(2004) Citizen Vince

by Jess Walter

  Raised voices argued these two points, fingers pointed, men in suit coats and open collars paced around: Last chance for…It is imperative that…And then Jody raised his hands and they all stopped and looked, not at Jody, but at him. His decision. The future depended…Waiting. Did they hate him with every bit of themselves, hate his shortcomings and his weakness, his lack of both gravity and humor? Did they hate him as much as he hated himself? They waited. How long is a moment? He looked from face to face and then at the briefing papers in his lap. Someone cleared his throat.

  In this job you always disappoint half the room.

  And that’s when he left, excused himself, and now here he is, alone, staring at this face in the mirror, trying to remember when he was simply himself, before he was a collection of disappointing polling numbers and failed ideas, of weaknesses.

  There is a third way, too.

  Sunday. Chicago.

  The briefing papers fall open to the most recent photos of some of the Fifty-two.

  I have walked in mine integrity.

  At that moment he decides.

  He will walk back out to the room, and announce that they are flying back to Washington. Canceling today’s campaign appearances. He will not raise the sword and he will not claim victory. He will tell the truth: we are simply not there yet.

  And in all likelihood he will lose.

  Sunday. Chicago. The face in the mirror stares back.

  Maybe after…life will begin again. Maybe his face will return to him. Maybe he’ll wake up in a bed and know where he is and judge himself by who he is instead of by what he is not. The men back in the room will stare. They will try to talk him out of this. But, no, he’ll say. I’m sorry. We’re going home. No politics today, fellas. Today…today, we walk in our integrity.

  Sunday. Chicago. Who are these people? He takes a breath, looks once more at his own face—hopeful and frightened—opens the door, and walks out into the room.

  THE FELLAS ARE cocky and assured, ties off, all triumph and strategy, when one by one they notice the big man in the doorway, his black hair perfectly combed and parted—it’s a running joke among them that he must sleep standing up, like one of the horses from his movies. That Nancy takes him out to the stable, puts blinders and a bucket of oats on his head, and out he goes.

  They snap to attention, almost as if…as if he’s already won. “What are you doing up, Governor? You have a big day tomorrow.”

  He holds his hands on the doorframe and leans forward so that his upper half is in the room while his legs remain out. It’s the Duke’s old entrance; he uses it sometimes when he wants to command a room without actually having to enter it. The fellas see it as his gift: a kind of opaque showmanship—detached control.

  “Well…” He smiles and the polls jump two points; his eyes are friendly slits. “Well, maybe I couldn’t sleep.”

  The fellas laugh; this is not a problem he has.

  “Whatcha got there?”

  “The terms, sir. The Iranian parliament’s terms for releasing the hostages.” Everyone in the room is bent over the five-page briefing report that the president’s people sent over as a courtesy.

  He saunters to the window and looks out. The sun is just coming up, bruising the clouds to the east. There is a stunted skyline, but nothing else to tell him…

  “Columbus, Governor.”

  He continues to stare.

  “Ohio.”

  He speaks to the cold window: “When I was making Dark Victory with Bogart, the director was this horrible little Jewish fellow named Edmund Goulding and he was always trying to get us to do it bigger and with more emphasis. He used to say, ‘We gotta make it play in Ohio, too. Make sure they get it in Ohio.’ For the longest time I hated Ohio.”

  He turns and betrays no sense of emotion, and as they often do, the fellas wonder if he understood his own point. “How about we don’t put that in my speech today?”

  More laughter.

  A copy of the report is offered, but he waves it off. He likes things like this on notecards and, besides, he doesn’t have his glasses. He hates his glasses; in fact, he chooses to wear one contact lens instead when he has to deliver speeches, and he reads with that one eye, just so he won’t have to admit he wears reading glasses. As if vitality were elective. “Tell me,” he says.

  The fellas look from one to another: “Basically…it’s untenable. They’re asking for the kitchen sink.”

  “Unfreeze assets. Give back the Shah’s money.”

  “Naked pictures of Suzanne Somers.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Let’s get ourselves a set of those.”

  The room breaks up.

  “So…what does it mean?”

  The fellas struggle to contain themselves. “Well, sir…it means that he is not going to be standing on a tarmac today or tomorrow with the navy band playing behind him while those fifty-two people get off an airplane and kiss the ground.”

  “That’s going to be you on that tarmac, sir.”

  Laughter. Someone claps.

  “No, no. Come on.” He hates this kind of thing, is superstitious about celebrating too early. In ’64, he refused to admit he’d been elected governor of California even after Pat Brown conceded.

  His face is cautious, almost angry. “We’ll use the army band instead.”

  Applause around the room.

  He holds his hands up. “How are they playing it?”

  “Apparently, they’re flying back to Washington. I’d guess he claims victory and hopes that no one notices that the actual hostages are still in Iran. Either that or he rattles the saber. That’s what I’d do. Have him shake his fist and say, ‘We will not bend. We will not be pushed around by these extremists.’”

  “What else could he do?”

  “He could ask Amy what she thinks.”

  Half the room breaks up.

  “Or admit he has lusted for the Ayatollah in his heart.”

  The other half.

  “And how do we play it?”

  “That’s the beauty. It plays itself. We look like we’re taking the high road—”

  “Right, like…”

  “Like we’re above it.”

  “Ooh, I like that, being above it. I want to stay above it. Can we do that? Can we be above it?”

  Heads nod. “We don’t comment directly on the crisis. We preach caution…”

  “It is our deepest hope that blah blah blah.”

  “The prayers of a nation…”

  “This is not about politics…”

  “Get back to the business of blah blah blah.”

  He looks back out the window, where the sun is up and the clouds have faded back to gray and white. On the other side of those clouds is Washington. Two days. He has the sense of being a general in the final days before riding upon a great city. Like they’ve ridden all the way from Sacramento to Washington. Be a good movie. He returns to the doorway, likes this vantage best. “Numbers? Do we have numbers yet?”

  The fellas turn to one another and smile. “They’re still preliminary…”

  “But we have them?”

  “Wirthlin wants to present them himself.”

  “But we have numbers?”

  “Yes. We have numbers.”

  He waits.

  The fellas can barely contain. “Eleven.”

  His arms fall to his sides. My God. This is going to happen. “Eleven?” He stands dumbly in the doorway, the Duke cum Gomer Pyle.

  “I mean, there’s a margin of error and it doesn’t factor in…”

  “Eleven?” With two days?

  “Yes, sir. It’s ours to lose.”

  The others shoot a glance—Ours to lose?—bad form, especially given the late summer fuckups on the KKK and Taiwan and the way he said trees cause most of the pollution and that they shouldn’t waste money investing in intellectual curiosity, the way he can veer dangerously off point and talk out of his ass, the way he lost eight points in a week. The fellas cannot al
low him to drift again. But he doesn’t seem to notice their concern. He is blessed with a short memory. He is blessed with deep stores of confidence. He is blessed, most of all, with an 11 percent cushion. Two days before. “What was that you said before? About us having deep hope?”

  “It is our deepest hope…”

  “No. Wait.” He smiles; his whole face smiles, the pure joy of a seventy-year-old kid. “It is MY deepest hope.”

  They all look. This is it, then. This is what it feels like.

  “It’s about me now. It’s MY deepest hope.”

  He stands in the doorway a minute longer, watching them do their jobs. He wanders back down the hall to his room, turns off the light, and lies on his back in bed, in the dark, listening to his own breathing and wondering which tie they’ve picked out for him today.

  Spokane, Washington / New York, New York

  1980 / November 3 / Monday / 7:20 A.M.

  VII

  Chapter VII

  David Best struggles to extricate himself from the driver’s seat of a champagne-colored Mercury Bobcat, his belly carved like a plump roast by the edge of the steering wheel. When he’s finally out he looks back at the car contemptuously, pushes the door closed, turns in the parking lot, and finds himself face to face with Vince Camden.

  David jumps back and covers his chest. “Vince. Jesus. You scared me to death.”

  “I can’t believe you brought Ray Scatieri here.”

  David still looks scared; takes a step back. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Ray Scatieri. You put him in the witness protection program and brought him to Spokane. Jesus, David. Do you have any idea who this guy is? He’s an animal.”

  David’s big cheeks flush red and he looks all around, then clenches his lips. “Goddamn it, Vince. You are not to have contact with anyone else in the program—”

  “Oh, we’re having contact all right,” Vince says.

  David looks grim. He glances over his shoulders, both ways. “Come with me.”

  Vince follows David into the building. It’s early and the lobby is empty. The steel doors slide open on the elevator and they ride in silence to the sixth floor, David refusing to make eye contact. Vince fights a yawn. Hasn’t slept more than a few hours in a week.

  The marshals’ oak lobby is empty. They go into David’s office and he sits at his desk, puts his hands out to the side—a gesture of surrender, or of endless possibility, or there is no difference: “Okay,” David says. “Where now?”

  “What?”

  “When witnesses come in contact with each other we move one. So…where? Your pick. Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t—” Vince looks out the small window: an overcast morning. He hadn’t thought of that. Sure. Why not just let them move you somewhere else? Get away from Sticks and Lenny and from this thing that Gotti wants you to do and just…disappear. Start over. Fresh. Just fly away.

  David reaches in a drawer and pulls out a map, unfolds it on the desk between them. “You told me once you wanted to start a restaurant? Okay. We’ll help. You pick a city and we’ll find a building for you.”

  The map shows the entire country, veined with highways and rivers, mottled with mountains, the states eyelined in black, separated by different colors, capitals marked with stars. There is solace in these familiar shapes; you run your fingers over the borders and remember a grade school puzzle—and it’s like that, like it’s your pick: each state a puzzle piece, the smooth, parallel edges of Tennessee, all those rectangles in the center, the jagged surfaces of the river-border states. When you were a kid, you used to take the little wooden Florida and Idaho from the puzzle and pretend they were guns—the panhandle barrels. You used to shoot the other kids with Florida, for God’s sake.

  “Hawaii?” David suggests, as if he’s offering a drink. “California?”

  Vince’s eyes drift up from the map to the photo of President Carter—even four years ago, you could see the burdens of choice and fear on his face—and Vince knows.

  A single moment can sometimes connect you to your time. President Carter stares in solemn agreement. It’s like this: You’re out there living your own life, and then, every four years, they give you a say—a tiny say in how this moment should proceed, and it is both real and abstract, like the black borders around the states, a creation of the very thing it is—a small say in which incremental direction we will go, and sure, it’s a cynical process: reactive, reductive, misguided—but goddamn it, if every four years it does nothing more than make you stop and realize that you’re part of something bigger, then maybe every time it’s a tiny fucking miracle.

  Vince touches his own head with his fingertips and says, quietly: “Why did you bring Ray Sticks here, David?”

  David pushes away from the map. “Vince. I can’t talk to you about this.”

  “David, the guy is bad—”

  “That guy is potentially the most valuable witness in the country, Vince.”

  “But here? Did you have to bring him here?”

  David raises his big shoulders in a full shrug. “What do we do, Vince? Three thousand people in this program, a good number of them wise guys, and we can’t put ’em in New York. Or Detroit. Or Cleveland. Or anywhere the mob operates. Okay, so take out the twenty biggest cities and their suburbs. Take out Vegas. And Atlantic City. What’s left? Lexington? Des Moines? Phoenix? Spokane? You tell me. Where are we supposed to put the dump, Vince? Whose neighborhood gets the garbage? Where are we supposed to put a guy like that? Where are we supposed to put a guy like you?”

  Vince deserves the sting. “Are there others?”

  “Here?” David considers before answering, then shrugs. “Sure. Any given time, there might be four or five. This is actually a good city for us. Italian community. Affordable. Isolated. Lots of service jobs. Federal offices. Big enough that you guys can blend in, but not so big that you can get into a lot of trouble.”

  Vince wonders if he knows any of them, and immediately begins thinking of the type: that dishwasher at Geno’s, the short limping guy who used to play cards at Sam’s. He remembers the word Officer Dupree used: Ghosts. “You just can’t put someone like Ray Scatieri in a place like this, David. He’s a criminal.”

  “Oh yeah?” David sighs. “What’s he do? Gamble? Steal credit cards? Sell dope?”

  Vince looks away, at the picture of Jimmy Carter.

  “How about you, Vince? You live pretty well making donuts?” David’s face betrays no emotion. “Look. We know it’s a challenge to go straight. When you’re in the fox business, sometimes you lose a hen.

  “And sometimes you gotta move a fox twice.” David leans forward and pushes the map in front of Vince. “Come on, Vince. Pick a new town. Pick a new name. Leave all this paranoia and your little scuffling operation behind.”

  Of course he’s right. It’s the only way to escape both Ray Sticks and Johnny Boy. And maybe himself. After a moment, Vince picks up the map. Start over. Really do it this time. Evaporate. Vince looks down at the map.

  “Good.” David smiles. “I’ll start the paperwork.” He walks into the outer office. Closes the door behind him.

  Vince stares at the southeastern point of New York State, where the island of Manhattan looks like the tip of a sliver…a tiny, harmless speck of a place. The world. Benny is on that speck, and Tina. Just a day ago he was on that island, in a car with Ange, talking about how to kill Ray Sticks. That’s the problem with a map like this—it can only show the surface of things, not the truth beneath. How does David know about the dope and credit cards—his scuffling operation?

  Vince stands, looks around the office, and when he opens the door to the lobby David’s thick back is to him and he’s on the phone, whispering: “I’ll keep him here until—” David straightens up and aware that he’s being watched, turns, and sees Vince standing in the doorway. David mumbles something about having to go and hangs up. He looks up at Vince as if seeing him for the first time. “You cu
t your hair.”

  “That the police?” Vince asks.

  David stares, as if trying to decide whether he can get away with lying. Finally, he shrugs. “They sent a cop to New York. He figured out you were in the program. This Detective Phelps called me last night, said they wanted to talk to you. They’re on their way, Vince.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Phelps? Said you were involved in some stuff—stealing credit cards. Selling dope. And they want to question you about a homicide.”

  “I already talked to them about it.”

  “Well, they want to talk to you again.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone, David.”

  “When he gets here, we’ll tell him that.”

  “I already told him.”

  “We’ll tell him again.”

  “Are you detaining me, David?”

  “I’m asking you to stay here and cooperate with the police.”

  Vince looks around the office. “And what are my chances of making it to the lobby and out the door before they get here? Before you call security?”

  “Come on, Vince.” David laughs.

  “One in five? One in ten?”

  David doesn’t blink.

  “My move, David?” Vince backs out of the office and walks casually to the elevator. He expects David to pull a gun or tackle him, or at least call building security, but the big man simply tags behind like a younger brother.