The Fool's Run

view of history, and a variety of small computers. If you want to be a state legislator, governor, congressman, or U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Minnesota, or several other states of the upper Midwest, you can buy a Kidd election model and run it on your own IBM office machine. You crank in a political position, and out comes a result in terms of vote shifts. If you don’t like the answer, you can crank in a different position. A model like that will cost five to twenty grand, depending on how rich you are.
    Sometimes, especially in political off-years, I take less conventional computer-related jobs. They pay the best of all.
     
    I TOLD MOST of this to Rudolph Anshiser himself three hours after Maggie and I flew out of St. Paul. We were met at the O’Hare general aviation terminal by a gray Mercedes limousine. The chauffeur wore a blue pinstriped shirt and rep tie. He looked like he might own a company or two himself.
    We drove north and east out of O’Hare. Forty-five minutes after we left the airport, the chauffeur turned off the arterial highway into a four-lane street through an expensive neighborhood. It may have been Evanston, but may also have been a bit farther north. Eventually we left the four-lane street for a two-lane through an even more expensive neighborhood, and finally turned onto a blacktopped lane that twisted and turned past gated entries and vine-covered walls. We stopped at a brick gatehouse with wrought-iron gates. The chauffeur pressed a button on the car’s dashboard, and the gates rolled open.
    Behind them were two acres of crisply landscaped grounds dotted with oak, ash, and the distinct forms of gingko trees. Here and there were the stumps of departed American elms. The house, a pile of ivy-covered brick, covered another quarter acre. Lake Michigan broke against a seawall in back.
    The chauffeur stopped at the arched front entry, and Maggie led me across a red quarry-tile porch, through a dimly lit, walnut-paneled entry hall and into an old-fashioned parlor. She pointed at an overstuffed chair.
    “I have to report. We’ll have you up in five minutes,” she said.
    She left, and I sat down and looked around the room. It had the peculiar stillness that comes with a lack of living-in. It was a waiting room, but few people waited in it. There was a blocked-up fireplace, flanked on both sides by bookshelves loaded with obsolete business texts. Another wall featured a narrow window with heavy brocade drapes drawn back to show a thin slice of green lawn. Little, sparkly dust motes glimmered in the shaft of sunlight that came through.
    A German Romantic oil painting hung over the fireplace, and my eye kept skipping over it. From the corner, beside the bookshelves, a much smaller painting made noises at me. I finally heaved myself out of the chair and went over to look at it. Then I got down in front of it.
    Damn. A Whistler. One of the pastels from Venice. A street scene with strollers and a garbage-eating dog. The buildings, outlined in black chalk on gray-toned paper, leaned out over the crowd, and were brought to life with a few simple touches of color. In the lower left-hand corner was his butterfly signature. I’d never seen it before, not the real thing. The painting was hung five feet off the floor and I was practically down on my knees peering at it. The light was terrible. I didn’t hear Maggie come back.
    “Like it?”
    I jumped and turned.
    “Jesus. This is a Whistler.”
    “Uhh-huh.” She was not interested.
    “Yeah. I like it.” I went back to it. How did he make it so real, with so few lines and so little color? I looked at it until Maggie started fidgeting.
    “Okay,” I said, and followed her out of the parlor and up a curving walnut staircase to the second floor. A long, carpeted corridor crossed the stairs at the top, running both ways the full length of the house. We turned left, past bedrooms now converted to offices. There were people in some of the offices, working over computer screens or stacks of paper. They didn’t look up as we passed. Halfway down the hall, Maggie knocked at a heavy oak door and went through.
    This room was a complete contrast to the waiting area. Anshiser had opened up the rear wall with huge glass windows. The lake made a sharp, dark horizon line as far as you could see to the north; to the south you could sense the great cul-de-sac at South Bend.
    Anshiser, in wheat jeans and a blue rough-silk sweatshirt, sat behind an ornate table,