Interface (94 page)

On the twenty-second an affirmation of Cozzano's strength
would be made: he would do a guest shot on a special live edition
of a popular woodworking show. The pipe-smoking, suspender-
wearing host would interview Cozzano working in his shop, steam
coming out of his mouth, as the President-elect fixed a busted chest
of drawers.

Scheduled for the twenty-third was the official launch of James
Cozzano's new book, Kingmakers. The Inside Stories of Ogle, Zorn, and Lefkowitz and How They Created a President. The
publisher was throwing a launch party at the Hay-Adams Hotel,
across the park from the White House. Rich and powerful people
would be present. So would TV cameras. The rave reviews had already been written.

The twenty-fourth would feature the Cozzanos at midnight
mass. And the twenty-fifth would make the country feel good.
Real
good.

The seven weeks after the election were glorious for Mary
Catherine. No more travel. Minimum of interviews, speeches and other campaign hassles. Maximum of time with Dad. Most of the
time was strictly business, though. As she had been doing for the
last six months, she spent several hours a day putting him through
therapeutic exercises, mostly concentrating on the left hand.

She had a lot of free time. Part of it she spent hanging around with her old high-school friends and driving up to Champaign or over to Decatur for Christmas shopping. She also took up a new
hobby: electronics.

She had purchased a book on the subject months ago in Boston
and had been reading it in free moments, learning about all the
mysterious hieroglyphs that made up a circuit diagram: resistors,
capacitors, and inductors. She didn't reckon she could design her
own circuits now, but she could certainly put one together from a
diagram.

The week before Christmas she made a stop at the Tuscola
Radio shack, which doubled as an Ace Hardware store. She picked up a set of gloves and some tools for her father, and then she went
into the little nook where all of the resistors, capacitors, and
inductors hung in bubble packs. Reading part numbers from a
wrinkled sheet of paper she'd taken from her wallet, she selected a
couple of do/en items and paid for everything in cash.

Her father already had a soldering iron, of course; he had every
tool known to the industrialized world. Mary Catherine let it be
known that she was going into Dad's workshop to assemble a secret
Christmas present and that her privacy had better not be disturbed.
She locked the door, pulled down the windowshades, and cranked
up the cast-iron stove that Dad used to heat the place up. When it
was warm enough that her fingers worked again, she plugged in the
soldering iron and went to work, soldering the little bits and pieces
from Radio Shack on to a breadboard - a slab of plastic with holes
punched through it. When it was finished the whole thing fit into
a black plastic box about the size of a paperback book. A toggle
switch and a red light protruded from one end.

President-elect Cozzano himself seemed to blossom under the
period of rest and relaxation. Aside from receiving his daily CIA
briefing and eyes-only presidential briefing, he was basically on
vacation. He evinced no desire to have a hand in collecting names
for his cabinet, being content to work with the same corps of
advisers that had brought him here. Football season blended into
basketball season at Tuscola High School, and periodically Cozzano
would slip out to the football field or into the gym to watch the
town's young student-athletes compete.

Cozzano had developed a new passion in the last months of the
campaign: Scrabble. It had been his idea that they start playing the game, but Mary Catherine encouraged it because (as she explained
to her father's curious handlers) it was a great form of therapy. Because it was a word game, it helped to exercise the parts of Cozzano's brain that handled verbal communication. But because
no speech was involved, it bypassed the speech centers of his brain
- which were now partly silicon. Mary Catherine insisted that
Cozzano play it with his left hand. At first, Cozzano had found it
surprisingly difficult to persuade his left hand to spell words; the
necessary neural connections had been severed by the stroke.

Mary Catherine mocked him for being so inept. That was all
Cozzano needed. He started playing to win. He was tenacious, and
over the months, became good. He played once a day with Mary
Catherine. He played it so often that even the Secret Service folks
and the people at control stopped noticing it.

Cozzano's cabinet members were announced. They were mostly
youthful and in good physical shape, their names indicated a
pleasing and politically correct distribution of ethnic groups and genders, they had gone to the best schools, they had outstanding records. They were all perfect.

A day later, Mary Catherine got a Christmas card from Zeldo. It
included several photos: a couple of Zeldo riding his mountain bike
on the bluffs above the Pacific and a few of Zeldo at work.

One of the photos showed Zeldo sitting in the courtyard of the
Radhakrishnan Institute, enjoying
caff
é
latte
and typing away on his
laptop. In the background, seated at another table, was one of the
institute's patients. Mary Catherine recognized the man: he was the
secretary-designate of Defense.

She went through the other photos very carefully, and saw three
more patients "accidentally" caught in the background: the
secretaries-designated of State, Treasury, and Commerce, and the
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Early on the afternoon of December eighteenth, Mary Catherine
went cross-country skiing. Three inches of new snow had fallen the
night before. By the standards of post-greenhouse effect Illinois, it
was a winter wonderland. She tossed her skis and poles into the
back of the family's four-wheel-drive pickup truck, checked her
arsenal of waxes, and took off. A few minutes' drive took her to the
old Cozzano farm. She got out, locked the front hubs, shifted into
four-wheel-drive, pulled on to a dirt lane between fields, and drove
for half a mile or so. Then she put her skis on and took off.

After a mile or so she was able to coast down into the gentle cleft
of a river valley, lightly forested with skinny ironwood trees. She
followed the river for another half mile until she came upon a beat-up, ramshackle old cabin, really more of a glorified duck blind than
a dwelling. Parked beside it was a big Chevy pickup truck, and as
she approached from downwind she could smell cigar smoke and
hear subdued conversation.

Mel Meyer, ludicrously clad in a heavy insulated farmer's
coverall, emerged from the building, walked up to Mary Catherine, and ran a bug detector over her body. This time he got a faint radio
signal from one of the buttons on her shirt. Mary Catherine skiied a couple of hundred feet away from the shack and left the button
under a log. Then she came back and gave Mel a long hug.

Inside the shack were a bulky, round-shouldered black man in
his fifties, and a huge white guy with bushy eyebrows and a salt-
and-pepper hair and beard. Mary Catherine knew them both
already. Respectively, they were Rufus Bell, USMC Retired, and Craig ("the Crag") Addison, Chicago Bears, Retired. "How's he doing?" Bell asked.

"He's doing great," Mary Catherine said, "this is all boy
adventure stuff. Just the kind of thing he likes."

Mel, Rufus, and Craig ("the Crag") all looked slightly
embarrassed.

"Okay," Mel said, "now listen carefully, because I'm freezing
my ass off, and because this is important. These two guys Rufus and
Crag can provide the bodies we need. With a little help from some
of Eleanor's friends and supporters in D.C., we can even make it
legal. And I can provide the paperwork. Mary Catherine?"

"I've got the black box ready. And I've got some information for
you. The secretaries-designate of Defense, Treasury, Commerce,
and State, and the Speaker of the House, have all spent time at the
Radhakrishnan Institute in the last few months."

Mel shook his head. "Tragic," he said. "A tragic epidemic of
strokes. Anyone else?"

"Not that I know of."

"Well, that will be useful knowledge," Mel said. "Now, Mary
Catherine, there's only one thing we need from you."

"My father," Mary Catherine said.

"Right. Can you give me Willy?"

"I have a plan, Mel," she said. "I have a scam."

That night after supper, Cozzano called Mary Catherine in for
another game of Scrabble. She'd had two or three glasses of
Chianti, she was in a good mood, and she spoke without restraint.
"Dad, it's the most boring game ever invented."

"If only you would play it right," he groused, "and not cheat."

They went into the study and sat down at the desk in front of the
works of Mark Twain.

Mary Catherine always started the same way: she reached into the heap of tiles and spelled out ARE YOU STILL THERE. They
had a fancy Scrabble board mounted on a turntable and so when she
was done, she spun it around so he could read it.

Cozzano frowned. "Stop playing around," he said. "You know
the rules." Both of his hands were active. It was a bizarre sight: with
his left hand he was breaking up the sequence that she had spelled
out, rearranging the letters, plucking more of them out of the
overturned box top. With his right hand, he was picking seven tiles
at random and placing them neatly on his little rack. He continued
to speak at the same time. He seemed genuinely annoyed and
appeared not to notice what his own left hand was doing. "You
have to pick seven tiles. And you can only spell one word at once.

Why do I have to explain this to you every time? Are you teasing
me, girl?"

Mary Catherine was accustomed to strange neurological tics
because of her work, and she had grown accustomed to her father's
peculiarities over the months that she had been putting him
through daily therapy. She had to remind herself just how bizarre
this would look to anyone else.

Cozzano's left hand spun the board so that Mary Catherine could
read the words DID YOU SEE MEL.

She looked into his eyes. He was frowning, staring down at the
Scrabble board, befuddled. "How did those letters get there?" he
asked.

Mary Catherine messed them up with her hand before his eyes
could read them. Then she combed some more tiles out of the heap
and spelled out the word YES.

He got the same look on his face as when she had come home
from school with Bs on her report card. "Is that the best you could
do? A three-letter word?"

"Sorry," she said. "I got bad letters."

"Thanks for giving me that big fat
Y
," he said. "That's four easy points for me. You need to think harder about strategy." As he was
talking, both hands were again active on the Scrabble board. His
right hand was turning her
Y
into the world YTTRIUM. His left
hand was spelling out HOW IS HE on the bottom left corner of
the board.

Mary Catherine spun the board around. Again, Cozzano's eyes
picked out the letters that had been laid down by his left hand. "How did those letters get on there?" he said. "For god's sake,
peanut, we need to make sure the board is clear before we start. Get
rid of those."

She had already read them, so she swept them away. Then she
used the
I
in YTTRIUM to spell out the world PLANNING. In
order to do it, she had to rummage through the box top for some
more letters. Cozzano frowned and grumbled about this cheating.

The conversation went back and forth like that for several more
rounds, the Scrabble board spinning round and around.