The Candidate

by Paul Harris

  * * *

  THE DOOR to the conference room at Hodges' campaign headquarters burst open with a violence that saw it spring back against the wall and chip off a spray of plaster flakes. Inside, Hodges, Christine and a half dozen campaign workers jumped at the sound and the sight of a red-faced, furious Dee exploding into the room.

  “Dee!” Hodges said, getting to his feet.

  Dee ignored him. “Everyone get the fuck out!” she yelled and then jabbed a finger at Hodges and his wife.

  “Except you and you!”

  Everyone was stunned at the outburst. No one had any doubt that Hodges had not been spoken to like that for many years. No one moved. But Dee did not see her candidate anymore. She saw a red mist drawn like a veil across her vision.

  “Could I make myself any fucking clearer?” Dee yelled.

  Hodges looked at her and then turned to everyone else in the room. “It’s okay,” he said. “Give us some time.”

  Now the spell of immobility broke and, with a scrape of chairs being pushed back on the floor, people raced to get out, casting worried glances at each other. As soon as the door closed Hodges stood up to his full height. But Christine beat him and spoke first.

  “You better have a good reason for talking to Jack like that?” she said. “Or you’re out of a job.”

  Dee rounded on her without hesitation. “Oh, shut the fuck up, Christine,” she said. “I’ll deal with you later, you goddamn bitch. But right now we’ve got to defuse a bomb that’s about to destroy this whole campaign.”

  Hodges was lost for words. He and Christine exchanged glances and then he sat down again, folding up his lanky frame like a machine. He crossed his legs and looked at Dee. His expression gave away nothing.

  “I know the truth about the payments to Carillo,” Dee said.

  Christine put her hands in the air with an exasperated sigh. “Dee! I told you already! He is an old friend. We’re helping his family out with university fees.”

  Dee offered a fake laugh. “Christine. That is the last time either one of you lie to me. The last time. Do you understand?”

  Christine fell silent. Hodges still did not move or say anything. Dee turned to face him. “Carillo may be your friend. But he has no family. You’re paying him hush money because you two worked together during his country’s civil war.”

  Hodges finally opened his mouth to speak but Dee shushed him. “No lies, Jack,” she said.

  He closed his mouth.

  “Mike Sweeney found evidence that shows you signed off on some of Carillo’s more dubious fun and games back in the 80s when he was a real sick puppy. Torture, death squads, village massacres. The usual Central American shit-storm.”

  Dee’s voice was laced with venom but it was impossible to tell if it was disgust at the acts she described or the fact she felt Hodges played her for a fool.

  “The woman who tried to kill you…” she said, but then switched gears. “As I am sure you already know, she used to work for Carillo. She was a psychotic case, which he found useful when it came to shooting peasants. Mike found out all of this on a road trip I sent him on to identify that crazy bitch and your man Carillo seems to have taken a swipe at him.”

  “What do you mean?” Hodges asked.

  “I mean your good buddy from the old days tried to kill one of your own staffers. And he did kill a priest who was helping Mike.”

  At last Hodges reacted. He groaned and his head sank to his chest. “Oh God,” he muttered.

  “Yeah, exactly,” Dee said. “Not surprisingly Mike’s kinda pissed about it. He’s talking about going public with all this.”

  Hodges looked up. The blood drained from his face. His face was shockingly pale. The only color was in his eyes, like blue pools of shallow melt water on the surface of a glacier.

  “It was war, Dee,” he said. “We were fighting against the Soviets. I was serving my country to the best of my ability and I will not apologize for that.”

  For the first time Dee was quiet. Hodges walked over to Christine and stood behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. She looked up at him and squeezed one of his hands in hers.

  “I was a much younger man,” Hodges said. “It was a different time and place. Do I have regrets that certain things happened? Of course. But someone needed to make tough decisions. I challenge anyone to put themselves in my place. I had a duty to protect my country and I did my duty to the best of my ability.”

  “So why pay money to Carillo?” Dee asked.

  Hodges shook his head grimly. “He asked,” he said. “I advised his unit during the war. I helped him and the government win. But I had not given him a thought for years. Then he rang out of the blue after he saw my picture in a newspaper. He said he needed help as he had fallen on bad times. But the implication was clear: pay up or he would start talking about our time during the war.”

  Hodges stopped talking for a moment. He cast a resigned look in Dee’s direction.

  “It seemed the easiest thing to do,” he said. “To just go along with it and put it in Christine’s name to give me a little distance.”

  He kneaded Christine’s shoulders now and slowly the color came back into his cheeks. His face gradually hardened, his jaw setting along a firm line as he came to terms with what happened. “I’m sorry I did that, Dee,” he said. He forced the words through clenched teeth. “But I will not apologize for being a loyal American soldier. I will never apologize for serving my country.”

  At the words a flash went off in Dee’s brain like a firework. It reminded her of the moment she first saw the photograph of Hodges under fire from the shooter back in Iowa. Once again, she envisioned the future. She smiled grimly.

  “That’s it,” she said and then again, louder: “That’s it. That’s our line. You are a patriot. You took the hits for your country back then. Just like you’d take them now.”

  Hodges looked at her, slightly confused. “Is this going to sink us if Mike speaks out?” he said.

  Dee thought about it long and hard. She looked at Hodges and then Christine and then back to Hodges.

  “Not if I can help it,” she said. “If the worst happens, we get out in front of it. Push back immediately. Get out all the facts and then control the message afterwards. You were a soldier in the line of fire. You did your duty for the stars and stripes. Repeat that until you are blue in the face. Anyone who disagrees is a goddamn coward who wasn’t there.”

  “Ok,” said Hodges. “But what about Mike?”

  Dee shook her head. “That’s my business. I’ll deal with him.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THE COUCH REEKED of staleness and age. The smell filled Mike’s nostrils as he sat on it, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, with his laptop open and the TV tuned to Fox News. His mother was at work which left him alone to await the impact of his actions. He knew he should feel some sense of righteousness that he had done the moral thing. But he felt only numb failure. He looked back at the months dedicated to the campaign as if they belonged to someone else; a close friend perhaps, but not him.

  He understood now that he left the real campaign the moment he accepted Dee’s offer of a job investigating Natalia and the shooting. As soon as he stopped working the streets and retreated inside the inner workings of the machine, he was lost. Ending up in this position was as inevitable as a rising sun. Sitting here in the home he grew up in, alone on this couch, destroying everything he worked so hard for, was always his final destination.

  He wondered when it would happen. He handed over the documents to Carver the night before and now it was mid-morning. He could imagine that Carver and his team poured over them all night, verifying and exploring, and then worked out the best strategy. The one with the maximum impact to seize the news agenda. After all it was just two days until South Carolina voted. They had little time to knock down Hodges.

  But so far there was nothing on the cable news. He flicked through the channels again, stabbing at the remote control and whi
rring through CNN, MSNBC and Fox in a never-ending tableaux of talking heads. He guessed Carver wanted to get it out early enough in order to ensure the evening news shows could prepare for more in-depth reports. But it was also worthwhile waiting just to keep Hodges’ team guessing. Carver undoubtedly, and wisely, aimed to put Dee under maximum pressure. Mike flicked through the stations yet again and then refreshed the Drudge Report on his laptop.

  There it was.

  “HODGES A WAR CRIMINAL — SHOCK CLAIM!”

  The headline shouted the news in huge type complete with a flashing animated siren above it. Mike felt shocked even though this was the moment he waited for. Seeing it happen was still something else. He got up, his brow suddenly covered in a film of sweat, and went into the kitchen. His stomach was in knots and he leaned over the sink, wondering if he would throw up. He gripped the counter-top and then poured himself a glass of water.

  By the time he returned to the living room the story had spread across the cable channels, at first citing Drudge and then slowly their own sources. It metastasized like a blossoming tumor. Within an hour the New York Times website spat out details no one else had. Then the Washington Post. The whole picture emerged. The payments to Carillo, his history of murder and massacre and the identity of Natalia as a brutal government assassin. Hodges’ signature on the orders giving the go ahead to the attack on Santa Teresa quickly formed the center-piece of the story. Anchors and talking heads raced to pretend to be experts about a country and a war about which they knew next to nothing.

  It took three hours for Dee to make her first TV appearance. Mike flinched at the sight of her. It was a live link-up from Hodges’ campaign headquarters in Columbia to the Fox studio. Dee looked relaxed and calm and refused to respond to the details of the anchor’s persistent questioning. She was on TV to deliver one message only and she kept finding ways to repeat it.

  “Senator Hodges has always done his duty by his country. He is a patriotic American. He will be giving an interview tonight to answer any questions you may have fully and frankly,” she said. She intoned the sentences over and over again like a mantra.

  The message seemed to work and subdued some of the more hysterical fever around the story. Finally Mike could not take it anymore. He switched off the phone and rooted around in the kitchen. He knew his mother would have left a half-smoked pack of cigarettes in there somewhere. He quickly found a crumpled pack of Camels. He pulled out one. He had not smoked since he left for Florida, but now he welcomed the sudden need for nicotine like an old friend putting an arm around his shoulder.

  He stepped outside and shivered against the cold but didn’t bother to put on a coat. He inhaled deeply and looked out over the houses and streets that he had known all his life. He felt the smoke go into his lungs and he held it there for as long as he could, until it burned. Then he breathed out and his head became wreathed in blue gray mist. It obscured his vision for a moment, stinging his eyes, and gave him an excuse for the tears that streamed down his cheeks.

  * * *

  “SHUT UP and get away from me!” Dee snapped at the young TV runner who hovered next to her and carried a clipboard. The woman, probably no older than 25, skittered away like a fly avoiding a swat.

  “Jesus!” Dee swore.

  She was aware her hands were tightly clenched into fists and the rest of the people in the studio green room looked at her, including Hodges who sat in a chair having thick layers of make-up applied to his craggy face.

  Dee shrugged an apology for her outburst. At least Hodges looked calm, she thought. She understood now just how ice cold his blood must be and why he was such a good soldier. He rarely revealed any hint of emotional turmoil throughout the day. He kept his head calm and clear and absorbed Dee’s advice, taking it all in and then agreeing to her plan. One interview. Go with the national security line. Stick to it. Do not lose your head. No matter what the provocation.

  They practiced for several hours earlier that evening. Dee fired question after question at Hodges and goaded him with insults veiled as questions.

  “What do you say to those who compare your actions to My Lai in Vietnam?” she asked.

  Hodges did not budge. Each time he calmly and quietly asserted his patriotism as an American soldier in the middle of the Cold War. “I never shirked from doing my military duty for my country,” he said.

  Dee was impressed. We can do this, she thought. We really can. But she knew that keeping calm in the face of her questions was a whole different beast from weathering the blasts from a trained news anchor on live television. It would also be an arena in which a single mistake could cost them everything. Even a stutter or a pause could destroy their whole campaign. They must get everything, absolutely everything, right. First time.

  The runner reappeared nervously. “Three minutes to air,” she said, avoiding Dee’s gaze.

  Hodges stood up, his spine as straight as a board. A US flag adorned his lapel, bigger than usual. Dee insisted on it and put it on like the medals that once were pinned there. It was a deliberate echo. She wanted him to look every inch the American hero.

  Hodges strode out without a glance at her. He looked like he was going into battle. Or to face a firing squad. She was not sure which. Dee followed.

  The walk to the studio was only a few yards and Christine waited there. Hodges leaned in and kissed her, putting a hand up to her cheek reassuringly. He then strode over to the interview chair.

  The anchor, Katie Reynolds, was already seated, adorned in an explosion of expensively coiffed blond hair. Having Reynolds was part of the deal on granting the interview to this channel. She was good and well respected. But she was also young. Dee figured she was more likely than most to be a little susceptible to being star-struck.

  Hodges sat down opposite her and nodded a hello. The countdown began. Sixty seconds to go… then fifty… then forty. Suddenly Hodges leaned forward and rested a hand lightly on Reynolds’ forearm.

  “Be gentle with me, Katie,” he said.

  It was a trick Dee told him to pull. But she was not sure he would do it. Yet he pulled it off seamlessly. Even from where Dee was standing she knew Reynolds was flustered. It might have been the physical contact, or Hodges’ open flirtation, but she squirmed on her chair and glanced around nervously. Thirty… twenty… ten. Then the show began.

  Reynolds gathered herself and moved right in. “Senator Hodges, these are very serious accusations that you face. People are saying that you were complicit in torture and massacres by Guatemalan death squads. Do you really believe that the American people should vote for you?”

  The question was hard enough. But Reynolds tone was respectful. She smiled nervously, clearly a little intimidated with Hodges in front of her. Hodges nodded seriously.

  “Katie,” he said. “I would never presume to tell the American people who they can or cannot vote for. Nor should you.”

  It was a good strike back. Dee felt a little visceral thrill in her gut. She loved the cut and thrust of it, even when everything they worked for was on the line. Hodges did not give Reynolds a moment to say anything but ploughed straight into his standard defense.

  “When I put on the uniform of the United States army I made a decision to serve my country. That was at the height of the Cold War, Katie. It was a different world. The very existence of this country was at stake. Tough choices were made and sometimes I was the one who made them.”

  Reynolds opened her mouth to interject. She already felt she was losing control of this interview. But Hodges leaned into her and fixed her with his eyes. “I have never regretted a moment of wearing my country’s uniform,” he said.

  Dee felt a wave of relief and exhilaration wash over her and she sighed. She knew now this was going to be okay. She knew it in her gut. The gut she trusted to guide her for the last thirty years. The same instincts that took her out of the godforsaken bayous of Louisiana and brought her here; at the right hand of the best political candidate she ever saw. She re
laxed. Hodges was in full command of the show now. His line never wavered. Reynolds never succeeded in rattling him. He stood tall as the American soldier who kept his country safe. After all, Dee thought, would the average voter really care about the fates of a bunch of Guatemalan peasants twenty years ago? Not a chance.

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She took it out as she walked out of earshot of the studio. It was Roger Armstrong, a conservative-leaning columnist at the Washington Post. Dee had known him for years and he owed her numerous favors, both professional and personal. She rang him that morning to prime him on Hodges expected line of defense and drop subtle hints that a column defending Hodges would be a great boon for the candidate. Armstrong’s voice filled her ear and his rich Southern accent oozed out of the phone. Dee always bit her tongue when she spoke to him. He was born in Maryland and was about as Southern as a Maine lobster roll, but it suited his image and Dee was in no mind to nitpick.

  “How’s it going, Roger?” Dee asked. “What do you think?”

  “I think your man has been deeply impugned,” Armstrong said, lengthening the word impugned so that it rolled like treacle. But it was what Dee wanted to hear.

  “You’re damn right,” she said, summoning genuine outrage. “What’s happening here is a national disgrace. It’s typical of the way we treat our soldiers these days.”

  “Too true, Dee. Too true,” Armstrong said. “It’s a sad reflection of our modern age. But I, for one, am determined to stand against the unpatriotic tide. I will not let a fine servant of our nation be raked over the coals by a bunch of liberals who would rather burn the flag than wave it.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Dee said and fought down an urge to laugh at Armstrong’s pompousness. It was not like he ever joined the military himself. Typical chicken hawk.