No Safe Place (48 page)

There were outstretched hands in front of him, children thrust out to hold. Kerry touched everyone he could reach, looking into faces, saying “Thank you,” over and over, hugging a small girl he had noticed. Next to him, Susan Estevez said, “They love you.” Nodding, Kerry murmured, “I feel that.”

Slowly, they worked through the crowd to the edge of the park, Susan greeting her constituents in rapid-fire Spanish. “I’m hungry,” Kerry told her. “Aren’t you?”

Susan smiled. “There’s a
taquería
on Guerrero Street. No fancy restaurants, remember?”

Laughing, Kerry answered, “Let’s go.”

Moving down Seventeenth Street, Kerry felt the press of bodies around him—the Secret Service, the pool of reporters, the crowd that followed. He touched more hands; he had time, Kerry decided, and he was sick of life in the bubble, of worrying about
Newsworld
and a past he could not change.

At the corner of Guerrero and Seventeenth, he followed Susan inside the
taquería
.

It was small and dark and smelled of pork and cooked vegetables and seasonings. Kerry sat at the counter with Susan. The proprietor, a mustached man with gray-brown hair and a smile that crinkled his eyes, held out his hand.

“Senator,” he said, “I’m Frank Linares. For you, the lunch is free. As it was for your brother.”

Behind the counter, Kerry saw a picture of Jamie and Linares. In his surprise, Kerry was quiet. His brother smiled back at him. “How long ago?” Kerry asked.

Linares’s eyes turned serious. “Twelve years.”

Just before he died,
Linares did not add. But Kerry could see
it; in death, Kerry had noticed the crow’s-feet at the corners of Jamie’s eyes, the new streaks of silver at his temples. As he saw them now, in Jamie’s picture.

Belatedly, Kerry noticed the press pool crowding in the doorway, Nate Cutler among them.

When Kerry turned again, Linares had placed an empty beer glass on the bar.

“Too early for me,” Kerry said with a smile. “Drink a beer, and I’ll fall asleep.”

Linares gave him a shy look. “Your brother drank from that glass. I’ve kept it.”

Kerry gazed into the man’s brown eyes, and saw what this meant to him. “What did Jamie have?” he asked.

“Dos Equis.”

Kerry nodded. “Share one with me.”

Next to him, Susan Estevez smiled. Frank Linares poured Kerry a few inches of beer, then some for himself, and touched his glass to Kerry’s. “To you, sir. May you become President.”

As your brother never did,
Linares left unsaid. Within the toast was a prayer, a benediction.

“Thank you,” Kerry said softly, and sipped his beer. After a moment, he turned to Susan Estevez. “This has been a good day,” he told her. “Before we leave, I’d like to visit headquarters.”

Sean Burke hung up the telephone and, for a moment, was in Boston.

It was the last call from Paul Terris, the local leader of Operation Life; the time was close to ten at night, and Sean was in his room.

“Sean,” Terris said simply, “please don’t come to meetings anymore.”

Sean’s fingers clasped the telephone. Answering, he found that his chest was tight.
“Why?”

“You know why. We may agree about goals, but we’re far apart on means.”

Sean stood. The sparely furnished room—a bed, a desk, some drawers, the crucifix on the wall—felt shabby and too small. “Because we’re cowards,” Sean said angrily. “We’re
like witnesses to the Holocaust. We stand outside these chambers of death while they keep on killing babies.”

“So what is ‘militant action’? Acts of violence?” Terris’s voice was so quiet and patient that Sean felt he was being treated like a child. “If we believe abortion is murder, how can we advocate murder?”

He had never told Paul exactly what he meant, Sean realized. But now it was clear to him. “Because these murderers choose to violate God’s law,” he answered. “America executes murderers all the time. Except for the abortionists.”

“Sean,” Terris said coldly, “if any of us says that aloud, decent people will turn their backs. And if one of us acts on it, Operation Life may cease to exist.”

Sean felt the dark fear of rejection, of isolation, of scorn. And then, in his pain, he saw the truth of his solitude—alone Sean Burke was free to act. He would show this club for pacifists the courage they lacked.

“What difference would
that
make,” Sean asked with bitter scorn, “to all the children you watch die?”

Hands trembling, he put down the telephone, severing his connection to the man who, for four years now, had given his life its meaning and its mission.

Deep in the night, an image came to him.

It was the man who had murdered Rabin, that traitor to
his
cause. Stepping from the crowd, the executioner had aimed his gun at the traitor’s back, and by this lone act had changed the history of a region and the spirit of a people …

“John,” Rick Ginsberg said now. “He’s coming.”

“Who?”
Sean asked, then flushed at Ginsberg’s smile.

“The senator. He’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

Sean swallowed. No gun, he thought. Only a knife, with Secret Service agents between them.

“Dammit,” Kate Feeney said behind him. “I have to go.”

How long would it take, Sean wondered, to pull the knife from inside his jacket and plunge it into Kilcannon’s heart? He clenched his jaw, imagining his hand falling short, the bullet entering his brain. “Are you all right?” Ginsberg asked him.

He was
afraid
, far more so than when he executed the abortionist. Afraid of the look on Kerry Kilcannon’s face. Afraid for himself, dying at Kilcannon’s feet.

Panicky, he turned to Kate. “You stay here,” he said in a trembling voice. “I’ll go.”

Her eyes widened, surprise and hope struggling on her face with the wish not to be selfish. “Are you sure?”

Sean nodded curtly.

She hesitated another moment, as if trying to read his face. “Do you know which bus to take? You just go on Geary to Powell.”

Fifteen minutes, perhaps less. Sean stood to leave. “I’ll find it.”

Heading for the door, he heard Rick call out behind him. “Wait, John. Let me tell you what to do.”

The trace of impatience in Ginsberg’s voice made Sean more anxious. He stood there, unable to leave, glancing over his shoulder at the showroom windows facing the street. “There’ll be pamphlets on the table,” Rick told him, “a sign-up sheet for volunteers, and a list for people who want us to get them to the polls. Make sure you ask everyone if they want to help us, or how we can help them.”

Sean felt the fear of being trapped here, and then the dread of meeting people in person, torn from the anonymity of the telephone. All he could do was nod.

Rick placed a hand on his shoulder, freezing him. “It’s nice you’re doing this for Kate. I know how much meeting the senator means to you. If there’s some way I can make it up, I will.”

Sean found he could not answer. Ginsberg’s brow furrowed, as if sensing his words were inadequate. “There are three more days, John …”

As Rick patted him on the shoulder, Sean turned toward the door. His footsteps echoed in the cavernous room.

Through the glass, he saw people clustered on the sidewalk—the receptionist, other volunteers, men in sunglasses who looked like Secret Service agents. Then, as if in a silent film, a black limousine glided to a stop in front of them.

Three feet from the doorway, Sean froze.

A second car pulled up, filled with men who looked like Secret Service agents. They spilled from the car, surrounding Kil-cannon’s limousine. As an agent opened its door, Sean’s heart raced.

Slowly, Kerry Kilcannon got out.

Utterly still, Sean watched him through the glass.

Kilcannon waved briefly to the crowd, his grin curiously shy, as if their applause surprised him. They moved toward him as one.

As though caught in their vortex, Sean went out the door, eyes locked on Kilcannon’s face.

Next to Kerry, the agents in sunglasses watched the crowd. Sean stood behind the cluster surrounding Kilcannon, watching Kerry greet the mahogany-skinned receptionist. He could get to him, Sean suddenly thought, thrust the knife toward Kil-cannon’s throat before the agents shot him.

If only he could see their eyes.

Reaching out toward Kate Feeney, Kilcannon saw him. He seemed to hesitate …

Sean flinched, turning away, and scurried down the sidewalk.

Who was he?
Kerry thought. Pale, shrinking from contact, with a face unlike the others—hungry, possessed, unsmiling. What was this odd flicker of fear, of recognition.

It was false
pre
cognition, Kerry thought, the instinct for danger that made him study faces, looking for the eyes of a man who, like the one who murdered Jamie, wished to take his life. But Kerry had looked into ten thousand faces and had no time to wonder, or remember.

Jamie. Perhaps what had driven Kerry here to headquarters was the wish to thank those too young to remember, who worked not for a myth but because they believed in Kerry himself. He could feel what he meant to them, was learning what they meant to him.

Turning, he looked at the blond-haired girl in front of him. She was delicate, Irish by the look of her, poised between shyness and naked wonder at his presence. He reached out to her, smiling. “I’m Kerry Kilcannon,” he said. “I wanted to thank you.”

She took his hand, her touch soft, and then began grinning like she might never stop. “I’m Kate Feeney,” she told him.

Kerry squeezed her hand. “Thanks, Kate. I’ll remember you.”

Sean ran away.

Chest pounding, he fought the sour sickness rising from his stomach to his throat, as he dodged pedestrians startled by his panic.

Stopping abruptly, he began to gasp.

He bent, wheezing, clasping his knees as his body shook with coughing. Eyes moist with anguish and humiliation, he stared at the spittle at his feet, stained with blood.

Coward,
he told himself. The frightened child he once had been had returned to claim him.

As the press bus shuddered to a stop three blocks short of Kerry’s headquarters, Lara saw him—a lone man, perhaps drunk or mentally disturbed, retching saliva as others passed him without looking. A sad piece of urban detritus, like so many Lara had seen here, people with stories that broke the heart. She could not seem to look away.

The man’s body trembled, and then he straightened, staring wildly at the bus as if he had just noticed it.

Eyes narrowing, Lara leaned her face against the window.

She had seen him before, she was certain. But not recently, and she could not remember where. It could only have been here, she thought, in San Francisco.

Wheeling abruptly, the man ran away, vanishing from Lara’s vision and, moments later, her thoughts. The motorcade began moving again, toward the airport.

It was past three in the afternoon when Kerry arrived in South Central Los Angeles.

The air was hot, dense with smog Kerry could feel on his collar. He stood on the steps of the Third Baptist Church, a plain stucco building dating to the thirties, transformed by the Reverend Carl Wills into a social center that provided food for the urban poor, day care, after-school programs in sports and remedial reading. Though Wills’s congregation was mainly black, it reached out to Asians, Latinos, progressive whites, the urban poor. In a city marked by racial conflict, this set Wills apart.

For months, Kerry had worked to get Wills’s endorsement; the minister, a calm but strong-minded man who would not be used by anyone, had deflected Kerry’s appeals. When Wills’s call had come, days before, it was a surprise. “Well,” the minister told Kerry dryly, “guess you got a chance to win. I take that as a sign from God.” His voice softened. “Don’t let Him down, Senator. Or us.”

Now Wills stood beside him—a gray-bearded man with a benign countenance and shrewd brown eyes—speaking to a group of his supporters, the pool, and, well behind them, the remaining press.

“When no other congressman or senator would come to this state and say ending affirmative action was wrong, Kerry Kil-cannon
did.

“When no other candidate dares to stand up for the farmworkers, Kerry Kilcannon
does
.

“When no other of our politicians strives to save our cities, Kerry Kilcannon
will
.

“And when almost every President tries to hide from the problems of race, Kerry Kilcannon
won’t
.” Wills raised his hand. “This country needs a leader, not a pollster; a healer, not a wheeler-dealer; a conscience-raiser, not a fund-raiser.”

Slowly, Wills lowered his hand, placing it on Kerry’s shoulder.

“This is the man,” he said. “This is the one.”

The two men turned to each other. It was a moment the boy Kerry Kilcannon, a parochial Irish kid in a city divided by race, could never have imagined.

“Don’t let Him down,” the minister repeated quietly.

Kerry smiled. “Perhaps Him,” he answered. “But never you.”

Wills nodded, looking at him intently, and then Kerry
stepped up to the microphone. The crowd was mostly African Americans, some in suits or dresses, some not, but also Asians, whites, Latinos. In their faces, Kerry found his theme.

“When I meet a man like Carl Wills,” he began, “when I see the work of this church, I wonder how anyone can seek office by asking us to vote against each other.”

From a distance came the faint whine of a police siren. Kerry raised his voice. “Too often,” he said, “we’re told that politics is a matter of black versus white, suburbs versus city.

“It’s the era of the frightened white man, we’re told, of the endangered middle class. That’s true. Many white Americans have a right to feel threatened—they’re working hard for less money, and their kids go to lousy schools. And it is not their fault.” Pausing, Kerry said succinctly, “Nor is it the fault of Asians, Latinos, or African Americans. Many of whom face the same problems.

“I hope the day comes when bigotry ends. But that day is not in sight. And every day that a politician claims that the only discrimination left favors minorities, and that the problems of white Americans will vanish when we end affirmative action, the
real
solution to our common problems slips further from view.”