Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

“I don’t know,” Valerie said. “I’ll text him.”

Headley waved a dismissive hand. “Never mind. I don’t know what help he’d be anyway.”

Valerie, who had been standing in the middle of the room, took a step closer. “Mr. Mayor.” A pause. “Richard.”

He stopped pacing at the sound of his name, looked at her, and waited.

“It may not be my place to speak to this,” she said.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” the mayor said.

“I say this with the best of intentions.”

“Go ahead, Valerie. Just say it.”

“About Glover.”

“What about Glover?”

“I think... I’m worried about his self-esteem.”

The mayor cocked his head slightly to one side. His look bordered on amused. “Self-esteem?”

“I know we talked about this the other day, that his real talents lie in other areas, but you’re awfully hard on him. He’s trying so hard to please you, but he can’t seem to get anything right in your eyes. And I’m not just worried about him. It’s you I’m worried about.”

“Why?”

“Things get out. People talk. People observe. Moving forward, we’re working very hard to craft an image of you that voters will like.” She cleared her throat. “Like more . They see the way you treat Glover, they form an opinion. That you’re, well, something of a bully where your own son is concerned. It doesn’t play well.”

Headley grunted.

Valerie stood a little straighter, steeling herself for the onslaught she thought was probably coming. “Look, you’re a complex individual. You can be tough, even cruel. But there is another side to you, and I’ve seen it. You can be compassionate. I know there are things you care about. The environment, for one. But it’s not enough to care about the planet. You have to care about the people on it.”

Headley looked bemused.

Valerie continued. “There are going to be more stories about you moving forward. Profiles. We’re looking for someone else to ghost-write your bio, now that Barbara Matheson has taken a pass.”

Headley snorted derisively. “One of Glover’s bright ideas.”

“Maybe it was a better one than we think. She could have done a good job if we’d agreed to give her a bit of leeway.”

He shook his head.

“As I was saying, there will be more profiles, many of which we’ll have no control over, and that means people who work for and with you will be approached. There’s a good chance a lot of them will speak off the record, especially if they feel they’ve been insulted or slighted by you. They’ll talk about what they’ve seen. How you’ve treated Glover might be one of the things that comes out. And it will reflect badly on you. The fact is, there’s already talk about it. There’s even a Twitter account that—”

Headley raised a hand, silencing her. He slowly wandered behind his desk and sat in his plush, oversized chair. He lowered his head briefly, placing his palms on his forehead before looking up again.

“Okay, so I’ll never win Father of the Year,” he said. “But the fact that I have him here, working in this administration, is to try to make up for the missteps I’ve made over the years. If he were anyone else... I’d have fired him by now, most likely.”

“He’s a bright kid, Richard. He’s the most tech-savvy guy I know. Policy, okay, that’s not his strong suit. He’s too young, doesn’t have the experience. Put him somewhere where he shines, twenty-four/seven. Like polling and data analysis. He just did a new hire down there. Liberate him from being part of the inner circle. Let him do his thing without having to make you happy every day.”

The mayor appeared to be considering Valerie’s words. He looked away and said, quietly, “He... humiliated me. It took me years to live that down.”

Valerie sighed. “You’re better than this.”

“You can bet, when and if I announce for anything, they’ll dig up that clip of him crying for the cameras.”

“He was a kid,” Valerie said. “He was a kid who watched his mother die while you were out—”

She stopped herself.

Headley gave her a cold stare. “—fucking her nurse?”

Valerie nodded slowly. “I might have put it another way. But yes.”

The mayor’s face softened. “My own father was a son of a bitch.”

“I know.”

“Treated me like shit.” He shook his head. “I hated him. I still hate him, and he’s been dead for sixteen years. The shit he made me do. But at the same time, I’m grateful, you know?”

“I... think so,” Valerie said.

“He gave me the strength to make hard decisions. I had to execute his orders or face his wrath. It made me tough.” He paused, struck by a memory. “One time, he made me evict this couple. The husband had lost his job and his wife had just had a baby. Had some sort of health complications. But they were four months behind in the rent. We were a business, not a charity. They had to go.”

Valerie looked as though she’d caught wind of a sewage leak. “Jesus, you tell that story like you’re proud of it. God help us if that finds its way into your bio.”

Headley blinked, as if not realizing how the tale made him look. “Yeah, okay, I take your point. But it was not the point I was trying to make. I learned to do what had to be done. I grew a spine working for my dad.”

“Except when it came to standing up to him. You could have said no when he told you to put that family onto the street.”

Headley gave his assistant a withering gaze. She just wasn’t getting it.

“All I’m trying to do with Glover is make him tough, too.”

“I see,” Valerie said.

“God, you’re looking at me just the way his mother used to,” the mayor said.

Now it was Valerie’s turn to gaze witheringly. “You don’t have to make the same mistakes with your own son that your father made with you.”

The look he gave her was a mix of contempt and admiration. “You got some balls talking to me this way.”

“If you don’t want to hear the truth, Richard, hire someone else.”

His mouth slowly morphed into a crooked smile before his face once again turned grim. “Set it up. A presser, with the chief and that smug asshole from Homeland.”

“Maybe not Homeland,” Valerie advised. “We don’t want to scare everyone to death. You put Homeland on stage and we’re talking terrorism, no doubt about it.”

Headley gave that a thought. “Okay. And we better bring in what’s-his-name, our elevator guy, in case there are any technical questions.”

“On it,” she said. As she went for the door, it opened. Glover strode into the room.

“There’s been another one,” he said breathlessly. “Another elevator tragedy.”

Headley looked at his son pityingly, then at Valerie. “Breaking news.”

She gave her boss a sharp, disapproving look that said, You just can’t help yourself, can you?

Alexander Vesolov, the Russian ambassador to the United States, was walking through Grand Central Terminal when he turned into Hudson News.

He perused the front pages of the various newspapers and settled on a copy of the Wall Street Journal . He picked it up, his eye immediately going to a story, above the fold, about the death of Dr. Fanya Petrov in an elevator mishap. Shouldered into the piece was a one-column sidebar story with the headline: “Is it Safe to Ride a City Elevator?”

He took a ten-dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to the woman behind the counter. Once he’d pocketed his change, he folded the paper once and tucked it under his arm. He did not head back out into the terminal, instead deciding to peruse the periodicals. Hudson News had hundreds of magazines to choose from, as well as a selection of books.