The day after Election Day. The “item” Peter had just sold to Mr. Gee was Jack. The seventy million dollars payable to Peter in November was a finder’s fee. The thirty million dollars now fluttering into the vaults of a hundred American banks was the money Jack had been waiting for. The money he needed to win.
Peter had optioned Jack Adams’s contract with us to the new Chinese capitalists, who now owned all rights to the next president of the United States.
The blood drained from my face. “Dmitri,” my friend said, “what’s the matter?”
3 That week, the Adams campaign was in California. As soon as I stepped off my plane, I called Morgan’s personal cell phone. She answered on the first ring.
In a voice deeper than my natural tone I said, “I come from the fisherman.”
She said, “It’s about time. Fly to Monterey. Four-thirty at the aquarium. By the shark’s tank. I will speak to you.”
I recognized her at once, and like my friend in Shanghai she had no difficulty seeing past my new face. She herself was in disguise—her old false tummy and her counterculture clothes. She wore the thick glasses she had discarded years before and joke-store fake crooked teeth snapped over her own perfect smile.
“Nice try with the basso profundo, but I knew who you were,” she said. “I didn’t think the call would come from you.”
“You’re in for a lot of surprises,” I said.
I told her what I had learned in Shanghai.
I had thought that I knew her so well that nothing she did could surprise me. I was wrong. When I told her about the money, a magnified tear squeezed from the corner of her magnified eye. She said, “Thank God. God bless Peter. So that was what he meant!”
“Meant by what?”
“By Peter’s message.”
“Peter has been in touch?”
“In a roundabout way. He sent Jack a girl. Actually, she called me on the cell phone. She spoke the recognition phrase.”
“Describe this woman.”
“Black hair, tawny skin, long legs, big tits, high IQ. Mixed ancestry. Your basic bunny.”
The honey-colored girl. I said, “And what was Peter’s message?”
“That Jack was to keep himself only unto this bimbo until further notice. No other playmates. So far Jack doesn’t mind that part; you should see the girl. She’s his closest adviser.”
“Tell me more.”
“Lovely name: Trixie Wang. Poli-sci at Berkeley, master’s from Yale in Chinese.”
“Did she bring a message?”
“Peter wants Jack to play a round of golf with an important contributor. A Chinese gentleman.”
“Is his name by any chance Mr. Gee?”
“Yes. My, what a lot you know, Uncle Wiggly.”
“When does the golf game take place?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Someone has to warn Jack.”
Morgan said, “Warn him of what? That Peter has come through again, that all his problems are solved?”
I explained who Mr. Gee was, and what he stood for.
Morgan shrugged. “So he has good cover. He’s still a friend of Peter’s.”
“Morgan, he is no friend of ours.”
“Then why is Peter sending him to us?”
Peter, Peter. The bond was very strong. Could I make her understand? I tried. I said, “Morgan, remember what this operation you have given your life to is really about. It’s about saving the revolution, not betraying it.”
“Of course it is. And saving it is what’s happening.”
“No. Something else is happening. Our objective was to start over with a clean slate in a fresh country—the right country this time. To make the revolution work by purifying it. This man Gee represents corruption.”
Morgan frowned. “How so?”
“He is a capitalist.”
“He can’t be. Peter said he would never abandon us, and he hasn’t. The Soviet Union is gone, Dmitri. So Peter is bringing help from China. From the last good country on Earth, the last Marxist country in the world. He’s saving the operation, saving our lives, keeping his promises. Saving the revolution, for pity’s sake. Why are you saying these things against him?”
“Because you don’t know Peter.”
“Ha!”
“Morgan, listen to me. Peter doesn’t give a shit for communism. He wants money and secret thrills and he wants to die a long time from now with the knowledge that he double-crossed the whole world and got away with it. That’s all he ever wanted.” I spoke from the heart. As always, this was a mistake.
Morgan said, “Oh, really?” She took off her glasses and from eyes swimming with myopia gave me a look of deep, inexpressible disgust, as though she had been told what to expect and had fought belief but now understood that I had never been the honest Communist spy I represented myself to be but a secret fascist from the start. Now I had unmasked myself. In the tick of the clock everything had changed. She hated me.
“Are you sure it’s Peter you’re talking about and not whatever kind of slime you’ve become since the last time I saw you?” she said. “You’ve changed your face. What else have you changed?”
I said, “I’m not the one who has changed, Morgan. I want to talk to Jack.”
“So do a lot of other people. But they can’t get near him, and neither can you.” Her eyes were watering—from anger, not sorrow. “The bimbo brought me something in secret writing,” she said. “Shades of the Comintern. I had almost forgotten how to develop it.”
Morgan showed me the message, ghostly letters written in invisible ink on a slightly charred notebook page. The words were written in English, in Peter’s unmistakable flowing hand: Warning: D. is no longer a friend. Burn this.
I said, “If you believe this, why did you meet me?”
“Because I couldn’t believe it. But now I do. Dmitri, Jesus. You, of all people.”
“Morgan, tell me for your own sake. Where is the golf game?”
Morgan smiled very sweetly with her false hillbilly teeth, then produced a cigarette lighter and set Peter’s message alight. She let it fall from her hand and it fluttered, burning, to the ground.
I sensed movement just outside my field of vision. This was a signal. I looked behind Morgan and saw Igor. In the tiny lenses of her glasses I could see the Georgian’s reflection. I put my wallet into her hand. She stared at it, uncomprehending. I seized her and threw her to the ground.
“Thief!” I shouted.
A woman screamed. “She’s pregnant!”
People turned to look. A security guard arrived.
“Fucking bitch stole my wallet,” I said.
“A pregnant woman?” the cop said.
“She’s about as pregnant as you are,” I said. “Look at her. It’s a pillow. It’s part of the scam.”
Morgan was tugging frantically at her preggie, which had slid around to the side.
I said, “She’s got two confederates.” I described Igor and the Georgian. By now they had vanished.
Morgan denied everything, but there my wallet was, and there, twisted onto her hip, was her preggie. The security man unlimbered his handset, to call the police.
“Wait,” I said. “Forget the cops. All I want is my wallet.”
“You don’t want to file charges?”
“I’m on vacation. She’s fucked up my good time enough already. Just get her out of sight.”
He handed me my wallet. I counted the money and the credit cards. “All there.”
“Let her go,” I said. And to Morgan: “You need help, sister. Here’s a number you can call.” I tucked a card in the pocket of her jacket.
The guard walked her to the door, never dreaming whose elbow he was holding. “Never come back,” he said. I was sure she never would.
4 Time was running out for Jack; Election Day was just five weeks ahead. Broke as he was, behind in the polls as he was, he knew that he could win, that he could come from behind in the last two weeks
exactly as JFK had done if he could do what Kennedy had done: pick up just a few thousand additional votes in a few key precincts in swing states. He knew precisely which precincts to target and precisely what the voters in those precincts wanted to hear and were willing to believe.
What Jack needed was a breakthrough issue—something to get the media’s mind off drugs and the character issue. A new ex-mistress popped up on supermarket tabloid racks more or less weekly. All were good-looking and, in Jack’s opinion, did him as much good as harm with the voters, especially among women. The polls confirmed this; with each revelation his popularity took a little hop upward, as if in reward for potency. One of the wilder papers had even run a story—much milder than the reality—on the Gruesome penthouse. Jack was under daily attack from the Right on his drugs record. He wanted to counterattack with an issue that would startle and surprise the country and get the columnists talking about something else.
“What we need is a hidden danger,” Jack said to Danny. “A plot. A dragon to slay.”
Danny said, “You want to slay this dragon or just beat the shit out of it until November and then let it slink away?”
“Depends on how big a dragon it turns out to be.”
“Like a missile gap?”
“It’s been done,” Jack said.
“So has ‘What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.’”
Jack slapped his own forehead. “Thank you, Lord, that’s it!” With a whoop that brought the Secret Service running, Jack leaped to his feet, overturning a chair with a crash. “Daniel, you’re a genius. Tobacco.”
This fit right in with his overall strategy for victory. Attacking the tobacco barons had worked for him before. The polls told him he had no realistic chance to carry the tobacco states or any other major southern state except Florida, one of the keystones of his plan.
Jack hugged Danny. He counted off the elements of the story on his fingers. “You leak it, Dan,” he said. “I’ll take it from there.”
After one of its writers met in private with Danny, a newsmagazine ran a story claiming that Jack, if elected, was planning to dismantle the federal anti-drug effort, which he had already repeatedly described as expensive and ineffective, and concentrate instead on banning the sale of tobacco in the United States.
The rest of the media, stunned by what they saw as the complete irrelevance of this idea, expected Jack to deny the story and back away, but he did not. Instead, the very day after the story broke, he wrapped his arms around the issue and, speaking to a cheering crowd on a college campus, hit the tobacco industry hard.
“My fellow Americans, the tobacco kingpins are the secret weapon of the talk-big, think-small, do-nothing government they want to keep in office,” Jack cried. “America can lick drugs, but let’s start with the drug we grow at home and subsidize with billions in taxpayers’ hard-earned money. Tobacco! Tobacco kills more Americans than any other substance, ruins more lives, costs the taxpayers more, and makes the rich richer and the poor sicker. Tobacco! That’s the real threat to our families and our freedom. This administration is spending twenty billion dollars a year on secret drug police. They’re everywhere, watching anybody they don’t like, breaking down doors, shooting instead of asking questions. Ask yourself: Why? What’s the connection? We’re going to start asking questions the day we’re elected. We’re going after the evil forces that are behind this plot against America’s health, against America’s children. And we’re going to put this conspiracy out of business.”
This diatribe made no sense. But it worked. The new polls came out. Jack had dropped off the charts in the Carolinas and Tennessee and Kentucky, but overall he had gained five points on the president in a single week while the third-party candidate neither gained nor lost ground. Some money began to dribble into Jack’s campaign from individual donors. It was nowhere near enough, but he was staying afloat.
Four
1 On the second Friday in October, the news of the failure of the Columbus Bank of the Western Reserve broke in the Columbus press. It became national news the following day when the governor was found dead in his car, late at night on a street near the bank. As nearly as police could reconstruct events, the governor had stopped for a red light and suffered a seizure. When his foot slipped off the brake, the car rolled onward for a few yards, climbed the curb, and came to rest against a tree. An autopsy revealed that he had suffered a massive coronary thrombosis, together with many other, apparently simultaneous thromboses elsewhere in his circulatory system. Multiple thromboses were an extremely rare event for which there was no accepted medical explanation. There was no trace of alcohol or drugs in the dead man, apart from the residue of the widely prescribed medication he took daily to control long-standing high blood pressure. Although the coroner had no way of knowing—because its very existence was, at that time, a deep secret—this was a typical autopsy report in a death caused by ricin, the favorite poison of the KGB.
Morgan, a pioneer in the home manufacture and use of this surprising derivative of the otherwise harmless castor bean, was in California when the governor’s blood vessels burst like a string of firecrackers and his heart stopped. But I had seen Igor and the Georgian in her company, and who knew where they were at the fatal moment? I wondered if the governor had perhaps stopped at his red light, felt a pinprick, looked into the mirror, and …
No matter. The point was that the governor’s dramatic death was a grand diversion, a tabloid windfall. The respectable media got involved a day later when the FBI entered the bank with a search warrant and discovered that most of the bank’s crucial files had disappeared.
The diversion soon turned into a nightmare. The media reported that the bank’s depositors and investors, mostly poor, had lost their life’s savings. By the end of the day, reporters had discovered that the bank’s legal work was handled by the Columbus firm of Miller, Adams & Miller. The story broke on the evening news of one network only. It was a bare-facts report, but it mentioned Jack’s name and made note of the fact that the general counsel of the Columbus Bank of the Western Reserve was none other than Danny Miller, who was not only Jack’s law partner but his oldest friend and the manager of his struggling presidential campaign. By midnight, six separate contributors had called to cancel a total of four million dollars in desperately needed contributions.
“Jesus Christ!” Jack screamed, pacing the spongy carpet of a presidential suite in Detroit. “We’ve already spent the money on TV spots. We’ve sent rubber checks to half the stations in America. Danny, do something!”
“Like what?” Danny asked. “Put up our houses as collateral? We’re broke, Jack.”
“Then find other contributors.”
“These were the last six in America. The seventh dwarf isn’t answering the phone.”
“I’m glad you think this is funny,” Jack said. “Because this fucking bank was never supposed to touch my name, the money was supposed to be cleaned up, there wasn’t supposed to be any fucking failure until after the campaign, it was all supposed to be neat and tidy. And now it’s all over the fucking—”
Danny said, “Wait a minute. What did you just say?”
Jack remembered, too late, that Danny was not in on the secret of the bank’s true origins and sources of cash.
“Nothing,” Jack said. “Just raving. It all looks so goddamned bad, Danny. And the fucking money has stopped. And the fucking Morg is flipping her wig on me. Forget I opened my mouth.” He grinned, a sickly substitute for his usual supernova when caught in a lie. “It’s the stress.”
Danny gave his friend a long, searching look. “Jack,” he said at last, “what have you been up to with the bank?”
“I never had anything to do with the bank, Dan. It was you and Morgan.”
“Jack, tell me.”
Jack had never been able to lie to Danny. It had never been necessary, because Danny had always accepted him for what he was, a fellow who lived in a trance of untruth because he had no choice i
n the matter. Jack was a liar in the way that Danny had been a world-class athlete, because the great hidden river of their genetic heritage had spit them out that way on the shores of American life.
“Tell you what?” Jack said.
“The truth. For example, where did that twenty-seven million come from? And the mysterious millions before that?”
Danny was sitting down, yellow legal pad in his lap. He sat because his wounded leg could not long bear the weight of his body. He held the pad because it was his habit to write down everything Jack said to him or said to others in his presence—not as evidence, but so that Jack would have a reliable record of his words in case he needed to remember them. Even Jack’s capacious memory could not contain and classify all the fibs and evasions, half-truths and exaggerations, and outright lies that he told on any given day. Danny had been scribbling as they talked. Jack reached down and took the pad out of his hand.
“Danny,” he said, “I think you should go. Now.”
“Go?” Danny said. “What do you mean, go?”
“I don’t mean resign,” Jack said. “Take leave to defend yourself, to save what you can of the bank. Somebody’s got to look out for the little people who are going to lose their savings because the governor fucked up the way he did. That person should be you.”
“Why me?” Danny said.
“So you can help out the poor folks,” Jack replied. “They need you more than I do. Both of us see that, Danny, and the media will see it too.”
“When do I go?” Danny asked.
“The sooner the better,” Jack said.
This was pure Jack—self-delusion, diversion, deception, escape, legal defense all combining like chemical components to produce a lightning flash of brilliance. For the first time in their long, long life together, Danny did not laugh explosively at the wonder of it all. He simply stared in disbelief. Jack was doing to Danny what Danny had helped Jack do to so many others since they were boys, and for the first time Danny understood that this moment had always been inevitable. And that it was not the first time it had occurred.
Lucky Bastard Page 39
