God, how Dobbs had hated him, still hated him.
But if Reagan had merely killed the nation, it was Bush who was now attempting to bury it, and Dobbs hated him even more than he had his predecessor. In fact, it was a good thing he was no longer part of the White House Secret Service detail; he might have killed this president himself.
Got a domestic crisis?
Just bomb a foreign country.
Follow in the footsteps of the Great Communicator, who’d used military force against Lebanon in 1982, and Grenada in 1983, and Libya in 1986 and finally in Honduras in 1988. The Great Communicator. Who’d once sent a Bible as a gift to the Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of a Moslem nation. Bombs and bibles, how stupid could a person get?
So along comes Haji Bush, hero to millions, conqueror of Iraq, a fearsome nation with the gross national product of Kentucky, still bloated with his Commander-in-Chief importance, still managing to ignore the minor problems like dope, crime, collapsing cities, and civil rights so long as the Big Parade went on and on and on. The Washington newspapers were full of scathing editorials about him running off to New York where, golly, he could stand before that lady in the harbor on the Fourth of July, and, gee, wrap himself in the flag yet another time, and, wow, take advantage of all those big patriotic sound bites in an election year.
Reagan and Bush.
Two presidents too many.
Dobbs hated them both.
“Here’re your plane tickets,” Phillips said. “Enjoy the trip.”
They each had different agendas.
Sonny was here to observe and to record.
Elita was here on an outing.
In the distance, they could both see the Statue of Liberty sitting far out on the water, the sky clear behind it. But Sonny was registering a sign advising that Battery Park closed at 1:00 A.M., and Elita was noticing a pair of lovers strolling hand in hand, one white, the other Asian. On her right, Elita saw a man selling green, foam-rubber, Statue-of-Liberty crowns, and wondered if she would appear childish buying one. On his left, Sonny saw a low, greyish-brick building with the metallic letters UNITED STATES COAST GUARD across its facade — and wondered if there would be Coast Guard cruisers circling the island when the President made his Independence Day speech.
They bought tickets for the ferry in a round, red brick building that reminded Elita of a sun-washed cloister, and Sonny of a roofless fortress. The tickets cost six dollars each. Sonny had a camera around his neck. He posed her in front of a large posterlike sign headlined PLANNING YOUR VISIT TO LIBERTY ISLAND.
They boarded the ferry at two-fifteen.
Elita was wearing running shorts, a white T-shirt, and sandals. Sonny noticed that she wasn’t wearing a bra. He was wearing chinos, a striped polo shirt and jogging shoes. She thought he looked exceedingly handsome, dressed so casually. She did not know that he had dressed to blend in with what he’d suspected would be a tourist crowd.
There was a babble of foreign tongues everywhere around them. Elita found the mix of nationalities exciting; Sonny found them boring. He understood many of the languages, but did not reveal this fact to Elita. A French girl reading aloud from a guidebook to New York City was informing her friends that the island they were heading toward was once called Bedloe’s Island and was the site of the old Fort Hood, the outlines of which now formed the starlike base of the statue. Sonny found her voice monotonous. A German girl approached a man whom she’d heard speaking in her own language, and asked if she could have a single cigarette — eine einzige Zigarette, bitte — because there was no place to buy any on the boat. Sonny found her bold. The man gave her the cigarette she’d begged, and then, in English, asked, “Do you have fire?”
“Danke ja, ich habe,” she said, and went back to where she’d been sitting on the port side of the ferry.
The ferry was called Miss Liberty. It was moving out from Battery Park now in a southwesterly direction, approaching toward the distant copper statue from her right, where she clutched a tablet in the crook of her arm...
“... sur laquelle est écrite la date du quatre juillet, dix-sept cent soixante-seize...”
“How thrilling it must have been,” Elita said over the sound of the French girl’s voice. “Approaching her as they came into the harbor.”
“Yes,” Sonny said.
“The immigrants, I mean.”
“Yes.”
He was wondering how he would get back to the mainland once he’d accomplished his mission.
The soaring downtown towers of the financial district were behind them now; the island and Liberty were coming closer and closer. A Japanese girl sat beside him and began changing the film in her camera. She was wearing a T-shirt that read DISNEYLAND, TOKYO. Her friend said something to her in Japanese, which Sonny could not understand. A Hassidic Jew in a black suit, flat black hat, and snowy white beard stood at the railing, staring beyond Liberty to where Ellis Island sat on the horizon. The French girl kept babbling from the guide book...
“... fond de la base jusqu’à la torche est quarante-six virgule cinq mètres. Pour avoir accès à la couronne, il faut monter trois cent cinquante-quatre...”
The pilot of the ferry headed her straight for marker thirty-one, then brought her around so that she slowly revealed the statue first in profile, then in a three-quarter view, and then dead-on, the folds of her garments cascading to the pedestal in a flow of green copper, the left arm cradling the tablet, the sleeve of the raised right arm falling back, the golden torch in her right hand capturing the rays of the early afternoon sun, the sky behind her a vibrant blue. Viewing the statue as the boat circled her, revealing her as if in separate frames of motion picture film, Elita felt a fierce patriotic pride mixed with a sense of place and history. Sonny felt nothing.
The boat circled the island and came into the dock. In the distance, Elita could see the American flag flying from a tall flagpole. This, too, thrilled her. Sonny was busy looking down at a sign on the dock:
They came down the gangway and onto the dock. A high shed-like structure opened onto a wooden walkway that led to a huge brick-paved circle at the center of which stood the flagpole Elita had seen from the deck of the ferry. A tree-flanked esplanade — similarly paved with brick and ornamented with rectangles outlined in blue tile — led to the rear of the statue, standing tall on her pediment, a seeming halo of light around her crown.
“What happened to you at the train station?” Elita asked. She’d been dying to ask this from the moment he’d called, but had only now found the courage to do so.
“First, I couldn’t find a porter,” he said. “Next, I ran into a guy I went to Princeton with, and he dragged me off to...”
“But I was standing there waiting for...”
“Well, I had your number. I figured you knew I’d call.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“But I did.”
“It’s been three days.”
“I lost the slip of paper.”
“What slip of paper?”
“The one I wrote the number on.”
“Then why didn’t you look it up in the phone book?”
“I didn’t know your mother’s first name. There are dozens of Randalls in the Manhattan...”