Cozzano could have won the caucuses without lifting a finger. People in Iowa loved him, they knew he was a small-town boy. Anyone who lived in the eastern part of that state saw him on TV all the time. All he had to do was pick up a phone and get nominated. Looking at the candidates on TV, he was tempted to do just that and put an end to all of this nonsense.

Senators and governors were out in the snow, picking up baby livestock, milking cows, standing in schoolyards wrapped up in heavy overcoats, tossing footballs to red-faced blond kids. Cozzano chortled as he watched Norman Fowler, Jr., billionaire high-tech twit, walking across the hard-frozen stubble of a cornfield in eight-hundred-dollar shoes. The wind chill was thirty below zero and these guys were standing out on the prairie without hats. That said everything about their fitness to be president.

Cozzano's family had always told him he ought to run for president one day. It sounded like a nice idea, bandied across a dinner table after a couple of glasses of wine. In practice it would be ugly and hellish. Knowing this, he had never seriously con­sidered the idea. He had known for some time that Mel had quietly organized a shadow campaign committee and laid the groundwork. That was Mel's job, as a lawyer, he was supposed to anticipate things.

Of course, now that Cozzano had had a stroke and couldn't run, he wanted to be President worse than anything. He could make a phone call and a few hours later a chartered campaign plane would be waiting for him at the airport in Champaign, and suddenly literature and campaign videos would be piled up in heaps all over the United States. Mel could make it happen. And then Patricia would wheel him up on to the plane, drooling for the cameras.

This was the hardest phase of recovering from the stroke. Cozzano had not yet readjusted his expectations of life. When his high expectations collided with reality, it hurt like hell.

The news break metamorphosed into a commercial for cold medicine. Then the anchor person came back on to tell America when the next news break would be. And then a new program started up: Candid Video Blind Date.

Cozzano was so disgusted that he could not change the channel fast enough. It was as if this tawdry program would cause him physical damage if he watched it for more than ten seconds.

The remote control was on the table to his right, on the good side of his body. He reached over for it, but she had put it a little too far back on the table; the heel of his hand could touch it but his fingers couldn't. He tried to screw his arm around into a kind of self-induced hammerlock, but in his disgust he was doing it so hastily that he just ended up knocking it farther back on the table. It shot backward, flew off the table, and buried itself in the shag carpet. Now it was stuck between the table and a bin full of old newspapers: a two-week accumulation of the Trib, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, none of which he would ever read.

He couldn't reach the damn thing. He would have to ask Patricia for help.

On the screen, the hysterical applause of the crowd had subsided and the host was warming them up with a few jokes. The humor was crudely sexual, the kind of thing that would embarrass even a ninth grade boy, but the crowd was eating it up: in a series of reaction shots, Big Hair Girls and fat middle-aged women and California surfer types jackknifed in their seats, mouths gaping in narcotic glee. The game show host grinned devilishly into the camera.

"Goddamn it!" Cozzano said.

Patricia was washing some dishes in the kitchen and had the water going full blast, she couldn't hear him.

He didn't want Patricia to hear him. He didn't want to beg Patricia to come into the room and change the channel on the TV for him. He couldn't stand it.

He couldn't stand this TV program either. William A. Cozzano was watching Candid Video Blind Date. Across town, John and Guiseppe and Guillermo were turning over in their graves. All of a sudden tears came to his eyes. It happened without warning. He hadn't cried since the stroke. Suddenly he was sobbing, tears running down his face and dripping from his jaw on to his blanket. He hoped to God that Patricia didn't come in. He had to stop crying. This wouldn't do. This was too pathetic, Cozzano took a few deep breaths and got it under control. For some reason, the most important thing in the world to him was that Patricia not find out that he had been crying. Sitting there in his wheelchair, trying not to look at the television set, Cozzano let his eye wander around the room, trying to concentrate on something else.

In the far end of the living room, a pair of heavy sliding doors led into a small den. Cozzano had never used it for much. It had a small rol1-top desk where he balanced his checkbook. A beautiful antique gun case stood against one wall. Like all of the other furniture in Cozzano's house it had been made out of hardwood by people who knew what they were doing back in the nineteenth century. There was more solid wood in one piece of this furniture than you would find in a whole house nowadays. The top half of the gun case was a cabinet for long weapons, closed off by a pair of beveled-glass doors with a heavy brass lock. A skeleton key projected from, the keyhole. Cozzano had half a dozen shotguns and two rifles in there: all of his father's and grandfather's guns, plus a few that he had picked up during his life. There was a pump shotgun that he had used in Vietnam, an ugly, cheap, scarred monstrosity that spoke volumes about the nature of that war. Cozzano kept it in there as a reality check. It made a nice contrast between the fancy guns, the ornate collector's items that various rich and important sycophants had given him.

Above and below the long weapons, a few handguns hung on pegs. The bottom half of the gun cabinet consisted entirely of small drawers with ornately carved fronts where he kept his ammunition, oil, rags, and other ballistic miscellanea.

Sitting in the next room in his wheelchair, Cozzano tried a little experiment. He reached up into the air with his right hand, seeing how high he could get. He was pretty sure that he could reach high enough to turn the skeleton key on the gun cabinet doors. And if not, he could always haul himself up out of his wheelchair for a few moments and carry all his weight on his right leg. The cabinet was massive and stable and he could probably use it to pull himself up. So he could probably get the doors open. He could pull out one of the guns. It would probably make the most sense to use one of the handguns, because the long weapons were all enormous and heavy and would be awkward to maneuver with only one hand. The .357 Magnum. That was the one to use. He knew he had ammunition for it, stored in the upper right-hand drawer, easy to reach. He would pull the pin that held the cylinder in place and let it fall open into his hand. Then he would drop it into his lap, letting it rest on the blanket between his thighs. He would grope in the drawer and pull out a handful of rounds. He would insert a few of these into the cylinder - one would suffice - and then snap it back into place. He would rotate the cylinder into position to make sure that one of the loaded chambers was next up.

Then what? Given the power of the weapon, it was likely that the bullet would come flying out the far side of his head and hit something else. There was an elementary school nearby and he could not take any chances.

The answer was right there: across the den, opposite to the gun case, was a heavy oak bookcase.

Cozzano couldn't see it from here. He reached down and hit the joystick attached to the right arm of his wheelchair. A whining noise came out of the little electric motor and he began to move forward. Cozzano had to do a little bit of back-and-forth to get himself free of the living room furniture, then he swung around back of the sofa and into the den. He spun the wheelchair around in the middle of the den and backed himself up to the wall next to the bookcase.