The Perfect Candidate

by Peter Stone

  “Six years ago,” I said.

  “Are you trying to tell me I’m old?” she asked, clearing her throat. “So anyway, BIB took a chance on me, and I didn’t burn out like everyone else does, and now I’m his chief of staff. Younger than some of our LAs, which makes them die inside. But it’s all because BIB saw something in me.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said as I calculated a potential similar fate for myself—in twelve years. “Working on the Hill—trusted advisor to congressional leadership. Seriously, anything to congressional leadership. That’s kind of my dream. How’d you do it?”

  “Well, I’m not going to say that I haven’t done my share of all-nighters or hyperventilated by blowing up too many balloons for campaign events—but it really comes down to having a mentor—someone who believed in me. BIB. Look, you don’t want to be this guy’s enemy. . . .”

  Like the protesters or that opponent’s fund-raiser chief who Ariel told me about, I thought and nearly spoke out loud. Katie’s allegiance to the man stopped me from speaking the words.

  “. . . but if you’re his friend—if you demonstrate commitment—he is loyal. He can make you.”

  As we neared the towering temple to our third president, I kept walking toward it, while Katie diverged down a stairway to a poorly lit granite grotto.

  “No TJ?” I asked.

  “The second George,” she said and pointed to a small pond and a plain cement bench where an iron statue of a slightly larger than life-size colonial man was casually seated. Flanked by his cane, hat, and a stack of books, he pensively and eternally stared right through us. As if we had interrupted his reading, his right index finger held his place in a book on his lap.

  “Cameron,” Katie announced, “meet George Mason.”

  “Who?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Founding father, originator of the Bill of Rights, and one of the first founders to think that maybe the whole ‘slavery’ thing was a problem. And yet he’s hidden down here. Those giant tour buses are parked a hundred yards away to check out Jefferson and the cherry blossoms in the spring. And they don’t even know he’s over here.”

  “Well, nice to meet you, Second George,” I said as I sat next to his large frame and strained to put my arm around his shoulder. “I apologize. I should have known you, but I blame my culture for only focusing on the celebrity founding fathers. You should have had a more elaborate autograph. . . .”

  “See!” Katie said. “You get it. It’s the presidents, the Hancocks, the loud ones who get noticed. No one pays attention to the people in the background.”

  She sat down on the bench, on the other side of the statue. We leaned forward to see each other’s faces around the hulking mass.

  “Wait.” I stopped her. “Are we talking about you now?”

  Katie answered, “I’m talking about anyone who works on the Hill for eight years. Yeah, I guess I’m talking about me.”

  When she was in DC, my mom was in the background. Like Second George. My mom could have been a chief of staff like Katie. She would have loved it. She would have been great. And now I needed to be great for her, in her place.

  Katie continued, “Not that I’m complaining. I don’t want to fly across the country every weekend to see the district. I don’t want to have to answer the nasty questions from the press. I’m the person who’s slightly out of focus in the pictures online, standing just behind BIB. I make last-minute changes to his speeches—the lines that turn into sound bites every time. I get to do the real work. Trust me, it’s better than the political kabuki. I leave that to him.”

  The “real work.” I wanted it, too. Maybe it was the mind-softening humidity—or maybe it was hearing about Katie’s career trajectory and thinking I could do the same. Or maybe the city was already changing me, empowering me. But something made me say the words that Lagrima Cameron would never have said: “Will you do that for me?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Show me the ropes. Help me make the summer mean something.”

  She laughed to herself and said, “Well, you’re something between ambitious and desperate, yes, you are!”

  I looked down and realized that I had overasked. Daydreaming tends to be the most vivid late at night.

  “Of course I’ll look out for you,” she said. I looked up at her, grateful and incredulous. “You’re basically me, when I first started out! This environment can be tricky, and you can always come to me with questions, or if something seems off.”

  “Like how Nadia was acting after Ariel’s accident . . .” I stopped myself as I didn’t want Katie to think I was criticizing her peer.

  “Ah yes, so you’ve experienced Nadia,” she said. “Well, since I’m your mentor or whatever now, I’ll tell you something that a chief of staff probably shouldn’t say to an intern, but it’s for your own good. It’s better to stay away from her. I’ve seen her torture enough interns. Just be careful what you tell her, because she’ll use it against you.”

  “Yeah, I get that vibe,” I said, nodding, not fully understanding what that last phrase meant but wanting to appear in the know. It was comforting to hear Katie’s advice—like getting a map of a minefield that pinpoints where each unexploded ordinance lies.

  “Here,” she said, pulling her phone out of her leather purse and typing a text. “My contact info. In case you need anything or want to reach out. I already have your number in my contacts. Ariel gave it to us. . . .”

  Her voice trailed as a “Katie Campbell” contact popped up on my phone. I opened the text to find her phone number and an address.

  “My apartment. You probably didn’t need that. Anyway, that and the Nadia stuff is as much TMI as you’re going to get from me tonight.” She sighed, standing up. I joined her and we walked away from both TJ and Second George, across another bridge. Thousands of crickets chanted as the summer came into better focus. Ariel’s memory and her promises of more work—more experience—had started to fade as I realized that Katie—the chief of staff!—believed in me.

  We approached the bright white shaft of the Washington Monument, which shone starkly against the inky blue sky. First George.

  “That’s my stop. . . .” Katie pointed toward the distant light of the Smithsonian metro station. “I hope you keep secrets as well as the monuments do. Remember—I was on a date tonight.”

  “I wouldn’t dare disclose your relationship with FDR,” I assured her. “I mean, mostly out of respect to Eleanor.”

  With that, I stepped onto the deserted Mall and back toward the now-distant Lincoln Memorial, and she briskly walked toward the metro station. As my feet hit the gravel of the walkway, I pulled out my phone to find a bunch of text messages from Lena, which started with Save me from my father’s bureaucratic dinner from hell, and then a few Where are you?s. Followed by, Have I been replaced by someone else? And then, Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with Beck too?!

  I stopped in the moonlit summer air that had somehow grown thicker and warmer as the night went on—thinking about how to respond.

  No, just hanging out with Abe, Franklin, George, and George, I texted back.

  I put my phone in my pocket and continued the long trek back to the apartment, and thought to myself, And the chief of staff of the office. Who sees herself in me and wants me to succeed and confided in me and finally, yes, this is the DC I’ve been hearing about my whole life.

  10

  With Zeph and Hillary checking out New York City for a couple days (they invited me, but my wallet said “no”) and Lena still in Mexico City with her dad, I was friendless in DC for the weekend. Flying solo in the apartment was cool, but mostly and surprisingly lonely. I filled the void with a visit to the National Air and Space Museum because 1) free and 2) obviously. I tried to remember why the flimsy-looking frame of the Spirit of St. Louis looked so familiar. Then I remembered a photo of my mom and dad standing in front of the ancient plane. I asked a stranger to take a picture of me in the same place wher
e they’d stood. Family photo. Kind of. I sent the picture to my dad with the caption, Look familiar?

  My phone had collected a number of selfie texts from Lena in packed hotel ballrooms, each expression more bored out of her mind than the one before. I sent her a bunch of selfies in front of airplane exhibits.

  I also talked with my dad, who apologized for not being able to share any updates from home that competed with a congressional sex scandal. And he confirmed that my picture in the National Air and Space Museum did, in fact, look familiar—but, predictably, not much more about my mom. I caught Berto between a couple of his shifts at work. He talked about going to this waterslide park near Lagrima late at night. One of our friends was a lifeguard there, and got us in after hours. I had forgotten that this was one of my favorite parts of summer back home—and tried to convince myself that I didn’t miss it. I did. I found myself strangely looking forward to Monday—to the order and “lots of people around” of a busy office.

  • • •

  As I emptied a bag of constituent mail onto the long sorting table Monday morning, Zeph and Hillary informed me that I would be joining them on a guided tour of the Capitol building. Though most summer visitors stand in line for the official visitor’s center tour, the smart tourists know that they can get a private, front-of-the-line pass, courtesy of their congressman. It was Hillary’s turn to do the honors.

  “You’re in good hands, Cam. I give a much more interesting tour than Zeph does,” said Hillary.

  “Oh, really?” I asked.

  “And by that she means that she drops every US Capitol urban legend in the book on these poor people who don’t know any better,” informed Zeph.

  “I just enhance things a bit, and they love it. What they don’t know just makes them have more fun!”

  “Every congressman’s office has a tour script, and over the years some of the stories have gotten a bit exaggerated. All of a sudden you get the ghosts of Civil War soldiers terrorizing janitors at night,” said Zeph.

  “That is awesome!” I said.

  “Watch and learn,” affirmed Hillary. “I just better not get one of those Dan Brown fans who wants to know where the eternal flame under the crypt is, or how they can dig under the Washington Monument to find a Bible. So obno . . .”

  On Hillary’s handy abbreviation for “obnoxious,” a cluster of baseball caps, jean shorts, and white tennis shoes with shin-high socks entered BIB’s office. “You must be the Ferbers!” she exclaimed, her arms outstretched and her voice an enthusiastic octave higher.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the apparent patriarch of the family. “I’m Bert, and this is my wife and our kids.” He gestured to a staircase of descending heights: boy, girl, boy, girl. And then he acknowledged the short, white-haired, track-suited seventh wheel of the family vacation, “And this is my mother-in-law, Rihanna.”

  “Rihanna?” I burst out, incredulous.

  “Yes,” said Bert, unamused. “It used to be an Irish name.”

  “I don’t do stairs,” interrupted Rihanna.

  “We’ll be just fine,” comforted Hillary as she confidently guided the group out the door and down the hallway. “So, Mr. Ferber, what is your line of work?”

  “I’ve been a US history teacher for thirty-three years,” he replied.

  “Well, you’ll have to keep us all in check, then!” I said, mostly looking at Hillary’s stunned face.

  “I don’t know the real tour,” whispered Hillary in desperation to Zeph, his laughter barely contained. He gleefully gestured back to her, All yours.

  Hillary guided the group to the basement of the Rayburn building, where we boarded the Capitol subway. It was a 1960s-looking train with no cover, which started to make the tour feel like Disneyland. The operator whisked us through the tunnel, as Hillary explained in her best Megyn Kelly, “The foundation stone of the Capitol was laid in 1793 by—”

  “George Washington!” shouted Bert above the noise of the ride, providing further evidence that no one else in his family spoke.

  “Oh wow, we’ve got a live one. This should be fun,” she said under her breath to Zeph and me, while sending a veiled SOS signal through her eyes.

  After the thirty-second ride, we got off the train and headed up an escalator to the first floor of the Capitol building. Our first stop was the Crypt, a vast basement of columns holding up the building above. Hillary then guided the group down a hallway to a room that resembled a colonial courtroom, which is exactly what it was.

  “Hey, guys,” said Hillary in a more colloquial tone that was likely created in a plea for goodwill. “So, this is where the Supreme Court met for most of the eighteen hundreds—deciding cases like Marbury v. Madison and Dred Scott v. Stanford.”

  “Sandford.” Bert cleared his throat.

  “Lovely.” Hillary nodded. “And if you take look at that clock, you’ll notice that it’s five minutes fast! That’s because an old chief justice insisted that everyone be five minutes early to everything, and wouldn’t let anyone in after! And to this day, the US Supreme Court operates five minutes earlier than the rest of us!”

  I noticed a red-jacketed Capitol docent by the door shaking her head. Zeph just smiled. Bert drew his children closer to him, as if to protect them from an unpredictable stray dog.

  As Hillary walked us toward the elevator that would take us to the Rotunda, I heard Bert whisper to his kids, “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  Due to the tight squeeze of the group in the elevator, Zeph let us go first and then followed in the subsequent ride. Once he joined us, we single-filed our way down the hallway. Inside the Capitol Rotunda floor, the walls somehow commanded everyone to Look up! It was the kind of upward view that gave you vertigo, even though your feet were planted firmly on the ground. The giant domed room overwhelmed the eyes and somehow appeared to be much larger from the inside than it did from the outside view of the building.

  Hillary proudly declared, “Welcome to the Rotunda,” as if she were welcoming the Ferber family to her home. “The ceiling is over two hundred feet tall. You’ll see at the very top a fresco painting by Constantino Brumidi,” she said, her accent suddenly fluently Italian.

  “That’s her favorite part,” Zeph whispered to me.

  Hillary continued to describe the frieze that wrapped around the base of the dome. I turned around in a circle to take in countless families like the Ferbers, and a group of junior high school students wearing matching neon blue shirts. Every camera I could see pointed upward as well—except for one. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a man wearing a khaki fishing vest, who aimed his camera directly at me. I turned to look more closely, but he disappeared into the shifting crowd.

  “Where’s Reagan?” blurted out Bert.

  “I’m glad you asked that,” replied Hillary as she walked us over to a bronze statue of the Gipper. “Ronald Reagan is one of two statues that represents the state of California in the Capitol. The other is in the Statuary Hall, or what used to be the House of Representatives. Right this way. . . .”

  We walked out of the Rotunda and into an adjacent room lined with large statues.

  “Our second statue is over here.” She pointed toward the wall. “Father Junipero Serra.”

  At the base of the dignified monk with a cross in his hand stood Khaki Fishing Vest, casually taking pictures—with no wife or tag-along kids in sight.

  “And now for the highlight of the tour,” declared Hillary.

  “We already had that; it was President Reagan,” responded Bert.

  “Well, why don’t you all just come over here and listen—to the floor!” She pointed to a gold plaque on the ground as she walked about twenty steps away.

  We heard her voice—sugary, like toddler storytime at a public library: “I hope you enjoyed your tour!”

  Rihanna gasped as Hillary came back to the group. “You are standing where Representative John Adams sat before he was President. Adams would often keep his head in his h
ands, and everyone thought he was sleeping. But he was actually listening to the sound of his political opponents, whose voices carried throughout the House floor!”

  Bert gleefully pounced. “I don’t think so. First of all, everyone knew there were crappy acoustics in this room, so Adams couldn’t have fooled anyone. And second, they filled this place with drapes and carpet because the reverberations drove everyone crazy.”

  Hillary started to charge at Bert, her rage barely contained. I held her back, shrugged my shoulders, and did my best at diplomacy, saying, “You learn something every day, Mr. Ferber!”

  “If you’ll just follow me back to the elevator so we can return to the congressman’s office,” Hillary said, composure regained. The group followed her to the elevator. This time, I was the last one to enter the cramped space, so I waved them along and waited alone for the next car. I felt someone behind me waiting as well, and when the doors opened, we both walked into the elevator. I turned to see that it was Khaki Fishing Vest, who had a casual and calm look on his face. He was balding and looked Hispanic.

  The second the elevator doors closed, he pulled the stop button out and an alarm began to sound. He looked at me directly with his dark brown eyes and said, “Cameron Carter, we have exactly forty seconds.”

  “Excuse me?” I said and reached to press the button back in. He stopped me. The old-fashioned school bell screamed on. “Who are you? Let me out of here.”

  “Listen to me,” he commanded in an intense but somehow trustworthy way. “The Ariel Lancaster affair is not the story people should be paying attention to. It’s her murder.”

  “Murder? She died in a car accident,” I said. “What’s happening here? What about the diary?”

  “I don’t care who wrote that diary—but it wasn’t Ariel. Fake news. And it doesn’t matter anyway.” He spoke deliberately and very fast while looking at his watch. He looked back up to me, his eyes both harsh and imploring. “What you should be asking yourself is why Nani Lancaster isn’t pushing this story. And there is a story, and there is a cover-up. But we can’t let it stop with a junior congresswoman who doesn’t know better.”