by Ross Thomas
As he watched Cubbin climb into the Cadillac Imber spoke to the man next to him. “What time’s he due on that TV thing?”
“Midnight.”
“It’s going to be a long day.”
“They all are.”
The man that Imber spoke to would have been tall if he had straightened up out of his slouch. He carried his thin body like a wire question mark that somebody had once started to straighten out but had given up on halfway through. His head jutted forward from his lean neck as if on some perpetual, private quest. His hair was black, long and touched with gray at its shaggy ends. He had bright blue eyes that seemed a little cold, a slightly hooked nose, and a thick, black moustache curving around the ends of a thin mouth that managed to look hungry.
The thin man was Charles Guyan and for the past ten years he had earned a comfortable if uncertain living by trying to get men whom he usually felt nothing but contempt for elected to public office. He had been successful three-fourths of the time and there was a steady demand for his services, which, along with inflation, now enabled him to charge $50,000 a campaign plus expenses. The $50,000 was all profit because Guyan had no overhead, not even a permanent address. When he wasn’t working a campaign, he and his wife lived on their thirty-two-foot Chris-Craft and cruised the inland waterway from Florida to Virginia. Guyan felt that he had four years left before his steadily mounting disdain for his profession rendered him ineffective. In four years he would be forty and he wasn’t at all sure what he would do then and he worried about it a lot.
Seated now in the back seat of the Oldsmobile 98, Charles Guyan and Oscar Imber listened patiently while the car’s owner, a minor union official from Gary, gave them his version of the political climate.
“It’s warming up,” he said. “We’re stirring up lots of interest.”
“That’s good,” Imber said. “How does it look?”
“Oh, Don’s gonna make it okay if he keeps his eye on the ball.”
“John?” Imber said.
The minor union official whose name was John Horton turned his head around and away from the road he was supposed to be watching. “Yeah?”
“You want to know something?”
“Sure,” Horton said, his attention back on the road and his driving again, “what?”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
It didn’t bother Horton. “You just wait and see, Oscar. Old Don’s gonna make it all right, if he keeps his eye on the ball.”
“John’s supposed to deliver his local,” Imber said to Guyan. “I doubt if he could deliver a bottle of milk.”
“Don’t you worry about my local,” Horton said over his shoulder. “You don’t have to worry none about that. You’d better worry about those nigger locals, that’s what you’d better worry about.”
“Your local’s eighty-percent black, John,” Imber said.
“Uh-huh, about that, but they’re all good niggers; you don’t have to worry none about them.”
“Just the other ones, huh?”
“Well, you don’t have to worry none about mine, I’ll guaran-goddamn-tee you that.”
Imber slumped back in the seat. Guyan stared moodily out of the window. They rode in silence for several minutes until Imber said, “Well, you’ve had ten days of it. What do you think?”
“It’s a throwback to the thirties.”
“How?”
“I can’t use commercials on TV or even radio because we’re only trying to influence about nine hundred thousand votes in what … forty-some states?”
“About that.”
“So the cost is prohibitive. I’ve got the world’s most natural TV candidate, but I can’t use him. If this were a regular election I’d say spend every dime you’ve got on TV but it’s not, so I can’t use it, and that leaves only one thing.”
“What?”
“Print.”
“So?”
“So it bothers me.”
“Why? Hanks has the same problem.”
Guyan sighed. “I’ve never run a print campaign before. Not all print. I’ve got a candidate who looks like he oughta be voted for and I’ve got an opposition candidate who looks like somebody just dug him up out of the cellar, and I can’t use either of them in commercials. Jesus!”
“Well, what about printed stuff?” Imber said.
“I don’t have much faith in it.”
“Why?”
Guyan sighed again. “Who the hell reads anymore?”
Three blocks from the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel Fred Mure told the cab driver to stop at a liquor store. He went in and paid six dollars for four half-pints of Ancient Age bourbon. He put two of the half-pints in his coat pockets and two in his trouser pockets. Back in the cab he told the driver, “Let’s go.”
“That stop’s gonna make us a minute late,” the driver said.
“Don’t let it worry you,” Mure said, taking out his notebook and writing down “HFO—$12.” HFO stood for “hospitality for others.”
At the Sheraton Mure jumped out of the cab and pushed through the revolving door. Waiting in the lobby was a group of five men. One of them stepped forward, but Mure waved him back. “Wait right there, Phil. He’ll be here in five or six minutes.”
“We just wanta see him for a minute.”
“You can see him upstairs.”
“Appreciate it, Fred.”
But Mure was already heading for the bell captain’s desk. The captain rose quickly when he looked up and saw Mure.
“How are you, Jimmy?” Mure said.
“Fine, Fred, and you?”
“Keeping me on the run.”
“What’ll you need?”
Mure looked at his watch and then pointed at the bank of elevators. “Give me number one and number two in five minutes.”
“Right. How many bags?”
“Need a couple of boys.”
“You’ve got ’em. Staying long?”
“A few days. I’ll take care of you later.”
“Sure, Fred.”
Mure moved away from the bell captain and stationed himself in the lobby where he could keep an eye on both the elevators and the revolving door. He also let his gaze wander about the lobby, mentally classifying its occupants. No nuts, he thought. Just people.
The captain had summoned four of his bellhops who nodded as he gave them instructions. “Cubbin’s due in about three minutes. You two get on the door. You two bring number one and two down and hold them. Just like always.”
The four bellhops nodded and moved toward the elevators and the revolving door. Five minutes later the green Cadillac bearing Donald Cubbin pulled up at the hotel entrance. The uniformed doorman jumped for it. Cubbin was first out followed by the vice-president and the other two members of the Chicago reception committee. From the blue Oldsmobile came Oscar Imber, Charles Guyan, and John Horton, the minor union official. Before Cubbin had made it to the revolving door the bellhops had already gathered the bags from the two cars.
Cubbin was first inside the lobby, his long, double-breasted raincoat open and flapping, a cigar clenched between the white teeth of his smile, his eyes restlessly moving from side to side searching for anyone who deserved a wave or a nod or a hi-ya, pal. When he saw the group of five men he winked and jerked his head toward the elevators, not breaking his long stride.
“Number one, Don,” Mure murmured as Cubbin flashed past him. The idlers and loafers in the lobby had turned to watch the entrance that had now swelled into a small procession.
“Who is it?” an idler asked a loafer.
“Lorne Greene,” the loafer said, not wanting to seem stupid.
“Who’s that?”
“Pa Cartwright. On TV. You know, on ‘Bonanza.’”
“Oh, yeah. I thought it looked like him.”
Cubbin entered the elevator swiftly, Mure just behind him. Well schooled, the bellhop who was piloting the automatic car turned the key, closing the door.
; “Stop on six, Carl,” Mure said.
“Right, Mr. Mure,” the bellhop said.
The elevator stopped at six, but the doors didn’t open. The bellhop kept his face carefully to the front of the car as Mure handed Cubbin one of the now opened half-pints of Ancient Age. Cubbin tipped the bottle up and swallowed greedily. Then he handed it back to Mure who told the bellhop, “Okay, let’s go,” and slipped the bottle back into his coat pocket.
Donald Cubbin closed his eyes and sighed appreciatively as he felt the whiskey go to work.
7
Truman Goff, who had looked up the man he was going to kill in Who’s Who, had three weeks’ vacation coming from the Safeway store in Baltimore and he arranged to take one week of it during the second week in September and the other two weeks beginning October 9, a Monday.
The manager of the Safeway wasn’t surprised at Goff’s request because his produce manager always took his vacation at odd times and actually it made things easier because Goff was always there during the summer to fill in when others were away on vacation.
Goff’s decision to take his vacation so late in the year was no surprise to his family either. For the past three years, since their daughter had turned seven, the Goffs had vacationed separately. His wife had returned in July from a three-week tour of Europe which had cost Goff $995 plus the $300 he had given her to buy stuff with. His daughter had spent six weeks of the summer at a Methodist camp in Pennsylvania, just as she had done the previous two summers while her mother had taken packaged tours to Hawaii the first year and to Mexico the second. Now whenever she and her husband watched television together, which wasn’t often, and a foreign city was shown, Mrs. Goff usually said, “I been there,” even if she hadn’t, which irritated Goff who had never been out of the States and had no desire to go. But his wife’s “I been there” still irritated him which, of course, was why she said it.
Truman Goff’s wife wasn’t sure where her husband got the money to pay for her tours. He said he played the horses with a scientific system, but she didn’t believe it. Still, for the past three or four years he always seemed to have plenty of money and as long as he spent some of it on her she wasn’t going to worry about where it came from.
When Goff came home after arranging his vacation he told his wife, “I’m gonna take a week off starting Monday.”
“Where you going?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Florida.”
“It’s still hot down there.”
“I like it hot. I’ll leave you the car.”
“You’d better leave me some money, too.”
“Yeah, well, here’s four hundred. You can buy the kid some new clothes for school.”
Goff handed his wife four one-hundred-dollar bills. They were old, well-used bills and one of them had a rip in it that someone had neatly mended with a strip of Scotch tape.
“Well, have a good time,” his wife said, putting the money away in her purse.
“Yeah, sure,” Goff said and started carefully turning through The New York Times.
“What’re you reading that for?” his wife said.
“They got a better racing section than the Sun,” Goff said, stopping on page 13 because it contained a one-column headline that read:
Bitter Campaign
Seen in Fight for
Union’s Presidency
Donald Cubbin’s second wife was waiting for him when he eventually made it to his four-room, two-bath suite on the Sheraton-Blackstone’s twelfth floor. Cubbin hadn’t seen his wife in three days, but they greeted each other as if it had been a couple of years.
“How’s my darling little girl?” Cubbin said, booming the words out as he wrapped his arms around his wife and picked her up about three or four inches off the floor before he set her back down and kissed her wetly on the mouth.
“Honey, it seems months,” his wife said, smiling up at him with the handsome teeth that a Beverly Hills dentist had capped for $1,700.
“How’ve you been, sweetie?” Cubbin said, taking off his raincoat.
“Fine, darling, but I missed you so much.”
“I missed you, too, honey.”
It went on like that for a while, the terms of endearment punctuating every phrase. Fred Mure stood a little back from the couple, smiling as he watched them greet each other.
Oscar Imber and Charles Guyan had also come into the room and they tried to avoid looking at what Imber called “The Don and Sadie Show.” But there was nothing else to look at and after a while both men watched with a certain amount of detachment as the couple exchanged endearments and traded some more wet kisses that involved what Guyan thought of as “too much tongue work.”
Cubbin’s first wife had died seven years before, leaving him with their only child, a nineteen-year-old son, and a surprisingly dim memory of a vague, shy woman who had been a vague, shy girl when he had married her when she was nineteen and he was twenty-four.
Six months after his wife’s death, Cubbin had married Sadie Freer who was nearly three decades younger than he. There had been nothing either shy or vague about Sadie who had first met Cubbin when the UPI bureau in Pittsburgh sent her to interview him.
The last time they had tried sex together had been seven months before. It hadn’t been any good, in fact, it had been rotten, with Sadie at first doing all of Cubbin’s favorite tricks and even inventing some new ones. But nothing had worked and finally Sadie told him, “You’ve had too much to drink, honey. Why don’t we wait till tomorrow.”
But somehow they had never got around to trying again and Cubbin was relieved that he no longer had to make the effort or endure what he considered to be the shame of failure. Cubbin found that if he drank enough, he didn’t even dream about sex. After a month or so, Sadie had also discovered a satisfactory substitute. In the meantime their display of public affection continued, even more cloying than ever, because they were, after all, genuinely fond of each other.
After the greeting of his wife was over, Cubbin turned to Imber and Guyan. “Now I’m going to have one big drink of that Canadian whiskey I bought.”
“One won’t hurt you,” Imber said.
“Well, that’s all I’m going to have till after that interview.”
“I’ll fix it, Don,” Fred Mure said. “Sadie?”
“Anything,” she said. “A bourbon and water’s fine.”
“You guys?” Mure said to Imber and Guyan. They both asked for bourbon and water.
As Mure turned to go for the drinks, Cubbin said, “And send Audrey in here.” Mure nodded that he would as he went through the doorway.
Cubbin settled himself in an upholstered, low-backed chair and looked at Guyan. “So you really think it went okay, what I said to that TV guy in Hamilton today?”
Guyan nodded as he sat down on the room’s green couch. “You slanted it just right for the Canadians, I think. You won’t have to change too much tonight. He’ll probably ask you the same thing.”
“You mean why do I think Sammy’s running and whether I think I’ve lost touch with the rank and file?”
“That’s what they’ve all been asking so far,” Guyan said.
“Did you notice who that TV guy in Hamilton walked like?” Cubbin said.
“Walked like?” Imber said.
Cubbin rose. “Like this,” he said, bending himself backward and holding his arms a little out from his sides as he pranced across the room in a pigeon-toed gait.
“Christ,” Imber said. “You’re right. Cary Grant.”
Cubbin beamed. “The older ones like Grant and Wayne are easy. But the new ones all act like Burton and—”
Cubbin was interrupted by Fred Mure with the drinks. Mure was followed by a forty-year-old blonde who carried a slim, black attaché case. She was Audrey Denn who had been Cubbin’s secretary for fifteen years. She put her attaché case down, went behind Cubbin’s chair, and said, “Okay, handsome, relax.”
“What’ve you got?” Cubbin said to Audrey Denn as he
reached for the drink that Fred Mure handed him.
“Take a sip first,” she said.
Cubbin took two large swallows.
“All right?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said.
Audrey placed her hands on his neck, down near where the muscles started up from his shoulders. She started to massage the neck muscles skillfully. “You’ve got some letters to sign, I mean right away, and above five phone calls that can wait till tomorrow and one that can’t wait. You’d better take it pretty soon.”
“Who from?” Cubbin asked.
“Walter Penry. He called from Washington and said it was important.”
“Get him for me, will you?”
“Relax, goddamnit,” she said and went on massaging Cubbin’s neck muscles while his wife watched with a slight smile and wondered, as she always wondered, how many years it had been since Don had stopped taking Audrey to bed. Ten years at least, she thought, probably when Audrey had finally got married. Now the two of them shared the easy intimacy of former lovers who don’t have to bother with pretending anymore. It must be a relief, she thought, not pretending, and then she thought about something more pleasant, about when her own married life would improve. That would be after the election, of course. Everything was going to be after the election. In the meantime—well, in the meantime she would accommodate herself as best she could. Which wasn’t bad really.
“Okay,” Cubbin said, “that’s good. Now get Penry for me.”
Audrey Denn tapped him lightly on the shoulder, like a barber telling a customer that it’s all over, and said, “You can take it on my phone.”
“Fine,” Cubbin said and finished his drink in three swallows. “Now what else?”
“I’ve got a delegation from Local 127 stashed away in room C,” Fred Mure said.
