No Safe Place (68 page)

The least I owe the many people who helped me is to start by separating research and imagination. This is not a roman à clef but a work of fiction, all the essential elements of which I developed in 1995, before interviewing anyone or following the recent presidential campaign. To the extent that any events in the campaign paralleled my preconceived plot, that is a coincidence. Similarly, the book was finished by the end of September 1997 and prefigures, rather than reflects, any political events thereafter.

Equally fundamental, while I have grounded my story in the context of such ongoing issues as abortion, gun control, race, campaign reform, and the role of the press in reporting on the private lives of public officials, the positions, personalities, and attitudes of my central characters are not those of contemporary political figures. To me, this is a matter not only of fairness to men and women who put up with enough in real life but also of novelistic principle; in fiction, I believe, the deepest insight combines an authentic background with realistic, but invented, people. Nor is this book intended as a partisan comment; rather, successful or not, my intention is to provoke thought.

Finally, and I hope equally obviously, the attitudes expressed by Kerry Kilcannon do not reflect—in fact, frequently contradict—those of the political leaders and advisers who helped enhance my understanding of Kerry’s world. None of them “approved” the book or are in any way responsible for its contents. Rather, Kerry’s views reflect my sense of where his background and psychology would take him, my assessment of the possible components of an
insurgent candidacy, and, at
times, some biases of my own. For the book’s politics, as well as any errors, the buck stops with me.

That said, I’m very grateful to all those who provided such good advice in the midst of their own busy lives:

A number of people from the real world of politics helped with my imagined one, including Rich Bond, William Cohen, Peter Fenn, Marlin Fitzwater, Barry Gottehrer, Tom King, Peter Knight, Jim Lauer, Susan Levine, Christine Matthews, John McCain, Bill McInturff, Bob Squier, George Stephanopoulos, Joe Trippi, Donna Victoria, Nelson Warfield, and, in particular, Mandy Grunwald. And Senator Bob Dole and his campaign staff, including Steve Duchesne and Jenny Ryder, graciously allowed me to tag along.

Several journalists schooled me in the rudiments of campaign coverage and in the complex of issues surrounding whether Kerry Kilcannon’s private life deserved a public airing. Special thanks to Lorraine Adams, Candy Crowley, David Finkel, Blaine Harden, Jill Zuckman, and, above all, Paul Taylor. And, in particular, the book’s journalistic aspects were enriched by the late Susan Yoachum, political editor for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, whose intelligence, wit, and insight reminded me of one of the real privileges of writing—meeting people like Susan.

Others who shared their knowledge included novelist May-nard Thomson; psychiatrists Ken Gottlieb and Rodney Shapiro; psychologist Margaret Coggins; Carl Meyer and, especially, Terry Samway of the Secret Service; surgeon Dr. Bernard Alpert; Elizabeth Birch of the Human Rights Campaign; Robert Walker of Handgun Control, Inc.; Robert Allen, writer, teacher, editor of
The Black Scholar
, and a director of the Oakland Men’s Project; and Susan Breall, head of the domestic violence unit of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. As always, I could not have done without the perceptive comments of Anna Chavez, Fred Hill, and Philip Rotner, the consistent insight of my gifted assistant, Alison Thomas, and the day-by-day involvement of my wife, Laurie. And many thanks to Knopf and Ballantine—in particular, to Sonny Mehta—for their enthusiasm for, and encouragement of, a project so different from my other recent work.

California has a political and social dynamic all its own. I
am grateful to prosecutor Al Giannini, campaign worker Lor-rie Johnson, San Francisco Treasurer Susan Leal, advance specialist Walter McGuire, political adviser Phil Perry, and demographer Rosemary Roach for their advice and, especially, to political consultant Clint Reilly for all his help and time. Similarly, Newark is a unique place, and Kerry Kilcannon had a distinctive early life. Many thanks to Dennis Caufield, Father Pat Donohue, Tom Giblin, Denis Lenihan, William Marks, and Al Zach, all of whom helped me fill in the blanks.

Some writers inspired me without knowing it, by writing. I first read Jack Newfield’s memoir of Robert Kennedy nearly thirty years ago and remain struck by its vivid portrait of a complex and contradictory man, and by its effort to discern the connection between personal psychology and political beliefs. If there is a model for my approach to Kerry Kilcannon, it resides not in any living politician but in Newfield’s portrait of one we lost too young. Similarly, Hedrick Smith’s
The Power Game
was instructive on the problems of public life in Washington, D.C. And by writing thoughtfully about abortion, John Leo, Ann Roiphe, Edward Tivnan, George Will, and Naomi Wolff helped me feel my way through this difficult subject—to the satisfaction of almost no one, I am sure.

Finally, there are George Bush and Ron Kaufman. A few years ago, to my surprise and delight, I received a kind note from President Bush—a man I have long admired—about
Degree of Guilt
. When I conceived of this project, I wrote him, asking if he might help me understand what it feels like to run for President. His gracious response led to a meeting, much generous advice and help, and a friendship with President and Mrs. Bush that has been one of the great pleasures of Laurie’s and my recent life.

Perhaps President Bush’s biggest favor was to introduce me to Ron Kaufman, the President’s political director during his White House years. Ron knows as much about politics as anyone in Washington, and many hours of his advice, assistance, warm friendship, and good company have made all the work worthwhile. So that President Bush and Ron
don’t get blamed for
this
book, the
next
book is for them.

A preview excerpt from:
RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON’s

I
N THE
moments before the brutal murder of Jack Novak ended what she later thought of as her time of innocence, Assistant County Prosecutor Stella Marz gazed down at the waterfront of her native city, Steelton.

At thirty-eight, Stella would not have called herself an innocent. Nor was the view from her corner office one that lightened her heart. The afternoon sky was a close, sunless cobalt, typical of Steelton in winter. The sludge-gray Onandaga River divided the city as it met Lake Erie beneath a steel bridge: the valley carved by the river was a treeless expanse of railroad tracks, boxcars, refineries, cranes, chemical plants, and, looming over all of this, the smokestacks of the steel mills—squat, black, and enormous—on which Steelton’s existence had once depended. From early childhood, Stella could remember the stench of mill smoke, the stain left on the white blouse of her school uniform drying on her mother’s clothesline; from her time in night law school, she recalled the evening that the river had exploded in a stunning instant of spontaneous combustion caused by chemical waste and petroleum derivatives, the flames which climbed five stories
high against the darkness. Between these
two moments—the apogee of the mills and the explosion of the river—lay the story of a city and its decline.

By heritage, Stella herself was part of this story. The mills had boomed after the Civil War, manned by the earliest wave of immigrants—Germans and British, Welsh and Irish—who, in the early 1870s, had worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week. Their weekly pay was $11.50; in 1874, years of seething resentment ignited a strike, with angry workers demanding twenty-five cents more a week. The leading owner, Amasa Hall, shut down his mills, informing the strikers that, upon reopening, he would give jobs only to those who agreed to a fifty-cent cut. When the strikers refused, Hall boarded his yacht and embarked on a cruise around the world.

Hall stopped at Danzig, then a Polish seaport on the Baltic. He advertised extensively for young workers, offering the kingly wage of $7.25 a week and free transport to America. The resulting wave of Polish strikebreakers—poor, hardworking, Roman Catholic, and largely illiterate—had included Stella’s great-grandfather, Carol Marzewski. It was on their backs that Amasa Hall had, quite systematically, undercut and eventually wiped out the other steel producers in the area, acquiring their mills and near-total sway over the region’s steel industry. And it was the slow, inexorable decline of those same mills into sputtering obsolescence which had left Stella’s father, Armin Marz, unemployed and bitter.

Recalling the flames which had leaped from the Onandaga, a brilliant orange-blue against the night sky, had reminded Stella of another memory from childhood, the East Side riots. Just as the West Side of Steelton was home to European immigrants—the first wave had been joined by Italians, Russians, Poles, Slovaks, and Austro-Hungarians—so the city’s industry had drawn a later influx of migrants from the American South, the descendants of former slaves, to the eastern side of the Onandaga. But these newcomers were less welcomed, by employers or the heretofore all-white labor force. Stella could not remember a time in her old neighborhood, Warszawa, when the black interlopers were not viewed with suspicion and contempt; the fiery explosion of the East Side into riots in the sixties—three days of arson and shootouts with police—had helped convert this into fear and hatred. A last trickle of
nonwhites—Puerto Ricans,
Cubans, Koreans, Haitians, Chinese, and Vietnamese—felt welcome, if at all, only on the impoverished East Side. And so the split symbolized by the Onandaga hardened, and racial politics became as natural to Steelton as breathing polluted air.

This divide, too, shadowed Stella’s thoughts. In the last six years, she had won every case but one—a hung jury following the murder trial of a high school coach who had made one of his students pregnant and who, devastated by Stella’s particularly ruthless cross-examination, had thereafter committed suicide. It was this which had led a courtroom deputy to give Stella a nickname which now enjoyed wide currency among the criminal defense bar: the Dark Lady. But only recently had they become aware of her ambition, long nurtured, to become the first woman elected Prosecutor of Erie County.

Though this was a daunting task, it was by no means impossible. Stella was a daughter of the West Side, a young woman her neighborhood was proud of—an honors student who had worked through college and law school; had remained an observant Catholic; had not turned her back on Steelton and its problems, as had so many of her generation; had already become head of her office’s homicide unit. Stella was not a vain woman, and had always seen herself with objectivity: though she lacked the gifts for bonhomie and self-promotion natural to many politicians, she was articulate, truthful, and genuinely concerned with making her office, and her city, better. She was attractive enough without being threatening to other women, with a tangle of thick brown hair; pale skin; a broad face with a cleft chin and somewhat exotic brown eyes, a hint of Eurasia which Stella privately considered her best feature; a sturdy build which she managed to keep trim through relentless exercise and attention to diet, yet another facet of the self-discipline which had been hammered into her at home and school. And if there were no husband or children to soften the image of an allbusiness prosecutor or, Stella thought ruefully, her deepening sense of solitude, at least there was no one to object or to say, as Armin Marz might, had he not lost the gifts of memory and reason, that she was reaching above herself.

But her biggest problem, Stella knew, was not that she was a woman. It was as clear to her as the river which divided her city:
she was a white ethnic with no base on the black East Side. And
with that, her thoughts, and her gaze, moved to the most hopeful, most problematic, aspect of the cityscape before her—the steel skeleton of the baseball stadium Mayor Krajek had labeled Steelton 2000.

It was not the first improvement in this vista: the lake and river were cleaner; the air less polluted, if only because the mills had declined; the once seedy downtown area, formerly the preserve of prostitutes and muggers, now featured shops, theaters, and restaurants which were slowly drawing suburbanites and young people; some new glass office towers had kept clean industry from leaving. The public mall along the lake remained intact, the center-city’s only expanse of green, across which stretched City Hall and the County Courthouse, two beaux arts masterpieces from the turn of the century, the age of monumental architecture and municipal self-confidence. But it was the stadium-to-be which, for Stella and many others, symbolized the battle for the soul of their city.

The Steelton Blues baseball team dated back to 1901. Starting with her great-grandfather, four generations of the Marz family had gone to its games; five, Stella corrected herself, if her younger sister, Katie, and her husband had begun to take their kids. The Blues were part of the city’s fabric: a voice on the radio; an argument in a bar; a conversation between a father and son who might have little else to talk about; years of statistics documenting a futility so epic—the Blues’ last World Series appearance was in the 1930s—it had created a perverse fascination that a baseball team could so perfectly mirror its home.

But now that was a problem, too: attendance was off, the franchise was depressed in value, and the spoiled superstars who were baseball’s princes could demand far more money to play in better media markets. Peter Hall, the heartless steel baron’s great-grandson and current owner of the Blues, had threatened to sell the team to a group from Silicon Valley who would move the team to California. But, just as Hall did not relish being vilified as the callous owner who sold the Blues, Thomas Krajek, the young and ambitious mayor of Steelton who had risen from Stella’s own neighborhood, was
determined not to be the once-promising politician who had
let Steelton’s identity be sold to a pack of computer-chip millionaires.

The upshot had appeared, week by week, before Stella’s eyes. Once it had been an artist’s rendering, used by Krajek and Hall to sell their vision of Steelton 2000 in a hard-fought special election to float $275 million worth of municipal bonds. Now it rose, skeletal against the featureless gray canvas of Lake Erie: the ghost of a ballpark, its steel girders in place; the cement which would encircle it taking shape in stages; its timeless geometry imposed on bare earth. Above it, cranes stood watch like the bones of prehistoric animals; beside it, the trailers of contractors and subcontractors, though they were deserted today, a Sunday, had proliferated as Stella watched. It would be a modern classic, another Camden Yards or Jacobs Field—in 2000, when the Blues took to the field, the spirit of Steelton would be reborn. Or so Mayor Krajek promised, and Stella wished to believe.

And this, Stella knew, was her biggest problem of all.

Krajek was up for reelection this November. But, first, he faced a bitter Democratic primary. That this was inevitable stemmed from the race of Krajek’s opponent, Arthur Bright, and one of Bright’s principal contentions—that Steelton 2000 was a shameful diversion of public financing from such pressing needs as better schools, better housing, and safer streets. Bright was the first African-American ever elected Prosecutor of Erie County, and it was he who made Stella his head of homicide. She owed him loyalty; more important, she admired him. And her political future depended on his: the prosecutor’s office would be vacant only if Bright defeated Krajek; Stella could win election only if Bright supported her among the East Side voters who were his base. In either case, much depended on whether Bright could persuade voters to take a second, harsher, look at Mayor Krajek and his field of dreams.

It was this thought which, finally, drove Stella from her brooding inspection of Steelton 2000, and back to her desk.

She saw the usual mess: a coffee cup with cold, half-bitter dregs; her gym bag; status reports on homicide cases; police files. But squarely facing her was the one document so delicate
that she had discussed it with Bright himself—the police report on the death, four days earlier, of Tommy Fielding.

She had not known Fielding but, from what little she knew of him, it was not a death she would have predicted. His maid had found his body in the bedroom of his townhouse, naked, next to a dead black prostitute named Tina Welch. Fielding’s kitchen sink contained the primitive chemistry set—lighter, spoon, cotton balls, glassine baggy with a white residue of powder—used to cook heroin. The police lab could find no fingerprints on these implements, and no prints traceable to Welch anywhere; the initial police canvass of the neighborhood turned up no one who knew Fielding well, but no one who had imagined him using heroin or hookers. His former wife, the mother of his only child, had, according to the police, been too shocked to be coherent. Nor did his status in life square with the meanness of his death: Fielding had been Peter Hall’s lieutenant, an officer of Hall Development Company, and the project supervisor for Steelton 2000. Stella had barely read the headline in the Steelton Press, “Ballpark Official Found Dead,” when Arthur Bright appeared in her office.

Stella, he said, must handle this herself; he had already called Nathaniel Dance, Steelton’s Chief of Detectives, to make sure that everything went through her. The inquiry would be straight down the middle: thorough, impartial, professional. Most likely, Tommy Fielding had been the victim of an accidental overdose. But whatever the cause, only a fool could ignore that a man at the center of Steelton 2000 had died a puzzling death. And then, as Stella knew it would, their talk had turned to politics.

“I suppose,” Bright said in a sardonic voice, “it’s a welcome example of racial amity. ‘Hands Across the Onandaga’—black hooker teaches white executive to shoot up. How will that play in Warszawa, Stella?”

Stella did not have to answer: Bright knew, almost as well as she, that most of her parents’ generation, and many in her own, were so mired in bias that Tommy Fielding’s death would merely buttress their suspicion of all blacks. Never mind that Arthur Bright had devoted much of his professional life to a relentless fight against drugs—tougher enforcement; stiffer sentences; more education; better treatment facilities. All was
lost
in the neighborhood’s deepest fear: that, should Bright become mayor, “the blacks” would take over Steelton for good. Finally, Stella replied, “You could get some votes there, Arthur. If you can make them see past race.”

“What they see,” Bright answered wearily, “is just another black man—the predator they cross the street to avoid.” He leaned forward in his chair, restless. “I’d run stronger in a dress. White voters can cast black women in a nurturing role, like cook or nanny or housekeeper, at least if they’re older and fatter than Tina Welch. Sort of like Mammy in
Gone With the Wind
.”

“I can find you the dress,” Stella rejoined, “but you’d better start eating.” Her tone grew sharper. “You’ve been fighting this for years now. Why all the self-pity?”

Bright frowned at Stella’s tile floor. He was wiry, smooth faced, much younger looking than his fifty years, and wire-rimmed glasses gave him a scholarly appearance. Stella had seen him fire up an auditorium with an impassioned speech, reminiscent of Malcolm X at his incisive best. Yet, for Stella, his hidden core had a certain tenderness—wounds that Stella could sense but not see, and which would never quite heal.

“Polls,” Bright said bluntly. “My own. I’ve got ninety percent support on the East Side, less than sixteen on the West Side. And stuck there.” He looked up at Stella. “So how’s your campaign? You’ve been very decorous—I’d even say ladylike, if I didn’t know you better. But I hear you’ve been popping up among the ethnics, eating pirogi and giving speeches.”

Sensing where Bright was headed, Stella forestalled him with a smile. “I am a lady,” she responded, “who wants to run for a law-and-order job. So I’m changing my name to Duke.”