Act of Darkness(8)
“Stephen doesn’t know how to treat much of anybody.”
“Stephen knows how to treat reporters, and that’s all I care about. If I were you, Kevin, I’d worry about the Markey woman. She’d been on the phone to me six times already since eight o’clock this morning.”
“Eight o’clock?”
“Lobbyists get paid for bugging senator’s chiefs of staff at eight o’clock in the morning. Or three, which they think is even better.”
“Is she beginning to make an impression?”
“She has to make an impression, Kevin. She bought into the cocktail party, and just now she bought into the seminar Fourth-of-July weekend. We’re going to get a quarter of a million dollars in soft money out of that organization before the year is out.”
“And they’re going to get a bill without competency exams.”
“No,” Dan said. “They’re not.”
This, Kevin thought, must have been the way the Poles had felt at the end of World War II, when they’d found out they’d been sold lock, stock, and barrel to the Soviet union . It was not, of course, he himself who was being sold—it was Clare Markey—but he could sympathize. If there were competency requirements in that final bill, she was going to get killed.
“How the hell,” he asked Dan, “are you going to manage that?”
“I’m going to manage it,” Dan said, “because I have to. Without the competency requirement, that bill’s going to look like just another government handout, and to the social workers, too. You know how the heartland feels about handouts. You know how they feel about social workers.”
“I know how they feel about doctors,” Kevin said drily. “That was something we hadn’t counted on back in college, was it?”
“You’ll be all right,” Dan said. “You’re a publicly acknowledged exception. And we went over this before. Without government money, your standard of living is going to go through the floor, yours and every other doctor’s. People can’t afford to pay what you want to charge and the insurance companies are going to start refusing to at any moment.”
“Right. Being a medical man turns out not to be the ultimate stickup operation after all.”
“Kevin—”
“Never mind,” Kevin said. “I’m sorry. I’m not even too sure why I called. I saw that article in the paper and I got—nervous.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because Janet is a trooper, but her mother isn’t.”
There was a pause on Dan Chester’s end of the line. Kevin wondered what Dan thought about at times like this and then stopped wondering. Trying to second-guess Dan always gave him a headache.
“Victoria Harte,” Dan said, “is not somebody I’m going to worry about. Try to remember, Kevin. It doesn’t matter what she knows. It only matters what she can prove.”
[5]
FOR PATCHEN RAWLS, THE world was an enormously simple place. There were two kinds of problems, the practical and the moral. With practical problems, all that mattered was getting what you were owed: script approval, an extra million, the right wardrobe mistress, the new trailer. Her name had been a practical problem once, when she was first starting out as an actress, in New York. She had been born Mary Rawls in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and she had seen, as soon as she got to Manhattan, that “Mary” wasn’t going to do a thing for her. It was such an ordinary name, people forgot it, or mistook it for someone else’s. She was always running into visiting firemen who thought they had seen her in a production of Camelot or a road show of Carousel, when it was really Mary Rawley or Mary Reels they had seen. Because name recognition was everything, she had known she was going to have to change hers, and she had. She had picked “Patchen” off the spine of a book in the Endicott Booksellers on Columbus Avenue, and had been perfectly happy ever since. It was the name of some poet whose work she couldn’t read, but that didn’t matter. She had learned from at least a dozen people that the poet was a well-respected one and on the right side of most things, or at least not on the wrong one. He was considered both sensitive and intellectual, and with his name some of that reputation for sensitivity and intelligence began to rub off on her. It was a situation her high-school English teacher back in Pittsburgh was probably choking on. Her best friend from college was probably ready to slit her throat. That was just fine. Patchen Rawls had never considered herself as stupid as other people said she was.
Moral problems were much more complicated than practical ones, because they had to be broken down into two groups. First, there were the easy questions, the things everybody with any sense knew to be true. Pollution, for instance, ought to be outlawed and brought to a halt at once, no matter what it did to the economy or the country’s standard of living. People had too many things, anyway. Women who wore furs ought to be put in jail, or at least harassed on the street. Animals were innocent, and people were wicked. Plants were beautiful and peaceful and never made war. Every lumberjack in the country deserved to be taken out and shot—although they couldn’t be, because everyone knew capital punishment was wrong. Patchen had a whole list of convictions like this, covering everything from smoking to day care, from the double-nickel speed limit to gay rights. She had the world neatly divided into two sets of people, the Nazis and the resistance. There were gay activists and homophobes, self-affirming career women and brainwashed housewives, happy little day-care geniuses and sniveling little home-raised brats, people who wanted more public housing and people who wanted to see the poor living in the streets. Most of all, there were the people who believed in God and the people who knew He didn’t exist. The people who believed in God were always Nazis.