Читать книгу The 3rd Woman - Jonathan Freedland - Страница 17

Who would dominate? If you had to bet, you’d say it was the guy in the Dead T-shirt, longish hair. If they were testing ketchup or soda, he’d be the alpha dog, no doubt about it. But for this? Not so sure. Maybe the woman, overweight, polyester pants; you’d bet on her having strong views. Or the older man, retired accountant maybe. Or a dentist. If this were a jury, he’d be the foreman: prissy, stickler for the rules, president of his condo residents’ association. You’d stake your wages on it. But this was not a jury. Way more unpredictable.

The man at his side leaned in to whisper. ‘We’ll do a dummy first,’ he said before straightening up again. They were both standing, gazing through a large, rectangular window, like engineers behind the glass in a recording studio. Except no one was making music on the other side. Instead, this scientifically selected sample of the California electorate were being paid ‘expenses’ to give up an hour of their early evening to sit in a semi-circle of hard chairs in a specially equipped room in a hotel off the 605 near Anaheim. They had come on the promise of ‘an exciting opportunity to be involved in the early stages of marketing a brand-new product!’ As always, no one had warned the members of this particular focus group that the product in question was a new political message.

Bill Doran remembered the days when these were a novelty. The first one he witnessed seemed to him a revelation, the tool that would transform the trade plied by him and his fellow political consultants, that travelling band of mercenaries who rented out their smarts and experience to the parade of shallow, shiny inadequates and deviants who hankered after public office in the United States. Now focus groups were part of the established order. If anything they were under threat, dismissed as old school by the kids who seemed to base every judgement on the latest meme coursing through Weibo.

Bald, barrel-chested and thick-necked and, as such, a long-time standout among the bespectacled, chess-club dweebs of the political consultant community, Doran checked his phone while the dummy was underway, a question about the pizza that had been offered and chowed down by the group. ‘I knew it,’ said the Deadhead. ‘I told my pal, Joe, I said to him, “I bet it’s pizza”. And boom! It’s pizza.’ The man chuckled to himself and Doran adjusted his expectations, predicting that this was not a man his fellow focus-groupers were likely to follow.

‘All right, thanks everyone,’ the facilitator was saying, a studiedly informal man in dark jeans and a pressed white shirt. ‘Moving on. First of all I want to show you a very short film. Then I’m going to be asking for your responses to a few statements. I’ll read them out and you just tell me what you think, OK? Just like we did with the pizza, all right? Everyone happy?’ There was nodding around the semi-circle, except from the Deadhead as he slowly realized he had, in fact, lost his bet with Joe.

Doran watched as the film played on the other side of the glass, a short video primer explaining the Chinese presence on US soil. Apparently aimed at twelve year olds – The story starts on Capitol Hill … – it was ideal for this audience. Not that Doran was looking at the screen. His focus remained fixed on the faces in front of him.

Less than three minutes later, the focus group facilitator was rising from his chair. ‘Thank you, folks. Now, as promised, I’m going to read you a series of statements and I want to get your reaction. OK, here’s the first one. “The only troops on California soil should be American troops.” Anyone want me to read that again? OK, here goes. “The only troops on California soil should be American troops.”’

There was some spirited nodding and a rambling few sentences of assent from both the polyester trousers and the Deadhead. But then the dentist (or accountant) said, ‘We all agree with that, sure. In an ideal world, we’d only have American troops here. We all want that. But it’s not going to happen. The Treaty’s the Treaty. It’s signed, sealed and delivered. Nothing we can do about it.’

‘It’s too late,’ nodded a woman who, Doran guessed, had been recruited to represent the suburban married female demographic, the one they had called ‘soccer moms’ back when he was starting out in this business. Quaint, that phrase seemed now.

Doran checked his watch. Precisely twenty-three seconds after the idea had been floated the obvious rebuttal had followed: nice idea, but impossible. He watched as the rest of the group fell into line behind the accountant. The Deadhead attempted a rallying speech: ‘But we don’t have to accept that! Washington and Lincoln didn’t just accept the British being here, did they? They fought back!’ But, though no one corrected him on his history, his argument found no takers. Brief as it was, this little episode would be useful ammunition next time he got pressure from Ted Norman and his band of ultras in the state party, demanding the candidate adopt a more muscular nationalist position. He could tell them, ‘That’ll work – for precisely twenty-three seconds.’

‘All righty,’ cooed the facilitator, scribbling a note. ‘How about this one? “This is our country. We’ve accepted the Chinese presence here, but it’s got to be on our terms.” Shall I repeat that? Here goes …’

Much more support for that. It took a full minute and a half before anyone asked what, exactly, ‘our terms’ meant. Doran and the pollster looked at each other. Suitably vague, instantly consensual, apparently commonsensical: you couldn’t ask much more from a campaign message.

‘Let’s do a couple more. OK, this one’s a little longer. “The Chinese are here now, but that doesn’t mean they should be here forever. The new Governor of California should try to renegotiate the Treaty.”’ Lots of enthusiasm for the first sentence, Doran noted, but confusion on the second. The word renegotiate needed some work. That would never fly in a thirty-second TV spot. He heard his own voice, nearly a decade ago, tutoring the young Leo Harris: ‘Avoid Latinate words wherever possible, go Anglo-Saxon every time. No one wants to have intercourse. They want to fuck. Same with politics. It’s not financial institutions. It’s banks.’ Harris was such a good pupil, he had remembered it all. Motherfucker.

‘And here’s our last one. “The Chinese army are here. But they don’t have a blank cheque. They can’t do what they like. They need to follow our rules and obey our laws.”’

Every head nodding.

Doran felt his phone buzzing. Cupping his hand over the mouthpiece, he turned his back to the two-way mirror, making sure the pollster – whom he had long suspected was leaking to the LA Times – could not hear the conversation.

‘What can I do for you, Elena?’ It was the candidate, the underdog challenger for the governorship of the great state of California. Though the voice was not the one known to millions of viewers of Fox News, where she had become a favourite. There she was sharper, more acidic, obligingly playing to her network billing as ‘the tough-as-nails former prosecutor’. In person and now on the phone, her voice was smoother and calmer. (One of the tasks Bill had set himself was to encourage Elena Sigurdsson to behave on camera the way she did in person. That was always harder than it sounded, but in Sigurdsson’s case there was an extra difficulty: the Republican base, including the Ted Norman crowd who’d made sure she bagged the nomination, liked the persona of the ball-breaking former DA of LA County and she was reluctant to let it go.)

‘I won’t have any numbers from here for a while. But I can give you a readout based—’

‘No,’ Sigurdsson said. ‘I have some news for you.’

‘OK.’ This was worrying. You never wanted candidates to have their own information stream. Ideally you’d remove their smartphones altogether, citing security reasons. ‘How intriguing! Fire away.’

‘You know about this murder story, the sister of the journalist?’

Doran had seen a single weib mentioning it, which he had glided over and failed to absorb. ‘Sure.’

‘I’m hearing Berger’s nervy about it.’

‘Really? Why would he care?’

‘Not sure. Seems he’s putting the squeeze on the Chief of Police. Wants to get this done.’

‘“Seems”?’

‘The Chief of Police has declared it a priority. Putting pressure on his team.’

‘And he’s said this publicly, the Chief of Police?’

‘No, but that’s what I’m hearing. From my people at LAPD. They reckon it must mean he’s getting heat from the mayor. For Christ’s sake, Bill, is there a problem here?’

He was, he realized, challenging her. Some candidates liked that, but they were a minority. Even the ones who told interviewers the last thing they wanted was to be surrounded by yes men wanted to be surrounded by yes men. They needed the reassurance. He had given Sigurdsson more credit than that, but perhaps she was the same as the rest.

An awkward thought eeled its way into his mind. Was he showing her less respect because she was a woman? She had brought political information to him and he hadn’t simply accepted it but had doubted her. Would he have done the same with a man?

Who the hell cared? He had been right to doubt her, hadn’t he? She had jumped to conclusions – that Berger was nervy – on the basis of nothing her opponent had actually said or done, nothing even that the Chief of Police had said or done but just some watercooler talk she’d picked up from her cop friends. Not good enough. He had been right to push her. Worrying about sexism was Leo Harris, Democrat, political correctness bullshit. He scolded himself for breaking one of his own rules: never let them get inside your head.

‘I’ll look into it. That could be very useful. Thank you, Elena.’

‘If Berger’s sweating, that’s an opening. You said it yourself, he hasn’t shown us many weaknesses.’

Doran hung up, dissatisfied with both himself and his candidate. His assumption was that she was wrong. There was no reason for a mayor to worry about a single death in his city. That the victim’s sister was a journalist certainly raised a flag: the police would need to do their job properly, otherwise she could make some noise. But that was a long way off.

Still, Sigurdsson wouldn’t have got everything wrong. If the cops were telling her they were feeling some pressure, they probably were. Such pressure could originate in a dozen places. Could be Berger, over-anxious about his campaign, could be the Chief of Police himself. Or someone neither of them had even thought of.