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By Root 1317 0

temporary office in a Residence Inn on the outskirts of the District, planned to spend his nights unearthing all there was to know about the members of Edward Carson’s inner circle. He sat at a drab desk in front of his souped-up laptop, scanning a screen full of information from yet another government database he’d hacked into. Factoids from the public and private lives of Vice President Crawford, Kinkaid Marshall, G. Robert Kroftt, and William Rogers floated across his screen like messages from a phosphorescent universe. He was particularly interested in Crawford. Like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson before him, Carson had been drawn into a shotgun wedding with the old-line and conservative Crawford in order to carry Texas and the other swing states in the old South. The two men never got along. Though their public face was all smiles, behind closed doors their politics was fraught with friction and, at times, animosity. Though Crawford wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the intransigent members of the party, Paull didn’t like him; he certainly didn’t trust his style of backroom wheeling and dealing. Who knew what insidious pols Crawford was in bed with.

This was the work Paull had been doing since he arrived at just after six in the evening. It was now half past eleven. To one side was an open cardboard box with the remaining two slices of pepperon-cini pizza from Papa John’s. He rose, went to the bathroom, and washed the olive oil off his hands. Then he crossed to the window, peering through the slatted blinds at the smeared headlights on the highway. The traffic’s constant drone made him feel as if he were inside a beehive, an appropriate sound track for his working environment.

All at once he shivered and, focusing on the reflection of the room in the glass, thought he saw Nina, or more accurately her shadow, passing from right to left. Whirling, he confronted the half-dark room, lit only by the lamp that shed a pool of light over the desk, his work area, one corner of the stained pizza box, bloody with tomato sauce.

He wanted to laugh at the empty space, at his own foolish fears, but something stopped him, a sense of foreboding, perhaps, that he couldn’t shake. There was, for him, a sense of things ending, instead of beginning as they should have with the installation of the new administration. The world appeared to be sliding away from him, as if it were falling off the edge of a table into darkness.

Of course he was furious for allowing himself to be deceived by Nina, but that was in the past and it belonged there. Nevertheless, he was still furious, possibly more so, because he couldn’t forget her, because he missed her. She hadn’t been just another fuck, she hadn’t been just another sexy woman. When she betrayed him she’d devoured a piece of him he now knew he’d never get back. In the wake of her betrayal he felt diminished, not simply foolish or abashed. She’d stolen something vital.

Turning back to the window he stared out at a world hustling by, indifferent to his pain. He was alone, as he would be in the moment before death took him, and this made him think of his father, who was alone when he died because Paull was busy studying for his graduate school finals. He wished his father were here now, because he was the only person Paull had ever been able to confide in. Even Edward Carson, arguably his best friend, didn’t know everything Paull’s father had. The man had been compassionate enough to forgive Paull his sins and mistakes no matter their severity. “Why wouldn’t I forgive you,” he said once, “you’re my son.” And then, continuing, said, “Your mother’s gone and forgotten. You’re all I’ve got, I have to forgive you.” And yet he died alone, Paull thought, as we all do, whether we forgive or not, whether we hold people close to us or push them away, as Paull had his own wife, who was in the final, horrifying stages of Alzheimer’s, locked away in a facility. He went to see her less and less these days; she didn’t know him, but what did that matter, he had an obligation, didn’t he, he’d taken an oath: in