Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  She sat up late and alone watching tapes of Jack & friends, especially the infrared sequences, in which specters seemed to be making love. Watching them was a disembodying experience, somewhere between seeing in the dark and a bad dream, and she never tired of it. In time it occurred to her that it might be useful to know who else had used the penthouse for adulterous assignations. She began in her usual studious, systematic way to review the other tapes. She found them laughable: pudgy members of the Gruesome engaged in the sort of sex she had left behind even before she was the age of some of their partners, mostly high school girls who paid for their cocaine with inert coitus or reluctant and ludicrously inept fellatio.

  And then at the end of a long evening, at the very end of one tape, she saw something that interested her very much: the governor of the state, sucking on a Popsicle with a look of dopey ecstasy that no known flavor of confectionery ice could possibly produce. The camera, remotely controlled by the Georgian or one of his colleagues from a rented room on the floor below, pulls back to show a girl, her back to the camera, kneeling in front of the governor. The girl is a thin blonde with buds for breasts who looks no more than twelve. She licks a Popsicle. The governor asks if she’ll share it with him. “No, but I’ll give you my sweater!” He holds the Popsicle while she strips off her sweater. This is repeated, while she disrobes item by item, saying, “Don’t you dare lick my Popsicle!” At last she is stark naked: prominent ribs, a row of knobs down her spine. He refuses to give back her Popsicle. She whimpers, pleading, “But I have to have something to lick.” To which the governor replies (I am not making this up), “How about Uncle Wiggly?” She falls to her knees.

  Showing me this footage, Morgan said, “Can you imagine?”

  “There seems to be no need to imagine anything. Including who gave this to you.”

  Morgan made no apologies. She said, “You do understand what you have just seen and what it means, do you not?”

  I thought I did, but I said, “You tell me.”

  A completely spontaneous smile, luminous with delight—such a rare event—spread over her face. Giggling, she said, “The Good Humor Man has just made our boy governor of Ohio. And therefore, sooner than we ever hoped, president of the United States.”

  Peter agreed. He demanded immediate action to exploit this break. This was no work for Morgan. We delivered a copy of the tape to the governor along with several stop-action pictures of the Popsicle so that he would not delay watching it. A day or two later one of our people called him on his car phone.

  “Yes.”

  “This is the photographer.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Take the elevator to the penthouse at five forty-three tomorrow morning.”

  “Impossible.”

  “In that case, watch the Public Access Channel at six-thirty.”

  “Listen, you—”

  “The elevator, five forty-three.”

  Click.

  At the appointed hour the Georgian and another man, both wearing gorilla masks, met the governor in the same elevator car in which Jack and I had had our chat about the perils of indulging in sex and drugs in the presence of witnesses. The governor was staggered by the price his blackmailers named.

  “Resign?” he said, baffled. “What can I do for you if I do that?”

  “We’ve already told you what you can do for us,” said the smaller gorilla, who sounded like a Princeton man who had something disagreeable in his mouth and was looking for a place to spit. “You can accept it or see the tape on television.”

  “They’d never run it.”

  “No? Then this is your last day of happiness. Every newspaper and TV station will have a copy by the end of the day.”

  The governor said, “You’re crazy.”

  “It’s up to you. You can resign and walk away or refuse and take the consequences. Either way, you’ll be out in a week. We’re offering you a chance to go back to the practice of law. But if you prefer twenty years in prison for statutory rape, we won’t stand in your way.”

  The smaller gorilla handed the governor his playmate’s birth certificate. “That makes her thirteen,” the gorilla said. “She’s an eighth grader. Her father is a fireman. Both her parents are devout Baptists. The girl sings in the choir. She’s a hopeless cocaine addict, thanks to you. Think about it.”

  The birth certificate dropped from the governor’s long manicured fingers and fluttered to the floor.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Give me a break.”

  “Okay, you’ve got forty-eight hours,” said the Georgian. “Today is Tuesday. Resign not later than Thursday.”

  “That’s too soon. It can’t be done.”

  “The stuff goes out in the last mail on Thursday.”

  On Wednesday night the governor went on television, confessed that owing to the stresses of public life he had developed a dependence on prescription drugs and alcohol that clouded his judgment and endangered his life. His four teenage daughters sat beside him on the sofa as, holding his wife’s hand, he formally resigned his office. He asked for the prayers of all Ohioans that the course of treatment on which he was about to enter in a private hospital would restore him, whole and healthy again, to his wife and their wonderful family.

  Jack took the oath of office immediately, and a week later he and Morgan moved into the Governor’s Mansion and into an office that had previously been held by seven future presidents of the United States.

  4 Jack regarded the governorship as a wonderful opportunity to campaign on a continual basis. He had no real interest in actually governing. Running for office was what exhilarated him, and every victory was important only as a prelude to the next victory.

  He continued to denounce crime, to hammer the special interests without interfering with them in any significant way, to champion the downtrodden and walk among them whenever a camera was present. It was a rare month on Ohio television when Jack, often accompanied by the twins, did not visit a distressed welfare mother and promise succor, or visit a school to teach a class to the learning disabled, or throw his arms around the close relatives of a murder victim. He was often on the telephone, consoling widows and orphans, congratulating athletes and scholars, commending policemen on useful arrests and prosecutors on convictions. Ohioans from every walk of life found themselves invited to the governor’s mansion for breakfast or lunch or dinner, or just for a chat with Jack Adams. His sincerity was genuine, if not very long in duration—but then, it had to last only long enough for a shutter to whir.

  “He’s a political mosquito flying around looking for warm bodies,” said Cindy, watching him work a disaster scene on the evening news. “A drop of blood here, another case of political malaria there. Thanks for the blood, have a microbe! Today Chillicothe, tomorrow the world.”

  As to the daily business of his administration, Governor Adams of Ohio, like President Charles de Gaulle of France, did not concern himself with the details of government, but only with its grand strategy and enduring principles and interests.

  This approach drove Morgan crazy. What she wanted from Jack was substance, by which she meant a frontal attack on the Establishment, a fearless advocacy of the many causes in which she and her clients so passionately believed. In Morgan’s room, shouting now instead of whispering, she pleaded with him to take a stand on all the inflammatory issues of the day.

  “Issues make enemies,” Jack said. “Tell your friends—”

  “My friends? Who do you think are the street fighters of your movement?”

  “I know. Believe me, I know. But they’re already with me. What I need to do is attract the people who aren’t yet with me. I can’t get them to join me and trust me by doing things and saying things that piss them off.”

  “What about waking them up?”

  “They wake up every morning and look for work. This is the Rust Belt, Morg. People are scared by unemployment, scared by change that has ruined their lives. And you want me to tell th
em they ain’t seen nothin’ yet?”

  “There’s good change and bad change. This is the Rust Belt because capitalism has failed them, screwed them, and left them high and dry. Capitalism, Jack.”

  “Sure it has. But they want it to come home again. You think they look at those abandoned mills and factories and say, ‘Hooray, the bosses are gone’? What they say is ‘All is forgiven. Bring back the jobs.’”

  “That’s exactly what has to change—the mind of the people.”

  “Well, it won’t happen except out of the barrel of a gun. My grandfather was thrown into the street and do you know what he said about the rich? ‘No poor man ever gave me a job.’”

  “I want to vomit,” Morgan said. “Jack, listen to me. You have to stand for something.”

  “I do. Every day. Reelection.”

  “Goddamnit, Jack, get serious.”

  “About what? The endangered snail darter?”

  “Jesus! You really don’t understand, do you? The purpose of the environmental movement is not to save the fucking environment. Its purpose is to demonstrate the crimes and failures of capitalism. Just like every other component of the cause. Hammer away, hammer away, hammer away. Take the Establishment apart chip by chip. First we discredit them, then we remove them, then we apply the remedies.”

  “I thought my job was to get elected. I thought that was the Prime Directive.”

  “It is. But not as a goddamned Republican. You can’t even give a straight answer on abortion. It’s embarrassing, Jack.”

  “Morgan, I know you don’t feel like I do about this, but I look at Fitz and Skipper and I—”

  “And you what? I don’t want to hear it. You don’t understand. You have to send a signal to the faithful. Reassure them.”

  “That’s why I have you,” Jack said. “If I wasn’t the real thing deep down inside, would I be married to somebody like you? That’s the message. Tell them you know what’s really in my heart. Tell them to be patient.”

  “For how long?”

  He gave her the smile. “Until tomorrow comes, as they know it will.”

  “Today pinpricks, tomorrow hammer blows. Is that it?”

  “Pinpricks in the darkness are just another name for stars,” Jack replied.

  Morgan gagged theatrically, then threw her own yellow pad at him. “Here! Write that down too!”

  But she could not help admiring him. He was so quick, so glib, so Machiavellian—a prince in the only sense of the word that had any meaning or value.

  Tiresome as they were to Jack, these discussions of principle were important to Morgan because they reminded Jack that he was supposed to have a conscience. Even if he refused to act on them, it was her task to remind him constantly of the principles that drove the operation. Otherwise, she knew, he would forget them, as he forgot women, forgot favors, forgot friends, forgot promises. Jack lived in the moment, for the moment, in a psychic world that had no past, only a future in which, she suspected, he believed that he could escape from the consequences of youthful follies whose visible symbol was Morgan herself. He could live with her because he had to, for as long as he had to. But he wanted power as a means of escape from the past. Escape from Peter. Escape from the revolution. Escape from Morgan. That was what she believed.

  Fourteen months after succeeding to the governorship through the dirty tricks of the people in gorilla masks, Jack was reelected in a landslide while Republicans were sweeping into almost every other high office in the land. We gave him half a million dollars toward the cost of his campaign, but it wasn’t the money that made the difference, it was Jack, Jack, Jack. At least five national media outlets asked the question, “Next Stop, the Presidency?”

  Deep within himself, Jack was sure that the answer was yes. Everything favored him.

  5 “Everything?” Peter asked Morgan over a bucket of the Colonel’s crispy fried chicken in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. (This hamlet was out of the way, but Peter loved the name when he saw it on the map). “Even,” Peter said, “the hatred of his own party’s inner circle?”

  “Especially that,” Morgan said.

  She explained Jack’s reasoning: The new president in Washington, a charming fascist—who would have thought that such a creature existed?—had just won in a landslide of his own. Like Jack himself, and like JFK, this born winner was an outsider who only a short time before had been given no chance to rise to the top. Yet now his overpowering strengths—

  “Which are the strengths of trivia,” Peter said.

  “Precisely,” Morgan replied. “That’s the great American secret.”

  Now even the new president’s mortal enemies in the media conceded among themselves that he would probably be unbeatable if he ran for reelection. The economy, a shambles when he took office, was on the upswing. The president’s sunny disposition drove his policy. With tireless good nature he repeated over and over again the five or six simplistic principles that seemed to comprise his entire intellectual repertoire. Somehow, bewildering as it was to Morgan, this had produced the dawn of an era of good feeling. Anyone who ran against this lovable optimist would be seen as a doomsayer and would go down in defeat. Therefore, no candidate with the instinct of self-preservation would want the nomination four years hence. Jack’s party would be looking for a sacrificial lamb, someone on the outer edge of the party who could lose and then be tossed on the ash heap of history.

  Jack saw this as his great opportunity. The party leaders might not support him, but they would not oppose him if he ran. And if he won the primaries and went into the convention with enough votes, they could not stop him.

  “All this to lose the election?” I said.

  “Maybe,” Morgan said. “But to lose honorably, to go down fighting, to make an indelible impression. Jack is young. Four years after he loses he’ll still be young enough to run again, and win.”

  “He’s going to come out of the closet, be a radical?” I asked.

  “Jack?” Morgan replied. “Don’t make me laugh. He’ll make a point of being as much like his opponent as possible. It worked for JFK. Nixon was supposed to be the ruthless one, but it was Kennedy who called for nuking China if it took one step across an imaginary line in the Pescadores, Kennedy who claimed there was a missile gap, Kennedy who may have stolen the election—”

  “You’re quoting Jack?”

  “Yes. But it’s all true. You can get away with anything in this country if you make the right noises.”

  “Point taken,” Peter said. “Question: Is this a rational judgment or does Jack see this progression of future events as his destiny?”

  This was the fundamental question. Jack’s delusion that he was a secret carrier of the Kennedy genes had been powerfully reinforced by his unbroken series of political successes.

  “He believes in his bones,” Morgan answered, “that he can do this because he was born to do it. Every stroke of luck is a sign in the sky to him—Daddy on the heliograph from heaven. He never says this in so many words, but I see it in his eyes. He thinks he has already pulled Excalibur out of the stone, and all he has to do now is sit down at the Round Table.”

  Peter was smiling, bemused and proud. He had made all this happen with a wave of his magic wand. You could see the thought dancing like a jester in his head. I thought, And escape from this Merlin. That is his real plan. I kept the thought to myself; this was not the moment to speak it aloud.

  Morgan said, “There is one small problem. It will cost at least twenty million dollars to put this plan into effect. Jack believes he is holding a promissory note from you for that or any other amount he may need.”

  “Ah, he wants a trust fund, just like a real Kennedy!” Peter waved a careless hand. “Why not?”

  Always the worrier, I said, “Explaining where it came from will be the problem.”

  Peter said, quite distinctly, “Then make it cease to be a problem, Comrade Colonel.”

  By calling me by my rank, a recent one, he was pointing out
that (1), I had just been promoted because I was supposed to be able to solve such routine problems as this, and (2), If there was a problem, it was my problem.

  Peter had already put all annoying details behind him. “This chicken would be a sensation in Moscow,” he said, actually licking his fingers. “These outlets, so cheery with their stripes and cupolas, remind one of St. Basil’s, don’t you agree, Dmitri?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. His obedient servant. But I wondered how we were going to move all that money by dark of night.

  6 As a warranty of good things to come, Peter authorized the immediate delivery of $250,000 in cash to cover the incidental expenses of Jack’s politicking. I made a trip to a Caribbean island to draw the funds from a bank in which Peter deposited some of his fees from his allies in the cocaine trade. Morgan—happy in the knowledge that the drug offensive against the United States was war on capitalism by other means, sweet revenge for the plutocratic opium trade to China of another era—transported the money back to Columbus in the trunk of the used BMW that had replaced her beloved VW bus. The money—all in well-worn tens, twenties, and Peter’s signature fifties—made an impressive sight when Morgan untied the strings of the banker’s boxes and heaped it on the table in her soundproof safe room. She had summoned Jack by telephone from the governor’s mansion, expecting him to explode with joy when he beheld this hillock of greenbacks. His reaction was not quite what she had expected. Because she had been with me, and then with her Georgian (bank boxes under the bed), and then alone in her car on the highway, she had missed the evening news. Jack had not. The lead story described a CIA man who had been arrested, far too late, by the FBI and charged with passing secrets to us. According to the networks, this spy had been paid almost three million dollars in cash for his treason. Jack was infuriated.