Interface (89 page)

Cozzano ascended the stage a few minutes before air time,
unbuttoned his jacket, and sat down in his chair. A technician
assisted him in clipping a microphone to his lapel, and asked him to
say a few words so that they could adjust their sound levels.
Cozzano quoted the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet,
which raised a smattering of applause from the students and even
from a few of the TV people.

The host, looking professional, sat in his chair and went through a sound check of his own. At five seconds before eight
p.m.,
a man
in a headset gave them a digital countdown (he used his fingers) and
then the host delivered some prepared remarks, reading them from
a TelePrompTer. Then he turned toward Cozzano and asked him
a question about Middle East policy.

This was a hard pitch. The politics of the Israeli/Palestinian
question had been dissected and analyzed to an impossibly minute
degree, over decades, by persons whose sole function in life was to
know everything about these issues. Every squiggle and jog in the
contour of Israel's border had its experts, who knew about
everything that had happened in that place since the time of the
pharaoh. West Bank settlement and the status of the PLO had
become more arcane than the concept of the Trinity in the early
church: every conceivable idea had already been come up with, and
its ramifications worked out and analyzed. Of all the millions of possible opinions one could have on these subjects, there were only a few that a presidential candidate could get away with having, and
in order merely to explain these opinions the candidate had to
master a new vocabulary and even a new form of logic that did not
really apply anywhere else. The best way to trip up a governor who
was running for president was to ask him a seemingly simple,
innocuous question about the Middle East and then wait for him to
hang himself.

Cozzano maneuvered through it perfectly, delivering an answer
that was seemingly erudite; that hit all the key buzzwords that
would prevent him from being vilified by Jewish organizations; and
yet was so vague and imprecise that it said practically nothing at all.
Like compulsory figure in an ice-skating competition, it was devoid
of content and not much fun to look at, but to the initiate, it was
an extremely impressive display of technical skill.

By the time he was finished, it was time to break for a com
mercial. The host made a witty, self-deprecating remark about how
dull the show had been up to this point and then promised that the
rest would be more lively. The students applauded. The director, staring at a monitor, turned to the performers and said, "You're
clear."

Cozzano turned toward the table and poured himself half a glass
of water. He was just about to jump into some small talk with the host when a voice came out of the darkness behind the television
lights.

"Governor Cozzano, Frank Boyle from
The Boston Globe.
I'm
sorry to be the one to tell you this, but I just got a call on my
portable phone here from our correspondent who's following your
daughter in Minnesota. He called from the lobby of the hotel
where she is staying in Minneapolis. Apparently, Mary Catherine
was late for an appearance at Macalester College. All the press went
back to her hotel, and the floor where her room was is swarming
with cops and detectives. Our correspondent talked to one of these
detectives on background, and he said that apparently she was
assaulted in the hallway by Floyd Wayne Vishniak. He managed to
get past her Secret Service men and put a bullet into her head and
Mary Catherine bled to death right there in the hallway."

A hundred feet away, Cy Ogle, perched in the Eye of Cy, sat and watched William A. Cozzano's bio readouts go ballistic.

The television monitor in the Eye of Cy was patched into the pool feed from the cameras in the auditorium, and Ogle couldn't
help watching it. Cozzano's face had turned deathly pale as Frank
Boyle of the
Globe
told his story, and had now gone red. His eyes
had become red and glistening too. And Ogle could see from the
bio monitors that Cozzano's heart rate had gone up to 172, almost
three times the norm. His blood pressure was explosively high.

"Jesus Christ," Ogle said out loud, "this could only be the work
of Jeremiah Freel!"

He looked back at the television monitor, but Cozzano wasn't
there anymore. Just an empty chair. Then the camera wheeled
around, spinning past the host and then past an array of lights,
cameras, technicians, and other stuff that was never supposed to be
on camera. Finally the camera centered itself on the back of
William A, Cozzano, who was striding into the crowd of TV
people, print reporters, campaign aides, and Secret Service who
filled the space between the stage and the front row of seats. Most
of these people jumped out of his way instinctively. But a couple
of men in suits, displaying considerable physical bravery, closed
ranks in front of Cozzano and prevented him from charging into the auditorium.

In the background, a disturbance was making its way up the aisle as a man shoved his way toward the exit. Apparently this was Frank
Boyle of the
Globe.
Cozzano had gone after him, and he had
decided to get out of the building.

Throughout the campaign, Ogle had prided himself on being
ready for anything. But he hadn't been ready for the return of Freel.
Ogle took a deep breath, tried to still his own heart, and then put
his hands on the control panel and set about calming Cozzano.

Cozzano was in front of the stage having a conversation with his
Secret Service men. They were all talking into their shirt cuffs and
holding their hands over their earpieces, trying to hear each other
over the murmur of the shocked and scared students.

A woman with press credentials stepped close to Cozzano. "Governor? I'm with the
Globe.
And we don't have anyone named Frank Boyle."

The head of the Secret Service detail, listening to his earplug, shook his head conclusively and caught Cozzano's eye. "It was a
total fabrication," he said. "Mary Catherine showed up at
Macalester College on time and is speaking at this moment."

Cozzano, suddenly, was calm and collected. He shook his head,
seemed to forget that anything had happened, and returned to his
seat on the stage.

"Would you like to delay-" the host said, as the sound man was
fixing Cozzano's microphone.

"No," Cozzano said. "Let's continue as planned."

"Are you sure? You must be very upset."

"I'm fine," Cozzano said. "Why should I be upset?"

The headline of the next day's edition of the
New York Post
read,

"WHY SHOULD I BE UPSET?"

COZZANO NOT BOTHERED BY "MURDER" OF HIS
OWN DAUGHTER.

The President, delivering off-the-cuff remarks in the aisle of
Air
Force One,
said that he was shocked and disgusted by the impostor
who had delivered the fake news to Cozzano.

At the same time, though, he could not help but find it strange,
and just a bit disturbing, that a man who, to all appearances, had just
lost his own daughter, would agree to continue with what was,
after all, nothing more than a campaign event, the sole purpose of
which was to scrape up more votes. Surely, he said, there were
limits that should be observed, for the sake of decency.

Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane made a surprise appearance in a
hotel bar where a number of reporters had gathered - not just to
drink, but because they had received a tip from McLane staffers that
Tip might feel a bit thirsty around eleven o'clock.

Coincidentally, the evening news happened to be running on
the big projection TV over the bar at the time. A football game had
been on until a few minutes previously, but money had changed
hands between Marcus Drasher and the bartender, and now the
news was on - to the chagrin of several fans along the bar who had
not brought nearly as much cash as Drasher.

McLane and the reporters engaged in some friendly banter, but
everyone turned toward the television set when the image of
William A. Cozzano appeared on the screen. The cameras had caught the entire thing and the feed had gone out all over the
country. They watched Cozzano going into shock as he heard the
false story about his daughter. They watched him jumping out of his chair in a blind rage, and they watched him sitting back down
a minute later, calm and collected. The actual content of the two-
hour discussion received no coverage whatsoever.

All of the reporters looked at McLane. McLane turned away
from the TV and looked nonchalant. Finally a reporter asked him
what he thought of the whole thing.

"Well, I don't really want to talk about it," he said, "the whole episode is really distasteful. But now I see that the media have
grabbed on to this whole thing - in the typical way that they do -
looking for the sensational and paying no attention to content. . . and I can see that now the media are trying to take this event and
turn it into some kind of a test of Cozzano's psychological fitness to
be president."

"Do you think he looked presidential?" asked a reporter from a
rabidly conservative Catholic magazine.

McLane shrugged. "People say I'm a hothead," he said. "People
say I'm out of control and that I can't handle the pressure of the
campaign. So maybe I shouldn't be the one to talk, but I've learned that the world is full of crackpots who will shout crazy stuff at you.
I mean, they are everywhere. And you can't let them get under
your skin. If you're going to physically assault every lunatic who
babbles some nonsense to you, then you're not going to make
much of a president - and if that's how you handle a nut case, then
how are you going to deal with foreign leaders?"

55

Tuesday, October
22,
two weeks before Election Day, the
standings looked like this:

COZZANO
          
59%

PRESIDENT
            
8%

MCLANE
                
18%

UNDECIDED
           
10%

OTHER
                   
5%

An obscure Washington D.C.-based organization called the
American Association of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths
staged a press conference at which a videotape was shown to the
press and then disseminated to all of the networks. The videotape
was a series of outtakes from Cozzano's campaign, a blooper film if
you will. It started out with some excerpts from an interview in
which he was still suffering from some speech impediments. From
there it moved onward through the campaign, showing Cozzano
during commercial breaks, bantering with reporters on airport runways, walking down the aisle of his campaign plane to the
bathroom, doing sound checks before debates, and so on. The one
thing that all of these takes had in common was that, in each of
them,
 
Cozzano did something wrong: slurred some words or
tripped over his own feet. One particularly striking clip showed
Cozzano working a crowd at a rally in Newark. A woman handed
her baby to Cozzano for a kiss and he nearly dropped it, seemingly
overcome by a temporary seizure. "I-I-I-I'm sorry," he stuttered,
and handed it back to her. The conclusion reached by the experts
of the American Association
  
of Physicians, Surgeons,
and
Osteopaths was that Cozzano was still suffering from "severe
neurological deficits" and was not fit to be president.

Excerpts from the videotape were broadcast repeatedly on
virtually every television news program in the United States, in
many cases as the evening's top story.