Page 370 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

"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.

Now she lay with her head on his belly and tangled her fingernails idly in the curls. They were in his apartment on a Monday night. Rebecca had no meetings on Monday nights, but she pretended she did, and her husband pretended to believe her.

The physical arrangements were easy. Her feelings were harder to manage. It was so difficult to keep these two men in separate compartments in her head that she often wanted to give up. She felt miserably guilty about being unfaithful to Bernd. But her reward was passionate and satisfying sex with a charming man who adored her. And Bernd had given her permission. She reminded herself of that again and again.

This year everyone was doing it. Love was all you needed. Rebecca was no hippie--she was a schoolteacher and a respected city politician--but all the same she was affected by the atmosphere of promiscuity, almost as if she were inadvertently inhaling some of the marijuana in the air. Why not? she asked herself. What's the harm?

When she looked back on the thirty-seven years of her life so far, all her regrets were for things she had not done: she had not been unfaithful to her rotten first husband; she had not got pregnant with Bernd's child while it was still possible; she had not escaped from the East German tyranny years earlier.

At least she would never look back and regret not having fucked Claus.

Claus said: "Are you happy?"

Yes, she thought, when I forget about Bernd for a few minutes. "Of course," she said. "I wouldn't be toying with your pubic hair otherwise."

"I love our time together, except that it's always too short."

"I know. I'd like to have a second life, so that I could spend it all with you."

"I'd settle for a weekend."

Too late, Rebecca saw where the conversation was going. For a moment, she stopped breathing.

She had been afraid of this. Monday evenings were not enough. Perhaps there had never really been a chance that Claus would be satisfied with once a week. "I wish you hadn't said that," she said.

"You could get a nurse to take care of Bernd."

"I know I could."

"We could drive to Denmark, where nobody knows us. Stay in a small seaside hotel. Walk along one of those endless beaches and breathe the salt air."

"I knew this would happen." Rebecca stood up. Distractedly, she looked for her underwear. "It was only a question of when."

"Hey, slow down! I'm not forcing you."

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