The Forgotten Holocaust

Chapter Thirty-One

‘How’s my hair look?’ Finn McCrory asked his assistant, Janet, in the small office the factory manager had let them use as a makeshift dressing room. Four other staff members from the mayor’s office were crammed in with them. Bert Lessels was looking at his watch and Wendy Brandt was doing a last-minute check through the notes for the address the mayor was about to make.

Janet Reiss was a small, birdlike woman of sixty-two who’d been Mayor McCrory’s personal secretary and general organiser during both of his terms of office. She reached up and flicked a couple of locks of his greying hair into place. ‘Needs trimming at the back.’ Janet was attentive to details that way.

‘Yeah, but I don’t look terrible, do I?’ Finn asked. He was nervous about the speech. Public speaking was something he could do in his sleep, but today was special. He’d even bought a new pair of his trademark fancy tooled leather cowboy boots for the occasion. The tie was, of course, emerald green, neatly held with a gold shamrock tiepin.

‘You look fine,’ Janet reassured him in a motherly manner. For eight years she’d been fussing over his appearance, picking out his wardrobe, doing everything but wipe his nose for him.

‘You look like shit. Now leave your goddamn hair alone and get out there.’ The low growl came from the doorway, which was almost completely filled by the hulking, white-haired shape of Big Joe McCrory. At six foot three and with shoulders as broad as a power-lifter’s, he dwarfed his son by a good four inches.

Finn darted a nervous glance at his father. He hated the old man being here and speaking to him that way in front of the staff. But you didn’t talk back to Big Joe. That lesson had been learned the hard way, a long time ago. The old bastard could still break a man’s jaw with a single punch.

‘I’m ready,’ Finn said to Janet. ‘Let’s do it.’

Today, the mayor was addressing over twelve hundred workers at Larson Engineering, one of Tulsa’s largest aerospace plants, situated within the Cox Business Center, and producing wings and fuselages for Gulfstream G650 jets. The stage had been set up at one end of a factory floor. Partially assembled fuselages on gantries towered overhead.

It was stiflingly hot inside the building, but Mayor McCrory maintained perfect composure as he stepped up to the podium amid noisy applause. He was popular here, which was why he’d chosen this venue for today’s speech. The blue-collar crowd were entirely male, virtually all white, and exclusively Republican. Just the kind of audience he liked. He’d slackened off the emerald green tie, and was jacketless, with his shirtsleeves rolled up in order to appeal to the working men.

Finn beamed and waved until the applause died down. ‘How y’all doing?’ he began, adding a few brief lines about what a valued mainstay of the local economy the plant was and how delighted he was to be back here. He sensed right away that the crowd were with him.

‘You know, back during my courtroom days I was always known to be a man of few words. Juries loved me. Everybody got to go home early. So what I have to say to you today won’t take long. I mean, hell, I could stand here all day and go on about all that’s been achieved during my two terms as mayor of this great city of ours. I could talk about how we’ve reduced crime, cleaned up our town and boosted our economy. How we’ve reinforced Tulsa’s already rich history with the energy and aerospace sectors while at the same time instituting new environmental programmes to protect our valuable natural heritage. I could talk about how fast we responded when ninety thousand Tulsans were left without power after last year’s tornadoes, and about the huge success of the rebuilding programmes we put into place after that disaster.’

He paused, scanning the crowd and seeing nothing but attentive faces.

‘But I didn’t come here to yak and throw a bunch of facts and numbers in your face,’ he continued emphatically. ‘We all know that the last eight years have made Tulsa a better place to live, for you, for me, for the next generation. You only have to look around you to see that it’s so. And I’m prouder than I can say to have been a part of it, thanks to the trust and support of the people of Tulsa who elected me for two terms running. Thanks to you.’

The crowd loved this, and the roar of cheers took a while to die down.

‘In fact I’m so darn proud of this city and its citizens,’ Finn went on, ‘that after two terms as mayor, my service to you is far from done. I care deeply about Oklahoma. I know you do, too. That’s why I’m here today, and that’s why I’m taking this opportunity to announce my candidacy for the governorship of this great state. I know I can count on your vote come November.’

There it was. The big one. More roaring applause.

The announcement hadn’t been totally unexpected. Rumours had been flying for weeks, but this was the first official confirmation that Mayor McCrory was in the race.

He waited, smiling, for the din to subside. ‘Now, I’m not one of your fancy-pants preppie types born with a big ol’ silver spoon in his mouth,’ he said, causing a round of laughter. This was an obvious dig at his chief rival in the coming November gubernatorial election, Maynard Leighton Jnr, who had been to Princeton. Liberal, pro-gay, anti-gun, Leighton was a sitting-duck target with this audience. ‘I’m a straight-talking guy from good old Irish stock, just like a lot of you,’ Finn went on, jutting out his chin. ‘I understand what it’s like for the working man. Those strong values have been in my family for generations, ever since my granddaddy, Paddy McCrory, arrived in this great country over a hundred and sixty years ago from a little village on the west coast of Ireland called Glenfell. He came here as a refugee without a cent in his pocket and nothing but the strength in his two hands and the fire in his belly to sustain him.’

It was the same old account that Finn had enthusiastically repeated in speeches and interviews a hundred times over. The voters loved it and it worked every time.

‘He knew what poverty was, and hunger,’ Finn went on in a dramatic tone that had the audience hooked. ‘You bet he did. He threw off the shackles of oppression to come to the land of the free. There was no Oklahoma when he got here. People like my granddaddy, and my daddy after him, built this whole country from the ground up and made our state the best place to live in America. And I mean to see it stays that way.’

Over the applause, Finn turned from the mike and said, ‘Daddy, why don’t you come over here and say a few words.’

To universal cheering and clapping, Big Joe McCrory stepped up to the podium. There was not a trace of stiffness in the old man’s stride, and he didn’t need to suck in his belly the way his son did. He bent down close to the mike, glowered severely at the crowd from under bristling white brows and said in a throaty bass rumble that filled the hall, ‘Y’all vote for my boy. Hear me now.’

With that, amid whoops from the audience, Big Joe turned and calmly walked away.

Finn was beaming with filial pride. ‘That’s my old daddy, folks,’ he said, returning to the mike. ‘Ninety-eight years of age, and look at him. We McCrorys are famous for our longevity. That means I gotta lot of years left in me, and I intend to use every one of them for the benefit of my fellow Okies. That’s all I have to say.’

Cue even louder and wilder applause.

The announcement speech had been a tremendous success. Finn was still wearing a mile-wide grin as he swept out of the building with his entourage trotting behind him to keep up. Big Joe had gone off on his own.

‘Call Theo,’ Finn instructed Janet as they strode out into the hot sun. Theodore F. Walsh was the campaign manager he’d hired three weeks earlier in anticipation of today’s announcement, who had in turn hired a small army of strategists and media experts, all waiting in the wings for McCrory’s candidacy to come out into the open.

‘Now we can get this show rolling. We’re gonna get our message out there, let rip and win this thing. Leighton hasn’t a chance in hell. Come November, we’re gonna roll right over him like a goddamn juggernaut.’ Finn was on a high, walking fast and talking faster, already visualising himself moving into the governor’s mansion at 820 NE 23rd Street, Oklahoma City.

‘No going back now,’ Janet sighed. ‘I just hope we can afford these kinds of campaign expenses.’

‘Money?’ Finn scoffed. They were walking past the stationary Gulfstream jet that took pride of place in front of the main Larson Engineering building. Finn knew the type of aircraft very well, as it was the same full-spec model he owned himself. ‘Don’t you worry about money. That’s the easy part. We got ten times more cash than Leighton can even dream of. That little faggot won’t know what hit him.’

‘Oh, that’s great,’ Janet said, rolling her eyes. ‘You be sure to say that on NBC, now.’

Out in the sun-baked parking lot, their three vehicles were clustered side by side: the black mayoral Cadillac SUV, Finn’s own Mercedes SL-class convertible — emerald green, naturally — and the massive red Dodge Ram crew-cab truck that Big Joe insisted on driving himself around in. With jacked-up suspension and massive chromed bull bars, the 4.7-litre monster reflected a lot about the old man’s personality.

Big Joe was leaning against the door with his arms folded and his thick mane of snowy hair ruffling in the hot breeze. Finn caught the menacing look his father was shooting his way, and felt his euphoric confidence waver a tad. That was when his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he took it out to see he had a new text message. He read it, frowning, then slipped the phone back into his pocket and turned to Janet. ‘See you back at the office later, okay?’

‘Later?’ she queried.

‘Something I need to take care of first,’ he replied non-committally, and Janet shrugged and headed off to climb into the SUV with the rest of the staff.

‘Don’t you ever call me your “old daddy” again, boy,’ Big Joe growled at Finn. ‘I’ll beat the living crap outta you.’

Finn knew his father meant it. ‘I’m sorry. It just slipped out.’

Big Joe snorted in disgust. ‘Governor. Governor my ass. Can’t even drive American.’ He pointed at the Mercedes.

‘Two hundred thousand bucks,’ Finn said defensively.

The old man was not impressed. ‘Two hundred thousand bucks’ worth’a imported tin-can trash,’ he spat, then reached for the door of his Dodge. ‘I’m going home to the ranch. Be heading up to Topeka tomorrow for a couple days, week mebbe. Horse business.’

‘Oh. Nice,’ Finn said weakly.

With a parting hostile glare, his father clambered into his truck and fired it up.

Finn watched as the Dodge roared away in a cloud of dust. Very softly, as if the old man might be endowed with preternatural hearing, which he very possibly was, Finn muttered under his breath, ‘When are you going to die?’

The answer was probably never. Finn sighed and walked with slumped shoulders to the two-hundred-thousand-dollar imported piece of tin-can trash.