The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America

by Michael Kurland

  “I’ll scramble the eggs,” Miriam said.

  After brunch, Kit shared the couch with the bulky Sunday editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Miriam sat at her window desk editing the galleys of her latest article for Polity. It was almost three p.m. when the phone rang.

  “It’s for you,” Miriam said. “How does anyone know to call you here?”

  “I always leave this number when I’m staying over,” Kit said absently, taking the phone. “They don’t call unless it’s urgent.”

  He took the phone and listened, with only an occasional “Yes,” or “I see,” to break long stretches of silence. Miriam turned in her chair and stared at him, finding herself getting angrier and angrier. How dare he leave her number when he spent the night with her. What did he do, post it on the office bulletin board? This was too much. Why didn’t he just write it on a few phone booth walls while he was at it?

  Kit hung up and looked at her. There was a strange vacant expression on his face.

  “What do you mean leaving my number with your office?” Miriam demanded. “You’ve a hell of a nerve.”

  “They don’t know it’s your number,” Kit said, focusing on her. “It’s just a number. They couldn’t care less where I spend my nights. I’m on the right side.”

  There was something wrong. By now it had come through Miriam’s fog of anger that Kit wasn’t responding to her emotion. Something he had heard on the phone had preempted his response. “What do you mean?” she asked softly. “What do you mean, ‘on the right side’?”

  Miriam sat down on the couch next to Kit. “A guy named Schuster. Reporter for the Post. I knew him. They just told me.”

  “What? What did they just tell you?”

  “They found him this morning. The police. Vandermeer wants me to follow the case. There’ll be an official announcement.”

  “What case?” Miriam asked, taking his hand. “What are you talking about?”

  “He killed himself,” Kit said. “In his apartment.”

  “Oh,” Miriam said. There was a strange, stretched quality in Kit’s voice that she had never heard before, and she reached for understanding. “You knew him? I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned him. Was he a friend?”

  “No. Not a friend. I met him once. I—saw—him a few more times. I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t his friend.”

  “What does Vandermeer want you to follow? If he committed suicide, what more is there? And why should Vandermeer care, anyway?”

  “He left a note,” Kit said.

  “A note? Explaining why he—whatever he did?”

  “Shot himself. Through the head. The note doesn’t explain why. It’s very short.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It says, ‘Fuck all the President’s men.’ It was in his typewriter. That’s all it says.”

  “Oh,” Miriam said. “How strange.”

  “Yes,” Kit agreed.

  That afternoon Edward St. Yves met Billy Vandermeer in the latter’s White House office. “Glad you could take a few minutes to see me,” St. Yves said. “Sorry it had to be on such short notice, but I’ve got something I think will interest you.”

  “I have a well-developed faith in your judgment, Ed,” Vandermeer said. “If you ever have something you think will interest me, scoot it on over here right away. It’s about the Schuster business?”

  St. Yves shook his head. “That little son of a bitch,” he said. “Who would have thought?” He sat down in one of the metal-frame red chairs surrounding the desk. “I really thought we had him. I really did.”

  “How’s that girl of his? The Canadian, ah, lady?”

  “She’s been out of the hospital a month. Must have been hysterical. She wasn’t hurt that bad.”

  “Some people are sensitive,” Vandermeer said. The sun glanced off Vandermeer’s hornrimmed glasses, making it impossible to read his expression. Looking at his blond visage, St. Yves was suddenly reminded of Vandermeer’s daughter, Kathy, and felt himself on tenuous ground.

  “I don’t like to figure wrong,” St. Yves continued more cautiously, “and I sure figured this one wrong. We haven’t had any contact with him for the past three weeks. Give him a chance to get with that girl again. Think about it some. Then Warren gave him a call a couple of days ago. Put it to him. Something would happen to the girl again.”

  “That wasn’t very subtle.”

  “All he suggested was she might be persona non grata-ed as an undesirable. But I’m sure he got the drift. Said he’d think it over. That was Thursday. Then—blam! How can you predict such a thing?”

  “It was, um, an accident?” Vandermeer asked.

  St. Yves stared at Vandermeer, his blue eyes glinting. “It was suicide,” he said.

  “Yes, um, of course. What I meant was, there was no—to your knowledge—there was no external force that might have, um, prompted such an act? That is, beyond the pressures we’ve just been discussing.”

  “To the best of my knowledge,” St. Yves said, “the son of a bitch just up and shot himself.”

  “Right,” Vandermeer said. “Well, enough about that. It’s a, um, dead issue.”

  “You making a statement?”

  “Have to,” Vandermeer said. “We express regrets. Assign a man to cooperate with the D.C. Police. We picked Kit Young.”

  “Very good,” St. Yves said. “He’ll know which problem areas to steer clear of.”

  “Any prospect of plugging the leak with Schuster gone?” Vandermeer asked. “The President is very concerned about the leak. He feels keenly about disloyalty.”

  St. Yves shook his head. “I don’t recruit men like that for room sixteen,” he said. “My men are loyal to the President and to me; they don’t give a shit about the Constitution or the Washington Monument or the United States Code. They’re loyal to the country through the President and the President through me.”

  “What about the leak?” Vandermeer asked.

  “We’ll keep checking,” St. Yves said. “With his contact gone, the source is probably going to have to establish a new one before he can continue. One thing you should consider: it’s distinctly possible that the leak comes straight out of CIA. Those people may be trying to discredit us. It would be useful if the President passed the word to the new Director to check on that.”

  “I’ll mention it,” Vandermeer said.

  “Now,” St. Yves said, putting his briefcase on one corner of the desk and snapping it open. “Here’s what our document boys have come up with for you.” He took a file out of a zippered compartment and passed it over.

  Vandermeer took it gingerly, as though afraid that it might blister his fingers. The file cover had the printed seal of the Department of State on it, and was stamped top secret in red block letters. A typed label on the file’s tab read: “Saigon Embassy Cables / Nov. 1963.”

  “This is it?” Vandermeer asked, his voice almost a whisper.

  St. Yves nodded. “All the documentation,” he said. “And done right. Original typewriter, original carbon, the right paper. We got some help from the Technical Services Division of the Agency; the new director’s a big improvement.”

  “It’ll pass?” Vandermeer asked. “Everything?” St. Yves looked at him peculiarly, and he realized that he was still whispering.

  “It should,” St. Yves said. “But to make sure, like I said before, we make sure they only get their hands on Xerox copies of these. Can’t let these leave the files, after all. You check them over and give me your okay, and Operation Counterfoil is launched.”

  Vandermeer opened the folder and glanced at a few of the telegrams inside, then closed it and pushed it over to St. Yves by the edge. “I don’t want to read it,” he said. “Better if it comes as a surprise to me when the media boys come waving it at me. You sure you got the tone right?”

  “As right as a forgery can ever be,” St. Yves said. “There’s always a certain stiffness in forged documents because the forger is unwil
ling to be original—to use any phrases that weren’t in the real copy.”

  “You certainly know your craft,” Vandermeer said.

  “Yes,” St. Yves agreed. “Do we go with Counterfoil?”

  “Okay,” Vandermeer said. “I’ll pass it upstairs.”

  “Right,” St. Yves said. “You shouldn’t have any trouble with the Democrats for a while after this comes out.”

  “Speaking of Democrats, what about the special operations for the election? How are they coming?”

  “They’re well under way. We’ve picked our primary targets from the list of men the President wants out. We’ve got some very good men on special operations. A few opposition congressmen seem to have sex problems of one sort or another. It’ll take a while to get them pegged, but we’ve got a good lead time here. You want a list of the operations?”

  Vandermeer shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. Not at this point in time.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Malcolm Chaymber got out of the cab at the corner of Third Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street, Manhattan. He looked around cautiously as the cab pulled away, haunted as always at moments like this by the conviction that someone he knew would walk around the corner and recognize him.

  His heart pounding with fear and excitement, as it invariably did at the start of one of his adventures, Chaymber walked the two blocks to the bar called Peters and went in. Of course, Chaymber admitted to himself, the fear was part of it. It was cathartic. Without the excitement, the danger, and the fear, the whole thing would seem like a sordid little meaningless affair of the flesh each time; and despite his body’s hunger, he probably wouldn’t be able to go through with it. So the very factors that made it so unwise—that it was illegal and dangerous, and could ruin his career—in a strange way were what made it possible.

  Peters was, as usual, crowded to overflow. Account executives with forced laughs and hungry eyes jammed at the bar. Pretty boys with tight jeans and lean, muscular bodies posed against the far wall and nursed their drinks to make them last. Couples at the tables leaned over in close conversation, earnestly lying to each other. The tacky tinsel Christmas decorations looked worn out already, and it was still a week before Christmas.

  Chaymber wedged himself into a spot at the bar, ordered a scotch, and looked around at the scene. And we call ourselves gay, he thought. As he always thought. He would stand there, speaking to no one, and have three or four drinks. And one of the young men across the way would begin to look appealing to him, would suddenly attain attributes of truth, beauty, wisdom, and grace that would astound even his own mother, and he would think of some clever line to approach the youth with: a line that would enable them both to preserve some measure of self-respect as they both pretended they believed it.

  “You are quiet and pensive,” a voice on his left said.

  “What?” Chaymber turned. A young man with brown hair and frank eyes was staring at him.

  “Pensive,” the young man said. “And quiet. And a little morose. You’re eyeing the meat rack over there as though you contemplate a painful duty.”

  “Not painful, no,” Chaymber said.

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know if there’s a word,” Chaymber said.

  “If there were, what would it mean?”

  “I think ‘doomed to disappointment’ would approach it.”

  The young man put his hand to his head and twisted it as though turning a key. “Nope,” he said after a moment, “my mental thesaurus has no single word that means ‘doomed to disappointment.’ The closest it can come is ‘life,’ but that’s the closest it can come to a lot of things.” He brushed some dust off the sleeve of his suede jacket. “My name is Sandy, by the way.”

  “Richard,” Chaymber said. “Richard Hatch.” He held out his hand and Sandy shook it firmly.

  “No last name,” Sandy said. “I had one once, but I lost it in the dust of a previous journey.”

  “It must have been quite a trip,” Chaymber said.

  “Oh, it was,” Sandy agreed. “I traveled from there”—he nodded over at the meat rack—“to here, but on a very circuitous path.”

  “You hardly look old enough to have a past,” Chaymber said, mentally digesting the fact that Sandy had once been a hustler.

  “The past is only yesterday,” Sandy said, and then he grinned. “And that’s either very profound or very, very stupid.”

  “I’m hungry,” Chaymber said, suddenly realizing it was so. “Come have dinner with me.”

  “Glad to,” Sandy agreed. “But, you understand, I’ll buy my own.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Chaymber said.

  They went to dinner and they talked. Malcolm Chaymber talked about the world and Sandy talked about himself. Chaymber was unprepared to talk about himself, so it was a fair exchange. They enjoyed each other’s company and, for the first time in one of these relationships, Chaymber didn’t feel lied to or manipulated.

  Sandy told Chaymber what it was like being a male hustler: the insecurities, frustrations, self-denials; and how he had left the meat rack. “I met a father figure,” Sandy said. “Not a sugar daddy, you know, but a real surrogate father. And, believe me, incest can be beautiful. He was a novelist. You’d know his name, but there’s no point in my using it except to impress you, which it wouldn’t; you’re not the sort to be impressed by names. But anyway, we traveled together and I met all his friends. And he never introduced me as his ‘son’ or his ‘nephew’ or any of that bullcrap, but always as his friend. It lasted for two years and then we parted—friends—and he laid some money on me, and here I am.”

  “I have a wife,” Chaymber told Sandy over coffee, “and two children.”

  “Does she know about—you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never been close to any woman since I left home when I was fourteen,” Sandy said. “I mean, when I was a hustler I went through the usual macho trip of pretending that I only did it for the money, and I really preferred girls in the sack. So I took a few to the sack and I grunted and groaned, but I was never able to get it off with them.”

  “When I started coming to New York,” Chaymber told Sandy, “my wife threw a tremendous scene. She thought I had a girl here.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I finally told her the truth. I was afraid she’d go through the roof, maybe get a divorce, but it was just the opposite. At first she didn’t believe me. Then she started laughing. Then she got very sympathetic and told me we’d work it out.”

  “Did you?”

  “We worked out a very important part of it; we stopped lying to each other. We also stopped having sex.”

  Sandy had a loft on Houston Street, and they went there after dinner. “Careful where you step!” Sandy warned, switching on the overhead lights. The loft was done in a severe modern style, all chrome and bent plastic and stretched canvas like a harsh parody of the Bauhaus forty years later. The various work and sleep areas were formed by heavy drapery hangings suspended by wires several feet below the fourteen-foot ceiling.

  “Well!” Chaymber said. “I’m impressed. The place is huge.”

  “That’s why I didn’t put up full partitions,” Sandy said. “I get privacy and keep spaciousness at the same time.”

  Sandy pulled Chaymber through the various “rooms” to the rear of the loft. In the center of the large clear space, there rose a creation of welded bronze and steel rod, tube, and sheet. “My latest,” he said proudly.

  “You didn’t tell me you did anything like that,” Chaymber said, obviously impressed. “What do you call it?”

  “Right now I call it Chaos,” Sandy said. “Chaos by Sandy. But I don’t know what I’ll call it when it’s done. I have such fun doing them that I don’t have time to think about what they are. And then people come and pay me to take them away and make room for the next. It’s like being paid to make love.”

  “Which you were,” C
haymber said.

  “No,” Sandy corrected him. “I was paid to screw, but never to make love. Come with me—I’ll show you the difference.”

  They stayed in the loft together until the next evening, when they went to Pietro’s for dinner, then went to see The Sunshine Boys at the Broadhurst Theater. Then they went back to the loft and stayed together until eight the next morning, when Chaymber left to catch the shuttle back to Washington.

  Sandy went back to sleep, and slept till noon; then he rose and showered and had a cup of coffee and picked up the phone to dial a number. “St. Yves,” he said. “Tell him it’s Sandy.”

  “Hi. It’s me, Sandy. I got him.…

  “Of course I’m sure. He called himself Richard Hatch, but it was him. I got a look in his wallet. Senator Malcolm Chaymber. No question.…

  “Okay. I’m seeing him again next week. I’ll keep him on the string—no sweat. But listen, go easy on the guy, will you? I kind of like him.”

  George Warren drove his light-green Camarro north on the Garden State Parkway, keeping to the posted sixty-mile speed limit. The day was crystal-clear and the woods, covered with fresh snow, gleamed with peculiarly three-dimensional purity. Neither of which facts Warren noticed. For him, weather was an annoyance that made him add or subtract layers of clothing, and scenery was no more than an incidental backdrop.

  What concerned Warren was people and how to manipulate them. He considered himself something of an expert in this, and performed his expertise with cold-blooded efficiency. After ten minutes with a girl he could tell how many times he’d have to say “I love you” before she would spread her legs. After ten minutes with a man he would know whether threats of extortion or physical torture were more likely to cause him to become talkative.

  Warren turned off the Parkway and headed west. When the odometer had clocked ten and a half miles, he pulled over to the edge of the two-lane blacktop and shut off the engine.

  The manila envelope that St. Yves had given him was behind the sun visor. He pulled it out and examined the two photographs it contained. The first, a tall, skinny, blond Caucasian in his mid-twenties, was his contact, Calvin Middler. The second, a candid shot of a short, round-faced, blond Caucasian female in her early twenties, side view, was Zonya (believed alias, prints not on file). After staring at the two photographs for a few minutes, he slowly tore them into small pieces, which he wadded up and put in a lump on the dirt shoulder of the road. Then, with a heavy Zippo lighter, he set fire to the lump. When it burned out, he ground the ashes into the dirt.