George wondered whether this apparently accidental meeting had in fact been planned by Maria. He also recalled that old Renshaw, the senior partner at the law firm, was a boyhood friend of Greg’s.

Maria said to Greg: “We were just talking about George going back to work. Fawcett Renshaw wants him.”

“Renshaw mentioned it to me. You’ll be invaluable to them. Your contacts are matchless.”

“Nixon looks like he’s winning,” George said dubiously. “Most of my contacts are with the Democrats.”

“They’re still useful. Anyway, I don’t expect Nixon to last long. He’ll crash and burn.”

George raised his eyebrows. Greg was a liberal Republican who would have preferred someone such as Nelson Rockefeller as presidential candidate. Even so, he was being surprisingly disloyal to his party. “You think the peace movement will destroy Nixon?” George asked.

“In your dreams. The other way around, more likely. Nixon isn’t Lyndon Johnson. Nixon understands foreign policy—better than most people in Washington, probably. Don’t be fooled by his dumb-ass talk about Commies, that’s just for the benefit of his supporters in the trailer parks.” Greg was a snob. “Nixon will get us out of Vietnam, and he’ll say we lost the war because the peace movement undermined the military.”

“So what will bring him down?”

“Dick Nixon lies,” Greg said. “He lies just about every time he opens his damn mouth. When a Republican administration came into office in 1952, Nixon claimed we had discovered thousands of subversives in the government.”

“How many had you found?”

“None. Not a single one. I know, I was a young congressman. Then he told the press we had come across a blueprint for socializing America in the files of the outgoing Democratic administration. Reporters asked to see it.”

“He didn’t have a copy.”

“Correct. He also said he had a secret Communist memorandum about how they planned to work through the Democratic Party. No one ever saw that, either. I suspect that Dick’s mother never told him it’s a sin to tell a lie.”

“There’s a lot of dishonesty in politics,” George said.

“And in many other walks of life. But few people lie as much and as shamelessly as Nixon. He’s a cheat and a crook. He’s gotten away with it until now. People do. But it’s different when you’re president. Reporters know they’ve been lied to about Vietnam, and more and more they scrutinize everything the government says. Dick will get caught out, and then he’ll fall. And you know something else? He’ll never understand why. He’ll say the press were out to get him all along.”

“I sure hope you’re right.”

“Take the job, George,” Greg pleaded. “There’s so much to be done.”

George nodded. “Maybe I will.”

• • •

Claus Krohn was a redhead. On his head, his hair was a dark reddish-brown, but on the rest of his body it was ginger. Rebecca was particularly fond of the triangle that grew from his groin up to a point near his navel. It was what she looked at when she was giving him oral sex, which she enjoyed at least as much as he did.