“So like what’s with this murder thing?” a young man in a stocking cap and overcoat asked now. It was the third time this morning someone had referred to Hal’s ads. He had practiced an agonized look and a toss of his head, as if it were beyond comprehension.
“This dude’s an asshole, right?” said the guy. His skin was spotty and he had probably experienced a miserable adolescence, but now he was clearly not lacking in confidence.
“Your words,” he answered.
“Yeah, but it sounds bad, man.” With that the fellow was gone.
At 8:45, he and the two aides left the station. He had a breakfast at the Metro Club, a fund-raiser with trial lawyers. He’d lost some support there because he’d been willing to discuss damage caps as part of a failed effort at health care reform last year, but most of the attorneys attending had been colleagues forever, and he was still their guy, especially since he’d be controlling the County Law Department from the mayor’s office.
When he opened the back door of the campaign car, a red Taurus a couple of years old, Crully was in the back seat. Mark leaned out and asked Kim and Marty, the interns, if they’d mind grabbing a cab. That could not mean anything good. Mark would only have come out in the cold because he had to brief the candidate in private on something he needed to know about before he ran into any reporters. Sure enough, Crully handed over a fistful of papers. Discovery motions from Hal’s lawyers.
“No motion to dismiss?”
“Huh?” Crully answered.
“You said they’d file a motion to dismiss our complaint on First Amendment grounds and we’d be briefing it until the election. But they’ve skipped that stage and gone straight to discovery. Right?”
Mark shrugged, indifferent to the fact that he’d been flat wrong. Hal and his lawyers had outflanked Paul and wanted Judge Lands to order production of all the evidence that the state and local police still had on hand, and to direct Paul to give saliva and fingerprints. They were going to try to do DNA tests. He read over the attached affidavit from Hassam Yavem, a couple of times. It was shocking, actually. He’d had an idle worry about DNA testing once or twice over the years, but one thing he’d been told repeatedly was that there was no way to tell his DNA from his twin brother’s. Yavem was a real scientist, though.
Crully could tell what was on his mind.
“Ray already talked to Yavem. It’s like one in two hundred the test will actually work.”
“And is all that stuff even around?” he asked.
“Apparently the blood is. They found it in the state police fridge. They actually have a ten-year retention policy and then they adios it, but not this.”
“And why was I so lucky?”
“AIDS,” Crully said.
“AIDS?”
“It’s from 1982. They didn’t do routine AIDS screening on blood in 1982. So when they got to 1992, nobody wanted to touch it. It sat there.”
“Great.”
Crully didn’t like what he was seeing in Paul, and he was seeing it every time this subject came up. Crully had been running winning campaigns long enough to be able to pick his races. And he chose them on two bases. First, he wanted to win. Occasionally, just for money, he’d work a stone loser in an off-year election for some Democratic gazillionaire who thought she or he was the new face of democracy. But Mark had tasted ashes often enough, and if he needed money, he could move back to D.C. and lobby. So he wanted winners, one. And two, he wanted a hardworking candidate. People would never believe how many of these men and, more rarely, women didn’t want to put in the time. They liked getting up in front of cameras or an adoring crowd, even if it was half relatives of the campaign staff. But they didn’t care for eighteen-hour days. And they wanted to pretend that the money grew on trees, that George Soros or someone was going to take a liking to them and pour down millions out of a pillowcase. They thought it was degrading or embarrassing to ask people to make their support tangible. Gianis was a pro. And tireless. Two days ago, he’d told Mark that Crully could begin adding campaign appearances in February, three more every day. And Paul still had a law office, not to mention that the state senate would go back in session next week. Gianis wasn’t going to get more than four hours’ sleep a night until May.
Crully had met Paul three years ago when he was weighing a run for Congress. Crully had made a conditional commitment to a race in California, and ended up having to decline. But he had attended college at Easton, same as Paul, and while still a student, Mark had worked local races here, so he knew the right people to hire now. He welcomed the challenge of a big-city mayor’s race. And he liked Gianis. Straight shooter. Progressive. Could take advice. And believed in more than his own election, although they all believed in that first and foremost. Paul understood the metrics-how many volunteers, how many dollars. The guy, Clooney, who was running finance, gave Paul ten names to call before he went to sleep, and he’d have his cell out and the list in his hand as soon as the car door closed when they finished an event. Often, he’d be done by noon and ask for ten more. He didn’t whine about needing to see his wife and kids-everybody on the flipping campaign needed time with their children or girlfriends-and he didn’t come out of a church whispering about what a narcissistic asshole that preacher was. He knew you didn’t find shy types in the pulpit. This thing with Kronon was the first time Gianis seemed to have lost his usual discipline. He was acting scared was what bothered Crully. You could never win scared. Everybody-the press, your opponents, your staff-felt it. A leader always acted like a leader. Paul seemed anguished by this whole deal with his brother.
“This is out of control,” Gianis said. Crully watched Paul stare out the window at the big buildings and crowded streets of the city he hoped soon to govern. “And what do you want me to do about this?”
“What do you mean, what do I want? You do the obvious thing. Cooperate. Stick out your chin and say, ‘I’ve got nothing to fear. He can have my prints. He can have my spit.’ This isn’t about what happens in the courtroom. You’re fighting a war of impressions. I’ve said that before.”
“We don’t want that test. We’re not going to get good results,” Gianis said.
Crully thought his heart had stopped.
“What the hell does that mean? Are your fingerprints there? Or your DNA?”
Gianis revolved toward Crully, his mouth crimped sourly.
“What do you think, Mark?”
“So what do you mean ‘bad results’? That’s a good result, isn’t it, if your shit isn’t there? I’d roll up my sleeve and ink a fingerprint card in front of two dozen cameras. And I’d do it today.”
“I can’t do it today.”
“Why?”
“I need to talk to my brother. I need to talk to Sofia. This is hard on my kids. I need to prepare them all.” Gianis continued to roll his tongue around inside his mouth as he turned back to the window. He removed his glasses, as he did frequently, to rub at the lumpy bridge of his nose. “And the bad result, in case you haven’t figured this out, Mark, is that Yavem won’t be able to tell whose DNA it is, and Hal and his ad team will twist that as proof I could be the murderer. And the only thing I’ll have is what I had to start, namely saying I didn’t do it. This thing is a trap.”