Flashpoint (2 page)

Or was.

F
ifteen days earlier I'd sat on a folding chair in a high school gymnasium watching Senator Logan conduct a town hall meeting. Given the state of the economy, mixed-to-racist feelings about the president of the United States and the leader of Logan's party and the prospect of unions being busted, not to mention gay marriage, there was plenty to discuss.

The gym was decorated with yellow and black crepe paper and large papier-mâché images of a lion's head. Apparently there had been a pep rally here earlier today. Hard not to think of your own pep rallies, the slap of basketballs on the shining floor, the feel in your arms of your first love knowing that all too soon she'd break your heart; and how small it would all seem when you visited it a few years later.

Logan was in his usual casual attire, the chambray shirt and jeans plus a gray tweed jacket. He addressed the crowd of perhaps a hundred through a stand-up microphone. The meeting had started promptly at seven and now, at eight, showed no signs of calming down.

Even though some of the questions were pointed, none had been personal or demeaning. The entire country was pissed off and generally with good reason. The citizens of Linton, Illinois, population 31,600, had every right to be just as pissed, especially given the fact that within the past two years three of its manufacturing plants had been relocated in the South.

But then came the inevitable.

If this was a movie role you'd cast somebody burly and menacing. He'd have wiry black hair and need a shave and maybe his teeth would be bad. His eyes and his voice would belong on the violent wing of the nearest psych ward.

You would not cast a maybe one-hundred-and-thirty-pound, fortyish man with thick glasses and a faint lisp as your choice to drop the birther bomb. He wore a short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck and tan pants that reached to his ribcage. He was a parody of a type and when he stood up my first response was to feel sorry for him. You could imagine the bullying he'd had to endure in school and the invisible sort of life he'd had as an adult.

But then he started waving a bunch of papers and that was never a good sign. People who wave papers announce upfront that they are going to say something crazy. George Bush was behind 9/11 had become a popular myth once again. A lot of papers had been waved at Robert about that.

‘Senator Logan, my name is Stan Candiss and I have proof here that your president is a Communist spy.'

Before Mr Candiss had grabbed my attention the gymnasium had been inspiring some high school memories of my own. I'd been thinking about the girls I'd taken to my junior and senior proms respectively, wondering what they were doing now, wondering if they ever wondered about me. But when Mr Candiss had stood up I'd sensed – despite my feeling a little sorry for him – that we were about to witness the inevitable moment in all town hall meetings: the conspiracy accusation.

Mr Candiss was apparently a known commodity locally.

‘God damn it, Stan; sit down and shut up.'

‘We're trying to have a serious discussion here, Stan.'

‘Somebody should throw him out.'

Mr Candiss, it would seem, was not a beloved figure. Which did not stop him from continuing to wave his papers from his position in the last row of folding chairs – or from saying, ‘Whether or not the senator wants to hear about it, there is a website that proves that after the president was born in Kenya he lived for eight years in Moscow. If any of you have ever seen
The Manchurian Candidate
, you know how communists can turn human beings into assassins. This website documents how the president –
our
president – is going to turn our entire arsenal of nuclear bombs on our own country.'

Though there were a few giggles, the general response was cursing, grumbling and even threatening.

Logan handled it calmly. ‘I've actually seen that website. I believe you called my office in Washington a while back, Mr Candiss. You actually made our receptionist so curious that after she hung up she went right to the site and then started showing it to the staff. We were very intrigued.'

This time there was laughter. It wasn't hard to imagine congressional staffers chortling over some whacked-out crap about the president nuking America.

‘These people laugh because they're ignorant. Are you ignorant, too, Senator Logan?'

Candiss went back to waving his papers but was forced to stop when a huge man in a Packers sweatshirt and jeans reared up from his seat and stalked to the last row of folding chairs. Most of the people had swiveled around to watch the action.

You can never tell how something like this will play out. Harsh words can lead to violence. There is always the chance, given the fact that the NRA wants to arm everybody over the age of three, that a gun might appear.

‘We need to stay calm,' Logan said. ‘Sir, if you'll take your seat again—'

Logan's local people had hired two off-duty police officers to handle security. They now appeared from their posts at the respective doors of the gym. They moved quickly toward Mr Candiss. They would stand next to him in case the big man tried to charge him. Then came the surprise.

‘Stan, I stick up for you all the time at the lumberyard,' the man said, and there was real sympathy in his tone, ‘and I even listen to all your stupid stories at lunchtime. But we're trying to have a serious talk here so please just sit the hell down and shut the hell up.'

Just about everybody in the gym applauded. Mr Candiss knew enough to look embarrassed and sit down. As the Packers man made his way back to his seat other men stuck their hands out to shake his. I admired the way he'd handled the situation. I'd have shaken his hand, too.

Logan had a few awkward moments but finally assured everybody that he was still interested in taking questions. His enthusiasm for the task only reminded me and his staffers of how our fortunes had changed in the last twenty-three days. The other side had dumped more than eleven million dollars in negative TV advertising into the state and we had started to feel its effects. For the previous two months we had managed to stay two-to-three points ahead, but now our internal polling showed that we were in a tie. Our opponent was a man named Charlie Shay, a folksy multimillionaire insurance executive who had once been considered too conservative for even this election cycle. Insurance people were not beloved in this country. But his bullshit Huckleberry Finn persona, created by a public relations team in Washington, was starting to take hold. There was one especially unctuous commercial where he was sitting with his grandson at sunset along a stream where he pretends to be fishing while handing out numerous lies about Logan. The closest Shay had ever gotten to fishing was opening a can of tuna.

‘Who's she?'

Not only the question but the tartness of the voice brought me out of my thoughts about the election.

I was sitting between two women on the ass-numbing folding chairs. On my left was Caitlin Conners, who ran the day-to-day operations of the campaign for my firm. Caitlin was long, lean and red-haired, a college star in track with a pretty prairie-girl face and a sly smile. On my right was Elise Logan, Robert's wife, a striking if somewhat ethereal woman you had to be careful with. She had suffered a terrible childhood trauma, so terrible that she had been sent to psychiatric hospitals throughout her life, most recently three years ago. Shay's people couldn't talk about this on paid media but their printed material coyly referred to it many times. I liked Elise more than I did Robert, actually. She was one of those wan beauties you always read about in Agatha Christie; I wanted to protect her.

I had to scan the crowd to see whom she'd referred to. I didn't see the woman until my eyes reached the back of the gym.

From this distance she looked wrong not only for a town hall meeting, but also for a small burg like Linton. Just the way her hip was cocked, the way she smiled so obviously at Logan and the way her white silk blouse and tight dark skirt clung to her suggested that she likely had a big-city life somewhere. Not that she seemed obvious in any way; on the contrary, she was the kind of young woman – from here I guessed her age at around thirty – you saw in expensive clubs in Chicago and Washington, DC. I would have bet that the hairstyle had cost her three or four hundred and the duds an easy fifteen hundred. And if her facial features up close were as elegant as they appeared to be from here, I would probably be in danger of falling in love for an hour or two tonight.

The concern in Caitlin's response surprised me. ‘She's nobody, Elise. She's probably press or something.'

The conversation ended when a cranky older woman in the crowd stood up and barked, ‘What are you going to do about high school girls sending pictures of their boobies to their boyfriends?'

Hilarity, as they say, ensued.

The next morning I flew back to Chicago, and in the battles that awaited me forgot all about the woman at the back of the gym and Elise Logan's angry response to her. In fact, if I remembered anything it was the way the senator had responded to the booby question. He'd laughed and said, ‘My only solution is to bow our heads and pray.' He'd gotten a big ovation. Then he'd gone on to make the correct pious noises.

Eleven days later I was with Caitlin and the senator again. I had talked to him every day, Skyped with him every other day or so and poured over the daily internal polls. We were up with women and African-Americans, but getting a miserable twenty-two percent of white working-class males, which was terrible for us, and trailing substantially behind with college-educated males, a group that tended to vote. Our opponent was a believer in taxing the grubbing poor and helping the much misunderstood but deserving rich. I suppose that explained it.

And now we were back in Chicago at a major fundraiser. My one and only dinner jacket was fraying on the left cuff but I assumed I could get through the evening without causing a social catastrophe. As I had been without woman since my friend of several months had decided to go back to her faithless husband after all – this time he'd be different, she'd said, and I cared enough about her to let the lie go unchallenged – I had vague hopes of meeting somebody tonight.

Combing my hair in my room before the festivities I puckered my lips then smiled at myself in the mirror. I almost always did this before a fundraiser where wealthy people were the targets. Some of them expected Olympian-level ass-kissing and always got it. They wanted you to know how important they were to the campaign and what they expected the senator would do for them when and if he returned to Washington for an additional six years. The Pope doesn't get the kind of servility they expect. Fortunately that's a small number of them.

This being Chicago, a small troop of security men with guns had been hired to make sure that nobody was packing and that everybody who walked through the front door was on the approved list. Assassination was not exactly unknown in America.

I arrived early and was met by James-never-Jim Logan, the younger and less successful brother of the senator. They were near twins physically. Tall, lean, lanky and both graying some – nice-looking if not quite handsome in traditional manly ways. Mid-forties, my own age.

But there the similarities ended. Their father had spent his life in communications – radio, mostly – and at the time of his death owned a large number of small and mid-size radio stations across the country. That was the basis of his sprawling fortune, a fortune Robert had overseen quite well before entering politics, where he was equally successful.

James was the swashbuckler. Fast cars, faster women and three failed start-ups in a three-year period. At that point, his own inheritance depleted, he patched up a quarrelsome relationship with Robert and began to live off his older brother's charity. First he worked as a staffer for the then Representative Logan. But Robert made him do the kind of scut work most staffers have to do. So James did what every right-thinking American lad does who loves to sit and drink and toss the ol' shit back and forth. He became a lobbyist, spending most of his time working for firms that were interested in snagging his brother's vote. But it turned out that Robert's charity didn't extend to selling his vote to James' firms so they fired him. Unhappily he went back to work on Robert's staff.

‘I saw the internals, Dev. Not looking so good.' James was friends with another group of consultants. He had tried to convince Robert to dump me and go with them. All this took place two years ago. He still took every opportunity to challenge me. Everybody knows somebody who's better at a particular job than you are; consultants are used to that. But James makes it personal. Had I been less of the considerate gent I am, I would have brought up the subject of the loan he'd been begging his brother to make him. I'd caught them wrangling about it several times. James had another dumb idea for a dumb business – a public-relations agency for raccoons or something – and Robert was understandably sick of hearing about it.

‘I don't like the internals either but we're holding our own. And we have three weeks to go.'

‘What's that expression? Whistling past the graveyard?' Then he turned his attention to the doors and the sudden influx of sparkling high-end donors.

More than a dozen women in evening dresses were filing in on the arms of their husbands. James had two reputations – one as a heavy-drinking hothead and the other as a chaser. He was one of those mysterious males you run into occasionally. He didn't have the looks or the charm to be successful with women but somehow he was. It could have been his brother's money or his brother's status as a senator, but somehow I didn't think so because there was also the matter of the mysterious
female
. Women you credit with intelligence and judgment become slaves of a kind to men who treat them terribly. So maybe it was the bad-boy syndrome that kept James in contention. But fortunately I don't know that many women so inclined, so most kept their distance from him. He specialized in treating women horribly; there had been a few lawsuits, in fact, and one abuse incident in which police had been called but the woman refused to press charges. This was after, I was told, Robert offered her a good chunk of change.