtue to keep their vices
private and, call it common decency or rank hypocrisy, had nothing
but disdain for someone who had let his private life become a
scandal. In their considered good judgment, Robert Constable had
disgraced the office and disgraced himself. The wonder was that he
had always seemed to get away with it. That was what drove them all
a little crazy, the fact that the man they thought one of the
world’s greatest charlatans, a man without qualities or principles,
had somehow managed to break all the rules and laugh at those who
thought he might get caught.