Authors: Mallory Monroe
But it was sad.
And therefore they just sat.
***
Nathan Riles escorted Roman Wilkes into the morning room where Victoria Harber was waiting.
As soon as she saw him, she smiled.
“Hello there,” Victoria said.
“Hello,” Roman said.
She was wearing, he noticed, a very revealing peignoir, which looked ridiculous on her.
But she was on top of the world right now.
Was the woman who had brought a president to his knees.
The fact that the president in question also happened to be her son seemed beside the point to her.
She was flying high.
She undoubtedly figured she could wear, and could have, Roman thought as he sat down beside her, anything and anyone she wanted.
“I hear you’ve been a busy man.”
“How so?”
“I understand you’re all in, that you’ve informed your girlfriend that you will definitely defend her brother the murderer.”
“Ex-girlfriend, and that’s right.
I am officially defending Marcus Rance.
Why, you want to contribute to his legal defense?”
“Don’t be absurd! I have an image to uphold!
You may not take yours seriously, but my image is above reproach.”
Then she looked at him.
“Do you have them?” she asked him.
He reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out an envelope.
Gave it to her.
“Why are you giving them to me?
Why haven’t I seen them on the news yet?
The timing would be impeccable.”
“Kick’em while they’re down, something like that?” Roman asked.
“Exactly like that,” Victoria said. “And I’m enjoying every minute of it.
You can always count on the press to take whatever red meat you throw their way and chew it up until it’s only worth spitting out.”
“I thought you’d like to see the goods first,” Roman said.
“To make sure they live up to your standards so there’ll be no issues with me getting the second half of my pay.”
“Are they suggestive?” Victoria asked as she began to peel open the envelope.
“Do they show you and that Regina woman hugging and kissing as if she’s turned the nation’s White House into her own crack house for sexual deviants?”
“Hugging and kissing my ass,” Roman said.
“The brother is making love in those photographs.” Roman said this as Victoria, now excited, pulled out the photographs.
“And he’s making love to you,” he then added.
Victoria rose from her seat with the agility of a woman half her age as soon as she saw, not a photo of a naked Roman Wilkes making love to a naked Regina Lansing, but a naked Nathan Riles making love to his long-time employer, and lover, Victoria Harber.
“Yeah,” Roman said with laughter.
“I thought that would get a rise out of you.”
Victoria’s mouth flew open as she flipped through photograph after photograph, sexual encounter after sexual encounter.
She looked up at Roman, stupefied, and then back at the photos, as if she had been mistaken, as if she couldn’t possibly be seeing what she was seeing.
“But how could you know,” she started.
She and Nathan never shared their relationship with anyone, not ever!
It was forbidden for him to so much as mention her name out of the context of his job!
She looked at Roman again.
“Where did you get these?” she demanded to know.
“That’s my business.
But this is what’s going to happen,” Roman said, his face now serious, unrepentant.
“You and your three musketeers will go back on television, admit that all y’all lied through y’all teeth, and beg the president’s forgiveness.
Period.
If that doesn’t happen, if you can’t get those ladies to recant, I will whip out the photographs and show for all the world to see you, Victoria Harber, that great bastion of rich, white propriety, fucking the help.”
Victoria stumbled back, and then sat down.
Roman stared at her.
“How’s that for upholding that above reproach image of yours?” he asked.
She was still too stunned to speak.
“I mean, who knows?” he went on.
“Those old racist biddies that you run with might understand.
They might, in fact, be doing the same thing themselves.
But then again, hypocrisy is a bitch, isn’t it?
It never wants to admit its own failings.
Nope, with this kind of proof you’ll be castigated, lady.
Ostracized.
Eliminated from every sewing circle, every country club you’re a member of. You’ll be all on your own.”
Victoria was speechless.
For the first time in her life she was speechless.
“Those photos will always be my trump card,” Roman continued.
“And if anything happens to me, and it’s some funny-bunny stuff going on with the way I kick the bucket, they will become public.
So you see, Mrs. Harber, you’re screwed no matter who you fuck.”
Victoria closed her eyes, disgusted by his terminology.
Roman, however, couldn’t care less about her disgust.
He kept pounding.
“But if you don’t want to spend the rest of your days alone, isolated and ostracized, not to mention laughed at for the sheer magnitude of your hypocrisy, then you had better get those recantations.
Because unlike you and that little three-ring circus you displayed, I know how to put on a show.
And it’ll be compared to the greatest show on earth when I leave that stage.”
Then Roman smiled.
“We understand each other.
Don’t we?”
But she didn’t.
She just couldn’t understand any of it.
“But I paid you to get with Regina,” she said.
“I promised you another half million dollars if you delivered took photographs of you and her.
But instead you seek to embarrass
me
?”
“Exactly.”
“But
why
?” Victoria asked, confused to a point that bordered on panic.
“For one thing,” Roman said, “I have a conscience.
Unlike you, Mrs. Harber, I care which end of that horizontal line I spend eternity.
And for another thing, I happen to be eternally fond of the very woman you hate.
Because I love Regina Lansing.
She’s my girl and always will be.
And I get really annoyed when somebody tries to hurt her.
I get super annoyed by that.
And because Dutch Harber is her man now, and she obviously loves the man, I get equally perturbed when people try to run him down too.
Because that was what you tried to do with your own son, Mrs. Harber.
You tried to knock him down.
A hit and run if ever there was a hit and run!
But you didn’t see my black ass coming.
Did you?”
Roman said this with a grin.
“But I’ll bet you see me now.”
He grabbed his briefcase.
“I’ll keep that five-hundred grand,” he said, “for my expenses.
But the second part of my
payment
?”
He grinned.
“I think you ought to hold on to that.
Don’t want to be considered a greedy man.”
He left the room, although Victoria, still reeling, didn’t even know he had gone.
He was, in fact, just about to let himself out of the mansion’s front door when Nathan Riles, Victoria’s trusted manservant for over forty years, in additional to his
other
duties, met him at the exit.
And handed him a DVD.
“Give it to the press,” Nathan said.
“What is it that I’m giving to the press?” Roman wanted to know.
“The tape of that night in the White House.
The one with the president and Caroline Parker.
Not the doctored one, not the one with the missing scenes.
This is the original.”
Roman stared at Nathan, at this black man nearly thirty years his senior.
“I just laid those photos on her, man,” he said.
“She will most likely fire you when she discovers that you were the one who gave them to me.
Not to mention when she discovers you gave me this tape.”
“She won’t fire me,” Nathan said confidently.
“She won’t even suspect me.
She’ll believe somebody broke into this Fort Knox fortified mansion and snapped those photos, and then broke back out, before she suspects me.
I’m an old black dumbass far as she’s concerned.
Good for a little sex and a little cleaning, nothing else.
What harm could little ol’ stupid me possibly do?”
Roman stared at him.
“Why do you put up with it, man?”
Nathan hesitated, exhaled, and then looked away.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
And Roman knew that it was.
This man, this servant, truly loved that hateful woman.
And whenever her hate strayed too far from home and sought to destroy others, he would undoubtedly step in, behind her back, and right the ship again.
That was why Roman never fell in love with any woman beyond Regina.
You had to pretend that you were damn near blind to overlook all of their glaring faults.
And Roman was too visual to ever do that.
He shook Nathan’s hand, pocketed the tape, and left.
***
When the story broke it broke big, becoming as sensational a worldwide media event as the original accusations.
Allison, LaLa, and Christian, along with a slew of other staff and cabinet officials, jammed into the Roosevelt Room to watch the rapidly unfolding story.
First there was the president’s mother.
She didn’t stand behind any podium this time, didn’t have any standing room only crowd around her.
She, instead, stood in the library of her home, a solitary figure, reading from a shaking piece of paper:
“It is with a profound sense of conviction that I must come forward and tell the truth.
No-one is coercing me to come forward; no-one is threatening me in any way.
I come forward because I can no longer live with what I’ve uncovered.
To my horror, I’ve discovered that I was used to get to my son.
I’ve discovered that the accusations made by Caroline Parker, Jennifer Caswell, and Katherine Marris against my son, the president, are totally false.”