Interface. Part 51

"So that's what tertiary syphilis does to a man," said the driver of the sedan, screaming down the Dulles Access Road at ninety miles per hour in hot pursuit of the limousine. "They said he was an a.s.shole but I had no idea."

"Shut up and drive," said the one in the pa.s.senger seat. "You have any idea how badly we screwed this up?

Anybody catches sight of his face and we're finished."

They drove very fast, but they had a hard time catching up with Jeremiah Freel in his limousine. In theory the big limo was supposed to be the slower vehicle. The difference between them, though, was this: the Prince of Darkness was not afraid to ram. Not only was he not afraid to ram, he was practiced. Any vehicle in his lane not going as fast as he was got rear-ended and that was that. Lane changes were accomplished by force majeure. They pa.s.sed at least three vehicles that had veered into the ditch or the median strip. In the end, the only way to catch up with Jeremiah Freel was to pull on to the shoulder and floor it. Which is pretty much what they did, though by the time they actually caught up with him, he was screaming across the Potomac River on the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, vectored into the heart of the Capital like a poisoned dum-dum from a sniper's rifle.

"You know what he's doing?" the driver said. "He's going to the G.o.dd.a.m.n Watergate!"

"Head him off," the pa.s.senger said.

Once they realized where Freel was going, they were able to do a bit of deft curb-hopping, lawn-driving, and zooming down oncoming lanes, and pull their sedan directly across Freel's path just a few yards short of the entrance to the Watergate. Freel rammed them anyway, caving in the side of the sedan, but both of the occupants saw it coming and dove and rolled out of the other side of the car just before impact.

The suit who had been sitting in the pa.s.senger seat pulled a gun out of his armpit and used the b.u.t.t of the weapon to smash the driver's-side window of the limousine. The black gla.s.s dissolved into tempered fragments held together by the plastic sheet that had been used to blacken the window. When this debris was pulled out of the way, Jeremiah Freel was exposed, slumped against the steering wheel with a big laceration across his forehead, blood streaming out and dripping off the horn b.u.t.ton into his lap. He was barely conscious, mumbling deliriously."Drive much?" he said. "Where'd you get your f.u.c.king license? K mart? Get the f.u.c.k out of my way, a.s.shole, I got an equalizer in the glove compartment and more lawyers than you've got friends."

They shoved Freel across the seat on to the pa.s.senger side and then climbed in after him. The driver backed the limousine away from the wrecked sedan. A steady wisp of steam was piping from its radiator but it was still drivable. The pa.s.senger wriggled his hands into a pair of latex gloves and then set about tying Jeremiah Freel up with plastic handcuffs. Only when he was finished with that did he begin applying direct pressure to Freel's forehead.

Waiting at a stoplight, the two men in suits exchanged looks and rolled their eyes at each other. "Campaign consultants," the driver said, "gotta love "em."

"Oh, this is a good one," said the chairman of the Republican National Committee, inspecting a sheet of paper he had just pulled from a file folder marked FREEL. "During a campaign visit to Minot, North Dakota, you ran a school bus off a road, causing thirty-six injuries, ten of them serious. The parents sued you for a hundred million dollars and won."

"f.u.c.k you," Jeremiah Freel said. "f.u.c.k your mother too." Freel had a nice dark line of st.i.tches across his forehead, tracing a long welt that perfectly matched the curved of the limousine's steering wheel.

"When we add that to the libel and slander judgments from the last three presidential campaigns - let me see, those alone add up to almost another hundred million dollars, which you owe to a dozen and a half different people, including, by the way, myself. You owe me four million."

"Eat my s.h.i.t," Jeremiah Freel said.

Several other distinguished-looking and well-dressed men were sitting around the conference table. They were in a suite in a very private hotel a few blocks north of the White House. They had rented a whole floor, covered the windows with black stuff, disabled the elevators, and posted guards with submachine guns by all the stairwells. Jeremiah Freel was sitting in a luxurious padded leather chair in the middle of the table. Standing behind him were two men with a combined weight of six hundred pounds, wearing latex gloves and clear plastic face shields.

The other men sitting around the table were all glaring coldly at Freel. One by one, they began to raise their hands and speak up.

"You owe me three million plus legal fees," said the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

"One point five," said another man, holding up his hand.

"Eight hundred thousand," barked another man.

"One point one."

"Half a mil and a printed apology in The Miami Herald."

"What the h.e.l.l is this, a f.u.c.king star chamber?" Jeremiah Freel said. "Why don't you just tell me what the h.e.l.l you're after?"

"We're after Cozzano," the GOP chairman said.

"Fine. You got him. He's a dead man," Freel said. "By the time I'm finished with that wop son of a b.i.t.c.h, he'll curse his mother for every having given birth to him. He won't be able to cash a check north of the Equator.

Children will spit on his knees. His dog will climb on to his bed in the middle of the night and try to tear his face off and he'll beg for it to happen."

There was an awed silence in the room.

"Don't you want to hear what we are prepared to offer you in exchange for your services?" the Democratic chairman said uncertainly.

"f.u.c.k that," Freel said. "You guys have no imagination. You think I do this s.h.i.t to make money. But that's not true. I been sitting down there in Rio waiting for something like this. I do it for the pure joy of a job well done. Now, did you a.s.semble my A-Team, or not?"

"We got 'em."

"All of 'em?"

"All the ones who aren't dead, in prison, or running other campaigns," said the Republican chairman.

54.

A bit later than a month before election day, a flatbed truck carrying a G.o.dS shipping container could be seen fighting its way through the bewildering vortex of Boston's Kenmore Square, on the eastern fringes of Boston University. The truck eventually broke through by a.s.serting the divine right of semitrailer rigs to go anywhere they wanted, and entered the campus.

This area swarmed with Boston cops, campus police, men in dark suits, and nicely dressed young persons wearing COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT b.u.t.tons. An impressive minority carried walkie-talkies. These people had been seizing parking s.p.a.ces for the better part of the day. They did it by the power vested in them by various high authorities; by sheer chutzpah; and in some cases by the brutally simple expedient of placing their bodies in those places and refusing to move when motorists tried to bluff them out. When the big G.o.dS truck arrived, it found nine consecutive parking s.p.a.ces waiting for it, which in Boston happened about as often as a Grand Alignment of the planets, or, for that matter, a World Series victory.

Not long afterward, a motorcade sliced through the Gordian knot of Kenmore Square and pulled up near Morse Auditorium, a squat, domed synagogue-turned-lecture-hall that was already about half full of media personnel and politically conscious students.

William A. Cozzano emerged from one of the cars, waved cheerily to a number of supporters who had gathered in back for a brief sight of the Great Man, and followed an advance person into the back of the hall. A dressing room had already been staked out behind the stage. He changed to a fresh shirt and had his hair and makeup fixed by trained professionals.

Then he walked on to the stage. From here he could see a wall of television lights and, dimly, a dark auditorium beyond it. The auditorium was full of students who applauded him when he emerged from the wings. Two chairs had been set up in the middle of the stage, angled toward each other, a table between them set with a gla.s.s water pitcher and two tumblers.

William A. Cozzano was going to talk politics with the chairman of the Political Science Department, a long- time Washington figure who had taken an academic appointment that gave him the freedom to do pretty much whatever he wanted with his time; in return, he lent prestige to the university. The whole idea was that the discussion would be loose and unscripted, and Cozzano would be open to questions, both from the audience (mostly students) and the local media. This was a daring maneuver, exactly the kind of thing that Tip McLane probably couldn't pull off without offending half of the ethnic groups in the United States.

Cozzano ascended the stage a few minutes before air time, unb.u.t.toned his jacket, and sat down in his chair.

A technician a.s.sisted him in clipping a microphone to his lapel, and asked him to say a few words so that they could adjust their sound levels. Cozzano quoted the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet, which raised a smattering of applause from the students and even from a few of the TV people.

The host, looking professional, sat in his chair and went through a sound check of his own. At five seconds before eight P.M., a man in a headset gave them a digital countdown (he used his fingers) and then the host delivered some prepared remarks, reading them from a TelePrompTer. Then he turned toward Cozzano and asked him a question about Middle East policy.

This was a hard pitch. The politics of the Israeli/Palestinian question had been dissected and a.n.a.lyzed to an impossibly minute degree, over decades, by persons whose sole function in life was to know everything about these issues. Every squiggle and jog in the contour of Israel's border had its experts, who knew about everything that had happened in that place since the time of the pharaoh. West Bank settlement and the status of the PLO had become more arcane than the concept of the Trinity in the early church: every conceivable idea had already been come up with, and its ramifications worked out and a.n.a.lyzed. Of all the millions of possible opinions one could have on these subjects, there were only a few that a presidential candidate could get away with having, and in order merely to explain these opinions the candidate had to master a new vocabulary and even a new form of logic that did not really apply anywhere else. The best way to trip up a governor who was running for president was to ask him a seemingly simple, innocuous question about the Middle East and then wait for him to hang himself.

Cozzano maneuvered through it perfectly, delivering an answer that was seemingly erudite; that hit all thekey buzzwords that would prevent him from being vilified by Jewish organizations; and yet was so vague and imprecise that it said practically nothing at all. Like compulsory figure in an ice-skating compet.i.tion, it was devoid of content and not much fun to look at, but to the initiate, it was an extremely impressive display of technical skill.

By the time he was finished, it was time to break for a commercial. The host made a witty, self-deprecating remark about how dull the show had been up to this point and then promised that the rest would be more lively.

The students applauded. The director, staring at a monitor, turned to the performers and said, "You're clear."

Cozzano turned toward the table and poured himself half a gla.s.s of water. He was just about to jump into some small talk with the host when a voice came out of the darkness behind the television lights.

"Governor Cozzano, Frank Boyle from The Boston Globe. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but I just got a call on my portable phone here from our correspondent who's following your daughter in Minnesota. He called from the lobby of the hotel where she is staying in Minneapolis. Apparently, Mary Catherine was late for an appearance at Macalester College. All the press went back to her hotel, and the floor where her room was is swarming with cops and detectives. Our correspondent talked to one of these detectives on background, and he said that apparently she was a.s.saulted in the hallway by Floyd Wayne Vishniak. He managed to get past her Secret Service men and put a bullet into her head and Mary Catherine bled to death right there in the hallway."

A hundred feet away, Cy Ogle, perched in the Eye of Cy, sat and watched William A. Cozzano's bio readouts go ballistic.

The television monitor in the Eye of Cy was patched into the pool feed from the cameras in the auditorium, and Ogle couldn't help watching it. Cozzano's face had turned deathly pale as Frank Boyle of the Globe told his story, and had now gone red. His eyes had become red and glistening too. And Ogle could see from the bio monitors that Cozzano's heart rate had gone up to 172, almost three times the norm. His blood pressure was explosively high.

"Jesus Christ," Ogle said out loud, "this could only be the work of Jeremiah Freel!"

He looked back at the television monitor, but Cozzano wasn't there anymore. Just an empty chair. Then the camera wheeled around, spinning past the host and then past an array of lights, cameras, technicians, and other stuff that was never supposed to be on camera. Finally the camera centered itself on the back of William A, Cozzano, who was striding into the crowd of TV people, print reporters, campaign aides, and Secret Service who filled the s.p.a.ce between the stage and the front row of seats. Most of these people jumped out of his way instinctively. But a couple of men in suits, displaying considerable physical bravery, closed ranks in front of Cozzano and prevented him from charging into the auditorium.

In the background, a disturbance was making its way up the aisle as a man shoved his way toward the exit.

Apparently this was Frank Boyle of the Globe. Cozzano had gone after him, and he had decided to get out of the building.

Throughout the campaign, Ogle had prided himself on being ready for anything. But he hadn't been ready for the return of Freel. Ogle took a deep breath, tried to still his own heart, and then put his hands on the control panel and set about calming Cozzano.

Cozzano was in front of the stage having a conversation with his Secret Service men. They were all talking into their shirt cuffs and holding their hands over their earpieces, trying to hear each other over the murmur of the shocked and scared students.

A woman with press credentials stepped close to Cozzano. "Governor? I'm with the Globe. And we don't have anyone named Frank Boyle."

The head of the Secret Service detail, listening to his earplug, shook his head conclusively and caught Cozzano's eye. "It was a total fabrication," he said. "Mary Catherine showed up at Macalester College on time and is speaking at this moment."

Cozzano, suddenly, was calm and collected. He shook his head, seemed to forget that anything had happened, and returned to his seat on the stage.

"Would you like to delay-" the host said, as the sound man was fixing Cozzano's microphone."No," Cozzano said. "Let's continue as planned."

"Are you sure? You must be very upset."

"I'm fine," Cozzano said. "Why should I be upset?"

The headline of the next day's edition of the New York Post read, "WHY SHOULD I BE UPSET?".

COZZANO NOT BOTHERED BY "MURDER" OF HIS OWN DAUGHTER.

The President, delivering off-the-cuff remarks in the aisle of Air Force One, said that he was shocked and disgusted by the impostor who had delivered the fake news to Cozzano.

At the same time, though, he could not help but find it strange, and just a bit disturbing, that a man who, to all appearances, had just lost his own daughter, would agree to continue with what was, after all, nothing more than a campaign event, the sole purpose of which was to sc.r.a.pe up more votes. Surely, he said, there were limits that should be observed, for the sake of decency.

Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane made a surprise appearance in a hotel bar where a number of reporters had gathered - not just to drink, but because they had received a tip from McLane staffers that Tip might feel a bit thirsty around eleven o'clock.

Coincidentally, the evening news happened to be running on the big projection TV over the bar at the time. A football game had been on until a few minutes previously, but money had changed hands between Marcus Drasher and the bartender, and now the news was on - to the chagrin of several fans along the bar who had not brought nearly as much cash as Drasher.

McLane and the reporters engaged in some friendly banter, but everyone turned toward the television set when the image of William A. Cozzano appeared on the screen. The cameras had caught the entire thing and the feed had gone out all over the country. They watched Cozzano going into shock as he heard the false story about his daughter. They watched him jumping out of his chair in a blind rage, and they watched him sitting back down a minute later, calm and collected. The actual content of the two-hour discussion received no coverage whatsoever.

All of the reporters looked at McLane. McLane turned away from the TV and looked nonchalant.

Finally a reporter asked him what he thought of the whole thing.

"Well, I don't really want to talk about it," he said, "the whole episode is really distasteful. But now I see that the media have grabbed on to this whole thing - in the typical way that they do - looking for the sensational and paying no attention to content. . . and I can see that now the media are trying to take this event and turn it into some kind of a test of Cozzano's psychological fitness to be president."

"Do you think he looked presidential?" asked a reporter from a rabidly conservative Catholic magazine.

McLane shrugged. "People say I'm a hothead," he said. "People say I'm out of control and that I can't handle the pressure of the campaign. So maybe I shouldn't be the one to talk, but I've learned that the world is full of crackpots who will shout crazy stuff at you. I mean, they are everywhere. And you can't let them get under your skin. If you're going to physically a.s.sault every lunatic who babbles some nonsense to you, then you're not going to make much of a president - and if that's how you handle a nut case, then how are you going to deal with foreign leaders?"

55.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, TWO WEEKS BEFORE ELECTION DAY, THE standings looked like this: COZZANO 59%.

PRESIDENT 8%.

MCLANE 18%.

UNDECIDED 10%.

OTHER 5%.

An obscure Washington D.C.-based organization called the American a.s.sociation of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths staged a press conference at which a videotape was shown to the press and then disseminated to all of the networks. The videotape was a series of outtakes from Cozzano's campaign, a blooper film if you will. It started out with some excerpts from an interview in which he was still suffering from some speech impediments. From there it moved onward through the campaign, showing Cozzano during commercial breaks, bantering with reporters on airport runways, walking down the aisle of his campaign plane to the bathroom, doing sound checks before debates, and so on. The one thing that all of these takes had in common was that, in each of them, Cozzano did something wrong: slurred some words or tripped over his own feet. One particularly striking clip showed Cozzano working a crowd at a rally in Newark. A woman handed her baby to Cozzano for a kiss and he nearly dropped it, seemingly overcome by a temporary seizure. "I-I-I-I'm sorry," he stuttered, and handed it back to her. The conclusion reached by the experts of the American a.s.sociation of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths was that Cozzano was still suffering from "severe neurological deficits" and was not fit to be president.

Excerpts from the videotape were broadcast repeatedly on virtually every television news program in the United States, in many cases as the evening's top story.

Wednesday, October 23: COZZANO 51%.

PRESIDENT 10%.

MCLANE 21%.

UNDECIDED 13%.

OTHER 5%.

In Chicago, a press conference was held by Tommy Markovich, a venerable Chicago sportscaster who had been well known to sports fans in that city during the late sixties and early seventies. He had retired in 1980. Markovich said that his conscience had been troubling him about something. He showed an excerpt of a Bears-Vikings game from the year 1972. Late in the game, the Vikings were leading by ten points and the Bears were driving from their own thirty with only one minute left in the game. William A. Cozzano, who was a tight end, went out on a screen pa.s.s, caught the ball, and found himself out in the open with nothing between him and the goal line except for hard-frozen turf. He ran un.o.bstructed all the way to the Viking ten, where, inexplicably, the ball squirted loose from his arms and dribbled back upfield for a few yards, where a pursuing Viking fell on it. It had been a famous gaffe at the time, not so much because it was significant to the outcome of the game (it wasn't), but because Cozzano was known for being a steady and reliable sort of player who didn't make mental mistakes.

Now, a couple of decades later, the shriveled old man who had called that game on TV wanted to point something out: the Vikings had been favored to win that game by ten points. By dropping the ball, Cozzano had preserved the point spread.

Thursday, October 24: COZZANO 45%PRESIDENT 12%.

MCLANE 25%.

UNDECIDED 14%.

OTHER 4%.

In an exclusive interview with CBS Sports, a noted author of books on the Mob said that Nicodemo ("Nicky Freckles") Costanza, an important Chicago Mob figure who ran a huge illegal sports betting operation during the sixties and seventies, had made something like twenty million dollars off the 1972 Bears-Vikings game - money he would have forfeited if William A. Cozzano had simply held on to the ball long enough to reach the goal line.

A local TV reporter for one of the network affiliates in Chicago released the results of a two-month investigation into connections between the Cozzano family and the Mafia. The centerpiece was a vast family tree - actually, several family trees intertwined into a thicket - so big that it had been drawn, in minute letters and lines, on a four-by-eight foot sheet of plywood. The extended Cozzano family was shown in blue. Mob families were shown in red. The family trees went all the way back to the twelfth-century Genoa and showed that William A. Cozzano, John Gotti, Al Capone, and Benito Mussolini were all distantly related.

The Cozzano campaign issued a press release stating that the American a.s.sociation of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths had not existed until some two weeks previously, and appeared to have a membership of three, all of whom had shown up at the press conference two days ago as experts urging Cozzano to withdraw from the race. One of these three was a former Army doctor who had been discharged under other than honourable circ.u.mstances. One of them no longer practiced because he could no longer obtain malpractice insurance. The third had declared bankruptcy after fifty of his patients filed a cla.s.s-action suit against him complaining of botched breast implants.

The Cozzano campaign also issued a blooper reel of its own, showing the inc.u.mbent President and Tip McLane tripping over their shoelaces and slurring words, and suggested that these two might want to have neurological exams of their own.