Interface

57

Four days after Cozzano's landslide victory, the Speaker of the House suffered a stroke during a party in a private Washington ' club, while sitting on the toilet in the men's room. On the recom­mendation of the President-elect, the Speaker's family sent him. to the Radhakrishnan Institute for therapy.

The house across the street from the Cozzano residence in Tuscola had become vacant a couple of months previously, and the Cozzanos had bought it. Cy Ogle and some of his best people now moved into it and made it into the headquarters for the transition. If the Cozzano house was the Tuscola White House, then the place across the street was the Tuscola Executive Office building.

Cy Ogle had a big leather La-Z-Boy set up in the living room and spent much of mid-November lying in it "like a sack of shit," as he put it, recovering from a cold, watching TV, and enjoying his first chance to relax in the better part of a year. It was a wonderful time for him. He had devastated not only the opposition candi­dates, but also his competitors in the election business. Even the fearsome Jeremiah Freel was in jail. And besides, he was a sucker for Christmas.

After Election Day, Ogle, as leader of the transition team, declared a three-week moratorium on all official activities for the President-elect. Eleanor Richmond likewise stuck close to home - her Alexandria apartment - attending a couple of T.C. Williams football games (Harmon, Jr., had become a star punter) and shopping for inaugural clothes with her daughter, Clarice.

At the beginning of December, Ogle issued a press release listing the members of the Cozzano transition team. Ogle claimed, of course, that he had hand-picked these men, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Whoever had chosen them had done an excellent job: they were professional, experienced, nonpartisan, and classy in a nonintimidating way. They had impeccable credentials and were universally regarded as ethical and trust­worthy. It was claimed that these people had spent the last year behind the scenes, working on position papers for the Cozzano campaign. This was patently untrue, but Ogle had to admit that it sounded great. All the serious press agreed, and praised the skills of the Cozzano team. The rest of the media was content with photo-ops of Cozzano and his family and entourage shoveling snow in Tuscola.

Ogle knew that the people, whose consciousness he had pummeled and abused so relentlessly for the previous year, needed a rest. They needed to concentrate on the NFL, sitcoms, and Christmas. They needed to recharge their batteries because what was to come in the Cozzano administration would be tough. A quick glance at the aforementioned position papers proved that much. The waffling and pathetic efforts of the previous administration were to be replaced by calm, cool decisiveness. No one knew what the plan was, beyond the endless evocation of the return to values, and its fiscal corollaries: cut the deficit, pay back every penny on the debt.

Ogle knew that his role in this operation would end as of January 20. He had two major tasks left to organize, and this was the kind of thing he liked best - public displays without elections. Spectacles. On December 1 he gathered his staff together to launch the final push on the Cozzano Family Christmas Special. The buildup for the special would run until December 21. He would drop names out in the media like lures for hungry trout. Names for potential cabinet officers, names for White House staff. Names for possible judicial appointments. The idea was partly to show what fine people would be working for Cozzano, partly to build up suspense for the Christmas Special, and partly to avoid the tedious and demeaning sight of wannabes trudging back and forth between the Champaign-Urbana airport and Tuscola.

Instead he had a parade of foreign dignitaries make the same trip. It looked more impressive, and the sight of Brazilians and Saudis making snowmen on the front lawn was great television. Ogle toyed endlessly with the sequence of their arrivals. He also found ways to make use of the soaring stock market, inspired by the Cozzano victory, the knowledge that the debt would not be forgiven, and all of the feel-good symbolism that was radiating from Tuscola like heat from an old-fashioned wood stove.

Starting on the twenty-first he would begin to throw more logs on the fire. Mary Catherine had taken a job at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and Dad was giving her a cozy brownstone apartment to move into; while its exact location was not mentioned, Today show viewers were given a video tour of the place, complete with blazing fires, oriental rugs, and antique furniture.

On the twenty-second an affirmation of Cozzano's strength would be made: he would do a guest shot on a special live edition of a popular woodworking show. The pipe-smoking, suspender-wearing host would interview Cozzano working in his shop, steam coming out of his mouth, as the President-elect fixed a busted chest of drawers.

Scheduled for the twenty-third was the official launch of James Cozzano's new book, Kingmakers. The Inside Stories of Ogle, Zorn, and Lefkowitz and How They Created a President. The publisher was throwing a launch party at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the park from the White House. Rich and powerful people would be present. So would TV cameras. The rave reviews had already been written.

The twenty-fourth would feature the Cozzanos at midnight mass. And the twenty-fifth would make the country feel good. Real good.

The seven weeks after the election were glorious for Mary Catherine. No more travel. Minimum of interviews, speeches and other campaign hassles. Maximum of time with Dad. Most of the time was strictly business, though. As she had been doing for the last six months, she spent several hours a day putting him through therapeutic exercises, mostly concentrating on the left hand.

She had a lot of free time. Part of it she spent hanging around with her old high-school friends and driving up to Champaign or over to Decatur for Christmas shopping. She also took up a new hobby: electronics.

She had purchased a book on the subject months ago in Boston and had been reading it in free moments, learning about all the mysterious hieroglyphs that made up a circuit diagram: resistors, capacitors, and inductors. She didn't reckon she could design her own circuits now, but she could certainly put one together from a diagram.

The week before Christmas she made a stop at the Tuscola Radio shack, which doubled as an Ace Hardware store. She picked up a set of gloves and some tools for her father, and then she went into the little nook where all of the resistors, capacitors, and inductors hung in bubble packs. Reading part numbers from a wrinkled sheet of paper she'd taken from her wallet, she selected a couple of do/en items and paid for everything in cash.

Her father already had a soldering iron, of course; he had every tool known to the industrialized world. Mary Catherine let it be known that she was going into Dad's workshop to assemble a secret Christmas present and that her privacy had better not be disturbed. She locked the door, pulled down the windowshades, and cranked up the cast-iron stove that Dad used to heat the place up. When it was warm enough that her fingers worked again, she plugged in the soldering iron and went to work, soldering the little bits and pieces from Radio Shack on to a breadboard - a slab of plastic with holes punched through it. When it was finished the whole thing fit into a black plastic box about the size of a paperback book. A toggle switch and a red light protruded from one end.

President-elect Cozzano himself seemed to blossom under the period of rest and relaxation. Aside from receiving his daily CIA briefing and eyes-only presidential briefing, he was basically on vacation. He evinced no desire to have a hand in collecting names for his cabinet, being content to work with the same corps of advisers that had brought him here. Football season blended into basketball season at Tuscola High School, and periodically Cozzano would slip out to the football field or into the gym to watch the town's young student-athletes compete.

Cozzano had developed a new passion in the last months of the campaign: Scrabble. It had been his idea that they start playing the game, but Mary Catherine encouraged it because (as she explained to her father's curious handlers) it was a great form of therapy. Because it was a word game, it helped to exercise the parts of Cozzano's brain that handled verbal communication. But because no speech was involved, it bypassed the speech centers of his brain - which were now partly silicon. Mary Catherine insisted that Cozzano play it with his left hand. At first, Cozzano had found it surprisingly difficult to persuade his left hand to spell words; the necessary neural connections had been severed by the stroke.

Mary Catherine mocked him for being so inept. That was all Cozzano needed. He started playing to win. He was tenacious, and over the months, became good. He played once a day with Mary Catherine. He played it so often that even the Secret Service folks and the people at control stopped noticing it.

Cozzano's cabinet members were announced. They were mostly youthful and in good physical shape, their names indicated a pleasing and politically correct distribution of ethnic groups and genders, they had gone to the best schools, they had outstanding records. They were all perfect.

A day later, Mary Catherine got a Christmas card from Zeldo. It included several photos: a couple of Zeldo riding his mountain bike on the bluffs above the Pacific and a few of Zeldo at work.

One of the photos showed Zeldo sitting in the courtyard of the Radhakrishnan Institute, enjoying caffé latte and typing away on his laptop. In the background, seated at another table, was one of the institute's patients. Mary Catherine recognized the man: he was the secretary-designate of Defense.

She went through the other photos very carefully, and saw three more patients "accidentally" caught in the background: the secretaries-designated of State, Treasury, and Commerce, and the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Early on the afternoon of December eighteenth, Mary Catherine went cross-country skiing. Three inches of new snow had fallen the night before. By the standards of post-greenhouse effect Illinois, it was a winter wonderland. She tossed her skis and poles into the back of the family's four-wheel-drive pickup truck, checked her arsenal of waxes, and took off. A few minutes' drive took her to the old Cozzano farm. She got out, locked the front hubs, shifted into four-wheel-drive, pulled on to a dirt lane between fields, and drove for half a mile or so. Then she put her skis on and took off.

After a mile or so she was able to coast down into the gentle cleft of a river valley, lightly forested with skinny ironwood trees. She followed the river for another half mile until she came upon a beat-up, ramshackle old cabin, really more of a glorified duck blind than a dwelling. Parked beside it was a big Chevy pickup truck, and as she approached from downwind she could smell cigar smoke and hear subdued conversation.

Mel Meyer, ludicrously clad in a heavy insulated farmer's coverall, emerged from the building, walked up to Mary Catherine, and ran a bug detector over her body. This time he got a faint radio signal from one of the buttons on her shirt. Mary Catherine skiied a couple of hundred feet away from the shack and left the button under a log. Then she came back and gave Mel a long hug.

Inside the shack were a bulky, round-shouldered black man in his fifties, and a huge white guy with bushy eyebrows and a salt-and-pepper hair and beard. Mary Catherine knew them both already. Respectively, they were Rufus Bell, USMC Retired, and Craig ("the Crag") Addison, Chicago Bears, Retired. "How's he doing?" Bell asked.

"He's doing great," Mary Catherine said, "this is all boy adventure stuff. Just the kind of thing he likes."

Mel, Rufus, and Craig ("the Crag") all looked slightly embarrassed.

"Okay," Mel said, "now listen carefully, because I'm freezing my ass off, and because this is important. These two guys Rufus and Crag can provide the bodies we need. With a little help from some of Eleanor's friends and supporters in D.C., we can even make it legal. And I can provide the paperwork. Mary Catherine?"

"I've got the black box ready. And I've got some information for you. The secretaries-designate of Defense, Treasury, Commerce, and State, and the Speaker of the House, have all spent time at the Radhakrishnan Institute in the last few months."

Mel shook his head. "Tragic," he said. "A tragic epidemic of strokes. Anyone else?"

"Not that I know of."

"Well, that will be useful knowledge," Mel said. "Now, Mary Catherine, there's only one thing we need from you."

"My father," Mary Catherine said.

"Right. Can you give me Willy?"

"I have a plan, Mel," she said. "I have a scam."

That night after supper, Cozzano called Mary Catherine in for another game of Scrabble. She'd had two or three glasses of Chianti, she was in a good mood, and she spoke without restraint. "Dad, it's the most boring game ever invented."

"If only you would play it right," he groused, "and not cheat."

They went into the study and sat down at the desk in front of the works of Mark Twain.

Mary Catherine always started the same way: she reached into the heap of tiles and spelled out ARE YOU STILL THERE. They had a fancy Scrabble board mounted on a turntable and so when she was done, she spun it around so he could read it.

Cozzano frowned. "Stop playing around," he said. "You know the rules." Both of his hands were active. It was a bizarre sight: with his left hand he was breaking up the sequence that she had spelled out, rearranging the letters, plucking more of them out of the overturned box top. With his right hand, he was picking seven tiles at random and placing them neatly on his little rack. He continued to speak at the same time. He seemed genuinely annoyed and appeared not to notice what his own left hand was doing. "You have to pick seven tiles. And you can only spell one word at once.

Why do I have to explain this to you every time? Are you teasing me, girl?"

Mary Catherine was accustomed to strange neurological tics because of her work, and she had grown accustomed to her father's peculiarities over the months that she had been putting him through daily therapy. She had to remind herself just how bizarre this would look to anyone else.

Cozzano's left hand spun the board so that Mary Catherine could read the words DID YOU SEE MEL.

She looked into his eyes. He was frowning, staring down at the Scrabble board, befuddled. "How did those letters get there?" he asked.

Mary Catherine messed them up with her hand before his eyes could read them. Then she combed some more tiles out of the heap and spelled out the word YES.

He got the same look on his face as when she had come home from school with Bs on her report card. "Is that the best you could do? A three-letter word?"

"Sorry," she said. "I got bad letters."

"Thanks for giving me that big fat Y," he said. "That's four easy points for me. You need to think harder about strategy." As he was talking, both hands were again active on the Scrabble board. His right hand was turning her Y into the world YTTRIUM. His left hand was spelling out HOW IS HE on the bottom left corner of the board.

Mary Catherine spun the board around. Again, Cozzano's eyes picked out the letters that had been laid down by his left hand. "How did those letters get on there?" he said. "For god's sake, peanut, we need to make sure the board is clear before we start. Get rid of those."

She had already read them, so she swept them away. Then she used the I in YTTRIUM to spell out the world PLANNING. In order to do it, she had to rummage through the box top for some more letters. Cozzano frowned and grumbled about this cheating.

The conversation went back and forth like that for several more rounds, the Scrabble board spinning round and around.

Cozzano: FOR WHAT.

Mary Catherine: INAUGDAY

"I defy you to find that word in any dictionary," Cozzano said.

DuLafayette Webster, Heisman trophy winner for the Elton State Comanches, scored three touchdowns singlehandedly in the first half of the Fujitsu Guacamole Bowl on Christmas Night. As soon as the first half clock ticked down to zero, the broadcast cut away to the cheerful theme music of the Cozzano Family Christmas Special.

A live shot from a hovering chopper zoomed down on the twinkling Christmas lights of Tuscola, which had begun billing itself as "America's hometown." The Christmas decorations had been heavily enhanced by the largesse of Ogle, and coordinated by his designers. The camera panned across church steeples, small businesses, and the city park, all decked with boughs of electric holly, and then settled on the now-familiar Cozzano residence. A street level camera peered through the large front window to view the roaring fire and the happy, smiling group gathered around the eggnog. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. From Tuscola, Illinois, America's hometown, we bring you an address by the President-elect, William Anthony Cozzano. Governor Cozzano."

Cut to a shot of Cozzano, James, and Mary Catherine sitting together on the sofa. Zoom into a talking-head shot of Cozzano alone.

The President-elect made a heartfelt statement of thanks to the American people, expressed his happiness with his daughter's career plans and his son's excellent book, and incidentally, announced his cabinet nominees.

Then he stood up and introduced them personally. The cabinet-to-be were all gathered around the huge dining room table, dressed in cozy sweaters, drinking cider. They interrupted the convivial routine for a moment as Cozzano introduced them, one by one, to the American people. They were good-looking, confident, bipartisan, and multicultural.

Finally Cozzano returned to his seat by the fire to address a few last words of greeting and holiday cheer to the American people. Cozzano had developed a sense of timing that was positively eerie. He brought his little speech to a close just in time to cut back to the Scoreboard clock at the bowl game.

On the eighteenth of January, the Cozzanos climbed on to a chartered plane and flew to Washington, D.C. Journalists from around the world were converging there at the same time. So were members of the incoming administration and transition team, all of Cy Ogle's top people, several big GODS trucks full of electronics, Floyd Wayne Vishniak, and an irregular caravan of buses, cars, and airplanes carrying old teammates and Marine comrades-in-arms of William A. Cozzano.