The Cutting Room (19 page)

“There’s that handsome devil,” one woman worker said, without irony, pointing to a giant photo of Webby that loomed over the square.

A stage had been erected on the cobblestones, beneath the photo and a billowing banner. Like the buttons we were given, it said
WEBBY SLICONE—HE’S PLAYING
our
SONG
. Since everyone recruited was white, the
our
had an exclusionary feel, and the campaign people did nothing to dispel this idea.

“Stay out of the sun,” one of them warned jocularly. “We don’t want you any darker than you are.”

Along with Jeanine and the others, I had also been given a straw boater to wear, and a little American flag. It was not the most dignified way to conduct—I hoped, to end—my investigation. But it would bring me within a handshake of the congressman, whose future now rested inside my jacket pocket. Unlike an assassin, with a simple exchange, I meant to
save
his life.

There had been a close call when we were patted down, upon arrival. But the security people were on the lookout for guns and not modern, leather-bound address books. Had Webby informed only one favorite henchman of its existence? I didn’t know.

Someone else took hold of my arm then, with, as ever, an intention less clear than a bodyguard’s.

“See him?” Jeanine asked.

I had been looking closely at the security detail, trying to identify—and avoid—the man in the mask who had shot Little Bobby and let me live. But either pin-striped suits are all the same, or the guy had one ensemble for killing and another for everyday; I couldn’t pick him out.

“ ‘Does this ski mask smell funny to you?’ ” Jeanine imitated a sneaky technique. “ ‘Here, try it on, okay?’ ”

“Good idea,” I said sourly.

We were given our final instructions now. Ringing the stage, we were told to applaud, loudly, for our leader, when he arrived to the strains of “May the Best Man Win,” another DreamDate stinkeroo.

I thought of Lewis Milestone’s film,
The North Star,
a 1940s drama written by Lillian Hellman, extolling the efforts of the Russians in World War II. After the war, it was considered pro-Red, cut, and retitled
Armored Attack
.

“Okay, people,” the same earnest woman said. “When he shows up, let Webby know you love him!”

Clearly, this person did, as might anyone drawn to short men with Seventies-style mustaches, comb-over haircuts, and right-wing views.

“Uh-oh,” Jeanine said, next to me. “There he is. Be still my heart.”

I looked up at the stage. Between two goons, Webby had arrived, all gussied up for his re-election run. His face was remarkably tan, given the cloudy New England fall. His shedding pate was covered by what I assumed were new hairplugs. The mustache was trimmed to a more contemporary length, at least 1984. Even his height, helped by shoe lifts, had increased. Despite all this, he still looked his own age, about sixty.

More and more people now milled in the vicinity, though most were shoppers at the mall stores around us. Piped-in music from loudspeakers began blaring the whole DreamDates canon, building to the song that would be his walk-on cue.

Then, with his one other top-ten hit in the air, Webby waved at the crowd. Since we had only been paid half so far, we cheered back heartily. Our tiny flags waved. Our straw boaters flew, as if it were a barbershop quartet graduation. Around us, tourists, patrons, and brunch eaters pointed with curiosity at a man who had become a celebrity twice, in two different professions.

“I’d yell his opponent’s name,” Jeanine called to me, “if I knew what it was!”

I did not listen to Webby’s speech, which touched on lower taxes, character in government, and late-term abortions—with added show biz jokes and references. I only made sure that, Jeanine in tow, I inched as close to the stage as I could.

“My dream of capital punishment,” went Webby’s spiel, “is to allow survivors to kill the criminals who killed their loved ones! We shouldn’t depend on the government for everything!”

Here we had been told to chant, “Pull the switch! Pull the switch!” his other campaign slogan, which was coupled on a poster with a picture of a voting booth lever.

When Webby had finished—to quieter acclaim, our lunchtime approaching—music recommenced, this time a medley of “The New Math” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Stepping gingerly on his new heels, the Congressman made his way downstairs into the crowd.

Bodyguard beside him, sardined among us, he began pumping hands, those of his own workers, those of we temporary employees. He tickled a baby’s tummy. He got a kiss on his cheek. I admired Webby’s ebullience despite his new woes; he clearly loved being famous.

Did he regret buying drugs from Stu Drayton? Did he already have his spin in place if the story blew? Had he ever seen
The Magnificent Ambersons
? I seemed to remember the DreamDates on a Sixties Dean Martin roast with Orson Welles, then in his buffoon phase. I had to check that one out with Jeanine.

“Hey! Thanks for your support!”

Suddenly, Webby was right in front of me.

His face-lift taut, he was still smiling broadly, as he had at the person before. My heart pounding, I tried to recall the moves I had rehearsed in my head: was it whisper, then open coat? Or was it open coat, then whisper? I would never be a performer like Webby, unflappable in the face of potential disaster.

My hand shaking, I made a move toward my inside pocket, my fingertips touching leather. At the same time, I leaned in close, to catch his ear. But my movements were awkward and incoherent.

Misleading, too. As soon as Webby’s bodyguard saw me move toward a concealed area of my clothes, he pulled Webby back, the candidate’s smile fading. The goon immediately made Webby cut through the crowd, to greet other people, his only inelegant action of the day. Then he whispered words of his own, into the ear of the congressman. Startled, Webby looked over and stared, for one long minute, into my eyes.

I was already edging out of the crowd. The last thing I needed was to be arrested for threatening a candidate. I would never get out of the clutches of the cops then. While I was stuck in the system, who knew what Webby would do with the bag, which contained what he did not want, just an old movie?

“Roy—”

Jeanine was already out of my sight, her one word wan and distant, her very existence a luxury to consider. I dipped in and out of the group around me, gunning for the daylight just yards away, at the front of the square.

When I broke free of it, my head a blur of flags and faces, I walked as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. Never looking back, I headed for the main road, on which cars were whizzing back and forth.

There was no way to cross, and nowhere else to go. I could have walked back to the square and disappeared into a store. But it was a mini-mall, like New York City’s South Street Seaport, and the stores were scaled-down versions of bigger outlets, with only one front door. So instead, impulsively, I ran for a bus that was now passing by and hissing to a halt.

I did not know where it was headed, did not know Boston at all. But I doled out whatever change I had, which eventually caused an approving bell to ring.

Only a mother, a child, and a blind guy had followed me on. My feet nearly squishing with sweat, I took a seat in the back. Through the window I saw two security agents, walkie-talkies at their mouths and ears, search around the edges of the square. Then I watched the red, white, and blue of Webby’s rally drift into the distance behind me. I heard “Pull the switch!” and the final notes of a DreamDates song pipe faintly into the past.

I thought of the end of
The Graduate
, with Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross escaping on the bus. The part of Mrs. Robinson—played by Anne Bancroft—had originally been offered to Doris Day, as a satiric contrast to her virginal roles. Day, however, had declined.

In the few seconds of peace I now found, I considered one question: When our eyes had met for that one moment, had Webby seemed to know my face? I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t know what any answer might mean.

The bus seemed to be going into midtown. My brilliant plan was to ride until I recognized a T-stop, take the subway back to Cambridge, and hope that Jeanine would meet me at the hotel.

I pressed for a stop at the base of Beacon Hill.

Emerging at Charles Street, I felt more calm among the browsers and buyers on the elegant, unpretentious block. There was just one thing that caused me new concern.

The blind guy who got on had exited with me.

Ordinarily, this would not have meant a thing. But today, I felt new dread as I snapped my head around to see him.

Walking with a cane, wearing dark glasses, he was speaking into a tiny cell phone.

On any other day, it would have seemed a typical urban accessory and action. Today, I picked up my pace and took a fast right off the main street.

To my horror, he followed.

I looked up what seemed a massive mountain, leading to ritzy Beacon Hill brownstones. Avoiding the skinny sidewalk, I used the center of the street. Picturesquely cobbled, it crunched beneath my feet as my straining legs climbed.

I heard the blind man tapping right behind me.

“Excuse me!” he called faintly. “Excuse me!”

Was he a bodyguard? A Boston undercover cop? Or merely looking for directions? Whatever, he was in better shape than I was; soon he was beside me, panting not at all.

“Excuse me,” he said, with a trace of a local accent. “Were you just at the Webby Slicone rally?”

“I, uh . . .” Should I say I was? Or deny everything? Maybe he was just a right-wing blind gay guy seeking a like-minded man. “Yes, I, uh, was.”

“Really. Well, maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me what you’ve got in your coat.”

The man’s own blazer drifted intentionally from his hip. And I saw a gun, lodged securely in its holster.

If I gave up the Filofax now, I would have nothing to barter with, no hope of progress, and no way to get
Ambersons
back from Webby. The road from Alan Gilbert’s apartment to Ben Williams’s hideaway to Erendira’s bed would end here, in shameful failure, on a Boston street.

“What do you mean?” I said. “It’s nothing.”

There was a very brief silence. Then, with one swift kick, the blind man knocked both of my legs out from under me. My face hit the street stones, and he locked me on the ground, my right arm bent backward, his hand pushed inside and fishing in my jacket. His dark glasses were hanging off, held by a chain around his neck. His eyes looked fine.

“Just don’t move,” he said, “dumb-ass.”

I looked up: A car was heading right at us, coming down the giant hill. I squinted into the daylight reflected off its chrome, and its wheels rumbled deafeningly on the street beneath my cheek.

With one shriek of brakes, it veered around us, wanting no trouble, and went on its way.

Then the man pulled it out, my latest and last ace in the hole. In his haste, the leather covering slid away and landed near my nose. Was it all Webby wanted? Would the man let me go now or quietly, surreptitiously, shoot? There was a chance I would get nothing
and
get killed, a double doom.

He did neither. The man just relaxed his grip on me and pulled away, and let me up.

“Sorry,” he said. “But you can never be too careful.”

He handed the Filofax back to me, even bending to retrieve its cover as a final courtesy. Then he replaced his phony shades.

“There are a lot of nuts around.”

“So close, yet so far,” I said, bandaging my chin. “Wasn’t that a DreamDates song, too?”

“It was ‘Close but No Cigar,’ ” Jeanine corrected me. “It sucked, as well.”

I was having trouble dressing my wound in the little mirror on the back of my sun visor. We were in a rental car, heading out of Boston proper, Jeanine swerving in and out of scrapes, as usual.

She had thought it best that we leave: No sense courting more trouble. Also—and I’d forgotten this in my disastrous rush to approach Webby—we had another place to stay. Or, to be more exact now, to hide.

Claude and Alice Kripp were those rarest of trivial characters: a happily married couple. They taught film at Wellesley College, and kept a small and pleasant house in the suburb nearby. Post-hippies, they had met at an alternative Boston paper in the Seventies and been inseparable ever since. Their domestic bliss—which included, shockingly, a child—was looked upon with envy by some trivial folk. Despite this, their example had not been followed; they were still curiosities, not trendsetters.

“They remind me of Barbra Streisand,” Jeanine said, our tires shrieking.

“They do?” I said. “How?”

“Well, Barbra was a unique kind of female star in the late Sixties.”

“Right. Like Dustin Hoffman.”

“Exactly. Both were ethnic, not conventionally good-looking. Yet how many men followed in Dusty’s footsteps?”

“Everybody from Pacino to Richard Dreyfuss to De Niro.”

“Right. And how many women followed in hers?”

“Debra Winger, maybe. And that was years later.”

“That’s my point. Claude and Alice, like Barbra, are still two of a kind.”

“But the Streisand thing is maybe just the difference between what men and women want. I don’t think that Claude and Alice are.”

Jeanine looked completely away from the road then, at me.

“Oh, no?” she said.

Suddenly, I saw where this conversation was headed, and I tried to divert its direction as hastily as Jeanine took her next turn.

“Also, you could say that George Segal was even earlier,” I said. “Before Hoffman. As a Jewish star.”

Jeanine did not reply. So, lamely, I continued the conversation for her.

“Except that Segal had lightened his hair. Like Danny Kaye did in the Forties.”

This received no answer, either. I made a last-ditch attempt at diversion, pleading for sympathy.

“The whole side of my head aches,” I said. “From where I hit the dirt.”

But, not even bothering to signal, Jeanine was taking an exit off the highway. Within seconds, we saw the Kripp house before us, and our treacherous discussion was at an end.