First Citizen (29 page)

My first night in town, the Speaker’s office sent a courtesy bouquet and orientation data pack up to my suite at The New Omni. It must have been confusion about my name and my district, which was so close to the border: The text of the greeting and the pack were in Spanish. I gave a laugh and read them anyway.

The laughing stopped when I realized what was going on. For any freshman congressman who had just arrived from what was essentially a foreign country, this message from the Speaker of the House would be the gospel on democratic institutions in America. After all, McCanlis was the Old Man of the U.S. Congress, father of the New Republicans, and de facto chief executive of the richest nation of the West.

His orientation pack, at least the Spanish version, read like something out of Banana Land. It was the monotheistic vision, with McCanlis as chief deity, pope, and political oracle. Separation of powers and the U.S. Constitution were lost in the murk of words. What came through very clearly was the NR—or
Nuevos Republicanos
—party line: support the Speaker in this time of crisis, protect the Federal cash flow, preserve peace and order. For statesmen who went to school under the
Partido Revolucionario Institutional,
the message would be both powerful and reassuring. It told them this foreign place was a lot like Old Mexico. I grated my teeth, but what could I do? With his own brand of audacity, McCanlis had once more outflanked everyone.

The first session of the 114th Congress in January 2015 was the now-traditional joint session with the Senate. Which meant the New House chamber was crowded asses to elbows, waiting for McCanlis to arrive. And with the heavy infusion of congressmen from Old Mexico, it had the flavor of a border-town rodeo.

The mixture of gringo and Spanish was jarring. Among the sober sharkskin and occasional polysatin suits of the congressmen and -women from the East and the Midwest, the older Mexican politicians stood out in their immaculate white linen or their too-conservative charcoals, like pieces of sea shell and chunks of burned wood in the sand. They had the obdurate manners of Old Empire, smoking thin black
cigarillos
and, among the low murmur of voices, carrying on distracted monologues in Spanish with whomever was in earshot. It was the younger members, however, with a reputation for guerrilla politics to preserve, who added the real noise. They wore green fatigues, pistol belts (with the weapons removed at the door by the sergeant-at-arms), and boots that they hiked up on the desk, railing, chair back, or whatever was in front of them. If they disagreed with what they heard, they drowned it out by clapping their hands on their knees—in less decorous circumstances they probably rapped the table with a pistol butt—until the House chamber echoed like a football stadium. It was a circus.

And then there were the Mexican politicians who dressed like
norteamericanos,
spoke like
norteamericanos,
and thought like
norteamericanos.
They were the smooth ones, the ones we would have to watch out for.

At this opening session, however, I was wedged in between white linen and green duck, trying hard not to inhale the evil cigar smoke. Then I caught sight of a familiar face across the room. The tall forehead was higher than I remembered, helped by a receding hairline. The pale hazel eyes shone like headlamp, and I fancied their beams would sweep up and lock on me like a truck zeroing in on a rabbit. The body seemed athletic as ever, although the waist had thickened.

He was in deep conversation with two senators, their little group ringed by aides and, even in this powerhouse, awed followers. While one of the senators with his back to me was be speaking, Gordon Pollock raised his eyes, looking right at me. There was no dividing instant between casual glance and recognition. He looked up as if he had been keeping an eye on me for hours. Those arched eyebrows raised a fraction. His head nodded minutely. Then the eyes returned to the senator.

I felt like a distant satellite receiving a high-speed, blip-squealed message from Earth. With a look and a nod, Pollock had said: “Hello, hello. It’s been a long time. You’re looking about as old as I expected. Do you still have your wagging tongue? Are you fit for a fight, boy? We are finally matched in an arena worthy of both of us. You killed my brother. I don’t have but a second to spare for you now. I will destroy you later, at my leisure.” End of message and close the circuit.

I’m not telepathic, but this one time I could hear every word in that casual-cool voice. His hatred was beautifully masked, but it gleamed there like something rotten and phosphorous under his smile.

From the congressional directory, I knew Pollock was a ranker in the majority Republican party. He represented the New York district that included Nyack and most of Rockland County, the rich semi-farming communities west of Tappan Zee on the Hudson. His unofficial position was third-assistant whip and shepherd to the new Mexican congressmen who had landed on his side of the aisle. As always, Pollock was a comer.

In the opening address, Speaker McCanlis tallied the problems facing the nation and the legislation that Congress would, in response, be proposing during this session.

First among the problems was the condition he quaintly called “unrest.” Rioting had continued in the cities. It had gradually shifted and focused, ending up in the poorest pockets of the East and South as a free-floating phenomenon. Any big city, however, was likely to catch fire; Denver, Los Angeles, and Oakland in the West had all erupted in their turn. Military jurisdictions in Mexico had not stabilized either—although there the guerrillas vanished into the mountains and jungles, instead of across the tenement rooftops. Everyone still used automatic weapons and captured grenades.

McCanlis conjured words like “breakdown of civil and moral authority” and “unresolved racial tensions.” But they were just smoke. Every skin color was represented in the vandal bands that washed through these cities. And the police forces and National Guard units—if they represented any kind of “moral authority”—were hardly broken down. They were better organized and equipped, with more firepower, than ever before.

No, the problem, as framed in the garbled
communiqués
that had been issued by the loose-knit guerrilla associations, was a breakdown in popular expectations. The pay-as-you-go society was leaving larger and larger segments of its people behind. Not everyone is a capitalist entrepreneur. Not everyone wants more opportunities than assurances in his or her life. A lot of people can’t even see straight enough to tie their shoelaces before 10 a.m.; so they resent the burdens placed on them by true economic freedom.

This long-simmering brew of want and envy had boiled over when the Mexican war began siphoning loose cash out of the economy. I knew well the extent of that drain, having personally funneled a billion or two off to support the Homeless Bastards in Yucatan and to build a few schools and hospitals along the way.

Compared to the free-for-all running firefight in the cities, the nation’s second, third, and fourth runner-up crises were minor league. Violence in the expanding drug trade. Collapse in key financial sectors as the government fine-tuned the prime interest rate. Russian and Chinese violations of air space, coastal oil fields, and fisheries. Et cetera. Mostly economic problems.

McCanlis spoke like a stage magician who has a single card up his sleeve and wants you to believe it’s a flock of live doves. I could see that the man had outrun the limits of his power and imagination. The floor was hardly listening to him.

On coming to Baltimore, I had picked my committee assignments carefully. I tried to get on the International Strategy Subcommittee. There, if anywhere, a successful general in the Gentlemen Volunteers could make use of his experiences and expertise. The old-line career politicians, however, had that bench all filled up. The Insurance Subcommittee of the House Banking and Finance Committee had been my second choice. I thought it would be fertile ground, representing an industry on the edge of ruin, and it was. Almost as an afterthought, I took the junior seat on the Urban Affairs Committee. And that, of course, was going to land me right in the middle of the cities’ running firefight during the next couple of months.

Early in my first term, the Larkin-Redgren bill came up. It was approved out of International Strategy unanimously and went to the floor with a strong recommendation to pass from the majority Republican side. It was a measure to revoke the commissions of the Gentlemen Volunteers and withdraw all troops from Mexico, returning those States to independence as a nation. Larkin-Redgren was clearly an attempt to reverse the collapse of our cities, as the preamble admitted in stumbling prose.

Whoever cooked this one up must have parked his brains in the side lot: The text of the bill was issued in both English and Spanish, to accommodate all of our new members. The majority whip and all his elves, including Gordon Pollock, chased all over the floor, praising Larkin-Redgren to the skies, in both languages. The honorable members from Mexico nodded and puffed their cheroots. The bill crashed and burned on the first vote.

Urban Affairs had a selection of instruments for dealing with the national unrest, but our new members from south of the South had some very direct ideas. The abortive Mendez bill called for martial law, a 7 p.m. curfew, water cannon, and suspension of
habeas corpus.
There was one piece of legislation—a perennial, I was told—that proposed a separate Black Nation to be formed in, variously, Montana, Arizona (if the Indians didn’t mind), and Rhode Island (if the Old Money didn’t mind). It had to be a joke, right? Except that the authors, an estranged coalition of the Black Caucus and old States Rightists, were deadly serious. Nothing even resembling legislation that could pass constitutional scrutiny was sent out of our committee in my first term.

The rioting went on, picking up the pace of violence as the summer of 2015 heated up. The Old Man of the House, McCanlis, showed his age as he called on us repeatedly for some kind of action. With each speech his lion’s mane was a shade whiter; the hand that gestured with the gavel shook more; the heavy baritone reached for a higher note and cracked on the vowels. The country was killing him before our eyes.

Finally, during an August heat wave that baked the pavements and muffled Baltimore and the East like a pillow, Speaker McCanlis resigned. But I wasn’t in the House to hear his farewell speech. On a Thursday evening, after a late session of the Urban Affairs Committee, I was introduced to an urban affair of my own.

It was while driving back to Baltimore from the new Capitol Complex, which was northeast of the city proper and across the Patapsco Inlet from Fort McHenry. To live in, Carlotta and I had bought the old Commerce Exchange on Commerce and Water Streets. Its simple brickwork, round-topped windows, and extra-high ceilings had appealed to me. The south-facing windows on the top floor looked down two blocks past the World Trade Center to a slice of the Inner Harbor. And the building could be made defensible. So we lived there and I commuted to the complex.

“Driving back to Baltimore” sounds like I was honking along at sixty, arm out the window with the top down, doesn’t it? No, I was in the back seat of a plain blue GEM sedan with my driver and burly boy in front. The car was special and didn’t look it: armor plate under the plastic skin, bulletproof glass all around, tires filled with high-temp, ripstop jelly.

Out ahead somewhere, weaving through the traffic and watching for us, was a Harley motorcycle with a leather freak astride it. Leather freak had a radio in his ear and a mike on his larynx, talking to burly boy. He also carried a silenced 9mm and a handful of penades. Somewhere behind us was a white van, Parker House Rolls, with four more burlies, a .50-caliber recoilless on swivel jacks, and a collection of shoulder-mount rocket and grenade launchers, plus the heat they were carrying concealed. Slam on the brakes and in three seconds they would be outside and making little ones out of big ones over a 200-yard radius. They were all trusted men, special picks from the Homeless Bastards, trained in the desert and sharpened in Yucatan.

My own armaments? Well, the honorable representative from Deaf Smith District carried a pocket knife with a scissors and nail file on it. And my own hardened hands and feet.

This rig was our normal commuting convoy. The colors of the vehicles changed. Sometimes there were two motorcycles. For state occasions, we laid on a helicopter with “TV-52 Sky Eye” markings. But reinforcement in depth was our formula.

Somebody had figured it out … or sold out our secrets.

That Thursday evening, the first hint of trouble we had was when Chickie, the cyclist, went off the air. Burly Amos in the front seat was still tapping his ear and whispering deep in his throat when we spotted Chickie. He was in the middle lane of the turnpike, under the rear wheels of a city bus that was flashing “Not in Service” on its route sign. Both Amos and I swiveled to look out the rear window for Parker House. John, the driver, kept his eyes ahead and picked up speed by a fraction.

Parker House was closing the gap when a truckload of kraft paper, a flatbed trailer piled high with brown rolls four feet long and a hundred-odd pounds apiece, swerved. The strapping on those rolls came loose and the van disappeared under a pounding avalanche. I saw one side of it collapse before our guys slid over into the guardrail.

“What should I do, General?” John asked.

“Keep driving,” Amos answered for me in a harsh, strained voice.

“Right,” I affirmed.

Suddenly, the highway was empty—of course, with all that wreckage behind us, and our not slowing down to rubberneck. The driving was smooth and eerily quiet. Up ahead the sun was going down in our eyes.

“It could all be coincidence,” John began. “I mean, the bus … Chickie always did take chances on that hog … and then the truck. They never check those—”

“Shut up, John,” Amos grated.

“Don’t think,” I said soothingly, as Sensei Kan would have done. “Spread your senses. Look with your ears and listen with your eyes. Trust your guts. Be ready.”