Act of Darkness(4)
“Oh.”
“I’m very good at what I do, Harvey, I know how these things run. We’ll get up there on Friday, listen to a two-hour speech on Saturday, and spend the rest of the time drinking mineral water and pretending to be impressed by Fox’s Hollywood relatives. Then they’ll send up a bunch of Fireworks and everybody will pretend to be having a good time. Not a single solitary thing will get done except this: we’ll be on board.”
“And we have to be on board,” Harvey said.
“You bet we do.”
Harvey Gort sighed. “Do you think the rumors are true? That Chester is setting Fox up to run for president?”
“I don’t think it makes much difference if he is or he isn’t. If he is, we’re contributing to a presidential campaign. If he isn’t, we’re contributing to his next run for the Senate. Who cares?”
“Not me,” Harvey said.
“I’m glad you feel that way. Now get off the phone and let me get back to work.”
There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line and a cough, as if Harvey were considering getting back into the fray. Then there was a click and then a void and then a dial tone, and Clare found herself holding a telephone receiver that connected her to nothing.
Damned idiot, she thought. Damned slimy little bastard.
She replaced the receiver in the cradle and walked over to her wall of smoky gray windows, to look out on the cars and the people and the mossed-over brown granite buildings. It was one o’clock on the afternoon of a hot June day and everything she could see looked wilted. Funny, she thought. I’m only twenty-nine years old, I won’t have my thirtieth birthday for another six months, and I feel tired enough to die.
Being tired didn’t really worry her, though. She was tired all the time. It was part of the job. What made her uneasy was that she had actually found a point of agreement with Harvey Gort.
Dan Chester was a slimy little blob of corruption who ought to be squashed into the pavement somewhere and left to rot.
[3]
WHEN VICTORIA HARTE HAD first found herself transformed into a movie star, her politics had consisted of a manic ambition to get into the bed of one Kennedy or another. It was one of the few ambitions she had never been able to realize. Now, more than thirty years from the day she had first heard Senator Jack Kennedy speak at a Hollywood Democratic Club luncheon, she thought that was probably a good thing. Jack would have been a coup, Bobby would have been a pleasure, but that other one—bleh. There was something about that other one that made Victoria think of her childhood in Los Angeles and all those men who used to spend every nonworking waking minute at the Knights of Columbus” Hall. Actually, as far as Victoria was concerned, most of the things that had happened to her, and most of the things that had not, had been for the best. There had been a time in the late sixties when she had felt cheated because she had not been ten years younger than she was. The world had seemed to belong to the very young, and she had wanted desperately to be one of them. Now she realized that being part of that generation, or the one that followed, would have been a bore. These new “movie stars” were not allowed to behave like movie stars at all. When they tried, they got beat up by the gutter press. She, on the other hand, was expected to travel with an entourage of twelve and enough clothes to outfit a small Caribbean island. It was part of the Old Hollywood mystique she was supposed to represent. That mystique gave her a lot of latitude, for which she was grateful. The presently fashionable cause back in Beverly Hills was Fake Fur and Kindness to Animals. All the young women out there were throwing their minks on the bonfires of the animal rights movement. Nobody expected her to do the same, which was a very good thing. At the moment, she had six minks, four chinchillas, three sables, and a moth-eaten Persian lamb. She also had a leopard, but she’d put it into storage. In the present political climate, mucking around with endangered species would probably be pushing things just a little too far.
It was two o’clock on the afternoon of June first, and she was sitting in the living room of her suite on the top floor of the Old Washington Hotel, the biggest, flashiest, most ostentatious, and most expensive accommodation in the District of Columbia. It was the kind of place that suited Victoria, and she knew it. It was also the kind of place she liked. She had started her life as a child actress, and an unsuccessful one. What she remembered of the world before her eighteenth birthday consisted of a series of two-room apartments with peeling paint and leaking pipes, inadequate heat and nonexistent air-conditioning, disintegrating stucco and the brown pinpoint tracks of rampaging bugs, presided over by a mother with only two emotional modes: euphoria and condemnation. The euphoria surfaced every time Victoria got an audition. The condemnation was more of a constant, Mother’s preferred response to auditions failed, weight gained, weight lost, potato chips eaten, and pimples and blackheads of any kind. During the acne years, Victoria had wanted to take a razor blade to her face and settle the issue once and for all. Nobody with a face full of scars would ever be a movie star, and nobody with a face full of scars would ever have pimples again either. In the dark quiet hours after one of her mother’s real fits of craziness—Mother pulling her own hair out in clumps, tearing at her face with her nails, keening in the high whistling screech that sounded like a cross between a banshee and a witch being burned at the stake—permanent disfigurement had seemed like the least of all possible evils.