Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) (23 page)

“If you weren’t in politics, Stony, what would you be doing?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“You’d be dead?”

“No, I’d be doing nothing on a beach somewhere, sipping piña coladas and slapping the rumps of local wenches.”

“Wouldn’t that get boring?”

“Not if you do it right. I did have a dream, once, but my father wouldn’t have allowed it.”

“Old Briggsy was tough, was he?”

“As horsehide. It was this game or no game for me, and so here I am.”

“What was the dream?”

“Oh, it’s silly, Victor. Spilt milk grows sour.”

“Tell me.”

“It wouldn’t have amounted to anything anyway.”

“Go on.”

“I always wanted to sing.”

“Folk?”

“Opera.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes. And I wasn’t terrible at it, either. For a time even, in my youth, I worked as a busboy at Victor’s in South Philly. You know it?”

“With the singing waiters?”

“That’s the one. Every once in a while I’d put in an aria or two.”

“Wow, color me impressed. Let me hear.”

“I’m out of practice.”

“Oh, come on now, don’t be shy.”

And so he sang, Stony Mulroney, with his eyes closed and one arm waving in the air like a flag atop La Scala. He sang something sad and sweet and all in Italian. Gad, it was awful.

“Even when I was young,” he said, after he had finished, as I was cleaning the rotten notes out of my ear with a finger, “my voice wasn’t a thing of beauty. My father was right about where my true talents lay. I was made for this game and no other. It’s the vicious simplicity of it that I take to. Politics is a blood sport, and the goal is to make damn sure it’s the other guy with the knife in his neck.”

“Is that another of Briggs’s Rules?”

“Oh, no, Road Dog, that one is all mine. From hard experience. What about you? If politics doesn’t work, it’s back to the law with you?”

“I always wanted to be a lawyer; it’s just that I can’t afford to pursue it as a hobby. What kind of car did you say she had?”

“A Honda, old and gray.”

“Like that?” I said, indicating a car pulling quickly out of an alleyway and heading onto Queen Street.

“That’s the one,” he said, starting the Lincoln.

I paid close attention to how Stony followed the gray Honda as it speedily made its way first through the twisty streets of Lancaster and then through a bucolic grove of trees before landing on the main avenue out of the city. As we passed through a gauntlet of outlets and fast-food joints and the aforementioned amusement park, he kept the Honda close, letting other cars and a truck slide between us, but never so many that we couldn’t keep track of who we were following. His technique was spot-on. It was amazing what you could learn from the inside of a matchbook.

When Mrs. Gaughan turned off the main road into a piece of farm country, Stony slowed his pace and fell farther behind. We passed a series of fields, horses leaning their long necks down to pick at the grass, an Amish buggy. Finally, on a rural road called Irishtown, she slowed down her hurried pace and pulled into a drive beside a small farmhouse close to the road.

Stony turned into another driveway, about sixty yards back, and set the car behind a thick, twisty oak in full leaf. The aged two-story farmhouse where Mrs. Gaughan had parked was in front of a much larger, more modern structure. The farm family that lived there had built a new house for itself but kept the old one for guests or renters. The ramshackle old place, set in the middle of nowhere, was as ready-made a place to hide as could be found in America.

Dressed neatly now in slacks and a blouse hanging loose, her hair done, her shoes shiny, Melinda Gaughan climbed out of her car. She had played the part of the soused ruin to perfection, our Mrs. Gaughan, had lied with aplomb, but her reaction to the picture and subsequent lie of never seeing Amanda before had convinced me that the rest of her story was just as unreliable. And so the question was how to get the truth out of her.

I had asked Nadine in Dr. Patusan’s office to do me just a small favor in exchange for my going away. It is amazing how much people will do to just get me to go away. I didn’t ask for the name of the child in the photograph she had given to Amanda Duddleman, I didn’t ask for any information she wasn’t by law allowed to give. All I asked was that she review the file and then call Mrs. Gaughan and tell her that one of the tests her granddaughter had taken showed an anomaly and that the doctor wanted her to make a new appointment immediately to have it checked out. That was all. And then we waited outside Mrs. Gaughan’s house, waited with two thermoses.

I slipped out of the car with Stony’s camera, and under cover of the oak I focused the long zoom lens on the house. There was something in that photograph Nadine had given to Duddleman that had been dangerous, something Duddleman couldn’t wait to show me, something Amanda Duddleman had died for. I was going to see what it was even if I had to wait all day. But I didn’t have to wait all day.

The front door of the small house opened and a little girl burst out, four or five, in jeans and a T-shirt and small white sneakers. She ran down the steps and spun around a spindly tree in the front yard and shouted something. A moment later Melinda Gaughan and a man in his thirties walked together down the steps, talking quietly, sadly. The grieving mother, the grieving husband, the daughter who doesn’t understand her own sadness.

I focused the camera on the girl, young and smiling, with pale skin, swinging around the tree. Click click. I took some of the mother and the husband but focused mostly on the child. Click click. It felt wrong somehow, but I kept pressing the button. Click click. It was evidence, something I could use to convince McDeiss to save the little girl’s life. But I didn’t need any photographs to be convinced myself about what was what. One look was all it took.

Click click.

CHAPTER 39

THE OPPOSITION

I
filched the memory card from Stony’s camera. Slipped it from the bottom while I was out of the car taking photographs of the little girl in Lancaster.

I felt a slash of guilt when I snatched it—I considered Stony a friend, my shiny new friend, and he had been nothing but the supportive guide through my whole sordid political journey—and yet I stole the card anyway, yes, I did. I even covered it up by pretending to take a few shots after I had palmed the thing. Fake click fake click. Before she up and left the family, my mother repeatedly told me I was an ungrateful wretch.

And yet I was not without my reasons.

The moment we returned to the city and Stony let me out of his car, I hightailed it to Goodrich Camera on Fifteenth and slid the memory card across the counter. “I need some pictures made,” I said to the good-looking blond kid at the counter. “Could you tell me how many snaps are on the memory?”

“Just a minute,” he said before taking the card in the back room. He returned a few moments later. “You have sixty-two.”

I had taken about ten, and I guessed there were about as many of Bettenhauser. What were the other forty-two? “Print them all,” I said. “Eight-by-tens. And I’d like all the files transferred from the card to a disk. Can you do that?”

“For the price of the data disk, sure. Want me to clear the card when I do it?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “And could you deliver the disk on your way home, someplace right in the city?”

“No, we don’t do that.”

I opened my bag, pulled out two Franklins, slapped them on the counter. Without saying anything, the kid pocketed the hundreds before pulling out a square envelope big enough to fit a disk and sliding it across the counter. I started writing an address on the envelope.

“How soon can you do the transfer?” I said.

“I could do it right now, if you want. Anything you want.”

“That’s fine.” After I finished filling out the envelope, I wrote a Lancaster address on a slip of paper along with the words “From your pal Mulroney,” signed my name, and put the slip inside. “Make sure you deliver this tonight.”

“If you want to wait, I could print up all the photographs for you right now. I’ll put you at the head of the queue.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m already late for a picket line.”

Even as my political career crumbled beneath me like a stale banana scone, I could still admire my handiwork. There they were, my little grassroots activists, snarling traffic in front of the Hilton, their hate-filled eyes brilliantly illuminated by the lights of the news crews. They formed a rough line of about thirty or so, all of them shouting and jeering for the cameras, singing paeans to the Second Amendment, brandishing their signs like pitchforks. I C
ARRY A
G
UN BECAUSE A
C
OP
I
S
T
OO
H
EAVY
. I
T
’
S
N
OT ABOUT
G
UNS
, I
T
’
S ABOUT
C
ONTROL
. H
EY
T
OMMY
B
ETTENHAUSER
, I’
LL
K
EEP
M
Y
G
UNS
, Y
OU
K
EEP THE
C
HANGE
. And the ever-popular outline of an M16 with the stirring motto C
OME AND
T
AKE
I
T
.

As I walked between the shouting line of demonstrators and the hotel, I spotted among the picketers our man Thompson, shaking his sign and shouting so fervently the tendons in his neck bulged. I gave him the barest of nods. It was in neither of our interests to have me in any way connected to this patriotic demonstration of love for God and country. I elbowed my way through a corridor of police before I headed into the Hilton to see Tommy Bettenhauser blather on about avoiding an environmental holocaust.

“Our environment is changing, and there are no good answers,” said the candidate in front of a group of the tweedy and the earnest, handwrought silver-and-turquoise jewelry on the men, little black ponytails on the women—or was it the other way around? “But in the midst of these wrenching climate swings, we can’t even stand together on the same street corner and agree on whether the light is red or green.”

The difference between Congressman DeMathis’s crowd and this crew, listening like eager puppies to every platitude, was the difference between duck confit served with foie gras on a crystal platter and a jicama, beet, and fennel slaw picked up at Whole Foods. The room was the same dreary kind of place in which I had seen the Congressman speak, but the wine I grabbed was sour and cheap, and the hors d’oeuvres laid out on the tables ringing the room were mostly crudités. Is anything cruder than crudités? As Tommy Bettenhauser droned on, I looked around desperately for something hot and butlered, preferably in a puff pastry.

“And the answer isn’t to just cut the difference,” said the candidate, “call the light yellow, and feel righteous in our moderation. Because an untruth, even a moderate untruth, will still lead us in the wrong direction. We need to look plainly and honestly at the condition of our world, but, sadly, our leaders are often led astray. The problem with our politics is not stupidity, or venality, though heaven knows both are alive and well in the US Congress.” A fervent bout of laughter, as if Bettenhauser had suddenly morphed into Seinfeld. “No,” he continued over the laughter. “The problem with our politics is politics.”

With that profound thought, as obvious as saying the problem with death is all that dying, I turned to a woman standing next to me in a sweet summer dress, all flowers and pleats, that modestly showed off a sharp little body. She was staring at the candidate with eyes squinted and sincere, eyes that said,
I care; I really, really care.
No matter how pretty they are, and hers were very, sincere eyes always scare the solemnity out of me.

“Is there anything to eat other than the wilted vegetables?” I said.

“They’re organic,” she said.

“I don’t doubt it, and I’m all for organic. I was just hoping for something organic that mooed or blatted. Goat, maybe. I could go for some organic goat on organically grown skewers.”

She turned and looked at me, like she was observing some invasive species of fauna, and then I got the smile I’d been mining for. “There were some egg-roll things a bit ago.”

“I hate it when I miss the good stuff. I’m Victor.”

“Carrie,” she said. “I’ll elbow you if I see a tray.”

“That would be so kind. I’m not sure I can take all this pabulum on an empty stomach.”

“When did everything we see and hear, everything we read and think and shout, get infected with politics?” said the candidate. “Politics has become a screen through which too many of us see the world. The lives we then end up inhabiting are cramped and sour, where everything exists solely to outrage us or give us an opportunity to gloat, where the world is a barren zero-sum game in which every vile act to support our side is not just allowed, but required.”

“Peace and love,” I said.

“Are you not a fan of our Mr. Bettenhauser?”

“Our? What did you do, pull him out of a cereal box?”

“Something like that, yes,” she said with a smile.

“I’m no different than the rest of our countrymen when it comes to politicians, interested only in what they can do for me. Right now all your Mr. Bettenhauser can do for me is get me fed. Was there any shrimp? Did I miss the shrimp?”

“No shrimp,” she said.

“These low-rent campaigns give me the shingles. If you’re going to buy my vote, at least buy it with meat.”

“A prime rib would do it?”

“A prime rib would get all three of my votes.”

“We’ll have to get you a slab of beef, then, posthaste.”

“Carrie, are you asking me out?”

“No.”

“I can tell you that this type of politics is not a prescription for perfecting our democracy or healing our world,” said Bettenhauser, continuing on with his speech as if all the yobs in the room really cared. And surprisingly, glancing around, it looked like they did, including pretty little Carrie. I thought of maybe actually listening to what he was saying, but thankfully that deranged idea fled and I searched around for something other than the sour wine to drink.

“It is, instead, pure poison. And that’s why I am here asking for your vote. Not because I have the solution to all our problems—trust me when I say I don’t—but because I pledge to bring a new perspective to Washington, where up is up, down is down, and facts are treated with reverence, not disdain.”

“Well, that’s original,” I said. “Everything good as long as you elect me and not the other guy.”

“Quite the cynic, aren’t you, Victor?” said Carrie.

“Trust me when I tell you it is well earned.”

“I have found the worst cynics are actually secret idealists. Cynicism is merely a defense of a bruised heart.”

“Or an empty stomach,” I said.

“Isn’t your cynicism heavy, Victor? Don’t you just want to put it down sometime like an overstuffed backpack and take a breath?”

“Then what would I have?”

“I don’t know. Find out.”

“Would I have to eat quinoa with my tempeh?”

“Yes,” she said.

“There’s not enough ketchup in the world.”

“I don’t know if we can heal the damage we’ve already done to our earth,” said Tommy Bettenhauser, “or if we can prevent further erosion of our environment. But I do promise to bring a fresh perspective to climate change, and every other problem facing our country and our world, a perspective where myths hold no sway just because we want to believe them, where clear evidence is accepted as the starting point, and where solutions are reached based on sound science, sound policy, and what’s good not just for our own political party, but for the country as a whole.”

“Now he’s going to talk about changing the world,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes, they love that. It so inspires the young to empty their meager little wallets.”

“Together,” said Bettenhauser, “have no doubt that we will change the world.”

“Good call,” she said.

“It didn’t take Einstein.”

“How fortunate for you.”

“We will change the world,” said Bettenhauser, “because we have no choice. That is every generation’s fate. But I believe that it will take a new kind of political vision to change our world for the better, and that’s what I promise to bring to Washington.”

“Hear, hear,” I said, clapping with the rest after he finished the speech.

“So you were actually moved,” said Carrie, looking at me searchingly.

“No, I’m calling out to the waiters with the trays. Here, here, bring them here.”

“Would you like to meet him, Victor? The candidate, I mean.”

“Yes, please, that would be jimmy.”

“Come then,” she said, taking hold of my hand. Her touch was warm and dry, and I felt a frisson full of possibility. “I’ll take you to him.”

After Carrie led me to the scrum surrounding Bettenhauser, she left it up to me to patiently wait for an opportunity to introduce myself. When I saw an opening, I called out his name. He turned and grabbed my hand and bathed me like a babe in the impersonal warmth of his version of the political stare.

And then he recognized me and recoiled as if I were syphilis.

It should have been a sobering moment, to make another man recoil like that, but I had to admit I liked it.
Recoil, you son of a bitch,
I thought.
Let the whole damn world recoil when it sees me coming, just like I recoil every morning when I shave.

“It is nice to meet you, Mr. Bettenhauser,” I said, in my sweetest tone. “I’m Victor Carl.”

“Of course you are,” he said, eyeing the big brown diplomatic bag I had brought with me. “I recognize you from that scene at the Governor’s Ball and then your photo in the newspaper. You work for DeMathis.”

“I work for myself, mostly. I enjoyed your speech. ‘The problem with our politics is politics.’ And all along here I was thinking it was the politicians that were screwing things up.”

“Yes, well, we’re out to change that. But thank you, Victor, for your support. We’ll take it from any quarter we can get it.”

“That’s good, because a quarter is about all I’ve got to give. But do you perhaps have a few moments to talk?”

“I’m awfully busy. Why don’t you call the campaign office and we can—”

“It would be worth your while to talk to me tonight, Mr. Bettenhauser,” I said in a voice as flat as slate. Sometimes you take all the humanity out of your tone, and the point is made.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course. Let me finish up here and I’ll make some time before we leave. While you wait, why don’t you grab something to eat.”

“Where?” I said.