The Last President. Michael Kurland
Within these limits, the dealer may choose.
four
The office of Secretary shall rotate from session to session. The Secretary shall supply the cards.
Adams went upstairs to shower and dress and then came down to eat the omelette aux fines herbes that Gerald had prepared for dinner. When they were alone, Adams ate in the kitchen with Gerald. When there was any third person in the house, Gerald would not permit it.
Obie Porfritt was, as usual, the first to arrive. And, as usual, his first words on coming through the door were, “Evening, Aaron. Where is everybody?”
“You’re a shade early, Obie,” Adams said. “Make yourself a drink.” He nodded to Gerald, who put the scotch on the bar, looked at Adams, and tapped his nose twice with his ring finger, and left the room.
“Boy!” Obie said, staring after Gerald. “What I’d give for a couple of aides who couldn’t talk.” He took a tall glass, filled it halfway with scotch, and then stuck in two ice cubes and two inches of Seven-Up. “Had a hard day,” he said, “entertaining constituents. Least, they damn well better have been entertained.”
Obie was Representative Obediah Porfritt (R., Neb.), a hardworking, intelligent, capable representative of the citizens of central Nebraska. He put as much time as he could into personal contact with his Nebraskan constituents, as he knew himself to be a boring public speaker who came across badly on television. His great fear was that someday the Democrats would find some farmer with charisma to run against him in his district.
“What sort of entertainment do constituents go in for these days?” Adams asked.
“Not much in the way of song or dance,” Obie told him. “They actually came to see the President, congratulate him on his reelection, let him know they support him, in case he was wondering. I only escorted them to the Oval Office.”
“Did they come away with pens?” Adams asked.
“Tie pins and cufflinks. And a group photograph and autographed presidential photos. How can a poor congressman compete with the presidential seal?” Obie slumped down into an armchair and stared into his scotch. “Do you have any idea of how much the government spends a year on cufflinks? I hear he wanted to put his picture in the middle of them, right in the center of the presidential seal, but Vandermeer wouldn’t let him.”
“Obie!” Adams said in mock horror. “And you a Republican. Do you mean that the fair citizens of Nebraska weren’t interested in talking to you at all?”
“Oh, sure,” Obie said. “I sat them down and told them an amusing story about my plan for getting the Army Corps of Engineers to inspect the Middle Loup River with an eye toward inserting a dam. That got their interest. Very amusing.”
“They were amused?”
“They were delighted. I was amused.” Obie took a long gulp of whiskey. “Over Wilbur Mills’ dead body do I get a dam on the Middle Loup.”
“You mean you can’t deliver?”
“Sure I can deliver. All I told them was that the Corps would inspect. And inspect they will. The Corps loves to inspect. No problem there.”
“Ah.”
Colonel Francis Baker entered the study and skimmed his hat onto the couch. “I’m early,” he said, “but I may make up for that by leaving early. Fair warning.” He took a wide glass, plumped two ice cubes in it, and surrounded them with bourbon. A tall man with silver-white hair who looked trim and youthful in his uniform, Colonel Baker had begun his Army career by being drafted during the Korean War. To his surprise he liked the Army; it was dirty, muddy and dangerous, its regulations were mostly stupid, and entirely too many officers were incompetent, but for the first time in his life he felt that he was doing something worth doing. Something that mattered. And he did it well.
He had gone to OCS after Korea and slowly worked his way up the chain of command. Now, back from a field command in Vietnam, he was holding down a staff job in the Pentagon and waiting for his first star.
Adams nodded at him. “Sit down, Colonel,” he said. “Leaving early should be no problem. If you’ve lost enough, I’m sure nobody would object.”
Colonel Baker snorted. “That’s a precedent I don’t think I’ll set.” He was known as an ultraconservative player, who seldom lost.
Ian Faulkes and Grier Laporte were the next to arrive. Ian, a Londoner who had been living in the United States for the past six years, was employed by the MacPherson News Syndicate to report and comment to the British on their American cousins. A slender, handsome man in his early forties, he dressed with the faultless arrogance found only in upper-class Englishmen.
Grier, a fifty-year-old Texan with a pot belly, had a wide handlebar mustache and was bald as a marshmallow. His suit looked as though he had borrowed it from a larger friend who slept in his clothes. As always, he had on a string tie with an American flag tie clasp. One of the founders and owners of a commercial freight airline called Globeair, he served the company as their Washington lobbyist.
Grier fixed himself a bourbon and Saratoga. “Time,” he said. “Let’s get down to the serious business at hand, gentlemen.”
Ian took a chilled ginger beer from the small bar refrigerator and poured it into a sloping glass. “Thank the Lord that’s over,” he said. “I think I’ll put in for a well-deserved vacation.”
“Thank the Lord what’s over?” Baker asked.
“That special I was doing on your presidential election,” Ian said. “You can’t conceive what it’s like to attempt to explain the American presidential process to the great British public.”
“Say,” Obie said, settling down into his playing chair. “What’s the matter with our elections?”
“You’ve got no complaints, Obie,” Grier said. “You picked up the biggest majority yet in this last one, didn’t you?”
“Goddamn right. My constituents know when they’ve got a good thing going. That’s my motto: ‘You’ve got a good thing going in Obie Porfritt’.”
The last three current members of TEPACS entered during this conversation. They were Rear Admiral David Bunt, son of Admiral David “Pigboat” Bunt of World War I fame, and currently Deputy Chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence in the Pentagon; George Masters, Director of Training Aides for the FBI; and Sanderman Jones, who did this and that for the State Department. They fixed themselves drinks and then got down to the serious business of cutting for deal.
Grier Laporte won the deal with a three of clubs. “A little stud, gentlemen,” he said, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.
“What was that about the election?” Sanderman asked Ian. “Your viewers don’t understand the process, or the result. Or what?”
“Not particularly the last election,” Ian said. “But American presidential elections in general. In their wisdom, the electorate choose a majority from your Democratic Party. Then they turn around and, by an overwhelming landslide, elect a president from your Republican Party so he can veto all the laws your Democratic legislators enact. And thus does government come to a standstill while two of the coequal branches fight it out. Fortuitously, one of the branches is more equal than the other, so progress is made.”
“You gonna play cards or lecture us on democratic institutions?” Grier demanded. “Come on, ante up!”
They played in silence for a while, except for an occasional obligatory poker comment. Then Colonel Baker turned to Sanderman Jones. “Much reshuffling going on in State? Is it going to affect you?”
Jones shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “There’s a lot of head-rolling going on, but it’s mostly in the more visible sections of the department. Intelligence hasn’t yet felt the ax.”
“I heard about that,” Faulkes said.