Capital City

by Lee Hurwitz

The donuts arrived, and Treanor immediately attacked the French Crullers. For an instant, Watson was reminded of John Stone, who—to Watson’s everlasting gratitude—keeled over, dead of a heart attack, before they handed down his indictment.

  “I don’t imagine Mr. Traum had much to say,” Watson ventured.

  “On the contrary, he was very loquacious,” Hurwitz replied. “In fact, I think he’s interested in doing his own autobiography.”

  “Better get it together quick,” Watson said. He chuckled, too, a little bit. Traum’s execution was set for June 1.

  “Umph—those things take forever,” Treanor said, finishing off his first cruller and attacking his second. “He won’t be executed until midway through the Kemp Administration, if then.”

  Well, this is just what Wendell Watson wanted, people who knew nothing, asserting their convictions with absolute certainty. “Gentlemen, if I can be of help...” Loretta opened the door; the interview was over.

  “I told you to keep notes,” Treanor said as soon as they were out of Watson’s office. “You did, and look what happened!”

  “My notes are not exactly what Amazing wanted to hear.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars!” Treanor looked like he was on Ecstasy. “For each of us.” He peered at Hurwitz. “What did you think of our subject in there?”

  “He gave us a load of crap,” Lee Hurwitz said to his writing partner.

  “It may have been crap, but it was our crap,” Treanor replied immediately. Hurwitz looked hard at Treanor. He was a lawyer by training, Hurwitz knew, and that might have given him a sort of worldly perspective.

  But, dammit, Hurwitz had been there. He had been part of the Watson administration, admittedly in a low-level position. But it was he who had to go home every night and face the jeers of his friends and neighbors, who knew that he was part of something corrupt and incompetent.

  “You remember what Chief Dennis said?” Lee said softly.

  They had interviewed Chief Dennis in his office, a surprisingly small place, less than half the size of the conference room Amazing had gotten as an office for the two writers. Dennis, they knew, could be a dramatic wellspring for their story. They had already talked to his wife, and wasn’t it romantic, that someone would come to the heroic lawman looking for help, and end up marrying him? The story would end, of course, with Watson expressing gratitude to Dennis for rescuing him from himself, and in that way helping him to find Jesus and redemption. They would bathe the reader in a warm pool of love and understanding.

  But love and understanding were in short supply on the day they interviewed Chief Dennis. “I will in no way cooperate with your attempt to whitewash the life of Wendell Watson,” Dennis had said.

  “But this is not a whitewash,” Treanor had replied. “We are portraying him warts and all.”

  “You are not,” Dennis snarled. “You are having him admit to sex outside of marriage and some drug use, which everyone knows anyway and which society mostly condones, and sweeping everything else under the table.”

  Treanor put up his hands. “Sir, we’re trying to get all the information we can, good and bad. That’s why we’re here with you, the man who brought Mayor Watson to justice.”

  Dennis shook his head. He was obviously frustrated. “Look, I don’t expect you two white men to understand. Especially you, Mr. Treanor; you’re from out of town. But Mr. Hurwitz, you live here.” He looked directly at Lee. “You’ve been part of City government. Can you understand for a minute what you’re about to do?”

  Dennis stood up, began to pace. “You two are enablers. And what you’re enabling is white bigots. The white bigots who say, yeah, that’s what happens when you give self-rule to Black people. That’s the sort of people they elect—corrupt drug addicts whose only interest is who they can screw. Do you remember Earl Butz’s joke? Loose shoes, tight pussy and a warm place to shit. Well, congratulations. You’re about to bring Earl Butz’s joke to life.”

  Well, that was pretty harsh, Hurwitz thought. It didn’t seem to bother his writing partner at the time, and so Hurwitz didn’t say anything.

  But he was going to say something now. Their office was in the Wyndham Bristol, and once they got their coats off Hurwitz said, “I’m having misgivings.”

  Treanor poured himself a coffee, slammed into one of the low-slung desk chairs, and fired up the WordPerfect program. “We’ve talked about this before, Lee. We’re just ghostwriters. We’re like—we’re like the guys who write advertising copy. We don’t have to actually use the product we sell.”

  “This is like perfuming a corpse, Tim.”

  “That’s a good simile! We’re like undertakers!”

  “Yeah, but our corpse is going to run for public office in a couple of years.”

  Treanor thought about this for a couple of minutes. “You’re right,” he said. “Your simile sucks. You touch any of the fifteen thou yet?” They had received half their advance upon signing the agreement with Amazing. They would get their other half when they handed in the manuscript.

  “No,” Hurwitz said. He wanted to know what his taxes were going to be before he used any of the money. But he knew that Treanor had some debts from his law practice and assumed that he had used the money to satisfy them.

  “Look. Let’s just get to work.” The computer program was ready and Treanor turned to the screen.

  “Didn’t you use to work in politics yourself?” Hurwitz asked.

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “What about the politicians you knew? Were they all as sleazy as Watson?”

  “Hell, no! Most of them were good people. They worked incredibly hard, sometimes ten or twelve-hour days. They’d put in a full day taking care of whatever business they had to do, and then spend the rest of their time going to constituent meetings and handling constituent problems.”

  “Didn’t they all take money under the table?”

  “None that I worked for did. And I never heard of anybody I knew doing it. They took all their money over the table, through fundraising, and they hated doing it.”

  “Didn’t they all take drugs and cheat on their spouses?”

  “When would they have the time?” Treanor laughed. “Most of them were dead on their feet once the day ended.”

  Hurwitz nodded. “Well, every time somebody like Watson is glorified, by an autobiography or a talk show, it tars everybody in public office. It increases public cynicism just a little bit more. It makes our democracy just a little bit more dysfunctional. And we’re going to be one of the reasons, Mr. Advertising Copy Man.”

  “You want us to walk away from the contract?”

  “I want us to tell the truth.”

  Treanor stared hard at the blank screen, the blinking cursor.

  “We won’t get this published for twenty-five years,” he said. “We’ll have to give back the advance.”

  “That’s okay,” Hurwitz replied, “I think we should start in Sean O’Brien’s office, just after I got hired.”

  Treanor nodded and began to type. “Sean O’Brien, who once was a good man, but now was a happy one instead, meditated on his sins,” he wrote. “He had fifteen minutes to kill before lunch, so why not?”