But Isabel knew it already.
20
“I JUST GOT off the phone from those slimeballs at Close-up,” Bill Edwards wheezed down the phone. Isabel and Ed were listening on speaker and could almost hear Bill shift his trademark cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “They had the hide to demand I get my butt over to their studios tomorrow night. Mine! On a Sunday!”
Bill Edwards and political muscle were Siamese twins; locked together, a freak of nature. Even at seventy-two, he was still a beefy six-foot-six and born to command. He’d been quietly pulling the Republican strings of power from on high for years, emphasis on quietly. Though a big man, he maintained a small public presence, speaking rarely and when he chose to, so softly that people had to strain to hear him, adding to the impression that whatever he said was worth listening to. In private, though, he never held back. And when Bill eventually let it be known he would, if asked, step out of the shadows to chair the peak Republican National Committee, all other contenders stepped back to make way for him.
“What did they tell you?” Isabel asked.
“It’s about your past… big implications… national interest. Isabel, it’s not like one of your long lost relatives died and bequeathed you a fortune; you’re already richer than Croesus. Whatever this is, it ain’t good.”
She heard Bill take a long deep draw and imagined him tilting his head back, eyes closed, and contemplating the mess they seemed to be in. “Have they called Hank?” she ventured, knowing Bill would understand the implication.
“Damn, I should’ve thought of that,” he said. “Lisa!” he screamed to his assistant, causing Isabel and Ed to flinch. “Find out if Clemens scored an invite to Close-up… Bel, if they did ask him, we’re dead meat—who in their right mind would invite that turkey to his own Thanksgiving Dinner? Unless they had to.”
She didn’t remind Bill that he was the one who had foisted Hank Clemens on her as her running mate to help bolster her stocks with the conservative base. She’d agreed, for sure, but now realised how big a mistake she’d made. It was almost John McCain and Sarah Palin from 2008 all over again, except Isabel had insisted on Hank keeping his mouth closed, and so far he’d done that. She wasn’t going to have her running mate shooting from his lip. Unlike Palin, who knew what she wanted to say but found it hard to put two words together, at least correctly, Hank’s problem was that he wavered on policy, except on guns and moral issues. Unless he was closely scripted, he could take more positions than the Kama Sutra.
“The point is, Bill… if Hank’s invited, it’s me who’s the dinner.”
She heard Bill cover the mouthpiece, and waited.
“He’s at his hoity-toity racquet club,” Bill tittered in a falsetto whine. “One where the members can’t use their cell phones. Bel, when you’re elected, don’t ever let Hank take you to his damn club if there’s a war looming, okay?”
Isabel’s other line was ringing. It was Gregory. She joined up the two calls.
“I told them,” said Gregory, “you know, no info, no dice. Well, not those exact words, different w…”
Ed was shaking his head in disbelief that Isabel could have retained this verbal stumblebum as her key strategist. For Isabel, Gregory’s rambling usually brightened up her day. He was an experienced campaign manager with the capacity to crack everyone up while making a deeply insightful point. She’d told him, many times, he was doing himself a disservice by it, since most people’s first, and wrong impression was that he was a fool.
“Get to the point,” said Bill, cutting Gregory short.
“It’s about one of Isabel’s parents.”
She went as white as one of the Limoges porcelain figurines she’d bought for the Adam mantel. “Not my moth…”
“It’s your father.”
Thank heavens. She exhaled deeply, and her eyes rose to the high ceiling. All she knew about her father was the photograph… and the little her mother had told her. But had her mother lied about that, too? Had they found him alive somewhere? No… it wasn’t possible, or he’d surely have revealed himself before now. In person. To her. Not on some TV show.
Ed’s mind was also racing, and what started to emerge out of the bushes was the dread that Isabel’s father’s business activities might not have been very suitable for a US president’s dad. JFK got clean away with a supposed bootlegger and stock market manipulator for a father, but Ed feared coca was in another ballpark altogether, especially these days with the war after war on drugs, none of which was ever won. Bolivia was infamous for its coca trade, and if her father had been a coca-runner it could be utterly disastrous, especially when added to the Karim Ahmed debacle that was still beating them up.
“So,” snapped Ed, “what about him?”
“Ah… it’s who he is,” said Gregory.
Ed leant forward, close to the phone speaker on the white marble tabletop in front of them. “Who he is, or who he was?” He glanced at Isabel to see her fingers digging into her palms.
“Was. Sorry,” said Gregory. “Yes, it’s about who he was. My mistake. He’s been dead for years… as we all thought… I mean, knew…”
“But,” interrupted Isabel, “we know who he was. My mother told…”
“Apparently, we don’t,” said Gregory. “Your mother’s story stacks up, according to… well, a source… except for two things, though I can’t see why they’re such a big deal…”
“What things?” asked Isabel, her stomach tightening even more, if that were possible.
“She told you he died before you were born. But it was after.”
“No! How long…?” she jumped up, hating her mother even more, and starting to imagine all those years she might have known him and what they might have done together.
“It was only a month.”
“But my birth certificate says…”
“If she could lie to you, why couldn’t she lie to the hospital? Maybe it was to get higher welfare benefits as a widow? I don’t know.” Before Isabel could readjust, Gregory continued, “And she also told you he was a Bolivian businessman, right? Murdered for ransom?”
“Ri-ight,” said Isabel, her hesitance apparent to all on the call. She’d been thinking the same things as Ed.
“Wrong,” said Gregory. “He lived in Bolivia, sure, but he was Chilean. And not just any old Chilean. He was way up in Chile’s elite... a diplomat, high-ranking.”
Isabel started to speak, “A diplo…?”
Ed, a little relieved, interrupted and spoke from experience, “Chile and Bolivia haven’t actually been the friendliest of neighbours…”
“Exactly,” said Gregory. “Dr Diaz was an official envoy who Chile dispatched to Bolivia for secret negotiations aimed at resuming diplomatic relations. Isabel, he met your mother… a local… and one thing led to another, and they married.”
“That’s it?” said Bill.
“All I can get so far,” Gregory responded, “but there’s obviously an angle to this that we’re missing. I’ve already put a team onto researching this guy… to see if there were any scandals.”
“Greg, so what are your thoughts?” asked Ed, nervously scratching his pinkie stump against a knuckle on his other hand.
Gregory was taken aback yet felt foiled at the same time. When it seemed he’d finally earned Ed’s respect, damn it, he didn’t have the answers to keep it. “I mean, sure, call in Isabel and tell her on camera. Human interest… ra-ra… but why ask Bill? Unless it has… you know, implications.” He said “implications” as if he’d put heavy quotation marks around it.
SATURDAY night marched up on them, yet nobody was any wiser. Isabel had packed for her flight to Detroit. Gregory was holed up in the campaign War Room to command the team effort. This would be his fifteenth call to her that day, according to the log he kept—for the eventual book—but this time it was to tell her to flick on her TV. Gregory already had Bill Edwards and Hank Clemens on the same line.
“Where were you when JFK
was shot?” the crass voiceover teased with its text in white on a simple black screen. “Where were you on 9/11? And where will you be tomorrow night when Close-up reveals a story that will also shake the nation?”
The screen then cut to a clip of Isabel at one of her conquering rallies, and the announcer went on:
“Tomorrow night, Close-up’s new Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Mike Mandrake… in a searing, groundbreaking report… will reveal presidential candidate Isabel Diaz’s real story. His report will fracture this election… it will change American history. Whatever you do, don’t miss it. Tomorrow night…”
Unilaterally, Ed punched the remote and switched off the TV. “Why would your mother lie to you? Makes no sense. But who really cares if he was a Chilean diplomat? At least he wasn’t a drug dealer!” Ed wasn’t particularly directing his questions and comments to Isabel or Gregory or Bill Edwards or, for that matter, Hank Clemens, but all of them were mentally saying the same things.
“Mothers lie all the time,” said Bill in an unusually flat, soft tone, as if he was trying not to remember something painful.
“Or maybe, Isabel, you remembered some things wrong?” suggested Hank.
“Gregory, I’m not doing the show,” said Isabel, standing again to make her point though it was an unseen gesture to those on the other end of the phone.
“But Ed said… and I promised them,” Gregory pleaded, brushing his hand over his bald head as if he had nowhere to hide.
“Tell them you misunderstood,” she said.
Ed smiled, but Gregory didn’t.
OVER in LA, Elia was pulling another piece off a quattro stagioni pizza. She and her boyfriend had just seen the Close-up promo. Simon muted the sound and finished chewing. “So?” he said, his eyes drilling into her.
Elia looked embarrassed and picked at a piece of olive. “Really, I don’t know. Mandrake flew back to DC for the shoot and no one’s talking. It’s like there’s a lockdown.”
“You’ve got to find out, Elia.”
“I can’t.”
Abruptly, Simon stood and stared down at her.
“Okay, I’ll try,” she said.
21
NIKI’S BUTTER-CREAM LEGS brushed against the green sheets, revealing her at her best…
Niki Abbott was no egotist. A hedonist, yes. A sybarite and a sensualist, absolutely. Tonight would be perfect. If you were going to do someone like Robert J. Foster, the presidential candidate himself, it needed to be momentous. Breathtaking. Tonight demanded far more than quickie sex in a vice-presidential hotel shower stall.
Tonight, Foster would receive more than he’d ever dreamed of, and given his track record that was saying something. In two hours, Candidate Foster would be on his own knees, praising the Lord.
She looked up at the ceiling mirror to ogle herself. Voluptuous. Niki loved how when you said that word out loud, your tongue did what it meant. Voluptuous. Loose lips sink ships, she smiled.
Niki’s fingers feathered herself, and the high gloss of her nails winked sparks back at the sun that was streaming in between the slats of the venetians.
Bobby Foster would indeed have his breath taken away.
22
ELIA AND SIMON tore over to the studio in his plumber’s truck. As though they were on a heist, he kept the motor running and she went in, heading upstairs for the office Mandrake had occupied but with no idea what she was looking for.
While the door to Mike’s office was closed, she tried the knob and it unlocked. Betty was still working in the open-plan, so Elia mumbled she’d lost her pen somewhere, a Montblanc she’d been given for her birthday.
Thankfully, the cleaners hadn’t made it to this floor yet. Three paper planes were lying in Mike’s waste paper basket and, without unfolding them, Elia stuffed them into her bag. There was nothing on his desk or in any of the drawers. No, she was wrong: the third drawer down contained an unopened four-pack of Trojan condoms. Mandrake really was a sleazebag, she decided, but when she saw the box was still sealed she allowed herself a quick smirk.
Something else? There had to be something.
She punched ‘redial’ on his desk phone and wrote down the long grey number that scrolled across the small screen. She kept punching until she’d retrieved the numbers of his last five calls; the phones here stopped remembering at five.
She pasted a smile on her face as she left Mike’s ex-office and almost skipped over to Betty. “Yay!” she shouted, holding up her pen and a finger to mock the V-for-victory sign. “Now I can sleep.” She bounced over to her own desk, logged onto her computer, located the master contact list for the political campaign teams, and emailed it to herself at home.
ELIA approached Simon’s truck with a bit of a shrug. It was running but he wasn’t inside. She cast around and saw him loitering at the corner and signalled him back.
“Well?” he asked as he slammed the door shut beside him.
“A few scraps of paper and some phone numbers,” she told him. “Can we get the hell out of here? I’m shaking like a leaf.”
As he drove, she pulled the folded pages out of her bag and flattened them out on her knee. The first was a print-out of an email from Mike’s assistant in Washington, confirming dinner for him with his wife when he got back. “Sleazebag,” she repeated to herself as she recalled the condoms. The second sheet had The Un-Making of a President typed on it with by Mike Mandrake underneath, but no other text. She didn’t need to remind herself about his ego. And the last sheet was the first page of the LA office’s internal phone list which, no doubt, he tossed away knowing he wouldn’t have to put up with the likes of Elia any more.
“And?” Simon twisted his head around to glance at the pages.
“Nothing here, but wait till we get home so I can check some phone numbers.”
FOUR of the five numbers had East Coast area codes: Washington DC, New York City, Boston and Greenwich. The fifth was a number she already knew because she’d had to ring it herself a half-dozen times. It was the speed-dial for Mike’s assistant.
10 PM in LA wasn’t the best time to be making calls back east. “Here goes nothing,” and Elia dialled the first number.
“This is the Mandrakes,” said the answering machine. Elia hung up. “Next,” she said, punching in the second number. After one “Oops, wrong number” to a sleepy voice familiar to her as one of Close-up’s co-producers, followed by a ring-out, Elia felt this might be it:
“This is the Harvard Law School office of Professor Robert Dupont. Please leave a message…”
Elia didn’t, but did an internet search on him instead, striking what she hoped was paydirt. “Simon,” she yelled to him in the bedroom. “This could be something.” He came over. “Mandrake phoned a professor of constitutional law at Harvard,” she said. “This guy’s credentials go way up to here,” she added, her hand hovering above her head.
After speculating what this might mean, from absolutely nothing to damn near everything, Simon pressed Elia to contact Isabel’s campaign office.
“At this time of night?”
“For this, absolutely.” He could see Elia’s anxiety growing. At best, she’d already breached her duty of fidelity to her employer; at worst, she was guilty of theft. “It’s not as if we broke into the Watergate or anything,” he said sincerely, but that only made Elia’s mouth even dryer.
“Then I’ll do it,” he said, grabbing the phone.
Elia watched him, relieved. In truth, she wanted it done but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“I got to speak to the guy in charge,” Simon said. “My name’s, er, Joshua and it’s confidential.”
“At 1 AM?” It was Julia Lee, a night owl who covered the phones in Isabel’s campaign headquarters three nights a week, from midnight to dawn. She was a veteran Republican volunteer four campaigns in a row.
“Confidential and urgent, okay?” But Simon was getting nowhere. “Did you see the Close-up promo?” he asked.
She h
adn’t. She’d been staying at her sister’s the last two days, and her TV had been busted.
“It’s about that,” Simon said. “Just find the head guy and tell him. I’ll hold.”
Gregory and about fifteen people had been locked up since well before Julia arrived. The receptionist she’d replaced at midnight had warned her there was some crisis going down about Close-up.
Julia grimaced as she went in: drink cans; half-eaten pizza cold and curling on sheets of yellow legal paper all over the central table; the close odour of people who’d been fretting sixteen hours straight. Disgusting… but she loved it. The acrid smells, the heat, the mess, the pressure. At first, no one noticed her. Several pairs of eyes were locked onto computer screens. Maybe eight people had their ears glued to cell phones in various parts of the room. For a second, she wondered if they were phoning each other—campaigns really could make people go nuts. Another two were tapping away on their BlackBerrys.
Gregory was speaking on a landline. Julia had already scratched out a note and put it under his nose. He gave her an irritated I’m-busy headshake but got the sort of stern response that only a sixty-year-old grandmother in a button-up pink woollen cardigan could give without uttering a single word. He read her note: “Joshua (?) holding. Re Close-up. Urgent AND confidential.”
“Hold a second?” Gregory asked Isabel. She was on board her jet to Detroit. Whenever he thought about the plane, he smiled. Even now; he couldn’t help it. The Wall Street Journal had christened the jet ‘Big Red’ after the rose icon they’d painted on the tail, but the campaign team had morphed that into the ‘Big Red Bed’ given how much time many of them spent strapped in it themselves. Originally, Isabel had been scheduled to arrive in Detroit at ten but, as things panned out, she hadn’t even taken off till after midnight. Gregory read the note again and said to Julia, “This guy for real?”
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