«He has his massage every afternoon at this hour, sir,» replied Miss Trueheart brightly.
«Well, I don’t mean to criticize, but—»
«You have every right to criticize, Mr. President,» interrupted the wide-eyed heir apparent.
«On the other hand, Subagaloo’s been under a great deal of stress lately. The press corps call him names and he’s quite sensitive.»
«And there’s nothing that relieves stress more than a massage,» added the Vice-President. «Believe me, I know!»
«So where do we stand, gentlemen? Let’s get a fix on the compass and tighten the halyards.»
«Aye, aye, sir!»
«Mr. Vice-President, give us a break, huh?… The compass we’re locked into, Big Man, should better be fixed on a full moon, ’cause that’s where we’re at—looney-tune time, but nobody’s laughin’.»
«Speaking as your Secretary of Defense, Mr. President,» broke in an extremely short man whose pinched face barely projected above the table and whose eyes glared disapprovingly at the CIA director, «the situation’s utterly preposterous. Those idiots on the Court can’t be allowed to even consider devastating the security of the country over an obscure, long-forgotten, so-called treaty with an Indian tribe nobody’s ever heard of!»
«Oh, I’ve heard of the Wopotamis,» the Vice-President interrupted again. «Of course, American history wasn’t my best subject, but I remember I thought it was a funny name, like the Choppywaws. I thought they were slaughtered or died of starvation or some dumb thing.»
The brief silence was ended with Director Vincent Mangecavallo’s strained whisper as he stared at the young man who was a heartbeat away from being the nation’s Commander in Chief. «You say one more word, butter skull, and you’re gonna be in a cement bathrobe at the bottom of the Potomac, do I make myself clear?»
«Really, Vincent!»
«Listen, Prez, I’m your head honcho for the whole country’s security, right? Well, let me tell you, that kid’s got the loosest mouth in the beltway. I could have him terminated with extreme prejudice for saying and doing what he didn’t even know he said or did. The hit off the record, naturally.»
«That’s not fair!»
«It’s not a fair world, son,» observed the perspiring Attorney General, turning his attention to the White House lawyer at the blackboard. «All right, Blackburn—»
«Washburn—»
«If you say so… Let’s zero in on this fiasco, and I mean zero to the max! For starters, just who the hell is the bastard, the traitor, who’s behind this totally unpatriotic, un-American appeal to the Court?»
«He calls himself Chief Thunder Head, Native American,» answered Washburn. «And the brief his attorney submitted is considered one of the most brilliant ever received by the judiciary, our informer tells us. They say—confidentially—that it will go down in the annals of jurisprudence as a model of legal analysis.»
«Annals, my ass!» exploded the Attorney General, once more working his soiled handkerchief across his brow. «I’ll have that legal banana peeled to his bare bones! He’s finished, eliminated. By the time the department’s through with him, he won’t get a job selling insurance in Beirut, forget the law! No firm’ll touch him and he won’t find a client in the meat box at Leavenworth. What’s the son of a bitch’s name?»
«Well,» began Washburn hesitantly, his voice squeaking briefly into a falsetto, «… there we have a temporary glitch, as it were.»
«Glitch—what glitch?» The nasal-toned Warren Pease, whose left eye had the unfortunate affliction of straying to the side when he was excited, pecked his head forward like a violated chicken. «Just give us the name, you idiot!»
«There isn’t any to give,» choked Washburn.
«Thank God this moron doesn’t work for the Pentagon,» snarled the diminutive Secretary of Defense. «We’d never find half our missiles.»
«I think they’re in Teheran, Oliver,» offered the President. «Aren’t they?»
«My suggestion was rhetorical, sir.» The pinch-faced head of the Pentagon, seen barely above the surface of the table, shook back and forth in short lateral jabs. «Besides, that was a long time ago and you weren’t there and I wasn’t there. Remember, sir?»
«Yes, yes, of course I don’t.»
«Goddamn it, Blackboard, why isn’t there a name?»
«Legal precedent, sir, and my name is … never mind—»
«What do you mean, ‘never mind,’ you wart? I want the name!»
«That’s not what I meant—»
«What the hell do you mean?»
«Non nomen amicus curiae,» mumbled the bespectacled White House attorney barely above a whisper.
«What are you doin’, a Hail Mary?» asked the DCI softly, his dark Mediterranean eyes bulging in disbelief.
«It goes back to 1826, when the Court permitted a brief to be filed anonymously by a ‘friend of the Court’ on behalf of a plaintiff.»
«I’ll kill him,» mumbled the obese Attorney General, an audible flatus emerging from the seat of his chair.
«Hold it!» yelled the Secretary of State, his left eye swinging back and forth unchecked. «Are you telling us that this brief for the Wopotami tribe was filed by an unnamed attorney or attorneys?»
«Yes, sir. Chief Thunder Head sent his representative, a young brave who recently passed the state’s bar, to appear before the justices in camera and act as temporary counsel anticipating the necessity of the original anonymous counsel should the brief be held inadequate… It wasn’t. The majority of the Court deemed it sufficient under the guidelines of non nomen amicus curiae.»
«So we don’t know who the hell prepared the goddamned thing?» shouted the Attorney General, his attacks of duodenal gas unrelenting.
«My wife and I call those ‘bottom burps,’» snickered the Vice-President quietly to his single superior.
«We used to call them ‘caboose whistles,’» replied the President, grinning conspiratorially.
«For Christ’s sake!» roared the Attorney General. «No, no, not you, sir, or the kid here—I’m referring to Mr. Backwash—»
«That’s … never mind.»
«You mean to tell us we’re not allowed to know who wrote this garbage, this swill that may convince five air-headed judges on the Court to affirm it as law and, not incidentally, destroy the operational core of our national defense?»
«Chief Thunder Head has informed the Court that in due time, after the decision has been rendered and made public and his people set free, he will make known the legal mind behind his tribe’s appeal.»
«That’s nice,» said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. «Then we’ll put the son of a bitch on the reservation with his redskin buddies and nuke the whole bunch of them off the goddamned map.»
«To do that, General, you’d have to wipe out all of Omaha, Nebraska.»
The emergency meeting in the Situation Room was over; only the President and his Secretary of State remained at the table.
«Golly, Warren,» said the chief executive. «I wanted you to stay because sometimes I don’t understand those people.»
«Well, they certainly never went to our school, old roomie.»