Legacies

"So this is the Heurich Society," said Button Samuelson, looking around the room as she took her seat in the upper room of the Brewmaster's Castle.  "I didn't see any of you at the funeral."  ("Well, we--")  "Oh, I understand," she said.  "You can't be publicly associated with one another."  She picked up a doughnut, examined it closely, then put it back down.  "And I really did appreciate all the flowers with the anonymous gift tags--very touching.  So here's the deal:  my father knew that my brother was not the right person to follow in his footsteps, so here I am."  ("This has never been--")  "Oh, I know, children don't inherit their parent's place in the Heurich Society, it's not like that at all.  And, anyway, I was adopted!  Probably from an unwilling political prisoner in South America, but that's neither here nor there."  She paused to pick up the doughnut again and take a bite of it, then she looked around the room while she chewed.  "And you haven't been big on admitting women, have you?"  She looked at the speaker phone, but Condoleezza Rice said nothing.  "Still, my father left me a lot of...information, shall we say, and I've shared that with some other people as insurance, shall we say.  Oh, and Project Cinderella?  Angela also thinks I should replace my dad as Chair of the Heurich Society."  She took another bite of the doughnut and waited.

"We've never had a member so young before," said one of the members.

"Is there any particular goal you have?" asked another member.

Then the speakerphone crackled.  "I move to make Henrietta Samuelson Chair of the Heurich Society," said Condoleezza Rice, who believed the young woman could be easily manipulated, blackmail or not. 

And a few minutes later, it was so.

A couple miles away, Angela de la Paz was sitting with Charles Wu in his office (former apartment), listening remotely to the closing minutes of the Heurich Society meeting.  "You did it!" said the spy.  "So what are you and Henrietta planning?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?!" said Angela, with a Mona Lisa smile.

"You don't have the foggiest idea, do you?" asked Wu, with a mystifying smile of his own.

"Dr. Rajatala keeps telling me I should finish my education and go to college, but what's the point?  Samuelson left his daughter an entire storage shed full of documentation of all these CIA operations he did, and the spy files he had on other people and organizations.  Why study history, or anything else, if people are changing everything in secret?"

"It's just one man's secrets, Angela.  Nobody has enough power to change everything.  And even if the Heurich Society does everything you want it to do--"

"I don't think you understand--he wasn't just one man.  The CIA--"

"I understand," said Wu.  "You think I don't?!  I deal with the Chinese Communist Party on a weekly basis!  Everybody wants to rule the world.  Look at what Woodward and Bernstein are now saying about Richard Nixon!"

"Who?"  (Wu just shook his head, uncertain whether the teenager was saying 'who' to Woodward, Bernstein, Nixon, or all three.)  "So what do you want?" asked Angela.  "And if you die tomorrow, what's Delia going to find in your storage boxes?"

Wu gave her a wry smile and got up to make himself a drink, trying to picture a time when Button Samuelson was a baby smiling up at Henry.

A few miles to the south, former Senator Evermore Breadman was trying to picture Kwame Brown surrounded by smiling children.  "I need to provide a legacy for my children!" Brown was whining over the speaker phone. 

Why do they always come to me too late? "Look," said Breadman, drawing hangman trees on his legal pad, "you're still a young man with a lot of supporters.  You'll be out of prison in no time, do some community service--look at Jack Abramoff!  He's been on the talk show circuit promoting his book!  Martha Stewart--the American public has a very short memory.  You can get through this!"

Several miles to the north, Basia Karbusky was looking at pictures of her parents in an old photo album.  She wasn't smiling in any of them.  She flipped the pages back and forth.  The photos with her smiling were always when she was with her grandfather.  Her parents still didn't know.  She put the photo album back on the shelf and turned back to the diary she had inherited from her grandfather--the diary of Nazi experiments.  From out in the pasture, the comforting bellows of Mega Moo wafted into her Potomac Manors home from time to time--the only sound that penetrated her concentrated focus.

Out in the Potomac, Ardua groaned under the oppression of a beautiful day in June, and took comfort that not everybody in Washington was outside worshipping the sun.