DeMarco may have played in a political arena, but he really didn’t pay all that much attention to the other players. Fortunately, he knew people who did.
There was an alcoholic reporter at The Washington Post named Reggie Harmon who had been around forever. In the Senate, there was a guy he went to law school with, Packy Morris, who was chief of staff to the junior senator from Maryland. Packy breathed gossip instead of air and always seemed to know who was doing what to whom. But when the stakes were really high, and he wanted insight and intuition and not just data and rumors, he went to Miranda Bloom.
Miranda was older than DeMarco but younger than the speaker. Because she’d been blessed with a supermodel’s face, long legs, and a noticeable bosom, in her late teens she’d been a Miss America runner-up. She could have married a golden quarterback from Ol’ Miss, had a couple of gorgeous kids, and spent the rest of her life hosting parties and talking about how close she’d come to being princess for a year. But Miranda Bloom had been blessed with more than a good body and a lovely face. She had a wicked, devious, clever mind, and she put it to good use.
Miranda was a lobbyist and had been one for many years. She was in fact the lobbyist, the one desperate CEOs came to when they wanted legislation twisted unreasonably in their favor. And get it twisted, Miranda did. How she did what she did was something she could never have written down in a how-to book. There was no set formula, no consistent, identifiable set of rules. She operated by some deep inbred political instinct she couldn’t have explained to anyone other than someone just like herself, of which there were none. But most important, from DeMarco’s perspective, she knew every politician in town better than they were known by their lovers and their mothers; she had to know them that well to get them to do whatever she wanted done.
Miranda had been married three times that DeMarco knew of and had had more affairs than probably even she could remember. DeMarco suspected that one of those affairs had been with Mahoney, because once—when Miranda misstepped, when her marvelous instincts momentarily failed her—she did something that at best could have landed her in jail and at worst could have caused her to be disappeared, and the speaker sent DeMarco to help extricate her from the situation.
After being threatened by Nick Fine, DeMarco had decided he needed to talk to Miranda and he arranged to meet her in the bar of the St. Regis Hotel located on K Street, close to her office. She was dressed in a white silk Versace blouse and a red St. John suit that showed off her legs to their best advantage. A simple strand of pearls graced her long neck, and her earrings matched the pearls. DeMarco knew nothing about women’s fashion, but he would have bet even money that the outfit Miranda had on—clothes, jewels, and shoes—was worth more than he made in a month.
DeMarco loved talking to Miranda. She reminded him of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, not because she looked like the late Anne Bancroft but because she was delightfully jaded, world-weary, wise, and sexy. With the help of a good surgeon she had aged extremely well, so well you had to wonder how she could have ever been a runner-up to anyone in Atlantic City all those years ago. It was her voice, though, that DeMarco thought was her best feature: a deep southern accent combined with a cigarette- and whiskey-tinged purr filled with the promise of seduction. Her voice alone had probably corrupted more lawmakers than her clients’ money.
“Tell me about Nick Fine,” DeMarco said.
“Oh, that poor boy,” Miranda said.
“What’s that mean?” DeMarco said. He found it hard to imagine anyone feeling any sympathy toward the guy he’d just met.
“You know of course that he was chief of staff to the late Senator Wingate?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” DeMarco said.
“Well, he was. He worked for Wingate for almost twenty years, started right out of college, but unfortunately for Nick, Wingate just lived forever and ever. It seemed like the man was never gonna die.”
“What’s this—”
“Wingate, that glorious old bastard, promised Nick that when he retired—it never occurred to Wingate that he might actually die—the party would back Nick for his seat. He told Nick he was what the Republicans needed: their own brilliant, handsome, articulate black politician, one who might actually get a few African Americans to vote for the Grand Ol’ Party. And twenty percent of Virginia’s residents are black. Wingate, for the last five years, had all but guaranteed Nick his job when he moved on—or up, as it were.”
“But he didn’t get it,” DeMarco said.
“No, he did not. When Wingate joined that great caucus in the sky, the party hacks decided they didn’t like Wingate’s choice of successor, maybe because of his race, but more likely because they thought Bill Broderick was a guy they could push around.”
“So why didn’t Fine quit when Broderick got the job?”
“I heard he considered that quite strongly. I know he approached a couple of K Street firms and offered his services, and a lad like Nick would seem to be a real catch as a lobbyist. He’s been on the Hill a long time, knows who’s who, and has the brains to understand what needs to be done. Although I’d never hire him, I heard he got a few good offers, three times his current salary.”
“Because Nick’s one of those people that, if given the choice between battering you into submission and sweet-talking you into doing what he wants, he prefers to batter. Though he hides it most of the time, there’s a deep mean streak in Nick. Maybe he feels, had he not been born black and poor, he wouldn’t have been playing second banana to Wingate all those years. Whatever the reason, I just don’t think he’d fit into our little club. We lobbyists don’t go around armed, darlin’. We rely on our charm as well as our clients’ money, and Nick, handsome and smart as he is, is for the most part devoid of charm.”
She said chawm, and DeMarco couldn’t help but smile.
“I still don’t get it,” he said. “If he resented Broderick so much, why didn’t he take a job at some think tank or a consulting firm? For that matter, why didn’t he go home and start campaigning against Broderick?”
Miranda didn’t answer immediately. She was making eye contact with a tall gray-haired man at the bar who was about as handsome as Cary Grant. She tipped her martini glass at the gentleman, then said to DeMarco, “Well, what I heard was that Nick met with Cal Montgomery …”
Montgomery was the chairman of the Republican National Committee.
“… and with Rick Walters …”
Walters was the minority leader in the Senate.
“… and I think those boys gave Nick the ol’ your-time-will-come speech and probably made him some kinda promise. You know, Virginia’s other senator ain’t no spring chicken either. But I’m just guessin’, sugar, since I couldn’t get any details from anyone.”
Which meant Miranda wasn’t sleeping with anyone who’d attended the meeting.
“This bill of Broderick’s,” DeMarco said.
“Now ain’t that somethin’,” Miranda said.
“How involved is Fine in that?”
“Totally, would be my guess. Broderick’s had some incredible luck—if you can call the Capitol nearly gettin’ blown up luck—but the guy who maneuvered that bill through the Senate was Nicky.”
“I can believe it,” DeMarco said. “Is Broderick really the lightweight that he seems to be?”
“Yes and no,” Miranda said. “I mean, the man’s no intellectual giant, but he has one thing goin’ for him and that’s ambition: raw, unrestrained, unadulterated ambition. You’d never guess it to look at him, but he’s one of the most power-hungry bastards you’ll ever meet, and considering that he works with ninety-nine other power-hungry bastards, that’s saying something.”
“What’s he wanna be, president?”
“No. I mean, yes, of course he wants to be president, but that’s not what motivates him.”
“What does?”
“Sibling rivalry.”
“You gotta be shittin’ me.”
“No. Bill Broderick was the classic unloved and ignored middle sibling, and his two brothers were the apples of his daddy’s eye. The oldest is not only a neurosurgeon, he’s out there on the leading edge. And the other brother, the one on the West Coast, he’s on the Hollywood A-list and has been invited to the White House a lot more times than brother Bill. I’ve heard that if you even mention his brothers to him, he gets this look on his face like he’d like to strangle you. This is the first time in his life, being a senator and in the middle of a national debate, that he’s ever gotten more attention than those other two boys, and he’s just lovin’ it.”
When DeMarco saw Miranda glance over at the gray-haired matinee idol at the bar again, he thanked her for her time and tried to pay for the drinks, but she wouldn’t let him. She pointed out that she spent more on shoes than he made in a year. As DeMarco was shrugging into his topcoat, she asked, “Are you finally over that ex-wife of yours?”
DeMarco laughed, sat back down, and told her about his cousin getting arrested and Marie having the nerve to ask him for help. He concluded by saying, “Yeah, I’m definitely over her.”
Miranda Bloom looked at him for a long moment with her marvelous, dark, seen-everything eyes. Then she reached out and patted his hand and said, “Oh, honey, you are so not over her.”