A God in Ruins

by Leon Uris

  A murmur arose from a shocked audience.

  “For years,” Thornton said, “I’ve heard rumors about Urbakkan. When I went to research it, I learned that the report on the raid was sealed and under lock and key. Now we know why,” he said, holding up the Longacre newsletter.

  Jesus, Quinn thought, keep your cool! The bastard thinks he can create confusion that cannot be clarified until after the election. Quinn scratched his jaw as Tomtree continued to thunder.

  “I respectfully request that you lower your tone, Mr. Tomtree,” Carter Carpenter admonished.

  “On behalf of my courageous buddies who gave up their lives, I cannot dignify you.”

  “Sham!” Tomtree repeated. “Convenient of you not to answer.”

  “There are seventeen survivors of the Urbakkan raid,” Quinn said. “We have remained close down through the years. We have never missed an annual reunion. I have been stalked about Urbakkan since I first ran for state office over a quarter of a century ago. I knew this was going to come up. Fifteen of these Marines were able to come to New York and are in the audience. Both the former commandant of the Marine Corps and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff are now in the process of issuing statements to answer the Longacre Institute’s terrible lie. The reason the facts of Urbakkan were kept secret was because of the raid’s success. We did not want the enemy to learn how we did it. Moreover, the plane itself and many of its systems were kept secret for national security reasons. In fact, the surviving members of Urbakkan will hold a news conference in the McGraw Rotunda directly after the debate.”

  Darnell hustled Thornton into a side office at intermission. A string of damage-control people trailed in. Darnell sat the President down. The President was a tombstone with eyes, staring at the floor. Darnell hovered over him like a manager whose fighter has undergone a beating.

  “Mr. President, according to a snap poll at the Oyster Bar—“ Mendenhall began.

  “You, Mendenhall, out!” Darnell commanded. “And you, Turnquist, out, and you, you, and you—out!”

  “Mr. President—“ Turnquist demanded.

  “Out!” Darnell yelled.

  “Do what Darnell tells you to,” Thornton rasped.

  Secret Service Agent Lapides moved everyone into the corridor quickly and closed himself in with Mr. Jefferson and the President.

  Thornton looked up, crestfallen. “I fouled up,” he mumbled.

  “Big-time.”

  “Why, how did I do wrong?”

  “You tried to turn this debate into a search-and-destroy mission,” Darnell snarled.

  “It’s hard to get a handle on O’Connell,” Thornton went on.

  “Yeah, he can beat you to death with the truth. If we are on a losing slide, you go out with dignity, Thornton. It’s liar’s poker, and you got called. You walked into a couple of sucker punches with your fucking ocean floor and Urbakkan raid. Who the hell at Longacre did you assign to write this newsletter?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Darnell turned to the door. “Lapides, the President is soaking wet. He has a clean shirt in the bathroom.”

  Thornton was led to the sink and mirror. The damage was not beyond repair. He freshened up. Darnell tied his tie, watching his man’s mood go from self-pity to anger.

  “Five minutes!” they heard a voice from the corridor.

  “I think I’ll go back in early,” Thornton said.

  “I know by your expression what you’re thinking,” Darnell said. “You can’t do it.”

  “It’s legitimate!” Thornton said, gaining authority by the instant.

  “You will not bring up an affair Rita O’Connell had thirty years ago.”

  “She left her wedding bed to run off with a drug cartel lawyer!”

  “You will not bring that up,” Darnell cried.

  “I’m the president. I can do any goddamned thing I want!”

  Darnell held him by the lapels. “Pucky has been having an affair for two years. O’Connell knows about it.”

  Thornton tried to brush Darnell’s hands off him, but Darnell held on tightly. Thornton blinked, and blinked again.

  “Was this affair with a male or a female?”

  (( v

  A man.

  “Well, thank God for that. Do you think O’Connell will sit on it till after the election?”

  “I warn you, don’t go after his wife.”

  “I see,” Thornton said. “And you’ve known about this all along and didn’t tell me?”

  “I learned about it when I meet with Greer Little and Professor Maldonado in Chicago.”

  “Greer Little!” Thornton spat. “That bitch!”

  “You’ve got it backward, Thornton. Greer uncovered Pucky’s affair. O’Connell made her swear to keep it a secret. Maldonado was the one who spilled it to me. When O’Connell learned, he fired Maldonado on the spot, his own father-in-law.”

  “Who the hell is this O’Connell?” Thornton moaned.

  “One minute!” the voice called from the corridor.

  “Darnell, what should I do?”

  “You have to apologize. You say that in Longacre’s zeal to get O’Connell, they fed you disinformation which you disavow!”

  Thornton nodded his head. “Darnell, are you going to leave me?”

  “No, I won’t leave you, Thornton.”

  For the first time in their long years, Thornton threw his arms about Darnell and hugged him strongly, then went to the door.

  “Thornton.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you want to know the name of Pucky’s .. . lover?”

  “What the hell’s the difference? How could Pucky have done this to the presidency?”

  Thornton Tomtree had a hundred seconds to resurrect himself, and he did. He spread his options out. The news of Pucky’s affair was annoying. Who the hell could have wanted her? That’s not the point, he told himself. How much damage would it do before the election? If O’Connell showed enough desperation to make an attack, Thornton’s spin people could throw it back in O’Connell’s lap and show the American people his Democratic opponent would stoop to anything. With the knowledge out Thornton would get to play “the wounded Lincoln” suffering.

  Even as he followed Darnell to the door, a plan evolved. The Urbakkan raid still had enough mystery to it to cause confusion over the real facts.

  The crowd had thickened in Times Square a few blocks away under the great news screen.

  In this home and that, the intermission chores were closed up with a final flush of the toilet, snap of the Coke and beer bottles, and gathering in about the television.

  America’s downtowns were empty.

  This land, so diverse, realized that a particular moment of epiphany was about to take place.

  “Thornton,” Darnell whispered, “the people know you are still the president. There is a fear of O’Connell. This next hour is the moment of your life.”

  Thornton nodded to Carter Carpenter as he cozied to his lectern.

  “Mr. Carpenter,” Thornton said, “because of the nature of our debate before the break, I’d like to make a statement.”

  “It is not your turn, sir,” Carpenter said.

  “I’ll cede to Mr. Tomtree,” Quinn said.

  “It’s a rock-bottom humiliation for a politician to look in the mirror and see egg on his face. This Longacre report was only published today, and because the issue of the truth about Urbakkan has become vital to this election, I accepted it because of Longacre’s decades-long devotion to the truth.”

  The loved ones in Quinn’s section paled. There seemed to be loved ones in Thornton’s seats besides Pucky, but they were faceless to a father who didn’t know their birthdays.

  “Why did this spring up now? If Longacre published this account and it is proved false, then I would be greatly embarrassed. But, my fellow citizens, Urbakkan has been sealed for three decades. I believe the truth is that someone on O’Connell’s staff deliberately fed
disinformation to the writer of this article. What media power fits the bill, and will she answer?”

  “Mr. O’Connell?”

  “Mr. Tomtree’s reference was to my campaign manager, Greer Little-Crowder. The Longacre think tank has marched to T3’s drumbeat for twenty years, fed by your generosity of over three million dollars.”

  “You see there, how you are trying to distort—“

  “Longacre didn’t verify a single fact, Mr. Tomtree. It was a hatchet job to create suspicion over the raid. There are only one or two persons who could have written it. We’ll know soon enough, and it won’t hold till after the election.”

  Well, now, he had dared O’Connell and O’Connell had not thrown out the Pucky affair. Even if Quinn attacked, the revelation would backfire on him. O’Connell could then easily go down as a raider and a shark.

  On the other hand, if Quinn misses this opportunity, he will I show he is too weak to duke it out with me, Thornton thought.

  “The American people will have an answer on this in a few days,” Carter Carpenter said. “I think it propitious to move on to other issues.”

  Just what Thornton wanted, to create doubt and confusion, leave it unsettled, challenge O’Connell’s hero status.

  Thornton was now wired with charts and graphs—over the hills and down to the dales, to grandmother’s house we’ll go-lines and colored bars and round pieces of pie all sliced to percentages. Thornton was in a boardroom posture where he could lay a hundred and one booby traps with the figures distorted, omitted .. . and with three you get egg roll.

  “I’ve got a real problem with your charts,” Quinn laughed.

  “Yes, I know, of course you do,” Thornton replied. His blood circulated faster as his full strength returned. Thornton hung tenaciously to the visuals, unfinished portraits.

  “Gentlemen,” Carter Carpenter said, “we are running low on time. You both have enough for a three- to five-minute summation. Mr. Tomtree.”

  “So what if the Urbakkan article proves to be wrong? All it proves is

  that after three decades under seal, someone in O’Connell’s court was able to slip disinformation to us, using an honorable institution as a dupe. It is this kind of confusion that the American people will be facing from the White House if this man is elected.”

  “Hot damn!” Thornton congratulated himself. “I whacked him good! Now, nail it on, T3.”

  “Is it not fitting,” Thornton continued, “to have had this debate in this great library? Nothing could better explain the difference between us. I am of the new American breed who has made possible transmitting every piece of information in this library anywhere on earth, in a fraction of a second. Since this new century began, we have moved to the cusp of forging a great electronic world. Men like Quinn Patrick O’Connell would rather carve in stone than have a printing press. Yes, there is greed and sin and garbage on the Internet and on the cable channels.

  “When has the human face been free of greed? Every time a new invention comes into play for the betterment of the human race, greedy legions pounce on it.

  “I know that. I also know who of the two of us is better suited to deal with this complicated new world technology. Quinn Patrick O’Connell has shown himself to be a one-issue candidate. The sophistication and needs of man’s new electronic age cannot be mastered by him.”

  “May I?” Quinn asked.

  “Yes, Mr. O’Connell,” Carter said.

  “Thornton Tomtree will indeed keep us busy regulating the two-bit

  stockbrokers, children’s porno, scams, and slap a wrist for the massive

  invasion of American privacy. There will be sensational trials and

  rigid regulations. That will be for the greedy little flies buzzing

  around a dead carcass. But Thornton Tomtree will leave the big players

  alone. T3’s seven hundred and forty industrial, commercial, shipping,

  banking networks are the greatest instruments for greed this world has

  ever seen. He’ll use his power to ride shotgun on the little fish

  while, at the same time, he covers up billions of dollars moving daily in utter secrecy.”

  Quinn had weighed carefully but quickly, and the words seemed to tumble out of his mouth.

  “This is not a Tut’s tomb or an obsolete dinosaur. This is my father’s generation who gave more of themselves for the betterment of this nation than any other.”

  A great door opened between speaker and listeners.

  “I’ve lived on a ranch most of my life. My parents and I took a lot of trips. The moment of glory was entering this building and the Library of Congress in Washington. It was like coming into a sacred place. I knew, early on, that the writer afforded me a window to our past, an understanding of human relationships that set me on a bridge to cross and participate with my own generation. I was often lonely. It was not till I read Of Mice and Men that I realized I was not alone and that loneliness was a universal sadness of man.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time with John Steinbeck. He bared his soul to bring light to me. He bared human frailty in his pages and in his own life—as did a hundred .. . no, a thousand other authors who knew what one little boy was going through and who stood tall for the dignity of man.”

  What the hell is he getting at? Thornton wondered. He’s rambling. But would you believe the quiet in here? Believe it?

  You ought to see Times Square silent. Taxis pulled over into parking lanes, and twenty-five thousand people, or more, watched the great screen.

  “We tore down buildings like this not long ago,” Quinn went on, “in our

  everlasting hunt for the mall and the skyscraper. What the hell! The

  legacy of past generations can now be kept on a piece of software and

  flashed up on the screen with a tweak of the mouse. “Something is

  missing from that. What is missing is the personal relationship, the

  love between writer and reader, all the hope and all the horror the

  writer has to tell you. It is you and the writer alone, together, that will give you understanding about the joy and fear, the jealousy and love you have with your parents and your sisters and brothers.

  “I glory in the electronic age, but do not tear this building down. I believe that the salvation of man will not come from an IBM printout, but from the words, on stone indeed, that came down from Sinai. Let us not abandon all the great thought in these rooms to the proposition of putting all our faith into an impersonal machine. By so doing, we will become something less than human beings ourselves.”

  *

  After the debate the ground shifted, radically. The Tomtree campaign seemed to run out of energy. O’Connell had splintered away part of the hard Right, not by politics alone, but by the growing charisma of the candidate. Is O’Connell too good to be true?

  In Los Angeles, Quinn spoke to the Mexican American community with a candor they had not heard. “We have no right to interfere with Mexican internal affairs, but for Mexico to be a good neighbor of the United States, its institutionalized corruption must stop. No better example of that is the exploitation of Mexican labor in factories along our borders.”

  It was another of Quinn’s daring speeches, but some people finally heard out loud what they had been saying in whispers.

  The following night was a gathering in the Hollywood Bowl for a two-hour telecast from the community of stars. It was a love-in.

  Rita knew the instant her daughter-in-law phoned. Siobhan had pulled herself together for coherence every night when her son phoned. For the last two nights she had been unable to speak to him.

  “She’s in and out of lucidity. We just don’t know how long.”

  Mal and Quinn had been able to keep up civil contact, a new bend in their years together. The pressure was taken off when Mal phoned first.

  “I’ve been visiting with your mother,” Mal said. “She is in a bad wayr Quinn. If you can get back, you and Rita still have
your wing at my place. I can book enough rooms in Grand Junction to fairly well cover the entourage.”

  “It’s your dad,” Quinn said to Rita. “I need to go back.”

  “Siobhan?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve got your mother in a quiet place, adjoining the south veranda. Beside Duncan and Lisa, and Rae, there should be other rooms open at the ranch house.”

  “Rita and I will fly directly into Troublesome. We should be there after midnight or so. Mal .. . Mal .. .”

  “Don’t say anything, Quinn. Get it straight that I am not sorry I told Darnell Jefferson what the President’s wife was up to. If I hadn’t, Tomtree would have attacked my daughter and your wife. No job in the world is worth how they can ravage and savage. But, asshole that thou art, you are my son-in-law. Now, where do you want me to put Greer?”

  “Greer, Greer. She stayed in New York to see her husband and clear up some business. Will you have room at your place?”

  Mal laughed. “The room where Rita kept her stuffed animals. I’ll have Juan and a couple of the hands get it cleaned out. I’ll install what electronic and computer shit there is around to keep the wires buzzing.”

  “Mal, thank you, man.”

  “You’re a stupido bastardo, but I love you.”

  Rita was on another phone. She canceled Quinn in the Northwest, then directed a press aide to put out a simple bulletin to the effect that it was family business.

  Rita kicked off her shoes and stretched on the chaise longue. Quinn sat on the ottoman and massaged her feet.

  “How are you doing, honey?” she asked.