Interface (8 page)

She did not want to look at Harmon or touch his body and so
she went and sat on the front steps of the White House for a while,
letting tears run down her face and shatter her clear view of the
lights of Denver. She did not have any shoulder to rest her head on
and so she scooted over to one end of the step and leaned against the white vinyl siding of the house, which gave a little under the weight of her head.

After a while, she walked back in through the open front door and went back into the living room. She picked up her husband's crowbar from where he had thrown it away. The floor was dented
beneath it; he must have hurled it down there in a rage when the
door jamb had shattered. From there he had probably gone straight
to the Volvo.

Eleanor worked the point of the crowbar underneath the portion
of the doorjamb that was still nailed down, and prying gently, a
little at a time, moving the crowbar up and down its length, worked
the jamb loose from the frame of the house. It held together okay and she knew that a little Elmer's glue would fix it right up. She
would ask Doreen's boyfriend to nail it up to the wall of the trailer and then she would have Clarice and Harmon, Jr., stand against it and she would measure their height and mark their progress. They
would roll their eyes and say it was stupid, but they would secretly
love it.

Every few seconds, all the way through this, she remembered,
with a shock, that her husband was dead.

She carried the doorjamb out and fed it in through the open
window of Doreen's car. It still stuck out a little bit but it would be
okay for the drive home. Living in Commerce City, watching
Mexicans, she had learned that you could get away with letting just
about anything hang out the windows of your car. She backed out of the driveway and turned around in the big circle and left
White House beyond, driving aimlessly into the heart of her old neighborhood, looking for another house with lights in it, a house
where they might have a working telephone.

PART 2
The Ride

5

Marsha Wyzniewczki's relationship with her boss had never
been ceremonious. When he didn't answer for the third time, she
got up from her desk, worked up a good head of steam accelerating
across ten feet of office floor, and threw her full hundred and ten
pounds against one of the two tall, narrow, Lincolnesque doors that
separated her office from the Governor's.

A small old gray man was hunched over in the Governor's chair,
in a pool of light in the dark office. Marsha had to look at him for
several seconds before she was completely sure that this man was
William Anthony Cozzano, the tall sturdy hero who had entered
the office a few hours ago, ruddy from his afternoon jog up around
Lincoln's Tomb. He had somehow been transformed into
this.
A wraith from the VA Hospital.

A mother's reflex took over; she groped for the wall switch,
lighting up the office. "Willy?" she said, addressing him this way for
the first time ever. "Willy, are you all right?"

"Call," he said.

"Call whom?"

"Goddamn it," he said, unable to remember a name. This was
the first time she had ever heard him utter profanity when he knew
that she was listening. "Call her."

"Call whom?"

"The three-alarm lamp scooter," he said.

Cozzano flapped his right arm, causing his whole body to bend
perilously to that side, and pointed across the office at his wall of
pictures. "Three-alarm lamp scooter."

Marsha couldn't tell which picture he was pointing at. Christina?
The
 
little
 
Vietnamese
 
girl?
 
One
 
of the
 
bridesmaids?
  
Or his
daughter, Mary Catherine?

Mary Catherine was a doctor, three years out of medical school. She was a neurology resident at a big hospital in Chicago. The last
time the Governor had gone to the city, he had visited her
apartment and come back chuckling about one detail of her life: She spent so much time on call and slept so little that she had to
have three alarm clocks by her bed.

"Mary Catherine?"

"Yes, goddamn it!"

Marsha went back to her little cockpit, where she sat all day,
irradiated on three sides by video screens. Sliding a computer
mouse around on the desktop, she located Mary Catherine
Cozzano's name and slapped a button. She heard the computer
dialing the number, a quick tuneless series of notes, like the song of
an exotic bird.

"South Shore Hospital switchboard, may I help you?"

Cozzano's voice broke in before Marsha could say anything; he had picked up his extension. "The budlecker! Make the budlecker
go!" Then, infuriated at himself: "No, goddamn it!"

"Excuse me?" the operator said.

"Mary Catherine Cozzano. Pager 806," Marsha said.

"Dr. Cozzano is not on call at this time. Would you like to speak
to the doctor who is?"

Marsha did not understand the following words were true until
she spoke them: "This is a family emergency. A medical
emergency."

Then she dialed 911 on another line.

Then she went back into the Governor's office to make sure that he was comfortable in his chair. He had slumped over to one side.
His right arm kept lashing out like a gaff, trying to hook on to
something sturdy enough to pull his full weight, but the surface of
his desk offered no purchase.

Marsha grabbed the Governor's upper left arm in both of her
hands and tried to move him. But Cozzano reached across his body
with his right hand and gently, firmly, pulled her hands loose. She

watched his hand for a moment, confused, then noticed that he was
staring directly into her eyes.

He glanced significantly at the telephone on his desk. "Fuck
me," he said. "Get the maculator!" Then he closed his eyes tight in
frustration and shook his head. "No, goddamn it!"

"The maculator?"

"The old Egyptian. Glossy head. He'll fix this muggle. Get the
boy of my father's acehole! Ace in the hole."

"Mel Meyer," she said.

"Yeah."

That was an easy one; Mel was the second preset on the
Governor's phone, a one-button job. Marsha picked up the phone
and pushed that button, with a sense of relief that made her
decisive. Mel was the guy to call. She should have called him first,
before calling the ambulance.

She ended up having to try a couple of numbers before she
reached him on his car phone, somewhere on the streets of
Chicago.

"What is it!" Mel snapped, getting things off to a typically brisk
start,

"It's Marsha. The Governor has had a stroke or something."

"Oh, no!" William A. Cozzano said. "You're right. I had a
stroke. That's terrible."

"When?" Mel said.

"Just now."

"Is he dead?"

"No."

"Is he in distress?"

"No."

"Who is aware of this?"

"You, me, an ambulance crew."

"Is the ambulance there?"

"Not yet."

"Listen carefully." In the background, Marsha heard honking,
the squealing of tires, the dim filtered sound of other motorists
shouting at Mel, their voices Dopplering wierdly as they veered and
accelerated around him. He must have pulled on to the shoulder,
sidewalk, or wherever else he saw clear space. Mel kept talking
smoothly and without interruption. "You don't want an
ambulance there. Even at night the Capitol is crawling with media
jackals. Damn that glass wall!"

"But-"

"Shut up. I know you have to get him medical attention. Who's
on security detail? Mack Crane?"

"Yes."

"I'll call and tell him to get Willy into the dumbwaiter. You take
the stairs down to the basement - don't wait for the damn elevator, don't talk to any press - and find Rufus Bell, who's down in the boiler room, smoking Camels and waiting for the lottery numbers to come up on TV. Tell him that the Governor needs his help. Tell
him to clear a path to the civil defense tunnel."

Then Mel hung up. Marsha was saying, "Civil defense?"

The Governor was smiling at Marsha with one side of his face. The other side was expressionless. "He is a smart back," he said.
"No! You know what I mean. Do what he said."

The Governor's offices were separated from the rest of the
capitol by a huge glass wall that completely sealed off the east wing. Just inside the glass wall was a generously sized reception area,
furnished with leather chairs and davenports, where visitors waited to see the Governor or his staff. Right up against the glass was a
security desk where Mack Crane or another member of the
Governor's security detail was always stationed, twenty-four hours
a day, keeping a sharp eye on anyone who approached from the
direction of the rotunda. Mack was a plainclothes Illinois cop, bald head fringed with straight, steely hair, wearing an unfashionably wide tie over a short-sleeved shirt. By the time Marsha had made it
out of the Governor's office; through her own office, and out into the reception area, Mack's phone was already ringing, and as she
punched her way out through the glass doors, heading for the
Rotunda, she could hear him saying, "Hi, Mel."

Rufus Bell was downstairs in his little asbestos empire, smoking
unfiltered Camels and watching television on a little black-and-
white set he had poised on an upended bucket, when Marsha drove
her shoulder into the steel door of the boiler room. Something in her manner caused him to rise to his feet.

"This is an emergency," she said. "The Governor needs your
help."

Bell flicked his cigarette into a coffee can full of water, scoring a
direct hit from ten feet away, simultaneously punching the TV's off
switch with a knee. Then he just stared at her and Marsha realized
he was waiting for instructions.

"Is there a civil defense tunnel or something?"

By way of saying yes, Bell strode over to a big sheet of stained and lacquered plywood bolted to a wall. The plywood had dozens
of cup hooks screwed into it. A key chain dangled from each cup
hook. He grabbed one.

"Willy's coming down," Marsh said, she swallowed. "On the
dumbwaiter."

Rufus froze solid for a long moment, then turned around and
looked searchingly at Marsha.

"You need to clear a path from the dumbwaiter to the civil
defense tunnel. Big enough for a stretcher."

Bell shrugged. "Shouldn't be hard," he said, exiting the room.
He was a big round man with a rolling gait that looked slow, but
Marsha had to hurry to keep up.

As they came into the hallway, Bell turned and held the key
chain out to her, suspending it by a single one of its myriad keys,
held between his thumb and forefinger. "You want me to clear that
hallway, you gotta do the tunnel yourself. End of this hall, take a
right, go to the very end."

Marsha had thought that she knew her way around the state
house but now was beginning to feel lost and uncertain. But Bell
was staring at her remorselessly, holding the key chain right up in
her face, and she had to do it. She took the keys, getting a firm grip
on the important one, and ran down the hallway.

"Yo!" Bell said, "you'll need this!"

She turned around to see Bell holding up a thick black rubber-
coated flashlight. He clicked it on, waved it back and forth a couple
of times, and underhanded it to her down thirty feet of hallway.
She plucked it out of its spinning trajectory with a one-handed-
grab, shattering two fingernails, and spun on her heel.

Behind her she could hear a tremendous clattering; looking back
she saw Rufus beginning to shove entire file cabinets this way am
that. That was all she took in before she turned down the next
corridor.