Leon Uris - A God In Ruins

“Greer, you’re going to have to excuse the hour, but I just got through with my meetings. Are we on a secure line?”

“You bet.”

“Do we trust each other?”

“To do what?” she asked.

“Anything beyond this phone call. If we meet, where we meet, what we say is not taped or bugged or leaked.”

Greer mulled a moment. “I don’t know. What do you have in mind?”

“The President’s kicked ass on me. We’re trying to complete his campaign schedule, and we can’t ‘do it unless we agree on the debates.”

Bingo! Greer thought.

“All right,” Darnell said, “so we blinked first, but you know and I know every campaign pussyfoots around the debates, then always conducts them. The responsibility falls on both sides. And you know damned well, we’ll end up with debates.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“The President is really leaning on me. He wants it settled in the next couple of days.”

Darnell was calling from Washington. It was two in the morning there. Pretty late to clean one’s desk. Presidential urgency. They must have gotten late polls. Quinn was running neck and neck with Tomtree. Were they soft, or was T3 trying to set Quinn up?

“So, what’s the program?” Greer asked.

“Chicago is midway between Denver and Washington. We have a safe house there, or if you are too suspicious, you can set it up in a hotel of your choice. We’d send a charter jet for your negotiator.”

“And yourself ?”

“I’m authorized to cut a deal.”

“I’ll get back to you in a few hours, Darnell. If I come to Chicago, I can’t leave until tomorrow evening. It should be me and Professor Maldonado.”

“The governor’s father-in-law?”

“Yep.”

“I’ll be waiting for your call. It will be nice to see you again.”

Greer could not fall back to sleep, so she finally arose, yawned and stretched, and set the coffeepot into motion. Since the Iowa caucus in February, she had expected someone to tap her on the shoulder and say, “I know what you know.”

Every day her secret grew, like a tumor, and every day she ignored her own sense of propriety, it enlarged. Greer walked through her arguments again, but she found herself in the same place, with the madness of holding a secret. The fear of letting it go made her shiver.

Call Warren? Christ, she knew what he would say. He’d tell her to press her advantage, as in hostile takeovers. No prisoners.

“Oh, Christ,” she whispered and punched a phone number.

“Hello,” a dreary voice said.

“Hi, Rita, it’s Greer.”

“Anything wrong?”

“Are Mal and Quinn at the condo with you?”

“Yes.”

“Get them up. I’ll be over in a half hour.”

A God In Ruins

The three of them were draped around the living room,...

time of night, they were going to be talking “rotten apples,”

Greer came rumpled, and she showed the wear of executive decision making. “I got a call from Darnell Jefferson, two in the morning Washington time. They want to get together with us and nail down a debate.”

“They must be hurting,” Rita said.

Greer shook her head and, although it was a serious moment, she could not help but see how voluptuous and filled with Quinn Rita was. Greer felt a pang of jealousy.

“What did you wake us up to tell us?” Reynaldo Maldonado asked.

Greer took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and lifted her face. “Pucky Tomtree has been having an affair for two years.”

“Well, you’ve got this old boy’s attention,” Mal said. Both Quinn and Rita stared, puzzled.

“Go on,” Quinn said softly.

“I’ve personally known Pucky Tomtree fifteen, maybe twenty years,” Greer began. “She chaired an awful lot of community services from Boston. Committee to Save the Llamas, Committee to Bring Caruso Back from the Dead, Up the Symphony, Artists Against Starvation, Artists for Peace. She either chaired or served on the boards of a hundred national groups. We’ve been on a dozen committees together. I find her to be a lovely woman.”

Orange juice all around.

“Providence has a very active theater life. Sort of a bedroom community for Broadway. She loved to hang out in the garret scene. There were a few moot whispers about affairs. Nothing to write home about.”

“I don’t want to hear any more of this,” Quinn interceded.

“Shut up and listen,” Mal ordered his son-in-law.

“Okay, gang,” Greer said, “hand me the envelope, please.

And the winner is ... Aldo de Voto,” she said, “the reigning conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. I worked with him before he moved to Washington, when he directed the New York Philharmonic. Events .. . committees .. . fundraising. He’s a very charming guy with wife and kids safely tucked away in Spain. No, we were never lovers, but Aldo and I were bosom buddies.”

Greer went on that Crowley Media kept a company apartment at the Watergate where Aldo de Voto lived. They spent a lot of time rapping, as friends, each having the key to the other’s apartment.

“Why did you think you needed a key to his place?” Mal asked.

“Because my place often looked like the interstate, with the Crowder people coming and going and a line of politicians at the door. Aldo seldom came home until very late, and I could hide out there. Washington trips ain’t no fun, folks.”

To this day, Rita found discussions of infidelity discomforting, but she tried not to show her reaction. Quinn seemed to be hardly listening, while Mal cleared every sentence in his mind.

“I hadn’t been to Washington for about three months, and after the FCC hearings I had the bird dogs on me, even from my own network. I gave Aldo a ring, but his voice machine said he was in Philadelphia. Anyhow, his key still worked. I stretched out on his couch for a while, then went to freshen up. There was a cosmetic bag at the vanity mirror with the top opened. Have you ever noticed the jeweled Japanese fighting-fish brooch Pucky wears?”

“Yeah .. .” Mal sighed.

“It was there in the cosmetic bag as well as her lipstick, an initialed notepad, her perfume, et cetera. And, a name tag.”

“It would be impossible for anyone to plant it,” Mal said.

“Particularly a brooch worth several hundred thousand dollars,” Greer said. “There were a few other things in Aldo’s closet that a lady would wear for an afternoon tryst. Her size.”

“What about her Secret Service detail?”

“She drives her own damned car sometimes. Pucky is an independent lady.”

“Didn’t we stop all this with Clinton?” Quinn asked in disgust.

“It’s been eight years without a whisper of scandal in the country,” Rita said. “Do you think the American people even care?”

“Look, daughter, the President can ball any alley cat he gets his hands on. But the First Lady! The Capitol dome would fall to the floor,” Mal said.

“Adultery is a man’s misdemeanor and a woman’s felony,” Greer said.

“Who knows?” Mal asked. ;.

“We and the principals. They do not know that I.know. My educated guess is that Tomtree is oblivious of it.”

Quinn saw Rita shaken up by it all. His hand pressed her shoulder. “That’s all we need to hear,” he said. “We are going to do absolutely nothing except to vow to each other to do absolutely nothing. Done. End of discussion.”