Michaelson inventoried the crowd.
“Okay,” Humphreys said. “Well, I got the copy of that document you had couriered to my office. Where’s the original, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“With an archival document preservation expert at George Washington University.”
“Sounds like a real good place for it.”
“We rigged a television hookup for this call so that you could look at the book the document came out of, in case you have any doubts about its authenticity.”
“I don’t,” Humphreys said. “We’re going straight up the middle with this. Press release hits the wire in fifteen minutes. Speech and press conference in less than three hours. Finding out that thing’s a forgery would spoil a real good strategy.”
“Preemptive disclosure,” Michaelson said, nodding.
“Now, that’s what I called it,” Humphreys said, grinning. “What my staff tells me is that we’re being ‘proactive.’ It’s like Chick Johnson in that old vaudeville routine: We’re not confessing, we’re bragging.”
“I’ll leave the semantics in your more than capable hands,” Michaelson said.
“Seriously,” Humphreys said then, “if this thing had blindsided us three weeks before an election, we’d have been running for cover. This way we get to lead with it, turn it into a positive. The only way I could get more coverage on a Sunday afternoon is to be assassinated.”
“That strikes me as too high a price to pay for a Monday-morning headline,” Michaelson said. “Good luck with it.”
Humphreys leaned back in his chair and seemed to relax a bit. His expression became more reflective, as if the journeyman pol thrilling helpful amateurs with inside banter about tactics had suddenly yielded the floor to a serious thinker.
“Funny thing,” he said. “I’ve known at least since college that there were black slaveowners, although it never occurred to me that my own ancestors might have been among them. I don’t know of any serious historians who even question it. But all the same, that piece of paper would’ve been a world-class bombshell at the climax of a campaign. Even some kids on my own staff were stunned by it. They didn’t know. They’d never even thought about it.”
“I suspect most people haven’t,” Michaelson said.
“Most people haven’t thought, period,” Humphreys said. “There are tens of millions of voters out there whose total idea of American slavery comes from seeing Roots or Gone With the Wind. They have no idea that there were any blacks before the Civil War who weren’t slaves, or that there were whites opposing slavery while Abe Lincoln was still learning his ABC’s. They buy what I say about health insurance regulation or transportation policy because they want to square things with Kunta Kinte. That indenture is going to mess with their heads. And if you’re going to mess with people’s heads, it’s better to be on offense than on defense.”
“So now they’ll get a little real history on television,” Michaelson said.
“Very little, but very real,” Humphreys said. “Okay, now you know the game plan. Was that all you had for me?”
“That’s it.”
“Then thanks again for handling it the way you did, and check CNN at three o’clock Eastern.”
The screen went blank and the line went dead. Michaelson stared for a moment at the monitor.
“He was right,” Marjorie commented. “One hundred percent of what many Americans know about slavery comes from television.”
“Yes,” Michaelson said. “Just like one hundred percent of what I know, even now, about Marcus Humphreys. Even when we had a direct conversation, the dominant image I have of him is from a television screen.”
“Kind of messy, isn’t it?” Phillips said quietly to them, nodding toward Cindy and Catherine across the room. “Just leaving them this way. The killer and the neurotic. Lizzie Borden and Martha Stewart, playing house.”
“I suppose so,” Michaelson said. “They’re collateral damage. Like those kids whose legs are blown off by land mines years after the fighting is over. We were at war and we won, but the price of victory included innocent lives.”
“Catherine didn’t have a chance before,” Marjorie said. “Maybe she has a chance now. That’s something.”
“Not much,” Phillips said.
“A small thing,” Michaelson agreed. “But all there is. Thanks for providing the electronics. I’d pitch in on packing it up, but I’d probably break something.”
“Don’t bother,” Phillips said. “Just answer one more question.”
“Shoot.”
“What are you going to demand from Connaught when he calls tomorrow?”
“A medal,” Michaelson said.
Chapter Twenty-five
I was delighted to get Willie a ticket for this,” Michaelson whispered to Marjorie eleven weeks later. “But I can’t imagine why he wanted to come.”
“Soaking up atmosphere,” Marjorie said. “He’s working on a movie script.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes indeed. A thriller revolving around a politically sensitive document hidden in a crate of German sausage.”
“Remarkable,” Michaelson said. “A wurst-case scenario.”
“That’s his title.”
They shut up then and rose because a stentorian voice said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
The president was in good form, as usual. The setting helped. The East Room of the White House, the seal on the podium, the reporters and camcorders crowding the seats, the flags, the sunshine from the Rose Garden window, the marine guards in dress blues. It all conspired to produce just the right pitch of understated solemnity.
The lists of accomplishments for each of the seven people behind him had certainly been written by someone else, certainly not been glimpsed by the presidential eye until minutes before he stepped to the rostrum. Yet he read it as if he’d penned every syllable himself. Now he’d reached the climax of the ceremony.
“And so it is my high honor and distinct privilege to recognize the remarkable contributions of each of these distinguished Americans with our nation’s highest civilian decoration, the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” he said. “First, James Terence Halliburton.”
A discreet attendant pushed Halliburton’s wheelchair forward. Halliburton wore a lustrous navy blue suit, a white shirt, and a blue silk tie with broad red diagonal stripes. Blue-faced cuff links stamped in silver with the seal of the United States Department of State showed just below his coat sleeves. His black wingtips had been buffed to a mirrorlike shine. Every strand of his thinning hair was in place. If you hadn’t heard him chatting a few minutes before the ceremony about how Nixon couldn’t be counted out, you might confidently have sent him into a negotiation over anything from fishing rights to hostages.
Smiling warmly, the president leaned over the wheelchair and pinned the medal to Halliburton’s left lapel. Shutters snapped. Electronic flashes flashed. The president spoke a few confidential words, getting heaven knew what response from Halliburton. Then he shook the older man’s hand amidst more snaps and flashes and stepped back to the podium.
That was it. Michaelson studied Halliburton’s eyes intently during the exchange, hoping desperately to spot some flicker of lucidity, however brief, some precious interval of understanding. And he saw one. He was sure of it. He wasn’t given to kidding himself and he felt confident of his judgment.
He sat back in his folding chair, satisfied. It was a small thing, done well.
Author’s Notes
The historical premise underlying Collateral Damage is accurate. Free persons of color lived and worked in Maryland and elsewhere in the antebellum South, and in some cases they owned slaves and exploited the labor of those slaves in the same way that white slaveowners did. As one detailed treatment of the subject explains:
Although the
academic community is fully aware that there were Afro-American slave masters, their existence is not common knowledge among the public. Most Americans, black and white, believe that slavery was a system exclusively maintained by whites to exploit black people. But in fact Afro-Americans played a small yet significant role in the annals of the peculiar institution as slave masters. Many black Americans of the antebellum period believed that slavery was a viable economic system and exploited the labor of black people for profit. In Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves, according to the federal census of 1830.
Larry Kroger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860 (University of South Carolina Press, 1985), 1.
The story’s technical premise is also authentic. The exit method demonstrated by Michaelson was empirically verified by physical experiment before publication. Readers who would like to examine time-lapse photographs documenting the experiment may obtain them without charge by sending a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Cold Coast Productions, P.O. Box 510015, Milwaukee, WI 53202. Readers who would like to examine a videotape documenting the experiment may obtain it by sending a check or money order in the amount of $15 to the same address.
More from this Author
For other books, upcoming author events, or more information please go to:
www.poisonedpenpress.com/Michael-Bowen
Contact Us
To receive a free catalog of Poisoned Pen Press titles,
please contact us in one of the following ways:
Phone: 1-800-421-3976
Facsimile: 1-480-949-1707
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.poisonedpenpress.com
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave. Ste 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
Collateral Damage Page 19
