First Citizen (20 page)

It would also, as we were to discover, allow McCanlis and his coterie sufficient time to weld together the sort of government
they
desired.

“Second,” he continued, “we must consider our colleagues in the Senate. We are reasonably assured of the death of Vice President Richard Stokes, who was duly sworn as president of that body. Now, lacking a bare seventh of their members, those senators here present may feel some embarrassment about naming a president
pro tem.
Therefore, I propose that until such an election in April shall bring up their numbers, the Senate continue to sit in joint session with this house.”

What McCanlis was omitting, of course, although he knew it perfectly well, was that a certain number of freshman senators, as well as newly elected representatives, were waiting in their home States to be sworn in as the 108th Congress on January third. That omission—purposeful or not—would confound the legitimacy of the incoming Congress for many months.

“Third,” he said, “we must appoint a special committee to propose, in accordance with the Constitution of these United States, the names of candidates to fill out the vacated term of President Martin Geddes, who has likewise been declared officially dead.”

Uncle Aaron, three rows back in the spectator seats, was shaking his head slowly side to side. I wondered briefly about his reaction, until I’d worked it out for myself: McCanlis could more easily have proposed himself as acting chief executive and taken office this same day. He had the votes right here, and Aaron knew it. Most of the surviving congressmen and -women seemed to be from the Rust Bowl Conservatives, of the same stripe as McCanlis. (Had there been a secret caucus, held outside Washington, last evening?) Anyway, that the Speaker should name a committee to propose candidates could only mean he had some deeper game to play. And that might mean more trouble for everyone than an outright grab.

“Fourth and last,” McCanlis said, “we must prepare for a full investigation of yesterday’s tragic events. As this body, in my own opinion, lacks sufficient members to fill a second extraordinary committee, I propose that we request a commission be appointed by the governors of the adjoining States of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to sift the ashes, as it were.”

Evidently, McCanlis was not quite as concerned as either Uncle Aaron or I was about who had launched or placed the bomb that destroyed Washington. A governor’s commission would take months simply to convene—not an effective forum for either strategy or diplomacy. I hoped the boys under Kansas were still watching their screens.

Then a chilling thought occurred: Would a … could a … nascent dictator arrange to bomb his own capital? With a nuclear device? To take power in the confusion? And cover the traces—those not already fused to glass in the rubble—with a ponderous official committee?

No, even McCanlis would not. Could not.

“Now, I know all of this proposing is quite a mouthful. I hope our secretary
pro tem
can formulate these sentiments into an orderly set of motions that you, my colleagues, can second, discuss, and then vote in favor of.” The wink and nod McCanlis gave the front row was only partly humorous.

The measures were seconded and approved in half an hour. Discussion took only ten minutes of that, and Aaron Scoffield was ruled out of order six times in three of those minutes. I marveled that the 107th Congress was certainly an orderly place to work in.

Uncle Aaron had no staff—all dead in Washington—so I agreed to stay on in Baltimore and help him during the transition. He began that very day, saving three hours for sleep in the morning, to pull together a coalition that might beat McCanlis. He had eighteen Democrats and a handful of leaning Republicans to work with.

On the other side, McCanlis’s party was not made up entirely of fools. They would back him on a tariff bill or States’ Rights, but in deciding the presidency, they just might think for themselves.

As the history books tell it, thirty-four potential candidates were named between then and March 29. The lobbying went on night and day, over meals, side by side in the men’s room, in the hallways outside of the courtroom—which remained their meeting place all that time. Bearing Uncle Aaron’s card, I made concessions to Helpfuls, cornered Hesitants, and confronted Hostiles. I made more promises than I can remember, and some of them my uncle never knew about.

However intent I may have been on staying for the fighting, my leg ruled otherwise. Within days it began oozing pus, probably from germs in the garbage smeared on that cutter blade, and I kept doping it with alcohol and off-the-shelf disinfectants. Finally, the leg turned septic and puffed up like a blind white grub with an angry red mouth. The doctors were back in town, but the hospitals were full of burn and radiation cases. So I flew back to California to lie down and try to avoid an amputation. To this day, I still have a shiny purple scar across my shin.

During those hundred days, the nation saw everyone from rogues to saviors to sycophants proposed to fill the highest office in the land. At one point, even Uncle Aaron was just three votes shy of a majority. But it always came up short. I followed the action from California by television and later got the complete story from Aaron. He was sure, from the fabric of the deals that were being made around him, that McCanlis was rolling logs
against
his own candidates. It was as if he wanted the confusion to go on and on.

Finally, toward the end of March 2003, the Joint Congress passed a resolution declaring themselves unable to name a President and requesting Speaker McCanlis to serve out the remainder of Martin Geddes’s term. It was known as the Emergency Powers Act.

I never understood the part called Title VI. Aaron had fought it like a devil and all the Democrats snarled when they talked about it. Yet to me it seemed like a technicality: Every two years, at the opening of a new Congress, the members were to assemble in caucus and name the Speaker of the House who would serve two years into the future.

According to the Constitution, the House had the power to choose its Speaker and apparently the freedom to do the choosing how it liked. A powerful man or woman with a strong party behind him or her could serve again and again, for years. Look at Rayburn or O’Neill. Title VI would seem to break up this pattern, letting the new blood choose for the future.

When I tried this opinion on my uncle, long after the fact, Uncle Aaron only said, “You young fool.” But he said it kindly. There were new lines in his face and tears showing in his eyes. He seemed to be exhausted by the struggle of those hundred days. A fast cancer took him just nine months later. As a supplement to the Emergency Powers Act, almost an afterthought, Congress approved and sent to the people the Thirtieth Amendment, which eventually became known as the Speaker’s Amendment. It provided for the Speaker of the House to assume the duties of the executive branch if both the President and the Vice President should resign or die.

The rest you know. This new but already worn-out Congress neglected to call a special presidential election, as provided for in that amendment. The regular election in 2004 was spirited, with the young turks pushing through John Ramos and Stephen McKenzie at the Republican Convention in Kansas City. They won a landslide vote and were assassinated before the inauguration, while they were technically still private citizens.

Both murders were well timed, well executed, and well covered. Three bullets each, all head shots, fired at medium range by a medium-size, medium-weight, medium-complexioned man, or possibly a mannish woman dressed as a man, who left the scene in a late-model, medium-size car of no remarkable color. One witness thought it was yellow, but he was later proven to be standing at another corner, looking the other way.

George McCanlis called for a congressional commission to investigate the assassinations and thereby put off any special elections. Its members met for sixteen months and returned nothing but an array of rumors that the FBI had presented, with embarrassed smiles, early in the testimony.

For the country as a whole, the deaths were some kind of psychological straw. One aging anchorman in a jacket-and-sweater combination opined sententiously, “The People can take no more.” As if these crises—the bombing, the assassinations, the political confusion—were acts of a stupid volition which, if somebody only wanted to, could be stopped or somehow made right. The pundits and the politicos generally felt that an immediate special election to fill the still-vacant presidency, another hotly contested national campaign within a few months of the last election, would somehow be “too disruptive” or “too costly” or just too much.

On that note, “The People can take no more,” McCanlis was quickly confirmed as chief executive under the Thirtieth Amendment.

In the next presidential election year, 2008, the major parties rallied and chose their candidates. The pundits observed that they seemed to be second-stringers. Not one sitting member of Congress had consented to run. None of them was visibly involved with the conventions. None endorsed the candidates. And a month before the election, the three presidential candidates and two of their vice presidential hopefuls—I don’t remember their names, nobody does now—were assassinated. They were fragged by a wire-guided rocket, shot by a “jealous husband,” crushed by a falling stage flat, snuffed by cyanide, burned in a head-on collision. All of these were creative ways to die. And, if some or all were actually murders, they involved enough
modi operandi
to give the FBI an excellent excuse not to link them to each other or to the assassinations of 2004.

Once again McCanlis assumed, or rather retained, the duties of chief executive.

By the time the presidential election of 2012 came around, power was firmly centered with Congress and not with the vacated Office of the President. So, although the columnists and anchors posed rhetorical questions about the possibilities of an election, it never attained the necessary political velocity to get off the ground.

Five times McCanlis was chosen in caucus as Speaker for a “trailing” (as it came to be called) two-year term. His future was secured.

Chapter 11

Granville James Corbin: High Times And Misdemeanors

I met my second wife, Tracy, at a ball. No, I take that back. It was at the Norwegian Embassy, which was in a converted mansion along Fifth Avenue in the low Eighties. And the ballroom was where they held their receptions. This one was for the King’s birthday, or maybe the Crown Prince’s. Neither was there for the occasion.

Why was the embassy in New York and not the capital? After the bombing of Washington, you see, the Federal government may have been content to relocate in Baltimore; the diplomatic community, however, would have none of that. I think they were nervous about living so close to that wide, black-glass crater. And it didn’t help that the local Baltimore vids were reporting the milly-milly each morning—that is, so many thousandths of a millirem riding on the wind from the southwest. Too much like the reports following Chernobyl. So when the new ambassadors and their staffs arrived, replacements for those who had died in the bombing, they migrated to New York, where their U.N. consulates were settled in and would remain for a few years more.

Tracy Starrett was at the birthday reception, being squired by a flaxen-haired giant who was either some kind of unlanded baron or a renowned socialist. Perhaps both at once. Call him Peer Gynt. He introduced himself and tried to get me into a confab about municipal sewer sludge and the problems they had with the wastewater treatment plant at Trollhaven. Or wherever.

In the meantime, this woman, beautiful by any standard, and tanned, and blonde, and wearing a strapless sheath of blue-gray silk that was being held up by static electricity, was still on his arm but looking around the room like a pilot fish about to jump ship. And she still had not been introduced to me by Gynt.

At first, I thought she was Scandinavian, his wife, and just restless. After the third time she made some extravagant flip-flap gesture with her left hand, I caught her third-finger code and tumbled that she was unattached and signaling frantically to be rescued from the ice giant. I deftly inserted some wisdom into his talk about sewers and permafrost, sought her agreement, then excused myself for not being introduced. Even Peer Gynt got the message.

“Ah, may I present Granville Corbin, who is one of your countrymen, Tracy.”

“Charmed,” she said with relief.

“Mr. Corbin is an expert on—”

“I know that he’s an expert, Karl.” Her eyes never left my face. “He’s an expert on money, experienced with women, and I hope he knows something about food and can offer me better than that mess of pickled fish and head cheese you call smorgasbord.”

“What’s your pleasure, Tracy?” I asked smoothly.

“Prosciutto. Pasta. Piccata. None of this
piscati profanatti,
hey?” Her accent was pizza-Italian, hinting at origins in the Midwest.

“Do you have a wrap?”

“Right here.” Like a stage magician she pulled four square yards of silk out of her clutch purse. It was iridescent blue-gray on the outside to match her dress but silver-sheened on the inside. When I raised an eyebrow and mentioned the temperature outdoors was ten above, she gave a small laugh.

“Space blanket,” she said. “Keeps two bodies warm for, oh, hours.”

We walked away from Gynt without ever looking back. Tracy and I did not make love the first night. Instead I left her in the hotel lobby with just a pressing of hands. But we had made arrangements. She was flying back to Denver and her family in the morning; I was going to be in Pueblo toward the end of the week to inspect a site. We would meet at the Brown Palace at six Friday, by the bar, white carnation in my lapel, purple gardenia in her hair. Use code. Wink. Nod. Goodnight.

Her family turned out to be rich. Chris Starrett, her father, was an investment banker connected with drilling for natural gas and petroleum. He may have known my father, although I never got a chance to ask.