Lucky Bastard (39 page)

As to the daily business of his administration, Governor Adams of Ohio, like President Charles de Gaulle of France, did not concern himself with the details of government, but only with its grand strategy and enduring principles and interests.

This approach drove Morgan crazy. What she wanted from Jack was substance, by which she meant a frontal attack on the Establishment, a fearless advocacy of the many causes in which she and her clients so passionately believed. In Morgan's room, shouting now instead of whispering, she pleaded with him to take a stand on all the inflammatory issues of the day.

“Issues make enemies,” Jack said. “Tell your friends—”

“
My
friends? Who do you think are the street fighters of your movement?”

“I know. Believe me, I know. But they're already with me. What I need to do is attract the people who aren't yet with me. I can't get them to join me and trust me by doing things and saying things that piss them off.”

“What about waking them up?”

“They wake up every morning and look for work. This is the Rust Belt, Morg. People are scared by unemployment, scared by change that has ruined their lives. And you want me to tell them they ain't seen nothin' yet?”

“There's good change and bad change. This is the Rust Belt because capitalism has failed them, screwed them, and left them high and dry.
Capitalism
, Jack.”

“Sure it has. But they want it to come home again. You think they look at those abandoned mills and factories and say, ‘Hooray, the bosses are gone'? What they say is ‘All is forgiven. Bring back the jobs.'”

“That's exactly what has to change—the mind of the people.”

“Well, it won't happen except out of the barrel of a gun. My grandfather was thrown into the street and do you know what he said about the rich? ‘No poor man ever gave me a job.'”

“I want to vomit,” Morgan said. “Jack, listen to me. You have to stand for something.”

“I do. Every day. Reelection.”

“Goddamnit, Jack, get serious.”

“About what? The endangered snail darter?”

“Jesus! You really don't understand, do you? The purpose of the environmental movement is not to save the fucking environment. Its purpose is to demonstrate the crimes and failures of capitalism. Just like every other component of the cause. Hammer away, hammer away, hammer away. Take the Establishment apart chip by chip. First we discredit them, then we remove them, then we apply the remedies.”

“I thought my job was to get elected. I thought that was the Prime Directive.”

“It is. But not as a goddamned Republican. You can't even give a straight answer on abortion. It's embarrassing, Jack.”

“Morgan, I know you don't feel like I do about this, but I look at Fitz and Skipper and I—”

“And you what? I don't want to hear it. You don't understand. You have to send a signal to the faithful. Reassure them.”

“That's why I have you,” Jack said. “If I wasn't the real thing deep down inside, would I be married to somebody like you? That's the message. Tell them you know what's really in my heart. Tell them to be patient.”

“For how long?”

He gave her the smile. “Until tomorrow comes, as they know it will.”

“Today pinpricks, tomorrow hammer blows. Is that it?”

“Pinpricks in the darkness are just another name for stars,” Jack replied.

Morgan gagged theatrically, then threw her own yellow pad at him. “Here! Write that down too!”

But she could not help admiring him. He was so quick, so glib, so Machiavellian—a prince in the only sense of the word that had any meaning or value.

Tiresome as they were to Jack, these discussions of principle were important to Morgan because they reminded Jack that he was supposed to have a conscience. Even if he refused to act on them, it was her task to remind him constantly of the principles that drove the operation. Otherwise, she knew, he would forget them, as he forgot women, forgot favors, forgot friends, forgot promises. Jack lived in the moment, for the moment, in a psychic world that had no past, only a future in which, she suspected, he believed that he could escape from the consequences of youthful follies whose visible symbol was Morgan herself. He could live with her because he had to, for as long as he had to. But he wanted power as a means of escape from the past. Escape from Peter. Escape from the revolution. Escape from Morgan. That was what she believed.

Fourteen months after succeeding to the governorship through the dirty tricks of the people in gorilla masks, Jack was reelected in a landslide while Republicans were sweeping into almost every other high office in the land. We gave him half a million dollars toward the cost of his campaign, but it wasn't the money that made the difference, it was Jack, Jack, Jack. At least five national media outlets asked the question, “Next Stop, the Presidency?”

Deep within himself, Jack was sure that the answer was yes. Everything favored him.

5
“Everything?” Peter asked Morgan over a bucket of the Colonel's crispy fried chicken in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. (This hamlet was out of the way, but Peter loved the name when he saw it on the map). “Even,” Peter said, “the hatred of his own party's inner circle?”

“Especially that,” Morgan said.

She explained Jack's reasoning: The new president in Washington, a charming fascist—who would have thought that such a creature existed?—had just won in a landslide of his own. Like Jack himself, and like JFK, this born winner was an outsider who only a short time before had been given no chance to rise to the top. Yet now his overpowering strengths—

“Which are the strengths of trivia,” Peter said.

“Precisely,” Morgan replied. “That's the great American secret.”

Now even the new president's mortal enemies in the media conceded among themselves that he would probably be unbeatable if he ran for reelection. The economy, a shambles when he took office, was on the upswing. The president's sunny disposition drove his policy. With tireless good nature he repeated over and over again the five or six simplistic principles that seemed to comprise his entire intellectual repertoire. Somehow, bewildering as it was to Morgan, this had produced the dawn of an era of good feeling. Anyone who ran against this lovable optimist would be seen as a doomsayer and would go down in defeat. Therefore, no candidate with the instinct of self-preservation would want the nomination four years hence. Jack's party would be looking for a sacrificial lamb, someone on the outer edge of the party who could lose and then be tossed on the ash heap of history.

Jack saw this as his great opportunity. The party leaders might not support him, but they would not oppose him if he ran. And if he won the primaries and went into the convention with enough votes, they could not stop him.

“All this to lose the election?” I said.

“Maybe,” Morgan said. “But to lose honorably, to go down fighting, to make an indelible impression. Jack is young. Four years after he loses he'll still be young enough to run again, and win.”

“He's going to come out of the closet, be a radical?” I asked.

“Jack?” Morgan replied. “Don't make me laugh. He'll make a point of being as much like his opponent as possible. It worked for JFK. Nixon was supposed to be the ruthless one, but it was Kennedy who called for nuking China if it took one step across an imaginary line in the Pescadores, Kennedy who claimed there was a missile gap, Kennedy who may have stolen the election—”

“You're quoting Jack?”

“Yes. But it's all true. You can get away with anything in this country if you make the right noises.”

“Point taken,” Peter said. “Question: Is this a rational judgment or does Jack see this progression of future events as his destiny?”

This was the fundamental question. Jack's delusion that he was a secret carrier of the Kennedy genes had been powerfully reinforced by his unbroken series of political successes.

“He believes in his bones,” Morgan answered, “that he can do this because he was born to do it. Every stroke of luck is a sign in the sky to him—Daddy on the heliograph from heaven. He never says this in so many words, but I see it in his eyes. He thinks he has already pulled Excalibur out of the stone, and all he has to do now is sit down at the Round Table.”

Peter was smiling, bemused and proud. He had made all this happen with a wave of his magic wand. You could see the thought dancing like a jester in his head. I thought,
And escape from this Merlin. That is his real plan.
I kept the thought to myself; this was not the moment to speak it aloud.

Morgan said, “There is one small problem. It will cost at least twenty million dollars to put this plan into effect. Jack believes he is holding a promissory note from you for that or any other amount he may need.”

“Ah, he wants a trust fund, just like a real Kennedy!” Peter waved a careless hand. “Why not?”

Always the worrier, I said, “Explaining where it came from will be the problem.”

Peter said, quite distinctly, “Then make it cease to be a problem, Comrade Colonel.”

By calling me by my rank, a recent one, he was pointing out that (1), I had just been promoted because I was supposed to be able to solve such routine problems as this, and (2), If there was a problem, it was
my
problem.

Peter had already put all annoying details behind him. “This chicken would be a sensation in Moscow,” he said, actually licking his fingers. “These outlets, so cheery with their stripes and cupolas, remind one of St. Basil's, don't you agree, Dmitri?”

“Absolutely,” I said. His obedient servant. But I wondered how we were going to move all that money by dark of night.

6
As a warranty of good things to come, Peter authorized the immediate delivery of $250,000 in cash to cover the incidental expenses of Jack's politicking. I made a trip to a Caribbean island to draw the funds from a bank in which Peter deposited some of his fees from his allies in the cocaine trade. Morgan—happy in the knowledge that the drug offensive against the United States was war on capitalism by other means, sweet revenge for the plutocratic opium trade to China of another era—transported the money back to Columbus in the trunk of the used BMW that had replaced her beloved VW bus. The money—all in well-worn tens, twenties, and Peter's signature fifties—made an impressive sight when Morgan untied the strings of the banker's boxes and heaped it on the table in her soundproof safe room. She had summoned Jack by telephone from the governor's mansion, expecting him to explode with joy when he beheld this hillock of greenbacks. His reaction was not quite what she had expected. Because she had been with me, and then with her Georgian (bank boxes under the bed), and then alone in her car on the highway, she had missed the evening news. Jack had not. The lead story described a CIA man who had been arrested, far too late, by the FBI and charged with passing secrets to us. According to the networks, this spy had been paid almost three million dollars in cash for his treason. Jack was infuriated.

“The Russians pay some fucking file clerk in the CIA three million bucks for a grocery bag full of Xeroxes,” he said, “and Peter expects me to become president of the United States on a lousy two hundred and fifty thou?”

He was shouting. He was speaking Peter's name aloud. He was abandoning the pretense that he was a free agent who sometimes got a little help from benevolent friends. All this was a startling turnabout. This red-faced, screaming dervish was not the Jack whom Morgan knew. She was nonplused. She thought she had better defend the cover story lest it unravel altogether.

She said, “Jack, shut up. The comparison is ludicrous. The KGB has nothing to do with Peter.”

“Right,” said Jack. “And you and I are America's happiest married couple.”

Morgan felt a stab of panic. She felt like a guilty wife whose husband reveals that he has known all along about her lover. Or so she said later, after she had had time to classify the anxiety that burst so unexpectedly to the surface. Did Jack
know
? What did he know? How could he know it? Was he going to drag it all into the open? Ruin everything?
Embarrass
her?

With a calmness that surprised them both, she asked, “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means I'm tired of playing games and even tireder of being poor,” Jack replied, also calmer now but still angry; like a husband who is prepared to forgive for the last time, he was laying down the law. “But listen to me, Morgan. I want this problem solved or I'm gone.”

“Gone? Where to? Are you crazy?”

Jack laughed, a harsh bark she had not heard before. He said, “You heard me. What are they going to do, hunt me down to the ends of the Earth and shoot me? Have they got somebody else who has a chance at the White House? I got where I am on my own. You think I can't get to the presidency, or somewhere else where I can make life hell for them, on my own?”

“On your own, my ass. If you think that, you
are
crazy.”

“Try me. I don't need these fuckers, and I don't care how many pictures of my slippery dick they've got. I'll tell the world they're the CIA trying to frame me because of their ties to the Mafia and the child porn trade. Who do you think will be believed?”

Morgan knew he was serious. She knew he was right about the media's reaction to the outrageous lie he had just invented on the spur of the moment. What a talent! She said, “I can't believe this.”

“You'd better believe it. Morgan, this is my message to Peter and his freedom-loving friends: Get the fucking money or get another boy!”

With a sudden, violent gesture straight out of the movies—Steve McQueen in a rage—Jack swept some of Peter's money off the table. Packets of banknotes flew across the room and bounced off the cork-lined walls.