Эд Горман - Stranglehold

As he spoke, his assistant, Doris Kelly, watched him. She was seated on the edge of the small divan where staffers relaxed sometimes. Her hands were tight little fists and her knuckles bone white.

“Look,” Manning said into the phone, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. It’s just that you’re about the tenth caller in the past couple of hours. You’re just doing your job and I should understand that. But I’m telling you the truth, all right?” Pause. “Thanks for saying that. I appreciate it.” Pause. “You, too. Bye.”

Away from Natalie and his servitude Manning was a competent, collected man. As he started to speak his eyes met Doris’s. “I’ll bring you up to date, Dev. There was a scene this morning. Natalie called. She wanted to see me. Urgent. I canceled a meeting so we could talk. I had a sense of what she was going to say, but it was still a shock. She came to my office and told me that a reporter had stopped her assistant Winnie and was asking questions about Susan and me — about our marriage and whether we slept in the same room. All those things. So then Natalie managed to track down Susan and demand that she come over to the office, too.”

He stood up. His anger was harsh in his eyes and voice. “Then when Susan came, Natalie told us that we need to start being seen in public together. Then Natalie got crazy. Everybody was shouting. There was a reporter in the lobby. I doubt she could hear the exact words, but she certainly heard all the anger.”

“I don’t like the sound of that, either,” I said. “Did you hear any of it, Doris?”

“Yes. I have a small office outside of David’s. I’m his receptionist, among other things.”

“She’s everything, Dev. I’m the most disorganized man on the planet. I couldn’t get along without her.” He nodded to Ben. “I just needed to get out of the office. So I came over here to tell you folks what happened. That reporter must have filed a story about it already because that was another reporter who called me here.”

“We have to be at the college in twenty minutes, David.”

Manning smiled down at Doris and said, “See what I mean about how she keeps me organized?”

After they were gone, Ben said, “I’ll start working on a press release.”

I went to one of the computers and started checking every local news source I could find. One newspaper, four radio stations. Two of them carried stories of an angry exchange between Congresswoman Cooper and her stepmother.

“Two sources have the story, Ben.”

“Everybody over at the Duffy campaign is probably drinking champagne and snorting coke and fucking each other’s brains out.”

“Let’s go join ’em.”

He held up a hand. “I don’t want to smile.”

“All right.”

He laughed. “You’re right. If we could catch Duffy all coked up and hitting on some seventeen-year-old volunteer...”

“Dream on.”

He went back to banging out the press release. Hunched over his computer, his tie askew, a yellow pencil behind his ear, he looked like a reporter for a big-city newspaper of the forties or fifties, one of those hard-nosed guys in a film noir. He was one of the few people I knew who could write and talk at the same time. “That Doris. I always go for those kinds of looks. The sexy librarian. But I could never get near anybody who looks like her. I think there are certain types who are attracted to certain other types. And whatever her type is, my type doesn’t do it for her.” He blew out a breath. “I’m babbling.”

“Gee, I hadn’t noticed.”

He paused long enough to flip me the bird. Then: “I’ll finish this release and get a couple reporters over here and we’ll talk it through. We have to answer it. ‘All campaigns have spirited moments and this was just one of ours.’ I’ll make the argument about campaign tactics and say it didn’t have anything to do with the marriage.”

I spent the next half hour working on the campaign. I’d recently seen a documentary about my chosen profession. The script made an interesting point early on. Political campaigns have been with us for centuries, dating back to when a segment of Greeks had pushed to banish or kill Socrates. They had tried to discredit and smear him and it had worked. Political parties today did the same thing with less dire consequences. What I studied now were pages of microtargeting, a breakdown of key voting blocs we needed to win over, and how to tailor everything from our direct mail to our billboards to appeal to them.

We were headed into the final push, and that meant our TV and radio expenditures would quadruple. Not only did we have to create commercials that did us good, we had to create commercials that did us no harm. In every election cycle there is a story of a commercial or a series of commercials that damages the candidate who created them. You then spend your time, your desperate frantic time, trying to undo what you’ve done. This happens most often when you’ve made negative charges that are so nasty even some of your supporters find them unacceptable.

I wanted to know which segments we were still having trouble with. Duffy was a hardliner but not a fool. He ran a careful, persuasive campaign that appealed to voting segments across the board. His chief vulnerability was that he’d been a lobbyist for twenty years before moving back to his hometown and running for office. We were happy to remind voters that he had worked as a hired gun for some pretty odious people and corporations, including one that had replaced local workers with a large number of undocumented ones. We’d decided early on to keep body-punching him with his history. By contrast we reminded voters of how much Susan had done for her district. We’d always known the race would tighten, and the internals we were seeing bore that out. We still had a safe lead. The task now would be to keep it.

Ben finished his press release and we went over it. We acknowledged that there had been a “discussion” between campaign staffers that had gotten heated, but then, “What campaign doesn’t have heated discussions now and then?” We could deny that it had ever happened, that somebody had made up this “fight” story to discredit us, but that would only keep the incident alive. The press would push harder and harder to make us admit the truth. This way, with any luck, they’d quote our release and go on to something else.

The other staffers were gone. Lunch hours were staggered and there was work to do all over the district. During all this Kristin was in and out. She’d asked me twice if I knew where Susan was. There was another radio interview show she was supposed to be doing later this afternoon. I couldn’t help her, of course. The final time she hurried back into the office she said: “She just called me on my cell.”

I swiveled around in the chair. “Susan, you mean?”

“Right. She said she’d call the station at four and would do the interview.”

“Did she say where she was?”

“No.”

“Great.”

Her gaze moved from me to Ben and back to me. “Do I get to know what’s going on here? Why wouldn’t Susan tell me where she was?”

“I don’t know.”

She glanced at Ben. “He’s lying, isn’t he?”

“I can’t tell. He won’t tell me what’s going on, but maybe he doesn’t know where she is.”

“This whole thing is coming apart, isn’t it?”

“Kristin—”

“Don’t play that ‘Kristin’ bullshit, Dev. What’s going on? You’re the boss, but Ben and I are running this campaign. We asked you to deal with Susan only because you seem to be able to get along with Natalie. We deserve to know what the hell is going on.”

Ben said, “I agree, Dev. I’d say if you don’t trust us enough to tell us what you’ve found out, then why did you hire us in the first place?”