I looked at Fix Farrell standing by the window with his hat on. His face remained impassive. Alexander continued.

"I do not require that you be a Christian. But I do require that you understand my faith and its power. We will be together often and sometimes continuously for some time. My wife and I are in earnest."

Farrell said, "Okay, Meade, cut the shit. We ain't hiring him to pray for you."

"Please be careful of your language, Francis, in front of Mrs. Alexander."

"Yeah, sure," Farrell said. "But Spenser is what we need in this job. My people checked him out real thorough. Yeah, he's a royal pain in the ass; but he's got the stuff. So let's get to it and stop frigging around."

Alexander smiled and shook his head slightly. He looked at me a moment.

"Do you have the stuff, Mr. Spenser?"

"So far," I said.

He smiled again and nodded. Everyone was silent. Westin looked at his watch. The two Fitchburg cops sat stolidly in their chairs. You don't have to be a cop long to get good at waiting.

Ronni Alexander said, "Are you married, Mr. Spenser?" Her smile when she asked me was very bright.

"No, ma'am."

"Ever?"

"No, ma'am."

She kept smiling and nodded as if she had confirmed a suspicion. If I'd been married, I'd have had better manners.

"Do you want me to demonstrate anything?" I said to Alexander. "Shoot the wings off a fly? Wrestle a bear? I'm really very skillful for an unmarried agnostic."

"Funny as hell too," Westin said.

"That's free," I said. "A fringe benefit, when you pay for the muscle."

"Well," Alexander said, "I'm afraid you'll do. I don't quite know why, but you're rather convincing. Think so, Ronni?"

Ronni did her brilliant smile. "I think inside he's really very, very nice. I'll feel much better with him aboard."

"Well, I guess you're hired then," Alexander said. "These gentlemen will brief you. Ronni and I will want to rest for an hour or so before we go to work again."

Alexander stood up. I stood up. We shook hands. Alexander and his wife went through the connecting door into their bedroom and closed the door behind them.

Abel Westin said to me, "You got some smart mouth, fella. You damned near blew the job."

"I know," I said. "My pulse is still pounding."

Farrell said, "Okay, okay. We gotta be in Lowell in two hours. You two talk with Spenser. Abe and I got things to do."

"I told you before, Farrell. My name is Abel, not Abe."

"Oh, yeah, right. Well, let's go see about getting a news conference organized."

Farrell shook hands with me. "These boys'll fill you in. Don't worry about Meade. He believes all that shit, but he's a stand-up guy, you unnerstand? He's straight ahead. And you better believe he's a winner. F. X. Farrell doesn't climb on the boat with a loser. Right?"

I nodded but Farrell didn't wait to see if I nodded or not. He jerked his head at Westin and they went out of the hotel room. I turned to the two cops.

They were both young. No more than thirty. One wore a houndstooth check jacket, the other a gray suit.

"You're Fraser," I said to the check jacket.

"Dale Fraser," he said. He was clean shaven and balding. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and looked like he might have played guard for a small college basketball team.

The other cop said, "Tom Cambell." He was blockier, with close-cut brown hair and a thick neck. His hands were small and very thick from palm to back. I shook hands with both.

"How do you feel about me coming in?" I said.

"Relief," Fraser said. "There was too much for two of us."

"How you been working it until now?"

"I been doing most of the coordination with local law enforcement. Tommy's been doing most of the bodyguard stuff."

"Most of the security provided by local cops, I assume?"

Fraser nodded. "I set it up ahead. Crowd control, screening people at receptions, that stuff. The personal safety, you know, carrying a piece and walking beside Mr. Alexander is our responsibility."

"We need more people?" I said.

Cambell said, "Not really. Now that you're on. We don't have to stand outside his door or anything. Dale calls ahead, arranges connecting rooms. He and I sleep next door. I mean ten more guys around him might help, but he won't stay inside a ring like that anyway. He shakes hands and"-Cambell shrugged-"he's trying to get elected, you know. You can't do that from hiding."

I nodded. "Okay, let's leave the set-up as it is. Dale, you keep doing the coordination. Tom and I will share the protection. You need anything, tell me. You have any suggestions, make them. I'm in charge but humble. No need to salute when you see me."

Fraser said, "Mind if we snicker every once in a while behind your back?"

"Hell, no," I said. "Everybody else does."

In an auditorium at the University of Lowell, Meade Alexander was explaining where the nation had dropped its molasses jug and why. The room was mostly full. Ronni sat behind him on a folding chair on the stage, her knees and ankles neatly together. Her feet firmly on the floor, her white-gloved hands folded neatly in her lap, her eyes riveted on her husband, her interests animated and her expression approving, maybe even adoring.

"There is a crisis in this land," Alexander said. "Nearly half of the marriages in this nation end in divorce; what God has joined, any man can now put asunder at will."

I was leaning against the wall of the auditorium, near the stage, beside a window. When I looked out the window I could see the Merrimack River break over some rapids and drop in a waterfall before it moved off toward Newburyport. I had heard that someone caught a salmon in it not long ago. Or maybe that was another river, and I was being optimistic. At least it hadn't caught fire like the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.

"My friends, nearly eighty percent of the video cassettes now sold are pornographic," Alexander said.

Some kid in the back of the room said audibly, "Right on."

Tom Cambell was on stage, in the wings, and Fraser was at the back of the auditorium standing beside the campus security chief, who had a walkie-talkie.

"Nudity and sex are big business. Any small grocery store in the land will sell magazines that twenty years ago would have landed the seller in jail. Television sells jiggle, newspaper columnists routinely suggest that any form of sexual excess is acceptable, that abortion is simply a matter of personal preference-as if the slaughter of unborn children were no more significant than an upset stomach."

The audience was a mix of students and faculty, with a few citizens of Lowell who were interested. Outside the auditorium there were pickets representing gay liberation, NOW, NAACP, the Anti-Nuclear Coalition, Planned Parenthood, and everyone else to the left of Alexander. Since, as far as I could tell, there was no one to the right of Alexander, it made for a considerable turnout. They were quiet by the standards I had learned in the late sixties and early seventies, but campus and Lowell city police had kept them at passive bay.

"The family, the nucleus of civilization, is under attack from the spread of feminism, from those who council a form of rebellion under the deceitful rubric of 'children's rights,' from drug pushers who would poison us, from those who would urge homosexuals to marry, from an intrusive government whose social workers all too often violate the sacred web of family with their theories of social engineering."

Beneath my window, on the grass, a young woman in a plaid skirt sat, leaning her back against a tree. A young man lay flat on the ground, his head in her lap. Each was reading, and as they read, her left hand absently stroked his hair.

"My candidacy is not merely political. I am striving not only to change laws, but to change the assumptions of a nation, to reinvigorate the purity and sinew of a younger America. To call forth the inherent decency in the people of this country, united under God, to refortify the resolve of this nation to stand firm against Godless communism. This is beyond legislation. I am calling upon all of you to join me in a crusade, to help me find America reborn."