The Candidate (13 page)

Carver looked away – just for a moment – as he sipped his drink and Dee caught the hint of a sly smile. That fucker, she fumed. Now she knew it. They were behind it. Carver didn’t need to say a word more. She breathed deeply, keeping control. It was a useful reminder. Carver was dangerous and Dee ought to remember that. No need to poke a wasps’ nest too hard just yet.

“Well, I’m mighty relieved to hear that,” she said with thinly laced sarcasm. “Because whoever did circulate that little bank transfer paper is going to be sorely disappointed. It’s nothing. A charity donation. Not very exciting to anyone. You’re gonna have to do a hell of a lot better than that to knock us off course.”

Their meals arrived and they stopped their jousting match as the food was placed in front of them. Dee looked down and did not feel the slightest pang of hunger. But Carver immediately began slicing his steak.

“Just a shot across your bows, Dee. Just a little warning to keep things nice. It would be best for our future co-operation if things go cleanly here in New Hampshire.”

Dee looked at Carver and the bloody red juice of the steak that dripped from one corner of his mouth. She hated this man. She hated him more than she hated the other party and the fool in the White House they both wanted to unseat. She was sick of sharing the same table with him. It was time to cut to the chase.

“Quit talking crap, Howie. You didn’t invite me here for the pleasure of my company. What do you have to say?”

Carver stopped eating. He carefully put his knife and fork down on the white linen tablecloth and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin.

“Dee,” he began quietly. “Governor Stanton is going to win New Hampshire. We know that. You know that. What I want to say is…” He stopped himself and rephrased it, smiling as he did so. “No, what
the governor
wants me to say is: when you lose here, you need to leave the race. Call it quits straight off. If you do that we’ll make sure Hodges is a lock for the vice president’s spot. The ticket will be Stanton and Hodges. In that order.”

Dee looked at Carver. She said nothing and he frowned at her silence.

“Look,” he said. “That’s more than you could have dreamed of a month ago. Before some crazy bitch took a shot at your man.”

That was enough for Dee. She saw it clearly. Carver was afraid. He was scared of Hodges and his campaign. His cozy world turned upside down. That meant Stanton was scared too. They read the same polling numbers Dee did and they saw the same thing: Hodges had a real chance. They could win New Hampshire. They really could. Dee felt a rush of pleasure. She picked up her burger and took a deliberate juicy bite and then spoke with her mouth full, holding the mess in one hand as she pointed at Carver. She was going to enjoy this.

“You know, Howie. That’s a mighty fine offer ya’ll are making. Perhaps a
couillonne
like me should feel pretty blessed for such attentions. But you know, Howie, I just ain’t feeling it. I ain’t feeling your love.”

Dee looked at Carver’s face and tried to read the mix of emotions struggling for control of his features. She felt sure no one had ever spoken to him like that before, especially not someone like her. It was a risk to anger him. But it was worth it. Her whole life she had worked to get a campaign in this position and now it was all or nothing time. Might as well enjoy it. Then, to her amazement, she started channeling Hodges. She could hear his voice in her head as she spoke. Christ, she thought, Hodges made a believer out of her.

“You see, Howie,” she said. “We ain’t about deals. We’re about changing this country. We’re about giving people back some hope. We’re about actually making people’s lives a little bit better, not just winning a goddamn race. If you ever got out of your little campaign bubble, you might see that. America is hurting, Howie, and we aim to fix that.”

Suddenly she could not stand to be in the same room with Carver. She got up and threw down a wad of dollars on the table.

“We’re going to fuck you boys up,” she said.

Carver’s cheeks flushed red.

“Let’s keep this civil, Dee,” he said. But Dee was rolling now.

“Fuck civil. Civil ended when you started pushing documents under hotel doors.”

She turned and walked out the door. This time as she left through the restaurant she did not care who saw her. She had nothing to hide and when she hit the cold air outside she did not feel it. She felt warm, on fire almost, burning brightly from the light of making a stand.

* * *

“ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT! I’m coming,” Mike snapped. The rapping on his door was so insistent he half-expected to see the hotel manager there. But it was Dee. He could tell something was different about her: a kind of frantic energy that radiated from her eyes as she barged past him. She looked like there was something inside her that she could not keep bottled up as she gestured for him to sit down.

She paced up and down a few times before she turned on her heel and casually tossed something small and plastic at him. He caught it deftly. It was a computer memory stick.

“Take this to your blogger friend, Lauren O’Keefe,” she said with a grin. “It’s time to give Stanton’s team some payback from my little vault of secrets.”

Mike looked at the tiny, white plastic in his hand.

“What?” he said.

Dee’s grin grew wider. “That dumb son of a bitch Howard Carver started a war with his tricks. Well, now we fire back. For months, I’ve had teams of folks pouring over anything and everything related to Stanton – digging for anything we can use. I’ve got myself a nice little weapons depot now.”

Mike put down the stick on his bedside table like it was a hot coal. But Dee ignored him and continued to talk.

“On that stick is a picture of Stanton when she was a student during the anti-war protests of 1974. She appears to be part of a group of people burning the American flag.”

Dee let words hang in the air and then repeated herself. “Take this to your blogger friend.”

Mike shook his head, suddenly realizing the scale of what she asked him to do.

“Hang on a minute,” he said. “I don’t want to be involved in something like this. It’s not right.”

Dee looked him up and down, as if taking the measure of him. Her expression softened. “Sorry,” she said. “I know this is serious stuff. But that’s what campaigns are made of;
winning
campaigns anyways. You’ve signed up for this fight, Mike. This is part of our job. We fight for our candidate. They shot first with that bullshit trick in the hotel. We have to protect our man.”

Mike looked again at the memory stick. He had a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I don’t know…” he began.

Dee sat down beside him and flung an arm around his shoulder. She ruffled his hair with her hand. “You’re a good man, Mike. Most of the folks on this campaign are good people. That’s why we are different. That’s why when we win, it will make a difference.”

She paused and then leaned in close to whisper in his ear. “This is how we
win,
Mike,” she hissed.

She got up and did not look back as she left the room. Mike did not watch her go either. He sat in stunned silence on his bed, the tiny memory stick on his bedside table filling his vision and his thoughts.

* * *

“HOW MANY of you folks have heard this speech before?” Hodges asked as his iron-blue eyes twinkled above his craggy smile. He wore casual clothes, jeans and a heavy shirt, but still looked a military man. That bearing never left him. A forest of hands shot up in the tightly packed rooms and hallways of the suburban Manchester home in which he held his third house party of the day. Hodges grinned broadly at the response.

“Okay, then,” he laughed. “I guess we have some real fans in here. So I’ll just stick to some of the classic hits…”

Then he was off, riffing his campaign speech with the expertise and familiarity of a rock musician playing his greatest tunes. The sound was familiar and the audience knew what was coming, but he took to the task like he played it for the first time, and the crowd eagerly awaited their favorite moments. There was not an applause line in the speech that most of them had not heard before, but they waited for them all the same and clapped like school children.

Mike paused for just a moment to listen and marvel at Hodges’ skills. The candidate –
his
candidate – was getting even better as the New Hampshire campaign took off. He was always good, bending crowds to his will, but he seemed to thrive on the excitement now. Hodges and his ever-larger audiences knew each other well and familiarity had bred love, not contempt. Mike watched as Hodges spent five minutes talking about the problems of just one crowd member, never hurrying the speaker along, giving her his focused attention, in a way that bonded the room together and forged them into one. They were not an audience and speaker, Mike thought, but something else. A movement. That was the right word. Hodges was building a movement. Mike reveled in the thought. For years he wanted to be a part of something like this, something with an impact. Now he was.

But he snapped himself out of the moment of reverie. He was not here to soak up the atmosphere. He was here to do a job for Dee. He saw Lauren tucked away in a corner of the room, tapping away on her computer. She looked up and caught his eye. She smiled and for a moment Mike felt the warmth of a pretty woman looking at him. Not a blogger. Just a woman. Just Lauren. He smiled back, nodded toward the door and tapped his watch.

“Five minutes?” he mouthed.

Lauren looked over at Hodges and evidently decided nothing new would come out of this particular meeting. Then she nodded back at him and closed her laptop.

Mike went outside and waited for her, hugging his arms against the cold despite the thick jacket he was wearing. He saw Lauren emerge and she kissed him on the cheek.

“Hey, Mike” she said. “What can I do for you? You got any news for me about the money transfer?”

“Let’s walk,” Mike said and they strolled down a sidewalk cleared of snow that cut a long black line through the white streetscape. Mike was silent for a minute and heard only the crunch of their footsteps on the salted, slushy path. He put his hand in his pocket and felt the memory stick in his palm. Lauren assumed Mike had not heard her.

“The wire transfer, Mike,” she said. “Do you have any comment for me?”

“Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Mike said, suddenly snapping into the moment. “We’re still checking exactly what that’s about. I’m 90 percent sure it’s what I thought. Just a charity gift. But it’s sensitive, so we’d still appreciate you holding off for a while.”

Lauren pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “That sounds a little strange, Mike. I could just put it out there right now and see what happens.”

Mike tried to keep his voice casual. “Of course,” he said. “But this involves Christine and the Senator is fiercely protective of his family. He hates the fact that she has to be involved in the campaign at all.” He decided to push that line a little further, sending a message.

“He’s fiercely protective,” he repeated. “You don’t want to put this out there and then discover it’s just some Guatemalan bake sale that’s she been sponsoring.”

Lauren was silent as she mulled over Mike’s words. Mike felt a tinge of panic mixed with a rush of guilt. Had he overdone it? Made it too much of a threat? Still, that was the stick with which to beat back this Guatemala story. Now he had to get out the carrot.

“But we have found something that might be of interest to you,” he said.

The pair halted. Lauren looked at him, puzzled. Mike could scarcely believe he was doing this but he heard Dee’s admonition.
This is your job. Protect the candidate.
He reached into his pocket and brought out the memory stick. He showed it to Lauren.

“On this stick is something we’ve found that disturbs us. It is a picture of Governor Stanton from an anti-Vietnam war protest when she was at Cornell. It shows her with a group of students, one of whom is setting fire to an American flag.”

Lauren inhaled sharply, as she looked at the memory stick in Mike’s hand, nestling there like a little nugget of gold. Or thirty pieces of silver. Mike willed Lauren to take it. It was a bribe. He knew it. Lauren knew it.

“This is some pretty dirty stuff, you’re pulling here, Mike,” Lauren said.

“We feel this is legitimate criticism. Senator Hodges is concerned that he is the only candidate who 100 percent supports our troops,” Mike said.

Lauren giggled. But it was a sound devoid of mirth. She looked at Mike, straight in the eye, and searched for some sort of validation, or some sort of release to allow her complicity. Then she plucked the memory stick out of his hand.

“Why me?” she asked. “Why not Drudge or someone at the Huffington Post? My blog is growing fast but I’m not in their league.”

Mike quickly put his hand back in his pocket, not giving her a chance to change her mind. He warmed his guilty palm against the heat of his body.

“You will be when you post that,” he said.

They both knew his words were true. This was a quid pro quo deal. Lauren’s silence on the mysterious Guatemala payment in return for an even bigger story. One that was sure to damage Stanton. It was an ugly, low blow. But Lauren did not have time for such thoughts. Mike had already turned and walked back up the road and Lauren’s guilt was rapidly replaced by excitement. Her cheeks blossomed with color and her head felt dizzy and light. Mike was right. This was going to make her part of the story.