Part 51 (2/2)
”Jesus Christ,” Ogle said out loud, ”this could only be the work of Jeremiah Freel!”
He looked back at the television monitor, but Cozzano wasn't there anymore. Just an empty chair. Then the camera wheeled around, spinning past the host and then past an array of lights, cameras, technicians, and other stuff that was never supposed to be on camera. Finally the camera centered itself on the back of William A, Cozzano, who was striding into the crowd of TV people, print reporters, campaign aides, and Secret Service who filled the s.p.a.ce between the stage and the front row of seats. Most of these people jumped out of his way instinctively. But a couple of men in suits, displaying considerable physical bravery, closed ranks in front of Cozzano and prevented him from charging into the auditorium.
In the background, a disturbance was making its way up the aisle as a man shoved his way toward the exit.
Apparently this was Frank Boyle of the Globe. Cozzano had gone after him, and he had decided to get out of the building.
Throughout the campaign, Ogle had prided himself on being ready for anything. But he hadn't been ready for the return of Freel. Ogle took a deep breath, tried to still his own heart, and then put his hands on the control panel and set about calming Cozzano.
Cozzano was in front of the stage having a conversation with his Secret Service men. They were all talking into their s.h.i.+rt cuffs and holding their hands over their earpieces, trying to hear each other over the murmur of the shocked and scared students.
A woman with press credentials stepped close to Cozzano. ”Governor? I'm with the Globe. And we don't have anyone named Frank Boyle.”
The head of the Secret Service detail, listening to his earplug, shook his head conclusively and caught Cozzano's eye. ”It was a total fabrication,” he said. ”Mary Catherine showed up at Macalester College on time and is speaking at this moment.”
Cozzano, suddenly, was calm and collected. He shook his head, seemed to forget that anything had happened, and returned to his seat on the stage.
”Would you like to delay-” the host said, as the sound man was fixing Cozzano's microphone.”No,” Cozzano said. ”Let's continue as planned.”
”Are you sure? You must be very upset.”
”I'm fine,” Cozzano said. ”Why should I be upset?”
The headline of the next day's edition of the New York Post read, ”WHY SHOULD I BE UPSET?”.
COZZANO NOT BOTHERED BY ”MURDER” OF HIS OWN DAUGHTER.
The President, delivering off-the-cuff remarks in the aisle of Air Force One, said that he was shocked and disgusted by the impostor who had delivered the fake news to Cozzano.
At the same time, though, he could not help but find it strange, and just a bit disturbing, that a man who, to all appearances, had just lost his own daughter, would agree to continue with what was, after all, nothing more than a campaign event, the sole purpose of which was to sc.r.a.pe up more votes. Surely, he said, there were limits that should be observed, for the sake of decency.
Nimrod T. (”Tip”) McLane made a surprise appearance in a hotel bar where a number of reporters had gathered - not just to drink, but because they had received a tip from McLane staffers that Tip might feel a bit thirsty around eleven o'clock.
Coincidentally, the evening news happened to be running on the big projection TV over the bar at the time. A football game had been on until a few minutes previously, but money had changed hands between Marcus Drasher and the bartender, and now the news was on - to the chagrin of several fans along the bar who had not brought nearly as much cash as Drasher.
McLane and the reporters engaged in some friendly banter, but everyone turned toward the television set when the image of William A. Cozzano appeared on the screen. The cameras had caught the entire thing and the feed had gone out all over the country. They watched Cozzano going into shock as he heard the false story about his daughter. They watched him jumping out of his chair in a blind rage, and they watched him sitting back down a minute later, calm and collected. The actual content of the two-hour discussion received no coverage whatsoever.
All of the reporters looked at McLane. McLane turned away from the TV and looked nonchalant.
Finally a reporter asked him what he thought of the whole thing.
”Well, I don't really want to talk about it,” he said, ”the whole episode is really distasteful. But now I see that the media have grabbed on to this whole thing - in the typical way that they do - looking for the sensational and paying no attention to content. . . and I can see that now the media are trying to take this event and turn it into some kind of a test of Cozzano's psychological fitness to be president.”
”Do you think he looked presidential?” asked a reporter from a rabidly conservative Catholic magazine.
McLane shrugged. ”People say I'm a hothead,” he said. ”People say I'm out of control and that I can't handle the pressure of the campaign. So maybe I shouldn't be the one to talk, but I've learned that the world is full of crackpots who will shout crazy stuff at you. I mean, they are everywhere. And you can't let them get under your skin. If you're going to physically a.s.sault every lunatic who babbles some nonsense to you, then you're not going to make much of a president - and if that's how you handle a nut case, then how are you going to deal with foreign leaders?”
55.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, TWO WEEKS BEFORE ELECTION DAY, THE standings looked like this: COZZANO 59%.
PRESIDENT 8%.
MCLANE 18%.
UNDECIDED 10%.
OTHER 5%.
An obscure Was.h.i.+ngton D.C.-based organization called the American a.s.sociation of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths staged a press conference at which a videotape was shown to the press and then disseminated to all of the networks. The videotape was a series of outtakes from Cozzano's campaign, a blooper film if you will. It started out with some excerpts from an interview in which he was still suffering from some speech impediments. From there it moved onward through the campaign, showing Cozzano during commercial breaks, bantering with reporters on airport runways, walking down the aisle of his campaign plane to the bathroom, doing sound checks before debates, and so on. The one thing that all of these takes had in common was that, in each of them, Cozzano did something wrong: slurred some words or tripped over his own feet. One particularly striking clip showed Cozzano working a crowd at a rally in Newark. A woman handed her baby to Cozzano for a kiss and he nearly dropped it, seemingly overcome by a temporary seizure. ”I-I-I-I'm sorry,” he stuttered, and handed it back to her. The conclusion reached by the experts of the American a.s.sociation of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths was that Cozzano was still suffering from ”severe neurological deficits” and was not fit to be president.
Excerpts from the videotape were broadcast repeatedly on virtually every television news program in the United States, in many cases as the evening's top story.
Wednesday, October 23: COZZANO 51%.
PRESIDENT 10%.
MCLANE 21%.
UNDECIDED 13%.
OTHER 5%.
In Chicago, a press conference was held by Tommy Markovich, a venerable Chicago sportscaster who had been well known to sports fans in that city during the late sixties and early seventies. He had retired in 1980. Markovich said that his conscience had been troubling him about something. He showed an excerpt of a Bears-Vikings game from the year 1972. Late in the game, the Vikings were leading by ten points and the Bears were driving from their own thirty with only one minute left in the game. William A. Cozzano, who was a tight end, went out on a screen pa.s.s, caught the ball, and found himself out in the open with nothing between him and the goal line except for hard-frozen turf. He ran un.o.bstructed all the way to the Viking ten, where, inexplicably, the ball squirted loose from his arms and dribbled back upfield for a few yards, where a pursuing Viking fell on it. It had been a famous gaffe at the time, not so much because it was significant to the outcome of the game (it wasn't), but because Cozzano was known for being a steady and reliable sort of player who didn't make mental mistakes.
Now, a couple of decades later, the shriveled old man who had called that game on TV wanted to point something out: the Vikings had been favored to win that game by ten points. By dropping the ball, Cozzano had preserved the point spread.
Thursday, October 24: COZZANO 45%PRESIDENT 12%.
MCLANE 25%.
UNDECIDED 14%.
OTHER 4%.
In an exclusive interview with CBS Sports, a noted author of books on the Mob said that Nicodemo (”Nicky Freckles”) Costanza, an important Chicago Mob figure who ran a huge illegal sports betting operation during the sixties and seventies, had made something like twenty million dollars off the 1972 Bears-Vikings game - money he would have forfeited if William A. Cozzano had simply held on to the ball long enough to reach the goal line.
A local TV reporter for one of the network affiliates in Chicago released the results of a two-month investigation into connections between the Cozzano family and the Mafia. The centerpiece was a vast family tree - actually, several family trees intertwined into a thicket - so big that it had been drawn, in minute letters and lines, on a four-by-eight foot sheet of plywood. The extended Cozzano family was shown in blue. Mob families were shown in red. The family trees went all the way back to the twelfth-century Genoa and showed that William A. Cozzano, John Gotti, Al Capone, and Benito Mussolini were all distantly related.
The Cozzano campaign issued a press release stating that the American a.s.sociation of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths had not existed until some two weeks previously, and appeared to have a members.h.i.+p of three, all of whom had shown up at the press conference two days ago as experts urging Cozzano to withdraw from the race. One of these three was a former Army doctor who had been discharged under other than honourable circ.u.mstances. One of them no longer practiced because he could no longer obtain malpractice insurance. The third had declared bankruptcy after fifty of his patients filed a cla.s.s-action suit against him complaining of botched breast implants.
The Cozzano campaign also issued a blooper reel of its own, showing the inc.u.mbent President and Tip McLane tripping over their shoelaces and slurring words, and suggested that these two might want to have neurological exams of their own.
<script>