The Chosen One

TWELVE

Washington, DC, Wednesday March 22, 06.35

She was with Liz, in the shady area at the back of their garden. They were holding hands, Liz tugging her, a five-year-old girl impatient to show her big sister what she had found. They were wading through grass that had grown taller than they were, brushing their bare arms. Any second now, they would find it. It would be here, at the bottom of the garden.

A loud siren yanked her from sleep and bolted her upright. Her heart was thumping. The siren sounded again, though now Maggie realized it was the ringer on her cellphone, left on her bedside table. She squinted at her watch: 6.35am.

‘Hello.’

‘Maggie. It’s Stuart. Did I wake you?’

‘No. Not at all.’ It was a reflexive lie. No one in Washington ever admitted to being asleep, not even at 6.35am. In DC setting the alarm for 7am counted as a lie-in.

‘Sorry about that. Anyway, put the TV on.’

‘Is this like some kind of daily service? Because I don’t remember signing up.’

‘Now.’ There was something different in Goldstein’s voice. Not so much panic as a kind of manic energy.

Maggie’s eyes were still closed, as if she were half-expecting to glimpse whatever it was Liz had promised to show her. She fumbled for the remote, knocking over both a glass of water and her watch in the process.

‘Jesus.’

‘My first reaction too.’

‘Hold on, I haven’t got it on yet.’ She leaned over the bed, to grope on the floor there. Her hand was met with a discarded T-shirt and a pair of sneakers, as well as an eye-mask she’d once picked up on a business class flight.

At last, the remote. She aimed it at the small box in the corner and waited for it to glow into life. It was tuned to MSNBC: unable to sleep, she’d been watching a re-run of Olbermann in the middle of the night.

Still squinting, she gasped at what she saw. ‘Fucking hell.’

‘My sentiments exactly.’

She couldn’t say anything else, even though she knew Stuart was waiting for an instant reaction. But she simply couldn’t speak. All she could do was stare at the words streaming across the bottom of the screen.

Breaking News: Vic Forbes found dead in New Orleans.

THIRTEEN

The Corner, National Review Online, posted March 22, 07.39:

It’s too early to speculate, details are sketchy, yadda, yadda, yadda. (The fullest account so far seems to come from AP.) Suffice it to say, we know what Democrats would be howling right now if there were a Republican in the White House. Don’t we? Well, conservatives should not sink to their level. Instead, we should do no more than point out that some deaths are more convenient than others. And for Stephen Baker the death of Vic Forbes is very convenient indeed.

From the comments thread, Talking Points Memo, March 22, 08.01:

We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead and I don’t want to speak ill of Vic Forbes. Like everyone else in Washington, apparently, I never knew the guy, never even heard of him until this week. But I would be lying if I said that a deep wave of relief did not come over me when I heard the news just now. I’m not proud of that, but there we are. I want to be honest. Bottom Line: Forbes was trying to destroy the elected president of this country and that was a threat not only to Baker and the Democrats – though it most certainly was that – but to the United States constitution. With his death, that clear and present danger to the republic has passed . . .

FOURTEEN

Washington, DC, Wednesday March 22, 06.37

Maggie kept staring at the screen, which showed a residential street in New Orleans, a row of timber-clad houses in light blues and greens, with the one clearest in vision now behind yellow-and-black tape. Even from here, the words were in focus: Police Line Do Not Cross.

She clicked channels: same street, different angle. With a reporter doing a stand-up. She could hear Stuart breathing heavily into the phone, waiting for her to speak. She turned up the volume on the TV.

‘. . . few details at this hour, Tom. What sources are telling this network unofficially is that the circumstances in which Mr Forbes was found were—’ and here the reporter made a great show of looking down and checking his notebook, ‘—bizarre.’

‘Bizarre?’ echoed Maggie.

‘Let me in and I’ll tell you.’

‘You’re here?’

‘Cab just pulled up.’

Now she needed to absorb the strangeness both of what she had just heard on the television and the notion of Stuart Goldstein in her apartment building. Whatever affinity she felt for him as a colleague, she would never have described him as a friend. He hadn’t been to her place, she hadn’t been to his; that line had never been crossed.

‘You’re here,’ she said again, uselessly. ‘Can you give me five minutes?’

‘Two.’

Under the duvet, she was wearing only a man’s T-shirt – white, large and bearing the name of an Israeli basketball team. It had belonged to Uri, though she had never worn it while they were together. But last night she had dug it out, smelling it before putting it on, even though she knew the scent of him had been washed away long ago.

As she rushed to pull on a pair of jeans and to find a sweater, grateful that Stuart would take longer than most to get into her building, into the elevator and out again, she kept one ear on the intriguing tale tumbling out of the TV.

‘. . . we’re not able to disclose all the circumstances of Mr Forbes’s death at this time, Dan, and that’s not only because some of our sources are speaking only on background. It’s also because this is a family network and it’s still early on in the day.’

What were they talking about? What on earth had happened to Vic Forbes that they couldn’t give the details? Last night she and the rest of the band of brothers who had got Stephen Baker elected President had sat there facing a series of brick walls. There had been no good options. Whichever path they took, Vic Forbes with his bald head and his thin, bland, smiling face had stood there blocking their escape.

And now he was gone, helpfully magicked away and just in the nick of time.

She heard the knock on the door and the unmistakable sound of Stuart Goldstein’s breathless panting outside. She did a last scope of the apartment, scanning for potential embarrassment. Now that she had closed the door to her bedroom, the place looked tidy enough. One of the advantages of Washington hours: you were barely home long enough to make the place a mess.

But still, and even in just that brief glimpse, she had seen something that had made her not quite embarrassed – no dirty laundry on the floor – but ever so slightly ashamed. In that short, stabbing second she experienced the apartment as if through the eyes of another.

She had seen that it was elegant, located in the much-admired art-deco grandeur of the Kennedy-Warren building, and stylishly furnished, with a sprinkling of items that hinted at her past life of constant and exotic travel. But she had also seen that it was, however subtly, empty. That it was, visible to the naked eye, the home of a person alone. And, her eye falling on the crisping leaves of a dying ficus, one without the nurturing ability even to keep a houseplant alive.

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