Levine remained on his feet until she had turned away and taken several steps back toward her table.
“It was an immigration thing,”he remarked vaguely as he sat down. “I like being a congressman. Once in a while you actually do something that helps someone. Anyway,”he added with a shrug, “it beats handing out jock straps.”
Bobby leaned forward. “Look, Lenny, let's get something straight. We both know you had the better deal.”
“The better deal!”repeated Levine incredulously. “You were an All-American—a blond, blue-eyed all-American,”he added with a laugh. “I was a skinny kid so shy that if a girl had ever noticed me long enough to say hello I probably would have fallen down dead out of sheer embarrassment.”
The waiter brought the congressman and I each a scotch and soda; Bobby had a plain soda with a twist of lime.
“You were smart, Lenny. We all knew you were going to be somebody. So you weren't the most popular guy on campus— so what? All that meant was that you had the rest of your life to look forward to. You think it was better to believe that you were going to spend the rest of your life looking back on a football field during your senior year as the best thing you'd ever do?”
Noiselessly, the waiter slid back in front of the table and scribbled down our order. Just before he turned to go, Levine asked for another scotch and soda. I had more than half mine left.
“But you've done well,”said Levine as he pulled one knee onto the leather bench seat.
His voice seemed to fade away, and I started to imagine what he had been like, the gawky kid with braces on his teeth, sweating in the damp heat of a locker room, his arms flashing like toothpicks as he took care of everybody's laundry, grinding his teeth and squinting nervously each time some spoiled muscle-bound clown shouted an obscenity if he wasn't quick enough to do something the jock wanted. I didn't believe Bobby when he told him that they had all thought Lenny Levine was going to be someone later in life; I did not believe they had ever thought about him at all. I wanted to believe that Bobby had thought about him, though; I wanted to believe that when everyone was crowding around him, telling him how great he was, he knew even then how ephemeral it all was, and that the next year, after he was gone, those same people would be crowding around someone else.
“Did you know that I never graduated from Cal?”
My eyes came back into focus, and I looked at Bobby, wondering if I had heard him right. Levine, a puzzled expression on his face, was again suddenly rising to his feet. With a broad smile he reached across and took the hand of someone Herbert Wong wanted to introduce.
“My apologies for the interruption,”said Wong affably as he led away a prosperous-looking young man of not more than thirty.
“What do you mean—you didn't graduate? You went to law school,”objected Levine.
“I didn't have enough credits to graduate at the end of my senior year, and then I played pro ball for two years—until I got hurt.”
I suppose I had always assumed—and I think Levine must have assumed as well—that Bobby had in his youth led the kind of golden life most young men could only dream about. That the truth was somewhat different, that things had not always come to him so easily as we had imagined, changed the way we thought about him because it made him seem more like us. We pressed him for more detail.
“I didn't know what I was going to do then—after I got hurt and couldn't play anymore. Albert Craven suggested I become a lawyer. He was involved with the alumni association—that's how we first met. Albert knew everyone. He worked it all out. I enrolled at San Francisco State, took the courses I needed to get my degree. Then Albert talked to some people at the law school. That's how I got in—Albert Craven.”
There was an awkward silence. Levine rattled the ice in his glass and finished what was left in it. The waiter came back, bearing a tray with steaming hot dishes. Bobby removed a pair of chopsticks from their paper wrapper and began to pick at his food.
“You may have had some help getting in,”I reminded my cousin, “but nobody helped you get through it. You did that on your own.”
Levine agreed and then added, “You're not the only one Albert Craven helped. He's always helped me—right from the start: first time I ran for Congress.”Levine was starting on his third scotch. “Albert has been a great friend,”he went on, turning his attention to me. “I tried to warn him against getting involved with Fullerton.”
He studied me for a moment and then, with sullen eyes, followed the circle of his finger as he dragged it along the edge of the amber-colored glass.
“I've been in politics a long time,”he said without looking up. “I've never seen anyone like Fullerton.”
His finger kept moving around the edge, pausing only to reverse direction or to trace just above it the circle of the glass, in a contest with himself to see how close he could come without actually touching it at all.
“Fullerton was a fake,”he said with a kind of grim determination. “He never told the truth about anything in his life. He lied about everything. He even lied about who he was.”
Levine looked at me, then at Bobby. He wrapped his hand around the glass and lifted it to his mouth.
“He changed things,”he explained. He set down the glass and searched the room for the waiter to order another. “His name, for example. It wasn't Jeremy,”he reported with a mocking smile. “It was Gerald. He claimed his father had been an 'oil man'; his father ran a gas station out near Golden Gate Park. He said his mother had been involved with the theater; his mother was a cashier at an old movie house in the Sunset District.”
“A lot of people try to make their backgrounds sound more interesting than they really are,”protested Bobby.
“Yes,”agreed Levine. “But they do it by emphasizing one thing more than another; they make something they did sound more important than it really was. They don't just change the facts when it suits them. Everything about Fullerton was dishonest.”
Levine peered down at his nails, quickly brushing his thumb over the end of each finger. “He was worse than a fake,”he said in a strangely solemn voice, uttering each word as if it were part of a formal judgment rendered by the living on the dead. “He was a thief, a crook.”
Lifting his head, he gazed at me, waiting for a reaction. When he did not get one, at least not the one he wanted, he became annoyed.
“It's true,”he insisted.
“What exactly did he do?”I asked, now studying him.
Leaning back against the cushioned wall, Levine folded his hands together in his lap. A thin, sarcastic smile started across his face.
“What did he do? I don't really know what he did—not the way a lawyer would want to know. I don't have any of what you might call provable facts. All I know is that on a salary that forces most members of Congress—I mean those who aren't independently wealthy—to share apartments in Washington because they still have to maintain a home back in their districts, Fullerton had a house in Georgetown you couldn't touch for less than seven figures, a co-op apartment here on Nob Hill, and a house across the bay in Sausalito.”
He took another drink, swallowing hard. He put down the glass but did not let go of it.
“He didn't marry money, so you tell me—how did he get it all? The generosity of friends? Maybe. But then it might make you wonder who his friends really were—and what his friends really wanted—wouldn't it?”he asked, scowling at me.
“Do you have any idea who they were?”I asked.
“No,”he replied, taking another drink. “Wherever he was getting his money, he kept it hidden.”
Bobby had been watching with growing interest as Levine became more and more hostile.
“You drink too much, Lenny,”he said as Levine, holding up his empty glass, signaled to the waiter.
Anger flashed across Levine's eyes. “What the hell business is that of yours?”
Calmly, Bobby eased forward and put his hand on Levine's wrist and held it down on the white tablecloth. “We're friends—remember? For some reason, just talking about Fullerton has you all upset. And you've just ordered your third—or is it your fourth?—scotch and soda.”
The waiter brought the drink. For a while Levine just looked at the glass, as if he were deliberating with himself what to do with it.
“You're right,”he said as he took a brief sip and then put down the glass. He looked at me, shook his head, and smiled. “Your cousin is right. I am angry. It has nothing to do with you. I meant what I said before: Fullerton was a fake—the worst I ever saw; and he always got away with it. There's nothing I can do about it, either,”he went on, laughing at his own bewilderment. “Every time I turn around there's another reporter, another television camera, another interviewer who wants to know how we'll ever get over the loss. I have this sickening feeling that for the rest of my life I'm going to see Fullerton's phony smiling face on the cover of the tabloids every time I go through a checkout line at the grocery store.”
He reached for the glass again, then banged it down and let it go.
“Do you know why I'm so damned angry?”he asked, his eyes flashing as he clutched the edge of the table with both hands. “The real reason? Because I could have had that Senate seat instead of Fullerton. It was mine for the taking. All I had to do was get into the Democratic primary. I would have won. You know why I didn't? Because I didn't think anyone could beat a Republican incumbent that year and because I didn't want to give up my House seat to find out. The truth—the absolute, unvarnished truth—is that I actually envied that crooked son-of-a-bitch.”
He stared at us, a foolish grin hanging on his mouth. “Isn't that awful?”he asked with a haunted look in his eyes. “He was a fake; he didn't believe in anything; but despite that, somehow, deep down, he believed in himself a lot more than I did. The truth of it, Bobby,”he said, turning to my cousin, “is that when I was a kid in college I wanted to be just like you, and now that I'm all grown up, I wanted to be someone just like him.”
Beckoning to the waiter, the congressman handed him the scotch and soda and asked for coffee.
“Now that I've got that out of my system,”he said, a broad, unforced smile on his face, “what can I do to help?”
I asked the most obvious question of all. “Do you know anybody who would have wanted Fullerton dead?”
He started to smile again. “I could give you a shorter answer if you asked me if I knew anyone who wanted him alive. But the answer to your question is anyone who knew him. Now, if you're asking me if I can think of anyone who might have had something to do with his death, then I suppose I have to say no.”
“Would he have beaten Marshall—would he have become governor?”
Levine did not hesitate. “I don't think there's any question. You have to understand something. People who knew Fullerton—I mean really knew him—hated him. He was everything I said he was. But people who didn't know him, or who only met him at some political event, loved him the way you can only love someone you don't know, someone you can idolize, someone you can imagine is all the things you want them to be. He was like this great, magical mirror in which you always saw only the best things about yourself. I saw him in an auditorium speaking to thousands of people: Every one of them thought he was speaking only to them; and all of them felt better about themselves because of what he had said. Was he going to beat Marshall and become governor? Absolutely.”
“And if he had won, would he have run against the president?”
“The president thought so. Before Fullerton decided to run for governor, the president was certain Augustus Marshall would be the Republican he would have to run against for a second term in the White House. As soon as Fullerton got into it, the president knew there would be a different Republican candidate and that he, the president, was going to have to fight for his political life inside his own party.”
“Would Fullerton have beaten the president?”
Levine's eyes narrowed into a hard, calculating stare.
“That's not so clear,”he said finally. “It would have been tough. No, it would have been brutal. They hated each other. I think it was because they understood each other. They had a lot in common, you know,”he added with a cynical smile.
He remembered something. “Just before Fullerton was killed, I was starting to hear rumors that some of the people around the president were giving Marshall information about Fullerton that was supposed to be pretty damaging.”
“What kind of information?”I asked, leaning forward.
But that was all he knew, and when I asked him if there was any way he could find out, he told me that it was not the kind of thing anyone was now likely to talk about. I had the feeling he did not want to ask.
“If Fullerton was that much of a threat, do you think the president could have had something … ?”
Levine put his hand in front of his mouth. I could see his jaw muscles working back and forth. His eyes looked tired. Then his hand dropped away and a sad smile crossed his mouth.
“We're not supposed to think that sort of thing is possible, are we?”
It was all the assurance I was going to get, and it told me more than perhaps I wanted to know. There was one more question I had to ask.
“What about the governor?”
“You mean, like what happened to the attorney general?”
It was the second time I had heard someone mention the fortuitous death of Augustus Marshall's first political opponent.
“He died of natural causes,”Levine said, glancing at his watch in a way that told us he had to go. “If you want to know anything about the governor, all you have to do is go see Hiram Green.”
I had no idea who Hiram Green might be, but instead of admitting my ignorance, I nodded as if I did.
Outside the restaurant, after we said good-bye to Leonard Levine, Bobby stood at the edge of the sidewalk, scraping the bottom of his shoe against the curb.
“Remember when he said he could have won the primary for the Senate seat instead of Fullerton?”he asked, shaking his head. “He wouldn't have had a chance.”
We started to walk away, down the street toward the gate over Grant Street, on our way out of Chinatown. I had not learned much that was helpful from the congressman, and Bobby put his arm around my shoulder to cheer me up.