Hotchins fixed himself a cup of tea and put half a spoonful of sugar into it. He stirred it slowly, looking at Lowenthal with his crystal blue eyes.
‘What’s your interest in me, Julius?’ he asked.
Lowenthal smiled. ‘Plain and simple? You’re a maverick and I like that, always have. I’ve been watching you for years. We believe in the same things.’ Then: ‘So much for idealism. Now we’ll get to the bottom line. You have style. You have a hell of a war record. But the big thing is, I don’t think Humphrey can beat Ford and I think you just might. Ford’s the weakest incumbent president the Democrats have ever run against, but that doesn’t mean he’s a pushover. He can shake the Nixon thing. He’s already done a pretty good job of that. My personal opinion is that a dark horse is going to take him. And they don’t come any darker than you right now.’
Hotchins and Roan both laughed.
‘Besides,’ Lowenthal said, ‘maybe, just maybe, you could make one hell of a president.’
Hotchins smiled warmly. Then he laughed out loud. ‘I’ll be a son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘That’s one hell of an answer.’
‘Good,’ Lowenthal said, ‘now let’s get to the nut-cutting fast. You got any secrets. Anything in the closet we ought to know about? Any illegitimate kids, bad friends, vices that may upset the little old ladies in Nebraska?’
Hotchins smiled to conceal a tiny shock that hit him in the stomach. A picture of Domino flashed past his eyes. ‘Of course not,’ he said casually.
‘We’ve been through this before,’ Roan said. ‘If there was anything, it would have been turned up by now.’
‘Not like this time. This time they’ll be all over you — into your business deals, your war record, your family life. Both parties in the beginning. I don’t want any surprises popping up at the last minute.’
‘What else?’ Hotchins said, killing that conversation.
‘What’s your net worth?’
Hotchins thought about that for a few moments. ‘I suopose I’ll show close to a million dollars when my CPA finishes the audit. But most of that’s on paper. Investments, stock in trust to protect me from conflicts of interest.’
‘How much liquid?’
‘Less than two hundred thousand dollars.’
‘Our credit position is very strong,’ Roan said. ‘We can tap several banks. I’d say we can raise a million, maybe more to start with.’
‘Not enough.’
‘What is enough?’ Hotchins asked.
Lowenthal tapped dead ashes out of his pipe. Then he said, ‘Two million, minimum. It could go higher depending on how rough it gets. And no big contributors. It could hurt you later. It also could be illegal.’
Hotchins stared at the lawyer. He had to be careful with Lowenthal. No matter how tough he might talk, Lowenthal was known for his integrity. It was one of the traits that gave him credence and had ever since he had first appeared on the political scene during the Kennedy campaign. But Hotchins was thinking, Illegal? It was only illegal if they got caught and he knew DeLaroza well enough to know Victor would never get caught. Hotchins’s big concern was two million dollars. Vas his finance minister prepared to raise that kind of money? He thought he knew the answer.
‘We’ve got it,’ he said suddenly. ‘And without that son of a bitch Fitzgerald. I don’t want his money. I don’t want him until we get to New York. Then I want him with his hat in his hand, begging to get on board.’
He limped to the window and looked down at the street, at the little people scurrying back to their offices and after- lunch Alka Seltzers. The voters. ‘they were little people to him, humiliated by the routines of life, badgered by the banks and the mortgage companies and the institutions, running one step ahead of failure. His contempt for the common man was a deeply guarded secret, a flaw which could destroy him. And looking down at them he felt a deep rage that his future lay in their hands. But the emotion passed quickly.
‘So it’s Humphrey we have to beat,’ he mused aloud.
‘Hubert’s a fine man,’ Lowenthal said. ‘And a hell of a campaigner.’
‘He had his chance in ‘68,’ Hotchins said, and there was a snap to his voice, like a whip cracking. To Hotchins, he was a loser, a failure, like the little people below, a man who smiled in defeat and cried in public. Happy Warrior, hell. But he said nothing, for he sensed Lowenthal’s respect for the Minnesota senator.
Lowenthal walked over to him. ‘Look, you got a lot going for you. You’re handsome, honest, got a great record.
You’re a war hero; you left a foot in Korea and came back with the Distinguished Service Cross and a Purple Heart. You took a little nothing business and an SBA loan and parlayed it into a national franchise, You’re a lawyer, a soldier, a businessman. Got a great family. Mr. Clean. And it’s all beautiful and great. What it gets you, it gets you into the gate, period.
‘After that, it’s a balls-out race. What I can do for you, I can bring in some real heavyweights. Joe McGuire, Angie Costerone, John Davis Harmon. They’ll come aboard if I’m aboard. I can work the demographics, tell you how to get the Chicano vote in L.A., the blacks and Puerto Ricans in New York, the Irish vote in Boston, the Polish vote in Chicago, deal with the unions, the city machines, the state hacks. We can do all that. But it won’t mean a damn unless we come off big. You got to open up your campaign lilce a winner and run like one. When we announce we have to take the biggest hail in the state and fill it with the kids, the senior citizens, blacks, reds, yellows, greens, pinks, Wasps. We want bands and noise and, uh, what we can’t do, we can’t come out with bupkus. You know bupkus? It’s Yiddish. It means nothing, zilch. A quiet noise. You sneak into this campaign and Fitz figures he’s got you dead already. You come out big, with me and McGuire and the rest, it’s gonna scare him to death.’
Hotchins grinned. He was going to come out big, all right. That, he could guarantee.
Phipps Plaza was one of the city’s more elegant shopping centres, located a few minutes from Victor DeLaroza’s office, its parking lot three storeys deep and under the mall. At two that Thursday afternoon there were
