"How are you, Max?" Pickering said, smiling. "I gather the house is full."
"Yes, indeed."
"What am I to do?" Pickering said. "I need a place to stay. Is there some Democrat we can evict?"
Telford chuckled. "I don’t think we’ll have to go that far. There’s always room for you here, Mr. Pickering."
"Is Mrs. Fowler in town?"
"No, Sir. I believe she’s in Florida."
"Then why don’t I impose on the Senator?"
"I’m sure the Senator would be delighted," Telford said. He turned and took a key from the rack of cubbyholes. "I’ll take you up."
"I know how to find it. Come up in a while, and we’ll have a little liquid cheer."
"Why don’t I send up a tray of hors d’oeuvres?"
"That would be nice. Give me fifteen minutes to take a shower. Thank you, Max."
Pickering took the key and walked to the bank of elevators.
Max Telford turned to the desk clerk.
"I know you haven’t been with us long, Mr. Denny, but you do know, don’t you, who owns this inn?"
"Yes, Sir. Mr. Foster. Mr. Andrew Foster."
"And you know that there are forty-one other Foster Hotels?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Well, for your general information, as you begin what we both hope will be a long and happy career with Foster Hotels, I think I should tell you that Mr. Andrew Foster has one child, a daughter, and that she is married to the chairman of the board of the Pacific and Far Eastern Shipping Corporation."
"The gentleman to whom you just gave the key to Senator Fowler’s suite?" Mr. Denny asked, but it was more of a pained realization than a question.
"Correct. Mr. Fleming Pickering. Mr. Pickering and Senator Fowler are very close."
"I’m sorry, Mr. Telford, I just didn’t know."
"That’s why I’m telling you. There is one more thing. Until last week, we had a young Marine officer, a second lieutenant, in the house. His name is Malcolm Pickering. If he should ever appear at the desk here, looking for a room, which is a good possibility, I suggest that it would behoove you to treat him with the same consideration with which you would treat Mr. Foster himself; he is Mr. Foster’s grandson, his only grandchild, and the heir apparent to the throne."
"I take your point, Sir," Mr. Denny said.
"Don’t look so stricken," Telford said. "They’re all very nice people. The boy, they call him ‘Pick,’ worked two summers for me. Once as a sous-chef at the Foster Park in New York, and the other time as the bell captain at the Andrew Foster in San Francisco."
(Two)
Washington, D.C.
1735 Hours 19 December 1941
When Senator Richardson S. Fowler walked in, Fleming Pickering was sitting on the wide, leather-upholstered sill of a window in the Senator’s sitting room. A glass of whiskey was in Pickering’s hand.
Senator Fowler’s suite was six rooms on the corner of the eighth floor of the Foster Lafayette, overlooking the White House, which was almost directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the hotel.
"I had them let me in," Fleming Pickering said. "I hope you don’t mind. The house is full."
"Oh, don’t be silly," Senator Fowler said automatically, and then, with real feeling, "Jesus, Flem, it’s good to see you!"
Senator Fowler was more than a decade older than Fleming Pickering. He was getting portly, and his jowls were starting to grow rosy and to sag.
He looks more and more like a politician,Flem Pickering thought, aware that it was unkind. Years ago, as a very young man, Pickering had heard and immediately adopted as part of his personal philosophy an old and probably banal observation that to have friends, one must permit them to have one serious flaw. So far as Pickering was concerned, Richardson Fowler’s flaw was that he was a politician, the Junior Senator from the Great State of California.
Flem Pickering had a habit of picking up trite and banal phrases and adopting them as his own, ofttimes verbatim, sometimes revising them. So far as he was concerned, Richardson Fowler was the exception to a phrase he had lifted from Will Rogers and altered. Will Rogers said he had never met a man he didn’t like. Pickering’s version was that-Richardson Fowler excepted-he had never met a politician he had liked.
He had tried and failed to understand what drove Fowler to seek public office. It certainly wasn’t that he needed the work. Richardson Fowler had inherited from his father the San Francisco Courier-Herald, nine smaller newspapers, and six radio stations. His wife and her brother owned, it was said, more or less accurately, two square blocks of downtown San Francisco, plus several million acres of timberland in Washington and Oregon.
If Fowler was consumed by some desire to do good, to lead people in this direction or that, it seemed to Pickering that the newspapers and the radio stations gave Fowler the means to accomplish it. He didn’t have to run for office-with all that meant-for the privilege of coming east to the hot, muggy, provincial, small Southern town that was the nation’s capital, to consort with a depressing collection of failed lawyers and other scoundrels.
But, oh, Flem Pickering,he thought, what a hypocrite you are! Right now you are delighted to have access to a man with the political clout you pretend to scorn.
Senator Fowler dropped his heavy, battered, well-filled briefcase at his feet and crossed the room to Pickering. They shook hands, and then the Senator put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders and hugged him.
"I was worried about you, you bastard," he said. "You and Patricia. She here with you?"
"She’s in San Francisco," Pickering said. "She’s fine."
"And Pick?"
"He’s at Pensacola, learning how to fly," Pickering said. "I thought you knew."
"I knew he was going down there," the Senator said. "I had dinner with him, oh, six days, a week ago. But he never came to say good-bye to me."
There was disappointment, perhaps even a little resentment, in his voice. Senator Fowler had known Pick Pickering from the day he was born.
"If you were a second lieutenant and they gave you two days off, would you spend them seeing an aging uncle-politician, or trying to get laid?" Pickering asked with a smile.
The Senator snorted a laugh. "Well, he could have tried to squeeze in fifteen minutes for me between jumps," he said. He turned and walked to an antique sideboard loaded with whiskey bottles. "I have been thinking about having one of these for the last two hours. You all right?"
Flem Pickering raised his nearly full glass to show that he was.
Senator Fowler half-filled a glass with Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch, added one ice cube, and then sprayed soda into it from a wire-wrapped soda bottle.
"This stuff," the Senator said, raising his glass, "is already getting in short supply. Goddamn German submarines."
"I have four hundred and eleven cases," Fleming Pickering said. "If you treat me right, I might put a case or two aside for you."
Fowler, smiling, looked at him curiously.
"Off the Princess, the Destiny, and the Enterprise, " Pickering explained.
The Pacific Princess, 51,000 tons, a sleek, fast passenger liner, was the flagship of the Pacific and Far Eastern Shipping Corporation. The Pacific Destiny and the Pacific Enterprise, 44,500 tons each, were sister ships, slightly smaller and slower, but, some said, more luxurious.