I rested the palm of my hand on the table, prompting one of his goons to come over. Sammy shooed him away-a good sign.
'Yes or no, Sammy. That's all I need. A goddamned yes or a goddamned no.'
He stared up at me in silence, taking an occasional puff from his cigarette and blowing the smoke out of the side of his mouth, away from me.
'I need it,' I said.
He took a final drag on his cigarette, looked it over in his fingers, stubbed it out, and said, 'Yes.'
I asked, 'You know who he is now, who he became?'
Markowitz sat with both his elbows on the table, still meeting my gaze with a blank look. He averted eyes to take a sip of his cheap champagne, then looked back at me.
He said, 'No one does. Black disappeared in the program. You probably know as much about where he went as anyone right now.'
I knocked my fist against the table twice as I turned around to go.
'Thank you,' I said, and made a straight line for the door, for the street, for my idling taxi that would take me to the airport for the triumphant flight out of town. I placed a call to Lincoln Powers at the White House from my cell phone and told him I'd neared a decision and would like to meet the president one last time. He sounded pleased and told me he could give me a few minutes the following morning in Illinois, on a campaign stop there.
Next stop: Chicago.
My next call was to Havlicek. 'Hey, old man,' I said.
'Jesus Christ, where are you and what'd you learn?'
'I'm in Boston, on my way to the airport for Chicago. Going to meet up with Hutchins tomorrow. Find out as much as you can about the federal witness protection program. I'll explain more when I get in tomorrow afternoon.'
I heard his voice as I hung up the phone, and it occurred to me, rolling across the rain-glistened streets of Chelsea, that in my business, the only thing more dangerous than knowing nothing is thinking you know more than you actually do.
sixteen
Saturday, November 4
A high school band exploded into a rousing rendition of 'Hail to the Chief' as I walked inside the ballroom of the Chicago Sheraton. A pair of stocky Secret Service agents in trademark dark suits escorted me along the side wall to a holding area cordoned off with velvet ropes near the side of the dais.
The crowd of several thousand Republican partisans was up on its feet cheering wildly. Hutchins, who had just walked out onto the stage, had a smile on his face as big as Lake Michigan. He waved his arms back and forth above his head, stopping only to point out people in the audience whom he recognized, giving them a thumbs-up sign as he mouthed their names. He actually did this to me, letting his eyes linger a moment on mine before turning his palm up toward the crowd as if to say, 'Look at all this.' He appeared elated, the antithesis of that last time I called on him in the Oval Office.
And why shouldn't he be? He was barnstorming across the country in a rousing campaign swing, unveiling a series of commonsense policy initiatives designed to take the public discourse beyond the routine stalemate of partisanship to a place he called 'The American Way.' At every stop, in cities like St. Louis, Cleveland, Houston, and Atlanta, there wasn't just enthusiasm but adulation. Pollsters said his lead had increased to about five points, give or take. It was a combination, they said, of the honeymoon that any president gets when he takes over at a trying time, his survival of an assassin's bullet, and his newly floated battery of ideas.
And those ideas flowed with abandon, ignorant of traditional party lines. In a bald appeal to the American mainstream, he warned the Republican-controlled Congress not to send up any more bills that would curtail abortion rights, lest they wanted to face another veto and anger a president of their own party. He told the Democratic leadership not to even think about turning back welfare reform. He proposed a sweeping overhaul of Social Security that would allow young workers to invest their money privately in Wall Street and be virtually guaranteed a long-term rate of return double that of anything the government had ever provided. And he proposed health care reform that was met with enthusiasm by key members of both parties, the U.s.
Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL–CIO.
How popular had he become? That morning's Chicago Sun-Times, a bratty little tabloid, had endorsed Hutchins on its editorial page, and also had Hutchins's photograph splashed across its front page, with several of his proposals bulleted down the side, all under the fawning headline
'Clay's Way.' A Washington Post endorsement described him as 'a leader with the common sense of Mark Twain and the political instincts of Franklin Roosevelt.'
'These aren't Republican ideas,' he boomed from the podium in Chicago.
'These aren't Democratic ideas. These are American ideas.' The crowd fell into a near frenzy.
'Not a bad little reception, huh?'
That was Royal Dalton, the White House press secretary who had taken the job in the first days of the Cole administration and was about to lose it in the first days of the Hutchins administration, though I'm not entirely sure if he realized that fact yet.
Speaking of which, my intention was to reject the press secretary's job. I'm a newspaper reporter-always have been, always will be. I don't look good on television. I don't particularly like politics, mostly because I don't particularly like politicians. I disdain the idea that, as a press secretary, I'd ever have to suck up to someone like myself, some cynical reporter whose bullshit meter jumps off the charts at the first sign of any insincerity and virtually explodes at the suspicion of a lie.
That said, I'd use the rejection as a chance to ask some much-needed and belated questions.
'Kind of reminds me of Nixon in Egypt about a month before he resigned,' I said to Dalton. He looked at me quizzically, then decided to ignore the remark.
'So I have you slotted for about fifteen minutes with him, after this event. He'll go up to his suite in the hotel for some private time, and you're due to be brought up there right after him.'
Dalton was having to speak louder. The crowd had broken out into a chant of 'Clay's Way, Clay's Way.' Hutchins stood on the podium pretending to be mad that they had interrupted his speech, holding his hands up in a plea for quiet, peering over the crowd with a mock sour look on his face.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' he shouted into the microphone. 'You have to let me finish. I have to continue across the country. I have an election to win, an agenda to put into place. I have to get back to Washington, victorious, to make sure those career politicians aren't misusing any more of our money and dampening any more of our American dream.'
My God, how campy. But the crowd went crazy, the sound of the applause and the cheers swirling toward the cavernous ceiling, mixing with the red, white, and blue balloons that floated in the netting overhead.
Dalton said, 'It's been like this at every stop. I've never seen anything like it.'
I gave the press secretary a quick up and down. He was dressed in a gray chalk-stripe suit with a brightly colored bow tie pinned up against what looked to be a remarkably expensive shirt, the type that had French cuffs adhered by monogrammed gold cuff links. As I may have mentioned, he had a rather puffy, pasty look to him, no doubt honed by years spent in conservatories playing the piano as a child or reading Shakespeare in his room in boarding school, or tucked away in some corner of a library at his Ivy League university. He made George Will look like the Marlboro Man.
'On background,' he said, 'between you and me, over in the West Wing, we just have to watch out that he doesn't get too carried away with this populist message.' He gave kind of a knowing laugh, mostly through his nose, as if he had just said something funny, though I wasn't sure what it was. 'We just have to make sure he doesn't start believing all this centrist pablum he's throwing out. God, President Cole must be rolling over in his
