The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy

by Robert MacLean

“I just hope you’re not forgetting who we owe all this to.” She sat on an adjacent settee. “Mrs. President’s used to making the decisions.”

  “Look,” I laughed, “you can’t have a stable marriage, you can’t have a stable country where the wife’s in charge.” There was an object lesson for Alberta here.

  “In charge. I thought we’d got past all that.”

  “Yes yes yes, but he’s the President, don’t you see? He has to act like the President!” Seemed clear to me.

  “You’re so difficult when you’re drunk.”

  I belched and she gave me an indulgent look. I closed my eyes and lifted my face into the breeze.

  “You want another drink or shall we go and dally?”

  “Clever-ass.”

  “Mr. Wallace?”

  I hung back my head and looked at an upside-down stranger. He hadn’t been announced by the guard downstairs, he hadn’t rung the doorbell, he hadn’t been shown in by the flunky. He was just there.

  “Yes?” I said, unable to gather myself into anything more pointed.

  He turned to Alberta. “Mrs. Haines?”

  I stood up with my glass. “What the devil?”

  “My name is Lewman. I’m from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’d like to talk to you.”

  We. Three more of them stood fanned out behind him. Not that I was ready to run for it.

  “Can we make it tomorrow?” Alberta said. “We have a dinner.”

  “Now,” he clarified. Short, stocky, Rex Morgan jaw. The suit had been sat around in a lot.

  “We’re indisposed,” she said.

  “Well, may I suggest that you get yourselves disposed? Or you can come downtown in your housecoats, mox nix to me.”

  I exchanged looks with her. I think we’re in trouble, mine said.

  “Is this some sort of brutal joke?” she said.

  “This is a matter of national security.”

  We dressed in the bedroom. I was beginning to associate her company with short stays behind The Door. It wasn’t a thought I cared to explore at the moment. This wasn’t even my idea!

  No one spoke during the ride downtown. Empty streets. Everybody was somewhere else.

  We pulled up by a squarish office building with a corner door. The look of the place made me regret my double-breasted evening suit. No one here was going to be dressed like that.

  Inside was like a hospital lobby. Lewman paused at the admitting desk and we waited while he signed something. He led us to an elevator and we got in.

  Alberta’s eyes were anxious. As I suspected, my look said. We are about to have our asses handed to us.

  When we got out they separated us, took us in different directions.

  “Wordy, don’t let them!”

  We went down a hall and into a small room with metal desks pushed to the wall. They sat me down. The partner angled his chair in a way that suggested he’d had a lot of practice sitting in it and leaned back.

  Lewman poked around in a desk, picked some things out of a file drawer and read them as if he were alone. He smiled to himself, kicked a chair over beside mine and put a foot on it, leaned on his knee and slapped the folder down on the desk behind me, still reading.

  “Wallace,” he sighed, stretching. “Wordsworth. Says here he ran a grant-application service. Filled out the forms for people. Came up with original reasons why the foundations should give them money. Took a third.”

  He raised his eyebrows absently.

  “Got sussed out on that one but they couldn’t nail him. Listen to this. Then he forms a company with these guys named Allsworthy, Teargarten and Trumbull and sells shares in it. Calls it A,T&T. Stock patrol got him and explained the rules to him, he said he didn’t know.”

  The partner grunted.

  “Then we got some items under Misuse of the Mails. Advertised a bathroom mirror so you can shave while your roommate’s in the shower. Seventy-nine ninety-five plus handling got you a junkyard windshield wiper and a clamp, batteries not included.”

  He read the whole C.V. There were things there I hadn’t even done but I didn’t bother to protest. The legend has a life of its own.

  I guess it all started in my student days. There was a time when prolonging them indefinitely had seemed the only meaningful alternative to actual work. Climbing around on the monkey bars of literature and so forth. Staring out the window.

  I was going to be an eagle scout of the academy, get all my badges, but then this grant-application business just ballooned! You have to know how to word these things. I was having lunch with professors their colleagues needed appointments to see and retained an office staff larger than the dean’s.

  When the game was up and I left the sheltered world of the campus it was clear at least that my gift was for working with people. In New York I was taken in by a richish lady with an off-off-Park Avenue apartment where I lived while I was looking for a job. Went out to the balcony every day, looked.

  When my honey-babe was out lunching with her brokers the cleaning lady used to bring breakfast in on a tray. Short, fat, sixtyish. Black sweater torn at the armpits and safety pinned where the buttons were gone. Mustache and a gold tooth. But, she wasn’t that bad in bed and when my consort came home to make sure Maria wasn’t wasting the day on the phone, well, I was thrown upon the world.

  Naturally I had to fend. Do those things implied by the getting of the living. I didn’t want to just go into business, join the mad scramble for success. I had been educated beyond that. Cut out for something creative.

  Not all my contributions were up to standard, it’s true. We went into production on the mirror-wiper before we had all the bugs out, but there was an idea there!

  “Organized a potato contest?” Lewman looked at me.

  When it became imperative to leave town I found myself on the departures level shopping for a ticket that could airlift me even a little distance away, counting all the capital I could scrape together and coming up short. I put my foot on a baggage scale to recount and when I turned around some guy was watching me.

  Clodhopper shoes, a suit made for somebody smaller and a false three-pointed handkerchief in the pocket that said the drycleaner’s name when you pulled it out. Hair cut with a bowl. He stared past me in puzzlement.

  “Is that a scale?” he said.

  I studied him cautiously. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s a scale.”

  “Boy, you could just about weight a whole cow on that one!”

  “Sure could,” I said. Freshly deplaned.

  He pawed the turf. “Boy, we don’t have nothin’ like that back in Arkinsaw!”

  “Well, look,” I said, “I’ll sell you this one.”

  We dickered hard but two-fifty was as high as he’d go. I took it with a resigned look, got my boarding pass before last call and left him arguing with the ticket agent.

  I flew a zigzag pattern of local flights across the country until the bread gave out and we were taxiing towards a terminal in Idaho. Where exactly was Idaho, I wondered. And what? A town? A state?

  I had never really believed in Idaho, I now realized, let alone thought of going anywhere near it, and when I got out of the plane and looked around my sense of exile deepened. Darkest rurality. I had died and gone to hell.

  How was one to proceed? All I knew about Idaho was seeing it printed on a potato bag when I was a kid. Potatoes, then, were a valued commodity in Idaho. Something the local mind could relate to.

  I took space in the Almanac Gazette announcing a contest for the biggest potato in Idaho and indeed generated no little enthusiasm. Entries arrived by mail, by courier service and by personal delivery and at the end of the week several U-Hauls outside my motel room were piled high with outsized autographed potatoes.

  Idaho being Idaho I was able to convert these almost immediately to a ticket out of there and was already standing in the slingshot as I was photographed presenting the smiling and randomly selected winner with a check for twenty-five dollars, after
which I reached behind me and snipped the string and pinged first-class to the coast.

  Then the East.

  Now, by the laws of cosmic bounce, I was back about where I’d begun, confronting my past. Beginning the second movement of My Adventure in America.

  We had already won, right? All we could do now was lose, right? Here it came.

  “Nothing quite criminal, eh Wordsworth? Strictly from small time.”

  “Until now,” said the partner.

  “What do you mean, until now?”

  “Until this, Wordswoth.”

  “What this?”

  “You got these people pouring their hearts out to you, Wordsworth.”

  “That’s not criminal either.”

  “It is if you’re shaking them down, Wordsworth.”

  “What? Doing what?”

  “You a real palmist, Wordsworth? You got credentials?”

  “I got intutitions. Would you mind specifying what this is about?”

  They laughed. “You know what this is about, Wordsworth. Quit kiddin’.”

  “We want you to tell us, that’s what would be nice.”

  “Well I don’t know what you’re talking about and unless you tell me the conversation stops and I get the President on the phone. You want to talk to him?”

  They looked at me. At one another. Then Lewman jerked his head and the partner went out to ask whoever was in charge for permission to tell me what it was all about.

  I smiled at Lewman.

  The partner came back and Lewman said, “All right, Wordsworth, here’s what we got on you. We know you tape-record these—encounters.”

  “That’s part of the service.”

  “Yeah, well I wouldn’t say anything into a taperecorder within half a mile of you. And we know the President gave you some sensitive material.”

  “I can’t discuss a case.”

  “And it’s your practice to turn these tapes over to the people who come to you?”

  “It’s their record.”

  “So where’s this one?”

  “What one?”

  “The one or ones you made of the President.”

  “One,” I said. “I left it in his office.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no! Yes!” I looked at the partner. “I did!”

  “No, Wordsworth,” Lewman said. “He can’t find it. The Secret Service can’t find it. We can’t find it. Naturally we thought of you. You,” he explained, “are conspiring to blackmail an elected official, Wordsworth. And we”—he turned to the partner, who smiled back at him—“are going to throw you away.”

  “You’ve hit the big time, Wordsworth. You’re going to have a lot of status inside.”

  “This is not true!”

  “You’ve done a bad thing.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Let’s start when you arrived in Washington. Tell us everything. What you did, where you went, who you saw, who you spoke to. Everything. We’re going to make a list, and then we’re going to see if it matches what your friend Mrs. Haines says. And where it doesn’t match, that’s where we start, you see how it works?

  They grilled me for hours. It was all shirtsleeves and shoulder holsters and coffee cups and let’s try it again. I lost track of the time.

  “Give us the tape, Wordsworth.”

  “I haven’t got it.”

  “Where is it, Wordsworth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did the President say, Wordsworth? What are you using against him?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Come on, Wordsworth.”

  “The President trusts me.”

  “We can hold you indefinitely, Wordsworth.”

  “Call him.”

  “He doesn’t want to talk to you, Wordsworth. The tape, Wordsworth. Give us the tape. Surrender the tape.”

  11.

  The door to the apartment was wide open. It was midmorning. I walked in with my hand in my pocket and my jacket slung over my shoulder.

  No servants in sight. When the Man comes and takes you away it’s some kind of sign or something. And there must have been a search.

  They didn’t even give notice. Just as well, there was no money to pay them with. Our assets had been frozen pending an investigation of my whole operation. The cars were impounded. I had a hundred and fifty or so dollars in my pocket and my Stim-U-Dents.

  “The President has lost things before,” I had pointed out.

  “Who was in the Office every day, Wordsworth? Who else knew what was on the tape?”

  “It proves nothing,” I sneered, but I sounded too disdainful. “Who told you it was missing?”

  He gave me his muscular smile. “We’ll turn this over to the Department of Justice, Wordsworth, see what they want to do. For the moment you may go.”

  I was already grabbing my jacket.

  “We’ll talk later, Wordsworth.”

  So now I was looking at a stretch inside. Back to the schoolyard but with deeply committed bullies. Years of keeping your eyes straight ahead.

  Alberta was supposed to have already gone home. She hadn’t. My steps made empty-church echoes.

  Even if we didn’t go to trial I had had it as a palm-reader. The mere suggestion that one of my tapes had gone missing, let alone that I was holding it for hush money—who would ever consult me again? Professionally speaking my ball had been thwacked out past the gazebo.

  I was tired-eyed, unshaven. Felt like a piece of rolled-up rat dropping. Even in the tinted mirror I didn’t look that good.

  I threw my coat on the couch, kick-shoved a soft chair out onto the terrace and fell into it to consider the skyline. I sighed. Whenever you think you know what’s going to happen next the odds are long you’re wrong. You just can’t second-guess The Game.

  I stretched my face with my hand.

  Well, I’d been in spots before. Comes a moment when even the most elegant scam develops bubbles under the fuselage. It’s a good idea to keep your legs crossed in the direction of the door.

  The logical thing now was to do a quick couple of C.O.D. readings and skip to a remote corner of the empire. Get out through Canada or something. Mexico. It was a month since I’d gone to sleep with a lizard on the wall. Sort of missed it.

  While I was busy with these calculations Alberta brought a tray out and set it on the table. She kissed me and stroked my hair back, poured tea and handed me a cup, pulled a chair over and twisted down into it.

  “That was the longest night I’ve ever spent. Those sticky people. The whole technique is to wear you down. I must say it works. Fatigue is a truth serum. Fortunately I didn’t have much to tell them. I don’t see why we should bother to memorize everything we do. They refused to let me think they believed me. Mrs. President won’t see me, I’ve been trying all morning. I didn’t want to go over there looking like this but I thought she’d want to know. I’m sure she’s not behind this but she does believe whoever is. She won’t even come to the telephone. Wordy you didn’t take that tape, did you? You wouldn’t. Just say it.”

  I gave her a the-world-is-perfectly-calculated-to-seduce-our-enterprise-and-insult-our-arrogance look. “Dry up,” I said.

  “Darling, don’t be angry, I told them we didn’t take it. But you never take the long view. Wordy, I am sorry, I just never know where you are. Forgive me?”

  I got up and went inside, came back with a telephone and sat with it on my lap, tapped numbers and waited.

  “The President’s office.”

  “Mr. Wallace for the President.”

  “He’s busy right now, Mr. Wallace. Can he call you back?”

  “Yes, please. He has the number.”

  I hung up. If I went over there they’d probably tell me my pass had expired.

  “I wonder if it could be Belton,” she said. She looked through the mail on the tray and handed me a postcard.

  It had a picture of the Washington Monument from a particularly tumescent
angle. Addressed to her. “Well! I seem to miss you! Interesting. Call first. B.”

  “Poor Belton. No hair and the ratings are falling. You’re the man now. Oh, well.”

  “How would he get the tape?”

  The phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Word?”

  “Hi, sir.”

  “Word, I guess I’d better tell you, this conversation’s being recorded.”

  “I know, sir. How’s everything?”

  “Word, I—Well—I don’t know.”

  “Mr. President, we’ve come a long way together. I hope you can believe me when I say I don’t have the cassette, sir. I thought you had it!”

  “I know, Word, I want to believe you but, well, I’ve been getting a lot of advice lately that I have to take seriously and, I think I got a little carried away there, Word. I have to say now that, if you do have the tape, I hope you’ll turn it over.”

  “Mr. President, please believe that I would if I did. But I don’t, sir.”

  “Well, Word, that’s all I—” Someone said something in the background. “That’s all I have to say. I’ll have to hang up now. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, sir.”

  He clicked off.

  “You were right,” she said, stretching. “We should have left earlier. I’ll just put some things in a suitcase. Will they be watching the door? Wordy?”

  I snapped to and hung up the phone. “I don’t know. All I’ve got is cab fare.”

  “I have some things we could pawn. They certainly caught us on the wrong foot. We should have been sending the money straight to Zurich. Well, you learn as you go. Don’t worry, darling, you can keep the suits. What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing. I was just having a break.”

  “We really need a few days in bed, but I suppose we should get organized. Oh, Wordy, we’re on the run, isn’t it fun? Do you think we should change our names?”

  I would like to have been swept along by her cheering if faintly menacing appetite for life but I couldn’t seem to get with it. “What about the President?” I heard myself saying.

  “He’ll be fine. Mrs. President will see to things. We have to travel light, don’t we. I’d better make a list.”

  Mrs. President. She would see to things, that went without saying but—Did she know what she was dealing with? Could she handle Reb? If it was him who had the tape—who else could it be?—what would he do with it?