Triggers (26 page)

Bessie and Darryl sat in the back, separated from the driver by a pane of smoked glass. Darryl suspected Bessie was thinking that in the good old days, it would have been the black man driving the white man, not the other way around. And speaking of the other way around, why did it have to be
him
reading
her
—or why couldn’t Obama have still been in office, if she were destined to read the president’s memories?

The limo took them through the Los Angeles traffic all the way out to Burbank. It had been years since Darryl had visited L.A., and he’d
forgotten how horrible the congestion was, but Bessie was thrilled to catch a glimpse of the Hollywood sign high above the city. When they arrived at their destination, they had to go through more security—this with even more holes—handing photo ID through the car window to the gate guard. Darryl was stunned at how time-consuming and inefficient the process of getting in here was; he thought of five easy ways he could have gotten past the guards.

He’d never been on a studio lot before, and he hadn’t known much about corporate mergers, but apparently Disney owned ABC Studios, and so, in addition to traditional Disney fare, lots of sitcoms and adult dramas were produced here. The soundstages were giant cubical buildings the color of cheese with huge billboards for ABC or Disney programming on their sides—who knew that
Chadwick’s Place
was still in production?

The driver hopped out of the car and held the rear door open for Bessie. Darryl got out from his side, and a brown-haired white woman in her mid-twenties came driving up to them in a golf cart; the driver had called her to let her know they’d arrived.

“Hello,” the woman said. “I’m Megan; I’m the assistant to Jessika Borsiczky. Won’t you come with me?” She drove them down a series of paved paths between buildings and past some giant trucks until they came to the entrance to one of the stages. A sign on the door said, “Do Not Enter When Red Light Is Flashing.” But it wasn’t—and so they did.

They walked along a narrow space between the wall of the stage and the plywood backs of whatever set was on the other side. Giant black cables ran along the floor, and they occasionally had to squeeze against the wall to let people pass in the other direction; it was a long, arduous journey for Bessie. Finally, they came to the end of the plywood, and Megan turned. Craft-services tables—Darryl was pleased with himself for knowing that term—were spread out in front of them, covered with coffee urns, plates of sandwiches and pastries, and wicker bowls full of packaged snacks. A couple of people were standing by the table, chatting softly. They walked on, and came to more plywood, but this wall was
curved…

They continued around to the other side, and there it was:

The Oval Office.

Granted, it was a reconstruction, but except for the fact that it had an overhead grid of lights instead of a ceiling, it was
perfect.
And, Darryl supposed, it pretty much
had
to be: over the years, most Americans had seen countless pictures of the real Oval Office and had a good sense of what it had looked like before it had been destroyed. The Secret Service agent in him thought it ridiculous that the room the president had spent most of his waking hours in had been so publicly documented: its location, its exact dimensions, its every nook and cranny. But it had been, and this was a near-perfect duplicate. He wasn’t surprised, though; lots of people in Washington loved
Inside the Beltway,
calling it the most accurate White House drama since
The West Wing.

A smile broke out on Darryl’s face. Here he was thinking about the
set,
when right there in front of him, sitting behind a flawless reproduction of the
Resolute
desk, was Courtney B. Vance, who starred as President Maxwell Doncaster. Vance was one of Darryl’s favorite actors; Darryl had been thrilled when he’d won an NAACP Image Award earlier this year. He was looking off in the distance, apparently waiting for something.

“They’ll be breaking for lunch in just a minute,” Megan said.

“Can we do one more, Courtney?” asked a woman’s voice; from this angle, Darryl couldn’t see the speaker.

Vance nodded. He picked up the phone on the desk and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Get me the Russian president right away,” he said, “and if he’s not awake, wake him!” He slammed the phone down, and, in what the scriptwriters had doubtless written as “off the president’s determined expression,” the shot came to an end.

“Perfect,” said the woman’s voice. “All right, everyone, that’s lunch!”

“Is it okay if we go onto the set now?” Darryl asked Megan.

Bessie, who looked more excited than Darryl had ever seen her, said, “And can I meet Mr. Vance?”

Megan smiled. “Of course.” Vance was just getting out from behind the desk. “Come with me.”

Bessie looked like she was going to burst. Darryl followed her.

“Courtney,” said Megan, after they’d closed the distance, “this is Mrs. Stilwell and Mr. Hudkins—Mr. Hudkins is a real Secret Service agent.”

Vance was gallant. He took Bessie’s hand gently in his, and said, “A pleasure to meet you, ma’am.” Darryl smiled: two handshakes from African-Americans in one day; it probably was a record for Bessie. Vance then took Darryl’s hand and shook it much more firmly. “Agent Hudkins, what an honor, sir.”

“Thank you,” said Darryl.

“Are you here consulting on the show?” Vance asked.

“Not exactly.”

“Well, I hope you enjoy your visit.”

Megan must have heard a cue in that. “Mr. Vance has only a short time for lunch, and he has to do a wardrobe change before he comes back, so if you’ll forgive him…”

Vance smiled and moved off. Having an African-American president had become a cliché in movies and TV before Barack Obama had ever come to office. Darryl had enjoyed the joke that had been everywhere when Obama had been elected: “A black president? Crap, that means the Earth is about to be hit by an asteroid!” But he could tell that Bessie had been genuinely thrilled to meet Vance; then again, blacks as entertainers had always been welcomed, even by bigots.

Although he’d shown it to her repeatedly before, Darryl again fished out the picture he’d been carrying of Leon Hexley, the director of the Secret Service. The print was a still frame from security-camera footage taken on the day in question; Hexley had on a dark blue suit and a tie much more colorful than any he would have let his subordinates wear.

Bessie squinted as she studied it, then she nodded, and started to explore the set. There were cameras they had to walk around, but the rest of it was uncannily like the real thing. The lighting wasn’t quite right, though—it was brighter than the real Oval. And the translight visible through the window was not exactly the view one got from the
president’s window—which, of course, made sense: the photographer who had taken the image probably had done so from out on the Ellipse.

Darryl was fond of the movie
Working Girl,
and particularly liked the ending, because he loved Carly Simon singing “Let the River Run.” When he was young, you could count on seeing that movie every few months on TV, but nobody showed it anymore; Melanie Griffith’s character had worked in the World Trade Center, and the movie ended with a pullout of her in her office fading into a loving long shot of the Twin Towers—it was just unbearably sad to watch now.

He wondered how the writers for
Inside the Beltway
were going to deal with the loss of the White House; would it continue to exist in their series? That, too, would probably be unbearably sad to see.

Darryl watched as Bessie slowly circumnavigated the room, looking at things that might jog her memory: the portrait of George Washington over the mantel at the north end flanked by potted Swedish ivy (a tradition that went back to the Kennedy administration), the bronze horse sculptures, the grandfather clock, the Norman Rockwell painting of the Statue of Liberty, the two high-back chairs in front of the fireplace, the coffee table, and the presidential seal in the carpet.

But Bessie kept shaking her head. Darryl was tired—it had been a long day already—and so he decided to sit in the one place he’d never been able to in the real Oval: the president’s red leather chair behind the
Resolute
desk.

“Anything?” said Darryl. “Ignore the cameras; ignore the cables.”

“Not yet.”

Darryl looked around the room, and—

And of course he spotted it at once, although a casual visitor—or viewer!—would miss it altogether: the plain panel that was the door to the president’s private study, just east of the Oval Office.

Darryl walked over to it. It had no handle, and it popped open when one pressed against it, just like the real thing had.

“Jerrison was here,” Darryl said. “He came through this door into the Oval Office from his study.”

Bessie shuffled over to be next to Darryl. He motioned for her to go into the study, and he sidled along the curving wall of the Oval Office so she could look back through the hidden doorway without having him, an extraneous element, as part of her view.

“Anything?” called Darryl. “Think about Jerrison in that room, walking through that door, finding Leon Hexley standing here, his back to the president at first, talking on his BlackBerry, and saying…what?”

“I don’t know,” said Bessie. “There are so many memories of this place, and of meetings here with Mr. Hexley. To find the precise one you want…”

“It was Wednesday, about four in the afternoon. Hexley said, ‘Tell Gordo to aim’…?” He let the unfinished sentence float in the air, hoping she’d fill in the rest.

She shook her head but repeated, “Tell Gordo to aim” out loud five times, each time in a slightly different way—and finally her voice brightened. “He said, ‘Tell Gordo to aim 4-2-4-7-4 the echo.’”

Darryl scrambled for a pen and paper. There was a pad with the presidential seal on the desk, and a fountain pen in a fancy stand. He desperately hoped it was a real pen, and not a nonfunctional prop—and it was. He quickly wrote out what Bessie had said.

“Are you sure?” he said. “Are you positive?”

“That’s what he said, all right,” Bessie replied. “He must have heard the president then because he stopped talking and turned around. What does it mean?”

Darryl shook his head. “I don’t know. But let’s hope to God someone does.”

ERIC
Redekop and Janis Falconi got into Eric’s maroon Mercedes, out front of the Bronze Shield. He buckled up and waited for her to do so, then gently said, “You’re doing the right thing, Jan. The shelter is open even on weekends. We’ll have no trouble getting you in.”

“No,” replied Jan softly.

Eric had his hand on the ignition key. “Sorry?”

“Don’t take me to a shelter.”

“You need help, Jan. You need support.”

“Tomorrow, maybe. But not today. You can’t just abandon me.”

Whatever they were going to do, sitting outside the gaming store wasn’t prudent. Jan’s husband might come after them, after all. Eric turned the key and drove, heading nowhere in particular. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get some lunch, then. Do you like—” But merely thinking the question was enough to know the answer. She loved Italian food; memories of her at various restaurants popped into his head. “There’s a great Italian place not far from here.”

“Thanks,” Jan said.

They drove in silence for a time; the roads weren’t busy on a normal Saturday and were even more sparsely filled today.

“You’re recalling my memories,” Jan said. “Right now. Aren’t you?”

Eric nodded. He was trying not to do it, but they came anyway.

“You know I like you,” she said. He was keeping his eyes on the road but was aware that she had turned her head and was looking at him.

“Yes,” he said softly.

“And I thought, before all this craziness,” she said, “that perhaps you liked me.”

“Yes,” he said again, signaling a turn.

“But that was
before,”
she said. She was quiet for another block, and so was he, but then she asked, “What about now?”

And
that
was the question, Eric realized. It was one thing to know someone on the outside, but to know them on the inside! He’d never known anyone but himself this well before. He knew what her childhood had been like. A memory came to him of her at maybe eight years old, unable to sleep, coming down to the kitchen in her family’s little house and telling her mother that she was scared about dying, and her mom comforting her and saying that everyone dies eventually, but it would be a long, long time before either of them did.

And he knew what she’d been like at college, including the one and only time she’d cheated on a test, desperate to get into nursing school.

And he knew what she’d been like on her wedding day, walking down the aisle, thinking,
This is the biggest mistake of my life
—but being too afraid of making a scene to put a halt to the whole damn thing.

He knew it
all.
And she was right to wonder what effect that had on his perception of her.

The car rolled on; shops and restaurants passed by.

And the answer came to him. Not from his mind and not from hers—but from his heart.

He did still like her.

He liked her
a lot.

But…

“Jan,” he said. “I’m a doctor. I can’t…”

“Can’t what?” she replied. “Get involved with a patient? I’m not your patient, Eric.”

She was right. “True.”

“And, yes, you’re older than me, but I like older men.”

He thought about this; she did indeed. “Ah.”

“Or,” she said, “is it that you can’t get involved with a nurse? Because, like, this would be the first time in history
that
has ever happened.”

He smiled and drove on.

SUSAN
Dawson was waiting down in the lobby of Luther Terry for Paul to show up. They’d been dating for six months, and he’d had a key to her place for the last three. He had kindly gone there to pick up a change of clothes for her.

And there he was! She ran over and hugged him, holding on tighter than usual; she surprised herself by how much she needed the contact, needed the stability.