Chapter Six
The Apprentice
A White House aide appeared as Jimmie was putting his change back into his pockets. “Mr. Bernwood? This way, please.” He led Jimmie down a dimly lit, wood-floored hallway.
“Wow, the inside of this place is a lot less fancy than the outside,” said Jimmie.
“The president believes in containing costs,” explained the aide. “He had all the marble and brass removed from the staff areas and placed out where visitors and the public can see it. He said, ‘Marble has wow factor, so why waste it on a bunch of secretaries and cooks?’”
“I guess I see his point,” said Jimmie.
“Well, then, I think it’s sad that you don’t believe you deserve wow factor,” said the aide. “Here’s Miss Blythe’s office.”
He entered to find Emma smiling at him with her huge Miss Universe–quality anime eyes. Wow factor indeed.
“You look like an entirely new man, James.”
He took the seat across the desk from her—gently, as he still had lower back pain from being shivved. The scar, however, looked totally rad in the mirror. Like a pink lightning bolt. Women were going to be super-impressed by it. Now Harry just needed to find his Hermione.
“You didn’t like the beard?” he said, running a hand across his freshly shaved chin.
“When I visited you in the hospital, there was a scorpion in it.”
All Jimmie could say was, “Alive or dead?”
Emma tossed him an employee manual. As she rifled through her filing cabinet, Jimmie marveled at how she looked even hotter than she had when he’d last seen her. Rare was the woman (or man) who looked better without a little medicated haze to smooth out the imperfections. Then again, Emma Blythe was a rare specimen.
As he’d learned via Wikipedia, she was a former Miss Universe winner from the United Kingdom who was now the White House apprentice. The position had formerly been known as chief of staff—a sort of personal assistant to the president. Though beauty pageant contestants got a bad rap from some in the femisphere, they were often intellectually heads and tails above their peers. Emma Blythe, for instance, had graduated at the top of her class from Cambridge. She was now the youngest chief of staff in history. If pageant contestants also had heads and tails above their peers, well, you couldn’t very well hold that against them, could you? That would be discrimination. At least in Jimmie’s book.
“Did they give you any trouble in security?” Emma asked.
“They took my tape recorder apart. With a hammer.”
“I should have warned you about that. We’ll provide you with one to use on-site—one that doesn’t leave the White House under any conditions. One with an internal hard drive, to prevent tapes being lost. Until we get you on President Trump’s schedule, however, you’ll be free to use a notebook to record your informal observations.”
“When will I get on his schedule? What sort of time frame are we looking at here?”
Emma leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “We’re going to take this one day at a time. You’re to be a fly on the wall. Like a child during the Victorian era. You’re to be seen but not heard. Blend in with the background. The less anyone around here sees you, the better. Case in point: That jacket has to go.”
The bright-blue suit jacket and American flag necktie had cost him nearly thirty bucks at JCPenney. Along with the generic white button-up shirt, they were the only “dress-up” clothes he owned. In fact, they were some of the only clothes he owned. He’d been living out of a duffle bag for a while now.
“If I could get an advance on my first paycheck—”
She opened her drawer and peeled five fifties off a stack of bills like she was a bank teller. “It’s important to the president to always have cash on hand. Just remember to replace this after you get paid.”
This was a pleasant surprise. He decided to push it. “Do we have a per diem for food? Because all I had for breakfast today was reheated Chipotle. Didn’t have enough cash on me for the salmonella-free upgrade last night, so I spent half the night with my head in the toilet.”
“If you got sick off something, why did you even keep the leftovers?”
He shrugged. As if on cue, his stomach rumbled.
“You can request reimbursement online,” Emma said. “The cap is seventy-five dollars a day, though.”
“I can . . . probably work with that.”
So far, Jimmie was liking his new employer. He’d never been much for politics before, but he could get used to the expense-account lifestyle. Pity the clueless taxpayers who were going to be footing his bill.
“So where’s he at?” Jimmie said. “The president.”
“Most days, he’ll be right on the other side of that door with the brass T on it, in the Oval Office. Right now, however, he’s in a meeting with his top-level advisors. Once we have your dot-gov e-mail set up, you’ll be receiving daily updates with President Trump’s schedule. I don’t think I have to tell you how important it is to keep this information to yourself. If somebody—some outside agitator—were to get ahold of such vital information . . .”
“Understood,” he said. “My lips are sealed.”
“You built an entire career out of digging up dirt on celebrities. I strongly doubt it was a one-way street. There’s a fair amount of trading gossip in your line of work, am I right?”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m not judging you,” she said. “It’s not my call, anyway—it’s the president’s. And you’re his guy. We had to give up considerable assets to bring you home. The relationship between our countries is strained at the moment, as you’re well aware. President Trump sent me to personally negotiate the transaction.”
“What’d they want for me?”
“Adam Sandler.”
Jimmie nodded. Depending on your comedic sensibilities, America had either gotten the better of Mexico or been ripped off. “You said the president is a fan of mine. What about you? Have you read my stuff?”
“Just out of curiosity, what do you think?”
She leaned forward. He could see that her blue eyes were shaded with green. “What do I think? I think—”
The door behind Jimmie flew open, startling him. He turned to see a man clad in a sharp gray suit whose pits were sopping wet.
“We have a situation,” the man said. “And it rhymes with ‘muclear.’”