Don’t make me call the Secret Service.’
‘Just shut up and let me finish this,’ his wife scolded as she fussed some more with the Asphyxiator. ‘I can’t do this while you’re flapping your gums around.’
‘I love what you’ve done with your hair, Babs,’ said Marilyn. It was an artful attempt to push the conversation away from Kipper’s deep-seated aversion to dressing like a grown-up and onto a topic with which Jed’s wife was familiar. One in which she was frighteningly overqualified, in fact.
‘Oh, this?’ The First Lady blew a freshly cut fringe of hair back out of her eyes. ‘It was getting too long. I had to do something.’
She finished with her husband’s bow tie and banished him to the walk-in closet for his jacket. The two women fell into conversation as Culver joined his boss.
‘I know you hate these things, Kip,’ he said, as always, getting his attention immediately with the informal manner of address. ‘But it’s as much a part of your job as dealing with budgets, railroads and reconstruction, and more a part of your job than worrying about snow blowers and powerlines around the city like you were this afternoon.’
‘Jesus, Jed, did Barbara word you up before you got here? Because I’ve been getting slammed by her for the same thing all evening.’
The Chief of Staff helped him get his arms into the dinner jacket and even tugged at the lapels a couple of times to make it sit properly on Kip’s shoulders.
‘That’s because she’s right,’ he said. ‘You’re not the city engineer anymore. You’re the President. City engineers worry about snowstorms. Presidents worry about re-election.’
Kipper frowned. ‘I thought I was supposed to worry about a lot more than that.’
‘It’s all moot if you don’t get re-elected. And that’s not going to happen unless you campaign properly. And you cannot campaign properly without money. So that’s what tonight is about - raising money, to get you back into office, so you can do your job, clearing roads, rebuilding railways and pissing off the Greens by opening up a nasty new power plant somewhere. It’s all good. But none of it is going to happen if you don’t get the votes.’
Kipper coughed out a short, humourless laugh. ‘I think all those things will happen whether I get re-elected or not, Jed. Some things aren’t political. They just have to happen.’
‘Really? Seriously? You actually live inside that gingerbread house?’ Culver asked in a gentle voice. ‘You think Sandra Harvey would let the French build that shiny new pebble bed reactor you’re so keen on? You think Blackstone would run your settlement program completely blind to race, colour or creed? You happy with the way he’s virtually outlawed labour unions down there in Texas?’
He had him, of course, which didn’t improve Kip’s mood. He hated being pushed into a corner. But at least when you got him there, he had the good grace to stay put.
‘I suppose so,’ he sighed. ‘Well, are we going to get this done?’
They exited the large closet and rejoined their wives, who had moved on from complementing each other’s outfits to discussing the children. Marilyn had never had any of her own, but she had been stepmother to Melanie and Roger for long enough to have earned her spurs. Jed pursed his lips at the incongruity of it all, the banality of everyday life within the insanely pressurised environment of supreme executive power. Even if that power was a dim shadow of its former greatness.
A soft knock at the door, and the protocol chief, Allan Horbach, admitted himself after a greeting from Barbara.
‘Time for cocktails,’ he announced.
‘Well, at least there’s that,’ said Kipper in a funereal tone. But in fact, there wasn’t, not for him.
The four of them walked the short distance to the reception room, where the buzz of conversation grew noticeably louder with their arrival. Jed nodded in satisfaction. All of the big chequebooks were here: Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, Costco, Cesky Enterprises, T-Mobile, the biotechs. All manoeuvring for access to the President, who would need to keep his head straight while he talked to them. After being announced to the room by Horbach, both Jed and Kip were handed champagne flutes by the White House head of protocol. On Culver’s instructions, both contained sparkling apple juice.
‘But I don’t even like champagne,’ Kipper muttered out of the side of his mouth.
‘Then you’ll be fine,’ replied his Chief of Staff, without sympathy. ‘Because you’re not getting any.’ He could’ve murdered a whiskey sour himself, but he had learned as a baby lawyer that drinking was best done after work, not during, and this was definitely work.
‘Mr President!’
Really. Hard. Work.
Henry Cesky, all bulk and bravado, had elbowed his way through the crowd to claim pole position in the race for Kipper’s attention. His shoulders moved around under the expensive fabric of his dinner jacket like barrels loose on the deck of a schooner.
‘Hey, Henry,’ said Kip, pleasantly enough, while Culver went into a full-throttle, double-grip handshake, with shoulder punching and a bit of locker-room rough-housing thrown in. He could pull it off, having been a college wrestler. Kip couldn’t. And Cesky was one of those guys who didn’t just like to cultivate a rough-handed, working- stiff-made-good image. He was the real thing. Even if he hadn’t always done good to make good, and even if that roughness of character sometimes made him a risky choice at events like this. He was entirely capable of getting liquored up and throwing a punch at someone, perhaps a business rival or somebody who looked askance at his wife. Even the Secretary of the Treasury, if he was in a bad mood after filing his taxes. Rough, unkempt black hair and a twice-broken nose added to the impression that Henry had spent decades in a boxing ring, never knowing when to give up.
It was a wonder Kipper and he didn’t get along better. After all, it was Cesky putting a couple of hundred of his workmen onto the street, armed with sledgehammers and crowbars, that had added enough muscle to the popular uprising against Blackstone to see the fascist little prick tipped off his throne back in April ‘03. But Kip, like Marilyn, just didn’t like the man. He hid it well enough, though. And that’s all Jed could ask. Henry Cesky was a fucking cash cow.
The reception room at Dearborn House wasn’t so crowded that people were being jostled - unless they’d been in Cesky’s way when he moved across the room to see Kipper. But it was crowded enough that people were beginning to raise their voices to be heard over each other. A string quartet borrowed from the city’s Symphony Orchestra kept it light with a bit of Vivaldi, while waiters circulated with more food than drinks. For now.
‘How’s business, Henry?’ the President asked. ‘I was in KC a couple of weeks ago with Barney. He said the power grid over there was working almost perfectly now, thanks to your guys and the work they did at the plant.’
Brooklyn-based before the Wave, and Polish-born long before that, Cesky was a short but powerfully built man. You could see him levitating an inch or two with the compliment.
‘That’s good to hear, Mr President,’ he roared back, altogether too loudly.
Kip’s Secret Service detail momentarily switched their attention from scanning the room to focus in on the loudmouth. As soon as they saw it was Cesky, however, their interest evaporated.
‘Anything my guys can do to help, we’re there,’ the construction tsar added, raising his glass in salute.
‘And I’m sure anything the government can do to help one of our biggest employers and taxpayers,’ said Jed, ‘well, I’m sure we’ll be there, too.’
Cesky snagged a beer from a passing waiter, causing the President’s face to crumple in naked envy. He sipped at his sparkling apple juice with no pleasure at all.
‘Well, on that, I gotta tell you, Mr President - Kip - I’m looking forward to this tax review you got going on. And I’m hoping your people are going to listen to my idea about one simple flat rate that everyone pays. No deductions. No paperwork. No fucking around with any of that stuff. We just hand over, say, twenty per cent. And the government gets off our backs. What do you say?’
‘I’d say it sounds like the sort of idea I would’ve come up with when I had an honest job,’ replied Kipper, giving Cesky cause to float another inch off the carpet. ‘But like all my best ideas, Henry, I bet yours would hit the brick wall of the bureaucracy and splatter like an egg.’
Culver had to hand it to Kip. He really knew how to tell a guy what he wanted to hear while he let him down at the same time. Of course, it was always possible that he agreed with Cesky’s crazy flat-tax idea - in which case, it was probably a good thing he assumed it would splatter when tossed against the proverbial wall.
