make the arrangements.
“I remember when I was young and heard my father railing about the links among organized crime and the Teamsters and Longshoremen’s unions and the Democrats and asked myself how politicians could’ve let that happen to themselves. What were they thinking? How could they have been so self-deceiving? Now I know.”
Landon opened his lower left desk drawer and withdrew a humidor of Cuban Cohiba cigars. He opened the box, selected one, and held it up.
“You know where I got these?”
Gage didn’t answer.
“The vice president.” Landon paused, then added, “of the United States,” a reminder of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo.
Landon reached into the drawer again, withdrew a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey, and set it next to the box.
“You know what’s wrong with the phrase ‘follow the money’?” Landon unwrapped the plastic cigar casing. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. It’s no secret where the money comes from. Everybody knows from where and what it does.” He looked over at Gage, and then said, “Remember years ago I wondered aloud why Americans had stopped reading James Fenimore Cooper?”
Gage nodded. It had been during a late night talk, up at his cabin. Landon pacing, struggling to understand the country and his place in it.
“It was because of a line of his that had stuck with me since college. He said it ‘was the proper business of government to resist the corruptions of money, not to depend on them.’ Now I know why we turned away from him. It was too much like looking into a mirror that revealed all our hypocrisies and self-deceptions.”
Landon slipped the end of the cigar into a miniature spring-loaded guillotine and snipped it off.
“Picture this. Early May, late evening, sitting on the porch of the vice president’s mansion. Me, him, and the head of the energy lobby, drinking Scotch and sucking on Cohibas. Male bonding. That’s what my wife calls it. But this wasn’t playing football in the park or catching bass on Lake Okeechobee or guzzling beer over boiled crayfish.”
Landon paused, glanced around his office, and then asked himself aloud, “Where am I going with this?” He ran the cigar under his nose, drawing in the aroma. “Following the money.
“Three little criminals sucking on Cohibas. Federal criminals at that.” He pointed at Gage. “I know what you’re wondering. You’re an investigator. You’re wondering where the vice president got the criminal cigars.” Landon smiled. “From the lobbyist, of course.” He gestured again, not pointing, simply punctuating. “And where did the lobbyist get them? From the president of Hudson Wire and Cable. And where did president of Hudson Wire and Cable get them? At a meeting in Barbados with the managing director of Hudson’s Cayman Island subsidiary that installed the electrical infrastructure for thirty-four hotels that were built on Varadero Beach in Cuba. And where did the managing director get them? From Fidel Castro’s brother’s son’s sister-in-law’s cousin who supervises the entire construction project.
“So there we were sitting on the back porch…” Landon paused, then clucked. “In case you’re wondering, the sister-in-law’s father is the leader of the largest anti-Castro group in Florida.”
Landon rose, walked to the window, and gazed over Washington. “Given this introduction, you’re no doubt imagining the lobbyist met with us to push for lifting the embargo. Not at all. And it’s not because he supports it. It’s simply irrelevant. Anti-Castro Cubans in the U.S. are no more than a bloc of votes to be delivered to politicians- on both sides of the aisle-who vote the right way on other matters.
“Hudson Wire and Cable makes tens of millions a year in Cuba, embargo or not. And one of those millions found its way into a political action committee backing me, and part of it has been set aside to get out the anti- Castro Cuban vote in Florida.”
Landon spun toward Gage.
“You think Hudson Wire and Cable ever gave a damn about how many political opponents Castro imprisoned and executed over the years? Or how many innocent Chechens Putin murdered or Egyptian protesters Mubarak shot down in the street? Or Suharto’s genocide in East Timor? Not a bit. As long as Hudson is free to pursue its interests in Cuba and Russia and Indonesia, it doesn’t care. And people like me who took their money didn’t choose to think about it.”
Landon picked at a fingernail.
“But let’s face it. The deaths of innocents are like fertilizer. Take China. Our Internet hardware manufacturers overlook political repression in order to sell them routers. Routers open the Chinese to the Internet. The Internet opens their eyes to freedom of speech and democracy.”
Gage pointed at Landon. “You’re starting to sound like Anston.”
“That’s exactly the problem, except Anston didn’t believe in democracy, only in fertilizer.”
Landon paused, then a half smile appeared on his face.
“There’s a certain irony in all of this I didn’t grasp until now. Brandon used to think of himself as my Machiavelli. What he didn’t realize was that Machiavelli believed the first act of a newly formed republic was sacrificial. It must murder the prince-and I suspect it’s something Anston never doubted.”
Landon’s eyes focused on the bookshelf behind Gage. “You know what St. Augustine says about original sin?” He looked back at Gage, but didn’t wait for an answer. “He calls it an inescapable blindness in human action. We never really know what we’re doing. And by ‘we’ I mean all of us. It’s not just Republicans or Democrats. We’re all coconspirators in our own self-deceptions. We create the most powerful industrial nation on earth, but only by funding oil-producing governments that want to destroy us. And then once in a while we wake up, have a moment of terrifying clarity, then run from it or go back to sleep pretending it was just a nightmare.” He hung his head. “Worst of all, when we most think we’re our own men, we’re really just someone else’s puppets.”
Landon inspected the cigar in his hand as if he’d never seen it before, then threw it into the wastebasket next to his credenza.
“In all these years since you gave me Augustine’s Confessions, it never crossed my mind he was talking about me.”
Landon dropped back into his chair, his arms limp in his lap. His eyes went vacant and inward for a moment, then he squinted as though searching for something far in the past. He finally focused on Gage.
“You always knew how all this would end, didn’t you?”
Gage shook his head, He hadn’t known. He had no way of knowing. And he was certain that in his heart Landon didn’t believe Gage knew. It was just that the floundering man still needed to believe that there was such a thing as perfect knowledge-both insight and foresight-with which he could have armed himself against the tragedy that now enveloped him.
“Maybe not specifically,” Landon continued. ”Maybe you couldn’t have foreseen where I am now, but from that first day on the river, you saw the hazards below the surface”-he lowered his gaze-“and all I really saw was my own reflection.”
Chapter 92
Senator Landon Meyer paused at the threshold of the Senate Radio-Television Gallery, just out of sight of the video cameras focused on the door. He looked over at Gage.
“You know where I am in the New Hampshire polls?” Landon asked.
“Does it make a difference?” Gage asked.
Landon shook his head. “Turns out it never did.”
He then stepped through the doorway into the floodlights. In three strong steps he stood behind the podium. He scanned the familiar faces before him, the sources of thousands of questions over nearly two decades. While they were always dis-satisfied with his politically polished answers, he was always forgiven because of his charming delivery.
He glanced toward his wife standing behind him, thinking that she would have made a wonderful first lady. But he knew the voters would never forgive him for Brandon, and for his own blindness. She smiled at him as though they were alone in the kitchen reading newspaper cartoons over coffee or at the dinner table after he said
