Mike Lawson - The Inside Ring

DeMarco did and when he finished Mahoney just sat there, a small smile on his lips, a contented look on his broad Irish face. In an attempt to head off the disaster he feared was coming, DeMarco said, ‘Sir, it’s pretty unlikely this agent’s guilty of anything – even Banks admits that – but in case he is, the right thing to do is to tell the Bureau. Or the press.’

Mahoney nodded as if agreeing with DeMarco but there was a gleam in his eye. It was the gleam of a man who has sighted a sail on the horizon and knows that it’s his ship that’s coming in.

DeMarco played his last card. ‘If the FBI catches me fooling around in this, it could lead back to you. You don’t want—’

The Speaker rose slowly from the bench.

‘Help Banks out, Joe,’ he said. ‘Do whatever the man wants.’

Mahoney patted DeMarco affectionately on the shoulder. As he walked away there was a spring in his step caused by more than his new tennis shoes. He was a few paces up the sidewalk when DeMarco heard him bark a laugh and say, ‘Donnelly. I fuckin’ love it.’

‘Do you like chamber music, Joe?’

‘No. I like rock and roll. I like jazz. I like Ella singin’ the—’

‘That’s nice, dear. A quartet is playing Mozart in the National Art Gallery cafeteria today. Meet me there at three. And don’t be late.’

‘Do you know someone in the quartet, Emma?’

The phone was silent. ‘The cello player,’ Emma finally said, and then she laughed. ‘I’m becoming predictable in my dotage. I hate that.’

‘The last thing you’ll ever be is predictable, Emma, but what I have to tell you can’t be told in front of the cello player.’

‘I’ll send her shopping. Just be on time, Joe.’

The cafeteria was crowded and a number of spectators were standing, yet Emma sat alone at a table for four. DeMarco could imagine music lovers approaching, asking politely if they might sit, and Emma backing them off with a glance and a growl, like a lioness protecting a bloody haunch from a flock of timid vultures. At present, the lioness was serenely drinking a glass of white wine while tapping a manicured nail in time to the music.

Emma was tall and slim. Her features were patrician, her complexion flawless. Her hair, cut short and chic, was neither gray nor blonde but some mysterious shade in between. She was beautiful in an austere way and with her ice-blue eyes she reminded DeMarco of the actress Charlotte Rampling. He suspected that she was somewhere between fifty and sixty, not because she looked it, but because of what little he knew of her history.

The operative word with Emma was always ‘suspected.’ She refused to discuss herself, past or present. She would drop hints – tantalizing, inconsistent tidbits – but would never explain when asked to clarify. She admitted to having once worked for the government, but she wouldn’t say in what capacity or for which department. She claimed to be retired but was often out of town for extended periods and never returned with a tan. She lived expensively and owned a home in pricey McLean, Virginia – property that did not seem affordable on a civil servant’s pension. She was gay but something she had once said made DeMarco think she had been married and might have a child. But he wasn’t certain; he was never certain.

DeMarco knew that Emma was at times enigmatic because she chose to be, because it suited her contrary nature. But he also knew that she was sometimes elusive because she had to be.

As he walked toward her table, DeMarco glanced over at the musicians and noted, as he had expected, that the cello player was a beauty: a tall, willowy, Viking blonde – with legs to die for, spread erotically for her cello.

DeMarco pulled back a chair to take a seat next to Emma. She heard the chair scrape the floor and said without looking, ‘That seat’s taken. So are the other two.’

‘Liar,’ DeMarco said.

‘Takes one to know one,’ Emma muttered.

Pointing his chin at the cello player, DeMarco said, ‘She’s a hottie, all right.’

‘A hottie? God, Joe.’

As DeMarco listened to the quartet he wondered why all these people were here. Did they really enjoy this music or was it something they forced themselves to endure, a self-prescribed dose of sophistication, the cultural equivalent of swallowing a carrot smoothie for one’s health.

‘When will this end, Emma?’ DeMarco said. ‘I’ll slip into a coma if it goes on much longer.’

‘Sit there and be quiet,’ Emma said. ‘It’s time you learned to appreciate something other than the Dixie Chicks.’

The quartet finally finished and the cello player handed her instrument to a pimply-faced volunteer. She wagged a finger at him in a stern you-be-careful-with-that gesture, then moved toward Emma’s table, blonde mane flying behind her, long thoroughbred legs flashing. Had Emma not been his friend DeMarco would have been jealous. Hell, he was jealous.

Seeing DeMarco, the cello player hesitated when she reached the table but Emma said, ‘It’s all right, Christine, sit down. Christine, this is Joe. Joe’s a bagman for a corrupt politician.’

‘Jesus, Emma,’ DeMarco said.

‘Which one?’ pretty Christine asked.

Thankfully, Emma ignored her question and said, ‘Joe, be a good bagman and fetch Christine a glass of white wine.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ DeMarco said.

DeMarco returned with Christine’s wine and a Pepsi for himself. Emma was complimenting Christine on her playing, gushing how the third movement had almost moved her to tears. DeMarco rolled his eyes when he heard this; bamboo splinters jammed under her toenails wouldn’t move Emma to tears. To his relief Emma finally said, ‘Dear, I have some business with Joe. Something tedious. Would you mind if I met you at your suite in an hour? I’ll bring some of that champagne you like.’

‘And strawberries?’ Christine asked.

‘Strawberries too,’ Emma said.

As Christine walked away, Emma shook her head and muttered, ‘Strawberries and champagne. What a cliché.’ Turning to DeMarco, she said, ‘So, Joseph, what’s the problem? Might I assume that shit Mahoney has once again dropped you in the soup?’

‘The Speaker was at a dinner the other night, drunk as a Lord, when he decided to loan me to Andy Banks.’

‘Homeland Security?’

‘Yeah. So I meet with General Banks this morning and he tells me he has a small problem.’

‘Joe, I have a lovely friend waiting for me.’

‘Banks thinks a Secret Service agent may have been an accomplice in the assassination attempt on the President, and both Banks and Patrick Donnelly are withholding information from the FBI.’

‘Well! You do know how to get a girl’s attention.’ Then Emma said exactly what Mahoney had said: ‘Tell me what Banks told you, Joe. Don’t leave out a thing.’

Philip Montgomery and the President had been roommates at Harvard. Montgomery was the best man at the President’s wedding, and the President had returned the favor for two of Montgomery’s three nuptials.

The President went on to become governor of his home state, then U.S. senator, then President. He was a bright man, though not a brilliant one, and felt he was dodging his responsibilities if he worked less than sixteen hours a day. Montgomery, the President’s opposite in temperament, was a literary genius who drank like Tennessee Williams and played and fought and fucked like Hemingway. He was a master of the twelve-hundred-page epic that blended fact and fiction so artfully that it was difficult to tell which parts were which, not that his readers particularly cared.

Every year, for more than twenty years, the President and Montgomery got together for three or four days to enjoy various pastimes: skiing, hunting, fishing, river rafting – and a lot of drinking. This annual holiday with Montgomery, an event that was highly publicized, was the only time the President appeared to let his hair down. As for Montgomery, his hair was always down. After being elected to the highest office in the land, the President continued to enjoy his reunions with Montgomery and insisted that his Secret Service detail be as small as possible. The reason for this was to minimize the number of people seeing him and a Pulitzer Prize winner behaving like drunken fools. Like the time they threw empty whiskey bottles into the Bitterroot River and blasted them to bits with automatic weapons borrowed from the President’s bodyguards; hardly an activity he wanted reported to either the environmentalists or the gun-control crowd.