The Last Debate (41 page)

“Why not?”

“Because what happened there is private.”

“Not anymore it isn’t.”

The darkness that I had seen in his face when I showed up now returned.

“I do not believe any of the other three talked to you,” he said.

“You are free to believe whatever you wish.”

“Thank you, asshole.”

Now I looked away toward the sea. OK, OK, he called me an asshole. Twice now, he called me an asshole. So what. I am here to do a job. I am not here to take offense at being called an asshole. In fact, the madder he gets, the more I might get from him.

So. Do I press this Longsworth D point now? That is the question. Do I completely give away the fact that Joan and Henry and Barbara opened up to me on what happened in Longsworth D? No, I decided. Not now. I’ll
come back to it later. Let him believe for a while longer that he might be safe on exactly what he said that Sunday afternoon in Williamsburg to get the other three to go along with his scheme to change the outcome of an election for president of the United States.

But it was time for another thrust—something more than a soft pat.

“Where did you get those women’s statements?” I asked.

“Who says I was the one who got them from anywhere?”

“I know you got them, Mr. Howley. All I want to know is where you got them.”

“No comment.”

“How can you say, ‘No comment’?”

He leaned across toward me and said: “Read my lips. ‘No comment.’ That’s how I can say it.”

“I assume you brought them with you to Williamsburg that Saturday afternoon?”

“You are free to assume anything you wish.”

“By the way, how did you come to Williamsburg?”

He told me about driving his own car and listening to tapes and CDs during the ride down from Washington. I asked him what he did on Saturday night and he brushed me off with a simple “Nothing worth mentioning.” It changed the tempo, at least, for a few seconds. But only a few.

I was right back at it. “I know who took the statements from those women.”

“Good for you.”

“They were taken by people on behalf of one of the campaigns.”

Howley shook his head and smiled. “Forget it, Chapman.” He glanced again at the clock on the table between us. “You’ve got less than five minutes left.”

There was no way I was stopping in five minutes. Maybe not in five hours.

“Was it Tubbs who gave them to you?”

“I said, forget it. There is no gold down that hole, Chapman.”

Like hell there isn’t, Howley.

“I know you talked to him that Saturday night before the debate.”

“Who?”

“Tubbs.”

“How do you know that?”

“No comment.”

Again, he was pissed.

I said: “Somebody—and I know who because he told me—from one of the campaigns gave those statements to somebody who gave them to you. It was Tubbs, wasn’t it?”

“Why is this so important to you?”

“This is not for me. It’s for … well …”

“The public? The American people? Give me a goddamn break.”

“Did you or did you not go to Williamsburg with a plan in mind to use the debate to derail Meredith by driving him crazy enough to lose it there in front of everybody?”

“ ‘Did you or did you not.’ Forget it, Mister District Attorney. I am not on trial.”

“Yes you are.”

“I
was
on trial. But the trial was over on Election Day. The American voters were my judge and jury. They saw and listened and they did not vote for Meredith. That is what this was all about and
all
it was about.”

“What were your thoughts when you opened that debate that night?”

“I don’t recall having any.”

“Not one second thought?”

“Nope.”

“Do you have any idea now of the magnitude of what it is you did?”

“Yes.”

“The outcome of a presidential election was changed because of what you did.”

“Right.”

“Are you proud of what you did?”

“Yes.”

“Journalism. What about what you did to your profession of journalism? Are you proud of what you did to it, too?”

“It was already headed over the cliff, thanks in part to people like you. All I did was give it a last-minute good purpose before it sailed off a cliff and died.”

“Died?”

“Died. Gone. Deceased. Passed away. Expired. Journalism, as something good little boys and girls should devote their dreams and lives to, died. What we are part of is the slimy rigor mortis that is setting in. You more than me, but I am part of it, too, with my lecture fees and TV appearances. We’re no better than the big-buck anchors who are treated as movie stars, not as journalists. They read ‘lines,’ not the facts. They are not expected to inform, only to be entertaining or sexy—”

There was a loud metallic buzzing sound. The alarm. The goddamn alarm was sounding!

Howley reached out with his right hand and turned it off.

“Don’t stop,” I said. “You were saying about your own role in journalism—”

“This interview is over, Chapman.”

“No, no, come on.”

“Yes, yes.”

He stood up. “Get your ass out of my house and out of my life.”

“We have just begun.” I did not stand up.

“We have just ended. Beat it.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Never more so in my whole life, Chapman.”

I still did not move.

“I’m going to call the Greek cops,” Howley said. “I’m going to tell them you offered to sell me some crack cocaine that you smuggled into their country from the United States. I am going to tell them that when I said I did not want your poison and that I was going to call the police, you tossed your evil merchandise over the cliff in the direction of the donkeys. I will tell them that I hope the donkeys, bless their burdened but noble souls, do not by accident chew on a bite of crack cocaine. That would be terrible because it would probably affect their nervous systems and cause them to toss people and goods off of their burdened backs to their deaths or damage.…”

He started laughing. “Crack-crazed donkeys,” he roared. “That’s what you people were like after the debate.”

“You people?”

“You people in the pressroom. Crack-crazed donkeys.”

He had
that
right, but I had another problem right now. I said: “You really would call the police?” I had heard all of the stories about the Greek and Turkish police and drugs. He had my attention.

“You bet your ass I would. They throw people in prison for twenty years without parole simply for possessing drugs in this country.”

Now I was on my feet.

“I have many, many more questions,” I said.

“Out, Chapman, out.”

“I am authorized by my publisher to pay you for your story, Mr. Howley.”

“You bastard! Go!”

“Seriously. Why shouldn’t you be paid for your story? You earned it the hard way.”

“Keep talking, Chapman, and I may throw you down to the donkeys where you belong.”

“Fifty thousand dollars—in cash.”

“No!”

“I can have it here in less than twenty-four hours.”

“Go!”

“Seventy-five?”

He made a move toward me. He really did. A step and then another. I decided to shut up. I had seen the men and women—the crack-crazed donkeys—of the American press at their violent worst in the Virginia Room. I had been known to throw an angry softball at an editor myself. There was seriously no telling what this man coming toward me now might try to do to me.

I said: “How about lunch? I’ll buy.”

“Out! Good-bye!”

Out, good-bye, it was.

Chapman
v
. Howley. I had imagined a round-the-clock marathon of strong, hot, smart words and emotions that would tax civility and intellects. I had expected to be spent, to be exhausted, to be used up, but to be bleeding joy and triumph, as did the warriors who battled in other times, in other places over other things.

Instead, it was over in an hour to the sound of an alarm clock. And I had been thoroughly defeated. He had wasted precious time off the clock
with all of those details about that goddamn theater in San Antonio, the plane ride, and other irrelevancies. I thought I could push back the time. I started soft. I threw away my time. He was smarter than me.

He won.

I did see and do a few more things on Santorini before I left on the noon plane for Athens the next day.

I walked the eight hundred or so steps that zigzagged down the side of the cliff to the port, had a cup of espresso and a pastry in an outdoor café. The waitress, a Greek woman in her forties, told me in rough English that I was actually sitting on the edge of a volcano. “It’s down in water somewhere,” she said. “It blows, we blow, happens many times.” Back at the hotel I read in a brochure even more about what Howley had told me out on his deck. The monumental volcanic explosion thirty-five hundred or so years ago caused the center of the island to drop into the sea, creating the cliff where Fira and the rest of Santorini was now. Archaeologists have been hard at work since the 1930s unburying Akrotiri, a complete, once-prosperous city on the southern end of the island that was buried in that first big eruption. They still had not found any bones or other signs of human or animal bodies. There had been several other destructive eruptions since, the worst being in 1956.

The brochure said the island was occupied by the Germans and Italians during World War II. I wondered why the Germans and the Italians thought this place was necessary to occupy? How did the people here get through such a horrendous experience? Were there any collaborators? Did any of the Germans or Italians stay here after the war? Was there any intermarrying between the occupiers and the occupied? The whole story of Santorini sounded fascinating, and I thought vaguely that someday—a better day—I might even become interested in finding out more.

I rode a donkey back up to the top of the cliff, a twenty-minute trip made memorable mostly by the flies and the smell of donkey doings. As I went into several of the many shops on the main, pedestrians-only street, I paid some attention to the people this time. All were dark-skinned, made that way naturally by God at birth or since then by being out in the hot Greek sunshine.

I didn’t buy any gold jewelry, the apparent specialty of Fira, or anything else. The only item that tempted me was a pair of white duck pants I came across in a tiny clothing store. I decided against them because I knew I would never wear them, because every time I put them on I would think again about what happened to me where I bought them.

Chapman
v.
Howley. I came, I failed. I fell on my face. I, the defeated.

There now remained on my interview list two central figures in the Williamsburg drama. They were the new president of the United States, Paul L. Greene, and the man he defeated, David Donald Meredith. They were the ultimate victor and victim of Williamsburg, and thus their most detailed personal memories of that Sunday night on that stage were crucial to painting the full and complete picture of the event. So were their thoughts and opinions about Howley and Barbara and Henry and Joan and what they did.

I was determined to get interviews with both Greene and Meredith before I rested—and wrote. The story would never be complete without them.

I had begun working on a Greene interview almost immediately—within forty-eight hours of my return from Williamsburg following the debate. The people who replaced Lilly and the other campaign people simply and politely put me off. Nobody ever quite said yes or no, and everyone I talked to was encouraging, hopeful, helpful, pleasant. But there was no interview. Transition problems were cited. Later, they said. Later, later, later. Let him get a cabinet and a government together. Then he will gladly sit down and ruminate about Williamsburg. I came back again and again through everybody I knew or could cultivate within the transition team and entourage. Nothing. The man’s got an inaugural address to write and deliver, they said. Let him get that behind him. Later, right after he’s there in the Oval Office. Later, later. You’re at the top of the list. He really wants to talk to you, they said. Patience, please, is all we ask. Let him get situated and comfortable. Patience, please. Later.