'Okay, Ernie, that's something.'
12—Formalities
There had to be speeches. Worse, there had to be a lot of speeches. For something of this magnitude, each of the 435 members from each of the 435 districts had to have his or her time in front of the cameras.
A representative from North Carolina had brought in Will Snyder, his hands still bandaged, and made sure he had a front-row seat in the gallery. That gave her the ability to point to her constituent, praise his courage to the heavens, laud organized labor for the nobility of its unionized members, and introduce a resolution to give Snyder official congressional recognition for his heroic act.
Next, a member from eastern Tennessee rendered a similar panegyric to his state's highway police and the scientific resources of Oak Ridge National Laboratory—there would be many favors handed out as a result of this legislation, and ORNL would get a few more million. The Congressional Budget Office was already estimating the tax revenue to be realized from increased American auto production, and members were salivating over that like Pavlov's dogs for their bell.
A member from Kentucky went to great pains to make it clear that the Cresta was largely an American-made automobile, would be even more so with the additional U.S. parts to be included in the design (that had already been settled in a desperate but necessarily unsuccessful accommodation effort by the corporate management), and that he hoped none would blame the workers of his district for the tragedy caused, after all, by non-American parts. The Kentucky Cresta plant, he reminded them, was the most efficient car factory in the world, and a model, he rhapsodized, of the way America and Japan could and should cooperate! And he would support this bill only because it was a way to make that cooperation more likely.
And so it went. The people who edited Roll Call, the local journal that covered the Hill, were wondering if anyone would dare to vote against TRA.
'Look,' Roy Newton told his main client. 'You're going to take a beating, okay? Nobody can change that. Call it bad luck if you want, but shit happens.'
It was his tone that surprised the other man. Newton was almost being insolent. He wasn't apologizing at all for his gross failure to change things, as he was paid to do, as he had promised that he could do when he'd first been hired to lobby for Japan, Inc. It was unseemly for a hireling to speak in this way to his benefactor, but there was no understanding Americans, you gave them money to do a job, and they—
'But there are other things going on, and if you have the patience to take a longer view'—long view had already been tried, and Newton was grateful for the fact that his client had good-enough language skills to catch the difference—'there are other options to be considered.'
'And what might those be?' Binichi Murakami asked acidly. He was upset enough to allow his anger to show for once. It was just too much. He'd come to Washington in the hope that he could personally speak out against this disastrous bill, but instead had found himself besieged with reporters whose questions had only made clear the futility of his mission. And for that reason he'd been away from home for weeks, despite all sorts of entreaties to return to Japan for some urgent meetings with his friend Kozo Matsuda.
'Governments change,' Newton replied, explaining on for a minute or so.
'Such a trivial thing as that?'
'You know, someday it's going to happen in your country. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.' Newton didn't understand how they could fail to grasp something so obvious. Surely their marketing people told them how many cars were bought in America by women. Not to mention the best lady's shaver in the world. Hell, one of Murakami's subsidiaries made it. So much of their marketing effort was aimed at attracting women customers, and yet they pretended that the same factors would never come to be in their own country. It was, Newton thought, a particularly strange blind spot.
'It really could ruin Durling?' The President was clearly getting all sorts of political capital from TRA.
'Sure, if it's managed properly. He's holding up a major criminal investigation, isn't he?'
'No, from what you said, he's asked to delay it for—'
'For political reasons, Binichi.' Newton did not often first-name his client. The guy didn't like it. Stuffed shirt. But he paid very well, didn't he?
'Binichi. you don't want to get caught playing with a criminal mailer, especially for political reasons. Expeciallv where the abuse of women is involved. It's an eccentricity of the American political system,' he explained patiently.
'We can't meddle with that, can we?' It was an ill-considered question. He'd never quite meddled at this level before, that was all.
'What do you think you pay me for?'
Murakami leaned back and lit up a cigarette. He was the only person allowed to smoke in this office. 'How would we go about it?'
'Give me a few days to work on that? For the moment, take the next flight home. You're just hurting yourself by being here, okay?' Newton paused. 'You also need to understand, this is the most complicated project I've ever done for you. Dangerous, too,' the lobbyist added.
'One of my colleagues is in New York. I plan to see him and then fly home from New York.'
'Fine. Just keep a real low profile, okay?'
Murakami stood and walked to the outer office, where an aide and a bodyguard waited. He was a physically imposing man, tall for a Japanese at five-ten, with jet-black hair and a youthful face that belied his fifty-seven years.
He also had a better-than-average track record for doing business in America, which made the current situation all the more offensive to him. He had never purchased less than a hundred million dollars' worth of American products in any year for the past decade, and he had occasionally spoken out, quietly, for allowing America greater access to his country's food market. The son and grandson of farmers, it appalled him that so many of his countrymen would want to do that sort of work. It was so damnably inefficient, after all, and the Americans, for all their laziness, were genuine artists at growing things. What a pity they didn't know how to plant a decent garden, which was Murakami's other passion in life.
The office building was on Sixteenth Street, only a few blocks from the White House, and, stepping out on the sidewalk he could look down and see the imposing building. Not Osaka Castle, but it radiated power.
'You Jap cocksucker!'
Murakami turned to see the face, angry and white, a working-class man by the look of him, and was so startled that he didn't have time to take offense. His bodyguard moved quickly to interpose himself between his boss and the American.
'You're gonna get yours, asshole!' the American said. He started to walk away.
'Wait. What have I done to harm you?' Murakami asked, still too surprised to be angry.
Had he known America better, the industrialist might have recognized that the man was one of Washington's homeless, and like most of them, a man with a problem. In this case, he was an alcoholic who had lost both his job and his family to drink, and his only contact with reality came from disjointed conversations with people similarly afflicted. Because of that, whatever outrages he held were artificially magnified. His plastic cup was full of an inexpensive beer, and because he remembered once working in the Chrysler assembly plant in Newark, Delaware, he decided that he didn't need the beer as much as he needed to be angry about losing his job, whenever that had been…And so, forgetting that his own difficulties had brought him to this low station in life, he turned and tossed the beer all over the three men in front of him, then moved on without a word, feeling so good about what he'd done that he didn't mind losing his drink.
