The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America

by Michael Kurland

  Adams nodded and appeared lost in thought for a minute. “We’d better work through a cutout from now on,” he said. “You can keep coming here as my guest, of course, but never speak privately to me after today. And don’t ever bring any documents, books, or papers in with you. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Who are we going to use as a cutout?” Kit asked.

  “Miriam.”

  Kit froze for a second and then, realizing where he was, resumed rubbing himself with the broad red towel. “You’re crazy,” he said. “I won’t let her get involved in this.”

  Adams stood and wrapped a towel around his neck. They walked back toward the house.

  “I understand your feelings,” Adams said. “But consider what an egotistical ass you’ll sound like when you tell Miriam.”

  “I don’t intend to tell her,” Kit said.

  “Great,” Adams told him. “Then when St. Yves sends two thugs to her door she won’t even know why they’re there.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Kit said. They walked into Adams’ den and Kit dropped onto the massive couch, feeling the leather upholstery stick to his damp skin. “But you’re right. Miriam is probably safer witting than unwitting. I’ll talk to her.”

  “Not at your house,” Adams said, “or hers.”

  “You know something?”

  “I know how great minds think. We must treat these people very carefully. And remember that they are very dangerous.”

  “They killed Dianna Holroyd,” Kit said. “There’s no way I’ll forget that.”

  “That’s good,” Adams said. “But go beyond anger and let the memory make you very cautious. Very.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Kit said.

  Representative Clement W. Korr (D-Ohio) was a squat, dour, energetic man with a face like a petulant bulldog’s. Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and one of the five most powerful men in the House, he was running for his fifteenth consecutive term as the elected representative of the people of Ohio’s twenty-seventh congressional district. The Republicans, wasting neither time nor money in opposing him, were fielding a chiropractor with a seat on the local school board who saw Communists in the schools, in the churches, in the waterworks, and presumably under his bed. Korr was not worried.

  Now, suddenly jerked out of the cocoon of prestige and power he had been thirty years weaving, Korr sat on a camp chair that was too small for his bottom and stared into the face of his doom. “Moving pictures?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Warren said, allowing a smile to briefly flicker over his composed features. “I have a hand viewer with me with a few feet of film on an endless loop. Would you like to view it, sir?”

  Korr shifted his weight and the canvas and wood frame under him creaked alarmingly. He was sitting in front of a gaily colored tent, one of a row of similar tents along the edge of a meadow on the grounds of a state institution in Maryland. There was a medieval fair and tournament in progress on the meadow before him: three hundred or so people in costumes out of the King Arthur coloring book. At the entrance to the fair, Korr had been given a one-piece garment resembling a bath towel with a hole cut out for his head. His nemesis, who squatted on the ground facing him, was garbed in the rough olive robes of a mendicant monk. “Do I have a choice?” he asked. “Let’s see it.”

  Warren produced a small plastic object shaped like a toy gun from under his robe. “Look into the muzzle,” he told Representative Korr, “and pull the trigger.”

  Korr did so, hooking his thumb through a trigger guard obviously designed for hands somewhat smaller than his own. The gun muzzle flickered to life, and he was treated to a jerky, six-second loop of himself and Miss Tish Johnson, a secretary in his office, in an intimate embrace on the king-sized vibrator bed in room seven of the Kings Park Motel. The camera was somewhat behind and above the action, and it made him look frenetic, undignified, and ridiculous; but there was no question that it was, indeed, he.

  Korr handed the viewer back to Warren. “How much?” he asked quietly.

  “Oh, a couple of hours’ worth easy,” Warren said. Behind him two men in mock armor started bashing each other with mock swords.

  Korr stood up. “You mistake me, sir,” he said. “Are you empowered to negotiate or must you consult with your principal? Tell him I will buy this material, but I must have the original and any copies that have been made. And I will not make the mistake of submitting to blackmail twice. The second time you come back, I call the police, regardless of the consequences to me.”

  “It’s you who are mistaken,” Warren said.

  “State your price,” Korr demanded, the muscles tightening around his jaw.

  “The material is not for sale,” Warren said. “This is not a blackmail scheme. We’ll safeguard the material and, with your cooperation, nobody else will ever see it.”

  “Cooperation?”

  “I represent a political group,” Warren said. “We believe that the only hope for the salvation of this country is in the program of the President of the United States. We’d like to see you support that program.”

  Korr sat down, his mouth open. “You must be kidding.”

  “We’re very serious.”

  “You expect me to start voting Republican? You think maybe nobody will notice?”

  Warren shook his head. “No, of course not. No more than four or five times a year. We’ll call you, let you know.”

  “I—”

  ”Otherwise we use these pictures and your opponent gets elected. He is, after all, a Republican.”

  Korr stared at the two fighting knights without seeing them. “I was wondering,” he said. “All my liberal colleagues are getting smeared. They’re soft on communism, they’re against law and order, they have sexual designs on small children; charges springing out of the woodwork in well-organized smear campaigns. A lot of money is out there somewhere. But nothing on me. I wondered about that. Thought maybe I was too powerful for you. That was foolish wasn’t it? And all the time you had me with my pants down—as it were.”

  “It’s your decision,” Warren said.

  “Yes. Well, I’ll need some time to think about this.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow at two at your office,” Warren said, standing up. “If you’re not there, you can leave a message for me. Yes or no. No negotiating.”

  “No one will ever see that film?” Korr said, trying to sound firm and not succeeding. “That’s understood. If I—no more than five times a year—if I—”

  ”That’s the deal,” Warren said. “You save your honor, your dignity, your office, and your marriage, and we get five votes a year for the President of the United States. It’s not as if we were asking you to do anything subversive, just support your President.” He turned and walked off across the field with the slow, measured steps appropriate to his costume.

  “I’ll be damned!” Korr said. “I’ll be goddamned!” It was some minutes before he found the strength to push himself out of the chair and head down the hill toward the parking lot.

  Malcolm Chaymber tossed his overnight bag on the floor and dropped into one of the chrome and canvas chairs that littered Sandy’s living loft. “Well, I’m here,” he said.

  “Thank God you’ve come,” Sandy said, closing and double-locking the loft door behind him.

  “When you called I had to assume it was important,” Chaymber said. “The fact that you know my real name and phone number came as quite a shock. I’ve felt guilty all these months, you understand, but it’s very hard to change a lie back into the truth, and the longer you wait the harder it gets. I won’t ask you now how you knew, since you should have known months ago if I’d had the courage to tell you. What do you need?”

  “We’re still—friends?”

  “Yes, Sandy, even without the dramatic pause we’re still friends. And I’m sure that you didn’t get me on an early-morning plane from Washington just to show me that you know. Did you?”

  “No. Of course not. Oh, R
ichard—Oh, shit! Now I don’t even know what to call you. It isn’t Richard, it’s Malcolm. Do I call you Malcolm?”

  “Usually it’s Mal.”

  “I’ve known for some time, Mal. Since the first time, as a matter of fact. I’m nosy. I looked in your wallet. So I knew that you’re a United States senator. But I don’t give a damn what you call yourself. Why should I? You could have stayed Richard Hatch forever as far as I was concerned.”

  “That’s very nice, Sandy,” Chaymber said dryly. “Now tell me what I’m doing here.”

  “I had a phone call yesterday.”

  “A phone call?”

  Sandy looked up and Chaymber saw that his eyes were bloodshot. “A man called,” he said. “He told me about—about you—us. His language was—obscene.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He gave me to understand that he knew who you were. He has pictures of us together. Very together.”

  “Pictures?” Chaymber’s brain refused to work. He felt suddenly as though someone were throwing buckets of warm shit on him and he were unable to move aside. “How could anyone have pictures?”

  “Through the skylight over my bedroom,” Sandy said. “I mean, you must understand, you must know that I had no idea that such a thing was even possible. I mean, how the hell anyone got up on the roof to take pictures I can’t tell you.”

  “It’s a bluff,” Chaymber said. “It must be a bluff.”

  Sandy went over to the long wall where a stack of plastic boxes in primary colors were stacked to serve as a random-form bookcase. “Here,” he said, taking an envelope from one of the shelves and tossing it over. “I said something like that over the phone, so these were slid under my door.”

  Chaymber looked at the four-by-five color prints of acts of what the Marquess of Queensberry had called “somdomy” being performed on Sandy’s oversized bed. They were good pictures and very clear.

  “This is—most disconcerting,” Chaymber said. The words came stiff and hollow from his mouth. “Did the man on the phone say what he intended to do with the pictures?”

  “He said to tell you he had them. He said he’d be in touch.”

  “With me or you?”

  “He didn’t say. If it’s blackmail, it must be you he’s after. Everyone knows I’m gay—even my mother.”

  Chaymber stared at Sandy without saying anything. He got up and walked into the kitchen and looked at the array of orange pots on the wall over the stove and didn’t see them. After a few minutes he went back into the living area. “I have to think,” he said. “This catches me off guard. I suppose it was inevitable. But I’m not prepared at all. I don’t know what to do. Hell, I don’t even know what they want.”

  “Money,” Sandy said.

  “Did he say that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s possible.”

  “I could help,” Sandy said earnestly. “I mean, if you decide to pay.”

  “Thank you, Sandy. Thank you for saying that. But I doubt if it will be that simple. Nobody bothers to get at a United States senator for money—even if he is a closet queen.”

  “What then?”

  “Power, influence, votes. Somebody wants to buy me. I’m on the meat rack and it’s a long jump down. I’m about to pay for my sins.”

  “It’s not a sin!” Sandy said. “I don’t care what it says in Leviticus; I don’t care what the law is, what two adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom is not a sin!”

  Chaymber smiled. “That’s one hell of a private bedroom you’ve got there, fellow.” Then the smile disappeared from his face and he shook his head. “That’s not the sin, Sandy. In politics the only sin is getting caught. I’m too tired to think about anything now. I’m going to take a nap. Here, on the couch, I think. There’s no skylight in here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sandy said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Chaymber said. “It’s not your fault.” He stretched out on the amorphous softness that was Sandy’s modern couch. “I’m glad they called you instead of me. If my wife hears about this, the shit will really splatter about.”

  “You told me your wife knew about you.”

  “About me she knows. But she doesn’t know any, ah, details. And she doesn’t want to. And, more to the point, she doesn’t want anyone else to. What will it make her look like, her husband a faggot? And what will it do to the kids? Jesus. I don’t want to think about it. I’m going to sleep. Don’t wake me. Unless he calls back.”

  “Right,” Sandy said. He padded quietly out of the room. Sometime later, when Chaymber’s regular breathing showed him to be really and truly asleep, he cautiously picked up a phone in the bedroom and dialed.

  “St. Yves,” he said. “Tell him it’s Sandy.…”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Say, excuse me, but aren’t you Senator Ryan?”

  Kevin Ryan looked up from his Time magazine. An apple-cheeked stewardess with perfect teeth was standing over him, an ice-filled plastic cup poised expectantly in her left hand. “That’s me,” he admitted, smiling back up at her. “What, is it cocktail time already?”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s right.” She gestured toward the drink cart in front of her. “A dollar a drink. What would you like?”

  “A Bloody Mary would be comforting,” he said, digging into his pocket for his wallet.

  She poured the mix into the plastic glass, then, putting down Ryan’s tray for him, set the napkin-wrapped glass on the tray, and put a tiny bottle of vodka next to it. He handed her a dollar.

  “It’s just that I’m surprised to see you here,” she said, adding the dollar to the money tray on top of her cart. “I mean, in tourist class. I thought all you government people traveled up front in first class.”

  “Bureaucrats with expense accounts do,” Kevin said. “We elected officials have to get by on our own salaries. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes someone else pays and we travel first class, but we always wear false noses and dark glasses so none of our constituents will recognize us.”

  She laughed. “I don’t vote,” she said, “or I would have voted for you.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Come back when you’re done pushing that cart and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Yes, sir” she said. “I’ll do that.” She maneuvered her drink cart on down the aisle and Kevin watched the slow undulation of her hips like a man hypnotized by beauty. Women had always been one of the great preoccupations of his life, at first because he couldn’t get them, and then because he could.

  All his adult life Kevin Ryan had gotten along well with women. Probably because he treated them like people. “It’s amazing how many men treat women like another species,” a lady friend had told him once, “and then can’t understand when women respond in kind. You’re not like that. You’re interested in a woman’s mind, not just in her vagina.”

  “The mind,” Kevin remembered telling her, “is the sexiest part of the body.”

  Now, perhaps, Kevin Ryan was going to have to pay for his lifelong easy friendship with women. What he thought of as a casually intimate friendship could easily be blown up by an unfriendly press as a torrid, sleazy affair. Anything involving sex outside of marriage could be torrid and sleazy to the press.

  And it was last Friday that a phone call had come to his private number and threatened to turn his private sex life into public scandal. A low, scratchy male voice had breathed the name “Nancy” and the address of a cabin in Vermont, and suggested that he had photographs the Senator might be interested in seeing.

  “If you have them, publish them,” Ryan had said angrily into the phone before slamming it back down into its cradle. He had since then had second thoughts. Not that he’d even consider going along with any sort of blackmail; he’d see them—and himself—in hell first. But it would have been wiser to arrange a meeting with this man so he’d know who his adversary was and could handle him better. A counterthreat to prosecute for extortion migh
t be an adequate way to handle a blackmail threat, if he knew whom to prosecute.

  And then last night, another phone call. This one from Tom Clay, the Majority Leader of the Senate. “Kevin, boy, I’ve got to talk to you. It’s important.”

  “Of course, Senator. What is it?”

  “Not over the phone, Kevin. I hate to ask this of you, and I wouldn’t if it weren’t so damn important, but could you fly out here? The National Committee’ll pay for your ticket.”

  “Fly out…to Minnesota? Are you in Minnesota?”

  “That’s right. I hate to bother a senator between sessions, especially in an election year. Even if you’re not up at bat yourself. I know how it is. But I need to see you, boy. And I need to see you now!”

  “In Minneapolis.”

  “That’s right. I’ve got you booked on a nine-thirty flight out of Kennedy Airport. Can you make it?”

  “If you say it’s that important.…”

  “I do.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Fine, fine. I’ll meet you at the airport. ’Bye now, Senator.”

  And so here he was drinking Bloody Marys at ten-fifteen in the morning, ten miles over the state of (maybe) Ohio, waiting to find out what the Majority Leader wanted to see him about. Was he about to be shown some interesting photographs? The last time he had seen Tom Clay, the Majority Leader had asked him to go easy on the administration. “We’ve got to live with them, Senator,” Clay had said in his clipped, nasal voice, “just like they’ve got to live with us. We all get more done that way with less hassle, if you see what I mean.”

  Senator Clay was waiting for him at the exit gate. “Good to see you, Senator,” he said, shaking hands with Kevin. “Come this way, please.”

  “What’s this all about?” Kevin asked, following Senator Clay through the exiting throng.

  “Patience,” Senator Clay said. “All will be revealed in a minute. Thanks for coming on such short notice, by the way. Ah, here we are.” He led the way through a door marked private: airport personnel only and up a flight of stairs. “The airport manager has loaned us a conference room,” he said, stopping before a white door and pushing it open.