Lucky Bastard (37 page)

Jack fell precipitously in the polls. Rumors of his scandalous private life ran through the state. Republican operatives floated scatological Jack jokes. There were allegations—all true, alas—of a secret love nest, of cocaine, of underage girls.

None of this worried Jack. Rumors of his enviable sex life never made the newspapers because the reporters assigned to investigate them were loath to discredit the media hero they had created—and, just as important, even more reluctant to help his Republican opponent. And even though this harmless little exercise in hypocrisy helped her cause, it gave Morgan another reason to despise the press. Weaklings. Whores. If Jack could use them so easily, so could his enemies.

Jack understood this and of his own volition gave up women for the remainder of the campaign. Although he had lost nothing of his seemingly inborn conviction that he could lie his way out of anything, he understood that not even the most ingenious lie could save him if an enemy obtained pictures of him or planted an agent provocateuse on him. He did not subject his partners to background checks before he invited them to his lair, and the game of friendly rape his women came to play could easily be portrayed as a brutal crime. He knew this would finish him, that no one could protect him in such a case. The badger game, in which the errant wife is surprised in the presence of witnesses by an irate husband and a cameraman, has served politics well. Jack did not throw the key to his secret apartment down a sewer, but knowing himself at least as well as Morgan thought she knew him, he gave it to Danny Miller for safekeeping.

“Don't give this back to me before Election Day no matter what I say,” Jack said.

Danny fingered the envelope and felt the shape of the key inside. There was no need to tell him what lock it fitted.

Danny said, “This is a truly noble sacrifice.”

Jack grinned and made an ancient masculine hand movement. “Anything for the cause,” he said.

“Sit down, I've got something to show you,” Danny said. He switched on the television set and put a videotape into the VCR. F. Merriwether Street popped onto the screen. He was giving a stump speech.

“Jesus,” said Jack, “the eloquence.”

Danny said, “Pay attention.”

Street was on the attack. “Ohio is snakebit by drugs,” he cried. “They're in every school, in too many homes, they are ruining young lives every single day. And, my friends, this happened while my opponent was the chief law enforcement officer of our state. As attorney general he did not prosecute one single significant drug case in four long years. I wonder why. We all wonder why.”

Danny said, “You can't let this go on.”

“I'll have to think about it.”

“What's to think about, Jack? It's like motherhood, for Christ's sake. Make some busts, make a speech. Take the issue away from this jerk.”

“I said I'd think about it.”

“I heard you. What the fuck is the matter with you on this one, Jack?”

Jack's hands were tied, of course. He pleaded with Morgan to let him denounce the drug trade, and Morgan pleaded with me, but Peter's guideline held firm.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “He has to stay away from this issue.”

“It's killing him.”

“Then Jack will have to find some other issue. A diversion.”

“Diversions cost money, Dmitri. And we're broke.”

This was true. Ironically, there was no shortage of money. Peter's Caribbean accounts were overflowing. The problem was explaining where it came from. How to hide the funds, how to launder them? Those were the questions; they are always the questions.

Meanwhile, Jack was running out of time. A month before the election, eight points behind in the latest poll, he pleaded in private with the governor for more money, more exposure, more appearances together. The governor put an arm around his young running mate and with a sad shake of the head said, “Jack, your showing is a real disappointment to us, too.”

“Those fuckers
want
me to lose,” Jack told Danny. “They set me up with this worthless office to get rid of me. I knew what they were doing. I should have gone for the governorship.”

“You wouldn't have made it.”

“Maybe not, but I could have made it close and then come back. No one would have expected me to win. Just like nobody expected me to lose for this chickenshit office. Except my own party.”

“You are so right,” said Danny. “I just got off the phone. The word is: no help. You're on your own. Without the party organization, we can't get out the vote for you.”

Jack was undaunted. “Then we'll go around the bastards.”

“That may not work either. The governor's losing a point a week in the polls. They won't come right out and say it, but they think it's all over for everybody. It's that asshole in the White House, dragging everybody in the party down with him. It will take an act of God for either one of you to win.”

“No, just money,” Jack said.

“We've got less than two thousand bucks in the kitty.”

“I don't give a shit about that. Find out how much it will cost for a week of thirty-second television spots on every TV channel and radio station in Ohio. I'll have Morgan call New York and find out about production costs.”

“Jack—”

“Danny, just do it. Now.”

Danny picked up the phone. While he made his calls, Jack scribbled on a yellow legal pad, outlining the ads he had in mind. They were mostly images, few words. Subliminals were what he wanted. He knew every inch of footage that had ever been taken of him by the media. Danny finished his telephoning. He made some entries on the old-fashioned hand-cranked adding machine that he kept on his desk, then tore off the tape and handed it to Jack.

“That's about eighty grand more than we've got,” he said.

Jack said, “A bargain. Book the time. I want a spot an hour for the last five days, heavy on the football games.”

“Jack, they'll want the money up front.”

“I'll sell the house,” Jack said.

Morgan walked in.

Jack said, “I'll raffle Morgan.”

“Very funny,” Morgan said. “What's this all about?”

“Money,” Jack said. “We need a hundred grand. Now. Morgan, find a buyer for the house.”

“The house?” Morgan said. “You're out of your mind.”

“It'll be a national landmark someday,” Danny said. “On this spot President Adams, unarmed and alone, defeated the Mafia sharpshooters and went on to save the world for the workers.”

“Jack,” Morgan said, “get serious.”

“Morgan, honey, sell the house. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?”

“No.”

“Then I'll spell it out: Merriwether is rich. We're poor. He can spend millions and not miss it. We're willing to lose everything. Why? Because we have made a sacred promise to the people and we'd rather live in a cardboard box than break that promise.”

Morgan looked at him with respect, and something that went beyond respect. “I understand,” she said.

“Good. Bring me the money.”

The next evening, in a motel near Beaver, Pennsylvania, a Mr. O. N. Laster of Saddle Brook, New Jersey, signed an agreement to purchase the Adamses' bungalow. He handed over to Mrs. Adams, the sole owner, a cashier's check for $59,500 as payment in full for the property.

After Mr. Laster departed—an exit easily arranged inasmuch as he did not exist—I gave Morgan a crate of rare books. Thanks to Morgan's Harvard training in cutthroat bargaining, the books, which included autographed first editions of a work by Henry James and
The Great Gatsby
, brought an aggregate of $68,764, or about 15 percent more than I would have dared to ask for the items. Morgan told interviewers that the books had been a bequest from her grandfather, and though they were the material things she treasured most in the world, she knew that Papa, as she had called that wonderful old man, would have understood that her husband and what he represented to Ohio and America had to come first.

Five days before the election, the spots went on the air. One set of ads showed a dizzying montage of still and moving pictures of F. Merriwether Street in the company of Richard Nixon, closing with a remarkable video sequence of Nixon shooting a sidelong glance at Merriwether, followed immediately by another in which the two men stood side by side in front of a crowd with their backs to the camera and their arms around each other. Because Nixon was so much shorter than Street, his groping hand appeared, briefly, to be fondling Street's buttocks. This was followed by a clip of Nixon's famous “I am not a crook” utterance and finally by an extreme close-up of F. Merriwether Street's habitually puzzled face. As Jack's witty columnist friend wrote, Street looked in that photo like an especially stupid horse that had just awakened to find itself in bed with the severed head of a Hollywood producer.

The other ads focused on Jack: A series were tributes to Jack from wounded Ohioans to whom he had ministered as an army medic during the Vietnam War, shots of Jack pushing the twins in their stroller, an interview with a worshipful Teresa Gallagher, shots of Jack comforting his terrified wife in the ruins of their modest bungalow, footage of Fats Corso scuttling off to jail in manacles. One or the other of these spots ran at least once an hour on every local television channel in Ohio.

The ads were brilliantly ruthless examples of the genre, and thanks to the last-minute surge in the polls that they created, Jack won election to lieutenant governor by 1,936 votes. By no coincidence, the governor, who had been pronounced dead by the media, won by an almost identical plurality of 1,894 votes. His margin might have been greater, but after Jack's closing blitz a lot of voters were under the impression that he was running for governor, and he got about two thousand write-in votes for that office in addition to the total he received for lieutenant governor.

At the victory celebration the governor embraced Jack, called out his name to the exultant crowd, and cried, “Meet a future governor of our great state! Lucky Jack Adams!”

When the governor turned to Morgan, she handed the twin she was holding—Skipper, she thought it was—to Jack and threw her arms around the governor, bestowing a big daughterly kiss onto the empty air beside his cheek.

While the crowd cheered Jack and his twins, who were waving to one and all, Morgan whispered a message into the governor's ear: “Lucky my ass, you double-crossing son of a bitch.”

The governor blinked, smiled, and lifted one of the boys out of Jack's arms and held him aloft in triumph. “Cry, Skipper!” Morgan whispered.

This twin's name was Fitz, but frightened out of his wits by his mother's fierce expression, he uttered a mighty yell of distress and, to the crowd's delight, held out his chubby arms to his daddy.

2
Street, Frew, Street & Merriwether, the venerable law firm for which Cindy Miller worked, had devised a peculiar system for choosing partners from within itself. After a promising associate was marked for possible promotion, he was summoned into the presence of the managing partner and offered candidate membership in the Handful, so called because the firm never had more than five senior partners, and because the candidate would be observed and judged by the stern standards of the firm for the next five years. At the end of that period he would either be offered a partnership, or not. The candidate would know which way the decision had gone when, arriving at work on the fifth anniversary of the offer, he opened the door of his office to find either a burst of applause from the assembled senior partners or an empty office. In the latter case, the failed candidate was expected to depart at once. Personal belongings would be packed and shipped at the firm's expense, along with a final paycheck. This system had produced several nervous breakdowns, but the survivors usually did well for Street, Frew, Street & Merriwether and for themselves.

The fifth anniversary of Cindy's candidacy happened to fall in the week after the election in which Jack Adams had defeated F. Merriwether Street for lieutenant governor of Ohio. When she went into work that morning—arriving precisely fifteen minutes early as was the tradition—she found an empty office. Even though she had brought hundreds of thousands of dollars in business into the firm, had won difficult cases in court and settled even knottier ones by negotiation, no appeal was possible, or even thinkable. She left her rest-room key on her desk.

Danny had driven Cindy into work that morning and parked around the corner. His heart fell, then swelled with anger at the Streets, Merriwethers, and Frews of this world as he saw her approaching in the rearview mirror, head up, golden hair bouncing, skirt swinging as she walked at her usual firm, rapid pace. He saw her smile, then smile again and yet again as a stream of people said hi to her. A man in a five-hundred-dollar suit turned to watch her with a rueful smile as she walked by, the American object of desire itself.

“Bastards,” Danny said.

“They are what they are,” Cindy said.

“Cin, I'm so sorry.”

“For what?”

“For sticking with Jack. That's the reason for this. We both know that.”

“You're right,” Cindy said. “What else would you expect the Merriwethers and the Streets to do to a woman whose husband did what you did to the scion of their fine old family?”

“I don't know what to say.”

“I do,” Cindy said. Cindy was dry-eyed. Her voice was even. What had happened was exactly what she had expected, and in her tidy way she had already made provisions for a new future. She grasped Danny's ruined right thigh and said, “Cheer up. You just got yourself a new partner.”

Danny frowned in puzzlement. “I thought we always were partners,” Danny said.

“I mean law partner. I want to join your firm.”

Cindy had not mentioned this before. Danny said, “No shit? Are you serious?”