“That sounds ominous,” Forrester said. He went behind his desk and pulled the chair out and sat down.
“As for Ronnie, I told her she could take the afternoon off. I’m holding the fort, standing by to repel boarders and whatnot. She said to tell you she’s gone out to the ranch and you’re expected there for dinner.” Suffield’s eyes were round with innocent mockery and his wide mouth grinned. “The way she said it sounded downright proprietary.”
There was a stack of correspondence on the desk bound up in a heavy rubber band. Forrester glanced at it and Suffield said, “Your first bundle of hate mail. I thumbed through it. Mostly unsigned, of course. When they get that blasphemous they don’t like to put their names on it.”
“To hell with them then.” Forrester swept the stack into the wastebasket.
“Sure. But maybe you ought to keep count. Give you a rough tally of sentiment.”
“So far the mail’s been running eight to one.”
“For you?”
“Yes.”
“How about that?” Suffield said. “There have been a few columnists’ blind items in the Washington papers over the past week. I don’t know if you saw them.”
“No. Blind items? What about?”
“You know the kind of thing. Not mentioning names but thick with insinuation. Young Republican white knight gets tarnished armor, will be dumped by party machine for insubordination. You know the drift. A lot of people including the Secretary of Defense and several Senators have agreed to appear on panel TV news shows to shoot your position full of holes. I might remind you at least thirty-two Congressmen own interests in television stations and most of them by some odd coincidence are pretty far over to the right.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just that it may make it kind of hard for you to get your message across to the Great Unwashed. Unless you want to shell out the price of an aircraft carrier to buy your own television time.”
“You mean national television time? Why would I spend money on that? This is Arizona, Les.”
“I didn’t get the impression you wanted to run for President of Arizona.”
Forrester only smiled. Suffield said, “The point is the networks are lining up a lot of big guns. I’ve heard rumors about rumors to the effect that the President himself may throw a few needles your way at his next TV press conference.”
“I always Welcome publicity.”
“Not that kind you don’t. Believe me. But I think you don’t recognize that the parent companies of all three TV networks are deeply committed in aerospace contract work. Ordinarily the network bias runs toward the liberal side of things, as Mr. Agnew pointed out a few years ago, but when you start tromping on aerospace you’re stepping on a very sore corn.”
“I take it this is Lesson Number Four in Suffield’s Elementary Politics.”
“Like I said, I’m just staying aboard ship to point out the shoals. I still think you’ve tackled an elephant with a flyswatter, but if that’s your game I’ll help out all I can, right up to the funeral.” Suffield ran strong fingers through his shaggy pelt of gray hair. “How’d it go with Guest arid Trumble?”
“I’ve been ditched as far as the primary’s concerned. Trumble may run against me, but I’ve got a pledge from both of them that if I win the primary in spite of their opposition I’ll get the full backing of the party in the election campaign.”
“That’s better than nothing, then.”
“Frankly it’s more than I expected to get.”
“Nuts. You like to undersell yourself—I’ve pointed it out before. They need you almost as much as you need them, when you come right down to it. Neither party has very many hotshots around with your brand of vote-getting charisma. Aside from Lindsay, who’s left besides you? All the rest of them are tired. No—Woody Guest will go pretty far off his usual base if that’s what it takes to keep you from switching over to the Democratic Party. You may get more Republican support than you think.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Don’t forget they ditched Lindsay in the primaries when he ran for reelection.”
“And then he won in spite of it and they welcomed him back into the fold because if they hadn’t he could have made hell for them.”
“Maybe,” Forrester said again, not at all convinced. “Anyhow I think we’ve got to assume I’m not going to be the fair-haired Republican boy for a while. I’ve got to run an independent campaign without clubhouse support and we’ve got to plan accordingly.”
“Yeah. A paper clip, a Band-Aid, a rubber band, a wad of chewing gum and a shoestring.”
“A pretty thick shoestring. I expect it’ll take half a million dollars to beat the machine in the primaries and if I have to I’m prepared to put it up myself.”
“Jesus. You really are serious about this. You’d have to mortage the ranch.”
“No. Old James Hayden Forrester socked away a pretty good pile of real estate and invested capital and I’m good for a few million without dipping into the cookie jar at home.”
“But if you spend it and lose you won’t have a thing to show for it.”
“If Defense spends thirty billion dollars on Phaeton Three and one of the damned things blows up in its silo what do you think we’ll have to show for that?”
“Okay, okay.”
“Have you seen Top Spode?”
“Today? No. He called and talked to Ronnie but she didn’t tell me what it was all about.”
“He’s on a job for me and I think I want to call him off. If he calls after I leave, tell him to get me at the ranch.”
“All right. But I think maybe I’d better spend the rest of the afternoon making the rounds, seeing what kind of support we can drum up for you in the primary. You must have a few friends left and I want to reach them before the opposition gets to them.”
“Good idea.”
“I’ll use the phone in the front office, then.” Suffield uncoiled himself and strolled to the connecting door. He paused there and turned and spoke after an interval. “Listen, about Ronnie—”
“What about her?”
“Just—well, this might not be a good time to let it ripen into something. You know?”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“I mean, it’s not so long since Angie died, is it? You’ve got the voters to think about.”
“For God’s sake, Les!”
Suffield showed his discomfiture. “What would it look like, right now? Rich prominent widowed Senator gets hot pants for his dewy-eyed secretary. I mean, you’d be laying yourself open to all kinds of locker-room snickers, and you don’t need that kind of gossip right now—things are tough enough without it.”
“Let’s just leave my personal life and Ronnie’s out of this.”
“In politics that ain’t so easy, amigo.” Suffield turned through the door and pulled it shut behind him.
Forrester stared at the closed door for a long time before he reached toward the In box.
Tucson was a prime example of how boulevards and superhighways created a centrifugal force that flung vital energies out of the downtown area. The stores had moved out to glittering suburban shopping centers and the old-town decay was particularly depressing in the hard sunshine: the abandoned business sites seemed singularly out of place under the vast cobalt sky. A traffic light halted Forrester between a cut-rate furniture store, peeling yellow stucco, and a rancid little hotel with its doors wide open and its sagging chairs inhabited by girls in thin dresses who would come out on parade after dark. A theater marquee advertised “mature adult films” and the titles were in Spanish.
He let in the clutch and the Mercedes growled up the ramp and out into the left lane. He went southeast at a good clip, driving too fast for the traffic, darting from lane to lane to pass daydreamers and trucks. Past the VA Hospital towers and the municipal airport and the dusty end of Davis Monthan Air Force Base; past the Truckers’ One Stops and dreary motels, out into the uninhabited cactus flats with distant mountains on all the horizons. Dinosaur-shaped billboards flashed by—SEE Colossal Cave! I Mi.