Ralph Peters (20 page)

8

Washington, D.C.

"
Perhaps
...
"
Bouquette said,
"
we should slip off
somewhere for a drink after all this. I do think we owe ourselves a break.
"

Daisy looked up from her notes. Clifton Bouquette stood above her, a bit too close. Her eyes scanned up the weave of his slacks, then along the silken breeding certificate of his tie. In these frantic days, when everyone else's shirt looked as though it had been worn hours too long, Bouquette's starched collar glowed with perfect whiteness. He was the sort of man who was born with a perfect knot in his tie, and now, at an age when other men had begun to soften toward incapability, when faces grew ashen with care, Bouquette stood easily, with a sportsman's elasticity, and his skin showed only the handsome damage of countless weekends spent sailing. When she first arrived in Washington, Daisy had been anxious to look up to, to believe in, men such as Clifton Reynard Bouquette, and the readiness of such a man to overlook his wife in order to spend even a few of his sought-after hours with a plain, if bright, young analyst had made her feel as though dreams—serious, grown-up dreams—really did come true in this city. She had felt that way for the first half-dozen affairs. Then it had all become routine, and the men with so many names had not needed to offer quite so many excuses for their absences, their inabilities, their growing inattention. She told herself that she was their equal, using them as sharply as they elected to use her, and she could not understand the feeling of desolation that had grown up around her professional success. Daisy Fitzgerald was a woman who could understand the course of nations, who could brilliantly intuit the march of events. But, she realized, she had never managed to understand men. Why, indeed, did a man such as Clifton Reynard Bouquette, deputy director of the Unified Intelligence Agency, wealthy in so many ways, married to a forbiddingly attractive woman not much older than Daisy, want to risk even the slightest embarrassment to sleep with a woman whose hair was never quite right and whose skin still broke out under stress or when she ate any of half of the good edible things in the world, a woman whose plain features had driven her to achievement? She remembered a workmate's laughing comment to the effect that Cliff Bouquette would crawl between the hind legs of anything female and breathing.

"
I can't, Cliff,
"
she said.
"
I've got too much work.
"

Bouquette inched closer, the nap of his trousers almost brushing her. She could smell him. It was a smell she remembered.

"
Oh, come on, Daze. Can't keep going without a little break.
"

"
Really . . .
"

"
Things will sort themselves out.
"
Bouquette smiled beautifully.
"
After all, we don't want to get stale. Need to keep our perspective.
"

"
I've got to get back to the office after this. The sort wool of his trousers. And the remembered feel of him. The taste. The things he liked to do. And the urgency he had always felt to leave when he was done.

She could feel a slight change in him. As though he had already invested too much time and effort in her tonight, as though, by her refusal, she were treating him with an inconceivable lack of gratitude.

"
Well,
"
he said, in a subtly changed voice, still carefully low, so that the secret service men would not overhear,
"
just a quick drink on the way back then. For old time's sake. All right?
"

"
Cliff, please,
"
Daisy said,
"
I've got to look over my notes—
"

"
You know that stuff inside out.
"

"
—and I'm seeing someone.
"

Bouquette backed away slightly. He smiled and shook his head.
"
Oh, Daze . . . Daze . . . we're two of a kind, you and I. And you know it. We'll have our little flings with others, but we'll always—
"

"
You have no right
—
"
she said angrily. It was the first time she had ever raised her voice to him when they were both fully clothed, and it shocked him even more deeply than she had surprised herself. He backed up still farther, then instantly came very close to her, bending down as if to discuss something in her notes.

"
For God's sake,
"
he whispered,
"
keep your voice down. Do you know where we
are?
"

Nerves, she told herself, it's all nerves. I need sleep. Control yourself, control yourself.

"
I know
exactly
where we are,
"
she said.
"
Now stop
it
"
For a moment that she promised herself she would treasure, Daisy saw a shadow of fear, of self-doubt, of age pass over Bouquette's face. Then he recomposed his features into the sculpted mask the world knew so well.

"
We'll see,
"
he said, smiling indulgently now, as though he pitied her foolishness. And he abruptly turned away. A few seconds later he was across the room, discussing the President's schedule with the secretary.

She stared briefly at his back, aching to see an imperfection in the lines of his body, any sign of the tyranny of the calendar. She already had her first gray hairs. Just a few of them, but, it seemed to her, at far too young an age. Bouquette would never gray—his hair was of a blondness that would simply mellow. He was a man who knew the names of wines and waiters, who affected to like nothing so much as a beer drunk from a bottle. He preened over his sports injuries and worked very hard to impress when he made love, seeking to convince his partner that he was still coursing with boyish energy. He had boyish names, too, for the things he wanted her to do for him, and she had done each thing even when it hurt her, unable to explain to herself why she could not say no to actions that would leave her uncomfortable for days. And the more a thing hurt her, it seemed, the more controlled he would be in it, drawing it out. Where her pain excited another man to lose control, to stream wildly inside of her, it only seemed to strengthen Bouquette. He savored the sexual borderland between misery and the passionate cry. Then, suddenly, he would begin to curse, to growl obscenely, and with a powerful thrust into her vagina or anus, he would finish. Anxious to leave, ready with an excuse as to why, after hours of mingled limbs and sweat and whispers full of praise, he had to disappear into the night or afternoon. Yet, she had valued him as a lover. Because he had known so many things about her desires. As a matter of course. In the physical sense, he had been a far better lover than the man for whom she told herself she was waiting.

There were, she suspected, few things that made a woman such as her more uncomfortable than being loved by an honest man.

And what kind of a woman was she? She tried to concentrate on the scribbled notes that updated her computer printout. But she could not help thinking of the unexpected man, the unreasonable, embarrassing man who had suddenly turned up in her life like a blemish found on the skin upon waking. What kind of a woman was she? The kind who lashed a sincere—hopelessly sincere—lover with her past, telling him needlessly much about what she had done with others, speaking in the name of honesty, making him suffer for the unforgivable crime of loving her when all of those other better, smarter, richer, far handsomer men had simply used her body as a place to empty themselves. The only time she had not been able to hurt him consciously had been in her bed. Over a dinner table, over a drink, she had been able to savage him with her confessions, instinctively aware that he could take all of this hurt and survive. But as his clumsy hands searched over her body, as he pushed himself into her with a laughable attempt to resurrect some long-forgotten finesse, as he held her with a ferocity that made her gasp, holding her as though she might slip away from him forever even as he stabbed himself urgently inside her, she sensed a weakness that could not tolerate the slightest mocking, the least teasing word. She was the kind of woman who shut her eyes tightly in the struggle not to weep as he continued to hold her—desperately—after he had drained into her, reluctant even to let her rise to go to the bathroom.

A plain girl with bad skin and bad judgment, who could foretell history, but not her own heart. Falling in something that might almost be love with a man whose face was something out of the shadows of an old horror film, a man too naive to lie, even to a woman such as she. She remembered him standing in her kitchen that last morning. She had known more about the situation into which he was being sent than he had, important things that he was forbidden to know, but which a lover of quality, of decent heart, could not have helped telling him. To warn him. But she had been unable to speak, and he had stood clumsily in the gray light, the wreck of his face curiously boyish, almost weak above the tie into which he had never learned to work a confident knot,
"
I love you . . .'' he had said. Not in the splendid darkness, which teased out so many lies, which excused the most ill-considered choice of words, but in the flat gray sober light, with rain tapping at the windows above the sink. In an unkempt kitchen in suburban Virginia, he had waited for a response. And, when she did not reply, he repeated himself:
"
I love you.
"
As if testing his voice to see if it had really said such a thing. Eyes pretending to drowse, she kept her silence, legs cold where the bathrobe would not grip. Feeling slovenly, sluttish in a way that had little to do with her sex, a matter of hangovers worn on the skin and untidy hair. He stared at her in hopeless fear, and she recognized that nothing in his life, no matter how terrible or physically punishing, had cost quite the same sort of effort as those tentative words.
"
I . . . don't
...
"
she said finally, in a voice too drab for his moment,
"
George, I just don't know . . . what I feel right now.
"
Her heart pounded, and she felt with painful intensity that, yes, at least for that instant, she did love this man, that she loved him with the same ferocity with which he had clutched her to him in the darkness. But she could not say the words. She felt as though her speech would damn her beyond all hope of redemption. No god was sufficiently forgiving to tolerate those words from her mouth. And the moment collapsed into the inconsequence of a teaspoon chiming the porcelain sides of a cup, the stuck lid of a jam jar, and terrycloth slipping from a bruised thigh. At most, she managed to convey to him that she would make an effort to keep her knees together until she saw him again. And she watched him go, a plain girl who had done so much more to hold a life's history of uncaring men, saying goodbye to the one good man who had happened to her.

The door to the briefing room opened. John Miller, a staff aide, stepped halfway into the waiting room.

"
Mr. Bouquette, the President's ready for you.
"
Bouquette marched across the room to retrieve his briefcase from its place beside Daisy's thicker, heavier
attaché
case. Grasping it confidently, he turned:

"
Is the President ready for Daisy, Miller? Or does he want to see me alone first?
"

The aide considered it for a fraction of a second, while all the politics and intricacies of his job raced through his mental computer.

"
She can come in too. Just remember, the President s tired. It's been a long day.
"

Bouquette nodded.
"
For all of us.
"

Daisy hastened to fit her notes back into her
attaché
case, feeling clumsy against Bouquette's polished manner. She had only recently reached the level where she personally briefed the President and the National Security Council, and she remained in awe of this holiest of realms, despite the years she had spent learning how very, very mortal and fallible the men were who governed the nation.

At first, the familiar faces were a blur. The room was slightly overheated, the air surprisingly stale. She hastily put down her
attaché
case, then stood awkwardly, trying to look both alert and at ease. Inevitably, her eyes were drawn to the black man in the navy pin-striped suit.

President Waters had loosened his tie. Normally, he was every bit as fastidious as Bouquette, and Daisy read the opened collar as a sign that the man had truly grown weary. President Waters had been elected in 2016, on a platform that focused on domestic renewal and on bridging the gap between the increasingly polarized elements in American society. Even after the disastrous trade war with the Japanese, as well as the long sequence of military humiliations and hard-won successes, even after Runciman's disease had cut a broad path across the continent, the United States remained a relatively wealthy country in an impoverished world. Yet the decades had more and more turned its society into a solvent majority and a number of marginalized subsectors whose members had fallen ever farther behind contemporary demands for an educated, highly skilled work force and the need for cultural integration to facilitate competitiveness. Then the United States had given sanctuary to the Israelis who had survived the final Mideast war, and although the Israelis settled largely in
"
homelands
"
located in the least promising areas of the Far West, they soon constituted a powerful force in post
-
epidemic America, where the shortage of skilled, dedicated workers had grown critical. The resulting explosion of anti-Israeli sentiment from minority groups that had isolated themselves ever more drastically from the mainstream manifested itself in demonstrations, confrontation, and, ultimately, in bloodshed. The candidacy of Jonathan Waters in 2016 succeeded on the premise that all Americans
could
live together—and succeed together. He promised education, urban renewal, and opportunity, and he was a handsome, magnetic man, who spoke in the rhetoric of Yale rather than the Baptist Church. A campaign-season joke called him the white-man's black and the black-man's white . . . and he felt like the right man for the times to a bare majority of the citizens of his country. He defeated an opponent who was a foreign policy expert, but who had few domestic solutions with which to inspire a troubled nation. Yet, the first term of President Waters had been shadowed by a wide range of international issues, while his domestic solutions remained promising—but the stuff of generational rather than overnight change. As Cliff Bouquette was fond of putting it,
"
The poor bugger's totally lost in all this, and he's about to be equally the loser at the polls.
"
Everyone believed that Jonathan Waters was a genuinely good man. But a series
of nationwide surveys indicated that he had lost his image as a leader.

The President looked first at Bouquette, then at Daisy, before settling his noticeably bloodshot gaze back on the tanned, perfect man at Daisy's side.

"
Good evening, Cliff,
"
the President said,
"
and to you, Miss Fitzgerald. I hope you've brought me some good news.
"