The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear

by Stuart Stevens

  Lisa Henderson scowled as Ernie whispered in her ear. Typical Lisa. Every other woman in New Orleans would be smiling like crazy if Ernie was that close but not Lisa. It was a subject of some speculation among staffers in the vice president’s office that she had a secret life as a dominatrix. I hoped like hell it was true. Anything to make her seem more human. A guy could like a dominatrix. But liking Lisa, that was harder.

  Then Ginny Tran appeared at the edge of the stage, looking rattled. I’d worked with Ginny since those first days in New Hampshire and couldn’t remember ever seeing her look like this, even when every political expert in America thought we were running an expensive funeral and not a campaign. Something had to be bad wrong. Christ. I wondered if maybe Hilda had finally blown up at a reporter asking the same questions over and over. It wasn’t easy being just a few delegates shy of winning a nomination, and the idea that you might lose to an idiot like Armstrong George didn’t help. In the years I’d spent working with candidates, the one overwhelming lesson I’d learned was that even the best still had moments of terrible vulnerability. And waiting for a bunch of whack-job delegates to decide your fate was a pretty good definition of vulnerability.

  None of the Indians noticed me sliding offstage, but they were so much into their own drug-enhanced world, they probably wouldn’t have known it if their feet caught on fire. Which actually was one of their favorite closing-number tricks, something they did with the help of New Orleans’s expansive fireworks industry. Ginny pulled me into the cramped wings. For a half second I wondered how she got backstage. At the convention, where everybody was crazed about security and prestige, access was everything. For a brief few days, who had what passes to what areas was more important than how much you made or how many years you had played in the NFL. CEOs were known to offer five thousand dollars cash to junior staffers for the passes hanging around their necks. But that’s how it was in the bubble of the convention.

  “We’ve got a problem.” Ginny started right in. She was shouting over the sound of the Indians.

  “Houston, a problem?” It was an inside campaign joke. Right after our tracking showed us coming in second to Armstrong George in New Hampshire with only four days to go, second being as bad as fourth after coming in third in Iowa, I’d had a late-night screening at our Manchester headquarters of Apollo 13. We were all giddy and exhausted, laughing and crying all the way through the movie, and came out with a screw-the-world game face that helped turn it around those last four days. That and Hilda Smith’s kick-ass debate performance when she had finally shamed Armstrong George into going on the defensive. It showed us what Hilda Smith might be able to do, and the debate was like a light shining down a path to lead us out of the maze. That was also the night, right after Apollo 13, that Ginny and I slept together for the first time. It had all been her doing, too, which made it all the better. “I knew I wanted you before the campaign was over,” she’d said that night, standing in the snow outside the Quality Inn that we all called the Low Quality End, “and since this campaign might be over in three days, I’d better get with it.”

  “Well, you’re a goddamn optimist,” I’d shot back, but didn’t hesitate for a second. Going back to my first campaign, I’d lived by a rule of staying away from any campaign relationships, even the late-night, one-night campaign kind of sex that everybody went for at some point. But Ginny was beautiful and smart and twenty-six, and this was New Hampshire, for Christ’s sake, and it looked like my comeback campaign was about to end before it really started. And the truth was, I hadn’t slept with a woman since I’d been dumped by Sandra.

  “A bomb went off,” Ginny shouted over the Mardi Gras Indians. “In the French Quarter.”

  —

  Ernie Hawkins ushered us past the cordon of flashing lights and what looked like half of the New Orleans Police Department. On the way down, Ernie told us what he knew: some kind of explosive device had detonated down in the Quarter. But instead of being filled with shrapnel, it had been filled with dye. Red dye.

  “Dye?” I asked. It made no sense, and I was wondering if maybe I had some kind of hallucinogenic contact high from the Indians.

  “Dye,” Eddie said. “Like somebody was trying to play a joke. One woman was injured and is at the hospital. Nothing serious, but she was right next to it.”

  Drunken delegates still roamed the Quarter in a light, misting rain. Despite the moisture, it was almost a hundred degrees at three twenty in the morning. The television remotes were just setting up. The reporters giving stand-ups looked either exhausted or half-drunk, turned out of bed or bar. But who could blame them? No one was expecting a piece of juicy news like this to come down in the middle of the night.

  “Saigon isn’t this fucking humid,” Ginny moaned as we followed Ernie’s towering presence toward the entrance of Pat O’Brien’s. “How did you live here?”

  “It’s not the humidity, it’s the stupidity.” That had been the unofficial slogan of my high school crowd in Metairie.

  “No wonder you got the hell out of this place,” she said, taking my hand lightly so I could tow her through the crowd.

  “Darlin’, you don’t know the half of it,” I quipped, but I was thinking about her hand, wondering if she was trying to send me some kind of signal. Which was very unlike Ginny. She usually delivered signals by more direct means, like, “What do you think, you want to have sex or what?”

  “Hey, J.D., you behind this bullshit?” The question came from a tall man with a big shock of blond hair. He was wearing a trench coat and a blue blazer, holding a microphone.

  “Jesus Christ, Hendricks,” I said, looking him over, “you almost look like a real reporter.”

  “Ain’t it grand, laddie?” Paul Hendricks lapsed into an Irish brogue. He was from Boston and liked to play the working-class kid from Southie. “So the rumor is”—he leaned down to whisper, his bright blue eyes flashing—“that you set this off trying to scare Armstrong George delegates to death.”

  “You are so pathetic, Hendricks,” I answered evenly. I paused for a moment, then continued. “You know I’d never scare anybody. I’d just kill ’em.”

  Hendricks chuckled. “Hey,” he said, “you like my look?” He stepped back for a second, holding the lapels of his trench coat. “Feel like a real war correspondent, covering the Blitz or something cool like that.”

  “You look like a flasher with a free candy van in front of St. Aloysius grade school.”

  “I’m getting a live shot out of this, so screw you.”

  Paul Hendricks was one of those political operatives who had made the switch to journalism, if that’s what you could call what he did. I suppose I’d have to call him a role model, which was a depressing thought. He wrote a column, hosted a weekly show on Fox, and popped up wherever a talking head was needed on politics. In a presidential year like this, in a tight race with a genuine real convention, Paul Hendricks seemed to be everywhere. We didn’t really like each other, but we had that most common of political realities, a “useful” friendship. I’d leaked to him that our tracking polls showed Hilda making big moves with older voters in New Hampshire after the last debate, and when one of Eddie Basha’s field reps found flyers in a GM plant parking lot near Toledo, Ohio, saying that Hilda Smith favored replacing union jobs with illegal aliens, we fed it to Hendricks and he ran with a story blaming the Armstrong George campaign for dirty tricks. I was never quite sure if one of Eddie’s guys had planted the flyers, but hey, we won Toledo and we won the Ohio primary—if only by 1.8 percent.

  Hendricks had carved out a nice niche for himself, but he didn’t have his own show, a show that he partly owned. That was my game plan. If everything went smoothly, he would be part of my competition. I knew I could take him on the tube. Like most everyone in the media who pretended to know something about politics, Hendricks was basically a political amateur. Sure, he had worked some races back in the day, but his commentary was like having an old player in the booth at the Super Bowl
whose last contact with football was playing for a single-wing team. Me, I was the stud quarterback fresh from the pros, the guy who could sit in the booth and tell you what it was really like out there on the field, what the players grumbled to one another across the line, how it felt to score in the last second of a big game when everybody thought it was impossible. Sports was how I was going to cover politics.

  “So, look,” Hendricks said, turning serious, “you have any idea what the hell is going on? This make any sense to you? Delegates are going to be really freaked out.”

  I’d already heard from Eddie Basha that some of our delegates were talking about leaving town. Even if only a few of them jumped ship it could be a disaster. When you were down to fighting hand to hand, every delegate was precious. Any drop in our count could be seen as fatal and start a stampede of those who were only with you because they thought you would win, delegates rarely being profiles in courage.

  “Jesus, you are a sick son of a bitch, Hendricks,” I shot back. “How can you even think about delegate counts now?”

  “Yeah,” he sneered, “and you want to tell me what the hell you’re doing here? You going to play detective? Give me a break. Hey, remember, the innocent have nothing to fear!” Hendricks laughed. That was the line that Armstrong George loved to use when asked if his New Bill of Rights went too far. The innocent have nothing to fear. He always said it with a certain smile. He was very good.

  I started to say something back to Hendricks, but Ginny pushed me discreetly forward and we followed Ernie past the outer row of sawhorses and yellow tape into the cleared area where the bomb had exploded. There was red dye that looked like dirty blood and little pieces of a gym bag that had been holding the bomb. Somber-looking men in dark windbreakers labeled FBI and NOPD BOMB SQUAD milled around as if waiting for something else to happen.

  “We got the locals, the Service, the FBI, the ATF,” Ernie ticked off. “Just your typical law enforcement goat rope.” This was what had become known since September 11, 2001, as “A Unified Response.” It was the standard procedure for every big public event, from the Super Bowl to NASCAR races. And political conventions. “Well now,” Ernie said, “lookie here. We’ve even got the son of the great man himself. Somerfield George, in the house.” Ernie nodded to a scrum of reporters and Secret Service agents moving our way. At the center, a blond, absurdly handsome head had the “concerned but not panicked” look that the best politicians adopt naturally. “You going to say howdy?” Ernie joked.

  That was exactly what I intended to do. I couldn’t let Somerfield George be this close and not engage. It would make me look…weak. And if I looked weak, Hilda Smith looked weak, and there were reporters everywhere. Okay, who was I kidding? If I looked weak, I looked like a loser, and my own image was what really mattered. I made my way through the crowd, Ginny trailing. “Paging Major Shit Storm J.D.,” she said in a low voice, but I knew she’d be enjoying it. She loved confrontation.

  About five feet away, the big handsome head turned my way and our eyes locked. He glared at me for a split second before a smile broke out and his eyes seemed to warm. It was like watching a killer shark trained at Sea World to accept humans. He pushed through the ring of security, hand outstretched. “J.D., sad night. You holding up?”

  We shook hands while photographers scrambled to get a shot. “Hell of a thing,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder in my most friendly gesture. I pulled him down just a bit and leaned in. “What I can’t figure out,” I whispered, “is how you guys planted this without anybody seeing you.”

  Most guys would have snarked back, but he just nodded, as if I’d shared my deepest condolences. “America’s better than this,” Somerfield said in that perfectly modulated voice that every microphone was sure to capture. “We will never let fear defeat us.”

  I stared at him, deeply impressed. This was really level-A bullshit, and even coming from the candidate’s son, not the candidate. I respected it. Behind me, Ginny said, “Oh, go fuck yourself, you pretty-boy piece of shit.” She did it perfectly, just loud enough for Somerfield, his face tightening for just a nanosecond, to hear, but not loud enough to be captured by the reporters. It was like the experienced prison inmate in the cafeteria line who leaves the victim bleeding but isn’t seen by the guards. I shrugged, as if to say, “Hey, she’s right, what can I do?,” reached out and shook Somerfield’s hand, and then turned away. I was just making my way out of the crowd when Lisa Henderson caught me from behind.

  “J.D.,” she whispered, “you think it’s a good idea for you to be here?” Lisa Henderson had a flat, edgy voice and a knack for making every utterance sound like she was back in the courtroom as one of Hilda Smith’s assistant prosecutors, grilling an uncooperative witness. It was her style to always pose awkward questions, instantly placing the other person on the defensive. It didn’t matter how small the issue, it was just how she dealt with the world. “So this is a turkey and Swiss?” she would ask the poor White House intern fetching her lunch. It was very hard not to experience a moment of deep panic and wonder if somehow the sandwich had gotten mixed up with something else, say, a fresh dog turd wrapped in aluminum foil.

  I’d learned to deal with Lisa Henderson by simply ignoring most of her questions and pursuing my own line of questioning. It gave our conversations an odd, disconnected quality, something like a bad Beckett play.

  “Have you spoken to the vice president?” I asked.

  “What did Somerfield say?” she continued.

  All at once I was very, very tired. I liked to consider myself a master of chaos management, planning for every contingency, but I hadn’t in my wildest dreams considered a scenario in which a bomb would go off and scare the living hell out of the entire convention. A bomb outside Pat O’Brien’s?

  “He’s a regular Churchill and FDR. He thinks we should never let fear defeat us.”

  “What a pompous ass,” she said.

  “We have to put out a statement,” I sighed. “Hilda has to be told.” I hated the idea of waking her up, but there was no escaping it.

  “I have a draft working,” Ginny said.

  “I’ll inform the vice president.” Lisa bristled, ignoring Ginny. She hated it when I called the vice president by her first name.

  “The war room in half an hour, okay, then we’ll go see her?” For a moment our eyes met, and I thought I saw a hint of confusion, maybe a touch of fear. I reached out and touched her elbow. “Long night.” I wondered if she realized I really did feel bad about how she had been treated after I replaced her, being particularly sensitive to the realities of public humiliation. Not that it had stopped me from pursuing her demise for one second. But I was a political consultant. Political consultants weren’t expected to be good people, thank God.

  She smiled, or did what Lisa Henderson did that passed for a smile. “In the war room,” she said.

  I had dealt with variations of Lisa from my very first campaigns. She was the staffer who was totally dedicated to her boss, and she was always suspicious of a hired-gun political consultant who would move on to another campaign win or lose. On Capitol Hill these staffers tended to be more female than male, and the joke went that each of them had the perfect recipe for beef Bourguignon—for one. Like many of them, male and female, Lisa had never married. And, like a nun, she had married her job, and her job was Hilda Smith. She saw Hilda winning the presidency as something close to divine prophecy, her religion being worship at the House of Hilda Smith. She had met our boss when Hilda was teaching part-time at the University of Vermont and followed her through every step of her career. Lisa hated me because she needed me to help Hilda Smith win. I understood that, and there was nothing I could do but manage it, not fix it.

  I was halfway down the block, crafting a statement in my head expressing Hilda Smith’s outrage, when I heard Sandra. She was yelling at a crew to hurry up. It was a famous voice, clear and distinct, but now with an edge never heard on the air. When she was angry or drinking
or not thinking or all three, you could hear the accent she had been born with, not the one she cultivated to take her from Florida to NBC in Washington.

  I stopped and instinctively took a half step backward toward the comfort of the deep shadows along St. Ann. One moment I had felt exhausted and slightly numb, then my heart was pounding like after a near miss on the freeway. Ginny looked away, as if she had caught me with my pants down emerging from a bathroom. Which she had, really, I thought. Christ, I can’t just hide here in the shadows like some scared kid. So I stepped back out into the street and headed right toward the woman hurrying in high heels followed by a small pack of straining men.

  She smiled when she saw me, and, later, replaying it all in my head, that was what bothered me the most. She didn’t even feel like she had to look awkward. Just a smile, a tilt of the head, maybe a little apology in the eyes, but it was dark and I might have been imagining it.

  “J.D.,” she blurted, slightly out of breath, “what the holy hell is going on here?”

  “A bomb,” I said simply, and later I hated this moment. No witty comeback, no elegant put-down, not even a bitter exchange. Just a quiet statement of the obvious. “A bomb. One person was hurt.” In that lousy dead-air blanket of the New Orleans night, I thought I could smell her perfume. But that was probably impossible, what with the reek of garbage wafting over everything. Then she held out her hand. For a moment, I stared at it, stunned. Her hand? We had lived together for eighteen months, or more or less lived together. We had made love hundreds of times. We were going to shake hands?

  “Christ, Sandra,” was all I muttered, and then walked away, a smiling Ginny in tow. We were only a few feet away when Ginny uttered one word, which hung there in the air: “Bitch.”