The ascent to the throne room of the White House by the man with the code name Little Prick was not without its ceremonial falterings and sundry spiteful amusements, as G. Noodles Cook could have documented in detail were it not for a lifelong propensity to be guarded, self-serving, calculating, mendacious, and mercenary—all qualities commending him as a soul singularly qualified for his exalted post as the tenth of nine senior tutors to the man who had eventually become the country’s newest President. Yossarian had informed the FBI that his old friend and business colleague G. Noodles Cook was a sneak and a snake and that the administration was not going to find a much better person to fill whatever position he was being considered for. Noodles Cook was a man who could always be trusted to lie.
He got the job.
As far back as seminars in graduate school, where they had met, Noodles had unmasked himself as a person with a tendency to display his gifts only in the presence of a designated mentor, who could note that anything original emerging had originated precociously with him. Noodles, who’d done well at a less-than-elegant preparatory school while Yossarian was away at war, labored on to obtain his doctoral degree and soon found out there was not much for him to do with it but teach.
By that time, Yossarian, who had dropped out of graduate school with just a master’s degree, was already in a position to hire Noodles for his group in the public relations agency where he was at work when Noodles wisely decided to give that kind of business a shot. He had good family connections, and the public relations agency seemed to him a good launching pad for something bigger and better.
Coworkers soon smelled out that Noodles never proposed an idea save when Yossarian was close enough to hear and, more frequently, would postpone suggesting anything even to Yossarian until both were in the presence of the client or with a superior official of the company. Too often when they were collaborating on their screenplays and television scripts, Noodles would supply the pregnant line in a way that aroused suspicion that the key to the problem had been lying in his grasp the day before. Telling him to change, Yossarian would tell himself, would be like telling a hunchback to stand up straight. A noodle was a noodle. In his way he was loyal to Yossarian, who did not like him but did not mind him, and they persisted as friends.
Departing graduate school with the matter-of-fact discovery that he did not want his higher education to go any higher, Yossarian had done some teaching and then moved into advertising. He did well, enjoyed his annual raises and small promotions, liked the people there better than those at the university, received a small raise again at the end of his third year, and decided to go out exploring for a better-paying job doing work of a different kind. He found a new better-paying job quickly with a different agency that handled accounts pretty much the same as the one he had just left. He remained until he received his annual raise and then went looking for another new job, and another quicker increase in salary.
Each time he took leave of one place for another, it was with the discouraging resolution that he did not want to spend the balance of his life exercising his intelligence, ingenuity, and good looks furthering the progress of products he did not himself use and of publications he would not normally read. On the other hand, he could not think of a product or cause with which he did wish to become involved that paid enough for the things he had learned to want for himself and his wife and children. The dilemma was not agonizing.
There was no need to rationalize.
He worked because he had to.
In Wall Street, of course, lay the exotic attraction in quantities unimaginable of a distilled product denuded of all complicating attributes. It was called money, and mountains of it could be manufactured out of nothing, as magically, almost, and as naturally, as a simple tree manufactures tons of wood out of thin air, sunlight, and rainwater. Money might be shit, as every college student with some knowledge of Freud might point out perversely at parties and family gatherings; but it was shit that could buy things: friends of rank and means; a coat of arms in the furriers’ and jewelers’ and in the fashion hubs of the world; baronial estates in Connecticut, Virginia, Mexico, East Hampton, and Colorado; and titles of knowing distinction that admitted the truncating of first names into the mere initial and the graceful relocation of accent onto the middle name, as in G. Noodles Cook and C. Porter Lovejoy, that most gray of graying eminences in the Washington Cosa Loro.
The forbearing Noodles Cook was tireless in repeating that his mother had been a daughter of the Goodman Noodles family of Goodman Noodles fame and his father a collateral descendant of the British Cooks of Cook’s Tours, and that he himself was something of a scion of the Noodles and the Cooks, with some means and property devolving upon him through the normal processes of heritage. Noodles Cook had been Goody in college, Goodman in business, and Noodles in newspaper gossip coverage of such social doings as are reported regularly. And today he was G. Noodles Cook in Who’s Who and on official White House stationery.
Noodles, beginning in government as the tenth of nine senior tutors to the freshman Vice President, never failed to respond on the rare occasions Yossarian had need to telephone him, and Yossarian had found that this access still obtained, even in his present post as one of the more trusted confidants of the new man recently installed in the White House.
“How’s the divorce going?” one or the other of them was certain to inquire each time they spoke.
“Fine. How’s yours?”
“Pretty good. Mine’s having me followed anyway.”
“So is mine.”
“And how are you getting along with that guy you’re working for?” Yossarian never failed to ask.
“Better and better—I know you’re surprised.”
“No, I’m not surprised.”
“I don’t know what to make of that. You ought to join us here in Washington if I can find some way to worm you aboard. Here at last is a real chance to do some good.”
“For whom?”
The answer always was a self-effacing laugh. Between these two it was not necessary to put more into words.
Neither back then at the public relations agency was troubled ethically by the work they were doing for corporate clients who never had the public interest in mind and political candidates they would not vote for, and for a large cigarette company owned mainly by New Yorkers who did not have to grow tobacco to scratch a livelihood from the earth. They made money, met people of substance, and generally enjoyed succeeding. Writing speeches for others to deliver, even people they abhorred, seemed but a different form of creative writing.
But time passed, and the work—like all work to a man of open intellect—turned tiresome. When there was no longer doubt that tobacco caused cancer, their children looked daggers at them, and their roles took a subtle turn toward the unsavory. They separately began thinking of doing something else. Neither had ever tried pretending that the advertising, public relations, and political work they were accomplishing was ever anything but trivial, inconsequential, and duplicitous. Noodles revealed himself first.
“If I’m going to be trivial, inconsequential, and deceitful,” announced Noodles, “then I might as well be in government.”
And off he moved to Washington, D.C., with letters of recommendation, including one from Yossarian, to utilize his family connections in an aspiring endeavor to slither his way into the Cosa Loro there.
While Yossarian had a second crack at high-finance easy money with an insider on Wall Street who sold sure things at a time when there were sure things. He continued writing short stories and small articles of trenchant satirical genius just right for publication in the prestigious New Yorker magazine; each time his pieces were rejected, and each time he applied and was turned down for an editorial post there, his respect for the magazine escalated. He was successful with two screenplays and half successful with another, and he outlined ideas for an acerbic stage play that he was never able to finish and a complex comic novel that he was not able to start.
He made money also by consulting with clients profitably on a personal freelance basis for fees, percentages, and commissions and by participating on a modest scale in several advantageous real estate syndication ventures, which he never understood. When national affairs again took a turn toward the menacing, he found himself going as a father in anguished consternation to his old wartime acquaintance Milo Minderbinder. Milo was elated to see him.
“I was never even sure you always really liked me,” he revealed almost gratefully.
“We’ve always been friends,” said Yossarian evasively, “and what are friends for?”
Milo showed caution instantaneously with a native grasp that never seemed to fail him. “Yossarian, if you’ve come to me for help in keeping your sons out of the war in Vietnam—”
“It’s the only reason I have come.”
“There is nothing I can do.” By which Yossarian understood him to mean he had already used up his quota of illegal legal draft exemptions. “We all have our share to shoulder. I’ve seen my duties and I’ve done them.”
“We all have our jobs to do,” added Wintergreen. “It’s the luck of the draw.”
Yossarian remembered that Wintergreen’s jobs in the last big war had consisted mainly of digging holes as a stockade prisoner and filling them back up for having gone AWOL one time after another to delay going overseas into danger; selling stolen Zippo cigarette lighters once there; and serving in a managerial capacity in military mailrooms, where he countermanded orders from high places that fell short of his standards, simply by throwing them away.
“I’m talking about one kid, damn it,” pleaded Yossarian. “I don’t want him to go.”
“I know what you’re suffering,” said Milo. “I have a son of my own I worry about. But we’ve used up our contacts.”
Yossarian perceived dismally that he was getting nowhere and that if Michael had bad luck in the draw, he would probably have to run off with him to Sweden. He sighed. “Then there’s nothing you can do to help me? Absolutely nothing?”
“Yes, there is something you can do to help me,” Milo responded, and for the moment, Yossarian feared he had been misunderstood. “You know people that we don’t. We would like,” Milo continued, and here his voice grew softer, in a manner sacramental, “to hire a very good law firm in Washington.”
“Don’t you have a good firm there?”
“We want to hire every good law firm, so that none of them can ever take part in an action against us.”
“We want the influence,” explained Wintergreen, “not the fucking law work. If we had the fucking influence we’d never need the fucking law work or the fucking lawyers. Yossarian, where could we begin if we wanted to get all the best legal connections in Washington?”
“Have you thought of Porter Lovejoy?”
“C. Porter Lovejoy?” At this, even Wintergreen succumbed to a state of momentary awe.
“Could you get to C. Porter Lovejoy?”
“I can get to Lovejoy,” casually answered Yossarian, who’d never met Lovejoy but got to him simply with a phone call to his law office as the representative of a cash-rich corporate client seeking the services of someone experienced in Washington for an appropriate retainer.
Milo said he was a wizard. Wintergreen said he was fucking okay.
“And Eugene and I agree,” said Milo, “that we want to retain you too, as a consultant and a representative, on a part-time basis, of course. Only when we need you.”
“For special occasions.”
“We will give you an office. And a business card.”
“You’ll give more than that.” Yossarian turned suave. “Are you sure you can afford me? It will cost a lot.”
“We have a lot. And with an old friend like you, we’re prepared to be generous. How much will you want, if we try it for a year?”
Yossarian pretended to ponder. The figure he would name had jumped instantly to mind. “Fifteen thousand a month,” he finally said, very distinctly.
“Fifteen dollars a month?” Milo repeated, more distinctly, as though to make sure.
“Fifteen thousand a month.”
“I thought you said hundred.”
“Eugene, tell him.”
“He said thousand, Milo,” Wintergreen sadly obliged.
“I have trouble hearing.” Milo pulled violently at an earlobe, as though remonstrating with a naughty child. “I thought fifteen dollars sounded low.”
“It’s thousand, Milo. And I’ll want it on a twelve-month basis, even though I might be available for only ten. I take two-month summer vacations.”
He was delighted with that whopper. But it would be nice to have summers free, maybe to return to those two literary projects of yore, his play and comic novel.
His idea for the stage play, reflecting A Christmas Carol, would portray Charles Dickens and his fecund household at Christmas dinner when that family was at its most dysfunctional, shortly before that splenetic literary architect of sentimental good feeling erected the brick wall indoors to close his own quarters off from his wife’s. His lighthearted comic novel was derived from the Doctor Faustus novel of Thomas Mann and centered on a legal dispute over the rights to the fictitious and horrifying Adrian Leverkühn choral masterpiece in those pages called Apocalypse, which, stated Mann, had been presented just once, in Germany in 1926, anticipating Hitler, and possibly never would be performed again. On one side of the lawsuit were the heirs of the musical genius Leverkühn, who had created that colossal composition; on the other would be the beneficiaries to the estate of Thomas Mann, who had invented Leverkühn and defined and orchestrated that prophetic, awesome, and unforgettable unique opus of progress and annihilation, with Nazi Germany as both the symbol and the substance. The attraction to Yossarian of both these ideas lay in their arresting unsuitability.
“Fifteen a month,” Milo finally tabulated aloud, “for twelve months a year, will come to …”
“A hundred and eighty,” Wintergreen told him curtly.
Milo nodded, with an expression that revealed nothing.
“Then we agree. You will work for us for one year for one hundred and eighty dollars.”
“Thousand, Milo. A hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year, plus expenses. Tell him again, Eugene. And write out a check for three months in advance. That’s the way I’m always paid, quarterly. I’ve already gotten you C. Porter Lovejoy.”
Milo’s look of pain was habit. But from that date on, Yossarian knew, but did not care to admit, he had not been in serious want of ready cash, except in those uncommon times of divorce and the successive collapse of his tax shelters a dozen years after each had been erected by infallible specialists.
“And by the way”—Wintergreen took him aside at the end—“about your son. Establish a legal residence in a black neighborhood where the draft boards don’t have trouble meeting their quotas. Then, lower back pain and a letter from a doctor should do the rest. I have one son technically living in Harlem now, and a couple of nephews who officially reside in Newark.”
Yossarian had the feeling about Michael, and himself, that they would sooner flee to Sweden.
C. Porter Lovejoy and G. Noodles Cook took to each other symbiotically from the day Yossarian brought them together, with a reciprocating warmth Yossarian had never felt toward Noodles or for Porter Lovejoy either the few times they had met.
“That’s one I owe you,” Noodles had said afterward.
“There’s more than one,” Yossarian took the precaution of reminding him.
C. Porter Lovejoy, silver-haired, bipartisan, and clearheaded, as the friendly press chose consistently to describe him, was a man still very much at ease with life. He had been a Washington insider and a made member of the Cosa Loro there for almost half a century and by now had earned the right, he liked to ruminate to listeners, to start slowing down.
Publicly, he served often on governmental commissions to exonerate and as coauthor of reports to vindicate.
Privately, he was the major partner and counsel-at-large to the Cosa Loro Washington law firm of Atwater, Fitzwater, Dishwater, Brown, Jordan, Quack, and Capone. In that capacity, because of his aristocratic prestige and reputation for probity, he could freely represent whatever clients he liked, even those with adversarial interests. From a border state, he professed legitimate home ties in all directions and could speak in the soothing accents of the well-bred southern gentleman when talking to Northerners and with the phonetics of the cultivated true Ivy Leaguer when talking to Southerners. His partner Capone was dark and balding and looked down-to-earth and rather tough.
“If you are coming to me for influence,” Porter Lovejoy would stress to each hopeful prospect seeking him out, “you have come to the wrong man. However, if you wish to retain the services of experienced people who know their way blindfolded through the corridors of power here, who are on close terms with the people you will want to see and can tell you who they are and can arrange for them to see you, who can accompany you to meetings and do much of the talking for you, who can find out what is happening about you at meetings you don’t attend, and who can go over heads directly to superiors if the decisions are not those you like, I may be able to help.”
It was C. Porter Lovejoy who did most to foster the aspirations of G. Noodles Cook and to increase their range. He astutely calibrated the parameters of the younger man’s initiative and moved with openhanded celerity to place him with other celebrities in the Cosa Loro family who could best utilize his ingenious insights into the mechanics of political public relations and image building: his knack for the rabble-rousing motto, the snide insinuation, the smooth and sophisticated insult, the tricky prestidigitation in logic that was quicker than the eye and could glide by invisibly, and the insidious lie. Once given the chance, Noodles had never disappointed anyone who, like C. Porter Lovejoy, expected the worst from him.
Between Yossarian and a Cosa Loro hit man like Noodles Cook a breach of peaceable distaste had taken shape which neither saw any necessity to repair. Yet Yossarian had no hesitation in calling now about the ridiculous possibility of inducing the new President to pretend to take seriously an invitation from Christopher Maxon to the wedding of a stepniece or something at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
“He raises millions for your party, Noodles.”
“Why not?” said Noodles merrily. “It sounds like a lark. Tell them he says he’ll think seriously about coming.”
“You don’t have to ask him?”
“No.” Noodles sounded surprised. “John, the brain has not yet come into being that is large enough to deal with all of the matters any President has to pretend he understands. I’m still riding high since I helped him through the inauguration.”
As the tenth and newest of the nine senior tutors with eleven doctoral degrees in the brain trust surrounding the man who had since become President, G. Noodles Cook was still unstained by that particular contempt which familiarity is often said to breed.
It was C. Porter Lovejoy, observing the dimming luster of the original nine tutors, who had proposed the appointment of G. Noodles Cook as a tenth to rekindle an illusion of brilliance in high office, a choice, he maintained with disinterested authority, that had to be beneficial to this Vice President, the administration, the country, to Noodles Cook himself, and, unsaid but understood, to C. Porter Lovejoy and his partnership interest in the Cosa Loro lawyer-lobbying firm of Atwater, Fitzwater, Dishwater, Brown, Jordan, Quack, and Capone. Capone, like Lovejoy a founding partner, played golf at good clubs with business leaders and high government officials, and was rarely permitted to lose.
The impediments in the formalities of the inauguration arose from the natural preference of the Vice President to be inducted into the higher office with an oath administered by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The honorable gentleman occupying the post, a steely, rather domineering personality with eyeglasses and a high-domed forehead, resigned abruptly rather than collaborate in an act he felt was outside the spirit of the law, if not the letter.
The unexpected action left the new chief executive little choice but to call on one of the other celebrities on the court with party affiliations akin to his own.
The woman then on the court resigned voluntarily fourteen minutes after she was sounded out. She put forth as her explanation an overwhelming yearning to return to the field she loved most: housework. All her life, she stated, she had aspired only to be a housewife.
And the other star of magnitude in that revered constellation of honorable justices to which people had formerly been prone to look up, an honorable gentleman commended frequently by friendly newspapermen for what they called his wit and his showman’s preening flair for tendentious and self-amusing hair-splitting, went fishing.
The Afro-American was of course out of the question. White America would not tolerate a President whose legitimacy in office had been validated by a black man, and especially by a black man like that one, who was not much of a lawyer and not much of a judge and had seemed at his confirmation hearings to be composed entirely out of equal measures of bile and bullshit.
The other orthodox party members on the court were spurned as simply not colorful enough and insufficiently well known. Their rejection became all the more final when from their chambers the constitutional doubt filtered out through unnamed sources and unidentified background officials as to whether any honorable member of any court in the land truly possessed the right to swear a man like him into the office of the highest government official in the land. In rare unanimous decision, they hailed the chief justice for resigning, the woman for her housework, and the witty one for going fishing.
That left only the Democrat, who’d been appointed by the putative liberal John Kennedy long back, and had voted conservative ever since.
Could a President take office without taking the oath of office? There was not enough court left to decide. But then Noodles Cook, and Noodles alone of the senior tutors, came up with the enterprising suggestion he’d had in mind from the start but had kept to himself until the climactic time, which at length brought a satisfactory resolution to the embarrassing impasse.
“I still don’t get it,” said the Vice President once more, when the two of them were again conferring alone. By then the other nine of his senior tutors with eleven doctoral degrees had steadily lost face with him. “Please explain it again.”
“I don’t think I can,” Noodles Cook said, grimly. He liked the position he held but was no longer sure about the work, or his employer.
“Try. Who appoints the new chief justice of the Supreme Court?”
“You do,” said Noodles, gloomily.
“Right,” said the Vice President, who, with the resignation of his predecessor, was technically already the President. “But I can’t appoint him until I’ve been sworn in?”
“That’s right too,” said Noodles Cook, glumly.
“Who swears me in?”
“Whoever you want to.”
“I want the chief justice.”
“We have no chief justice,” said Noodles, grouchily.
“And we will have no chief justice until I appoint one? And I can’t appoint one until—”
“You’ve got it now, I think.”
In silence, and with an expression of surly disappointment, Noodles was regretting once more that he and his third wife, Carmen, with whom he was in the throes of a bitter divorce, were no longer on speaking terms. He hankered for someone trustworthy with whom he could burlesque such conversations safely. He thought of Yossarian, who by this time, he feared, probably thought of him as a shit. Noodles was intelligent enough to understand that he himself probably would not think much of himself either if he were somebody other than himself. Noodles was honest enough to know he was dishonest and had just enough integrity left to know he had none.
“Yes, I think I have got it,” said the Vice President, with a glimmer of hope. “I think I’m beginning to click again on all cylinders.”
“That would not surprise me.” Noodles sounded less affirmative than he meant to.
“Well, why can’t we do them both together? Couldn’t I be swearing him in as chief justice at the same time that he is swearing me in as President?”
“No,” said Noodles.
“Why not?”
“He’ll have to be confirmed by the Senate. You would have to appoint him first.”
“Well, then,” said the Vice President, sitting up straight with that very broad smile of nifty achievement he usually wore when at the controls of one of his video games, “couldn’t the Senate be confirming him while I am appointing him at the same time that he is swearing me in?”
“No,” Noodles told him firmly. “And please don’t ask me why. It’s not possible. Please take my word for it, sir.”
“Well, I really do think that’s a crying shame! It seems to me the President should have the right to be sworn into office by the chief justice of the Supreme Court.”
“No one I know of would disagree.”
“But I can’t be, can I? Oh, no! Because we have no chief justice! How did something like this ever come about?”
“I don’t know, sir.” Noodles warned himself reprovingly that he must not sound sarcastic. “It could be another oversight by our Founding Fathers.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Here the Vice President leaped to his feet, as though propelled into a choleric rage by some inconceivable blasphemy. “There were no oversights, were there? Our Constitution was always perfect. Wasn’t it?”
“We have twenty-seven amendments, sir.”
“We do? I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not a secret.”
“How was I supposed to know? Is that what an amendment is? A change?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know?” His mood was again one of morose despair. “So that’s where we still stand, right? I can’t appoint a—”
“Yes.” Noodles deemed it better to cut him off rather than to have them both subjected to the litany once more.
“Then it’s just like Catch-22, isn’t it?” the Vice President blurted out unexpectedly, and then brightened at this evidence of his own inspiration. “I can’t appoint a chief justice until I’m the President, and he can’t swear me in until I appoint him. Isn’t that a Catch-22?”
Noodles Cook stared fiercely at the wall and made up his mind sooner to forfeit his position of prestige with the incoming administration than deal with a person like this one with a conjecture like that one.
He was staring, he saw, at a large, simplified chart, hanging as art, of the disposition of forces at the battle of Gettysburg. Noodles began brooding on the historical past. Possibly it had always been thus, he was thinking, between sovereign and adviser, that the subordinate was in all ways but rank the superior. It was then that Noodles, in exhausted desperation, snapped out in command the solution that in the end saved the day:
Use the Democrat!
What?
“Yes, use the fucking Democrat.” He swept objections aside by anticipating them. “He was a Kennedy Democrat, so what does that mean? That guy is as bad as the rest of us. You’ll get better press coverage for being bipartisan. And when you turn unpopular, you can blame him for swearing you in.”
Porter Lovejoy’s vision was vindicated again. In briefing Noodles he had stressed the good use the Vice President could make of him. The need was immediate, the opportunities unlimited. There would be an interview. “How much should I tell him?” Noodles had wanted to know. Porter Lovejoy beamed owlishly. “As much as he lets you. Actually, you will be interviewing him to see if you want the job, although he won’t know it.” And how, Noodles wondered, amused, would he manage that? Porter Lovejoy merely beamed again. The code name?
“Don’t bring that up now,” Porter Lovejoy cautioned. “He chose it himself, you know. You will have no trouble.”
“Come in, come in, come in,” said the Vice President jovially to Noodles Cook, after convivial salutations in the anteroom that Noodles found bewilderingly informal.
It surprised him that the younger man of distinguished title had come bounding out to welcome him warmly. Noodles barely had time to note the high school and college pennants on the walls of the reception room. He could not take count of the large number of television screens, all of them tuned to different channels. “Waiting for old clips and sound bites,” the girls there explained, giggling, and Noodles could not tell whether that was serious or not.
“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” the Vice President went on convincingly. “Varoom, varoom, varoom,” he said confidentially when they were alone, with the door closed. “That’s from a video game I’m undefeated at called Indianapolis Speedway. Do you know it? You will. Are you good at video games? I’ll bet I can beat you. Well, now, please tell me all about yourself. I’m dying to know more.”
For Noodles, this was child’s play. “Well, sir, what is there about me you’d like to find out? Where should I begin?”
“The thing about me,” answered the Vice President, “is that when I’ve set my mind to do something, I’ve always been able to accomplish it. I’m not going to cry over spilt milk, and what’s past is past. Once I set a goal, I pursue that goal with a vengeance.”
“I see,” said Noodles, after a minute’s surprise, when he guessed that a chance was being offered to comment. “And are you saying that you had the goal of becoming Vice President?”
“Oh, yes, definitely, definitely. And I pursued that goal with a vengeance.”
“What did you do?”
“I said yes when they asked me to accept it. You see, Mr. Cook—may I call you Noodles? Thank you. It’s a privilege—to me the word that best describes the office of Vice President is be prepared. Or is that two words?”
“I believe it’s two.”
“Thank you. I don’t think I could get an answer that clear from any of my other tutors. And that’s what I want to continue to pursue with a vengeance. Being prepared. Obviously, the more days you have as Vice President, the better prepared you are to be President. Don’t you agree?”
Noodles dodged that question adroitly. “And is that the goal you want to pursue with a vengeance next?”
“It’s the main job of the Vice President, isn’t it? My other tutors agree.”
“I would not pursue it with a vengeance now unless he gave his full approval. Is there anything more you wish to know about me that will help me decide if you’re good enough for the job? Porter Lovejoy says you are.”
“Well, sir,” said Noodles Cook, and went ahead gingerly. “Is there anything you’re taking on now that you feel you might not be perfectly equipped to do entirely on your own?”
“No. I can’t think of a thing.”
“Then why do you feel you need another tutor?”
“To help me with questions like that one. You see, I made a mistake in college of not really applying myself to my studies, and I regret that.”
“You got passing grades anyway, didn’t you?”
“As good as those I got when I did apply myself. You’ve been to college, Mr. Cook? You’re an educated man?”
“Yes, I have, sir. I have my graduate degrees.”
“Good. I went to college too, you know. We have much in common and should get along—better, I hope”—and here a sound of the querulous crept in—“than I am getting along with those others. I have a feeling they make jokes about me behind my back. Looking back, I should have pursued philosophy and history and economics and things of that sort in college more. I’m making up for that now.”
“How—” Noodles started to ask, and changed his mind. “Sir, my experience has been—”
“I’m not going to cry over spilt milk, and that’s past.”
“My experience has been,” Noodles threaded his way onward obsequiously, “as a student, and even when teaching a bit, that people do what they are. A person interested in athletics, golf, and parties will spend time at athletic events, golf, and parties. It is very difficult in later life to grow interested in subjects like philosophy and history and economics if one was not attracted to them earlier.”
“Yes. And it’s never too late either,” said the Vice President, and Noodles did not know whether they were in agreement or not. “Lately I have been studying the Napoleonic Wars, to sort of round out my education.”
For a second or two Noodles sat motionless. “Which ones?” was all he could think to reply.
“Was there more than one?”
“That was not my field,” answered Noodles Cook, and began to give up hope.
“And I’m doing the battle of Antietam too,” he heard the man who was next in line for the presidency continue. “And after that I’m going to have a crack at Bull Run. That was really a great war, that Civil War. We’ve not had one like it since, have we? You’d be very surprised, but Bull Run is only a short car ride from here, with a police escort.”
“Are you preparing for war?”
“I’m broadening myself. And I believe in being prepared. All of the rest of the work of a President is pretty hard, it seems to me, and sort of dull. I’m having all of these battles put onto videocassettes and turned into games where either side can win. Varoom, varoom, varoom! Gettysburg too. Do you like video games? Which is your favorite?”
“I don’t have a favorite,” Noodles muttered, downcast.
“Soon you will. Come look at these.”
On a cabinet beneath a video screen—there was a video screen with game controls in many recesses in the office—to which the Vice President walked him lay the game called Indianapolis Speedway. Noodles saw others, called Bombs Away and Beat the Draft.
And one more, called Die Laughing.
His host gave a chuckle. “I have nine college men on my staff with eleven doctoral degrees, and not one has been able to beat me at any of these a single time. Doesn’t that tell you a lot about higher education in this country today?”
“Yes,” said Noodles.
“What does it tell you?”
“A lot,” said Noodles.
“I feel that way too. There’s a new one coming out just for me, called Triage. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“Triage is a word that comes from the French, and in case there’s a big war and we have to decide which few should survive in our underground shelters—”
“I know what the word means, Mr. Vice President!” Noodles interrupted, with more asperity than he had intended. “I just don’t know the game,” he explained, forcing a smile.
“Soon you will. I’ll break you in on it first. It’s fun and challenging. You would have your favorites and I would have mine, and only one of us could win and decide who would live and who would die. We’ll enjoy it. I think I’ll want you to specialize in Triage because you never can tell when we really might have to put it into play, and I don’t think those others are up to it. Okay?”
“Yes, Mr. Vice President.”
“And don’t be so formal, Noodles. Call me Prick.”
Noodles was appalled. “I could not do that!” he retorted emphatically in a reflex of spontaneous defiance.
“Try.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Not even if it means your job?”
“No, not even then, Mr. Prick—I mean Mr. Vice President.”
“See? You’ll soon be doing it easily. Take a look at these other things Porter Lovejoy says you can handle. How much do you know about heavy water?”
“Almost nothing at all,” said Noodles, feeling himself on firmer ground. “It’s got something to do with nuclear reactions, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t ask me. It says something like that here. I don’t know much about it either, so already we’ve got a good meeting of the minds.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Well, they’ve got this man in custody who’s producing it without a license. A retired chaplain from the old army air corps, it says, back in World War II.”
“Why don’t you make him stop?”
“He can’t stop. He’s producing it sort of, if you know what I mean, biologically.”
“No. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, that’s what it says here on this synopsis of a summary of this classified folder, code name Tap Water. He eats and drinks like the rest of us, but what comes out of him, I guess, is this heavy water. He was researched and developed by a private corporation, M & M E & A, that now has an option on him and a patent pending.”
“Where have they got him?”
“Underground somewhere, in case he decides to turn radioactive. He was in contact with some kind of associate just before they nabbed him, and his wife and this other guy talk on the telephone in code regularly and pretend to know nothing about anything. Nothing dirty between them yet. He talks on the telephone to a nurse also, and a lot that’s dirty may be starting between those two. It’s as though they never heard of AIDS. And there may be a Belgian spy connection with the new European Economic Community. The Belgian is swallowing again,’ she reported to him, the last time they spoke.”
“Well, what do you want to do about him?”
“Oh, we could easily have him killed by one of our antiterrorist units, if it comes to that. But we may need him, because we’re having a problem with a shortage of tritium too. How much do you know about tritium, Noodles?”
“Tritium? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Good. You can be objective. I think it’s a radioactive gas of some kind that we need for our hydrogen bombs and other things. They can get it from heavy water, and this chaplain could be very valuable if he can train others to start passing heavy water too. The President hasn’t got much patience for this and wants me to handle it. I don’t have the patience for it either, so I’ll give it to you.”
“Me?” exclaimed Noodles, with surprise. “You mean I’m hired?”
“We’ve been talking, haven’t we? Let me know what you think I should recommend.”
He handed Noodles a red folder of some bulk with a top sheet with a one-sentence précis of an abstract of a digest of a synopsis of a status report of a summary of a condensation about a retired military chaplain of seventy-one who was manufacturing heavy water internally without a license and was now secretly in custody for examination and interrogation. Noodles knew little about heavy water and nothing about tritium, but he knew enough to betray no flicker of recognition when he read the names John Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, although he pondered somberly over the nurse Melissa MacIntosh, of whom he had never heard, and a roommate named Angela Moore or Angela Moore-cock, and about a mysterious Belgian agent in a New York hospital with throat cancer, about whom the nurse regularly transmitted coded messages by telephone, and a suave, well-dressed mystery man who appeared to be keeping the others under surveillance, either to snoop or as bodyguard. As a connoisseur of expository writing, Noodles was impressed by the genius of an author to abridge so much into a single sentence.
“You want me to decide?” Noodles murmured finally with puzzlement.
“Why not you? And then here’s this other thing, about someone with a perfect warplane he wants us to buy and someone else with a better perfect warplane that he wants us to buy, and we can only buy one.”
“What does Porter Lovejoy say?”
“He’s busy preparing for his trial. I want you to judge.”
“I believe I’m not qualified.”
“I believe in the flood,” the Vice President replied.
“I don’t think I heard that.”
“I believe in the flood.”
“What flood?” Noodles was befuddled again.
“Noah’s flood, of course. The one in the Bible. So does my wife. Don’t you know about it?”
Through narrowed eyes Noodles searched the guileless countenance for some twinkle of play. “I’m not sure I know what you mean. You believe it was wet?”
“I believe that it’s true. In every detail.”
“That he took the male and the female of every animal species?”
“That’s what it says.”
“Sir,” said Noodles, with civility. “We have by now catalogued more kinds of animal and insect life than anyone could possibly collect in a lifetime and put onto a ship that size. How would he get them, where would he put them, to say nothing of room for himself and the families of his children, and the problems of the storage of food and the removal of waste in those forty days and nights of rain?”
“You do know about it!”
“I’ve heard. And for a hundred and fifty days and nights afterward, when the rain stopped.”
“You know about that too!” The Vice President regarded him approvingly. “Then you probably also know that evolution is bunk. I hate evolution.”
“Where did all this animal life we know about now come from? There are three or four hundred thousand different species of beetles alone.”
“Oh, they probably just evolved.”
“In only seven thousand years? That’s about all it was, as biblical time is measured.”
“You can look it up, Noodles. Everything we need to know about the creation of the world is right there in the Bible, put down in plain English.” The Vice President regarded him placidly. “I know there are skeptics. They are all of them Reds. They are all of them wrong.”
“There’s the case of Mark Twain,” Noodles could not restrain himself from arguing.
“Oh, I know that name!” the Vice President cried, with great vanity and joy. “Mark Twain is that great American humorist from my neighboring state of Missouri, isn’t he?”
“Missouri is not a neighboring state of Indiana, sir. And your great American humorist Mark Twain ridiculed the Bible, despised Christianity, detested our imperialistic foreign policy, and heaped piles of scorn on every particular in the story of Noah and his ark, especially for the housefly.”
“Obviously,” the Vice President replied, with no loss of equanimity, “we are talking about different Mark Twains.”
Noodles was enraged. “There was only one, sir,” he said softly, and smiled. “If you like, I’ll prepare a summary of his statements and leave it with one of your secretaries.”
“No, I hate written things. Put it on a video, and maybe we can turn it into a game. I really can’t see why some people who read have so much trouble coming to grips with the simple truths that are put down there so clearly. And please don’t call me sir, Noodles. You’re so much older than I am. Won’t you call me Prick?”
“No, sir, I won’t call you prick.”
“Everyone else does. You have a right to. I have taken an oath to support that constitutional right.”
“Look, you prick—” Noodles had jumped to his feet and was glancing around frantically, for a blackboard, for chalk and a pointer, for anything! “Water seeks its own level.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
“Mount Everest is close to five miles high. For the earth to be covered with water, there would have to be water everywhere on the globe that was close to five miles deep.”
His future employer nodded, pleased that he finally seemed to be getting through. “There was that much water then.”
“Then the waters receded. Where could they recede to?”
“Into the oceans, of course.”
“Where were the oceans, if the world was under water?”
“Underneath the flood, of course,” was the unhesitating reply, and the genial man rose. “If you look at a map, Noodles, you will see where the oceans are. And you will also see that Missouri does border on my state of Indiana.”
“He believes in the flood!” Noodles Cook, still stewing, and speaking almost in a shout, reported immediately to Porter Lovejoy. It was the first time in the relationship that he had presented himself to his sponsor with anything other than a conspiratorial contentment.
Porter Lovejoy was unruffled. “So does his wife.”
“I’ll want more money!”
“The job doesn’t call for it.”
“Change the job!”
“I’ll talk to Capone.”
His health was good, he was not on welfare, and it was understood now by all involved that as the secretary in charge of health, education and welfare in the new cabinet, Noodles would focus his energies entirely on the education of the President.