The Frankenstein Candidate (44 page)

Afterward, curled up in the privacy of her home, and refusing every call for an interview, Olivia was carefully analyzing everything that each of the candidates spoke about. Going over the history of both the major parties, she pored over hundreds of campaign speeches, promises, and interviews, noting how Logan and Ganon had merely rehashed old phrases. She made a cutting of the
Salt Lake City Daily Express
online article that summed up the first debate: “Parents home early from their night out surprised their kid, and stumbled upon a crowd of revelers buried in an orgy of street racing, sex, drugs, and drunken fighting; the parents turned on the house alarm. Everyone froze. The party ended.”

She pinned the article on the bulletin board in her study under the heading
Frank Stein
.

“Men and women of the fourth estate, become completely intransigent. It’s a good thing.”

Frank Stein was addressing the graduating class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York on the Saturday after the first debate. It was a rare opportunity to hear a presidential candidate in the final weeks of an election campaign. A lot more than just the graduating class filtered in to the room, including journalists, lecturers, administrative staff—basically anyone who could get past security. The lecture theater was crammed.

“Why intransigent?” a cute co-ed asked.

“That’s what makes a good journalist. Unless a media professional really owns up to that responsibility, she will end up becoming the fourth branch, which is where we are with most media organizations today. Investigative truth could improve your ratings even more than scandal would. Scandal is old hat.”

“Mr. Stein,” another young woman asked, “yesterday I heard you speak up against Wall Street. Yet you are or were part of it. It made you rich, didn’t it?”

“No, I wasn’t really part of Wall Street,” Frank said, “and there is actually a noble function within finance. That is to continually redirect capital toward its most productive uses.

“I did not speak up specifically against Wall Street per se but against the very idea of banks having the support of a federal agency. When things go wrong, they get bailed out. When things go right, the chiefs pay themselves spectacular bonuses. It is all done under the nonsensical assumption that banks have a special place in the economy.”

“So who killed Chip Ramsey?” a nondescript male voice from the back asked.

“I’m sure the police are looking into it. A disgruntled guy on Main Street, perhaps?”

“Can’t blame him,” the voice from the back said, reflecting the general mood.

Ralph Prescott was watching the show from the back. A long-time reporter with the
Boston Monitor
, Ralph was a guest lecturer at master’s level journalism classes at Columbia and loved the commute to New York, where he could always find stories to pursue. Ralph had been present at the very first talk that Frank Stein had given at the Ford Hall Forum after declaring his presidential bid, at the Rabb Lecture Hall in the Boston Public Library in the winter.

Ralph still vividly remembered what Frank had asked of him then: “
So are you going to spend the rest of your life writing what pleases your masters?
”

As Frank Stein mingled with the students afterward, Ralph had neither the courage nor the courtesy to come face to face with Frank Stein, even so much as to thank him. Frank’s question was still droning in his head like a bumblebee stuck inside a helmet. Ralph Prescott had never forgotten the date: January 5. Today was September 19. The bee had been droning the whole time.

Ralph Prescott left quietly, the old bee still in his head. He was turning thirty-nine in a few weeks. That was half-time, they said, for an American man’s average life span was seventy-eight years. But you couldn’t go sit on the bench and reflect a bit…life just went on. Ralph went to his favorite café near the Columbia campus. He ordered his usual: a cappuccino with cinnamon toast. He loved their Brazilian-sourced coffee.

Ralph pulled a wad of paper from his jacket pocket. It was an article he had written. It was titled “Ganon paints Logan into the Stein corner.” It was meant to be the incisive analysis that followed the first debate. It said that Ganon had succeeded in making Logan look like an extremist. For decades, the media had changed the English language to make “extremist” sound like a dirty word, like terror
ist
or isolation
ist
…anything with an “ist” sound to it sounded murderous. The editor-in-chief of the
Boston Monitor
absolutely loved his draft. He wanted it for the Sunday special edition with the election pullout.

As the coffee and toast arrived, Ralph reached into the other pocket of his jacket. It was another wad of paper. This was what he had written the previous night on the plane to New York. It was titled “The Ghost of Weimar” and spoke about the dangers of hyperinflation in the United States. It praised Frank Stein for bringing intelligent debate into American politics. It was highly critical of Sidney Ganon, John Logan, and of their rhetorical speeches and their parties. Ralph never dared to show this piece to the editor-in-chief; Ralph knew he would hate it, but Ralph loved reading what he himself had written over and over again, particularly this piece. The editor-at-large hated the very idea of writing a feature about hyperinflation when Ralph tried to broach the idea with her.

“The Ghost of Weimar” opened with a brief history lesson about the Weimar Republic, the period of 1919 to 1933 in Germany, including a period of intense hyperinflation from 1921 to 1923. Eventually, you needed a trillion marks of the old currency to get one mark of the new currency. Prices rose not just by the day, but by the hour—or even by the minute. If you had your morning coffee in a café, and you preferred drinking two cups rather than one, it was cheaper to order both cups at the same time. The law-abiding country crumbled into petty thievery. Gasoline was siphoned from cars. People bought things they didn’t need and used them to barter—a pair of shoes for a shirt, some cutlery for coffee.

Ralph’s piece then spoke about twentieth century hyperinflation in Hungary, Argentina, Bosnia, Russia, and Zimbabwe. Then it shed light on the situation in the United States and the Stein campaign.

He needed another cup of coffee, which he ordered. He needed to edit his piece, even though he knew he didn’t have the courage to show it even to a colleague or an associate editor, let alone the chief. But Ralph always liked to tidy his writing.

The waiter came and went, and the beautiful aroma of the second cup of coffee lifted his mood. God, he loved it. Ralph never noticed the waiter who had come and gone, as he was busy staring out the café window at the gas station across the street. Ralph had discerned that the sign had changed from $8.14 per gallon to $14.8 per gallon, right in front of his eyes. If it wasn’t for his good eyesight, he could have missed the trick on a cloudy day like this. His commodity trader friend had told him to expect this—
WTI futures are above $330 a barrel
, he had said. Ralph finished correcting the article on his laptop and picked up the tab to look at it.

He fumbled for the change in his pocket as he read the little invoice on his table. The first cappuccino was $6, and the second was $9. The waiter was back and smiling at him, obviously expecting him to be a good tipper.

“Sorry, the new menu just arrived…four minutes ago,” the waiter said.

Ralph was on his cell as he left the café. He called the online news editor at the Net Station. Things were a blur after that—he was sweating under the cap he wore.

Ralph went online with the “The Ghost of Weimar” piece without a pseudonym. He then typed in a letter of resignation by e-mail and clicked “send” with a one-hour delay.

Ralph switched his cell off and went for a walk down Broadway, taking the cap off his sweaty scalp. The droning bee was gone. He felt a lot better now.

Olivia spent the weekend in Baltimore with Gary. They watched the interviews now raging on the Net Station. Scientist after scientist had broken free.

Some of them cried openly on national television—some thanking Mardi for his confession, some denigrating him for selling himself out.

“You have to get back in there,” Gary said. “Your country needs you.”

“I’ve made up my mind,” she said.

“And?”

“I will join him if he’s still interested.”

“You know, I was hoping that would be the case,” Gary said, “not just because you belong there, but because Frank’s vision is the right one. And you need to pay Victor back his dues. We need to get him.”

“Don’t worry, that train is in motion,” she said.

Despite the little victory that Stein had with Ralph Prescott, Sidney Ganon was running red-hot in the polls with well over 50 percent of the vote.

After Olivia had more meetings with Frank Stein, the press caught on to what was likely to get announced. Frank and Olivia didn’t deny it either. On the night of September 22, Frank Stein announced that Olivia Allen would join his campaign as the vice presidential nominee, a mere three days before the vice-presidential debate.

It was hard to make sense of Olivia’s decision by any conventional yardstick. She had already won the Democratic nomination for the presidency and would have been short odds to win the presidency given the way Ganon was leading the pack at the moment.