“What are you going to do now?” Job’s voice was chastened, almost meek.
“Tell the strikers at the meeting tomorrow that if they will not accept the new terms, I shall ask the courts for an injunction against the strike.”
It was the first time Tash had slept at Leafy Way. Perhaps it was the brightness of the moon, shining through an uncurtained window which she had left open for air that woke her in the middle of the night.
When she couldn’t get back to sleep, she went over to the window and stepped out on a balcony there. It was hardly a working balcony, just an architect’s whim, only about two feet wide.
She stood looking across a lawn blanched by moonlight to a belt of trees, then glanced down at the stone terrace below the balcony.
It was a shock to find herself looking down directly into another human face that was looking up at her.
She had not heard a sound. The moment was so still that her first thought was: hallucination.
For this was a face that had haunted her memory for a long time: pale eyes, blurred and blind-looking, the elfin smile of of a fallen angel.
For an instant, neither he nor she moved or spoke. The shock of mutual discovery cast a spell over both of them.
Then, still soundless, he melted across the grass into the trees.
She went through the motions of calling the guard room on her bedside telephone. She was not surprised when Captain Wilkes called back an hour later to say that his men had not been able to find anyone in the grounds.
9
NEXT MORNING, the executive offices were as grimly busy as a command post on the edge of a combat zone.
Everyone knew that violence on the waterfront was now held in check only by the presence of national guardsmen.
At twelve noon the Governor went to the State House to meet representatives of all three parties—the strikers and the Barloventan immigrants and Barloventan political exiles—in a last effort to patch up some sort of truce that would at least avoid further bloodshed.
Carlos went with him as interpreter. Job remained at Leafy Way with Tash, putting together the rough draft of a statement which the Governor was to make on television at seven o’clock that evening.
Whether a truce was established or not, he wanted to make a short, clear statement of the issues so that the electorate would know what was going on while it was going on.
The executive offices were in such turmoil that Job and Tash went to work in Jeremy’s own office on the floor above, the Octagonal Room, a tower room with a view of the garden on all eight sides.
It was the first time Tash had worked with Job, and she found him less easy to work with than anyone else in the Tennis Cabinet. The little courtesies that lubricate social mechanisms were neglected by Job. Perhaps they were incompatible with the Boss Tweed role he wanted to play in politics. That populist tradition demanded sand in the machine, not oil.
All morning Tash had an uncomfortable feeling of gears clashing, gritty surfaces grinding together, and abrasive metals uttering high-pitched squeals.
What Jeremy or Carlos would have conveyed as a smiling request, Job growled as a surly command, while the series of cigars in his mouth made the atmosphere almost unbreathable by one o’clock.
Yet it was impossible to work with him without recognizing one thing: his single-minded devotion to Jeremy’s service. Job had what Bill Brewer called a fundamentalist mind. He would never be troubled by self-doubt, or by doubt of any chief to whom he had given allegiance.
When he had cut Tash’s first rough draft from thirty pages to twenty, it was better. When he had cut the twenty-page version to fifteen pages, it was still better.
He lit a cigar complacently. “Have you any suggestions now?”
“Yes. I would cut three more pages and reduce the total to twelve instead of fifteen.”
“Which paragraphs would you cut?”
“I wouldn’t cut by paragraph. I’d cut by line. We have fifteen pages of twenty-five lines each. I would cut five lines from each page. That’s a total of seventy-five lines or three pages.”
“And it would still make sense?”
“More sense than before. Cutting by paragraph is butchery, but cutting by line is surgery. There’s hardly any blood. Almost like cutting a callus off your heel.”
“Where did you learn this?”
“Working for newspapers and magazines that would cut anything to the bone to make room for a four-line ad.”
“Let’s see you cut this.”
Tash went through the script with a soft-leaded pencil as swiftly as if she were making merely typographical corrections.
Job took it from her and read.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” It was the mildest of his colloquial expressions. “If Jeremy retires, will you write speeches for me?”
“Maybe. Shall I have this typed now?”
“Yes, and tell the secretariat to make a dozen Xeroxes and put them on Jeremy’s desk in this room.”
A tap on the door.
“Sorry.” It was Hilary’s voice. “You’ll have to get out now. The TV men are here to set up their equipment.”
“Let’s go and have a snack in the mess,” said Job to Tash.
Outside, the corridor seemed narrower now it was choked with an unseemly clutter of cables, monitors, strobe light fixtures, throat microphones, and other mysteries which men from a network were dragging into the Octagonal Room.
In the mess hall, Job planked a pocket radio on the table beside his cup of coffee and tuned in a local station that was hitched to one of the national networks.
“. . . according to a reliable source, strikers and immigrants have both made concessions to compromise, but the Barloventan political exiles are refusing to yield an inch. This afternoon, the Orioles . . .”
Job switched off his radio.
“Damn those expatriates!” He
