Джеффри Арчер - The Prodigal Daughter

Edward told her that they could thank heaven for the curiosity value of a woman candidate. His advance team never had to worry about filling any hall where Florentyna was to speak, with potted plants rather than with Granite State voters.

Pete Parkin, who had a good-luck streak with funeral duty, proved that the Vice President had little else to do: he spent more time in the state than Florentyna could. On the eve of the primary Edward was able to show that someone on the Kane team had contacted by phone, letter or personal visit 125,000 of the 147,000 registered Democrats; but, he added, obviously so had Pete Parkin because many of them had remained noncommittal and some even hostile.

Later that night, Florentyna held a rally in Manchester which over three thousand people attended. When Janet told her that tomorrow she would be about one fiftieth of the way through the campaign, Florentyna replied, ‘Or already finished.’ She went to her motel room a little after midnight followed by the camera crews of CBS, NBC, ABC and Cable News and four agents of the Secret Service, all of whom were convinced she was going to win.

The voters of New Hampshire woke up to drifting snow and icy winds. Florentyna spent the day driving from polling place to polling place thanking the party faithful until the last poll closed. At eleven minutes past nine, CBS was the first to tell the national audience that the turnout was estimated at forty-seven percent, which Dan Rather considered high in view of the weather conditions. The early voting pattern showed that the pollsters had proved right: Florentyna and Pete Parkin were running neck and neck, each taking over the lead during the night but never by more than a couple of percentage points. Florentyna sat in her motel room with Edward, Janet, her closest staffers and two Secret Service agents, watching the final results come in.

‘The outcome couldn’t have been closer if they had planned it,’ said Jessica Savitch, who announced the result first for NBC. ‘Senator Kane thirty point five, Vice President Parkin thirty point two, Senator Bill Bradley sixteen point four percent and the rest of the votes scattered among five others who in my opinion,’ added Savitch, ‘needn’t bother to book a hotel room for the next primary.’

‘If the result of the New Hampshire primary turns out to be satisfactory...’

Florentyna left for Massachusetts with 6 delegates committed to her; Pete Parkin had 5. The national press declared no winner but five losers. Only three candidates were seen in Massachusetts, and Florentyna seemed to have buried the bogey that as a woman she couldn’t be a serious contender.

In Massachusetts she had fourteen days to capture as many of the 111 delegates as possible, and here her work pattern hardly varied. Each day she would carry out the schedule that Edward had organized for her, a program which ensured that the candidate saw as many voters as possible and found some way to get onto the morning or evening news.

Florentyna posed with babies, union leaders and Italian restaurateurs; she ate scallops, linguine, Portuguese sweet bread and cranberries; she rode the MTA, the Nantucket ferry and the Alameda bus line the length of the Mass Pike; she jogged on beaches, hiked in the Berkshires and shopped in Boston’s Quincy Market, all in an effort to prove she had the stamina of any man. Nursing her aching body in a hot tub, she came to the conclusion that had her father remained in Russia, her route to the Presidency of the USSR couldn’t have been any harder.

In Massachusetts, Florentyna held off Pete Parkin for a second time, taking 47 delegates to the Vice President’s 39. The same day in Vermont, she captured 8 of the state’s 12 delegates. Because of the upsets already achieved by Florentyna, the political pollsters were saying that more people were answering ‘Yes’ when asked ‘Could a woman win the Presidential election?’ But even she was amused when she read that 5 percent of the voters had not realized that Senator Kane was a woman. The press was quick to point out that her next big test would be in the South, where the Florida, Georgia and Alabama primaries all fell on the same day. If she could hold on there she had a real chance, because the Democratic race had become a private battle between herself and the Vice President. Bill Bradley, having secured only 11 percent of the votes in Massachusetts, had dropped out because of lack of funds, although his name remained on the ballot in several states and no one doubted he would be a serious candidate sometime in the future. Bradley had been Florentyna’s first choice as running mate, and she already had the New Jersey senator on her short list for consideration for Vice President.

When the Florida ballots were counted, it came as no surprise that the Vice President had taken 62 of the 100 delegates, and he repeated the trend in Georgia by winning 40 to 23, followed by Alabama, where he captured 28 of the 45 voters, but Pete Parkin was not, as he had promised the press, ‘trouncing the little lady when she puts her elegant toes in the South.’ Parkin was increasingly trying to outdo Florentyna as a champion of the military, but his choice of legislation setting up the so-called ‘Fort Gringo Line’ along the Mexican-American border was beginning to rebound on him in the Southwest, where he had imagined he was unbeatable.

Edward and his team were now working several primaries ahead as they criss-crossed the country back and forth; Florentyna thanked heaven for her ample campaign funds as the Lear jet touched down in state after state. Her energy remained boundless and if anything it was the Vice President who began to stammer and sound tired and hoarse at the end of each day. Both candidates had to fit in trips to San Juan, and when Puerto Rico held its primary in mid-March, 25 of the 41 delegates favored Florentyna. Two days later, she arrived back in her home state for the Illinois primary, trailing Parkin 164 to 194.

The Windy City came to a standstill as its inhabitants welcomed their favorite daughter, giving her every one of the 179 Illinois delegates so that she went back into the lead with 343 committed delegates. However, when they moved on to New York, Connecticut, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the Vice President eroded the lead until he arrived in Texas trailing by only 591 to Florentyna’s 655.

No one was surprised when Pete Parkin took 100 percent of the delegates in his home state; they hadn’t had a President since Lyndon Baines Johnson and the male half of Texas believed that while J. R. Ewing might have had his faults, he had been right about a woman’s place being in the home. The Vice President left his ranch outside Houston with a lead of 743 to Florentyna’s 655.

Traveling around the country under such tremendous daily pressure, both candidates found an off-the-cuff remark or an unwary comment could easily turn out to be tomorrow’s headline. Pete Parkin was the first to make a gaffe when he got Peru mixed up with Paraguay, and the photographers went wild when he rode through Flint in a chauffeured Mercedes on one of his motorcades. Nor was Florentyna without her mishaps. In Alabama, when asked if she would consider a black running mate as Vice President, she replied, ‘Of course, I’ve already considered the idea.’ It took repeated statements to persuade the press that she had not already invited one of America’s black leaders to join her ticket.

Her biggest mistake, however, was in Virginia. She addressed the University of Virginia Law School on the parole system and the changes she would like to make if she became President. The speech had been written and researched for her by one of the staffers in Washington who had been with Florentyna in her days as a congresswoman. She read the text through carefully the night before, making only a few minor changes, admiring the way the piece had been put together, and delivered the speech to a crowded hall of law students who received it enthusiastically. When she left for an evening meeting of the Charlottesville Rotary Club to talk on the problems facing cattle farmers, she dismissed all thought of the earlier speech until she read the local paper the next morning during breakfast at the Boar’s Head Inn.