by David Zeman
Twenty-five miles away, in his Senate office, Michael Campbell lay with his head in the lap of Colin Goss.
50
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MICHAEL’S EYES were half closed. His hand was in that of Goss. The room was in darkness.
The light in the outer office was left on for the agents who were tailing Michael. The agents, respecting Michael’s grief and worry over his missing wife, would not disturb him.
Only the smoke of Goss’s cigar disturbed the stillness of the room. With his free hand Goss stroked Michael’s hair, his fingers gentle as those of a mother.
“There, there,” he said. “It will all be all right. You’re going to be fine.”
Neither Michael nor Goss had any idea where Susan was or who had taken her. Her disappearance had been the only event of the winter that was not foreseen. It was also the one event that could endanger everything.
Michael was frantic. Goss, though deeply worried, was cool. He had surmounted many a crisis before, and believed in his heart that he would overcome this obstacle. The more so because Susan Campbell was not central to the plan. Susan alive was a plus. Susan dead was not really a negative. Goss had thought this through.
Michael sighed, savoring the caress that was the closest thing he had to a mother’s touch. That had always been the most important thing about Colin Goss in Michael’s mind. Goss was not like a father, but like a mother.
————
COLIN GOSS had come into Michael’s life much as a character in a fairy tale crosses the path of a wayfarer deep in a forest. Like a mysterious stranger or a gnome, Goss had simply appeared. And by appearing he had changed the course of Michael’s life.
It began when Michael was still a schoolboy. He was in the lower school at the Bryce Academy in Maryland, testing his wings as a scholar and athlete against the aggressive boys who went there. They all came from distinguished families, and all felt the silent but powerful pressure to live up to their backgrounds. It made for a curiously unpleasant experience. You never felt quite alone in yourself. You sensed a mission mapped out for you in advance. In a subtle way it left you feeling suffocated.
For Michael this situation was perhaps more painful than for the other boys. Judd Campbell was a hard, rigid man. He knew his own ideas and his own ambitions. It was obvious to his sons that they could not question them. The price of Judd’s approval was obedience. When Stewart, later on, made his choice to rebel against Judd, he would have to give up everything for that choice.
But that was Stewart. Michael was different. He loved Judd Campbell and could not bear the thought of disappointing him. He excelled at everything he did. Not because he felt a natural impulse to excel, but because, in a way, the devil was at his back.
This came easily enough in academics. Michael was bright, brighter than his father. With a modicum of application he attained straight A’s.
In athletics it was much harder. Michael was not strong as a child. His body was slim. His personality was gentle, not assertive. His future talent as a peacemaker and diplomat was already in evidence. He was a great communicator. Had things worked out differently, it might have been Michael instead of Stewart who grew up to become a teacher.
But on the playing fields Michael had to be fierce, aggressive. He knew his father wanted and expected this. He forced himself to comply.
One weekend he returned home from school with bruises on his legs from a collision that had occurred on the soccer field. Judd Campbell was more approving than sympathetic. “They gave you something to remember them by, did they?” he asked. “Well, think of it as a trophy.”
Michael forced a smile, for the hurt muscles ached. Perhaps sensing his distress, Judd asked, “Who hit you?”
“Fred Cooperman,” Michael replied.
“Is he bigger than you?” Judd asked.
“Yes.” In fact Fred Cooperman was six inches taller than Michael and outweighed him by forty pounds.
“Did you give him something to remember you by?” Judd asked. “Something black and blue?”
“Not really,” said Michael, who had taken by far the worst of it in the collision.
“Well, make sure you do it next time,” Judd said, looking back to hisWall Street Journal . “Then he’ll respect you.” And with a final glance at Michael, “And then you’ll respect yourself.”
Judd Campbell meant this stern man’s-man philosophy in a loving and protective way. Michael was his favorite son. He simply wanted Michael to be well armed for the struggle he would face in the competitive world. Judd meant no harm.
But the remark’s effect was quite different. Michael felt there was a price tag on his father’s love, and that price tag was the sternest possible definition of manhood. This demand was like a toxin injected into Michael’s personality. Judd, who was not an introspective man, could not know how seriously his fatherly “encouragement” had backfired.
One day at a soccer meet with another private school Michael noticed a man watching the game from the sidelines. Michael’s school won, and Michael scored one of the goals. The man came up to congratulate him. He introduced himself as “a friend of your mom and dad.” He said he came to the games for old times’ sake, since he himself had once been a boy here.
Michael replied with polite thanks and a smile. He did not feel he could spurn the stranger’s overture, since the man apparently knew the family and was an alumnus of the school. A few weeks later Michael was in another meet and injured his knee in a collision with one of the opposing players.
He was coming out of the locker room when the stranger blocked his path.
“Are you all right?” the man asked.
“Sure.” Michael’s response was abrupt. He did not want to admit that he was in pain.
“Come and have a cup of coffee with me,” the stranger suggested. “We can talk about the game.”
Michael had nowhere to go, so he accepted the invitation. The stranger took him to the local café, where Michael ordered a hot cocoa and the man had coffee.
The man was extraordinarily gentle as he spoke to Michael about the game. He had only praise for Michael’s performance on the field, and concern for his injury.
“Can I see it?” he asked.
Michael pulled up the leg of his pants and the man gently touched the sore knee, which was already turning black and blue.
“That must hurt,” the man said. “You’re very brave. I don’t think I would have been so brave,” he added, watching Michael roll the pant leg back down.
This was new to Michael, this self-effacing bestowal of praise by a man. Michael was used to a rigid yardstick by which he was expected to measure up to male standards. This man was more like a mother than a father. He was sympathetic, understanding, and completely approving.
They parted after their brief conversation at the coffee shop, but the man came back now and then to see the games, and Michael fell into the habit of having a drink or a snack with him.
The man introduced himself as Colin Goss and said he had known Michael’s parents a long time ago. He inquired about Michael’s mother, and listened attentively to the little details Michael provided about the Campbells and their life. Michael got the impression the stranger had a crush on his mother, for the man spoke of her with an exaggerated respect, a kind of courtly veneration.
Colin Goss explained that he was a widower whose wife had died giving birth to a stillborn child a long time ago. “A little boy,” he said. He seemed to feel that Michael reminded him of the son he wanted so much and never had. The odd tenderness in his manner accentuated this impression.
He asked Michael all about his friends, the school, his feelings and opinions. Michael was fascinated by the respect with which Goss treated him. There was nothing to live up to, nothing to prove. Goss delighted in everything about Michael.
“It might be a good idea not to tell your parents about me,” Goss told him. “Your dad is mad at me.”
“Why?” the boy aske
d.
“Oh, something that happened a long time ago. Nothing for you to worry about.”
Michael acceded to this request willingly. The sweet, lulling intimacy he felt with Goss was so much in contrast to the relationship he had with his father that it seemed natural for him to keep this new friendship secret.
Goss began coming to Michael’s away meets, and sometimes drove him back to school. He gave him gifts, almost always books. This also was in contrast to Judd Campbell, who was not a reader, and whose gifts to Michael were always athletic equipment or hunting or fishing gear. The poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling was the only piece of literature Judd had ever mentioned to Michael. Goss introduced Michael to Jack London, to Walter Scott and Dumas, and later to writers like Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. Goss encouraged the dreamy, reflective side of Michael, while Judd cared only to make his son a man of action. Interestingly, in later years Michael’s literary knowledge would help endear him to the more intellectual people he met as a politician. Colin Goss was largely responsible for this aspect of Michael’s success. It was as though Michael had two fathers, each of whom provided half his education.
Michael learned from both men how to make his way in the world, how to succeed. From Judd he learned ambition and the desire to get things done. From Goss he learned how to wait, to bide his time, to circumvent obstacles instead of trying to crash through them.
By the time Michael started at Choate he had reached the point in life where thoughts of girls preoccupied him throughout the day and kept him awake at night. Since he attended an all-boys’ school he didn’t have occasion to see as many girls as he would have liked. Those he did see, he fantasized about intensely. In the dark hours of the night he undressed them in his mind, adoring their soft bodies, listening to imagined endearments they murmured in his ear as he caressed them.
Judd Campbell noticed no change in Michael and seemed reticent on the subject of girls. But Goss noticed Michael’s sexual maturation immediately, and discussed it with him in a delicate, almost poetic manner. “Nothing in the world is as perfect as a pretty girl,” he said. “A girl’s smile is worth a whole Mozart symphony. We men have poetry in us, son”—he had come to call Michael “son” by now—“but we need women to bring it out for us. We are nothing without them.”
Soon after that conversation Goss took Michael to an apartment not far from the school on a rainy autumn afternoon. When they came in the door a girl stood up from the couch where she had been reading a magazine. She was extraordinarily attractive, with auburn hair and milky skin. She had slender legs and beautiful breasts whose outline was clearly visible under her blouse.
Goss introduced her as Valerie and excused himself. She took Michael into the bedroom and had him lie down on the bed. She sat and talked with him for a while, then politely asked him to help her off with her blouse. She showed him how to unhook her bra, even having him practice it a few times. “It’s something you’ll need to know,” she said.
She seemed to understand Michael better than he understood himself. For a long time she confined herself to the things he had already fantasized about, touching, kissing, letting him look at her and caress her. Then she began to instruct him in the art of intimacy, spreading her legs to let him explore her, then exploring him in her turn, asking, “Does it feel good when I touch you here?” until his answers became moans.
Michael learned most of what a man needs to know about a woman’s body that afternoon. The rest Valerie taught him in the weeks to come. She made him as subtle in bringing her to orgasm as she was in doing it for him. The clumsy experiments most young men struggle through in high school and college—usually under the influence of alcohol—were spared Michael. He became an adept of physical pleasure and an expert seducer at age fourteen.
This talent was to stand him in good stead, for Colin Goss soon encouraged him to find attractive young girls on his own and, later, to bring them to Goss himself. “You’re so much better with them than I am,” Goss said self-deprecatingly. “And no pretty young girl wants an old man.”
Michael was happy to act as intermediary. It was a way for him to repay Goss’s kindness, and to earn his gratitude and admiration. More subtly, it confirmed their loving relationship, this providing of young female flesh that made Goss so happy. Later, when Goss confided to Michael that sometimes he got from the girls a kind of pleasure that society frowned upon, a kind of pleasure that was not something young girls would give of their own accord, Michael did not object. He continued in his role as go-between, and took the special precautions Goss asked him to take. He made sure the girls never knew his real name, or Goss’s real name.
Michael understood in one part of his mind that what he was doing was wrong, was bad for the girls. But on another level he felt that it was right and justifiable, for it cemented his friendship with a man who admired him and could do a great deal for him. (For by now Goss had begun to make promises to Michael, to speak to him of a future in which he would have great privileges and accomplish great things, with Goss’s help.)
This moral casuistry was not new to Michael. His father had taught it to him a dozen times over. In order to be a man of action, Judd said, you sometimes had to do things that seemed repellent or reprehensible. If you lacked the courage and the will to do such things, you would inevitably be walked over by stronger men. “Nice guys finish last,” Judd often repeated. You had to dare to transgress the laws that might hold you back from attaining your goal.Winning isn’t everything—it’s the only thing . The Lombardi maxim was Judd’s bible in one sentence.
What Michael did not realize was that Goss had sought him out precisely with this moral blind spot in mind. Like any powerful man in charge of a large organization, Goss had to be constantly on the lookout for men who could be of use to him. As an outlaw entrepreneur he needed a steady supply of men whose moral compass was slack enough to permit them dubious endeavors on his behalf.
Goss knew Judd Campbell, had crossed paths with him. Been beaten by him, hated him. He knew how ruthless Judd was, and how incapable of imagining any point of view other than his own. Goss had suspected that Judd might raise a son who cared more for ambition than for human beings. Now, having met Michael and tested him over a period of years, he knew he was right. Michael would do anything that furthered his own ambitions. Like Goss himself.
Colin Goss had high hopes for Michael. Michael was a more subtle man than his father, a cleverer man, while equal to his father in force and determination. Michael knew how to use his charm to get other people to do what he wanted. Judd Campbell had never had that gift. Judd always made more enemies than friends. In the end that had limited him severely in his career.
Goss did not doubt that Michael would go much further in life than Judd. Michael was capable of becoming a great man, a man who could change the world.
And indeed Michael went on to greater and greater things in his young life, bringing praise and love from both his fathers as he did so. His excellence in sports brought approval from Judd, while his academic achievements and his hungry intellect delighted Goss. His success in school politics pleased Goss more than it did Judd, while his physical courage in enduring two painful spine operations touched both men.
They were thrilled when Michael won his Olympic medals. Judd was present when Michael won the relay, while Goss watched at home on TV. Both men cried when Michael, paralyzed by muscle spasms, was helped from the pool by his teammates.
When Michael married Susan, Judd was guardedly enthusiastic. She came from a fine old family whose name might help Michael in his career; on the other hand her branch of the family was impoverished, and Susan’s childhood darkened by her father’s disappearance and her mother’s death.
As for Goss, who had not been introduced to Susan, he approved of her as a match, but worried that Michael might become too emotionally dependent on her. Michael soon showed that he was not slowed down by marriage. His early political career was marked by triumphs of strategy tha
t matched the greatest coups of Goss’s own career.
The rest was history. The official history of Michael’s rise to prominence in the Senate, and the unwritten history of the master plan that took shape in Colin Goss’s mind as the years passed. A master plan whose linchpin was to be Michael himself. A plan that was about to become a reality.
Until Susan Campbell disappeared.
51
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Boston
KAREN EMBRY saw all five of the surviving girls who had been part of the mysterious series discovered by the Boston police fifteen years ago. She learned nothing new from seeing the incapacitated girls. As Dr. Doering had said, their condition was a mystery. No medical professional could have looked at thirteen healthy adolescent girls in this condition without suspecting either a drug overdose or some sort of foul play, such as deliberate poisoning. But the physical or chemical clues that might have supported such a theory simply were not there.
Whatever had happened to the girls—or whatever had been done to them—had left no trace. Except for the destruction of their capacities, that is.
Karen was also unable to learn anything worthwhile from the families of the girls. They were predictably bitter about what had happened, and deeply depressed. They knew the other victims had already died, so there was no realistic probability that their bedridden girls would recover. Yet they clung to the desperate hope that medical science would discover a new treatment that could save them.
The victims were still young, only in their thirties. They should have had their whole lives ahead of them. This was the most painful aspect of all.
Karen kept her own thoughts to herself as she interviewed the families and thanked Dr. Doering for his help. Privately she weighed the disturbing similarities between the sick girls and the millions of victims of the Pinocchio Syndrome.
The two illnesses had several things in common. Physical incapacitation. Mental incapacitation. Lack of an apparent organic or inorganic cause. Sudden onset of the disorder, with immediate paralysis of voluntary cognitive processes. Coma.