left guard.'
'Left is certainly right!'
'That's an interesting statement. May I quote you?'
'I know about you,' said Barrish ominously, threateningly. 'Don't talk to me about the guy down the street, pretending you're like everyone else.' Barrish paused, then as if he could no longer control himself, shouted, 'You're not even married!'
'That's the most accurate statement you've made here. No, I'm not, but if you're asking me for a date, I'd better check with my girl.'
No contest. The Pentagon's big gun backfired, the powder burns all over his face on national television.
'Who the hell is he?' asked Mr. Joseph Smith of 70 Cedar Street in Clinton, New Jersey.
'I don't know,' replied Mrs. Smith, in front of the television next to her husband. 'He's kind of cute, though, isn't he?'
'I don't know about cute, but he just told off one of those snotty officer types who used to give me a lot of shit in 'Nam. He's my buddy.'
'He's good,' said Inver Brass's Eric Sundstrom, rising and turning off the set in his flat overlooking New York's Gramercy Park. He drained his glass of Montrachet and looked over at Margaret Lowell and Gideon Logan, both sitting in chairs across the room. 'He has a quick mind and stays ice cold. I know that cobra Barrish: he likes nothing better than drawing blood in the spotlight. Kendrick buried him with his own bullshit.'
'Our man's kind of cute, too,' added Mrs. Lowell.
'What?'
'Well, he's attractive, Eric. That's hardly a liability.'
'He's funny,' said Logan. 'And that's a decided asset. He has the ability and the presence to shift rapidly from the serious to the amusing and that's no small talent. He did the same thing during the hearing; it's not accidental. Kennedy had the same gift; he saw humorous ironies everywhere. The people like that… Still, I think I see a grey cloud in the distance.'
'What's that?' asked Sundstrom.
'A man with such quick perceptions will not be easy to control.'
'If he's the right man,' said Margaret Lowell, 'and we have every reason to believe he is, that won't matter, Gideon.'
'Suppose he's not? Suppose there's something we don't know? We will have launched him, not the political process.'
Far uptown in Manhattan, between Fifth and Madison avenues, in a brownstone town house that rose six storeys high the white-haired Samuel Winters sat opposite his friend, Jacob Mandel. They were in Winters' large top-floor study. Several exquisite Gobelin tapestries were hung on various wall spaces between the bookshelves, and the furniture was equally breathtaking. Yet the room was comfortable. It was used; it was warm; the masterpieces of the past were there to serve, not merely to be observed. Using the remote control, the aristocratic historian snapped off the television set.
'Well?' asked Winters.
'I want to think for a moment, Samuel.' Mandel's eyes strayed around the study. 'You've had all this since you were born,' said the stockbroker, making a statement. 'Yet you've always worked so hard.'
'I chose a field where having money made things much easier,' replied Winters. 'I've occasionally felt rather guilty about that. I could always go where I wanted, gain access to archives others couldn't, study as long as I wished. Whatever contributions I've made have been minor compared with the fun I've had. My wife used to say that.' The historian glanced at the portrait of a lovely, dark-haired woman dressed in the style of the forties; it was hung behind the desk between two huge windows overlooking Seventy-third Street. A man working could turn and gaze at it easily.
'You miss her, don't you?'
'Terribly. I come up and talk with her frequently.'
'I don't think I could go on without Hannah, yet oddly enough, considering what she went through in Germany, I pray to God she leaves me first. I believe the death of another loved one would be too great a pain for her to bear alone. Does that sound awful of me?'
