Interface (18 page)

There was a sharp rapping noise. Someone was knocking on the
window.

Cozzano turned the wheelchair halfway around and looked. It
was Mel Meyer, standing out on the porch, waving to him.

10

Mel Meyer saw some boys on the shoulder of the interstate
checking the tie-downs on a flatbed truck carrying a piece of farm m
achinery. He pulled into the left lane to give them a safe berth, an
d as he shot past them he realized that the boys were about sixty an
d forty years old respectively.
 
They only looked like boys b
ecause, on this cold February day, they were wearing denim j
ackets that barely came down to their waists. Culture shock again, Y
ou'd think he would have gotten used to it by now.

Mel understood intellectually that these people had to wear short
jackets because it gave them greater freedom of movement while
they worked, and he also understood that their mall-dwelling
females wore pastel workout clothes and running shoes at all times
because they were more comfortable than anything else. But to
Mel they all looked like children. This was not because Mel was s
ome kind of a snob. It was because he was from Chicago and these
people were from the entirely separate cultural, political, and economic entity called downstate.

To make anything work between two such disjointed places th
ere had to be the equivalent of diplomats - people who, in an
other context, had once been defined as "men sent abroad to lie for their country - in both senses of the word." The intra-Illinois
diplomats were the old family law firms in the major and minor
towns of the state. These professionals lacked the partisanship to
have a killer impulse for their clients. Instead they saw life in terms of each side winning, if at all possible.

In Chicago there were perhaps a hundred families such as the
Meyers, ranging through the Polish, Slovak, Irish, Ukrainian,
Hungarian, and even WASP sections of town, who kept the lines
between the two Illinoises open and flowing, working in enter-
prises legal and illegal. It was perhaps the purest and most pro
fessional group in Illinois, and the Meyers were masters of the guild.
Shmuel
 
Meirerowitz's
  
son
 
David,
  
even
 
though
  
he
 
was a
Conservative Jew, had the skill and honesty to gain the trust of even
the most bigoted downstate ambulance chaser.
 
 
Generations of
lawyers from. Cairo, Quincy, Macomb, Decatur, and Pekin (home
of the Fighting Chinks) knew that the Meyer family's word was
good. It was not particularly surprising, then, that the Cozzanos had
encountered the Meyers, and that they had formed, an alliance.

Since then, a lot of Meyers had put a lot of miles on various cars,
driving back and forth. Shmuel normally rode the Illinois Central,
but David cruised up and down U.S. 45 in the stupendous Cadillacs
and Lincolns of the
 
1950s and
 
1960s,
 
and Mel scorched the
pavement of Interstate 57 in a succession of Jaguars and Mercedes-
Benzes.

Mel had defined his very own Checkpoint Charlie, the official
dividing line between Chicago and downstate. He drove by it
every time he took I-57 south from the heart of the city. It was out
in one of the suburbs, Mel had never bothered to find out which,
where traffic finally started to open up a little bit. The landmark in
question was a water tower, a modern lollipop-shaped one. It was
painted bright yellow, and it had a smiley face on it. When Mel saw
the damn smiley face he knew he had passed into hostile territory.
The flatness of downstate was, in its way, just as stark and awe-
inspiring as Grand Canyon or Half Dome. He had been down here
a thousand times and it always startled him. The settlers had come
here and found an unmarked geometric plane; anything that rose
above that plane was the work of human beings. When Mel had first
come this way it was mostly grain elevators, water towers, and ranks
of bleachers rising up alongside high-school football fields. These
artifacts were still there, but nowadays the most prominent structures were microwave relay towers: narrow vertical supports made of steel
latticework, sprouting from concrete pads in cornfields, held straight
by guy wires, drum-shaped antennas mounted to their tops. Each
antenna was pointed several miles across the prairie in the direction of
the next microwave relay tower. This was how phone calls got
bounced around the country. These things were all over the place,
crossing the country with a dense invisible web of high-speed com
munications, but other places you didn't see them. In cities they we
re hidden on the tops of buildings, and in places with hills, they
were built into the high places where you couldn't see them unless you
knew where to look. But out here, the buildings and hills had fall
en
 
out from under the phone company and their invisible net
work had been laid bare. It was not merely visible, but the single mo
st obvious thing about the downstate landscape.
It caused Mel to wonder, as he skimmed across the prairie on I-57
, its four lanes straight as banjo strings, paralleling the equally straight Illinois Central railway line, whether downstate had some ma
gical feature that might expose another network, a network that had
, so far, so perfectly hidden its workings in the complexity of the mo
dern world that Mel wasn't even sure it existed.

Cozzano beckoned Mel into the house and rolled forward into the
living room.

"Hey, Willy, how are you?" Mel said, coming in the front door.

He spun a stack of newspapers into Cozzano's lap: the
Financial
Times
was on top, and Cozzano could see the red corner of the
Ec
onomist
sticking out underneath. Mel pounded Cozzano on the sho
ulder, peeled off his heavy cashmere overcoat, and, oblivious to the
fact that it cost more than a small car, tossed it full-length on to the sofa where it would pick up dog hairs. "What is this shit on the TV?"
he said. He went up to the set and punched buttons on the
cable box until he got CNBC. Then he turned the volume down so
it wouldn't interfere with the conversation.

"Hey, Patty," Mel said. "You need to do any medical stuff with Go
vernor Cozzano in the near future?"

Patricia had no idea how to deal with people who were not from
Tuscola. She just stood in the dining room, glowing fuzzily in her pea
ch-and-lavender sweatsuit, drying her hands, looking at Mel, com
pletely baffled and uncertain. "Medical stuff?"

"I am asking you," Mel said, "if the Governor will be needing any specific medical attention from you in the next few hours -
medications, therapy, anything like that. Or are your duties going
to be strictly domestic in nature - making food and taking him to the bathroom and stuff like that?"

Patricia's eyes looked down and to the left. Her mouth was
slightly ajar. She was still completely nonplussed.

"Thank you," Mel said, reaching his arms far apart to grab the
handles of the big sliding doors that separated the living room from
the dining room. He drew them shut with a thunderclap, closing
off their view of Patricia. Then he went to another door that had
been propped open and kicked out the doorstop.

"In or out, Lover. Command decision!" he snapped.

Lover IV, the golden retriever, scurried into the room and got
out of the way as the door swung shut.

"You gotta take a leak or anything?"

"No," Cozzano said.

"You look good, for a guy who's exhausted."

"Huh?"

"You've been working so hard thinking about the campaign that
you have collapsed from exhaustion," Mel said. "You're taking a
week or two off to recover. In the meantime, your able staff
 
is
filling in for you."

Mel popped down on the couch next to Cozzano. He began to
rub his chin with his hand. Mel had a thick and fast-growing beard
and shaved a couple of times a day. For him, chin rubbing was
something he did when he was taking stock of his overall situation
in the world.

"You were going to blow your brains out, weren't you?"

"Yeah," Cozzano said.

Mel thought it over. He didn't seem especially shocked. The
idea did not have a big emotional impact on him. He seemed to be weighing it, the way he weighed everything. Finally he shrugged, unable to deliver a clear verdict.

"Well, I've never been one to argue with you, just offer advice,"
Mel said.

"Yes no."

"My advice right now is that it is entirely your decision. But th
ere may be factors of which you are not aware." "Oh?"

"Yeah. I'm sure you're probably thinking what it would be like to
spend twenty, thirty years this way."

"You win the Camaro!" Cozzano said.

"Well, it's possible that you may not have to. I'm getting, uh, shal
l we say,
feelers,
from people who may have a therapy to cure thi
s kind of thing."
"Cure it?"

"Yeah. According to these people you could get back a lot of w
hat you lost. Maybe get back all of it." "How? The melon is dead."

"Right," Mel said, not missing a beat, "the brain tissue is toast, Ka
put. Croaked. Not coming back. They can rewire some of the co
nnections, though. Replace the missing parts with artificial stuff.
Or so they say."

"Where?"

"Some research institute out in California. It's one of Coover's li
ttle projects."

"Coover." Cozzano chuckled a little bit and shook his head. D
eWayne Coover was a contemporary of Cozzano's father. Like John
Cozzano, he had gotten lucky with some investments during th
e war. He was a billionaire, one of those billionaires that no one ev
er hears about. He lived on some patch of warm sandy real estate do
wn in California and he didn't get out much except to play golf with ex-presidents and washed-up movie stars. His granddaughter Al
thea had gone to Stanford with Mary Catherine and they had b
een on the fringes of each other's social circles.

John Cozzano and DeWayne Coover had had a number of d
ealings during and after the war and had never really hit it off. Some people liked to believe that there was some kind of rivalry
Between the two men, but this was a completely off-the-wall idea.
Coover's success dwarfed that of the Cozzano family. He was in an entirely different league.

"I got a call from one of Coover's lawyers," Mel said. "It was on
an unrelated thing. A leukemia thing."

After Christina died of leukemia,
 
Cozzano
 
had founded a
charitable organization to research the disease and assist victims.
DeWayne Coover, who had a penchant for big medical research
projects, had been a major contributor. So it was not unusual for
Cozzano's people to talk to Coover's people.

"So I'm talking to the guy, and it's about some kind of trivial
question relating to taxes. It comes into my head to wonder why this guy, who is a senior partner in a big-time L.A. firm, is talking
to me about this issue, when it's so tiny that our secretaries could
almost handle it. And then he says to me, 'So, how's the Governor doing these days?' Just like that."

Cozzano laughed and shook his head. It was incredible how
word got around.

"Well, to make a long story short, he's been dumping bucks into
researching problems like yours. And he's definitely putting out
feelers."

"Get more phone books," Cozzano said.

"More information about it? I knew you'd say that."

Cozzano raised his right hand to his head, shaped like a pistol,
and brought his thumb down like a hammer.