Free Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital Page B

Who’s going to be the lucky man?” She taps this man and that on the shoulder. “Not you, not you, not you,” she says. There is laughter at each table as she passes. “I’m rather particular,” she says, “about the men whose bed I’ll crawl into. I’m partial to the smell of power. Well, it’s the local aphrodisiac in this town, isn’t it? Can’t get up without it.”
    As faces loom out of the candlelight, Samantha sniffs at them with elaborate show. Sometimes she sees one of her professors from Georgetown U, but not often. It’s more a hangout for congressmen, senators, lobbyists, publicists, Pentagon brass, the whole Capitol Hill tribe. “This man,” she says, tapping him on the shoulder, and suddenly the spot swings toward them and highlights a well-known face, “this man has more government secrets tucked into his jockey shorts than you have bees in your honeysuckle. But we’ve got our little secrets here too.” And the spot moves slightly to bathe in white light the pillowy-lipped young woman at his side. She is expensively dressed—perhaps wrapped is a better word—in something clingy and silver. “Tinfoil,” Samantha announces, crumpling a little of the cloth in her hand. The metallic sound of foil comes from the speakers. People laugh. “Luckily for our patrons,” Samantha says, “we don’t allow cameras in here. If we did, they might have to pay dearly for their pleasures.” The spot lingers on the bare shoulders of the young woman and pans along the slit that runs from the hem of her skirt to thigh-high. “Anyway …” Samantha pauses dramatically, and the spot turns back to the senator’s face. “I’m sure he’s paid enough for her already.” Much laughter, as the spot and Samantha move on.
    She weaves between tables, she moves between dark and light. Each stretch of dark is immense. She slides her foot forward on the tiled floor and feels for the void. It can open up anywhere with no more than a second’s warning. Sometimes she has to steady herself by catching hold of a chair back or someone’s shoulder. She believes that Salamander may be present. He is her compass and her magnetic North Pole. She will find him. She believes she will know him by his smell. She has fantasies of causing Salamander pain, and when he is screaming, she will make him lead her to Sirocco, because Sirocco may have been the one who lit the fuse. But both of them knew , both of them planned , and the knowing is not something that Sam will forgive. “Halloween was a week ago,” she says, “but it’s always Halloween here, isn’t it? The place is always full of spooks. Trick or treat, that’s the question. Who’s the spook of the week?
    “Not you, not you, not you,” she says, tapping shoulders as she passes by. “When the lights go out in Washington, the powerful play musical secrets and musical beds. Did you hear the one about the guy in Intelligence who made his own lie and went to bed with it? Gave birth to an international incident but the CIA and the NSA pressured him to put it up for adoption. It grew up to be a full-sized war and then—because this is the way things go these days—it went looking for its birth father. There were blood tests, DNA, the whole works. Everything pointed to someone high up in Intelligence, who denied all on the grounds that he never fucked with the lie of the land. Turned out he was a double agent so they tripled him and packed him off to Pakistan and arranged for another double agent to accidentally on purpose bump him off.”
    This is the way it goes. Samantha loves the nervousness of the laughter. She gets high on it. “Who’s going to make the honor roll tonight?” she croons. She likes to tantalize. The spotlight roams and picks out faces here and there. “All sinners together, isn’t this cozy?” she asks. “All in the same boat. It’s like being crammed into the same hijacked plane.
    “You know,” she confides, “I only go to bed with