The Obama Identity

by Edward Klein

  He was pointing at a lit glass cylinder that contained the brain and skeleton of President Garfield’s assassin. Next to that specimen was a jar displaying a piece of John Wilkes Booth’s spine.

  “Want one?” Nutwing asked.

  For a second I thought he was referring to the mummified remains. But then I realized he was offering me something from the white paper bag around his neck. Inside were a dozen large cinnamon rolls, topped with caramel and pecans, which Nutwing had purchased at a local Cinnabon kiosk.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  He hobbled over to another glass display case. “I just love this one,” he said. “Just love…”

  He reached into the white paper bag and grabbed another cinnamon roll and stuffed it into his mouth. He licked his fingers and pointed to the hairball of a twelve-year-old girl who had compulsively eaten her own hair and died in the process.

  “Delicious, isn’t it?”

  I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the cinnamon roll or the hairball.

  “The-o-dore,” he said after he managed to swallow yet another cinnamon roll, “the CIA is quite certain that George W. Bush will defeat John Kerry and be re-elected president this November. You know we always wanted that boy to be president. Ever since his father was director of the CIA, we had our eyes on George W., because we knew he could be controlled by us. We took an inarticulate, malleable, and not-very-bright boy, the black sheep of the Bush Family—a guy who snorted cocaine at Camp David when his father was president—and we made that boy our President.”

  Nutwing dug into the bag of cinnamon rolls.

  “The-o-dore…” he went on.

  “Call me Higgy,” I said.

  “Now, Higgy, the CIA has had an off-the-books domestic operation for decades, in which we keep tabs on our most ambitious presidential hopefuls. We compile dossiers on all of them, we infiltrate their staffs, we bug their homes and cars and offices, and we even bug their mistresses’ or boyfriends’ homes… their homes. We do this in order to defend ourselves from the miscreant, publicity-seeking politician who might become president of the United States and get it into his head to play games with our budget.”

  He was winded by his long monologue and he paused for a moment to catch his breath.

  “In short,” he said at last, “our job is to get our guy—Democrat or Republican—into the White House. And once he’s there, to make sure he stays on the straight and narrow…yes, you heard me—the straight and narrow.”

  I knew that federal law expressly prohibited the CIA from operating inside the United States. But I also knew enough to know that the Persian philosopher Sara Truth wouldn’t consider it constructive for me to point out that inconvenient truth to Nutwing.

  He handed me a copy of that morning’s Boston Globe. “Did you see this?”

  I recognized the figure staring back at me from the front page right away. It was a photograph of Barack Obama. These days he was a state senator from Illinois. He had given the keynote address the previous night at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. The Democrats had nominated the ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards. But judging by the size and play of Barack Obama’s photo, his performance had stolen the show from the two Johns. Why was I not surprised?

  “Fourteen years ago, The-o-dore…I mean Higgy…you met this guy Obama when he was president of the Harvard Law Review,” Nutwing reminded me. “All our indicators show that four years from now, in 2008, he’s going to make a run for president of the United States. And we think he’s got a good chance of winning.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

  “I want you to take a good look at this photo of Obama on the front page. Who do you see standing right behind him?”

  I inspected the photo again. “Holy Toledo! Is that who I think it is?”

  “Yes,” said Nutwing. “That’s Yurik Maligin, the legendary spymaster of the FSB.”

  I tried to recall what Maligin had told me years ago in London when I had outwitted him on the Bill Clinton case. We had met for high tea at Brown’s and Maligin had threatened me.… How had he put it? All at once, I remember his exact words:

  “There’s always a next time, my dear Higgy. And I will do everything in my power to make sure I win. I will stop at nothing!”

  “Higgy,” Nutwing said, “I want you to do a complete workup on Barack Obama before Maligin gets the goods on him. Everything about Obama’s past…his personal life…his habits… girls…boys…drugs…where he buys those neat neckties. You’ll be in a race against the legendary spymaster Yurik Maligin. But your team will be given the highest classification; it will be the most secret directorate in the CIA. It’s even going to be given a very special name. It will be called…are you ready for this?… The Tchaikovsky Circle.”

  From the intense pleasure he derived from the name, I had no doubt who had originally thought it up.

  “That sounds sibilantly Communist,” I said.

  He wagged a stubby finger at me. “The original Tchaikovsky Circle was a nineteenth-century secret Russian society that fought to reverse Russia’s moral decay… yes, moral decay. Our Tchaikovsky Circle will have a similar goal: fighting the downhill slide in America’s moral values.” I knew he considered me slow, and he added pointedly, “Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky was a composer, not a Commie. He died long before the Communists came to power in Russia.”

  As we parted company, I didn’t have the heart to tell Whitney Nutwing that the original Tchaikovsky Circle wasn’t named after the famous composer; it was named after Nikolai Tchaikovsky, a flaming radical who fought on the side of the Communists during the Russian Revolution.

  Whitney Nutwing had named my new unit—the CIA’s most secret directorate—after a Communist hero.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  One week to the day after Whitney Nutwing created The Tchaikovsky Circle, I found myself standing at the luggage carousel in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Chicago was ground zero in Barack Obama’s political career.

  I was traveling, as was my custom, with a gigantic Louis Vuitton wardrobe trunk that accommodated three suits, a tuxedo, a blue blazer, two pairs of slacks, workout clothes, sneakers, several pairs of shoes, plus shirts, sweaters, and accessories. It took two brawny porters to wrestle the monster into a taxi. Seeing them grunt and strain made me chuckle. No effort in the name of fashion was too great.

  I told the driver to take me to The Townhouse at 107 East Oak Street, and asked him to wait for me there. This was the location of Paul Stuart, my favorite men’s store. I bought a half dozen pairs of jockey undershorts, one size too small. I always remembered my father’s sage advice: “There’s nothing like feeling firmly supported when you begin a tough new assignment.”

  My next stop was the Ambassador East, a luxury hotel on Lake Michigan. A diminutive bellhop who looked as old as the hotel itself (it was built in 1926) escorted me to a suite on a high floor. He was so decrepit that he could barely manage to open the curtains.

  “Mister,” he said in a wheezy voice, “I don’t know who you are, but you sure must be major league to rate this suite. When Old Joe Kennedy came to Chicago, he met right here, in this very room, with Sam Giancana, the boss of bosses of the Chicago Outfit. This is where Old Joe and Sam hatched their scheme to get Jack Kennedy elected president back in 1960.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said.

  And I was impressed. Until then I had never thought of myself as being in the same business as Joseph P. Kennedy—the making of a president.

  “And you see that red stain on the carpet?” the old bellhop continued, pointing to a spot near my feet. “That’s from the 1957 murder of Teddy Roe, a South Side bookmaker who refused to pay Sam Giancana the going street tax. Giancana had Teddy Roe rubbed out right where you’re standing.” He paused, then added: “Believe me, Mister, Chicago’s still that kind of a town.”

  If he thought he was putting the fear of God into me, he didn’t know the kind of man he was dealing with
.

  That evening, instead of eating downstairs in the dining room, I slipped on a pair of Derek Rose brushed Egyptian cotton striped pajamas and ordered room service: lobster bisque, fresh trout a la meunière, puré of squash, haricot vert almondine, and, for desert, profiteroles au chocolat and a double espresso. Caffeine never kept me up at night. I always slept like a baby—a fact that I attributed to my untroubled conscience.

  The next morning, feeling refreshed and with my loins appropriately girded, I strolled out of the Ambassador East Hotel lobby and walked a few blocks to a nondescript office building near the Sears Tower. I took the elevator to the eighth floor and entered through a door with a brass nameplate that said MITT.

  In case anybody asked, MITT stood for the Midwestern Institute for Traditional Thinking. The CIA had established these think tanks and non-profit front organizations all over the country. (It’s only fair to point out that the CIA created MITT long before Mitt Romney dropped his real first name, because he didn’t think that an elder in the Mormon Church named Willard could get elected president.)

  Waiting for me in the conference room, drinking from a can of Coca-Cola, was Russ Slanover, a chip head tech wiz with a mop of flaming red hair and a matching beard. Russ and I had worked together on several investigations. He could go on the Internet where no man had ever gone before. No website, no account, no firewall was off limits to Russ Slanover.

  “Russ,” I said, “I’m going to level with you. I met this guy Obama fourteen years ago, and never in my wildest dreams did I believe that a half-black, half-white man with a Muslim middle name…a man who’s an obscure member of the Illinois state senate… never did I dream…. You tell me, what’s the chance of somebody like that becoming president of the United States? Absolute zero, right?”

  “Actually,” Russ replied, extracting another can of Coke from his six-pack, “absolute zero can’t be reached artificially because it’s impossible to decouple a system fully from the rest of the universe.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but—”

  “So,” Russ continued, popping open the can and taking a long swig of Coke, “if Obama doesn’t have a chance of becoming president, why did Whitney Nutwing send you here? According to Moore’s Paradox—which, as you know, is named after G. E Moore, one of the founders of the analytic tradition in philosophy—Nutwing must have thought about the relation of assertion and belief when it comes to Obama.”

  I was still trying to figure out what the heck the relation between assertion and belief could possibly be as I said, “I think this Barack Obama thing is another of Whitney Nutwing’s wild goose chases. They don’t call him ‘Nutwing’ for nothing.”

  “Of course they don’t,” Russ said. “They call him that because that’s his name.”

  I let that pass. “So, have you been in contact with Vangie Roll yet?”

  For all our past successes, Russ Slanover and I didn’t know Shinola about Chicago. We needed to recruit a local expert to the Tchaikovsky Circle. I put in a phone call to the CIA’s best deep-cover asset in the Windy City—Vangie Roll, a single black professional woman with both a law degree and a real estate license, who lived with Elvira, her eighty-one-year-old wheelchair-bound mother.

  The phone was answered on the first ring.

  “Vangie?” I said into the receiver. “Vangie Roll?”

  “No, this ain’t Vangie,” said the voice on the other end. “Who’s callin’?”

  “Tell her it’s Higgy.”

  “Tell her yourself, honky. This is Vangie’s mother, Elvira.”

  “Elvira,” I said, “how are you?”

  I hadn’t spoken to Elvira in quite a while, and I could hear her labored breathing over the phone line. She had been a heavy smoker, and suffered from an advanced case of emphysema. All her life, Elvira had been a very active woman. Back in the late 1940s, she had become the first black woman to be admitted to the Illinois Bar Association. And she had worked hand in glove with Thurgood Marshall during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. I imagined that it was hard for her to be sidelined in her old age.

  “Higgy,” Elvira asked, “do you know what’s white and twelve inches long?”

  “No,” I said, glancing downward idly. “What?”

  “Nothin’.”

  Elvira broke into one of her deep, cigarette-smoker cackles, which quickly turned into a coughing jag. When she had recovered, she said:

  “Why haven’t you called Vangie? She’s been pining away for you.”

  “I’m sure Vangie’s got plenty of male suitors,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you’re still the one and only, Higgy. You’re the one she’s been waitin’ for. Hang on, here she is.”

  “Sorry about Mom’s non-P.C. sense of humor,” Vangie said when she came on the phone.

  “No problemo.”

  “Oh, Higgy,” Vangie said rapturously, “it’s been so long that I almost forgot how much I loved to hear your voice. Say something—say anything…”

  “Vangie,” I said, ignoring her request, “I need to see you. I’m at the Midwestern Institute for Traditional Thinking.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty.”

  Sure enough, twenty minutes later Vangie Roll strode into the MITT conference room. She was a tall woman, well over six feet, and she was dressed in a green pantsuit with a short fitted jacket that accentuated her toned figure.

  Vangie had been a star on the University of Tennessee’s championship women’s basketball team, and then played in a professional women’s league in Eastern Europe, which is where the CIA recruited her. She was still involved in an amateur basketball league at the University of Chicago on weekends. Because she had an athlete’s build and a face filled with humor and kindness, people often underestimated her intelligence. But Vangie Roll was as sharp as they came. She was, hands down, the best agent I’d ever worked with.

  She gave me a buss on the cheek and lingered there long enough for me to feel the warm breath on my ear and smell the rich, woody, Oriental scent of Chanel Cuir de Russie (“Russia Leather”) Parfum, which went for $700 an ounce.

  “Where’d you get that outfit?” Vangie asked as soon as we had settled into our chairs.

  I was wearing a summer-weight tan gabardine suit with a dark blue, modified spread-collar shirt, and a paisley tie.

  “Paul Stuart,” I said. “Don’t you like it?”

  “Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “As they say where I come from, ‘You so square don’t make me shank you.’ ”

  “But I am square,” I said.

  “Not to me, you’re not,” she said. “To me, you’re the most attractive man in the world. You’d look great in Dolce and Gabbana.”

  “Well, as long as we’re talking about what we’re wearing and not wearing,” I said, “why aren’t you wearing the engagement ring your fiancé gave you?”

  She looked like she didn’t want to tell me. “He flew the coop with another bird.”

  “He broke his engagement with you?” I asked. “How many does that make?”

  “I’ve lost count,” she lamented. “Mom’s on my case about men all the time. She says the problem is that my heart belongs to the one man who isn’t interested in me. I’m sure you know who I’m referring to…Higgy. “

  “Yeah…right,” I said. “So, uh, where does Barack Obama buy his suits?”

  “Right here in Chicago—at Dillard’s,” Vangie said. “He gets made-to-measure Hart Schaffner Marx.”

  “Any relation to Karl?” I asked cheerfully.

  “No such luck,” Vangie said. “Obama buys Hart Schaffner Marx’s ‘Gold Trumpeter Collection.’ Those suits go for $3,200 a pop.”

  I didn’t appreciate the competition. “Where does he get that kind of money?”

  “Higgy, you have no idea who you’re dealing with,” Vangie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you have no idea what Team Obama has going for them here in Chicago. This is Obama’s first run for the
United States Senate and, I tell you, he’s going to win without breaking a sweat. The word on the street is that he’s already planning his 2008 presidential campaign.” She leaned a little closer to me. “Obama is the toughest, smartest, meanest political operator I ever saw. I’m telling you, Higgy, these Obama folks’ll stop at nothing.”

  I suddenly recalled what the diminutive bellhop at the Ambassador East Hotel had told me:

  “Mister, Chicago’s still that kind of a town.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A few days after my meetings with Russ Slanover and Vangie Roll, my phone rang at the Midwestern Institute for Traditional Thinking. I immediately recognized the ex-smoker’s leathery voice as belonging to Vangie’s disabled old mother, Elvira.

  Vangie often let her mother dial her calls. It made Elvira, who used to be on a first-name basis with governors and Supreme Court justices, feel useful. But in this instance, most of what Elvira had to say was drowned out by music playing in the background.

  “Elvira,” I shouted into the receiver. “I can’t hear you. Turn down the volume. What is that?”

  “That’s Ella Fitzgerald,” she said. “I always knew you had Van Gogh’s ear for music…. Hold on. Here’s Vangie.

  When Vangie came on the phone, she sounded breathless with excitement.

  “Higgy, you aren’t going to believe what happened to me today,” she began. “Remember how I told you that I play in an amateur basketball league on weekends at the Ratner Center at the University of Chicago? Well, I was down there this morning, and who do you think I ran into in the gym? Our friend Barack Obama.”

  “Did you have a chance to talk to him?” I asked.

  “Better than that,” Vangie said. “The Ratner Center has three basketball courts, side by side, and when I saw Obama walk onto the far court with a group of players, I figured, hey, this is my big chance to get to know this guy. So I ditched my regular league game, and changed my uniform. I got into a tight-fitting black Nike tank top, which highlights my long arms, and a pair of matching skintight Under Armour bicycle pants, which accentuate my derriere. Do you dig me?“