Lucky Bastard (54 page)

He handed the phone back to Mr. Gee. The two men gazed long into each other's eyes.

Mr. Gee said, “Before I hang up, I think it would be nice to tell Peter your decision.”

Jack nodded, one quick jerk of the head. “I'm so glad,” said Mr. Gee. He spoke a single word into the phone, then clicked off. “What can you tell me about the next hole?” he asked.

Jack did not hear him.

“Two iron?” Mr. Gee asked, examining his ball, which had landed near a tree.

“Three wood, maybe,” Jack replied. This was mischievous advice, but Mr. Gee pulled the club from his bag.

He hit the three wood. The ball dropped toward the green, landed at its far edge, bounced high, and trickled over the lip of the green into another trap.

“Shit!” said Mr. Gee.

“Bad dream,” Jack said. “Guess you were right about the two iron.” He hit a perfect shot with that club—onto the green, six feet from the cup. They walked on.

“One more thing,” Mr. Gee said. “On October twenty-ninth, something will happen in China. This will have a bad effect on the U.S. economy. Only temporary. But this event will make the president look stupid and put you over the top in the election, only five days later. Correct?”

Jack said, “What do you mean, something will happen in China?”

“Better you do not know the details. It will be a nice surprise. But take nothing for granted. Campaign hard. Spend all the money. Go for it.”

“I'll do that little thing,” Jack said.

Mr. Gee shook Jack's hand. “True friends,” he said.

“To the end,” said Jack, remembering his perfect shot with the two iron. He grinned at Mr. Gee.
Star Wars
, he mused. He let his innermost thought show:
I can always drop one on Beijing if I have to.
He smiled at Mr. Gee.

“You look like your real father when you smile,” Mr. Gee said. “However, don't think like him, okay? He was a
very
impetuous man.”

4
Ten days remained in the campaign. Using Mr. Gee's money and the last reserves of his own energy, Jack launched his trademark end game: the last-minute blitz of television commercials and a flying, fifteen-state speaking tour. The country resounded to the strains of “Jack, Jack, Jack!” Jack Adams girls danced at the rallies. The commentators spoke of a rising fever of enthusiasm in the land. Maybe it was too little, too late, they said, but you had to hand it to Jack Adams: He never gave up.

Jack's numbers went up, but not quite enough. At midweek he was a little more than one point behind the president in the polls. Jack was saying nothing new, doing nothing different. He had just stepped up the intensity.

Morgan told him he was off-message. He was not hitting the issues. The core constituency was disturbed. Jack had heard all this before, and always at the wrong moment—the last moment, when none of that shit mattered.

“Morg,” he said, “I just can't give twelve speeches a day and argue with you, too. My throat feels like I've been gargling paint remover.”

But she kept after him, ticking off a long list of ideas he had not mentioned in weeks, positions he had abandoned, verbiage he had pruned from his political vocabulary.

“It's a fucking sellout,” she said. “The troops are mad as hell.”

Jack said, “Morgan, lighten up. I'm just trying to get elected.”

“By sounding like Barry Goldwater?”

“Duplicity in the name of victory is no crime.”

“Duplicity is one thing,” Morgan said. “Treason to the Left is another. You're not supposed to bamboozle the good people. You can't be elected without your own constituency.”

“They're
your
department,” Jack said. “Always have been. Go talk to them.”

Morgan's temper kindled. Jack was patronizing her. “No,” she said. “That's not the way it's going to be.”

Jack simply stared at her.

Morgan said, “You agree? I can't leave without an answer.”

Jack said, “You want an answer? Okay, here it is. You're out, Morgan.”

She blinked theatrically—something else Jack had seen too many times. “Out?” she said. “Out of what?”

“Out of here,” Jack said. “Out of the campaign. Out of my hair, you pain in the ass.”

“Who the fuck says so?”

“Morgan,” Jack said, “go away.”

“You don't tell
me
what to do. As far as I know, the rules haven't changed.”

“Right,” Jack said. “As far as
you
know.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

A cellular phone rang in the far corner of the vast hotel suite. Trixie Wang stepped from behind a Chinese screen with the phone in her hand. “It's for you,” she said to Morgan.

Morgan lifted the phone to her ear and heard Peter's voice. “Hi,” he said, as if they had spoken only the day before. “I have some new instructions for you.”

“Over the
phone?
”

“It's okay. Special phone.”

In a few sentences, Peter told Morgan that from now on she would have no contact with him, or with anyone representing him. Peter was taking away Morgan's power over Jack on the very day before Jack took power. She realized that I had told her the truth about Peter's purposes and Jack's future.

Too late.

Barely able to breathe, Morgan said, “Peter, what are you telling me?”

“That phase one is over,” Peter replied. “You've done wonderful work. It's time to say thanks and make an honest woman of you.”

“I don't understand.”

“I want you to step back. Retire. First lady is a full-time job. From now on, being first lady is your only job.”

“First lady?” Morgan said. Her voice trembled. Her face twisted like a child's. Listening, watching, Jack had never thought such reactions possible. Fighting for self-control, she said, “Peter, please don't do this to me.”

Peter said, “Comrade Colonel, an operational decision has been made. The case has been given to another handler. You have a new assignment. There is no appeal. Do as you are ordered. Goodbye.”

Having ruined her life by informing her of a promotion in an organization that no longer existed, Peter hung up. For several heartbeats, Morgan listened to the dial tone. Then she handed the phone back to Trixie, who regarded her with a blank face. The inscrutable East. Then Morgan realized the truth.
Trixie had taken over.
She was the new Morgan. The truth, the monstrous reality of it, penetrated Morgan's consciousness with the force of a bullet shattering bone. She put her face in her hands and wept like a woman.

Not for long, of course. After a moment her old friend anger came to her rescue. Her eyes, still wet, rested on Trixie Wang, a woman twenty years younger than she, a stupid woman with a stupid name who looked like a stupid centerfold.
Trixie enjoys clandestine meetings on Air Force One and kinky sex.

Morgan said, “One question. Are you two fucking?”

“Like mad,” Trixie replied. “It soothes the savage beast. Peter never makes the same mistake twice.”

Jack shrugged, goodbye.

5
On October 29, the government of the People's Republic of China announced that the strong U.S. dollar, cynically foisted on the Third World by an arrogant and reckless administration, had created the conditions for a massive economic crash in East Asia. To avoid chaos and great human suffering, China had decided to intervene decisively.

Ji De Lu, the hitherto obscure party official who had been chosen to make this momentous announcement, explained that China had accumulated massive gold reserves through Western central bank sales. This had happened slowly, over a period of years, and now China's gold reserves were the largest in the world.

But there was more. Beneath the desert of Xinjiang province, in the bed of an extinct underground river, Chinese engineers had made a major new find of gold. This discovery, kept secret for ten years for reasons of national security, was now being announced to the world. The new gold mine, called the Victory of Socialism Mine, was the richest in the world, and it was now fully developed. Through intensive use of the most modern methods (read “slave labor”), the Victory of Socialism Mine was producing more gold than all the mines of the former Soviet Union and Africa combined.

“Therefore,” said the man Jack knew as Mr. Gee, “the government of the People's Republic of China today announces the full convertibility of the Chinese renminbi, backed by gold at the ratio of one ounce of gold per twenty-four hundred renminbi, or three hundred United States dollars per ounce. We invite all neighbors of China on the rim of Asia to join with the Chinese people and their government in a Pacific Prosperity Zone, in which all their currencies will be pegged to the renminbi.”

Within hours, all Southeast Asian countries, plus India and the Philippines, had accepted Mr. Gee's invitation and linked their currency to the new gold-backed renminbi. Despite heavy American pressure, Japan tied the yen to the Chinese currency.

This series of events, coming one after the other with sickening rapidity, meant that roughly half the world's population had gone onto the gold standard over a single weekend.

World currency and capital markets and the New York stock market crashed. It was the worst decline since 1929.

On Tuesday, Jack Adams was elected president of the United States with a plurality of one twentieth of 1 percent of all popular votes cast, and with the slimmest possible margin in the Electoral College.

He and Morgan listened to the returns in Tannery Falls. After the president conceded defeat in the wee hours of the morning, the first couple-elect appeared before a rally of thousands of dancing, singing supporters. Jack, who had lost his voice in the final hours of the campaign, was unable to say a word. While he held their sleepy twin sons in his arms, Morgan stepped up to the microphone. “I can't say it as eloquently as my husband,” she said, “but at this great moment for our country and for all humanity, I can say what Jack Adams in his humility might not say—that the man and the hour have met at last, and that America and the world are going to be different and better and more just and generous because of it. God bless Jack Adams.”

Smiling more luminously than ever, Jack handed his wife one of the twins, and while she gazed at him with what looked for all the world like adoration, he managed to croak out a single phrase: “God bless America.”

The crowd sang his name. The twins saluted.

A network commentator, one of the crustiest veterans of his craft, had the last word. “And so Jack Adams begins and ends with ‘God bless America,'” he said. “That may be a cliché, but clichés are clichés for a reason, and after all maybe there's a certain poignant symbolism in all this. We can be sure it was a cliché from the heart. As most people know by now, Jack Adams is all heart. He wears it on his sleeve, he carves it on every rhetorical tree he passes. He's not ashamed of heart, and neither should we be. Looking at Jack Adams, looking at Tannery Falls, Ohio, where he was born and raised, it's just plain impossible not to believe another cliché—the one that says any American boy, no matter how humble his beginnings, can be president. We'd better believe it, because tonight he walks tall even if he cannot talk. Good night, Peter.”

The old journalist was addressing a different Peter, but somewhere the real Peter was smiling as broadly as his asset.

Five

1
Now I had no one to turn to but Cindy. The day after the election I called her at Miller, Adams & Miller and asked for an appointment to discuss a delicate legal matter. Her voice was familiar to me from the tapes but clearer, more musical, over the phone.

“I'm not taking on new clients at the moment,” Cindy said. “But I'd be happy to refer you to another lawyer.”

I said, “Ms. Miller, I want to talk to you because I think I may be able to help your husband.”

A silence. “Oh? In what way?”

“You put me in a difficult position. But this is not a crank call. I mention the name Banco Amazones. I mention the sum of twenty-seven million dollars. I'll talk to you in person about this. Not over the phone.”

“Five-thirty today,” Cindy said crisply. “You know where we are?”

“Yes.”

I was punctual, a matter of training and long practice. The many photographs I had seen of Cindy and the many reports I had read did not prepare me for the reality. There is no beauty like American beauty. Whatever Europeans may say and write in their envy and rancor, there is more to this than diet and dentistry. You look at a former beauty who is Russian or French or English and you see an exile fleeing from lost looks. Life is over and pleasure an impossibility—she is Helen of Troy after Paris's family lost everything. But American beauty is a palimpsest. The girl Cindy had been was visible in every lineament and gesture of the woman she had become. She could not possibly have been lovelier at eighteen than she was at forty: slim, with skin that glowed, eyes that shone with health, and the hands of a young girl. There was a little blue vein at her temple, faint wrinkles at the eyes. The physical being was not all. Her intelligence and honesty enveloped her like an electrical field. No wonder Morgan had hated her; no wonder fucking a creature like Jack had left this goddess dazed by shame.