‘Who’s to say it’s more than a friendship?’
‘Spare me the crap.’ Pauline was getting angry. She had thought that Milt would be realistic and mature about this, accept that he had been caught out breaking the rules and retire graciously. No such luck.
‘She’s not underage,’ Milt said, with the air of a card player who lays an ace.
‘Tell the reporters that, when they call to ask you about your relationship with Rita Cross. Do you think they’ll say that, in that case, there’s no scandal? Or what?’
Milt was looking desperate. ‘We can keep this secret.’
‘No, we can’t. Your bodyguards know, and they told Jacqueline, who told me and Sandip, all in the last twenty-four hours. And what about Rita? Doesn’t she have sixteen-year-old friends? What do they think she’s doing with a sixty-two-year-old man who gave her a ten-thousand-dollar bicycle? Playing Scrabble?’
‘All right, Madam President, you’ve got a point.’ Milt leaned forward, lowered his voice confidentially, and spoke as one colleague to another. ‘Leave this with me, please. I’ll work things out, I promise.’
The proposal was outrageous, and he should have known that. ‘Fuck you, Milt. I’m not going to leave anything with you. This is a scandal that will hurt every one of the people here who have been working so hard for a better America. The least I can do is minimize the damage, and to that end I will control when and how the news comes out.’
Milt looked as if he was beginning to see that there was no hope for him. He said miserably: ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Go to church, confess your sin, and promise God you won’t do it again. Go home, call Rita, and tell her it’s all over. Then write me a resignation letter, citing personal reasons – don’t lie and invent health problems or anything else. Make sure that letter is on this desk by nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’
Milt stood up. ‘I’m serious about her, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘She’s the love of my life.’
Pauline believed him. It was absurd, but against her will she felt a twinge of sympathy. She said: ‘If you really love her, you’ll break up with her, and let her go back to the life of a normal teenager. Now go and do the right thing.’
He looked sad. ‘You’re a hard woman, Pauline.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘But I have a hard job.’
CHAPTER 14
On Monday morning Tamara began to suspect that the General was up to something. It might be trivial, but she had a bad feeling.
She was too euphoric, after Marrakech, to go straight to her desk, so she dropped her bag in her room and went to the canteen. She got a big cup of weak black coffee, American style, and a slice of toast, and picked up a copy of the government-subsidized French-language daily newspaper, Le Progrès.
It was when she turned to page three of the paper that an alarm bell rang faintly in the distant back of her mind. There was a photograph of the General, bald and smiling, dressed as if for sport in jogging pants and a warm-up jacket. He was pictured in the Atrone slum in north-east N’Djamena. News from Atrone usually focussed on delays in extending the city’s fresh water and sewage network. However, today there was a positive story. The General, pictured against a shanty-town background, was surrounded by a crowd of happy children and teenagers, and he was handing out free Nike trainers.
As she mulled over the story her mind kept wandering to Tab.
She had travelled discreetly. Tab had ordered cars from the French embassy to take them to and from the airport, where they used the private aviation terminal to board the Travers company jet. Tamara had filed the required notification that she would be out of the country, but had not included the information that she was travelling with Tab. Dexter never read that kind of paperwork anyway.
The weekend had been a success. They had been inseparable for forty-eight hours without getting irritated or bored by one another. Tamara knew that domestic intimacy could cause quarrels. Men were never as hygienic as you thought they should be, and they, in turn, accused you of being a fusspot. People had long-established habits that they hated to change. ‘We’ll tidy up in the morning,’ men would say, but they never did. However, Tab was not like the rest.
She kept reminding herself how badly she had judged men previously, especially the two she had married, immature Stephen and gay Jonathan. But surely she must have learned better? Jonathan had been an improvement on Stephen, and Tab was better still. Perhaps Tab was The One.