“I’m Sharon Bedford,” the woman said, extending her hand.
Laying an open volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry face-down beside him on the weathered wooden bench, Michaelson rose and shook hands as he spoke his own name. With a gesture he invited her to sit next to him. They were on a quiet patio on the west side of the hotel, where strategically placed foliage and unobtrusive architecture provided the illusion of a tranquil rural view.
“I know who you are, actually,” Bedford said. She tugged awkwardly at the hem of her skirt as she sat down. “I was on the NSC staff the first time you were up for national security adviser, not long after you retired from the State Department.”
Bedford gazed at him in silence for a moment. He was over six feet tall, thin and angular. White-haired, with a look of politely detached interest in eyes so dark they seemed black. Half the pinkie on his right hand was missing—the result, Bedford knew, of collision with a ricocheting bullet during an embassy disturbance many years before.
“I wouldn’t have thought of you as the poetry-reading type,” she said, glancing at the volume he’d set beside him.
“For a long time I wasn’t,” he said. “I only got back to it last year, when I realized that I hadn’t read poetry except in the line of duty in four decades.”
“Line of duty?” she asked.
“Yes. Quite bad poetry, as a general rule, written by some potentate or minister I was trying to understand.”
She didn’t seem to expect further explanation, and Michaelson wasn’t sure he could have provided it if she had. He’d enjoyed verse when he was twenty, as most educated people at the time did. For decades since, though, he’d treated good poetry like a well-crafted but never-used pair of cuff links that had somehow been shoved in the back of a drawer and forgotten. Mislaid, perhaps, as other important things had been during his working life.
Almost impulsively, he’d decided in his sixties to start reading poetry again. He’d done this simply for pleasure, filling idle hours and rediscovering a youthful enthusiasm. As he’d plunged more avidly into the thin volumes, though, he’d found himself reading his own perspectives into the verses and stanzas. It reminded him of a standard diplomatic history exercise in which dispatches about the same conference or the same negotiation by legates from the different countries involved are compared. It had occurred to him somewhere around the middle of a Dickinson poem that poetry and history were like that—accounts of the same human events by different legates from different countries. Or different worlds.
Tilting her head back slightly, Bedford let the evening breeze cool her face and neck. She shifted a cellophane pack of Hershey kisses from her lap to the bench beside her.
“You’re here with Wendy Gardner, aren’t you?” she asked then.
“Basically.” An evasion, not a lie. “She’s asked me for advice from time to time, and I’m vain enough to find that flattering.”
“I’m trying to get a job from her. If she’s elected. That’s why I rode a bus for almost eight hours, pleaded with someone I’m not crazy about just to get a room here when the hotel was supposed to be sold out, maxed out on my Visa to stay at this place for two full nights. I want that kind of a job, and I’d do anything to get it.”
Michaelson paused for a moment as she finished. The pause was long enough for her to read his expression and react to it.
“Bad girl, Sharon,” she said, giving her left wrist a mocking swat with her right hand. “I overstated that, didn’t I? I wouldn’t be qualified for the kind of job I want unless there were some things I wouldn’t do to get it.”
“Understanding that much puts you well ahead of most of the people going after jobs like that,” Michaelson said. “I know what you’re talking about, and I don’t blame you for feeling the way you do about it. At the same time, getting what you want might prove even more disappointing than doing without it. I was bitterly downcast a few years back when the new administration passed me over. Then, as I watched that administration limp from one fiasco to another, I realized that being ignored might have been the luckiest break I’d gotten in years.”
“Maybe you could have made the difference between fiascoes and quiet, well-managed successes.”
“I’d love to believe that,” Michaelson said, “but realistically I don’t think I could prove it. The people who were hired in place of me are very sound. Smart, tough, principled. The problem isn’t those people. The problem is elsewhere.”
“Maybe,” Bedford said dubiously. “Even knowing all of that, though, if the president called and asked you to be national security adviser, you’d take it, wouldn’t you?”
“In a heartbeat,” Michaelson admitted, smiling in recognition at the triumphantly grinning young woman.
“So you can understand how important the kind of job I want is to me.”
“I can and I do. But I don’t know how I can help. Ms. Gardner asks for my advice about foreign policy, not personnel decisions. If I lobbied her to put you on her staff, I’d do you a lot more harm than good.”
“There’s one way you can help,” Bedford said. “I had a few minutes with Ms. Gardner this afternoon. I told her I could help her make a splash in a hurry. We didn’t get into it in detail, but I think she was interested.”
“I should think she would be.”
“What I was talking about is in the area where she does take your advice. I’d like to go into it in depth with you.”
“No time like the present.”
She glanced at her watch, and Michaelson reflexively looked at his as well. Six-twenty. She handed him a piece of hotel stationery with a Bethesda, Maryland, address and a 301 area code telephone number written on it.
“I’m supposed to meet someone in a few minutes,” she said, “and you’re going to want to see what I’m talking about anyway instead of just having me tell you about it. If you’re interested, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call sometime next week.”
He was interested all right. This little chat was apparently just supposed to show him the bait. A call from him next week would tell Bedford how intrigued he was. If nothing better than a Wendy Gardner staff job was in prospect, she could follow up; if someone at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue had bitten, she could brush him off. If you have the goods, you don’t have to worry about finesse.
Michaelson just resisted the urge to seize Bedford’s hand. It wasn’t just lack of finesse. Her innocence almost took his breath away. In her early thirties from the look of her, Michaelson thought, Sharon Bedford was more naive than Wendy Gardner had been at nineteen, when Wendy and Michaelson had first met.
“How many people have you made this pitch to?” he asked, trying to keep any suggestion of misgiving out of his voice.
“How many people are there here who could get me the kind of job I’m looking for?” she asked as she stood up.
“There are two ways you can get in trouble in Washington,” Michaelson said. “One is by promising what you can’t deliver. And the other is by delivering the kind of thing you just promised.”
“I know,” Bedford said.
But Michaelson sensed with leaden certainty that she didn’t know. Not really. The inside of his belly suddenly felt cold.
***
“Now, that’s craftsmanship,” Jeffrey Quentin informed the mirror as a talk-radio host reduced a dissenting caller to tinny, impotent rage in the background. “That’s a pro at work.”
His intense blue eyes shining with fierce enthusiasm, Quentin stared at the mess he was making of the knot in his tie. His dark brown hair framed a round face that no one could ever think of as threatening until their access was cut off or their funding went out the window.
If JQ brought this one off, Quentin thought, it’d give those talk-show guys something to yammer about all right. He’d stage a campaign that Lee Atwater and Larry O’Brien combined
couldn’t have dreamed of. He’d be playing at the big table until they shut the game down.
Quentin checked his beeper, slipped into his jacket, took a last look to be sure the jacket matched his pants, and headed for the door.
Chapter Four
The computer screen filled with dazzling blues, reds, and greens. A three-dimensional pie chart materialized. Polis Systems was about seven minutes into a heavy-duty software demonstration.
Sally Field, thought Wendy, whose attention was elsewhere.
She picked up only random snatches of the continuing patter: “…point and click…sixteen-plus percent of ninety-eight forecast GDP…any conceptual health-care plan now in play.…” Her focus was on Sharon Bedford, who was deep in conversation with a short, curly-haired man who Wendy finally realized was Jeffrey Quentin. Presumably because they were smoking, Bedford and Quentin stood well away from everyone else, isolated near a narrow, vertical window that had been cranked open to the maximum four inches that its security-conscious design allowed.
“Not impressed?” Jerry Marciniak asked Wendy from a few feet away, nodding toward the Polis presentation. “Health care’s going to be the iceberg issue for the rest of your generation. Paying for medical services isn’t just huge in itself, the cost is so enormous that it’s going to have an effect below the surface on everything else. Within ten years you won’t be able to talk about highways or weapons systems or anything else in Washington without looking at health care and its budget.”
“The software they’re peddling goes a lot farther than that,” Wendy replied. “Those projections say that by the time I’m fifty the entire private sector will consist of health-care workers and insurance companies. I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Marciniak grinned. He was still wearing the outfit he’d had on when he’d given his speech that afternoon.
“I don’t think it’s going to go quite that far either,” he said. “But we are spending money hand over fist on medical services. Every year we’re spending more of it and spending it faster, and that’s not gonna go on forever either. The only way to stop the cash hemorrhage is to build a wall for people to crash into when they’re running away from death. ‘No dialysis for you—you’re too old.’ ‘No transplant for you—taxes are high enough.’ ‘No chemo for you—you’re a goner in six years anyway.’”
“I think we’ll do better than that,” Wendy said.
“Data?” Marciniak challenged.
“None,” she admitted, shrugging. “I just think we’ll muddle through somehow until we stumble into some kind of messy compromise that halfway works most of the time. Americans are pragmatists.”
“You’re right,” Marciniak said, “but we’re the worst kind of pragmatists.” Closing his eyes and pressing the fingers of his right hand together, he groped for a word. “We’re utopian pragmatists. The bottom line for us is a new Jerusalem. Anything short of that is a Problem with a capital P—and like good little pragmatists, when we see a Problem, we want it solved before lunch by God, without a lot of chat about principles in the meantime.”
“It does make for a sloppy kind of politics,” Wendy acknowledged, nodding. “Of course,” she added slyly, “you made your opinion of politics pretty clear this afternoon.”
Marciniak offered her a biting smile.
“People ask me how I feel about politics, I ask them how Ed Norton felt about sewage,” he said. “I spend my life up to my eyebrows in it, but how can I complain? Shoveling it up and making it flow is what I get paid for.”
“‘It smells like money to me,’” Wendy offered, quoting a line favored by her state’s paper mill owners when they found themselves downwind of a sulphur vat.
“Exactly. Let me give you one tiny example.” Marciniak’s voice rose in excitement as he warmed to the topic. “You know who’s paying for this hospitality suite?”
“Polis Software better be paying for it,” Wendy said. “They have their name on the door and they’re hustling everyone who walks in here.”
“I’m paying for the room. Or my agency is.”
“Why?”
“Because three months ago when this thing was getting planned, I knew I’d have at least eight thousand dollars for travel, meetings and public appearances left in my budget, but I’d be running short on discretionary funds. So I called Polis and we swung a deal. I got a bunch of rooms including the suite, and I’m letting them use it. They’ll reimburse the agency dollar for dollar—and that reimbursement will magically change my money from a categorical appropriation into discretionary funds.”
“Our tax dollars at work,” Wendy said mordantly.
“Totally legal. An absolutely one-hundred-percent legal scam that serves the public interest. Because there’s no way that money wasn’t going to be spent. We couldn’t turn it back in to the Treasury without getting our next year’s appropriation cut.”
“I know.”
“So if the end of the fiscal year was sneaking up on us with that money in the till yet, I’d have had to come up with a conference in Vancouver or someplace that we couldn’t live without. This way, the money actually gets spent doing what my agency was set up to do.”
“You really love this whole political mosh pit, don’t you?” Wendy asked suddenly, intrigued by the epiphany. “You dump all over it, but you couldn’t do without it.”
“You got me,” Marciniak said, smiling as he fixed a penetrating gaze on Wendy. “You read me like an X ray. And unless I miss my bet, you need it as much as I do.”
“Everyone in this room does,” Wendy said. “Look at Sharon Bedford, that woman over there in the corner pretending to smoke just so she can chat someone up.”
“The one talking with Jeffrey Quentin?”
“Right.”
“It doesn’t look like she’s pretending to me. I don’t think there’s anyone left anymore who smokes just to be polite. You’re either addicted or you abstain. I’d put her and Quentin both in the addicted category—chronic self-mutilators.”
“Look more closely. She reminds me of Sally Field in Absence of Malice.”
“I don’t catch many flicks,” Marciniak said.
“Sally Field was supposedly this tough-as-nails reporter who was having trouble giving up smoking. Whenever she took a puff on the screen, though, she didn’t look like she was having trouble stopping—she looked like she was having trouble starting. What she tried to pass off as smoking would’ve gotten her laughed out of the girls’ lav at any self-respecting high school in the country. Same thing with Sharon Bedford. She’s holding a lighted cigarette, but she’s not really smoking. She’s posing.”
Marciniak studied the scene for perhaps ten seconds. The way Bedford held the cigarette did seem unpracticed, as if it weren’t something she did habitually. Something studied and fastidious distorted the gestures she made with it, and while the drags she occasionally took looked technically competent, she didn’t seem to approach them with unbridled enthusiasm.
“I don’t think so,” he said, frowning and shaking his head. “I’d say she’s just very nervous, like someone who thinks she’s out of her league all of a sudden. She’d probably look just as awkward to us right now if we were watching her eat or sew or something like that. Take my word for it: veteran addict.”
“The guy she’s talking to is someone who could get her a job on the inside again, isn’t he?”
“Quentin?” Marciniak asked. “You bet he could.”
“I’ll bet you a bagel against a PAC top-contributor list that the only reason she’s smoking is to give her an excuse to spend ten minutes alone with him.”
“You’re on.”
Wendy waited until the Bedford/Quentin conference broke up and Bedford had begun to make her way across the room. Then Wendy moved unobtrusively to intercept the somewhat older woman.
“Oh, hi,” Bedford sa
id after a moment’s surprise when she noticed Wendy.
“Hello again,” Wendy said. “You know Dr. Marciniak?”
“Sure do,” Bedford said, shaking hands with him.
“Nice seeing you again,” he said, pumping her hand firmly instead of giving her a perfunctory, two-finger squeeze.
“I stopped you because there are no photographers around and I’m feeling existentially wicked,” Wendy said then in a conspiratorial tone. “Can I bum a cigarette?”
Bedford looked stricken.
“I’d love to give you one but I don’t have any,” she said. In an almost comical anxiety to prove her statement, she opened her purse and displayed the tobacco-free inside to Wendy. “I just took one from Jeffrey Quentin, but I haven’t actually smoked regularly since college.”
“That’s a lucky break, then,” Wendy said, eager to reassure Bedford. “You’ve saved me from my first lapse in five years.”
Bedford moved away, apparently warmed by Wendy’s parting smile. Marciniak looked disbelievingly after her, opening his mouth once and then closing it tightly and giving his head one last puzzled shake.
“I owe you a bagel,” he said quietly to Wendy. “And if Ms. Bedford wants a job that badly, I hope she gets one.”
They parted. Wendy circulated for a few more minutes and left. She had an eight a.m. flight back to the Midwest, and she wanted an extra half-hour of sleep more than thirty additional minutes of Potomac hustle.
***
Sharon Bedford left the Polis hospitality suite somewhat later and went to her own room, next door to it. As she opened the door, she must have found on the floor just inside an envelope containing a fax that the front desk had sent up. The fax read:
Now don’t argue. You are NOT going to ride a bus all the way back to D.C. tomorrow. Checkout time isn’t until noon. I’ll be there at 11:45 to help you with your bags, and I’ll drive you back in my Cadillac El Dorado with the nice soft leather seats and the CD console and the air conditioning. Plus, we’ll stop for a decent meal along the way.
Worst Case Scenario Page 3
