No Way to Treat a First Lady (4 page)

"Looks like war," his deputy said.

"Finally," Boyce said, "I would ask all Americans to remember something in the days ahead. Yes, the country has lost a president. But a beloved First Lady has lost her husband."

Beth, watching from her new temporary headquarters in Cleveland Park, a few miles from the airport, muttered aloud to her TV screen, " 'Beloved'?"

"That's really all I have to say at this time. Thank you." He always said this before proceeding to take questions.

"Boyce! Were you and Beth MacMann lovers?"

"Jesus Christ," said Perri Pettengill's senior producer, "those two? Used to
do it?"

"Um-hum." Perri nodded, continuing to watch.

"That's perfect."

"They were in law school together. She screwed him over."

"So why's he helping her?"

Perri looked at him. "Harry, it's the Trial of the Millennium. Of course he's going to represent her."

"You gotta get him on the show tonight. We gotta have him."

Boyce had told Perri he wouldn't do her show, at least for a while. "It wouldn't look right." In retaliation she told him fine, no sex. They compromised: sex and monster leaks.

"Let's save him for something big," Perri parried.

"It's
all
big," Harry said. "You've got a mass of hot air over Washington, a cold legal front coming down from New York, and media from all over the world converging. It's
The Perfect Storm
all over again.
'Perfect Storm'!
We could use that."

"Yes, Harry. That's good. Use it."

"I'll Chyron it."

Boyce had been ready for the question. He paused to give the impression that it had taken him by surprise. "The First Lady and I were at law school together. It was a long time ago." He added with nice faux self-deprecation, "You'd know it was a long time ago to look at me, maybe. Not the First Lady."

Through the plate-glass window in the airport terminal where Boyce was standing, he could see in the distance the towers of Georgetown University. A quarter century ago, he and his fellow third-year law student Beth Tyler had one night found themselves in the auditorium for their first moot court. They were so nervous they shook, and this was in the days before beta-blockers.

A rumor had been going around for days that the presiding judge would be a Bigfoot. When that day the door opened and out walked Chief Justice Henry Adolfus Wiggins of the Supreme Court of the United States, a gasp went through the standing-room-only auditorium. A month before, Wiggins had ordered the President of the United States to turn over his secret Oval Office tape recordings. That led swiftly to his historic resignation. The Georgetown Law School dean—he had clerked for Wiggins years ago—had pulled off a coup getting him to come.

Beth groaned to Boyce, sitting beside her, "We're dead."

She was to play the part of the U.S. solicitor general and argue the government's side before the Supreme Court. Boyce was her deputy. He whispered back, "He doesn't look happy."

Indeed, Chief Justice Wiggins wasn't happy, not at all happy. He'd been sandbagged by the dean, his former clerk, who had not told him until the last minute that the mock case tonight he would be presiding over would be the very same one he had so historically decided a few months ago. It bordered on impudence.

Beth and Boyce had pulled two consecutive all-nighters to prepare. They looked like extras from the movie
Night of the Living Dead.
Her argument for letting the President keep his tapes was that the Supreme Court justices lacked the proper security clearances to hear what was on them. They were armed with precedents, but now, looking at the imperious, pinched-looking Wiggins taking his seat before them, they felt a presentiment of doom. In effect, their job tonight was to persuade him that he had been wrong. And chief justices, generally, did not like to be told that they were wrong.

"Oyez, oyez, oyez," the dean intoned, grinning at his triumph.
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times
had sent reporters. "All persons having business before the honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, present themselves."

Boyce began humming Chopin's "Marche Funèbre." Dum dum de dum
dum
de dum de dum de dum.

"Shut
up,"
she hissed.

Beth stood. Justice Wiggins did not return her smile. In his robes, spectacles, and blue, bloodless lips, Justice Wiggins looked as though he were yearning to sentence everyone present to death by hanging, or preferably by some more prolonged, medieval form of execution.

Beth stood mute at the lectern. Five seconds went by, ten. Fifteen. Wiggins, accustomed to brisk kowtows and beginnings, frowned, a formidable sight.

People exchanged glances. The dean's smile vanished. The silence that descended on the auditorium had an Old Testament quality, the kind that preceded the Voice in the Whirlwind announcing,
I am the Lord God Almighty, and I am very, very wroth.

"Your Supreme Honor—"

Off to a good start.

"With all due respect, I—we, that is, the government of the United States—do not believe that you—that the Court—has jurisdiction in this matter."

Wiggins, who had just earned himself his own chapter in the legal history of the United States for a written opinion that was being hailed as the most consequential legal ruling since Maimonides, glowered at Beth like a malevolent owl contemplating a mouse. The Wiggins Supreme Court felt that it had jurisdiction over everything, including what time the sun was allowed to rise.

Boyce felt his insides loosen, along with the cold scalp prickle that augurs calamity.

Wiggins let her continue another two and a half sentences, whereupon he assumed his accustomed role of grand inquisitor. It was merciless. It was scathing. It was so bad that no one could bear to watch. Four hundred pairs of eyes looked down. Never had the auditorium floor been so closely examined. It was so awful that finally Boyce decided there was nothing left to lose. He scribbled on an index card and slid it in front of Beth as the judge continued to blowtorch her for her abominable—no, worse, abysmal!—understanding of the Eleventh Amendment. It read:

To keep from laughing, Beth sucked in her upper lip and bit down on it so hard that it stayed swollen for two days.

Boyce's note saved her from annihilation. Chief Justice Wiggins, who deep down was really more angry at the dean than at an intellectually frisky third-year student, saw this young woman in front of him apparently about to burst out crying and ceased his attack. He became even moderately magnanimous. He concluded by telling her that her argument was "without merit," but was without merit "in an original way." For Wiggins, this was tantamount to a compliment.

At the reception afterward, another third-year student named Kenneth Kemble MacMann, six feet four, lean, with Kennedyesque hair and soulful, hooded eyes, approached Beth to say how impressed he had been by her performance. Boyce knew him slightly. He was older than the other students. Word was he'd been to Vietnam. If you were a vet in the 1970s on an eastern college campus, it was not something you broadcast to your fellow students or teachers, who would be only too glad to accuse you of crimes against humanity.

A few days later, Beth showed up in Boyce's dorm room with microfiche copies from
The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek,
and an official U.S. Navy publication, page after page of news stories about a navy ship called the
Santiago.

"What's this?" he said.

"That guy, the third-year the other night we talked to—read this."

Boyce read.

The
Santiago
was a fast navy electronic surveillance vessel assigned to monitor Russian shipping in and out of Haiphong Harbor. Its captain had taken it inside the twelve-mile limit, probably on orders. A North Vietnam MiG attacked. Everyone on the bridge was killed except for Lieutenant (jg) MacMann. Wounded, he had assumed command and—as the citation that she for whatever reason had dug out of the archives put it—at great personal risk attempted to drive the
Santiago
into undisputed waters while simultaneously directing aid to the wounded and the destruction of classified materials. The
Santiago
was overtaken by North Vietnamese gunboats. Lieutenant MacMann ordered abandon ship and evacuation of the wounded but remained on board himself. While continuing to receive enemy fire, he successfully scuttled the
Santiago,
which sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Tonkin.

He was picked up by the gunboats and endured three and a half years of torture, starvation, inadequate medical care, and solitary confinement at the Hanoi Hilton. Upon his release, Lieutenant K. MacMann was awarded the Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Medal, Navy Cross, and Congressional Medal of Honor. He'd been personally decorated, in the Oval Office, by President Richard Nixon, otherwise known among the eastern academic elite as the Antichrist. (Not that the eastern academic elite believed much in Christ.)

"He's a hero, Boyce."

"Boy," Boyce said. "I'll say."

"Listen to this." She read: " 'Following Lieutenant MacMann's release by North Vietnam, he was returned to the United States and spent two months at the Naval Hospital in San Diego. Subsequently he received an honorable medical discharge from the Navy with the rank of Lieutenant Commander.'

"I wonder what the reason was," Beth said.

The first indication that something was wrong came a few days later when from a distance Boyce saw Beth heading into Habeus Sandwich, the Georgetown Law student hangout, with Kenneth Kemble MacMann. Boyce followed them and, finding them both sitting cozily in a booth, announced himself with a "Hi." Beth appeared clearly disappointed.

"Mind if I join you?"

"Absolutely," Ken MacMann said heartily, displaying more ivory than a Steinway piano.

Beth looked even more disappointed.

They made small talk until the French fries arrived, when Boyce, feeling more and more leery, decided to plunge in.

"So Beth tells me you had to quit the navy for medical reasons."

Beth stiffened.

"Yeah," Ken said.

"Must have been serious."

"Nah. Navy regs, is all."

"So what was it?"

Beth kicked him. "He doesn't want to talk about it, Boyce."

"Just asked."

"You know what the worst part of it was?" Ken said. "Saying good-bye to those navy nurses."

"But you had to leave, is that it?"

"Boyce. Will you stop?"

"It's okay. I could have stayed in, but it would have been a desk job."

Boyce wondered if a penis was considered essential equipment for line duty aboard a navy ship.

Awkward silence descended on the table.

Ken said, "If you really want to know—"

"Oh God," Beth cut in, "seven forty-five!"

"Is the world scheduled to end?"

"I have to get back to the library."

"Well, go ahead," Boyce said. "I want to hear about Ken's wound."

Beth's eyes narrowed.

"I took a tracer round through the stomach. It kind of never fully healed."

Beth turned to Boyce. "Why don't you tell Ken about your squash injury. The one that kept you from being sent over there?"

On their way back to the library after Ken had left them, Boyce said, "You had to bring up my knee?"

"You were being a dick."

"I was trying to get you an answer to the question that clearly had been tormenting you."

"Good
night."
She peeled off.

A week before finals, Beth knocked on Boyce's door. She was flustered.

"I guess we need to talk."

"We are talking."

"Okay," she said, exhaling, "Ken's asked me to marry him."

Boyce stared. "Did you tell him you were already engaged? To me?"

"Uh-huh."

"So, then?"

"I told him yes."

"How can you be engaged to two people?"

She kissed him tenderly on the top of his head, the blow-off spot. "I'm so sorry, honey," she said. "It just happened."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

Beth and Ken were married two months later, by Chief Justice Wiggins.

"Did you have to say that about the attorney general sacrificing me on the altar of his burning ambition?"

"You missed the key word," Boyce said. "Sacrificing a
widow
on the altar of his burning ambition."

"I don't think of myself as a widow."

"Start."

"But why piss him off? I bet he's ballistic by now."

"Worried he might get really mad and indict you for murder? I
want
him mad. I want them all mad. Mad people make mistakes. We need the other side to make mistakes, since you've made so many of your own so far."

"Such as?"

"Where do I start? Like talking to the FBI without counsel present. People who rob convenience stores know better."

"How would it have looked? Hiring a lawyer."

"Smart."

"Boyce, I was in shock, for heaven's sake Have you ever woken up in bed with a dead spouse?"

"I've gone to bed with some." He sighed. "I'm frankly surprised at how you screwed this thing up."

"Is abuse included in your thousand-dollar-an-hour fee, or do you bill separately?"

"Separately, under 'photocopying, telephone, facsimile, and messenger services.' " He read the FBI report. "Why did you refuse the polygraph? It was the right thing to do, but since you did everything else wrong, I'm curious."

"It was insulting," she said hotly. "I'd just come back from burying him at Arlington. I thought it was grossly inappropriate to ask me to take a lie detector test."

"Your outrage is convincing. I almost wish we could put you on the stand."

"I want you to put me on the stand."

Boyce laughed. "Under no circumstances are you taking the stand. What's the matter with you? Have you forgotten everything you learned in law school?"

"I want to tell the truth."