thinking'
'Why don't you say it?'
'I'm not sure. Everywhere you turn someone's shouting at us to stand tough. I was a kid at Bastogne, in the Bulge, and nobody had to tell me to be tough I was tough—and damned scared, too. It just happened, I wanted to live. But things are different now. It's not men against men, or even guns and planes. It's machines flying through the air punching big holes in the earth. You can't aim at them, you can't stop them. All you can do is wait.'
'I wish you'd been at the hearing. You just said it better than I ever could with better credentials.'
He really did not want to talk any more, he was talked out and strangers in the streets were not helping him find the solitude he needed. He had to think, sort things out for himself, decide what to do and decide quickly if only to put the decision behind him. He had accepted the Partridge Committee assignment for a specific reason he wanted a voice in his district's selection of the man who would succeed him, and his aide, Phil Tobias, had persuaded him that accepting Partridge's summons would guarantee him a voice. But what Evan wondered was did he really give a damn.'
To a degree he had to admit that he did, but not because of any territorial claim. He had walked into a minor political arena an angry man with his eyes open. Could he simply close up shop because he was irritated by a brief flurry of public exposure? He did not wear a badge of morality on his lapel, but there was something inherently distasteful to him about someone who gave a commitment and walked away from it because of personal inconvenience. On the other hand, in the words of another era, he had thrown out the rascals who had been taking Colorado's ninth district to the cleaners. He had done what he wanted to do. What more could the voters of his constituency want from him? He had awakened them, at least he thought he had and had spared neither words nor money in trying to do so.
Think. He really had to think. He would probably keep the Colorado property for some future time as yet unconsidered, he was forty-one, in nineteen years he would be sixty. What the hell did that matter? It did matter. He was heading back to Southwest Asia, to the jobs and the people he knew best how to work with, but, like Manny, he was not going to live out his last years, or with luck a decade or two, in those surroundings Manny Emmanuel Weingrass, genius, brilliance personified, autocrat, renegade, totally impossible human being—yet the only father he had ever known. He never knew his own father, that far-away man had died building a bridge in Nepal, leaving a humorously cynical wife who claimed that having married an outrageously young captain in the Army Corps of Engineers during the Second World War, she had fewer episodes of connubial bliss than Catherine of Aragon.
'Hey.' yelled a rotund man who had just walked out of the small canopied door of a bar on Sixteenth Street. 'I just seen you! You were on TV sittin' on a desk! It was that all-day news programme Boring! I don't know what the hell you said but some bums clapped and some other bums gave you raspberries. It was you!’
'You must be mistaken,' said Kendrick hurrying down the pavement. Good Lord, he thought, the Cable News people had rushed to air the impromptu press conference in short order. He had left his office barely an hour and a half ago, someone was in a hurry. He knew that Cable needed constant material but with all the news floating around Washington, why him? In truth, what bothered him was an observation made by young Tobias during Evan's early days on the Hill. 'Cable's an incubating process, Congressman, and we can capitalize on it. The networks may not consider you important enough to cover, but they scan Cable's snippets all the time for what's off-beat, the unusual—their own fill. We can create situations where the C-boys will take the bait, and in my opinion, Mr. Kendrick, your looks and your somewhat oblique observations—’
‘Then let's never make the mistake, Mr. Tobias, of ever calling the C-boys, okay?' The interruption had deflated the aide, who was only partially mollified by Evan's promise that the next inhabitant of his office would be far more cooperative. He had meant it; he meant it now, but he worried that it might be too late.
He headed back to the Madison Hotel, only a block or so away, where he had spent Sunday night—spent it there because he had had the presence of mind to call his house in Virginia to learn whether his appearance on the Foxley show had created any interruptions at home.
'Only if one wishes to make a telephone call, Evan,' Dr Sabri Hassan had replied in Arabic, the language they both spoke for convenience as well as for other reasons. 'It never stops ringing.'
'Then I'll stay in town. I don't know where yet, but I'll let you know.'
'Why bother?' Sabri had asked. 'You probably won't be able to get through anyway. I'm surprised that you did now.'
