Note: In what follows, Max's thoughts about Jed Bartlet are his own, not mine. And another minor correction of something I wrote earlier: Max didn't throw his whole wallet at the manager of the good restaurant, just a handful of bills. He clearly needs his ID to get through the following scene.
Chapter 29:
The next time Josh's phone rang, he wasn't so quick to tell the agents to let the new arrivals in.
"Who? No, never heard of them. Why-? Oh. Oh, I see. Yeah, okay, you'd better do your thing and send them along. Yes, I know you'd rather tell them to come back in two months when you've checked out every last contact they've ever had with anyone, but-look, let me talk to Gerald."
There was a pause while the agent found his superior and put him on the phone.
"Yeah, Gerald, look-these are the people Noah hitched a ride with this afternoon, right? You've been all over them and their place. I'll bet you took it apart looking for him, didn't you? And ran their names through your computers, and didn't come up with anything. Yeah, I know-I've gathered they probably didn't vote for me, and I'm furious about the way they've been treating their nanny and her child, not to mention their own boy this afternoon-but you've basically checked them out already and you said they came out clean as far as security goes. My son caused them a pretty significant amount of trouble this afternoon. And their baby is in my house. So you'd better scan them and send them on down to get him-as long as you don't find anything on them while you're scanning, of course."
The agents were thorough in searching both the Maxwells and their car. It was another forty-five minutes before Max and Sabrina were put into one of the Suburbans and driven to the lighthouse door. The snow was too deep for the Mercedes, and the agents were happier keeping it outside the gate in any case-even though they'd insisted on checking it over for explosives before they allowed its owners to go on without it.
The couple managed to get through the entire process without making a single demand or complaint. Max did open his mouth to protest once, when he saw the agents starting to pry the seats out of his car, but he shut it again without a word.
Sabrina never even tried to say anything. She didn't have anything to say. Her mind still felt frozen. She couldn't stop shivering-she'd rushed out of the restaurant without her coat-but she was barely aware of that. She'd heard the firemen and policemen tell her that Tyler was all right, but she hadn't believed them; she thought they were lying, to calm her down. He couldn't really be all right. Someone was going to hand her his little body wrapped in a blanket, all cold and still. She just hoped she'd still be able to recognize his face.
She sat stiff and motionless beside Max in the back of the Suburban. He glanced sideways at her and wondered what was going on. He'd never seen her like this. He didn't know what to say to her.
He felt subdued himself, of course, but he was beginning to recover a little. The boy was all right-that was the main thing. Max wasn't much for babies, and he hadn't been particularly involved with his other children even when they got older, but he thought he cared as much as any man about them. He certainly didn't want anything to happen to his son.
He'd thought the kid would sleep till his nanny came home. Who could have guessed the house would catch on fire? He'd never heard of anything like that before. Things like that only happened in run-down dumps in the slums, not places where anyone he knew lived.
What could have started it? Something in the wiring, maybe. He wondered if it was too late to sue the contractor who'd done the last round of renovations for them. The house was a write-off now, and they'd have lost the contents: the electronics and furniture, some of his good suits, Sabrina's clothes and jewelry-the stuff she'd had with her, anyway. Thank God it wasn't their main place. The insurance would cover all that-at least, he hoped it would. As long as the adjusters didn't make a stink about their having left Tyler on his own. There'd be a brush-up with the police and child services about that, too. . . .
The lawyers would be able to spin it for them, though. He and Sabrina could say they'd thought Mariana was in the house when they left. Didn't know she'd gone out-no, the cops had been there, they'd be able to contradict that.
Well, she'd said she'd be back in an hour. They'd thought they heard her come back in before they left themselves. They'd called out to her, thought they'd heard her call back. Yeah, that should do it. It was a big house, there could easily have been an echo, the wind in the chimney, a voice from a TV left on, a sound from outside-something they could have heard and thought was Mariana answering, saying yes, yes, to their calls of was it her and was she back for the night. They'd get a reprimand and a warning to be more careful next time, but that would be about it. . . .
This train of thought felt steadying to Max. By keeping his mind fixed in its usual way on damage assessment and control, he was almost able to distract himself from the buzz of worry going on underneath. Almost, but not quite: he could still feel it jittering inside his head. It kept flashing out like heat lightning from around the edges of his rational arguments, jazzing his heart rate up and making him have to work to keep feeling in control.
What was worrying him wasn't what could have happened to Tyler. The boy was safe now, and Max wasn't the sort of guy to dwell on might-have-beens. It was what was lying ahead that had him on edge. He was about to meet the President of the United States-the Chief Executive of the country, the Commander-in-Chief of the world's largest and best-funded military (a good deal of Max's money came from defense contracts), the most powerful and influential leader on the planet, who could with a single word make or break Max's future chances for power and influence of his own-and he'd be doing it under circumstances that almost guaranteed he wasn't going to make a good impression on the man.
It didn't help that the President in question was Joshua Lyman. In the first place, he was a Democrat. Max was a Republican, of course. He didn't even know any Democrats. He couldn't think of any names he could drop to give himself some advantage when he had to talk to Lyman.
In the second place-and this was the worst of it-Lyman had a reputation for being what Max's father would have called "sea-green incorruptible." Max had always thought the phrase quixotic; he'd never believed anyone was truly incorruptible, not even Jed Bartlet, who'd had such a reputation for it until the MS scandal had shown the world that he could be as crooked as anyone else.
But Lyman was a different matter. There'd been questions about him when he was a brash young politico in Barlet's administration, of course-how much he'd known about the MS coverup, for one-and plenty more when that scandal broke during the Santos campaign. He'd seemed corrupt enough then, all right. They'd called him Lyin' Lyman; he'd gone to prison for lying under oath.
And then that scene on the dock right here in Crabapple Cove had been picked up by a webcam and made it onto the internet, and the whole world had seen it (Max hadn't, but he'd been willing to take other people's word for it) and realized that Lyman had been telling the truth all along. If integrity was sea-green, it seemed he was about as green as the sea could get. Anyone who'd go to prison just to keep his girlfriend out of trouble was clearly operating without any discernible trace of the self-interest Max had always assumed was the basis of every decision anyone who wasn't a complete idiot might make.
(Not only that, Max remembered dimly from the movie Sabrina had dragged him to that the woman hadn't even beenhis girlfriend at the time. She'd been his secretary or something, and-it seemed inconceivable, but everyone who'd known them had sworn up and down it was true-he'd never so much as touched her, even though he'd been in love with her for years.)
The obvious conclusion was that Lyman was an idiot. Max had read the news accounts and dismissed him as a fool. He and his friends had joked about how the guy had made it clear he couldn't function in the real world and ought to be shut up again for his own safety-probably in Saint Elizabeth's.
But then Arnold Vinick, a Republican president, had made him his advisor. The Governor of Maine had made him a U.S. Senator. And a landslide victory in a federal election had made him President of the United States. And along the way it became clear even to Max that Lyman was no Forrest Gump. Even his enemies-the intelligent ones- didn't doubt his intelligence, or his integrity, either. Of course Fox News did everything they could to paint the man as both a liar and a fool, but they didn't manage to convince as many people as they might have if he'd been elected a decade earlier, or if he'd been African-American instead of Jewish.
Max didn't care whether Lyman was a Jew or not, and he was intelligent enough not to take Fox too seriously. Their financial advisors were a joke. He didn't like a lot of Lyman's policies, especially on taxes, but he knew the man was no fool. And while he still wasn't convinced that any sensible man could truly be completely incorruptible, he had a feeling that dropping hints about the sizeable donation he was thinking of making to Lyman's re-election fund might not be the best way to go with this man.
The trouble was, he had no idea what the best way to go with this man would actually be. Here was the opportunity of a lifetime staring him in the face, and unless he could think of something pretty soon, Lyman was going to come away remembering him as the guy who'd left his kid alone in a house that burned down-and then shown up at the President's house without a coat on his back in the dead of winter, and with his wife coatless and shivering and staring straight ahead like a zombie beside him.
He wondered if he could get her to stay in the car while he went in to collect Tyler and have a word or two alone with the President. He could use that story about having thought Mariana was home when he left. Talk about how distraught his wife had been after the Service ripped her house up; get his sympathy, man-to-man. The whole thing had been their fault, really, after all-theirs and that boy's. What was his name? Noah. The President's son. The man owed him something, didn't he?
He wouldn't say that, of course. That wouldn't be politic at all. He'd play it innocent, go for the sympathy angle-that would be a start. And maybe he could do the "Of course you won't remember it, but we've met before" line. Max had spent enough time up here in Maine; there must be plenty of events he could have met the guy at. If he could just think of one-oh, yeah, of course. That big event in Augusta last year. That should do. . . .
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Max found he couldn't persuade his wife to stay in the car. She didn't seem to hear a word he said, just climbed out stiffly and followed the agents to the cottage door.
She looked like a wreck: her stockings torn, her hands and knees bloodied, her make-up half rubbed off. And there seemed to be some sort of bruise spreading across her face, probably from where she'd fallen when she'd jumped out of the car. Max had retrieved her shoe from the road in front of their house, so she did have a complete pair on now, but she was still hobbling. He wondered if she'd sprained something.
Watching her, he felt a mix of impatience (what a crazy thing to do; she'd have got to the house faster if she'd just stayed in the car), embarrassment (this was so not the way he wanted to meet the President), and something else that he couldn't quite put a name to, but was actually the dawning of a new kind of respect-one not entirely unmixed with fear. He felt rather the way he had as a boy when his friend's cat-which had always seemed like a docile creature, quite content to be patted and picked up and carted around as part of their games-had suddenly bitten his hand and scratched his face when he reached for her, then gone on a rampage around the room, knocking over the pictures on top of the piano and sending a vase of flowers crashing in a spectacular mess to the floor.
The next day they'd found her curled up on the floor of a closet with four tiny kittens sucking on her teats. Max had handled female cats with considerable caution after that.
The agents who'd driven them down from the gate followed them into the house. They had no intention of letting this pair out of their sight.
"Oh!" Sabrina gasped, and rushed towards Tyler.
"Oh, good lord," Josh moaned softly under his breath. "Them."
"Mr. President!" Max's eyes singled Josh out from the others in the room. "It's good to see you again, sir."
"Is it?" Josh said, wryly, not offering his hand. Max didn't notice the warning and blustered on.
"Of course, you wouldn't remember, sir, but we have actually met before. Last year, in Augusta,-"
"Oh, it was much longer ago than that," Josh cut in. "A little over nine years, I'd say. Nine years and four months, to be exact."
Max's eyes bulged and his face, its natural color already red, got redder.
"It was at Gagnon's." Josh's voice was silken. "You were celebrating your wife's birthday, I believe. But perhaps you don't remember. You were drunk at the time-quite offensively so, as I recall."
The red in Max's face deepened to an unbecoming puce.
"I, er, uh-" A memory began to stir, like creeping nausea. But surely that man had been someone else? A working man, he remembered, with battered hands and no jacket or tie. That couldn't possibly have been Joshua Lyman-could it? But then he remembered the story, how Lyman had worked on the docks after getting out of jail. . . .
Max's stomach suddenly soured, and his head began to pound. "Um, er-I'm, er-sorry." He licked his lips and remembered how one was supposed to speak to the President of the United States. "Uh-sir."
Josh's eyes suddenly hardened.
"That's nothing," he said. "It was a long time ago, and all it tells me about you is that nine years ago you were an arrogant, offensive little asshole when you'd had too much to drink. Today, though-today I saw a child who lives in your house but doesn't have a warm coat or a decent pair of boots to wear. In Maine, in winter, in the sub-zero temperatures we've been having here. That offends me."
"Her mother buys her clothes!" Max was astounded at the accusation. How could this man possibly think he had anything to do with buying the little brat's clothes?
"She buys them with what you pay her. I've been asking some questions about that, and it sounds to me as though you'd better consult with your accountants about how much the law requires you to pay a domestic worker, even one who gets room and board as part of the deal."
Max swallowed, hard.
"Um, yes-perhaps you're right-I'll-"
"Perhaps I'm right? You'd better believe I'm right! I know the federal employment laws inside out and backwards; I wrote half of them. If I were you, Maxwell, I'd have that talk with my accountants soon. I'd talk to them about a few other things, too, like making sure you've been paying enough social security and other benefits for Ms. Rivera. Or anything else in your affairs the IRS might take an interest in."
Max eyes turned glassy. His face had paled and was beaded with sweat. He looked, Josh thought, more like an oppossum caught in the headlights than the proverbial deer. He could almost picture the man with a long, ratty tail. The image did nothing to take the edge off his anger, which had very little to do with what had happened on that first date with Donna nine years ago.
"Come, man,"-and he gave Max a clap on the arm that only a fool would have mistaken for friendly, "we all have to face up to an audit some time or other, but no honest man really has anything to worry about. Come and have a drink. A tip to the wise, though: if by any chance you've been tempted to get involved with the MacInstalker Group, don't. They've been in our radar for over a year now."
Max's face, Josh thought, must be made of litmus paper: the pinkish-possum-white it had paled to a few moments ago was now taking on peculiar shades of gray-green. The man's hand slipped instinctively into his pocket for his cell phone.
"I wouldn't, if I were you." Josh steered his guest into the dining room. "That was privileged information I just gave you. Acting on it could be construed as a crime."
The defense contractor's offices had, in fact, been raided that afternoon. The news was already out on the wires, or Josh wouldn't have said anything at all. Max didn't guess that. He pulled his hand out of his pocket quickly, and wiped his sleeve over his dripping face.
"What will you have?" Josh asked, like any genial host. "There's some good whisky-but of course, you'll be driving soon, and with your wife and son in the car, you won't want to take any chances. Some of the punch, then?"
Josh poured him a glass. He enjoyed the expression on Max's face as he tasted it. His mother-in-law had mixed the stuff up from a package earlier in the evening, for the children.
"Come and meet my mother now," Josh suggested, as Max choked the sweet, sticky, and entirely non-alcoholic beverage down. "She's been wanting a word with you."
Baffled, Max followed the President into the living room, where he was introduced to an elderly woman.
"Young man," she said, putting down her knitting and fixing him with a look that reminded him uncomfortably of both his first-grade teacher and his grandmother, neither of whom had ever let him get away with a thing. "You have been very lucky today. Much, much luckier, from the sound of it, than you deserve."
Josh walked away quickly. He was still so angry about what could have happened to Tyler that he couldn't talk about it. His mother, though, had been determined to, ever since she'd heard Mariana's story.
Glancing back, Josh could see the man perspiring more heavily than ever, and turning new shades of pink and purple laced with white, grey, and green. He smiled grimly. He didn't envy Max Maxwell the next fifteen or twenty minutes. He had a feeling the man might actually prefer that visit from the IRS.
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