Power Play

She was silent for a moment, handed him a covered basket. “Have a croissant. I made them.” They were big, hot and flaky, and his mouth watered, they smelled so good. “Try one with the turkey bacon,” and she pointed to another covered dish.

She was dithering, which meant she wasn’t sure yet about him and she wanted to feel him out. Well, okay, not a problem, since he was starving, and so he gave all his attention to making a bacon croissant sandwich and stayed silent, waiting to see where she’d head.

“I understand you met my daughter yesterday evening.”

He took a big bite of his croissant and fell in love. Both with the croissant and the cook. “Yep, got home and there she was on her Harley, very nearly on my nicely kept front yard.”

“Do you know who she is?”

“After I Googled her, sure. Since I’ve been a Redskins fan from the womb on, I realized I’d read some of her bylines and some of her blogs. Actually, I remember thinking Perry Black was a guy until they started running her photo next to her byline in the Post. I was amazed, I mean, a woman who’s a real expert on pro football? Then yesterday, of course, I found out she’s related to you.

“I thought your name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t put it together until one of the agents told me yesterday when I got to the Hoover Building. And then, of course, I found out all about you and your current difficulties.” She looked so normal, he thought, and nice and pleasant, and yet—“Here you are, the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, one of the plummiest Foreign Service assignments in the universe, right?”

“Well, except for the Vulcan ambassadorship, I’m told, which isn’t in the cards, since I can’t pronounce the Vulcan capital.” She grinned at him, chewed on her croissant. He saw blackberry jam ooze over her lip.

He said, “I read your family in Boston is very well connected, big politicos for decades now, with their fingers in lots of local and national elections. Did their big contributions help secure that ambassadorship for you?”

She didn’t throw her fork at him. No, she laughed. “Not a bad assumption, but off the mark in my case. There’s quite a bit more.”

“You slept with the president.”

She laughed again. “Can’t say I did. Nope. He’s happily married, though it took him a while to take the plunge. Imagine his daughter is only twelve years old and Perry’s twenty-eight. You’re forgetting who my husband was, Agent Sullivan.”

A smile bloomed, Davis couldn’t help it. “Dr. Brundage Black, the longtime orthopedic surgeon for the Washington Redskins, and one of the first physicians to be directly on a pro football team’s payroll. He died of a heart attack when he was only fifty. I was very sorry to hear it.” He found he leaned toward her, at the loss and pain in her eyes.

After a moment, he said, “So tell me, Mrs. Black—”

“Call me Natalie, please.”

He nodded. “Natalie, what did your husband have to do with your appointment as the ambassador to the United Kingdom?”

“You want to go back into the mists of time?”

“Sure. I’ll eat another croissant.”

She handed him the covered bread basket. “Four of us—President Gilbert; Arliss Abbott—he appointed her as his secretary of state; my husband; and I all met at Yale in our sophomore year. Thornton Gilbert—Thorn—and I were both in Berkeley College. My husband, Brundage, and Arliss Abbott in Calhoun and Branford. At any rate, the four of us were tight friends from our sophomore year on, all of us full-charge types, but we laughed about it, and somehow it worked. Brundage and I married soon after we graduated, and so did Arliss, a whirlwind romance with a mining engineer, and had her son not long after that. The president went on to law school at Harvard. He met and married his wife, Joy, some fifteen years ago. We all stayed in touch over the years, even though our paths diverged.”

“So your appointment as ambassador to the United Kingdom was for auld lang syne?”

“Perhaps, in part, but I’ve made my career in the diplomatic corps for five years now. I had two other postings before this one.”

“But you have a law degree; you had a successful practice here in Washington. Why did you decide to join the Foreign Service?”

She smiled. “Thorn, President Gilbert, told me I was the natural-born diplomat in the group, that I could talk a sheik into giving up his harem and that I was wasted hammering out endless business contracts. He said it was invaluable to him to have people around him he could trust implicitly, and he trusted me. Arliss Abbott, his newly appointed secretary of state, another one of the four of us, agreed, and so I did.