by Leon Uris
“Don’t raise the stinker that you’re retreating because of your family.
They know their daddy is a great leader ...” Mal said.
“Mea culpa time,” Quinn said. “I wanted clean in and clean out. Before the bust I made up my mind that I would stand for reelection if I had a chance to get this legislation through and impound about eighty-five percent of the guns in Colorado. When plans for the raid became a reality, I treated myself to massive doses of mendacity, the ancient art of lying to oneself. I lied, I made dirty deals, I was very selective of people’s rights, I put a lot of folks in harm’s way, I endangered the careers of some very gifted people. I went into Urbakken clean and escaped by a miracle. I went into AMERIGUN tainted and again escaped clean, except for those sad Jensen brothers. Am I cursed to have to always ride in on wings of a raven? Must I blow up half of the state to prove my point? Do the people really want a cowboy?”
“Well, right now they’ve got one,” Mal snapped back.
“You are their hero, Quinn,” Rita said.
“I love you guys,” Quinn whispered, “and I know what you are thinking but dare not say. Play it cool for your next term, Quinn, then go take a shot at the presidency.” Quinn had balled up both fists. “Nothing,” he banged out, “nothing can happen, no disaster can befall so great as to go through the agony of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Nothing,” he said, “nothing, nothing, nothing.”
*
THE WHITE HOUSE, 2007
From the get-go Thornton invoked a formal operation of the White House. It was a more serious place with a serious dress code. No more roller-blading in the halls outfitted like a member of the chorus of Guys and Dolls.
Serious young people were nominated for internship by serious Republicans. No more liberal punk kids. No more showing of thigh or cleavage and improper hairdos.
Intimacy among staff was more risky.
Under control, the hordes of legislators, consultants, media, public relations hired guns, and lobbyists entered a correct and hallowed place.
Daringly, the press facility near the Oval Office was exiled to the nearby Executive Building. The media went into a rage. Darnell knew that this was one the President could win. After the media debacles at the end of the last century, the public was delighted that the press was learning manners.
Thornton Tomtree was the first fully computerized president. He
installed a crew of the finest computer analysts. No matter what the
chore, background on a political appointee, weather in Alaska, cabinet
meeting, they could dissect and translate information faster than any
like team in the world. Tomtree went into his meetings with
up-to-the-second data,
the sway of public opinion, every nuance of the financial world.
Darnell Jefferson had the run of the place. He pulled together a public relations staff of rare genius to counter any idea that the Oval Office was rigid.
With his first years scandal free, the nation’s social agenda was soon overtaken by power bestowed on the corporate world, allegedly to keep America as the only superpower.
If Thornton was smart about one thing, it was human greed. Every American owned some. His programs were designed so the public saw a payoff for them.
Pucky had grown into a stylish sixty-year-old. She and the President had been long unfamiliar with one another’s bed. This did not result in her anger, but in a strange sense, it gave her freedom. She did all the First Lady things, often adding spice and humor and throwing the most elegant banquets in memory.
Thornton understood her value and rewarded her by endowing the cultural scene.
I am sleeping and I can’t wake up! I can’t wake up! Where the hell is Pucky? Where am II It will be daylight, and O’Connell is addressing the nation .. . enormous consequence.
Where the hell is Pucky?
“Mr. President,” my steward, Eric, repeated, pulling me out of a deep, confusion-filled sleep. I pointed at my mouth. He handed me a glass of mouthwash and held a spittoon, then put drops into my eyes.
“It is four A.M.” Mr. President, two o’clock Rocky Mountain time.”
That got my attention. I asked for Darnell’s whereabouts. Eric had hunted him down before he awakened me. Darnell was tied up for ten minutes or so in the press room. “Hold my calls until Darnell can brief me,” I ordered.
Come on, Darnell, God dammit! That’s funny. The first time I said those words to him was when we were teenagers.
Darnell Jefferson, the first black billionaire in American history
he who sat on three dozen corporate boards, he who endowed the black community and colleges handsomely, he who personally went to Moscow as the Soviet Union was breaking up and snared the twenty best computer scientists in the country for T3, he who talked me into building a pleasure palace for my workers which became the model for all industry, he who, he who, and so forth and so forth.
Well, I’ve done damned well for Darnell .. . and he’s done right well for me. He is the only one whom I can trust in this vacuum I carry. I trust no one in there but him. Suppose we had never met? Suppose he had decided not to spend his life keeping my public image pure and dynamic?
On New Year’s Eve of 1999 I told him I was going to make a run for the presidency in 2004. Darnell was way ahead of me and charted out a brilliant campaign.
We rode to the White House right after the turn of the century. The care, feeding, and control of the Internet had created great answers and greater confusion.
All of a sudden the world had potentially three billion would-be writers, not only with free and unfettered access, but hidden by anonymity.
The great computer firms were bent on speed and shrinking chips. Packaging, marketing them were the berries. Competition had become slaughterhouse-mean and fighting off an antitrust suit the most noble form of corporate life. No one seemed to have a vision of the future, or where this electronic colossus was taking us.
Darnell took a team of experts and science writers and Grafted a manuscript: The T3 Commonsense Guideline for International Internet Ethics: A Primer for the 21st Century.
I wrote the final draft and subsidized a major publisher to put it on
the market. Damned if it didn’t sell over a million copies in the
bookstores and another million over the various web sites. I made T3
Commonsense a must in every convention and salesroom at sweetheart prices and sent hundreds of thousands of copies to schools and universities.
Like According to Hoyle and Burke’s Peerage before it, T3 Commonsense established the rules of the road on a road sorely needing them. I had taken my first step on the golden carpet which climaxed with my election as president of the United States.
All the above may sound funny to you in light of the nation coming out of the closet by the end of the nineties. However, many of the things we let out of the closet would serve us better if they were shoved back in.
The point of this is to say, I myself, Thornton Tomtree, am a clean, moral, progressive, self-made entrepreneur.
The Four Corners Massacre was not my doing, but it happened on my watch. Darnell Jefferson and Pucky literally forced me to travel a nation in mourning and share the people’s grief.
Awkward and stumbling in the beginning, I learned the art of compassion. Even though I never personally knew or understood it. I acted it out, people responded to my “sincerity”.. . I never felt the depth of their anguish. Isn’t that what a leader is all about: not to go down in an ash heap, but demonstrate strength and ability to endure after a tragedy?
If a leader felt pain in every flood, hurricane, shooting, epidemic, school bus overturning ... he would cave in and no longer be a leader.
Darnell and Pucky forced enough of the mundane stuff into me to help me regain my position for reelection.
Speaking of tragedy! I was gaining on Governor O’Connell in the polls, and at the Great Debate I expected to bury him.
I blew it! As for Pucky’s part in this, it is history better left, unwritten.
We are now less than two weeks away from the presidential election of 2008. I’m not doing so well. Or am I?
Why, out of clear blue sky, did O’Connell call for national TV coverage of an announcement?
Darnell came in with a handful of pages. He glimpsed at the dark suit Eric had laid out. “Put away that mourning outfit,” Darnell ordered Eric. “I want the President to wear a green sports jacket and open collar.”
“Darnell.. .”
“A lot of folks downstairs need their morale lifted.”
No use arguing over so trifling a matter.
“What’s the latest?”
“We have some data from the NYPD. This Ben Horowitz visit seems to have set off some kind of chain reaction in the O’Connell camp. Ben Horowitz is a detective lieutenant, thirty years’ service, semi-retired or detached to teach at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Horowitz’s father was a professor of Russian studies at NYU. Horowitz’s own expertise is missing persons.”
“Got any photos?”
I lifted my magnifying glass, studying the pictures. “There may be a resemblance, there may not be. I can’t tell from these. What else?” Tomtree asked.
“I’ve spoken personally to our main man inside the Church hierarchy. There are no official records in Church adoption files about O’Connell’s birth. Two people were intimately involved in the adoption, namely, Cardinal Watts of Brooklyn and a Monsignor Gallico, both deceased. They did this on behalf of a priest who was Siobhan O’Connell’s brother but gave him no details. He is also deceased. The convent that raised and delivered O’Connell to Colorado could not give us any information as to the child’s biological parents.”
I liked what I was hearing. Some kind of moral blister was ready to
pop, the kind the media could seize on to devour whomever. Sure,
Horowitz and O’Connell were connected. Yes, I have turned a corner,
and the polls in a few days would see me back in the lead. The miracle
of my reelection would happen. It would be an upset even greater than
Truman’s defeat of Dewey. I was chomping at the bit. Was there a way
to find out what O’Connell was going to say before he went on? If so, we could be planning our counter strike right now.
“You’re drooling, Thornton,” Darnell said.
“You bet I am. If Horowitz senior was an academic teaching Russian, there has to be an FBI file on him.”
Darnell gave me a “shit for brains” look. “Wait, for Christ’s sake. Do not fart with FBI files. Do not jump the gun and step into a pile of shit. We will know in a matter of a few hours. I believe O’Connell has painted himself into a corner. It has to be good news for us.”
COLON, PANAMA, 2007
The free-trade zone at Colon was a long hour’s drive from Panama City. The zone sat plunk in the middle of the north south axis of the Western Hemisphere and was the transit point of anything and everything going up to North America and down to South America. Anything, everything.
The town itself epitomized a thieving, seedy, peeled, steamy, muddy-floody, baking, dangerous Central American place where eyes and ears seemed behind every corner and wall in a greedy hunt for deals.
Red Peterson, an old West Texas wildcatter, was scarcely moved to perspire even though the overhead fan grunted its last days.
Across from Red sat Moshe Rosenthal in ear locks beard, yarmulke, and prayer shawl. He took an envelope from his safe and handed it over the desk to Red.
The envelope contained a blue-white seventeen-carat diamond, in a diamond cut. The stone was a blinder.
“Now, which South American dictator’s wife did this little gem come off of?” Red asked.
Moshe held up his hands in innocence.
“Did you set your price on this?”
“Mas o’ minus.”
“For you and only you, a hundred and fifty thousand.”
Red replaced the diamond in its envelope, folded it securely, placed it in his top shirt pocket, and buttoned it. He signed an IOU marker to Rosenthal which the jeweler could cash later at Villa Hans Pedro Oberg, one of the main clearinghouses and banks of Colon.
“You made a good buy,” Rosenthal said. “It might be a little risky to sell it as one stone. If so, it could fetch over a half million. I’ll give you the name of a tip-top merchant on Forty seventh Street in New York. He can figure out the cuts like no one else. He’ll double your money.”
“Moses, you know I don’t deal in this crap. This is just a little present for the big, tall Swedish bombshell I’m married to.”
“Such a stone for your wife! Well, it will look beautiful in a necklace setting.”
“It’s like this, Moshe. I got her this G-string.”
“A G-string, you know, a G-string?” Red said tentatively.
He stood up and pretended he was wearing a G-string. “Up the left side, I call that first base, the string has a row of little rubies. Up the right side, I call that third base, a row of emeralds. This diamond is going right in at home place.”
“You’re such a romantic,” Moshe said.
The teakettle whistled. How the fuck can he drink hot tea? Red always wondered. He never winced, but it annoyed him whenever he saw Moshe Rosenthal’s concentration camp tattoo. Moshe produced a bottle of Red’s stuff. They clicked on the deal; prayers would be said tonight at shul.
“You delivered a hell of an order here. Some guys were around this morning looking for your pilot, Cliff Morgan. Apparently some kind of parachute drop.”
“Smells like CIA, doesn’t it, Moshe?”
“The guns are going into the Sierra Maestra Mountains in Cuba to a half
dozen anti-Castro guerilla bands. Strange, I remember in fifty-nine or sixty when the Americans parachuted guns to Castro back in the Sierra Maestra.”
“Nothing changes,” Red said. He looked outside. It was darkening for the daily downpour. “Guns coming out of the United States, sold to the CIA in Colon, and flown into rebel Cuban camps. At the same time I’m going to buy Bulgarian AK’s for shipment from Colon to the United States.”
Red caught forty seconds of hard rain and reached Kelley’s Klub dripping. Cliff Morgan occupied a table with a half-dead bottle and a dancer on his lap. Christ, Red thought, that little concita reminds me of why a fellow can never go on a diet of straight blondes.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your little friend?” Red said on entering.
“This is Choo-Choo,” Cliff said. “Her and her sister, Candi, do a real artistic number together. They’d like to be broadened by a mature man.”
Red took his hotel key out and handed it to ChooChoo. “Arrange to get off about nine or ten o’clock,” Red said, “I’ll square it with Kelley.”
She took the key. Red’s hand felt the beautiful curve of her hip and she left.
“Thanks,” Red said to Cliff.
“My treat,” Cliff answered. Red wished to hell Cliff Morgan had paid the installment on his jet.
“I hear the CIA was looking for you.”
“Yeah, they want me to fly our delivery in a transport and drop them in the Sierra Maestra. Fifty thousand in it.”
“You take the job?”
“After I finish up our charter. When we leaving?”
“I’ve got a little business at the Villa. Was going to leave tonight, but Choo-Choo and Koo-Koo .. . well, tomorrow morning. File a flight plan for Lubbock.”
The guards passed the Villa Pedro Oberg’s limo through the gates. Red emerged and with Hans Pedro disappeared into the safe room that had no eyes or ears. It was one of the most protected civilian buildings from the Rio Grande to the tip of Argentina.
The fucking little Swiss banker, Claus Von Manfried, was at hand to pick up droppings of the deals. Could he operate! He spread the large accounts into a half dozen
to a dozen banks, all numbered and inaccessible accounts.
“Let’s see what I’ve got here,” Hans Pedro said. “I have a verification of the pieces you sent down. Payable to you in the sum of two million, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Minus four hundred and seventy thousand you owe for the Bulgarian AK’s.”
“Yeah, I owe Moshe Rosenthal a hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Have you verified your purchase?”
“Yeah, I checked this morning. They’re all there. They’ll be going up on a Greek freighter, Kaspos. What have I got left over?” Clauf Von Manfried’s calculator added in bribes, transportation, Hans Pedro Oberg’s clearinghouse fees.
“Slightly under a million.”
“What’re my total deposits?” “Thirty million in eight accounts.”
Red scratched his head. “Bank a half million of the new money and give me the rest in cash.”
“I’ll prepare it, sir.”
You bet your sweet ass you’ll prepare it, you Swiss fart, Red thought to himself. “I’ll pick it up at six in the morning.”
Handshakes and curt nods all the way around.
Red smirked as he left the villa. Bunch of thieves, he thought. But then Coo-Coo and Du-Du would be ... waiting .. . and, he broke into his first smile in days, Greta would wear the G-string. Not a bad deal.
Hosanna Corner in the godforsaken outskirts of godforsaken Lubbock had ministered to the righteous and the sinner in its alternative histories. Hosanna Corner had come into being after the Civil War as the last watering hole before the wagon trains plunged into the southwest desert.
Nearly a century later, during the heyday of the West Texas oil strike, it naturally evolved into a saloon with gambling and prostitution amenities. When the oil patch collapsed, thousands lost it all and were left with land that could scarcely grow a crop.
Lubbock turned into a mean and nasty place where the American dream had betrayed the wildcatters, roughest of all men.
Hosanna Corner returned to a sense of grace as a local gathering house where a variety of Christian sects tried to gain a foothold among the discontent.