Fletch and the Man Who Read online

  “… You and I know there is no theology, no ideology causing this new, sudden, total integration of the world. Christianity has had two thousand years to tie this world together … and it has not done so. Islam has had six hundred years to tie this world together … and it has not done so. American democracy has had two hundred years to tie this world together … and it has not done so. Communism has had nearly one hundred years to tie this world together… and it has not done so.”

  “He’s doing it.”

  “He’s doing something all right,” she said.

  Fletch’s eyes studied the faces in the crowd. He was seeing faces blue with cold, noses red. He was seeing eyes fixated on The Man Who might become the most powerful person on earth, have some control over their taxes and their spending, their health care, their education, how they spent their days and their nights, their youths, working years, and old age, their lives and their deaths. For the most part, in the cold, their ears were covered with scarves and mufflers.

  The congressperson was working with as much speed as possible through the thick crowd to the platform. She was still allowing her hand to be shook, still mouthing a responsive sentence here and there, but her face was stony. With all apparent graciousness, Barry Hines and Flash Grasselli were still turning her around to face the bulk of her constituency.

  “… You and I know what is tying this world together, better than any band of missionaries, however large, ever have or ever could; better than any marching armies ever have or ever could …”

  “What is he saying?” Freddie demanded. She checked the sound level of the tape recorder on her hip.

  Fletch said, “Gee, I dunno.”

  “Today,” The Man Who continued, “satellites permit us to see every stalk of wheat as it grows in Russia, every grain of rice as it grows in China. We can see every soldier as he is trained in Lesotho or Karachi. We can fly to Riyadh or Luzon between one meal and another. Every economic fact regarding Algeria can be assimilated and interpreted within hours. It is possible to poll the entire population of India regarding their deepest political and other convictions within seconds….”

  Freddie said: “Wow. Is he saying what I think he’s saying?”

  Walsh Wheeler, who had been walking slowly, unobtrusively through the crowd, began to move much more quickly toward the campaign bus. The congressperson had struggled her way through the crowd and was almost at the steps to the platform.

  “I dunno.”

  “… You and I, my friends, know that technology is tying this world together, is integrating this world in a way no theology, no ideology ever could. Technology is forming a nervous system beneath the skin of Mother Earth. And you and I know that to avoid the pain, the body politic had better start responding to this nervous system immediately! If we ignore that which hurts in any part of this body earth, we shall suffer years more, generations more of the pain and misery of spreading disease. If we knowingly allow wounds to fester in any particular place, the strength, the energies of the whole world will be sapped!”

  The crowd of photographers on the steps to the platform was blocking the congressperson’s ascent. She could not get their attention, to let her up.

  “… American politics must grow up to the new realities of life on this planet! Technology brings us closer together than any Biblical brothers! Technology makes us more interdependent than any scheme of capital and labor! Technology is integrating the people of this earth where love and legislation have failed! This is the new reality! We must seize this understanding! Seize it for peace! For the health of planet earth! For the health of every citizen of this planet! For prosperity! My friends, for the very continuation of life on earth!”

  There was a long moment before anyone realized The Man Who was done speaking. Then there was applause muffled by gloved and mittened hands, a few yells: “Go to it, Caxton! We’re with you all the way!” The band began to play “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

  At the edge of the platform, The Man Who shook hands with the congressperson as if he had never seen her before, keeping his arm long, making it seem, for the public, for the photographers, he was greeting just another well-wisher. He waved at the crowd and passed the congressperson in the mob on the steps.

  At the front of the bus, Walsh Wheeler, Paul Dobson, and Phil Nolting were in heavy consultation.

  “Wow,” said Fletch, still in the press area. “I never knew it was so easy to be a wizard.”

  Freddie said, “You know something about all this I don’t know. You going to tell me?”

  “No.”

  Freddie Arbuthnot frowned.

  She turned back toward the platform. The grandmotherly congress-person was shouting into a ringing amplification system. She was not at all heard over the band.

  “But what does it mean?” Freddie asked.

  “It means,” Fletch answered, “he’s made the nightly national news.”

  15

  Approaching him, Governor Caxton Wheeler grinned at Fletch. “How do you feel?”

  “Like Adam’s grandfather.”

  At the foot of the campaign bus’s steps, the governor was still grinning when he turned to his son. Walsh and Phil Nolting and Paul Dobson looked like a wall that had come tumbling down at the blast of a single trumpet. Each face had the same expression of stressed shock.

  “How’d I do?” the governor asked.

  Walsh’s eyes darted around, seeing if any of the press were within earshot. Outside their little circle was a group of thirty to forty retarded adults who had been brought from their institution to meet the presidential candidate.

  “You’ve got to tell us when you’re going to do something like that, Dad.”

  “I told you I had an idea.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t mention you were going to drop a bomb—a whole new departure.”

  “A new speech.” Phil Nolting’s eyes were slits.

  “Sorry,” the governor said. “Guess I was really thinking about it while that congressperson was babbling on about the waterway.”

  “The question always is—” Paul Dobson said in the manner of a bright teacher. “You see, we’ve got to be prepared to defend everything you say before you say it.”

  “You can’t defend the truth, anyway?” the governor asked simply. “I can.”

  “Hi, Governor,” one of the retarded persons, a man about thirty-five, said. “My name is John.”

  “Hi, John,” the governor said.

  “It might have been a great speech, Dad, I don’t know. We all just feel sort of punched out by your not telling us you were going to do it.”

  “I wasn’t sure I was going to do it.” The governor smiled. “It just came out.”

  “We’ll get a transcript as fast as we can,” Dobson said. “See what we can do about it.”

  The governor shrugged. “It felt right.” He put out his hand to one of the retarded persons, a woman about thirty. “Hi,” he said. “Are you a friend of John’s?”

  Aboard the campaign bus, coordinator of volunteers Lee Allen Parke was connecting a small tape recorder to a headset. A typist was at her little desk, ready to work.

  “Lee Allen,” Fletch said. Parke didn’t answer. “Just a simple question.”

  “Not now,” Lee Allen said. “No questions now, please.” He said to the typist, “We’ve got to have an exact transcript of whatever the governor just said, sooner than soonest.” He placed the headset over the typist’s ears. She settled the earphones more comfortably on herself.

  All the buttons on the telephone in Barry Hines’s chair were flashing. The phone was not ringing. Barry Hines was nowhere in sight.

  “Ah, Lee Allen—” Fletch began.

  Lee Allen pressed the play button and listened through a third earphone. “Loud and clear?” he asked the typist. She nodded in the affirmative. “My God,” he said, listening. “What is the man saying?”

  “Lee Allen, I need to know about Sally Shields, Alice Elizabeth Sh
ields—”

  “Not now, Fletcher! All hell has broken loose! The governor just went off half-cocked, in case you didn’t know.”

  “No. I didn’t know.”

  “First he’s caught bribing schoolkids. Then the hard-drinkin’, sexpot congressman we were told to expect turns out to be somebody’s great-grandmother. By the way, there’s a pitcher of Bloody Marys in the galley, if you want it. Then he makes like Lincoln at Gettysburg at Winslow in a snowstorm. And the day’s barely begun!”

  “Well begun,” Fletch consoled, “is half done.”

  “Not by my watch.” To the typist, who was listening and typing, Lee Allen Parke shouted, “Can you hear?” She nodded yes with annoyance. “We need every word,” he said. “Every word.”

  “You could have answered me by now,” Fletch said firmly.

  Lee Allen Parke still held the earphone to his head. “What? What, what, what?”

  “Did Alice Elizabeth Shields apply to you for a job as a volunteer, paid or otherwise?”

  “How do you spell Riyadh?” the typist asked.

  “No,” Lee Allen said impatiently.

  “She didn’t?”

  “Some of the volunteers reported the caravan was being followed by a Volkswagen. That’s all I know about her.”

  “He said something new?” Bill Dieckmann shouted. His face looked like someone had knocked his hat off with a snowball.

  He was one of the group returning to the press bus from the bar-café.

  “I guess he did,” Fletch admitted.

  “New-new?”

  Betsy Ginsberg said, “Nu?”

  Bill Dieckmann’s face looked truly alarmed.

  “New,” said Fletch. “I’m not sure how germaine….”

  “Ow,” Stella Kirchner said. “Who’s got a tape?” She looked sick.

  “All those people presently usurping telephones in downtown Winslow,” Fletch said. “I expect.”

  Betsy said, “Have you a tape? Honest, Fletch, I promise we won’t spring a story like presidential-candidate-bribes-schoolchildren on you again if you let us hear your tape.”

  “Ain’t got one,” Fletch said. “Transcripts will be ready in a minute.”

  “‘Transcripts,’” Dieckmann scoffed. “My editors should read it on the wires while I’m airmailing them a transcript—right?”

  “Not on my wire,” moaned Filby.

  “What did the governor say?” Kirchner asked.

  “Well,” Fletch said, “roughly he said the world is getting it together despite man’s best ideas.”

  They all looked at him as if he had spoken in a language foreign to them.

  “Nothing about the waterway?” Filby looked about to faint.

  “Nothing about the waterway,” Fletch said.

  “Shit,” said Filby. “I already reported what he said about the waterway—what he didn’t say about the waterway.”

  Fletch led her onto the campaign bus.

  “Oooo,” said Betsy in fake cockney. “Don’t they live well, though? Telly and everything.”

  Walsh was chatting with Lee Allen Parke.

  “Walsh,” Fletch said, “this is Betsy Ginsberg.”

  “I know Betsy.” Walsh gave Fletch an odd, questioning look. “Not as a person,” Betsy said.

  “Yeah,” said Fletch. “She does nice table settings.”

  The governor got on the bus while Fletch was collecting copies of the transcripts from the volunteers.

  “Come on back here, clean-and-lean,” the governor said.

  They went into the stateroom together. The governor closed the door. “Sit a minute.”

  “I’m supposed to be handing these out.” Fletch indicated the transcripts in his hand. “Sir.”

  “They can wait.” The governor took off his overcoat and dropped it on the bed. “Tell me what you think.”

  “I think you’re damned eloquent. Sir.”

  The governor dropped himself into the swivel chair. Fletch did not sit.

  “Thank you.”

  “Take a germ of an idea like that—”

  “More than a germ, I think.”

  “You’re brilliant,” Fletch blurted.

  “Thank you. Now tell me what you think.”

  Fletch felt himself turning warm. “Frankly, I, ah—”

  “You—ah?” The governor was looking at him with patient interest.

  “I—ah—didn’t know a presidential campaign is so impoverished for ideas. Sir.” The governor laughed. “I mean, I thought everything was sort of worked out from the beginning; you knew what you were saying, had to say, from the start.”

  “You were wrong. Does that surprise you?”

  “I’m never surprised when I’m wrong.”

  “Part of the process of a political campaign is to go around the country listening to people. At least, a good politician listens. You said something this morning that struck me as eminently sensible. Something probably everybody knows is true, but no one has yet said. Probably only the young have grown up with this new reality in their guts, really knowing it to be true.”

  “Yes, sir. Maybe.”

  “I think people vote for the man who tells them the truth. What do you think?”

  “I hope so. Sir.”

  “I do too. Politicians aren’t philosophers, Fletch. They’re not supposed to be. No one wants Tom Paine in the White House. Or Marx. Or Eric Hoffer. Or Marcuse. But they don’t want anyone in the White House who doesn’t pursue general truths, or know a general truth when he trips over one, either.” Rocking gently in his swivel chair the governor watched Fletch standing stiffly at the stateroom door, and chuckled. “I think I enjoy shakin’ you up. I bet everybody who has ever met you before has thought you real cool, boy.” Fletch swallowed hard. “That right?”

  “I … may … I … ah—”

  The governor laughed and held out his hand for a transcript. “Let me have one of those.”

  Fletch handed him one from the top. He nearly dropped the pile.

  The governor began reading it. “Better see what I said.”

  16

  “Get your damned ass up here.” It was clear from Walsh’s voice that he meant to be taken seriously.

  “Yes, sir, Lieutenant, sir,” Fletch said into the hotel room phone. “Please tell me where I’m to get my damned ass up to, sir.”

  “Room 1220.”

  Instantly the phone went dead.

  Fletch tripped over his unopened suitcase in his scramble for the door.

  Fletch had spent the afternoon popping back and forth between the press bus and the campaign bus.

  Using the phone on the press bus, he had spent a long time talking with the governor’s advance man, Willy Finn, in California, about the arrangements made for that day in Spiersville, that night in Farming-dale, the next day in Kimberly and Melville. Finn had nothing to say about the governor’s Winslow speech, although he had already heard of it. He seemed sincerely upset by the death of Victor Robbins.

  With the others Fletch visited Spiersville. He grabbed a bag of stale donuts from a drugstore, ate four of them, spent time with the local press, provided them with whatever material they requested. On the wall of a warehouse was scrawled: LIFE IS NO FUN. Fletch had first seen that message, in English, on walls and sidewalks in northern Europe in the early 1980s. After the Spiersville visit, it was discovered that someone had broken a window of the press bus with a rock.

  During the hour-long ride to Farmingdale, Fletch played poker with Bill Dieckmann, Roy Filby, and Tony Rice. He won twenty-seven dollars.

  In the corridor of the Farmingdale hotel, the doors to an elevator were open.

  Hanrahan was in the elevator. He either smiled or grimaced at Fletch.

  “Up?” Fletch asked.

  Hanrahan didn’t answer, just kept whatever that facial expression of his was.

  A lady on the elevator finally said, “No, we’re going down.” She was wearing a purple cocktail dress and brown shoes.
/>   Fletch pushed the button for the next elevator.

  Walsh flung open the door of Room 1220 immediately Fletch knocked on it. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Door closed, they stood in the short, dark corridor outside the bathroom. “Okay,” Fletch answered. “I’ll give the twenty-seven dollars back.”

  “Some foul-smelling, crude, filthy-looking reporter was in my room before I ever got here. He was in here when I arrived.”

  “A foul-smelling, crude, filthy-looking reporter?”

  “Said he was from Newsbill, for Chrissake.”

  “Oh, that foul-smelling, crude, filthy-looking reporter. Hanrahan, by name. Michael J.”

  “He was waiting for me when the bellhop let me in. Sitting in that chair.” Walsh stepped into the bedroom and pointed at one of the chairs near the window. “Smoking a cigar.” The ashtray on the side table had a little cigar ash in it. “Bastard. Wanted to show me how very, very resourceful he is, I suppose. Privacy, locked doors don’t mean a thing to Mr. Newsbill. ”

  “He was trying to intimidate you.”

  “He doesn’t intimidate me. He makes me damned mad.”

  Walsh was saying he was mad, but his eyes were not particularly angry. They appeared more restless, as if he would have preferred thinking about something else. His voice was not hot with anger, but more cold with annoyance.

  Fletch was hearing a complaint being lodged more as a matter of form rather than from emotion.

  “Michael J. Hanrahan is a foul-smelling, crude, filthy-looking bastard,” Fletch agreed. “He writes for Newsbill I wouldn’t dignify him by calling him a reporter.”

  “I thought we had someone else from Newsbill—that thoroughly stupid woman, what’s her name?”

  “Mary Rice.”

  “Is she any relation to Tony?”

  “No. Mary is writing for Newsbill. On the campaign supposedly, but I see her reports seldom get above the blatantly sensational. I mean, one report she did reported that one of Lee Allen Parke’s great-great-great-grandfathers was a slave owner.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Meaningless stuff.”

  “Does Newsbill ever report from anywhere but the bedroom?”

  “Bedrooms, bars, police courts. Runs pages of horoscopes. Stars on the stars. As news.”