The Obama Identity

by Edward Klein

  “Where’s your mom?” I asked.

  “On the porch of the cabaña,” Vier said.

  As I approached the Millard cabaña—actually, it was just a wooden closet with a few towels hanging on rusty old hooks—I heard a familiar voice.

  “Hello, Theodore. Welcome back to Newport.”

  “Hello, Ambassador.”

  Ducky Millard’s tone was proper, but it lacked even a dollop of warmth and sincerity. We shook hands, but discovered that we had nothing further to say to each other.

  Then I saw Taitsie. She was lying on her back in a white bikini, with her hair tied up in a white ribbon. Her skin was a deep bronze. Her stomach was flat. Her breasts were still firm. Her cheekbones were more accentuated than ever. Elizabeth Dubois Millard was more beautiful than that day I met her at the United States embassy Fourth of July party in London.

  I stood over her and cast a shadow on her face, which made her open her eyes.

  “I’m Theodore Higginbothem,” I said, repeating the exact words I had used when we met more twenty years ago.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said, playing along.

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “That can’t possibly be your real name.”

  “I’m afraid it is my real name,” I said. “But my friends call me Higgy.”

  “Well, I hardly qualify as your friend,” she said.

  “You will,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “When did you decide we were going to be friends?” she asked.

  “As soon as I caught your eye,” I said. “I knew we were going to be more than friends.”

  She tilted her head backward to look at me, and then she smiled.

  “You look healthier than I have ever seen you,” she said.

  When she stood, we were only a foot apart. My heart raced. Nothing had changed in my feelings for her. But I had changed. And I had to tell her.

  She grabbed a big, floppy hat. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  We walked toward the ocean and then set off along the water’s edge. The warm August waves washed over our feet. I noticed her perfect posture, her beautiful long legs, and her wonderfully shaped back.

  “Taitsie,” I said, “there’s something I have to tell you.”

  She did not reply. So I forged ahead with the speech I had been rehearsing for weeks.

  “Taitsie, I’ve lied to you since the day we met. I’ve hidden something from you that may have caused our marriage to fail.”

  That grabbed her attention. “You’re gay?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m a spy.”

  She stopped and faced me. “A spy? Like The Deuce?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was recruited while I was an undergrad at Harvard. And I’ve been on the payroll ever since.”

  She stared at me in silence. Then we resumed walking.

  “Our honeymoon was paid for by the CIA in return for that little side trip to Tripoli,” I said.

  “What about your career at the Sticky Fingers Literary Agency?”

  “It’s a cover.”

  “How come you’re allowed to tell me all this now?” she asked. “Aren’t you sworn to secrecy or something?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m breaking the law by telling you this. I could be fired. Worse, I could be prosecuted and thrown into federal prison. But I have to make amends to you for all the years of my bad behavior when I was a drunk, and for withholding the truth from you, and for allowing you to think that my absences were connected with other women.”

  Taitsie looked shell-shocked. “Well, have you been with other women?” she finally asked.

  “Since the day I met you, I’ve never even imagined being with another woman. There has never been another woman. I wouldn’t know what another woman was if she came up to me and said, ‘I’m another woman.’ “

  Taitsie raised her hand and wiped a tear from under her sunglasses. But she remained silent as we continued to walk along the water’s edge. After a while, she stopped and turned toward me.

  “I have some things to say to you, too,” she said. “That night in the emergency room at the Chicago hospital, after you tried to commit suicide, you said a lot of things while you were under the influence of the drugs they gave you.”

  Oh, great. “Really? Like what?”

  “You bared your soul to me, Higgy. How much you loved me. How you couldn’t live without me. You touched my heart in a very profound and moving way. And then…then you talked about my, ah, friends…. You weren’t too happy about those two girls.”

  “I called them the Desert Girls,” I said. “Where are they, by the way? What about your commitment ceremony?”

  Taitsie’s face tightened.

  “They left me that night, right after I visited you in the hospital. They saw how deeply you had affected me. How I still loved you. They had the commitment ceremony all right—to each other. One of them said to me, ‘Taitsie, your heart is already taken.’ And she was right.”

  Now it was my turn to be speechless. All this time, I had imagined Taitsie and the Desert Girls living happily in a hot lesbo ménage à trios. I had thought how much fun joining that ménage à trios would be. Now, suddenly, I realized that just Taitsie and I would get back together.

  “We’ve both been fools,” I said.

  To hide her emotions, Taitsie looked away, far into the distance. I followed her gaze and spotted two figures walking toward us. As they came closer, I was shocked to see my old adversary, Yurik Maligin, accompanied by a brace of Cavalier King Charles spaniels and his long-suffering assistant, Charnofsky.

  “Taitsie, my dear!” Maligin said. “How wonderful to stumble upon you like this. You look splendid!”

  Taitsie wrapped her arms around Maligin and kissed him on the cheek—a little too long and a little too warmly for my comfort. Had there been a ménage à quarters without me?

  “Yurik,” she said, “this is my husband, Theodore Higginbothem.”

  “How do you do,” Maligin said, pretending that he was meeting me for the first time.

  One of Maligin’s King Charles spaniels squatted on the sand and defecated.

  “Pooper scooper!” Maligin ordered.

  Charnofsky picked up the dog’s mess and deposited it in a plastic bag.

  “Treat!” Maligin ordered.

  Charnofsky gave the dog a treat.

  “Disappear!” Maligin ordered.

  Charnofsky fled with the dogs.

  “Yurik and my father were friends when Dad was ambassador in London,” Taitsie explained to me. “Somehow, Yurik heard that you and I were separated and he looked me up. We reestablished our old friendship. Of course, Dad couldn’t have been happier. He always liked me to be friends with his friends.”

  “Taitsie,” Maligin said, “I’m having a small dinner party tonight on my yacht, The Escape. Seven o’clock. Just some friends. Some dogs. And the Countess Gladys of Thurn und Taxis. I hope you can join us.”

  “I don’t know, Yurik—Higgy just arrived to stay for a week,” Taitsie told Maligin. “Can he come, too?”

  “By all means, bring along your ex-husband,” Maligin said.

  “He’s not quite ex,” Taitsie said. “We’ve never divorced.”

  But by then, Yurik Maligin had cast one last appraising glance over his shoulder at Taitsie and walked away.

  Bring him along?

  What was I—a dog that you dragged along?

  I could feel the hot arrow of jealousy leave its foul barb in me. One minute, Taitsie and I were baring our souls to each other; the next minute, Yurik Maligin, the psychopathic Russian spymaster, hands out a last-minute dinner invitation and Taitsie drops everything to go. How could Taitsie not see through this lascivious opportunist?

  “You’ll be blown away by Yurik’s yacht,” Taitsie said.

  “Have you seen it?” I asked innocently.

 
“Oh, yes, I’ve been on it several times,” Taitsie said with pleasure.

  That was it. I had had it. I could stand being ditched for some luscious, panting Desert Girls, but I would not allow my arch enemy to step into my slippers. “I forgot—I have to get back to Washington,” I told her abruptly.

  “I thought you were going to stay with Vier and me for the week,” Taitsie said.

  “My plans have just changed,” I said. “Spy business, you know.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  When I returned to my home on M Street in Georgetown, a message was waiting for me on my answering machine. Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, wanted to see me in his office—urgently!

  I wasted no time making my way over to the West Wing, where a conservatively dressed female escort greeted me and led me down a long corridor to a door with a discreet nameplate: Mr. Emanuel. I followed her through a reception room and a private office and then into a third—empty—room, which was little more than a converted walk-in closet. There were floor-to-ceiling mirrors everywhere.

  “Please wait here,” my escort said brightly. “The chief will see you in a trice.”

  A moment later, the door burst open and Rahm Emanuel rushed in. He was wearing a red tie, a white shirt, a pair of perfectly creased dark blue pinstripe suit pants, and immaculately shined black shoes.

  “Higginbothem,” he said, acknowledging my presence.

  He walked over to the mirrored wall, removed his shoes, undid his belt, and dropped his trousers. To my amazement, he was wearing a pair of black tights with attached feet. He stepped into a pair of ballet slippers.

  In his youth, Rahm Emanuel had trained to be a professional ballet dancer. Ballet was a profession that required endless repetition and superhuman precision. Some of Rahm’s boyhood friends took it for granted that, as a ballet dancer, he was gay. Which was not true and which he went out of his way to prove was not true by being a hyper-aggressive prick. I think it was Senator Lindsay Graham who said, “If you’ve ever seen Rahm in leotards, you don’t have to strain too hard to see he’s got a set of balls.”

  Emanuel picked up a remote control device and switched on a hidden CD player. I recognized the melody as Franz Schubert’s Ballet Music in G.

  “The President’s told me that he’s ordered you to get the 2016 Olympics for Chicago,” Emanuel said. “How do things look?”

  As he spoke, Emanuel grabbed the wooden barre—a horizontal bar at waist level on which ballet dancers rest a hand for support—and began going through the five basic ballet positions, including a series of pliés, deep knee bends with his feet turned out and his heels firmly on the floor.

  “I’ve met with individual members of the International Olympic Committee,” I said, speaking louder than usual so that I could be heard over the music. “And it’s all come down to Chicago or Rio. I’m worried, though, that the vote might be rigged against Chicago. The president will be greatly embarrassed if he flies to the organizational meeting in Copenhagen and comes back empty-handed.”

  Emanuel was staring at himself in the mirror, making subtle corrections to his posture and stance.

  “Do you know what I’d like to do?” he asked.

  “Get the Olympics for Chicago and have the city be named after the president? I said.

  “Yes, of course, I want that,” Emanuel said, executing another plié. “But I also want to break the record of thirty-two fouettés pirouettes in the Black Swan Pas De Deux. That’s my real dream.”

  “Rahm,” I said, “I don’t know anything about fouettés, but I do know this: if Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen and doesn’t get the Olympics, he’s going to have egg all over his face.”

  Emanuel stopped his ballet exercises for a moment and looked at me.

  “Barack Obama is the greatest brand in the world,” he said. “Who’s going to deny him anything?”

  “Rahm,” I had to inform him, “the Russians are buying the votes of IOC members left and…well, left. I can’t guarantee that the president will win the vote to bring the Olympics to Chicago.”

  Emanuel had one leg up on the barre and his head bent toward his toes.

  “Can’t you CIA guys buy more votes?” he asked.

  There was a knock on the door, and an aide came in.

  “The president wants you.”

  Emanuel nodded, took off his ballet slippers, and pulled on his still-creased trousers.

  “I’m not worried about the fucking Russians,” he said. “We’ll fly up to Copenhagen and let the IOC members see The Chosen One. They’ll experience the Rapture and give the Olympics to Chicago. And then we’ll celebrate on the flight home.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Yurik Maligin had spent many years greasing palms with rapture.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The night before President Obama’s scheduled presentation to the International Olympic Committee, Sydney Michael Green and I waited outside the Copenhagen Concert Hall, the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. The spectacular building—a large, blue rectangular box—was built in 2002 by Jean Nouvel and seated 1,800 concertgoers.

  “Where’s this Knud character?” I asked. “He’s late.”

  Sydney Michael Green checked his watch.

  “He’ll be here,” he assured me. “His daughter’s concert begins in fifteen minutes.”

  “What’s the story on this guy?” I asked.

  Sydney Michael Green gave me a long-suffering look, like, “Would you ever do your job?” “His name’s Knud Kjarsgaard. Age fifty-four. A mathematics instructor at Kobenhavns University. Thirty years ago, he was on the Danish two-man luge team. He’s the swing vote at tomorrow’s I.O.C. final meeting for the 2016 Olympics. If Knud votes for Chicago, it’s Chicago. If he votes for Rio, it’s Rio. It’s as simple as that.”

  “And what kind of inducements have we given him to vote for Chicago?”

  “The works,” Sydney Michael Green said. “Girls, drugs, cars, money. The Tchaikovsky Circle has wired nearly half a million dollars into his off-shore account along with a lifetime supply of Baby Ruth chocolate bars.”

  “So why’s he still holding out on us?” I asked.

  “It’s Maligin. The Russian will do anything to humiliate Obama. He doesn’t’ want the Olympics going to Chicago”

  A limo pulled up in front of the concert hall, and a stocky blond man, dressed in a mink-lined overcoat, emerged from the back seat. He walked up the steps and stopped in front of Sydney Michael Green.

  “Mr. Green,” Knud Kjarsgaard said in a voice so low I could hardly hear him. “We shouldn’t be seen together in public.”

  Sydney Michael Green grabbed him by his mink collar. “The CIA isn’t happy about your failure to follow through on our agreement.”

  “I never agreed to anything,” Knud Kjarsgaard said.

  “You took the dough, the whores, the car, the Baby Ruths—everything,” Sydney Michael Green said. “We bought you, Knud. Now I want your guarantee that you’ll vote against Rio and for Chicago tomorrow.”

  Knud brushed past us. “I have to go inside to see Pia’s performance.”

  We followed Knud Kjarsgaard inside, and found our reserved seats in the front row. Sydney Michael Green had made sure that Knud Kjarsgaard was sitting next to us. But what we had not counted on was that Yurik Maligin and his brow-beaten assistant, Charnofsky, would be sitting on the other side of Knud Kjarsgaard.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer said, “we are honored to hear tonight a performance by a sixteen-year old musical prodigy, Pia Kjarsgaard. Pia will play a series of Sifferskrift solos on her specialty, the one-string Psalmodikon. And so, let us welcome Denmark’s first true teenage superstar—Pia Kjarsgaard!”

  All 1,800 Danes were on their feet applauding the cute blonde girl with bangs who walked across the stage carrying her Psalmodikon. She sat on a stool and searched the audience until she located her father. Knud Kjarsgaard blew his daughter a kiss, and a shy smile c
ame over her face. The crowd quieted and a single spotlight focused on Pia.

  Sydney Michael Green turned to Knud Kjarsgaard. “What’s so hard about playing the one-string Psalmodikon?”

  “You need really nimble fingers.”

  Yurik Maligin leaned toward Knud on his other side. “But will she be able to play the Psalmodikon after her ten little nimble fingers have been broken?” he asked with a smirk.

  Sydney Michael Green gave me an elbow in the ribs. “Higgy, for chrissakes, are you going to sit here and let Maligin talk like that?”

  I patted him on the knee. “All in good time,” I said.

  “That’s the trouble with you, Higgy. You don’t take the initiative. That’s why Nutwing sends me with you wherever you go. He wants results, not talk.”

  Without warning Sydney Michael Green climbed over Knud Kjarsgaard and hurled himself at Maligin. They went sprawling into the aisle just as Pia began playing. Their fighting styles couldn’t be more different. Sydney Michael Green was a street fighter who went for the jugular. Maligin held a sixth dan in sambo, the Soviet martial art, and was an expert in Harai Goshi, a sweeping hip throw. But Maligin wasn’t taking any chances. Six burly Russian goons came dashing down the aisle, yanked Sydney Michael Green off Maligin and carried him kicking and screaming away.

  “Higgy,” he yelled, “tell Nutwing I tried.”

  Maligin dusted himself off and sat down next to Knud Kjarsgaard. “Now,” he said, “we were talking about broken fingers.”

  As Pia resumed playing, I knew I’d soon be telling Obama that the Olympics weren’t coming to Chicago.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The Four Seasons Restaurant has epitomized New York glamour and power since the day it opened in 1959. The Deuce attended the opening fifty years ago, and whenever he was in town, it was the only place he would eat. Which explained why I was standing at the restaurant’s front desk on Thanksgiving Day, waiting to check in with Julian Niccolini, one of The Four Seasons’ owners.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Higginbothem…the thiry-third,” said Julian, who liked to rag his customers because it made him feel like their equal.