And most oddly of all, Danny Deere was there. Tommy had recognized him instantly, and wondered greatly that he was present. He got his answer when Danny stood up and started the riot, but it was an answer that raised new questions.
Then it became really disagreeable. As soon as Danny Deere got the words out, the mob at the back of the room took up the shout. Tommy hung around long enough to find out that the Jupiter meeting was canceled, and then headed for a quieter spot to think things over.
All those people! All that excitement! His hunch had been right. There were votes in there somewhere, he could smell them. Tommy had been in Chicago, building alliances for the upcoming convention year, when Mayor Bilandic failed to neaten up the streets after the 1978 snows. He had seen the election results a year later. He had heard John Lindsay's teeth-gritted self-abasement for the same fault in New York a few years earlier, when he was up for his second term—and those were only for snow. What would happen to his brother's career—not to mention his own hopes of following the senator right up the ladder—if, by any chance, all this was real and they let some part of California slide into the sea?
He made up his mind to report to the old man. He left the hotel, cut through the parking lot of the public library, hurried across a couple of typical downtown-Los Angeles streets—curb to curb with drivers who thought they were still on a freeway—and entered the grounds of the Pioneers Club.
When downtown Los Angeles was Los Angeles, and not just a place Los Angelenos boasted of never going near, the Pioneers Club was where millionaires kept their eyes on each other. For the old-timers at least, it hadn't changed.
As he expected, his father was still in the dining room, playing dominos with his secretary, Tim Paradine. The old man looked up briefly and nodded to a seat beside his wheelchair. "Gus'll bring you some coffee if you want it," he said, "or a drink, but let's finish this game before we talk."
Tommy sat down as bidden, as he always did when his father spoke, sulky with resentment, as he always was. T. Robert Pedigrue had given his sons everything, including the inside line to the levers of power in American society, but it was not to be forgotten that he was the Old Man. In 1940 the elder Pedigrue had been one of FDR's personal emissaries—to Latin America, to Madrid, at last to London in the middle of the Blitz. He got there in the middle of one of the worst West End raids, and when he left London his feet stayed behind. It wasn't a bomb. It was a bus. He stepped politely off the crowded sidewalk at Oxford Circus to let a gaggle of Wrens pass, forgetting that the traffic was coming the wrong way, and the Number 73 for Kensington High Street ground the lower ten inches of each leg to gritty suet. End of airborne diplomacy for T. Robert Pedigrue. It was almost the end of Pedigrue, too, but the surgeons at Guy's Hospital had had a lot of practice in carpentering mutilated limbs that year, and he lived. He even thrived. FDR remembered, and the week after Pearl Harbor Pedigrue got the job he asked for. He became the head of California's War Mobilization Board. When his wife asked what he would be in charge of, he said, "Everything. " He still was. He was in charge of his sons, and before long one of them would sit in the chair where FDR had sat, warming it for the other one: there would be sixteen Pedigrue years in the White House, and by then everything would be shipshape.
T. R. fitted a double-six on a spur of the domino pattern and counted triumphantly. "Forty-one, fifty, double-nine is sixty-eight and the double-twelve is eighty, and I'm out." He flung himself back in the wheelchair like Dr. Gillespie and waited while his secretary, who doubled as his chauffeur, his bodyguard, and once in a while his procurer, added up the score. "That's forty dollars you owe me, Tim," the old man said. "You can wait outside until I'm finished with the boy, if you don't mind. "
"I don't mind, Mr. Pedigrue," the secretary said, and he didn't. He didn't mind that the old man consistently won, either. T. R. was careful not to win more than half his salary back, and as Tim Paradine easily doubled his pay with the unbought gasoline allowance and the kickbacks from the gardener, the grocery store, the garage, and whatever contractors came along to make improvements or repairs on the house, it all evened out.
"More coffee, Gus," the old man called, and the waiter set down the plates he was about to bring to another table and hurried over with the pot. T. R. watched him carefully while the man filled the cup and added one ice cube out of the pitcher of water on the table to bring it to the temperature and tempered strength T. Robert preferred. It paid to be on the board of governors of the club. Apart from pepping up the service, it was a good way to keep the undesirables out of the club, the TV people who would turn it into a sales meeting and the land speculators who were chasing the crumbs that people like T.R. had left— and getting fatter on them than T.R. ever had, with the crazy way homes were going. Of course, you couldn't keep everybody out. There were six blacks, fifteen Jews, and a Mexican priest in the club. (But at least the priest was Episcopalian.) That was carefully planned. Some of the other undesirables were unplanned, like Sam Houston Bradison, but what could you do when he was on the board too? "All right, Tommy," he said, "what've you got for us?"
Tommy Pedigrue set his cup down fast and began his report. "They never held the meeting," he said. "There was a goddam mob!" He told his father about the pickets, the paper-airplane leaflets, the scores of people who had shown up for the meeting that was never held.
The old man leaned back in his wheelchair. "Substantial people, any of them?"
Tommy reflected. "Yeah, sure. Some. And a lot of crazies, too. There was that stoned-out hippie from Puerto Rico and fifteen or twenty more like him."
"They're the ones we'll see on the six o'clock news," his father predicted.
- "Just another bag of trash," Tommy said.
"There's votes in that trash, boy." The old man thought for a moment, while Tommy waited. He scowled and said, "I can't get a clear fix on this thing. I called up that old fart Sigismendt at the Foundation, and he wouldn't commit himself until he checked, and then he called back and said he didn't personally believe it was going to happen. But when you come to pin the son of a bitch down it's all, well, there is a possibility, of course, and, oh, the theory has some support. He says in six months we'll have evidence one way or the other."
"Bastard! He isn't earning his pay."
T.R. nodded, although in fact Dr. Sigismendt and everybody else at the Pedigrue Foundation earned their pay every day of their lives in tax credits, whether they worked or not. "All right," he said, "tell you what we're going to do. You're going to pick out a body of experts to look into this thing, and your brother's going to appoint them to the Senate committee."
"Not a chance, Dad! I can name six senators offhand that'll be making speeches about the Democrats wasting taxpayers' money again—"
"We won't pay them with taxpayers' money, boy," the old man said patiently. "We'll pay them out of Foundation money and donate them to the Senate as a public service. Sigismendt will okay it. About three scientists, a couple of assistants maybe, maybe a secretary or two. One month. And you can promise each one of them a Foundation grant for a year if they do a good job."
Tommy grunted rebelliously. "What can they do in one month?"
"You never know till you try, boy. Now, that's set. I don't want to use Foundation people, either. Sigismendt had some recommendations—don't follow them. Pick your own. Mix them up, make them look like an integrated group. You don't have to get top names. Get smarts. You can probably find everybody you want at that circus down the street. Got any idea who to pick?"