THE OVERTON WINDOW (15 page)

“Did he do something wrong?”

“Absolutely yes, he did. He helped set up a former aide as an unregistered lobbyist, and then he sat in some questionable meetings in support of that business, and while he was at it he was also carrying on a hot-and-heavy love affair with the guy’s wife for almost a year.”

“Oh, my.”

“Yeah, it’s all connected in some pretty sick ways.”

“And what did you give him to say?”

“You’ve heard it before—there’s been no wrongdoing, the charges are baseless, a pledge of full cooperation, faith in the process, a little slam at the motivations of his accusers—short and sweet, because he’s so eager to get back to serving the needs of his constituents. Believe me, this sort
of thing is routine. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow night; that’s why I can tell you about it.”

Noah had been through this introductory conversation many times and so he knew what the next question would be. He’d answered it often enough, at scores of cocktail parties and on hundreds of first dates, and his answer had become so smooth and automatic that he no longer had to worry much about it. Trouble was, though the words were basically the same, Beverly Emerson asked the question in a manner that no one else ever had.

“But doesn’t it bother you sometimes, Noah?”

It wasn’t asked in mock amazement, or as a high-handed moral judgment, not even as the (much more common) probe for good advice on how best to sidestep one’s conscience in a similarly shady career. Instead she asked the question with genuine compassion, as if she already knew what was in his heart. That gave him no real choice but to answer it honestly.

“Whenever I make the mistake of stopping to actually think about it? Yes, it really does bother me.”

The car had pulled up to its first stop, idling there.

“This is me,” Beverly said. As the driver opened the side door she hugged her daughter and whispered good night, then leaned forward to pat Noah on his knee. “My friend, it’s been an experience. I hope to see you again real soon.”

“Good night.” He raised his soda bottle. “Here’s to a quieter night next time.”

Molly watched her mother’s departure until she’d disappeared safely into the hotel lobby. Then the car was moving again; the driver would choose a scenic holding pattern while awaiting further directions. Oftentimes, he’d surely been instructed, his work was as much about the journey as the destination.

“You’ve been awfully quiet,” Noah said.

“I guess I have.” There was a display screen on a swing arm that was
partially between them, and Molly eased it aside. “Do you have any music in this car?”

“Sure.” He tapped a touchscreen near the door, and having no idea what she was into, let the vehicle decide on a playlist.

“It was my twenty-eighth birthday today,” Noah said. “Yesterday, I mean.”

“Happy birthday.”

“Thanks. When I blew out the candle on my cupcake, I made a wish that we’d spend some time together tonight.”

She smiled a bit. “You probably should have been more specific.”

“You’re right. I should have said not behind bars.”

A song began to play low over the speakers, just a sweet, haunting voice and a quiet guitar.

“Noah?”

“Hmm?”

“I want to apologize.”

“For what?”

“I think I misjudged you.”

“I don’t know if you did or not.”

She looked out the window for a while. There was a scuff and a bruise on her cheek from the fight in the bar, but these marks did nothing to diminish the profile that he’d found so enchanting at first sight.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Nowhere right now. Do you want to go home?”

She shook her head. “I’m hungry.”

“Say no more.” Noah touched the intercom. “Eddie, could you take us up to Amy Ruth’s, on One-hundred-and-sixteenth? And call ahead, would you? I don’t think they’re open yet. Tell Robert we need some orange juice and two Al Sharptons at the curb.” Through the glass divider, he saw the driver nod his head and engage the Bluetooth phone system.

“What’s an Al Sharpton?” Molly asked.

“Fried chicken and waffles. You’re a Southern girl, right?”

She nodded. “But I think the South may be a little bigger than you New Yorkers think. I’ve never heard of chicken and waffles.”

“Then I guess you’re in for a treat, aren’t you?”

On the way to the restaurant he learned a little more about her life. Her family had moved around a great deal when she was young, following her father’s job as a journeyman engineer for Pratt & Whitney. They’d ended up living near Arnold Air Force Base outside Manchester, Tennessee. When her dad was killed in an accident at the testing facility there, that’s where they stayed. Her mother then reclaimed her maiden name and started the patriot group they were both still a part of, the Founders’ Keepers, a few years later.

“How old were you when you lost your father?” Noah asked.

“Nine.”

He sighed, and shook his head. “I was ten when my mom died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You know what? New topic. Ask me anything.”

“Okay. Who’s the most fascinating person you’ve ever met?”

He didn’t hesitate. “President Clinton. Hands down.”

“Really?”

“All politics aside, you’ve never seen so much charisma stuffed into one human being. And you brought up the subject of lying earlier—this man could keep twenty elaborate, interlocking whoppers in his head at a time, improvising on the fly, and have you believing every word while you’re holding a stack of hard evidence to the contrary. His wife might be even smarter than he is, but she doesn’t have any of that skill at prevarication, and Gore was pretty helpless if he ever dropped his script. But Clinton? He’s like one of those plate spinners at the circus: he makes everything look completely effortless. And obviously, in a related skill, he’s a total Svengali with the chicks.”

“I never found him all that attractive.”

“Oh, but it’s a whole different thing when someone like that is right next to you, as opposed to on your TV. If he was sitting here now, where
I’m sitting? I promise, you’d be helpless. He wouldn’t even have to try. You’d listen to him recite from the phone book for an hour and swear it was written by Oscar Wilde. Clinton could read you a fairy tale and you’d be down to your panties by the time Rapunzel let down her golden hair.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it.”

“That being said, he’s also one of the most ruthless sons of bitches who ever walked the earth, and we won’t see another one like him for generations.” He briefly checked their progress out the window. “And how about you?”

“Hmm?”

“Who’s your most fascinating person?”

“Oh.” Molly thought for a moment. “My mother, I guess. I don’t travel in the circles you do, but I’m a huge fan of integrity.” She took a last sip from her soda, leaned back, and put the bottle down. “Speaking of fascinating parents, your father would be a gripping subject.”

“That he would.”

“So?”

“Let me think about where to start … Rhodes Scholar, that’s a little-known fact. He was studying anthropology at Oxford when he met a man named Edward Bernays—Bernays was an admiring nephew of Sigmund Freud, if that explains any part of this messed-up business—and Mr. Bernays needed some new blood, someone with my father’s skill set, to give a shot in the arm to the industry he’d invented a few decades before.”

“Public relations.”

“Right. Bernays got his start in the big leagues helping Woodrow Wilson beat the drums to push the U.S. into World War I. And my father’s first project with him was a massive propaganda campaign for Howard Hunt and the CIA, along with the United Fruit Company, when they all got together to overthrow the president of Guatemala in 1954.”

“No.”

“Yes. And the rest is literally history.”

She frowned. “I just imagine armies and tanks in the streets when I think of a coup d’etat, not a bunch of posters and leaflets.”

“No, no, it’s so much more than that—politics and war, it’s all social psychology, and maybe it always has been. Look at the PR push that got the American people behind going back to war with Iraq in 2003. That wasn’t our company, it was the Rendon Group in Washington, but they do the same work we do. And we don’t take sides unless we’re paid to do so. If somebody comes to us and wants to drum up support for a war, for example, we don’t ask whether it’s right or wrong, any more than the ad agency for McDonald’s asks whether their client is really better than Burger King. But in our case it’s not just words and pictures; that makes it seem too simple. Public relations is the scientific engineering of consent.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Take a manufactured takeover, like Guatemala. We engineered the overthrow of a democratically elected president, and this guy was popular, he was going to take their land back from United Fruit and return it to the people. So he had to be demonized before he could be taken down. If you just march in one night, the people might rise up and resist, and you don’t want that. They have to be pacified, so their minds are the first thing you have to change.

“Use our own country as an example. Eighty million citizens own guns in America, you’d never win if they all started pushing back. You can’t take away the freedom of an aware, informed populace; they have to give it up themselves.

“So the soldiers come last, and if the PR job’s done right then there’s almost no fight left in the public at all. By the time the tanks roll in, the people welcome them. You know, the whole ‘hearts and minds’ thing. They submit to searches, give up all their rights, and forget about their neighbors that got taken away. Listen, the centerpiece on the bookshelf of Joseph Goebbels was a book by Edward Bernays, and I don’t have to
tell you how effectively the Nazis used PR. Now, I know that’s a hideous example—”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.”

“—but from the very beginning, all of the old guys in this business and their friends in the ruling class, they really saw themselves as the new founding fathers. Seriously, they thought of themselves as shepherds, and the great unwashed masses as their helpless flock. Bernays especially, he believed it was the responsibility of the elites in society to manipulate the general public into decisions they weren’t smart enough to make on their own, by whatever means necessary.

“His vision for this country, for the world, really, was a huge, benevolent nanny state, a plutocracy, where the people would be spoon-fed in every aspect of their simple, dreary lives. He’d show them how to vote, what to eat, what to love and hate, what to think, and when to think it. And, God help us all, my father took those lessons to heart and built on them. He does what he does better than anybody else ever has.”

He realized he’d been going on and on, and noticed only then the bleak expression that had settled into Molly’s eyes. She looked like a kid who’d just been told what happens to all the unwanted puppies at the pound.

“That whole subject was kind of a buzzkill, wasn’t it?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. No more shop talk.”

The car pulled up to the curb outside the restaurant, the side window glided down, and a broadly smiling man in a white apron approached with a steaming serving tray.

“Young Mr. Gardner.”

“Good morning, Robert. Sorry if we got you out of bed.”

“No trouble, no trouble at all, I will happily itemize my inconvenience on your tab.”

“I’m sure you will. Robert, this is Molly. This is our first meal together, and I wanted to impress her.”

The chef passed through his covered plates, carafes, and rolled silverware. “Well, Molly, if nothing else, your new friend at least has some excellent taste in soul food.”

There was more eating than conversation as the car made its way south and east again. The chicken and waffles were always amazing, and Molly finished quite a while before he did.

“What was your mom like?” she asked.

“My dad met my mother in 1978, and I’ll tell you, I doubt if two people have ever been more different. Oh, this is interesting, my mom is actually in that documentary about Woodstock.”

“Which part?”

He waved a hand in front of his eyes. “I don’t know exactly, I can’t really watch it. She’s kind of making out with some hairy guy, and I’m not sure, I think she flashes the cameraman at one point—”

“You’re not sure? That’s something I’d remember pretty clearly.”

“Look, I’m blocking it out, it’s my mom, okay? So anyway, years later, late seventies, and she still had her causes that she marched for, but mostly she just loved life, you know? Never wanted much. She had a little apartment in upstate New York, and she was working as a waitress at a resort up there one summer.

“And my father, the man who would become my father, had this huge place down on the lake near there, still owns it, and he saw her in the restaurant, asked her out, and that was it. Kind of a whirlwind romance. I think she was his fourth wife, or maybe his fifth. But he never married again after she was gone.”

“So you all lived up there together?”

“Oh, God no. She wouldn’t move to the city, and of course he was too big for that little town, so I hardly ever saw him except on holidays. We weren’t what you’d call a traditional family unit; hell, I thought he was my grandfather until I was about six. He’s quite a bit older than she is. Was.” He lost himself for a few moments, and had to take a long look at his hands in order to stop remembering. “Anyway, she died, lung cancer,
and I guess Dad didn’t know what else to do with me, so he moved me down here.”

It was quiet in the car for a minute or so.

“Hey.” She tapped him on the knee, and he looked up. “Would you mind if I sat over there with you?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

The seats were meant for one occupant only but she moved across, put their plates aside, and situated herself easily, sidesaddle across his lap, one arm around his back, a hand resting on his chest, her head against his shoulder.

“I think I’m going to like you,” Molly said.

“You sound so surprised.”

“I guess I am.”

He gently put his arm around her, hesitant lest he disturb the moment, but he needn’t have worried. She touched his hand, and curled a little closer.