The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America (13 page)

Sandy looked up and Chaymber saw that his eyes were bloodshot. “A man called,” he said. “He told me about—about you—us. His language was—obscene.”

“What did he say?”

“He gave me to understand that he knew who you were. He has pictures of us together. Very together.”

“Pictures?” Chaymber’s brain refused to work. He felt suddenly as though someone were throwing buckets of warm shit on him and he were unable to move aside. “How could anyone have pictures?”

“Through the skylight over my bedroom,” Sandy said. “I mean, you must understand, you must know that I had no idea that such a thing was even possible. I mean, how the hell anyone got up on the roof to take pictures I can’t tell you.”

“It’s a bluff,” Chaymber said. “It must be a bluff.”

Sandy went over to the long wall where a stack of plastic boxes in primary colors were stacked to serve as a random-form bookcase. “Here,” he said, taking an envelope from one of the shelves and tossing it over. “I said something like that over the phone, so these were slid under my door.”

Chaymber looked at the four-by-five color prints of acts of what the Marquess of Queensberry had called “somdomy” being performed on Sandy’s oversized bed. They were good pictures and very clear.

“This is—most disconcerting,” Chaymber said. The words came stiff and hollow from his mouth. “Did the man on the phone say what he intended to do with the pictures?”

“He said to tell you he had them. He said he’d be in touch.”

“With me or you?”

“He didn’t say. If it’s blackmail, it must be you he’s after. Everyone knows I’m gay—even my mother.”

Chaymber stared at Sandy without saying anything. He got up and walked into the kitchen and looked at the array of orange pots on the wall over the stove and didn’t see them. After a few minutes he went back into the living area. “I have to think,” he said. “This catches me off guard. I suppose it was inevitable. But I’m not prepared at all. I don’t know what to do. Hell, I don’t even know what they want.”

“Money,” Sandy said.

“Did he say that?”

“No.”

“Well, I suppose it’s possible.”

“I could help,” Sandy said earnestly. “I mean, if you decide to pay.”

“Thank you, Sandy. Thank you for saying that. But I doubt if it will be that simple. Nobody bothers to get at a United States senator for money—even if he is a closet queen.”

“What then?”

“Power, influence, votes. Somebody wants to buy me. I’m on the meat rack and it’s a long jump down. I’m about to pay for my sins.”

“It’s not a sin!” Sandy said. “I don’t care what it says in Leviticus; I don’t care what the law is, what two adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom is not a sin!”

Chaymber smiled. “That’s one hell of a private bedroom you’ve got there, fellow.” Then the smile disappeared from his face and he shook his head. “That’s not the sin, Sandy. In politics the only sin is getting caught. I’m too tired to think about anything now. I’m going to take a nap. Here, on the couch, I think. There’s no skylight in here.”

“I’m sorry,” Sandy said.

“Don’t be silly,” Chaymber said. “It’s not your fault.” He stretched out on the amorphous softness that was Sandy’s modern couch. “I’m glad they called you instead of me. If my wife hears about this, the shit will really splatter about.”

“You told me your wife knew about you.”

“About me she knows. But she doesn’t know any, ah, details. And she doesn’t want to. And, more to the point, she doesn’t want anyone else to. What will it make her look like, her husband a faggot? And what will it do to the kids? Jesus. I don’t want to think about it. I’m going to sleep. Don’t wake me. Unless he calls back.”

“Right,” Sandy said. He padded quietly out of the room. Sometime later, when Chaymber’s regular breathing showed him to be really and truly asleep, he cautiously picked up a phone in the bedroom and dialed.

“St. Yves,” he said. “Tell him it’s Sandy.…”

“Say, excuse me, but aren’t you Senator Ryan?”

Kevin Ryan looked up from his
Time
magazine. An apple-cheeked stewardess with perfect teeth was standing over him, an ice-filled plastic cup poised expectantly in her left hand. “That’s me,” he admitted, smiling back up at her. “What, is it cocktail time already?”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s right.” She gestured toward the drink cart in front of her. “A dollar a drink. What would you like?”

“A Bloody Mary would be comforting,” he said, digging into his pocket for his wallet.

She poured the mix into the plastic glass, then, putting down Ryan’s tray for him, set the napkin-wrapped glass on the tray, and put a tiny bottle of vodka next to it. He handed her a dollar.

“It’s just that I’m surprised to see you here,” she said, adding the dollar to the money tray on top of her cart. “I mean, in tourist class. I thought all you government people traveled up front in first class.”

“Bureaucrats with expense accounts do,” Kevin said. “We elected officials have to get by on our own salaries. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes someone else pays and we travel first class, but we always wear false noses and dark glasses so none of our constituents will recognize us.”

She laughed. “I don’t vote,” she said, “or I would have voted for you.”

“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Come back when you’re done pushing that cart and we’ll talk about it.”

“Yes, sir” she said. “I’ll do that.” She maneuvered her drink cart on down the aisle and Kevin watched the slow undulation of her hips like a man hypnotized by beauty. Women had always been one of the great preoccupations of his life, at first because he couldn’t get them, and then because he could.

All his adult life Kevin Ryan had gotten along well with women. Probably because he treated them like people. “It’s amazing how many men treat women like another species,” a lady friend had told him once, “and then can’t understand when women respond in kind. You’re not like that. You’re interested in a woman’s mind, not just in her vagina.”

“The mind,” Kevin remembered telling her, “is the sexiest part of the body.”

Now, perhaps, Kevin Ryan was going to have to pay for his lifelong easy friendship with women. What he thought of as a casually intimate friendship could easily be blown up by an unfriendly press as a torrid, sleazy affair. Anything involving sex outside of marriage could be torrid and sleazy to the press.

And it was last Friday that a phone call had come to his private number and threatened to turn his private sex life into public scandal. A low, scratchy male voice had breathed the name “Nancy” and the address of a cabin in Vermont, and suggested that he had photographs the Senator might be interested in seeing.

“If you have them, publish them,” Ryan had said angrily into the phone before slamming it back down into its cradle. He had since then had second thoughts. Not that he’d even consider going along with any sort of blackmail; he’d see them—and himself—in hell first. But it would have been wiser to arrange a meeting with this man so he’d know who his adversary was and could handle him better. A counterthreat to prosecute for extortion might be an adequate way to handle a blackmail threat, if he knew whom to prosecute.

And then last night, another phone call. This one from Tom Clay, the Majority Leader of the Senate. “Kevin, boy, I’ve got to talk to you. It’s important.”

“Of course, Senator. What is it?”

“Not over the phone, Kevin. I hate to ask this of you, and I wouldn’t if it weren’t so damn important, but could you fly out here? The National Committee’ll pay for your ticket.”

“Fly out…to Minnesota? Are you in Minnesota?”

“That’s right. I hate to bother a senator between sessions, especially in an election year. Even if you’re not up at bat yourself. I know how it is. But I need to see you, boy. And I need to see you now!”

“In Minneapolis.”

“That’s right. I’ve got you booked on a nine-thirty flight out of Kennedy Airport. Can you make it?”

“If you say it’s that important.…”

“I do.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll meet you at the airport. ’Bye now, Senator.”

And so here he was drinking Bloody Marys at ten-fifteen in the morning, ten miles over the state of (maybe) Ohio, waiting to find out what the Majority Leader wanted to see him about. Was he about to be shown some interesting photographs? The last time he had seen Tom Clay, the Majority Leader had asked him to go easy on the administration. “We’ve got to live with them, Senator,” Clay had said in his clipped, nasal voice, “just like they’ve got to live with us. We all get more done that way with less hassle, if you see what I mean.”

Senator Clay was waiting for him at the exit gate. “Good to see you, Senator,” he said, shaking hands with Kevin. “Come this way, please.”

“What’s this all about?” Kevin asked, following Senator Clay through the exiting throng.

“Patience,” Senator Clay said. “All will be revealed in a minute. Thanks for coming on such short notice, by the way. Ah, here we are.” He led the way through a door marked private: airport personnel only and up a flight of stairs. “The airport manager has loaned us a conference room,” he said, stopping before a white door and pushing it open.

Kevin recognized the three men seated around the oval table in the small conference room. The large, florid-faced man was Senator Horace Slater, the Democratic whip. The small man in the rumpled suit, whose face looked as though each feature had been chiseled in unyielding stone, was David M. Wittling, who had given up his seat in the Senate to run for Vice-President of the United States, against his better judgment, and had lost. The third man, slender, aging, wearing the black suit some said he had been born in, was Laurence Harris, Democratic leader of the House, who’d been on the Hill since before Kevin was born. One hell of a star chamber, Kevin thought, now more curious than ever.

“You all know each other,” Senator Clay said. He ushered Kevin through the door and closed it carefully behind him. “Let’s get down to business. Senator Ryan doesn’t know why he’s here. Senator Wittling, would you like to inform him, please?”

Wittling smiled, his craggy features rearranging themselves into a rugged ugliness that surpassed good looks. He was what Lincoln would have looked like, one political caricaturist had remarked, if Lincoln had been a Democrat. “We’ve never actually met, Senator Ryan,” he said, extending his hand across the table. “It’s a pleasure, I assure you.”

Kevin shook the offered hand firmly and then sat down. “I’ve admired you since—”

Wittling held up his hand. “Please,” he said. “Don’t tell me how, as a babe suckling at your mother’s breast, you listened to my speeches over your primitive crystal set. It makes me feel like even more of a troglodyte than usual.”

“I shall restrain my, ah, youthful enthusiasm,” Kevin said.

“Good. You have no idea how inflating it is to one’s ego and deflating it is to one’s morale to read about oneself in a high school history text. At one with the pharaohs and not even decently laid to rest and out of sight yet.”

“Get on with it, David,” Harris said, staring across the table with unblinking eyes.

“Yes,” Wittling said. “Of course.” He leaned back and laced his fingers together over his chest. “You have, of course, been following the campaign, even though you, yourself, are not up for reelection?”

“Of course,” Kevin said.

“You’re aware of the tenor the campaign has taken on of recent weeks? All over the country, in many individual, unrelated districts—or, I should say, districts related only in having incumbents antagonistic to the President—sudden, vicious smear attacks have been made through anonymous front organizations against these incumbents.”

“I’ve been reading the newspapers,” Kevin said nodding.

“Bah!” Senator Slater said. “Not ten percent of it has gotten into the papers. Not ten percent.”

“True,” Senator Clay said. “Most of its unprintable.”

“We have a file here,” Congressman Harris said. “Well, file is perhaps too formal a word. A compilation of documents collected from various sources around the country.” He slid a cardboard file box about the size of the Manhattan phone book across the table toward Kevin. “Take a look through it,” he said.

Kevin opened the box and sorted through the collection of papers, letters, telegrams, handbills, booklets, and other scurrilous material inside. Most of it was the common sort of indirect political slander—a handbill that appears to be from the candidate’s own committee, for example, which makes him a supporter of gay rights, or black activism. There were news stories: “Maringer Denies Black Panther Support” was one headline, “Congressman Devoe Asserts He and Wife Not Separated” was another.

“That was all the early stuff,” Wittling said. “In the past couple of weeks the tactics have shifted. Now it’s all sex, law and order, communism, perverts, and a lot of stuff designed to incite the hidden racism of that silent majority the President keeps talking about.”

Senator Clay nodded. “And that rash of bombings that’s going on isn’t helping either. Every time a terrorist bomb goes off, the President’s team gets another ten thousand votes.”

Kevin shifted his gaze from the papers to Senator Clay. “You think all this is being orchestrated from the White House?” he asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Clay said. “Which reminds me, did you know that your phone is tapped?”

“What?”

“Truth.”

Kevin shook his head. “I hate to disagree with you, Senator,” he said. “But I’m paranoid enough to have that checked out once a month. The office phones and my home phone. I pay a private detective firm to do the checking.”

“They can check all year,” Clay said, “but if the tap is put on at the central switching gizmo in the phone company office, there’s no way in hell to detect it.”

“Then how do you know?”

“A loyal—or maybe a disloyal, depends on how you look at it—American who works for the phone company thought I ought to know. Gave me a list.”

“Who’d he say is doing the tapping? And how do you know he’s not putting you on?”

“It seems like an elaborate joke for an earnest man with twenty years working for the central switching office to suddenly spring. He says that they say they’re CIA, but he says they’re not.”

“How does he know?”

“He says the CIA taps phones out of that office all the time and they have an established procedure. And this group doesn’t know anything about it.”

“The CIA taps phones all the time? I thought their charter says they can’t work within the United States.”

“It does. Let’s handle one problem at a time. It isn’t the CIA who’s tapping you, it’s these other people.”

“What do we do?”

“I’d suggest you be a little discreet in your telecommunications for a while. Nothing much else we can do at this time.”

Kevin leaned back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re saying that the administration is smearing candidates, frightening voters, tapping congressmen’s phones, and there’s nothing we can do about it?”

“That’s the American political system,” Wittling said. “You run for office and accuse your opponent of whatever you think the public will believe, and a few things they won’t, and he does the same for you. It’s called democracy. What we’re seeing now is the democratic process being manipulated by a man with a lot of money, an insatiable lust for power, and no scruples.”

“Its the goddamn best political media manipulation I’ve seen in thirty-five years in the game,” Congressman Harris said. “By God, you’ve got to respect the son of a bitch for that. Every time anything bad about the administration comes out, it’s the Eastern Establishment Press gunning for the President. It must be obvious to every political reporter covering the election that these unrelated events are being manipulated from above, but they’re scared to death to open their mouths.”

“That’s why we called you here,” Wittling said, leaning forward and fixing Kevin with his deep-set eyes.

“You’ve lost me,” Kevin said.

“We’ve bought half an hour of prime time on all the networks for the evening of November Fourth. We want you to speak to the American people on behalf of the Democratic party. We want you to reassure them.”

“The only thing we have to fear,” Congressman Harris intoned, “is that son of a bitch in the White House.”

“We want you to calm down an overheated silent majority,” Senator Slater said. “Tell them that the Democrats aren’t trying to take their jobs or rape their daughters.”

“You want me to do a Muskie,” Kevin said.

“You could put it that way,” Harris said.

“Yes,” Wittling said, “that’s it.”

“Why me?”

“You have exactly the right image,” Wittling said. “Our first thought was to use some old and honored statesman of the party—I speak in this roundabout manner of myself—but it was wisely decided that I possess insufficient relevance to today’s young people. Or, to put it another way, most of them don’t know who I am. Anything that happened more than a month ago is prehistory to modern Americans.”

“We commissioned a special poll,” Senator Clay said. “People trust you as much as any Democratic politician, and more than most. You have astounding name recognition.”

“What about the way I picked on the administration last year?” Kevin asked.

“Very courageous and with the highest motives, the poll says,” Clay said. “It must be your smile.”

“The administration isn’t going to be very pleased with me,” Kevin said.

“They don’t exactly weep for joy when your name is mentioned now,” Harris told him.

“That’s true. I get to write my own speech?”

“Of course.”

Kevin looked slowly around the table at each of the four men. Senator Slater was staring at the tops of his own hands. The other three looked back at Kevin with unreadable expressions.

“I may be vulnerable,” Kevin said slowly, one of the hardest things he had ever had to say in his life.

“How’s that?” David Wittling asked.

“I recently received a phone call. The caller claimed to have certain photographs which could embarrass me politically. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but the caller might represent the White House.”

“How embarrass you?” Clay asked sharply. “What do they show? And for God’s sake, be straight with us!”

“I haven’t seen them,” Kevin said. “But they purport to show me and another person engaged in acts of sexual congress.”

“May I ask the sex of this other person?” Clay asked.

“Female,” Kevin said, looking slightly surprised.

“And the age?” Wittling added.

Kevin smiled. “Well over the age of consent,” he said. “And single.”

“What did you tell this person on the phone?” Congressman Harris asked.

“I told him to go to hell,” Kevin said.

“You’ll do,” Senator Clay said.

Wittling smiled. “I look forward to hearing your speech,” he said. “Now let’s break this little gathering up and get back to work.”

San Francisco, 1200 noon

And now it’s twelve noon here at KGGB and time for the news. Well, the People’s Revolutionary Brigade have had a busy night of it. In Chicago, the early-morning hours were marked by the bright red flames of the Federal Welfare Building as the entire second-floor records section was gutted by a two-alarm fire supposedly set off by a bomb. The Brigade claimed credit in a phone call to the
Chicago Tribune
just as the bomb was going off. A spokesman for the government said that this shouldn’t hold up welfare payments to the recipients since the city makes those directly, but it might delay for an indefinite time the federal grants to the city.