“They ain’t took that away from us yet. Ma’am, you sure do look familiar, like I seen you before.”
“We just moved here,” Sharon said.
Chloe moved on to another table and Nail lifted a brow. “Newlyweds?”
“Tonight is what we have,” she said, and left it at that.
“It seems like I’ve always known you.”
“Yes,” she said. Then, a little wistfully, “I miss the Safe House.”
TV sets were hooked to the walls in the restaurant, as in most public places these days; it seemed people couldn’t even go out to eat without being accompanied by their boxes. Nail and Sharon had an unavoidable view of the nearest one. It was tuned to CNN, which Big C referred to as the Communist News Network. A commentator was busy lauding the big One Nation rally at the Lincoln Memorial in D.C., extolling it as the greatest gathering since the Civil War era. He had a PEIU representative cornered at the bottom of the steps leading up to Lincoln.
“Have these workers shown up because they’re being paid or because they want to?” he asked.
“Union members are doing this for both reasons. They’re being paid, which is only fair, and they want to stop the un-Americanism and lies of the Tea Parties, talk radio, Sharon Lowenthal and Zenergy News. We’re ready for a fight.”
CNN and the networks had edited tight in order to show only the more innocuous elements and placards.
Full and Fair Employment
Silence Tea Party Lies
Educate Every Child
Zenergy News, on the other hand, as Nail saw at the apartment before they left for dinner, aired it all. Chanting fanatics wearing red Mao and Che Guevara Tees and waving signs revealed the true color of One Nation.
Capitalism is Failing
Socialism is the Answer
Capitalism Sucks
Make the Rich Pay
Vote for Hope, Not Hate
Communist Party USA
Jerry Baer had tried for the past two years to expose what was happening. People weren’t listening, or if they were listening they weren’t doing enough to stop it. The Anastos juggernaut’s takeover of the nation proceeded unchecked.
Nail shook his head in disgust. “We can’t escape them even for a little while,” he groused.
“Are you ready to blow this joint, Jonathan Harker?”
They walked outside. The street was almost deserted. Only a single streetlight struggled valiantly against the darkness a block away. The ten-year-old tan Toyota Sharon bought for Nail at a used car lot, paying cash under an assumed name, sat parked in a customers’ lot with four or five other vehicles. He had abandoned the old pickup he drove from Oklahoma; it was likely stripped down to its frame by this time on the mean streets of New York.
He looked around. He didn’t see Big C’s clunker, but he knew his faithful friend was somewhere nearby, watching over them. A man could go an entire lifetime without a friend like that.
They had intended seeing a movie on their first date night. Sharon moved close to him once they were in the car and pulling out of the lot. He stopped the car so they could kiss. The kiss turned passionate. She broke first. Her eyes were dark, moist and demanding in the light from the dashboard panel.
“Let’s go home instead,” she said.
Like a typical cop, he attempted to cover with a flippant remark the flood of emotion that made his voice crack. “Your place or mine?”
“Ours,” she said.
* * *
There was pain in his side from the unhealed bullet wound, but Nail barely noticed it when he opened his eyes. Last night was so incredible that it took him a moment or so to orient. He felt the length of Sharon’s warm body snuggled close in his arms, one of her bare legs between his, her arm across his chest and her tousled hair dark in the nest between his shoulder and neck. He lingered in his contentment. He needed this moment of awaking to last forever, even though there was no such thing as forever. Not in this life.
Not since before his wife left him had he experienced serenity to settle his unsettled soul. There had been other women from time to time over the years. Mostly one night stands, sweaty trysts in some woman’s house or apartment. A three-month thing with a female detective had been his longest-running relationship. Connie was always between him and any other woman. Until now.
Nail was a one-woman man; anything less would have been an affront to Connie, even though she no longer wanted him. And to Jamie.
At some point last night Sharon and he decided to get married. Marriage would make the night okay from her moral Christian perspective, if not exactly right. They came to the decision together.
There was only one hitch. They could never marry like ordinary people, not under their true names. The tabloids would be all over it, followed by Homies and the FBI.
“My groom would be ‘Jonathan Harker’ on our marriage license?” Sharon exclaimed, laughing with him. “Maybe I could change my name to Mary Shelley, you think?”
Under whatever names, they would never be able to hold back indefinitely the maelstrom of events into which they had been cast.
“When we marry, I want it to be under our true names,” she decided. “Maybe a Jewish wedding even though I’m a Christian convert.”
“I’d marry you in a Buddhist temple, in a Creek Indian wigwam, in the middle of Transylvania...”
“Would you really?”
“Try me.”
She giggled naughtily. “I already have.”
Now, with daylight breaking through the bedroom window, Nail was forced to accept reality. Last night and now, these few hours, were all they had.
Her dark lashes fluttered. She must have felt him awake. Her eyes opened. She smiled. She lifted her head and kissed him.
“I love you, Jonathan Harker.”
“Morning breath and all?”
“Bullet holes and everything.”
It had been a long time since a woman told him she loved him. Not since the early days with Connie—and look how well that turned out.
“I—” he began.
“Don’t say it unless you mean it.”
“I love you.”
“When did you know,” she asked, teasing. “After you got me in bed?”
“I think I must have known when I woke up in the hospital in Tulsa and you were there.”
“We just needed each other.”
“Are you all right?” he asked her. “I mean, about last night?”
“I think God will understand. These are unusual times. Sort of like people during World War Two.”
They lay together in each other’s arms for a long time, eyes closed, luxuriating in the warmth of their conjugal bed, as though trying to will more minutes into the now. Nail could almost hear the cosmic minutes ticking away.
“I’ll cook breakfast,” he offered.
“Let me,” she countered with a giggle. “Once we’re married, you must promise never to open another can of beans. Wake Corey. I’m sure the dear man must be famished while we lie here in our selfish indulgences.”
CHAPTER SIXTY
Chicago
“They spent a fucking fortune getting Anastos elected president—three hundred sixty million, to be precise—and they intend to get their money’s worth out of the goofy bastard,” Senate Majority Leader Joe Wiedersham said as the entourage of three limos, escorted fore and aft by siren-screaming motorcycle cops, raced toward Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to meet Air Force One when it arrived.
Congressional candidate Dennis Trout rode the lead vehicle with his brother-in-law, along with Wiedersham’s chief of staff Justin Cobb and Chicago’s Mayor Deagan, whose bulk reminded Trout of Boss Hogg. Wiedersham was wearing a new suit. Trout had stopped trying to guess the labels; they all looked the same on him anyhow.
Trout had discarded his Kenneth Cole shoes for a pair less ostentatious and as different from Wiedersham’s as he could find. That meant a pair of cheap Oxfords from Wal-Mart. Cobb, on the other hand, still
wore his Coles and a suit of the same cut as Wiedersham’s. Trying to get his toast buttered.
Talk about goofy bastards!
A warren of political advisors and handlers, security people and lawyers occupied the two trail cars—along with Marilyn and her pink poodle Reggie. She had intended to go home until she learned President Anastos was coming to Chicago to stump for her husband during a brief stopover at the airport. After that, you couldn’t have driven the ladder-climbing bitch off with bullwhips.
“People need to see us with the President,” she rationalized. “Everyone will know we have arrived. Trout, don’t fuck it up.”
“You have a filthy mouth, Marilyn, you know that?”
“Just don’t fuck up things, Trout.”
“Or you won’t speak to me anymore?”
“Or you’ll find your skinny ass back out on the streets working for minimum wages where I found you.”
Trout had had his own dreams back then. He wanted to be a novelist. Now look at him. A man could be diverted by the prospect of wealth and power to the point that he would wear Kenneth Cole’s and tolerate living with a pink poodle.
It was hard to see the point of all this anyhow if the election was already in the bag, as Wiedersham claimed. Pressing the flesh; kissing babies and asses; breathing the stench of “the People’s” bad breath; getting insulted and hit in the face with pies. Wiedersham said it was because they had to keep up the outward appearance of legitimacy until the time was right. The Homers mustn’t know what was planned for them until it was too late. Two weeks from now, the Sustainable World Conference would lay out the plan and the final timeline for, as Anastos often said, “the complete transformation of the United States of America.”
Out of chaos came order.
Trout sucked another draught from his Whiskey Sour as the caravan of limos and cops screamed toward O’Hare, stopping other traffic on the streets. Cobb glared at him with disapproval. Trout glared back.
Wiedersham settled it. “Dennis, you’ve had enough.”
It was better than swigging Maalox on the rocks. Nonetheless, Trout dutifully sunk his glass in a cup holder to show he could take it or leave it. He put on his happy face.
Satisfied, Wiedersham resumed the campaign briefing with which he began haranguing Trout as soon as the caravan left the hotel. Taking advantage of the ride to lay out position shifts Trout was to take on key issues, stressing campaign talking points.
“We don’t call it a stimulus bill anymore,” Wiedersham was saying. “Message experts say we’re to call it ‘the Recovery Plan.’ That plays with the Homer Simpsons. More positive.”
Yessuh, massa.
“There’s also revised messaging in the Healthcare Law. Instead of saying the law will reduce costs and national deficits, emphasize how, with a little tweaking, universal healthcare is an entitlement that will cover every little Who in Whoville from cradle until the sonofabitch dies.”
Don’t mention the eighteen-trillion-dollar national debt, the forty million people on food stamps, double-digit unemployment, the growing poverty rate, government’s control of financial institutions, business and energy... Keep on the happy face. Tell the Homers that “hope and change” will save them from the “destructive policies” of the Tea Parties and other obstructionists.
The underlying message that must never be spoken was that voters were stupid and must be forced to do what was best for them.
Trout thought these briefings unnecessary and boring. After all, advisors and handlers under Wiedersham’s tutelage scripted Trout’s speeches for him. Almost nothing that issued from his lips in public was his own. He was like a puppet enslaved to his ventriloquist master.
“The Tea Party philosophy is that every man is for himself and owes no responsibility to his neighbor,” Trout informed a campaign rally at a basketball arena in Skokie, following President Anastos practice of using teleprompters to keep him on track. “The Far Right in this country believes that there should be no more taxes, no more government, no more safety nets for the poor and disadvantaged and elderly, no more anything. You know who these people are. They’re mean-spirited and selfish. It has led to concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest Americans while everyone else suffers. It’s only fair and just that wealth be taken from those who hoard it and redistributed to those who need it...”
On an Evanston football field, he delivered this gem of wisdom: “The Rich Right through its PACs and anonymous organizations dominated by rich fat cats is trying to flip Americans into a white heat. Disinformation campaigns appeal to people’s baser instincts rather than to their more caring social rationale. Honest to God, half of these Tea Baggers are rabid and need psychiatric help. Nobody can be that angry that long and it be healthy for you.”
He had the people with him. He could feel it. It felt good. No pies in the face or anything.
“People who hate immigrants, gays, African-Americans, women and other minorities are trying to make the election a referendum rooted in anger and apathy and amnesia. This is a bare knuckle fight for the future of this country and for the world. It’s a struggle between the Far Right that would return to the failed policies of the past and those who want to move American forward into peace, prosperity and social justice for all...”
He started to add “amen,” but caught himself in time.
Wiedersham suggested Trout make the contrast between the despised Far Right and the forward-looking Progressives even plainer. At an indoor convention center in Niles, Trout’s teleprompters guided him through, “Is anyone starting to see parallels here between the Tea Baggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brown Shirts in Nazi Germany? Violence instigated by Tea Parties reminds me of how Hitler took over Germany by yelling and marching and shouting down meetings. Is that what we want in this country? A Nazi America?”
It was all spin, much of it outright lies to cover up the real truth, the rest of it so distorted that anyone who believed such crap had to be an idiot or an ideologue. A fly landed on Trout’s lip while he was speaking in Niles. Another buzzed around his head. He half-expected a plague of them, like from The Amityville Horror. His left eye began to spasm, a nervous tic that started a week ago and made him look as though he were winking at people as if to say, Hey, it’s all bullshit, but we’re in this together, right?
Air Force One was just landing at O’Hare when the Wiedersham caravan arrived and sirened on through to where a small crowd of people waited excitedly on the tarmac. Most were local, state and national media, the rest “common people” vetted and allowed past security as window dressing for the President’s “pit stop,” one of several he was making today on behalf of chosen candidates. He seemed to be everywhere during this crazy season leading up to mid-term elections. How many millions of dollars, Trout wondered cynically, were American taxpayers shelling out so this clown could caper around the country stumping for Progressive politicians?
It gave Trout little solace in assuming that President Anastos had his own ventriloquist—George Zuniga?—to pull his strings and that advisors and handlers likewise kept him in line and wrote his speeches. The difference between Trout’s camp of cynical pragmatists and Anastos’ was that the President’s camp consisted of true Marxist believers. Every time Trout happened to run into one of the White House czars through Wiedersham, the czar was saying something like, “This generation’s children belong to us because we control education. Their parents will pass on. Their descendants, however, now stand in our camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”
Regulatory czar Sam Shrader was being prepped to take over Chicago as mayor. One time he dropped by Trout’s campaign headquarters and laughed like a maniac and his eyes bugged out when the discussion turned to how that babe on Zenergy New Channel, Sharon Lowenthal, might die of a heart attack.
“I never knew I had this much hate in me,” he confessed. “But she deserves it.”
Air Force One taxied up to the ro
ped-off tarmac. A Marine Corps band struck up a march to be followed by Hail to the Chief when the door opened and the President stepped out onto the flag-draped platform. A bunch of grade school kids chanted, “Ummm Ummm Ummm, Patrick Wayne Anastos...” Another bunch of kids wearing green Junior AmeriCorps Tees delivered the Pledge of Allegiance, but in the new vein of the times. I pledge allegiance to the Earth and all the life it supports, one planet in our care with sustenance, respect and social justice for all...
A presidential aide ushered Wiedersham and Trout to the platform to stand and be photographed with the President while he delivered his standard spiel about how America needed dedicated young public servants like—reading his teleprompter to see who he was endorsing—“the next congressman from Illinois, Dennis, uh, Trout!” Trout noticed Anastos was back to wearing an American flag lapel pin. Kissing up to the Homers after having first declared, “I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest. Instead, I’m going to tell the American people what I believe, what will make this country great...”
When the National Anthem played, Anastos gave his customary “crotch salute,” standing there with his hands clasped in front of his groin while everyone else stood at attention, hands over their hearts.
Trout’s eye tic’d. Back during Anastos’ campaign for the presidency, a retired Air Force general on Meet the Press asked the candidate why he didn’t follow protocol when the National Anthem played.
“As I’ve said about the flag pin,” Anastos said, “I don’t want to be perceived as taking sides. There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag, uh, is a symbol of oppression. The Anthem itself conveys a war-like message. You know, uh, the bombs bursting in air and all that sort of thing. If the National Anthem should be swapped for something, uh, less parochial and less bellicose then I, uh, might salute it. As President of the United States, I will, uh, use my power to bring change to this nation and offer a new path...”
What were we thinking? Trout raged to himself. What the hell have we elected President of the United States?
A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller Page 26