Capital City

by Lee Hurwitz

  Hightower gassed up outside Siloam, still improvising. Why did the cops come looking for them in Conyers? The only thing Hightower could conclude was that the bitch Evelyn was staying with had sicced them on to him. But how had she known where to find them? She was terrified. Hightower doubted that she had seen his license plates. So what gives? And what’s next?

  He would have to call the Mayor back and reschedule his meet. Hightower felt worst of all about that. He knew he was going out on a limb by improvising against the Mayor’s orders, and yet here was the Mayor, so understanding and all, sending his personal escort to bring Hightower, Hawkins and Evelyn back to Washington. All Hightower had to do was stay in his motel room, and he couldn’t even do that, as it ended up.

  And yet…and yet. Something seemed odd about the Mayor’s manner. He couldn’t explain it. Did it make sense that Mayor Watson would give in so easily, would react so calmly to Hightower’s disobedience of a direct order? After all, he had seen Mayor Watson terrify Presidents and white developers alike, and he did not get to be the way he was by tolerating disobedience, or improvisation. And what was this business of the personal escort? Why would they need that? Okay, the Mayor said that Hightower had somehow gotten himself onto the cover of a tabloid. And it is conceivable that if they had flown into National, some reporter might have asked him about the photo. But so what? With Evelyn on our side, he thought, I could brazen it out; sure, that was me; I was trying to get Jimmy Ray Mallory’s autograph for my—girlfriend, he thought, picturing Evelyn, running, in the upper corner of the picture. So why does he need somebody to take us back to Washington? And what, exactly, would he do? Throw a big blanket around us if some reporter started, asking questions?

  They were approaching Warrenton. “Pull off this exit,” Hightower instructed Hawkins. “We’re getting a new car.”

  On a bitterly cold Friday morning, Wendell Watson gazed out on his stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue. There was a time when he felt a certain ownership of this misbegotten city, that it was his, and that he was responsible for every tragic little part of it. Ten years ago, he stood at this spot during a garbage strike, looking down and seeing a week’s piled-up trash. He commandeered an idling truck, took it up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, stopping to load the garbage in it himself. The strike ended two days later.

  Those days were gone forever. Now when he looked out on a day like this he imagined going to the Virgin Islands, or Brazil. Or working in New York, where they’d give him an office at such a lofty elevation that he would see nothing but the tops of clouds from his windows. In Washington, buildings could by law be built no higher than the Washington Monument and so when he looked out, all he could see was the grimness of his City.

  There was a time, too, that he would have looked forward to this encounter with the press. He came of age as a political man watching Jack Kennedy’s press conferences. He believed that he had the skill to manipulate the questions and answers as easily as the young white prince did. In the early years, he spent the day before a press conference in briefings with his top aides, finding out not only the substance of the questions likely to come up, but the biases of the journalists and their masters.

  Today, two hours before his press conference, he was staring out the window, thinking about how soon he could get to his single-malts Scotches. He was trying Oban this week. It was a little lighter, a little sweeter, than the others and he liked it just fine. But it was way too early in the morning, wasn’t it? After I retire I’ll drink whenever I want, he thought, and he would, too, since he’d be a consultant, and that’s what consultants did, get companionably drunk, for two hundred a year or more.

  He knew what he would lead with; he was shitcanning Freddie Carter as AIDS Coordinator. That gutless little provocateur, he thought, with that mincing little “we can do better” drivel—I’d feed him to the dogs if I could. What was that thing Kennedy said? “He who rides the tiger often ends up inside,” or something? Maybe he’d use that line. Maybe not.

  And then the three new homeless shelters. That ought to be worth something to somebody. When the poor were dying quietly in public housing, nobody gave a good goddam, but now that they’re out, panhandling and sleeping on grates, they were a big deal. Well, this ought to make Katharine Graham happy. Nobody fouling the view from her limousine.

  Watson stopped for a moment. He was thinking of ways to filibuster the press conference. And why was this? The moment he asked the question he knew the answer. Because he dreaded the moment someone would ask him about this photo.

  By God, he could stop all this dead if he could start with a credible Statehood initiative. But it was way too early; nothing was set up.

  He knew he had support on the majority side; friends of his in the Speaker’s office had told him that Jim Wright was favorably disposed, at least to reporting a bill out. And they held the majority in the Senate, too. Of course, some people thought it would take a Constitutional Amendment to give DC two voting Senators and a voting Representative, but Watson thought that was nonsense. They didn’t amend the Constitution to admit Alaska and Hawaii, did they?

  But all this was a pipe dream; he hadn’t approached Wright or Senate Majority Leader-designate George Mitchell, and he knew that saying anything before greasing the wheels with them would be an embarrassment of national dimensions. Plus, of course, Corbin had to play his role; Watson had spent the better part of yesterday afternoon trying to slap some political sense into the Young Prince, but he still wasn’t ready.

  The most important step, the thing that would make this credible, was enlisting enough Republican muscle that they could override the inevitable veto. They would need twelve Rs in the Senate and thirty-nine in the House. Impossible for Statehood, of course, but not for the deal he would cook up with his old friendly enemy, Senator Trotter.

  He took another sip of his Scotch and gave himself a moment to marvel at his own brilliance. He had heard through his network that Trotter loved the blues and was an authentic aficionado, not just some White politician trying to impress Black voters, of which there were none in Utah. So he reached out to Vasquez and landed a bootleg Robert Johnson album. He took it with him for his first meeting with Trotter, who turned out to be a bulletheaded fat guy in a badly-fitting suit who reminded him, somehow, of Nikita Khrushchev.

  He slipped the album over to Trotter as he sat down.

  “What’s this?” Trotter asked.

  Watson smiled. “Play it.”

  There was a hi-fi in Trotter’s Senate Office, as Watson knew there would be. Trotter, looking as though Watson had just slipped him blackmail tapes, walked over to the record player, and put it on.

  A look of astonishment ambushed the Senator’s face and then it softened. As Watson watched, Trotter’s eyes grew round and wet.

  “Where’d you get this?” he asked.

  “It was my dad’s,” Watson lied.

  Trotter shook his head. “I can’t take this,” he said.

  “I wish you would,” Watson said. “I’ve got it memorized.” Damn! Now he would have to learn all about Johnson and every other freak who played the blues. But it might be worth it.

  It was worth it, Watson thought, correcting himself into the present tense. Watson and Trotter learned how to advance each other’s political careers by harassing and insulting each other, and by so doing rallying their rabid bases. Outside of the glare of the klieg lights, they would drink bourbon and listen to the blues.

  And talk about history, another one of their shared interests. Why, right now Watson was reading Jasper Ridley’s Henry VIII, at Senator Trotter’s recommendation. Watson could identify with Henry, who was a man brilliantly fitted for his time and place. He especially identified with the six wives part.

  There was even a one-to-one relationship. Keisha was his Ann Boleyn, hot-blooded and full of conviction, an incredible playmate who was smart and loyal until...well, until she wasn’t. Watson had no idea what prompted her to campaign for reparation
s; it was the one issue which would provoke white backlash, because it provoked white guilt. And it was a nonstarter. And she got involved just as he was starting his first campaign for Mayor; the first story about her involvement in the movement coincided with the first drop in his campaign contributions, and if it hadn’t been for Rachel, he might not have been able to raise enough money to continue.

  Rachel Montgomery was the first woman of color in America to become a billionaire, and she did that the moment they pronounced her much older husband Clark dead at Georgetown Hospital. She was ten years older than Watson, but she took a shine to him, and he took a shine to her money. She engaged him as a business consultant for $100,000, which was her way of working around the post-Watergate limits on political contributions.

  And so, eventually, she became his Ann of Cleves. As he quietly divorced Keisha (and later supported her for Council, which was much better than a beheading), Watson began to squire Rachel around to political and social events. She was a tall, flat-chested, horsey-looking woman, not given to interesting public comments. And she was very rich. For political purposes she was the ideal wife.

  They got married, and moved to a magnificent house down the street from the French Embassy. They had a room just to eat breakfast in. They had a smoking room. They had a library.

  And they had separate bedrooms.

  Rachel explained that she couldn’t sleep with another person in her bed; for the last ten years of their married life together she and Clark had slept in separate bedrooms, and she promised Watson that he would find it invigorating.

  What was telling for Watson, though, was that he had no heartfelt objections. In bed, he loved to hold a woman in his arms and press against her warm naked flesh, to see and smell her smooth aromatic skin and then touch it with his tongue, to plunge into her as he might plunge into the ocean, and then to expand, leaving his seed like an occupying force. He wanted to do none of these things with Rachel, though he still wanted to do them.

  In fact, in the few times that they made love, Watson horrified and shamed himself by sometimes coming up empty, losing interest and deflating in the middle of the passion they had willed up. “That’s all right, dear,” Rachel would say, turning over and going to sleep.

  He was the Mayor and he lived like an Emperor, but he felt lonely and depressed. Two years into his term, however, Rachel’s daughter Monica came home from college and his world turned to grace.

  Where Rachel was plain and dull, Monica was full of juice. She was bright, she was uninhibited, and she was beautiful. She made him laugh. He got her a job in the Department of Public Works.

  For two years, Watson had straitjacketed his sexual impulses. His mental chastity belt, self-imposed, came from both a desire to show a virtuous face to the public and from a real fear of what Rachel, with all her resources, could do to him. It wasn’t for lack of opportunities.

  But Monica—nubile and delicious, and living in his own house—was too much to resist. When they were together Rachel seemed to fade into the background and Watson had this incredible thought: she doesn’t mind, really. Maybe Monica with Watson was the solution to Rachel’s problem, as well as his own.

  Watson was wrong about that, though, as he found out when Monica became pregnant. There was no shouting, screaming, or crying. But Rachel took control.

  They would divorce, of course. Rachel would give Watson a settlement. He would move out immediately; with the money she was giving him he should have no trouble finding an excellent home of his own.

  As for Monica, who would not agree to an abortion, Rachel appointed her to an executive position in one of her companies in Taiwan.

  “We can remain friends,” Rachel explained to Watson, “as long as you attempt no contact whatsoever with Monica.”

  Rachel kept her end of the bargain, and so did Watson. It was good to be friends with Rachel Montgomery. He heard that Monica had a boy, but he never approached her. Monica would be his Jane Seymour, his love lost forever.

  But he moved on. His senses reawakened by his affair with Monica, he plunged himself into his own personal urban renewal: sexual renewal. For two years he had shown the world how a faithful husband behaved, more or less; now he would show the world how a healthy male in his prime acted. He carried on affairs brazenly with beautiful women; he flirted shamelessly with married ladies, implicitly challenging their husbands to do something about it.

  He had intended to remain unfettered for the rest of his days, and would have, too, except for Reina Kimble, who danced at a Gentlemen’s Club and could offer no coherent account of her life or background. Though Reina, Watson soon concluded, was a congenital liar whose most everyday pronouncements couldn’t be trusted, she was also the best sex partner he had ever had in his life, and by a considerable margin.

  Watson had had a lot of sex, and had had it with a lot of different women. But this was a difference in kind, not degree. Reina fulfilled every sexual fantasy Watson had ever had in his life. With Reina, every part of his body, and every part of hers, was a sex organ. Did he want to do a threesome? No problem, she was into that. Another couple, a switch, an orgy? She could do that too.

  And the drugs…Watson had smoked dope, of course. But Reina had access to the full range of drugs: coke, crack, crank, nitrous, even a little horse. They would snort things off of each other’s bodies and do unspeakable things for hours.

  Was it risky? Of course. But for a politician, it’s always smart to be authentic, and the Wendell Watson who was on his Magical Mystery Tour with Reina was a lot more real than the dutiful husband or the young idealist. As he became more and more the subject of gossip and speculation, his popularity—his legend—grew.

  So he married her, and because she thereafter had sex with all of his friends and most of his enemies, sometimes for money, she became his Catherine Howard. When he was her studly lover, he imagined the gasps of admiration; now as her cuckolded husband, he could feel the snickers as he passed.

  He threw her out of the house and they divorced. He had never felt such anger in his life. He fantasized about having her beheaded, as the real Henry beheaded Catherine Howard. He needn’t have bothered, though, because six months later she was dead of an overdose, her body undiscovered for five days.

  After that, he felt a great calm. He found, once again, that he could focus on his work, and also that he could look back and accept the gifts each one of his wives had given him—from Keisha, a sense of passion and idealism; from Rachel, an appreciation of some of the finer things in life; from Reina, an appreciation of some of the other finer things in life.

  He married Essie Mae Evans, the sister of an old college friend, two years ago. Essie Mae was a caretaker by nature, and she took care of Watson which is just, he realized, what he needed. Essie Mae cooked for him, and listened to his occasionally rambling stories, and took care of the house. She never said anything that got him into hot water, and she had no objection to his night owl activities. Sometimes he got mad at Essie Mae for not having Keisha’s beauty and intelligence, or Rachel’s money, or Reina’s sex drive, but Essie Mae didn’t mind. And that was the great thing about Essie Mae: she didn’t mind. She was his Catherine Parr.

  “Five minutes to the press conference, Mr. Mayor.” His secretary had stuck her head into his office, as he had asked her to do, but now he was enraged that she had interrupted his reverie. He shook his head; it wouldn’t do to show how he felt. “Thanks,” he said thickly.

  Why was he thinking about Catherine Parr? He reeled his mind back to Essie Mae—to the book on Henry the Eighth—to Trotter—to Statehood—and then remembered. It was that damn photo that he would have to address because he couldn’t talk about Statehood.

  He looked at it again, trying to judge how much reporters could guess from the front page photo in last week’s National Tattler. Hightower was unmistakable, caught full profile with all his identifying features: his gray hatchet face, his big Adam’s apple and Jheri curl, his lanky frame in mo
tion. True, the Tattler thought he was one of Jimmy Ray Mallory’s bodyguards, but no one knows how inaccurate the news is more than reporters do. The reporters who covered City Hall knew Hightower well, and at least one of them will have recognized him.

  Who else could they recognize? Surely no one would recognize Evelyn Boone. Here was the only thing—she was running, and she looked scared. Could someone put two and two together and conclude that Hightower was chasing her?

  Or what about Hawkins? The junior partner was less known to the City Hall beat, but he had been frequently seen in the Mayor’s presence, and in Hightower’s, Watson realized suddenly. Worse, Hawkins was in this picture running in the same direction as Evelyn. It would be easy to conclude that Hawkins was chasing Evelyn because he was chasing her, as it turned out. What might the reporters infer from seeing Hawkins and Hightower together, in Miami, chasing after a fleeing woman?

  Or what about Sean O’Brien? Surely they would recognize him, sitting with those cretins at the front table, like well-heeled businessmen at a strip…

  Watson felt himself jerk before he understood the cause. O’Brien? What could he possibly be doing there, fifteen hundred miles away from Washington…

  Watson shuddered. For a second he thought he had fallen into one of those old puzzles that he used to see in the comics, where you tried to identify the celebrities in the crowd, but horribly personalized—see, there’s Superman, and Batman in the corner, next to the Joker, and there, over there just behind the front row, that’s your mother.

  But surely that could not be O’Brien in Miami! Watson found himself getting up, pacing around the room. Didn’t O’Brien quit to join that outfit out of New Jersey, the heartless ofay bastard? The Mayor remembered O’Brien, a little vaguely, as one of Stone’s technocrats. Did O’Brien know anything about computers, or was his new job simply influence? Watson heard O’Brien was being paid a hundred fifty large, which suggested influence. Watson considered this. Soon O’Brien could be making some real money, if he kept his nose clean. Watson walked over to his phone and told his secretary to get John Stone down to the office.