No Safe Place (41 page)

She saw him on the convention floor, surrounded by delegates who wanted to shake his hand, to get an autograph, or simply to touch him. The electricity surrounding him reflected Dick Mason’s well-known belief: that Kerry was positioning himself to fight Mason for the presidential nomination in four years’time. The Vice President’s minions had already punished the New Jersey delegation for Kerry’s anticipated sins in the petty, telling ways through which an incumbent could play hardball: bad hotel rooms, well away from the convention hall; limited invitations to parties and outside events; cramped meeting rooms.

But Kerry’s immediate sin was his refusal to submit any speech he might give to Mason’s handlers for approval. The result was that—unless Kerry relented—he was scheduled to speak for no more than ten minutes late Tuesday night, well after the network coverage had stopped. It was, as Nate Cutler quipped to Lara, “a special place in media purgatory.”

Now, as Kerry approached, she darted between two delegates and confronted him, tape recorder in hand.

Kerry gave her a sardonic grin, then gazed up at the sky-boxes. “Like a trough for special interests, isn’t it? Imagine the migrant workers they could feed.”

As was often true with him, Lara thought, beneath the irony lurked a more serious point. “I hear you’re staying at a Motel Six, Senator. In Tijuana.”

He laughed with what seemed genuine amusement. “Only until they find us something worse.”

You don’t mind this,
Lara thought suddenly.
You think Mason looks scared, and you enjoy being an underdog.
“Do you attribute that to the Vice President?”

Kerry looked up at the four-sided screen hanging over the
convention floor, magnifying the images the President’s convention
managers wished to showcase. The image of the moment was Dick Mason, seated in a VIP section with Jeannie and their three children, waving to people on the floor below, his face alight with pleasure. Kerry’s own expression was quizzical. “Why should I?” he answered. “I can’t imagine that the Vice President of the United States has time to worry about room reservations, can you?”

The question had a subversive innocence, Lara thought; it could be taken either at face value, as a gracious dismissal, or as a tacit comment on the emptiness of the office and the pettiness of the man. “Really,” she said, “don’t you think that your problems over speaking time have to do with the
next
campaign?”

Kilcannon still gazed up at Dick Mason’s enormous electronic head. “Is Big Brother watching me, you mean?” He looked at Lara, then spoke in a different voice, more serious. “If this were only about hotel rooms, or personal ambitions, I’d have stayed home.”

“What
is
it about?”

“Issues. The President and Vice President have an election to win, and I’m here to support that effort. It’s just that sometimes there are differing priorities. I didn’t go into politics just to hold an office, or secure a place on prime-time television. People expect better.”

“Have you said that to the Vice President?”

“Oh, I think he understands.” Kilcannon smiled, adding, “It’s nice to see you again.” And then he was off, shaking more hands, talking into a microphone shoved at his face. It was only much later, when they truly knew each other, that Kerry told her about his meeting with Dick Mason, an hour before she saw him.

At Mason’s request, the meeting was private, without aides.

They sat in Mason’s suite, two blocks from the convention hall, late-afternoon sun falling on the bright floral displays sent by numerous well-wishers. Kerry looked around him at the flowers. “Did you die, Dick? No one told me. And you look so natural.”

Mason gave a good-humored laugh; his blue eyes, crinkling
with amusement, signaled his appreciation at Kerry’s sense of
humor, his fondness for Kerry himself. “It comes from clean living, Kerry. And short commutes.”

“Yes,” Kerry said lightly. “Sorry to be late. It’s rush hour in Tucson.” He sat across from Mason. “So here we are, like a pair of scorpions, and for what?”

The Vice President sat back, hands folded, gazing at Kerry with disarming candor. “The President and I want a unified party. After that, I may want to be President myself. I’d rather have you as an ally than an adversary.”

“But first,” Kerry responded, “you thought you’d get my attention.”

Mason smiled again, though now his eyes did not. “There are thousands of delegates to satisfy, dozens of governors and congressmen and senators clamoring for a prime-time slot. And you’re the only one who insists on saying whatever he pleases, rather than playing your part in a coordinated message.”

Kerry met his gaze. “Dick,” he answered, “I don’t need to speak at all. And you don’t need
me
to read whatever part of the message you had in mind—‘reinventing welfare,’ was it? Especially when I don’t believe in it.”

Mason leaned forward; he had a thousand postures and expressions, Kerry thought, to signal how much a particular conversation engaged him. “We
do
need you. You’ve become a strong voice in the Senate. You represent a legacy …”

“Ah, that.”

“Yes,
that
. Your support carries a great symbolic power.” Mason’s voice became soft, sincere. “When I first ran for Congress, your brother campaigned for me. I had a deep admiration for him, as I do for you. And I’m sure that Jamie would have muted whatever differences there are.”

Despite himself, Kerry felt stung; there would always be a part of him that felt inferior to Jamie, that doubted his own instincts. It made him squirm that Dick was shrewd enough to see this, even as he resented Mason’s inherent condescension—the belief that this knowledge would change what Kerry did.

“But I’m not Jamie.” Pausing, Kerry tried, for once, to reach Mason on a deeper level. “When I took his place, I knew I couldn’t be Jamie. All I could do was take this terrible accident and give it some kind of meaning, in the way that seemed best
to me.

“If I’d wanted this life, yes—maybe what you’re saying would make sense to me. But when you try to use Jamie to make me shrivel, all it proves is that you don’t know me at all.”

There was the first flicker of doubt in Mason’s eyes, the fear that an unblinking knowledge of his own motives could not help him grasp Kerry’s. “Look,” Mason said in a reasonable tone, “we all know campaign finance is a terrible problem. But the other party’s worse; until we fix it, every dime we raise is in self-defense. And what about our union friends, and all the money
they
raise to run ads on our behalf? For you to challenge our fund-raising in a convention speech, when we need
more
money for November, is like cutting our balls off with a butter knife.”

“How do you know,” Kerry retorted, “that they’re not already missing?” When Mason flushed, angry for the first time, Kerry held up his hand. “You’re about to step in it, Dick. Your people are so hungry to raise cash that they’ve stopped caring how they get it or where it comes from. You’re going to wake up some morning and find Saddam Hussein sleeping between you and Jeannie.

“Voters already think we’re on the take—that the way we raise money is a slightly more elegant version of the kind of bribery I saw in Newark. When are we going to find the guts to change that?” Kerry lowered his voice. “If we don’t change things soon, Dick, what does it matter
who
becomes President? Except maybe to you.”

Mason stared at him. “That’s easy to say,” he responded, “from the shelter of a safe Senate seat. It’s harder when you want to run the government, and the alternative is turning it over to Bible thumpers and reactionaries.” He paused a moment. “Who do you want to be, my friend? Jerry Brown, wearing denim shirts and sniping from the sidelines, a popgun in the wilderness? Or someone who helps make the hard decisions, with the wisdom to know how hard they really are?”

Mason gathered his thoughts, his tone reasonable again, avuncular. “I
will
win the nomination the next time out, Kerry—no sitting Vice President has lost one, ever. The question is whether you force me to marginalize you to protect my interests, or start asking yourself a
better
question.”

“And what’s that?”

The Vice President smiled slightly. “‘When Dick Mason becomes President, who takes
his
place?’”

Silent, Kerry studied him, a pleasant-faced man imploring Kerry to be as practical as he. Detaching himself, Kerry had a second, sadder image—two men of decent intentions, trapped in mutual incomprehension, who might be led by circumstance to tear each other apart.
I don’t want this,
Kerry thought, but it did not serve his interests, or the things he believed in, to take the pressure off now.

“I’m sorry,” Kerry said. “And I appreciate your candor. But I’ll take my place with
Nick at Nite
. Or whenever you’ve got me scheduled.”

Frowning, Mason shook his head. “I’m sorry too, Kerry. For both our sakes. But four years is a long time.”

“It is that.”

They stood, shaking hands, and then Kerry heard the door open.

Turning, he saw Jeannie Mason in a smart blue suit that matched her eyes, her blond hair newly cut. She smiled at Kerry with unaffected warmth.

“Hello, Kerry.” She walked over, kissing him on the cheek, and then leaned back to look into his face. “I haven’t seen you since the last time you refused to take me away from all this. How
are
you?”

Kerry returned her smile. “Fine. Morphing into Jerry Brown, Dick tells me.”

Jeannie grinned; even in her mid-forties, she reminded Kerry of a homecoming queen with a wicked sense of humor. “Jerry Brown?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.”

Kerry found himself laughing. “That was Dick’s point, actually.”

“It’s the convention,” Jeannie said cheerfully. “It brings out the best in everyone.” Her smile narrowed. “Is Meg here?”

“No. At home.”

Dick stood beside them, seemingly amused. But Jeannie’s eyes became serious and, Kerry thought, kind. “In my next life,” Jeannie said to him, “I want Meg’s deal.”

Kerry smiled again. “I’ll tell her that.” But when he left, heading for the convention hall, what he felt was not worry
about his future, or even about what he would say tomorrow. It was envy of Dick Mason, and a piercing loneliness.

The next morning, Kerry spoke to three different delegations before nine o’clock, promising to campaign for statewide candidates in the fall. Lara followed him—at each stop, he made a mocking reference to himself as “the convention’s answer to Conan O’Brien,” a veiled jab at Mason which drew chuckles from his audience.

If Kerry wasn’t preparing to run for President, Lara thought, he was doing more than enough to make Mason nervous: Kerry was highly visible, the most popular figure on the convention floor, and his schedule was jammed with meetings with delegates and party leaders from around the country. There was about him the crackle of prospective candidacy—the frenetic pace, well covered by the media; two aides to keep him on time and remind him of names; the burst of applause from bystanders in the lobby when he emerged from the Hyatt; even the air of cheerful defiance he carried from place to place. Despite her posture of detachment, Lara felt disappointed and a little cynical. His air of coyness was a ruse, she was coming to believe; Kerry was doing what any ambitious politician did at a party’s convention—simply better.

All of which, to Lara, made the absence of Meg Kilcannon more striking. Politics was a viciously public business, and never more so than at a convention, where appearances are paramount, rumors fair game, one politician’s weakness another’s target of opportunity. Everywhere Kilcannon went, Lara saw some operative for Mason watching from the crowd; everywhere the Vice President went—and his
schedule was
equally busy—his attractive wife was with him. With the growing sense of barely concealed conflict, it was inevitable that the comparison harmed Kerry. “Where’s his wife?” Lara heard a woman delegate from Texas ask. “We need a candidate with a
family
, not just an
arrangement
.”

At nine-thirty, Lara saw Kerry emerge from another meeting at the Hyatt, his fourth of the day, and murmur something to one of his aides.

The young man, seemingly startled, began to remonstrate about the senator’s commitments. Kerry stilled him with a long, cool look and then said pleasantly, “So call me the defiant one, all right? But I’m going.”

Kerry hurried off, pursued by Lara.

“Going where?” she asked.

He turned to her. “Watsonville,” he said over his shoulder. “Want to come along?”

Lara was startled. Watsonville was about five hundred miles north, in the farm country near Salinas; she knew of it only because of her series on migrant workers. “Why are you going
there
?” she asked.

“To impress you, of course.” He pushed open the glass door and stood on the sidewalk amidst the palm trees and bright morning sun, hands shoved in his pockets, looking for a limousine. “There’s a United Farm Workers rally. The president of the UFW phoned yesterday, and I’ve decided that’s where I want to be.”

“What about your schedule?”

Restless, he scanned the line of black Town Cars. “What are a few offended delegates? It’s a perfect chance to firm up my credentials as a centrist.” He turned to her, eyes serious now. “Think what you want, Lara—the press always does. But there’s not a single major politician from our party who’s agreed to come. Besides, I was suffocating in there.”

So
that
was what he was thinking about last night, gazing up at the luxury boxes.
Like a trough for special interests,
he had murmured.
Imagine the migrant workers they could feed.
But whether this sudden trip was an act of impulse, conscience, or politics—or some uneasy combination—Lara could not guess.

A Town Car pulled up in front of them, and a driver popped out. “So,” Kerry asked her, “are you coming?”

He was serious, Lara realized. “I’ll have to call my editor.” The driver opened a rear door for them. “You can do it from the car,” Kerry answered.