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finding her.”
    “I know.”
    “I’ll have to go find her first.”
    Edgardo nodded, looking at him with an evaluative expression. “Maybe so.”
    A T THE QUIBLERS’ HOUSE IN BETHESDA this unsettled winter, things were busier than ever. This was mainly because of Phil Chase’s election, which of course had galvanized his Senatorial office, turning his staff into one part of a much larger transition team.
    A presidential transition was a major thing, and there were famous cases of failed transitions by earlier administrations that were enough to put a spur to their rears, reminding them of the dire consequences that ineptitude in this area could have on the subsequent fates of the presidents involved. It was important to make a good running start, to craft the kind of “first hundred days” that had energized the incoming administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, setting the model for most presidents since to try to emulate. Critical appointments had to be made, bold new programs turned into law.
    Phil was well aware of this challenge and its history, and was determined to meet it successfully. “We’ll call it the First Sixty Days,” he said to his staff. “Because there’s no time to lose!” He had not slowed down after the election; indeed it seemed to Charlie Quibler that he had even stepped up the pace, if that was possible. Ignoring the claim of irregularities in the Oregon vote—claims which had become standard in any case ever since the tainted elections at the beginning of the century—and secure in the knowledge that the American public did not like to think about troubling news of this sort no matter who won, Phil was free to forge ahead with a nonstop schedule of meetings, meetings from dawn till midnight, and often long past it. He was lucky he was one of those people who only needed a few hours of sleep a day to get by.
    Not so Charlie, who was jolted out of sleep far too often by calls from his colleague Roy Anastophoulus, Phil’s new chief of staff, asking him to come down to the office and pitch in.
    “Roy, I can’t,” Charlie would say. “I’ve got Joe here, Anna’s off to work already, and we’ve got Gymboree.”
    “Gymboree? Am I hearing this? Charlie which is more important to the fate of the Republic, advising the president or going to Gymboree?”
    “False choice,” Charlie would snap. “Although Gymboree is far more important if we want Joe to sleep well at night, which we do. You’re talking to me now, right? That’s what telephones are for. How would this change in any way if I were down there?”
    “Yeah yeah yeah yeah, hey Chucker I gotta go now, but listen you
have
to come in from the cold, this is no time to be baby-sitting, we’ve got the fate of the world in the balance and we need you in the office and taking one of these
crucial
jobs that no one else can fill as well as you can. Joe is around two right? So you can put him in the daycare down here at the White House, or anywhere else in the greater metropolitan region for that matter, but you have to
be here
or else you will have
missed the train,
Phil isn’t going to stand for someone phoning home like E.T., lost somewhere in Bethesda when the world is sinking and freezing and drowning and burning up and everything else all at once.”
    “Roy. Stop. I am talking to you like once an hour, maybe more. I couldn’t talk to you more if we were handcuffed together.”
    “Yeah it’s nice it’s sweet it’s one of the treasured parts of my day, but
it’s a face business,
you know that, and I haven’t
seen
you in months, and Phil hasn’t either, and I’m afraid it’s getting to be a case of
not seen not heard
.”
    “Are you establishing a climate-change task force?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you going to ask Diane Chang to be the science advisor?”
    “Yes. He already did.”
    “And are you going to convene a meeting with all the reinsurance companies?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you’re proposing the