Capital City

by Lee Hurwitz

  “He’s in a bad mood, Mr. O’Brien,” Sheila said.

  “What kind of bad mood?” His news was important, but sometimes Stone could be so overwrought that it was a bad idea even to be in the same room. And, of course, sometimes he was drunk.

  “He’s all mopey. He’s like…” and the secretary made a gesture which told him nothing more than she had said already.

  O’Brien thought for a moment. “I’ll take a chance,” he said, and pushed into Stone’s office. “Holy shit.”

  Stone was sitting in the dark. The only illumination was such dim sunlight as got through the dreary Washington winter sky, further diminished by the polarized glass of the window.

  “Hiya, Stoney,” O’Brien said, trying to will cheerfulness into the room. The effort failed; the words fell flat, and Stone didn’t respond.

  “Well I—do you want some light in here?”

  “No.”

  “Um, suit yourself. I—ah—mind if I sit down? I just wanted to tell you I, ah, you know, John, we’ve been through a lot together, and I’ve always felt you were in my corner, supporting me, and I hope you’ve felt the same way about me. That I’ve been in your corner, I mean. Well, yesterday, out of the blue, I got a terrific offer. From RDE. It was so good I think I have to take it. For my family’s sake, I mean.” O’Brien thought it prudent not to tell Stone that he was being paid more than Stone, more than the Mayor (or more than the Mayor’s salary, in any event). “Anyway, I wanted you to know as soon as I did. So that you’ll have plenty of time to find a replacement for me. And, um, train him. Or her. John?” A minute passed, then another. “John?”

  For the first and only time that morning Stone looked up, directly at O’Brien. At first Stone spoke so softly that O’Brien couldn’t hear, and he had to ask his boss to repeat himself.

  The second time Stone drew himself up to his full height, thrust his head toward O’Brien, and said with great, exaggerated politeness:

  “Goodbye.”

  Hightower got in the brand new Cadillac Seville and fired it up. Hell, with the cash Watson had given him, nearly fifty thousand dollars, he could have rented a Lamborghini. But he didn’t want to be conspicuous, and in this ritzy City, where even the Ramada went for a hundred fifty a night, a gold Seville with Moroccan leather interior, Bose sound system and cigar ashtray was not conspicuous.

  Hightower eased the Caddy onto Doral Boulevard, and then up East 8th Avenue over to NW 79th Street, all the way across the Bridge to Collins Avenue until he reached the address.

  There was no need to involve Hawkins. Hightower could enter the building—if it had a buzzer system, wait until someone used it and push though—go up to apartment #609, jimmy the lock—no phony pizza delivery man, not enough time—fire two shots, one to drop her and one to be sure, and leave—no rush, no panic, just a brisk walk to the car. He’d be back in the motel before his slow-witted partner finished watching the soaps. He hoped that whoever was putting her up wouldn’t see him but if she did she would have to go, too.

  Then why did he feel like a six-year-old about to get a whipping from his daddy?

  I’m no killer, he thought, parking the Caddy a block short, getting out, leaving it unlocked, strolling down the street like he lived there. I’m no killer, he thought, even though killing three men on the streets of Washington greased his transfer from robbery to the Mayor’s Praetorian Guard. I’m not like Aaron the Moor, he thought. Not like the man who carved taunts on the bodies of dead men and who bragged about his lies and arsons. Then why was he walking toward the apartment of two women he didn’t know with a loaded gun?

  But wait, wasn’t that her, wasn’t that both of them, leaving the building and getting into a red Corvette convertible? The gun in his pocket, warm in his hand, seemed to come to life, like an animal suddenly wakened to the scent of game. He looked around, there was no one else on the street. Instinctively, he pulled up the collar of his overcoat. He could fire, dash back to his car in less than ten seconds, take off, turn in the car, and get back to DC. Mission accomplished.

  He slid the gun out.

  Chapter 4

  Wendell Watson, Sr. was a pimp and a drug dealer. Ida Watson was a heroin addict and a two-dollar whore. They were made for each other.

  They spent a lot of time as guests of the criminal justice system and as a result, they had less than full parent-child relationships with their only child, the whip-smart Wendell Jr. Indeed, the future mayor was eight years old before he realized that the tiny, bug-eyed woman who occasionally stayed in his grandmother’s apartment was actually his mother, and he never saw his father outside the Algoa Correctional Center’s visiting room until after his twelfth birthday.

  He never resented their absence. Years later, he would acknowledge that he never witnessed a love as pure or powerful as his mother’s—for her fix. He would watch in wonder as she concentrated in anticipation, her eyes almost prayerful in longing as she heated the mixture in a spoon, and then threw her head back in ecstatic satisfaction as the drug hit home. Sometimes briefly, wistfully, he would wonder what it would be like to be the object of so much self-annihilating love.

  He raised himself, learning on the street how to beg, steal, and lie—skills which he found useful in political life. But his agile, capacious mind absorbed other information as well: Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Bach, all the great thinkers and writers and artists. He read Marcus Garvey and Frederick Douglass as well and through them experienced, not rage, but something better: an understanding of rage, and the uses to which it could be put.

  He was almost a teenager when he moved into the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis. Later, Pruit-Igoe would be recognized as the most catastrophic housing project in the history of the world, a place so horrible that its eventual demolition was honored and celebrated by architects even nearly thirty years after the fact. At the time young Wendell lived there, the policy experts whose thinking shaped public housing praised the immense, bleak, featureless monolith as a monument to efficiency and service to the poor. As Wendell walked down the dimly-lit corridors, the monotony of the cookie-cutter construction relieved only by the gang graffiti or droppings from some of the thousands of rats that infested the building, he learned a healthy skepticism for policy experts.

  School taught him to be skeptical about education. There is a special place in hell reserved for those who designed education for Black kids in segregated St. Louis. Wendell began his learning at P.S. 103, whose most famous former student was a young thug named Charles Liston, who destiny marked to briefly serve as the most fearsome man in the world until Mohammed Ali cleaned his clock. He was taught his numbers and letters by a succession of nervous, half-educated women, more wardens than teachers, in a succession of dirty, overheated rooms, many of them windowless. His textbooks had been used so many times that words were smudged into illegibility, and his history text stopped at the election of Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

  I must be a genius to have survived all that, Wendell Watson, Jr., thought from the safety of his present tense. He had said the same thing to himself many times over his adult life, and had the evidence to back it up: a scholarship to Howard University (the highest caliber of college realistically available to an impoverished Black student in 1961); academic honors; leadership in the nascent civil rights movement; election to the City Council; and eventually the Mayoralty of Washington, DC in 1988, the most significant public position in America occupied by a Black man.

  Civil rights bloomed like the magic plant from Jack and the Beanstalk during Wendell’s freshman year, and it did not take him long to decide to ride it all the way to the clouds. It astonished him that Martin Luther King Jr., a man not that much older than he, could rally people all over the country for such a cause, even assembling hundreds of thousands here in Washington to demonstrate before the President and Congress! And it worked! Martin had tapped into the rage of Blacks, the guilt of Whites. The ensuing flood wiped away a social order that had
been in existence for hundreds of years. And here was Martin meeting the President of the United States in the Oval Office! Having dinner with Bobby Kennedy at Hickory Hill!

  Wendell decided that he wanted some of that. At first tentatively, and then with more and more assurance, he thrust himself into the center of the war for civil rights in Washington. The nation’s capitol was as segregated as any other southern city, and Wendell led sit-ins, picket lines, and marches to open up housing, lunch counters, and jobs. He had the necessary gifts—a speaking voice which, though it lacked Martin’s ringing cadences, was melodious and persuasive, and an extraordinary sense of strategy which permitted him to sense the point to which people could be taken, and no further.

  Wendell loved being at the front of the charge for civil rights. Among other things, it resulted in all the pussy he could possibly handle. He had been a virgin throughout high school, terrified of the diseases which the few girls willing to have sex with him might bring to the bed. But at Howard he met young women of exquisite sensibilities and impeccable taste, and as he became prominent in the movement they all wanted to go to bed with him. He accepted their offers—all of them—and now remembered his sophomore year principally as one continuous orgasm interrupted sporadically by marches, speeches, and classes. The wellsprings of his sex drive seemed as limitless as the yearning for civil rights, and more fun to satisfy. He loved the way a woman’s heart would open during sex; how she would vibrate as he thrust himself into her as though he had made an electric current run through her body. He loved working his will upon the body of a woman, as he loved working it on the body politic. And he loved their gratitude afterward.

  And the body politic was as supple and responsive as any woman. Men ten and fifteen years his senior deferred to him in matters of strategy. And why not? By his senior year, all he needed to do was to identify a target in order to rally two thousand people to his cause. Eventually, in full retreat, local merchants hired him as an “integration consultant,” to advise them on how to comply with the requirements of the Civil Rights Act. It was not an overly taxing position, requiring principally that he not organize his picketing at the client’s establishment, but the money paid for his graduate degree in political science.

  A Ph.D. in political science qualified its possessor to teach political science, but Dr. Wendell Watson, Jr., had a more practical application in mind. Congress, in its largesse, had recently granted DC self-rule, and Wendell set out to obtain a seat in the new City Council. Raising money for the campaign was not a problem; he had a grateful client list, and they knew he was less likely to lead a crowd of picketers from a council member’s office. He was well-known and a good campaigner and he won easily. Eight years later he beat an ineffectual incumbent into the Mayor’s office.

  All of it’s going to shit now, he reflected, as he drained the last of his Laphroaig. He had developed a taste for single-malt scotches lately, in the process of cultivating a more corporate image for his anticipated post-political career. He thought he might reprise his role as an “integration consultant” after his third term was done, this one for hundreds of thousands of dollars to steer contracts from his hand-picked successor to his clients. No chance of that now, he said to himself, feeling the fabric of his scotch-soaked despair against his heart. No chance of that at all, if the Post or the Times ever got a whiff of this. They were out to get him anyway, the ofay bastards, the Post in their old-money pinstripes, tut-tutting in their Georgetown parties; the Times a collection of loonies and Moonies, salivating over a right-wing agenda in which the only place at the table for people of color was clearing away the dishes.

  How did I get here? And instantly he knew it was his weakness, not for women—he considered his hunger for female flesh to be a sign of his good health and potency—but for bad people. He felt an instant attraction to, and bond with, the broken ones, whether it be that fat carnivorous drunk, John Stone, or Aloysius Hightower, with his lunatic rages, or even the security guard, Aaron Copland, with the unfortunate past. He loved Sharon Scott’s corruptibility, loved her greed and her need to be spoiled. He loved that he saw in her, a mid-level bureaucrat with middling talents, an ambition for material goods so ferocious and absolute as to be sexual, a longing so overwhelming that she would do anything and be anyone in order to have it satisfied. He satisfied it, he gorged it, and in his arrogance he never imagined that Sharon would turn on him. Well, he had paid for his mistake. And so had she.

  And now this. What were the odds that someone would be hiding, in his own office, when Hightower capped the bitch? What an infernal coincidence; it was demonic; and for an instant Wendell could almost imagine that the arch-fiend himself, along with Wendell’s enemies at the Post and the Times, were in league to destroy him. He poured himself another Scotch, to calm down. And now Hawkins and Hightower were on a mission to put down the witness before she found herself in the comforting arms of the US Attorney or, worse, Barbara Walters. What a stupid, bloody mess this had turned out to be! They were not, strictly speaking, on a fool’s errand. However, they were fools. He had made a terrible mistake to send them on this assignment; springing from his weak impulse not to spread the web of involvement further. He should have sent a pro; he had sent a pro, for the limited mission of visiting Evelyn at her sister’s house. He should send a pro still. His eyes narrowed; he reached for the phone and stopped. No, give Hightower the weekend to get the job done and get back to the District. It’s too early to panic. He took a generous swallow of Scotch, relaxed, and with an effort turned his attention back to affairs of the City. He could make decisions, he realized; that’s why they paid him the big bucks.

  So now it was time for another one. The god damn press was regurgitating old stories about Hawkins being arrested—detained—for chasing after Evelyn Boone (thank God he was out of the reach of any reporter at present), and every development in the Sharon Scott murder investigation generated a new story in the Metro section. He desperately needed a distraction, and a huge one. It could not be a new homeless shelter; an anti-AIDS initiative wouldn’t do; nor would a plan to bring jobs into the City. These were immensely important to poor people and sick people but the newspapers didn’t give a crap about it. It had to be something that would attract la Graham’s attention.

  Something like Statehood.

  Now Watson knew that the honkies were more likely to give voting rights to Moon people than residents of the Nation’s Capital. But he also knew about something else. He knew about Utah.

  Every once in a while, a revolution will come down from the Heavens, but everything else that happens does so because of compromise. Usually, it is a compromise between people whose interests, whose backgrounds and whose personalities are so different that it seems as though they are members of different species. People like Wendell Watson and the Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, the hon. Brad Trotter (R.-Utah).

  To the public, Watson and Trotter were brutal, bitter enemies whose interests were in total conflict. In private, though, they were sociable and friendly, united by a common interest in history, blues, and bourbon. Watson and Trotter had traded horses on numerous occasions over the past year or so. Watson would now see if the Junior Senator from Utah was prepared to trade an elephant.

  Watson walked over to his desk, and took out the papers he had received from his Congressional lobbyist’s office. They showed that, based on annual census estimates, Utah would be a few thousand short of earning a fourth member of the House of Representatives in 1990. If Trotter—who was still in his first term—could somehow conjure up that extra representative, he would cement his ties to the Republican establishment. And in Utah, one of the few states without a primary, those are the ties that bind.

  He played it out in his head. The Statehood idea would have to seem credible to get play in the papers, and he had a suspicion that the Dems in Congress—having lost spectacularly by pursuing a Wonk Strategy in the recent national plebiscite—wo
uld be out for blood. The threat of a few Republican defections—Warner of Virginia would be a prime target—would raise the specter of sixty-seven votes in the Senate, enough to override Bush’s veto.

  So, first the sturm and drang of the Statehood demand, followed by the backroom compromise: voting rights for the DC representative in Congress, and a fourth, countervailing representative from Republican Utah. Multiple heroes; with luck, Watson would not be around to take the credit.

  Which reminded him: long-term strategies require long-term players. He picked up the phone and dialed the Young Prince directly. “C.C., it is sweet to hear your voice,” he said when the Councilman answered the phone. “Come on over and let me lay your destiny before you.” Watson hoped he hadn’t woken Corbin up.

  The Young Prince was there in fifteen minutes, shiny with sweat. He wore an excellent suit: a beautiful three-piece, pinstriped, with a silk tie, all brown. Ronald Reagan has sure fucked up our color sense, Watson thought. Corbin wore his head shaved, which emphasized the plumpness of his face, which in turn emphasized how short he was.

  “Mr. Mayor, it is ever my great pleasure to join forces with you on projects great and small.” Not for the first time, Watson wondered whether Corbin’s elaborate form of speech was motivated by fear, or by a desire to somehow emulate him, or by some subtle taint of contempt.

  “Sit down, C.C.” Watson knew he should offer to have coffee brought in or some such, but didn’t feel in a mood to do so. “I would like to talk to you about DC Statehood.”

  “Absolutely,” Corbin replied, banging his arm down on the other side of Watson’s desk. “I consider DC Statehood to be my signature issue.” This was news to Watson, who had never heard Corbin mention it before.