his watch. Precisely twenty-three seconds after the idea had been floated the obvious rebuttal had followed: nice idea, but impossible. He watched as the rest of the group fell into line behind the accountant. The Deadhead attempted a rallying speech: ‘But we don’t have to accept that! Washington and Lincoln didn’t just accept the British being here, did they? They fought back!’ But, though no one corrected him on his history, his argument found no takers. Brief as it was, this little episode would be useful ammunition next time he got pressure from Ted Norman and his band of ultras in the state party, demanding the candidate adopt a more muscular nationalist position. He could tell them, ‘That’ll work – for precisely twenty-three seconds.’
‘All righty,’ cooed the facilitator, scribbling a note. ‘How about this one? “This is our country. We’ve accepted the Chinese presence here, but it’s got to be on our terms.” Shall I repeat that? Here goes …’
Much more support for that. It took a full minute and a half before anyone asked what, exactly, ‘our terms’ meant. Doran and the pollster looked at each other. Suitably vague, instantly consensual, apparently commonsensical: you couldn’t ask much more from a campaign message.
‘Let’s do a couple more. OK, this one’s a little longer. “The Chinese are here now, but that doesn’t mean they should be here forever. The new Governor of California should try to renegotiate the Treaty.”’ Lots of enthusiasm for the first sentence, Doran noted, but confusion on the second. The word renegotiate needed some work. That would never fly in a thirty-second TV spot. He heard his own voice, nearly a decade ago, tutoring the young Leo Harris: ‘Avoid Latinate words wherever possible, go Anglo-Saxon every time. No one wants to have intercourse. They want to fuck. Same with politics. It’s not financial institutions. It’s banks.’ Harris was such a good pupil, he had remembered it all. Motherfucker.
‘And here’s our last one. “The Chinese army are here. But they don’t have a blank cheque. They can’t do what they like. They need to follow our rules and obey our laws.”’
Every head nodding.
Doran felt his phone buzzing. Cupping his hand over the mouthpiece, he turned his back to the two-way mirror, making sure the pollster – whom he had long suspected was leaking to the LA Times – could not hear the conversation.
‘What can I do for you, Elena?’ It was the candidate, the underdog challenger for the governorship of the great state of California. Though the voice was not the one known to millions of viewers of Fox News, where she had become a favourite. There she was sharper, more acidic, obligingly playing to her network billing as ‘the tough-as-nails former prosecutor’. In person and now on the phone, her voice was smoother and calmer. (One of the tasks Bill had set himself was to encourage Elena Sigurdsson to behave on camera the way she did in person. That was always harder than it sounded, but in Sigurdsson’s case there was an extra difficulty: the Republican base, including the Ted Norman crowd who’d made sure she bagged the nomination, liked the persona of the ball-breaking former DA of LA County and she was reluctant to let it go.)
‘I won’t have any numbers from here for a while. But I can give you a readout based—’
‘No,’ Sigurdsson said. ‘I have some news for you.’
‘OK.’ This was worrying. You never wanted candidates to have their own information stream. Ideally you’d remove their smartphones altogether, citing security reasons. ‘How intriguing! Fire away.’
‘You know about this murder story, the sister of the journalist?’
Doran had seen a single weib mentioning it, which he had glided over and failed to absorb. ‘Sure.’
‘I’m hearing Berger’s nervy about it.’
‘Really? Why would he care?’
‘Not sure. Seems he’s putting the squeeze on the Chief of Police. Wants to get this done.’
‘“Seems”?’
‘The Chief of Police has declared it a priority. Putting pressure on his team.’
‘And he’s said this publicly, the Chief of Police?’
‘No, but that’s what I’m hearing. From my people at LAPD. They reckon it must mean he’s getting heat from the mayor. For Christ’s sake, Bill, is there a problem here?’
He was, he realized, challenging her. Some candidates liked that, but they were a minority. Even the ones who told interviewers the last thing they wanted was to be surrounded by yes men wanted to be surrounded by yes men. They needed the reassurance. He had given Sigurdsson more credit than that, but perhaps she was the same as the rest.
An awkward thought eeled its way into his mind. Was he showing her less respect because she was a woman? She had brought political information to him and he hadn’t simply accepted it but had doubted her. Would he have done the same with a man?
Who the hell cared? He had been right to doubt her, hadn’t he? She had jumped to conclusions – that Berger was nervy – on the basis of nothing her opponent had actually said or done, nothing even that the Chief of Police had said or done but just some watercooler talk she’d picked up from her cop friends. Not good enough. He had been right to push her. Worrying about sexism was Leo Harris, Democrat, political correctness bullshit. He scolded himself for breaking one of his own rules: never let them get inside your head.
‘I’ll look into it. That could be very useful. Thank you, Elena.’
‘If Berger’s sweating, that’s an opening. You said it yourself, he hasn’t shown us many weaknesses.’
Doran hung up, dissatisfied with both himself and his candidate. His assumption was that she was wrong. There was no reason for a mayor to worry about a single death in his city. That the victim’s sister was a journalist certainly raised a flag: the police would need to do their job properly, otherwise she could make some noise. But that was a long way off.
Still, Sigurdsson wouldn’t have got everything wrong. If the cops were telling her they were feeling some pressure, they probably were. Such pressure could originate in a dozen places. Could be Berger, over-anxious about his campaign, could be the Chief of Police himself. Or someone neither of them had even thought of.
The Great Hall of the People was a landmark. The building itself was nothing special – an entrance on South Wall Street next to a vintage clothes store – but everyone knew it, thanks to the green-uniformed sentries who guarded the door, alongside two outdoor flame-heaters, in oversized peaked caps and retro People’s Liberation Army fatigues.
Maddy had only been once, but she remembered it. Beijing kitsch was the theme: heroic posters of Mao, waiters in workers’ caps, and on one wall a giant TV screen, the pixels usually flooding red, projecting patriotic slogans. Even from her vantage point in the car parked on the other side of the street, she could see the words ‘Innovation, Inclusiveness, Virtue’ in bold yellow and in English, against the rippling flag of the People’s Republic.
She guessed the place was heaving now, the long, long tables – styled after the dining hall of a Mao-era peasant farm – packed and spilling over. The Great Hall filled up early every night, serving Chinese fusion –
