No Safe Place (36 page)

“Thirty-six people in Sweden.

“Thirty-three in Great Britain.

“One hundred twenty-eight in Canada.

“Thirteen in Australia.

“Sixteen in Japan.” For an instant, Kerry paused. “And, in the United States, thirty
thousand
four hundred and ninety-five.

“In
our
country, people armed with handguns committed over one point one million violent crimes.

“In
our
country, guns are the leading cause of death for black males under thirty-five.

“In
our
country, fifty-three percent of the victims in spousal murders died from gunshot wounds.

“In
our
country, the annual firearm-injury epidemic—due largely to handguns—is ten times larger than the polio epidemic in any year in the first half of the twentieth century.”

The staccato delivery of fact upon fact, Lara thought, was devastating. The demonstrators were silent.

“What causes this terrible slaughter?” Kerry asked. “Are Americans less humane than the Japanese, or the Australians, or the Swedes? Do Americans consider mass murder a small price to pay for the unfettered right to buy and sell guns?” Now Kerry’s voice became almost gentle. “Or that the life of Carlos Miller is a small price to pay?

“We do
not
. These tragedies occur because, despite the wishes of the vast majority, our efforts to control the flow of weapons are among the most feeble in the world. So there is
something else which must be said, out of respect to Carlos Miller and the countless others who have died for no good reason.” At last, Kerry turned to the demonstrators, voice rising in anger. “The notion that James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights so that racists and sociopaths and madmen could slaughter innocent men, women, and children with assault weapons
or
handguns is one of the most contemptible notions that an irresponsible minority has ever crammed down the throats of its potential victims.”

There was a startling riptide of emotion: Kerry’s supporters screaming their support; the demonstrators trying to drown them out, faces filled with rage. Lara saw a squat man balanced on a folding chair and shouting through a megaphone,
“Where’s your brother?”
His hatred was so visceral that Lara felt it on her skin.

“No,”
Lee McAlpine whispered. When Lara turned, she saw that Lee’s usual insouciance had vanished; her face was pinched with apprehension.

“I don’t care about the politics,” Lee said under her breath. “He’ll never live to be President, and I don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Instinctively, Lara scanned the rooftops, then turned to watch Kerry again—a distant figure, looking almost frail, who had made himself a vortex of passion.

Why,
she asked him.
Why?

“In the last half of this last century,” Kerry said into the cacophony, “men with guns stole our future by killing the best of our leaders, again and again—in one single tragic year, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. And day after day, death upon death, they steal our dreams by killing the people we love.

“Enough.”

Abruptly, Kerry’s voice changed again; to Lara, it sounded lilting, eloquent, faintly Irish. “Today I ask you to share a dream too powerful to kill, too important to let die: the day when we have eradicated the misery caused by assault weapons and handguns as surely as we eradicated smallpox.”

Kerry paused, letting the crowd absorb this. “In New Hampshire,” he told them, “I promised you a program. Here it
is.

“
First,
everyone who owns a gun should be required to carry
a license, conditional on completing a course in firearms use and passing a safety test …”

Once more, the demonstrators unleashed a wave of jeers and catcalls. “That’s what we do with automobiles,” Kerry snapped. “Why is a drunk with a gun safer than a drunk in a car?”

Waving their signs, Kerry’s supporters cheered him on.
“Second,”
he continued in a steady voice, “we should ban any weapon whose sole purpose is to kill other people—assault weapons, cheap handguns, cop-killer bullets.” Turning to the demonstrators, he said, “No ‘sportsman’ uses weapons that can kill twenty deer—or twenty people—in less than thirty seconds. No ‘marksman’ needs a bullet designed to tear another man’s insides to shreds.”

“The bullets are for
you
,” the squat man called through the megaphone.

His voice carried across the park. “No,” Kerry answered simply, “the
laws
are for
you
.”

He faced the crowd again. “It should be a felony,” he went on, “to sell
any
gun to anyone not licensed to have one.

“But that brings us to the heart of the problem—that Robert Kennedy, and Carlos Miller, were killed with guns bought and sold illegally. To end the slaughter, we have to put gun traffickers out of business. So here’s what I would do.”

Again, Kerry gazed out at the demonstrators. “I’d limit gun purchases to one a month, so that illegal traffickers can’t resell in bulk.

“I’d require manufacturers to install a code in every gun, like a home alarm, so that only the licensed owner could use it. And finally, I’d go after the people who hoard weapons for illegal resale, for organized crime, and for so-called militia groups …”

With a primal roar of anger, the demonstrators began shouting from behind their barriers, waving their fists and their signs. One sign near Lara read “Stamp Out Kilcannon, Not Guns.”

“He’s making himself a target,” Lee murmured to Lara. “Doesn’t he know how nuts these people are?”

Taut, Lara folded her arms. “That’s clearly his point. They’ll be on the news tonight, for everyone to see.”
The Secret Service agents, Lara noticed, scanned the roiling
knot of demonstrators. Through the public address system, Kerry’s voice carried above their taunts. “Every person who owns more than ten weapons should be required to have an arsenal license. No license, no gun collection—a felony, plain and simple. And if you sell a single gun outside the law, your license goes.”

“
You
go,” a demonstrator shouted, and then the cry became a ragged chorus. “
You
go,
you
go,
you
go …”

“Who will object to this?” Kerry asked. “Very few of us. Fully ninety percent of Americans support the ban on assault weapons, and eighty percent support the regulation of handguns.

“No, we have an epidemic of death because our government has been bullied and bribed by a powerful lobby which values guns more than human life.”

Quickly, Lara scanned the roofline.
“We’ll get you, Kil-cannon,”
the man with the megaphone called out.

Stopping, Kerry stared at him. “Do you think it ends with me?” he demanded. “If that were so, the world would still be ruled by all the other cowards who tried to murder truth—the Nazis, the Communists, the dictators—and wound up on the trash heap of history.”

Kerry paused, his voice, though measured, filling with passion. “There is a long and committed line of people who will never rest until the violence ends. Every murder in this country creates
more
of us. So that the loss of any
one
of us will only hasten the day when the fight is won where it should be won—at the ballet box, in the Congress, and in the presidency itself.”

Once more, Kerry took in his audience. “For Carlos Miller,” he said, “and for all those who have died, we have work to do.”

The applause rose, drowning out the jeers, the catcalls, the shouted threats. Suddenly Kerry was in the crowd, shaking hands, stopping to talk to the families of victims, looking into each face as if no one else were there.

Get back in the car,
Lara silently implored him.

Next to her, Lee McAlpine expelled a breath. “Well …”

Lara could feel the moisture on her forehead, the beating of her own heart. “I’d better set up,” she said, and went to find her
cameraman.

Ten minutes later, Lara stood on a swath of grass facing the camera. Her producer, Steve Shaffer, stood chatting with Nate Cutler.

Lara felt quite certain now that the subtext of Nate’s story would be how Kerry’s lover had reported his campaign.
News-world
would scrutinize each broadcast, parsing every word she said. The press, self-referential as it was, would find her downfall as compelling as Kerry’s: Lara Costello, once NBC’s rising star, now its deepest embarrassment. In the cool air of early evening, the dampness of her skin felt chill.

Ignoring Nate, she reviewed her scribbled notes. Through her earpiece, a technician asked, “Ready?”

Lara nodded. “The roll cue,” she said into her microphone, “is ‘demonstrators as foils.’”

Standing straighter, Lara gazed into the lens and began.

“In a speech punctuated by the angry shouts of pro-gun demonstrators, Kerry Kilcannon made an impassioned plea for a society free of handguns and assault weapons. His proposal is possibly the most far-reaching ever made by a member of Congress—comprehensive licensing for gun owners or collectors, a ban on all assault weapons, Saturday night specials, and cop-killer bullets, and the denial of guns to anyone with a record of violence, not just those convicted of felony offenses.”

Now came the time for her analysis. “In the short term,” she continued, “these proposals have little chance of becoming law. But Kilcannon’s speech neatly balanced his earlier support for the death penalty with an issue that appeals to liberals, even as it showcased his gift for using demonstrators as foils …”

In the sound truck, the tape began to roll. Lara could hear the angry calls of the gun enthusiasts, and then Kerry.

“In the last half of this last century, men with guns stole our future by killing the best of our leaders …”

“Today,” Lara said to the lens, “was the twelfth anniversary of James Kilcannon’s death. Kerry Kilcannon never spoke of this. But then he didn’t have to. From his introduction by Stacey Tarrant to his last plunge into the crowd, his message was clear: ‘I’m the candidate with a moral mission, standing in my brother’s place.’

“Lara Costello, NBC News, with the Kilcannon campaign in
Sacramento.”

Finishing, she was still for a moment.

Kerry would despise her closing, she knew—it hit him where he was most sensitive. But she could not cut him slack another reporter would not; his speech had shaken her too much already.

“Nice,” Steve Shaffer said.

Removing her microphone, Lara turned to him. Nate was still there.

“Perfect,” Nate opined. “You nailed both the politics and the calculated symbolism.”

Lara gazed at him evenly. “It’s what I live for,” she said, and turned to chat with her cameraman.

Guided by Agents Joe Morton and Dan Biasi, Kerry headed toward his limousine. With every step, he reminded himself to walk slowly, to mimic unconcern. But when he slid inside, to find Clayton rather than another politician, Kerry slumped down in the seat, letting the relief wash over him.

Clayton was silent. After a time, they were gliding down the highway toward the airstrip, causing traffic jams on the entry ramps blocked by motorcycle cops. Gazing out the windows, Kerry imagined the frustrated commuters, late for dinner with their families.

“I hope you put those ‘Mason for President’ stickers on our bumpers,” he said to Clayton.

Clayton emitted a short laugh, but his tone was without humor. “I should have. Maybe that way they won’t shoot. Seeing how you won’t wear a vest.”

Don’t
you
understand?
Kerry thought. But when he turned to Clayton, ready to be angry, he remembered that his friend
understood a great deal. “I can’t let them change me,” he said simply.

“Who’s ‘them’?” Clayton shot back. “Peter Lake and all the others who try to keep you from getting killed? Every time you wade into a crowd, you make their job that much harder.”

“That wasn’t just a
crowd
, dammit. Some have lost people they loved to guns, and I’m not supposed to
be
with them? Then why am I running?”

Clayton stared at him, his round face somber. “To get elected, I used to think.”

“Can the pop psychology,” Kerry snapped, and then reined in his temper again. “Today was hard enough.”

“I
know
it was hard, Kerry. So what does risking your life do for anyone?”

Kerry sat back. “You can’t run for President,” he said at length, “and hide from people. But look what’s happened to me.

“In New Hampshire, when nobody thought I’d win, we didn’t have this entourage. I could talk with people, see their faces. Now I’m surrounded by the Secret Service, the press, all the handlers.

“It’s life in the bubble: limousine, airplane, hotel room … The last ‘real’ people I spent time with were a bunch of rich film producers in Beverly Hills, and I was asking them for
money
, not votes.” He turned to Clayton. “When you start learning about people from tracking polls and ‘mall intercepts,’
you’re
not real, either. You’re a TV pitchman for someone else’s product.”

“Well,” Clayton answered, “you met some ‘real’ people today. Like that psychopath with the megaphone.”

Turning, Kerry gazed out the window. Twilight was thinning to gray smoky dusk; in the distance, the lights of Sacramento were barely visible. “What makes someone like that?” he murmured. “So many reasons, I suppose. Like the guy who murdered Jamie.”

It was strange, Kerry reflected; after twelve years, he still could not speak the name Harry Carson. Perhaps it was the dream …

“All the more reason,” Clayton was saying, “to stop playing chicken. If you could melt down all the guns tomorrow, and turn them into steel girders in a chain of public libraries, that
would be one thing. But you can’t. You’re going to have to live awhile.”

Kerry faced him again. “I may not have that much time,” he answered. “It would be that much worse if I pulled punches, waiting for it to happen.”

In the enveloping shadows, Clayton stared at him in genuine alarm, and then comprehension dawned. “Cutler?”