almost physical. But she knew what was right. She knew what was needed. She wanted to be happy and the first responsibility for that fell to her.
She was packed and dressed and out of the apartment, and away from Heather’s high-pitched clamor, in another ten minutes. She sat in her car in the garage under the building, waiting until she felt ready to drive. It had been such a long road for her, just to face what she wanted, which had seemed so frightening and shaming and, worst of all, alien. She had hated being different, feeling different, and having to take that on for life. But she had. And now, at the age of fifty, there was something else to face, something worse: that she might never be loved at all, never, not in the unburdened, lasting way she still hoped for. She sat in her car in the dark garage at 3 a.m., with her arms wrapped around herself.
10
It was 7:30 a.m. and he stood in the light-rail station in Center City, one glove on, his right hand bare as he extended it to commuters. He was positioned in the lower level, near the bank of doors, so he could catch both the inbound and outbound rush, but there was no heat here and the temperature could not have been more than ten degrees. The young interns who had accompanied him were stomping their feet and walking in circles, but the rush of engaging with so many people distracted him from the throbbing in his ears. Since John F. Kennedy abandoned the formal top hat for his inauguration, it had been the preferred political style in the US to greet voters bareheaded.
“Paul Gianis, hoping for your vote for mayor on April third.” He must have said that five times a minute, never varying more than a word or two.
He loved the meet-and-greets, but not for the reason most might suspect. They taught him humility, for one thing, a trait their mother always commended, even if she practiced it rarely. In today’s world only athletes and entertainers were real stars. Paul had been majority leader of the state senate for four years, but people still registered his as no more than a familiar face, figuring they’d met him someplace unrecalled, like their cousin’s wedding. When they heard his name, the commuters’ reactions varied. Most smiled tepidly and shook as they passed by. Some stopped to tell him they’d shopped in his father’s grocery, or that they’d voted for him in the past. There were always a few who wanted a picture, particularly if they were with their kids. Plenty of folks breezed by coldly, R’s or, more often, people who regarded politicians as a plague, especially ones making it harder to get to work. Of course, people he’d known for years-lawyers on the way to the office, most of them-would stop to say hi. And there was also one great Latino guy who, by sheer coincidence, he’d run into at four or five of these stops around the Tri-Cities, who opened his arms and hugged him this morning, shouting, “Pablo,
Occasionally, commuters wanted longer conversations. Moms tended to ask pointed questions about schools and the Rec Department, both perilously underfunded, and younger people who were engaged in what used to be regarded as a reverse commute, going from their Center City apartments to jobs near the airport, would sometimes tarry to find out his plans to make the county more energy-efficient or to feed start-ups in the tech sector. Doing this day in and day out-and he was at a different bus stop or here every workday, and in grocery stores all over the county on the weekend-you could get a feel for the issues. There were still too many black folks moved to complain about the police force’s excesses, particularly in the North End. And inevitably he heard stories that broke his heart-today it was the dad of a gravely disabled son who couldn’t get adequate help from the schools or county agencies, but who refused to institutionalize a boy whose mother had abandoned him long ago. There was also comic relief-morning travelers who expected him to do something on the spot about their neighbor’s barking dog, or the zeta beams from Mars, or, very often, the judge hearing their divorce case, whose rulings against them were a sure sign of ingrained corruption. But he loved it all, the meeting, the wooing, the listening, telling his staffers to write down ideas and plans and names. This was the open heart of the city, full of need.
“So like what’s with this murder thing?” a young man in a stocking cap and overcoat asked now. It was the third time this morning someone had referred to Hal’s ads. He had practiced an agonized look and a toss of his head, as if it were beyond comprehension.
“This dude’s an asshole, right?” said the guy. His skin was spotty and he had probably experienced a miserable adolescence, but now he was clearly not lacking in confidence.
“Your words,” he answered.
“Yeah, but it sounds bad, man.” With that the fellow was gone.
At 8:45, he and the two aides left the station. He had a breakfast at the Metro Club, a fund-raiser with trial lawyers. He’d lost some support there because he’d been willing to discuss damage caps as part of a failed effort at health care reform last year, but most of the attorneys attending had been colleagues forever, and he was still their guy, especially since he’d be controlling the County Law Department from the mayor’s office.
When he opened the back door of the campaign car, a red Taurus a couple of years old, Crully was in the back seat. Mark leaned out and asked Kim and Marty, the interns, if they’d mind grabbing a cab. That could not mean anything good. Mark would only have come out in the cold because he had to brief the candidate in private on something he needed to know about before he ran into any reporters. Sure enough, Crully handed over a fistful of papers. Discovery motions from Hal’s lawyers.
“No motion to dismiss?”
“Huh?” Crully answered.
“You said they’d file a motion to dismiss our complaint on First Amendment grounds and we’d be briefing it until the election. But they’ve skipped that stage and gone straight to discovery. Right?”
Mark shrugged, indifferent to the fact that he’d been flat wrong. Hal and his lawyers had outflanked Paul and wanted Judge Lands to order production of all the evidence that the state and local police still had on hand, and to direct Paul to give saliva and fingerprints. They were going to try to do DNA tests. He read over the attached affidavit from Hassam Yavem, a couple of times. It was shocking, actually. He’d had an idle worry about DNA testing once or twice over the years, but one thing he’d been told repeatedly was that there was no way to tell his DNA from his twin brother’s. Yavem was a real scientist, though.
Crully could tell what was on his mind.
“Ray already talked to Yavem. It’s like one in two hundred the test will actually work.”
“And is all that stuff even around?” he asked.
“Apparently the blood is. They found it in the state police fridge. They actually have a ten-year retention policy and then they
“And why was I so lucky?”
“AIDS,” Crully said.
“AIDS?”
“It’s from 1982. They didn’t do routine AIDS screening on blood in 1982. So when they got to 1992, nobody wanted to touch it. It sat there.”
“Great.”
Crully didn’t like what he was seeing in Paul, and he was seeing it every time this subject came up. Crully had been running winning campaigns long enough to be able to pick his races. And he chose them on two bases. First, he wanted to win. Occasionally, just for money, he’d work a stone loser in an off-year election for some Democratic gazillionaire who thought she or he was the new face of democracy. But Mark had tasted ashes often enough, and if he needed money, he could move back to D.C. and lobby. So he wanted winners, one. And two, he wanted a hardworking candidate. People would never believe how many of these men and, more rarely, women didn’t want to put in the time. They liked getting up in front of cameras or an adoring crowd, even if it was half relatives of the campaign staff. But they didn’t care for eighteen-hour days. And they wanted to pretend that the money grew on trees, that George Soros or someone was going to take a liking to them and pour down millions out of a pillowcase. They thought it was degrading or embarrassing to ask people to make their support tangible. Gianis was a pro. And tireless. Two days ago, he’d told Mark that Crully could begin adding campaign appearances
