The Switch

4

The faint trace of L’Air du Temps in the outer office told Will that the boss had arrived.

She was early.

Normally she didn’t get in until nine or nine thirty, leaving him a full hour at his desk, undisturbed, to prepare for the day. Because every day was a battle in an extended military campaign. He started preparing as soon as he got up, cup of strong black coffee in hand. A general in the war room.

In his little home office he’d glanced over the press clips that came in the e-mail from media services, sifted through e-mails (more than three hundred a day, not including the junk: he’d once counted), looked at the Post and The Hill and Real Clear Politics and Politico and Drudge. Read about the bills that were coming up. Sent out notes asking staff members to stop by his office and see him. Then into the office by eight thirty, girded for battle. The commander must decide how he will fight the battle before it begins. He’d read that somewhere and remembered it verbatim. By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.

There was always a lot going on, which he appreciated; he liked being at work, in the grown-up world, away from squalling little Travis. But today the calendar seemed more crowded than usual. The legislative director wanted to fire one of the legislative assistants, who was always late. But you couldn’t just fire a staffer. Politicians never want to have a disgruntled former staff member out there grousing and bitching and threatening. So he’d have to meet with the LA, give her an off-ramp, help her find a new job. He also had to sign off on some press releases. He had a ten o’clock videoconference with the state director and staff. A lunchtime fund-raiser at Bistro Bis.

And there was the boss’s laptop mix-up. Which could turn out to be no big deal.

Or it could be a nightmare.

In a way it was strange that Will was a chief of staff to a prominent senator. There was one all-important relationship to manage, and then there were the forty-five people who worked under him, if you counted the fifteen in the district office in Chicago. He was a boss. He had to manage a lot of different personalities. Yet he’d always been a guy who never really fit in anywhere.

He’d been a nerdy kid at a jocky college. He’d gone to Miami University of Ohio — not in Miami, Florida, and boy, did he get tired of telling people that — because of its great poli-sci program. On Saturday nights, when everyone was heading over to the Goggin Ice Center to watch the RedHawks play hockey, or drinking Natty Light in cans at a frat party uptown, he’d be studying at King Library. Most lunches or dinners he’d sit by himself at Harris Dining Hall while seemingly everyone around him was sitting at a crowded table talking boisterously, laughing and hooting and having a great time. The truth was, he was sort of a grind.

His father had passed away when he was fourteen, and his mother, a receptionist in a dentist’s office, didn’t make much money. After his dad died, his mother sold real estate on the side. But it didn’t bring in near enough. So in college he did what he could: he had a work-study job at the admissions office, and he wrote term papers for some of his fellow students for cash.

Freshman year, in a fit of lunacy, he ran for class treasurer and was soundly defeated by some jock, a very public humiliation. When the election results came in, he went to his single in Swing and closed the door and ignored his classmates’ knocking.

It was a great embarrassment, but a useful one, he later decided. He loved politics but learned, that night, that some people aren’t meant to run for office. Some people get their picture taken, and some stand off to the side. He was the guy off to the side. He was the political junkie who could advise the simpler, denser, popular kid how to run and win. The popular kids, the charismatic, attractive ones with that hail-fellow-well-met gift that he so lacked, realized that he could be useful.

Will had been given a nickname, but it was not one he would have chosen. Freshman year, some hateful frat bro, noticing his slightly waddling gait, started calling him Penguin. As in, “Where’s Penguin?” And “Let’s get Penguin to do it.” He wanted to be liked, more than anything, but the best he could do was be the guy you have to be nice to.

He didn’t rush a frat; he knew better. When, during the fall of his junior year, a popular guy on his floor in Dorsey decided to run for student president against another popular kid, Will approached him and offered his services to “manage” his campaign. The kid, Peter Green, at first thought Will was kidding, then thought it over and said sure. Peter won, and when he gave his victory speech — really more like rambling, semicrocked ad-libbed remarks — he said, “And, hey, I owe you big, Penguin — I mean, Will.” It was nothing but a slip of the tongue on Peter’s part, Will told himself, and he pretended to laugh along with everyone else.

By senior year Will became president of the debating club, the Forensics Society — because no one else wanted the drudgery of the job. Which was something to put on his résumé when he applied for jobs on Capitol Hill. Along with dean’s list all eight semesters.

He knocked softly on her open office door. Senator Susan Robbins was sitting behind her glass-topped wooden desk, on the phone. She held up an index finger, gave him an even gaze as she said, “Yes, Chuck. Can do. Will do.”

Will waited in the doorway. She was a striking woman, with her auburn hair and cobalt-blue eyes. When she was in her twenties and thirties she must have been a knockout. At sixty-two she was still beautiful.

She was wearing her cerulean-blue suit, the one she wore when she was in combat mode. She always wore jewel-tone suits, whether skirts or pantsuits. Turquoise meant she was in a conciliatory mood. Emerald was for high-visibility hearings, when the TV cameras were there. Ruby was for evening functions and fund-raisers. He was probably the only person in the world who knew what Susan Robbins’s suit colors signified. He was probably the only one who cared.

She toyed with the coiled cord, swung it like a little lasso. “I understand,” she said. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Bye.”

She put the phone down. “Come,” she said.

He entered and sat in the chair beside her desk. The senator had twenty-five years on him, and sometimes he felt like one of her sons: the good son. She had a fraught relationship with her older son and practically no relationship at all with her younger one. He wondered what it must have been like to have Susan Robbins as a mother. It couldn’t have been easy. As a boss she could be, well, a lot, but he felt toward her a fierce protectiveness, an abiding loyalty, as sticky as epoxy.

“Isn’t there some clever way to find my laptop?” she said. “Online, I mean.”

She was talking, he assumed, about Find My Mac, a feature on some Macs that allows you to use iCloud to locate a missing or stolen computer or iPhone. He was moderately surprised she knew about this. Unfortunately, their IT guy had disabled it on Susan’s MacBook, at her insistence, for security reasons.

“In theory, but it’s turned off.”

“So there’s no way to find it online?”

“Right. Our best bet is to contact whoever must have taken yours and arrange a swap.”

“But I have no idea whose computer this is.” She pointed to the laptop flat on the desk in front of her, a shimmering silver oblong. “It’s locked. How do we find out who it belongs to?”

Will reached out for it. She lifted it from the desk and handed it to him.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

“I don’t think you realize how sensitive this is.” In a quieter voice, she went on: “If anyone finds out — it could be a felony. Not ‘it could be’; it is a felony.”

Will felt queasy. “But you’d never get prosecuted.”

“Don’t be so sure. The atmosphere today, it’s a career ender for sure. There must be some way to hack into it, to find out who owns it, right?”

Will put a palm up like a traffic cop. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s handled.”