“Maybe switching to straight calcium carbonate’ll do the trick,” Kelly’s lips whispered while the PR men grimaced at the undirected fury in the veteran’s eyes.
“Oh, good evening, Mr. Kelly,” said the young woman at the front desk – a second-year student out of Emory, if Kelly remembered correctly. She looked flustered as usual when she spoke to the veteran. She wasn’t the receptionist, just an intern with a political science major getting some hands-on experience; but the hour was late, and service to the public – to possible constituents – was absolutely the first staff priority in all of Representative Bianci’s offices.
“Marcelle, Marcelle,” said Tom Kelly, stretching so that his overcoat gaped widely and the attache case in his left hand lifted toward the ceiling. His blazer veed to either side of the button still fastening it, baring most of the shirt and tie beneath but continuing to hide the back of Kelly’s waistband.
He’d been on planes that anybody with a bottle of gasoline could hijack to god knew where; he’d been walking on Capitol Hill at night, a place as dangerous as parts of Beirut that he’d patrolled in past years with flak jacket and automatic rifle; and anyway, he was a little paranoid, a little crazy, he’d never denied that. … It was no problem him going armed unless others learned about it … and with care, that would happen only when Tom Kelly was still standing and somebody else wasn’t.
Kelly grinned at the little intern, broadly, as he had learned to do because the scar tissue above the left corner of his mouth turned a lesser smile into a snarling grimace. “If you don’t start calling me Tom, m’dear, I’m going to have to get formal with you. I won’t be mistered by a first name, I’ve seen too much of that . . . and I don’t like ‘mister.’ Okay?”
All true; and besides, he was terrible on names, fucking terrible, and remembering them had been for the past three years the hardest part of doing a good job for an elected official. But Marcelle, heaven knew what her last name was, colored and said, “I’m sorry, Tom, I’ll really remember the next time.”
Filing cabinets and free-standing mahogany bookshelves split the rear of the large room into a number of desk alcoves, many of them now equipped with terminals to the mainframe computer in the side office to the right. Another of the staff members, a pale man named Duerning, with a mind as sharp as Kelly’s own – and as different from the veteran’s as Brooklyn is from Beirut – was leaning over a desk, supporting himself with a palm on the paper-strewn wood. It was not until Carlo Bianci stood up beside Duerning, however, that Kelly realized that his boss was here rather than in the private office to the left where the closed door had seemed to advertise his presence. Never assume. . . .
“That’s all for tonight, Murray,” said Representative Bianci, clapping his aide on the shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie as natural as it was useful to a politician. He stepped toward Kelly as Duerning, nodding his head, shifted papers into a briefcase.
Carlo Bianci was Kelly’s height and of the same squat build, though the representative was further from an ideal training weight than his aide and the difference was more than the decade’s gap between their ages. Nonetheless, Bianci’s thick gray hair was the only sign that the man might be fifty, and he was in damned good shape for anyone in an office job. Kelly suspected that Bianci’s paunch was really a reservoir like a camel’s hump, enabling the man to survive under the strain of constant eighteen-hour days for the decade he had been in Congress.
At the moment Bianci was wearing a blue jogging suit, which meant it was not expectation of a roll-call vote which kept him in his office at ten PM, and something was sticking worry lines around the smile of greeting which accompanied his handshake for Kelly. “Wasn’t sure you’d be in tonight, Tom,” he said, and there was an undercurrent below those ordinary words. “Thought you’d maybe want to get some rest.”