Marvin Harmes had been the choice, and doubtless a superior one, except that he detested Donald Cubbin and was now one of Sammy Hanks’s most partisan supporters. Harmes despised Cubbin for having chosen him as regional director because he was a black. If Sammy Hanks had done the choosing, Harmes would have been supporting Cubbin. Harmes didn’t have much faith in happy endings for anything.
“It was like I was saying before when you—” Harmes stopped and started over. “It was like I was saying before. I admit the Midwest looks dicey just now. Forty-eight to forty-one percent’s a big lead for Cubbin, if that poll’s right. But hell, we haven’t even started yet. I can put fifty guys to work tomorrow, real arm twisters. And besides, we’ve got almost six weeks to—”
“Five weeks,” Hanks said.
“Okay, five weeks. I can change a whole lot of minds in five weeks.”
“You think you can?”
Harmes frowned. “Look, Sammy, I’ve got just as much riding on this as you do.”
“I know. That’s why I asked you.”
“Well, I’m telling you it can be done.”
Hanks turned to one of the four men who was noisily stripping a cigar of its cellophane wrapper. He was Emil Lorks, a vice-president of the union who lived in West Los Angeles in a house with a pool, two Russian wolf hounds, and his wife. As a vice-president of the steel union, Lorks drew only about $10,000 a year in per diem and expenses. His principal income, around $27,000, came from his job as business agent of a large, rich local whose base was a relatively new and gigantic fabricating plant about twenty miles east of Los Angeles. Lorks was up for reelection and he was worried about his chances.
“Well, Emil?” Hanks said.
Lorks’s hair was still a pale, fine blond and he liked to wear it a little long so that it lapped over his shirt collar. He stuck the cigar in his mouth, tipped his chair back, looked up at the ceiling, and patted his hair. He was stalling for time so that he could think of how to agree with Sammy Hanks without getting the nigger mad. He was a damned good nigger, but he sometimes went off half cocked. “I think,” Lorks said slowly, “that we oughta do both. Now just think about it a minute. If we do both, we can’t lose.”
Lorks shifted his glance from the ceiling to the men in the room. Hanks was nodding. Harmes was impassive. Olkes looked vaguely impressed. The fifth man in the room was also the oldest. Like Lorks, he was a vice-president up for reelection. He was also business agent of one of the big Pittsburgh locals that paid him nearly $27,000 a year for his services. He got another $10,000 a year from the union in per diem and expenses. He lived in a seven-room apartment with his wife and nineteen-year-old son who was studying piano and didn’t seem to like girls much, which worried his father whose real name had been Zbigniew Kowalczewski until he had had it legally changed to Ziggy Kowal. He knew over three hundred Polish jokes and he told at least twenty of them in every speech he made.
The four other men in the room were now looking at Ziggy Kowal. In what Lorks had said he sniffed a compromise that would satisfy everyone, keep the nigger happy, and Sammy from wiggling around on the floor again. And it wasn’t a bad idea either, Kowal thought, and decided to make a little speech about it.
“Well, you guys know that there’s nothing dumber than a dumb polack and the dumbest polacks in the world work in the plants around Chicago.”
“We got some pretty dumb niggers up there, too,” Harmes said softly.
“They ain’t as dumb as us polacks. Well, I was up there a week ago as you all know and I was trying to find out how they were gonna vote. Now I don’t know what your poll says about ’em, Sammy, but from what they told me they’re all gonna go for Cubbin. Now that’s a sizable chunk of votes and maybe we can change their minds in five weeks and maybe we can’t. I’m not sure we can because they’re so goddamned stubborn. But like Harmes and Lorks said, we oughta try. But I also think we oughta take out a little insurance so that’s why I’m willing to go along with Sammy.”
Sammy Hanks let the silence that followed grow for a few moments. Then he turned to Olkes. “Well?”
Olkes shrugged. “I guess we’d better do both, like Emil says.”
The last man that Hanks needed consent from was Harmes, the one who would have to do it. “Marvin?” Hanks said.
Harmes shrugged. “It’s gonna cost,” he said.
“Everything costs,” Hanks said. “So we’re agreed. We run a real tough campaign around Chicago. But like Ziggy says we take out insurance.”
“Don’t fancy it up, Sammy,” Harmes said. “Just say it out plain what it is you want me to do around Chicago.”
The scowl came back on Hanks’s face. “All right, goddamnit, I want you to steal the fuckin election.”
“I just wanted to hear you say it plain,” Harmes said.
6
The idlers and loafers in the lobby were always rewarded with a minor spectacle whenever Donald Cubbin took an elevator up to his hotel suite. If the spectacle lacked pomp and ceremony, it at least involved enough ritual to make onlookers aware that Somebody Important was going to take an elevator ride.
If Cubbin were just arriving in a city, the arrangements began as far away as the airport, in this case O’Hare International at Chicago. After the Lear 24 had landed and taxied to its place of temporary rest, three cars, a large blue Oldsmobile 98 and a green Cadillac Fleetwood followed by a Plymouth taxi, drew up to the plane. All three cars had special airport passes displayed on their windshields.
The Oldsmobile and the Cadillac contained loyal Cubbin supporters including a sixty-three-year-old vice-president from the Chicago — Gary area, Lloyd Garfield, who, in Donald Cubbin’s borrowed opinion, wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. Nevertheless, Garfield knew where he could lay his hands on a sizable amount of money for the campaign and Cubbin would treat him with polite contempt. Garfield would have been surprised if he had been treated any other way.
Fred Mure was first out of the plane. He was listed on the union’s payroll as an organizer, but he was actually Cubbin’s shadow. If they were traveling, it was Mure who got Cubbin up in the morning and saw him into bed at night. He served Cubbin as valet, bootlegger, whipping boy, retainer, occasional confidant, and, some said, bodyguard because of the .38 Chief’s Special that he carried in his hip pocket. He was a handsome thirty-five-year-old man without even a high school diploma, who over the years had grown moderately wealthy by acting on the stock-market tips that came his way from those who had wanted something from Cubbin and who thought that Fred Mure could help. Sometimes he had.
Mure’s public devotion to Cubbin bordered on the slavish. It occasionally transformed itself into jealousy, which amused Cubbin who found Mure a little pathetic, but useful. Cubbin sometimes tried out explanations of complicated union economic proposals on Mure because “if that dumb son of a bitch can understand it, anybody can.”
After Mure helped Cubbin out of the plane, he stood back and watched while Garfield and two other Chicago supporters did the welcoming. When he was sure that Cubbin had no further need of him, he trotted over to the cab, got in, and handed the driver two bills, a ten and twenty.
“You can keep ’em both if you get me to the Sheraton in thirty minutes.”
The cab driver stuck the bills in his shirt pocket. “I can try, buddy.”
Mure got in the back seat, took a small notebook out of his pocket, and used a ball-point pen to write down, “Cab fare, $40, Chicago.” It was another one of his jobs, to keep Cubbin’s expense records, and he did it meticulously and with a commendable amount of imagination.