It wouldn’t be anything good, that was certain. When he didn’t show up for work tonight, no doubt someone would check his apartment. At least he had had the good sense to leave the Mustang parked in front of the joint. That simpleton Freddy had wanted to take it back to the FBI lab. Harrison had told Hooper and Freddy in no uncertain terms what he thought of their intellectual ability.
His disappearance would not be something Freeman McNally would ignore. What was it he had said about Fat Tony Anselmo — you can find out anything if you know who to ask and have enough money?
Harrison stared out the window at the manicured lawn and trimmed trees.
The day was dismal. Overcast, threatening to rain.
And he was sitting here in plain view of anybody out there with a set of binoculars. He lowered the window blind and pulled the string to shut the louvers.
Then he threw himself full-length on the bed.
Ten months of this shit and he was still sweating it. Would it ever end?
“Did you watch any TV this morning?” Mergenthaler demanded of Jack Yocke on Monday morning. The older man stood at the opening of the cubicle with a wad of newspapers in his hand. He always read the New York Times, the Chicago Herald Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times every morning when he arrived for work.
“Fifteen minutes or so.”
“Those idiots are canonizing Bush and he hasn’t even had the decency to die. I got NBC’s eulogy with my morning coffee. If he lives we’ll have our very first saint in the White House. The Democrats won’t even bother to have a convention in ’92.”
“Haven’t you heard? The Democrats are talking about running Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley in ’92.”
“Stop laughing! I’m not kidding! I don’t care how maudlin and saccharin those television twits get after he dies, if he dies. But if he doesn’t, we’re going to have to live with a politician the public gets all weepy just thinking about. Saint George. Yuck! Turns my stomach.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’ll be that bad,” Jack Yocke said slowly. “The public’s memory is short. By ’92 the Republicans will be spending millions trying to remind the voters that George almost gave his life for his country.”
“Humph! By God, I hope you’re right. This damn country won’t work if we gotta start being nice to the politicians. And it won’t work if we have only one viable political party.” Mergenthaler stalked away toward his glassed-in office.
All across America this Monday morning the wheels of commerce turned slowly, if at all. Parents let children stay home from school and took a sick day themselves. The televisions stayed on. From coast to coast streets, stores, and factories were nearly deserted as everyone participated in the national drama by watching the talking heads on television.
Normal programming was preempted. Every fact, rumor, and tidbit about the shootdown and the President’s condition was played and replayed, experts discussed the massive manhunt, politicians went from network to network for cameo appearances to assure the viewing audiences that the wheels of government were continuing to turn and to urge the public to remain calm.
Why these officials felt it necessary to urge the public to keep its wits was never explained. The only people who seemed outraged beyond endurance were a few elderly ladies who telephoned their local television stations to voice bitter complaint about the preemption of their favorite soap operas. Even so, there were fewer of these calls than television executives expected.
Amidst the speculation about the identity and motives of the assassins, a new element was slowly introduced. Tentatively, with circumspection at first, Dan Quayle began to get airtime.
He had appeared in the White House press room at seven-thirty a.m., in time to be carried live on all the morning shows, said a few carefully prepared words, then embarked in a heavily guarded motorcade for Bethesda Naval Hospital to see the President’s doctors, since Bush was still comatose.
By midmorning the networks were heavily into Quayle. His wife, his kids, his parents, his school chums and former professors back in Indiana, all were paraded before cameras and all mouthed appropriate words. Those that didn’t, didn’t get on the air.
All the networks approached the subject in basically the same way. The popular perception that Quayle was a lightweight airhead was silently refuted by the carefully chosen words and pictures the network chose to air. Quayle was cast in a presidential light, spoken of with deference. Conspicuously absent this morning were the snide asides and giggles up the sleeves and lighthearted try-to-top-this reporting of his public misstatements and bloopers that had characterized media coverage of Dan Quayle since the day Bush chose him as his vice-presidential candidate.
In the Post newsroom Ott Mergenthaler noticed the collective corporate decision to polish Quayle’s image and began making phone calls, trying to pin down producers and executives on why they made this decision.
Over in the Joint Staff spaces of the Pentagon, Toad Tarkington noticed it too. And when Toad noticed something, he quickly made everyone in earshot aware of it. Today, as usual in his new assignment, his listeners were all senior to him in years, rank, and experience, but that didn’t seem to crimp the Toad-man’s style in any significant way.
“Hoo boy, I’m telling you, they’re grooming Danny the Dweeb for the big one. They ought to turn on the TV in George’s room. If he saw this he’d leap out of bed and jog down to the White House.”
“Mr. Tarkington,” the Air Force colonel said in a tired, resigned voice, “please! Must you?”
“This is all a sick joke, right? Quivering Dan Quayle? The pride of the Indiana National Guard? Somebody call me when the commercial comes on. I’m gonna go buy some popcorn.”
“Can it, Toad,” Jake Grafton said. “Don’t you have any work to do?”
“Yessir. As you know, I’m preparing a contingency plan to convert all the A-6s to Agent Orange spray aircraft so we can zap the South American cocaine fields. I figure if we mix the stuff with the gas, we can just fly over the fields with the fuel dumps on and—”
“Back to work.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Judge Snyder was at least seventy, with thin hair and a thick waist and big, hamlike hands. He was tall, about three inches over six feet, but he appeared taller because he moved with that clumsy awkwardness that some big men have. Still, the word that came to most people’s minds after they had met Judge Snyder was “crusty.” Even his wife used that word when describing him to new acquaintances. The young lawyers with fashionably long, styled hair who practiced in front of him would have added another word—“profane”—although no one had ever heard him indulge in salty language in the presence of his wife. Clearly he was not of the generation of the buttoned-down, big-firm Mercedes drivers who constituted the majority of the lawyers who practiced in his courtroom.
When Thanos Liarakos entered the judge’s office at ten o’clock on Monday morning, Snyder had a television going and was reading a newspaper. He held the paper up before him, spread wide, as he leaned back in his heavy swivel chair.
His office was full of books, with briefs and case files stacked everywhere. On the wall behind him was a framed piece of needlework. Inside delicate pink and yellow flower borders were the words SUE THE BASTARDS.
When the door closed Judge Snyder lowered one corner of the paper and frowned at his visitor. “Why aren’t you at home, Liarakos, watching the damned TV with everybody else?”