The Keep spread her hands, long slender fingers covering the book that was the purpose of this meeting. The Keep had started the meeting by asking him simply: “Tell me what you learned here.”
And he’d laughed and said: “Like what did I do during the summer?”
She had not laughed. “Lessons learned, to be passed down the line.”
And he’d had to begin to dredge up memories, many bad, a few good.
The Keep answered his question. “Your opponent did a good job of equating the treaty with being soft, Mister President. Of caving in.”
Someone telling the truth. That was a rarity in this building, Templeton thought. But the Keep had nothing to gain or lose by doing so, unlike most others that surrounded him. When he and his administration went packing, she would still be here, dumping on the next poor schmuck who had “won” his job.
“I think it was the name,” he said.
A furrow of confusion crossed her forehead. “Name, sir?”
“My middle name. Armstrong. What do you think of when you hear it?”
“Neil Armstrong, sir. First on the moon.”
“Ah yes, the little hop, as my wife once called it in one of her fouler moods while we were watching the Discovery Channel. It takes a lot to impress her. But that’s not how my opponent played it. Armstrong. Middle name. Just like you know who, who got it at Little Bighorn. How can they make that leap, then leap to the treaty leading us into another massacre? And, of course there’s Lance Armstrong. And what that’s about, I have no idea. There’s absolutely no connection.”
“There rarely is with politics, Mister President,” she said. “Human beings, while irrational, are predictably irrational. In fact, note how you went from hop to leap without consciously realizing it?”
Templeton laughed. “How come you weren’t working on my campaign?”
She tapped the book on the table, drawing them back to task. “I have a job, sir.”
Templeton straightened up in the chair and sighed. “You know, you scared the heck out of me that first month when you briefed me here, in this same room, with that damn book of yours. And not just the top ten lessons learned by every president, but all the rest. Especially the stuff about the Rifts and the Fireflies and the other near disasters.”
“I’m sorry, Mister President. I didn’t mean to.”
“You know what I call you in my head,” he said. “I call you the Heartbreaker.”
She nodded. “Your predecessor came to the same conclusion, and I understand all previous Keeps have been called the same in one form or another. We prefer realists.”
“I couldn’t even tell Helen or my chief of staff how you broke my heart and turned me into a liar for so many of my campaign promises. You and that damn book hog-tied me long before I got to this point of being a lame duck.” He shifted in the chair and stared her in the eye. “Do you know why they call it a lame duck?” He could tell she knew, but he didn’t care. This was his chance to bitch and by God he was gonna take it. “Birds molt a few feathers here and there, but ducks drop them all at once like a dirty bathrobe and have to sit around naked and vulnerable because they can’t fly for weeks. We should have a duck as the national bird, not an eagle.”
“Would you like me to write that down, sir?” she asked, and he knew she wasn’t jerking his chain. It was her job.
“Very funny.” He looked about, because he could use a drink. “Heck, Franklin fought against using the eagle as the symbol of our country, didn’t he?”
The Keep nodded. “Yes. He called the eagle a bird of bad moral character that did not make his living honestly. That an eagle was a carrion bird, which isn’t quite true as an absolute. He wanted the turkey as our national bird.”
“You know,” he added as he spotted nothing to drink in the room, “if I’d been reelected I was going to switch to pot. Easier on the liver. Enough states have made it legal. What the heck? Don’t drink, smoke pot. You can write that one down.”
The Keep smiled. “What a good idea. We’ve lost too many fine men and women to the bottle.”
“And a few bastards,” the president said. “McCarthy drank himself to death after losing to the army in his hearing. I remember there was a section in there from Ike about how, in retrospect, he’d realized he’d handled McCarthy the wrong way. Should have squashed him like a bug right from the start. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t judge or evaluate, sir. I just copy it down.”
“No,” the president said in a sharper tone than he intended. “After you copy it down, you read it to the next poor sap who inherits this house and shit on his head. Then you copy down what he’s learned four years later for the next poor sap.”
“It’s efficient,” the Keep said. “It preserves institutional knowledge.”
He stared into her deep blue eyes, so full of intelligence and a keen quickness that bothered him in a way he couldn’t define. “You should brief anyone who thinks they want to get the nomination from either party. I bet it would send some home before they even got started.”
“That wouldn’t be secure, sir.”
“So you trust all the former presidents to never speak of these things or write about them in their memoirs?”
“Will you, sir?”
“No.”
The Keep seemed to take that as sufficient answer to his own question. “You are joining a very unique club, sir. It’s why former presidents get along better than most people expect. You share something very special.”
“And you share it with no one.” It was not a question. “Why does the Keep have to be a woman?”
“We’ve learned that men respond better to women bearing bad news, sir. Less testosterone and less desire for the alpha to be right, regardless of cost.”
“Now that the new president is a woman, are you losing your job, too?”
“No, sir. She’ll have to resign herself to me like you did, until I pass the job along.”
“So are you a duck?”
“No, sir. I’m an eagle. I always hold on to a few feathers. No pun intended,” she added, quill in hand.
“That’s the funniest thing you’ve said,” the president noted, “and it’s not that funny. You might be considered carrion, feeding off my dead carcass now that the country has discarded me.”
To that, the Keep had nothing to say.
“How many presidents have you served?”
“You’re the second, sir.”
“How’d you get this job?” he asked.
“I was selected, sir.”
“By who? My predecessor? Your predecessor?”
“No, sir.”
Templeton waited for amplification, but the Keep only seemed a font of information regarding history and secrets. He was so sick of it all.
“Who selected you?” he pressed.
The Keep’s face showed the tiniest glimmer of… was it irritation, the president wondered?
“Hannah chose me.”
“Of course,” the president said. “Who else but her.” It too was not a question. “How on earth does she find someone like you with the weird combination of knowing just about everything and reading the secrets in that book but having no desire to tell anyone?”
“It’s Hannah’s gift to find people with certain talents, sir.”
“And how do you get replaced?”
“I don’t know, sir. It’s on the last page of the book if I feel a need to replace myself.”
“You haven’t read it?” he asked in surprise.
“No.” She seemed genuinely confused. “Why would I read it? It’s to be read when I need to replace myself if need be.”
“What if you get hit by a bus?”
“There’s always Hannah, sir.” She shook her head, as if trying to figure out how to explain something to an ignorant child. “What you’ve never understood, Mister President, as no president before you has ever really understood, although some came close, is that the United States of America is like a finely tuned engine. It runs because there are those who maintain it in the shadows, on the inside. For my part, we run on information. We take it in, we give it out.”