Born to Run (17 page)

Ed coughed, his craggy face suddenly as grey as a heavy cloud. “I’m afraid it does matter.”

In a single sweep, all present turned toward him like sideshow clown heads.

Ed was walking back in from the rear, holding Isabel’s photo-frame in one hand. Everyone could see he’d pried open the back. The old picture of Isabel’s dad was in his other
hand. It had been glued all these years onto a metal backing square placed under the glass—Isabel had seen it herself many times—but with the blade of the knife, Ed had painstakingly
peeled the photo off the metal. He passed it to Isabel.

Handling her beloved photo like it was coated with poison, Isabel quickly saw that what she’d devotedly kept with her all these years wasn’t a photograph at all… but a cutting
from a glossy magazine cover. The name of the publication had been stripped off, but the caption beneath the face had been folded back behind the backing plate.

Yet another of her mother’s lies.

Isabel’s lip began to quiver as she read the text to herself:

“
Lucho Gatica: King of Bolero. His smoke-and-velvet
Bésame Mucho…”

That fucking
Bésame Mucho
, she thought, and slowly looked up at Ed. Her eyes, moist, went round the room, pausing for just a moment at each expectant face. Her shaky fingers
wriggled into her pocket and locked onto the rosaries from St Hyacinth’s.

Ed wound his arm around her pulling her close, and she tilted her head briefly to nuzzle against him.

The tips of one of Gregory’s hands pressed against his lips and the fingers of the other hand were spread flat against his chest, as if he were palpitating and preparing to scream
“oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God” once Ed or Isabel explained what the heck was happening. One thing was for sure: the campaign was not looking good. Nor was The Book.

Isabel straightened up and inhaled. Her eyelids dropped for less than a second and, as she looked back up, her free hand crushed the once beloved picture into a ball and it dropped to the cold,
wooden floor.

No longer looking anyone in the eye, but with a smile weakly hanging on to her mouth, she said, “No debate tonight, folks. Not ever, apparently.”

And in the hushed gloom, the approaching noise from outside was all the louder… the long rolling crunch of gravel along the drive by CBS’s outside broadcast van and three other
vehicles as they drew up outside the hall doors.

For months, America had been clinging optimistically to Isabel’s lustre like moths to the screen door of a lone shiny, bright room. Yet in fewer than thirty TV minutes, Mike Mandrake had
doused those lights with a single flick of his microphone.

From that night, Isabel’s election posters, still beaming her candour, high-mindedness and sense of justice, would curl up into relics for a disheartened nation robbed of a candidate they
adored.

And Mike Mandrake, the man to blame, would become a pin-up of a different kind.

TERRIFIED eyes tried to meet through the cigar smoke, and Bill Edwards’ colleagues startled when he stood his entire bulk, thumped the table, and bellowed,
“Somebody… find me that damn Bolivian whore!” Myron Kowalski, of course, was snickering since, in their younger days, he’d delivered on many similar requests from Bill.

Bill had done all he could tonight, so he sat back down and puffed on his cigar, devastated, though the others in the room wouldn’t be able to tell it from his rock-hard expression.

Bill was thinking fast. But as quick as he was, his mind kept taking him back to two years ago, when he had the vision to identify Isabel, from among the hundreds, as the best candidate. And how
he went after her, chasing her, persuading her, cajoling her, using whatever influence he had to win her over. He’d watched her in action before that, and had liked what he’d seen. To
him, she was the one way out in front, and it didn’t matter a squib to this ancient conservative that she was female, Hispanic, Catholic, childless, rich, had a weird scar, or any of the
other negative qualifications he could imagine being drummed up against her. It was Bill who, once he got her interested, used his clout and stature to dismiss all the party’s teeth-sucking
and hand-wringing—some of which, undoubtedly, was a smokescreen for racism and sexism. In fact, he boldly told his Republican National Committee, with Isabel—he had never been a Sarah
Palin fan—the time had clearly come for a female president, let alone a Hispanic, and that he personally wanted the Republicans to have that first honour.

What were they to do now? The ExCom met around Bill’s table till 3 AM, though Kowalski and other non-ExCom attendees had been dismissed at midnight. Bill, as chairman of the RNC, knew that
the party rules bestowed enormous powers on ExCom, but filling a vacancy in the candidacy for president wasn’t one of them. Under Rule 8, that had to go to the full RNC in five long days
time, the shortest period of notice he could give.

For a brief moment, Bill contemplated substituting Ed as the candidate; the war hero was almost as well-known as his wife and, if Ed won, she’d still be in the White House. But even Bill
knew that was an impossibility.

The debate about Isabel’s running mate, Hank Clemens, raged. Only that day’s
Washington Post
had them cringing over its accuracy: “Henry Samuel Langhorne Clemens III has
as much grip on the major political issues as on a wet bar of soap.” The feature on Hank was excruciating, detailing that while the Clemens family fortune was founded on hogs and river boats,
he had spent his pre-public life making a hash of managing it. Hank was the classic butt of the old joke, “How can you make a small fortune…? First, you give Hank Clemens a big
one.”

Until Bill had pushed him forward as Isabel’s running mate, Hank had enjoyed a richly deserved obscurity, apart from a stint as deputy director of Homeland Security, where the best that
could be said was that nothing had happened on his watch. Even the Republican hard-core was underwhelmed, with the
Weekly Standard
, their bible, painting Clemens as “a shocker with no
awe, a man whose very bright future lies behind him. His entire manner is a drawl, having lived his life like a shoe stretching out a wad of gum stuck to the sole.”

But Bill had backed him, as a sop to appease the law-and-order crowd who saw Isabel as too soft. He didn’t expect Hank would actually have to step forward, but so be it.

So, pressed hard by Bill, the ExCom decided four things that night: to convene an urgent meeting of the RNC in five days; to recommend that Hank take Isabel’s spot; to recommend that Perry
Patein, a Wisconsin congressman, become Hank’s running mate; and to press Isabel Diaz to stay on the stumps and keep campaigning, despite her disqualification, using her charisma and the
nation’s sympathy to back up the new team.

Five turbulent days later, the RNC met, with little choice but to rubber-stamp the ExCom’s recommendations—not least because, at Bill’s insistence, Hank, Perry and Isabel,
without missing a beat, had all three gone straight out onto the hustings to try to salvage as much momentum as possible; and because Bill had leaked the recommendations to the media.

This was a brand-new ball game. Bill… everyone… knew that. Like most vice-presidential candidates, Hank hadn’t been taken seriously until now. The most flattering comment
that could have been made about his public performances to date was that he hadn’t said anything stupid, which was easy for him since he hadn’t said anything at all; he’d just
looked fine standing at-ease in the traditionally respectful spot back and to the side of Isabel at her rallies. And while he filled the minimum technical qualifications for president—over
thirty-five and, yes, truly a natural born citizen—the public now needed to know exactly who this low-profile man really was, whereas the key task that Bill Edwards knew faced his Party was
precisely the opposite: to prevent people finding out.

According to Gregory, when Hank was handed the nomination form where it said “Sign here,” he wrote “Virgo”.

It was why Bill knew he had to lean on Isabel to keep campaigning, though now for the team, not herself. In the current circumstances, if they didn’t have her up front, the Party’s
chances approached zero. They all knew that when people focused on Hank he’d make even George W. Bush and Al Gore seem like they’d been jived-up marionettes dancing on crack. Hank
Clemens might have a heart of gold but, as the saying went, so did a hard-boiled egg.

Perry Patein, the new running mate, had been Isabel’s original preference before Bill Edwards had white-anted him in favour of Hank. Though also young, at forty-two, Perry was no
dewy-eyed, Republican apple-polisher. He’d started life as a hard-hitting economist working on education policy, for the Democrats back then, as it happened. Isabel met him later when he was
seeking funding for education programs that he was developing for Africa. That steered him toward gaining a wider experience in foreign affairs, including a short stint in Iraq, and it wasn’t
long after that when he won his seat in Congress.

That fateful night, Bill told his ExCom colleagues that even if Isabel’s heart wasn’t in continuing to trudge the campaign trail, the pressure on her would be enormous. And, when he
called her in Detroit at 3:15 AM, it already was. She and Ed were still thrashing around the alternatives themselves. Gregory had just left their hotel suite for bed, Isabel only half-kidding that
she’d ring housekeeping to remove the razor blades from his bathroom.

So Bill had an easier task than he expected. After what they’d achieved so far, there was no way Isabel and Ed could bear even the image of Bobby Foster’s stockinged feet up on the
desk in the Oval Office. They’d both known that much even without speaking.

Isabel and Ed didn’t need Bill or even a poll to convince them that without the halo of Isabel’s ongoing presence on the hustings and her strong advocacy, whoever they replaced her
with was guaranteed to go down in a screaming heap. With her, they still might not win, but at least they’d have a fighting chance.

And besides, she was going to have plenty of free time—her Representative’s seat in the House had just been pulled out from under her, too. Old Kowalski had contributed that fine
piece of news to Bill Edwards straight after
Close-up
. He’d pointed out that for Isabel to keep her seat in Congress she still had to be a citizen, though unlike with the presidency,
being naturalised was acceptable.

“No problem,” Bill had said. “We’ll get a naturalisation fast-tracked.” Bill was already thinking about whose arm he’d be twisting for that.

“No,” said Kowalski, “she’s got to be a citizen for seven years first.”

IN the lead up to the official RNC meeting, almost every lawyer in the country who’d been pumping for a Diaz win had pored over the Constitution and the case law. The
Republican National Lawyers’ Association had convened an urgent web conference of its constitutional law experts. The Heritage Foundation asked its legal scholars to opine. Major newspapers
and magazines published opinion pieces galore on the subject. TV networks keen to prove Professor Dupont and
Close-up
wrong, especially FOX, scrabbled around for their own telegenic
experts.

The Democratic Party was ecstatic. Bobby Foster was riding an all-time high, and it was with no assistance from unlawful substances.

Contrary legal arguments were dredged up, of course; even with just two lawyers you get three opinions.

But what was swaying the general public was the absurd notion that a fusty old legal judgment, based on the state of world politics more than a century ago was still the law today; surely it was
merely a dreary relic of a quaint and distant past.
The Wall Street Journal
led that charge, reminding its readers that 1898 was the year the USS Maine was sunk in Havana Harbour triggering
the Spanish-American War and the Cuban blockade; it was the same year a nest of white supremacist ideologues from the Democratic Party—yes, the Democratic Party—signed the scandalous
“White Declaration of Independence” in Hank Clemens’ home town of Wilmington, North Carolina: “
we will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled, by men of
African origin
.”

But
The Journal
wasn’t the deciding forum, and the antiquity of the decision cut no ice with the lawyers.

All the pro-Diaz legal lobby could do was say that the old case should be limited to its own facts; the most popular arguing that while Isabel was the daughter of a diplomat, despite his visit
to see LBJ, he hadn’t been an official envoy to the United States itself, so it didn’t matter, or that since he was long dead, it rendered the Supreme Court decision irrelevant. There
was merit in the counter-arguments, but the RNC’s own experts didn’t see them guaranteeing a positive outcome since it was inevitable the Democrats would challenge everything before the
Supreme Court, the diversion throwing the election into total disarray.

Bill Edwards wasn’t going to be deflected by legal maybes. He knew that with Isabel standing firm behind Hank and Perry, carrying the momentum on as best she could, they’d at least
have a shot.