Interface (56 page)

The crowd went dead silent, like Sunday school children who
know that they are about to be told that they stand a high chance
of burning in Hell. All of the people here at the Southern California
Rightist Coalition who had been brought up Christian (which was
most of them) knew what was coming. The non-Christians were
already so alienated by the heavily pork-oriented meal that they
weren't talking much anyway.

Sweigel continued. "Now our lord JEEE-zuss once spoke of mustard seeds. He said that all one needed in order to perform
miracles was to have faith the size of a mustard seed.

"This is a piece of Scripture that I have known since I was just a
little boy. But I never really understood what it meant until today.
You see, in all of my life, this is the first time that I have ever
actually seen a mustard seed. My mustard has always been the bright
yellow substance to which I earlier alluded. So I did not know,
frankly, whether a mustard seed was a very small thing, like a poppy
seed, or a very large thing, like a coconut. So when I read these
words of our lord JEEE-zuss, I did not know whether he was saying
that we needed just a tiny little bit of faith, or a whole lot of faith.
"But today the LORD has seen fit to educate me in these
matters and I have had my first taste of expensive Southern
California MOO-tard, and I have seen actual mustard seeds. And I
can report to you that they are neither extremely small, as seeds go,
nor are they extremely large."

Ten feet away from the lectern, Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane was
sitting with his hands folded in his lap, trying to resist the
temptation to order another hot dog. He knew exactly where this was going and he had to keep his wits about him.

The Reverend Doctor Sweigel was an Odessa. He did things out
of pure, dumb principle, and for that reason he was about to go
upside Tip McLane's head with a little bit of JEEE-zuss, as he had
been doing for about the last couple of weeks - ever since William
A. Cozzano had begun to make television appearances.

The media had given Sweigel a free ride all the way through
Super Tuesday. They liked having a goofball in the campaign; it put variety in their tedious, ink-stained lives. When he had done
well on Super Tuesday, they had turned on him in Illinois.

McLane had turned on him too. As part of their Illinois
campaigns, all of the candidates had made ritual visits to the bedside
of William A. Cozzano, who was still hospitalized at that point.
McLane, like the others, had been shocked to see how bad
Cozzano looked.

Billy Joe Sweigel had become a wealthy and powerful TV evangelist by claiming to heal people through the power of faith.

He would heal anyone of any disease in return for a ten-dollar contribution. So the question had naturally arisen: as long as he'd
been in the room, why hadn't he just healed William A. Cozzano? It seemed like a fair enough question to Tip McLane and he had
repeatedly raised the issue in public, and during debates. It seemed
safe as anything, like asking Sweigel to heal the craters on the moon.

Then Cozzano had put on a miraculous recovery.

Sweigel continued, "So what our lord JEEE-zuss was saying was
that in order to move mountains, one need not have a great deal of
faith - one need not be some kind of a paragon - but a teeny little
bit of faith won't do it either. We have to have a reasonable amount
of faith. A sort of in-between amount of faith.

"Now, some people have more faith than others. I don't think
that it's unfair to say that. And I can remember a night a couple of
months ago, in an auditorium in Illinois, when one of my
opponents didn't seem to have very much faith at all."

A stir ran through the crowd. In the corner of his eye, McLane could see long lenses swinging in his direction, zeroing in on his
face for reaction shots.

"And a certain candidate who shall go unnamed expressed skepticism that I could, through the divine power of JEEE-zuss, heal the terrible affliction that had descended upon a certain prominent Illinoisan. And I will admit that on the night of that
debate, my faith was much smaller than a mustard seed. I went back
to my hotel room and asked, as JEEE-zuss did on the cross, 'God, why hast thou forsaken me.' But it came to me that it was not God
who had forsaken me, but the other way around. Gradually my
faith returned and waxed until it was the size, not just of a mustard seed, but of a sunflower seed, or maybe even a Brazil nut. And just
a few short weeks later I was astonished to turn on my television set
and see this prominent Illinoisan suddenly looking the very picture
of health. Praise the Lord!"

About three people in the audience, widely spaced, shouted,
"Praise the Lord!" Everyone else just looked embarrassed.

"Truly doth the Lord work in mysterious ways," Sweigel said.

That's for sure,
McLane said to himself, thinking of Goofy.

Norman Fowler, Jr., the Goofmeister himself, the reincarnation
of Marvis, had not been invited to this little get-together, in the
football-field-sized backyard of the Markham estate in Bel Air. The
Southern California Rightist Coalition was not the kind of outfit that would let a moderate like Fowler anywhere near their cam
paign events, or their coffers. Tip McLane was a shoo-in, and the group had a large enough evangelical Christian wing that Sweigel
had gotten an invite too.

After the debacle in Illinois, followed by severe drubbings in the
northeastern states where television evangelists had a bit of an
image problem, Sweigel had stayed in the race anyway, as a broker
for the evangelical vote. He was a political vampire. His broad
casting network in the Bible Belt served as an inexhaustible source
of funds, and in every city he had a hard core of supporters who could be relied on to sustain his campaign.

The incredible recovery of William A. Cozzano had caused a
sudden surge in Sweigel's popularity. Because of the number of
people who believed that Sweigel had cured Cozzano, his numbers
were now climbing up into double digits, and he was starting to
become a major annoyance to McLane.

But nothing more than an annoyance. Sweigel was frightening
enough that he served as his own worst enemy, his own personal
Goofy. Whenever he rose in the polls, he started to get more
television coverage, people started having bad dreams about him,
and he sank again.

The hot dogs said everything about this luncheon. Hollywood
people would not have served hot dogs. They would have served
caviar, fine wines, California cuisine and all that, to show how rich
and tasteful they were. But this luncheon was full of people who
had come to California and staked claims to real estate prior to the
invention of the movie camera, which was to say that they tended
to be very old and endowed with a level of wealth that far
transcended the petty plane of movie stars. Much of this wealth was
not in liquid assets; all together, the territory owned by the people
at this luncheon probably composed an area larger than many
north-eastern states. But however you looked at it, they were
loaded, and this was one invitation you did not turn down.

The man who had invited McLane to speak was none other than Karl Fort himself. Fort was now in his nineties. He had long since
cashed in his agricultural holdings. Those original investments had
made him a rich man, but they only produced steady dividends as long as Fort was right there on the ground, personally dispatching
thugs with ax handles. This kind of micromanagement had grown
wearisome, and so Fort had moved into less earthy forms of
investment.

This had left him with a great deal of free time, only some of which could be taken up on the golf course. Karl Fort had begun
dabbling in politics during the sixties, supporting the likes of Caleb Roosevelt Marshall, Goldwater, and Wallace. He had been a major
player in the California conservative movement of the seventies
and eighties. He had given lots of money to the conservative think
tanks that had provided Tip McLane with his first few jobs.

And when the Markhams had begun making plans to host this
luncheon, Karl Fort had called Tip McLane personally and actually
reminisced about the good old days back in the Depression, and
Tip McLane had actually called him "sir."

Sweigel eventually concluded his sermon with a prayer. A few people clenched their hands and bowed their heads fervently.
Everyone else just looked restless or embarrassed. And then it was
Tip McLane's turn to speak.

They applauded generously. The nervous silence that had
reigned during Sweigel's performance was finally broken. McLane
got up from his seat at the high table in the front and waved and
nodded to the crowd: a hundred and fifty of the richest people in the West, seated at a few long tables with their paper plates and
plastic wineglasses. To one side, the press corps was corralled
behind a red plastic ribbon, like wild animals.

This was going to be a piece of cake. These people loved him;
he could do no wrong here. "Thank you very much. And thanks
to Mr. and Mrs. Markham for making the backyard of their
magnificent home available for this event. In a few months I hope
to return the invitation - though I'm afraid that you'll have to fly all the way to Washington, D.C."

A few men in the crowd barked out laughter and there was a
smattering of applause.

"I have a dirty little secret for you: I'm sick to death of cam
paigning. I think everyone in America has heard my message by
now. Most people who have heard it seem to agree with it. My
opponents don't, but, expecting Reverend Sweigel here, I've
always found my opponents to be just a little bit on the goofy side."

About half a dozen people - those who had already seen the
Fowler/Goofy image on TV - laughed loudly at this. Everyone else
tittered uncertainly. The line wasn't intended for them. It was
intended to be used on the evening newscasts, at the appropriate
moment.

"So I'm not going to harangue you with my usual stump speech.
Instead I'd like to speak, very briefly, about some of the ideas that I intend to put into action once I get settled into the White House next January."

At this point McLane paused for a moment and pretended to
fiddle with his note cards. He was doing this because some kind of
a distraction had arisen at one of the tables, and he didn't want to try and shout his way through it. He assumed it was something
minor, like a glass of lemonade that had spilled into someone's lap.
But it didn't die away. It kept building.

Several people had stood up now. They were all facing inward, looking at an elderly man who was leaning way back in his chair,
almost lying down, pressing one fist into his breastbone. His mouth
was open, he was gasping for breath.

"Are there any doctors present here? This man is in distress,"
McLane said.

Something caught his eye: Zeke Zorn, standing up, waving him
away from the lectern with both hands, like one of those guys at the airport directing the jetliners. McLane moved quickly away
from the lectern. Only later would he understand that this had been
good advice. There were very few things a man could say into a microphone at such a time that would make him look as though he had handled the situation presidentially. There were many ways to
screw up.

No one had responded to the call for a doctor. All of the lenses
and microphones in the makeshift press gallery had swung over and
brought themselves to bear on the man in distress.

People were doing the normal sorts of folksy first-aid things. A couple of men cleared off a table in one instant by yanking at the
tablecloth, sweeping all the plates and glasses off on to the ground,
and then four people gathered around the stricken man and lifted
him up on to the table's clean surface. They loosened his tie.
Someone offered him a glass of water. None of it was doing
anything for his life expectancy, which clearly was measurable in
seconds or minutes.