Womack turned, a pistol in his hand. Reen staggered backward. His hip collided with the open door.
Womack’s preoccupied eyes swept past him as though Reen were too insignificant to register. Turning to the mantel, he set the pistol on it. “Forget about the subpoena. I signed the tariff bill. They’re not after you now. Besides, the Senate’s not the problem. Something big is going on. I always tried to do the right thing. Well ... nearly always. Do you think history will realize that?”
Although the President seemed to have forgotten about its existence, Reen stared at the pistol. “What are you doing with a gun?”
“Oh, God! I know too much, termite!” Womack cried. His skin was taut over the bones of his cheeks. His eyes were so wide, Reen could see the halo of white around the irises. “All I wanted was gossip. You know how I love gossip. Now they’re all after me. They know I have proof. So I had to choose a vice president, you see? There’s danger ahead: bogs and quicksand and knee-deep shit. I mean, there comes a time when you have to put politics away and think about duty and morality and all that crap, you know? Jesus. I took an oath, didn’t I? Nobody has the political skills to take my place but Kennedy.” He cocked his head and said wistfully, “I always pictured myself as being a little like Kennedy, you know.”
Reen approached Womack, holding wary hands up. “Sit down, Jeff. Let me call a doctor. Getting upset this way ...”
Head still cocked, Womack asked, “Tell me, termite. All in all, don’t you think I was a little like Kennedy?”
“I hated Kennedy,” Reen moaned. “You know that. I can’t believe you’d betray me like this.” Tali. Womack. The Sleep Master. Everyone was turning on him.
Womack looked around the room.
“What are you looking for?”
“I forget,” Womack said vaguely, patting his pockets. “I lose things. My ballpoint pens. My mind. My soul.” He chuckled. “They’ll never find it. They don’t know where to look. But they know I have evidence. Records. Pictures. I’ve got it all. So I have to keep the gun handy, termite. Maybe I’ll kill a few of them first. Tell me, do you think life’s worth living anyway? Listen.” He bent down and whispered into Reen’s ear. “The Secret Service can’t be trusted.”
Reen stiffened in alarm. “Do you think that is how the graffiti got on the walls? The Secret Service? Of course, you must be right. How else could someone have written that without being seen?”
Clapping his hands to his cheeks, Womack gave Reen a long-suffering sigh. “I mean they’ve gotten to the Secret Service. That’s what I mean! I tried to tell you! I tried!”
“You tried to tell me what?”
“Shhh!” He put a finger to his mouth for emphasis. “There’s bugs in the walls. Bugs in the walls. And they’re listening through the window. They have stuff that can do that, you know.”
“But who wrote the graffiti?”
“Jeee-sus! Important things are going on. Will you forget about the graffiti? I was the one who wrote the damned graffiti.”
“You?” Reen asked dumbly. “You did it?”
“Get with the program, termite! Start thinking bad guys, okay? Start thinking assassinations.”
Reen’s indignation gathered. He could feel its chill weight at his neck. He backed away from Womack. “You no longer exist,” he hissed, giving the President a level, malicious gaze. “You are in that place where the eye does not see.”
Womack looked startled, but there was no way for him to fully understand what this meant. Only Marian could know. Marian, who understood endings.
“Come on. Don’t be a jerk,” Womack told him. “The graffiti–the Secret Service knew all about it. And we had a good laugh. I was messing with you, okay? I was getting under your skin a little, that’s all. It’s fun to get you rattled.”
Reen would never forgive the President’s treachery, just as he would never forgive his Brother’s; but it would have taken a Community decision to do with Tali what Reen was doing now with Womack. “I cannot identify your face. I do not recognize your voice.” Reen turned and stalked from the room.
Womack’s apology trailed after him down the hall. “I said I was sorry. You wishing I was dead or something? Come on, termite. You sound like a three-year-old.”
It would not be as if Womack was dead but as if he had never been. Even as Reen shoved that love away, he could feel it tugging at his sleeve, demanding attention.
“Reen!” Womack called.
Head high, back rigid, Reen walked to the stairs.
Womack hobbled after, threw himself in front of Reen. “I’m sorry, okay? I’ve got my sad face on, see?”
Reen stepped around him.
“Termite?” Womack’s voice was thick with hurt.
Reen turned the corner and started down the stairs. His knees gave out, and he huddled there, mourning his loss.
Below, the press conference was breaking up. Jeremy Holt, Kennedy still occupying his body, swept down the hall at Reen’s feet, a broad white grin on his lips. The rectangle of light on the carpet blinked out as a cameraman in the East Room extinguished the kliegs.
A moment later Oomal emerged, paused in the corridor, and looked up the steps. “Reen? Are you all right, Cousin Brother?”
“No,” Reen replied. “Thural warned me of my temper, and he was right. My anger has caused me to do something stupid.”
Oomal came and sat down beside him. “Tell me.”
With a catch in his voice Reen said, “I threw Jeff Womack away, Brother, and I don’t know how I will be able to bear it. From now on he will talk to me, and I can no longer hear. From now on I will look at him and no longer see. Our friendship is over.” Reen peered through the brass banister rails to the floor below, imprisoned by his own decision.
“It’ll get better as time goes on,” Oomal said softly. “You’ll get used to it. Can I do anything?”
“Leave me alone,” Reen whispered.
Oomal hesitated, then got to his feet and padded quietly down the carpeted steps.
Love dies, Marian had told him. She was wrong. Love never died. Only relationships. And they left love festering behind.
He could hear the chairs in the East Room being folded for storage, the podium being put away. Soon the room would be cleared. Sitting, staring between the bars, Reen carefully folded and put away one by one the memories of Womack.
Jeff, a young President just two months in office, standing in the hot, whipping wind of the Vandenberg base, the aftershock of having learned of aliens and secret treaties still trembling in his face. His hand coming forward, a whispered word from an advisor, and the hand jerking back nervously to his side. Reen looking up at this new President and wondering how they would get along.
Fists pounding the table eight months later, Jeff’s red-faced shouts of “No! No! You don’t have the right!” and Reen telling him mildly that treaties were worthless and their landing inevitable. How much younger they had both been: Reen, unused to humans, pushing too hard; Jeff, unused to Reen, glaring at him as though he were a monster.
Less than a month later both of them facing each other across the oval doughnut of the UN’s National Security Council table. The banks of cameras, the hush, the other members fearful and silent in their knowledge that the Cousin ships could outfly a plane and send conflicting messages into the brain of a missile. Reen, Loving Helpers around him like a living wall, because if a gun was fired, they would die for him–ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand of them, if need be. Reen watching Jeff calmly as the new President shouted, “Why should these nations give up their sovereignty? It isn’t in the interests of the United States that they become colonies.” And Reen, who had learned to see behind human words into that dim region of what was left unsaid, recognizing the President’s dark mirth.
A little show for the cameras. Jeff had taught him that. “Wave at the cameras,” he
said a year later as they stood on the White House portico. And in the Green Room, before the fireplace, the crumbs of their finger sandwiches dusting their empty plates, the remains of brown coffee ringing the bottom of their cups, Jeff pointing to Reen’s chair and telling him about all the heads of state who had once sat there.
Jeff was a student of history, a pupil of human nature, a scholar of vice. Jeff had taught Reen well.
Thinking back, Reen couldn’t remember when partnership became love. Affection entered as stealthily as a cat into a strange room, until without warning there it was in Reen’s lap, purring and warm.
Now he stood and brushed at his legs, as if shooing it away. Below him, the East Room was silent. A maid, dustcloth in hand, passed across the hall on her way to the pantry.
Jeff, slapping Reen lightly on the arm and laughing at something he said that he hadn’t meant to be funny. Jeff, poking him lightly, playfully in the side with his finger and for the first time calling him termite.
When had that been? Reen wondered. The years flowed into each other like rain into a calm sea.
Upstairs, a clap–loud and sharp. Reen lifted his head curiously and heard swift footsteps from the elevator. Another clap, different from the first. The slam of a door. A slight clank as the elevator descended.
Somewhere in the quiet building a maid was running a vacuum cleaner. The smell of frying green peppers drifted up from the kitchen.
The elevator clanked again, once, as it ascended. More footsteps, slower now, but determined. A door above opened with a squeal of hinges.
Whispers, murmurs, a choked “Goddamn.”
A thunder of steps, and a Secret Serviceman rounded the top of the stairs at a dead run. He nearly fell over Reen. His face was pale. His forehead and upper lip glistened with sweat.
“Go to the West Wing desk immediately, sir!” The man took Reen’s arm forcefully, nearly pulling him off his feet. “Find Miller. Can you remember that? Agent Miller. Stay with him until we have the situation under control.”
“What is it?”
“The President’s been shot.” Suddenly the man was gone. Reen stumbled up the stairs.
In the study two men stood staring down at Jeff Womack. Jeff lay in that place where the eye did not see and yet, in the light from the windows that was the color of old silver, Reen saw everything clearly.
Jeff was sitting in the rocking chair, his neck crimped back hard against the rest. The McDonald’s Happy Meal scented the room with onions; Jeff scented it with blood. His eyes were open, and he was regarding the ceiling with surprise. Behind him on the cheerful yellow carpet was a feathery spray of brains.
“Have somebody call the Senate and see if they’ve confirmed,” one of the men said, glancing at his watch.
The other man hurried away. A doctor and a nurse ran in.
“Let’s get him on the floor,” the doctor said sharply, grabbing the President by the front of his jacket and pulling him out of the chair.
Jeff punching Reen in the side and calling him, for the first time, termite. Jeff tumbling bonelessly, heavily to the carpet, the back of his skull staining the yellow red. Jeff with the doctor tearing his shirt open, buttons flying, one button bouncing like popcorn off the gun that lay a few feet away.
“Get me an airway.”
Brown eyes as wide and unblinking as a Cousin’s. Hands curled, the palms perfect and pink as shells. The long, groaning, hopeless sigh from the dead chest as the heels of the doctor’s rhythmic hands compressed the lungs.
“What time do you call it, Doctor?” the man in the suit asking.
The doctor snapping back, “I haven’t called it yet.”
“His goddamned brains are all over the floor.”
The doctor, kneeling, pushed at Jeff’s chest. But couldn’t he tell that that wasn’t what needed attention? Jeff’s pink brain was pushing through his white hair as though some deformed creature were squirming its way to birth.
Put it back in, Reen thought. Please put it back in. They should, all of them, find the pieces scattered on the rug and put them back inside the splintered bone where they belong.
More footsteps pounding. A breathless voice. “Confirmed fifteen minutes ago.”
“Shit.” The man turning, fists raised impotently.
Reen could not see; but he did. He saw Jeff’s blood on the floor. He could not hear; but he heard Jeff laughing in the Green Room, talking about history.
Suddenly Oomal and Thural were at either side of Reen, claws digging into his sleeves so hastily that they left stinging scratches. “Come away, Reen-ja,” Thural said, tugging.
Reen felt his feet trip over each other, felt himself falling. Thural sucked in a breath as they collided, and for an instant both touched the oblivion of Communal Mind.
Thural struggled to get away, but Reen seized him around the waist, tumbling him to the floor where dim light and purposeful dark waited, where the young were in their nests and Brothers crawled unthinking through the smooth, cool tunnels of childhood.
“Reen!” Oomal was dragging him back. Thural was scrabbling across the carpet to escape Reen’s grasping hands. The humans were staring.
Jeff was staring, his sightless eyes still fixed on the ceiling as his cunning, wry mind leaked across the floor.
Reen lay on the carpet. Thural crouched before him, the gaping hole of the pistol’s muzzle a few feet away. One of Jeff’s buttons lay near Reen’s outstretched fingers.
He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, and Oomal stepped back.
Quieter footsteps this time, hesitant footsteps. Men entered the room with a stretcher and a long green plastic bag. They looked curiously at the Cousins and somberly at the dead President.
The doctor, still kneeling, looked up at the men with the stretcher. “A suicide,” he said.
REEN WENT down to the ground floor and sat in the Vermeil Room, his Cousin and Brother sitting silently by him but not too close lest he touch them again.
The ambulance left, lights winking, siren off. Thural walked to the kitchen and brought back a late lunch.
“You may return to Michigan if you wish, Brother,” Reen offered finally, looking at his untouched food.
Oomal pushed his empty plate away. “I’ll stay awhile, Reen-ja.”
When dusk was settling across the lawn, Reen, without a word to the other two Cousins, left and made his way up the two flights of stairs.
Jeff’s office was a yellow hearth of light kindled against the icy evening. A wall-to-wall strip of carpet had been pulled up, exposing the dun pad underneath. In the fireplace was a humped grave of smoldering ash. Jeff’s rocking chair was gone.
Reen walked to the bar and stared at the half-bottle of Wild Turkey lying on the counter, the used glass beside it.
Jeff, eyes twinkling over the rim, telling him of Harding’s mistress; of Brezhnev’s scantily clad masseuse; of broken treaties and purposeless wars.
Jeff, too, had become part of history.
Among the row of books on the shelves above the dry bar, Sandburg’s Lincoln and Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage were upside down.
Someone had been searching the room.
Behind Reen came the sound of a drawer slamming shut. He pivoted. The door to Jeff’s bedroom was slightly open. Quietly he went to the crack and heard the sound of shoes on carpet.
“I still can’t believe the Senate confirmed him,” a voice said.
There was a click, like a small box closing. A feminine sigh and a familiar voice, “Last night Womack telephoned all one hundred senators, He traded the signing of the tariff bill, and the vote passed by acclamation. You always underestimated him. I didn’t. Womack was a devious son of a bitch.”
The quick triple-pump of Reen’s heart was so forceful, so loud, that he was certain the people on the other side of the door could hear it. H
e crept backward, bumping into a small table and catching a vase before it could fall.
Marian Cole was searching for Jeff Womack’s evidence.
Reen tiptoed down the hall, down the stairs. He had known Jeff better than anyone, and he knew that if Jeff wanted to hide something, he would have been cleverer than to hide it upstairs.
He would have hidden it where he thought no one would look.
Reen passed the pantry and the Secret Service room at the end of the corridor. The colonnade was silent except for the gurgle and lap of the pool. Reen stole into the West Wing like a small gray wraith and turned left to the Oval Office.
The reception desk was vacant, with a single lamp left burning. The door of the dark office gaped like a mouth. Reen walked in, flicked on a light, and began his search.
It was behind the portrait of Millard Fillmore that he found it, taped to the canvas with black electrician’s tape: a fat manila envelope. He tore it from its hiding place and spilled its contents on the desk.
Enough photos to fill an album. Neatly typed memoranda. Notes crumpled by nervous, sweaty hands. And a folded slip of paper with a blue karma ticket stapled to the top. Reen picked that up and opened it. The paper was dry and old, and made a sound like dead leaves when he pulled the edges apart.
Under the blue ticket was the Xeroxed typewritten suggestion:
WRITE YOUR SIN BELOW.
Under that was a Cousin’s scrawled and difficult handwriting.
May God forgive us for killing you
–Jonis
Reen’s fingers began to tremble. Paperclipped to the karma ticket was a typed note:
Jonis now an asset.
–Bernie
Poor, deluded Jonis, whom guilt could not release. Reen traced his Cousin’s painful scribbles with a numb finger. No wonder Jonis had avoided Thural. It was so hard for a Brother to hide truth from a Brother. And treason was so alien a concept that not even Thural would have understood.
Brother Termite Page 13
