Good Intentions

Joseph Hardy sat in the ruins of his congressional campaign early in the morning of the first Wednesday in November and wondered if there was anything more humiliating than having tens of thousands of people reject you and all you stood for.

Almost a year of kissing babies, eating rubber chicken and guzzling untold carloads of Maalox, ten thousand doors knocked on, a hundred thousand hands shaken, a marriage in trouble, and it had all come to this: a man alone in a big empty hall littered with squashed cigarette butts, red-white-and-blue bunting drooping to the floor. Vote for Hardy signs nailed to wooden laths lay stacked like Confederate rifles at Appomattox. In one corner two bottles of cheap California champagne sat unopened in galvanized tubs full of melting ice.

Onto this stage of dashed hopes, as he had so many times before, strode the Devil. Hardy knew at once that this was Satan, though he looked not at all remarkable and though the only commotion created by his appearance was among a caucus of exhausted balloons that squabbled briefly along the floor in his wake.

Satan stopped a few feet from where Hardy sat, regarded him silently for a time and then nodded slowly.

"Well, Joe," he said quietly. "What do you say?"

"You've got to be kidding."

The Devil simply shook his head and waited.

"I never wanted this job in the first place. They talked me into it. They said Haggerty was getting too old. It didn't matter if he carried this district with seventy percent two years ago. 'We need a young face, that's what we need, Joe, a young face.'"

That face smiled at the Devil and Joseph Hardy from a hundred campaign posters taped to the walls. It was a good-looking face, stopping short of Kennedyesque. There was intelligence in it, mercifully not quite Stevensonian. Hardy wore horn-rimmed glasses befitting a college economics professor, which is what he was. He had good teeth.

"You can't lie to me, Joe," Satan said. "Yesterday you wanted it. We all saw your face when the early returns put you ahead. You wanted it more than you've ever wanted anything."

Hardy put his face into his hands and rubbed it for a long time. Then he looked up, exhausted.

"Talk to me," he said.

•

The sun was coming up when they reached the final terms.

"I won't compromise any of my ideas,"(continued on page 180)good intentions(continued from page 136) Hardy said. "That's why I finally said yes. I think I can make a difference."

"It won't be a problem," Satan said calmly.

"I'm serious. No swaying with the winds. I don't care what the polls say, I won't alter a stand just to get votes."

"You won't have to."

"And no fat cats. No special interests. I want to limit campaign contributions to one hundred dollars, like Jerry Brown."

"Done."

"No negative advertising. No character assassination, no mudslinging. No Willie Horton."

"You're taking all the fun out of--all right, all right. Done."

"And I get ... ?"

"A congressional seat in two years. In six, the Presidency." Satan waited, asking without words if there were any more points to discuss. Then he went to the phone bank across the room. He punched in his AT & T credit card number and spoke briefly to the party at the other end. In a moment the fax machine began to hum and he pulled out three pages of a contract. Taking out a ballpoint pen, he bent over a table and began marking up the boilerplate.

Hardy read it twice, folded it, put it into his pocket.

"I'll run this past my lawyer," he said, "but I think we've got a deal."

"I'll see you in his office tomorrow at three," said the Devil. "And in the meantime...." He held out his hand.

Hardy hesitated only a moment, then shook it. The Devil's hand was warm and dry and firm. He'd been afraid it would be clammy. He hated that.

"What should I call you?" Hardy asked.

"'Nick' will do just fine."

•

"I don't care much for 'his immortal soul,'" said the attorney, a worthy named Cheatham. "And what's this about 'until the end of time'? The customary term would be 'in perpetuity.'"

"It means eternally," Nick said. "Forever."

"Um, yes, yes." Cheatham frowned. "Frankly, it seems like a long time."

"These are my standard terms. The duration is long, granted, but the reward is huge, and the payment ... frankly, sir, most courts would see it as trivial."

"It being difficult to establish a market value for an immortal soul," Cheatham said, nodding. "I see your point. But look here: 'To be disposed of in whatever manner pleases the party of the first part.'" He looked owlishly over to Hardy. "It's all very vague, Joseph."

"Let it stand, Mr. Cheatham."

"Very well, very well. But I still don't think that I can sign off on the time element here." A little palpitation of sparks appeared around Nick's eyebrows, unseen by the lawyer, who was studying the ceiling as if the solution to the impasse might be written there. And perhaps it was, for he soon looked down and said portentously, "Why don't we make it a thousand years?"

Nick laughed.

"I ask for eternity and you offer a thousand?" he said. Then he leaned forward. "A billion years. My final offer."

They settled on 250,000 years, and Cheatham seemed satisfied.

"I imagine you'll want to show these amendments to your own attorneys," he said.

"No need," said Nick, hooking his thumbs in his vest. "Harvard Law, class of 1735."

•

While a secretary was preparing clean copies, a bottle of brandy was produced. Cheatham asked Nick what eventuality had led him to read for the law.

"The legal fees were eating me alive," Nick admitted. "I saw which way the wind was blowing, and I can't tell you how handy it's been."

Hardy took a stiff drink when the copies arrived and hardly hesitated before he signed. Nick bent over Cheatham's desk, then looked up at Hardy with a gleam in his eye.

"Don't worry, Joe," he said. "I know ways of making a hundred thousand years seem like an eternity." He signed each of the three copies, then straightened and said, "We should get started. How does tomorrow sound? Let's have lunch."

•

They met at a Chinese place for dim sum. They each stacked half a dozen of the little plates brought to the table by girls pushing carts and finished half a pot of tea.

"I suppose you've been wondering how we'll go about this," Nick said.

"I've thought of nothing else."

"Simplest thing in the world." Nick produced a small bottle with a glass stopper and set it on the table. "Concentrated charisma."

Hardy picked it up, looked at it, pulled the stopper and sniffed.

"Try not to spill it," Nick said. "Pretend it's thousand-dollar-an-ounce perfume. Just dab some on your face once a day."

Hardy applied some and felt nothing.

"Bit of a letdown," he muttered.

"Wait for it," Nick said, folding his arms. "The stuff's hard to come by. I collect it where I can find it. Baptist revival meetings are good; sometimes the stuff drips off the tent walls. You can find a bit around used-car lots, salesmen's conventions, get-rich-quick real estate seminars. And, of course, every year I get a lot of the stuff at the Oscar ceremonies." He shrugged. "I have to be out there, anyway, so what the heck."

"I thought I recognized you," someone said, and Hardy looked up to see that two waitresses had converged on the table. They had been serving Joe and Nick for half an hour without incident.

"Joseph Hardy!" said the other, putting her hand to her mouth. "I voted for you, Joe!"

"You and about three more," Hardy said. The waitresses laughed more than the feeble joke deserved.

"I didn't vote," the first one admitted, "but if you run again, I sure will. Here, take this, it's on the house." It was some sort of meat-stuffed dumplings.

Soon a buzz spread through the restaurant. The owner came by and tore up the check, and people began to ask for autographs. Nick sat back and watched, then during a lull reached over and touched Hardy's sleeve.

"Tough being in the public eye, eh?"

"What's that? Oh, Nick, sure. Why don't you try one of these dumplings with the spicy mustard?"

"Far too hot for me, I'm afraid. Joseph, I'll be going now. You won't see me for another five years. Look for me at primary time."

"What's that?" Hardy signed another napkin and glanced up. "Oh, sure, primary time. Uh ... is there anything else I should know? Anything I need to do?"

"Just stick to your principles. I'll take care of the rest." He frowned slightly, taking one more look at his candidate.

"Next time, be plain old Joe. And get a haircut. See if you can find Dan Quayle's barber."

•

The next five years passed like a montage in a Frank Capra film based on a Horatio Alger novel.

Joseph "Call me Joe" Hardy returned to the campus and immediately his classes began to fill up. Within a term, the administration had twice moved him to a larger hall. The students loved his lectures and said he managed to make economics interesting for the first time ever. Applause was common.

Strangers approached him on the street to pump his hand. Reporters asked his comments on political issues. The camera loved him, they said. Radio talk-show hosts clamored for him to be interviewed and to field questions from callers. He had a folksy, common touch that showed to good advantage on the local Nightline knockoff, where his face became familiar to everyone in the state.

Even his marriage improved.

At the proper time he announced his candidacy for Congress. Party bigwigs couldn't have been happier. Although his opponent outspent him three to one, the election was never in doubt. Joe Hardy led in the polls from the first, and the only question come election day was the margin of his victory. He was sent to Washington with a stunning mandate and very little political baggage.

In D.C., he did a passable imitation of Jimmy Stewart for a few weeks, stumbling a few times, making a few mistakes as he got his office organized. But he was neither stupid nor innocent and soon was offering bills and fending off political action committees as if he'd done it all his life.

His reputation as a straight shooter was quickly established. It could have been a handicap, but Joe Hardy knew when to compromise to get things done and when to stand fast on a matter of principle. He was a man you could do business with, but you couldn't buy him. He earned the respect of most of his colleagues, grudging at first, genuine soon after.

There was jealousy, of course, from both parties. It wasn't every freshman Congressman who had Ted Koppel calling every other week to ask him to debate George Will or Ted Kennedy. Few new faces rated a 20-minute profile on Prime Time Live. Hardy had an uncanny knack for picking up free exposure worth millions in a reelection campaign. He was returned for a second term by an even larger margin.

No one was surprised when he threw his hat into the ring for the upcoming presidential race.

•

Even a Capra movie must have trouble along the way, and some was brewing. Dark forces were gathering inside the Beltway, powerful forces stirring within think tanks, public relations firms, advertising agencies. Campaign committees representing his rivals from both parties began to circle Joe Hardy, sniffing for blood.

Soon after his name started coming up as a presidential hopeful, his opponents began their research. It went from his birth to his last vote on the House floor. It was quickly established that he was not an escaped mass murderer, a homosexual, an IRA terrorist or a communist spy. Still, the private detectives reading his grade school reports and interviewing every friend Hardy ever had were not discouraged.

There were persistent rumors, whispered here and there, of something really big. Some knockout punch, something to blow Joe Hardy out of the race before it'd really begun. The peepers vowed to find it, whatever it was, if they had to track leads straight through hell.

Which is exactly where the trail led them.

One by one they had returned, battered, scorched, empty-handed, until one day a tall, thin, pimply fellow walked into the offices of the Elect Peckem Committee and put a smoking document on the chairman's desk.

"It wasn't that tough," the hacker said smugly. "Old Scratch could use better security software. I was in and out of his hard disks before anybody knew what was happening."

•

Joe Hardy in Pact With Lucifer screamed the headline of the Manchester Union Leader two weeks before the New Hampshire primary. Next to the damning article was another quoting a CBS--Wall Street Journal poll conducted minutes after the announcement. Joe's standing had plummeted. He now stood only two percentage points above the chief rival for his party's nomination, Senator Peckem.

Nick found Joe secluded in his office. Joe leaped to his feet.

"How could you do this to me?" he screamed.

"Calm down, Joe. Just calm down. All is not lost."

"The deal was supposed to be confidential!"

"I know, Joe, and I couldn't be sorrier. I've hired a new security consultant, but the cat's out of the bag," he said.

"So stuff him back in! You're ... well, you know who you are. Can't you do that?"

"Unfortunately, my powers have limitations, Joe. I can't change what's already happened. As for that cat, however"--and now he smiled--"I've always preferred to skin it. And I know more than one way."

•

"Tonight Jay's guests are: From Beverly Hills, 90210, Jason Priestley. Congressman Joe Hardy. And special guest, Satan, Prince of Darkness. And now ... Jay Leno!"

It was rough at first, as they'd known it would be. Leno skewered them during the monolog. But when Joe and Nick were finally seated, the tide began to turn. The two of them seemed relaxed, not at all ashamed or defensive, and, well, interesting. The audience wasn't on their side yet, but they were willing to listen.

So when the talk turned serious, Joe offered information about something that hadn't got much play in the press: the terms of the contract.

"If I had it to do all over," Joe said with a pensive frown, "would I? I really don't know, Jay. But you read it yourself. Of all the candidates in this race, I am the only one guaranteed not to stoop to attack-advertising. You saw it there in black and white. I won't abandon a stand I've taken for a cheap political motive. There'll be no flip-flopping on the issues from Joe Hardy. I won't say one thing in Boston and something else in Atlanta. I want to be your President, and I want to do it solely with the small contributions of the working class and the middle class of this great country. I can't do otherwise. It's in my contract."

"And if he were to break it," Nick said with a devilish grin, "I'd be sure to give him hell."

•

The next day, on The Joan Rivers Show, Nick tackled the question of his role as the Great Adversary with a casual wave of his hand.

"That's been blown way out of proportion," he said. "Remember, He and I used to be good friends. We had a falling out, it's true, but He did create me, and I'm part of His plan. You might say I'm just doing my job." The grin on his face as he said this was infectious.

To Arsenio, Nick said, "I have to say this Lord of Evil business is mostly a bad rap, my friend. Darkness, yes. But that can be cool."

Discussing his methods with Regis and Kathie Lee, Nick said, "We both move in mysterious ways, God and me. It's true, I am out to get your soul and I do send it to hell. But have you been there lately?"

That's exactly where Dan Rather went with a television crew. He reported back with footage that suggested a medium-security federal prison. "We saw no fire and brimstone," Rather said, wearing his Afghan-war safari jacket. "Make of that what you will; we were not given free run of the facilities. Still, all in all, Manuel Noriega doesn't have it much better than what we were shown."

Geraldo sneaked to the outskirts of Hades shortly afterward, was roughed up by succubi and was ejected. He claimed to have been sucker-punched by the head succubus, but she denied everything and had a lurid videotape to back her story. When it aired the tape, A Current Affair drew an enormous audience rating.

Oprah claimed to be worried by something: Could one love God and still deal with Satan? Nick convulsed her audience by retorting, "Me and God? It's true we don't double-date. Think of us as Siskel and Ebert."

Slowly Joe edged back up in the polls as voters adjusted to the new playing field. Many seemed to feel they'd faced considerably worse choices most election years.

On primary day, New Hampshiremen slogged through a snowstorm to give Hardy 38 percent of the vote, ten points more than his nearest rival.

•

That nearest rival was Senator Peter Peckem, and upon viewing the exit polls, Peckem slammed his fist onto his desk and growled to his assembled campaign staff: "That's enough of that crap. You're all fired." He was on the telephone before the last of them had scampered through the door.

Within the hour he had spoken to Phillips Petroleum, General Motors, Matsushita, Dow Chemical, McDonnell Douglas, Toshiba and was working his way through the Fortune 500. The message was the same: I need lots of money and I need it now. Send it and I'm your boy. It was very much like a stock offering. By midnight he was a wholly owned subsidiary, and the money was pouring into offshore laundries from Bimini to the Cayman Islands.

His last act before retiring for the night was to hire a new campaign manager, a man by the name of Yerkamov, famous for engineering the reelection of an 82-year-old Senator from a Southern tidewater state shortly after that worthy's conviction on a charge of statutory rape.

Yerkamov hired the advertising firm of Mayerd & Scheisskopf, the Charity Crackerjack public relations agency, a top pollster, a speechwriter and a political psychologist. By the time the sun rose on the ruins of New Hampshire, the revivified Peckem campaign had come out of its corner swinging.

•

"Let me show you something, Joe," Nick said, pressing a button on a VCR remote control. On the screen, in grainy black and white, Japanese torpedo bombers swooped over Pearl Harbor. The Arizona exploded and sank. Hordes of troops waved rising-sun flags and shouted "Banzai!" And a deep, concerned voice said: "The Matsushita company likes Senator Peckem. Sony likes him, too, and so does Toshiba. If they didn't, they wouldn't be funneling millions into his campaign through their fat-cat lobbyists and special-interest political action committees. Joe Hardy stands for the American worker. Who will you vote for--Joe Hardy or the Senator from Toyota?"

"Are you out of your mind?" Hardy gasped, leaping from his seat.

"Just thought I'd run it past you."

"Why don't you show the bomb falling on Hiroshima, too? Maybe I could take credit for that."

"Actually, in the next one...." Nick tapped another videocassette box thoughtfully against his chin.

"No, never! The agreement was, no attack ads."

"I wouldn't call this precisely an attack ad," Nick wheedled. "We do know it's true, about the Japanese contributions. Peckem has sold out to every----"

"That's his problem. No one will own me when I'm President, and I'll do it without stooping to...." He noticed the look on Nick's face. "What's the matter? Is something wrong?"

"Wrong? No, nothing." Nick sighed deeply. "I don't like those new numbers from Florida, that's all."

•

It wasn't just Florida. Hardy's support was eroding in Massachusetts, Tennessee, Delaware ... across the board in the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses. He had held his early strength in Maine and South Dakota, but by the time Super Tuesday rolled around, he'd slipped an average of three points in the eight early March races. Peckem, written off by many pundits in February, was being called a slugger, a man with staying power, not afraid to take off the gloves and mix it up at the line of scrimmage, coming up on the rail.

These things don't happen spontaneously. Voters in the 12 Super Tuesday states were being surveyed, pamphleted, focus-grouped, phone-banked and sound-bitten more thoroughly than in any previous election. All over the South, people sat in conference rooms and theaters to have their sweat glands, heartbeats, blood pressure and breathing rates monitored as they listened to trial speeches or discussed the issues. Computer-guided laser beams were being bounced off eyeballs as test groups watched new commercials. Semanticists and programmers had developed an all-purpose speech that could, within two seconds, be tailored not only to small constituencies in a particular state but also to individual zip codes within the state. Peckem could promise one thing at nine A.M. at the Masonic Lodge and something completely different two miles across town at ten.

The usual hot-button issues had been identified, and Hardy's weaknesses in each category carefully plotted. He had once said that school prayer might make Islamic or Buddhist students uncomfortable. By the time Mayerd & Scheisskopf were through with it, Hardy sounded like a goddamn atheist. Once, Joe had opined that burning the flag might be protected by the First Amendment. The Charity Crackerjack agency soon had him using Old Glory for toilet paper. But the best purchase Yerkamov made turned out to be Peckem's speechwriter. He came up with a catch phrase widely viewed as the best since "Read my lips." It quickly became a chant at Peckem rallies and spread rapidly through society, and it went like this:

"To hell with that!"

Do you want the man who stands for higher taxes and being soft on criminals?

"To hell with that!"

The man who wants to keep this great country headed down the road to mediocrity, who sends your tax dollars overseas whenever his liberal friends tell him to, who doesn't give a damn about the jobs of working men and women in America?

"To hell with that"!

Who wants to close the military base in this fair city, shut the sawmills, cancel the weapons systems, kowtow to the Japanese, truckle to the Arabs, deny you the right to pray ... the man who says I can't get elected because he's made a deal with the Devil?

"To hell with that, to hell with that, to hell with That!"

Elect Peckem was outspending Vote for Hardy 50 to one, but the crowning blow was yet to come.

•

"It was the charisma," Joe whined when the story broke.

"Charisma my forked tail," Nick steamed, pacing the floor. "Charisma my aching horns. It was your not keeping your pants zipped."

Nick was not being completely fair. One of the hazards of charisma use, discovered by many a politician before Joe Hardy, was the bimbo factor. It attracted bimbos as sugar brings flies, and in the first heady days Joe had succumbed to the charms of several.

"Several? Hah!" Nick huffed.

"OK, OK. Let's call it a few score." Of that number, Peckem's troops had found four willing to tell their stories. Worse, two of them had proof.

Far, far worse, Mrs. Hardy did the unthinkable. After a short, sharp meeting with Joe, she filed for divorce and flew off to the Bahamas.

"So what are we going to do now?" Hardy asked.

"We have a little money," Nick mused. "Not what we should have, but some. Of course, I'll need your permission." He pulled a videocassette from his pocket and put it on the table between them.

•

The Pearl Harbor ad started running on Saturday, along with three others of equal virtue. Hardy applied a triple dose of charisma and appeared with Nick on Meet the Press on Sunday. By Monday the polls had begun a ponderous swing in his favor.

Super Tuesday found him winning by small margins in seven states, losing in three, with Texas and Florida too close to call.

•

Old Scratch sat in the ruins of a presidential campaign early in the morning of the second Wednesday in March and wondered if God was laughing.

Joe Hardy entered the room, along with a burst of noise from Hardy faithfuls partying into the night in the next room. Joe held a bottle of Dom Pérignon and a glass and he staggered slightly. His shoulders were littered with confetti and draped with ticker tape. His hair was unruly.

"So," he said, burping. "On to Illinois?"

"It's over, Joe," Nick said.

"What do you mean, 'it's over'? We won!"

What a pathetic thing his man had become, Nick marveled. He'd been a lot easier to take back in the days before the contact lenses, before the new barber. Back in the days of cheap California champagne. Now he was more of a sound bite than a man. Hardy must have known this, at some level, or he wouldn't be drunk so much.

"You call that a win?" Nick handed Joe a long sheet of Teletype paper. Key sentences and words had been highlighted with a yellow marker. "Did you catch the NBC special? Did you hear what John Chancellor had to say?"

"I was----"

"Those are tomorrow's columns you've got in your hands. They're saying the secret word, Joe, the one they've been hinting at for weeks. 'Unelectable.' And the duck comes down but you don't win a hundred dollars."

"We didn't do so bad in----"

"You don't win anything." Nick cupped his hand to his ear. "Hear that sound, Joe? That's the sound of the press corps beating a retreat. A dozen of them have already left to cover Peckem. By morning the bus will be half full. By next week, who knows?"

Hardy was leafing through the Teletypes with a baffled expression.

"That's right," Nick said. "Read it and weep. Look at what Evans and Novak are saying. And get a load of that Royko column: The Senator from Toyota versus the Congresscritter from Hell.' When you've got the time, play that tape over there, see what Letterman had to say about you a few hours ago. With spin like that, we're sunk."

"But we won, damn it!"

"By three points in two states. And we lost two we were supposed to win."

"But we're still ahead!"

"That matters only in the general election. What matters in the primaries is fulfilling predictions, sustaining momentum. Joe, if the polls have you at seventy percent, and you get sixty-five, you lose! Just ask Lyndon Johnson. I did, ten minutes ago."

"You spoke with----"

"Well, where did you think he would end up? He said to throw in the towel. And I haven't even told you the worst of it yet."

"There's worse?"

"Exit polls. That's what this is all about these days. A month ago the voters saw you as an attractive outsider. Now you rate as just another politician. Your approval rating has dropped below twenty percent."

"It was that damn ad," Joe accused. "The Pearl Harbor ad."

"Actually, no. They liked that. The voters say they hate a negative campaign, but they really get a charge out of it. Running that ad made you look scrappy. Like you won't take Peckem's allegations lying down."

"Then we'll just have to hit 'em harder," Joe said, tossing the papers aside and slapping his fist into his palm. "Let's run more of those ads. Lots more. Let's punch that bastard Peckem where it hurts."

"We're broke, Joe," Nick said. "We can't afford the airtime. The campaign's in debt almost a million dollars. The only reason we could borrow that much is some ex--S & L people owed me some serious favors."

"Well, let's accept larger contributions. I won't hold you to the letter of the contract. Maybe we could even get some corporate money."

"Great. You think people are lining up to give you money after a showing like today? Wise up."

"Then make some money. Snap your fingers, make a pile of it appear right here." Joe pounded the table, getting angry.

"Get thee behind me, politician. What, are you crazy? With the Federal Elections Commission breathing down our necks and the IRS snooping around?"

"But ... you're the Devil, goddamn it! Why should you be afraid of Internal Revenue?"

"Obviously, you've never been audited," Nick said, shivering.

"Peckem gets away with it," Joe sniffed after a long silence.

"Peckem's organized, Joe. It takes time to put together a money laundry like that. He's insulated. He's got plausible deniability."

Nick stood and rubbed his face, then looked at Joe Hardy, standing with his shoulders slumped.

"Go home, Joe. Get some rest. It's over."

Joe nodded and turned to go, then looked back over his shoulder.

"What about my soul?"

"You're free to keep what's left of it."

•

Satan had never been quite so depressed. For a century he'd been feeling as if he were falling behind. He kept trying to adapt, did everything he could think of to modernize his operation. Then they did something new. Hitler, the H-bomb, global warming. Toxic wastes, the ozone layer. Deforestation. AIDS. Heavy-metal rock and roll. Jim and Tammy Bakker. I wish I'd thought of that, he'd say to himself, then scramble to catch up. And now this.

It was not the first time he'd lost a soul in contention, though his batting average was high. But it darn sure was the first time he had lost one through being unable to fulfill his own side of the bargain.

It was one heck of a note. In today's political world, if you weren't willing to lie, cheat and be bought, it looked as if not even the Devil himself could get you elected.

He had decided to catch the next shuttle to Hades, flog a few sinners, try to cheer himself up, when his beeper went off. He glanced at the number in the liquid crystal display, got out his cellular phone and dialed.

"Yeah, what is it, Ashtoreth?" He listened, then sighed and said, "All right, put him through." After a short pause, "Son of Chaos here. What can I do for you?"

"Sure, I know who you are."

"Uh-huh. Uh-huh."

He sat up a little straighter.

"Talk to me," he said.

•

Yerkamov and Associates had the top floor of a 20-story tower of black glass that dominated a sterile edge-city office complex in Bethesda with all the warmth of the slab gizmo in 2001. Nick's heels echoed on black marble as he was whisked from the limo through a stainless-steel lobby and into a brushed-aluminum private elevator that deposited him before the glass desk of Yerkamov's receptionist. She'd been kicked out of the Miss America pageant. The judges thought she was too pretty. Why can't I get help like that? Nick wondered as she ushered him into the vast corner office with the million-dollar view of the Potomac and suburban Virginia. It was freezing cold.

Yerkamov was a fat little man with a bald head and rolled-up sleeves and sweat trickling down his neck. Sitting behind a big clean desk, he was almost obscured in a cloud of blue smoke. He leaned out of the cloud and thrust a chubby index finger at Nick.

"Reason I called," he said, brandishing a sheaf of computer printouts, "I was going through some polling data and I came across a little blip here when I ran Hardy versus Peckem." He chuckled. "Sort of a Ross Perot factor. Thing is, you tested higher than either of 'em."

"How interesting."

"I thought you might think so. The numbers from the Oprah show got my staff sitting up and howling at the moon. You do quite well across all the demographic lines. Young ones like that whiff of anarchy. And boomers find you trustworthy. Fatherly. Women enjoy the hint of danger." He got up and walked to the windows, puffing on his cigar. He looked over his shoulder. "Got any money?"

"People owe me favors. I can raise some."

Yerkamov nodded. "Of course, I can see a certain amount of trouble with the whole Prince of Darkness issue. Fly-god, Corrupter, Father of Lies.... Some of the nicknames you've picked up over the years."

"I prefer plain old Nick," said Lucifer.

"Sure, sure, and it plays better, too. And you've made a start on defusing that. With the right spin ... do you see where I'm going here?"

"I think I have the direction. Not so sure about the motivation."

Yerkamov shrugged. "My business is seeing the writing on the wall. If I head Peckem's reelection committee, I'll have to learn Japanese and see him only on visiting days. There's things even I can't make look good. Besides, I like to back a horse I understand."

He went over and sat on the edge of his desk. "Potential problem. What's your citizenship?"

"I have a United States passport."

"Not good enough if we're going all the way. Gotta be a natural-born citizen."

Nick thought it over.

"Hades is vast. I believe I could convince any court in the world that when I was cast down, I came to rest beneath New Jersey."

"That would explain a lot. Where do you live?"

"I maintain a condo in Dallas for tax purposes."

"Then here it is: junior Senator from Texas in '94. Six years later...."

"The millennium...." Nick whispered, and the banked fires in his eyes blazed briefly. When he looked down, he saw that Yerkamov had extended his hand. Nick took it. Yerkamov's hand was clammy, his grip flaccid. Nick hated that. He swallowed hard and pretended he didn't mind.

Hell, it was a small price to pay for the White House.