The Last President. Michael Kurland

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СКАЧАТЬ meant he hadn’t slept through his date with Miriam. He had a full fifteen minutes to pick her up at her apartment in Georgetown. Cursing the selective deafness that enabled him to sleep through every alarm in every clock ever made, he rolled out of bed and staggered into the shower.

      He was only half an hour late. Miriam was on the steps of her red brick building waiting for him, trying not to look annoyed, the wind playing games with her long brown hair.

      “The traffic—” he said.

      “Bullshit!” she replied, not looking at him.

      “Okay, I overslept. It just feels so damn silly saying ‘I overslept’ at five in the evening.” He pulled her toward him to kiss her. After a moment’s stubborn resistance, she yielded and returned the kiss with sudden warmth.

      “I am very fond of you, you know. If you’d grow your hair longer, I’d run my fingers through it. And if you’d get a normal job and work normal hours, you’d be able to keep your social engagements.”

      “I like my job,” he told her. “Excitement, danger, romance, far-off places, angry women.… Are we going to Aaron’s?”

      “Right,” she said. “My car or yours, as the actress said to the bishop?”

      “Yours,” Kit said. He gave Miriam a last hug and they started, hand in hand, for her parking space. “And you drive. It’s not fit work for a man. I almost killed myself twice getting over here.”

      “Sleep-driving is a special skill,” Miriam agreed, unlocking the passenger-side door of her Volkswagen and starting around. Kit watched Miriam as she climbed in beside him, and once again he wondered at the providence that had brought her into his life. They had met at one of Aaron B. Adams’ small dinner parties three years before. Professor Adams had seated his newest assistant professor, Ms. Miriam Kassel, campus liberal, next to Christopher Young, Jr., CIA, apolitical conservative, and then sat back to watch. They disagreed on just about everything political, and somehow they were unable to talk about anything but politics. Kit’s worst moment had come when, in exasperation, he had admitted that actually he just didn’t care much one way or the other about politics. Miriam had exploded and told him that not caring was a worse moral crime than being wrong.

      But somehow Kit and Miriam had found, without discussing it, that there was something pulling them together that made all the arguments about politics worthwhile, that made the times when they didn’t argue sweeter and fuller and more beautiful than either of them had known before.

      “That strange buzzing in your ears,” Miriam said sweetly, “won’t stop unless you buckle your seat belt. Not that I’m trying to influence your actions.”

      “Oh. Sorry.” Kit buckled the belt. “You know, actually, I have a very good job. It keeps me here near you. I could have been assigned to Saigon or Phnom Penh or one of those other resort areas where the natives spend their spare time taking potshots at American civilians.”

      “They only acquired the habit because American soldiers spend so much time shooting at them,” Miriam said.

      “Oops,” Kit said. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I just wish you wouldn’t take your gripes against the policies of this administration out on me. I’m merely a minor bureaucrat. My job is to report facts, not to decide what’s done with them. I just work for the government.”

      “The CIA,” Miriam said.

      “Intelligence-gathering is not a more intrinsically evil profession than college teaching.”

      “If the CIA’s only activity were intelligence gathering, I wouldn’t say a word. But both you and I know that isn’t so. You must know it far better than I.”

      “Please get that pedantic tone out of your voice,” Kit said. “I’m sorry I can’t discuss the inner policy-making of the Agency with you, but I’m far too junior for anyone to ever discuss it with me. Technically I’m not even supposed to admit to you that I’m CIA.”

      “Come on,” Miriam said. “When Aaron first introduced us he told me you were CIA. It must be a very open secret.”

      “Professor Adams is part of what we call the old-boy network. He was in OSS with a lot of people very high up in the Agency now, including my present boss. But since he’s retired from the, ah, government service, he’s assumed the right to discuss many things that we GS types aren’t supposed to talk about—including my work.”

      “What’s your point?” Miriam asked.

      “My only point is that, since I’m not allowed to discuss my work, it isn’t fair for you to take potshots at it—or me.”

      “Bang,” Miriam said. “A potshot’s better than a bullet any day.”

      “Listen, I agree with you,” Kit said. “I think the war is a mess and it’s being handled all wrong.”

      “Yes, but you also think they ought to go over there and beat the shit out of those nasty North Vietnamese,” Miriam said. “Bomb ’em back to the stone age.”

      “Damn right,” Kit said as a way of ending the discussion. And it did. Miriam sulked the rest of the way over to Professor Adams’ Chevy Chase estate.

      * * * *

      Professor Aaron B. Adams did not maintain his three-story stone house with swimming pool and guest cottage, along with its two acres of very subdividable land, on the salary of a tenured professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Government and Political Science. Not even when that was added to his retirement pay from the various secret branches of the government he had served in. Had it not been for an obscure Adams ancestor somewhere—after the two who had been impecunious but honorable Presidents—who had gone into business in Boston importing Japanese habutae silk and had later expanded into mother-of-pearl buttons, Professor Adams could not even have afforded the guest cottage.

      Of course, as Professor Adams himself liked to say, his fondness for money was such that, had he not inherited it, he probably would have occupied himself with making it. In which case the United States would have lost a brilliant intelligence officer and Aaron B. Adams would have led a much duller life.

      Miriam parked behind the four other cars in the driveway, groped in the back seat for a large straw tote bag, and preceded Kit into the house. Neither residents nor guests were in evidence as they crossed through the huge living room and through the open French windows to the cabaña area next to the pool, which was one of the most imposing features of the Adams house.

      Even compared to the house and grounds surrounding it, the pool was large. The previous owner of the house had been told by a mystic that his son was going to be an Olympic swimmer, so he built a full Olympic pool for him to practice in. This was in 1932 when labor was cheap and Sonny was five years old. Thirteen years later, after paying a lot of money to get his son cleared of charges of draft evasion, the father closed the house and moved back to Iowa.

      For nine years, the house and the pool lay vacant. Then Adams bought it at auction and moved in, lock, stock, and unwritten memoirs. After two years of starting his memoirs, Adams decided he was too young for such nonsense and took a part-time teaching position at Georgetown. “You understand this is only temporary,” they told him. “Suits me,” he said.

      In his spare time he taught a couple of courses for the newly formed CIA, СКАЧАТЬ