Silken Prey

campaign managers.
    She was sitting on the soft-as-wool leather couch, looking at a miniature legal pad, when Taryn came down from the bathroom, wearing black slacks and a white angora sweater, with gold earrings and a modest gold necklace.
    “Dannon said he’d be in the monitoring room. Alice is outside,” Schiffer said.
    Taryn nodded and dropped into a chair opposite Schiffer. “So what’s up?”
    “Things are developing and it’s almost all good,” Schiffer said. “I talked to Ray Jorgenson, just in passing, and he says that Smalls is toast. That doesn’t mean we can let up: we have to go after him even harder. Push his head under. Kick him while he’s down.”
    “I thought we were doing that,” Taryn said.
    “We are, but we can always do more. Ben Wells is giving a talk to the Minneapolis chamber, and if we could commit to a twenty-five-thousand-dollar donation in two years, and if we can plant a question with somebody, he’s willing to go off on Smalls. You know, an unscripted spontaneous statement, spoken in real but slightly saddened anger. He’d call for Porter’s withdrawal.”
    Wells was a Republican congressman, who might like a shot at Smalls’s Senate seat someday, after he grew up. Taryn asked, “Would it help twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth?”
    “Yes. It’d absolutely curdle the Republican vote,” Schiffer said. “But Wells wants a call from your father, since you wouldn’t be able to make the donation. You know, being . . . a loyal mainstream Democrat.”
    “I’ll talk to Father tonight,” Taryn said. “He’ll want me to kick the money back to him somehow, but that’s not a problem.”
    “Good. Then let’s make it happen.” Schiffer drew a line through an item on the yellow pad.
    •   •   •
    T HEY SPENT FORTY-FIVE MINUTES plowing through the minutiae of the campaign. Taryn was running as a law-and-order Democrat, as conservative as she could be and still get the nod from the party. The party understood the problem with taking down Smalls, and hadn’t really expected her, or any other Democrat, to win, so it was willing to overlook a little political incorrectness. On the other hand, she couldn’t be too incorrect.
    Walking the line was both interesting and delicate.
    Schiffer said, “About the gorgeous David. If you really are thinking of breaking it off with him—or in him—I’d suggest that you wait for three weeks. Everybody understands that it’s a nice, adult relationship, and Smalls has banged enough strange women that he won’t mention it, but you probably wouldn’t want to call it off right now. It’d make you look flighty. Or unsteady. Or fickle.”
    “Okay. I’ve about had it with David’s act, but he doesn’t know that,” Taryn said. “I’ll keep him on until the excitement dies down.”
    “Excellent.” Another item checked off on Schiffer’s list. “Now, over at Push. We fully support Push and we’ll find money for it somewhere. The problem is that the Republicans are unnecessarily locking up money or sending it off to their already-rich friends . . .”
    “. . . and as a longtime successful businesswoman, I know how that works,” Taryn recited, “I adamantly oppose socialism for the rich while the less-well-to-do have their funding cut off . . .”
    “. . . for important neighborhood programs like Push,” Schiffer said, “which keeps the drug dealers out of our neighborhoods . . .”
    “. . . especially black ones with cornrows, who wear hoodies and those funny low-crotch pants and listen to that awful hopscotch music, or whatever it is.”
    Schiffer recoiled: “Oh, Jesus Christ, Taryn, don’t give me a heart attack,” she said, clutching at her chest. “Remember: no sense of humor. How many times do I have to tell you that:
No sense of humor
. Humor can get you in all kinds of shit and we’ve got this won, if we don’t get funny.”
    “Then we go to Borders,” Taryn continued. “I don’t drink too much and I tell everybody that I don’t want their money but I do want their love, and—”
    “No humor,”
Schiffer said. “You don’t want their money, but you do want their respect—”
    “I got it, I got it,” Taryn said. “You need to take a couple of aspirin, Connie.”
    Schiffer shook a finger at her: “I lost the first race I ran because I didn’t nail down those details. I let my candidate speak honestly. I let him be funny and intelligent: that was the last time