State of the Union

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The Senate hearing room was packed with reporters. It was a slow news day. Even the prospect of listening to a mad scientist testify before the organized crime committee was welcome.

At the moment, only one member of that committee was missing from the chamber. Since the missing man was Josiah Hitch, the ranking minority member, the session had not yet been formally opened even though everyone else had been in place for twenty minutes. There was a noisy buzz in the room as reporters talked about whatever they had to talk about. At the witness table, a single man, obviously still on the sunny side of forty, sat waiting patiently. Part of the twitter among the reporters was because the witness had come in without even one attorney. In Washington, that was news almost on the level of Man Bites Dog.

Josiah Hitch eventually arrived, scowling as always, and muttered pro forma apologies for being “unavoidably detained.” Both the scowl and the apology were garbled by the Churchill cigar in his mouth. His colleagues were too polite to snicker. Everyone knew what had detained Hitch, what always detained him. He spent so much time in men’s rooms that his less sympathetic colleagues had started talking about “going to the hitch.”

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