The Nominee

Twelve

Six Years Earlier

WHEN THE FIRST OF the network affiliates, WBZ-TV, declared Lance Randolph the winner in his first race for governor, the cheers and chants in the Copley Plaza ballroom were so thunderous that they shook the gold-plated chandeliers above, so infectious that they spread to the fifth floor hotel suite, where Randolph sat glued to the television surrounded by family, aides, and friends.

“Randolph Two! Randolph Two! Randolph Two!”

“Alright already,” Randolph said, lifting himself up off a suede-covered wing chair, the smile on his handsome face so broad it could have spread from Boston to the Berkshires.

“Randolph Two! Randolph Two! Randolph Two!”

They were screaming it throughout the cavernous ballroom. They were shouting it in the living room of the presidential suite. His wife was yelling it. His two young ponytailed daughters in their matching velvet dresses were squealing it. Even the kitchen staff in the basement were hollering it, the words echoing off the pots and pans that hung above the industrial stoves.

He stood in the middle of the room trying to quell the small crowd. His wife nuzzled him on the forehead and whispered into his ear, “Congratulations, governor. You’re the most decent man I know.” His mother pecked him on his cheek and told him in that patently plain way of hers, “You’ve made me the proudest old lady in the world.” Before emotion completely overcame him, he shook a few more hands and shuffled off toward the bathroom to regain his trademark cool.

Randolph Two.

The first Randolph, Governor Bertram J. Randolph, was dead, killed a year before in the most mundane of gubernatorial events — the dedication of a state-funded computer laboratory at an inner-city high school in Roxbury, the most crime-ridden neighborhood of Boston.

At the end of the ceremony, complete with a school marching band, a gang of cheerleaders and a stumbling introduction from an obsessively nervous principal, the governor was led out a side door to meet some of the construction workers who had just finished building the new wing the day before. They stood in a straight line, their hard hats gleaming in the morning sun, like a military unit presenting itself for inspection. The old man, a political institution in Massachusetts, filed down the line, shaking and glad-handing and joking as he so often did. At the end, he turned, gave a long, wide wave, and walked around a construction trailer to his awaiting sedan.

When he got to within about ten yards of his car, a student with stringy, shoulder-length hair and a long white coat — it looked, in some strange way, like he had just strolled over from biology class — walked toward him, earnestly calling out—“Hey, governor.”

Randolph smiled, turned, and approached him. The air was filled with dust, the dirt beneath his feet grooved with the tracks of industrial tires. When he was about fifteen feet away, a mere free throw, the kid pulled a semiautomatic machine gun from inside his long coat. He fired not at Randolph, but to his right, at the lone State Police trooper who drove the governor on his official duties. The officer, just forty-four years old, crumbled to the ground, his grayish-blue uniform covered in widening circles of deep red blood.

Then the boy took direct aim at the governor. An airplane flew overhead, but between the student and the politician, there was a long moment of agonizing, excruciating silence. When he pulled the trigger, he didn’t just fire once or twice, but what the coroner eventually determined was thirteen times in all, each bullet tearing through Randolph’s flesh and exploding into either bone or organ. When the ambulance raced across city streets and over sidewalks a few minutes later heading for the Boston Medical Center, the paramedics inside already knew they were carrying a corpse, not a man.

The kid, a straight-A student named Denny Bogle, placed the long barrel of the gun against the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger, dead, his own executioner. Another school shooting in a nation decreasingly stunned by them, but this one an assassination as well.

The only man spared in the outburst was the governor’s eldest child, Lance Randolph, the Suffolk County district attorney. He was also his father’s most trusted adviser, and as such, often accompanied the governor to various speeches and appearances around the Boston area — father and son, a political dynasty in the making.

Lance Randolph, the next day’sRecord reported, stood in the middle of the dirt patch when the first shots were fired. During that long moment of silence when the shooter took aim at his father, Randolph bolted toward the governor, screaming “No! No!” He dove on top of his father, draping his own body over the older man’s, but it was too late. One of the paramedics told a television reporter, “We had to pry the younger Mr. Randolph off the governor. He was in some sort of trance or daze, like he was in shock, and wouldn’t get up on his own.”

Randolph stared hard into the bathroom mirror. His face looked gaunt, the result of a year of hard, nonstop campaigning. But his eyes, his famous blue eyes, still did their youthful dance, and his body, lean from his time on the road, was that of someone two decades younger.

“You deserve this,” he whispered into the mirror, the freshly splashed cold water dripping down his face. Louder, he told himself, “You deserve it. You won it. It’s yours.”

He snuck from the bathroom to the bedroom to towel his face off and change his shirt for his victory speech downstairs. It was there he saw Robert Fitzgerald, the regal columnist forThe Boston Record, sitting on the edge of his bed staring intently at a television correspondent reporting amid the whoops and screams of the ballroom five flights below.

“Natalie, it is utter pandemonium here,” the reporter was saying in an exaggerated scream, a group of Randolph supporters behind him waving signs in no particular rhythm.

“Well, Robert, we did it, me and you,” Randolph said, his tone familiar and casual. “We got the governorship back. Your words. My genes. And some great policies, too. Now it’s time to see what we do with it.”

Randolph buttoned his white, monogrammed shirt and looked at Fitzgerald earnestly, awaiting congratulations or an acknowledgement or any sort of reply. Fitzgerald returned the gaze and said, flat, “You feel good?”

Randolph squinted at him for a moment, perplexed at the point, the underlying meaning of the question. He shook his head and said, “I do feel good. I miss the old man. I wish he were here tonight giving the victory speech, not me. But this is the best thing that a son can do to honor his father’s work and memory and love.”

He paused, and asked, “You think I’m wrong?”

The sounds of bedlam blared relentlessly from the television set — horns and yells and excited kids in their twenties shouting at reporters that this was the greatest night of their lives. On the other side of the closed bedroom door was a more restrained purr of revelry, but revelry nonetheless.

“No, you’re not wrong,” Fitzgerald replied, still sitting, his eyes on the television. “You did what anyone would do, and probably should do.”

Then he added, “It’s just sad for me.”

Randolph said, “It’s a bittersweet night for you and me both. I keep thinking, what would the old man say in his speech? What would he tell me to say if he ever saw me elected governor. Then I see his blood. I see it spattered on the cuffs of my shirt. I feel it dripping on the backs of my hands.”

He stopped, regrouping, collecting his emotions.

Fitzgerald finally stood up from the bed. Randolph tightened his blue-striped tie, working his hand up the silk to secure it at his neck.

The television became quiet, then flipped to a panel of analysts in the studio, one of whom was saying, “It’s not quite the Kennedys yet, but the tragedy and the passage of power and the overwhelming popularity sure smacks of a dynastic development tonight, a little bit of history. I’d start watching those young Randolph daughters to see which one has the common touch.”

Fitzgerald extended his hand out toward Randolph, who shook it, then moved closer into a soft embrace. They patted each other’s backs, and Fitzgerald said, “Congratulations, Lance. Go down there and make your father proud.”

“I will,” he said. “I will. And I want to make you proud as well.”