Giacomo had promised himself he wouldn't leave the convention with less than $12,000. In the last hour he'd collected almost half his goal, which put him pretty well on pace. But just when he was getting excited, about to shake his own hand firmly, congratulatorily, he realized how pathetic he was, all of this was. The most humiliating thing about a campaign like this, one whose candidate was no millionaire, one that hadn't attracted any major donors, was scrounging for these sorts of sickly, middling checks. Giacomo knew, though, that he needed to raise money not only for phones and flyers, he needed to show the party leaders, in Springfield and Chicago and D.C. and even L.A., that the campaign had steam. He had to show everyone that Romaine was a viable candidate, and because none of the candidates at this point had any name recognition at all, the only way that seemed to convince anyone was the raising of funds.

But it was all so meager! He had to act thrilled to get a check for $1,000. He had to have dinner with some lonely psoriasis-suffering slob to collect $2,800. For $10,000, Rebecca had to come along and grin like Doug Henning. And there would be the dinners, luncheons and bowling nights for larger donors, and personal phone calls and letters to the Gold Circle or Leadership Council or whatever the fuck he'll decide to call it this time. It confused him to no end that CEOs were regularly collecting $130 million pensions while for $500, senators and representatives would scurry around like kids around a broken piñata. He loathed the role of money in campaigns, in large part because it was all so demeaning and paltry -- because everyone sold themselves for so little. You couldn't bribe the manager of a Rite-Aid for $2,000 but an Illinois candidate would bend over and get his fudge packed. (Did he just say that? No, not out loud.)

But he had to do it, had to love doing it, because there was no doubt that somewhere in the state, there was some multi-millionaire fuckwad at that very moment deciding that what he wanted to do with the expendable portion of his fortune was buy himself a seat in the Senate.

As a matter of fact: About one hundred miles away, in Versailles, a small town on the Western bulge of the state, Lincoln Wiltepauer Douglas, reclining on his porch in a rocking chair made of wicker and painted white, faced a perfect sunset and decided it was time that people started calling him Senator. He made some calls and figured out he could afford it. He had $45 million in the bank and assumed he'd have to spend about half. This he could do if it meant that he'd be called Senator, and not just while in office, but forever after. That was what he liked best about the position: that you got to keep the title after you left. Lincoln figured he'd do at least one term, see how he liked it, and then either run one more time or cut out. But he'd be Senator Douglas for life.

Satisfied with another difficult decision made with breathtaking finality, Lincoln Douglas watched his two grown children, their spouses and their five children, run about on the back lawn. He owned thirty-two acres of rolling countryside and he liked nothing better than to see them here, his progeny and their own, and since the death of his wife Dee Dee, he did whatever he could to cajole them all into coming here, into staying as long as they could.

His grandson Kyle ran to him and buried his head in his lap. Lincoln laughed and lifted the boy to his face.

"What do you think of your Granddad being a senator?" he asked.

"It's stupid," said Kyle, and punched his grandfather on the temple. Douglas laughed more.

During dinner he told his children his plan, and they seemed to think it a fine idea. After a smoke on the porch with his daughter-in-law Ellen, who really, he thought, had a superb set of cans, he called Seamus Pulaski, an old Chicago friend of his who'd spent some time in Washington, as a lobbyist for ethanol. He was delighted about Lincoln's run.

"You know the kind of tail a senator could get, don't you Linc?"

"Oh well, I don't know about that."

"Linc, this is your last hurrah. Dee Dee died three years ago, and you're still spry. You're what, seventy-two?"

"Sixty nine."

"The girls will love you! D.C. is the wealthy divorcee capital of the world!"

"Well?"

"You go get yourself some tail, Linc. You deserve it."

Of course Lincoln Douglas had been thinking of the sex he might be able to have in Washington, but it wasn't his primary concern. It wasn't like it was in the twenty or thirty years before, when people had the decency to look the other way. He knew it would be tough to go to Washington and have some good and lustful ongoing affairs simultaneously with three or four women in their forties, but he was determined to be strong, to go to D.C. with an agenda, and that agenda was to have good and lustful ongoing affairs simultaneously with three or four women in their forties.

But he also wanted to do something important with his money. What was money good for, after all, if you couldn't do something substantial with it -- something lasting? He'd run through so many possibilities -- baseball stadiums named after Dee Dee, municipal swimming pools for the grandchildren to shun in favor of their own private pools, statues of himself on horseback -- but none of them gave him the sense of contentment and pride that being a senator did. He was an atheist, and the idea of leaving a lasting mark on this earth, with his name firmly attached to that mark, engraved in stone perhaps, appealed to him enormously and had inspired him since, as a teenager, he read and re-read The Fountainhead and finally copied it in longhand on his bedroom walls. All of his years since -- he'd not been good enough at math to be an architect so instead went into banking and then corporate farm management -- he had worked hard, hired people to work hard for him, had saved and invested wisely, and now could think seriously about his legacy, and exactly how to get some tail out of it before he was dead.

He called more people, including Giacomo Skinputty, a campaign consultant he'd met at a fundraiser for Phil Gramm -- Lincoln was mystified about why a man like Gramm, so handsome and charismatic, hadn't fared better -- and with whom he'd had occasional conversations predicated on Giacomo's desire to extract funds from Lincoln. Now Lincoln was doing the probing, feeling out the terrain.

"Can I win?"

"Sure. You're a war hero, right?"

"Well, I --"

"You won a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, right? You know how few Korean War vets there are out there running for office? And you're a wildly successful businessman who still lives in the town where you were born and raised. You were married to the same woman for 45 years. By the way, I'm sorry for your loss, sir."

"Thank you Giacomo."

"And you've got five children, a million grandchildren. You're handsome, affable, you've got the voice of James Earl Jones. And is that story true, the one where you flew in your own Gulfstream to rescue your employees from a Honduran prison?"

"I must admit, it is true."

"You're an inspiration, sir."

"The field's not too crowded?"

In addition to the eleven Democrats, there were eight Republicans, two Greens, one Libertarian, an Anarchist and Lyndon LaRouche, who was trying to make his way onto the ballot, and for some dark reason seemed better organized than anyone in the running.

"No one's more viable than you, sir. And the field will clear up by the winter, sir."

Lincoln very much liked this man who called him sir. Maybe he would hire him. How much was it worth to have a respectful young man around the office? He would have to crunch some numbers. But for now, more questions.

"How do I win?"

"Well, early on, you'll --"

"No, early on nothing. I mean, what's the trick here?"

"The what, sir?"

"The trick, the gimmick."

There was a long pause.

"You have money, sir?"

"I do."

"You'll need it."

"Any reason in particular?"

"Well, for starters, no Republican's won an open Senate seat in Illinois since 1928. It's gonna be a slog, sir."

"So how much you think I'll need?"

"Thirty million. Minimum. Sir."

"Thirty, eh? Where's it go? Buying people off and such?"

"Um. Not really, sir. Mostly TV ads. About sixty percent will go into TV. The rest is staff, mailings, phonebanks, signs, getting you and your people from place to place."

"So you think I have to run myself?"

"How do you mean, sir?"

"You know -- do I have to run around, ride on a bus, all that? The whole song and dance?"

"That's usually the way things are done, sir."

Lincoln sighed with every part of his body.

"But it seems so low-rent," he said, full of fatigue and disgust. "Kinda scruffy and desperate, don't you agree? And I'm almost seventy! Can't I hire someone to do that kind of thing? Like a vice-senator or something? He runs around and does all the bus and barbeque business, and then I swing in for a week or so before the election, give a few speeches --"

That was only the second time anyone had ever hung up on Lincoln Douglas, and he intended, as soon as he was Senator, to have Giacomo Skinputty punished in some very real way. Could that death-penalty moratorium be lifted? That would be job one, and this disrespectful twerp would be the first in line.