Interface (36 page)

"My God," Mary Catherine said out loud to no one. "We're in
deep shit."

She flinched as the door of the limousine came open, letting in bright unfiltered light. The car had stopped.

She'd lost track, but something about the light told her they were
near downtown, hemmed in by skyscrapers. They were in a
crowded little side street, just south and west of the Board of Trade,
stopped in front of a brownstone with a first-floor restaurant. An
awning extended from the front door, across the sidewalk, to a loading zone along the curb. An uniformed doorman had opened
the door for her.

He reached in with one hand and helped her out, which was a
nice, if superfluous, gesture. He was an older guy, a kindly white-
haired doorman type, and as he was helping her out on to the
sidewalk, he gave her hand an extra squeeze, nodded at her,
looking at her in a way that was almost worshipful.

There was another man, a guy in a plain old dark suit, standing
under the awning waiting for her. Dad had once told her that you
could gauge the quality of a restaurant according to how many people you spoke to before you actually got around to ordering
food. She wasn't even into the door of this place yet and she had already encountered two people.

"Howdy, Miz Cozzano," the man said, "I'm Cy Ogle."

"Oh, hello," she said, shaking his hand. "Did you just get here?"

"Nah, I nailed down a table for us," he said. "But I figured that
since I dug you out of work like this on such an ugly day, least I
could do was come out and say hi."

"Well, that's very nice," she said noncommitally.

So far, he didn't seem like the cynical, media-manipulating son
of a bitch that he was supposed to be. But it was way, way too early
to be jumping to conclusions.

Another guy in a suit, who clearly
did
work here, nearly killed
himself bursting out the front door of the place, and met her
halfway up the sidewalk, holding out one hand, bending his knees
as he approached so that by the time he reached Mary Catherine he
was practically duck-walking. Mary Catherine could see in his
whole face and affect that he was Italian.

He was crying, for god's sake. He pumped her hand and grabbed her upper arm with his left, as if only all the willpower in his body
prevented him from violently embracing her. He said nothing but
merely shook his head. He was so overcome with emotion that he couldn't speak.

"We were just watching CNN over the bar," Ogle explained.
"It was incredible."

Some kind of a huge commotion was going on inside the place. It got louder as Mary Catherine moved toward the door, led by the
crying Italian and followed by Ogle, and as she crossed the
threshold, it exploded.

The back of the restaurant was all quiet little tables, but the front
of the place was a sizable bar, currently packed with bodies. They were all men in suits. This was an expensive place where people in
the commodities business, and the lawyers and bankers who fed off
them, gathered to fortify themselves with martinis and five-dollar mineral water.

And right now they were all on their feet, howling, applauding,
stamping their feet, whistling, as if the Bears had just run back an
interception for a touchdown. They were going nuts.

And they were all looking at Mary Catherine.

She came to a dead stop, shocked and intimidated by the noise.
Ogle nearly rear-ended her. He put one hand lightly on top of her
shoulder and bent toward her. "Pretend they don't exist," Ogle
said, not shouting but projecting a deep actor's voice that cut
through the noise. "You're the Queen of England and they're
drunks in the gutter."

Mary Catherine stopped looking at them. She stopped making
eye contact with any of them. She focused on the back of the
rna
î
tre d', who was plunging through the crowd of pinstripes,
making an avenue for her, and she followed him straight through
the thick of it and into the restaurant proper. The people at the bar
were chanting now: Cozzano! Cozzano! Cozzano!

Half of the people dining in the restaurant area stood up as she
came through. Nearly all of them applauded. The ma
î
tre d' led
them straight to a table at the very back of the place, behind a
partition. At last, they had privacy. Just Mary Catherine and Ogle.

"I'm really, really sorry about that," Ogle said, after they had
been seated, menued, watered, and breadsticked by a swirl of
efficient, white-aproned young Italian men. "I should have
arranged to bring you in the rear entrance."

"It's okay," she said.

"Well, I'm embarrassed," Ogle said. "This is my business, you see. It was unprofessional on my part. But they had CNN going
above the bar, and I didn't reckon on that footage being shown just
before you got here."

"Powerful stuff," she said.

"It was unbelievable," Ogle said. He stared off into space. His
face went slack and his eyes went out of focus. He sat motionless
for a few seconds, moving his lips ever so slightly, gradually
beginning to shake his head from side to side, playing the whole
thing back on the videotape recorder of his mind.

Finally he blinked, came awake, and looked at her. "The kicker
was Pete Ledger getting choked up. I never thought I'd see that in
a million years."

"Me neither," she said. "He's usually too smart for that kind of
thing."

"Well," Ogle said, "this is some powerful stuff that's going on
right now."

That led them into small talk about the primary campaign, the misguided petition drives that were trying to put her father's name
on the ballots in several states, and eventually into a discussion of
Dad's stroke and its aftermath. Mary Catherine kept the whole thing quite vague, and Ogle seemed content with that; whenever
the conversation wandered close to Dad's medical condition, or his
political prospects, his face reddened slightly and he grew visibly
uncomfortable, as if these topics were way beyond the bounds of
southern gentility and he didn't know how to handle it.

She had only rarely gotten a chance to watch Dad doing
business. But she knew that this was how Dad operated: lots of
small talk. It was an Italian thing. It meshed pretty well with Ogle's
low-key southern approach.

In fact, Ogle seemed to have no desire to talk business at all, as if
the near riot at the bar had embarrassed him so deeply that he
couldn't bring himself to return to that subject. So, after an
opportune pause in the conversation, Mary Catherine decided to
open fire. "You manage political campaigns for a living. My dad's not running for anything and neither am I. Why are you buying me
lunch?"

Ogle folded his hands in his lap, broke eye contact, and glanced
around at the food on the table for a few moments, as if this were
the first time he'd ever thought about it. "There's a bunch of
people in my business. Most of the important ones are busy running
primary campaigns, for various candidates, right now. But not me.
So far I have not committed my resources to any one candidate."

"Is that a deliberate strategy?"

"Sort of," Ogle said, shrugging. "Sometimes it pays not to
commit too early. You may end up backing some loser. In the
process, you antagonize the guy who ends up being the nominee,
and then you can't get any work during the general election, which
is where the big money gets spent."

"So you're holding back until you find out who's likely to get
nominated. Then you try to get them as a client."

Ogle frowned and stared at the ceiling as if something was not
quite right. "Well, there's more to it. I have been doing this for a
number of years now. And frankly, I'm getting tired of it."

"You're getting tired of your business?"

"Certain aspects of it, yeah."

"Which aspects?"

"Dealing with campaigns."

"I don't understand," Mary Catherine said. "I thought you
were
the campaign."

"I would
like
to be the campaign. Instead, I'm the media
consultant
to
the campaign."

"Oh."

"The campaign proper consists of the party's national committee
and all of its hierarchy; the individual candidate's campaign
manager and all of his hierarchy; and all of the pressure groups to
which they are beholden, and their hierarchies."

"Sounds like a mess."

"It's a hell of a mess. If I can just make an analogy to your
business, Ms. Cozzano, running a campaign is like doing a heart-
lung transplant on the body politic. It is a massively difficult and
complicated process that requires great precision. It cannot be done
by a committee, much less by a committee of committees, most of
whom hate and fear each other. The political nonsense that I have
to go through in order to produce a single thirty-second advertising spot makes the succession of the average Byzantine emperor seem
simple and elegant by comparison."

"I find that kind of surprising," Mary Catherine said. "People
have known about the value of media since the Kennedy-Nixon
debate."

"Long before that," Ogle said. "Teddy Roosevelt staged the charge
up San Juan Hill so it would look good for the newsreel cameras."

"Really?"

"Absolutely. And FDR manipulated the media like crazy. He
was even better at it than Reagan. So media's been important for a
long time."

"Well, you'd think that the major political parties would have
figured out how to deal with it more efficiently by now."

Ogle shrugged. "Dukakis riding in the tank."

Mary Catherine grinned, remembering the ludicrous image from
1988.

"The Democratic candidates in the '92 debate, sitting in those
little desks like game show contestants while Brokaw strode around
on his feet, like a hero."

"Yeah, that was pretty silly looking."

"The fact is," Ogle said, "the major parties haven't learned how
to handle media yet. And they never will."

"Why not?"

"Because of their constitution. The parties were formed in the days when media didn't matter, and formed wrong. Now they are
like big old dinosaurs after the comet struck, thrashing around
weakly on the ground. Big and powerful but pathetic and doomed at the same time."

"You think the parties are doomed?"

"Sure they are," Ogle said. "Look at Ross Perot. If Bush's psy-
ops people hadn't figured out how to push his buttons and make
him act loony, he'd be president now. Your father has everything going for him that Perot did - but none of the negatives."

"You really think so?"

"After the reception you got when you came through that
door," Cy Ogle said, nodding toward the entrance, "I'm surprised you would even ask me such a question. Heck, you dad's already
on the ballot in Washington state."

She was appalled. "Are you joking?"

"Not at all. That's just about the easiest state to do it in. Only
takes a few thousand people."

Mary Catherine didn't answer, just sat there silently, staring
across the restaurant. She had been watching this political business
for a while, but she still couldn't believe that a few thousand total
strangers in Seattle had taken it upon themselves to put her father on the ballot.

"This is kind of interesting, as an abstract discussion," Mary
Catherine said. "I mean, I'm enjoying it and I guess I'm learning
something. But how it relates to my dad isn't clear to me."

"You're going to be hearing from a certain major political
party," Ogle said. "Medical situation permitting, they're going to try to draft your father at the convention."

"And if that happens, you want me to use whatever influence
I've got to get them to hire you?"