Mick Lasker was refilling his cup at the coffee urn. Over his shoulder, he asked, “What kind of access are you giving them?”
Kit stood. “I don’t see why we change now, Mick. Every so often, Kerry goes back to the press section, says hello, answers questions—”
“Because”—Mick turned to her now—“he’s a little bit of a freelancer, and now the stakes are too high for any fuck-ups. Maybe you should rein him in some.”
A shadow of annoyance crossed Kit’s face. “I don’t know what his brother was like, but Kerry won’t be handled. And shouldn’t be. Kerry’s funny, charming when he cares to be, and the press knows he doesn’t bullshit them.” Kit folded her arms. “I’ve been watching this for three months now. As much as they can let themselves, our reporters have started rooting for him. I’m not going to tell Kerry Kilcannon to start hiding in the john.”
Clayton turned to Mick. “Kit’s got a problem, Mick. The candidate thinkshe actually won those primaries. It’s the damnedest thing.”
Clayton watched Mick measure the gulf between them: Clayton the friend of the candidate, who was there because he believed in Kerry; Mick the professional adviser, who, but for his association with James Kilcannon, might have worked for Mason. “At least,” Mick said at last, “Kit ought to prioritize access. For the next seven days, the national press matters a whole lot less than the local TV stations and the major California papers—theL.A. Times , theChronicle , theMercury News , theSacramento Bee .They should get any formal interviews.”
“You agree?” Clayton asked Kit.
She nodded; once again, Clayton was grateful that he never had to prod her to make the right judgment. “Yeah,” she said. “That much makes sense. Even the bigfoot reporters will understand why we’re doing that.”
“Okay,” Clayton said. “Thanks.”
Hastily, Kit headed out the door.
“The big decision,” Frank Wells said at once, “is how much we spend in advertising.”
Clayton nodded. “Right now, we’ve got about four million until we hit the federal spending cap. After that, we can’t spend money until we win the nomination. California’s a black hole; you spend two million just to lose. Shoot all our cash now, and Kerry’s living off the land.”
“Don’tshoot all your money now,” Frank retorted, “and there’s no nomination to worry about.”
“You think that’s right?” Clayton asked Jack Sleeper.
The pollster stared at the table. “It’s close,” he said at last. “The biggest difference will be advertising, no question.”
“Let’s see the ads,” Clayton ordered.
Frank Wells walked to the video monitor. “The basic idea,” he began, “is compare and contrast.”
“In terms of guts, Kerry kicks Mason’s ass. Dick’s got the passion of a Norwegian dairy farmer and the spine of a mollusk. Mention any interest group—the AFL-CIO, the wrinklies, the teachers unions, Anthony’s Legions—and Dick drops his pants and starts bending over. He’s the ultimate pander bear.”
“People know that,” Jack Sleeper told Clayton. “Poll Californians on ‘independence’ and ‘integrity,’ and Kerry runs ahead. The problem is, compared to a known quantity like Mason, Kerry feels like a risk. Passion and spontaneity can be a little unsettling in a President.”
“These ads make a virtue of that,” Frank explained. “Plus the fact that Kerry’s young, good-looking, smart, and the fastest-rising politician since his brother. For a lot of upwardly mobile voters, boomers especially, he’s an idealized version of whothey want to be.” Frank paused a moment. “The only problem, Clayton, is he’s got no family except a mother he won’t let us use and an ex-wife he won’t let us ask for help.”
“Don’t ever try,” Clayton said sharply. “You leave Meg right where she is, teaching school in New Jersey.”
Frank looked defensive. “I was hoping to remind people that Kerry isn’t gay. That’s out there, you know.”
Clayton gave him a cold smile. “It’s good for ten percent in San Francisco. Let it be, Frank.”
“Why not his mother?” Jack Sleeper said. “Doesn’t he likeher ?”
Beneath the frustrated question, Clayton knew, was something deeper: the sense that Kerry was an enigma, too private for a politician, and that only Clayton could crack the code. “That’s just it,” Clayton said. “Kerry likes his mother very much.
“For my part, I think people want a President, not a group-therapy facilitator. Some mystery is not so bad, and voters like it that Kerry has an idea of himself that’s separate from politics.” He turned to Frank. “Show me the positive ads first.”
Frank put in a cassette and pushed the button. “You should know,” Jack Sleeper put in, “that we’ve tested Frank’s ads with focus groups. These are the ones that rated highest.”
The first ad was from campaign footage, Kerry with a group of multiracial kids at an inner-city school, talking about education. “I guess minority children are less threatening to white folks than their parents,” Clayton commented. “Smaller, anyhow.”
“Yup,” Frank answered crisply, and put on the next ad; Kerry in a living room with fertile-looking young adults, talking about gun control. As was his habit, Kerry had loosened his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves, and his hair was slightly mussed. It was easy to imagine him white-water rafting.
“Killing people,”Kerry was saying,“is the only point of an assault weapon. It’s time we held the gun lobby and gun traffickers responsible for these kinds of murders . . .”
“Good,” Clayton remarked.
Frank kept watching the screen. “Mason’s against assault weapons,” he said, “but can you imagine him taking on the gun lobby? Listen to him, and you’d think all these gun nuts found their AK-forty-sevens under cabbage leaves.”
“At least until Boston,” Clayton rejoined. “Now we’ll see . . .”
“Kilcannon,”the ad’s voice-over finished.“The truth, for a change.”
“What about Social Security?” Mick Lasker asked. “Mason’s new ads attack Kerry’s reform proposals.”
“That just shows Kerry’s willingness to make a decision,” Frank said. “Even if Dick says Kerry’s going to cut benefits, Mason’s approach is too ‘old politics’ to work anymore.”
“People aren’t that stupid,” Jack Sleeper concurred. “Our polling shows they know Social Security’s in trouble. And more gen X-ers believe in extraterrestrials than that they’ll ever see a nickel from Uncle Sam. Dick comes off like the smarmy principal all the kids know is lying.”
On the screen, another ad appeared.
“Americans know,”Dick Mason said,“that I’ll fight to protect their air and water . . .”
The picture shifted to a view of the Vice President walking on an oil-befouled beach in hip boots.“For the last four years,” the voice-over said,“Dick Mason has accepted more contributions from corporate polluters than any previous presidential candidate.”
On the beach, Dick Mason shook his head in dismay.
“Sorry, Dick,”the voice said again.“It’s too late . . .”
“None of us want to run too many ads,” Clayton observed. “Rather than blur our message, I say we stick to using Kerry. Dick looks pretty stupid in the hip boots, but not as dumb as Dukakis in the tank.”
Frank glanced at Jack Sleeper, then, surreptitiously, at Nat Schlesinger. “There’s one more spot, Clayton, that Frank and I wanted to talk about.”
He sounded unusually tentative. “What’s that?” Clayton asked.
“It goes back to our focus groups,” Frank said. “Okay, Kerry’s got no wife, no kids, and, for political purposes, no mom. But what he does have going, at the risk of being irreverent, is the Holy Ghost.”
Clayton looked from Frank to Jack. “James Kilcannon,” he said in a flat voice.
“Look,” Jack Sleeper urged. “Think about what made Bobby Kennedy work. Part of it was the association with his brother and, in an odd way, the hope of r
eincarnation.
“Maybe, people thought, we can bring Jack back to life—make it up to the Kennedys, and to ourselves. In a way, repeat history.
“Some people found Bobby strident and authoritarian. Like Mick was saying, some people thinkKerry ’s a little scary—too combative and confrontational. But emotion and Jack Kennedy took Bobby a long way. Even if he was never President, James Kilcannon can help carry his kid brother across the river . . .”
“The river Styx?” Clayton asked. “What are you suggesting?”
Jack Sleeper stood, hands resting on the back of his chair. “We’ve focus-grouped James Kilcannon—how voters remember him. His favorables are something like eighty-three percent.” He looked around the table. “Frank’s preparing an ad using clips from Jamie’s last campaign. It’ll be ready tomorrow.”
“What will we call it,” Nat Schlesinger inquired. “ ‘Necrophilia’?”
They turned to him, silent, waiting. It was Nat Schlesinger who, as James Kilcannon’s press secretary, had been there when he died; Nat who had announced his death to the press corps, with tears in his eyes. “I loved James Kilcannon,” Nat said in the same quiet voice. “Oh, he was a pretty cool character, but I always figured he had his reasons, and he would have made this country proud.
“But that’s not why I have such a problem with this. Jamie was also the smartest politician I’ve ever known—smarter than Kerry, which, in some ways, is to Kerry’s credit. And what James Kilcannon would say if you managed to resurrect him is that this is a question of touch, and that you don’t need to beat folks over the head to remind them Kerry is his brother. Voters won’t like it.”
“Not justvoters ,” Clayton added bluntly. “Kerry. Where have you two been?”
“It works,” Frank Wells shot back. “You can look at Jack’s polling data. Dick Mason would do this in a nanosecond.”
“You tell Kerry that, Frank. That’ll turn him around.”
Frank’s diplomat’s face was harder now. “He’s gotten himself in trouble on abortion. He should think about getting himself out before Mason kills him with it.
“I have a favorite metaphor, Clayton. If all your friends came to you with a red box and told you that you had to hold it for four years and never drop it, because if you dropped it the whole goddamned world would blow up, you and every other normal person we know would hand the box back in a heartbeat.
“But every four years there are ten guys who come forward and say, ‘Give me the fucking box.’ And the guy who wins is the one who’ll kill all the other guys just for the chance to hold it.
“To me, that guy’s still Dick Mason. It’s time for Kerry to stop treating his brother like a forbidden subject.” Frank leaned forward. “I’ll show him the ad. Jack will show him the polling data. We’ll take the heat for it. But you letKerry decide how much he wants the box.”
Clayton stared at him. “All right,” he said. “We’ll do that. Tomorrow. It will absolutely make Kerry Kilcannon’s day.”
Frank’s gaze broke, and he looked suddenly weary. “Whether or not we run that ad, there’s the question of whether we go for it—sink our money into California, or not. Which is part of the same question.”
“Maybe not,” Mick Lasker countered. “I know Ellen Penn is calling every other day, saying go for broke. But that’s abouther reputation; she doesn’t want Kerry to embarrass her by losing in her state, and she doesn’t want to be blamed if he does.
“California isn’t winner-take-all. Kerry could lose a close election here and still pick up almost half our delegates.”
“If Kerry loses,” Jack Sleeper snapped, “it’s over. Haven’t we been claiming that the partyhas to ditch Dick Mason because only Kerry can win.”
Clayton did not comment. Instead he got up, removed the tape from the television, and turned on CNN.
On the screen, Dick Mason was standing in front of the abortion clinic, speaking in a strong, clear voice.“In the name of those who died here, I say to the purveyors of terror and violence: No more. Not one more life, not one more woman deprived of her legal rights . . .”
Clayton turned from the television. “Spend the money,” he said.
FIVE
Sean Burke stood alone on the corner.
Van Ness Avenue was slick with rain; a moment before, a Muni bus filled with commuters had splashed through a puddle of water and soaked the bottom of Sean’s jeans. Chilled, he gazed at the abandoned auto showroom across the street, papered with signs that read “Kilcannon for President.”
Sean felt disoriented. It was nine in the morning; by this time yesterday he had killed the abortionist and his accomplices, three time zones away. All that seemed real was the woman he had spared.
Sean could see her frightened green eyes, could imagine her describing to the police artist a killer who had babbled nonsense while the receptionist bled on the carpet. Soon they would show the sketch to members of Operation Life.
Who would be the one to give him up? he wondered. Which one would see a reproach to his own cowardice and, out of shame, look up from his portrait and put a name to Sean’s face?
Perhaps Paul Terris. He would remember their disagreements and, in tones of false reluctance, say, “It’s a little like Sean Burke.” And then the police would go to Father Brian and find that Sean had vanished.
The plane ticket would bring them here. His last hope was that he had vanished in the maze of a new city, under a new name, long enough to do what must be done.
Seven days, and he could not make himself cross the street.
Hands in his pockets, Sean felt the cool drizzle on his face and hair, smelled the exhaust fumes of a hundred cars. San Francisco was ugly, he decided: low-slung buildings, cheap restaurants, no trees, an anonymous dirty six-lane avenue that could have been anywhere.
A patrol car stopped at the curb beside him.
Sean stepped back, looking for a place to run. There was nothing but a grid of streets he did not know.
Heart racing, he looked back at the police car. It had only stopped for a traffic light; the cop in the passenger seat gazed ahead, sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup. This was a warning, Sean realized. The lining of his stomach felt bloody and raw. His pocket seemed empty without a gun.
When the light changed, Sean crossed the street and forced himself to enter Kilcannon headquarters.
The building felt as vast as a church, was as shabby as an old hotel. Voices issued from behind cheap partitions and echoed from tile floors to fifty-foot ceilings, filigreed with fading gold.
A receptionist of indeterminate race and age sat at a cafeteria table. Her skin looked dry, her face severe; her black eyes were opaque as obsidian. Remembering the eyes of another receptionist in her last moments of life, Sean looked away.
“I’m here for Senator Kilcannon,” he said.
“All right. Please have a seat and fill out a volunteer form.”
It took some moments. With the awkwardness of a child learning cursive, Sean wrote the name “John Kelly.” The only address he gave was “Golden Gate Motel.”
The next section asked for his activity preference. The list of tasks meant nothing to him; all Sean cared about was that Kilcannon would come to San Francisco, that headquarters must surely know his schedule. He put a check mark near any job that might keep him in this building.
The last question was “Best times to volunteer.”
Carefully, he wrote “Every day until next Tuesday” and gave the form to the receptionist.
Silent, she read it. “Looks like you’ve got some time for us,” she said, and picked up the telephone.
* * *
As the plane took off from San Diego, Kerry murmured to Kevin Loughery, “Miles to go before we sleep.”
He was tired yet fully awake, like someone on a coffee jag. He had already doneGood Morning San Diego and given his first speech. Ahead for the day were stops in Sacramento, then Oakland, then Los Angeles, and finally a cocktail party in Beverly
Hills, where film stars and studio heads would lecture him on public policy. “All most of them want is proximity to power,” Clayton told him. “Maybe a sleepover in the White House. Just worry about the ones who want to sleep withyou .”
Tomorrow morning, Kerry realized, Lara would be in the rear of the plane.
Somehow he would make himself meander through the press section, chatting with the others, until he reached where Lara was sitting and, as twenty reporters listened, say how nice it was to see her. The moment would feel like death—pretending that he had never looked into her face and wished their lives were different . . .
He stared out the window.
Kerry did not know how much time had passed before he noticed that the ground beneath was green and fertile, rich fields of crops bisected by irrigation ditches. It was no longer two years ago, when Lara and he could still make choices: the only question he faced now was “Are you good enough?” That was the question he asked himself in the privacy of flight, watching the lights of a city at night; or crossing the gray, jagged Rockies; or, as now, passing over farmlands that fed so many so well.
Are you good enough?
Twelve years ago, tomorrow, Jamie had died before he could find that out.
Next to Kerry, Kevin Loughery was quiet.
For another moment, Kerry watched the earth below them, coming closer. “Have you been back to Vailsburg lately?” he asked.
Kevin shook his head. “Not since Christmas,” he answered. “I took my mother to Mass at Sacred Heart, and things were so different it brought tears to her eyes. When she lived there, she said, the church was overflowing; even the balconies were full. Now it seems like a ghost town to her—rows of empty pews, and only a few of the old faces, the ones who couldn’t leave.”
Kerry thought of Liam Dunn, now buried near the church; Kerry had taken Kevin on the journey of politics much as Liam had, towing Kerry to the bars on Sunday. “It was a fine place,” Kerry answered. “If only we could have adapted instead of moving away. I wonder about that, now and then.”
NO SAFE PLACE Page 10
