If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  “Do you have any children, Cliff? Maybe you can help me out here?”

  “I’m afraid not, Senator.”

  He held his arms out as though he were overwhelmed, and knelt suddenly, his long legs folding up, looking a surprised black child directly in the eyes. They gazed at each other in mutual astonishment and then the child smiled, and Crane swept him up in one arm and a little girl in his other arm, and I thought how easily came this expectation that he could win the hearts of innocents and the jaded alike. It was something you wanted to resist and, yet, there was a child in his arms, and here were thousands screaming until their throats were raw, and here you were, very professionally keeping your voice quiet, yet with your shirt sticking to your back, your eyes seeing blue dots, your heart racing like a runaway roller coaster. Here you were, with all the rest, carried aloft.

  I didn’t want to leave, but I had work to do. I slid through the crowd, ducked under a curtain and hurried down the halls and tunnel that led to our temporary bureau on the stage of the Paramount Theater. I turned over the quotes I had collected about the party’s chances in the fall to the reporter doing the story and joined my editor, who had swiveled her chair to watch Crane on one of the televisions set up across the bureau.

  “He’s not going to mess this up?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She searched for the remote control in the miniature landfill on her desk, found it, and turned the volume down. I noticed silver was weaving itself further through her hair and there were new lines around her eyes. I wondered how many hours she was working each week. During my years in the bureau I had watched her change. She came from San Diego as a tanned, squarely built athletic woman, the kind you might see playing soccer in a park on Sunday morning. Her principal gift had been a willingness to work hard. It had won her a chance to edit the campaign coverage, and over the last year everything else had been stripped away as she transformed herself into a vessel of pure efficiency. Once there had been a woman named Ellen Herrin who played racquetball on Saturdays, loved to cook Italian, and kept too many cats, but the campaign had swallowed her like so many others.

  “They think you’re doing a great job in San Diego,” she said, her eyes on the television. “They want to keep you out on the road from here on in.”

  San Diego was the home of Cannon Newspapers’ corporate headquarters. Praise from offices above the bay arrived through acolytes like blessings from Mount Olympus.

  “That’s okay. You know I don’t mind.”

  “How are you getting along with Robin?”

  “Fine. We don’t see each other all that much.”

  “No problem, then?”

  “No. It’s just business. The world’s full of politicos and journalists who’ve slept together and then screwed each other all over again in the light of day.”

  She looked at me. “Is that right?”

  I knew I’d made a mistake. “I don’t know. Anyway, it’s not a problem.”

  The bureau had been set up in hasty disarray amid a nest of cables and cardboard boxes. A dozen reporters and editors sat at metal tables, clattering away at keyboards while Crane’s voice drifted through the clamor: Charity. Responsibility. Community. Independence. These things are not contradictions. Applause rose from the unseen audience and reporters looked up briefly across the bureau and focused absently on a close-up of a face radiant with reassurance. I wanted to be in there. I wanted to be in there to hear him and for another reason. I had been trying to reach Robin for three days. She’d be here tonight, but if I waited too long I might not find her.

  Ellen lowered her voice.

  “About the other thing. What you and Kelly found. You’re sure you can follow up on the road?”

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t said anything to anyone else. It’s still your lead.”

  “Yes. I’ll be fine.”

  “Kelly will help whenever you need it.”

  “I know.”

  Her blue-green eyes arrived on mine without apology.

  “You’re not too tired?”

  “I’m tired. So are you. I’m not too tired.”

  “You haven’t fallen in love with Thomas Crane or anyone working for him?”

  “I have a crush on John Starke, but I’m fighting it.”

  She smiled and glanced back at the television.

  “You’re in a hurry to get back in there?”

  “I’d like to see the end of the speech.”

  Her hand slid absently over the papers beside her terminal.

  “Why don’t you round up a few react quotes and call it a night. I know you head out early tomorrow morning.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It should be a hell of a ride, Cliff. Don’t fuck up.”

  Crane’s voice echoed indistinctly down the hallway. I stopped in a small bathroom hidden behind floor polishing equipment in an alcove and found Steven Duprey throwing up into a toilet. The door to his stall had slipped open and he was on his knees, clutching the toilet paper dispenser for balance.

  “Oh Christ, not you.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure. I dropped something.”

  “What?”

  He was seized by dry heaves and bent over the toilet.

  “I don’t know. Something. Can’t you please walk out the door now?”

  He caught his breath and stood unsteadily, wiping his mouth with a wad of toilet paper, his skin pale, sweat popping in beads of pearl across his forehead.

  “It’s going awful, isn’t it?” he said.

  “The speech?”

  “The speech.” He said the word as if it was a mountain he had tried and failed to scale.

  “It’s fine. It’s good.” I’d heard only a few sentences.

  “I knew it was too long. I should have cut the middle. It was self-indulgent not to cut it.”

  Then I understood. “You wrote it.”

  He nodded and then quickly shook his head. “Mostly him. He went over it in longhand.”

  “It’s okay. Listen—” You could hear the tidal roar of the audience through the walls.

  Steven nodded weakly. I dampened a paper towel in the sink and handed it to him. He wiped his forehead, dabbed at his mouth, took another deep breath.

  “This is going to look great in print,” he said.

  “You’ll come across as human.”

  “That means pathetic.”

  He bent over a sink and splashed water on his face. He did it several times. When he looked into the mirror, his self-control had returned.

  “Maybe we could make a deal,” he said.

  I thought about the night in San Francisco—he was building up quite an account. But I had no desire to write about Steven Duprey bent over a toilet; it meant nothing in the larger scheme of things, and the fact that it would be repeated everywhere represented all the things I hated about journalism. Besides, I considered him a friend—and I knew the value of the debt.

  I handed him a dry towel. “Everybody gets the stomach flu. I don’t think it’s news. At least not today.”

  He dried his face and looked at me sideways in the mirror. “Thank you, Cliff.”

  I had to go. Once people started leaving I would never find her. Steven tossed the towel in the trash. We walked out the door together, and I could not help but smile.

  A sour look crossed his still pale face. “What?”

  “Nothing, Steven. I just never knew you cared.”

  I reached the floor as circles of foil came tumbling out of the rafters, red on one side, silver on the other, winking as they fell, delegates laughing and reaching for them like children, then balloons, drifting out of the netting in a lazy red, white and blue waterfall sent bouncing back into the air while the orchestra launched into Copland’s Theme for the Common Man with a flourish of trumpets. I saw Duprey hovering at the back of the stage, recovered, as inscrutable as ever. I saw Myra on the edge of the Illinois delegation, her hair wrapped in a brig
ht red bandanna that made her impossible to miss. She grabbed a balloon the size of a small man and, pinning it against her chair, stabbed a pen into its side. It exploded and a chorus line of delegates in Uncle Sam hats staggered and fell like dominoes.

  I saw everyone but Robin. She had been hidden away for days, working with the platform committee, but she wouldn’t miss tonight. I knew she was here, but it was like trying to see through a hurricane. A circle darted and landed in my mouth, tasting warm and metallic. I brushed another out of my eyes.

  I saw her nearer the stage. I wedged myself past a heavy woman in a straw hat, between a pair of weeping young men, beneath a swinging flag. Bodies were massed solid, and I leaned against a broad back until I felt the crowd surge and my feet were lifted up and I was carried forward. I saw Crane descending a stairway on the front of the stage, bending toward a forest of hands. Balloons bounced off my head. I struggled to breathe in the heat and the damp exhalation of sweat, and then I found my feet and pushed, and when I looked up Robin was only two feet away.

  I reached across a stranger and touched her on the shoulder. She smiled, scraps of silver foil tangled in her hair, and I saw her mouth my name. I leaned hard against someone’s side, and the crowd slid clockwise in some oblique shift of Crane’s gravity, and we were facing each other, pushed together and laughing.

  “God, where have you been?” she said.

  “I’ve been here! Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been stuck in a closet for three days with the most anal—Oh God, it doesn’t matter.” She tossed her head back. “Isn’t this wild?”

  We were turned by the crowd, pressed so close I could feel her against my stomach, smell lemons in her hair.

  “Dinner tonight,” I said. “Whenever you get through. I’ll buy.”

  “Oh God, Cliff. I have to get ready for tomorrow. I’m going to be up all night. I’m sorry.”

  “On the road then.”

  Her eyes were a glittering patchwork of reflected silver. “Soon. I’m sorry.”

  Crane came down the stairs and stepped into the delegates. I felt an elbow in my back and an arm slid across my sight. When I could see again, Robin had been carried forward. She lifted one hand and let the crowd sweep her away, mouthing good-bye. I leaned backward and fought to stay in place. It was like fighting a tide when it releases and you stumble backward onto the beach—suddenly I was free and backpedaling down the aisle. I settled beside the California delegation and watched people sway to the music and the signs swinging back and forth and the silly hats and costumes and felt the noise pound against my heart. I found enough stray delegates in the hallway to get all the quotes anyone could need, stopped by the bureau, checked with my editor one more time, grabbed my bag and left.

  A torrent of bodies spilled out onto Eighth Avenue. Policeman sat regal on their mounts, whistling and pointing like heroic statues while bright yellow cabs turned into traffic with an existential disregard for the laws governing moving bodies. I walked toward the theater district. The crowd moved around me, but almost no one spoke. Halfway to the hotel I passed a wig shop, blank-faced heads in the window, echoing in their immobile apprehension and hope the blurred mass of faces I had seen turn toward Crane.

  My room was on the twenty-first floor of the Omni Hotel. I left the lights off, pulled a Heineken from the mini-bar, opened the drapes, and let the neon of Times Square flood the walls with light. A message scrawled across the electronic ticker tape far below, but I could only make out two foreshortened words. Thomas Crane.

  For two weeks in Washington, Kelly Williams, the bureau’s financial reporter, and I had waded through the vague financial records required of American political figures. We’d found nothing. Then late one night I looked up. “We’re starting from the wrong point.”

  Kelly brushed her straight black hair out of her eyes and waited. A quiet woman, slim and teacup pale, with an unfussy prettiness in her pursed mouth and curious eyebrows, she was most at home with numbers and the obscure but irrefutable language of official documents.

  “Everything we have here commences with the start of his public life,” I said. “But Berthold isn’t part of his public life. It’s all from before. What started this were three unexplained trips back home. When I asked Latrelle Gregory about it, he indicated that Crane owed a debt to someone back there.”

  I held up a sheaf of disclosure forms. “We’re looking for some slipup here that other people have missed, although these things have been gone over a hundred times. But it has to be earlier; if it brought him home it has to be earlier. What Latrelle Gregory said was, ‘It’s always fascinating what poor boys have to do to become rich.’”

  Kelly’s pale blue eyes fell to the papers in her hands.

  “He’s not really rich,” she said. “He might be worth a few hundred thousand dollars, but rich, by today’s standards—”

  “But compared to where he came from. That’s the point. He came from a family so poor they used to scrounge coal from alongside the railroad tracks. Look at this from his first House race.” I held up the form. “He already had twenty-nine thousand dollars worth of stock. Where did that come from?”

  “They asked him about that at the time,” Kelly said. “He made a ten-thousand-dollar investment in Teltronics and the stock nearly quadrupled in the space of a year.”

  “But where did the ten thousand dollars come from? I know it’s not a lot of money. But the thing is, it was to him. He’d been a graduate student two years earlier. He’d just gotten married. Where did the money come from?”

  Her eyes went blank and then filled with the pride of a document hound.

  “There was a small biz page story in the old Chicago Daily News”—she ruffled through a thick folder on the table—“that talked about investors who hit the gold mine with Teltronics. It mentioned Crane briefly. . . Here it is.” She produced a faded computer printout and read: “The money came from Roger Bushmill. A loan. Crane paid it off at the end of the year out of profits. This is before he ever met your friend Latrelle.”

  “And who is Roger Bushmill?”

  She blinked. “Bushmill Industries. They own two different plants that make high-grade opticals, mostly for the military.”

  “But that’s not who he is to Crane,” I said. “To Crane he’s one of the guys who used to pick him up when he was hitchhiking into Springfield.”

  Kelly looked at me blankly. Five-thousand-dollar donations and soft money contributions were her obsession, not Crane’s life.

  “When Crane was fifteen he got into a private Catholic school in Springfield. It was the start of everything. But his family was so poor he had to hitchhike into town. After a while, he had a handful of people who picked him up regularly, made sure he got there. Roger Bushmill was one of those.”

  Kelly set the papers in her hand down as if they had disappointed her.

  “So what are you saying? This is all worthless?”

  We were in an office in the bureau, deserted after midnight. Across the street the garretted roof of the Willard Hotel reflected scraps of moonlight. A lamp was on in a round window and I saw an eggshell blue wall and then a hand, as perfect as if painted by Michelangelo, reach for a book on a table. Then it was gone, the room transformed by its unseen presence.

  “You don’t just lend someone ten thousand dollars,” I said. “There’s a preexisting relationship there. A pattern of trust or reciprocity or something has already been established.”

  “Are they still friends?”

  “Not that I’ve heard of.”

  Kelly ran her hands through her hair and stared at the ceiling.

  “So, Cliff, what do we do?”

  I looked at the papers spread across the table. Crane’s life wasn’t her beat, it was mine, but she was a good reporter, and I had to give her something to do.

  “We need to find out everything we can about Bushmill. Check him out against all this”—I swung my arm to encompass the mess on the table— “and an
ything else you can think of. When I get back I’ll look through everything I have on his past again. We’ll figure it out from there.”

  I left Washington for a three-day trip through the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida to assess the chances of the democratic ticket across the South. When I came back there was a message waiting for me. Kelly’s voice was rushed and faintly euphoric.

  “Cliff, I did what you suggested and it’s amazing! You run a search and Bushmill’s name shows up everywhere. Regular contributions right up to the allowable limit. And listen to this! They were briefly partners in a group that invested in gulf drilling. Oil drilling. Five people. They put in two hundred thousand total.” She took a breath. “I did a little research on him. Bushmill. He still lives in southern Illinois, near Phillips. That’s only about thirty miles from Berthold.” Her giggle was one-part exhaustion. “I think we’re on to something here. I don’t know what exactly. It just feels right. I’m going to start looking farther back now. I’ve got some ideas.”

  A police car raced across Times Square, lights spinning like tops, strangely peaceful without the wail of sirens. I watched it roll past the ticket kiosk and disappear down Broadway. The restlessness I had felt since leaving the convention welled up. There were parties everywhere tonight. I should go to one, get out, escape into the collective amnesia of the celebration.

  I sipped from my beer, warm now. It was too late. The night was populated with ghosts sliding backward into the past.

  I remembered standing in a similar window staring at a different city. Robin and I had gone to Baltimore, hoping a weekend away would help. I wanted desperately to recapture some lost buoyancy, some stray lover’s magic that once floated us above it all. I wanted us to be light, but we were as heavy as a pair of tombstones. She was silent through dinner and I knew it was something I had said or done, some minor offense for which I was not to be forgiven. I knew it was my fault and I knew it was unfair. I started a fight and we argued as we walked along the harbor, shoulders hunched and heads bent together like two old men leaning on each other for support. By the time we got to the hotel room we weren’t speaking.