The Frankenstein Candidate (8 page)

She stopped on the landing between the fourth and the fifth floor. She heard footsteps below and saw a glimpse of the two youths. They stopped.

She hurried up the last floor. Her heart was beating fast. Why did Compassion make her ignore such obvious risks? She thought of Georgia and Natasha and Gary. How she wished Gary was with her here now.

The second door was the only one with paint on it. She knocked. There was no answer. The youths came around. The cat-calling one wore a nasty sneer.

She knocked again, hard.

Someone finally answered. Over six foot six and wide, he filled the doorway. Although the beard was gone, she recognized him. He nodded, as though he expected her. She glanced at the stairwell as he opened the door, noticing that the youths were gone.

“Jesus, what are you doing by yourself in this part of town?”

He unhooked the door lock. She went inside.

“I had to…had to see you…to thank you.”

“Your staff already did.”

She looked around. There was an old sofa, a television set, some lounge chairs—all probably picked up in a garage sale. The paint on the walls was peeled and flecked. Besides a well-worn rug in front of the sofa, there was no carpeting. The windows had no curtains.

The apartment had an attached kitchen and only one other door—probably a bathroom. There was nothing else. The walls were bare. Any sign of alcohol was conspicuously absent.

“Not the sort of place you are used to…”

“Oh no, it’s perfectly fine” she replied.

“Please make yourself comfortable.” He gestured toward one of the chairs. “Perhaps I can offer you some coffee.”

His diction did not place him with the street people. He must have seen better times, she thought.

“Oh no, it’s all right, I won’t be long.”

“They tell me you are Senator Olivia Allen from New York.”

“That’s right, but I stay in DC, I moved my family here.”

“I am Dan Curtis, as you know by now. I used to work with the homeless, first as a paralegal for a DC law firm and then with the Department of Housing.”

“What happened?”

“Well, we had budget cuts, as you know. Cuts you may have voted for. The Hill never helped us. The cuts meant many of us lost our livelihood.”

She lowered her head. Guilty as charged.

“And you repaid me by saving my life.”

“He wasn’t going to kill you.”

She looked at him.

“Or even maim you…they do this just to scare the living daylights out of the rich.”

She was going to say, “But I’m not rich,” then she thought the better of it. It was relative, wasn’t it? She noticed that he spoke without anger or resentment.

“In this decade alone, the number of homeless in DC has doubled,” he said. She already knew that.

“But what you probably don’t know,” he continued, “is how many of them come from white-collar professions. Engineers, architects, designers, middle-level managers, civil servants…out of work for ten, eleven years. Most have never found proper jobs since the 2009 recession. Also veterans. The number of homeless vets has grown fivefold this last decade. How do you like that, huh?

“They are ready to lay their lives down for this country, and sometimes this country asks them to lay their life down for another country…a blob on the map that most lawmakers need an atlas to find, for a people who hate us for helping them. So then they get PTSD, get discharged, and no one wants to give them a job. They take to the streets. They steal, get drunk, get high, and never get back to the cycle of life. The person with the baseball bat? He was no hobo. He used to be a sergeant in the Thirty-Seventh Field Artillery Regiment that served in Iraq in 2007.”

She sat and listened to more. Dan rambled for an hour, and although some of his rambling was emotional, he was driven by a sense of purpose, a mission to help the helpless, at any cost. She more than just liked him, she respected him. She accepted his second offer of coffee.

Expecting to meet a good-hearted and brave drifter, she had come prepared to write him a check for twenty grand. But she could not insult him.

Instead, she gave him her business card.

“I know someone in the DC office who needs a staffer. Department of Veteran Affairs. I could also use someone like you in my New York office. I visit New York at least once a month.”

“Thank you, but I can’t leave DC. My kids go to the public school here.”

She looked around to see the signs: a school bag, a poster, a game, kiddies clothes…something. Yet again, he swiftly read her mind.

“They live with their mother,” he said. “But Vets Department, I can give it a go.”

“Well, call me anytime, and I’ll arrange a meeting.” She meant it.

He smiled.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he said. “Once you get in, just drive…there are three traffic lights before you hit the highway…do not stop at any of them even if they are red…the last guy who did that got mugged and beaten.

“Or you can drop me off at the highway gas station…I need some cigarettes.”

That sounded infinitely better to Olivia. Somehow, she felt incredibly safe with him.

He collected his coat. She saw him put a gun in his coat pocket.

“You just never know,” he explained, double-locking the door behind him.

For a change, he let her do the talking as they drove out toward the highway.

“It is possible,” she said, “I absolutely think it is possible to have a humane and productive society. In fact, one can’t have one without the other. We can have programs that look after our servicemen and servicewomen till their final years. We can reorient our education system so that the skills in demand are the skills that are taught. We can create economic growth. It will need time, effort, and resources. But it can be done. It has been done before in this country, many times. We need more educators, particularly in some districts, and we need more police on the beat. We can create more jobs and get this country moving again—”

“Here’s where I get off,” Dan said.

He muttered a quick good-bye as he got out. She wanted so much to believe it was not the last she would see of him that her vivid imagination quickly gave her a vision of a clean-shaven Dan Curtis in a nice suit, working at her New York office, where she often visited.

In the cold of a Boston winter, on the Sunday evening of January 5, 2020, Frank Stein strode out to take the podium at the Rabb Lecture Hall of the Boston Public Library for the first of his Ford Hall Forum addresses. It was a medium-sized auditorium with a capacity for only 342, but it was less than half full. The first two rows were full of reporters; the rest were a scattering of what Stein imagined must be typical rich, East Coast liberals.

His first sentence got everyone’s attention.

“I hate politics,” Stein said. “I never wanted to be a politician. But then I realized that politicians have been wrecking this beautiful country of ours and something had to be done.

“Government should only protect individuals from being exploited by other people by violence, the threat of violence, fraud, or deception. If any of these occur, government must administer justice according to a known set of laws.

“Above all, government itself must not lie to us or deceive us.

“This is all pretty simple. So where did this country go wrong, and how can we fix it?

“Primarily, it went wrong because the government began to meddle in economic affairs in the mistaken belief that it could improve them.

“The good thing is that it can be set right. The first thing we must have is a proper discourse of the affairs of government. All we have had are demagogues telling you what you wanted to hear, not what you needed to hear.

“You need to know that your government is bankrupt, but it will print trillions of dollars in order to prevent an official bankruptcy. You need to know this will cause rampant inflation.

“You need to know that, by waging war, America cannot unilaterally prevent underdeveloped nations from obtaining nuclear weapons.

“You need to know that governments cannot create jobs, wealth, or any sort of economic value, nor can they create freedom-supporting democracies anywhere in the world.

“You already know that favors are bought with campaign money. You already know that the rich and the powerful protect themselves from competition, using the apparatus of government to do so. But you need to understand how that can be prevented.

“Above all, you need to know that presidents and high-ranking officials are not your leaders. They love to believe that. But they are simply office bearers, nothing more. Never treat your politicians like leaders—you will invite the wrong kind of people into power.

“To understand politics, the first thing you must do is reject the language of politics.

“The language of politics is rhetoric. Empty words and hot air. You must learn to identify rhetoric, and, I speak particularly to those of you who have chosen careers in the media, condemn it the way you would condemn perjury.

“That is our first commandment. The commandment of honesty is about the end of deception.

“Politicians engage in deception because it has been the ticket to getting elected and re-elected. That is the ticket to wealth and power.

“I already have wealth. Quite a lot of it, in fact. I am not seeking public office for securing a cozy retirement.

“I do not and will not employ any spin doctors. All other campaigns will. Governments always do. That should be your first clue.

“How do we understand the demagogues’ rhetoric? Listen carefully to what they say. Here is an example.

“Who do you think said this? ‘I know America wants reconciliation and unity. I know Americans want progress. And we must seize this moment and deliver.’ Your choices are: a) George H. W. Bush, b) Barack Obama, c) Jimmy Carter, d) George W. Bush, or e) Bill Clinton.”

Frank Stein looked around the room.

A few hands went up.

Ralph Prescott of the
Boston Monitor
said b. An old lady seated at the back was confident it was Bill Clinton. The man next to her said George H. W. Bush.

“None of you got it right. The right answer is d. Now, here’s the problem. I did a questionnaire composed of two hundred such platitudes. Even those with a media background got about 30 to 40 percent right. Others got 20 percent right. That’s no better than pure luck.

“So every four years, you are seating or unseating a government based on bromides that are so worn that even you don’t remember who said what.

“When they tell you that this election is about putting people first, ask them whether it means people other than their cronies and the politically connected.

“When they tell you they will build new hospitals or roads, ask them whose money they are stealing to finance the project that is buying them votes and what other projects will not happen because of the road they are building.

“When they tell you they will fix the environment, ask them why they are so sure that it even needs fixing.

“When they tell you that they will create jobs, ask them which jobs they will destroy to do so.

“Representative democracy will only work if the media behaves responsibly.

“So I ask, once again, for the media to avoid the easy sensationalisms and treat the population as essentially clever. Take that risk. You might just surprise yourself.

“Thank you.”

The paltry crowd was dumbstruck. They had heard this before—the candidates who gave speeches like this were always called loonies or extremists—they never won anything, so what was he talking about? If you wanted to win office, you could be right of center or left of center but not off-center.

Ralph Prescott raised his hand again.

“Yes?”

Ralph was quivering as he asked softly, “Ralph Prescott,
Boston Monitor
. Mr. Stein, if we displease the government, they won’t let us get on to the latest scoops or interviews.”

“So are you going to spend the rest of your life writing what pleases your masters?”