Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  Withers shaded his eyes against the sunlight, wondering if Park was visualizing happy children playing in the water or hiking up in the hills. Some instinct told him that those weren’t Park’s thoughts, but he couldn’t figure out what was going on in the man’s mind.

  Park slapped a meaty hand against the side of his neck. “How are the bugs?”

  “Those little black flies, and more mosquitoes than last year—but survivable. We lay in some Off, make the kids slap it on. They’ll be fine.”

  The year had been bad for Camp Charisma. Several of their usual customers had gone as far west as California and as far north as Utah, concerned about the fire hazard. Withers needed this rental.

  “Well, Mr. Park?” the older man said. “Do you think that’s a problem?

  Park, for all of his delicate motion, was very fit, hawk-lean, thick-fingered. He turned slowly, again. Absurdly, this time he reminded Withers of another bird, this time an owl. It seemed that Park’s head moved first, followed by his body. “No,” he said.

  “I mean, they’ll be able to swim. If these are city kids, they’ll probably just love it. It’s beautiful up here. Have you been to Prescott before?” He hoped that desperation wouldn’t make his voice shrill.

  “Yes.”

  Withers watched him carefully. There was something wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Probably just his own discomfort at his situation. He knew that he should just press the sale, but decided that he had to ask another question. “Mr. Park—could I ask you why you decided on Charisma Lake?”

  Park smiled at him. A perfect smile, one that might have been practiced in a mirror. At that moment, Park seemed the most plausible and engaging man Withers had met in years. “I’d heard good things, and the price was right.”

  Withers nodded. “Well, I can understand that—we had to lower a bit. What with the fire hazard, some of our usual groups were reluctant to book.”

  There was another subject that had to be broached, but Withers was reluctant to bring it up. “Your people understand about fireworks? I mean, we have zero tolerance. Fires are allowed only in the designated areas, and all counselors have to be drilled on procedure.”

  “No worries,” Park said. “They’ll be here a day early.”

  Withers felt his nagging sense of discomfort dissolving. Everything was going to be fine. “How many children are you expecting?” he asked.

  “Five percent,” Parks said, almost absently.

  “Excuse me?”

  Parks smiled like a man who had dropped a crouton from his plate, apologetic and ingratiating. “I meant fifty.”

  Fifty is three percent of what? About 1500?

  “All coming from one school?”

  “No,” Park said. “From around the country.” He didn’t seem to want to volunteer more information, and Withers was about to ask when Park spoke up again. “We’re a charitable organization. We identify children at risk who have managed to excel academically and in other ways, and we reward them with a week in the country and a thousand dollar savings bond. We’re businessmen, but we hire experienced staff with YMCA and Girl Scout training.”

  Another level of Withers’s emotions relaxed. That was something else that had nagged at him. Park just didn’t seem like the kind of man to get down and dusty with a bunch of kids. More a headmaster type. Maybe military, or law enforcement. That was definitely an oddity. But if Park understood his limitations, and had the sense to hire some college kids to wrestle around with the campers … well, then, Park’s square-cut business suit might have lovely deep pockets.

  Again, Parks seemed to have read his mind. “I assume that a cashier’s check is sufficient for the deposit?”

  “Of course,” Withers said.

  Parks pulled an envelope from his pocket, and handed it over.

  “Then everything is satisfactory. And I will see you again on June twenty-fourth.”

  They walked back down the hill to the parking lot. Park began gazing around the camp again, almost forgetting that Withers stood in front of him. He seemed to be memorizing the buildings and layout. Finally he nodded, satisfied with something that he had seen, or his own private thoughts. Without another word he returned to his Bronco, started the engine, backed it up, circled it, and began his way up the narrow trail. He hadn’t reached the first set of marker stones before halting and backing up.

  “Mr. Withers?” he called.

  “Yes?”

  “You live here on the grounds, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Me and Diane, the wife. We’re always here when we have campers.” Withers half-expected Parks to have some kind of objection to that, that he wanted to have the kids alone to himself. Right at that moment Withers decided that he didn’t like the man. If Park said anything, anything at all that gave the slightest sense that he wanted fifty kids up in the mountains without proper supervision, Withers was going to turn the contract down. To hell with the fact that he needed it, that Diane would probably stamp her foot and get quiet and pensive for an hour or two. They could just scrape a little deeper into their equity credit line at Arizona S&L, and—

  But Parks said, “Good.” His smile sparkled. “Love for you to both be here. Help us celebrate the Fourth.”

  Withers scratched his head. “Sure thing. But no fireworks, remember.”

  “Zero tolerance.” Park smiled warmly.

  Park trundled the Bronco down the trail and away. The dust hadn’t settled before Withers’s wife Diane, a dumpling of a woman with deeply grooved smile lines at mouth and eyes, emerged to watch it leave.

  “So,” she said, and linked her arm with her husband’s. “What do you make of that one?”

  “Money’s good, and we need it.”

  “But?”

  “What makes you think there’s a but?”

  She poked her tongue at him. “That’s your ‘But’ face. After thirty years, I should know.”

  The Bronco was making the first turn down the mountainside along the narrow, twisting trail. In a few moments, it would be gone.

  “Well?” she pried, refusing to let it go. Her manner was teasing, but insistent.

  He chucked her under the chin. “Let’s pray for rain next year, all right?”

  9

  SATURDAY, MAY 12

  Eyeful’s offices were on the thirteenth and fourteenth floors of the Marcus Tower in Century City. The Tower was the most impressive building on the central L.A. skyline, made famous in the movie Die Hard as the doomed Nakatomi Plaza.

  Sand had his own parking space, and an office cubicle with a door that actually closed: it should have been heaven. Fax and computer hookups, a three-line phone and a secretary only shared with five other reporters.

  Marcus International, the conglomerate which owned Marcus Communications and Eyeful, also published American Journal, America’s second-largest daily national, with numbers that made USA Today nervous about four months out of the year. It had better sports and financial coverage, and their Washington Bureau scooped USA Today’s about six times out of ten.

  Once upon a time that one building, just off Avenue of the Stars, had held Sand’s entire future. The plan was to start out on the middle floor, at Journal. With care and patience, he had worked his way up to the more prestigious magazines, maneuvering to snag that single killer assignment that might offer entrée to the biggest league of all. Not that Marcus Communications wasn’t big. There were none bigger.

  It was just that Marcus Communications had been founded by Alexander Marcus himself, one of Sand’s few remaining heroes.

  And even if the entire thing was run by the book, it was inevitable that a shadow as large as Marcus’s would overwhelm any quality of journalistic work, and give the inevitable impression of a vanity publication.

  That impression was bolstered during command performances like the current birthday party. Party, hell: it felt more like a postmortem. Marcus Communications employees milled about the conference room holding flowered paper cup
s half-filled with wine coolers or punch. The front of the room was dominated by younger reporters, corporate suits, and a few folks worried enough about job stability that they needed to practice their butt-smooching. The older, more cynical hands clustered in the back, sipping their watered Zinfandel and making tasteless jokes about zombies and vampires.

  The publisher was Dorothy Spivey, an iron-spined, graying blonde Harvard MBA in her fifties. Spivey gave a formal speech clotted with fawning superlatives before escorting the grande dame herself, Katrina Marcus, to the stage.

  Sand was in the back of the room, practicing his invisibility, sipping at a plastic cup of watered wine. A little cube of ice floated against his lip, and he sucked at it, and then chewed it out of existence.

  Muriel Tong sidled up, her flat smile resigned but not resentful. “Once more into the breech, dear friends…”

  He tried not to move his lips. “Every year they trot the old girl out.” Disrespect was the expected response to the yearly ritual, but the truth was, he wasn’t as cynical as the words implied. Marcus hadn’t been an ordinary man. And if his mother seemed like just another old biddy who should have been playing Hearts and complaining about the oatmeal at some retirement home, once upon a time she must have been extraordinary.

  Muriel stood close enough that her whisper warmed his ear. And points south. “Maybe Kitty’s holding the strings, Renny. She’s got over fifty percent of the stock, and loved her baby boy.”

  Forty years ago Katrina had been a great beauty, with jet-black skin and lustrous hair. But time had riven her painfully, the thick hair gone white and thin enough to need a glaringly obvious wig. Her left eye seemed partially occluded. She looked as if a cool breeze might send her spiraling into pneumonia. But as she took the microphone, some hidden well of strength possessed her, and she spoke with great presence.

  “Thank you all for coming—”

  “As if we had a choice,” a well-marbled reporter said snidely, earning a dirty look from a junior exec and a thumbs-up from Muriel.

  “—As time passes, my son’s accomplishments seem all the more vital and important.” She pronounced each word with painful precision. “It is the worst thing in the world to live beyond your children, but at least I know that the things Alexander Marcus created will live far beyond me. Thank you again.…”

  There was polite applause, and Dorothy Spivey gave Mrs. Marcus her arm, and escorted her to a chair.

  “And for my next trick,” Sand whispered. As if on cue the room lights went down. A screen dropped from the front of the room.

  “Ooh. Magic,” Muriel said, resting her long, cool fingers on his arm. She was forty-three, gorgeous in a willowy way, and his boss’s boss.

  A professional-quality video was projected on the screen, recapping what everyone in the room knew about the storied, celebrated and entirely deceased Alexander Marcus. The unseen narrator was Laurence Fishburne. Sand remembered when he was Larry. “Born in 1930, in the fifty-eight years before he died in the crash of his Lear jet, Colonel Alexander Marcus lived enough for a dozen men. Korean War hero, media giant and Olympic silver medalist, he was also the hidden force behind some of the most important civil rights actions of the sixties…”

  He’d only met Marcus once, at a reception about a year before his plane and body were fished out of the Pacific near Queen Charlotte Island up in British Columbia. With perverse precision, it was that very year’s video on display tonight. He remembered the occasion clearly: a Christmas party in December of ’87. Muriel had let herself be wrangled out of an invitation. She was just a junior editor then, a jade-eyed goddess with black hair falling straight to the small of her back, and a Masters in journalism from Columbia.

  With one small warm hand on his arm, she introduced Sand to Marcus as “one of the bright young talents at the Times. I’m trying to coax him onto the winning team.”

  Then a leonine fifty-seven, Marcus was smaller than Sand would have expected, but then, from the stories and rumors, his accomplishments and the sheer driving force of his personality, one might have expected him to be seven and a half feet tall.

  He was only a little over six, solid, with the gravity of a small black hole. People fought to keep from simply being sucked across his event horizon.

  It’s said that a few major movie stars, politicians and rock gods have a quality that projects beyond their physical selves. If they walk into an office, and you’re in the next room, you can feel them through the wall. That’s the story, anyway, but Sand had never experienced that effect until he shook hands with Alexander Marcus.

  He was very dark-skinned, darker than most American black men. He should have had tribal scars on his cheeks. Shaka Zulu must have looked a lot like Alexander Marcus.

  It was easy for Renny to understand why Marcus had remained so far in the background in the 1960s, allowing men like King and Jackson and Abernathy to take the lead during the civil rights struggles. Rumors abounded: His mother had never married his father. His eternally single status indicated satyriasis (probable) or homosexuality (not a chance.) The original source of Marcus Enterprise’s seed money was a mystery, and the great man didn’t want an investigative journalist to dredge up financial dirt.

  When the Movement began he was still in the military, which took a dim view of its officers involving themselves in radical domestic politics. When he retired after his first tour as an “advisor” in Vietnam he was already a millionaire through canny stock and real estate investments. Legend had it that he had wanted his fledgling media empire to avoid possible censure in the South.

  There were other public explanations why this wealthy and powerful man, known to have bankrolled several of the Movement’s most sensitive legal fights, rumored to be a major deal-maker and power broker, had never led a march, never allowed himself to be interviewed during that entire decade.

  But as soon as Sand met him, a deeper truth leaped out at him, hitting so hard, and so intensely, that it was startling no one had ever mentioned it before: Alexander Marcus was conservative white America’s worst nightmare. He was a wealthy, ambitious, unapologetically masculine, fiercely intelligent, competitive, politically powerful black man. There was no question about it. He had succeeded in white America without changing one single essential iota of who the hell he was.

  On the video, the reception line moved slowly past Emperor Marcus, who stood flanked by his bodyguard/assistants, the ’Nam vets usually referred to as the Praetorians. There was a smaller, white female figure in the group as well, a leathery little bit of a redhead with the brightest, most golden eyes he’d ever seen. They were like pools crushed with gold leaf, eyes that seemed to be watching everyone and no one. She was rumored to be a loan-out from the Secret Service.

  It was strange to watch himself mouse through the reception line to greet his once and future boss. Marcus grinned at him, and clasped his hand firmly. Sand was shocked by the raw power held in careful reserve: Marcus could have crushed a raw potato with those rough hands. He had lost little strength since brushing the shot-put world record at the 1956 Olympiad.

  The unmistakable, indelible impression was that he knew Sand’s work, and was delighted at the prospect of having him on the team. Furthermore, without saying a word, he managed to imply that he had personally requested that Muriel chat Renny up and bring him along. Damned if for a disorienting moment Sand didn’t sense that Marcus knew his destiny better than the reporter did himself, and that the two of them shared a great and wonderful secret.

  Then Marcus turned to the next person in the reception line. That massive focus slipped over Renny like a searchlight sliding over a rock. The absence left him feeling empty, a bit limp. For the first time in his life, he’d been touched by that quality some men call greatness. Throughout all history, men have followed the Marcuses of the world into the valley of the shadow. They’ve risked fortune and soul for the honor of serving such men faithfully. Sitting at their feet. Sand felt shaken, slack, hungry. For all his p
osturing and protestations of independence, Sand knew instinctively that he would accept Alexander Marcus’s orders, and feel blessed to be fortunate enough to do so.

  The realization had shaken him to the spine.

  Laurence Fishburne was still talking, his voice containing strong echoes of his Othello, as if overwhelmed by the majesty of his subject. Or maybe just overcompensating for the mediocrity of his dialogue. “—A man of the people, Marcus never lost touch with the thousands of employees who daily strove to bring, in his words, ‘an honest day’s news for an honest dollar’ into approximately one-fifth of all American homes.…”

  * * *

  Renny watched Marcus on that video, nodding his massive head regally as the crowd moved past him one handshake at a time, and a chill swept him. Quite simply, he’d been awed by the man. He suspected that many of the others, now clustered at the back of the room in the shadows and making jokes, had been awed as well. That Marcus had shaken and inspired them in a way that was now almost embarrassing to admit, that it had become fashionable among the painfully hip reporting staff to mock the yearly ritual remembrance.

  Like most people, he’d always assumed men like Marcus led through domination, that they somehow inspired a doglike devotion through projecting some untouchable, unapproachable quality. But the actual aura of the man spoke a different truth. I am you, he said without speaking. The best and strongest part of yourself. Do not follow me. Follow my path, and I will take you with me. There is not a one of you who could not achieve what I have done, were you to travel deep within yourself, and follow your most basic nature. It is our nature to succeed. Whoever told you different, sold you short on yourself, has lied. I am here to awaken you from the dream.