by Ed Gorman
“Man, you think I’d try and screw you or something?”
“Gosh, no. A man of your integrity?”
“So get outta here and let me work. That waitress don’t want to go home with me, I’m sure I’ll find some broad who will.”
“Probably a line around the block there’ll be so many.”
He didn’t like me much, but then the feeling was completely mutual. He worked both sides of the street and didn’t make any secret about it. There are some things you just don’t want to know.
I bought a Repairman Jack paperback in the hotel lobby. I’d been reading F. Paul Wilson since I was in college. The Jackster was his greatest creation. I liked the idea of somebody who helped people just for the sake of helping rather than somebody who did good for self-aggrandizement. Superman kind of digs his power a little bit too much, don’t you think?
I read fifty good pages. I turned out the light, expecting to get to sleep. But that didn’t happen until I spent a useless half hour on a lot of what-ifs, a lot of dead ends, a lot of pointless speculation. Who’d killed Greaves? And where was the tape?
I finally got to sleep a little before midnight, but it didn’t last long. The phone woke me at 12:49, according to the nightstand digital clock. My first thought was, as always, about my daughter. The parental terror that something had happened to the most precious person in your life. I rolled over, reached long, and grabbed the receiver.
“Hello.”
The voice was being filtered through some kind of electronic device. No gender. The words so muffled a few of them were lost to me. Like a bad recorded message.
“I’m picking up where Greaves left off. I have your tape and I want what Greaves wanted for it. One million dollars. I want it at nine P.M. the day after tomorrow. You’ll leave it in your car in your hotel parking lot. I’ll”—muffled—“in the front seat.” Muffled. “There will be no other contact. If you cheat in any way the tape will go to a TV station immediately.”
I hadn’t even had time to wake up properly. I was in a dream state for a few minutes after the call. I knew the call was real, but it remained unreal somehow. I went to the john and took care of myself and then washed my face in icy water.
My guess was that I’d just been contacted by the person who’d hired Greaves. Maybe Greaves had passed the tape off before he’d been killed, making the search by at least two parties useless. Or maybe the person who’d just called, Greaves’s boss as it were, had been unhappy with Greaves and had killed him and taken the tape.
Whatever the case, we were back where we started. The tape in exchange for one million dollars. The way it was set up, they saw the money before I saw the tape. If the money wasn’t there, the tape wouldn’t be there. That simple.
I slept. Maybe it was pure escape. A retreat from reality. But I slept straight through until eight-thirty and even then I didn’t want to get up, could have slept a few hours longer.
By the time I got to headquarters, the staff had been at it almost two hours. I slipped into desk position and went to work immediately. The third new e-mail I opened was from a friend of mine at a large TV station. He said that there would be a new Lake spot premiering at eleven A.M. our time, that the substitution was made early this morning. Which had an ominous sound to me.
The spot would air half an hour from now. Gabe and Kate were the only two people in the office at the moment. I told them what was coming up.
“Maybe their oppo research people found something,” Gabe said. He sounded properly nervous. But there was amusement in his eyes. Though he might pretend otherwise, he’d be happy to see Warren brought down, even if it meant that Lake would win.
Kate said, “Don’t we have anything, Dev? We really need to fight back with something powerful. Everybody knows that Lake gets a lot of money under the table from lobbyists.”
“If that was a crime,” I said, “you couldn’t get a quorum for a vote in Washington. We need something a lot stronger, something that’s unique to Lake.”
“Any idea what he came up with?” she asked.
“Wish I did.”
“This could blow us right out of the water.” The glee in Gabe’s voice was unmistakable.
“I know, Gabe. You’re going to start crying any minute now.”
“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Forget it.”
I turned around in my chair, faced my screen, and went back to work. Difficult to concentrate. Most politicians come to think they’re irreplaceable. That’s why term limits have never gone anywhere. The divine right of kings has nothing on most pols in our country. They have manipulated the laws so that getting rid of them is virtually impossible. It can be done, but it usually takes a major seismic shift in public attitude to do it. And it usually comes as a surprise late in an election cycle. The last debate started us on our downward slide. And we hadn’t recovered yet. Maybe this new commercial would contain a charge that would knock us even lower.
“It’s almost eleven,” Kate said. “I’ll turn on the TV.”
The three of us grabbed quick coffees and stood in front of the TV, pagans before a false god.
The spot was scheduled for 11:08, premiering on a statewide talk show that had a large audience.
The first seven minutes were spent with the host asking two female reporters which candidate—Nichols or Lake—held the most appeal for women. One of them laughed and said, “Neither.” Then they got down to some serious assessing of the implications in the question. Both were manly men, though Lake was the manliest. Both were intelligent men, though Nichols was the most intelligent. And then came the health question. One of the reporters said that that was “the wild card.” And the other agreed. “I really felt sorry for Senator Nichols and what happened to him at the debate. But it made me wonder about his fitness to serve.” That was reporter one. Reporter two said: “He just looked so old and frail suddenly. That’s probably being unfair. You can look old and frail when you’re eighteen—if you’re sick enough. But this was the image that a lot of people took away from that debate. That here was this old man being helped by this younger, more vital man. This is one of those times when health really becomes an issue.”
The spot opened on a long shot of a man swimming laps in an Olympic-size indoor pool. We go into a medium close shot of the man swimming toward us now. The man is Jim Lake. We cut to Lake rising out of the water like a sea creature, water pouring off his tight, muscled body. And the voice-over accompanying all this: “A swimmer in college. A winner in Congress.” And then suddenly a long shot of Lake, surrounded by a six- and seven-year-old mixed-race group in swim trunks on the edge of the same pool, Lake demonstrating swimming strokes. Now they are all in the pool, Lake swimming slightly ahead of the pack, still showing them how to swim. “A family man, a fit man, a man who never tires of fighting for the right things, the good things in American life.” And we end on a freeze-frame of sea creature Lake in all his trim, muscled glory coming up out of the pool again.
“Motherfucker,” said Laura, who’d come in just as the spot had started to play.
For half a minute or so, hers was the only comment.
Gabe said, “I thought he played football in college.”
“He was out one year because of an injury, so he swam,” Kate said.
“What’d you think, Dev?”
“Corny and obvious, but it keeps on message that Warren is a broken-down old man too tired to do anybody much good.”
“That’s such bullshit,” Teresa said, coming through the door. “I watched it out front with the volunteers. I should do a spot about how virile he is.”
“Yeah,” I said. “If you could work the phrase ‘sex machine’ in there a couple of times, that’d be helpful.”
Teresa blushed, as if just now realizing what she’d said. “Well, you know what I mean. This is ridiculous. Somebody put something in his drink. He’s fine now.”
“Do you think they’ll stay with this health th
ing for the rest of the campaign?” Laura asked me.
“Unless we can force them off it. Put them on the defensive.”
“Is that possible?” Kate said. “Do we have anything that could do that?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I need to talk to Warren. Anybody happen to know where he is?”
Teresa said, “He’s between TV interviews. He should be back here in another half hour or so.”
“Great. Thanks. Guess I’ll get back to work.”
Teresa came over and said, quietly, “We could lose this, couldn’t we, Dev?”
No point lying. I nodded.
“They blame him for that stupid drug he took. It’s not fair.”
“No, it isn’t. But it’s politics.”
Then she said what was really on her mind. “Maybe we should’ve accused Lake right away. You know, of hiring somebody to put the drug in the drink.”
Her voice still wasn’t loud, but it was enough that everybody heard her. Everybody started paying attention to the conversation now. Everybody knew what she was saying. That this was my fault because I’d told Warren we shouldn’t make any kind of accusation until we could prove it absolutely.
“If you’re asking me if I handled it correctly, Teresa, maybe I didn’t. Maybe I should’ve suggested that we go on the attack. Make Lake the bad guy right away. But we had no evidence—and we still don’t.”
“People make unsubstantiated claims all the time, Dev.”
“Al Sharpton comes to mind. I don’t think I want to throw in with him, do you? Bush, Cheney, people like that? They made a lot of unsubstantiated claims, too.”
“You’re being silly. If you think you made a mistake, you could at least admit it.”
Now she was the typical political spouse. Protecting her husband from the stupid consultant whose stupid mistakes were about to deprive the nation of one of its finest leaders. I’d made mistakes in my time and had apologized for all of them. But I didn’t see this as a mistake. Lake had cleverly shifted the subject from the drink Warren had taken to the general subject of Warren’s health. The only tactic we could have used was a dubious accusation.
“Well, I’m not happy about this, Dev. I want you to know that.”
“I’m not happy about it either, Teresa. And believe it or not, I think there’s a way to respond to it. All I need is Warren’s approval.”
Tears now. “I just hope you know what you’re doing. We’re a part of Washington now. We have a beautiful home and a lot of important friends.”
And a lot of important friends. When senators are forced from office, many of them stay in D.C. and make enormous amounts of money as lobbyists. But there is no amount of money that can compensate them for the power and prestige they’ve lost. There are only a handful of United States senators. Except for the president and the vice president, there is no more significant role you can play in our government. Each man or woman is sought out by powerful people from around the world. People who want favors. People who give favors. No lobbyist ever gets that kind of treatment.
“I guess I’d better go,” Teresa said. The tears were flowing openly now. I wasn’t angry, I was just disappointed. I’d always felt that she hadn’t been seduced by all those dos in Georgetown. All those dinners for visiting potentates. All those evenings at the White House. But I’d been wrong.
“Sorry you had to go through that, Dev,” Laura said.
“Wasn’t so bad.”
“That’s a side of Teresa I’ve never seen before,” Kate said.
“She’s a limo junkie. She digs the red carpet,” Gabe said.
“She wants her husband to win, Gabe. Nothing wrong with that.”
“C’mon, Dev, they’re both addicts and you know it. They dig the red carpet and all that shit.”
“You think Lake would be any different?”
“We’re talking about Nichols. Not Lake.”
Nichols, I thought. The guy who kept loaning you money when you needed it for your stupid gambling problem. The guy who could’ve ended your political career with one phone call. The guy who at least votes the right way ninety percent of the time. I was sick of Warren, but Gabe’s attack was hypocritical and annoying.
“You ever think there’ll be a day when you help put somebody in office you actually have respect for, Dev?”
“I guess you don’t want to let this go, do you, Gabe?”
“It’s a fair question.”
“Give it a rest, Gabe,” Laura said.
“It’s a stupid question anyway,” Kate said.
“What’s so stupid about it? Just because you people don’t mind working for whores—”
I forced a smile. “And here I thought that I was the sanctimonious one, Gabe. We’re human. That’s what you’re not factoring in here. If I ever got to be a senator, I might be the biggest whore who ever hit Washington.”
“That’s not true, Dev,” Kate said, “and you know it.”
“No, I don’t. We’ve all seen it happen to people we thought we respected. They start living with all those privileges and perks and having their staffs do everything for them—I don’t think you can predict how most people would react.”
“There’re a few you can predict,” Laura said.
“Yeah, a few. Just a few. Men and women who don’t get their heads turned by all the fuss made over them. But everybody else—” I shrugged. “I need to get back to work.”
Over the next half hour I wrote copy for the spot that would respond to the health issue. Then I wrote a statement that Warren would give at his appearance at a luncheon for retired party officials. The press would be expecting a droner. Few pols used an appearance like this to make news. We didn’t have much choice. I did all this presuming that Warren would agree with it. One look at Lake’s new commercial would convince him that we needed to move quickly. Especially given what oppo research had been able to find out about Lake. All this was predicated on the hope that they weren’t holding back any oppo material of their own. The conventional belief being that any major attack coming in the last two weeks of the campaign was virtually impossible to counter. You just didn’t have the time to make your case effectively.
Warren came in just after noon. He said, in a tone as harsh as I’d ever heard him use, “Everybody out except Dev. And I mean now.”
When we were alone, Warren said, “Let’s nail his balls to the wall.”
“Great,” I said. “But now we have another problem.”
“The bearer of good tidings, eh?” He was ready to be angry.
“We’ve got another blackmailer in the picture.”
CHAPTER 25
By midafternoon every news source available to us, including all the cable news outlets, was carrying the story of how Senator Warren Nichols, slipping in the polls, had made available online his complete medical records dating back to age sixteen. We’d stored them this way in case we ever needed them. And now we needed them.
That was point one of his attack. Point two was that he was challenging Congressman Jim Lake to do the same in the next twenty-four hours. Everything in his medical history.
Point three was an ominous but vague suggestion that Nichols’s drink had been tainted by “forces against my voting record,” which he then listed highlights of. He emphasized how hard he’d fought for both the middle class and the working class. And how he’d managed to improve the lot of the working poor, “folks who Jim Lake once called in one of his more reckless and inhumane moments ‘disposable.’”
He concluded with, “I get a physical twice a year at Walter Reed. I’m healthy in every respect. And I’ve never suffered from any disease that would embarrass me.”
I’d rewritten that last line five or six times. I’d wanted to soften it. But then I decided the hell with it. Lake had dominated the news since the debate. Now we were going to dominate it; “that would embarrass me” would put the press on him day and night. “What did he mean by that, Congressman Lake?” “Are you going to release
your records in the next twenty-four hours?” “You’ve been in Congress three terms, but you’ve never released any medical records as yet. Why is that?”
I’d told everybody on the staff to play it coy when reporters called them. Never say it was Lake behind the drink plan, just say, “Anything’s possible.” Never say that Jim Lake had been treated for gonorrhea in the tenth year of his family-values marriage, only that we’d heard there was a shocking fact to be found in his medical records.
Even without Teresa pushing me, I’d known when I’d seen Lake’s new commercial that I was going to tell Warren that we should go after him. No other choice. I’d overseen this kind of bombast twice. Once it had worked, once it hadn’t. In the case of the former, a congressional opponent had managed to cover up a hit-and-run in a small town his father basically owned. In the case of the latter, the oppo people had come up with three counts of spousal abuse on a man who’d also managed to keep these off the official records. I knew this would be risky because he’d gone through AA five years ago and was now, by all accounts, including those of his wife, a very good husband. The electorate chose him over our man, who had a few problems of his own that the oppo folks on the other side had somehow missed.
We had pizza and beer as we watched the Chicago evening news. Three sets going so we didn’t miss anything. We were slotted either story number one or story number two on each of them. And the leads all played heavily on the “suggestion” that Lake might have something to hide in his medical records. His press spokesman, a kid usually given to smirks, was somber and somewhat dazed when he faced the press, assuring them that Lake had nothing to hide and would address this question as soon as he returned to Chicago from Springfield later tonight. The kid, happily, looked miserable.
Only one station picked up on the inference that “anything’s possible” might mean that Lake had had something to do with tampering with Warren’s drink. “Asked for a clarification, the Nichols camp would say only that no accusations were being made, but that many possibilities were being considered both by them and by local police.”