“So you’ll represent me?” he asked.
“If you want me to, I will.”
“I do,” he said.
“I don’t have the connections old Pete McCrae had.”
“You’ll do fine,” he said. “Don’t worry, Victor. You’ll make out just fine.”
And that’s how we left it, Chet Concannon patting my arm to help brace my courage as I faced the coming ordeal, as if I were the defendant and he were the lawyer, instead of the other way around. He opened the door and gestured for me to precede him out of the office. I had just stepped through the opening when I heard a loud voice rasp through the hushed Talbott, Kittredge hallways.
“Hell, I’m hungry. Hungry.” It was a sharp, emphatic voice, the voice of an overzealous lieutenant colonel or a college basketball coach. “I’m too hungry to work just yet. We have all night.” It was a voice of authority, an exuberant, demanding voice. “Let’s get out of this dump and find something to eat.”
I recognized the voice right off. I had been listening to it all day. It was the voice of Jimmy Moore.
6
“LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING,” said Jimmy Moore in his insistent voice, poking his cigarette right at me. “Those fat goons in the mayor’s office have no idea what is happening. No idea. They can’t understand it. They see the numbers, same as I do. If the primary was right now, even with the indictment, I’d beat that bastard by a hundred thousand votes, easy. Easy. And he knows it, he knows it, but he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know my secret. He doesn’t know where my power lies. But I’ll tell you where.”
He took a drag from his cigarette, held between the tips of his thumb and first three fingers.
“It’s in my passion,” he said with a violent expulsion of smoke. “Just like Samson’s strength was in his hair. If ever I lose the passion, well then stick a fork in me, I’m done. I might as well retire to Palm Springs and play golf every day. Too bad for the mayor I never cared for the game, right, Chet?”
“That’s right, Councilman,” said Chester Concannon.
We were at DiLullo Centro, a shining, famous bistro across the street from the Academy of Music, where a stylish crowd greeted each other warmly as they hopped from table to table. Everyone seemed to know at least someone there, and the one who everyone seemed to know was Jimmy Moore.
Moore was a thick-shouldered man of about fifty, short gray hair cut like Caesar’s, clean-shaven, with a round, angry face. He wore a flash Italian suit, designed for men thinner and taller. It was too tight on him and, in it, he looked nothing like the draped, statuesque mannequins in magazine ads. He had transformed it from a suit of elegance to a suit of armor. Embroidered on the white cuff of his shirt were the initials JDM. He had the intense eyes of an athlete and sucked attention to himself as he spoke, grabbed it with those eyes and the vicious certainty in his voice. He moved quickly, aggressively, head turning in sudden jerks like a giant bird. When he looked at me, it was as though he was looking into me and there was a sudden and intense connection. For that instant there was no one else in the room but him and me. And then he looked away, at someone else, and the connection was broken. But, even so, his animalistic power lingered like an afterimage burned onto the cornea, leaving no doubt that here was a dangerous man.
There were seven of us at a large, round table in DiLullo’s, having just finished a lavish meal. Next to Jimmy sat his wife, Leslie, grasping tightly to the stem of her champagne glass, the puffed shoulders of her bright red dress shining like huge apples. She was still a pretty woman, auburn hair done up in all kinds of wing things, smooth shiny skin tight over sharp cheekbones, a dramatic neck, but the years with Jimmy Moore’s passion had clearly not been easy ones and her face showed the wear. Next to Leslie Moore was her sister, Renee, a heavier, more bitter version of Mrs. Moore, whose mission in life, it appeared, was to keep Leslie’s champagne glass filled. Then sat Chuckie Lamb, Concannon, myself, and Prescott, who had encouraged me to have the champagne but had taken none for himself. Jimmy Moore was holding court here, his voice loud and rich, his strong large hand warmly shaking those of his admirers as they came to the table paying respect.
“The mayor thinks he can destroy my reputation with this indictment, but he’s dreaming. Dreaming. His stooges in the so-called Department of Justice can try to sully my name, they can drag me through their mud, hell let them. Let them. I got enough to kick their butts halfway to Jersey and still become mayor. They all think I’m doing this with mirrors, my numbers rising like a rocket ship, my fund-raising shooting through the roof. Over two million in the last year for CUP, my group, not to mention the fat stream of donations I have going for my youth treatment centers. And let me tell you something, I got some big guns giving, sure, but I get more ten dollar donations, twenty dollars, fifty dollars, more than anybody. Nobody understands it. Nobody. I was just a normal political hack like every other slob in City Hall when Nadine died, just another grubby councilman looking for his piece of the pie. But when she died, when they killed her with their poisons, murdered her, fuck. Fuck.”
He slammed his cigarette into an ashtray and lit another with his gold lighter. Leslie Moore drained her glass of champagne and reached for the bottle herself. There was a long silence. The Moores’ daughter, Nadine, had died of an overdose of barbiturates, it was in all the papers five or six years back, a teenager still when she started playing around with a dangerous crowd, experimenting with whatever was available. And then one night at a party, after too much cocaine and too many of the wrong pills, she collapsed and died. Moore was on the evening news, crying first and then shouting about vengeance, railing at the drug dealers who were destroying the city’s youth. A few weeks later he started his campaign to wipe them out, neighborhood by neighborhood, crack house by crack house. There were marches, there were raids, there were mysterious fires and unexplained deaths. He had started a war.
After a drag from his cigarette, Moore continued. “I’ve been building my new coalition day by day. I speak in the neighborhoods, I do the good work, I open the athletic centers, the shelters, my youth treatment centers, but it’s not the speeches, it’s not the buildings, it’s not the programs that draw my support. These people, they look into my eyes and you know what they see?”
“Their taxes being raised,” said Prescott.
Jimmy Moore laughed, a genuine, head thrown back laugh. “My lawyer the Republican wouldn’t vote for me on a bet, I know that.”
“I can’t vote for you,” Prescott said. “I live in Merion.”
“Of course you do. But I didn’t hire you for your vote. I hired you because you’re going to kick the government’s ass.”
“We’ll do what we can.”
“No, you’ll do what you have to. But let me tell you, Bill. What the people see in my eyes is real. It can’t be faked. You won’t find a white politician in the entire country with the following I have in the black community and that’s because they know the pain I’ve felt, they know the hate I feel, they know I will rid them of their greatest threat or die trying. What they see is my passion.”
He leaned over and draped one of his thick, tightly clothed arms over his wife’s shoulders.
“It’s no different than what I felt when I first saw Leslie, standing in that crowd outside the schoolyard, with her little Catholic school skirt and her saddle shoes. She was so shy, she was, hiding out at the back of the group, unable to meet my stare from the other side of the fence. I was in my football uniform when I first saw her, on the practice field, and my passion spoke and I knew. I wouldn’t let anything get in the way. Not her mother, not her little private school boyfriend with the fancy sweaters. Nothing.”