The Fourth K by Mario Puzo
In the smaller cities and rural areas, after the shock and horror had worn off, there was a grim satisfaction. New York had gotten what it deserved. It was too bad that the bomb had not been bigger and blown up the whole city with its hedonistic rich, its conniving Semites, criminal blacks. There was, after all, a just God in heaven. He had picked the right place for this great punishment. But through the country there was also fear—that their fate, their lives, their very world and their posterity were in hostage to fellowmen who were aberrant. All this Kennedy sensed.
Every Friday night Francis Kennedy made a TV report to the people. These were really thinly disguised campaign speeches, but now he had no trouble getting airtime.
He used certain catchphrases and little speeches that went straight to the heart.
“We will declare war on the everyday tragedies of human existence,” he said. “Not on other nations.”
He repeated the famous question used in his first campaign: “How is it that following the end of every great war, when trillions of dollars have been spent and thrown away on death, there is prosperity in the world? What if those trillions had been spent for the betterment of mankind?”
He joked that for the cost of one nuclear submarine the government could finance a thousand homes for the poor. For the cost of a fleet of Stealth bombers it could finance a million homes. “We’ll just make believe they got lost on maneuvers,” he said. “Hell, it’s happened before, and with valuable lives lost besides. We’ll just make believe it happened.” And when critics pointed out that the defense of the United States would suffer, he said that statistical reports from the Defense Department were classified and that nobody would know about the decrease in defense spending.
He announced that in his second term he would be even tougher on crime. He would again fight to give all Americans the opportunity to buy a new home, cover their health care costs, and make certain they were able to get a higher education. He emphasized that this was not socialism. The costs of these programs would be paid for simply by taking a little bite out of the rich corporations of America. He declared that he did not advocate socialism, that he just wanted to protect the people of America from the “royal” rich. And he said this over and over again.
For the Congress and members of the Socrates Club, the President of the United States had declared war upon them.
The Socrates Club decided to hold a seminar in California on how to defeat Kennedy in the November election. Lawrence Salentine was very worried. He knew that the Attorney General was preparing serious indictments resulting from the activities of Bert Audick and was mounting investigations of Martin Mutford’s financial dealings. Greenwell was too clean to be in trouble, Salentine didn’t worry about him. But Salentine knew that his own media empire was very vulnerable. They had gotten away with murder for so many years that they had gotten careless. His publishing company, books and magazines were OK. Nobody could harm print media, the Constitutional protection was too strong. Except of course that a prick like Klee might get the postal charges raised.
But Salentine really worried about his TV empire. The airwaves, after all, belonged to the government and were doled out by them. The TV stations were only licensed. And it had always been a source of bewilderment to Salentine that the government allowed private enterprise to make so much money out of these airwaves without levying the proper tax. He shuddered at the thought of a strong federal communication commissioner under Kennedy’s direction. It could mean the end of the TV and cable companies as now constituted.
Louis Inch, ever the patriot, harbored a somewhat disloyal admiration for President Kennedy. Still hailed as the most hated man in New York, he volunteered to restore the bomb-blighted area in that city. The damaged blocks were to be purified with marble monuments enclosed in a green woodland. He would do it at cost, take no profit and have it up in six months. Thank God the radiation had been minimal.
Everybody knew that Inch got things done much better than any government agency. Of course he knew he would still make a great deal of money through his subsidiary companies in construction, planning commissions and advisory committees. And the publicity would be invaluable.
Inch was one of the richest men in America. His father had been the usual hard-nosed big-city landlord, failing to maintain heat in apartment buildings, skimping on services, forcing out tenants in order to build more expensive apartments. Bribery of building inspectors was a skill Louis Inch learned at his father’s knee. Later, armed with a university degree in business management and law, he bribed city councilmen, borough presidents and their staffs, even mayors.
It was Louis Inch who fought the rent control laws in New York, it was Louis Inch who put together the real estate deals that built skyscrapers alongside Central Park. A park that now had an awning of monstrous steel edifices to house Wall Street brokers, professors at powerhouse universities, famous writers, chic artists, the chefs of expensive restaurants.
Community activists charged that Inch was responsible for the horrible slums on the Upper West Side and in the Bronx, in Harlem and in Coney Island simply by the amount of reasonable housing he had destroyed in his rebuilding of New York. Also that he was blocking the rehabilitation of the Times Square district, while secretly buying up buildings and blocks. To this Inch retorted that these troublemakers were people who, if you had a bagful of shit, would demand half of it.
Another Inch strategy was his support of city laws that required landlords to rent housing space to anyone regardless of race, color or creed. He had given speeches supporting those laws because they helped to drive the small landlord out of the market. A landlord who had only the upstairs and/or the basement of his house to rent had to take in drunks, schizophrenics, drug hustlers, rapists, stickup artists. Eventually these small landlords would become discouraged, sell their houses and move to the suburbs.
But Inch was beyond all that now—he was stepping up in class. Millionaires were a dime a dozen; Louis Inch was one of the hundred or so billionaires in America. He owned bus systems, he owned hotels and he owned an airline. He owned one of the great hotel casinos in Atlantic City and he owned apartment buildings in Santa Monica, California. It was the Santa Monica properties that gave him the most trouble.
Louis Inch had joined the Socrates Club because he believed that its powerful members could help solve his Santa Monica real estate problems. Golf was a perfect sport for hatching conspiracies. There were the jokes, the good exercise and the agreements struck. And what could be more innocent? The most rabid investigator from congressional committees or the hanging judges of the press could not accuse golfers of criminal intent.
The Socrates Club turned out to be better than Inch expected. He became friendly with the hundred or so men who controlled the country’s economic apparatus and political machinery. It was in the Socrates Club that Louis Inch became a member of the Money Guild that could buy the entire congressional delegation of a state in one deal. Of course you couldn’t buy them body and soul—you were not talking abstractions here, like the Devil and God, good and evil, virtue and sin. No, you were talking politics. You were talking of what was possible. There were times when a congressman had to oppose you to win reelection. It was true that 98 percent of the congressmen were always reelected, but there were always the 2 percent that had to listen to their constituents.
Louis Inch dreamed the impossible dream. No, not to be President of the United States, he knew his landlord imprint could never be erased. His smudging the very face of New York was an architectural murder. There were a million slum dwellers in New York, Chicago and especially Santa Monica who would fill the streets ready to put his head on a pike. No, his dream was to be the first trillionaire in the modern civilized world. A plebeian trillionaire, his fortune won with the callused hands of a workingman.
Inch lived for the day when he could say to Bert Audick, “I have a thousand units.” It had always irritated him that Texan oil men talked in units—a “unit” in
To make that dream come true, Louis Inch capitalized on the concept of airspace. That is, he would buy the airspace above existent buildings in major cities and build on top of them. Airspace could be bought for peanuts; it was a new concept, as marshlands had been when his grandfather bought them, knowing that technology would solve the problem of draining the swamps and turn them into profitable building acres. The problem was to prevent the people and their legislators from stopping him. That would take time and an enormous investment, but he was confident it could be done. True, cities like Chicago, New York, Dallas and Miami would be gigantic steel-and-concrete prisons, but people didn’t have to live there, except for the elite who loved the museums, the cinemas, the theater, the music. There would of course be little boutique neighborhoods for the artists.
And of course the thing was that when Louis Inch finally succeeded, there would no longer be any slums in New York City. There would simply be no affordable rents for the petty criminal and working classes. They would come in from the suburbs, on special trains, on special buses, and they would be gone by nightfall. The renters and buyers of the Inch Corporation condos and apartments could go to the theater, the discos and the expensive restaurants and not worry about the dark streets outside. They could stroll along the avenues, even venture into the side streets, and could walk the parks, in comparative safety. And what would they pay for such a paradise? Fortunes.
Summoned to the meeting of the Socrates Club in California, Louis Inch began a trip across the United States to confer with the great real estate corporations of the big cities. From them he exacted their promise to contribute money to defeat Kennedy. Arriving in Los Angeles a few days later, he decided to make a side trip to Santa Monica before going to the seminar.
Santa Monica is one of the most beautiful towns in America, mainly because its citizens have successfully resisted the efforts of real estate interests to build skyscrapers, voted laws to keep rents stable and control construction. A fine apartment on Ocean Avenue, overlooking the Pacific, cost only one sixth of the average citizen’s income. This was a situation that had driven Inch crazy for twenty years.
Inch thought Santa Monica an outrage, an insult to the American spirit of free enterprise; these units under today’s conditions could be rented for ten times the going rate. He had bought up many of the apartment buildings. These were charming Spanish-style complexes wasteful in their use of valuable real estate, with their inner courtyards and gardens, and their scandalously low two-story heights. And he could not, by law, raise the rents in this paradise. Oh, the airspace above Santa Monica was worth billions, the view of the Pacific Ocean worth more billions. Sometimes Inch had crazy ideas about building vertically on the ocean itself. This made him dizzy.
He did not of course try to directly bribe the three city councillors he invited to Michael’s but he told them his plans, he showed how everybody could become multimillionaires if certain laws were changed. He was dismayed when they showed no interest. But that was not the worst part. When Inch got into his limousine, there was a shattering explosion. Glass flew all around the interior of the limo, the back window disintegrated, the windshield suddenly sprouted a large hole and spiderwebs appeared in the rest of the glass.
When the police arrived, they told Inch that a rifle bullet had done the damage. When they asked him if he had any enemies, Louis Inch assured them with all sincerity that he did not.
The Socrates Club’s special seminar on “Demagoguery in Democracy” commenced the next day.
Those present were Bert Audick, now under a RICO indictment; George Greenwell, who looked like the old wheat stored in his gigantic Midwest silos; Louis Inch, his handsome pouting face pale from his near death the day before; Martin “Take It Private” Mutford, wearing an Armani suit that could not hide his going to fat; and Lawrence Salentine.
Bert Audick took the floor first. “Would somebody explain to me how Kennedy is not a communist?” he said. “Kennedy wants to socialize medicine and home building. He has me indicted under the RICO laws and I’m not even Italian.” Nobody laughed at his little joke, so he went on. “We can dick around all we want but we have to face one central fact. He is an immense danger to everything we in this room stand for. We have to take drastic action.”
George Greenwell said quietly, “He can get you indicted but he can’t get you convicted—we still have due process in this country. Now, I know you have endured great provocation. But if I hear any dangerous talk in this room I walk out. I will listen to nothing treasonous or seditious.”
Audick took offense. “I love my country better than anyone in this room,” he said. “That’s what gripes me. The indictment says I was acting in a treasonable way. Me! My ancestors were in this country when the fucking Kennedys were eating potatoes in Ireland. I was rich when they were bootleggers in Boston. Those gunners fired at American planes over Dak but not by my orders. Sure, I gave the Sultan of Sherhaben a deal, but I was acting in the interest of the United States.”
Salentine said dryly, “We know Kennedy is the problem. We’re here to discuss a solution. Which is our right and our duty.”
Mutford said, “What Kennedy’s telling the country is bullshit. Where is the capital mass going to come from to support all these programs? He is talking a modified form of communism. If we can hammer that home in the media, the people will turn away from him. Every man and woman in this country thinks they’ll be a millionaire someday and they’re already worrying about the tax bite.”
“Then how come all the polls show Francis Kennedy will win in November?” Salentine asked irritably. As so many times before, he was a little astonished by the obtuseness of powerful men. They seemed to have no awareness of Kennedy’s enormous personal charm, his appeal to the mass of people, simply because they themselves were impervious to that charm.
There was a silence and then Martin Mutford spoke. “I had a look at some of the legislation being prepared to regulate the stock market and banks. If Kennedy gets in, there will be mighty slim pickings. And if he gets his regulatory-agency people in, the jails will be filled with very rich people.”
“I’ll be there waiting for them,” Audick said, grinning. For some reason he seemed to be in a very good humor despite his indictment. “I should be a trusty by then, I’ll make sure you all have flowers in your cells.”
Inch said impatiently, “You’ll be in one of those country-club jails playing with computers that keep track of your oil tankers.”
Audick had never liked Louis Inch. He didn’t like a man who piled up human beings from underground to the stars, and charged a million dollars for apartments no bigger than a spittoon. Audick said, “I’m sure my cell will have more room than one of your fancy apartments. And once I’m in, don’t be too fucking sure you can get oil to heat those skyscrapers. And another thing, I’ll get a better break gambling in jail than in your Atlantic City casinos.”
Greenwell, as the oldest and most experienced in dealing with the government, felt he had to take charge of the conversation. “I think we should, through our companies and other representatives, pour a great deal of money into the campaign of Kennedy’s opponent. Martin, I think you should volunteer to be the campaign manager.”
Martin Mutford said, “First let’s decide what kind of money we are talking about and how it’s to be contributed.”
Greenwell said, “How about a round sum of five hundred million dollars.”
Audick said, “Wait a minute, I’ve just lost fifty billion and you want me to go for another unit?”
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Salentine said, “TV time costs a lot of money. If we are going to saturate the airwaves from now until November that’s five whole months. That’s going to be expensive.”
“And your TV network gets a big chunk of that,” Inch said aggressively. He was proud of his reputation as a fierce negotiator. “You TV guys put in your share out of one pocket and it appears like magic in your other pockets. I think that should be a factor when we contribute.”
Mutford said, “Look, we’re talking peanuts here,” which outraged the others. “Take It Private” Mutford was famous for his cavalier treatment of money. To him it was only a telex transporting some sort of spiritual substance from one ethereal body to another. It had no reality. He gave casual girlfriends a brand-new Mercedes, a bit of eccentricity he had learned from rich Texans. If he had a mistress for a year he bought her an apartment house to make her old age secure. Another mistress had a house in Malibu, another a castle in Italy and an apartment in Rome. He had bought an illegitimate son a piece of a casino in England. It had cost him nothing, merely slips of paper signed. And he always had a place to stay whenever he traveled. The Albanese girl owned her famous restaurant and building the same way. And there were many others. Money meant nothing to “Private” Mutford.
Audick said aggressively, “I paid my share with Dak.”
Mutford said, “Bert, you’re not in front of congressional committees arguing oil depletion allowances.”
“You have no choice,” Inch told Audick. “If Kennedy gets elected and he gets his Congress, you go to jail.”
George Greenwell was wondering again whether he should dissociate himself officially from these men. After all, he was too old for these adventures. His grain empire stood in less danger than the fields of these other men. The oil industry too obviously blackmailed the government to make scandalous profits. His own grain business was low-key; people in general did not know that only five or six privately held companies controlled the bread of the world. Greenwell feared that a rash, belligerent man like Bert Audick could get them all in really serious trouble. Yet he enjoyed the life of the Socrates Club, the week-long seminars filled with interesting discussions on the affairs of the world, the sessions of backgammon, the rubbers of bridge. But he had lost that hard desire to get the best of his fellowmen.