“Fifty-five percent.” Austen allowed himself to grin. “Fifty-five percent has a nice substantial feel to it, especially for a liberal Democrat running from California. Simon could be nominated for God on fiftyfive percent.”
. . . . .
So that was what they ran for. And that was why Frank Austen spent the next several months lashing the party barons into line like so many galley slaves. The labor leaders and the county commissioners and the ethnics and the state assemblymen, they all thought they had you over a barrel because you had an election coming up, and they all had to be reminded about where the bodies were buried. It was a little ritual, like a rite of passage, and Austen, because it wouldn’t do for the Senator to soil his hands, got to wield the ceremonial knife.
“Hiya, Frank.”
It was eleven o’clock, Tuesday, the twenty-first of February, so this was Steve Rankovic, president and ruling spirit of the Federal Transportation Workers’ Union, come up from Los Angeles for the day to throw his weight around and glamorize the premises with his blue-andgreen plaid leisure suit. He was a real treat; he shook your hand and grinned, showing all his teeth, like a debauchee being introduced to a schoolgirl.
“Now you tell the Senator that I want this containerized cargo bill passed,” he went on, dropping your hand and throwing himself back into a chair. “You tell him to remember that I got thirty-six thousand guys, all dues-payin’ members, and we got a quarter of a million in our political education fund, and we got. . .”
“You haven’t got shit, pal.” Frank Austen didn’t even smile. “And just because I like you so much, I’m not even going to tell the senator that you were here. He wouldn’t appreciate it, you know; he doesn’t react too well to being crowded.”
He sank back in his chair and, after a few seconds, picked up a pencil that was lying on the desk in front of him, clutching it like a scepter.
“What’s the matter with you, Rankovic? Haven’t you seen the new Field poll? The senator doesn’t need you—he’s going to take this election in a walk, and if you don’t quit fucking around like this, after November he’s not even going to be able to remember your name.”
In the end, the union contributed seventy-five thousand dollars and the services of a hundred and twenty campaign volunteers, and Austen didn’t even offer to take their president out for lunch. The poor bastard left the Powell Street offices cringing like a whipped dog.
. . . . .
The midday rainstorm had just abated, and the packed brown earth around the monastery at Pwin Soo, just outside the capital, swam with muddy little rivulets that in time would find their way to the Great River, and from thence to the delta, and finally to the green sea beyond.
So, U Ba Sein had heard often enough from his brother, does the soul of the virtuous man journey at last to the mercy of Buddha.
The President for Life, who wore a moustache after the Western fashion, along with the uniform of a field marshal, ordered his car to stop directly in front of the ornate entrance to the main temple, where he knew he would find Ko Yeik at this hour, still at his prayers. He looked out the window and frowned at the mud, wishing his brother the abbot were a little less traditional in his views and would order his fellow monks to cover in asphalt at least so much of their road as stretched to the gatehouse—he was wearing new boots, imported for him from Italy.
Still, one’s last surviving male relative, and especially so holy a man as Ko Yeik, deserved the attention of an occasional visit. In fact, as U Ba Sein was fond of telling anyone who would listen, he counted these interviews with the abbot as among the chief consolations of his busy, careworn life. And this was true. His brother was too much of a simpleton to care about intriguing, and thus his conversation, full as it was with pious nonsense, allowed the President for Life an opportunity to rest his suspicions.
The driver came around and opened the car door for him, saluting smartly, and U Ba Sein stepped out into the mud, which rose as high as his instep.
He smiled, showing teeth stained to the color of fresh blood with betel juice, adjusted his military cap so that the braided visor shaded his eyes, and looked around him. There was a column of jeeps both behind and before his own shining black Citroen limousine, and his bodyguards all carried the latest and most sophisticated of the automatic rifles sent from the United States. Their sullen, brutal faces gave him an enormous feeling of satisfaction.
In the twenty-three years since he and a cadre of other middle-level army officers—all safely dead now, victims, within the first eighteen months, of his own assassination squads—had taken power by overthrowing the old, leftward-leaning monarch with the blessing of the American CIA, he had never lost sight of the fact that the loyalty of the junior officers and the rank and file among the soldiers was his key to survival and power. The king, to his sorrow, had put his faith in divine right and the general staff, and these had brought him to the dungeon where he had finally been drowned in a bucket that had served as the prisoners’ latrine.
The army had the best of everything, the best women, the best food, the best of anyone who was fool enough to bring a complaint against them, and they were properly appreciative. He could do anything—he was safe from anyone—so long as they remained so.
His brother, of course, took a different view.
But his brother, immediately upon the death of his wife, had retired from the world. Grief had been the excuse, grief and the accompanying estrangement from all mortal joys, but actually it had been weakness. Ko Yeik’s wife had been his senior by over seven years, and U Ba Sein could hardly credit anyone, even his brother, with being fool enough to shed many tears over the loss of such. His own European wife and his Kyauktadan mistress did well enough between them, but to abandon life for a woman struck him as not only foolish but indecent. It was a symptom of almost Western effeminacy.
He entered the gloomy temple and strutted across the stone floor until he stood just behind a thin figure kneeling in a saffron-colored monk’s robe, through which the knobs of the spine were clearly visible. The monk rose, still facing the statue of Buddha, a Knobby triangle of gold leaf at the back of the altar.
“So you come once more, my brother.”
U Ba Sein smiled again. “You knew who it was?”
Ko Yeik turned around. His shaved head seemed to have been carved from sandstone, and there was no smile on his lips, which were thin as parchment and perfectly straight. “I do not often hear the sound of boots within these walls.”
“No? Should I have come with my feet bare, and perhaps shaved my head as well?”
“It would be better so.”
The President for Life looked from his brother’s face to that of the Buddha behind him, and his eyes narrowed uncomfortably as he noted the resemblance.
“I am building a pagoda, Ko Yeik,” he said, drawing himself up straight. He was a short, thickset man, and his brother, to his vast annoyance, was much the taller. “My agents buy fish to set free in the Great River. I will not enter the next life as a mud rat. “
Ko Yeik merely closed his eyes for a moment.
With one accord, the two men left the altar, pacing quietly across the stone floor. U Ba Sein, unconsciously perhaps, tried to muffle the sound of his boot heels.
“You have many sins upon you. You will be obliged to build many pagodas, and life is short, brother.”
U Ba Sein laughed quietly as he contemplated the abbot’s unmanly anxiety—if it was that. Was he not the head of a mighty army? Was he not President for Life? Did he not have the backing of the government in America?
“Do you fear for my safety, Ko Yeik?” he asked, letting his eyebrows arch and wondering, not for the first time, whether perhaps his brother did not harbor a certain tenderness for the old days—perhaps even for the monarchy.
“I fear for your soul. I doubt much you would find happiness as a mud rat, yet even so. . .”
Beside the main temple was a garden, completely enclosed, with a stone cloi
ster around the other three sides but open to the sky. The gravel pathways were still wet with rain.
“May I offer you tea, brother?” The abbot smiled, raising his hand to a novice, who immediately bowed from the waist and disappeared. “Many hands are raised against you, brother. Is it not so? The Lord Buddha teaches that the only safety is in virtue.”
“Your concern is excessive,” the president for life snapped. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come. “Except yourself, perhaps, no one is without enemies, but I am safe enough.”
“You misinterpret me, brother.”
They stood together silently, watching a huge, brightly colored carp that swam in the pool at the garden’s center, just as if those few yards of water were the wide world and it their absolute and unquestioned sovereign.
When, after a few minutes, the novice had not returned with their tea, the abbot turned to look for him. Instead he saw two men, dressed in the saffron robes of the monastery. They looked frightened. He did not recognize either of them.
“I am sorry for you, brother,” he said quietly, his voice calm and sad and barely audible. “It seems your good works have come too late.”
. . . . .
It was three-forty in the morning on the first Sunday in April when the telephone on Austen’s night table started ringing like a fire alarm. He got his hand on the receiver in time to keep it from going off again and waking Dottie, who in the darkness was visible merely as a series of lumps under their blanket, and once it was safely off the hook he took his time about sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Fortunately, he was still too sleepy even to be annoyed. “Yeah—who is it?”
“It’s Gus Paulson,” came the answer, as bright as a dime. “Remember me? I just got off work twenty minutes ago, and the first thing I did was hunt up a safe phone to call you from.”
It took a while, but, yes, he did remember. Gus Paulson worked in the crisis room over at State, apparently on the graveyard shift, God damn him to hell. He was one of those young men in a hurry who did favors for people; probably Austen was the second or third person he had called that night. He wanted to rise in the world, did Gus; he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life manning a teletype.
“I appreciate it. Now, what’s happened? Are we at war or what?”
“No, man.” Austen could hear the laughter at the other end of the line, and he looked at the dull red numbers of his digital alarm clock and considered how much he hated people who could find anything funny at three forty-two a.m.
“No, we’re fine. It’s your boss’s pal, everybody’s favorite gook generalissimo Somebody got to him while he was visiting his brother in a Buddhist monastery. Reports are that both of them ended up looking like pieces of Swiss cheese.”
“Who, U Ba Sein?” Austen was fully awake now and feeling around frantically, trying to find his bedroom slippers with his toes. “Is he dead? Is it confirmed?”
“Oh, he’s maggot meat for sure. It happened about three hours ago, and the country’s in a perfect turmoil. They don’t know if the Tien Pok is behind it, or maybe his own people—they don’t know shit. The assassins were killed instantly by the little bandit’s bodyguards, and it looks like the generals are going to fight it out among themselves about who gets to be the next strongman. It’s hit the fan, pal.”
“Thanks, Gus. I’ll remember you when we rule the universe.”
He put the receiver back in its cradle, and for several seconds he just sat there on the edge of the bed, trying to figure out what it could mean. U Ba Sein was dead. Kyauktada was up for grabs, the whole country. Nobody knew whether the Tien Pok guerrillas were communists or not, although they got most of their military support from Russia, and sure as hell they had no love for the American imperialists who had been propping up that corrupt, sadistic old brigand for the past quarter of a century. A little military dictatorship carved out of the base of the Malayan peninsula, perhaps a quarter of a minute of automatic weapons fire and half a dozen dead bodies later, and suddenly we’ve got the biggest diplomatic crisis since the end of the Vietnam War.
Well, it wasn’t exactly as if Faircliff hadn’t warned them.
“What’s the matter, Frank? Who phoned?”
He turned around to see that Dottie was awake enough to have rolled over—but that wasn’t really very awake. He smiled at her, perfectly aware that it was too dark for her to be able to see him, and touched her hair with the tips of his fingers where it nestled on her pillow.
“Everything’s fine, precious. I’m just going into my study to make a couple of phone calls.”
II
For the next five days, until a series of radio broadcasts from the capital made it pretty clear that the Tien Pok was now in control, news out of Kyauktada was fragmentary at best. The first really clear account came from the American ambassador, after he was unceremoniously expelled and driven over the border into Burma by order of the new Council of National Reconciliation.
Apparently the generalissimo’s army simply disintegrated into a number of warring factions, and the Tien Pok was able to annihilate some of them and come to some sort of murky Oriental understanding with the others. Within the week they had constituted themselves as the only government with any popular support at all and had been immediately recognized by both Moscow and Peking. And suddenly it looked as if that whole corner of the Southeast Asian peninsula might be teetering on the brink of a communist takeover.
There was near pandemonium in Washington. There was talk that the Secretary of State might be forced to resign, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which Simon Faircliff was one of the more visible members, was charged with conducting a full-scale review of the situation, complete with public hearings.
All this had been foreseen, and the strategy for turning it all to the best advantage had been worked out in detail on that first Sunday night in April while Frank Austen sat in the study of his darkened house in Alexandria and talked to his father-in-law over the telephone.
“It’s a mess, Frank. It’s a real can of worms.” The senator, like everyone else in the Western hemisphere, had been sound asleep, so it was difficult to tell whether he was genuinely depressed by the news or merely groggy. “This whole thing could have been avoided if they’d only listened.”
“That’s right, chief—and that’s what you’ve got to keep saying, over and over. So let’s not be shy; let’s give it to them with both barrels.”
“You’re a cynical son-of-a-bitch, Frank.”
“I know, chief. That’s what you pay me for. Go back to bed.”
For the next six weeks, the Senator from California was almost never absent from the evening news, and day after day the American public could watch the spectacle of President Brubaker’s most senior foreign policy advisors being admonished that, after all, it wasn’t as if nobody had told them this would happen. All at once Simon Faircliff seemed to have inherited the mantle of Jeremiah; it was enough to make you weep that the presidential primaries were still two years away.
From the very beginning Frank Austen found himself a very popular man. While Senator Faircliff was sequestered away in Washington, apparently saving the republic, all the local California press were painfully eager to interview his campaign coordinator and principal aide.
One of the privileged newspapermen was, naturally, Pete Freestone, who had risen in the world and was now a senior political writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. In fact, on the afternoon of the second telecast of the Senate Kyauktada hearings, they had a date for lunch at a Chinese restaurant in the Cannery.
Out of sentiment, and to prove he was a native, Austen took the cable car over Russian Hill, jumping on the rear at Jackson Street and thus avoiding the ticket taker, who never got back that far. It was a tradition, like the running of the bulls at Pamplona; only the tourists paid. He skirted the edge of Fisherman’s Wharf, wondering as he watched the steam rising out of the lobster pots whether perhaps they shouldn’t have settl
ed on Bernstein’s Fish Grotto No.9 instead. It was a beautiful day—the fog had burned off hours ago—and the place was crawling with people in shorts and palm-frond hats you could buy anywhere from street vendors for two-fifty a throw.
Maybe Shang Yuen had been a better idea.
He was a little early, which was fine. He was supposed to be back at the office by three-thirty for a budget meeting, and he wanted a chance to duck into the gourmet shop on the first floor to pick up a couple of things for Dottie—he was going back to Washington the day after next, and she did look forward to her Care packages.
Across the street in a parking lot there seemed to be some sort of gathering of about a hundred and fifty people, and some guy up on a vegetable crate was talking through a little portable public address system. Austen experienced a certain unpleasant twinge when he recognized one of Ted Boothe’s advance men as the speaker. The crowd continued to swell until, after about ten minutes, there were perhaps five hundred people jammed together like a swarm of bees; then a black Lincoln came around a corner and pulled up by the sidewalk and out stepped the Congressman himself, as if on cue. There was a little round of polite applause as he made his way to the podium and took the microphone.
Austen had heard the speech before, often enough so that about half the time he could fill in the tag lines. But the performance was a technical triumph he found endlessly fascinating. This was somebody who had charisma gushing out of him like water from a ruptured fire hydrant. He was simply good at it.
Ted Boothe would be the GOP candidate; the hunch was hardened into a certainty over the weeks. It wasn’t a question of anyone’s political philosophy; Boothe was your typical upper-middle-class moderate-toconservative type. He was so damn much a class act, so much the good-looking, youngish, honest prep-school athlete turned corporation lawyer sort that everyone just wanted to love him and trust him. The Republican fight had been every bit as nasty as anyone could have hoped, but very little of all that mud had stuck to Boothe. He would win the nomination and he would be damned dangerous.
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