“I’m not worthy,” Eleanor said, placing one hand to the breast of her white terrycloth bathrobe.
“My daughter costume,” Mary Catherine explained.
“Well, I knew I overslept,” Eleanor said, ushering her into the room, “but looking at you I feel like I am way behind the curve.”
“You don’t know how right you are,” Mary Catherine said provocatively. She groped for the curtain pull and yanked it decisively, flooding the room with light. Then she turned around and sat down on the unmade bed, facing Eleanor, who was squinting between her fingers.
“You have this look on your face like you are in possession of important state secrets that you can’t wait to blab,” Eleanor said. “So let me assure you that I have a Top-Secret Alpha clearance. Coffee?”
“No, thanks,” Mary Catherine said. “I had breakfast four hours ago.”
Eleanor laughed and pretended to be ashamed of herself. “In Alexandria my neighbor’s dog starts barking at five A.M. sharp,” she said, “so I never get the opportunity to sleep in.”
“Well,” Mary Catherine said, “I think you’ll find that the accommodations are much quieter on the grounds of the Naval Observatory.”
“Naval Observatory?”
“Yeah,” Mary Catherine said innocently.
The Naval Observatory was a circular patch of land along Massachusetts Avenue, northwest of downtown D.C., in a part of town that Eleanor had rarely visited while growing up there. Its function was to provide very nice housing to a few important Navy types who needed quick access to the White House. And it contained the official residence of the Vice President of the United States.
She inhaled sharply and looked at Mary Catherine’s face. Mary Catherine was sucking in her cheeks, trying not to break out laughing.
“I’m going to be made an admiral?” Eleanor said.
Mary Catherine shook her head.
The idea was too stunning. Eleanor couldn’t speak. It couldn’t be.
If Cozzano were a fringe candidate, she’d understand it. A purely symbolic candidacy, like the Libertarians or the Socialists, might pick someone like her as a running mate. But Cozzano was no fringe candidate.
Hell, Cozzano was the leader. All the polls had him out in front. It was impossible.
“You’re playing with me, girl,” Eleanor said.
Mary Catherine just shook her head. She put one hand over her mouth, trying to contain herself.
That one gesture finally brought it home to Eleanor. This wasn’t just some nice young lady she had made friends with at a convention, after all. This was the daughter of the candidate himself. And the way she was dressed—
“You came here to do some serious business,” Eleanor said.
Mary Catherine nodded.
“You came here to NOTIFY ME!” Eleanor said, and finally she couldn’t hold back any longer; she slid forward out of her chair, onto her knees, put both hands over her face, and started screaming. Mary Catherine, laughing hysterically, wrapped Eleanor up in her arms and held her tight.
In some deep, remote part of her soul, Eleanor knew that she was acting just like the winning contestants on the game shows that she used to watch when she was unemployed. But she didn’t care. Come to think of it, it wasn’t a bad analogy. She had gone on the biggest quiz show of all time and won the penultimate prize.
The results were so odd and yet so important that Cyrus Rutherford Ogle ran one more test, shortly before the announcement. They were starting off the broadcast with a round-table discussion among the four metapundits whom Ogle had handpicked from Central Casting.
One of them was a gruff, grandfatherly old man who projected traditional American family values. He had made a comfortable living playing a cowboy patriarch in various Westerns and an admiral on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Another was a tweedy academic (lab-coat wearing pseudoscientist on a couple of drug commercials). Then there was a middle-aged, professional-looking young woman whose role was to puncture the egos of the two men (occasional lawyer on L.A. Law). Finally, they had a stylish, younger black woman with a Hispanic surname and generically progressive politics (roommate/best friend to better-known actresses in various films). All four of the metapundits would gather every evening and engage in a spirited discussion of political issues that had come up during the day’s events at the National Town Meeting. All four of them had, at one time, worked in soap operas and had the ability to memorize dialogue rapidly, which came in handy since Ogle and his staff scripted the discussions.
During tonight’s discussion, the tweedy academic metapundit delivered a bombshell several minutes into the program by announcing that he had spoken with a high-level Cozzano operative minutes before the program and that this person had confirmed that Eleanor Richmond would be the vice-presidential candidate.
Cy Ogle was ensconced in the Eye of Cy at the moment his line was delivered, and the results were intense and striking. There were a few discrepancies between the new information and last night’s debate results, but they were not big discrepancies. Richmond had a hard core of support that would never change. There was also a smaller but strong anti-Richmond segment, led by Byron Jeffcote (Trailer-Park Nazi, Ocala, Florida) and by a few others like the Post-Confederate Gravy Eater and the Orange County Book Burner.
But reaction among more moderately conservative whites was not half-bad. And the big surprise was still there: Chase Merriam loved Eleanor Richmond. Cy Ogle picked up the phone and got his press secretary.
“Go ahead and announce it,” he said. “The demographics are perfect.”
“Richmond?” the secretary said, still a little uncertain about this whole idea.
“Eleanor Richmond,” Ogle said.
On the other end of the line, he heard keys whacking on a computer keyboard. The press release was now being transmitted digitally to the wire services, computer-faxed to every press outlet in the Western world. Cozzano’s state and local campaign managers, in all fifty states, were receiving information packets on Eleanor Richmond—pictures, videotapes, and canned sound bites for them to toss off to the local media. It all happened in an instant.
“It’s done,” his press secretary said.
“Good,” Ogle said. “White House, here we come. I gotta go,” he concluded. “I have a call on another line.”
It wasn’t just any old phone line. This was a special line that Ogle had agreed to keep open. The only person who had this phone number was Buckminster Salvador. Cy Ogle’s boss. Rarely heard from, rarely seen, but always there.
“Ogle,” Ogle said.
“Hold everything!” said the voice of Mr. Salvador, which was barely recognizable; his throat was tense to the point of strangulation. “Don’t move! Don’t push any buttons or make any phone calls or let anyone do anything!”
“I am alone. Alone and powerless,” Ogle said. “You have my undivided attention.”
“Thank god I reached you in time,” Salvador said. “I knew there was something wrong with that whole Eleanor Richmond thing.”
“What do you mean?”
Salvador spent most of his time hanging out in ODR’s fake headquarters in the office tower above Pentagon Plaza, so that he could monitor all of the PIPER 100 data at the same time as Ogle did. And he did so constantly, as Ogle had learned; scarcely a single campaign event went by that Bucky Salvador didn’t phone him up right in the middle of it and provide his own commentary on how the PIPER 100 were reacting. He fancied himself something of an expert. And, dilettante that he was, he completely failed to grasp the mediagenic advantages of Eleanor Richmond.
“Chase Merriam called me just a few minutes ago. He just got out of the hospital.”
Ogle laughed. “Haw, haw, haw,” he said, “don’t tell me. He had an operation. He was on laughing gas or something during the debate.”
“Worse than that. He was in a car crash Wednesday night. Some hoodlum stole his watch. We have no idea who’s wearing that thing!”
“A late-mid
dle-aged black female homeless person with good education and traditionalist values,” Ogle said.
Salvador was caught off guard. “Oh. You’ve found the watch, then?”
“Nope,” Ogle said, “just an educated guess.”
“Well,” Salvador said. “Well.”
“Well what?”
“This changes everything!” Salvador said, shocked by Ogle’s seeming indifference. “The statistics are completely fouled up!”
“If all the PIPER 100 got together and traded watches, that would foul up the statistics,” Ogle said. “One person doesn’t foul them up too bad.”
Deep in his heart, Ogle knew Salvador had a point. But he didn’t want to agree with him. He did not really get along with Salvador very well.
“That’s ridiculous!” Salvador said. “You told me yourself last night that the single strongest thing in Richmond’s favor was the fact that Chase Merriam loved her. You said it was a key factor in making your decision.”
“Hey,” Ogle said, “try to keep this in perspective. We’re talking about the goddamn vice presidency here. It just doesn’t matter.”
“So you admit that Richmond is the wrong choice,” Salvador said triumphantly.
“From here on out, she’s the right choice. She’s a brilliant choice. A daring, incisive, masterstroke of leadership on Cozzano’s part,” Ogle said, “because she’s a choice we already made.”
“Not true,” Salvador said, “the formal announcement doesn’t happen for another hour.”
“The formal announcement doesn’t mean diddly,” Ogle said. “We already unleashed the cascade. Stories have already been filed. Hell,” Ogle said, grabbing a remote control and clicking channels on a nearby TV monitor, “I got Koppel on screen right now with a picture of Eleanor Richmond over his shoulder. And when Eleanor’s peering over Ted Koppel’s shoulder on national TV, and Koppel’s got that smirky know-it-all look on his face, it’s just too goddamn late.”
“Good lord.” Salvador sighed, sounding quiet and defeated. “When I got into this thing, I never realized how complicated it was going to be.”
“Cheer up,” Ogle said, turning his attention back toward the Eye of Cy. “Look at the screens. I am seeing a generally green color this evening. The electorate is mellow and satisfied. If Richmond turns out to be a wrong choice, we’ll just send her to kiss babies in Guam.”
“I see a case of measles,” Salvador said. “I see a lot of red screens. Look at Economic Roadkill! Economic Roadkill is a key bloc. And tonight, Economic Roadkill is frightened.”
Ogle looked at the screen labeled FLOYD WAYNE VISHNIAK. As Salvador had pointed out, it was bright red. “It’s nothing,” Ogle said. “He does that all the time. He’s in another bar fight.”
Suddenly, Vishniak’s screen turned bright green. Ogle and Salvador both laughed. “Ha ha!” Salvador said, “I’ll wager his opponent is out cold on a barroom floor in Davenport, Iowa!”
forty-six
FLOYD WAYNE Vishniak strode into McCormick Place and heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. A cascade of sweat fell out of his hair and showered his face. He had made it through the metal detectors!
The Fleischacker had performed as advertised. It was a ceramic-and-plastic gun, made in Austria, that didn’t trigger metal detectors. After cashing in his latest check from Ogle Data Research, picking up his paycheck from detasseling, and pawning all of his other weapons, he had finally raised the capital he needed to purchase the Fleischacker at a gun store in Davenport and to top his truck’s fuel tanks. That done, he had made the trip across northern Illinois in two hours flat, blasting across the nearly empty pavement of I-88 at an average velocity of eighty-five miles per hour. He had wanted to leave himself an adequate time cushion upon reaching Chicago, because he wasn’t sure how to locate McCormick Place. But that turned out to be a snap. He just took the interstate into town and, to his astonishment, began to see signs for the damn place. A whole series of big signs that took him straight where he wanted to go.
This kind of thing did not happen to Floyd Wayne Vishniak very often, because usually he went places where no one else wanted to go: cornfields that needed detasseling, riverfront bars, and defunct factories. He had been forced to develop a certain amount of navigational cunning over the years. He had assumed that once he trespassed upon the borders of Chicago, he would, as usual, spend a considerable amount of time idling on the shoulder of various roads and in the parking lots of convenience stores, poring over his Chicago map collection.
But it wasn’t like that. All he had to do was pay the tolls and follow the signs. And as he was doing so, it dawned on him that this was natural and logical, because if he had the correct understanding of it, a convention was a thing where a whole lot of people came together at once for a purpose. Which meant that a whole lot of people were having to find their ways to McCormick Place all the time, every day.
Like most of the other new ideas that entered Floyd Wayne Vishniak’s head, this one came in the form of a pang of bitter resentment. It hit him straight between the eyes and made him grind his teeth and mumble indistinct profanities.
The whole world was set up for the benefit of the rich folks. That interstate, four beautiful lanes of pavement cutting straight across the state of Illinois, had been put there just to ferry the wealthy and privileged into Chicago so that they could go to conventions and meet with others of their kind and plot new conspiracies to keep the common man in his place: on the bottom. Far be it from these people to find their own way to McCormick Place. Oh no, these people were too busy and dignified and important to actually buy maps and find their own way. No, they had to have special signs.
It was easy enough to reach the convention center, but difficult to park in its vicinity; the lots were jammed. Not making it any easier was Vishniak’s own extreme nervousness. He was afraid to slow down, so he just orbited the target zone like an Indian circling a wagon train. He shot right past a few perfectly good spots. McCormick Place was the southern end of a whole chain of big civic projects, including Soldier Field, some museums, and Grant Park, and parking lots were strung for several miles up the shore of the lake. Vishniak ended up parking way the hell and gone up in the vicinity of Grant Park and then walking for half an hour, which was fine because it helped him burn off adrenaline.
Grant Park, he realized, must be named after General Grant. As in Grant and Sherman. Vishniak had learned all about those two guys on TV. One was drunk and one was crazy, he could never remember which, but the thing was that both of them kicked ass for their country. When the war started Grant was living in Galena, which was just a few miles up the river from where Vishniak lived. And he was working in a livery stable, which was equivalent to working in a car wash nowadays, or detasseling.
He walked south past Soldier Field, where William A. Cozzano had attained glory in an earlier life, and then took a pedestrian overpass across Lakeshore Drive into the extreme northern end of the McCormick Place parking lots. The first thing he encountered was a line of portable toilets. On the theory that you should never pass up a chance to make water or take water, he went into one of these, wiped the seat with a wad of toilet paper, and sat down. All he really had to do was take a leak—the series of thirty-two-ounce coffees he had picked up at various Chicagoland 7-Elevens was having an effect—but as long as he was here he flicked his Bic and had one last good look at the Fleischacker. He popped the magazine loose from the grip, checked it, shoved it in.
Someone pounded on the fiberglass door of the portable toilet. “Is anyone in there?”
“Fuck you,” said Floyd Wayne Vishniak reflexively. His heart was pounding; he was afraid it was a cop. But it wasn’t. Just another Cozzano supporter. Vishniak reholstered his gun under his windbreaker and started getting himself together, wondering whether this rude person had any friends, whether he was big, whether he would be worth picking a fight with. But when he came out he saw it was just a little man in a suit, accompanied by a little kid who
was holding his crotch and jumping up and down.
Fuck it anyway, Vishniak realized. He had abandoned his trailer and hit the road with a pocket of cash, a pickup truck, and a plastic gun. He had to get used to the idea that he was a different kind of man now, a man who had risen above the common crowd, who could not trouble himself with meaningless hassles over toilet access.
McCormick Place was a huge rectangular black thing with a much larger black slab of a roof that overhung the building quite a bit on all sides. As Vishniak walked toward it through the parking lot, Lakeshore Drive was on his right and a little backwater of Lake Michigan on his left; beyond that was a peninsula with a private airport on it, small planes taking off and landing and taxiing. The yachts of the rich and powerful were tied up in the water only yards away from the private jets of the even more rich and powerful, and Vishniak could plainly see that if you were the right kind of person, you didn’t have to waste your time with parking lots, or even cars.
All the way from Grant Park southward, the pedestrian traffic had been getting heavier. At the southern end of the parking lot, all the people were funneled down a wide staircase and into McCormick Place’s subterranean entrance. The flow was backed up a little bit, the crowd milled rather than streamed down the stairs. Working his way slowly down the steps, Vishniak was able to get a clear view of the metal detectors bracketing the doors.
He immediately got scared shitless. His heart was going so fast it was more of a vibration, like an idling truck engine, than a beat, and he was sweating like a pig. But it was a warm humid night and he was wearing a windbreaker, so he had every excuse to sweat.
Looking up, he could see into the underside of McCormick Place’s huge flat overhanging roof, which was supported and stiffened by a latticework of black girders. Laced through the structural members was a barely perceptible network of thin red lines—a system of pipes carrying water to the automatic sprinkler system. As Vishniak worked his way down the steps, swept along by the eager Cozzano supporters, he wondered whether anyone else ever bothered to look up in the air and take notice of these things, these hidden connections and networks that were laced imperceptibly through the structure of everything.