The Spoiler (35 page)

While Lofton headed down into the crowd to talk to Kirpatzke, someone in a chicken suit bounded onstage and pretended to struggle with the man at the microphone. The kids pushed and cheered at the front of the crowd.

“What a surprise,” Kirpatzke said when he saw Lofton. His voice held the same flat tone as always.

“I'm sure you're thrilled.”

On the platform Amanti was seated between Brunner and Kelley. The PA boomed, loud and scratchy: “Nope, folks, this is not the Hollywood Chicken.” The kids groaned. The announcer came back quickly. “Nope, this is the Hillside Chicklet.” The Chicklet looked up, surprised, grabbed himself in the stomach as if he'd been shot, then bounced up, waving his pennant.

“Listen,” Lofton said to Kirpatzke, “I talked to Brunner.”

“Another thrill.” Kirpatzke stared straight ahead. He chewed gum and would not look at Lofton.

“The Chicklet was sent ahead by the Hollywood Chicken to tell you he'll be at MacKenzie Field, tonight, along with these gentlemen on the bandstand.…”

“What does Brunner have on you?”

“Not a thing.” Kirpatzke continued staring at the platform.

“First, we have to punish you by making you listen to some of our politicians.”

“Damn right you're punishing us,” a teenager yelled from the back. The crowd snortled and laughed.

“Come on, Kirpatzke. Brunner as much as told me. If I give you the real story, will you print it? Or is the whitewash the only thing you'll take?”

“What piece, what whitewash?”

“The one Brunner wants me to write and you to publish. You know what I'm talking about.”

“Maybe I do. So what?”

“Be patient. Hold your breath while the politicians let out theirs, and pretty soon we'll meet Holyoke's star pitcher and soon-to-be major leaguer, Rickey Sparks.”

“Let me give you some advice.” Kirpatzke turned to him. “Get lost. Forget the story. Don't fuck yourself.”

Onstage Senator Kelley stepped toward the mike. His whole scheme had been squelched, but here he was at the rally, taking the stage, going at the crowd. There were several women onstage behind him, campaign workers and a few female representatives from the Holyoke City Council. Amanti was the only one among them who did not smile brightly; she stood at an angle back from the others, much the way she had stood when Lofton first saw her, that day at the ballpark, her weight resting back on one leg, somehow aloof from the scene, disengaged, though at the same time she was the one who seemed to know something the others didn't, the girl with a secret. She knew Brunner, she knew Kelley, she knew what the two men wanted—Brunner to own the team, the town, the players, and Kelley to hear the crowd's shouts and cries—but it amounted to the same thing: Each wanted to be the dog on top, the one with the sharp teeth and the big dick who nobody screwed with unless he was crazy, and then that poor fucker got what he asked for all right, every time. Or that's the way it seemed, for a moment, as Lofton looked at Amanti, and he guessed, even if he had known nothing about her at all, that she would be the one onstage who drew his attention.

“One big happy family up there. Gives me a warm feeling inside,” Kirpatzke said. The corners of his mouth turned up in a small smile. He put his hand on Lofton's shoulder. His tone changed, suddenly friendly, intimate. “You're a sap,” he said, and edged forward into the crowd.

Lofton edged closer, too. He wanted to catch Amanti's attention. He saw the way Amanti seemed to be watching Kelley from behind; he saw how Brunner in turn watched Amanti and how Kelley, at the last second, turned to look at them both before, finally, directing his full attention to the crowd.

Kelley was a small man, and he seemed even smaller, standing in front of the crowd alone. He had lithe movements and black hair, black like the hair of Italian girls in the movies. He took the microphone in a manner that was faintly silly but aware of its silliness, deliberate, charming; he grabbed it between his two hands, more like a singer than a politician.

“This isn't a political rally,” he said, speaking softly in the accent of the Irish North End. He gestured at the balloons and streamers, as if to call attention to how their presence contradicted his words. The combined effect of the gesture and Kelley's soft, insistent voice made you wonder for a second if perhaps there was something obvious you had missed, if perhaps all the politicians were gathered on the decorated platform for some purpose beyond the ordinary.

“I know a lot of you are tired, a lot of you are cynical. You've seen too many times how things come down in Boston, how the big boys”—he turned and looked at the men behind him—“how the big boys ignore the people out here in western Massachusetts.”

Kelley paused, surveying the crowd. The security men surveyed, too. Amanti looked up at Kelley, her lips parted, eyes blue and radiant, her face in the same ironic pout he remembered seeing once before: in those pictures, taken beneath the trees, when she was a college girl in Boston.

“But I tell you, this is a day we can celebrate the bipartisan spirit. Just yesterday, as I sat in committee—yes, in one of those long rooms with the long tables—the big boys lifted their sleeping heads, awakened by your shouts, by your pleas.” Kelley raised his voice now for a moment, then lowered it again, softer than ever. The crowd was quiet. “Yes, those statesmen—supporters of Wells and Sarafis alike—decided to reconvene, to rebudget.… Holyoke will get its funding. Holyoke will get its new downtown.”

There was a long hush in the mall. Then suddenly it seemed to sink in. The minicams were rolling. The reporters scrawled their excitement. The crowd seemed subdued, confused. Brunner sat smiling. The money for Holyoke's downtown had been allocated after all. Brunner's property held its value, at least until the next committee meeting, after the election. If Brunner acted now, he could burn and collect.

Brunner had not switched sides in the campaign. Kelley had lost; his plan to pressure Brunner had failed. After his failure he must have done some last-minute maneuvering to get the committee to reverse the funding decision, to give the go-ahead for the project. Now he stood in front of the crowd, claiming a spiritual victory, and for a brief second—though Lofton knew better—it seemed almost true. “Don't think this doesn't mean that we won't be back at our squabbles tomorrow, that we won't be fighting for what we think is right.” Kelley gestured at the men behind him. “But because we fight, it proves our passion for what is good, just as this one pure moment, today, proves how we can work together.”

Lofton watched Amanti, the serene way in which she stood there, not quite immersed in the scene. She was suspended above it, remote but still enmeshed. He knew that if a person wanted, he could dream up all kinds of explanations for why she kept herself locked between Brunner and Kelley. You could make like a front-porch psychologist, stir your stick around in the mud and come up with all kinds of things: a dead brother; squabbling parents; the sheer force of circumstance and accident. But in the end, nothing washed clean, you had no explanations; all you had was a stick and a lot of mud. Lofton thought of the moment Amanti had described to him, when she had first met Brunner and Kelley around her uncle's table. He looked up at the stage, trying to catch the connection between that moment and now, but then suddenly Amanti looked in his direction. He forgot what was on his mind, instead trying to read what he should do, if he really should meet her at Barena's, but her eyes skimmed over his, not seeming to see him. Her glance told him that for a brief instant Amanti was not distracted; she had felt the rush of the crowd in Kelley's voice, the holy moment of victory in the electric air of the mall, but now the feeling was already fading. Kelley's words were disappointing, ordinary. “… soon there will be a new Holyoke, one steeped in the past, one steeped in the sweat and toil of the Irish, the Portuguese, the French, the thousands upon thousands who have worked the mills.…”

It was an odd business. Lofton watched the reporters taking down notes. Though he had felt the exhilaration, and knew the other reporters had, too, he also could guess what they were thinking because he had thought such things often enough himself: It made little difference who won the election. One guy might put in a new road to encourage business along a suburban strip. The other guy might construct a drive-in window for handing out money to the poor. In the end, the only difference would be the shape of the buildings along the side of the road and whose friends got the contracts to build them. To pretend anything else was arrogance, but you did it anyway, because that's the way things were.

Amanti was seated now, blocked from his view, so he turned and walked away from the stage while Kelley's voice echoed around him, down the long corridors of the Hillside Mall.

When Richard Sarafis's limousine pulled away from the mall, Amanti was in the back seat between Tony Liuzza and Sarafis himself. Kelley was in the front, his arm draped over the seat. Despite the ebullience of the rally, there was a hard, bitter silence in the car.

“We can still beat them at the polls,” Sarafis said. “It's a close race—even without Brunner's money.”

The silence continued. A smile was fixed on Tony Liuzza's face, his knife-sharp, painful smile. Her cousin was not happy, Amanti knew. This had been his first political move on his own—with his father's money, but against his father's advice—and it had turned out badly. The secretary of education post was distant now, a castle in somebody else's sky.

“This is the last week of the primary campaign, and we need the television push. Our campaign chest is empty,” Sarafis said. No one responded. The others acted as if they had not heard. “Tomorrow I'll say the Wells people plan on canceling the Holyoke funding as soon as the election comes through their way. That'll get us on the air, at least around here. I'll need your help on this, Senator Kelley.”

“No,” Kelley said. “I can't play politics with this issue.”

While on the platform, Amanti had caught a glimpse of Lofton staring up at the stage. If she'd had any intention of actually going with him, that would have been the moment to do it—when the security guards were intent on the crowd, when Kelley was speaking and Brunner was flush in his glory—but that moment had passed. Brunner and Kelley had no intention of letting her get away from them; she had been right about that. The instant the rally was over, they had led her to this limousine. One of Brunner's security agents had been keeping a close eye on her. If she made an attempt to leave, to catch up with Lofton, then they would follow. So everything was better if she just went along, went out to dinner, offered no resistance.

Lofton, of course, would not show up at the depot. She had changed the time of the meeting as well as the place. “Barena's,” she had said at her apartment. “Meet me there after the game.” She wanted to think that the change had been a deliberate act on her part. She couldn't be sure. It may have just been a slip of the tongue, a moment of hesitation and panic in which some other part of her took over. Still, she had done it.

“You know, we might win this race yet. Massachusetts politics are quirky. It's closer than people think.” Sarafis had the tone of a loser, of a man hoping the front-runner would slip and fall. Soon he would be dragging out old clippings of Dewey's projected presidential landslide to prove that anything might happen, that he might win, too, just like the underdog Truman, despite the pollsters.

Amanti leaned her head back against the seat. She wished somehow that it would be possible for both Sarafis and his opponent to lose, for them all to go down together. The feeling brought back a memory. It was after her brother had died, and she had stood with her mother and Aunt Liuzza in the kitchen. There was snow on the ground, a dirty, ragged yellow snow that had been lying around too long. Her mother, with hair the color of that snow, was in one of her moods, tortured by grief over her dead son, Amanti's brother.

“It's all right for you,” she said to her sister. “You have your son, and you have your husband. They do things, they succeed in this world. But me, my son is dead, and my husband is nothing.”

“You're wrong,” Aunt Liuzza said, with a bitterness that was surprising. “I have nothing.”

“What do you mean, you have nothing? Your husband has power, you have power.”

“The only power I ever had is to spread my legs,” her aunt said, giving her young niece a meaningful glance, as if letting her in on a small bit of gossip. “And that isn't any power at all.”

Now the limousine pulled up to the restaurant. She noticed the way Kelley ignored Sarafis. Kelley had his own reelection bid coming up; he was already separating himself from the loser. She remembered how Kelley had told her that someday he would run for governor himself. With Sarafis losing this time, Kelley's chance might come in four years, with the next gubernatorial election. Sarafis's defeat could work to his advantage. He's probably already considered that, she thought. He'll try for that governorship, he'll get his father-in-law's support for that. As she got out of the car, she caught Brunner's glance, the turn to his smile. What if Lofton writes his story? she thought. That might disrupt things for a while, like a stone thrown at the spokes of a turning wheel, but the wheel would keep on turning, spinning, careening. If she wanted to escape her situation, it would have to be by leaving, by becoming someone else and forgetting Regina Amanti, just as you forgot a dead woman. She would do that, she thought; then a second later she knew that she wouldn't. She thought of the stage, the brief elation and the emptiness afterward, and guessed she would be up there again.

For Chicken Night at MacKenzie Field, fans were supposed to wear outlandish costumes. Ordinarily Lofton didn't participate in such events; he only watched. Tonight, though, was different. He was uncertain about Brunner's intentions, just as he was uncertain about the scheduled meeting with Amanti at Barena's. There were several hours between now and then; he did not want one of Brunner's thugs to recognize him at the game. He decided the best way to hide in the crowd would be to disguise himself.