Part 47 (1/2)
”Whatcha got there?” he said, brusquely.
”My stuff,” she said, unable to come up with anything more eloquent at this time of the morning.
”What's this?” he said, bending over and reaching for it.
The tote bag was just a cheap freebie given to by her travel agent in Alexandria. Eleanor had brought it along precisely because it was so flimsy that it could be wadded up and stuffed into other luggage. Tonight it had come in handy for carrying a change of clothes. Right now she was wearing jeans and an old sweats.h.i.+rt with TOWSON STATE printed across the front. Her party dress, jewelry, and purse were all in the tote bag. The purse was ontop. As the man in the suit bent down, she followed his gaze, and saw that the strap of the purse - a heavy gold- plated chain, a la Chanel - was dangling out. His hand reached out, quick as a snake, grabbed the chain, and yanked, taking the purse out with it.
”Hey!” she said, and grabbed at the chain. But he yanked the purse away as her hand was closing around it, ripping it out of her hand and bending a couple of nails back.
She'd heard of these guys: well-dressed thieves who wandered around in posh hotels late at night, s.n.a.t.c.hing purses and picking pockets. They'd be in the lobby any second and then this guy would be in trouble.
”G.o.dd.a.m.n it,” she said, and kicked him in the knee.
”You b.i.t.c.h,” he said. He bent down, got one shoulder into her solar plexus, and used the thrust of both legs to body-slam her into the wall of the elevator. Her head snapped backward against the wall, which didn't cause any serious damage but did leave her disoriented; she slid down the wall and collapsed to the floor with her legs sprawling, and realized that she could not draw a breath.
The man loomed in front of the elevator's control panel. He had pulled out a huge keychain, the kind that's attached to a spring-loaded reel on the belt, and shoved a tubular key into the switch at the base of the panel.
He rotated the switch one notch and then pressed the b.u.t.ton beneath the one for the lobby.
The door opened a moment later. This was not the lobby of the hotel: she saw barren concrete walls, harshly illuminated with cheap industrial lights, and steel doors with numbers painted on them. The man turned the key switch one more time and the elevator froze in position with the doors open. She still couldn't hardly breathe. This was the first time she'd had the wind knocked out of her since the second grade.
”Get out,” the man said, reaching down to grab her wrist. He yanked hard and trudged out into the corridor. He wasn't so much helping her to her feet as he was dragging her over the floor. Eleanor hardly cared; the lack of oxygen was a more immediate concern than this guy's bad manners. She ended up tumbled in a heap on the floor next to a steel door in the corridor, close to the elevator. The keychain jingled once again, the door swung open on a big room with a few people in it.
Finally she drew in a breath. Her lungs had constricted, her airway was clenched shut, and the air pa.s.sing through it made an ugly sobbing noise. But it felt good. She forced that breath out and drew in another one. Color vision returned. Her panic subsided.
In the meantime, a couple of other men in suits had stepped to the door, grabbed her arms, hauled her up off the floor, and dragged her into the room. They sat her down on a chair. The room contained four cheap steel desks, chairs to go with them, a couch, and a table with a coffee machine. In the corner was some kind of communications setup: a phone switchboard and a two-way radio.
Eleanor closed her eyes and just concentrated on breathing for a while. But when she closed her eyes, her head began to swim around; she was still dizzy from having been slammed into the wall. She kept her eyes open just enough to get a strong visual fix on one object: a cheesy pinup of a woman with huge b.r.e.a.s.t.s, dressed half in a cop uniform and half in s.e.xy lingerie, a pistol stuck into the band of her fishnet stockings, dangling a set of handcuffs from her finger.
Finally she recovered enough to get p.i.s.sed. ”What the h.e.l.l is going on here?” she said, and rose from her chair. But someone gripped the collar of her sweats.h.i.+rt from behind, twisted it tight around her neck, and jerked her back down into the chair. ”Shut up, sister,” a voice said. ”You should know better than to make trouble.”
Then they grabbed her arms and pulled them around behind her back, behind the back of the chair. She heard a high zipping noise and felt something go tight around her wrists: plastic handcuffs. She couldn't move her arms.
”Would you guys mind telling me who the h.e.l.l you are?” she said.
They ignored her. The man in the suit who had confronted her in the elevator went over to the telephone, punched a couple of b.u.t.tons, and spoke: ”Yeah, this is Moore in Security. We have apprehended a black female carrying a bag with someone's purse and some jewelry. She is intoxicated, violent and disorderly. Have you had any complaints of missing property from any of your guests tonight?”He listened for a moment. ”Okay. Well, it's possible she hit one of the other hotels on the block and just got here. You want to phone some of the others and see if they've had any problems?”
By now, the entire contents of Eleanor's tote bag had been spread out across the table, and the hotel d.i.c.ks were pawing through them, making lewd comments about her underwear and appraising her jewelry.
Eleanor knew she should have been chewing them out. She should have been calling down the retribution of heaven above. But she was so stunned that it was almost more interesting to stand back and observe.
A television set was going on the coffee table, showing a late-night news program. Her face flashed up on the screen right next to Cozzano's. What happened next was the most gratifying moment she had experienced since the birth of her last child. ”Look at the TV,” she said.
Mr. Salvador reached Cy Ogle by sky phone the next day. Ogle was on one of the Cozzano campaign planes. Cozzano 1 carried the candidate, his Secret Service detail, staff, and immediate hangers-on; Cozzano 2, was a press plane, and Cozzano 3, which hardly anyone knew about, was a G.o.dS cargo plane. It carried a G.o.dS s.h.i.+pping container, the Eye of Cy. Ogle was on Cozzano 1 when he got the call from Mr. Salvador, who was upset. ”Did you see the morning papers?”
”Of course I did,” Ogle said.
”It's exactly as I predicted. Eleanor Richmond is a loose cannon.”
”Now, why would you say that?”
”Are you kidding? The first thing she does is go out and get herself arrested.”
”Detained. Not arrested.”
”And then, immediately, without consulting you, she begins to run her mouth. Yap yap yap, racists here, racists there, lynch mob mentality, all the usual radical Afro-American buzzwords.”
”You can't blame her for being p.i.s.sed.”
”I can blame her for being strident. Did you see her on TV this morning? In front of the hotel?”
”Yes.”
”Who authorized her to throw a street rally?”
”I don't think she threw it, per se,” Ogle said. ”It just sort of happened. A bunch of people came up from the South Side and wanted to burn the hotel down. She came out and cooled them off.”
”Well, it looked like a rally.”
”I know it did.”
”And the last thing we need is some kind of outspoken radical black woman running through the streets with a megaphone.”
”Mr. Salvador,” Ogle said, quietly and forbearingly, ”Eleanor Richmond, as we speak, is on a plane to Cashmere, Was.h.i.+ngton, to pick apples with migrant farm workers. Then she's going to go white-water rafting and read a scripted speech about the importance of wild rivers. Then she's going to fly to San Diego to mend fences with those Mexican people who run up the centerline of highways. Then-”
”Okay, I get the picture,” Mr. Salvador said.
”So does she, I think,” Ogle said.
48.
PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS HAD THEIR OWN CALENDAR: A SERIES OF special days, sprinkled throughout the year,determined by certain arcane astrological formulae. Chief among these was Election Day itself, which was the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Another such occasion was Labor Day, which, to most people, marked the end of summer, but which to politicians marked the formal beginning of the presidential campaign - a complete surprise to almost everyone in America.
So television viewers across the land, who for the last year had not been able to settle into their recliners without being exposed to a scene of red-white-and-blue balloons and flawlessly coiffed candidates standing in front of blue curtains in hotel ballrooms, were generally befuddled when they checked the evening news on Labor Day and were informed, by solemn anchorpersons, that Tip McLane, the President, and William A. Cozzano had all kicked off their campaigns today.
The shortest point between a camera and a backdrop is a straight line pa.s.sing through the candidate's head.
Who these three candidates were, and how they would run their campaigns, could be inferred from the things they stood in front of.
The President stood in front of an empty Buick plant in Flint, Michigan. This informed the viewing public that he was a serious, taking-care-of-business type who cared about the downtrodden (unlike, for example, Tip McLane) and that he intended to renew America.
Nimrod T. (”Tip”) McLane stood in a lettuce field in California where he and his parents had once stooped at menial labor; behind him rose a mountain vista. This backdrop told the viewing public that Tip McLane had not forgotten his humble roots, that he was a gra.s.s-roots, back-to-basics conservative who was not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty.
William A. Cozzano and his running mate Eleanor Richmond kicked off their independent campaign on the runway of a munic.i.p.al airport south of Seattle. This was a fairly complicated bit of multileveled background engineering. The immediate background consisted of a runway, outlined in colored lights and streaked with tire marks, conveying a strong sense of motion (Cozzano is taking off!). The next thing down the line was a vast Boeing airplane factory; brand-new 767s were lined up on the ap.r.o.n, each tail fin freshly and brightly painted in the color scheme of a different airline somewhere around the world. Finally, in the deep background, Mount Rainier heaved itself up out of a low, dark line of foothills. It was so vast that it looked like a telephoto lens shot, even through a normal lens, and when the cameramen enhanced it with their telephotos (as none of them could resist doing) it looked like a giant ice-covered asteroid looming over the shoulders of William A. Cozzano and Eleanor Richmond.