“Um, yes, yes.” Cheatham frowned. “Frankly, it seems like a long time.”
“These are my standard terms. The duration is long, granted, but the reward is huge, and the payment . . . frankly, sir, most courts would see it as trivial.”
“It being difficult to establish a market value for an immortal soul,” Cheatham said, nodding. “I see your point. But look here: âTo be disposed of in whatever manner pleases the party of the first part.'” He looked owlishly over to Hardy. “It's all very vague, Joseph.”
“Let it stand, Mr. Cheatham.”
“Very well, very well. But I still don't think that I can sign off on the time element here.” A little palpitation of sparks appeared around Nick's eyebrows, unseen by the lawyer, who was studying the ceiling as if the solution to the impasse might be written there. And perhaps it was, for he soon looked down and said portentously, “Why don't we make it a thousand years?”
Nick laughed.
“I ask for eternity and you offer a thousand?” he said. Then he leaned forward. “A billion years. My final offer.”
They settled on 250,000 years, and Cheatham seemed satisfied.
“I imagine you'll want to show these amendments to your own attorneys,” he said.
“No need,” said Nick, hooking his thumbs in his vest. “Harvard Law, class of 1735.”
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While a secretary was preparing clean copies, a bottle of brandy was produced. Cheatham asked Nick what eventuality had led him to read for the law.
“The legal fees were eating me alive,” Nick admitted. “I saw which way the wind was blowing, and I can't tell you how handy it's been.”
Hardy took a stiff drink when the copies arrived and hardly hesitated before he signed. Nick bent over Cheatham's desk, then looked up at Hardy with a gleam in his eye.
“Don't worry, Joe,” he said. “I know ways of making a hundred thousand years seem like an eternity.” He signed each of the three copies, then straightened and said, “We should get started. How does tomorrow sound? Let's have lunch.”
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They met at a Chinese place for dim sum. They each stacked half a dozen of the little plates brought to the table by girls pushing carts and finished half a pot of tea.
“I suppose you've been wondering how we'll go about this,” Nick said.
“I've thought of nothing else.”
“Simplest thing in the world.” Nick produced a small bottle with a glass stopper and set it on the table. “Concentrated charisma.”
Hardy picked it up, looked at it, pulled the stopper and sniffed.
“Try not to spill it,” Nick said. “Pretend it's thousand-dollar-an-ounce perfume. Just dab some on your face once a day.”
Hardy applied some and felt nothing.
“Bit of a letdown,” he muttered.
“Wait for it,” Nick said, folding his arms. “The stuff's hard to come by. I collect it where I can find it. Baptist revival meetings are good; sometimes the stuff drips off the tent walls. You can find a bit around used-car lots, salesmen's conventions, get-rich-quick real estate seminars. And, of course, every year I get a lot of the stuff at the Oscar ceremonies.” He shrugged. “I have to be out there, anyway, so what the heck.”
“I thought I recognized you,” someone said, and Hardy looked up to see that two waitresses had converged on the table. They had been serving Joe and Nick for half an hour without incident.
“Joseph Hardy!” said the other, putting her hand to her mouth. “I voted for you, Joe!”
“You and about three more,” Hardy said. The waitresses laughed more than the feeble joke deserved.
“I didn't vote,” the first one admitted, “but if you run again, I sure will. Here, take this, it's on the house.” It was some sort of meat-stuffed dumplings.
Soon a buzz spread through the restaurant. The owner came by and tore up the check, and people began to ask for autographs. Nick sat back and watched, then during a lull reached over and touched Hardy's sleeve.
“Tough being in the public eye, eh?”
“What's that? Oh, Nick, sure. Why don't you try one of these dumplings with the spicy mustard?”
“Far too hot for me, I'm afraid. Joseph, I'll be going now. You won't see me for another five years. Look for me at primary time.”
“What's that?” Hardy signed another napkin and glanced up. “Oh, sure, primary time. Uh . . . is there anything else I should know? Anything I need to do?”
“Just stick to your principles. I'll take care of the rest.” He frowned slightly, taking one more look at his candidate. “Next time, be plain old Joe. And get a hair-cut. See if you can find Dan Quayle's barber.”
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The next five years passed like a montage in a Frank Capra film based on a Horatio Alger novel.
Joseph “Call Me Joe” Hardy returned to the campus and immediately his classes began to fill up. Within a term, the administration had twice moved him to a larger hall. The students loved his lectures and said he managed to make economics interesting for the first time ever. Applause was common.
Strangers approached him on the street to pump his hand. Reporters asked his comments on political issues. The camera loved him, they said. Radio talk-show hosts clamored for him to be interviewed and to field questions from callers. He had a folksy, common touch that showed to good advantage on the local
Nightline
knockoff, where his face became familiar to everyone in the state.
Even his marriage improved.
At the proper time he announced his candidacy for Congress. Party bigwigs couldn't have been happier. Although his opponent outspent him three to one, the election was never in doubt. Joe Hardy led in the polls from the first, and the only question come election day was the margin of his victory. He was sent to Washington with a stunning mandate and very little political baggage.
In D.C., he did a passable imitation of Jimmy Stewart for a few weeks, stumbling a few times, making a few mistakes as he got his office organized. But he was neither stupid nor innocent and soon was offering bills and fending off political action committees as if he'd done it all his life.
His reputation as a straight shooter was quickly established. It could have been a handicap, but Joe Hardy knew when to compromise to get things done and when to stand fast on a matter of principle. He was a man you could do business with, but you couldn't buy him. He earned the respect of most of his colleagues, grudging at first, genuine soon after.
There was jealousy, of course, from both parties. It wasn't every freshman Congressman who had Ted Koppel calling every other week to ask him to debate George Will or Ted Kennedy. Few new faces rated a twenty-minute profile on
Prime Time Live.
Hardy had an uncanny knack for picking up free exposure worth millions in a reelection campaign. He was returned for a second term by an even larger margin.
No one was surprised when he threw his hat into the ring for the upcoming presidential race.
Even a Capra movie must have trouble along the way, and some was brewing. Dark forces were gathering inside the Beltway, powerful forces stirring within think tanks, public relations firms, advertising agencies. Campaign committees representing his rivals from both parties began to circle Joe Hardy, sniffing for blood.
Soon after his name started coming up as a presidential hopeful, his opponents began their research. It went from his birth to his last vote on the House floor. It was quickly established that he was not an escaped mass murderer, a homosexual, an IRA terrorist or a communist spy. Still, the private detectives reading his grade school reports and interviewing every friend Hardy ever had were not discouraged.
There were persistent rumors, whispered here and there, of something really big. Some knockout punch, something to blow Joe Hardy out of the race before it'd really begun. The peepers vowed to find it, whatever it was, if they had to track leads straight through hell.
Which is exactly where the trail led them.
One by one they had returned, battered, scorched, empty-handed, until one day a tall, thin, pimply fellow walked into the offices of the Elect Peckem Committee and put a smoking document on the chairman's desk.
“It wasn't that tough,” the hacker said smugly. “Old Scratch could use better security software. I was in and out of his hard disks before anybody knew what was happening.”
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JOE HARDY IN PACT WITH LUCIFER screamed the headline of the Manchester
Union Leader
two weeks before the New Hampshire primary. Next to the damning article was another quoting a CBS-
Wall Street Journal
poll conducted minutes after the announcement. Joe's standing had plummeted. He now stood only two percentage points above the chief rival for his party's nomination, Senator Peckem.
Nick found Joe secluded in his office. Joe leaped to his feet.
“How could you do this to me?” he screamed.
“Calm down, Joe. Just calm down. All is not lost.”
“The deal was supposed to be confidential!”
“I know, Joe, and I couldn't be sorrier. I've hired a new security consultant, but the cat's out of the bag,” he said.
“So stuff him back in! You're . . . well, you know who you are. Can't you do that?”
“Unfortunately, my powers have limitations, Joe. I can't change what's already happened. As for that cat, however”âand now he smiledâ“I've always preferred to skin it. And I know more than one way.”
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“Tonight Jay's guests are: From
Beverly Hills, 90210,
Jason Priestley. Congressman Joe Hardy. And special guest, Satan, Prince of Darkness. And now . . . Jay Leno!”
It was rough at first, as they'd known it would be. Leno skewered them during the monolog. But when Joe and Nick were finally seated, the tide began to turn. The two of them seemed relaxed, not at all ashamed or defensive, and, well,
interesting.
The audience wasn't on their side yet, but they were willing to listen.
So when the talk turned serious, Joe offered information about something that hadn't got much play in the press: the
terms
of the contract.
“If I had it to do all over,” Joe said with a pensive frown, “would I? I really don't know, Jay. But you read it yourself. Of all the candidates in this race, I am the only one guaranteed not to stoop to attack advertising. You saw it there in black and white. I won't abandon a stand I've taken for a cheap political motive. There'll be no flip-flopping on the issues from Joe Hardy. I won't say one thing in Boston and something else in Atlanta. I want to be your President, and I want to do it solely with the small contributions of the working class and the middle class of this great country. I can't do otherwise. It's in my contract.”
“And if he were to break it,” Nick said with a devilish grin, “I'd be sure to give him hell.”
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The next day, on
The Joan Rivers Show,
Nick tackled the question of his role as the Great Adversary with a casual wave of his hand.
“That's been blown way out of proportion,” he said. “Remember, He and I used to be good friends. We had a falling out, it's true, but He
did
create me, and I'm part of His plan. You might say I'm just doing my job.” The grin on his face as he said this was infectious.
To Arsenio, Nick said, “I have to say this Lord of Evil business is mostly a bad rap, my friend.
Darkness,
yes. But that can be cool.”
Discussing his methods with Regis and Kathie Lee, Nick said, “We both move in mysterious ways, God and me. It's true, I
am
out to get your soul and I
do
send it to hell. But have you been there lately?”
That's exactly where Dan Rather went with a television crew. He reported back with footage that suggested a medium-security federal prison. “We saw no fire and brimstone,” Rather said, wearing his Afghan-war safari jacket. “Make of that what you will; we were not given free run of the facilities. Still, all in all, Manuel Noriega doesn't have it much better than what we were shown.”
Geraldo sneaked to the outskirts of Hades shortly afterward, was roughed up by succubi and was ejected. He claimed to have been sucker-punched by the head succubus, but she denied everything and had a lurid videotape to back her story. When it aired the tape,
A Current Affair
drew an enormous audience rating.
Oprah claimed to be worried by something: Could one love God and still deal with Satan? Nick convulsed her audience by retorting, “Me and God? It's true we don't double-date. Think of us as Siskel and Ebert.”
Slowly Joe edged back up in the polls as voters adjusted to the new playing field. Many seemed to feel they'd faced considerably worse choices most election years.
On primary day, New Hampshiremen slogged through a snowstorm to give Hardy 38 percent of the vote, ten points more than his nearest rival.
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The nearest rival was Senator Peter Peckem, and upon viewing the exit polls, Peckem slammed his fist onto his desk and growled to his assembled campaign staff: “That's enough of that crap. You're all fired.” He was on the telephone before the last of them had scampered through the door.
Within the hour he had spoken to Phillips Petroleum, General Motors, Matsushita, Dow Chemical, McDonnell Douglas, Toshiba and was working his way through the Fortune 500. The message was the same: I need lots of money and I need it now. Send it and I'm your boy. It was very much like a stock offering. By midnight he was a wholly owned subsidiary, and the money was pouring into offshore laundries from Bimini to the Cayman Islands.
His last act before retiring for the night was to hire a new campaign manager, a man by the name of Yerkamov, famous for engineering the reelection of an eighty-two-year-old senator from a Southern tidewater state shortly after that worthy's conviction on a charge of statutory rape.