“Mother of God, we’ve got a trillion-dollar deficit this year, maybe more. I bring up the deficit and the crowds go apeshit.”
“Those are our people, Marty,” Moran said. “You’re preaching to the choir. The rest of the country knows there are only two ways to deal with the deficit. Cut spending, which means social security and Medicare, or raise taxes. Political death, both of them.”
“Well, we’re already dying here. We could go out speaking the truth at least.”
Harry saw Moran make eye contact with Hugh Jamison, the campaign’s lead pollster. Expressions of principle made them uneasy.
“You mentioned three challenges,” he said.
“Number two is white men,” Moran said. “They’re usually our bread and butter, but they’re not buying what we’re selling. We’ve got the values vote—abortion, family, indecency on TV, the usual crap. But values are a women’s issue, and we never get above 45 percent of the women. For men it’s the economy, and they want a balanced budget and lower taxes, which in the current circumstances are mutually exclusive.”
“But that hasn’t stopped the other side from offering both,” Lightstone said with a sigh. He’d had this conversation a thousand times in the last few months.
“We used to own lower taxes and a balanced budget, but we blew that with Bush Two. Now we’re blamed for jacking up the deficit by blocking spending cuts, which means we can’t cut taxes. We talked about coming out with a spending freeze proposal, but that turns off women and minorities, and we’ve been making headway with minorities.”
“A modest tax increase for the top 1 percent and a big cut for the rest—”
“Would be political suicide.” Moran glanced around the table, challenging anyone to contradict him. “No one ever got elected president promising to raise taxes, even on the top 1 percent.”
“That’s because half the country thinks they’re in the top 10 percent,” said Jamison the pollster.
“We’re supposed to be the solution,” Martin Selkirk said in his trademark gargling-with-nails drawl. “Problem is, we don’t have a problem people can get excited about.”
“Number three?” Harry said quietly.
“Kamalia.” Moran let the word hang in the air for a few moments.
When Harry couldn’t take the disapproving silence any longer, he asked: “What about it?”
“Nobody gives a rat’s ass about some two-bit African hell hole. Shit, nobody cares about foreign policy, period. Since Iraq, Afghanistan, they want a wall around the country, nobody comes in, nobody leaves, except for sightseeing trips to Europe, which no one can afford anymore anyway.”
“Torture, human rights abuse…none of this is important?” Even to his own ears Harry didn’t sound passionate on the subject.
“They could dismember every man, woman, and child in Kamalia, do it on the evening news, and it wouldn’t get you one single vote,” Moran said. “Unless it’s Americans getting killed, nobody cares.”
“I care,” he said as convincingly as he could.
There was silence, punctuated by shifting in chairs and muffled coughs. Personal convictions, when the election was two weeks away and the polls were against you, were not acceptable fodder for polite discourse. Jamison finally broke the awkward silence.
“Our latest tracking poll shows that Kamalia is the issue most connected with you, Harry. That’s a disaster. Voters hold one or two impressions of a candidate, that’s all. Fifty percent of your reputation is tied to a place most people can’t spell. We can’t afford that.”
“Hugh is right.”
All heads turned to Marcella Lightstone at the far end of the table. She never sat in on strategy meetings, even when they were held in one of the Lightstone homes. This one she’d insisted on attending. I never asked for this, she’d told Harry that morning. True enough, but he strongly suspected she wanted it. I had a great life, one of the greatest lives on this planet. Now I can’t walk down the street without a thick-necked Secret Service agent two feet behind me and people coming up to me and touching me with sweaty hands, and God forbid I refuse to shake them, the papers make me out to be some sort of “Let them eat cake” ogress. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But this? We need a way to win this thing. I won’t have it be a waste of time.
At the end of the table, Marcella projected a surprising gravitas, given the infrequency of her appearances at strategy meetings, her diminutive size, and the fact that, even after a well-received speech at the convention in July, she was still not associated with a single issue or cause other than getting her husband into the White House. She was something of a cipher to the electorate, in fact, but that didn’t seem to be having an impact on the polls. She simply wasn’t in the political equation at all, and given the sturm und drang surrounding past First Ladies, that didn’t seem like a bad thing at all.
“Our platform is weak to begin with,” she said in an upper-class lockjaw that, in small gatherings like the present one, verged on ventriloquism. “The last thing we need is to distract voters with a silly issue that they have no interest in.”
“The arrest and torture of thousands of innocent people is hardly silly, Marcella, in fact—”
“Kamalia is off the agenda.”
No one gasped at this wholly unexpected and entirely inappropriate exercise of spousal authority, but they might as well have. All heads turned slowly to Harry, like turrets atop a flotilla of gunboats.
He waited until he felt he could speak with a steady voice. “Hasn’t our polling shown that the ‘We deserve better’ theme is working?” He didn’t wait for Jamison’s answer. “Eighty-plus percent recognize that line, and most of them agree with it. Let’s figure out a new creative strategy. Same message, new execution. Get some fresh blood around it. And we’ll go negative at the same time; I know that makes everyone at this table happy.”
After a tense silence, Jamison spoke. “What about Nessin’s son?”
Peter Nessin had recently made headlines after a consulting firm that he’d built, largely on his father’s name and connections, declared bankruptcy.
“He’s off limits.”
“We don’t have to name names,” Michael Steers said. “We compare and contrast.” The campaign’s chief spokesman glanced from Harry to Marcella and back.
“No, the boys are off limits.” Since the convention, Alan and Brian had been back at Saint Andrew’s, out of the public eye. They would not be paraded in front of the press to demonstrate Lightstone family values. He stood up. “I need to prepare for a briefing with the Times editorial board tomorrow, and then a speech to the Roundtable. Let’s see some new ad concepts by tomorrow afternoon.”
“And Kamalia?” Moran asked.
“Kamalia stays on the agenda.”
• • •
“You have no idea what this is really about,” he shouted at Marcella when they were alone in the library. “You have no goddamn idea what the pressures are on me, so I’ll thank you to keep your mouth shut.”
“Don’t shout,” she said calmly, pointing to the door, behind which stood the inevitable Secret Serviceman. Even after eighteen years surrounded by Marcella’s army of servants, eighteen years in which the two of them had very rarely had one of their several homes to themselves, he still could not get used to the ubiquitous Secret Service, with their undertakers’ suits and bird-furtive eyes and subtle suggestion of inappropriate knowledge.
“I’ll do whatever I want in my own goddamn home.” But he had lowered his voice, and sat down in one of the leather wing chairs on either side of the fireplace.
“Doing what you want is not what this is about.” Marcella took the facing wing chair.
“Well, I’m tired of taking advice that gets me nowhere.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Their eyes met for a long moment.
“You know.”
She nodded slowly.
“How long?”
“From the beginning.”
&
nbsp; He’d never told her about Julian Mellow, had never been tempted to, not once, during the long primary season following the New Hampshire upset, when things were going well, during the leadup to the convention in Dallas, when the momentum from the uncontested primaries carried him forward, nor since Dallas and the disappointing debates, when the momentum behind the campaign seemed to be leaking like air from an old tire. It wasn’t the San Francisco video so much as not wanting her to know that the whole colossal enterprise, which had already burned through $635 million, a sum that even the daughter of Kenneth Kollan could appreciate, employed several hundred paid experts and thousands of volunteers, had attracted hundreds of thousands of donations from supporters rich and poor on the internet, had eaten up countless of hours of air time and thousands of square feet of newsprint—that this whole enterprise was built on nothing more than a personal humiliation.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. She shook her head, but the apology wasn’t really to her—or to her alone. No sooner had the words left his mouth than he felt a lightening of the weight he’d shouldered for nine months.
“After Iowa, which was inconclusive, you were thinking of getting in anyway,” she said, which was part truth, part historical retrofitting. “Julian gave you the encouragement you needed.”
There would be, he realized with relief and, surprisingly, some ill-defined disappointment, no discussion of the video itself.
“Since then, he’s stayed out of your way, so I really don’t think there’s anything to be embarrassed or concerned about.”
She smoothed the skirt of her pale blue suit, one of many cheerfully bland ensembles she’d purchased for the role of candidate’s wife. Once he’d been safely defeated she’d revert to black couture.
“He’s stayed out of my way because I mention goddamn Kamalia in every speech. And what about Delsiner?” he practically whispered.
Again, their eyes met, a rare occurrence after eighteen years of marriage. She looked away first.
“The man did have a drug history. In any case, we had nothing to do with that.”
“And Charles Moore?” he said even more quietly.
“An accident,” she said without taking her eyes off the carpet. “Small plane crashes are an occupational hazard of politics. The NTSB report blamed the failure of the plane’s elevator controls, whatever that means.”
“At night, I dream about them, Delsiner and Moore. If I thought—”
“Well, don’t think,” she said. “Don’t think. They’re taken care of, whether by fate or God or Julian Mellow we don’t know and we never will, not if we know what’s good for us. We have the future to think about.”
Fate or God or Julian Mellow. He could only nod. Her conviction was bracing and unsettling. For a moment there he’d briefly looked forward to sharing the burden of what he knew, and what he suspected, but he now knew that they shared nothing. Remorse and guilt and even uncertainty were alien to her—he’d always known that, but he felt disappointed nonetheless.
“About Kamalia.”
“Julian insists that I—”
“I know what Julian insists. But we have to draw the line. It’s bringing down the campaign. You’re the candidate now. He wouldn’t dare release that video at this point. It would destroy him as much as you. You’re your own man now, Harry.”
He shook his head.
“It’s the one thing he wants from me. I don’t feel comfortable defying him on this.”
She stood up and stepped toward him.
“Listen to me, Harry. You are your own man.” She placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. “You’re bigger than Julian Mellow now. You’re the candidate. He can’t control you.”
He took her hand off his shoulder and held it. It had been a mistake, keeping so much to himself. She couldn’t share his guilt and doubts. But she could help him know what to do.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m bigger than Julian Mellow.”
“Good. Now, not a word about Kamalia in tonight’s speech. Let’s show Julian just where he stands.”
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15
Chapter 39
Receptions at the American embassy were as glamorous as things ever got in Villeneuve, Sophie thought. Everyone dressed up. The Americans tended to overdo the British Empire bit, the men sporting blue blazers and even khaki safari jackets, ties resolutely knotted despite the stifling humidity, the women donning straw hats even after sundown, all of them sipping gin and tonics from sweating highball glasses and smoking Rothmans and talking wittily about their previous postings. Well, you couldn’t blame them for trying to inject some dignity into what had to be a very undesirable posting. Rich American and European campaign donors or Presidential roommates got Paris or London or even Pretoria. Career diplomats without the right pedigrees or connections got dusty Villeneuve. The locals in attendance—business and government leaders and their wives—also tried to rise to the occasion, but even their best clothes looked at once painfully bright and badly faded, relics of better times. Sophie wore a short white dress that Calvin Klein had given her after she’d modeled it at one of his shows, and high-heeled sandals, relics from her past.
The day before, a handwritten note from Claude DuMarier had been slipped under her front door, inviting her to the affair. The US embassy was an unsurprising place for them to meet. The Boymond government still kowtowed to the Americans, even as it plundered the companies once owned by US investors, and she was considered an honorary American, having spent so many years there. She was also, she knew, the closest thing Kamalia had to a homegrown celebrity, at least in the eyes of Americans. In truth, most Kamalians had no idea who she was.
She arrived a few minutes after the party’s seven o’clock start and immediately procured a glass of white wine. The first sip nearly brought tears to her eyes, it tasted so cool and expensive—like her old life, she thought, forcing herself to drink slowly. She made her way across the crowded patio to DuMarier.
“I am—”
“Je vous connais,” he said with what he must have thought was charming insinuation. “You look fantastic, Sophie. Your photographs do not do you justice at all.”
Her last modeling gig had been three years earlier. Had the government been photographing her since then?
“I was surprised to learn that you are interested in helping us,” she said. “There are reports of an escalation of arrests in the name of state security.”
“Do not believe everything you hear.”
“You are head of Boymond’s security, so you tell me, then. Is it true?”
“In Kamalia, truth is a moving target.”
He smiled, as if he’d said something original. Tall and well fed, DuMarier had a fleshy face that almost obscured his small, round eyes and a tight, teeth-concealing smile. He was in full military regalia: a white jacket with a row of five straining gold buttons and covered with medals and ribbons commemorating service in imaginary battles.
“Why are you sympathetic to us?” she asked him.
“Who told you I was sympathetic?”
Best not to raise the name Julian Mellow. “I was led to understand that you would help us.”
“Ah, help you, yes. Sympathetic, no.”
It was about money. How stupid of her, to imagine that principles might be motivating him. Whatever the government paid him, Julian Mellow was paying him more.
“You wanted me to come here,” she said, suddenly impatient to be away from him.
“I want you to look around, get to know this place. If things should go badly for you and your friends, you can come here. You will be safe here, legally we are really on American soil.”
“I have been here before.” When Matthew was alive, they’d been frequent guests of the ambassador and his wife.
“I know that,” he said with a creepy lift of his eyebrows. “This time, I want you to notice the back gate, the one the servants use. I do not suppose you have entered through that gate before.” Another in
sinuating eyebrow lift. “It will be left unlocked at the critical moment. If you need to seek sanctuary, that is.”
“Critical moment. When—”
“You and your comrades will decide when. I, however, may be able to let you know when vulnerabilities are apparent.”
It was horrible to be dependent on such a man, who so smoothly sold out his government, however corrupt, for personal gain.
“Will these vulnerabilities be apparent anytime soon?”
“Very soon. Be ready. Ah, Madame Albertson,” he said, directing his tiny fish eyes over Sophie’s shoulder. “How nice to see you.” He nodded at Sophie and made his way to a matronly white woman, whose right hand he kissed with a ceremonial bow.
She wandered through the ambassador’s residence, a low, white building full of immaculately maintained 1960s-era furniture. The embassy had been built during the brief Kennedy administration, when Kamalia, sensing the optimism spreading across the United States, had encouraged the Americans to construct a bigger, more elegant embassy, something more appropriate to the great things the two countries would do together. And indeed, a period of major economic expansion had followed, fueled by new American-financed factories and cobalt mines. The embassy hadn’t changed much since then, and neither had Kamalia. The factories had been nationalized by the Boymond regime, and there were frequent threats from Washington to close the embassy in protest, but so far it remained open, though thinly staffed. As she made her way through the crowded public rooms, she thought it looked like a marooned ocean liner, a bit too grand, too carefree, for the land on which it had washed up.
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