A Separate War and Other Stories (26 page)

“Mr. President?”

“Ah, come in, Fred. Have a drink: it's going to be a long ride.”

“Thank you, sir.” He poured a couple of fingers and sat in the chair Tweed had just vacated. “I've made up a list, here, you'll want to check.” He handed Braxn a sheet of paper. “No banquet, of course, after the state funeral. These are just the people we're inviting to dinner.”

Braxn tried to study the list, the representatives of some twenty countries. But he couldn't seem to focus his mind on it. Suddenly the world
split
, and he knew what his father had been talking about. It was as if only the left side of his body was here in the atrium, talking to Fred—and the right side was walking down the steps in front of the White House, inhabiting an old body full of aches and twinges, looking at the cherry blossoms with a rheumy, jaundiced eye, nose and mouth full of bitter Toscani cigar smoke.

That young upstart that pup Harriman he thinks he can scare me, ME for shit's sake I ought to—

Chauffeur opening rear door, touching his cap. “Thank you, Harry.”

The left-hand side of the universe welled up crimson and faded out and Braxn sat up, rubbing his arm, then kneading his chest. Fred came tearing in with a glass.

“It's all right, Fred.” Braxn held up a hand, waving, refusing the water. “As I say, it's happened—”

Fred's sleeve buzzed. He set the water down and talked to his bracelet. “I'm busy, damn it. What? What!”

“Tweed's had a heart attack. Right in front here.”

Braxn didn't move a muscle. “Get that dossier.”

“God, that's right, that's what—” He spoke to the bracelet. “Manila folder on the seat of Tweed's car. Get it if you have to steal the
car
.”

“Guess I'd better go down. Make sure the area's cordoned off. And have somebody grind out a short speech for me to give to the reporters.”

“Guess Tweed's too old for another transplant, or an implant.”

“Probably.”

“Hopefully,” Braxn whispered. The two of them went off to the elevator.

Other members of the cortege were standing around, buzzing in a low murmur, mostly French and English. It looked like a theatre-of-the-absurd funeral, as if a state figure had died on cue, rows of black limousines and platoons of mourning dignitaries already arranged for; or as if the body had been on the way to its hearse and had been carelessly dropped on the sidewalk.

The only man not dressed in black was the White House physician, wearing a conservative twill one-piece.

“Any chance?”

“No, Mr. President. He's been on borrowed time and tissue for fifteen years. At his age, with his habits, it should have worn out long ago.”

Braxn looked at the old man he had just fought with and killed. Greyish skin, blue lips pulled over a wide, surprised yawn, eyes red slits where somebody had closed them, hands dead white claws on scrawny exposed chest. Smell of cheap cigar smoke competing with embarrassing evidence of final peristaltic surge.

A ground-car ambulance pulled up over the front lawn and, after they had taken the body away, Braxn got into the limousine directly behind the hearse and led the cortege off across the river.

 

Not too surprisingly, even after a lifetime of scrupulous churchgoing, Tweed admitted in his will to having always been an atheist and wanting no part of the barbaric practice of having his bones planted in magic ground. Instead he preferred antiseptic cremation, his ashes to be scattered in the Potomac by his lifelong companion, chauffeur, manservant, Harry Doyle.

Unfortunately, the Environmental Services Commission pointed out, that was against the law. Gently but firmly they reminded Tweed's estate that the Potomac is not the Ganges. At least not in Washington.

Of course, the Potomac also runs through Maryland on its course to the Chesapeake Bay. So Harry was dispatched with the urn to nearby Charles County, to go to Indian Rock and scatter Tweed's ashes not so very far downstream from his beloved Capitol.

(Harry, who had always hated the old man's guts, got as far as Waldorf, where he flushed the ashes down a toilet in the men's room of a Gulf station. Then he drove on to Indian Rock and drank a six-pack while watching the Potomac flow sluggishly by.)

 

After the funeral, the tea went quite well, and even the dinner afterwards, with all the enemies and switch-hitters and unaligned, was only occasionally marred by dignified argument, strained through the teeth.

During the tea, the West Pakistani ambassador implored Harriman to sign the draft bill. Braxn told him bluntly that the bill in its present form, tripling the draft call, would just put too severe a strain on American manpower. Besides, it would be political suicide—a Gallup taken the week before showed that 49 percent of Americans wanted us to withdraw the seventy-five thousand advisors already there…and 11 percent wanted us to throw our support over to East Pakistan and Tibet!

Accordingly, the next day Braxn vetoed the bill, as almost everybody but Tweed had expected. The veto was quietly but with lightning speed approved by the House.

A compromise bill, doubling the draft quotas, had been introduced earlier. It fizzled out by negative vote on engrossment and third reading.

The third and final draft bill was a complicated mess of new apportionment criteria, full of obfuscatory rhetoric and pages of figures. But if you sat down with a blue pencil and an adding machine, you'd find it boiled down to another compromise: essentially providing for a 1997 draft call of eighty thousand rather than sixty thousand.

“This bill here,” Braxn said, tapping the folder with a pencil, “is about the best you're going to get out of this Congress. I'm not sure that you'll get even this, though. I, for one, need more justification than Pakistan.”

“You've
got
it, sir!” The man who said it was a burly, bullet-headed, handsome soldier with so many stars on his shoulders that he only had to call one man “sir.”

“The general's right, Mr. President.” The secretary of defense was a slim, bland-looking man who looked as if he might be an insurance executive or the dean of a small law school. In fact, he had been both. He had never been a soldier. “We realize you probably haven't had time to read the entire report—”

“I've read it. I'm still not convinced.”

“Well, it convinced
me
,” the secretary said. “We've got to think of the future—”

“—in the light of the 1995 Geneva Accords, especially,” the general interrupted. “We're going to be headed for bad trouble if—”

“Wait, wait.” Braxn waved a hand at both of them. “I understand the argument. You assume there will never be another Two Chinas War; that the Geneva Accords forbidding the use of…certain weapons in international conflict, make our technologically oriented weaponry obsolete. That we ought to retool downwards, train fewer troops—
no
troops, eventually—in the use of sophisticated weapons…in effect, ‘detoxify' our military back to, hell, all the way back to World War II—”

“Sir, that's not it at all. Begging your pardon, sir…we plan to keep the modern weaponry in the event that the Accords break down. But more and more men have to be allotted to Infantry and regular Artillery if we're going to be able to cope with these brushfire wars with backw—with small countries.”

“And to be baldly frank about it,” the secretary said, “we need Pakistan, we need to not only stay there but increase our involvement, up to fourfold—otherwise, we aren't going to have the nucleus of experienced noncoms and officers we'll need if a
real
war comes up.”

“I think you're both unduly alarmed. General, approximately what percentage of our forces are combat veterans?”

“Well…sir, damn it, nearly sixty percent. But that doesn't mean anything! Most of those men got their combat experience in the Two Chinas War…and you can't blame them for thinking in terms of nukes and lasers and disruptors—not bullets and C-6 and lousy five-hundred-pound bombs! They're just plain ill equipped—”

“Then haul 'em back and teach 'em, General! Oh hell”—he tossed the pencil down on the bill—“I assume you both know that this bill is going to pass, whether I veto it or not. By the narrowest of margins, of course; the Senate wants a stronger military, but it doesn't want to seem hawkish to the folks at home. To the people who are going to
be
drafted.

“I'll think about it. I'll
keep
thinking about it. Gentlemen, I hate to seem abrupt, but we just aren't getting anywhere. Besides, I have some very important handshaking to do…”

Both men rose. “Well, thank you for taking time out to listen to us, sir,” the general said. “Again, I urge you to—”

Braxn cut him short with a wave and a smile. “I may. Good-bye.”

As soon as the men disappeared, Braxn took out his pen and looked at the document, without seeing it.
I wonder if either of them understands,
he thought,
that it's not really a military question at all
. It had to do with his relations with Congress. Since he had gotten to the presidency essentially through a governorship, he didn't have many real friends in the legislature.

There would be a lot of noise when the public deciphered it and found out that it meant larger draft calls all around. He could make them pass it over his veto, and come out lily white. Or he could sign the damn thing and take some of the heat off Congress.

The old-fashioned flat-nib fountain pen scratched loudly on the parchment.
Anachronisms
, Braxn thought, and he punched his secretary's desk.

“Send in the Scouts and feed me the speech.” He turned up the gain slightly on the receiver built into his eyeglass frame. This was the last formal appointment of the day.

It took about ten minutes, parroting the words and actions that his secretary fed to him. Twelve Eagle Scouts in full regalia, their scoutmaster in mufti. Braxn amused himself by imagining what the spindly little man would look like in the traditional shorts and Teddy Roosevelt hat. From Harriman's memory he dragged up a half-century-old image of Wally Cox playing
Mr. Peepers.