Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Danny said, “You can’t let this go on.”

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “What’s to think about, Jack? It’s like motherhood, for Christ’s sake. Make some busts, make a speech. Take the issue away from this jerk.”

  “I said I’d think about it.”

  “I heard you. What the fuck is the matter with you on this one, Jack?”

  Jack’s hands were tied, of course. He pleaded with Morgan to let him denounce the drug trade, and Morgan pleaded with me, but Peter’s guideline held firm.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “He has to stay away from this issue.”

  “It’s killing him.”

  “Then Jack will have to find some other issue. A diversion.”

  “Diversions cost money, Dmitri. And we’re broke.”

  This was true. Ironically, there was no shortage of money. Peter’s Caribbean accounts were overflowing. The problem was explaining where it came from. How to hide the funds, how to launder them? Those were the questions; they are always the questions.

  Meanwhile, Jack was running out of time. A month before the election, eight points behind in the latest poll, he pleaded in private with the governor for more money, more exposure, more appearances together. The governor put an arm around his young running mate and with a sad shake of the head said, “Jack, your showing is a real disappointment to us, too.”

  “Those fuckers want me to lose,” Jack told Danny. “They set me up with this worthless office to get rid of me. I knew what they were doing. I should have gone for the governorship.”

  “You wouldn’t have made it.”

  “Maybe not, but I could have made it close and then come back. No one would have expected me to win. Just like nobody expected me to lose for this chickenshit office. Except my own party.”

  “You are so right,” said Danny. “I just got off the phone. The word is: no help. You’re on your own. Without the party organization, we can’t get out the vote for you.”

  Jack was undaunted. “Then we’ll go around the bastards.”

  “That may not work either. The governor’s losing a point a week in the polls. They won’t come right out and say it, but they think it’s all over for everybody. It’s that asshole in the White House, dragging everybody in the party down with him. It will take an act of God for either one of you to win.”

  “No, just money,” Jack said.

  “We’ve got less than two thousand bucks in the kitty.”

  “I don’t give a shit about that. Find out how much it will cost for a week of thirty-second television spots on every TV channel and radio station in Ohio. I’ll have Morgan call New York and find out about production costs.”

  “Jack—”

  “Danny, just do it. Now.”

  Danny picked up the phone. While he made his calls, Jack scribbled on a yellow legal pad, outlining the ads he had in mind. They were mostly images, few words. Subliminals were what he wanted. He knew every inch of footage that had ever been taken of him by the media. Danny finished his telephoning. He made some entries on the old-fashioned hand-cranked adding machine that he kept on his desk, then tore off the tape and handed it to Jack.

  “That’s about eighty grand more than we’ve got,” he said.

  Jack said, “A bargain. Book the time. I want a spot an hour for the last five days, heavy on the football games.”

  “Jack, they’ll want the money up front.”

  “I’ll sell the house,” Jack said.

  Morgan walked in.

  Jack said, “I’ll raffle Morgan.”

  “Very funny,” Morgan said. “What’s this all about?”

  “Money,” Jack said. “We need a hundred grand. Now. Morgan, find a buyer for the house.”

  “The house?” Morgan said. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “It’ll be a national landmark someday,” Danny said. “On this spot President Adams, unarmed and alone, defeated the Mafia sharpshooters and went on to save the world for the workers.”

  “Jack,” Morgan said, “get serious.”

  “Morgan, honey, sell the house. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll spell it out: Merriwether is rich. We’re poor. He can spend millions and not miss it. We’re willing to lose everything. Why? Because we have made a sacred promise to the people and we’d rather live in a cardboard box than break that promise.”

  Morgan looked at him with respect, and something that went beyond respect. “I understand,” she said.

  “Good. Bring me the money.”

  The next evening, in a motel near Beaver, Pennsylvania, a Mr. O. N. Laster of Saddle Brook, New Jersey, signed an agreement to purchase the Adamses’ bungalow. He handed over to Mrs. Adams, the sole owner, a cashier’s check for $59,500 as payment in full for the property.

  After Mr. Laster departed—an exit easily arranged inasmuch as he did not exist—I gave Morgan a crate of rare books. Thanks to Morgan’s Harvard training in cutthroat bargaining, the books, which included autographed first editions of a work by Henry James and The Great Gatsby, brought an aggregate of $68,764, or about 15 percent more than I would have dared to ask for the items. Morgan told interviewers that the books had been a bequest from her grandfather, and though they were the material things she treasured most in the world, she knew that Papa, as she had called that wonderful old man, would have understood that her husband and what he represented to Ohio and America had to come first.

  Five days before the election, the spots went on the air. One set of ads showed a dizzying montage of still and moving pictures of F. Merriwether Street in the company of Richard Nixon, closing with a remarkable video sequence of Nixon shooting a sidelong glance at Merriwether, followed immediately by another in which the two men stood side by side in front of a crowd with their backs to the camera and their arms around each other. Because Nixon was so much shorter than Street, his groping hand appeared, briefly, to be fondling Street’s buttocks. This was followed by a clip of Nixon’s famous “I am not a crook” utterance and finally by an extreme close-up of F. Merriwether Street’s habitually puzzled face. As Jack’s witty columnist friend wrote, Street looked in that photo like an especially stupid horse that had just awakened to find itself in bed with the severed head of a Hollywood producer.

  The other ads focused on Jack: A series were tributes to Jack from wounded Ohioans to whom he had ministered as an army medic during the Vietnam War, shots of Jack pushing the twins in their stroller, an interview with a worshipful Teresa Gallagher, shots of Jack comforting his terrified wife in the ruins of their modest bungalow, footage of Fats Corso scuttling off to jail in manacles. One or the other of these spots ran at least once an hour on every local television channel in Ohio.

  The ads were brilliantly ruthless examples of the genre, and thanks to the last-minute surge in the polls that they created, Jack won election to lieutenant governor by 1,936 votes. By no coincidence, the governor, who had been pronounced dead by the media, won by an almost identical plurality of 1,894 votes. His margin might have been greater, but after Jack’s closing blitz a lot of voters were under the impression that he was running for governor, and he got about two thousand write-in votes for that office in addition to the total he received for lieutenant governor.

  At the victory celebration the governor embraced Jack, called out his name to the exultant crowd, and cried, “Meet a future governor of our great state! Lucky Jack Adams!”

  When the governor turned to Morgan, she handed the twin she was holding—Skipper, she thought it was—to Jack and threw her arms around the governor, bestowing a big daughterly kiss onto the empty air beside his cheek.

  While the crowd cheered Jack and his twins, who were waving to one and all, Morgan whispered a message into the governor’s ear: “Lucky my ass, you double-crossing son of a bitch.”

  The governor blinked, smiled, and lifted one of the boys out of Jack’s arms and held him aloft in triumph
. “Cry, Skipper!” Morgan whispered.

  This twin’s name was Fitz, but frightened out of his wits by his mother’s fierce expression, he uttered a mighty yell of distress and, to the crowd’s delight, held out his chubby arms to his daddy.

  2 Street, Frew, Street & Merriwether, the venerable law firm for which Cindy Miller worked, had devised a peculiar system for choosing partners from within itself. After a promising associate was marked for possible promotion, he was summoned into the presence of the managing partner and offered candidate membership in the Handful, so called because the firm never had more than five senior partners, and because the candidate would be observed and judged by the stern standards of the firm for the next five years. At the end of that period he would either be offered a partnership, or not. The candidate would know which way the decision had gone when, arriving at work on the fifth anniversary of the offer, he opened the door of his office to find either a burst of applause from the assembled senior partners or an empty office. In the latter case, the failed candidate was expected to depart at once. Personal belongings would be packed and shipped at the firm’s expense, along with a final paycheck. This system had produced several nervous breakdowns, but the survivors usually did well for Street, Frew, Street & Merriwether and for themselves.

  The fifth anniversary of Cindy’s candidacy happened to fall in the week after the election in which Jack Adams had defeated F. Merriwether Street for lieutenant governor of Ohio. When she went into work that morning—arriving precisely fifteen minutes early as was the tradition—she found an empty office. Even though she had brought hundreds of thousands of dollars in business into the firm, had won difficult cases in court and settled even knottier ones by negotiation, no appeal was possible, or even thinkable. She left her rest-room key on her desk.

  Danny had driven Cindy into work that morning and parked around the corner. His heart fell, then swelled with anger at the Streets, Merriwethers, and Frews of this world as he saw her approaching in the rearview mirror, head up, golden hair bouncing, skirt swinging as she walked at her usual firm, rapid pace. He saw her smile, then smile again and yet again as a stream of people said hi to her. A man in a five-hundred-dollar suit turned to watch her with a rueful smile as she walked by, the American object of desire itself.

  “Bastards,” Danny said.

  “They are what they are,” Cindy said.

  “Cin, I’m so sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For sticking with Jack. That’s the reason for this. We both know that.”

  “You’re right,” Cindy said. “What else would you expect the Merriwethers and the Streets to do to a woman whose husband did what you did to the scion of their fine old family?”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I do,” Cindy said. Cindy was dry-eyed. Her voice was even. What had happened was exactly what she had expected, and in her tidy way she had already made provisions for a new future. She grasped Danny’s ruined right thigh and said, “Cheer up. You just got yourself a new partner.”

  Danny frowned in puzzlement. “I thought we always were partners,” Danny said.

  “I mean law partner. I want to join your firm.”

  Cindy had not mentioned this before. Danny said, “No shit? Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely. We can start today.”

  “What about Jack?”

  Cindy said, “When was the last time he came into the office? As a lawyer, not as a candidate?”

  “Not since he was elected attorney general. As long as he’s a public official he can’t mess around with the firm. You know that.”

  “Which means he’ll never come back, because he’s going to spend the rest of his life being elected to higher and higher office. Isn’t that the plan?”

  Danny shrugged. “Unless he loses one.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “Cindy, he may not come in to practice law, but he comes in almost every day to talk politics or drop off the kids.”

  Cindy paused, eyes wide. “He drops off the kids?”

  “Only for an hour or two. The receptionist watches them.”

  “What about Morgan?”

  “He never brings them in when she’s there.”

  “Ah. He’s using them for cover while he gets laid.”

  “Probably.”

  “That will stop,” Cindy said. “No kids in the office. And no politics. You’ve got to split the political operation off from the practice. You can keep the space you’ve got now as campaign headquarters or whatever you want to call it. Meet him there.”

  “Isolate the virus?”

  “You said it, not me.”

  “Cindy, why this?”

  “I’m unemployed.”

  “You can get a job with any firm in town.”

  “No thanks. You can’t handle the firm alone. You’re going broke. You need a litigator and a partner with contacts with the people who run this town. I need a job. Unless you don’t want me.”

  “I want you. You’re the best lawyer in Columbus. But is this realistic?”

  Cindy took Danny’s hand. She said, “Danny, I don’t need any lessons in reality. Let’s go look at the new offices. We can walk.”

  “New offices?”

  She looked over her shoulder at him, smiling, and crooked a finger: Follow me. To Danny she did not look a day older than she had looked in the corridors of Tannery Falls High. She had rented the offices the week before, in a glass building next door to the Merriwether Building. The brass plate on the mahogany door read: MILLER, ADAMS & MILLER.

  “Jack between us,” Cindy said. “Just like always.”

  She turned the key and opened the door onto a handsome suite of offices. Light fell through a glass ceiling onto mahogany and leather, onto Bokhara carpets and aromatic leather-bound books.

  Danny whistled. “Can we afford this?”

  “If we don’t let Jack sign checks, yes, I think so,” Cindy replied.

  In her office, next to Danny’s corner office, she unlocked a drawer and removed the papers she had drawn up for the partnership.

  “I’ve already signed,” she said. “Sign them yourself and get Jack’s signature and we’re in business.”

  3 To everyone’s surprise, Morgan accepted the new partnership with enthusiasm. She saw advantages in removing Cindy from the encampment of the enemy and placing her, as it were, in protective custody. The closer her physical presence, the easier she was to watch and control. Yes, control: Morgan did, after all, have the power to disclose Cindy’s innermost secret—or to put her in a position where she would be forced either to confess it to Danny, thus making wreckage of his life, or to do what her blackmailer asked. Any such blackmail would be more likely to succeed if Cindy had no power base of her own. As Morgan saw it, Cindy’s loss of a gilded future at Street, Frew, Street & Merriwether was in every way our gain.

  Also, from the start, Morgan had disliked having Danny in the same office with her and Jack. Danny’s presence was the reason why she and Jack conversed in whispers when they discussed operational matters. Whispering annoyed them both—Jack because he disliked the hiss of Morgan’s displeasure in his ear, Morgan because Jack made her want to shout and she was seldom able to do so.

  To make possible more outspoken communications she converted Jack’s old office into a soundproof room, telling the office staff that Jack needed a place to think, practice and play back his speeches, and, especially, hold strategy meetings out of earshot of the right-wing spies who stalked all persons of conscience who were fighting for social justice. The secretaries and the receptionist were themselves persons of conscience who had lived since Movement days with the suspicion that their telephones were being tapped and their food and drink were being poisoned by fascists, so this explanation made perfect sense to them.

  The staff called it Morgan’s room. It was equipped with a television set, a coffeepot of its own, a small refrigerator and microwave oven for heating pizza, a reading chair a
nd lamp, a sofa bed. It could only be entered through a heavy steel door with a keypad lock to which Morgan alone had the combination. Not even Jack—especially not Jack—was entrusted with the entry code.

  The room was also equipped with a hidden safe and certain other clandestine features. These were installed at night by her friend the Georgian sexual mechanic. He did this without my knowledge or approval. As provided by the approved procedure, he and Morgan now met at least once a month, usually in a motel after she met me. Unbeknownst to me, they also met from time to time on an impulse. These heated assignations had reawakened the Georgian’s sexual obsession. In or out of bed, he would—as I soon learned—do anything for Morgan.

  It was the Georgian, as you will remember, who headed the team that bugged the Gruesomes’ penthouse. For what I thought were sound operational reasons, I had refused to let Morgan keep the tapes of Jack in action. It was, however, a simple matter for the Georgian to make copies and hand them over to her. Given his virtually matchless experience of women and what they are capable of doing in the name of love, this was an act of almost unbelievable folly. You would have thought him the last person in the world to fall into this particular trap. But as the history of the world had taught us long before these two lovers met, no one falls so deeply, madly, truly in love as a whore.

  In any case, Morgan stored the tapes in the safe in her soundproof room and sometimes went there at night to study them. Her power over Jack was slipping from her fingers. I had taken away her control of his sex life. As lieutenant governor, Jack had shaken loose from other bonds. He kept later hours, presiding over the state senate during crucial night sessions and traveling around Ohio to speak at political dinners and other name-building events. After “selling” the bungalow (which was subsequently resold at a loss by its purchaser), the Adamses purchased a new, larger house in an upscale part of town. Jack now had a car of his own, in which Morgan frequently discovered, in wee-hour searches, such traces of female occupancy as long hair of many colors, lipstick-smudged cigarette butts, combs, barrettes, lingerie, the lingering aroma of perfume and bodily secretions, and telltale stains on the upholstery—even, once, a diaphragm. All this forensic evidence of Jack’s incurable treachery she kept in her hidden safe, sealed in a Tupperware container.