No Safe Place (13 page)

Nate got to the press buses with about a minute to go.

There were a couple of seats left in the third bus. Nate walked with his briefcase to the back and found himself sitting next to the cameraman from NBC, he of the Dallas Cowboys cap. The man nodded curtly; Nate generally did not condescend to talk to him, and now felt somewhat elitist about using him for sport this morning.

“So,” Nate asked, “how’s Mike Devore doing?”

The man shrugged. “Pissed, mostly. He’s spending the next month in an ankle cast.”

“If you talk to him, say hi. Tell him for me that he’s gone to a better place.”

The cameraman laughed. Encouraged, Nate asked, “So who’s replacing him?”

This brought a genuine smile. “With all respect to Mike, we’ve gotten an upgrade. It’s Lara Costello.”

Nate sat back.
“Lara,”
he said at length. “Yeah, it’ll be nice to see her.”

A few minutes after Kerry left the meeting, Kit Pace had checked her watch.

“I’ve got to get downstairs,” she said. “Start telling our friends in the press what we’ll be accomplishing at every stop. They get so anxious when they’re not plugged in.”

Clayton smiled; Kit had proved expert at roving through the back of the plane, feeding tidbits to the media and telling them what to think. “I guess by the end of the day,” he said dryly, “Kerry will have overachieved again.”

Kit smiled back. “He’s astonishing that way. Thing is, some of our press pals are so lazy that they’re grateful for my help. Not the best ones, of course, but even
they
respond to kindness.”

Mick Lasker was refilling his cup at the coffee urn. Over his shoulder, he asked, “What kind of access are you giving them?”

Kit stood. “I don’t see why we change now, Mick. Every so often, Kerry goes back to the press section, says hello, answers questions—”

“Because”—Mick turned to her now—“he’s a little bit of a freelancer, and now the stakes are too high for any fuck-ups. Maybe you should rein him in some.”

A shadow of annoyance crossed Kit’s face. “I don’t know what his brother was like, but Kerry won’t be handled. And shouldn’t be. Kerry’s funny, charming when he cares to be, and the press knows he doesn’t bullshit them.” Kit folded her arms. “I’ve been watching this for three months now. As much as they can let themselves, our reporters have started rooting for
him. I’m not going to tell Kerry Kilcannon to start hiding in the john.”

Clayton turned to Mick. “Kit’s got a problem, Mick. The candidate thinks
he
actually won those primaries. It’s the damnedest thing.”

Clayton watched Mick measure the gulf between them: Clayton the friend of the candidate, who was there because he believed in Kerry; Mick the professional adviser, who, but for his association with James Kilcannon, might have worked for Mason. “At least,” Mick said at last, “Kit ought to prioritize access. For the next seven days, the national press matters a whole lot less than the local TV stations and the major California papers—the
L.A. Times
, the
Chronicle
, the
Mercury News
, the
Sacramento Bee
.
They
should get any formal interviews.”

“You agree?” Clayton asked Kit.

She nodded; once again, Clayton was grateful that he never had to prod her to make the right judgment. “Yeah,” she said. “That much makes sense. Even the bigfoot reporters will understand why we’re doing that.”

“Okay,” Clayton said. “Thanks.”

Hastily, Kit headed out the door.

“The big decision,” Frank Wells said at once, “is how much we spend in advertising.”

Clayton nodded. “Right now, we’ve got about four million until we hit the federal spending cap. After that, we can’t spend money until we win the nomination. California’s a black hole; you spend two million just to lose. Shoot all our cash now, and Kerry’s living off the land.”

“
Don’t
shoot all your money now,” Frank retorted, “and there’s no nomination to worry about.”

“You think that’s right?” Clayton asked Jack Sleeper.

The pollster stared at the table. “It’s close,” he said at last. “The biggest difference will be advertising, no question.”

“Let’s see the ads,” Clayton ordered.

Frank Wells walked to the video monitor. “The basic idea,” he began, “is compare and contrast.”

“In terms of guts, Kerry kicks Mason’s ass. Dick’s got the passion of a Norwegian dairy farmer and the spine of a mollusk.
Mention any interest group—the AFL-CIO, the wrinklies, the
teachers unions, Anthony’s Legions—and Dick drops his pants and starts bending over. He’s the ultimate pander bear.”

“People know that,” Jack Sleeper told Clayton. “Poll Cali-fornians on ‘independence’ and ‘integrity,’ and Kerry runs ahead. The problem is, compared to a known quantity like Mason, Kerry feels like a risk. Passion and spontaneity can be a little unsettling in a President.”

“These ads make a virtue of that,” Frank explained. “Plus the fact that Kerry’s young, good-looking, smart, and the fastest-rising politician since his brother. For a lot of upwardly mobile voters, boomers especially, he’s an idealized version of who
they
want to be.” Frank paused a moment. “The only problem, Clayton, is he’s got no family except a mother he won’t let us use and an ex-wife he won’t let us ask for help.”

“Don’t ever try,” Clayton said sharply. “You leave Meg right where she is, teaching school in New Jersey.”

Frank looked defensive. “I was hoping to remind people that Kerry isn’t gay. That’s out there, you know.”

Clayton gave him a cold smile. “It’s good for ten percent in San Francisco. Let it be, Frank.”

“Why not his mother?” Jack Sleeper said. “Doesn’t he like
her
?”

Beneath the frustrated question, Clayton knew, was something deeper: the sense that Kerry was an enigma, too private for a politician, and that only Clayton could crack the code. “That’s just it,” Clayton said. “Kerry likes his mother very much.

“For my part, I think people want a President, not a group-therapy facilitator. Some mystery is not so bad, and voters like it that Kerry has an idea of himself that’s separate from politics.” He turned to Frank. “Show me the positive ads first.”

Frank put in a cassette and pushed the button. “You should know,” Jack Sleeper put in, “that we’ve tested Frank’s ads with focus groups. These are the ones that rated highest.”

The first ad was from campaign footage, Kerry with a group of multiracial kids at an inner-city school, talking about education. “I guess minority children are less threatening to white folks than their parents,” Clayton commented. “Smaller, anyhow.”

“Yup,” Frank answered crisply, and put on the next ad; Kerry
in a living room with fertile-looking young adults, talking about gun control. As was his habit, Kerry had loosened his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves, and his hair was slightly mussed. It was easy to imagine him white-water rafting.

“Killing people,”
Kerry was saying,
“is the only point of an assault weapon. It’s time we held the gun lobby and gun traffickers responsible for these kinds of murders …”

“Good,” Clayton remarked.

Frank kept watching the screen. “Mason’s against assault weapons,” he said, “but can you imagine him taking on the gun lobby? Listen to him, and you’d think all these gun nuts found their AK-forty-sevens under cabbage leaves.”

“At least until Boston,” Clayton rejoined. “Now we’ll see …”

“Kilcannon,”
the ad’s voice-over finished.
“The truth, for a change.”

“What about Social Security?” Mick Lasker asked. “Mason’s new ads attack Kerry’s reform proposals.”

“That just shows Kerry’s willingness to make a decision,” Frank said. “Even if Dick says Kerry’s going to cut benefits, Mason’s approach is too ‘old politics’ to work anymore.”

“People aren’t that stupid,” Jack Sleeper concurred. “Our polling shows they know Social Security’s in trouble. And more gen X-ers believe in extraterrestrials than that they’ll ever see a nickel from Uncle Sam. Dick comes off like the smarmy principal all the kids know is lying.”

On the screen, another ad appeared.

“Americans know,”
Dick Mason said,
“that I’ll fight to protect their air and water …”

The picture shifted to a view of the Vice President walking on an oil-befouled beach in hip boots.
“For the last four years,”
the voice-over said,
“Dick Mason has accepted more contributions from corporate polluters than any previous presidential candidate.”

On the beach, Dick Mason shook his head in dismay.

“Sorry, Dick,”
the voice said again.
“It’s too late …”

“None of us want to run too many ads,” Clayton observed. “Rather than blur our message, I say we stick to using Kerry. Dick looks pretty stupid in the hip boots, but not as dumb as Dukakis in the tank.”

Frank glanced at Jack Sleeper, then, surreptitiously, at Nat Schlesinger. “There’s one more spot, Clayton, that Frank and I wanted to talk about.”

He sounded unusually tentative. “What’s that?” Clayton asked.

“It goes back to our focus groups,” Frank said. “Okay, Kerry’s got no wife, no kids, and, for political purposes, no mom. But what he does have going, at the risk of being irreverent, is the Holy Ghost.”

Clayton looked from Frank to Jack. “James Kilcannon,” he said in a flat voice.

“Look,” Jack Sleeper urged. “Think about what made Bobby Kennedy work. Part of it was the association with his brother and, in an odd way, the hope of reincarnation.

“Maybe, people thought, we can bring Jack back to life—make it up to the Kennedys, and to ourselves. In a way, repeat history.

“Some people found Bobby strident and authoritarian. Like Mick was saying, some people think
Kerry
’s a little scary—too combative and confrontational. But emotion and Jack Kennedy took Bobby a long way. Even if he was never President, James Kilcannon can help carry his kid brother across the river …”

“The river Styx?” Clayton asked. “What are you suggesting?”

Jack Sleeper stood, hands resting on the back of his chair. “We’ve focus-grouped James Kilcannon—how voters remember him. His favorables are something like eighty-three percent.” He looked around the table. “Frank’s preparing an ad using clips from Jamie’s last campaign. It’ll be ready tomorrow.”

“What will we call it,” Nat Schlesinger inquired. “‘Necrophilia’?”

They turned to him, silent, waiting. It was Nat Schlesinger who, as James Kilcannon’s press secretary, had been there when he died; Nat who had announced his death to the press corps, with tears in his eyes. “I loved James Kilcannon,” Nat said in the same quiet voice. “Oh, he was a pretty cool character, but I always figured he had his reasons, and he would have made this country proud.

“But that’s not why I have such a problem with this. Jamie
was also the smartest politician I’ve ever known—smarter than Kerry, which, in some ways, is to Kerry’s credit. And what James Kilcannon would say if you managed to resurrect him is that this is a question of touch, and that you don’t need to beat folks over the head to remind them Kerry is his brother. Voters won’t like it.”

“Not just
voters
,” Clayton added bluntly. “Kerry. Where have you two been?”

“It works,” Frank Wells shot back. “You can look at Jack’s polling data. Dick Mason would do this in a nanosecond.”

“You tell Kerry that, Frank. That’ll turn him around.”

Frank’s diplomat’s face was harder now. “He’s gotten himself in trouble on abortion. He should think about getting himself out before Mason kills him with it.

“I have a favorite metaphor, Clayton. If all your friends came to you with a red box and told you that you had to hold it for four years and never drop it, because if you dropped it the whole goddamned world would blow up, you and every other normal person we know would hand the box back in a heartbeat.

“But every four years there are ten guys who come forward and say, ‘Give me the fucking box.’ And the guy who wins is the one who’ll kill all the other guys just for the chance to hold it.

“To me, that guy’s still Dick Mason. It’s time for Kerry to stop treating his brother like a forbidden subject.” Frank leaned forward. “I’ll show him the ad. Jack will show him the polling data. We’ll take the heat for it. But you let
Kerry
decide how much he wants the box.”

Clayton stared at him. “All right,” he said. “We’ll do that. Tomorrow. It will absolutely make Kerry Kilcannon’s day.”

Frank’s gaze broke, and he looked suddenly weary. “Whether or not we run that ad, there’s the question of whether we go for it—sink our money into California, or not. Which is part of the same question.”

“Maybe not,” Mick Lasker countered. “I know Ellen Penn is calling every other day, saying go for broke. But that’s about
her
reputation; she doesn’t want Kerry to embarrass her by losing in her state, and she doesn’t want to be blamed if he does.

“California isn’t winner-take-all. Kerry could lose a close election here and still pick up almost half our delegates.”

“If Kerry loses,” Jack Sleeper snapped, “it’s over. Haven’t
we been claiming that the party
has
to ditch Dick Mason because only Kerry can win.”

Clayton did not comment. Instead he got up, removed the tape from the television, and turned on CNN.

On the screen, Dick Mason was standing in front of the abortion clinic, speaking in a strong, clear voice.
“In the name of those who died here, I say to the purveyors of terror and violence: No more. Not one more life, not one more woman deprived of her legal rights …”

Clayton turned from the television. “Spend the money,” he said.

Sean Burke stood alone on the corner.

Van Ness Avenue was slick with rain; a moment before, a Muni bus filled with commuters had splashed through a puddle of water and soaked the bottom of Sean’s jeans. Chilled, he gazed at the abandoned auto showroom across the street, papered with signs that read “Kilcannon for President.”

Sean felt disoriented. It was nine in the morning; by this time yesterday he had killed the abortionist and his accomplices, three time zones away. All that seemed real was the woman he had spared.