by John Varley
Geraldo sneaked to the outskirts of Hades shortly afterward, was roughed up by succubi and was ejected. He claimed to have been sucker-punched by the head succubus, but she denied everything and had a lurid videotape to back her story. When it aired the tape, A Current Affair drew an enormous audience rating.
Oprah claimed to be worried by something: Could one love God and still deal with Satan? Nick convulsed her audience by retorting, “Me and God? It’s true we don’t double-date. Think of us as Siskel and Ebert.”
Slowly Joe edged back up in the polls as voters adjusted to the new playing field. Many seemed to feel they’d faced considerably worse choices most election years.
On primary day, New Hampshiremen slogged through a snowstorm to give Hardy 38 percent of the vote, ten points more than his nearest rival.
The nearest rival was Senator Peter Peckem, and upon viewing the exit polls, Peckem slammed his fist onto his desk and growled to his assembled campaign staff: “That’s enough of that crap. You’re all fired.” He was on the telephone before the last of them had scampered through the door.
Within the hour he had spoken to Phillips Petroleum, General Motors, Matsushita, Dow Chemical, McDonnell Douglas, Toshiba and was working his way through the Fortune 500. The message was the same: I need lots of money and I need it now. Send it and I’m your boy. It was very much like a stock offering. By midnight he was a wholly owned subsidiary, and the money was pouring into offshore laundries from Bimini to the Cayman Islands.
His last act before retiring for the night was to hire a new campaign manager, a man by the name of Yerkamov, famous for engineering the reelection of an eighty-two-year-old senator from a Southern tidewater state shortly after that worthy’s conviction on a charge of statutory rape.
Yerkamov hired the advertising firm of Mayerd & Scheisskopf, the Charity Crackerjack public relations agency, a top pollster, a speechwriter and a political psychologist. By the time the sun set on the ruins of New Hampshire, the revivified Peckem campaign had come out of its corner swinging.
“Let me show you something, Joe,” Nick said, pressing a button on a VCR remote control. On the screen, in grainy black-and-white, Japanese torpedo bombers swooped over Pearl Harbor. The Arizona exploded and sank. Hordes of troops waved rising-sun flags and shouted “Banzai!” And a deep, concerned voice said: “The Matsushita company likes Senator Peckem. Sony likes him, too, and so does Toshiba. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be funneling millions into his campaign through their fat-cat lobbyists and special-interest political action committees. Joe Hardy stands for the American worker. Who will you vote for—Joe Hardy or the senator from Toyota?”
“Are you out of your mind?” Hardy gasped, leaping from his seat.
“Just thought I’d run it past you.”
“Why don’t you show the bomb falling on Hiroshima, too? Maybe I could take credit for that.”
“Actually, the next one . . .” Nick tapped another videocassette box thoughtfully against his chin.
“No, never! The agreement was, no attack ads.”
“I wouldn’t call this precisely an attack ad,” Nick wheedled. “We do know it’s true, about the Japanese contributions. Peckem has sold out to every—”
“That’s his problem. No one will own me when I’m President, and I’ll do it without stooping to . . .” He noticed the look on Nick’s face. “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”
“Wrong? No, nothing.” Nick sighed deeply. “I don’t like those new numbers from Florida, that’s all.”
It wasn’t just Florida. Hardy’s support was eroding in Massachusetts, Tennessee, Delaware . . . across the board in the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses. He had held his early strength in Maine and South Dakota, but by the time Super Tuesday rolled around, he’d slipped an average of three points in the eight early March races. Peckem, written off by many pundits in February, was being called a slugger, a man with staying power, not afraid to take off the gloves and mix it up at the line of scrimmage, coming up on the rail.
These things don’t happen spontaneously. Voters in the twelve Super Tuesday states were being surveyed, pamphleted, focus-grouped, phone-banked and sound-bitten more thoroughly than in any previous election. All over the South, people sat in conference rooms and theaters to have their sweat glands, heartbeats, blood pressure and breathing rates monitored as they listened to trial speeches or discussed the issues. Computer-guided laser beams were being bounced off eyeballs as test groups watched new commercials. Semanticists and programmers had developed an all-purpose speech that could, within two seconds, be tailored not only to small constituencies in a particular state but also to individual zip codes within the state. Peckem could promise one thing at nine A.M. at the Masonic Lodge and something completely different two miles across town at ten.
The usual hot-button issues had been identified, and Hardy’s weaknesses in each category carefully plotted. He had once said that school prayer might make Islamic or Buddhist students uncomfortable. By the time Mayerd & Scheisskopf were through with it, Hardy sounded like a goddamn atheist. Once, Joe had opined that burning the flag might be protected by the First Amendment. The Charity Crackerjack agency soon had him using Old Glory for toilet paper. But the best purchase Yerkamov made turned out to be Peckem’s speechwriter. He came up with a catchphrase widely viewed as the best since “Read my lips.” It quickly became a chant at Peckem rallies and spread rapidly through society, and it went like this:
“To hell with that!”
Do you want the man who stands for higher taxes and being soft on criminals?
“To hell with that!”
The man who wants to keep this great country headed down the road to mediocrity, who sends your tax dollars overseas whenever his liberal friends tell him to, who doesn’t give a damn about the jobs of working men and women in America?
“To hell with that!”
Who wants to close the military base in this fair city, shut the sawmills, cancel the weapons systems, kowtow to the Japanese, truckle to the Arabs, deny you the right to pray . . . the man who says I can’t get elected because he’s made a deal with the Devil?
“To hell with that, to hell with that, to hell with THAT!”
Elect Peckem was outspending Vote for Hardy fifty to one, but the crowning blow was yet to come.
“It was the charisma,” Joe whined when the story broke.
“Charisma my forked tail.” Nick steamed, pacing the floor. “Charisma my aching horns. It was your not keeping your pants zipped.”
Nick was not being completely fair. One of the hazards of charisma use, discovered by many a politician before Joe Hardy, was the bimbo factor. It attracted bimbos as sugar brings flies, and in the first heady days Joe had succumbed to the charms of several.
“Several? Hah!” Nick huffed.
“OK, OK. Let’s call it a few score.” Of that number, Peckem’s troops had found four willing to tell their stories. Worse, two of them had proof.
Far, far worse, Mrs. Hardy did the unthinkable. After a short, sharp meeting with Joe, she filed for divorce and flew off to the Bahamas.
“So what are we going to do now?” Hardy asked.
“We have a little money,” Nick mused. “Not what we should have, but some. Of course, I’ll need your permission.” He pulled a videocassette from his pocket and put it on the table between them.
The Pearl Harbor ad started running on Saturday, along with three others of equal virtue. Hardy applied a triple dose of charisma and appeared with Nick on Meet the Press on Sunday. By Monday the polls had begun a ponderous swing in his favor.
Super Tuesday found him winning by small margins in seven states, losing in three, with Texas and Florida too close to call.
Old Scratch sat in the ruins of a presidential campaign early in the morning of the second Wednesday in March and wondered if God was laughing.
Joe Hardy entered the room, along with a burst of noise from Hardy faithfuls partying into
the night in the next room. Joe held a bottle of Dom Perignon and a glass and he staggered slightly. His shoulders were littered with confetti and draped with ticker tape. His hair was unruly.
“So,” he said, burping. “On to Illinois?”
“It’s over, Joe,” Nick said.
“What do you mean, ‘it’s over’? We won!”
What a pathetic thing his man had become, Nick marveled. He’d been a lot easier to take back in the days before the contact lenses, before the new barber. Back in the days of cheap California champagne. Now he was more of a sound bite than a man. Hardy must have known this, at some level, or he wouldn’t be drunk so much.
“You call that a win?” Nick handed Joe a long sheet of Teletype paper. Key sentences and words had been highlighted with a yellow marker. “Did you catch the NBC special? Did you hear what John Chancellor had to say?”
“I was—”
“Those are tomorrow’s columns you’ve got in your hands. They’re saying the secret word, Joe, the one they’ve been hinting at for weeks. ‘Unelectable.’ And the duck comes down but you don’t win a hundred dollars.”
“We didn’t do so bad in—”
“You don’t win anything.” Nick cupped his hand to his ear. “Hear that sound, Joe? That’s the sound of the press corps beating a retreat. A dozen of them have already left to cover Peckem. By morning the bus will be half full. By next week, who knows?”
Hardy was leafing through the Teletypes with a baffled expression.
“That’s right,” Nick said. “Read it and weep. Look at what Evans and Novak are saying. And get a load of that Royko column: ‘The Senator from Toyota versus the Congresscritter from Hell.’ When you’ve got the time, play that tape over there, see what Letterman had to say about you a few hours ago. With spin like that, we’re sunk.”
“But we won, damn it!”
“By three points in two states. And we lost two we were supposed to win.”
“But we’re still ahead!”
“That matters only in the general election. What matters in the primaries is fulfilling predictions, sustaining momentum. Joe, if the polls have you at seventy percent, and you get sixty-five, you lose! Just ask Lyndon Johnson. I did, ten minutes ago.”
“You spoke with—”
“Well, where did you think he would end up? He said to throw in the towel. And I haven’t even told you the worst of it yet.”
“There’s worse?”
“Exit polls. That’s what this is all about these days. A month ago the voters saw you as an attractive outsider. Now you rate as just another politician. Your approval rating has dropped below twenty percent.”
“It was that damn ad,” Joe accused. “The Pearl Harbor ad.”
“Actually, no. They liked that. The voters say they hate a negative campaign, but they really get a charge out of it. Running that ad made you look scrappy. Like you won’t take Peckem’s allegations lying down.”
“Then we’ll just have to hit ’em harder,” Joe said, tossing the papers aside and slapping his fist into his palm. “Let’s run more of those ads. Lots more. Let’s punch that bastard Peckem where it hurts.”
“We’re broke, Joe,” Nick said. “We can’t afford the airtime. The campaign’s in debt almost a million dollars. The only reason we could borrow that much is some ex-S&L people owed me some corporate money.”
“Well, let’s accept larger contributions. I won’t hold you to the letter of the contract. Maybe we could even get some corporate money.”
“Great. You think people are lining up to give you money after a showing like today? Wise up.”
“Then make some money. Snap your fingers, make a pile of it appear right here.” Joe pounded the table, getting angry.
“Get thee behind me, politician. What, are you crazy? With the Federal Elections Commission breathing down our necks and the IRS snooping around?”
“But . . . you’re the Devil, goddamn it! Why should you be afraid of Internal Revenue?”
“Obviously, you’ve never been audited,” Nick said, shivering.
“Peckem gets away with it,” Joe sniffed after a long silence.
“Peckem’s organized, Joe. It takes time to put together a money laundry like that. He’s insulated. He’s got plausible deniability.”
Nick stood and rubbed his face, then looked at Joe Hardy, standing with his shoulders slumped.
“Go home, Joe. Get some rest. It’s over.”
Joe nodded and turned to go, then looked back over his shoulder.
“What about my soul?”
“You’re free to keep what’s left of it.”
Satan had never been quite so depressed. For a century he’d been feeling as if he were falling behind. He kept trying to adapt, did everything he could think of to modernize his operation. Then they did something new. Hitler, the H-bomb, global warming. Toxic wastes, the ozone layer. Deforestation. AIDS. Heavy-metal rock and roll. Jim and Tammy Bakker. I wish I’d thought of that, he’d say to himself, then scramble to catch up. And now this.
It was not the first time he’d lost a soul in contention, though his batting average was high. But it darn sure was the first time he had lost one through being unable to fulfill his own side of the bargain.
It was one heck of a note. In today’s political world, if you weren’t willing to lie, cheat and be bought, it looked as if not even the Devil himself could get you elected.
He had decided to catch the next shuttle to Hades, flog a few sinners, try to cheer himself up, when his beeper went off. He glanced at the number in the liquid crystal display, got out his cellular phone and dialed.
“Yeah, what is it, Ashtoreth?” He listened, then sighed and said, “All right, put him through.” After a short pause, “Son of Chaos here. What can I do for you?
“Sure, I know who you are.
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”
He sat up a little straighter.
“Talk to me,” he said.
Yerkamov and Associates had the top floor of a twenty-story tower of black glass that dominated a sterile edge-city office complex in Bethesda with all the warmth of the slab gizmo in 2001. Nick’s heels echoed on black marble as he was whisked from the limo through a stainless-steel lobby and into a brushed-aluminum private elevator that deposited him before the glass desk of Yerkamov’s receptionist. She’d been kicked out of the Miss America pageant. The judges thought she was too pretty. Why can’t I get help like that? Nick wondered as she ushered him into the vast corner office with the million-dollar view of the Potomac and suburban Virginia. It was freezing cold.
Yerkamov was a fat little man with a bald head and rolled-up sleeves and sweat trickling down his neck. Sitting behind a big clean desk, he was almost obscured in a cloud of blue smoke. He leaned out of the cloud and thrust a chubby index finger at Nick.
“Reason I called,” he said, brandishing a sheaf of computer printouts, “I was going through some polling data and I came across a little blip here when I ran Hardy versus Peckem.” He chuckled. “Sort of a Ross Perot factor. Thing is, you tested higher than either of ’em.”
“How interesting.”
“I thought you might think so. The numbers from the Oprah show got my staff sitting up and howling at the moon. You do quite well across all the demographic lines. Young ones like that whiff of anarchy. Boomers find you trustworthy. Fatherly. Women enjoy the hint of danger.” He got up and walked to the windows, puffing on his cigar. He looked over his shoulder. “Got any money?”
“People owe me favors. I can raise some.”
Yerkamov nodded. “Of course, I can see a certain amount of trouble with the whole Prince of Darkness issue. Fly-god, Corrupter, Father of Lies. . . . Some of the nicknames you’ve picked up over the years.”
“I prefer plain old Nick,” said Lucifer.
“Sure, sure, and it plays better, too. And you’ve made a start on defusing that. With the right spin . . . Do you see where I’m going here?”
“I thi
nk I have the direction. Not so sure about the motivation.”
Yerkamov shrugged. “My business is seeing the writing on the wall. If I head Peckem’s reelection committee, I’ll have to learn Japanese and see him only on visiting days. There’s things even I can’t make look good. Besides, I like to back a horse I understand.”
He went over and sat on the edge of his desk. “Potential problem. What’s your citizenship?”
“I have a United States passport.”
“Not good enough if we’re going all the way. Gotta be a natural-born citizen.”
Nick thought it over.
“Hades is vast. I believe I could convince any court in the world that when I was cast down, I came to rest beneath New Jersey.”
“That would explain a lot. Where do you live?”
“I maintain a condo in Dallas for tax purposes.”
“Then here it is: governor of Texas in ’94. Six years later . . .”
“The millennium . . .” Nick whispered, and the banked fires in his eyes blazed briefly. When he looked down he saw that Yerkamov had extended his hand. Nick took it. Yerkamov’s hand was clammy, his grip flaccid. Nick hated that. He swallowed hard and pretended he didn’t mind.
Hell, it was a small price to pay for the White House.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I admit I made a teeny change here. I originally had Yerkamov offer Nick the junior senatorship from Texas in ’94. Looking back, this seems more appropriate. They say Satan can take many forms. You don’t suppose . . .
Probably not. I think Nick would have made a better president.
INTRODUCTION TO “The Bellman”
The second-most-asked question, as any writer will know, is “How do you go about getting an agent?” The answer is fairly simple, like the answer to the old question, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Practice. Write stories, send them out, endure the rejection when it comes. When you have a few stories in print, there are agents out there who will take you on. (If you’re not good enough to sell, no agent can help you.) Before that, few serious agents will look at your work; they don’t have the time. There are “agents” who will read your stuff for a fee, and maybe send them out to magazines, but don’t count on it. And don’t count on their advice. If you need opinions and helpful criticism, workshops are a better place to get them.