“Help the Senator,” Oscar commanded, jumping to his feet. “And get Sosik in here, right away.”
Bambakias vanished in a cluster of panicked retainers. The room emptied as suddenly as a Tokyo subway car. Oscar and Greta found themselves suddenly alone.
Oscar watched the screen. One of the American defectors had just appeared on-camera. The man looked very familiar, utterly cyni-cal, and extremely drunk. Oscar recognized him as an acquaintance: he was the public relations officer for the Louisiana air base. He was wearily delivering a prepared statement, with French subtitles. “What a genius move! Huey’s dumped his Trojan horse people into the hands of French spooks. The French will hide those rogue airboys in some bank vault in Paris. We’ll never hear from them again. They’ve sold out their country, and now the crooked sons of bitches will live like kings.”
“What a convenient interruption that was,” Greta told him. She was still eating lunch, pincering her chopsticks with surgical skill. “The Senator had you pinned down and right on the spot. I can’t believe you had the nerve to pull that trick.”
“Actually, I was keeping a weather eye on that screen all along, just in case I needed a nice distracting gambit.”
She sampled the dim sum and smiled skeptically. “No you weren’t. Nobody can do that.”
“Actually, yes, I can do that sort of thing. I do it every day.”
“Well, you’re not distracting me. What was it about this Moira person? It must be something pretty awful. I could tell that much.”
“Moira is not your problem, Greta.”
“Ha! Nobody around here is addressing my problems.” She frowned, then poured a little more soy. “Really good food here, though. Amazing food.”
“I’m. going to get to your problems. I haven’t forgotten them. I just had to shelve those issues for a minute while I was getting the poor man to eat.”
“Too bad you couldn’t get him to keep it down.” Greta sighed. “This has certainly been eye-opening. I had no real idea what to expect from your Senator. Somehow, I imagined he’d be just like you.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Oh… a Machiavellian, showboating, ultra-wealthy political hack. But Alcott’s not like that at all! Alcott’s a real idealist. He’s a patriot! It’s a tragedy that he’s clinically depressed.”
“You really think that the Senator is clinically depressed?”
“Of course he is! It’s obvious! He’s crashed from starvation stress. And that myoclonic tremor in his hands — that’s an overdose of neural appetite suppressants.”
“He’s supposed to be long off all those pills.”
“Then he must have been hoarding them, and eating them se-cretly. Typical behavior in the syndrome. Those repeated presentations about his so-called criminality — those far-fetched guilt obses-sions… He’s very depressed. Then when you tricked him into eating, he turned manic. His affect is all over the map! You need to test him for cognitive deficits.”
“Well… he was just faint from hunger. Normally, he’d see right through a childish gambit like that chowder stunt.”
Greta put down her chopsticks and lowered her voice. “Tell me something. Tell me the truth. Did you ever notice that he’s enormously outspoken and energetic in public, but then he always retreats and cocoons himself? For, say, two or three days?”
Oscar nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“First, he’s very expressive and charming, working twenty-hour days, throwing off a lot of sparks. Then, he’s just gone. He claims he’s thinking things over, or that he needs his privacy — but basically, he’s dug himself a hole and pulled it over him. That’s not uncommon with creative personalities. Your Senator has bipolarity. I imagine he’s al-ways been bipolar.”
“He’s ‘in the back of the bus.’ ” Oscar sighed. “That’s what we used to call it, when he pulled that routine on the campaign.”
“In the back of the bus, with Moira.”
“Yeah. Exactly. Moira was very good at getting next to him when his guard was down.”
Greta narrowed her eyes. “You did something awful to Moira, didn’t you?”
“Look, the man is a U.S. Senator. I put him into office, I have to look after his interests. He had an indiscretion during the campaign. So what? Who am I to judge about that?” He paused. “And who are you, for that matter?”
“Well, I came here so that I could judge the Senator,” she said. “I hoped he could really help me. We could have used an honest, decent Senator to back the lab, for once. Obviously, Alcott’s some-one who could really understand us. But now he’s been destroyed, because he went head-to-head against Huey — a man who just chews up people like him. Politics always chews up people like him.” Her face grew long and grim. “Look what he’s done with this hopeless old building, look at this beautiful work he’s done. He must be some kind of genius, and now they’ve just crushed him. This really makes me sick at heart. What a loss. He’s lost his mind. It’s a national tragedy.”
“Well, I admit that it’s a setback.”
“No, it’s over. He’s not going to come around just because you force-fed him. Because he is demented. He can’t help you anymore — and that means that you can’t help me. So it’s all over, and it’s time for me to give this thing up.”
“We’re not going to give up.”
“Oscar, let me go back to my lab now. Let me work. It’s the reasonable thing.”
“Sure it is, but I’m. not a reasonable person, and these aren’t reasonable times.”
Leon Sosik came into the office. “Bit of a debacle there.” His face was gray.
“Can you believe the audacity of that guy?” Oscar said. “Huey had a French aircraft carrier waiting offshore. The guy’s a traitor! He’s in league with a foreign power!”
Sosik shook his head. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“We can’t acquiesce in a naked power grab like this. We’ve got to nail Huey’s feet to the Senate floor and beat him like a drum.”
Sosik stared at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m serious! Our man has flushed Huey out of the canebrake, and now he’s revealed his true colors. He’s a clear and present menace to national security. We’ve got to take him out.”
Sosik turned to Greta with courtly concern. “Dr. Penninger, I wonder if you’d allow me to speak to Mr. Valparaiso privately for a moment.”
“Oh, of course.” Greta rose reluctantly, setting down her chop-sticks.
“I could get our chef to put together a little takeout box for you,” Sosik said considerately.
“Oh no, I do need to be going … If you could just get me a cab. There’s a conference in town. I have work to do.”
“I’ll have our chauffeur take you to your meeting, Doctor.”
“That would be perfect. Thank you very much.” She gathered her purse and left.
Oscar watched her reluctantly, then spotted a screen remote and plucked it up. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” he told Sosik. “She has an agenda, you know. We could have gotten to her a little later.”
“They told me you were like this,” Sosik said soberly. “They told me you were exactly like this, and I couldn’t believe it. Would you put down that remote control, please?”
Oscar squeezed his way through a set of feeds. “This is a break-ing development, Leon. We’ve got to spin this quick, and nail the guy before he launches his next cover story.”
Sosik gently plucked the remote from Oscar’s hand. He put his hand over Oscar’s shoulder. “Kid,” he said, “let’s go for a walk. Let’s do some serious face-time together.”
“We don’t have a lot of time to kill right now.”