“The Court nominee?”

“They’re taking the vote. He’ll be back, I guess, if the Dixierats don’t start a filibuster.”

“I’ll wait.” Spode parked his briefcase and shrugged out of his coat. His brown suit needed pressing. He unbuckled the galoshes. “Les, you wouldn’t have another half-sandwich you could spare?”

“Help ‘self.” Suffield proffered a waxed-paper wedge. “I’m supposed to be on a diet anyhow.” He was a big florid man, shaggy with a soot-gray pelt, but his eyes were clever like a terrier’s.

When Spode walked over to him the open buckles of his galoshes chinked like Mexican spurs. He unwrapped the sandwich and held the waxed paper under his wide blunt chin to catch crumbs while he ate. “Where’s Gloria? Lunch hour?”

“Gone for good. Buying her trousseau.”

“I forgot.”

“He still hasn’t hired a replacement.”

“Figures,” Spode said. He always took sergeants for granted, too.

“I think I’ve got a girl lined up,” Suffield said. “Remember Veronica Tebbel?”

“Ronnie Tebbel? Sure. Isn’t she still running the home office? What makes you think she’s willing to move back East and take a demotion to common secretary?”

“I asked her, son. That’s the first rule of detective investigation. You spooks could save a lot of sweat if you remembered once in a while that the easiest way to get an answer to a question is to ask it.”

“Us investigators don’t look at it that way,” Spode said. “Us investigators figure the less questions you ask, the less you get lied to.”

“Which may explain why you never find out anything worth knowing.”

“It could explain that, come to think of it.”

Suffield settled a wistful glance on the empty chair behind the secretary’s desk. “Sic transit Gloria,” he said.

“Oh Christ.” Spode crumpled the waxed paper in his fist, launched the wad toward the wastebasket, and missed by two feet.

Suffield said with mild interest, “For a spook with your second-story history, you’re about the most spastic excuse for a human being I ever saw.”

Spode leered at him. “White man, you want to go five rounds with me, I’ll call the gym and tell the medics to stand by to haul your carcass away.” His look traveled up and down Suffield. “God knows you could use the exercise. Look at the gut on you.”

“Sure, Jaime. A nice fair fight. My high-school boxing and your karate.”

Spode snorted and went over to put the wadded waxed paper in the basket. “Karate. Christ.”

“Didn’t they teach you that stuff in the spooks?”

“You’ve been looking at television.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Maybe we learned a little hand-to-hand. It was a long time ago.”

“Did the Senator get the same kind of training?”

“The Senator wasn’t in the spooks with me.”

“The hell he wasn’t. He told me about it once.”

“That was military counterintelligence. A thousand years ago—Korea. We were kids, it was one of those games they told you to play when they put the uniform on you.”

“But you stayed in and he didn’t.”

“Because he’s got brains and money and I’m dumb and poor and anyhow what else could I do? You’re right, you do like to ask questions.”

“Let’s swap jobs, then. You be the Senator’s aide and I’ll be his investigator.”

“Forget it, I know when I’m well off.”

“Then you’re not as dumb as you look.” The corners of Suffield’s wide mouth turned down. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m wet-nursing a mental retard. Will Rogers must have had our private Senator in mind when he said every now and then an innocent man gets sent to Congress. I hate to think of what’s going to be left of us when Webb Breckenyear and Woody Guest get done dribbling the Senator’s head on the table like a basketball.”

The Senator came in grinning. “No way to talk about me behind my back, Les.”

Suffield turned a dismal glance on him. “I’m glad you think it’s funny.”

“Nothing cheers me up like enthusiastic optimism.” The Senator’s tough gold-flecked eyes pivoted to Spode. “How’re they hanging, Top?”

“Loose and shriveled,” Spode replied. The Senator had called him Top for twenty years. It was a habit Spode had stopped trying to break him of.

Senator Alan Forrester walked into his private office and peeled off his topcoat. Went around behind the big desk and pawed through the litter of papers to see if anything had been added to it in his absence. Spode strolled into the office behind Suffield and sank into a chair. The Senator pulled his chair out and said, “God, what a grim day.”

The Senator had a deep tan, made ruddy by the chill wind outside, and all his bones were big. His patrician good looks masked a hide as tough as a dollar steak. He had the Forrester grin that, on the face of his eminent father, had appeared eleven times on the covers of Newsweek and Time when the old man had owned this Senate seat. There was a lot of the old man in the young Senator—and of the grandfather who had come to Arizona in the 1880’s with a Yorkshireman’s canny acquisitiveness and in twenty years had built an empire of mines and ranches and railroads. But Alan Forrester was his own man and nobody had known that better than the late Senator Hayden Forrester.

The Senator sat with one arm hooked over the back of his chair. He had enormous hands—but Spode had seen how gently they held newborn calves and voters’ babies. The creases that bracketed his mouth had grown deeper since Angie had died.

The Senator said, “Report, Top.”

“I ain’t got much.” Spode admitted it apologetically, spreading his palms.

“Such as it is, let’s have it.”

“I spent two hours over at the Rayburn, standing in line in Webb Breckenyear’s waiting room. The old bastard ought to sell tickets—he’d make a fortune. For a senile politician with a two-horse constituency he’s got a fan club can’t be beat.”

“Lobbyists or down-home folks?”

“Lobbyists. Panting around for scraps from the pork barrel.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Let’s say he talked to me.”

“Get anything?”

“After he asked after you with plenty of affectionate chuckles, he made it clear the Honorable Webb Breckenyear is still Chairman of House Military Appropriations, and until the pit-viper liberals and the pinko-pacifist disarmamenters pass a Constitutional Amendment putting military affairs in the hands of Junior Senator Alan Forrester—and I emphasize ‘Junior’—until that time, the Constitution provides that military appropriations are the bailiwick of the House in general, the Committee in particular, and Webb Breckenyear in person. I think I’m quoting him more or less verbatim.”

“In other words, no dollar figures.”

“For a wild-eyed revolutionary radical redskin like me it would’ve been easier to get General Custer to pin a patriotism medal on Sitting Bull.”

The Senator’s face hardened. “Is that the way he treated you, Top?” He sat up straight.

Spode waved his hands. “Forget it. I don’t want to start a civil-rights sit-in on the old curmudgeon’s doorstep. Forget I said it.”

“No.”

“I wish you would. Maybe I’m just using it as an excuse because I didn’t get anything out of him.”

The Senator settled back slowly in his chair. “I’m sorry you had to waste your time.”

“You pay me by the week.”

“At least he can’t come back at us later and push his old ferret eyes wide with innocence and say, ‘Why didn’t y’all jist come rat out an’ aisk me?’” A smile touched the Senator’s mouth. “Sometimes I take pleasure in knowing Breckenyear would like to see me right where I’d like to see him. No satisfaction in hating a man if he won’t hate you back.”

Les Suffield stirred in his chair. “Breckenyear’s in a position to hate pretty hard.”

“Good. I’m tired of knocking down straw horses.”

Suffield said slowly, “You want this fight, don’t you?”

“Why not? I feel like busting a few heads.”