Small Town

He’d liked the job, but he missed New York every single day he was out there. Portland was a good place, it had a lot to offer, but it wasn’t New York, and that was the thing about New York — if you loved it, if it worked for you, it ruined you for anyplace else in the world.

Out of lust and boredom, he had an affair with a TV reporter, and that only made things worse. He’d had affairs before, he neither chased women nor ran away from them, but affairs seemed to mean more in Portland, somehow, and by the time this one had run its course, so had his marriage. His wife, who’d never wanted to go to Oregon in the first place, moved back to New York and took the kids with her. He stayed where he was, hating it now, and when the New York offer came he had to hold himself in check to keep from appearing too eager. If he didn’t get the job, he decided, he was moving back anyway. He’d go into private security, he’d open a restaurant, he’d sell shoes, but whatever it was he’d damn well do it in New York.

He got the job. The mayor who gave it to him wanted someone who would jump right in and make waves, and Buckram gave him what he wanted and then some. He’d tried out some theories in Portland, his own and some other people’s, and he’d learned how to make a police force proactive, not just responding to crime but targeting career criminals and getting them off the street. Crime dropped when there were fewer criminals out there to commit it, and there were perfectly legitimate ways to take them out of the game without trampling all over their civil rights. It had worked in Portland, and it damn well worked in New York.

He did so well it cost him the job.

There’s no limit to what a man can accomplish if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.

He’d heard the line somewhere, and he didn’t know the source and wasn’t sure of the precise wording, but a few weeks ago he’d been fooling around on his home computer and he dummied it up, printed it out, and kept forgetting to pick up a frame for it. It belonged on the wall over his desk, but what was the point? He’d learned the lesson, though not in time to save his job.

Because the commissioner’s job wasn’t just about covering asses. It was also about kissing one — specifically, the mayor’s. And this particular mayor had wanted the credit for every positive thing that happened on his watch, and couldn’t stand it when any of it went to somebody else.

Buckram had known that (though no one had known the full megalomaniacal extent of it) but the media loved him and he was great on camera, the expensive clothes showing to good advantage on his lean frame, the natural wave in his styled hair, the easy smile on his lips, the glint in his Irish blue eyes. The mayor was pudgy, with a narrow chest and a potbelly, and a comb-over that might have been endearing on a humbler man. Buckram spoke in bracing sound bites; the mayor’s on-camera remarks seemed harsh and mean-spirited at best, and out of context they often came across as heartless.

Three and a half years on the job, and the crime rate dropped and the streets got safer and people felt great about the city, and hotel room occupancy soared with an increase in convention bookings, because suddenly New York was everybody’s favorite city. Foreign tourists flocked to it, and midwesterners, who for years wouldn’t even change planes at JFK, were pouring in, rushing to see lousy musicals and stand in line outside cookie-cutter theme restaurants on Fifty-seventh Street.

The mayor got plenty of credit, and deservedly so, but he wanted it all, and Buckram was too cocky to get out of the way whenever somebody showed up with a camera and a notepad. So one day he was out of work, and the city was up in arms about it for a few minutes, but the crime rate kept on dropping and the tourists kept on coming, and that was that. The mayor got re-elected and Fran Buckram signed up with a lecture bureau, giving after-dinner speeches for $3,500 a pop.

He was forty-three when he got the job, and had just turned forty-seven when he had to give it back. Now he was fifty-three, and the mayor had finished his second term a hero, elevated to that status by his performance during 9/11 and its aftermath. The voters would have given him a third term — they’d have made him dictator for life if they’d had the chance, and awarded him both ears and the tail in the bargain — but constitutional term limits forced him to step down, and his replacement was halfway through his first year in office and seemed to be doing just fine.

The new man had three and a half years to go, plus four more if he ran again and won. So it was far too early for anyone to enter the lists to succeed him, but people had a pretty good idea who was in the running.

Buckram’s name was at the top of the Maybe column.