"Oh, don't I know it. But why don't we give it a try anyway? Give Che Guevara a buzz on the intercom and tell him Thomas Dickens is here to discuss poetry with him. Maybe he'll also think I'm cute."
She turned serious. "Oh, I can't disturb him when he's in conference, Mr. Dickens. If you'd like, I'll try to get him to sign a copy of one of his poems, and I'll send it to you. I'm sure he'll be pleased by your interest."
I turned serious. "Thomas Dickens, missy," I said, pointing to the twenty-button intercom beside her elbow. "Guaranteed that he's going to want to talk to me, probably immediately. Also guaranteed that he's going to be extremely displeased if I walk out of here and he finds out later that I was here and you didn't notify him. He's going to be so disturbed that he'll probably cancel all of his appointments for the rest of the day, and then he'll probably fire you. Better not take a chance."
The redhead with the shiny crimson lips stared at me strangely for a few moments, then tentatively reached over and pressed the top button on her intercom.
"What is it, Jane?" a man's irritated voice asked tersely.
"Sir, I'm very sorry to disturb you," the woman said quickly, looking at me with both annoyance and nervousness. "There's a gentleman by the name of Thomas Dickens out here, and he insists you'll want to speak with him. Should I call security?"
"Who?"
She repeated the name very slowly. "Thom-as Dick-ens."
There was a considerable pause, and then a strained, "Give me five minutes, then send him in."
I stood at the desk, alternately smiling at the woman and glancing toward a gray-suited, stern-faced man wearing dark glasses whom I assumed was a Secret Service agent assigned to Kranes because of the congressman's newfound place in the line of succession to the presidency. He had appeared out of nowhere, and was standing a few feet away off to my left. Two minutes later a heavy, carved oak door to my right opened and a tall man carrying a briefcase and wearing a Stetson and cowboy boots with his black, pin-striped suit came stalking out, obviously in a huff because his audience with the king of the Hill had been abbreviated. I gave Kranes three more minutes to compose himself, then walked unbidden through the door and into a large, plushly furnished office decorated with expensive, mounted shotguns and photographs of Kranes with enough politicians, sports and movie stars, and world leaders to populate a small town.
Kranes was sitting hunched over his desk and trying to look busy as he scribbled furiously on a yellow legal pad. His bushy brown hair was unkempt, as if he had recently been nervously running a hand through it, and the little I could see of his forehead and face was flushed. Unlike most people, Kranes looked even fatter in person than on television, and I wondered if he ever now regretted the venomous comments he used to make about his opponents' less attractive physical characteristics when he had been a younger, less powerful, and much thinner man. I somehow doubted it.
Kranes, whose heart I assumed was racing along at a pretty good clip at the moment, was a man who had proudly declared that he was going to take the country back to the 1950s, when "things were the way they're supposed to be." A lot of people, including myself, believed that the time he had in mind for the country was a few centuries further back than that. In one of his many unguarded moments, during one of his many histrionic rambles on C-SPAN before his party had ascended to power, he had described slavery as "not all bad, an economic system dictated by market forces, and a kind of health-care and welfare system for the underprivileged." He was a piece of work. It was because of Kranes that a lot of people, including not a few conservatives, prayed every day for the health of the president and vice president, as liberal as they were. Kranes was occasionally touted as a presidential candidate himself, but I doubted that was a serious possibility. His party was most pleased to have installed him as Speaker of the House of Representatives, but the only popular elections he had ever won had been to his seat in Congress representing this district in Alabama; with his spacey views and his willingness to express them, I considered it highly unlikely he could ever win even a statewide, much less national, election, even considering the sour mood the country was in. Garth would laugh and call me a naive fool, arguing that William P. Kranes was as all-American as apple pie.
Finally, having apparently decided upon some kind of strategy for dealing with the man whose poetry he had been plagiarizing, Kranes looked up. I was spared the boyish, toothy grin he liked to flash at the unwary; his eyes went wide, his mouth dropped open, and he snapped back in his chair as if he had been goosed with a cattle prod. His face, which had been red before, now went white. His features rapidly morphed into a variety of expressions, ending with one that looked curiously like relief.
"Your name isn't Dickens!" he triumphantly announced, rising from his chair and pointing a trembling, accusatory index finger in my direction, reminding me of nothing so much as an overweight edition of the other Dickens' Christmas Past. "You're that Frederickson dwarf! I'm on the Intelligence Committee, and I know all about what you and that ultra-liberal president and all your hippie friends are up to! If you think you're going to interview me as part of your effort to gut the CIA, you've got another think coming! Hell will freeze over first! I want you the hell out of my office!"
"Mr. Speaker," I said, smiling sweetly. "The Frederickson dwarf is not here to interview you about the CIA. You wouldn't tell me anything I want to know, even if you knew anything I want to know, which you probably don't, since you and the other members of the intelligence committees in both the House and Senate are usually the last to know about anything really important going on in the intelligence community. What you people hear is all honey and bullshit."
The relief, if it had been that, I had glimpsed on his face and in his brown eyes suddenly vanished, and now Speaker of the House of Representatives William P. Kranes looked more than a bit haunted. "What do you want, then?" he asked tightly.
"Thomas Dickens. You think I pulled that name out of a hat? It's the reason you agreed to squeeze me into your frantic schedule."
Kranes slowly sank back down into his chair, looked away toward a shotgun mounted in a glass case. "The name does sound vaguely familiar," he said quietly, "but I can't place it."
"No? Let's see if I can't jog your memory." I reached into my briefcase, removed a sheaf of Moby Dickens' poems, and tossed them on the other man's desk, right under his nose. "Why don't you read over these poems by Mr. Dickens and then see if you can't remember where you first saw the name? If that doesn't help, I have some other poems in here with your name on them that might help."
There was a long pause, and then I saw his gaze flick away from the shotgun down to the papers scattered over his desk. He swallowed hard, then said softly, "This is, uh, very. ."
"I think 'embarrassing' is the word you're searching for. Your career as a poet is toast, Mr. Speaker. Now, do you want to discuss this in a reasonable manner, or do you want to keep on embarrassing yourself?"
"Sit down, Frederickson," he said in the same quiet, slightly choked tone.
I sat, moving the chair back a couple of feet so that I had a clear view of his face over the top of the desk. "Have you plagiarized anyone else's poems?"
He slowly shook his head.
"So you're selective, and you've got taste. But why'd you do it? If you've got the heart to appreciate Dickens' poetry, why not write your own:
He breathed deeply, slowly shook his head again. His lips were compressed tightly, and there were spots of color high on his chubby cheeks, but he now held his head erect and looked me squarely in the eye. "I, uh. . I don't even think I was aware I was doing it, if you want the truth. I used to be an English professor, you know. I taught poetry, and I still read an enormous amount of it in my limited spare time."