by Edward Klein
There was a long pause on the other end of the line and for a moment I thought I had lost my phone connection to The Deuce.
Then I heard him say: “To make a long story short, Higgy, we bombed ourselves!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
In 1990, I received a letter addressed to the Sticky Fingers Literary Agency from an aspiring author at Harvard University who was looking for a literary agent. He signed his name “President Barry Obama” and used the Harvard Law Review as his return address.
I made an appointment to see him and flew up to Boston. When I arrived at the offices of the Harvard Law Review just after six o’clock in the evening, I found the place a beehive of activity. Three male secretaries manned the phones, which were ringing constantly.
“Good evening, Senator Kennedy,” one of the secretaries said into the phone. “Yes…yes he’s in…just a moment.” The secretary pressed an intercom button and said, “Mr. President, it’s Senator Kennedy on line three for you.”
Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. Finally, the secretary called over to me.
“The president will see you now,” he said. “Please follow me.”
The secretary led me down a hall to a polished wood door with a large brass knob. He knocked once and then opened the door.
“Mr. Higginbothem to see you, Mr. President.”
The office was an exact replica of the Oval Office! Everything was exactly the same down to the last detail—the presidential desk; the sofa; two sitting chairs in front of a fireplace; the American flag; the red, white and blue rug with an embossed presidential seal; even the credenza behind the desk. Six framed photographs lined the credenza—five of them of presidents of the United States who had attended Harvard: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. The sixth portrait was of the young man sitting in the chair behind the desk: Barry Obama.
“Welcome,” he said, getting up to greet me.
Barry Obama was a tall, rail-thin young man with a trim Afro haircut. He had an engaging smile that displayed a set of large white teeth. To my practiced fashion eye, he was the best-dressed graduate student I had ever seen. He was wearing a dark blue suit from the Hart Shaffner Marx “Gold Trumpeter Collection.”
He placed his hand on my elbow and guided me over to the sofa. He took one of the chairs by the fireplace, leaned back and stretched his long legs out in front of him. He fished out a pack of Marlboros and a gold lighter from his inside jacket pocket.
“You mind?” he asked.
“No…go right ahead.”
He took a long drag on the Marlboro and then said, “I’m writing my memoirs. I expect it to be a runaway bestseller. And I’m looking for an agent.”
“Do you think you’ve had enough experience in life to fill the pages of a memoir?” I asked.
“There’s nothing to worry about, Mr. Higginbothem,” he said. “My staff here at the Review has already outlined and written the first draft. They tell me I’m the most fascinating person they’ve ever met. One of a kind. Peerless. Unrivaled. Nonpareil. The one and only. Notable. Incomparable.”
“Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment,” I said, interrupting him. “Why would anyone shell out their hardearned cash to buy a memoir from someone who isn’t even thirty years old?”
“Because,” he said, “I am… the first. The first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. And I intend to be the first African-American president of the United States. I’m the one everybody’s been waiting for.”
Just then the phone on his desk rang. It wasn’t a normal ring. It was Ruffles and Flourishes, the fanfare that is played for the president of the United States before Hail to the Chief.
Barry picked up the phone, listened for a moment, and then put down the receiver.
“My accountant needs a quick word with me,” he explained.
There was a knock on the door and a harried-looking student entered the office.
“Barry…uh…Mr. President,” he said. “The monthly budget figures just came in. All this furniture. The rug with the embossed presidential seal. The extra secretaries. The rented limo and the chauffeurs. You’re going to bust the budget!”
“Hey,” Barry said. “Don’t sweat it. That’s what budgets are for. To be busted!”
I didn’t think so much about it then. I passed him up as an author, of course. Who in the world would ever want to read about someone with a weird name like Barack Obama? Yet even that first time I could tell he stood out from the crowd. Just why he stood out, I didn’t know then. But I would soon have occasion to find out everything about him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As the years passed, I learned to juggle my multiple personalities. In my guise as Personality Number One, I was the devoted husband, who kissed his wife goodbye in the morning and came home faithfully every night for Sie müssen aufhören! Then there was my Personality Number Two—the successful millionaire president of the Sticky Fingers Literary Agency, who revolutionized the publishing industry by refusing to read a word that my authors wrote. And finally there was Personality Number Three—the undercover CIA agent, who disappeared for weeks on end without explanation.
As far as I was concerned, Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve had nothing on me. But then one day my boss at the CIA, Whitney Nutwing, summoned me to his office and upset my cozy, carefully balanced multiple-personality-disordered life.
“Higgy,” said Nutwing, “someone in President George Herbert Walker Bush’s reelection campaign headquarters has been stealing classified State Department records. This person pulled the files on Bill Clinton, Bush’s Democratic opponent, and stuffed them down his boxer underwear.”
“How do you know he wasn’t wearing jockeys?” I joked.
“Because when one of the State Department’s female security guards saw the culprit leaving the building, she noticed a huge bulge in the front of his pants, and she said, “Did you stuff classified documents in your underpants or are you just glad to see me?’ And the guy took off like a bat out of hell…out of hell… and some of the pages starting falling out of his boxer shorts and down the legs of his trousers and he left a trail…like Hansel and Gretel in the woods.…the woods to grandma’s house. Except, when we followed the paper trail, it didn’t lead to any woods. It led to the Bush reelection campaign headquarters… headquarters. And we figured out who the culprit was… the culprit.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Poppy Bush’s chief of staff and closest friend, James Baker,” Nutwing said. “It seems that Jim Baker’s got it into his head that Bill Clinton worked for the KGB when he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford… a Rhodes scholar….and traveled to Eastern Europe. If Jim Baker can prove that Bill Clinton cooperated with the KGB, it’ll destroy Bill Clinton’s chances of beating Poppy Bush at the polls in November.”
“So what?” I said. “Doesn’t the CIA want Poppy Bush to win? After all, Poppy Bush used to be the director of the CIA.”
“I wish it was as simple as that, The-o-dore…”
“Call me Higgy.”
“I mean, Higgy,” Nutwing said. “You see, without knowing it, Jim Baker has stumbled upon one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War.”
Nutwing paused to let that sink in.
“Higgy,” he went on, “what I’m about to tell you is so classified that only four thousand people in the national security community know about it. Plus Bob Woodward at the Washington Post. But that’s all. When Bill Clinton was at Oxford… at Oxford…he cut a secret deal with the CIA to infiltrate the anti-Vietnam War movement. Bill Clinton was—and, in fact, Bill Clinton still is—an agent for the agency!”
“Do you mean to say that the man running on the Democratic ticket for president is an agent for the agency!” I asked.
“Yes, an agent for the agency.”
“Do you mean to say that the man running for president sold out his friends in the anti-war movement?”
I asked.
“In a heartbeat,” Nutwing confirmed.
“Do you mean to say… What do you mean to say?”
“That’s how Bill Clinton beat the draft,” Nutwing said, raising his finger like a detective announcing a great deduction. “In return for his cooperation, the CIA kept him out of the army. But nobody can ever know about this, Higgy. If Bill Clinton is elected president, we’ll have an agent for the agency—one of our very own—sitting in the White House…in the White House, Higgy. Can you imagine that?”
“No, I can’t,” I said. “The words ‘president’ and ‘Clinton’ don’t parse.”
“Higgy,” Nutwing said, “I’m sending you to London to head off Jim Baker and anyone else who might dig up the truth about Bill Clinton and the CIA. Godspeed. And remember what that great rocketeer Wernher von Braun said.”
“What’s that?” I asked, pretending I hadn’t heard Whitney Nutwing quote Wernher von Braun before.
“It was toward the end of World War II,” Nutwing said, “and Von Braun said: ‘Bomb the shit out of London and kill all those Limey bastards!’ “
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The next day, I checked into the Hotel Cavendish London, which was a short walk from my favorite Savile Row tailor, Alta Cocka & Shmuley. At the reception desk, who should I run into but the one man in the whole world who put the fear of God in the heart of every CIA agent—Russia’s legendary spymaster, Yurik Maligin.
Maligin had risen to his exalted rank in the old KGB, which recently had been rechristened the Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii—the Federal Security Service, or FSB—to make it sound more sibilantly friendly to Western ears. Eff-esss-be r-r-rolled off the tongue. But according to the CIA’s psychological profilers at Langley, Maligin was a psychopath. He could be charming, humorous and culturally refined. But beneath that pleasant exterior was a savage Cossack. He had a mansion in the Black Sea port city of Sevastopol, where he reportedly employed a team of sadistic Crimean Tatar hunchbacks who tortured anyone who got in his way.
For a villain, Maligin turned out to be a lot shorter than I expected. That wasn’t the only thing about Maligin that took me by surprise. In movies, a mangy dog always slinks away when the villain appears. But Maligin was carrying a Basset Hound under each arm, and those dogs were licking every square inch of his villainous face.
“Comrade Higgy,” Maligin said. “I recognized you instantly from your photos in our FSB file. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“All not good, I hope.”
“Absolutely not,” he said, smiling. “I’ve heard the most terrible things about you. Wonderful terrible things! And that only makes me want to know you better. Let me buy you a drink. We can discuss why the two best spies in America and Russia happen to be here in London at exactly the same time.”
I wanted to let him know that I was no chump. “I think we both know why,” I sneered.
“Yes,” Maligin said. “Isn’t it ironic? The CIA, the Bushies, and the FSB—all running after the same information about Bill Clinton.”
“But only I know where to look.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Maligin said. “I have the nose of a Basset Hound.”
He glanced down at the Bassett Hounds under his arms.
“Meet Gulag and Archipelago,” he said, introducing his dogs.
While I petted them, Maligin looked around as though he just remembered he had lost something.
“Where is that fucking assistant of mine, that Charnofsky,” he muttered. “Oh, there you are, you dumb retard. Get your fat ass over here!”
A bedraggled Russian with a head of patchy hair sidled up to Maligin. This was obviously Maligin’s assistant Charnofsky. He had a pair of droopy, sad eyes that gave him the look of a Basset Hound.
“Take Gulag and Archipelago outside” Maligin ordered Charnofsky. “They need to piss and poop.”
“But I don’t have any more poopie bags,” Charnofsky said.
“Then pick up the mess with your bare hands,” Maligin said.
Before Maligin could give Charnofsky a more graphic description of how to clean up after Gulag and Archipelago, I bid him farewell and went to my room on the sixth floor of the Hotel Cavendish London.
The bellhop deposited my steamer trunk and several other suitcases, and then left. As soon as the door clicked shut behind him, I heard a woman’s voice calling from the bathroom.
“Higgy, Higgy… I’m in here!”
Waiting for me in the bathtub, covered in pink bubbles, was the most beautiful redhead I had ever laid eyes on. Her breasts floated above the bubbles. She smiled at me as she ran a sponge over her long, thin, shapely legs.
“Care to join me?” she asked.
I was instantly on guard. I knew she was trying to seduce me. “I had a bath this morning,” I said. “I’m still clean.”
“Then hand me a large bath towel,” she said, emerging naked from the pink bubbles.
I gave her the towel and turned away—but not before catching a ravenous eyeful. That was only common courtesy.
“The least you can do is dry my back,” she said.
I began drying her back in an offhand way so that she wouldn’t think I enjoyed it.
“I know why you’re here in London,” she said, squirming under my touch and rubbing her rear end into my crotch.
“You’re getting me wet,” I said.
“That’s the idea,” she said.
“Not that kind of wet,” I said. “I mean you’re getting water all over my pants.”
She gave me a dirty look. “Sorry,” she said. “Anyway, I know that you’ve come here to track down Jean Sejna, the only person other than Bill Clinton himself who knows the whole story of his involvement with the CIA.”
“Who are you?” I asked as I started working on her breasts—drying her breasts.
“I’m Jean Sejna’s daughter, Masha,” she said. “My mother was a Czech intelligence agent working for the KGB who used her considerable sexual skills—and an unlimited supply of drugs—to coax young Bill Clinton into her bed. But recruiting him to the Communist side proved to be considerably more difficult than she had expected.”
“Why was that?” I said. “Was it because Bill Clinton was, in his heart of hearts, an American patriot?”
“Not at all,” Masha said. “It was because Bill Clinton wanted to dodge the draft. And the KGB couldn’t help him out on that score. Only your CIA could.”
That sounded like typical presidential timber. “Where’s your mother now?”
“Dead,” she said. “Tortured to death by Yurik Maligin’s team of sadistic Crimean Tatar hunchbacks in Sebastopol.”
“I hope she didn’t spill the beans about Bill Clinton before she died,” I said. “The CIA doesn’t want that information to fall into the hands of the FSB.”
“No,” Masha Sejna said, “my mother died with her lips sealed. By the way, you can stop rubbing my crotch now. I think it’s dry.”
“Oh, of course.” Flinging the towel into the bathtub, I followed her out into the bedroom. She switched on the hotel radio and found a station that was playing Bohemian polkas. Then she danced for me in the nude. Soon, I was on my feet, dancing along with her. Before I knew it we were on her bed and Masha was crying out in pleasure, Musíe prestat! Which is Czech for “You must cease!”
I eventually convinced Masha Sejna to stop shrieking and put on some clothes. Then I explained that if she, too, fell into the hands of Yurik Maligin, her life wouldn’t be worth a plug Czech koruna. We agreed that I would arrange a new identity for her, deposit a great deal of money in a Lichtenstein bank account, and send her to an undisclosed location in America.
Thanks to my quickie—I mean, quick—attention to Masha, the Bill Clinton Matter was put to rest. Jim Baker and the Bushies were never the wiser. And I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had outwitted Yurik Maligin.
Before I left London, he and I met again, this time for high tea at Brown’s
Hotel. We clinked teacups, and I said:
“Too bad you lost, Yurik.”
“There’s always a next time, my dear Higgy,” Maligin told me with a malicious gleam in his eye. “And I will do everything in my power to make sure I win. I will stop at nothing!”
For the first time since I had met him, I believed Yurik Maligin was telling the truth. We were fated to meet another day and engage in a life-and-death struggle for supremacy. Little did I know that our struggle would be over a prepuce—the retractable roll of skin covering the end of the penis that is customarily referred to as the foreskin.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Early one morning in the summer of 2004, I found a coded message in disappearing caffeine ink floating in my Starbucks Frappuccino. I took it back to my house on M Street and decoded it. My boss at the CIA, Whitney Nutwing, had written:
MEET ME AT 12 NOON IN THE BOWELS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE BEHIND THE WALTER REED ARMY MEDICAL CENTER. TELL NO ONE. WN
I got into my 1964 Bentley S3 Continental “Chinese Eye” and roared over to the museum, a sprawling cabinet of curiosities that housed five thousand skeletal specimens and eight thousand preserved organs. I had perused the exhibits a dozen times with keen curiosity, wanting to know every single aspect of my deadly craft.
Nutwing was waiting for me in the shadows of the museum basement, his arm outstretched, his palm warm and moist. As we shook hands, I noticed he had put on more weight; he tipped the scales at 400 pounds. He was now so obese that he had to support himself with a pair of elaborately carved, silver-tipped bastone da passegio, Italian walking sticks. He leaned forward at a forty-five-degree angle, all his weight on the thick wooden sticks. Dangling from his neck, like an equine hay bag, was a white paper bag, from which he extracted a gooey piece of pastry.
“Ah, my dear The-o-dore!” he wheezed in his inimitable husky faux-British accent. “Isn’t this museum wonderful … wonderful. Just look at that display! Marvelous…marvelous!”
