Kelly Cubbin sat next to Fred Mure, watching on a monitor as the guests and the reporters were seated on the studio set.
“Old Don looks great on TV, don’t he, Kelly?” Mure said.
“Fine.”
“And he’s only had two drinks today, too. I offered him one just before he went in there, but he didn’t even want it.”
“You’re nothing but kindness, Fred.”
Mure nodded comfortably. “I try to look after him.”
On the set four reporters, nicknamed “The Cutthroats,” sat behind a curved table on a raised dais, looking down on the guests, or victims, as Neal James sometimes called them. The two guests sat in plain, straight, armless chairs that gave them no place to rest their hands other than in their laps, which made them look silly, or folded across their chests, which made them look frightened. However, Cubbin knew what to do with his hands. He sat straight in his chair, his chin up, his legs crossed, his right arm casually resting on his crossed left leg, his left hand loosely grasping his right wrist. He looked attentive, casual, relaxed, and above all, dignified, and he knew it.
Sammy Hanks used the only weapon he had, his delightful smile. He turned it on and kept it on except when he thought it would be better to look serious and concerned. As for his hands, he forced them to hang straight down at his sides and Mickey Della thought it made him look like a man waiting to be strapped into the electric chair.
Neal James sat on a raised podium behind a small desk between his two guests. He had a round, almost cherubic face that made him look younger than forty-six. He also smiled frequently and the smile was at its sweetest just after he had asked a particularly nasty question.
James had chosen his panel of reporters more for their abrasive personalities than for either their looks or their journalistic abilities. Before they had started appearing regularly on the program, they had been small-time Washington correspondents with cubbyholes in the National Press Building who worked for various newspapers in states such as Louisiana, Texas, Idaho, and Nebraska. Now two of them, Ray Sallman and Roger Krim, had their own syndicated columns and the other two, Frank Felix and Arnold Timmons, were getting requests for articles from such magazines as Playboy and Esquire, although Timmons didn’t think he was getting his share.
They all realized that their new prestige and popularity depended on their continuing appearance on “The Whole World Is Watching,” and they also knew that Neal James would go on paying each of them $500 an appearance only as long as they continued to be nasty. And so nasty they were, even vicious, and each week they competed among themselves to see who could produce the most sordidly embarrassing questions.
The program actually had turned them into much better reporters because to come up with the right questions they had to do an immense amount of spadework, something that none of them had ever bothered with before. But they also found that as their prestige rose so did the level of their sources and the four of them were now considered to be among the best informed reporters in Washington.
After the introductions, the questioning was started by Neal James. His first question, a slam-bang one, went to Sammy Hanks.
“Mr. Hanks, how long have you known that your opponent here, Mr. Cubbin, was an alchoholic?”
“For several years,” Hanks said and thought, God, I didn’t know it was going to be like this. Della warned me, but I didn’t think it would start off this bad.
“And that’s why you decided to run against him, because you thought that you could beat a sick man?”
For twenty-two minutes the questions came much like that, first to Hanks and then to Cubbin. At the end of ten minutes, Hanks was yelling his answers. Cubbin, using every bit of his acting ability, managed to answer most of the questions crisply although once he snarled at Neal James: “I’m not going to answer that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a damn-fool question.”
“Well, perhaps your opponent, Mr. Hanks, will answer it for you.”
“Sure,” Sammy said, grinning happily, “I’ll be glad to.”
At twenty-two minutes past one Arnold Timmons took a deep breath, thought once more of the $10,000 that had been paid him in cash by Peter Majury, and said, “My next question is for Mr. Hanks.” Timmons paused and Hanks looked at him curiously before he smiled and said, “Go ahead. It can’t be any tougher than the ones I’ve already answered.”
“Your father was a graduate of Princeton, Mr. Hanks,” Timmons said, “yet you barely finished high school—”
Nobody ever did find out what the last of Timmons’ question was because at the mention of his father, Sammy Hanks shot to his feet. “You!” he screamed, pointing at Timmons. “You’re the worst man I’ve ever met. You’re rotten! Oh, God, you’re rotten!”
Hanks had now moved between Neal James and the four reporters and still aimed an accusing finger at Timmons as he screamed, “I’m going to get you! I’m going to get you! You’ll be sorry!”
In the control room the program’s director was talking happily to his number-three cameraman, “Oh, beautiful, beautiful! Keep it right on him, baby, all the way even if he flies out the window.”
In the studio Sammy Hanks had sunk to his knees and was pounding the floor with his fists, screaming the word that sounded like “cawg!” over and over again. Then he looked up at Timmons and some forty million persons got a good close-up view of Hanks’s face, now made incredibly ugly by the lips that were drawn back in a dog’s snarl, by the tongue that flicked in and out of his mouth, and by the spittle that trickled down his chin. Sammy Hanks crawled across the floor toward Timmons, pounding the floor and screaming as he went and the camera followed him all the way.
Well, shit, Donald Cubbin thought, nobody deserves this, not even Sammy. He rose and walked over to Hanks and stood there for a moment, a tall, dignified man with silver hair, wearing an expression of infinite compassion, which was only half put on.
In the control room, the director was still yelling his instructions, “Three on Cubbin, close and hold, now two on Hanks, hold, and back three to Cubbin and cry for us a little, Sammy, baby, oh God, that’s beautiful.”
Hanks was still crawling slowly, screaming his one word scream, when Cubbin bent down and said, “Come on, Sammy, let’s get out of here.”
Hanks looked up at Cubbin and also up into the number three camera. “Cawg!” he screamed and the tears ran down his cheeks to mingle with the spit on his chin.
Cubbin helped Hanks to his feet, turned, and started to lead him away when Neal James said, “How many votes do you think that’ll win you, Mr. Cubbin?”
Cubbin turned slowly and glared at James. He put a lot into the look: scorn, contempt, a little hurt, and the camera caught it all nicely and the microphone faithfully carried the deep baritone when it softly said, “I’m not thinking about votes; I’m thinking about another human being.”
On a monitor Mickey Della watched Cubbin lead the weeping Hanks out of camera range. Della took the cigarette from his mouth, ground it into the studio carpet, turned and walked down a hall and out of the building to his car. Mickey Della had no use for crybabies.
In his hotel suite Coin Kensington crammed a heaping spoonful of potato salad into his mouth, his eyes fixed on the television screen. “Oh, my God, that’s awful, that’s just awful,” he said from around the potato salad.
“That’s what we paid ten thousand bucks for,” Walter Penry said.
“Yeah, I know but it’s just God-awful.”
“It still won’t win Cubbin the election.”
Old Man Kensington tore his eyes from the screen long enough to glare at Penry. “Well, it sure as shit ain’t gonna lose it for him.”