Primary Colors by Joe Klein Page B

preemptive apology wouldn't work. He had to let it blow. "Fuck all, Henry--fuck all," he began, when we were back at the Mansion, having dropped Richard and Jimmy off at the hotel. "You don't know fuck-all about briefing me . . . You make me look like a flicking amateur, a rube-ass, barefoot, dipshit, third-rate, southern-fried piece of shit alderman. You couldn't tell me? You couldn't look it up in the fucking book before we took the kid out? You didn't know we were playing the same teachers' conference as Ozio? What the fuck kind of operation we got here, Henry? How do we get scheduled for hors d'oeuvres when he gets the main course, anyway? I'm Ozio's flicking warm-up act. And don't think he didn't know that. But, somehow, we didn't know that. Henry, there is no way we win this thing--we even compete--if we don't know shit like that. Now we're committed, we go there, we meet--his turf, his show-
    and he's top dog. Amateur fucking hour. Jimmy's probably on the phone right now, tellin' him he ain't got anything to worry about down here."
    "So what's wrong with that?" Susan asked.
    "What's wrong with it is, he gets more time to dick around," Stanton said. "We're putting no pressure on him. He's in no rush. All that money stays tied up. The press keeps sniffing around his governor's mansion. He's the story."
    "That would be the case," Susan said, looking over at me, "even if Henry hadn't screwed up." So she was pissed, too.
    "Henry, you've got to get on your bicycle, man," Stanton said, the storm passing. "Before I walk into that room next Tuesday, I've got to have a better idea what to expect than I did tonight. Okay?"
    I understood, but couldn't do much about it. I called Jerry Rosen the next morning.
    "Doesn't sound good," he said. "Orlando calls for a meeting only if he wants to fuck with you. The people he likes, he talks to on the phone."
    "So what'll he do?"
    "Your guess is as good as mine." Rosen said. "He talks to me on the phone."
    Thanks, I knew that. I called Howard Ferguson III, who wasn't much better. He laughed a dry little laugh. "Oh, Orlando's just trying to fuck with you," he said. "He's a bully. He wants to see how much he can mess with your mind. just don't let him."
    "Easy for you to say."
    "You can't handle Orlando," Howard said, "how you gonna handle the Republicans?"
    There was no campaign buzz in Orlando Ozio's suite at the Sheraton, no sense of urgency--but a powerful, primordial feeling of turf. Ozio was known for being a one-man show. He wasn't big on entourage, and the living room of the suite was empty, except for a press guy and Armand Chirico, Ozio's old law partner. On our side, it was me and the governor; Uncle Charlie and Tommy the Trooper were waiting downstairs.
    Chirico knocked softly on the bedroom door, then opened it a crack and simply nodded; he turned and gestured us in, like a headwaiter. Ozio was in shirtsleeves, in the shadows. The room was dark; he had only the desk lamp on, and the television. He gave the impression of being a nocturnal creature, and he was larger than I expected him to be, with powerful shoulders, neck and hands. He'd been a pretty fair middleweight boxer until his cheek was crushed in his seventh professional bout. He was watching the local news. The sports was on. He went straight for what he thought was Jack Stan-ton's jugular: "You ever play any sports, Jack?"
    "Golf," Stanton said, knowing Ozio meant competitive sports. "My father used to say that golf was the most capitalist sport--it used more land for less reason than any other," Ozio said, and laughed gently. "Papa . . . But he came from the old country. He had resentments, along with his dreams. You want some fruit, a sandwich? A Diet Coke?" Stanton refused the food, took the Coke. "Come, sit."
    So they sat across from each other, in the darkened bedroom. We, staff, stood at a distance, on the other side of the bed. It was odd, uncomfortable; I felt like a servant. Ozio was into family history now. His