The Day of the Donald (6 page)

S
omebody cranked up The B-52s’ “Love Shack” on the surround sound stereo system. The map on the video screen dissolved into an iTunes screen saver. For a meeting room, the Boardroom had some serious bass. Probably needed it for all the videos of explosions.

To Jimmie’s dismay, the cake was chocolate. Not really Jimmie’s thing. He was more of a vanilla guy, at least as far as desserts went. He’d accepted a piece, however. He didn’t want to be “that guy”—you know, the prissy coworker whose tastes are so specific that you’d probably catch them wanking at work before you caught them eating carbs.

Oh, who was he kidding? He already
was
“that guy”—the one who’d thrown up on the president on his first day on the job. If word hadn’t spread yet, it would soon. Not that he’d ever been one to mingle with his coworkers.

You’re a journalist
, he told himself, trying to swallow the sponge cake without making a face.
These aren’t your coworkers—these are your subjects
. And then another thought crossed his mind:
You’re not a journalist. Not any longer. Not when one of your subjects is bankrolling you
.

A big-bottomed guido took the empty chair next to Jimmie. Chris Christie. Although the job title on his badge said he was the “chief janitor,” Christie wasn’t dressed like a janitor. His navy-blue suit and power-red tie were the same as every else’s in the Boardroom, albeit from the “big-and-tall” section. The
really
big-and-tall section.

“You look like you’re having fun,” Christie said, leering at Jimmie.

“Just some first-day jitters. And maybe a little food poisoning.”

“Been there before,” Christie said, shoving a fork right into what was left of the cake. “First day in the governor’s office, I was so nervous that I shit my drawers. It was a little bit of excitement, a little bit of Montezuma’s revenge.”

“No shit.”

“
Yes
shit,” Christie said.

Jimmie watched as Christie shoveled the cake into his gullet like a bank robber stuffing bundles of cash into a duffle bag.

“So what did you do?” Jimmie asked. “After you . . . shit your drawers.”

Christie wiped the yellow frosting from around his mouth. “I ordered up a traffic study in Fort Lee, put the kybosh on a new tunnel to Manhattan, and then cleaned myself up in the bathroom of Jerry Jones’s G5 en route to the Super Bowl. The bathroom in that plane is nicer than anything on the ground in Trenton.”

“So the moral of the story is . . .”

“There is no moral to the story,” Christie said. “Morals are for putzes. You understand what I’m saying, Jimmie?”

“I think so,” Jimmie said. He really had no idea what the hell Christie’s point was, other than the fact that you couldn’t count on anyone who worked for you to tell you when your
shit stank. “Say . . . do you know anything about this ‘nuclear’ situation? The press secretary mentioned there was an emergency that rhymed with ‘muclear.’”

Christie snorted. “That’s just the Security Council code we use when there’s dessert in the Boardroom.”

“So what’s the code when there’s a real nuclear emergency?”

“Same thing.”

Jimmie felt his eyes go wide. “Isn’t that . . . dangerous?”

Christie narrowed his eyes to the point where his pupils were crushed into two tiny, black coals. “I see those hamsters running on those wheels in your head,” he said. “You’re not an idiot. Not like half the reporters upstairs in the White House press corps. The president wanted you for this job, though—Lord knows why, but he did. I know you’re dangerous. A wise guy like you, around here? You could hurt people, real easily, with that pen of yours. I’m talking about your words, of course. You writers and your weak stabbing motions. Just remember: You could also
get
hurt . . . real easily. And we wouldn’t want that. Trust me—I do a lot of ‘cleaning up’ for President Trump, if you know what I mean. Ask yourself, are you the froster? Or the frosting?”

Christie crammed the last of the cake into his gaping maw. “See you around, kid,” he mumbled.

Jimmie sat in stunned silence. If he didn’t know any better, he’d have thought the former governor of New Jersey had just threatened him. In his line of work, he’d been used to being threatened—by lawyers, usually. Never by a janitor.

Jimmie was beginning to sense that something . . . untoward might have happened to this mysterious predecessor. The ghostwriter who had left behind “big shoes to fill,” according to the press secretary. Big . . . concrete shoes?

J
immie Bernwood returned to the Royal Linoleum Hotel—“VACUUMED DAILY,” according to the neon sign—well after dark. He’d gone suit shopping, which meant forgoing the chauffeured car he’d arrived at work in for public transportation. He’d spent an extra forty-five minutes waiting on the Metro, which had stopped running during yet another electrical blackout. So far, he’d learned that when the trains did run on time, you could be sure the buses wouldn’t. And good luck hailing a taxi—Uber had put most of them out of business, just before getting put out of business themselves by Bikinibus. Washington’s entire traffic system was a mess . . . which, he supposed, was a good analogy for the government. Nothing prepared you better for working in DC like living in DC. Even when things were rolling along smoothly, you sensed there was a wreck just around the corner.

He fumbled with his keys. A prostitute passed by with a john. Jimmie should have taken Emma’s offer to put him up in a Trump hotel last week. At least the hookers there would be high-class—the kind that accepted Bitcoin instead of Starbucks gift cards.

But it hadn’t felt right to him. Even though he knew this was the lowest of the low in journalistic gigs—a celebrity ghostwriter who’d signed a nondisclosure agreement (a gag order, basically)—he needed some measure of independence. He was drawing the line at the daily allowance for food. The whole situation reminded him of when he’d dated Cat while working under her at the
Daily Blabber
. Time apart was a good thing. A healthy thing. Even if you didn’t think you needed it, you needed it. Well, until one of you goes off and screws some guy from the
New York Times
.

He flopped down on the bed with the weight of a lead-filled corpse. It was like landing at the bottom of a rock quarry. The only thing harder than the criminals at the Royal Linoleum Hotel were the beds.

A deep moan issued forth from the other side of the wall.

He lifted his head. There was a low grunt, followed by another moan.

Yes. Yes. Harder
.

There was a sharp knock on the wall between the rooms, and then another. Somebody was getting some use out of the beds, at least.

Jimmie grabbed a pillow and wrapped it around the back of his head, covering his ears. He needed to get to sleep soon. He had to be back at the White House in less than twelve hours, and if he didn’t get a solid ten hours of shut-eye, he was a cranky bastard. Maybe when they finally assigned him an office, he could just sleep under the desk.

You like that? Say my name . . . say my name.

Teddy Mac
.

Jimmie lifted the pillow and sat up. Teddy Mac? It couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. No way. He pressed an ear up to the wall, which appeared to be nothing more than wallpaper over plywood.

Who’s your daddy?

I don’t know . . . oooooh . . . I’ve never met him . . . ahhhhh . . .

Son of a bitch.

Although the headboard continued to hit the wall, Jimmie knew with 100 percent certainty that the voices weren’t coming from whoever was doing the bed-shaking. The voices were from the television, which was turned up to cover whatever action was really going on next door. Whoever was on the other side of the wall was watching the sex tape that had landed Jimmie Bernwood in hot water. Scalding-hot water. Boiling water that had ultimately cost him his job at the
Daily Blabber
.

They were watching the Ted Cruz sex tape.

J
immie phoned the front desk. The man with the Kardashian accent answered. It was the same man who’d given him the keys to the room. Actually, the only man who appeared to work at the Royal Linoleum Hotel besides the housekeepers. Jimmie explained that he wanted to file a noise complaint.

“I’m trying to get some sleep, and these guys—well, you can hear for yourself,” Jimmie said, holding the phone receiver up to the wall. The pounding continued. “You hear that?”

“I can hear it from here,” the man at the front desk said wearily.

“Well, aren’t you going to do something about it?”

“It should be over soon. In my experience, these things never last more than eight or nine minutes. Especially with how vigorous they are going at it. By the time I got up from my desk and walked over there—well, they’d be vaping on the balcony.”

Jimmie slammed the phone down. Eight or nine minutes? The sex tape went on for a full two and a half hours. It was as long and grueling as
Batman v Superman
. In fact, the tape was so grim and gritty at points that some believed it had also been directed by Zack Snyder.

It had been played so many times during the jury trial that it was burned into Jimmie’s mind. Sometimes at night, when he closed his eyes, the candidate’s smarmy visage slithered across
his field of vision. In night-vision green, which impossibly made him look even creepier. To this day, Jimmie couldn’t hear Pitbull’s “Timber” without thinking of the rattling venetian blinds, Cruz’s saggy pecs, and the squeaking.

Dear God, the squeaking.

It wasn’t surprising somebody was watching it in the next room. The video had spread far and wide after he’d posted it in full on the
Daily Blabber
. Once a sex tape gets out, there’s no putting that genie back into the bottle of lube. Everyone and their mother had seen it; some people had probably watched it with their mothers. Jimmie wasn’t one to judge.

What bothered him, however, was that whoever was on the other side of the wall had started playing it just as he arrived home for the day. Was somebody taunting him?

There was something else nagging him, too. It took him a few more minutes to figure it out. When he did, it was as obvious as Jimmie’s day had been long: The knocking of the headboard against the wall didn’t have the regular ebb and flow of a couple making whoopee. It came and went in odd fits:

BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP.

BUMP-BUMP.

BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP.

It reminded him of the rhythmic code used by the human traffickers in California, the ones he’d been embedded with. They’d used it over the phone, though, and not through a wall. Was someone tapping out a message?

Listen to yourself, Jimmie
, he thought.
Only in Washington for a week, and already you’re seeing conspiracies. Get your head checked, or get out of town
.

That was one thought—that was what he wanted to think. But what he wanted to be true and what was true were probably two very different things. It wasn’t a conspiracy theory if it checked out; it was just a conspiracy.

BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP.

BUMP.

BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP—

Jimmie searched for a pen and paper. Inside the bedside drawer, he found a Royal Linoleum Hotel ballpoint pen. No paper—the closest he could find was a Gideon Bible.

He opened it to the title page and began recording the knocking on the wall as hash marks.

After he’d filled two pages of the Bible, a pattern emerged. He’d recorded the same message twice now. Whoever was over there was going to keep banging it out (pun intended), but he had enough to go on now.

It was definitely the same code used by the smugglers: Morris code. It had been invented by some woman named Katie Morris, who felt that Morse code was too complicated. (Jimmie happened to agree with her.) The idea was simple: The number of taps between each pause corresponded to a letter of the alphabet. One tap for
A
, two for
B
, and so on. He translated the message as:

Which could be parsed as:

Jimmie had plenty of questions. Meet
where
in Clinton Plaza? How would he recognize who he was supposed to be meeting? Why not pick a meeting place without a
Z
in its name? (Those twenty-six taps had taken
forever
.) For that matter, why not cut a few words out of that message? It was quarter past ten already. Had this guy never sent a code before? And if Jimmie’s life were truly in danger, why not just tell him face-to-face right now? They were just some cheap wood and insulation apart. Why meet clandestinely in a park at the witching hour?

Jimmie rapped on the wall with knuckles to begin his own Morris code message. Before he got to his third rap, the television went silent. Jimmie heard the door open and close. There were footsteps on the stairs. His neighbor was on the run.

Jimmie rushed onto the outdoor balcony that connected the hotel rooms. He leaned over the second-floor railing. He couldn’t see anybody down in the parking lot. Whoever had been next door was gone. But he knew where the mysterious wallbanger would be in just a few short hours. The same place he would be: Clinton Plaza.