by Buffa, D. W.
THE GRAND MASTER
D.W. Buffa
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Blue Zephyr at Smashwords
Copyright © 2010 D.W. Buffa
www.dwbuffa.net
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
CHAPTER ONE
Richard Bauman sat just inside the doorway to the suite, one ankle crossed over his knee, annoyed that he was reading for the second time that evening the sports section of a day old paper. He was in the most expensive suite in one of the most expensive hotels in New York, and all he could do was sit there and let his eye wander down the box score of a game he did not even know had been played. He tossed the paper on the coffee table and walked over to the window and looked out at the moonlit shadows dancing on Central Park. What it would be like, he wondered, to have the kind of money, to be rich enough, to come here on his own, and watch for as long as he liked the shifting scene of the city’s endless magic.
The thought vanished as quickly as it had come. His eyes began their habitual circuit round the room, over to the double doors that led into the bedroom and back again. “Strange business,” he said quietly, shaking his head.
Three or four times every month, they stayed here, in this hotel, and always in this same suite. There was never any reason given; everyone understood. It was a simple matter of logistics, the easy convenience that did not even need the lie. Another room on the other side of the suite, a door that could be unlocked to add another bedroom or, which was the point here, kept separate and apart. It was a way to get privacy with discretion, a way to make sure that all the rumors remained only that; rumors that, even if nearly everyone believed them, no one could actually prove.
“Strange business,” Bauman repeated under his breath as he checked his watch. Ten minutes past one in the morning, ten minutes past one on a Saturday night. With a gruff sigh, he sat down in the chair and started reading the sports section he had read twice before.
He was just turning the page when he thought heard something. He put down the paper. He heard it again, louder this time, a brutal, gasping noise. He leaped out of the chair and ran to the bedroom door. It was locked. He could hear someone moving around inside. He pounded on the door. “Mr. President!” he shouted. “Are you all right?”
No one answered; no one came to the door. Then he heard it again, louder, more insistent, an unmistakable cry for help.
“Mr. President!” screamed Bauman at the top of his lungs, beating on the locked door.
The door flew open. A tall, thin woman in her late twenties or early thirties, with raven colored hair and dark frantic eyes, stood there, holding a sheet in front of her, pointing toward the bed.
“We were…and then he just stopped, and pulled away and got this strange, crazy look in his eyes, like something had happened and he couldn’t figure out what it was, and then he just rolled away and his eyes kind of…kind of went dead.”
Bauman pushed past her and ran to the bed. Robert Constable, the President of the United States, was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling with eyes that could no longer see. Bauman checked the President’s wrist and then his throat; there was no pulse. Robert Constable was dead.
“He had a bad heart, didn’t he?” asked the young woman, clutching the sheet under her chin. Bauman looked at her and told her to get dressed.
“You’re in the room next door? Get your stuff and get out of here, get out of here now!” he ordered. His eyes started moving all around the room. “Here,” he said with a little more sympathy, “let me help you.” He picked up the few of her things still scattered on the floor and handed them to her.
“Now listen to me, listen carefully. You weren’t here. You understand me? You were never here. Go back to your room. I’ll lock the door behind you. Pack your bag, whatever you brought with you, and leave the hotel. Do it now,” he said as he took her by the arm and led her to the door. “Get dressed and leave. You have to be out of here in five minutes, because in five minutes half of New York is going to be here. Now go!”
It had all been instinct, the immediate first reaction: protect the President, even if it was to protect the President against himself; but the moment the door shut behind her, he began to wonder if he had done the right thing. He turned back to the dead body lying on the bed. “What a waste,” he told himself. “What a stupid thing to do.”
There would be speculation enough, all those hollow-eyed talking heads on television, all those gossip hungry fools, always full of news, most of which they invented on the spot. Think what they would do with this. Robert Constable, the President of the United States, screws himself to death with a gorgeous young woman less than half his age. Bauman tried to clear his mind. Had he forgotten anything? Had the girl left anything behind? He checked the night stand next to the bed, and then the bathroom. There was a trace of powder, white powder, next to the sink.
“Crazy bastard,” he muttered, as he wiped the counter clean. He caught a glimpse of himself in the shiny silver mirror and for an instant thought he saw his conscience looking out. He looked away, finished what he was doing and went back to the bedroom.
The girl had not left any jewelry, and nothing else that he could see. Then he remembered. He felt a strange sense of impropriety, a violation of privacy, and not just that of the President and the woman he had been with, but of his own, as he searched beneath the pillows and then the corners of the bed, on the chance that the girl had left her underwear behind.
It had been only a few minutes since he first entered the room and found the President dead. He had done everything he thought he needed to, at least everything he could do alone. His eyes darted toward the body. It could not be left like that, stark naked, with….Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Lipstick, and not just on the President’s mouth.
“Damn it!” he exclaimed in a whispered, angry shout, as he hurried into the bathroom where he scrubbed soap and hot water into a washcloth.
He almost could not do it, wash away the tell-tale signs of a grown man’s infidelity, a womanizer’s last-time cheat. He taunted himself with being squeamish and, when that was not quite enough, tried to remember that it was not as if he had to deal with the disappointment he might have felt if this had been someone he had once respected.
Everything was ready. He took one last look around and then walked through the sitting room, opened the door to the hallway and motioned to the agent standing just outside.
“You better come in. We have a situation.”
James Elias, taller than Bauman and ten years younger, had worked with him long enough to know from his tone of voice that this was something serious.
“You want the others?”
“Not yet.”
Elias looked down the corridor to where two other agents stood opposite the elevators, and then followed Bauman inside. The doors to the bedroom were open. Though trained to caution, Elias was shocked at what he saw.
“Jesus Christ! Have you called the medics?”
Bauman was all business. “He’s dead. Nothing anyone can do. We need to get him dressed, get some pajamas on him.”
Elias respected Bauman; more than that, he looked up to him, the way he thought he would have looked up to an older brother had he had one. He had been willing to go along when they had done other things to keep the President out of trouble, but this was rearranging the scene of a death, and not just any death, b
ut the death of a president.
“I’ve taken care of everything else,” explained Bauman who understood the younger man’s dilemma. “You know what will happen if he’s found like this.”
Elias still did not move. He looked at Bauman, but Bauman suddenly seemed exhausted, too tired to think beyond the immediate present and the thing he had to do next.
“What about the girl?”
“What girl?”
“There was always a girl.”
Bauman did not answer; he turned and started toward the bedroom. Elias did not follow.
“Look, what choice do we have?” asked Bauman, his voice betraying some slight irritation. “We were supposed to take a bullet for him, if it came to that. This isn’t quite as bad, is it?”
Bauman himself was not sure how he would have answered that question. There was something noble and heroic about putting your life on the line for the man you were sworn to protect; it was hard to find anything to brag about in cleaning up the evidence of this last scene of almost Roman decadence: a sex-crazed politician, dead in the middle of an orgasm, the only witness to his final passing moments, not his family and friends, but some coke-sniffing woman with the face of an angel and a harlot’s heart, the kind who only sleeps with men who can sleep with anyone because of who they are.
“Maybe I should have found out who she was, but I didn’t,” he admitted with a weary, rueful glance.
“The room next door?” asked Elias, as they pulled the pajamas up over the President’s dead-weight legs.
“Yeah; we better check it, make sure she didn’t leave anything.”
“You see her before? She someone he…?”
“No; she was new. Young, gorgeous; a model, maybe - I don’t know.” He paused, remembering something that made him think. “She wasn’t scared. I didn’t pick up on it; there were too many things going through my mind. But I’m sure of it. She wasn’t scared. Her voice trembled a little, like she was - scared, I mean; but her eyes - they didn’t move, the way the eyes of someone really frightened would. She looked right at me, almost as if she were trying to measure my reaction.”
Elias tied the pajama cord and stepped away to see if everything looked the way it should.
“Wouldn’t surprise me, given the kind of woman he seemed to like,” he said, tilting his head to the side to look at what he had done from a slightly different angle.
“What wouldn’t surprise you?”
“That she didn’t look scared.” He nodded toward the body of the President, his head propped up on a pillow, now dressed in a pair of dark blue pajamas. “Maybe he’s not the first guy who had a heart attack while he was banging her.”
An hour later, after the President’s personal physician had been summoned, and several other calls had been made, the body of the President was wheeled out the front entrance of the hotel. A crowd had formed, and thousands stood in silence as the body was placed inside a waiting ambulance and, with the siren wailing, driven slowly away. While everyone stood watching, wondering at the shame of such an early death, a young woman on the other side of the street, opposite the hotel, spoke quietly on her cell phone.
“There’s a problem. Someone saw me.”
CHAPTER TWO
Bobby Hart had been at funerals in other places and paid his last respects to relatives and friends; he had, years earlier, held his mother’s fragile, shaking hand and wiped away a tear of his own, while they stood alone at the graveside as his father was laid to rest. Those funerals had been real, the final, last goodbye, the formal ritual of grief and resignation, in which only those who knew, and even loved, the one who passed away, are invited or allowed. This was different; a ritual, yes, but one that instead of serving as a catharsis for the emotions was a playhouse for a fiction, all the mourners certain in their roles, wearing faces made to reflect a sense of tragedy and loss that most of them at least did not feel.
Everyone who was anyone in Washington sat crushed together in the pews, come to listen in solemn acquiescence to the eulogy of a man many of them had privately despised. There were those who had hated him because they thought he had taken what they believed belonged to them, the office that, it is fair to say, someone else would have taken from them had Robert Constable never lived. There were others who disliked him because he had not given them what he had promised - or seemed to promise, because he had a genius for being vague - when he had asked if they would help in what at the time seemed a long shot bid for the presidency. And then there were those who, if they had not always acted properly themselves, thought it still the mark of virtue to keep their vices private and, call it common decency or rank hypocrisy, had nothing but disdain for someone who had let his private life become a scandal. In their considered good judgment, Robert Constable had disgraced the office and disgraced himself. The wonder was that he had always seemed to get away with it. That was what drove them all a little crazy, the fact that the man they thought one of the world’s greatest charlatans, a man without qualities or principles, had somehow managed to break all the rules and laugh at those who thought he might get caught.
Bobby Hart wondered how he would have felt if, like so many of the others in the front rows of the church, he had found his own ambitions defeated, his own dreams denied, by someone who, it was said, never remembered the name of anyone he had either hurt or could no longer use. He had barely known Constable. Most of what he knew about him, beyond the things everyone knew from reading the papers, he had learned from some of the other members of the Senate who had their own stories to tell, none of them very flattering, and always accompanied by a request that what they were about to tell him be kept in confidence. For all the President’s talk of hope and optimism, the main emotion he inspired among those who knew him best was fear.
The memorial service droned on. Crowded to capacity, with no room to move, the National Cathedral felt almost as breathlessly humid as the August heat outside. Hart tried to listen as one speaker followed another, but the eulogies seemed forced and artificial, what people are supposed to say, rather than what they really think or feel. He was there because, as a member of the senate, he was expected to be. It was an obligation that went with the office, something you did to keep alive the long traditions of the place.
Hart’s gaze drifted away from the secretary of state, recounting the foreign achievements of the Constable administration, and began to run along the line of dignitaries in the first few rows. It stopped at the sight of Madelaine Constable, the President’s widow, sitting in the first row on the aisle. Her face was resigned, respectful, but without any trace of grief. Perhaps it had always been a marriage of convenience; but, he reminded himself, it had lasted nearly thirty years. She must have known what he was like, this need that bordered on compulsion for the company of other women. Or did she? Perhaps she had known at the beginning, one of the first times he was unfaithful, and then, because he would have been forced to admit what he could not deny, taken that confession as a promise that he would never stray again.
As Hart looked at her, still attractive with her light blue eyes that when she looked at you seemed to tease you with some secret knowledge, and the ash blonde hair that was always cut so perfectly, he changed his mind; or rather, for the first time glimpsed a different possibility: that she knew, or could have known, everything, and not much cared. Even wearing widow’s weeds, Madelaine Constable had the look of someone very much her own person. Whatever her husband might have been doing with other women, she could just as easily, and with no doubt greater taste and discretion, have been doing with other men.
The service finally came to an end. The President’s widow led the procession back up the aisle, stopping every few steps to touch the hand of someone and thank them for all they had done. Some thought she was quite brave, the way she seemed to be more concerned with the feelings of others than with her own; others had a different impression.
“Still beautiful, and now single and quite rich,” a familiar voice w
hispered just behind him. Hart turned around to find his only close friend in the Senate, Charles Ryan of Michigan, raising his eyes in a way that suggested, more than irreverence, the knowledge of things best left unsaid. “You think it’s just accidental?”
Ryan had reddish brown hair and a slightly freckled face, eyes full of laughter and the quickest smile Hart had ever seen. Always in a state of motion, never able quite to sit still, when Ryan took a chair it seemed it was just to have a place from which to suddenly jump up. Caught up in an argument, which sometimes seemed the main preoccupation of his life, he spoke in half-sentences, eager to start the next one before he had finished the last; and if he did that to sentences, a paragraph was even worse, collapsing in a rush of incoherence like the drunken revel of a half-mad poet. But now, moving in solemn order in the middle of the crowd, he spoke slowly, quietly, and to the point.
Hart did not respond. There were too many people around, too great a chance to be overheard. With a faint half-smile, he nodded, and because they knew each other so well, it was enough to tell Ryan that they would talk outside.
As many as had gathered inside the cathedral, a hundred times that number were standing behind the barricades erected on the street, come to pay a final tribute to a president some of them had admired and to see the famous faces of those who had been invited to his funeral. The air was thick, heavy with the humid scent of summer smoke, every movement made uncomfortable, an effort that required strength; things seemed to pass in slow motion, the world become a crawl. Hart blinked into the dusty, reddish sun and felt a sudden disability, a sense of slow paralysis, a loss of all ambition beyond a cool dark place to sit and something cold to press against his lips.
