But it wasn’t his job to civilize the world, just to tell people what was going on in it. The trade talks were not where it was happening, not today, Wise thought. Today he and his satellite truck would head back to the home of Reverend Yu Fa An. Wise was playing a hunch. No more than that. But they’d rarely failed him before.
Ryan was enjoying another night off. The following night would be different. He had to give another goddamned speech on foreign policy. Why he couldn’t simply announce policy in the press room and be done with it, nobody had yet told him—and he hadn’t asked, for fear of looking the fool (again) before Arnie. This was just how it was done. The speech and the subject had nothing to do with the identity of the group he was addressing. Surely there had to be an easier way to tell the world what he thought. This way, too, Cathy had to come with him, and she hated these things even more than he did, because it took her away from her patient notes, which she guarded about as forcefully as a lion over the wildebeests he’d just killed for lunch. Cathy often complained that this First Lady stuff was hurting her performance as a SURGEON. Jack didn’t believe that. It was more likely that like most women, Cathy needed something to bitch about, and this subject was worthier than her more pedestrian complaints, like being unable to cook dinner once in a while, which she missed a lot more than the women’s lib people would have cared to learn. Cathy had spent over twenty years learning to be a gourmet cook, and when time allowed (rarely) she’d sneak down to the capacious White House kitchen to trade ideas and recipes with the head chef. For the moment, however, she was curled up in a comfortable chair making notes on her patient files and sipping at her wineglass, while Jack watched TV, for a change not under the eyes of the Secret Service detail and the domestic staff.
But the President wasn’t really watching TV. His eyes were pointed in that direction, but his mind was looking at something else. It was a look his wife had learned to understand in the past year, almost like open-eyed sleep while his brain churned over a problem. In fact, it was something she did herself often enough, thinking about the best way to treat a patient’s problem while eating lunch at the Hopkins doctors’ cafeteria, her brain creating a picture as though in a Disney cartoon, simulating the problem and then trying out theoretical fixes. It didn’t happen all that much anymore. The laser applications she’d helped to develop were approaching the point that an auto mechanic could perform them—which was not something she or her colleagues advertised, of course. There had to be a mystique with medicine, or else you lost your power to tell your patients what to do in a way that ensured that they might actually do it.
For some reason, that didn’t translate to the Presidency, Cathy thought. With Congress, well, most of the time they went along with him—as well they ought, since Jack’s requests were usually as reasonable as they could be—but not always, and often for the dumbest reasons. “It may be good for the country, but it’s not so good for my district, and…” And they all forgot the fact that when they had arrived in Washington, they’d sworn an oath to the country, not to their stupid little districts. When she’d said that to Arnie, he’d had a good laugh and lectured her on how the real world worked—as though a physician didn’t know that! she fumed. And so Jack had to balance what was real with what wasn’t but ought to be—as opposed to what wasn’t and never would be. Like foreign affairs. It made a lot more sense for a married man to have an affair with some floozy than it did to try to reason with some foreign countries. At least you could tell the floozy that it was all over after three or four times, but these damned foreign chiefs of state would stay around forever with their stupidity.
That was one nice thing about medicine, Professor Ryan thought. Doctors all over the world treated patients pretty much the same way because the human body was the same everywhere, and a treatment regimen that worked at Johns Hopkins in east Baltimore worked just as well in Berlin or Moscow or Tokyo, even if the people looked and talked different—and if that was true, why couldn’t people all over the world think the same way? Their damned brains were the same, weren’t they? Now it was her turn to grumble, as her husband did often enough.
“Jack?” she said, as she put her notebook down.
“Yeah, Cathy?”
“What are you thinking about now?”
Mainly how I wish Ellen Sumter was here with a cigarette, he couldn’t say. If Cathy knew he was sneaking smokes in the Oval Office, she didn’t let on, which was probably the case, since she didn’t go around looking for things to fight over, and he never ever smoked in front of her or the kids anymore. Cathy allowed him to indulge his weaknesses, as long as he did so in the utmost moderation. But her question was about the cause for his yearning for some nicotine.
“China, babe. They really stepped on the old crank with the golf shoes this time, but they don’t seem to know how bad it looked.”
“Killing those two people—how could it not look bad?” SURGEON asked.
“Not everybody values human life in the same way that we do, Cath.”
“The Chinese doctors I’ve met are—well, they’re doctors, and we talk to each other like doctors.”
“I suppose.” Ryan saw a commercial start on the TV show he was pretending to watch, and stood to walk off to the upstairs kitchen for another whiskey. “Refill, babe?”
“Yes, thank you.” With her Christmas-tree smile.
Jack lifted his wife’s wineglass. So, she had no procedures scheduled for the next day. She’d come to love the Chateau Ste. Michelle Chardonnay they’d first sampled at Camp David. For him tonight, it was Wild Turkey bourbon over ice. He loved the pungent smell of the corn and rye grains, and tonight he’d dismissed the upstairs staff and could enjoy the relative luxury of fixing his own—he could even have made a peanut butter sandwich, had he been of such a mind. He walked the drinks back, touching his wife’s neck on the way, and getting the cute little shiver she always made when he did so.
“So, what’s going to happen in China?”
“We’ll find out the same way as everybody else, watching CNN. They’re a lot faster than our intelligence people on some things. And our spooks can’t predict the future any better than the TRADERs on Wall Street.” You’d be able to identify such a man at Merrill Lynch easily if he existed, Jack didn’t bother saying aloud. He’d be the guy with all the millionaires lined up outside his office.
“So, what do you think?”
“I’m worried, Cath,” Ryan admitted, sitting back down.
“About what?”
“About what we’ll have to do if they screw things up again. But we can’t warn them. That only makes it certain that bad things are going to happen, because then they’ll do something really dumb just to show us how powerful they are. That’s how nation-states are. You can’t talk to them like real people. The people who make the decisions over there think with their …”
“. . . dicks?” Cathy offered with a half giggle.
“Yep,” Jack confirmed with a nod. “A lot of them follow their dicks everywhere they go, too. We know about some foreign leaders who have habits that would get them tossed out of any decent whorehouse in the world. They just love to show everybody how tough and manly they are, and to do that, they act like animals in a goddamned barnyard.”
“Secretaries?”
“A lot of that.” Ryan nodded. “Hell, Chairman Mao liked doing twelve-year-old virgins, like changing shirts. I guess old as he was, it was the best he could do—”
“No Viagra back then, Jack,” Cathy pointed out.
“Well, you suppose that drug will help civilize the world?” he asked, turning to grin at his physician wife. It didn’t seem a likely prospect.
“Well, maybe it’ll protect a lot of twelve-year-olds.”
Jack checked his watch. Another half hour and he’d be turning in. Until then, maybe he could actually watch the TV for a little while.
Rutledge was just waking up. Under his door was an envelope, which he picked up and opened, to find an official communiqué from Foggy Bottom, his instructions for the day, which weren’t terribly different from those of the previous day. Nothing in the way of concessions to offer, which were the grease of dealing with the PRC. You had to give them something if you wanted to get anything, and the Chinese never seemed to realize that such a procedure could and occasionally should work the other way as well. Rutledge headed to his private bathroom and wondered if it had been like this chatting with German diplomats in May 1939. Could anyone have prevented that war from breaking out? he wondered. Probably not, in retrospect. Some chiefs of state were just too damned stupid to grasp what their diplomats told them, or maybe the idea of war just appealed to one sort of mind. Well, even diplomacy had its limitations, didn’t it?