Distraction - Bruce Sterling [208]
“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 Washington.”
“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 těte-à-těte 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