On a bright day in August, from Rock Island, came a cold wind, a stinging, ruthless wind full of purpose and pain, and riding that wind was Edward Longshanks, wearing a pair of pinstriped suit pants, a blue sport coat, and under it the same Poi Dog Pondering shirt he'd been sporting for eight consecutive days. He'd left his Chicago apartment a week ago, meaning to make a one-day trip to Aurora and back, but he found himself called to fight fire after fire, from Galena to Waukegan to Mattoon, and now here he was, too many days later, without a change of clothes, smelling as if he'd been rolling in dead deer and fruit.
Edward Longshanks fought fires, but was Edward Longshanks a firefighter? He was not. Edward Longshanks was a fixer. He was a cleanup man. He was a slate cleaner. He was an operative. It was that last job description that he preferred, for he'd grown up wanting to be an agent of some kind -- FBI, CIA, ICM, anything. Instead, or until then, he worked for a vague and shadowy Democratic Party cabal, though no one could prove exactly whence his paychecks came.
Officially he was employed by a group called Illinois Triumph!, which had no employees or office, and which was funded by Democrats of means on either coast, whose über-operatives entrusted Edward Longshanks with $3,500 a week plus expenses, and with making sure that the eventual Democratic nominee for the open Illinois Senate seat was the right one, the one who could win, and was not named Saddam. At the moment Longshanks was heading home, to Chicago's south side, to Hyde Park, where he'd get a shower and then head up to Lincoln Park for a dinner meeting with Maxine Washington, who he liked very much but who he had to terminate. "Terminate" was his own word, not appropriate for mixed company, but a word that pleased him to use in this context, for he was a fan of certain science-fiction films, and of using grim and violent verbs in the political context.
By way of terminating Maxine Washington, what he had to do, simply, was to excise Maxine Washington from this Senate race. She wouldn't play well downstate, in large part because she'd never been downstate. No one downstate was particularly impressed that Maxine Washington had been for five years the comptroller of Chicago. Based on her name recognition, she was polling at around 11 percent, and this was messing everything up, because she was taking a good chunk of Chicago's African-American vote, but she'd get clobbered in the general election because she carried a cat in her purse, had married a man, named Basil, 20 years her junior, and spent a good deal of her time at a scarf-and-hat store she owned, called Maxine! What Should I Wear?
Longshanks specialized in clearing the field for tight primary races in crucial states, and though he'd been doing this for many years -- well, three at least, almost four -- he'd never seen such a ridiculously messy situation. The last time he'd witnesssed something so crowded, without any clear front-runners or viable options, it was in Michigan two years back, when there were five midgets, nobodies, vying for the nomination. The field was unsalvageable, and whoever won the nomination would get creamed. He was sent in to meet with Susanne Martin-Remy, the recently term-limited governor, and persuade her to run. In 48 hours she was in, within a week leaped to the front of the race, and the seat was secure -- she beat the Republican, whose name was Danny Donald and who carried a putter around with him (his motto: "Let's Be Steady") by 20 points.
This year, the Illinois seat was considered the most up for grabs, and with the Senate otherwise split 50-49, if the Dems didn't take the seat, it would be a very long few years. So he'd been pulled off some work he was doing in Puerto Rico -- long story; it involved infecting GOP cruises with salmonella -- to bring him here, to Illinois, to reduce the race to the three candidates the Democratic leadership in Washington felt could compete.
Doug Plank, the former Bears safety, was considered a winner who could raise money and appeal to Republicans downstate. Sydney Bellows, the retired millionaire-now-philanthropist, was popular enough, had a clean background and a patrician manner -- he looked like a senator, much more so than Plank, whose suits were NFL-colored, invariably some gruesome pastel. The only problem with Bellows was that, as mentioned before, he was made of glass. Lastly there was Rebecca Romaine, who had been backed by Charlie Panglosserman, a respected but unpredictable mover considered mad by many, a genius by a few. Longshanks hadn't made up his mind about Romaine, nor had the DNC or any of the state's main money people. Romaine had seemed competent and harmless at first, and was expected to land in the top five, but very recently Longshanks had been getting some unsettling reports about her campaign, beginning with the news that she'd moved her HQ from a respectable North Avenue storefront to a converted goth nightclub in the shape of a castle. Also, said his operatives, her volunteers were "sort of creepy." He was keeping an eye on her, but in the meantime had to pick the low-hanging fruit.
Thus he was heading to see Maxine Washington. She was the prototypical loose-cannon vanity candidate, who'd been told by too many friends and Chicago aldermen that she could win, that she could be the next Carol Moseley Braun. But she was no Carol Moseley Braun. While Moseley Braun had a quick wit, a billion-dollar smile and great personal charm, Maxine Washington was by most accounts just strange. She kept all of her employees under constant watch -- six surveillance monitors on her desk, where only she could do the surveying -- and she carried her cat, Harold (who shared her surname and who looked, she insisted, like the city's first black mayor), in a translucent shoulder-bag and insisted that Harold, with an inked paw, co-sign many of her official documents. In terms of skeletons in her closet, there were many, and hers had flesh, some hair, and the cuticles were still growing. Despite it all, Maxine Washington, on name recognition alone, was polling as well as anyone else, and was refusing to bow out.
So Longshanks needed to convince her she would be better off going away quietly, thankful to keep her day job and reputation. How did he do it? In an ideal situation, with whoever it was -- a massage innovator or a flake who carried a cat in her purse -- Longshanks would simply intimate that she or he didn't have a chance to win, that they should do the right thing and go home. This worked just about never. Usually the vanity candidate wanted something in return, and Longshanks was ready with any number of things to dangle before them: positions in the administration, guaranteed spots in the state Senate, seats on boards of directors, restaurant partnerships, time shares in St. Croix, Lake Geneva or Fort Sheridan.
If that didn't work, he had other ways, and they conformed in most ways to what the average citizen would assume happened behind the scenes and in the darkest corners of the dirtiest guerrilla-campaign tactics. And if the idea of a Democratic operative doing opposition research on his own party's candidates, of that operative feeding unflattering information to a network of media collaborators, of that operative being in most ways as unsparing to Democratic hopefuls as might be his GOP counterparts -- if all this seems unpalatable or startling, the reality of Longshanks was mitigated by his disposition, which in every way departed from expectations. Knowing that Longshanks was just 28 and was charged with threatening or following through with the ruination of undesirable candidates, one might expect him to be hard-driving, arrogant, two-faced and abrasive, but he was nothing of the kind. He reminded everyone of someone they knew -- a minister, a dairy farmer, Jimmy Stewart -- always someone with a plain WASP face, a faint '40s- or '50s-era aura of "Aw shucks" charm, and a slow and gentle way with people. No one knew he was coming, and no one knew what hit them. And Maxine Washington, sitting with her brother Rodney in her Lincoln Park brownstone, was soon to be another notch in Longshanks' belt -- though he'd never put it that way, not out loud at least.
