Frank’s shoulder heaved a little with amusement. “You figuring you will?”
“Pretty soon. Not right away. First thing Quentin will do is go talk to Wilhelm Saxe-Weimar about forging a united opposition. Let’s call it a ‘conservative’ opposition. Wilhelm will agree, of course—he’s a very sharp cookie—without letting Quentin understand exactly what the problems are. Which won’t be hard, since it’ll never occur to Quentin to consider that the term ‘conservative’ covers a lot of ground. Cats and dogs are both conservative too, y’know—I’ve raised ’em, so have you, and if you don’t believe me try changing their routine—but that doesn’t mean they necessarily get along or have the same attitudes and personalities.”
Seeing Frank’s little frown of incomprehension, Mike waggled his fingers. “I’ll get to that in a minute. The second advantage Simpson has over Quentin, now that he’s gotten the stuffing knocked out of him—enough of it, at least—is that he has an intrinsically wider view of the world to begin with.”
” ‘Intrinsically,’ ” Frank muttered. “Dammit, ever since you married Becky you’ve been starting to talk like a city boy.”
Mike grinned. “You shoulda heard the way I talked those years I lived in Los Angeles. I mean, like, man, when in Rome kick back like the Romans do.”
Frank chuckled. “All right, all right. And your point is?”
“What’s so complicated about it? Quentin was born and raised in West Virginia, spent his whole life here. There, I should say. Started in the mines right out of high school, picked up an education at college while he was working, wound up the manager. He’s not exactly what you’d call a ‘hick,’ but sure as hell a country cousin.”
“Hey!” protested Frank. “The same’s true for me. You too, for that matter, leaving aside those three years you spent in La-la-land.”
“Not the same thing, Frank,” replied Mike, shrugging. “The problem with Quentin is that his mind never left the place. Yeah, sure—you and me were coal miners. But did you take the job home with you?”
“Fuck no,” snorted Frank. “Washed it off with the coal dust, fast as I could.”
“Exactly. Whereas Quentin . . .” Mike shook his head. “He spent an entire adult lifetime thinking about not much else beyond his job and getting ahead. I used to wonder, sometimes, how he ever found time to get Roslyn to marry him, much less raise his kids.”
Mike spread his hands. “And that’s . . . still pretty much his world, Frank. Put a problem—especially a technical or managerial one—right in front of his nose, Quentin will do fine. Do very well indeed, more often than not. That’s why he was so good—and he was, let’s not deny it—in the first stretch after the Ring of Fire. But try to get him to consider the world beyond the little hills and hollers of his view of it, once things start getting complicated and confusing . . .” Mike shook his head.
“Can’t be done. God knows, I’ve tried, these last two years. Simpson, on the other hand—to get back to the subject—is a different breed altogether. Give the man some credit, Frank. Yeah, in a lot of ways he’s narrow-minded. It might be better to say, a narrow kind of man. But he’s no hick, that’s for sure. He’s been all over the world—and not just as a tourist—he’s run a major petrochemical corporation, been a naval officer, rubbed shoulders with generals and admirals and politicians in Washington D.C.—and—”
Mike’s grin was very wide. “Is married to a woman from old Eastern money who is a genuine connoisseur of the arts, a former wheeler-dealer in very high social circles, and happens to speak fluent French. Pretty decent Italian, too, Tom tells me.”
“I don’t—”
“Figure it out, Frank. Wilhelm of Saxe-Weimar will launch his kind of political party. One that not only suits him but can appeal to a broad range of people in the United States—a lot of whom find me pretty scary. A lot, Frank. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking it’s just a handful of sour-grapes noblemen and those bigoted goofs who hang out at the Club 250. All the way from old widows worrying that I’ll remove their rent income because it derives from some kind of old medieval land tenure, to religious fanatics or just people who really believe in witchcraft, you name it. But most of them are German, and so they’ll be thinking in their own terms. Wilhelm knows that. So he’ll put together a party based on a platform which can ‘bridge’ the gap. Draw mass support from Germans but be acceptable—enough, at least—to a lot of Americans.”