The Long Fall

The rain in LA doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the grime glisten.

I stood in the parking lot behind the Alexandria Hotel at midnight with a satchel full of cash that wasn't mine and a conscience that was smaller than it used to be, watching the water run off the awning in thin gray streams and thinking about how the last time it rained like this, I was standing in a foxhole outside Remagen with a rifle that cost more than my father's car and a prayer that I'd never used before and probably wouldn't use again.

The rain doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the grime glisten. I know that now. I learned it slowly, the way a man learns to walk with a limp—by adjusting his balance until the pain becomes a rhythm he can live with.

I was twenty-eight when I sold out my own. Tommy Callahan was his name, and he was a union man with a lung full of asbestos and a family of three who thought he was doing important work. He trusted me because I'd served with his brother in the 3rd Infantry, and I'd come back from Europe with a Purple Heart and a reputation for being the kind of guy who held the line when the line needed holding. Tommy didn't know that the line I held was the one between what I believed and what I did, and that line had been moving for years.

The city councilman who hired me was named Horowitz, and he had the kind of face that made you trust him—wide smile, warm eyes, a handshake that lingered just long enough to suggest sincerity. He paid me five hundred dollars a month to tell him where the union was planning to strike and who their inside men were in the mayor's office. Five hundred dollars a month, which in 1947 was enough to rent a decent apartment and buy a used Chevy and eat dinner that didn't come from a can. I told him everything. Tommy's strike at the docks. The names of the organizers. The meeting times at Local 47. I fed it all to Horowitz on a silver platter, and three weeks later, the strike was broken, the organizers were blacklisted, and Tommy was lying in a morgue in East LA with a single gunshot wound to the back and nobody who could or would point a finger.

The rain ran down my collar as I counted the cash in the satchel and walked to my car—a '40 Ford that had seen better decades—and drove home to a seventh-floor walk-up in Mid-City that smelled of boiled cabbage and the regrets of men who had arrived one step too late.

I told myself that everybody's dirty. I'm just better at it than most.

It was a good philosophy. Clean and simple, like a razor blade. It cut both ways, but I'd gotten used to the bleeding.

The climb from council assistant to state office was not a ladder; it was a series of doors, and each door required a key that I had to forge myself. I was good at forging things. Not keys, specifically, but the thing behind keys—the appearance of competence, the simulation of loyalty, the careful calibration of what to say and what to leave unsaid to the people who mattered.

My first real break came when I took a job as an aide to City Councilman Walter Cross, a man whose power base consisted of three union locals and a gambling ring that operated out of the back of a Chinese restaurant on Hill Street. Cross was fifty, bald, and ruthless in the way that men who came from nothing become ruthless—without restraint, without apology, and with a thoroughness that suggested he had spent his entire life making up for the fact that the world had once told him he was nobody.

"You're sharp, Morana," Cross told me on my second week, lighting a cigar with a match that burned halfway to his fingers because he was too busy looking at me to pay attention to the flame. "You know how to listen. That's rarer than you think in this town. Most people only hear what they want to hear."

"I try to hear everything, sir."

"Good. Because the people who hear everything are the ones who know when to speak and when to shut up. That's the job, kid. Not talking. Listening. The talking comes later, and it's usually someone else's words anyway."

I listened. I heard everything. And when the right moment came, I spoke—and the words I chose were the ones that would elevate me and sink whoever stood in my way.

The beautiful secretary who loved me was named Elaine Vasquez, and she had the kind of beauty that men write songs about and politicians exploit and good men protect Elaine was none of those things. She was beautiful and vulnerable and loyal to a fault, and I exploited her loyalty the way a man exploits a weather system—without malice, without affection, and with a complete indifference to what it does to the landscape it moves across.

She loved me because I was a war hero, and because I was kind to her in the small ways that vulnerable women notice—holding doors, remembering her coffee order, asking about her mother's cancer with an intensity that made her believe I actually cared. I did care, in the way that a man cares about the chair he sits on. Not deeply, not lightly, but with a practical appreciation for something that makes his day easier.

When Cross lost his re-election bid in 1948 and I was cast adrift, Elaine was there with a job lead—a position as a legislative aide in the state capital, Sacramento. She'd pulled strings with a contact in the governor's office, strings that she'd pulled without telling me because she wanted the surprise, wanted me to feel the gift land in my hands rather than see it being unwrapped.

I took the job. I also took the opportunity to mention, in a careful, offhand way, to a state senator I'd cultivated during my time with Cross, that Elaine Vasquez had mentioned to her that she'd heard Cross's gambling operation involved money laundering through the union pension fund. I didn't name Elaine. I didn't have to. The senator knew who I was talking about, and he knew that when I brought him something, it was worth something.

Cross went down. Elaine got promoted to my old position. And I moved one floor up in a building where the floors kept multiplying, like a hotel whose corridors got longer the higher you climbed, until you couldn't remember what the lobby looked like or whether you'd ever actually needed to go back there.

Each step cost more. The first step had cost me Tommy Callahan's life. The second step had cost me my ability to look at myself in the mirror without looking away. The third step had cost me Elaine, whom I'd gently but firmly redirected toward a younger man in the governor's press office—a man with a clean record and a clean conscience and a future that didn't require me in it.

She cried when I told her it was over. I watched her cry and felt the familiar numbness settle over me like a coat I'd stopped noticing because I'd been wearing it so long. Everyone's dirty, I told myself. I'm just better at it.

But even a man who tells himself the same lie a thousand times begins to hear, beneath the repetition, the faint echo of something that might have been a question.

The magazine cover came in February 1950. TIME called me "The Young Turk of Politics"—a title that made me want to laugh and vomit in equal measure. I was twenty-eight, rising through the state legislature at a pace that journalists described as meteoric and insiders described as merciless. My face was smiling on the cover of a magazine that was read by millions of people who had never met me and would never understand that the smile was the only thing about me that was honest.

The interviewer who wrote my profile was a young man named Danny Kessler, fresh out of USC with a head full of ambition and a notebook full of space he needed to fill. He sat across from me in my new office—a corner office on the eighth floor of the state office building, with a view of the capitol dome that I barely noticed, because from where I stood, the dome looked like any other building with a pointy hat.

"Mr. Morana," Kessler said, settling into the chair across from my desk with the eagerness of a man who knew he was sitting with something important. "You've risen faster than any politician in California's history. At twenty-eight, you're positioned for the Assembly. At thirty, the Senate is yours. I have to ask—what's your price? Everyone has a price, and yours is surely higher than most."

I laughed. It was a good laugh, trained over years of practice to sound effortless and genuine. "Kid, I don't have a price. I have a value. There's a difference."

"How so?"

"Price is what someone offers. Value is what I bring to the table. You don't negotiate with value. You pay it or you don't get it."

Kessler wrote all of that down. He published it the next week. It made a great quote. Nobody asked the question again.

That night, I sat in my apartment on Wilshire Boulevard, a bottle of rye whiskey on the coffee table and TIME magazine face-down on the floor, and listened to the rain hit the window with the persistence of a man who has all night and nothing better to do.

The knock at the door came at 2:17 AM. I knew who it was before I opened it, because the footsteps on the landing had the distinctive tread of a man who carries a gun and wishes he didn't have to.

The man who stood in my doorway was Victor Halstead, and he was Tommy Callahan's brother-in-law, the man whose wife Tommy had left behind when the bullets found him in the morgue. Halstead was thirty-five, built like a freight train, and carrying a .38 Special in a coat that had seen better winters.

He looked at me for a long time. The hallway light cast his shadow across the apartment in a way that made me think of the foxhole at Remagen, when the world had been reduced to a single rectangle of sky and a prayer that might or might not be heard.

"Jackie," Halstead said, using the nickname that he'd known me by for three years and had only just decided to use in a context that suggested either intimacy or violence, and I couldn't tell which. "You made it good and high, didn't you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Victor."

"Don't. Don't do that. Don't give me the polite words. I came here with a gun, and I intended to use it. But I've been thinking about this visit for six years, since the day they put Tommy in a box and I had to watch his brother cry in a church that didn't have enough pews for everyone who wanted to say goodbye."

He stepped inside without waiting for an invitation and sat on the edge of my sofa like a man sitting on the edge of his own grave. The gun rested on his knee, pointing at the floor, which was almost worse than if it had been pointed at me—because if it were pointed at me, I'd know where I stood. With it on his knee, I had to wonder whether he'd change his mind before he pulled the trigger, and wondering is a kind of death that people don't talk about enough.

"You're already dead, Jackie," he said quietly. "You just haven't stopped moving. I watched you today. On that magazine. You're smiling. You're always smiling. But I've been watching you for two weeks, and I'll tell you something—you never stop checking the door. You never stop counting the exits. You never stop looking over your shoulder. That's not a living man, pal. That's a ghost who forgot to die."

He stood up. I thought he was going to shoot me. He didn't. He put the gun in his coat and walked to the door and looked back at me one last time.

"You want to know the truth?" he said. "The truth is, you had a choice. Tommy had a choice. Every one of us had a choice. You just kept choosing until there was nothing left to choose from. And now here you are. At the top. Whatever that is for you."

He left. The door closed. I sat alone in the silence that follows a conversation that changes nothing but makes you understand everything.

Now I sit in my corner office on the eighth floor, overlooking a city that stretches out before me like a circuit board full of lights and possibilities, and I wonder if Tommy Callahan sat somewhere on a night like this and watched his own city and wondered the same thing.

The FBI knocks tomorrow. I can feel it in the way the air feels different today—thicker, charged with the electricity of things that are about to break. I've poured a glass of whiskey and it's sitting on the edge of my desk next to last week's TIME, and the photo of myself is smiling up at the ceiling with the empty cheerfulness of a man who doesn't know what's coming.

I made it to the top. From here, you can't even see the bottom.