Mary Catherine mocked him for being so inept. That was all Cozzano needed. He started playing to win. He was tenacious, and over the months, became good. He played once a day with Mary Catherine. He played it so often that even the Secret Service folks and the people at control stopped noticing it.
Cozzano's cabinet members were announced. They were mostly youthful and in good physical shape, their names indicated a pleasing and politically correct distribution of ethnic groups and genders, they had gone to the best schools, they had outstanding records. They were all perfect.
A day later, Mary Catherine got a Christmas card from Zeldo. It included several photos: a couple of Zeldo riding his mountain bike on the bluffs above the Pacific and a few of Zeldo at work.
One of the photos showed Zeldo sitting in the courtyard of the Radhakrishnan Institute, enjoying caffé latte and typing away on his laptop. In the background, seated at another table, was one of the institute's patients. Mary Catherine recognized the man: he was the secretary-designate of Defense.
She went through the other photos very carefully, and saw three more patients "accidentally" caught in the background: the secretaries-designated of State, Treasury, and Commerce, and the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Early on the afternoon of December eighteenth, Mary Catherine went cross-country skiing. Three inches of new snow had fallen the night before. By the standards of post-greenhouse effect Illinois, it was a winter wonderland. She tossed her skis and poles into the back of the family's four-wheel-drive pickup truck, checked her arsenal of waxes, and took off. A few minutes' drive took her to the old Cozzano farm. She got out, locked the front hubs, shifted into four-wheel-drive, pulled on to a dirt lane between fields, and drove for half a mile or so. Then she put her skis on and took off.
After a mile or so she was able to coast down into the gentle cleft of a river valley, lightly forested with skinny ironwood trees. She followed the river for another half mile until she came upon a beat-up, ramshackle old cabin, really more of a glorified duck blind than a dwelling. Parked beside it was a big Chevy pickup truck, and as she approached from downwind she could smell cigar smoke and hear subdued conversation.
Mel Meyer, ludicrously clad in a heavy insulated farmer's coverall, emerged from the building, walked up to Mary Catherine, and ran a bug detector over her body. This time he got a faint radio signal from one of the buttons on her shirt. Mary Catherine skiied a couple of hundred feet away from the shack and left the button under a log. Then she came back and gave Mel a long hug.
Inside the shack were a bulky, round-shouldered black man in his fifties, and a huge white guy with bushy eyebrows and a salt-and-pepper hair and beard. Mary Catherine knew them both already. Respectively, they were Rufus Bell, USMC Retired, and Craig ("the Crag") Addison, Chicago Bears, Retired. "How's he doing?" Bell asked.
"He's doing great," Mary Catherine said, "this is all boy adventure stuff. Just the kind of thing he likes."
Mel, Rufus, and Craig ("the Crag") all looked slightly embarrassed.
"Okay," Mel said, "now listen carefully, because I'm freezing my ass off, and because this is important. These two guys Rufus and Crag can provide the bodies we need. With a little help from some of Eleanor's friends and supporters in D.C., we can even make it legal. And I can provide the paperwork. Mary Catherine?"
"I've got the black box ready. And I've got some information for you. The secretaries-designate of Defense, Treasury, Commerce, and State, and the Speaker of the House, have all spent time at the Radhakrishnan Institute in the last few months."
Mel shook his head. "Tragic," he said. "A tragic epidemic of strokes. Anyone else?"
"Not that I know of."
"Well, that will be useful knowledge," Mel said. "Now, Mary Catherine, there's only one thing we need from you."
"My father," Mary Catherine said.
"Right. Can you give me Willy?"
"I have a plan, Mel," she said. "I have a scam."
That night after supper, Cozzano called Mary Catherine in for another game of Scrabble. She'd had two or three glasses of Chianti, she was in a good mood, and she spoke without restraint. "Dad, it's the most boring game ever invented."
"If only you would play it right," he groused, "and not cheat."
They went into the study and sat down at the desk in front of the works of Mark Twain.
Mary Catherine always started the same way: she reached into the heap of tiles and spelled out ARE YOU STILL THERE. They had a fancy Scrabble board mounted on a turntable and so when she was done, she spun it around so he could read it.
Cozzano frowned. "Stop playing around," he said. "You know the rules." Both of his hands were active. It was a bizarre sight: with his left hand he was breaking up the sequence that she had spelled out, rearranging the letters, plucking more of them out of the overturned box top. With his right hand, he was picking seven tiles at random and placing them neatly on his little rack. He continued to speak at the same time. He seemed genuinely annoyed and appeared not to notice what his own left hand was doing. "You have to pick seven tiles. And you can only spell one word at once.
Why do I have to explain this to you every time? Are you teasing me, girl?"
Mary Catherine was accustomed to strange neurological tics because of her work, and she had grown accustomed to her father's peculiarities over the months that she had been putting him through daily therapy. She had to remind herself just how bizarre this would look to anyone else.
Cozzano's left hand spun the board so that Mary Catherine could read the words DID YOU SEE MEL.
She looked into his eyes. He was frowning, staring down at the Scrabble board, befuddled. "How did those letters get there?" he asked.
Mary Catherine messed them up with her hand before his eyes could read them. Then she combed some more tiles out of the heap and spelled out the word YES.
He got the same look on his face as when she had come home from school with Bs on her report card. "Is that the best you could do? A three-letter word?"
"Sorry," she said. "I got bad letters."
"Thanks for giving me that big fat Y," he said. "That's four easy points for me. You need to think harder about strategy." As he was talking, both hands were again active on the Scrabble board. His right hand was turning her Y into the world YTTRIUM. His left hand was spelling out HOW IS HE on the bottom left corner of the board.
Mary Catherine spun the board around. Again, Cozzano's eyes picked out the letters that had been laid down by his left hand. "How did those letters get on there?" he said. "For god's sake, peanut, we need to make sure the board is clear before we start. Get rid of those."
She had already read them, so she swept them away. Then she used the I in YTTRIUM to spell out the world PLANNING. In order to do it, she had to rummage through the box top for some more letters. Cozzano frowned and grumbled about this cheating.
The conversation went back and forth like that for several more rounds, the Scrabble board spinning round and around.
Cozzano: FOR WHAT.
Mary Catherine: INAUGDAY
"I defy you to find that word in any dictionary," Cozzano said.
DuLafayette Webster, Heisman trophy winner for the Elton State Comanches, scored three touchdowns singlehandedly in the first half of the Fujitsu Guacamole Bowl on Christmas Night. As soon as the first half clock ticked down to zero, the broadcast cut away to the cheerful theme music of the Cozzano Family Christmas Special.
A live shot from a hovering chopper zoomed down on the twinkling Christmas lights of Tuscola, which had begun billing itself as "America's hometown." The Christmas decorations had been heavily enhanced by the largesse of Ogle, and coordinated by his designers. The camera panned across church steeples, small businesses, and the city park, all decked with boughs of electric holly, and then settled on the now-familiar Cozzano residence. A street level camera peered through the large front window to view the roaring fire and the happy, smiling group gathered around the eggnog. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. From Tuscola, Illinois, America's hometown, we bring you an address by the President-elect, William Anthony Cozzano. Governor Cozzano."