He led me to a little salon a few rooms northwest of the main room. Pre-Columbian clay figurines, African masks, pulsar screens, splash stands — a nice mixture of old and new decorative notions. The wallpaper was New York Times, vintage 1980 or so. “Some party,” Quinn said, grinning. He ran quickly down the guest list, sharing with me a small-boy awe at being among such celebrities.
Then he narrowed the focus and moved in on me.
He had been well briefed. He knew all about me, where I had gone to school, what my degree was in, what sort of work I did, where my office was. He asked if I had brought my wife — "Sundara, isn’t that her name? Asian background?”
“Her family’s from India.”
“She’s said to be quite beautiful.”
“She’s in Oregon this month.”
“I hope I’ll get a chance to meet her. Perhaps next time I’m out Richmond way I’ll give you a call, yes? How do you like living on Staten Island, anyway?”
I had seen this before, too, the full Treatment, the politician’s computerized mind at work, as though a nugget of microcircuitry were going click-click-click in there whenever facts were needed, and for a moment I suspected he might be some sort of robot. But Quinn was too good to be unreal. On one level he was simply feeding back everything he had been told about me, and making an impressive performance of it, but on another level he was communicating his amusement at the outrageous excessiveness of his own con job, as though inwardly winking and telling me, I’ve got to pile it on, Lew, that’s the way I’m supposed to play this dumb game. Also he seemed to be picking up and reflecting the fact that I, too, was both amused and awed by his skill. He was good. He was frighteningly good. My mind went into automatic project and handed me a series of Times headlines that went something like this:
BRONX ASSEMBLYMAN QUINN ATTACKS SLUM-CLEARANCE DELAYS
MAYOR QUINN CALLS FOR CITY CHARTER REFORM
SENATOR QUINN SAYS HE’LL SEEK WHITE HOUSE
QUINN LEADS NEW DEMOCRATS TO NATIONWIDE LANDSLIDE
PRESIDENT QUINN’S FIRST TERM: AN APPRAISAL
He went on talking, all the while smiling, maintaining eye contact, holding me impaled. He quizzed me about my profession, he pumped me for my political beliefs, he iterated his own. “They say you’ve got the best reliability index of any projector in the Northeast… I’ll bet not even you anticipated the Gottfried assassination, though… You don’t have to be much of a prophet to feel sorry for poor dopey DiLaurenzio, trying to run City Hall at a time like this… This city can’t be governed, it has to be juggled… Are you as repelled by that phony Neighborhood Authority Act as I am? … What do you think of Con Ed’s Twenty-third Street fusion project? … You ought to see the flow charts they found in Gottfried’s office safe…” Deftly he plumbed for common grounds in political philosophy, though he had to be aware I shared most of his beliefs, for if he knew so much about me he would know I was a registered New Democrat, that I had done the projections for the Twenty-first Century Manifesto and its companion, the book Toward a True Humanity, that I felt as he did about priorities and reforms and the whole inane Puritan idea of trying to legislate morality. The longer we spoke the more strongly I was drawn to him.
I began making quiet unsettling comparisons between Quinn and some great politicians of the past — FDR, Rockefeller, Johnson, the original Kennedy. They had all had that warm beautiful doublethink knack of being able to play out the rituals of political conquest and simultaneously to indicate to their more intelligent victims that nobody’s being fooled, we all know it’s just a ritual, but don’t you think I’m good at it? Even then, even that first night in 1995, when he was just a kid assemblyman unknown outside his own borough, I saw him heading into political history alongside Roosevelt and JFK. Later I began making more grandiose comparisons, between Quinn and the likes of Napoleon, Alexander the Great, even Jesus, and if such talk makes you snicker, please remember that I am a master of the stochastic arts and my vision is clearer than yours.
Quinn said nothing to me then about running for higher office. As we returned to the party he simply remarked, “It’s too early for me to be setting up a staff. But when I do, I’ll want you. Haig will be in touch.”
“What did you think of him?” Mardikian asked me five minutes later.
“He’ll be mayor of New York City in 1998.”
“And then?”
“You want to know more, man, you get in touch with my office and make an appointment. Fifty an hour and I’ll give you the whole crystal-balling.”
He jabbed my arm lightly and strode away laughing.
Ten minutes after that I was sharing a pipe with the golden-haired lady named Autumn. Autumn Hawkes, she was, the much-hailed new Met soprano. Quickly we negotiated an agreement, eyes only, the silent language of the body, concerning the rest of the night. She told me she had come to the party with Victor Schott — gaunt gigantic youngish Prussian type in somber medal-studded military outfit — who was due to conduct her in Lulu that winter, but Schott had apparently arranged a deal to go home with Councilman Holbrecht, leaving Autumn to shift for herself. Autumn shifted. I was undeceived about her real preference, though, for I saw her looking hungrily at Paul Quinn far across the room, and her eyes glowed. Quinn was here on business: no woman could bag him. (No man either!) “I wonder if he sings,” Autumn said wistfully.
“You’d like to try some duets with him?”
“Isolde to his Tristan. Turandot to his Calaf. Aпda to his Radames.”
“Salome to his Jokanaan?” I suggested.
“Don’t tease.”
“You admire his political ideas?”
“I could, if I knew what they were.”
I said, “He’s liberal and sane.”
“Then I admire his political ideas. I also think he’s overpoweringly masculine and superbly beautiful.”
“Politicians on the make are said to be inadequate lovers.”
She shrugged. “Hearsay evidence never impresses me. I can look at a man — one glance will do — and know instantly whether he’s adequate.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Save the compliments. Sometimes I’m wrong, of course,” she said, poisonously sweet. “Not always, but sometimes.”
“Sometimes I am, too.”
“About women?”
“About anything. I have second sight, you know. The future is an open book to me.”
“You sound serious,” she said.
“I am. It’s the way I earn my living. Projections.”
“What do you see in my future?” she asked, half coy, half in earnest.
“Immediate or long range?”
“Either.”
“Immediate,” I said, “a night of wild revelry and a peaceful morning stroll in a light drizzle. Long range, triumph upon triumph, fame, a villa in Majorca, two divorces, happiness late in life.”
“Are you a Gypsy fortuneteller, then?”
I shook my head. “Merely a stochastic technician, milady.”
She glanced toward Quinn. “What do you see ahead for him?”
“Him? He’s going to be President. At the very least.”