(1964) The Man Read Free Page B

Vice-President of responsibility for her head cold and wretched face, and now, her face repaired, her mind clearer, she smelled the steaming coffee on the desk behind her. Somebody from the Navy Mess had noiselessly come and gone, and because of her self-absorption, she did not know who it had been and whom to thank. She sipped the coffee, recoiled, blew on it to cool it, and finally, breaking the slice of toast, munching it, she was able to drink down the contents of the cup.
    At last, feeling better, forgiving the day for its earliness, forgiving everyone for everything, she came to her feet. Her platinum wristwatch, a generous gift from the First Lady, showed the time to be twenty-six minutes after six o’clock. Right now, Edna guessed, T. C. and his staff were leaving the Kaisersaal, the splendid dining room of emperors of the Holy Roman Empire located in the Roemer, Frankfurt’s five-gabled city hall. The European press, and recently the American papers, had gleefully taken to calling the meeting between the President of the United States and the Premier of Soviet Russia the Roemer Conference, reminding readers that Frankfurt’s city hall had been the site, during the Middle Ages, where international merchants gathered to trade.
    Well, Edna thought, T. C. has done his trading for the morning. Now, driving the several blocks to the Alte Mainzer Palace, his headquarters in Frankfurt, he is probably considering what problems of the trading he must discuss this afternoon (over there) or morning (over here) with select Cabinet members and Congressional leaders. Edna had seen photographs of the President’s ornate Gothic ground-floor bedroom in the ancient Palace—the Bonn government had suggested the President use the ancient Palace for his living quarters instead of the United States Consulate across the Main River, because it was roomier, more picturesque, and nearer the Roemer—and not seeing this fourteenth-century Palace was what Edna regretted most about missing the trip.
    Ordinarily, Edna traveled with the President. She had made four trips with him abroad—a wonderland for a farm girl from Wisconsin—but this was one of the two trips that she had missed, because of the darn head cold. Frankfurt was a city she had never seen, and even though Tim Flannery, the President’s press secretary, assured her that she had missed nothing, that postwar Frankfurt was a dull, Swiss-type industrial metropolis featuring nothing more exciting than the I. G. Farben Building and the Hesse State Radio Building, both modern monstrosities, Edna knew differently. She knew that the Allied bombers that had leveled Frankfurt’s medieval Old City in 1944 had, by some miracle, left almost intact the two dusty near-crumbling architectural wonders of the fourteenth century, the Frankfurt cathedral and the three-story Alte Mainzer Palace that housed the Presidential party. Edna knew that she traveled the way she tried to work, with efficiency, and she was not ashamed that she collected palaces, castles, and museums, with which to educate her children someday. The possibility of children, for one not even married and nearing spinsterhood, brought Edna back to reality, and once more brought her mind to George Murdock. She was sorry to lose the Alte Mainzer Palace for her collection, but there was compensation in not having to be apart from George the entire week.
    She realized with a start that she had been standing at the desk, daydreaming away five more precious minutes, and 3,000 miles away in Frankfurt the President was nearing his telephone in the ancient Palace, and she had not yet made the few preparations necessary for his call to the Cabinet Room. Hastily she searched her desktop for the list of those who would be present for the conference call, found no such list, and then guessed that Wayne Talley would, from long habit, have left it on the President’s own desk.
    Hurrying now, Edna opened the nearest door on her left, and