He conjured up a smile. “You’re really jealous! Shame on you.”
“Why would you go for her? She just had something that you wanted.”
“Clare, even though you’re a journalist, I really don’t think that’s any of your business.”
“I’m saying wicked things because I’m sad, and I’m jealous, and I’m lonely, and I’m sorry. And I’m getting really drunk. And you dumped me. For her.”
“I didn’t dump you. You dumped me, because I was out of town, and you wouldn’t fly down and join me, and you decided that it was a better career move to go live with our country’s worst enemies.”
“Oh, well, that’s better,” Clare said, and wrinkled her nose at him, and grinned a little. “I guess I’m getting through to you, finally.”
“I did my level best to make it work out for us, but you wouldn’t let me do it.”
“Well, it’s too late now.”
“Of course it’s too late.”
She looked at her watch. “And it’s getting pretty late tonight, too. ”
Oscar glanced at his mousebrain watch. The thing had just dampened his wrist with liquid waste, and it was nowhere near the correct time. It was sometime around midnight. “You’d better sleep this off, if you’re going to make the Senator’s flight back to Washing-ton.”
“Oscar, I have a better idea. Stop toying with me. Let’s just do it. This is my only night here, this is our big chance. Take me upstairs, let’s go to bed.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m not too drunk to know what I’m doing. I’m just drunk enough to be a lot of fun. You’ve been looking at me all night. You know I can’t stand it when you look at me with those big brown puppy-dog eyes.”
“There’s no future in that.” He was weakening.
“Who cares about the future? It’s about old times. Come on, it’s practically just as bad, just ’cause you want it so much.”
“It’s not just as bad. It’s worse to do it. It’s the worst of all. When the volcano burns, everyone knows it, but when the heart is in flames, who knows it?”
She blinked. “Huh?”
Oscar sighed. “I just don’t believe you, Clare. I’m a smooth talker and I know how to please, but as a male specimen, I’m just not that overwhelming. If I were, you’d have never left me in the first place.”
“Look, I already said I was sorry. Don’t rub it in. I can show you how sorry I am.”
“Who sent you here, really? Are there bugs in your purse? Are you wearing a wire right now? You got turned, didn’t you? They turned you, in The Hague. You’re a foreign agent. You’re a spy.”
Clare went very pale. “What is this? Have you cracked up? All this paranoia! You’re talking like the Senator at his worst!”
“What am I, a useful idiot? There’s a war on! Mata Hari was Dutch, for Christ’s sake.”
“You think they’d let me work for a Senator, if I was a Dutch spy? You don’t know what Washington’s like these days. You don’t know a damn thing about anything.”
Oscar said nothing. He watched her with lethal care.
Clare gathered the rags of her dignity. “You really insulted me. I’m really hurt. I have a good mind to just get up and leave you. Why don’t you call me a cab?”
“Then it’s the President, isn’t it?” Her face went stiff.
“It is the President,” he said with finality. “It’s me and Greta Penninger. The situation’s a little out of hand down here. It’d be better for domestic tranquillity if the girlfriend and I came to a sudden parting of our ways. Then it would all work out. That would put a nice healthy dent in the local morale. The Moderators would slide right into his private espionage network, and the scientist would go back to her lab, and the slimy pol who can’t keep his hands off women would be outed to everybody as just another slimy pol.”
Clare lifted a napkin and wiped her eyes.
“You go back and tell your agent-runner that I don’t work for the President because he’s a nice guy. I work for him because the country was up on blocks, and he got the country moving. I’m loyal to him because I’m loyal to the country, and it’s going to take more than a nightingale to push me off the playing board. Even if it’s a very pretty nightingale that I used to care about.”
“That’s enough, I’m leaving. Good night, Oscar.”
“Good-bye.”
Bambakias left Texas the next morning with all his krewe, including Clare. Oscar was not outed. No recorded tapes of the conversation showed up. There were no blaring net-flashes about his tete-a-tete with a former girlfriend. Two days passed.
Then there was big news on the War front.
The Dutch were giving up.
The Dutch Prime Minister made a public statement. She was small and bitter and gray. She said that it was hopeless for an unarmed country like the Netherlands to resist the armed might of the world’s last military superpower. She said that it was impossible for her people to face the environmental catastrophe of having the country’s dikes bombarded. She said that America’s ruthless ultimatum had broken her country’s will to resist.
She said that the Netherlands was surrendering unconditionally. She said that the country was declaring itself an open country, that her tiny military would lay down its arms, that they would accept the troops of the occupier. She said that she and her cabinet had just signed documents of surrender, and the Dutch government would voluntarily dissolve itself at midnight. She proclaimed that the War was over, and that the Americans had won, and she called on the American people to remember their long tradition of magnanimity toward defeated opponents.
The speech took eight minutes. And the War was over.
For a strange historical instant, the United States went mad with joy, but the madness subsided with remarkably few casualties. Their long trials had made the American public peculiarly resilient. No more than eight hours passed before the first net pundits began to explain why total victory had been inevitable.
Total victory had its merits. There was no resisting the over-whelming prestige of a hero President. His favorables shot into the high nineties and hung there as if nailed to a mast.
The President was not caught napping by this development. He wasted no time: scarcely an hour; scarcely a picosecond.
He commandeered domestic airlines by executive order. There were swarms of American troops in every Dutch airport by morning. The Yankee soldiery, dazed and jet-lagged, were met by a courteous and chastened Dutch populace, waving homemade American flags. The President declared the War over — barely bothering to have a doc-ile Congress certify this — and declared the arrival of a new American era. This epoch was to be henceforth known as the Return to Nor-malcy.
Like a sorcerer slamming swords through a barrel, the President began to bloodlessly reshape the American body politic.
The Normalcy manifesto was a rather astonishing twenty-eight point document. It stole the clothes of so many of America’s splin-tered political parties that they were left quite stunned. The President’s national plan for action bore only the slightest resemblance to that of his party platform, or that of his supposed core constituency in the Left Tradition Bloc. The President’s idea of Normalcy had something in it to flabbergast everyone.
The dollar would be sharply devalued and made an open global currency again. A general amnesty would free from parole anyone whose crimes could be considered remotely political. A new tax struc-ture would soak the ultra-rich and come down brutally on carbon-dioxide production. Derelict and underused buildings would be nationalized en masse, then turned over to anyone willing to home-stead them. Derelict cities and ghost towns — and there were many such, especially in the West — would be scraped clean from the face of the earth and replanted in fast-growing trees. Roadblocking was henceforth to be considered an act of piracy and to be punished with-out mercy by roving gangs of the CDIA, who, since they were all former roadblockers of the most avid temperament, could be expected to know just how to put an end to the practice.