Free The Parnell Affair by Seth James Page A

feathers,” she said.  “He was probably just shooting his mouth off.”
    She returned to bed, sitting above the covers.
    “I thought as much,” Joe said.  “However, this afternoon they had someone approach me again.  To see if I had changed my mind, presumably.  I was at lunch at Scotch Steak— that restaurant in The Four Seasons —when one of Senator Perkin's sons asked to have a word with me at the bar.”
    “Not the younger one,” she said, smiling.
    “No, not the drunk driver,” Joe said.  “He'd have been under the bar; it was nearly two, after all.  In any event, Perkins asked if I'd 'had a change of heart about what the President asked of me.'  He then, without waiting for my answer, launched into what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech about how a country is like a family and how we sometimes have to do things we don't like for the good of our family.  He laid particular stress on the word 'family' and then said there was nothing, for instance, that he wouldn't do for his wife.”  Joe looked at Sally.  “I managed to restrain myself and not hit him,” he said.
    “What did you say?” she asked, feeling oddly touched by Joe's protectiveness.
    “That I'd kill for my wife,” Joe said.  “And that if he ever came round with poorly veiled threats again, I'd start with him.”
    “Joe!” she cried.
    “Hard to believe I was an ambassador,” he said.  “Maybe all those pent-up emotions from years of controlling myself are spilling out the cracks,” he said, thinking thoughts of guilt-paying and the debt of gratitude he felt toward her that neither taking or giving a life could repay.  “Nevertheless,” he said.  “I don't believe we can dismiss their threats as spur of the moment.”
    Sally sat quietly for a few seconds and then shook her head, as if returning to the present.  “I appreciate the sentiment, Joe,” she said, touching his arm for a moment.  “But I can't believe they'd actually go through with it.  It couldn't possibly help their position.”
    “Revenge,” he said.  “A delicacy for the stupidly vicious.”
    “More trouble than it's worth,” she said.  “It wouldn't help convince anyone that Saddam has or wants uranium,” she counted off, “it would spark an investigation, which would in turn make them appear to be suppressing evidence counter to their claims, and they'd wind up looking like they're—like they're trying to start a wa r for no reason.  It's an ugly threat,” she said, “but it must be an empty one.”
    “You're right, I suppose,” he said with a sigh.  “Still, for them to be so obstinately against the facts—” he paused, shaking his head, “maybe they are.  Trying to start an unnecessary war.”
     
    Across town, on Pennsylvania Ave, the President sat in a chair near his wardrobe handling a left wingtip shoe.  He sat in his light blue pajamas, his feet bare.  He'd been on his way to putting his shoes in the closet when he'd noticed the sole coming away from the side of one toe.
    “If they mean that much to you,” Linda Howland, the First Lady, said, “send them out to be mended.”
    She sat across the room in front of her mirror applying face cream.  One of the beauties of the Texas town where she and Pete had grown up, she was generally held by the press as the most deserving of th e title 'First Lady' since Jackie Kennedy.  Elegant without pretension; poised but visibly moved to pity, commiseration, respect, and forgiveness; only once had she ever been pressed by a reporter, treated as a hostile witness.  And then she had responded with patience, never surrendering civility or acknowledging poor manners, until she had—in the space of two minutes—converted the reporter to an admirer before the entire press room.  The reporter wrote a glowing editorial about her that Sunday, enumerating the many charities she had founded or managed, both with her father's enormous oil wealth (as one of Big Oil's biggest and