by Ben Bova
“It’s going to be an interesting summer,” Tomlinson said as he and Jake walked back to the Hart Building.
A cutthroat competition, Jake realized. And it’ll all take place beyond the notice of the news media. Perlmutter and Santino twisting arms for votes, trying to win other senators, moving mountains to hold on to the votes they already had. Fifty-one senators, each one of them asking, “What’s in this for me? For my state? For my backers?”
“What I don’t understand is why McGrath didn’t come out with his backing for Santino,” Jake said. “According to the Little Saint, McGrath promised his support. Why hasn’t he made good on his promise?”
“He’s at death’s door, for god’s sake,” Tomlinson replied. “He’s got other things on his mind.”
As they turned into the tunnel that led to the Hart Building, Jake shook his head. “From what I’ve heard about McGrath, he doesn’t break promises. He’s known as a man of his word.”
They reached the elevator lobby, and Tomlinson pressed the call button. Looking down at Jake, the senator said, “You know, it could be that what McGrath told Santino and what Mario heard are two different things.”
Stepping into the elevator and leaning on the 2 button, Jake said, “Santino’s no fool. If he heard McGrath promise his support, that’s what McGrath did. And now he’s withdrawn it. Why?”
“Might be because he’s out of it,” Tomlinson said, grimly. “He’s dying. No time for politics.”
Jake stayed silent, but he couldn’t believe that a man of Senator McGrath’s long political career wouldn’t have left some record of his support for Santino. No, he withdrew his support and left the Little Saint out in the cold, to sink or swim on his own.
Why?
Declaration
Senator McGrath died the next day. According to the news release from his office, the Senate Majority Leader “slipped away peacefully in his sleep.”
Tami told Jake, “That’s the public relations people’s way of saying he was doped up to his eyebrows when he died.”
They were having dinner at a sushi bar near Dupont Circle. Jake had become fairly adept at using chopsticks, although he still spent a couple of moments at the beginning of the meal perfecting his grip.
“He died without giving his support to Santino,” Jake muttered.
“So?”
He looked up from the unagi eel roll he was enjoying. Tami didn’t seem at all concerned about the struggle for the Senate’s majority leadership. Gazing across the table at her smiling, perfectly lovely face, Jake asked himself why he was so wrapped up in it.
And the answer came to him immediately. If Santino doesn’t win, the energy plan goes down the toilet. The only reason the Little Saint is backing the plan is because we convinced him it can help him beat Perlmutter. If Perlmutter wins, Frank becomes numero uno on Santino’s shit list.
Win or go home, he thought.
But I don’t want to go home, he told himself. I want to stay here. With Tami.
“You’re awfully quiet,” she said, her smile diminishing slightly.
“I love you, Tami.” Jake was surprised to hear himself say it, to admit it, to declare it. But he realized it was true. I love this woman. I really love her.
The truth of it almost stunned him. After Louise was killed in the car wreck, Jake knew he’d lost the one woman he wanted to spend all eternity with. In time, he engaged in brief flings here and there, but that was physical need, not love. And now here was Tami, sharing his life, sharing his bed, and he loved her. It wasn’t that he’d stopped loving Louise; he would never stop loving her. He never could.
But, as he sat in the dimly lit restaurant, looking into Tami’s almond eyes, Jake realized that love wasn’t divisible. It was not a finite quantity. His love for Tami didn’t diminish the love he still felt for Louise. Love could expand, grow, increase, and strengthen and bring new joy to life.
Tami’s face grew serious. “That’s a big word, Jake,” she whispered. “Love.”
“I love you,” he repeated.
She lowered her eyes briefly, then looked up at him again. “I love you, too, Jake.”
He dropped his chopsticks, half rose, and leaned across the table to kiss her. Tami’s lips felt warm and soft and inviting.
She giggled. “Your tie is in your soy sauce.”
He plopped down on his chair again. “Who cares?” And he swished the end of his tie in the little bowl of sauce.
* * *
That weekend Tami moved into Jake’s apartment. He saw that her belongings were modest: a couple of suitcases of clothes, a bulging briefcase of papers, a laptop computer.
“No furniture?” he asked as he helped her tote the bags from her car.
“It was all secondhand junk. I left it with my roomies.”
Jake introduced his fiancée to his landlord and wife. She was warmly gracious, he stiffly formal.
“We’ll have to find a parking space for you along the street somewhere,” the landlord said.
His wife threw a mock frown at him. “Come on, now. You can park your car in the garage and let her have your space at the curb.”
The landlord looked less than pleased. “I’ll have to clean out the garage.”
“About time,” said his wife.
* * *
That evening, as they sat on the futon in Jake’s living room watching a slow-paced BBC television drama, Jake muttered, “I still can’t figure out why McGrath went to his grave without making good on his promise to back Santino.”
Her head resting against his shoulder, Tami replied, “Are you certain that McGrath made a promise?”
“Santino is. He even said that McGrath has turned his back on him.”
“Some conflict between them?” Tami asked.
“Something,” said Jake. “I wish I knew what it was.”
Tami stretched and yawned. “Let’s turn in. I’ve got an early morning tomorrow.”
With a grin, Jake said, “A motion to go to bed is always in order.”
“Robert’s Rules of Order?”
“Ross’s rules of romance.”
Summer of Indecision
Congress adjourned for the summer. Senators and representatives left DC, ostensibly to spend the summer months among their constituents, mending fences, doing favors, making promises, and taking in campaign contributions.
Of course, many members of Congress had to take trips here and there, to investigate this or that. Various European and Middle Eastern capitals were popular destinations. Senators and representatives showed up in Beijing, Sydney, and Tokyo as well. With their families. At taxpayers’ expense.
In Washington, despite the muggy, almost stifling weather, the city seethed with speculation. Although the big conventions that would pick their party nominees for president were still a year away, rumors, guesses, predictions were on everyone’s lips.
The Democrats would renominate the president, that much was sure. But would she stick with her first-term vice president or opt for a fresh face? Six candidates were running to be the Republican nominee, four of them governors of various states, the other two hugely successful business tycoons. Again, who would be the nominee for vice president? Perlmutter was a leading guess, among several other senators and a former secretary of defense.
And beneath all that highly publicized hoopla was the question of who the Republicans would pick to be the next Majority Leader of the Senate. Both Santino and Perlmutter had left Washington for their home states. But they each were waging a deadly serious campaign, with hardly a word in the news media about it.
Jake tried to keep his mind on his work, refining the details of the energy plan. He lunched with Wilmer Nevins a few times and, with some trepidation, showed him the section on solar energy.
Nevins scanned the report as he gobbled his lunch, in an Italian restaurant near the White House. Jake worried that he would spatter the pages with tomato sauce.
At last he handed the report back to Jake
, with a tight smile.
“I think it’s pretty good, Jake. You’ve finally got the picture right: solar electric goes from the bottom up, individual installations, not a big, grandiose government system.”
“Bottom up,” Jake echoed, then quickly added, “With tax incentives.”
Nevins’s smile widened. “Tax breaks are always helpful.”
“And the bit about using portable solar arrays for emergency electrical power in a blackout?” Jake asked.
“It’s a reasonably good idea,” Nevins said. “In fact, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has put out a purchase request for ten thousand emergency rigs.”
“FEMA? No kidding!”
His smile turning just the slightest bit cynical, Nevins admitted, “Some government programs aren’t so bad, after all.”
* * *
Senator Tomlinson was back in Montana, but he kept in touch with his Washington office almost daily through Skype sessions. As the dog days of August overwhelmed Washington with soggy, debilitating heat and humidity, Tomlinson looked bright and relaxed by the swimming pool at his family’s mansion.
“What’s the news, Kevin?” he asked cheerfully, sitting in a recliner beach chair at poolside.
Jake was in O’Donnell’s office, sitting to one side of the chief of staff’s desk, so that Tomlinson could see them both. O’Donnell had been slow to warm to Jake, but now he made certain to invite Jake in to these videophone conversations with the senator.
“The Majority Leader’s race is still neck and neck,” O’Donnell replied. “By our count, Santino’s going to win, but there’s a lot of bad blood. The party’s divided almost down the middle. That could be bad for next year’s presidential campaign.”
“Perlmutter’s up for reelection next year, isn’t he?” Tomlinson asked.
“Right,” said O’Donnell. “Santino isn’t.”
“So Perlmutter’s busy back home in Nebraska, campaigning for his reelection.”
“What else?”
“And Santino’s in Rhode Island.”
“Look, Franklin, the whole damned Senate is scattered all over the country,” O’Donnell said. “And at least a half dozen of them are overseas on fact-finding trips.”
Tomlinson laughed at the cynical emphasis O’Donnell put on fact-finding.
Reaching for the tall frosted glass on the table beside his recliner, the senator asked, “So who’s handling the campaign for Majority Leader?”
“Staff,” O’Donnell said. “The working stiffs who stay here in DC.”
“And how’s it going?”
“Still awfully damned close. Santino’s ahead, by our count, but it wouldn’t take much to change things.”
His expression turning serious, Tomlinson asked, “Is there anything we should be doing?”
O’Donnell started to reply, thought better of it, and hesitated. At last he said, “Nothing. Unless you can bring a couple more votes over to Santino’s side.”
Jake popped up with, “Did that senator from Ohio ever take you up on your offer to show him the MHD rig?”
O’Donnell said, “Zack Danner. He’s due to visit Montana next week.”
“That’s right,” Tomlinson said. “I’ve got a whole tour mapped out for him. Apparently he’s quite a fisherman. My father and I are going to take him up to our lodge on Sandy Creek.”
Nodding, Jake said, “See if you can get him committed to Santino while you’re at it.”
“What do you have to give him in return?” O’Donnell demanded.
“MHD power generation,” said Jake. “Most of Ohio’s electric utilities burn coal, don’t they?”
“A lot of them are switching to natural gas.”
“Either way, MHD can produce more kilowatts per pound of fuel. Danner might like that.”
With a smile, Tomlinson said, “He might, at that.”
* * *
That evening, Jake drove Tami down to the riverfront for dinner at the Cantina Marina. Even with the Mustang’s top down, the stubborn heat and humidity made him feel as if they were driving through steaming soup.
Once he’d parked the car, Jake pulled up the convertible’s roof. Tami, sitting beside him, pointed to the starry, cloudless sky. “You think it’s going to rain?”
“It might,” said Jake, as he fastened the roof’s edge to the top of the car’s windshield frame.
“Weather forecast calls for clear and dry,” she said, with a hint of teasing mirth in her voice.
“Uh-huh. But it only takes one little cloudburst to soak the car.”
Jake got out and went around the car to lend his hand to Tami. She waited obediently for him to open her door. It had taken Jake several weeks to get her to allow him to be a gentleman.
“Besides,” he said, as they started across the parking lot toward the lights of the restaurant, “an open top is an invitation to thieves.”
Tami laughed. “Like a ragtop is going to stop anybody.”
“It has so far,” he said.
The Cantina was barely half full. Jake asked the hostess for the same table they had sat at the first time they’d met.
“You’re sentimental,” Tami said as they followed the young woman out onto the patio.
“I guess I am,” Jake admitted.
“That’s fine.”
Halfway through dinner, Tami said, “I bumped into an old friend this afternoon. One of Senator McGrath’s senior aides.”
Jake put down the spoonful of crayfish soup he had just lifted from the bowl in front of him. “Oh?”
Mock-scowling at him, Tami said, “Don’t ‘Oh’ me, Jake. She’s an old gray-haired lady. Very dignified. She’s been with McGrath for ages.”
“Oh,” Jake said, in a completely different tone.
“She showed up at the EarthGuard office, out of the blue. I think she’s looking for a job, now that McGrath has died.”
“She’s not looking for another senator?”
“Of course she is. But she’s always been interested in environmental issues. She’s covering all her bases.”
Jake returned his attention to the soup.
Tami said, “I made a date to have lunch with her tomorrow. Maybe I can find out why McGrath dropped his support of Santino.”
“You think?”
“If anything significant happened between them, she’d know about it, I’m sure.”
“Just watch your step,” Jake said. “If anything significant did happen, it could be dynamite.”
The Deal
When Tami came home to the apartment the next evening Jake immediately asked her, “How was your lunch?”
“Puzzling,” she said, tossing her handbag onto the coffee table and heading for the kitchen.
Jake followed her. “Puzzling? How so?”
“According to Matilda—Senator McGrath’s aide—he and Santino had a meeting in McGrath’s private office a few days before McGrath announced he was retiring.”
Jake mused, “That must be when McGrath told the Little Saint that he wasn’t going to back him for Majority Leader.”
As she pulled a half-empty bottle of chardonnay from the refrigerator, Tami said, “Must be. They had a shouting match. The two of them screamed at each other.”
“Santino? He raised his voice?”
“McGrath, too,” Tami said, as she poured herself a glass of wine. “Matilda said she’s never heard him sound so angry.”
“What the hell were they arguing about? The Majority Leader vote?”
Shaking her head, Tami replied, “Matilda thinks that was part of it, but only part. There was something else, something that made McGrath withdraw his support for Santino.”
“What was it?”
“Matilda doesn’t know. Nobody in her office knows—she asked around and everybody there was just as surprised as she was. I mean, McGrath was always a sweetheart, never a cross word out of him. All of a sudden he and Santino are behind closed doors hollering at each other like a pair of barroom bozo
s.”
“What the hell could have caused that?” Jake wondered.
“Whatever it was, it broke the friendship the two of them had. Twenty years of friendship, shattered in one afternoon.”
Jake took the bottle from her hand and poured himself a glass. “What the hell could have caused that?” he repeated.
Tami went back to the living room, slipped off her high-heeled shoes, and dropped onto the futon. “It must have been something personal,” she said. “They didn’t have any political differences, not before the blowup and not afterward.”
“Except that McGrath dropped his support of Santino for Majority Leader.”
“He was pretty shaken up afterward,” Tami said. “Matilda says his health went downhill pretty steeply after their fight.”
“And nobody in McGrath’s office knows what it was all about?”
“Nobody.”
Jake sat on the futon beside her. “Then the answer must be in Santino’s office. Or maybe back in Rhode Island.”
* * *
Santino returned to Washington two days before Labor Day. So did Perlmutter.
O’Donnell was almost hyper with anticipation. “They’re running neck and neck down to the wire,” he told Jake.
“Is Santino still ahead?”
“By a nose,” O’Donnell said. Then he amended, “A nostril.”
The vote for Majority Leader was scheduled for the party’s Senate caucus, the Tuesday morning after Labor Day. Tomlinson returned to Washington that Saturday, with his wife, and invited Jake and Tami to a Labor Day barbecue at his house.
When Jake drove up the driveway, the young butler directed him and Tami around the side of the house, to the backyard. Tomlinson, Amy, Kevin O’Donnell, and several other office staff people were already there, all of them in shorts and casual shirts, as Jake and Tami were wearing.
And in the midst of them all stood Senator Mario Santino.
He looked stiffly out of place, in his usual three-piece gray suit. Doesn’t he own any other clothes? Jake wondered.
Despite his outfit, Santino seemed completely at ease as he shook hands with Jake and Tami.
“It’s good to see you again,” he said, smiling benignly.
