2

Oskar Millar heard about Charlie Martin’s disaster during batting practice. He was sitting in his front-row box at Clearwater, having just been wheeled in from the parking lot—through the outfield, along the warning track—by his usual ballpark chaffeur, an ancient redneck groundskeeper named Lowell, who insisted on the honor even though Millar was always accompanied by his private security detail. Oskar loved and dreaded this daily processional, which took place during the month each spring that his beloved Phillies camped near his Dunedin home: it put him in close proximity to the ballplayers, who saluted him with hats and bats (and inevitably asked for stock tips), but the welcome came at the price of being something of a public curiosity—although the ball-park was fairly empty when he arrived each day, the satisfying crack and thwapp of balls hit and caught echoing through the vacant stands.

The phone call from Pat Dunn came just as Oskar was settling into his box at dusk—a favorite time of day, after the American markets had closed and before the Asian markets opened. He switched on the multiscreened television and computer console the Phillies had allowed him to install so he could keep up with the latest financial news.

“You watching CNN?” Dunn asked.

“What? Trouble?”

“Our boy. A doozy this time. . . .”

Oskar Millar had met and befriended Charlie Martin in 1967, on the amputee ward at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital—a friendship considered something of a miracle by the staff. Oskar was the hardest of hard cases, spectacularly truncated just below the waist and flagrantly antisocial. He sat, staring out the window in the dayroom, fending off all comers with his titanic scowl and an occasional, iambic “GET . . . the FUCK . . . a-WAY!”

And yet, Charlie blithely slipped the forbidding ramparts, as if he hadn’t noticed the glower. He simply walked over one day, just after he’d arrived and scoped out the ward, and invited Oskar to play a game of APBA baseball, the most complicated and statistically authentic board game of the precomputer age. Oskar was stunned by the direct approach, especially from someone as confident and self-possessed as this newcomer seemed to be, someone who had no earthly reason to seek out the aggravation of an Oskar Millar outburst. He found himself agreeing to a game—reflexively, before he knew what he was doing—and soon was lost in the contest. He had always loved baseball: the infinite measurability of it. For an hour, he forgot everything, where he was and why, and how his mother had fled at the sight of him and not yet come back, and how the amp ward smelled, the screams and groans. The next day, he wheeled himself over to Charlie and said, “Hey, you want to—?”

“Absolutely,” Charlie said.

As the weeks passed, Oskar transformed their daily game into an ever more elaborate ritual, creating teams, a league, a schedule. He kept statistics, not just on the basics like batting averages, but also some really arcane stuff, statistics he invented. Soon he and Charlie began to develop other games. Everything became a contest, some of them quite ridiculous—guessing the proportion of carrots to peas on their dinner trays, the proportion of cars to trucks on South Market Street. Inevitably, this led them to the stock market. They gave themselves an imaginary thousand dollars each, and bought portfolios.

Years later, when Oskar Millar’s success in the market had become legendary, there was speculation that he had found a mystery formula, or that he had cheated somehow. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service, among others, investigated him and found nothing untoward. But Charlie Martin could have told them that (and he did, when visited, occasionally, by agents of the various agencies). There was no magic to it—only information, market analyses, annual reports, which Oskar began to accumulate, and memorize, and categorize in great gobs while they were still on the amp ward in Philly. Information, obsession . . . and fury: Oskar lived to prove the rest of the world foolish. He disdained the wisdom of the moment, bet the tortoise and prospered—slowly at first, then torrentially.

In the beginning, Charlie persuaded the orderlies to requisition a small bookcase and a desk for his new friend. These were placed in the corner of the dayroom, which became Oskar’s office. He was there before dawn most mornings, clicking a number-two pencil between his stubby teeth, chasing theories down narrow statistical corridors, sharpening pencils—he had a bundle of them—and writing, in a tiny, precise accountant’s hand, filling a shelf of loose-leaf binders he stored in his bookcase. He was there most evenings, when the rest of the ward—including Charlie—depressed itself by watching Mary Tyler Moore in pedal pushers on reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show. His first major killing was in gold, which he bought at thirty-five dollars an ounce and sold at $350 just after he was released from the hospital.

“How did you know it was going to be deregulated?” Charlie asked him.

“The stupid fucking war,” Oskar scoffed, taking no pleasure in his triumph. “Lyndon inflated the shit out of the currency.”

Oskar was flattered by the lavish quality of Charlie Martin’s attentions, so casually bestowed. Charlie’s eyes never drifted south, the way everyone else’s did—even the orderlies and the other amps were shocked by the severity of Oskar’s situation. Martin not only refused to acknowledge the deficits, he focused immediately upon the considerable assets that remained. Eventually, it occurred to Oskar that this might be a marketable skill—a singular talent that Charlie Martin had, a singular talent significantly underutilized. “Charlie,” he finally said one day as they packed away the APBA equipment. “I am sick of being surrounded by life’s losers. It’s time you taught these guys how to win something.”

“Me, huh? Right.”

Oskar, dark eyes under dark bushy eyebrows, tried to stare at Charlie Martin with the same casual intensity that Charlie routinely focused on him. But he was too self-conscious about it. He thought about the sight of himself staring—with his square head and square body, a cube atop a box; the loss of his legs had made him more symmetrical and apelike, his arms hung longer than his legs. He relinquished the stare, glanced down—encouraging Charlie to look where his legs had been. “You saved my life,” he said. “You can save theirs.”

“Get lost,” Charlie replied, embarrassed, refusing to look. “I didn’t do anything. I hounded you into playing a board game.”

“Why me?”

“You looked smart. I envied your anger. I was bored.”

“And now I’m bored,” Oskar confessed. “You’re making me feel guilty about playing the damn game. I’m sick of living with all these self-pitying slugs. So here’s the deal: organize them. If those fuck-brained college kids can march in the streets and get what they want, think of the leverage we’d have. A bunch of hero gimps protesting? The local news might be interested in that. You could get whatever you want.”

“Except the things we really want,” Charlie said.

“Stow that shit.” Oskar was surprised by the breach of etiquette. “I thought this was a No Mope zone.”

“That’s only because pain is relative,” Charlie cracked back, quickly retreating from the moment of self-pity. “No way to quantify it. Just think, Oz—if we could’ve figured a way to quantify pain . . .”

“The most convincing whiner would’ve won,” Oskar said. “It would have been counterproductive. We would have been like the rest of them.”

“Yo, Oz,” Charlie said. “We are like the rest of them. We’re just better at self-delusion.” (In fact, Oskar and Charlie had competed in the one injury-related area they could quantify: medication—they’d raced to see who could go cold turkey first; Charlie had won, painfully.)

“Charlie,” Oskar said. “You’re underemployed. You need vocational therapy. You need to organize these gimps. Protest something. Pick some idiot cause. Organize them. Let the blown-up fuckers win something for a change.”

Hence, ICED. Ice Cream Every Day. Instead of ice cream once a week, on Sunday. Instead of Jell-O, or pudding, or the yellow cake that tasted like wax paper. Ice cream every day. Charlie drew up the petition. They all signed it; given the circumstances, some of the signatures were rudimentary. It was a ridiculous protest and, obviously, it had very little to do with ice cream. It had to do with getting ripped apart, and coming together again: the amp ward’s manifest, and grotesque incompleteness, gave it power over the witlessly complete and unsuffering authorities.

The Navy acted like the Navy, and ignored the petition. So Charlie called Tom Snyder—who later went on to quirky notoriety as a network talk show host, but was then a young anchor at KYW—and he snuck onto the ward with a hidden camera in a satchel; the real dramatic cases, the triple amps, the faceless, were tricked out with protest signs. Oskar had an “ICED would be Nice” sign on his wheelchair. It made for very dramatic television. The brass tried to come down on Martin; they mentioned court-martial. They sent a Marine colonel to work him over. “You’re threatening unit cohesion,” the colonel said. “You’re trivializing the military. How do you think it sounds to civilians, Ice Cream Every Day?”

“Sir,” Charlie replied, “with respect, I don’t give a flying fuck. And this unit is about as cohesive as it can get.”

Oskar was right. They did have a lot of leverage. A local ice cream company stationed a pushcart on the ward, and started a job-training program for military gimps. And Oskar had been right about Charlie, too: he was good at making trouble. So, back in Philadelphia, they’d given each other a life. Charlie gave Oskar the stock market; Oskar restored Charlie’s natural tendency to lead—and he also gave his friend financial security.

When he left the hospital, Oskar staked Charlie to a real ten-thousand-dollar investment, which proceeded to grow by an average of 23 percent annually over twenty-five years, a portfolio that Millar continued to manage as a “blind trust” when Charlie entered politics, and had a real salary and money to invest for the first time. Oskar also served de facto as the finance chair of the various Charlie Martin campaigns—de facto because Oskar rarely did anything directly, and never did anything publicly. His company was named Fairmont Equities, for no apparent reason except its surpassing blandness; he accepted investments only from combat veterans, friends of friends who had served in Vietnam. He never gave speeches or granted interviews. Indeed, he seemed to grow more reclusive as the Millar empire entered a period of exponential growth in the late 1970s, while the rest of the world was stagnating. Suddenly, everyone—the press, the money managers, the politicians—wanted to get close, know more. Oskar would have none of it. He wasn’t neurotic about his solitude; he just wasn’t very interested in other people, at least not the nonfiduciary aspects of their lives. He had only been photographed a few times, from a distance. When he did go out into the world, he was accompanied by a significant but unobtrusive security detail: stray fans seeking autographs or stock tips at the Phillies games in Clearwater would find themselves politely but firmly rebuffed by a pair of middleaged former Marines quietly sitting in the box behind Millar’s. (Oskar only employed disabled combat veterans: his lawyers, doctors, stock analysts, household staff—every one of them had received a purple heart.)

He and Charlie didn’t see each other often. They communicated by phone, and only when there was something to say; Oskar didn’t chat. But he made sure to call the night of the Colorado Springs incident.

“So, you okay?” he growled, when he reached Charlie in Washington just past midnight.

“Awesome.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Dunno.”

“I were you, I’d have the hick arrested for assault and battery, get myself a neck brace and sue his ass,” Oskar said.

“Real men don’t sue,” Charlie said. He sounded distant and empty—but reflexively cheerful, depressingly so, like a talented telephone sales solicitor.

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot,” Oskar replied. “Real men seduce Neanderthal campaign pastries.”

“Fuck you, Oz,” he insisted. “She went dinky-dau on me. I don’t know what happened.”

“You don’t know what happened? That makes you unique in America.”

After Oskar had received the phone call from Pat Dunn, he’d watched the cataclysm unfold on the minitelevisions in his Clearwater box. The Martin story led the evening news on all the networks. The Colorado Springs videotape was broadcast over and over, often in slow motion. The girl’s name was Martha Schollwengen; her father was a honcho with the Colorado Springs Democratic party. Later, heading back to Dunedin, Oskar listened with disgust to several professional Vietnam vets yammering on talk radio: Charlie Martin probably was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. Oskar was incensed. There was a whole world of opinions out there, all of them dumb. Back home, more opinions: he watched a panel discussing “campaign date rape” on Nightline. And there were the late-night network comedy shows. David Letterman gave the top ten reasons why Democrats like Charlie Martin and Jack Stanton were so horny. (Number 8: they really like to press the flesh.) On The Tonight Show, Jay Leno rubbed his hands together and said, “Either of these guys is elected and gets his finger on the button—you gotta be thinking: which button?”

“You catch the stuff on the tube?” Oskar asked Charlie.

“No.” Charlie didn’t want to see or hear any of it. The enormity of the embarrassment was incomprehensible, paralytic.

“It sucks,” Oskar said.

“I’m sure,” Charlie replied. “Oz . . .”

And Oskar, sensing the reason for the hesitation, did an unprecedented thing: he encouraged Charlie to let it out. “Go ahead,” he said, for perhaps the first time in his life.

“Oz, this is worse than Philly, worse than the boonies,” Charlie said. “I did it to myself.”

“You said nothing happened.”

“I put myself in that position. I should have deep-sixed the campaign two weeks ago,” Charlie said. “And now, I’m tabloid dog meat—I’m a fucking scandal. Me and Stanton and all the fucked-up movie stars and serial killers. We’re all the same. Fodder. Interchangeable. I’m better known for this than for getting the Russkies to disarm. I mean, Oz, how do you show your face?”

“Dunno,” Millar said, stumped. The situation was well beyond foreign to him. “You alone there?”

“Totally,” Charlie said. He had bunkered down in his D.C. flat, which was something of a first: the place had always been an afterthought, a weeknight billet (weekends were usually spent back home, being a politician). It was large and glass and horizontal, on the sixth floor of an undistinguished horizontal glass building on New Mexico Avenue. It was, in fact, yet another motel room, although it did have a few amenities. He could ride his stationary bike, listen to CDs.

“So?” Oskar asked.

“So?”

“So what are you fucking doing?”

“I’m on my bike, listening to James Brown,” Charlie said.

“And what are you going to do?” Oskar asked again.

“Hey!” Charlie tried. “I’m gonna have a funky good time. . . .”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously seriously?” Charlie said. “Every talking head—every last nimrod inhabitant of Mediapolis—assumes I actually felt up that girl. I mean, did you hear one of them say, ‘Why would he do a thing like that? Maybe he didn’t do it. Maybe she’s a dipstick’? Of course not. And you want me to be serious? Fuck that, man. Fuck them all. I’m gonna maintain radio silence. I say anything, I just feed the beast.”

“Not good,” Oskar said. “Not you. Think some more. Smile. Reload.”

“Ozwaldo, I’m going to sleep,” Charlie said, refusing to play. “Or try to. Or something. See ya.”

Oskar figured the thing to do now—first thing in the morning—would be to organize a rescue party, a small core of on-site advisers who could help Charlie through the next few days. This would have to be done subtly, and it would not be pleasant duty. He knew he would have to deal with the Lords of the Delta—the small circle of noncombatant stripedpants pinwheels Charlie had met in the Saigon Embassy during his years as a military attaché, before he airmailed himself into the boonies. To Oskar’s dismay, they had all remained friends, more or less, ever since. And the very first call would have to be to Lincoln Rathburn, who was Charlie’s closest friend in that group: Linc was a Hoosier who aspired to aristocracy, perfect-looking, too blond to be real (even in late middle age), and perfectly educated—as all the Lords had been, exemplary young men with brilliant futures in government. After Saigon, they’d spent the next thirty years trying to recover from the damage the war had caused their glide paths. Now each new presidential election brought the hope, for Lincoln Rathburn and the others, that they would finally be elevated by a new administration to their rightful places at the center of foreign policy decision-making.

Rathburn, who lived in New York but was always somewhere else, was in London that day, doing—well, it was never easy for Oskar to understand what Linc was doing: he was a lawyer-diplomat, with the emphasis on the latter. He had clients, but they tended to be countries or companies; he never actually handled cases. He was, Oskar figured, the white shoe lawyer equivalent of Joe Louis in his later years, when the champ had been employed as a “greeter” in a Las Vegas casino. His handshake alone was assumed to produce profits.

“Have you talked to him?” Linc asked. “How is he?”

“You haven’t? How the fuck do you think he is?”

“I can’t call him now,” Linc explained. “It would seem like piling on.”

“Yeah?”

“He knows I thought running for president was wrong.”

“So when do you think you’ll resume the friendship?” Oskar asked.

“Oskar, you—” Linc considered tactical anger, then decided that, given Millar’s emotional bluntness, it was better not to even try. “Charlie has the greatest talent for leadership of anyone I’ve ever known.”

That was one of the things Oskar couldn’t stand about Rathburn: the overripe Olympian pronouncements of the obvious. “I guess the question is,” Linc now mused, “how completely do leadership ability and political talent intersect? I mean, are they the same thing? An interesting question, don’t you think?”

“For a symposium,” Oskar said. “Right now, I have a different question: what can we do for him without hurting his pride too much?”

“Send in Sherpas,” Rathburn said, getting down to it—and Oskar had to admit the son of a bitch was right. “If you and I or Pat Dunn showed up on his doorstep tonight, he’d have to put on his happy face. He’d get stubborn; he’d find ways not to listen to us. But somebody had better help him work through the next few days. What’s the girl’s next move?”

“Dunno,” Oskar said. “But I’ll see if I can handle that end.”

“He had to be crazy.”

“Linc, you actually believe he mashed her?” Oskar snorted. “When was the last time Charlie Martin had to force himself on a woman? More like vice versa.”

“Mike Coleman should go over there,” Linc said, picking the best organized and least ego-afflicted of the Lords.

“All right,” Oskar conceded. “Anyone else?”

“I have a better question,” Linc said. “What’s the agenda?”

“Stop the bleeding,” Oskar said. But Rathburn, the asshole, had hit the nail once more.

*    *    *

“You know what this reminds me of . . . and boy, do you look like shit,” Mike Coleman said when he showed up at Charlie Martin’s apartment at dusk the next day. Mike was a detail man, a genius staff guy; a corporate lawyer now. He had always been small, gruff, unprepossessing, notable mostly for the most severe flattop in Saigon outside of the military: a haircut lovingly maintained, the front row waxed upright like a picket fence across his forehead. He had surrendered the ’do reluctantly; thirty years later, it was still a crew cut, but the front and sidewalls were no longer so flashy, and the hair was now a black-gray tweed. He handed Charlie his overcoat.

“Thanks a lot. . . . And okay, I’ll bite: what does ‘this’ remind you of?”

“The last time you got yourself all fucked-up, back in Vietnam.”

“Great to see you, too, Mike.”

“No, think about it,” Coleman said. “Careless gallantry. Unnecessary risk. . . . Is there anything you can do about that eye?”

“There wasn’t much to do with gallantry in Colorado Springs,” Charlie said. “Carelessness, I’ll concede.”

But Mike was right. Charlie’s decision to patrol with Bravo Company—filling in for Lieutenant Sam Frost, walking the paddy dike behind Richie Radio—had been the combat equivalent of traveling alone with Martha Schollwengen: an idiot risk, not his job, something a captain left to subordinates, but a risk Charlie took because—because he always assumed he’d be able to handle any eventuality, because the grunts would be happy to see him out there: being out with his men was what a real soldier did.

“You want something to drink?” Charlie asked.

“Water,” Coleman said. “Straight up.”

Charlie retrieved a tall, clear glass of water from the kitchen. He admired the perfect austerity of it.

“So, Charles, what now?” Mike asked, having arranged himself on the couch, a yellow legal pad and pen at the ready on the coffee table. Charlie took this as a rhetorical question and chose not to answer. “You want to sit down or something?” Charlie was standing helplessly in the middle of the room, unsure of where to plant himself—a pathetic state of affairs in his own apartment. “You’re making me nervous.”

Charlie slumped down on the floor, his back against the console television, and reconnoitered Mike, who was settling into a chunky, jowly and rather distinguished middle age. His utter sanity, the steadiness of his gaze, was his most appealing physical characteristic. At the same time, Mike’s job hadn’t changed at all: he was still Gideon Reese’s assistant, just as he’d been in the political section of the Saigon embassy. Only now they were running Jack Stanton’s foreign policy. Mike had made it clear from the start, in his absolutely no-bullshit way, that he thought Charlie’s presidential run was premature, and he would not support it, but that he would remain a friend and he would be there to help—as a conduit to Stanton, at the very least. “So, Miguel,” he asked, genuinely interested, “what would you do?”

“Get back on the horse,” Mike replied. “Go back to work.”

“Work?” Charlie said. “It’s an election year. Nothing’s happening. I can go back, walk through appropriations and stuff, but nobody’s going to be up for any fun battles this year—what do I do with the rest of my mind?”

“You could cool it,” Mike said. “Take a break.”

“A vacation? Sheesh.”

“How about a committee junket—some Armed Services boondoggle?” Mike said. “It’s your specialty, right? You could go make sure the Russkies are actually destroying the warheads. Or you could go to someplace really inconvenient, someplace painful and worthy—Chechnya, maybe. Make yourself useful. Come back and brief Stanton on it.”

“Stanton?” Actually, a real vacation suddenly sounded not so bad, a lot better than a junket: Charlie wondered, idly, why he never took them. His recreation was always hinged on a speech, a meeting, a fact-finding thing—the appearance of business in a leisure setting.

“We can think that out later,” Mike said. “First, let’s deal with the tough part.”

“The tough part?” Charlie snorted. “You’d better brief me on precisely which part that is.”

“The next few days,” Mike said evenly. “Figure out what advice you’ll be least unlikely to follow, and save your ass.”

The doorbell. “Who’s that?” Mike asked, rolling his eyes. Charlie shrugged, and went to the door. A large slab of a human back in a scruffy, wrinkled tan London Fog raincoat darkened the doorway: Sylvester Parkinson, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, shouting into his cell phone. “It’s important, goddammit!” Parkinson screamed. “Bruce, he’s major. He’s huge. If he’s asking for another look at it, you make sure he gets it—oh, hi, Chuck, excuse me—Bruce, you ask the Air Force to give it a review. All right? Do it. Bye.”

“Sly, what the—?”

“Char-lie!” he said, spreading his arms wide, enveloping the senator in a bearhug. This was truly weird. Sly Parkinson on a mercy call. Sly had never visited his apartment before; but then, neither had Mike—or very many other people, for that matter. “I brought these,” Sly said, handing the senator a bag of Quarter Pounders. “I figured you wouldn’t be cooking.”

“Sly, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Had an interview up at NBC,” Parkinson said. He was a big mess of a man with thinning white hair and a short, sharp nose too thin to hold his eyeglasses, which he’d push back with an inverted thumb even when they didn’t seem to need pushing back. “Figured I’d drop by. Friends know when to say when.” He saw Charlie wasn’t buying this at all. “Okay, okay. Linc called. Said you might want some company. Hey, Mike . . . Mr. Wonderful sure looks like shit, doesn’t he? Great shiner, Chas. Have a cheeseburger,” he added, tossing his raincoat over a chair. Sly was still wearing makeup from the television gig; he looked more vivid than usual.

“Sly, I—” Charlie was touched by Parkinson’s visit, and embarrassed by it, and infuriated by it. Was he now officially pathetic?

Sly had never actually served in Vietnam, but he’d been one of Robert McNamara’s whiz kids and showed up in Saigon on occasion. Charlie and Linc had adopted him, taking him out on the town when he accompanied the secretary of defense on his in-country tours. In return, Parkinson would give them the latest gossip from Washington. And then Sly and Charlie had found themselves thrown together once more, in Congress of all places. They became renegades together on the House Armed Services Committee. Their shared Vietnam frustration led to passionate discussions about how to build a killer force to fight little wars in a world where big wars were unthinkable; and those conversations led to something approaching friendship.

“Just in time, Sly,” Mike said. “Charlie’s going to tell us what happened.”

“Why? What difference does it make?” Charlie asked.

“Because you’re not going out to meet the press tomorrow without a script. You understand? No silly-ass-Charlie-Martin-flying-by-the-seat-of-your-fucking-pants-because-it’s-more-honest-to-be-spontaneous. Too much is at stake. The rest of your career. That’s why.”

“He’s right, Chas,” Sly said, pulling a large bag of small carrots from his attaché case and popping one in his mouth.

“Dare to be dull?” Charlie asked.

“You bet,” Mike replied. “So, let’s start from the beginning. What happened?”

He told them. Parkinson shook his head and whistled. “What a waste,” he lamented. “As Shakespeare once said, ‘More’s the pity to take the hit and get no nooky.’ ”

“You’re not forgetting anything?” Mike asked.

“There isn’t anything to forget,” Charlie said. “Nothing happened.”

“I love it,” Sly said, consulting his watch and popping another carrot.

“Firing at three-minute intervals, Slick?” Charlie asked.

“Yup. Twenty an hour is about sixty calories. You do it every other hour, three hours a day. No-fat breakfast. You don’t eat lunch. You exercise. Wash down the carrots with a ton of water. Who knows? It could work.” Sly was an object lesson in what happens to high school defensive linemen when they start indulging their senses. He’d been able to subdue an incredible amount of military data, but not much else in life. In recent years, he’d had a string of extramarital adventures and heart attacks; the former, fleeting; the latter, mild. Sooner or later, he’d have one or the other that would be cataclysmic—although the prospect of a Stanton presidency was having a remarkably salubrious effect on him: Sly desperately wanted to be secretary of defense. But he understood he had to clean up his act. “Been working on my discipline, getting in shape. Learning to love hunger,” he added now, laughing at himself. “Charlie, could you get rid of those damn cheeseburgers before I go nuts?”

“Sly, could you put a fucking lid on it?” Mike Coleman said as Charlie took the McDonald’s sack into the kitchen. “Or better still: you got any thoughts about how to finesse this?”

“Where ya doin’ the press conference?” Sly asked.

“A zoo. Anyplace I do it will be a zoo,” Charlie said, then glanced at Mike. “Okay, the Senate Caucus Room. Noon tomorrow.”

“Then what?” Sly asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Go home.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s home. What are you gonna do here this week? We’re in recess.” Actually, Sly had turned out to be a pretty fair politician. He was one of those happy, huggy public pols who specialized in constituent service, a culinary populist who never left a kielbasa uneaten at a Pulaski Day picnic in his New Jersey district.

“Okay, I go home,” Charlie agreed. “Pat Dunn’ll be happy. I’ll do home-state press.”

“Guys. Can we slow down just a little bit?” Mike said. “Before we get on with the rest of Charlie’s life, can we think about what he should say tomorrow? Sly?”

“Sheesh,” Sly said, consulting his watch, popping another carrot. “Tough one. Charlie goes, Nothing happened. The press goes, So why did the father punch you out? Charlie goes, There was a misunderstanding.”

“The press goes, Ha-fucking-ha,” Charlie said.

“She was distraught,” Sly tried again. “She was a devoted Martin worker, saw the campaign going down the tubes, she burst into tears, Charlie tried to comfort her. . . .”

“That sounds plausible.” Charlie scowled. “I’m sure she’ll agree with that scenario.”

“Sly,” Mike Coleman said, “would you get up there and say that?”

Silent Sly. “Maybe we should call an expert,” Mike said.

“Like who?” Charlie asked.

“You’re out of the race,” Mike said. “Maybe we could get one of the Stanton guys to help—Richard Jemmons or Arlen Sporken. I’ll make a call.”

“Oh, please,” Charlie said. He stood up. “Enough of this.” But he didn’t stop Mike, who went to the bedroom to make his call.

“Look, Chuckie, I better run,” Parkinson said, more antsy than usual, discomforted by the personal nature of the situation. “You want me to stand there with you tomorrow?”

“Nah. Thanks, big guy. This is my show.”

“You sure?” Sly said, putting on his coat.

“Hey, Sly, thanks for coming by.” And for leaving so quickly.

“Well, I was in the neighborhood,” Parkinson said, draping an arm around Charlie’s back. “And I was sort of hoping it would be a juicier story.”

Charlie let him out, then stood in the hallway, lost; he thought about the Senate Caucus Room. He’d never dreaded the press, the way most of his colleagues did. He’d always been able to handle reporters. But things had turned snipey toward the end of the campaign—and now he would have to explain the inexplicable. There was only one way to do that: head-on. He would tell his story and take the hit.

“Charlie,” Mike said, poking his head into the room, “I’ve got Jack Stanton on the phone. He wants to talk to you.”

He went to the bedroom, picked up the phone, paced with it. “Hi, Jack,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“You okay?” Stanton asked.

“Peachy,” Charlie said. “This is some screwed-up world. . . . I’m sorry that you’ve been getting some of the blow-back from my adventures.”

“May have cost me Colorado, according to the first-wave exits,” Stanton said, “but that’s okay. We won big in Georgia.”

Charlie had almost forgotten that this was election day. “Jack, if you were me, what would you do?”

“Depends,” he said. “Did you have relations with the girl?”

“No! That’s why it’s so crazy, Jack. I didn’t lay a h-h—well, I did put my hand on her. . . .”

“In a romantic way?”

“No! I mean, have you seen her?”

“Big knockers, it looks like,” Stanton said. “I can usually tell from the hang of the shoulders, even from photographs. I pride myself on that.”

“Oh, Christ, Jack—” But this sure was strange: a locker room Jack Stanton, one of the guys. It was clear that he no longer considered Charlie Martin the competition.

“Why on earth were you with her alone?” Stanton asked. Charlie’s silence signified that he didn’t want to admit that it was because he was in the midst of a macho, snake-eating, pigheaded unwillingness to do the obvious thing: fold his tent and go home. Indeed, at that moment, Charlie felt the juices again: he still wanted to beat Jack Stanton somewhere.

“Charlie, my man, don’t you know the Rule of Three?” Stanton asked. “It’s like, basic. In a campaign, you never, ever travel alone. You always need a third person, a witness. Anybody can claim any damn thing on you, you don’t have a witness. And if you do have a witness—the right kind, of course—you can deny any damn thing. It’s Politics 101.”

“I skipped 101,” Charlie said. “They put me in advanced placement.”

“Yeah: war hero,” Stanton said. “They’ll give you a lot of running room when you’re a war hero. I always envied all the fun you were havin’ out in Hollywood and all. I couldn’t get away with that.”

Charlie resisted the temptation to say: That’s right, asshole, you’re married.

“For the record,” Stanton continued, “only things I do alone in a campaign are the three S’s.”

“The three S’s?” Charlie asked, thinking: he couldn’t mean the old college dorm three S’s.

He did.

“What about phone calls?” Charlie asked.

“Phone calls, too. It’s an innovation. I’ve only just started doin’ it since the shit started flying, especially if I do a phoner with the press. I got Henry listening in right now—right, Henry?”

“Hello, Senator—sorry about the mess,” Henry Burton said.

“You could’ve told me he was on,” Martin said, medium hot.

“Sorry, Charlie,” Stanton said. “So what you gonna do now?”

“Dunno,” Charlie said, finally putting two and two together, realizing that Mike had asked Stanton to let one of his campaign guys help him think this through and Stanton had said no. “Hey, Jack,” Charlie said, “I never really had you looking over your shoulder, did I?”

“Well, there were a couple of days there in New Hampshire—”

“Really?”

“Nawww,” he laughed. What a guy.