Interface. Part 29

"The reason our families have gotten along together is that the leaders - the patriarchs - have always been wise men who took the long view of things. And who were willing to do what made sense in the long run.

Other people have looked at the strategies of the Cozzanos and the Meyers and scratched their heads, but we have always had reasons for what we did."

"What are we doing now?" Mary Catherine said.

"w.i.l.l.y doesn't know this, because I didn't want to stress him out," Mel said, "but the s.h.i.+t is finally hitting the fan on what happened in February."

"What s.h.i.+t? What fan?"

Mel c.o.c.ked his head back and forth from side to side, weighing his thoughts. "Well, you know that we could have just hauled w.i.l.l.y down the front steps of the capitol and the whole thing would have been splashed all over the evening news. Instead we took a more old-fas.h.i.+oned approach. Like when FDR was in a wheelchair, but hardly anyone in America was aware of that fact because his media coverage was manipulated so well."

"We concealed the extent of his illness," Mary Catherine said.

"Right. We let his organization run the state government for a *while instead of just abdicating and turning things over to that putz, the Lieutenant Governor, as we were technically supposed to do." Mel spoke the last phrase in a screwed-up, Mickey Mouse tone of voice, as if the question of succession were a finicky bit of fine print, a mere debater's point. "Well, it might be possible to make the claim that what we did - what I did - was not, strictly speaking, ethical. Or in some cases, even legal. And sooner or later this was bound to come out."

"Let me ask you something," Mary Catherine said. "Did you know, at the time you were doing this, that it might come out?"

Mel was pained. "Of course I knew it, girl! But it's like dragging a man out of a burning car. You have to act, you can't think about the possibility that he'll later sue you for spraining his shoulder. I did what I had to do. I did it well." Mel turned and looked at her, a dry grin coming to his lips. "I was awesome, frankly."

"Well, what are you getting at?"

"You know who Markene Caldicott is?"

"Of course I do!" She was surprised that Mel would even ask this question.

"Oh, that's right. You're probably the type who listens to RNA all the time."

Mary Catherine grinned and shook her head. Most people considered Radio North America to be the height of journalistic sophistication, but Mel still had it lumped together with MTV and Arena Football. He got his radio news via shortwave, from the BBC.

"What about Markene Caldicott?" she said.

"Well, apparently she's some hotshot reporter," Mel said skeptically.

"You could say that."

"She's after my a.s.s. And I don't mean that in the s.e.xual sense," Mel said. "She's called every single person I've ever worked with. I can read this woman's mind like a f.u.c.king cereal box."

"What's she doing?"

"She'd really like to shoot down your father," Mel said, "but she can't, because w.i.l.l.y is without flaw, and was incapacitated for the last couple of months besides. So instead, she is going to do a big expose where she makes me out to be this sort of Richelieu with a yarmulke. The shadowy power who pulled the strings while Cozzano drooled down his chin. You know the kind of thing."

"Your basic over inflated election-year scandal."

"Yeah. She probably figures that w.i.l.l.y is going to get into the race and she wants to be the first to take shots at him. So I'm going to head her off at the pa.s.s."

"How are you going to do that?"

"I'm going to drive back up to Daley," Mel said. He and Mary Catherine had both fallen into the habit of using Cozzano's poststroke jargon. "And have dinner with Mark McCabe. A political reporterfrom the Trib. And I'm going to spill my guts. Going to lay the whole thing out."

Mary Catherine was shocked. "You're going to tell him everything?"

Mel looked at her with an expression that was somewhere between fatherly disappointment and pity.

"Are you nuts? Of course I'm not going to tell him everything. I'm just going to make it look like I'm telling him everything."

"Oh."

"So McCabe will get a big front-page story. We will release the information in the form most favourable to us. Markene Caldicott will have been scooped, and her story, if she even bothers to air the d.a.m.n thing, will have virtually no impact. And the Cozzano family and administration will be totally exonerated, because I, the runty Jew lawyer, will take all the heat."

"That's very good of you," Mary Catherine said.

Mel laughed and slapped the steering wheel. "Ha! Good of me. I like that. You downstaters just kill me.

'Very good of you,'" he mimicked her, not unkindly, and laughed again. Mary Catherine could feel her face radiating warmth. "Look, kid, this is not about good. This is not a good and evil thing, this is about being smart and taking our losses in the way that is least disadvantageous to us. That's what I am trying to set up here."

"Okay."

"I'm going to great lengths to be clever and set this whole thing up the way that is best for us," Mel continued, now starting to sound almost a little peeved, "and it just kills me when you try to characterize it as some kind of church-social altruism. It's like you're failing to see and appreciate the full artistry that is involved here."

"Sorry. I think it's very devious," she said, now getting a little peeved herself.

"Thank you. That's a compliment I can handle. Now we are on the same wavelength."

"Good."

"We're both listening to the same station," Mel said, extending the metaphor. "Both listening to the BBC instead of that RNA c.r.a.p." He spoke the final word with a resounding, sardonic whiplash that made them both laugh, albeit nervously. "So let's stay away from this weepy sentimental s.h.i.+t and do what is best for our families over the next several generations," Mel said.

"Okay."

"What is best, for right now, is that I, Mel Meyer, get out of Dodge."

"What do you mean?"

Mel sighed, a little defeated, as if he'd been hoping that Mary Catherine would simply get it. "Jesus, girl, I'm going public tonight. Telling the whole world that I did something unethical. I'm going to take the heat for the decisions that I made in January and February. Which were good decisions - but sooner or later, the karma comes back and hits you. Now, once I've made myself out to be the evil, scheming homunculus that I am, how can I possibly continue to be a close adviser and confidante of the Cozzano clan?

The whole point is that everyone throws s.h.i.+t at me, it all sticks, and then I run away and take all the s.h.i.+t with me. If I stick around you guys, some of it's bound to rub off."

As Mel explained all of this, the whole situation became clear to Mary Catherine, and the cloud of emotion that had obscured the beginning of this conversation lifted away. She felt calm and relaxed.

"How far away are you going to run?"

"Oh, pretty far, at least for a while," Mel said. "I'm formally severing my relations.h.i.+p with your father, as his attorney, and sending his files over to Ty Addison at Norton Addison Goldberg Green. Ty'll take good care of you guys. I will stay in touch by phone, but this is the last time I'll show my face in Tuscola for a while. It's okay for us to see each other when you come up to Chicago, as long as it's something casual, like lunch. Anything more than that, and someone in the media will notice it, and make it out to look like I'm still lurking in the shadows, pulling strings."

"What about the long term you were talking about?"

"Long term, nothing has changed. This is a blip on the screen of history."

During the conversation he had been steering the Mercedes randomly around the gridwork of roads thatcovered the area, occasionally zigzagging his way back toward the Cozzano farmhouse. Myron Morris's Suburban pa.s.sed them going the other way and they waved at each other. Finally Mel stopped next to Mary Catherine's car, parked along the shoulder, and she realized that he meant for her to get out.

"Do I get a hug?" she asked. "Or is that too sinister for Markene Caldicott?"

Mel just sat there pa.s.sively, as though suddenly stunned by what he was doing.

Mary Catherine unfasted her seat belt, leaned over the gap between the seats, and encircled Mel's neck in her arms, nearly lying down sideways across the front of the car. Mel wrapped his arms around her body and held her tight for at least a minute. Then he let go, all of a sudden.

"Okay, I want to be alone now," he said.

Mary Catherine pecked him once on the cheek and climbed rapidly out of the car without looking back.

She slammed the door behind her. Mel's car was moving forward before the door was even shut. The tires broke loose from the pavement, spun, and squealed, kicking back twin spurts of blue smoke, and the Mercedes shot down the road past the old farmhouse, just like in the old days. In the windows of the farmhouse, the faces of young Cozzanos appeared, drawn by the noise, then drifted away as they saw that it was just Mel Meyer, the old lawyer from Chicago who liked to drive fast.

William A. Cozzano was out for his morning const.i.tutional: out his back door, through the gate and into the alley, half a block down, through a break in the hedge, and into the Thorsen's driveway. Down the edge of their side yard, waving to ninety-year-old Mrs. Thorsen, who was invariably standing at her kitchen window was.h.i.+ng dishes, then into the street, another half block up, through a gap in the chain-link fence around Tuscola City park, and from there, wherever he wanted to go. It was a route he had been following since he had learned to walk the first time, and it was one of the first thing he had done when he learned to walk the second time.

Nowadays, of course, he was usually accompanied by half a dozen support personnel when he did it.

Mrs. Thorsen didn't seem to mind all those people traipsing through her yard. She lived alone now. It was a mystery how she could have so many dishes to wash, but she was always there was.h.i.+ng them.

The trip to the park was a tricky, twisting affair that Cozzano's entourage had to accomplish in single file.

Once they reached the broad open s.p.a.ces of the park proper, they were able to spread out and walk in a group. Usually the entourage consisted of a couple of nurses, Myron Morris's home-movie crew, and someone from the Radhakrishnan Inst.i.tute, connected back to a bedroom in the Cozzano house by a radio headset. On this particular day, Zeldo came along for the walk.

"You're walking. You're talking. Congratulations," he said.

"Thanks. It's nice," Cozzano said.

"If you keep improving the way you have been, then by sometime in mid June you should be essentially back to normal."

"Excellent."

"I'd like to know if you would have any interest in developing some capabilities that are better than normal."

This was a bizarre suggestion and Zeldo knew it; he was visibly nervous as he spoke the words. He watched Cozzano's face carefully for a reaction.

For along time, Cozzano didn't react at all. He kept walking as if he hadn't heard. But he was no longer looking around. He was staring down at the gra.s.s in front of his feet, trying to scorch a hole in the ground with his eyes.

After a minute, or so, he seemed to reach a conclusion. He looked up again. But he still didn't speak for another minute or so. He was apparently formulating a response. Finally he looked at Zeldo and said, nonchalantly, "I have always been a strong believer in self-improvement."

"I'm seeing my aunt Mary taking an apple pie out of the oven," Cozzano said. "It is Thanksgiving Day of 1954 at 2:15 P.M. A football game is going on the television in the next room. My father and some uncles and cousins are watching it. They are all smoking pipes and the smoke stings my nose. The Lions have the ball on their own thirty-five, second down and four yards to go. But I'm concentrating on the pie.""Okay, that's good," Zeldo said, typing all of this furiously into the computer. "Now, what happens when I stimulate this link?" He swiveled around to another keyboard and typed a command into another computer.

Cozzano's eyes narrowed. He was staring into the distance, unfocused.

"Just a very fleeting image of Christina at the age of about thirty-five," Cozzano said. "She's in the living room, wearing a yellow dress. I can't remember much more than that. Now it's fading."

"Okay, how about this one?" Zeldo said, typing in another command.

Cozzano drew a sharp breath into his nostrils and began to smack his lips and swallow. "A very intense odor. Some kind of chemical odor that I was exposed to at the plant. Possibly a pesticide."

"But you're not getting any visuals?"

"None whatsoever."

"Okay, how about this one?"

"Jesus!" Cozzano shouted. Genuine fright and astonishment had come over his face. He half-slid, half- rolled out of his chair and dropped to the floor of the bedroom, landing on his belly, and crawled on his elbows so that he was half-hidden under a bed.

"Let me guess," Zeldo said. "Something from Vietnam."

Cozzano went limp and dropped his face down on to his arms, staring directly into the floor. His back and shoulders were heaving and sweat was visible along his hairline.

"Sorry about that," Zeldo said.

"It was unbelievably realistic," Cozzano said. "My G.o.d, I actually heard the sound of a bullet whizzing past my head." He sat up and held up one hand, just above and to one side of his right temple. "It was from an AK-47. It came from this direction, right out of the jungle, and shot past me. Missed me by a couple of inches, I'd say."

"Is that a specific memory of something that happened to you?" Zeldo said.

Cozzano's eyes became distant. He was staring at the wall, but he wasn't seeing it. "Hard to say. Hard to say."

"When you saw the apple pie, it seemed very specific."

"It was specific. It really happened. This was more of a fleeting glimpse of something. Almost like a reconstruction of a generic type of event."

"Interesting," Zeldo said. "Would you like to take a break?"

"Yeah, I wouldn't mind," Cozzano said. "That one really shook me up. How many more do we have to do?"

Zeldo laughed. "We've done three dozen so far," he said, "and we could potentially do a couple of thousand. It's up to you."

By the end of the day, Zeldo had stimulated more than a hundred separate connections into Cozzano's brain. Each one elicited a completely different response.

AN ENTIRE Pa.s.sAGE FROM MARK TWAIN MATERIALIZED IN HIS HEAD.

HE SMELLED THE ROOT CELLAR AT THE OLD FARMHOUSE OUTSIDE OF TOWN.

HE FELT AN OVERPOWERING SENSE OF GRIEF AND LOSS, FOR NO REASON AT ALL.

A COLD FOOTBALL SLAMMED INTO HIS HANDS DURING A SCRIMAGE IN CHAMPAIGN.

HE BIT INTO A THICKLY FROSTED CHOCOLATE CAKE. A B-52 STREAKED OVERHEAD.

HE SAW A FULL PAGE FROM HIS WEEKLY APPOINTMENT CALENDAR, MARCH 25-31,.

1991.

SNOWFLAKES DRIFTED ON TO HIS OUTSTRETCHED TONGUE AND MELTED.

HE BECAME s.e.xUALLY AROUSED FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON.

AN OLD BARRY MANILOW SONG PLAYED IN HIS HEAD.