by Warren Adler
“And that’s what we want everybody to think for the time being,” Davis said.
“How they must pity me.”
“In that case,” Davis said, “why not see them? Invite them all here tonight at the same time and don’t tell any of them that the others are coming. They won’t tell each other, and by the time they get to the driveway of your house, it will be too late. The reporters will all know.”
“Great, Davis,” Don said, slapping his thigh. “The mountain comes to Mohammed. That ought to start the political stocks moving up again.”
“Unfortunately, not high enough, Senator. Just one little rung. It will make it appear that you are the kingmaker. That you’re pulling the strings. It would make a great show of strength. They’re going to be mad as hell at you, though.”
“Yes, they will be. But the bastards will know I’m not dead yet.”
Senator Virgil Mudd was the first to arrive. He kissed Karen and went into the den, where Don, Barnstable, Davis, and I were sitting. Don tried his best to look abject, but there was an unmistakable twinkle in his eye. I poured Mudd three fingers of Bourbon.
“Well, you bought it, Don. It was one bitch of a coincidence. I sympathize, my friend. I do sympathize.” He drank his whiskey, downing half the glass in one gulp.
“You live by the sword and you die by the sword, Virgil. I just got caught, that’s all.”
Mudd sat down and spread his big body across the couch. He was a marvelously expansive man, with great charm and feeling, always the courtly Southern gentleman.
“I really appreciate your seeing me, Don.” Both men looked at each other. They had worked together for fourteen years, jockeying themselves carefully into the right position. Both had their braintrusts, their strategy meetings. They knew all the nuances and subtleties of the game. Unfortunately, before Senator Mudd had time to proceed with his expected pitch, the doorbell rang, and Karen admitted Senator Billy Hopkins. He was boiling mad. He pecked Karen on the cheek and strode angrily into the room.
“God damn it, Don, it’s bad enough about this fix. We’re all real sorry it happened, but why did you have to embarrass us like this?” He looked helplessly at Senator Mudd. “Virgil, it was a damned lousy trick.”
“Cool off, Billy. We’ve been had. Just sit down and enjoy it. You might as well expect Sam Wilson to be bobbing in at any time now.”
Wilson appeared on the scene in a more philosophical mood.
“For a fellow in as much political trouble as you, Don, you sure got your crust.”
When they had all arrived and had been helped to drinks, Don got up and paced the room for a moment.
“I’m going to fight this thing, gentlemen. I know I’m written off for this trip, and I wish all of you lots of luck. I feel pretty lousy about what happened, as you all must know. But I intend to use every angle to keep myself alive for the future. Politics is my life, as it is yours.”
“It’s a damned shame, Don. You know we would have supported you down the line,” Virgil Mudd said. “We could have unseated that son-of-a-bitch in the White House.”
“Anyone speak to him today?” Davis asked.
“I did,” Billy Hopkins said. “He was chipper as hell. You know him—old true blue, Mr. Clean. There’s a man whose public morality is worse than the worst alley cat, while privately he’s a bloodless turnip. It’s quite obvious that his chances have improved after all this.”
“Do you think he’ll be able to hold together his constituency?” I asked. “You know his credibility is worn pretty thin.”
Wilson looked about the room. He was the oldest of the group, heavy-set, grey, with scraggly eyebrows.
“Will it upset you, Don, to talk blunt talk?”
“Not at all. That’s what we’ve been doing for two days.”
“I think his constituency not only will hold together, but as of this morning, it’s a hell of a lot stronger. Your own strength, Don—the young people, blacks, all those flaming knee-jerk liberals have got to feel somewhat betrayed now that their hero finds himself with his presidential hopes shattered. As for the wavering middle, the fickle center, they’ll go back to the president stronger than ever.”
“That’s our analysis,” Don said crisply. “The breaks of the game.”
“Recoverable, Don. You’re young enough to recover.”
“We think so, too,” Davis said.
“Brave man, Don,” Virgil Mudd said. “If anyone can do it, I guess you can. You’ve always had the advantage of us in your ability to charm the pants off a snake. When I first heard the news, I said to myself, ‘Virgil, but for the grace of God, there goes you,’ and I tried to picture the way I would react. I know one thing. I wouldn’t be putting up such a brave face to my friends. I’d be holed up drunk somewhere, commiserating with my navel.”
“Virgil, once you’ve lived in the nightmare that you’ve always thought you were about to have, it’s a hell of a lot easier to endure it,” Don said.
“It must be. But what really floors me is that I thought I’d find you contrite. And here you are cocky.”
“I think it’s wonderful,” Wilson began. “I, too, thought I’d find you lower than a snake’s asshole, and here you are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, besting us with your usual public relations coup and spitting into the wind. We all look like a bunch of vassals come to pay tribute to a feudal lord. But now comes the question of reality. With you out, Don, we’ve got to decide how much fight it’s all worth.”
“A bitter primary could be a disaster,” Davis said. “It has got to be a tough haul for any one of you. In my view, a primary fight could cost each of you about $20 million apiece. The election itself, three times that. With the president looking good, he’ll raise all kinds of money in a walk. You’ll have a tough time. Money is the ball game.”
“I know,” Mudd said, refilling his glass. “It’s staggering.”
“I don’t think we need a lesson in realism,” Hopkins pointed out. “We all know the risks, the hardships, the frustrations; and we don’t have to sit here and articulate why we’d go through the fires of hell to shoot for it. The question, it seems to me, is that of expedience. Don is out of the race. We’re afloat for the time being. Which way do you move, Don?”
“Stay neutral,” Barnstable said. “Stay out of it.”
“Don, you and I have been through a hell of a lot together,” Hopkins said. “I wish to God, someone else had gotten into this mess. I would have gladly stepped aside. You know it. There was no real contest for the nomination. You had it in the bag. We were just playing around. Right, Virgil? Weren’t we saying to each other just two days ago, Don was in. We couldn’t muster enough strength between us to beat you.”
“We did talk about that, Virgil,” Mudd said. “I figure it would cost the family about five mil in the primaries to even put up a decent fight, and even then I’d lose.”
“No contest, Don. It would have been no contest.”
“Look, Don. We’re big boys. You’ve got two choices. Back one or none,” Mudd said, a rosy glow beginning to spread over his cheeks.
“Back none,” Barnstable said angrily. He was losing his cool again.
“Take it easy, Jack,” Don snapped.
“There’s no percentage in it for us,” Barnstable said. “Let’s not dismantle our organization yet.”
“Dismantle,” Hopkins piped in. “Barnstable, your candidate is finished. You know it. I know it. Don knows it. None of us created your situation. We sympathize with it. It’s a goddamned shame. But you knew what you were doing. Don’t be self-righteous. We’re in public life, too. If you stick your neck into a compromising noose, don’t always be sure you’re going to pull your head out before the hanging.”
“Maybe from your point of view, Don,” Wilson said, “we look like a pack of vultures ready to eat the body; but let’s face it, you are presently washed up. Now the question is, can you do us harm by helping or hindering us? One of us is going to be the party’s n
ominee. You’ve built an organization, a terrific organization. You’ve got great fundraisers, good advance people. This has been your business. I know why I came here today. I want your organization. So do they. So what’s wrong with that?”
“Nobody is asking for special favors,” Wilson said.
“The hell I ain’t,” Hopkins shouted. “Don, you and I have been friends for a long time. One of us has got to get the nomination.”
“No question about that,” Don said quietly.
“This is nuts, absolutely nuts,” Hopkins said. “We should be meeting privately. This little joke of yours, Don, has got to backfire. We might look like a band of jackals now, but, at least, we have some credibility.”
“No need to insult the man, Billy,” Virgil Mudd admonished.
“Well, he has insulted us, you know. This whole staged event has been a lousy trick.”
“Oh, come, off it, Billy,” Mudd shot back. “Don has enough trouble on his hands without our problems.”
“He sure does.”
“So let’s be gentle.”
The undercurrent of bickering seemed strangely out of place. While Don had been the front-runner, there was more cordiality, more camaraderie. In politics, as in real life, yesterday’s heroes were gone with the wind. Don sensed this.
“You don’t have to humor me, gentlemen,” he said with an attempt at affected dignity.
“You’re not being humored, Don,” Virgil Mudd said. “You’re simply being told that reality has closed in on you. In the language of politics, your credibility gap is a mile wide. The only help that any one of us would want from you at this point is your organization, not the corpus delecti. That’s not worth much at this point. I hope you don’t mistake what I am saying to you for cruelty, Don. You know me better than that. You could stay in the background. Share in the fruits, so to speak.”
“I understand perfectly the parameters of my position,” Don said. “But I am still a member of the senate.”
“And you’ll have your hands full staying a member of that august body.”
“I don’t think so, Virgil.”
He was learning the hard way that his political currency had suffered a big drop in value. Davis motioned me aside.
“Don’t let it worry you,” he whispered. “We’ve bested them. To the public, it’ll still look like they’ve come crawling to Don for endorsement and help. They know it, too.”
“I think they’re being rough on him.”
“They’re going to eat their words.”
Virgil Mudd poured himself another drink and held it up to the light. He shook his head and laughed.
“I’d put a gun to my temple before I supported any one of these creeps,” Barnstable shouted.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Wilson admonished.
“For crying out loud, Jack,” Don said testily.
“I wouldn’t blame him,” Hopkins said. He could be cruel. “He’s lost his reason for being, Don. He’s finished.”
“Bastard,” Barnstable hissed.
Barnstable was, indeed, on the verge.
“We’re all under a strain,” Don said.
“I can imagine,” Mudd said. “Except that the whole business is unreal. After all, Don, what did you really do wrong? Nothing. It could have been any one of us in the senate of the United States, that worthy deliberative body. How many of us are closet queers, or compulsive masturbators, or transvestites, or alcoholics, or practicing God knows what kind of degeneracy. Someone once said that if you took us all as a profile of ambitious, most likely venal men, you’d come up with enough to make Krafft-Ebing look like he was writing the adventures of the Bobbsey Twins. But the people, whoever the hell they may be, prefer us as models; so we dehumanize ourselves. And when I go into the hinterland of the great state of Virginia, I hide the booze and suck cloves all day long. And, worse than anything, I don’t give a damn that I do it. I tell myself I’m doing the right thing.”
“Maybe it’s better that way,” Wilson said. “Maybe if we revealed the human side, it would be worse.”
Well, they were revealing their human side now. It’s amazing how philosophical those politicians get at times of crisis, like people sitting around at a wake. No discussion of the issues or the nitty gritty of the legislative process, obsessed only by the way other people observed them, judged them.
The talk droned on. It went round and round. There was no point to it. Everyone in the room knew the verdict. Don was just catching his breath. He would support no one until a winner was in sight.
I looked at Henry Davis, his blotterlike mind taking it all in, planning strategies, bits and pieces of public statements floating through his head.
XXXII
Who the hell was Henry Davis, anyway? It was one of those corrosive cranial itches that defies attempts at tranquility until, like an overripe pox, it explodes in the mind, and you had better find out who the hell Henry Davis was, simply to keep your mental equilibrium. The explosion took place in my bed as, unable to sleep, the events of the past few days raced through my mind.
After hours of this, it became apparent that one force dominated all of these events. This force was the mind of Henry Davis, which had us bobbing without gravity in the wind tunnel of his self-generating energy. It was like passing a kind of landmark every day of your life, never noticing it. Perhaps it is a tree or a house or a sign or a storefront. Then, through some mundane set of circumstances, there it is imprinted on your consciousness, dominating the daily round. First, there is the sense of wonder in that you’ve never noticed it before. When that passes, all you ever do is notice it. You pick at it, explore it in your mind’s eye. It becomes an obsession within an obsession.
It was in that way that I suddenly noticed Henry Davis. And, once that door was opened, my mind began to travel back through the maze of my memory, to every encounter I ever had with him. I hired Henry Davis eight years ago, a skinny kid out of the University of Southern California. We assigned him as one of a group of advance men for Don’s second statewide campaign. I couldn’t remember a thing about his background other than the college from which he had graduated as a political science major. Lord save us from political science majors. I knew he had never married, and, although I saw him almost daily, in dozens of working situations, I didn’t know a damned thing about his life.
The overriding thing about his personality was the sense of organization that he appeared to have. Even his physical make-up seemed calculated. It was an impression of control that was so dominant and which I now knew I envied. He was a man of no wasted motion. That was it—no wasted motion. Like a Laser beam with total concentrated energy, he had burned his way through all the heavy layers of bureaucratic protection that swathed Don, to become, as of this moment, the central force in his political life, in our lives. It was he who was pulling all the strings. It was we who dangled waiting for the deftness of his touch to force our movements.
It frightened me to discover that I couldn’t get a fix on his character. I couldn’t photograph him in my mind. He was an apparition. That’s the kind of a thought that gives you goose bumps at night. But I had never seen him in what I can describe as a human situation. No drinking. No smoking. No panic. No sweat. No girls. He was never sick. He was always simply there, observing. No wasted motion. Henry Davis had made the study of Donald James his life’s work in a far more objective way than any of us—Barnstable, Christine, myself, even Don himself. Davis had, undoubtedly, been through “games,” simulating Don’s present situation as well as who knows how many different combinations. Like the simulated battle situations that are the delight of the military mind.
No confirmation needed. Politics was simply a big roulette game for paranoiacs. And we were presently following Davis’s system.
There was something, though, that even Davis had missed, even Davis could not know. He could not get into Don’s mind, could not see that Don would only follow the game plan if he perceived himself in the called-fo
r-role. As a central actor in his own drama, Don had to believe in his role to make the whole act operational. At the moment, it was Davis who best articulated the “role”; and it was Davis currently in the director’s chair. And who the hell had either the will or the justification necessary to resist him?
Besides, you knew that Davis enjoyed the exercise. Why not? It gave him the power he secretly longed for. And yet you knew him to be totally immoral, without guile. You knew this because he never questioned motives once an act was recommended, making judgments solely on what effect they would have on people’s minds. All means were weapons. The end was “the goal.” Goals never changed, only means. Strategies were everything. There was no spontaneity, only calculated response. Put a penny in the slot and you always got what you wanted from the prize-strewn gum machine.
I envied him his bloodlessness.
The most disturbing thing about my discovery of Davis was that it revealed something that I thought I had lost years ago—my moral indignation. Now that sounds like a lot of horseshit, I know. It used to be called ‘conscience’ by my generation. All this deliberate manipulation of the public, that sad, dumb glob out there in whom all real power, nevertheless, is supposed to repose, people who are thought to be masters of their fate through what we call participatory democracy; all this glorification of the people, the fucking people. It made me sick at heart to see us use them to cash in on their witlessness. Strike that! That’s what they’re out there for—to be used, to be seduced, like an innocent victim to be fucked and refucked. The day I get soft about that fact is the day I quit politics.
But don’t despair. Pangs of conscience are an occupational hazard in my business, like black lung. The attack of conscience passed with the coming of dawn and two stiff Scotches, which I downed standing by the window and watching the sun come poking through the low Washington skyline. I don’t know why I was angry, but I was angry. I knew that I didn’t have the balls to stand up and fight, largely because I didn’t know what I would be fighting for or against, except some vague abstraction that made me feel that somewhere deep down in my shiftless and ever-expanding gut, there was a faint but flickering flame of purity.