The French Revolution (38 page)

“I was playing Shanghai last night. And Bangkok. How’s the tax shelter?”

“The foundation set a record for donations last quarter,” Ankra reported. “Also, Marat’s December billing just closed. Five percent growth over last year, also a record.”

“Hey now! You really stuck it to inflation, kiddo.”

“I moved all profits into the fund for mayor’s race,” said Ankra. “So far, twenty million dollars total.”

Marat’s stomach seized, his head pinched shut. “The mayor’s race?” he asked. “For Robespierre?”

“For me.”

The whir of Marat’s computer rose to a furor; dueling tidal waves rushed through his ears. “Murphy, you’re running for mayor?”

“Do not address me by that name.”

“You motherfucker.”

Fifteen years of leaden history summed up in a painfully accurate word. They gave the line a moment to freshen.

“I want you to work exclusively on my advertising campaign, starting now,” Joel said. “Right after I announce my candidacy, we hit primetime.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m advertising on television, Marat. Also on the Internet, cellphones, billboards, radio. The works.”

Marat rolled off his chair and onto the floor, rocked fatalistically side to side like a beetle on his back. “I can’t work on this,” he said. “Not now.”

“I thought you might quit outright. Not that I want you to—you’re very talented and have a lot of damaging insider information. But I could see it.”

Marat placed the phone on the hook and took another shot from the vaporizer, then called his sister. Voicemail. She never took his calls on the first try.

Marat explained that Joel Lumpkin was in for mayor, that he owned 247 coffee franchises, twenty-nine pornography websites, an island in Dubai, three office buildings in midtown Manhattan, half of the acreage abutting Yellowstone National Park, an chain of upscale assisted-living facilities, eight suburban office parks, a thriving international advertising agency, the largest foster care foundation in the country, a dive bar, the most profitable bagel shop west of the Rockies, and a banana-yellow house out by the ocean for which he’d fantastically overpaid. All this built in just over a decade, arranged out of the public eye to avoid scrutiny, and he was obsessed with construction so she could expect a lot more. The man was only twenty-seven. He did whatever he wanted. The auto-attendant overrode his soliloquy, and he hung up with a smash.

Motion overtook him, shuffling and clicking and resetting, the possibility of battle an enthralling option. He deleted files on his company laptop and took down the framed picture with his sister on his tank in Iran, his baseball autographed by the 2014 World Series champion Giants, and the photocopy of his first massive paycheck, packing them in a grocery bag along with the bandages and ointments for his arm. He loaded the bag in the trunk of his BMW and drove west into the Tenderloin. Grungy men leaning on shopping carts watched him park with great interest, offering advice and access to fabulously discounted prescription meds. Marat passed out dollar bills and asked them to watch the car, then walked uphill past dingy Indian restaurants and massage parlors and cigarette discounters. Robespierre’s campaign headquarters was located between a pizza stand and a nonprofit arts agency in what used to be a neighborhood insurance
office, bars on the windows and a huge green banner draped across the second story.

 

 

He said hello to the volunteer manning reception, a smiley college kid clearly relieved Marat wasn’t a homeless acidhead. He looked around the empty open office, phones ringing, a platter of dissected Danishes beside a row of industrial coffeemakers, pizza boxes on the floor, piles of paper shoveled across desks.

“They’re in the back,” the receptionist called. “Weekly staff meeting.”

He smelled the conference room before he saw it, grubby volunteers packed in too close, college kids, high school kids, old folks with time on their hands, thrilled just to be there, sweating their belief. Breathing through his mouth, Marat found a folding chair in the back and watched a Cal upperclasswoman in a stupendous purple skirt call out precinct assignments.

Robespierre slipped into a chair beside him. Her face was thicker than when he’d last seen her in person, though when that was he couldn’t recall. She punched his solar plexus, hard.

“Go back to work,” she whispered.

He doubled over until breath returned. “I can’t work there anymore,” he said.

“I need you to go back in there and do what you can.” Her fingernails crimped hairs on his wrist. “For us.”

“Let me buy you lunch,” he insisted, discovering a deep thirst for company, loneliness lining his blood vessels.

“Go back to work. Go.” And with one last pincer tug, finally her point got through.

He returned to his office, replaced his photographs and knickknacks, and got cracking on strategies for Joel’s campaign, something that might seem like a good idea at first blush but would spoil soon enough. Not unlike the night in the Khorasan desert escorting Robespierre on her first official visit to the
front, when he’d sat on a kitchen table smoking a hookah while two soldiers under his command tore apart an Iranian home searching for weapons, overturning the stove, slashing the mattresses, tearing off wallpaper and punching holes in the doors, kicking toilets off their settings, peeling the soles off shoes, ripping apart pants at the seams, hurling underwear into the street, then locking all the men in the closet and threatening to rip the clothes off their women unless they gave up five terrorist addresses, at which point Robespierre had asked him to stop. He’d continued smoking as she’d laid out her justification, as her arguments grew louder and more indignant, as the men began pounding and whining in the closet, as his soldiers tossed shredded medieval brassieres out the front door, as his tobacco burned down to gray pellets. He put down his hookah hose and told her that he’d pieced together the money trail—Slippy’s uneven birthday donation, the rewrite job on Fanny’s will, cash dug from his shoes. The unidentified snitch and her timely arrival at the principal’s door, blocking his escape with convenient concern. This with the family bankrupt and Marat doing the dirty work, knocking off grandma and trafficking narcotics and eating shit in the army, a hellish hustle decade. How easy it was to slingshot ahead with all the money she ever needed, her competition hunting snipe in Iran.

A long suck on the hookah and the haze in his head told her how he’d dreamed of killing her, it would be a cinch to put a slug in her skull, there were millions of bullets lying around, she had to sleep some time.

She’d responded with noncommittal silence, her eyes constricting to brown pins, standing with her feet together and arms crossed, her tormented disapproval holding his complete attention while an Iranian civilian came up from behind and whacked his arm with a tire iron, fracturing his ulna and radius in two and four places respectively, never to fully heal. He was unable to fight back, the shock had him frozen, but his soldiers responded with massive force, fifteen rounds at close range, his attacker’s
face like a rifle-range tin can. Robespierre cried lavishly while they mopped up the blood, then sat on the floor holding hands with the women of the house while a medic escorted Marat back to camp.

A night he deeply regretted, and had to get past.

He called Joel at home. “I’m in,” he said.

“Good,” Joel said. “Maybe you’ll land that rematch with your sister you always wanted. I’ll put a hold on the defibrillator.”

Marat’s instinct was to get aggressively vocal, but he stopped himself before sound materialized and instead delivered a slow, droll joke about Joel’s parentage he knew would hurt a lot more.

Joel laughed pleasantly, practicing the measured response behooving an imperturbable politician. “Forget Tide. I’ll be in tomorrow, and I want ideas.”

Marat hung up before another insult slipped out and set to work hungrily, developing banal creative briefs to soften things up artillery-style, crafting a cavalry charge of inefficient media-buying guidelines, diving into infantry combat with ad scripts loaded with incomprehensible, outdated street lingo. The pre-fight ritual comforted him—creating time-tested baseline documents and aligning with industry standards—and win or lose, he felt progress coming, the slight succor of hope.

On a Wednesday morning in early June Esmerelda noted an unusually large group of men huddled by the Bagel Stop entrance when she drove by on her nightly hunt for parking. Drunk bachelor party, she guessed, jonesing for late-night booze sopping carbs. She found a parking spot a half block away and nailed it on the first go, two good omens long overdue, this small spate of luck an odd feeling. By the time she hiked over to the store, the group had swelled to a couple busloads’ worth of loud dressers, maybe a pro sports team or a fraternity event, except the men were older, forty and up, their heavy faces marked by unexpected sweet glances in her direction.

She was digging her keys out of her purse when music fell on her like rain, sliding down her hair and into the rivulets of her jacket.

The voice moved toward her, an old black man wearing a purple Nike sweatsuit, purple Kangol cap, purple sunglasses, white sneakers, no socks. He walked with a jittery hop, a familiar creak in his step. His lungs squeaking like overdrawn balloons.

She was crying when he put his arms around her. She pushed her fingers through his knotted hair.

“Ezzie,” Jasper said. “Hey.”

She buried her face in his jacket and breathed in his soft wood chips smell. Felt his gnarled body, his thin, indestructible bones. He put his hand on the back of her neck while she held his lapels.

The block bulged with people, curious about the crowd, the flashy suits, the memorable vocals. Jasper’s men cordoned off a patch of the sidewalk, dissuading intruders with hand claps. “I saw the show in Vegas,” Esmerelda said when the tears ran out.

“I know.”

“I’ve been seeing you around, helping Robespierre. Catching up with Marat. Hear you on the radio and see you on TV. I didn’t know what to say.”

“You don’t need to say anything, Ezzie.”

“Your singing’s real nice.”

He chuckled quietly. “I got good inspiration.”

Esmerelda’s chest cracked into fractions, small twitching shreds of meat cycloning in a swirl of color and lifting her off her feet and over the sidewalk to Jasper’s limousine.

She saw Carlos accepting the day’s egg shipment as Jasper
directed the driver to the hotel. Her last tether to earth. “My job,” she muttered.

His mirrored sunglasses turned to her, reflected headlights winking miraculously. “Don’t mind that,” he said. “Unless you’d rather go.”

She felt physically sick at the suggestion, her stomach rolling, a wooziness in her temples. She shook her head once.

“Good.”

He laid his head on her shoulder and she put her hand on his cheek and they sat together in electric silence while the limousine slithered up the tipsy streets home.

Following Marat’s advice, the Van Twinkle mayoral campaign went negative after Joel Lumpkin’s first television ads aired. They put together an initiative based on the weirdest Joel Lumpkin photo they could dig up—on a farm spanking a goat in its pen, his lone venture into agriculture an uproarious bust—plus bullet points:

The campaign rolled out on a dull July afternoon; within hours it was bursting through the blogosphere, radio talk show hosts screamed warfare
,
they even made the crawl on CNN. When Marat arrived at work the next morning, Joel Lumpkin was sitting in his chair, chewing on a bagel.