DC Noir

The bottom line by James Grady

Capitol Hill, N.E./S.E.

The Capitol building glowed in the night like a white icing cake.

Can’t believe I’m here, thought Joel Rudd as he drove toward that fortress on a hill. The car wheels rumbled his eyes to the passenger he’d picked up at a prestigious down-town hotel. She had the edgy burn of a 1940s movie star. Used the name Lena.

As they neared Capitol Hill, she said: “So you’re the Senator’s number one boy.”

“I’m his Administrative Assistant, his Chief of Staff. A long way from boy.”

“Is this ride assisting administering?

“Call it the end of a long day.”

Joel had made his play earlier, when sunset pinked the marble Capitol. Legislative Director Dick Harvie and Personal Secretary Mimi sat with Joel on the leather couch in the Senator’s inner office, sipped cold beers while they waited for their boss.

Senator Carl Ness strode into his office, filled a glass with vodka and ice.

“Here’s to us fools on a hill,” toasted the Senator. “We got through another day without wrecking the country.”

They went over the schedule Mimi’d beamed to the BlackBerry the Senator carried along with two cell phones — the taxpayer provided one for official calls, the private one wrapped in blue tape for conversations nobody wanted logged in public records.

The Senator told Dick and Mimi: “Joel will drive me home.”

Meaning: Leave us now

The Senator and Joel sat alone in an office once assigned to assassinated RFK.

Senator Ness said, “Fuck it, I’m not making give-me-money calls tonight.”

“We’ll raise enough for reelection,” replied Joel.

“Nobody ever has enough cash.” The Senator frowned. “You look… shaky.”

“Did you call out to the state today and talk to Joyce?”

“She had that school award thing over in Personville. I’ll call her after you drop me off tonight. Maybe she’ll even pick up the phone.”

No comment thought Joel, who knew all about wives, having never had one. Then he said, “We’re facing two issues. First is the Committee vote on the F-77 fighter program. It’s down to which firm wins, United Tech or Z-Systems, no real differences between either company’s bird.”

The Senator shook his head. “We got zero enemies with an Air Force so powerful that we need a new war bird.”

Spring it now, thought Joel. He said: “Second, you’ve got to be Senate sponsor for an aid package, only $8 million and change, for refugee camps in Sudan—”

The Senator sighed.

“—only $8 million, but it’ll save 10,000 starving people.”

“Foreigners. Hell, African foreigners. Not our constituents.”

“Our folks are still lucky.”

“High as back-home unemployment is, never call them lucky. Our opposition is drooling to smear me as a ‘big spender’. A ‘tax-and-spend’ guy ain’t who we can reelect.” Ice clinked in the Senator’s glass. “That trip got to you, didn’t it?”

Joel remembered wails from raped women now “safe” inside a barbed-wire desert refugee camp. Life fading from the face of a skeletal eight-year-old boy. Buzzing flies.

The Senator said: “You didn’t need to bring me that white canvas sack. Like a flour sack, only it’s a body bag for dead kids. Didn’t need to give me that sack.”

“I wanted you to remember.”

“I already wake up every morning with too much to forget.” The Senator sipped his drink. “You gotta drive tonight.”

“I know. I’ll hit the bathroom before we—”

“It’s not just me who you got to drive.”

Joel sank back into the leather chair. “I thought we were through with all that. What if there’s a problem?”

“Won’t be. Out-of-town Joyce won’t know. Would probably feel relieved.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yeah, but it’s bullshit that works.” The Senator looked away. “Tonight isn’t… personal.”

“Oh, great

“Who do you want to pick her up? Me when every cell phone in town is a camera? Some mailroom geek who’s got nothing invested in us except a job that pays him less than he could make bartending? A taxi with logbooks?”

“I didn’t sign on for this.”

“It’s gonna happen. All you get to do is choose how.”

So after driving the Senator home, Joel played chauffeur.

His passenger said: “Aren’t you going to ask?”

“I got no questions for your answers.”

“Bullshit. You’re all questions. Probably been getting away with that for years.”

“Why are you a whore?”

“I’m good at it. What’s your excuse?”

“I don’t need one. I’ve got a great job.”

“So I see.” She looked out the car window. “You’re driving me.”

He sped past the Senator’s huge town house. Drove into a courtyard of two-story dwellings created as stables and slave quarters. Now most of those boxes were homes for the thin slice of Congress’ 20,000-plus employees who lived on Capitol Hill.

Joel stopped at the Senator’s back door. Slapped a key onto the dashboard.

She scooped up the key. “Don’t catch cold out here.”

Long and lean and not looking back, she disappeared into that town house rehabbed years after the city-gutting King-assassination riots.

Joel sped to his own house five blocks away. He lived alone. Stood on the maroon rug in his living room with its Smithsonian art prints and National Park Service black-and-white poster of a mustang in a blizzard. He charged upstairs, wrestled off his tie.

The cell phone filled his shirt pocket like a stone.

Joel looked out his bedroom window to the night.

Capitol Hill is a geography of mind, will, and luck. Gang turf carved by the blades of Congress. What matters on the Hill might not count in Chicago or Paris, not in the mile-away White House or at the Supreme Court, where Joel said the motto etched on that law cathedral should read: “Equal justice under the five-to-four decision.” Yet, what happens on Capitol Hill might change the world. As Joel had told his protégé Dick: “Up here, the bottom line never changes.”

Joel’s cell phone rang after 112 minutes. He said: “I’ll be right there.”

She stood alone in the night alley.

“You could have gotten mugged out there,” said Joel as she huddled beside him. “Or worse.”

“So what.”

He sped away from that back door. Stopped the car at the end of the alley. Idled.

“Next time, get your boss café au Viagra.”

Crimson flames roared in Joel’s head.

She said: “Are we going to sit here and stare at the road?”

“Tell me where to go.”

“So much to say, so little time.”

“I need to know—”

“But you never get to.”

“I know what I’m doing!”

“Congratulations,” she said. “How do you like it so far?”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“I wouldn’t take your business.”

“And you’re all business.”

“What’s your label? Politics?”

“Look, all I want is…” He stared out the windshield.

“Oh. I see. It’s about what you want.” Her hand pulled on the emergency brake. She drew toward him like a slow falling star.

“What are you doing?” he said as her face floated closer, closer.

“Guess.”

Her mouth covered his. He tasted lightning. She drew back. Met his gaze as he managed to say: “I thought girls like you never kissed on the mouth.”

She raged at him, both hands slapping.

Joel shook her. Lena’s hair flew wild in the streetlight’s glow. She fought free and he let her. She didn’t run or look away, and he saw her. Felt her shiver.

Streets of fire drove them to his living room.

She ripped his shirt. Wore black lingerie. Her bare legs clamped around Joel’s waist as he laid her down on the living room’s maroon rug.

Two hours or a lifetime later, they lay naked in the white sheets of his bed.

Her hand stroked his cheek. “What were your women like yesterday?”

“All I see are characters in movies.”

“How do they look?” she said.

“Smart. Funny. Successful. Pretty. Like the kind of woman a man needs.”

“Couldn’t fix them, could you?” She said: “Don’t save me. And don’t make me your personal Jesus.”

Joel smiled. “Jesus was a man.”

“Don’t be so limited.”

“Who knew you were so full of don’ts?”

“I’m about out,” she said. “How about you?”

“All I know is this is going to drive me crazy.”

Lena sealed that with her kiss.

Come morning, Dick grinned when Joel finally walked past his desk: “Get lost coming to work?”

“Whatever,” said Joel. “What’s happening?”

“Money wars,” said Dick. “We’ve got three weeks to decide our F-77 vote.”

“What’s up with the Aid to Sudan bill?”

“They should have waited on that over there,” said Dick, nodding toward the House side of the Hill. “Made sure they had a champion over here.”

Joel said nothing about his visits to the key House staffer for the bill’s author, nothing about urging speed on the bill. Now, to Dick, he said, “Polish our armor.”

“The boss went for that? It’s the right thing to do, but he’s so freaked about reelection I can’t believe he’ll stick his neck out on something for nothing.”

“He’s not there yet,” said Joel. “But be ready.”

Mimi buzzed Joel: “The boss wants you.

The Senator sat behind his desk. Looked up as Joel entered the private office.

“About last night.” The Senator shrugged. “We all have our needs.”

“Really.” Joel walked out.

The Senator’s eyes burned Joel’s neck through the door he shut behind him. At Mimi’s desk, Joel told her, “Call Joyce wherever she is. Get her back in town.”

“Home to her husband? Not likely.”

“Mrs. Senator loves her job as much as he loves his. Reelection on the horizon, gossip about his solo ways… Joyce knows we all gotta do what we all gotta do.”

The workday wall clock stretched Joel tighter with every sweep of its red second hand. He left the office for home as soon as he could. She showed up seven minutes early. Stood on his stoop holding a pizza box and a clunky cloth purse. Hair floating free, she wore no makeup or perfume, a hooded sweatshirt under a denim jacket, torn blue jeans on slim legs and black-and-white sneakers.

“This is nothing but me,” said Lena.

He pulled her inside.

Ninety minutes later, they ate cold pizza while sitting naked on his bed.

“Your arms,” she said. “How did an indoor guy get such a tan?”

He told her about Sudan, the refugee camp, the three-day “fact finding” trip that he blew up to a two-week tour in Hell that the State Department finally insisted he abandon. “The worst part was seeing the faces of real people fall away from the helicopter as it lifted me up. I saw their eyes. I saw them believe my promises.”

“You’re exactly who belongs in this town. Get out while you can.”

“What about you?”

“Where can I go? I started out letting guys be generous to a hot girl who didn’t want a slave-labor job or a soul-sucking career. Then one day you realize that you added it up all wrong and you’re stuck being your score.”

Joel cupped her wet face. “Who you are right now is all you need.”

She shook her head no “Remember Sudan? You’ve either got power or vultures get you. Plus, the shit I’ve done has to be worth it. Has to get me beyond it with enough nobody can touch me. Except you. The best I am is being who you want.”

Thursday night she only called to say she couldn’t see him.

Friday night her plans were to be not there, but he called her so many times that she relented. Said she’d see him around midnight.

Lena rang his doorbell at ten minutes into tomorrow. Stood on his doorstep looking like a magazine ad, all hair and lips and sheathed legs in a black dress that plunged between her teardrop breasts. Her eyes were broken windows.

She stalked upstairs to his bathroom and closed the door.

He sat on the bed. Listened to the shower run for twenty minutes. The hot water tank must be empty.

He found her huddled on the floor of the tub, naked, icy liquid bullets spraying down on her as she looked at him, sobbed, “Not enough soap in the whole damn world.”

He stepped into the shower and pulled her up, held her in that cold, cold rain.

By the next afternoon, smiles softened her jaggedness. They walked past Saturday shoppers who’d come from the Eastern Market food stands where J. Edgar Hoover sacked groceries as a boy. Joel tried to show her the secret grotto tucked into the Senate side of the Capitol grounds, but Homeland Security had kicked the terrorist alert level up to YELLOW. Even his Senate staff ID wasn’t enough to get her past SWAT-geared Capitol Hill cops swarming around America’s democracy factory.

“It’s okay.” She squeezed his hand. “Take me home.”

And he knew she meant to his house.

Sunday, she urged him to do one thing she’d never sold and they did.

Monday, he went to work.

“Getting down, Dick said, as he opened the Washington Post on Joel’s desk. “Here on A20, a full-page ad from United Tech salutes their planes with ‘American-built technology.’ Then on Page A24, a quarter-page ad where Z-Systems proudly announces their F-77A ‘simulator’ performed flight tests with ‘superlative success.’

“And,” continued Dick, “here’s an ‘According to government sources’ news story about a General Accountability Office ‘investigation’ into cost-overruns by Z-Systems on their flying tanker. Of course, no mention of which Congressman or Senator ordered GAO to kick Z-Systems’ butt or why the story got leaked.”

“Seen it before,” said Joel.

“Yeah,” said Dick. “Our boss ambushed me this morning at the coffee pot. Told me that he doesn’t care which company he votes for.”

Joel said: “Did he go off again on reelection?”

“Naw, but speaking of running that Sudan relief bill ain’t got no legs.”

“They’ll show up any day now. Trust me.”

“Always,” said Dick.

That night, as Joel’s kitchen echoed with laughter, Lena’s cell phone buzzed. She said, “Excuse me.” Walked as far away as she could. Came back in ten minutes. Said, “I’ve got to go.” Left him alone with his nightmares.

Tuesday evening she was sitting on his front stoop with a smile that lit her face.

Wednesday her restlessness woke him with the dawn. She wore only his tattered high school football jersey. Told him: “I can’t do this anymore.”

Joel felt his ceiling fly away.

“I can’t leave you,” said Lena. “I can’t go back and do what I do. And I won’t let my whole life until now add up to worse than nothing.”

“If it’s about money—”

“No! If it’s your money, then you’re just like all the rest. I can’t let you be that!”

“What about me? You say you protect yourself against psycho killers and getting… and I have to believe you. But you fuck other men and it’s like you let them rape you! Can’t you—”

“Start all over?” He heard the tremor in her voice. “Baby, I ain’t got the time. All I’ve done is like a long black cloud swelling up behind me. I’m running out of sky.”

He held her and she sobbed. The sun came up and she lay awake on his heart.

Victory at work that day meant he and Dick brokered a deal to give air polluters a six percent rollback of fines instead of the seventeen percent proposed by his Senator’s opponents. Joel linked a freelance cameraman he’d cajoled into filming the refugee camp to a network news producer who owed Joel. As he and Dick walked their boss to a Roll Call, the Senator told Joel: “Nobody wants your Sudan relief bill. I can’t put my brand on a dead horse.” Joel pleaded: “You can make it work.” Senator Ness looked at Joel, shrugged.

Later, Dick told Joel: “Least he left you with hope.”

“Hope isn’t enough on the Hill.”

“I know. Up here, the bottom line never changes: It’s what you can get done.” Dick added: “Still, working on the Hill is the right thing for guys like us to do. The last best place where we can get paid to fight the good fight.”

“Yeah,” said Joel, who’d preached that gospel to Dick once upon a time.

After work Joel found Lena on his couch, her hands wrapped around a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“I got a phone call today,” she said. “From your Senator. Didn’t take it.”

Joel took a swig of bourbon.

“I stared at my cell phone screen and realized something: I have his number.”

“Leave him out of this. Leave him alone.”

“No, he’s in this with us. He’s got my number, but I’ve got his. And the number of the guy who hooked up me and the Senator.”

“What guy?” said Joel.

“This guy, this lobbyist. He’s gay, so… No business between us. Don’t know how, but he hooked up with your Senator.”

“I can’t be with him all the time,” said Joel. “What’s the guy’s name?”

“Frank Greene.”

A bulldog who wears Wall Street suits. Joel said: “I didn’t know Frank was gay.”

“It’s not who he is,” said Lena, “it’s what he offered me.”

She leaned closer. “Frank told me that if I could get the Senator to tell me who he was going to vote for on a military planes contract—”

“The F-77 authorization bill.”

“Yeah. Frank offered me $5,000 if I got your boss to say who he was voting for.”

Joel took a swig from the bottle.

“My idea,” she said, “is that if five grand is a fee for just knowing about a deal, what would it be worth to a guy like Frank to be able to broker that deal?”

Joel’s stomach churned sour acid.

“You told me all about it!” said Lena. “It’s not like this vote makes any difference. It’s not about America or national defense or fighting evil.”

“We can’t be about this.”

“We’re not! We’re about us. This is about getting us free.”

“It’s for you.”

“Yeah, it’s for me. And you said you want me. I’ll always be who I was, but this way I have something to show for it. This buys me a getaway. Here.”

“Not enough,” he whispered. “We’re not worth enough to do this.”

“What other chance do we have? I’m changing my life for us. What about you?”

He walked to his window full of night. Stared out at the city he’d chosen to make his home. He searched the darkness outside. Faced what he’d never embraced.

“Only one way we can do this,” said Joel. “We need to make doing what’s wrong be for more right than just us.”

After he told her how, she said: “I’ll set it up.”

“Won’t work,” he said. “Frank won’t believe just you. Buy just you.”

“I don’t want you touching—”

He stroked her hair. “Too late.”

Joel nodded to her cell phone. “Make the call.”

“What about the Senator?”

“Nobody needs him,” said Joel.

But two nights later, Joel sat in his car with the bulldog in a Wall Street suit who said: “Hey, fucko, I need the Senator.”

Across the street waited Capitol Hill’s neighborhood ball-field-sized Lincoln Park that 198 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence became D.C.’s first public site for any statue honoring a woman or an African-American.

“It’s not about what you need,” said Joel. “It’s about what I can do.”

“You don’t get to vote in Committee. Or on the Floor.”

“Not in the flesh, but I’m the spirit moving the man.”

“This town’s full of people who died thinking they were somebody else.”

“You get close to him,” said Joel, “the odds go up that we’ll all get caught.”

Frank Greene drummed his fingers on Joel’s dashboard. “$100,000.”

“My price includes more than cash. There’s a relief bill for Sudan that’s come over from the House on a wing and a prayer. You’re going to angel that prayer. Muscle that bill into a workable law.”

“This is a money town and you want me to save the world? What’s the catch?”

“No catch. But I get to deliver my guy to lead the charge in the Senate.”

“One hand cleans the other, huh?”

Yellow headlights silhouetted them sitting in the car as a cop drove past two more men sharing secrets in D.C.’s dark night.

“Believe what you gotta believe,” said the bulldog. “But deliver what you sell.”

“Don’t you trust me?” Joel shook his head at the man’s silence. “Me too. That’s why I have to see motion on your side before I deliver from mine.”

“What do you mean motion? I call you in a few days, tell you which company, you lock your man down, I deliver the cash through the babe.”

“Never call her again. If you see her on the street, walk on by. And make me see what I need to see.”

On the following Wednesday, Mimi dropped a “Dear Colleague” letter on Joel’s desk, a mass mailing to all lawmakers on Capitol Hill from the Congressman who’d authored the Sudan relief measure and was now proud to announce that a caucus of business and labor groups had organized to support the bill.

Letter in hand, Joel walked to the suite Mimi shared with Press Secretary Ricki.

Mimi was on the phone. “Good to talk to you, Glenn.” She mouthed the name Parker to Joel. “The Senator will be sorry to have missed your call, but Joel’s standing right here.”

Joel took the phone. “Glenn, how are you?”

“How I am is stuck. Not sure we should be talking — legally.”

“The law says there’s no problem with a citizen calling his Senator’s office — one time, anyway. They let guys like us touch base for free.”

“Free?” Glenn laughed. “Then FYI, a bunch of the Senator’s friends out here plus some folks back in D.C. just formed an independent educational committee so voters realize who to touch the computer screen for next time.”

Dead air filled the phone call between the Senator’s D.C. office and the bank president’s phone back home in the capital of the Senator’s state.

Until Joel said: “That sounds like great news, but you’re right, it’s possibly of a partisan nature, so we can’t talk about it on this publicly funded phone, or from this taxpayer-owned office.”

Joel gave him a phone number for the town house that the party’s Senatorial Campaign Committee rented across the street from the Senate, told Glenn to call him there in an hour.

Mimi said: “Is this one of those things I don’t know about?”

Joel knocked on the brown door to the Senator’s private suite, didn’t wait for a “Come in” before he did, and closed the door behind him.

Senator Carl Ness sat with suit jacket off, tie loosened, three cell phones and BlackBerry on the massive desk, as he worked his way through a stack of papers.

“You talk to Glenn Parker recently?” said Joel.

The Senator shrugged. “Joyce ran into him at that Bay City pancake breakfast for the Girl Scouts.”

“And I suppose they chatted about how things are and how they could be better.”

“God bless the First Amendment. People can talk.” “Did you give Joyce her script?”

“She’s been at this a long time. She knows what to say.” The Senator smiled. “What are you upset about? None of us left any fingerprints.”

“Don’t ever pull a stunt like that again without first running it by me.”

“Hey, I am the Senator.” He raised his hand. “Point taken, but this is a done deal.”

Joel dropped the “Dear Colleague” Sudan letter on his boss’ desk. “If you lead the charge for that bill over here, you’re going to make a lot of important people happy.”

“Who will I make mad?”

“Nobody who can hurt you.”

The Senator leaned back in his chair. “We live in a brutal world. It’s incumbent upon us as Americans and human beings to do all we can to help innocent men and — no: innocen children — who violence, evil, and greed have blah blah blah The Senator raised a warning finger. “Don’t get me in trouble on this.”

“Me?” said Joel. “Get you in trouble? That’s not the way it’s always been.”

Later, walking back from the Campaign Committee’s house, Joel detoured to a Union Station pay phone. He called the bulldog, said: “Yes.”

“You can still back out,” whispered Lena that night in his bed.

“No we can’t,” said Joel.

The U.S. mail brought a package to his home the next day — a disposable cell phone that buzzed in his pocket three days later. Joel put the cell phone to his ear.

A bulldog said: “Is this who it should be?”

“Probably,” said Joel.

“Z-Systems. I repeat, Z-Systems.”

After work that night Joel arranged to go out for a beer with Dick and their Committee staffer Trudy. They went to one of only four bars that survived the deluge of ferns-and-cloth-napkins gentrification that laundered Capitol Hill in the 1990s, a booths-and-stools joint with Hank Williams wannabe’s in the jukebox. A stuffed owl spread its wings above the bar mirror. Congressional aides loved the bar: It reminded them of a blue-collar real world they imagined they could still claim as their roots.

“Is it just me,” said Trudy, “or are we the oldest Hill staffers in here?”

“Congress runs on the blood of twenty-five-year-olds,” said Joel. “Guys two jumps up like us are usually thinking about getting out, back to the real world and on to big bucks.”

Trudy asked: “How many people on your staff are from D.C.?”

“One,” said Joel.

“We aren’t like ordinary factory towns,” said Dick.

“We aren’t like any town anywhere,” said Joel.

They drank cold beer. Joel let Trudy think it was her idea to meet with the Senator. Those four playmakers huddled the next morning.

Senator Ness said: “Give me your recommends.”

“The companies’ planes are essentially equal,” said Trudy. “But the future looks best with United Tech. United’s bird is more bucks per copy, but Z-Systems’ bid is a low estimate that they’ll recoup in cost-overruns. Plus, Z-Systems has that GAO probe.”

Dick said: “Are you telling us that United Tech is more honest than Z-Systems?”

Even Trudy laughed.

“I say that the GAO investigation of Z-Systems means they’re the best choice,” said Dick. “They won’t be so inclined to try a rip while the watchdogs are in their shop. Plus, Z-Systems is the cheaper right now and we pay for our pick with right now dollars.”

The Senator said. “Joel?”

“Read the headline,” said Joel. “‘Senator Ness Votes Against Low Bidder on Jillion-Dollar Contract.’ It’s hard to explain to the voters why it looks like you chose to overspend their tax dollars. I say it comes down to good politics married to good government. If you add up everything, your best choice is Z-Systems.”

“Makes sense,” said the Senator.

“Okay,” said Dick. “Z-Systems it is. How about I draft a letter of commitment to the Committee Chairman?”

Trudy said: “Great idea.”

“Yeah, Dick,” said the Senator, “except I’m voting for United Tech.”

Dick blurted: “You said Z-Systems made sense.”

“But,” said the Senator as Joel fought terror, “it makes more sense and better government to build for the future. The political stuff’s gotta take a backseat.”

Dick said: “So do I draft the letter?”

Buy time. Joel said: “Let’s think that play through, hold off until tomorrow.”

Joel walked the Senator to a vote, then hurried through the tunnels honeycombing the Hill beneath the Capitol to use the Campaign Committee phone and call back-home banker Glenn Parker.

“Glenn, our friends in your new group,” said Joel. “Are they a bunch of guys from United Tech?”

Glenn said: “No. Are we expecting any?”

“Beats me,” said Joel. “It’s a free country.”

That night, he sat on his living room couch with Lena. Streetlamps filtering through his dirty windows cut across them with light and shadows.

“After the Senator bucked me for United, knowing that committee had just formed out in the state, I thought maybe I’d catch him having done his own side deal. He’s played cagey like that before.”

Joel shook his head. “But now he’s choosing what’s best for the country, the hell with reelection. That’s why I went to work for him. He may be a personal jerk, but he stands up for what he believes. The damn son of a bitch.”

“What if you can’t get the Senator to change his mind?” asked Lena.

“Then we’re fucked.”

“You could make it up to Frank Greene on some other vote some other time.”

“There is no other time,” said Joel. “If I fuck him on this, he’ll need to fuck me. Plus more. To keep his pride, his clout. Keep himself safe.”

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“This is a tough town.”

Joel woke up under a cloudy sky. He let Mimi play out the morning office rituals. Then told the Senator: “Change your mind. Go for Z-Systems.”

“Let’s get Dick in on this,” said the Senator, pushing the intercom button.

After Dick joined them, the Senator said: “Joel wants me to change my mind and go with Z-Systems.”

Dick asked Joel: “Why?”

“United Tech is the future, but today is tomorrow.” Dick shrugged. “Whatever that means, we agree.”

Senator Ness sighed. “Okay, I’ll vote for Z-Systems. Let’s get on to stuff we can give a shit about.”

“I think I can get TV showing you rescuing starving kids,” said Joel. He wanted to shout for joy. He wanted to cry for shame. He did his job, called the TV producer with “news” that prompted the producer to ask for a “deadline” chance that Joel granted.

Joel, Dick, Press Secretary Ricki, and the Senator huddled in his office.

“Just because they film our guy doesn’t mean they’ll use it,” said Ricki.

“Great visuals have a better chance of making the news menu,” said Joel. “Plus, if it bleeds, it leads, but — I’ve got it! The white sack. The burial bag for kids from the refugee camp!”

“Perfect!” said Ricki.

“Picture it, Senator,” said Joel. “You do the usual interview sit-down they want to film this afternoon, wait for the right moment… then pull the white sack out of your suit jacket pocket. That gives them action and the illusion of a gotchya — news film is all about gotchyas. You’ll be anointed a caring, crusading hero on network TV.”

Ricki said: “So where’s this sack?”

The three aides looked at the Senator. Who said: “Ahh…”

Joel snapped: “Don’t tell me you lost it.”

The Senator said: “Thing creeped me — wait! It’s on the pile to get auctioned off at a fundraiser or shipped to the state university’s archives. The sack’s at my house.”

Joel said: “The interview’s in three hours. You’ve got Agriculture mark-up in twenty-five minutes. You can cut out early. Dick, do that commitment letter now. Get him out of the Committee meeting with plenty of time for you two to get to his place, get the sack, come back. I like the idea of you two walking: You’ll roughen up for the camera.”

Seventeen minutes later, Dick showed Joel the commitment letter.

“Z-Systems it is,” said Joel. “Make him sign it, run copies, and bring it all to me.”

As soon as he was alone, Joel dialed the disposable cell phone.

“Yeah?” said the bulldog who answered Joel’s call.

“Yeah,” said Joel. “Now what about the rest of your end?”

“Ninety minutes. Your house.” He hung up before Joel could say no.

Joel punched in a second phone number. When Lena answered her cell, he asked: “Where are you?”

“Your place. Where else.”

“Get out of there. The bulldog is on his way.”

Knock, on Joel’s office door, and Dick came in: “Our boss signed on the line.”

“I’ll walk you two over.” Joel put the signed letter and copies in his suit pocket.

Dick’s frown said he thought that was peculiar, but hey: they were on the move.

Joel made sure they entered the right hearing room, then hurried outside.

An ocean of gray clouds rolled over the Capitol dome. Wind flapped Joel’s suit jacket as he walked past Hill cops, past tourists who were realizing that visiting this site was like hiking to a kabuki play but not understanding Japanese. An orange public school bus crammed with inner-city D.C. kids passed him on the way to their classroom that had a hole in its ceiling the size of a coffin.

He found Lena in his living room.

“I won’t let you do this alone,” she said. “Why is he coming here?”

“To show me he knows where I live.”

“Can we get away?”

“Sure,” he said. “Anywhere you want to go.”

“Here,” she said, nuzzling his chest. “I want to go right here.”

“After this, it can be just us.”

He felt her nod. “I can be somebody else. I can dye my hair.”

The doorbell rang.

Rain drops spit at Joel when he let the bulldog in his house.

The lobbyist stared at them. “You two make a helluva pair.”

“Don’t you talk about us.” Lena hugged her arms across her chest.

Frank Greene shrugged. “What do you got for me?”

Joel handed him a photocopy. As the bulldog studied that piece of paper, Joel heard the clatter of wind and rain storming against his living room windows.

“Our turn,” said Lena.

“About that.” The bulldog tossed a thick envelope to Lena. “Tough luck.”

“What do you mean?” said Joel.

“Changing circumstances require compromises. Means that your appropriation is cut fifty percent to fifty thou.”

“You can’t screw us,” said Lena.

“Fifty K is way more than you’ve been paid for screwing before.” The lobbyist turned to the Senate aide. Shrugged in a fashion that an amateur might mistake for an apology. “This town. What can you do?”

“I didn’t sign on for this,” said Joel.

“You signed up for everything the moment you let her in your car.”

“Stop it!” screamed Lena.

The bulldog thrust his finger at her. “You don’t give orders.”

Joel pushed the lobbyist’s arm away from Lena.

“What are you going to do?” growled the bulldog. “You got what I gave you.”

Joel replied: “And all you’ve got for sure is a piece of paper.”

“Oh, you think so?” The bulldog snapped at Lena. “You think so, too?”

“Shut up!” She shook the envelope in Greene’s face. “You think I did it for this?”

Lena threw the envelope away. It landed on the couch by her bulky cloth purse.

“Why you did whatever is your problem.”

Joel said: “Leave her alone.”

“Oh, come on.” said the bulldog. “Don’t you get it?”

Joel said: “I get that we’ve only gotten half of what was promised.”

“You sure you want the rest?”

“Shut up!” Lena lunged toward the couch, her purse, the money envelope. “You can’t fuck us like this!”

“Babe, getting fucked is your whole life.”

“Not now!” Lena cradled the envelope and her clunky purse. “Not for us.”

Whoa, stop the way the world’s been working, ’cause suddenly you decided you got yourself an us? Let’s see.”

“No. Don’t!”

Like a mad dog, the lobbyist whirled to Joel. “You want it all?”

“Shut up.” said Lena. “Stop!”

The bulldog surged toward her Joel, growled: “You want what you really got?”

Out of her purse jerked Lena’s hand holding a snub-nosed revolver Bam

Window panes flashed and vibrated with the gunshot.

From outside, it seemed only like the storm.

Joel knew he must have heard the bang, seen the gunshot flash, but he felt like he had fallen back into himself after being far away. Now, suddenly, he was right here, in his living room, Lena holding a pistol, Frank Greene clutching his left side.

“You bitch!” yelled Frank. “Gonna kill you.”

Frank staggered toward her.

Bam! Bam!

Frank crumpled to the maroon rug. Window panes rattled.

Lena whispered: “It shot him.”

Joel crouched to touch the lobbyist’s motionless neck. Then Joel’s hand shook and wouldn’t stop. His whole body trembled.

Lena pulled him up to her embrace. “I’ll call the police,” she said. “Tell them the truth.”

“What good would that do?”

“Even you can’t fix this.”

“But it can be managed.”

“Joel, no. What he did, said, what he was going to—”

“What matters is what happens right now,” Joel told her.

He filled her eyes as she told him: “I never thought it would go this way. I love you.”

“Yeah. But now that’s not enough.”

He pocketed the gun. Had her help him roll the dead man up in the maroon rug.

Joel put on a hooded raincoat. Ran outside in the storm. Drove his car into the alley, parked by his trash cans. Lena let him in the back door. Helped him shoulder the rolled-up maroon rug, stagger through the rain, cram it into his car’s trunk.

Inside his house, water dripped off them to tap on the bare wood floor.

“Take the money.” He stuffed the envelope in her cloth purse. “Go home. You weren’t here. Barely know me. I’ll call when it’s safe.”

He drove her to nearby Union Station. Stopped where the few people running past them had eyes only for their own escape from the storm.

“Go,” he told her crying eyes. “I’ll call as soon as I can.”

She hugged him so tight he almost died. Ran from his car toward the subway escalator. Turned to look back at him through gray sheets of driving rain. He memorized her standing there washed by all the tears in town.

The escalator fed her to the underground.

Go he told himself. No speeding tickets. No accidents. Off the Hill: Virginia? Maryland? A country road. A quarry filled by a dead lake. A ditch with rocks that could be rolled. Wipe the gun. Throw the wallet, cell phones — cell phones: what is it about — never mind Ditch evidence everywhere but on the Hill.

Ring! His cell phone, not the disposable he’d need to dump.

Can’t not

Dick’s voice in his ear: “Joel, where the hell are you?”

Sell the truth when you can: “In my car. On the Hill. Got places to go.”

“Yeah,” said Dick, “like here to the boss’ house, pron-to.”

“Why?”

“Because of the rain, man. It’s like a hurricane.”

“But—”

“No buts, or our butts are in a sling. We got here just as it started spitting. Finding the white sack took awhile. Now we gotta get back to the Capitol in time for the interview in the TV press gallery. Looking rough for a good TV Q is cool, but looking like a drowned rat blows, so you need to swing by here and give us a ride.”

“What about the Senator’s car?”

“In the shop, and in this storm, no way can we get a taxi. If you don’t come get us, we’ll lose the chance to get the Sudan bill on TV and spin the PR we need to win.”

Rain drummed the roof of Joel’s car. Flooded his wind-shield.

“Yeah,” he said into the cell phone, “Ness’s got to take this ride.”

Joel double-parked in front of the Senator’s town house.

Two men hurried through the rain to his car. The Senator wore a trenchcoat, jumped in the front seat. Dick tumbled into the back.

“Where’s your umbrella?” said Joel.

“Somebody else always has one,” said the Senator.

“Go!” said Dick. “We’re going to be late.”

Joel stepped on the gas.

Ca-lump.

Dick said: “What was that?”

The rearview mirror showed Dick turning to look toward the car’s trunk.

“D.C. streets,” blurted Joel. “Roughest roads around.”

Joel steered his car into a right-turn-on-red. Water wooshed under his tires. Potholes slammed the wheels. The wipers went whump whump.

“Turn on the defrost,” ordered the Senator. “You can barely see.”

The engine fan whirred an invisible wind up the fogged windshield.

“Look out!” yelled Dick.

A yellow smear slid past their surging car.

“You almost hit that cop!” said Dick.

A neon red starburst filled Joel’s windshield.

“What the hell?” said Dick as Joel slammed on the brakes.

Three Capitol Hill cops in yellow rain slickers blocked the road. One cop stabbed a popped flare into the wet mirror blacktop. Two others stalked toward the halted vehicle.

Joel lowered his window. Spray from the storm wet his face.

“Sir, shut off your vehicle!” yelled the older cop, while the younger one kept his right hand thrust inside his yellow slicker. “Now!”

A laser dot of red light refracted through the windshield to kiss Joel’s chest.

Joel shifted to park and killed his engine. The red dot danced on Joel’s chest as two cops moved to his side of the

“Sir!” yelled the lead cop. “The officer back there ordered you to halt.”

“I didn’t see him. I’m driving Senator Ness.”

The older cop snapped a flashlight beam on the Senator’s face.

Gonna be all right, thought Joel. Gonna make it now

“He’s him,” said the cop’s younger partner.

“Sorry Senator,” said the ranking officer, “I didn’t see you, but… Doesn’t matter. Homeland Security just bumped us up to ORANGE Alert.”

“Fuck Homeland Security!” yelled the Senator. “This is Capitol Hill, I’m a Senator, we’re in charge, let us pass.”

“Sir…our scenarios include a Senator being snatched in a terrorist attack.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“So is four jetliners being hijacked into flying bombs. I’m sorry, but you entered our secured zone so now you all have to step out of the vehicle before you proceed.”

Joel yelled: “In this damn storm?”

“Come on,” said Dick. “We can still make it.”

The black Senate staffer stepped out of the car, kept his hands in plain sight.

“Fuck me.” The Senator stepped into the rain.

Through the water-blurred windshield, Joel saw three more yellow-slickered cops march toward the car. One carried an umbrella. One carried a pole with a mirror for examining the underside of vehicles.

The senior cop told the driver: “Everyone must exit the vehicle.”

Joel Rudd stood on the road, arms out like Jesus, face turned up to the falling rain.

Senator Carl Ness stood under an umbrella held by a yellow-slickered cop and, like his law-writing aide Dick Harvie, stared at the Capitol Hill wizard they worked with who suddenly seemed to have gone insane.

“Sir, we need to pop the trunk. Check it. Then you can go.”

“No,” said Joel. “I’m going nowhere. I’m already there.”

The older cop said: “We’re just following the rules.”

Joel turned his flooded face toward that guardian of law and order. “Rules. I know about them. In my trunk you’ll find a body.”

What?” chorused the cop, the U.S. Senator, and the legislative director.

“A lobbyist named Frank Greene. Shot dead.”

Rain beat down on them. Flares sputtered. Police radios crackled routine reports.

Until a cop opened Joel’s trunk, announced: “He’s right.”

The younger cop slid his hand back inside his yellow slicker.

An officer lifted his radio, but his sergeant ordered: “Keep this off the air.”

Senator Ness yelled at Joel: “What have you done?”

Joel stared at the man he knew so well, had served so long. A thousand calculations churned behind the Senator’s frantic expression. Through the raging storm, Joel saw the spirit inside that man as clearly as he saw the spirit in himself.

Carl Ness reached inside his suit and pulled out a white sack.

“Do you see what you’ve done?” said the politician. “Do you see what you’ve put at risk? Ten thousand lives and you stand there flushing them down the drain.”

A cop exchanged his radio for a cell phone.

The Senator shook the white sack. “Now it’ll take all I’ve got to make this happen.”

Suddenly Joel saw it all through the pouring rain. Cell phone. Fingerprints. The cell phone in the cop’s hand as he reported in. The third cell phone on the Senator’s desk when there should have been only two. A sequence where a bulldog and a politician set up a “shaky” crusader with a desperate dream girl who they’d schooled. Joel positioned to structure the corrupt deal over the Senator’s “opposition” in front of witnesses Trudy and Dick. If anyone ever cried corruption, the guilty fingerprints would belong to fall guy Joel. The Senator’s “independent” campaign committee set up to reap a windfall from the contract winners. The payoff to Joel and Lena was chump change to distract him, keep him quiet, drive more nails into his frame.

The white sack waited in the Senator’s fist for what Joel would say.

The whole, unprovable, public truth wouldn’t save Joel. Would cut the balls off a Senator so that he kept his job but had no power. Would thus sentence 10,000 people to starvation. Destroy a woman desperate to be free.

Capitol Hill’s bottom line: It’s what you can get done.

Thunder boomed. Joel never saw the flash. His words tasted like smoke. “The creep got shot because he welched on paying me for fixing the warplane vote.”

“Wait,” said the youngest cop. “Shouldn’t we read him his rights?”

No one can prove me wrong, thought Joel. Or will want to.

Clarity shimmered through the hissing red glow of the flares, the spinning blue-and-blood lights on arriving police cars, the storm-slick skull-white glow off the Capitol dome. Joel envisioned Lena grimly marching through a D.C. airport. He wondered where she’d go. The color of her hair.

“My fall!” cried Joel.

“What’d he say?” yelled the older cop.

Whose partner yelled back: “He said it was his fault!”

But Senator Ness’s face said he’d heard Joel’s offer. A look of pure understanding passed between them.

Like the noble boss of a doomed sinner, the Senator told Joel: “I’ll do all I can.”

Joel’s nod sealed their redemptive bargain.

“Cuff him,” ordered the older cop.

Bare steel clamped around Joel’s wrists.

Dick Harvie lunged toward the prisoner who’d taught him how democracy works.

“Murder,” said Dick, the word burning in his eyes. “I get that. But how could you, you of all people, how dare you sell out all the best dreams up here.”

Joel said: “Everybody gets a hill.”

Stiffed by David Slater

Thomas Circle, N.W.

The restaurant had emptied after the Friday lunch shift, so Gibson shoved open the battered back door to get a quick taste of sunshine. He leaned against the chain-link fence, pulled his lunch tips out of his pocket, and slowly counted the crumpled bills. Seventeen lousy dollars.

He plopped down on an overturned five-gallon pickle bucket and lit a Camel to mask the dumpster’s ripeness. He added some numbers in his head, trying to figure out how much he had earned that week. He needed at least another thousand by the end of the month or he was going to lose his apartment. But if he was going to continue living off his eight-dollar-an-hour salary while putting his tips toward the thousand-dollar goal, there was no way that seventeen bucks was going to cut it.

He still had to man the grill until the next guy came on in a few hours, but he figured that there wouldn’t be many more tips coming his way that day. The afternoons had been slow lately as the stifling summer heat settled over D.C.

The heavy door groaned opened and Karen, the day waitress, walked squinting into the sunshine. “There you are,” she said. “Want to make a few extra bucks?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m supposed to hang around till the next girl comes in at 5:00. But I was hoping to get over the Bay Bridge before it backs up. You want to hold down the fort?”

“You think I can work the grill and wait on tables too?”

“Come on, Gibson, look at how dead it’s been. You can handle it for a couple of hours.”

Gibson shrugged his shoulders. What the hell. He had been counting on pocketing more than fifty bucks from the day’s lunch shift, and this might get him there.

“Give me a couple minutes to finish this cigarette,” he said, “and I’ll be out.”

The Shelbourne Grill was a dying breed for the neighborhood just below Thomas Circle. Nothing fancy or modern: People came in for made-from-scratch onion rings and fat burgers, grilled behind the bar by the same guys who served the beer. The crane-strewn neighborhood was upgrading fast, but the Shelbourne hadn’t seen much change in its four decades. It was narrow and dark, with seating for around sixty at a worn bar, six uncomfortable wooden booths, and a row of two-tops. The prices were low and the place only accepted cash, even though ten times a day they had to send customers scurrying to the ATM machine at the corner bank across the street.

Working as a combined grillman/bartender took some getting used to for Gibson. In the fourteen years since high school, he had bounced around a lot of restaurant kitchens, but this was the first place where he had worked behind the bar and around customers. When he first took the job, he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to put up with the patrons’ bullshit, but he had been doing it for more than a year now without any major hassles.

Gibson only worked the lunch shift, and most of the customers he dealt with were generally all right: low-key folks from the neighborhood or from the offices on 15th Street, most of whom would rather read a book or paper than talk anyway. But according to Williamson, who had worked dinners at the Shelbourne for a nearly a decade, an increasing number of twenty-somethings had been stopping in at night for a cheap tune-up, in part because of City Paper ads placed by Barry, the young owner who had inherited the place from his father around eight months earlier.

Gibson had dealt with some of these kids during his afternoon shifts. He found most of them impatient and a couple of them obnoxious, but so far he had managed to keep things in check. The tips, which cooks never saw at most restaurants, gave him a reason to watch his temper. And that motivation had intensified since he learned five months ago that his apartment building was turning into co-ops. Now, his only chance of holding onto his place, the place he had lived in ever since his mom passed away a decade ago, was if he came up with the down payment by the end of the month.

He stood at the end of the bar and poured himself a cup of coffee.The tables were all empty and so was the bar, except for McManus, the college kid that Gibson had just carried all through the lunch shift. He was a preppy little snot who moved in slow motion behind the bar and didn’t even care enough to cut a sandwich on a bias. The word was that he had been hired because he was a family friend of the owner. That seemed logical, because Barry wasn’t much older than McManus and, in Gibson’s eyes, was just as worthless. Barry was probably locked in his upstairs office at that very moment, jerking off as usual to a copy of Golf Digest.

Gibson looked down the bar at McManus, who was reading the sports section with his crisp red Nationals cap turned backwards on his head. Asswipe didn’t even know enough to go home after punching out on a beautiful Friday afternoon. He looked up at Gibson and waved his empty Budweiser bottle.

“Gibster, can I get another one of these?”

Gibson, who was half-heartedly filling the salt and peppers, sighed and rolled his eyes. “Fine with me if you want to drink up your tips.” He grabbed a beer from the cooler and put it in front of McManus, who nodded and said, “That lunch shift sucked today, didn’t it?”

“You’re telling me. Seventeen dollars in tips ain’t working for me.”

“I heard that,” said McManus. “Not when I’m only making ten bucks an hour.”

Gibson walked back toward him. “Did you say ten bucks an hour?”

“Yeah, man, can you believe that? I tried to get more out of Barry but he wasn’t budging. Said that’s the max for a starting cook.” He turned back to his newspaper, not noticing the color rising in Gibson’s face.

Just then, as if on cue, Barry appeared on the stairway.

“Gibson, where’s Karen?” he asked, as he sauntered toward the bar.

“She took off twenty minutes ago.”

“She left already? Who the hell told her she could do that?”

“I guess I thought you did,” said Gibson.

Barry turned his back, began walking to the stairway, and called out over his shoulder, “Come up to my office. Now.” Gibson hung back for a few minutes, refilling the tooth-pick containers so he could gather his thoughts. Then he walked upstairs, knocked on the door, and pushed it open. Barry pulled his feet off the desk and tried to pretend he had been doing paperwork. But Gibson saw the Sporting News peeking out from under the spreadsheets.

“So, did you and Karen even think of asking me before she took off?”

“I told you: I thought she had cleared it with you.”

“Bullshit.” Barry stood up, turned his back, and pretended to swing a club at a golf ball. “It’s too late for me to do anything about it at this point, Gibson. But I’ve got paperwork to do, so I’m not gonna help you if you get in the weeds.”

Gibson stared at him in disbelief, thinking, This idiot is probably five years younger than I am. He’s got a big-ass college ring, a fifty-dollar haircut, and a dive restaurant that his daddy bought him, but he doesn’t know the difference between a saucepan and a colander. And he doesn’t know how lucky he is that I don’t smack that smirk off his face.

“It’s gonna stay slow, Barry. I can handle it,” he said. “Anyway, I thought you’d appreciate it. I’ve been here since 10 a.m.”

“Oh yeah? You’ve been here since 10? Guess what? I’ll be here until we lock the doors at 10 p.m. tonight, and then for another hour closing up. So please don’t tell me what I’m going to appreciate. What I’ll appreciate is if the waitresses wait on the tables and the cooks do the cooking.” He turned and eyeballed Gibson. “You’re a mess, too. Put on a clean apron. And from now on, shave before you come to work.” He momentarily turned back to his paperwork, then looked up at Gibson as he stood there, seething. “Something else?”

“Yeah. Actually, there is. How come that little shit down there is making two bucks more an hour than I am?”

Barry inhaled deeply, his eyes narrowing. “Why is it your business what anyone else is making?”

“Because I’m supposed to be the head lunch cook. I’ve been here for a year now and I’ve never missed a shift. That kid is just here for his summer break.”

“That kid works half as many hours as you and is saving for college.”

“By drinking Budweisers at 2 in the afternoon at my bar?”

“Gibson, it’s my bar, and unless you’re ready to punch out for good, you better get your ass behind it right now.”

Gibson shook his head in disbelief. “You know that’s not right, Barry.”

Barry sat back down at his desk and again leaned over his imaginary paperwork. “The only thing I know is that you better leave my office now, Gibson.”

Gibson didn’t close the door behind him as he left the room. Downstairs, McManus was gone, and three singles were under his empty longneck — just enough to cover the staff price of his two beers.

Everything went fine for the first half hour or so. Three parties filtered through and Gibson made an extra eleven bucks. He sipped his coffee, felt a tingle across his forehead from the caffeine, and thought about his plight. He took out of his back pocket the folded up piece of paper he’d carried for five months, with the scrawled figures that traced his pursuit of the elusive down payment.

Just then a party of four banged through the front door. Two lantern-jawed young men with a blonde and brunette, all in their early twenties and still in their work clothes. The guys had loosened their ties. The girls wore unflattering suits, but Gibson quickly noticed they had opened their blouses a button or two.

Gibson had seen the two guys in there before. They dressed like little Congressmen but he could still smell the frat house on them. He figured they had gotten off early from their jobs on Capitol Hill, since they were all suited up when the rest of the young D.C. work force sported the casual Friday look most summer weekdays. Gibson silently cursed the recent Roll Call article about D.C.’s cheap watering holes. Most of the Hill rats were harmless enough, but these two guys were definitely the types who thought they owned the world just because they worked for self-serving blowhards who qualified as celebrities in D.C.

Because Gibson was going to be solo for another hour and a half, he waved them to a table at the back of the room, near the bar. That way, he wouldn’t have to run to the length of the floor and back to fetch their drinks and food. But they plopped themselves down at the booth that was farthest from him, in the front of the restaurant, pulling a chair from another table so one of the guys could spread out at the end of the table.

Gibson walked over to their table to drop off menus and get their drink order.

“How’re you all doing today?” he asked.

“Bring us four Sam Adams,” said the one of the kids, without even looking at Gibson. He had what sounded to Gibson like a Massachusetts accent. He was chunky, but looked comfortable and confident in his suit and tie. Like the other kid, he was sporting that short hairstyle Gibson was starting to detest, where the hair was combed forward and sloped up in front.

“And two orders of onion rings,” said his friend, a taller, thinner kid who somehow managed to look down his nose at Gibson even while sitting at a table. “We’ll order the rest when you get back.” No pleases thank yous

I’ve seen this act before, thought Gibson. They’re going to show off for their girls by acting like big-timers. In a god-damn burger joint.

While he wrote down their order, he noticed the brunette checking out the thick homemade tattoo on the thumb webbing of his left hand. Gibson wished he could change lots of things in his life, but this tattoo wasn’t one of them. He did it himself the day before his mom’s funeral, with just a broken ink pen and a needle with thread tightened around the tip. He was proud of its clarity and proud that he had used his mom’s initials — D.G — instead of the much less inspired MOM

Back at the bar, he threw two bowlfuls of onion rings into the fryer basket and slipped it into the hot oil. When he placed their beers in front of them, the junior Kennedy didn’t look up from his story. “…So this stupid constituent actually thought the Congressman was the one who had replied to his letter.” He smirked. “As if.”

A few minutes later, Gibson returned with their steaming onion rings. This time, the kid interrupted his story long enough to say, “Why don’t you just bring us another round now? And quarters for the jukebox.” He handed him two singles, and a long afternoon got longer.

They ordered their food, and while Gibson threw the burgers on the grill and garnished their plates, two more tables walked through the door — both deuces. But the kids from the Hill continued to act like Gibson was their personal servant, keeping him running for rounds of beer, mustard, napkins. Their empties piled up in the middle of the table, but they wouldn’t let him clear the bottles because they wanted everyone to see how many beers they had pounded. And when he went to take away their plates, they didn’t help him out at all, instead making him go through contortions to get around the bottles to the dishes.

Gibson dumped the dishes in the bus pan behind the bar and leaned against the beer cooler. He clenched his jaw and breathed hard through his nose. I’m a cook, not a waiter, he thought. In almost every kitchen he had worked in before coming to the Shelbourne, the cook was the king. As long as the plates went out full and came back empty, nobody gave a shit if he had an occasional temper tantrum. And he never had to put up with haughty, demanding customers — only the occasional bitchy waitress, which was easy enough to squelch by slowing down their orders until they learned who was boss.

Now, because he was saving for a down payment, he had to grin and bear insults from the same sort of dickheads who were driving up prices all through the neighborhood? Gibson’s stomach churned as he went to wait on another table. The taller kid from the Hill called out “Yo!” to him as he walked by, then held up his beer and pointed to it. Gibson signaled “one minute” to the new table, turned around, and went back behind the bar. He pulled out a cold one and brought it to the guy. Before Gibson could hustle off to wait on the other table, the brunette said, “I’ll have another one, too.”

“Okay,” Gibson said, breathing deeply. “Anyone else ready?”

They all ignored him, as Junior, who was making his move on the blonde, launched into another story.

Gibson hustled behind the bar and brought the brunette her beer. As he started to move off to the table that was waiting, Junior looked up from the blonde long enough to say, “I’ll have another beer, too.”

Gibson was just about to lose his temper, when he looked over at the table and saw the tall kid elbow the brunette. They were both giggling like grade-schoolers. At first Gibson thought it was only because they were getting a load on. But then he realized that the guys were busting his balls and keeping him running on purpose. They thought he was here for their amusement.

He looked hard at the tall kid and then at the jerks who surrounded him. He knew that in a just world this was where he told Junior and his buddy what he thought of them and their idiotic gelled hair, right before he made them bob for apples in the deep fat fryer. But instead, he clenched his jaw and thought about how big their check was and how much he needed the tip. Somehow, he managed to walk away to wait on the other table.

The rest of the shift was no better. By the time Williamson arrived to relieve him, Merle Haggard was blasting and Junior and the blonde were dancing awkwardly in the narrow aisle by the jukebox. No one ever danced at the Shelbourne. Gibson had to slide around them, loaded with dishes, every time he went to a table. His shirt was soaked with sweat and stained with ketchup.

Williamson took one look at him and said, “Rough one, huh?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” he replied through clenched teeth.

He finished up all his parties while Williamson restocked the garnishes behind the bar. The big party asked Gibson for their check and he brought it to them with a forced smile. It totalled $104 — not much for four people who had been eating and drinking for a few hours, but a lot for the Shelbourne, where a burger cost only six bucks. When he got back behind the bar, he watched the guys look long and hard at the check, trying to focus on it.

The table bucked up. It took them awhile. He walked over and they handed him the check and a thick mess of bills. “I’ll be right back with your change,” he said.

They were already getting up from the table. “It’s all yours, sport,” said the tall one, who actually slapped him on the back. Gibson thanked them.

He got back behind the bar to the register and counted it, facing the bills out of habit. He counted it once, then again, thinking that some bills must have been stuck together. There was $112 in his hand. Eight bucks on 104. Not even ten percent, after what they put him through.

He walked fast to the front door, pulling his apron over his head as he went. By the time he got to the street, they were nowhere in sight. He continued to look for a few minutes, then went back inside the restaurant and into the kitchen to calm down.

Willie B., the prep guy, had just started his shift, and was slicing and peeling a bag full of fat white Georgia onions. A Backyard Band go-go tune blasted from a flour-covered boom box on the shelf above his stainless steel prep table. Gibson stormed past him and was about to punch out and head home. But instead he turned and barreled up the stairs to the office.

Barry opened the door and looked up at him. “Everything all right?”

“Yo man, you gotta do something for me!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Barry, you gotta give me more money or start giving me some good night shifts. I need money and you owe me.”

Barry’s eyes narrowed. “How do you figure that?”

“You’ve been underpaying me since I’ve been here. I’m telling you, I need money, man! They’re gonna kick me out of my apartment.”

“Now you listen to me, Gibson. I don’t owe you shit. I offered you eight bucks an hour on good faith and you accepted it. And as for better shifts…” He hesitated, then took a breath and said, “Listen, Gibson, I don’t want to be any crueler about this than I have to. But you’re lucky I even let you behind the bar on day shifts. You’re really not the type of guy I want out in the front of the house with the kind of customers I’m starting to get at this place.”

“What’re you saying?” said Gibson. “You’ve—”

“Gibson, just call it a day. Go home and think about whether you want this job — the way I’ve set it up. If you come back Monday, I’ll know you do. If not… honestly, I don’t give a flying fuck.”

Gibson crossed Thomas Circle and trudged through the neighborhood. A woman with a broken flower in her tangled hair sat on the wall of Luther Place Memorial Church, belting out a song that Gibson didn’t recognize. He walked past brick town houses and an apartment building with a sign that read “Starting in the low-400s!” as if that were something to be excited about. Office workers and tourists didn’t bother with this part of 14th Street, but for Gibson it was home, and it bothered him that even here a new upscale furniture store was bumping up against his favorite chicken joint.

He got home around 6:30, went straight into the bedroom, and threw a wad of bills on top of his worn dresser. Not counting his hourly, he ended up making sixty-two dollars, which was more than he thought he’d end up with when he headed out in the morning. But all he could think about was the platter of shit sandwiches he was force-fed all day by those fucking Hill punks and that asshole Barry.

He climbed into a hot shower. His skin tingled, then got used to the burning spray. As the water ran over his head, a rank smell of burgers and fryer grease filled the shower stall, like he was one of those freeze-dried meals you eat while camping. He ran the water full blast on his head for a couple more minutes until the smell disappeared. But the steam couldn’t ease his anger and shame, or the pressure he felt behind his eyes.

He had to get out of the apartment, so he slogged down 14th toward Franklin Square. On the way, he dropped into a small liquor store for a forty-ounce beer. With his back to K Street, he sat down on a bench in the square, staring at the towering statue of John Barry in his cape and commodore’s hat. After five months of near sobriety, the beer tasted incredible.

While Gibson drank from the bottle, which was still wrapped in brown paper, he looked up at the office buildings surrounding the square, and then at the new luxury apartment building on 14th. He thought about the home where he had grown up in Arlington, right across Key Bridge. His old man, an honest, hard-working guy, had lost that place — and killed his wife’s spirit in the process — by running up around $15,000 in debt. Twenty years later, even a small bungalow there went for more than half a million. Where’s the fairness in that, Gibson wondered.

He watched a skeletal man with a scraggly beard rifle through a trashcan, and thought for the fiftieth time that day about the money he had to come up with by the end of the month. Gibson finally admitted to himself that there was no way he would be able to raise enough scratch in time.

He was restless, so he walked a block along K, stopped in at A-1 Wines and Liquors for another forty, and grabbed a bench at McPherson Square. Across the park he saw a man huddled inside a dirty hooded sweatshirt next to a mis-matched set of Samsonite luggage and a stuffed black trash bag. Over his shoulder, straight down Vermont, the top half of the Washington Monument was visible above a clump of trees. The streetlights cast an eerie hue over the park. Gibson leaned back, stretched out his tired legs, and sipped slowly from the bottle. Late-night businessmen and tourists from the nearby hotels avoided him as they crossed through the circle, on their way to the subway stop on the corner.

A little past 10:30, he polished off his third forty. He had been doing numbers in his head again, thinking about how many hours he had worked over the past year at the Shelbourne. At forty hours a week for roughly fifty weeks, he calculated that he’d put in around 2,000 hours over the past year. He multiplied that by the two bucks an hour that he figured Barry had cheated him out of, and arrived at the tidy sum of $4,000. Money that he could have easily saved. Money that would have enabled him to reach his down payment.

He twisted the open end of the damp brown bag tight around the thin neck of the empty bottle. He reckoned that $4,000 might be in the range of what the Shelbourne was going to do that day, since they rang nearly a grand on a decent lunch and at least two or three times that on a Friday night.

He crossed K Street and walked slowly back toward the restaurant, still grasping the heavy, empty bottle by the neck through the bag. Across the street from the Shelbourne, he found a spot, half submerged in shadow and half lit by a streetlamp, which gave him a good view of the front door. A few minutes after 11:00, the restaurant’s interior lights went out. Barry emerged and pulled the heavy wooden door shut tight behind him.

Gibson knew that Barry’s backpack contained the zippered bag that the owner slipped into the bank’s night deposit slot each evening. Barry double-checked the lock on the front door, then crossed the quiet street to walk the half-block to the bank. Gibson stepped back fully into the darkness.

Barry’s footsteps grew louder as he approached, the heels of his boots clapping on the sidewalk. Soon he was inches from Gibson, his eyes focused straight ahead. As Barry passed, Gibson moved out behind him and swung the bottle violently, connecting with the back of Barry’s head. To Gibson, things seemed to be moving in soothing slow motion. Blood jumped into the light of the streetlamp, and Barry’s body thudded to the ground.

Gibson’s heart beat rubbery in his chest, but he was otherwise calm as he reached for the backpack lying beside Barry’s still form. The colors on the street were vibrant and clear. The night breeze was pleasant on his face.

For the first time that day, Gibson felt at peace. His headache, and the weight upon his shoulders, had lifted.

The messenger of Soulsville by Norman Kelley

Cardozo, N.W.

Connie D’Ambrosio rose from her slumber and slowly rubbed her tingly right ass cheek. Normally she would have smiled remembering the sensation from the powerful slaps her posterior had welcomed the night before; she would have looked at herself in the full-length mirror and marveled at the reddish splotches on her rump. Connie had told her new lover, Douglas, that this was the only thing that carried over in her blood from Sicily, it having been invaded by the Moors, George S. Patton, and others over the centuries.

She was proud of her Mediterranean heritage, especially with people like Fellini, Sophia Loren, and Marcello Mastroianni on the world scene. Her olive complexion, a hint of melanin, meant she could pass for anything from the old, Old World: Arab, Jew, Spaniard, Greek, a southern-coast French woman, or even a Gypsy. With a head full of deep curls and raven-black hair, she knew that she was one generation away from not being considered white. When she had explained to Douglas the previous night the numerous ways in which Italian-Americans had been discriminated against (before becoming officially designated as “white” like Jews and Slavs), he merely smiled and gave her some serious tongue, working her in a way that only a saxophone player could.

But this morning there was a new sensation. It wasn’t the morning afterglow from their lovemaking, or even the receding skin-burn of a wondrous butt-slapping. No. This was an extremely localized sensation pinpointed just below the curve of her luscious right ass cheek.

She instinctively reached for the bed’s linen, only to discover that no sheets or blankets were covering her. Then she felt something else over her: burlap. She was wearing a burlap gown? The texture of the cloth almost made her ill. The thought of such a vulgar fabric touching her skin, covering her body, was beyond the pale. The finest linen, fabrics of the highest order, had graced her since birth. Constance D’Ambrosio was to the manor born: one built on the numerous misfortunes of former associates of her father, Carmine D’Ambrosio, a businessman of indeterminate affairs.

Sensing something was wrong, she rolled over to reach for the night lamp on the evening table. The cold concrete smacked her hard as she hit the floor.

“I don’t like this fucking dream,” she moaned in her Jersey-girl accent that only revealed itself under the most extreme circumstances. Slowly, she sat up and began collecting her wits, adjusting her eyesight to the darkness. She noticed a shaft of dim light slashing through the room, but what truly caught her attention was a shiny reflection off some polished surface. Two polished surfaces. Within seconds her mind began filling in the blanks and she realized that those surfaces were her shoes.

Connie tried to rise, but her foot slipped, landing her on her rump, shooting pain to the tingly spot. “Damn it.”

“Are you all right?” inquired a man’s voice from over by the shoes.

Connie scrambled backward upon the bed and drew her legs in. “Who are you? What’s going on?”

“Don’t be alarmed,” said the man. “No one is going to hurt you.”

“Where am I?” She lowered her volume. “Where’s Douglas? Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” said the figure sitting quietly in the darkness. “That’s why you were brought here.”

“Then you know who my father is and what he’ll do to anyone who lays a hand on me! He’ll—”

“Does that include Douglas?”

Connie said nothing.

“I’m sure he doesn’t know about Douglas, nor would he approve of your taste for… what do your people call us, mouliani?”

The stains of Connie’s lust were conveyed in a series of photos that the man slid to her across the concrete floor. Though it was dark in the room, she could make out enough of the images to recognize herself in a series of explicit contortions with her black lover. She fleetingly recalled those moments of pleasure, but the wondrous feelings turned to shame and self-recrimination as she imagined her father seeing the photos. Don D’Ambrosio was a man of respect.

“Miss D’Ambrosio,” continued the man from the shadows, “we have a situation that requires your assistance.”

“My assistance?!” she shot back. “You kidnapped me! That’s what this is about, isn’t it? How much do you want? Do you think that you’ll live long enough to get it from my father? He’ll—”

“Not if he sees the photos,” interrupted the voice. It was cool and cunning. Connie had become familiar with the timbre of black men’s voices, and he sounded like one, only educated.

The photos meant blackmail. He was right: Her father would have a genuinely violent reaction if he saw them. Whatever situation she was in, she would have to get herself out of it.

“What is it that you want?”

“This is a delicate situation, Miss D’Ambrosio. We want you to call your father.”

“What?” She shook her head in bewilderment. “No.” The fear had set in. She knew the consequences of breaching her family’s honor.

“Your father has taken something that belongs to another man, and he wants it returned.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re a hostage, Miss D’Ambrosio. Your father and his associates have taken something that doesn’t belong to them, and the rightful owners want it back. At the right time, all you have to do is make a phone call to your father and ask him to return it. Nothing else will be required of you; you’ll get the photos and negatives.”

“Return what?” replied the woman. “I wake up in a sack and you hold me responsible for something I didn’t take?!”

The man stood and stepped back into the deeper shadows of the room. She heard him knock three times on a door, then a dead bolt sliding.

“Sophia Devereaux.”

“What? Who the hell is tha — Hey!”

The light that entered the room was quickly extinguished, but it silhouetted the man’s lean body in a dark suit as he left.

“Wait!” She rushed to the door, almost tripping over the burlap gown. “Look, I’ll do it!” She pounded with her small fists. “Just get me some clothes! Get me some real clothes! GET ME SOME REAL CLOTHES!”

Dr. Minister Mallory Rex’s footsteps echoed through the cavernous basement as he made his way past the warren of rooms to the stairs leading him away from the devil’s bitch that the Messenger had instructed him to cage. When he got to the ground floor of Washington, D.C.’s Temple of Ife No. 1, he told the chief sister, Maaloulou, to get the captive something better than burlap.

“After all, she is our guest, and we Afrikans always attend to our guests’ needs. As is our custom.”

“As is our custom,” replied the dark woman dressed in white from head to toe, then she bowed her head.

The doctor minister continued through the temple, nodding to the other brothers and sisters he passed as he thought about the situation that had been handed him. And he thought the situation was beneath him.

Dr. Minister Mallory Rex made them feel proud. He was a former officer in the United States Marine Corps, a war hero cashiered for sleeping with a fellow officer’s wife — a yacoub’s bitch. He had fallen within the white man’s military, but had risen and moved forward with a new mission after reading Dr. Isaiah Afrika’s words in Rise Ye Mighty Race: A Message to the New Blackman Dr. Isaiah Afrika had laid the foundation for the Original Kingdom of Afrika based on a conflation of Yoruba and Islam: Izlam. Now it was the relentless recruiting, mesmerizing telegenic appearances, and stylistic zeal of Dr. Rex that captivated the faithful and put fear into the hearts of yacoubs, the nation of white devils. And who knew their trickery and deceitfulness better than one who had served faithfully during his years as a “lost Negro” nigorant but loyal, as the Messenger of Izlam once said of the sleeping blacks he called the “walking dead.”

Thus far the operation had gone according to plan. The she-devil, while taking her lusts, was unaware that her new lover, Douglas, a follower of the Original Kingdom of Afrika, was under orders to bring her in. Inebriated, she didn’t feel a thing, thinking she was being pinched and stroked, when he inserted a small needle into her rumptious tush, putting her soundly to sleep. Hiding her inside his double-bass case, Douglas wheeled her from his apartment on 16th Street onto U Street, in the direction of the temple near the corner of 14th. No one would have thought anything was untoward, certainly not a colored musician rolling his instrument down a street of clubs, southern fried joints, and gut-bucket gospel storefronts. These establishments stretched west from the Howard Theater area to the social axis of U and 14th streets, the heart of Soulsville. It was the center of “third places,” the loci between work and home for the city’s colored population, the best place for the Temple of Ife to recruit the walking dead.

Dr. Rex knocked on the double doors leading to the Messenger’s meditation chamber and waited for the word. Upon hearing it, he removed his shoes, entered a large room with a gurgling fountain in the center, and bowed to the figure in white who sat divining the wisdom of Olodumare with cowrie shells.

“May our Lord and Father be with you,” said Rex.

“And He unto you, my son,” answered the Messenger, without looking up. He counted several shells and moved them around. “It’s been written that you have received some wisdom.”

“Yes,” said Rex, who walked over to the old man’s desk and pressed a button. Water ushered forth from the fountain more loudly.

[FBI Agent 1: Damn it, that smart-assed nigger turned up the volume again.

FBI Agent 2: Hoover is going to have our butts if we bring in more flushing toilets!]

Rex placed himself in front of the man who had made blackness a badge of honor. For untold minutes the master and teacher uttered not a word, letting the sound of water wash over them and empty their heads.

Rex slowly opened his eyes and presented a koan to the Messenger: “Why?”

The old man said nothing at first, his dried lips unparted. The student knew something was coming by the way the old man’s Adam’s apple began to move above his collar.

“Because the Blackman has to become a man of respect.”

Man of respect, thought Rex as he crossed U Street, stopping by Brother’s Shoe Shine Shop to pick up a copy of the Evening Star.

“Good seeing you, brother minister,” said Herman, the legless newsie, looking up to Rex from his platform affixed to four wheels. Herman had always considered himself half a man until he met Dr. Minister Mallory Rex, the only black man in America who truly confronted the devils. He and the denizens of Soulsville, while most of them God-fearing Christians, had welcomed back the black prince from exile after his intemperate remarks brought the Kingdom scorn and opprobrium during the nation’s mourning of the white devils’ fallen leader. He had been cast aside for nearly a year, watching lesser men attempt to claim his position, “trying to rap like Rex” but falling flat on their faces. The Kingdom’s numbers were down. Recruitment had flattened, and the coffers were less than full. It was Rex who added a kind of severe glamour and dash to the humorless black men in white robes who preached Izlam on the street corners of America’s urban bantustans while Uncle Tom ministers called for reconciliation and integration. It was the “mighty Rex” who the brothers proclaimed “cool and slick,” and who the sister women, O.K.A. and not, wished would park his shoes beneath their beds.

Rex understood his new mission: He was on a test. Would he do the dirty work of the Kingdom?

“Peace,” he said to the half-man.

As he walked toward his appointment, the prince of Soulsville observed that U Street was having its streetcar tracks removed — a sign that the sleepy little city was maturing. The Metropolitan Board was laying down the beginnings of a subway system like New York’s.

This stretch of northwest D.C., from 11th Street west to 18th, had seen better days. It was, as one book Rex had read suggested, its own “secret city.” Earlier, a better tone of Negroes had resided there, but the influx of rough-and-umble Southern blacks had changed the place and driven them away. It now had the odor of real people; it was a place of beauty parlors, fried hair, and big-hipped bouffant-do sisters. Men still wore hats but the new looks, the “James Brown” process and the “Afro,” were making barbers anxious. There was a different mood in the air; the elders called it “funky” and the youths ran with it. Soul Brother No. 1 had announced a “brand-new bag,” and civil-rights cats working for SNCC hung out at Ben’s Chili Bowl, with kids constantly coming in and out of the three cinemas along the way: the Lincoln, the Republic, and the Booker T.

D.C. was different. D.C. was country, and that meant a slower sense of reality — colored people time, heightened by the lush foliage of the area and its legendary humidity. The whole city had the feel of a village since the buildings were no more than three stories high in residential areas and ten or less in the commercial districts. It was a chocolate city, a city in which over seventy percent of the population was colored, invisible to the master class that lived there and ignored by the indifferent tourists visiting the national edifices.

But D.C. was also a city of an aspiring middle class that was branching out from Le Droit Park, Shaw, and U Street, to the tree-shaded “Gold Coast” of upper 16th Street. There resided the “big-ticket Negroes” that Rex rallied against in the oasis of Meridian Hill Park, cited in the past as one of the most beautiful landscaped parks in the country. On a warm spring day, when the heat brought out the richness in colored people’s skin, making them glow, the Original Kingdom of Afrika would hold its annual Kingdom’s Day in this park, creating a huge Afrikan village in the heart of bourgie D.C. Hundreds of vendors would lay out their wares in stalls, and it was at the Groove Records pavilion on Kingdom’s Day that Dr. Minister Mallory Rex had first met Sophia Devereaux.

And he well remembered her when he slid into the booth at Ben’s Chili Bowl across from her brother, Lorenzo Devereaux. Rex told the record producer that phase one had been completed and that the Messenger approved of the recording that Groove Records was making of his speeches.

Ten years younger than the man facing him, Lorenzo Devereaux shifted the conversation to the real agenda for the meeting: the mob’s encroachment on all that his family had achieved. Groove Records had been on a steady roll of soul and sweaty R&B hit records since the 1950s, and these days even the “legit” labels were salivating over their work, wondering how they were doing it: making music and money. Now these wop bastards thought they could just walk in and take over their company because “niggers ain’t shit and had no protection.”

Three days earlier, Lorenzo had met with his step-mother and half-brother, Leon, to discuss the family crisis. Sophia, his half-sister, had been kidnapped by the Gambino family of New Jersey, headed by Carmine D’Ambrosio.

“We need to get some back-up,” Lorenzo urged. “We’re going to get some black people who aren’t afraid of the mob.”

O.K.A.

“Are you crazy!!” Leon had recently assumed the position of president of Groove Records and did not like the idea at all. He wanted to call in the police.

“Yeah, sure,” said Lorenzo, stubbing out his Chesterfield in an ashtray. “Go to the cops, the FBI, the same people who been spying on Daddy and Mama for years! I say we handle this way. I have a contact with the Kingdom.”

“You’re crazy, man!” Leon protested.

But Leon had no real plan other than calling the police. Either capitulate or ask the cops to handle it. It wasn’t fair, he thought. He was just supposed to handle record deals, make money, cruise around in his Cadillac, and go to bed with red-bone lovelies… and show up his bastard half-brother, Lorenzo. In Leon’s eyes, Lo resented the fact that their father had chosen him to run the firm, despite the fact that Leon’s own mother thought the half-brother should be at the helm. Perhaps Lo was more competent as an executive, but doesn’t blood — full blood — count for something?

Betty Lou Compton, the legendary jazz pianist and composer, the woman who had rescued Groove from the dark days of the Red Scare, was silent. This was a gamble. Her daughter’s life, certainly more important than the record company, was in the balance. Yet she understood, as did Lorenzo, that the kidnapping was a form of humiliation, that a family such as the Devereaux could not fully protect itself on its own. The police and the FBI would likely be indifferent, given the accusations the bureau had made against them in the past. They wouldn’t even protect those poor civil-rights demonstrators who were beaten during freedom rides in the South. It was rumored that Hoover thought Martha Reeves’s “Dancing in the Streets” was an underground call for riots and demonstrations.

“Mama!” said Leon, who could see that her slow response to shutting down the crazy idea meant she was considering it. “We’re talking about Sophia. Lo can talk all that foolishness about the Kingdom, but she ain’t his sister.”

“Lorenzo has been just as much of a brother to her as you,” defended his mother. “I don’t recall you changing her diapers, mister. When have you ever taken a real interest in anyone in this family? You got your position as the president of Groove, but the first sign of trouble…? You’re willing to cut a deal with them!”

“We’re talking about the Mafia!” said Leon.

“And they bleed like anyone else,” countered Lorenzo. “I know how we can checkmate them.”

“How?! How you gonna do that? Huh? We only have a few days for Sophia—”

The door opened and in wheeled Rayford Devereaux, the wounded Lear who had retired as the founding president of Groove Records years ago to work on his book. When Betty Lou had recently decided to leave the company’s helm to return to composing, that’s when the mob had spotted something fat and unprotected for the taking.

“What are you two arguing over now?” asked Rayford as he approached them. The very sight of their father in a wheel chair underscored how his two years in prison had broken and discouraged him. He had finally given up, after battling for years to prove that black music was the social glue keeping Negroes together.

No one had yet mentioned to him that the center of his heart had been stolen.

“Daddy,” said Lorenzo, “something has happened.” Lorenzo peered around the room and his eyes settled on Leon, who, as the chief executive of Groove Records, ought to be the bearer of bad news. Leon looked away.

“Sophia has been kidnapped,” said Lorenzo.

Their father’s white eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead as he turned to his wife, who only nodded yes.

“Who?”

“The mob. Carmine D’Ambrosio,” replied Betty Lou. “They have given us seventy-two hours to make a decision. They want to be our, uhm, partners.”

“You mean our masters,” corrected her husband. He turned to the CEO of his patrimony. “What’s your plan, son?”

“Plan? Uh…” Leon stammered.

“You got something up your sleeve or not?!”

“Daddy, it’s the mob,” explained Leon. “They just want the company — parts of it.”

“I’ll give them every bit of money we have to get my baby girl back, but they ain’t getting their hands on this firm! No deal.”

“They’ll kill her…” started Leon, shocked at his father’s ruthlessness. He thought it had been drained out of him.

Rayford Devereaux looked at his son and realized at that very moment that he had made a terrible mistake. Leon saw Groove Records only as a business, not an empire or dynasty, certainly not a way of life, a trust. He himself may have been a tired old nigger in the eyes of many, but he had become such the old way: arrested by the government and beaten in jail because he refused to denounce some of his artists as Communist. He spent two years in jail for Contempt of Congress, and many a patriotic Negro had stomped his ass in bids for early release.

“Son, this is a ship, the USS Groove, and we’re officers. We go down with the ship. Money? Let them Italian crackers have it, but they will not get this company. Not even over Sophia’s body! This is our heritage.”

Leon gaped at his mother.

Betty, however, saw a miracle: Her husband was back. The old Rayford Devereaux, who won her heart forty years before when she was a college student under his tutelage, had empowered her to defy her blues-hating, preacher-crazy father. That man had re-emerged… but at the price of her daughter?

“Lorenzo has an idea, Ray,” said Betty. “It’s risky.”

“Hell,” said Rayford, “if Kennedy could risk the goddamn world over Cuba and make the Russians pull their missiles out of Dodge, I’ll take a chance.”

“Yeah, for your record company,” muttered Leon.

Lorenzo told his father the idea: Call in the Original Kingdom of Afrika. Seeing that the new chief executive of Groove Records had no other idea or plan, Rayford Devereaux dispatched Lorenzo to the temple immediately. Time was tight.

“WHAT?” said Jimmy Falco. “Are you sure?… Damn. Okay… Yeah, I see… I understand… Right. Gotcha.”

Jimmy “the Hydrant” hung up the pay phone at a Maryland rest stop just outside of the District line. He watched the cars along the highway and couldn’t shake off what he’d heard. He had to whack the bitch. It was fortunate that he had brought along Ricci, the sick bastard. It was one thing to follow orders, but Ricci was the kind of sick fuck who actually enjoyed hurting people.

Jimmy got into his black Buick and returned to the place where he and Ricci were keeping the colored gal. When he had first heard the assignment, he was excited. Wow, he thought, the daughter of the owners of his favorite R&B label. Jimmy loved R&B; his hero, from his own tribe, was Louis Prima, the Italian-American who sounded colored because he had grown up in New Orleans. As a street-corner boy, one of the last Italians who lived in East Harlem before the spics took it over, Jimmy Falco had sung on stoops with his group, Spics & Spades. Darker than most Italians, he passed for PR, and fucked as many of them as he did Italian gals. Colored women? Shit, he couldn’t get enough: sweet, dark butter.

After the two hoods grabbed the girl blocks away from Howard University earlier that week, they had driven out to Maryland and put a lid on her. She was scared crazy. She should be. Ricci was as big as the Hydrant was short, though the latter was in charge. Five-foot-four, one hundred seventy pounds of muscle and man, Jimmy was on the rise as a soldier and future crew leader; he followed orders, but did so with style and stealth. Whenever he put some sucker to sleep, he carried out his assignment as painlessly as possible.

But whacking a dame? Orders were orders. The business transaction didn’t go right, and something new had come up.

When he turned the bend onto the gravel road, he could see stars winking at him through the trees above. The air was clean, unlike stinky New York. He parked, then pulled his squat muscular body out of the car, lit a Camel, and trudged toward the little bungalow. He would give Ricci the order to waste her. When he reached the door, he knocked on it three times but heard nothing. He looked around, placed his hand on his heater, and knocked again. Still no response. He put his ear to the door and listened.

That motherfucker.

Jimmy darted around to the side of the bungalow and peeked into the window of the bedroom where the hostage was being kept. Ricci, a towering hulk, was having his way with the girl, who was sitting on the bed with her arms and legs bound.

Jimmy cursed himself for leaving Ricci with her. Ricci had talked about doing something to her, but they both knew that anything untoward with a hostage was strictly forbidden unless sanctioned by the don.

Now, Jimmy had an extremely serious disciplinary problem on his hands; it was a good thing that Ricci wasn’t a “made” man. The Hydrant went to the back door and quietly jimmied the lock. Crossing the room without a sound, he pulled out his silencer and affixed it to his piece.

When Ricci heard his name, he knew instantly he was dead. But reflex action made him go for his holster. The Hydrant plugged him four times: one in the head, two to his heart, and the fourth blew off his putz.

The colored gal screamed her head off until Jimmy told her to shut up and pulled her into the living room. She was in shock, having been struck a few times by Ricci before he molested her.

Exhausted and disoriented, Jimmy decided to report the sudden turn of events. Jimmy untied her legs and told her to grab her shoes. They were heading out.

Back at the rest stop, he parked the car and looked at her.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said. “That was very unprofessional. That’s why he was punished. I have to make a call. If you even try to get out of the car, I’ll have to take care of you the way I took care of him. Do you understand?”

The girl was still in shock but had enough awareness to grasp what the short but handsomely ugly man was saying. Jimmy left the car, made his calls, and was back in. He looked at the colored gal again and thought about what he had to do, something that sickened him.

As they approached D.C., two other cars joined them and they drove together to Union Station. Late at night, under the sleepy eyes of indifferent travelers, an exchange was made: a life for a life.

Connie D’Ambrosio, dressed in a chic Chanel suit, was escorted by Dr. Minister Mallory Rex and his chief lieutenant; keeping security were several well-dressed black men known as the Sword of Izlam. Sophia Devereaux, dressed in the dungaree slacks and red cashmere sweater she had been wearing for days, was escorted by Jimmy the Hydrant; they were backed up by several Gambino hoods.

The two men in charge said nothing. They each nodded, prompting their hostages to cross over to their respective.

Finally, Jimmy spoke: “Mr. D’Ambrosio wishes for me to convey his apologies to the Devereaux family about this misunderstanding, and assures you that it will never happen again.”

“It better not,” came the curt reply from the minister. He turned around, taking Sophia with him, his security team covering their backs.

Both parties vanished as the early morning sun seeped through the large windows of the train station.

Jimmy and two other members of the Gambino family headed north with Connie, who held the photos and negatives in her purse, greatly relieved that the whole situation was over. She talked about the “spades” and how they had kept her locked up. The boring food they served her… how stupid those moulianis were. She carried on for a while in this manner.

The car soon pulled back onto the gravel road and came to a stop at the bungalow. Jimmy, sitting up front, told the driver and the other guy, Marcos, to go inside and collect Ricci’s body, which would be stuffed into the trunk.

The Hydrant didn’t understand what hit him: It was very unprofessional, but he started to cry. He was spent.

“What’s the matter, Jimmy?” asked Connie, who treated the lug as one of many “uncles.”

“Nothing,” he choked. When Connie reached forward to console him, he grabbed her arm and pulled her over the seat before she could feel his stiletto cutting her throat.

“Why?” asked Rex.

The Messenger had sent the photos of Connie D’Ambrosio cavorting with Douglas to her father. The Messenger knew that her father would be compelled to murder her to avenge his honor as a man of respect. The deal was that the young woman would call her father and tell him she was being held in exchange for another person — nothing more.

Rex felt that sending the photos was a betrayal, and that the young woman, though a she-devil, had been needlessly sacrificed. “We gave our word,” he said. “That means something.”

“My son,” reflected the Messenger, feeling triumphant, “you gave your word. Besides, one’s word only means something if the other person is worthy of receiving it.”

As a gift, the Messenger handed Rex a copy of one of his favorite books: Machiavelli’s The Prince

Dr. Minister Mallory Rex withdrew from his teacher’s chamber. He had been firmly reinstated, with good standing, into the O.K.A., and the Messenger’s son, Kwami, would become an executive at Groove Records. But as he walked through the halls of the Temple of Ife No. 1, taking in the admiring gazes of those he passed, the minister wondered what the cost was to his soul, and how long would he keep it.

Time would tell.

The dupe by Jim Fusilli

K Street, N.W.

Though it was not quite 1 o’clock, the Bombay Club was already filled to capacity for Sunday brunch. Its décor reminiscent of a British officers’ lounge in occupied India, the restaurant’s dining room shimmered with the buzz of convivial conversation from the customary mix of Senators, Congressmen, White House aides, K Street lobbyists, TV pundits, and print journalists. The insiders acknowledged each other discretely.

Surrounded by the whiff of coriander and piano jazz played with stately reserve, Jordan Port sat at the bar, his back to the clipped cordiality. He hunched into his camel’s hair topcoat, its collar turned high, incredulous still that Mendes had invited him to where he was no longer welcomed.

Port had known Mendes for decades; he interned under her at the Des Moines Register, and she edited his first book, Restoring the Soul of America, a surprising bestseller that had made him all the more useful in the eyes of his handlers. Though the two had lunch together earlier in the week, he accepted her email invitation to the Bombay Club because he needed her. Taking a circuitous route that revealed his desperation, he arrived at the restaurant two blocks from the White House grounds well aware she was likely his last friend.

Sweating under his violet shirt and black cashmere blazer, Port anxiously surveyed the room through the veined mirror behind the bar. He saw a half dozen people with whom he’d had dinner at their homes, and there were at least that many with whom he had shared a dais at a conference or a podium at a rally.

They are shunning me, he thought. Every one of them.

And all he had done was write a new book, one that could be summarized by what Ronald Reagan said some thirty years ago

“When we begin thinking of government as instead of they, we’ve been here too long.”

“Mr. Port?”

He turned to find a young Indian man, a rail-thin bus-boy.

“Mr. Port,” he said compliantly, “a message, please, from Ms. Mendes. She prefers for you to wait outside.”

Port looked into the man’s dark eyes for a sign of sincerity. He wondered if the restaurant’s manager had been asked to send him elsewhere.

“Please, sir,” said the Indian man with a sweep of his arm. “The lady is waiting.”

Port nodded, left the bar stool, and headed out onto Connecticut Avenue.

He was greeted there by pale sunlight and a sinewy black man who crossed the avenue to approach him. The black man wore a vest with the yellow logo of a company that owned a chain of parking garages. The winter wind rippled the sleeves of his white shirt.

He towered over Port, who was as lithe and delicate as a young teen.

“She’s in Room 523 at the St. Regis,” he said, repeating the room number.

Port shivered and dropped his hands into his coat pockets. “I don’t understand. The St. Regis—”

“Ana Mendes,” he said directly. “You’d better go now.”

Port nodded and began to walk briskly toward I Street.

When Port turned the corner, the valet dashed back across Connecticut Avenue to the garage where the Indian busboy was behind the wheel of a black Cadillac Escalade. The valet removed the uniform top he’d been given and tossed it behind the front seat.

The busboy drove quickly toward I Street, but not so fast as to overtake Port.

The St. Regis was one block away.

Five days earlier, Port was summoned to Off the Record, a clubby bar in the basement of the Hay Adams Hotel. Douglas Weil Jr. was waiting, and with a wave he called him to a cherrywood table set deep in a dark corner. Framed political cartoons and caricatures rested on the wall above Weil’s neat salt-and-pepper hair.

Weil had ordered a 2001 Viognier from a Virginia winery, and he poured Port a glass as his guest crossed the crowded room and eased into the banquette.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Jordie,” he said.

“Always a pleasure, Doug,” he replied cheerfully, concealing his nervousness.

They were both in their mid-forties, but Port’s famed boyishness and Weil’s grinding sense of purpose made them seem years apart.

Before Port could reply, Weil said, “My father is disappointed, Jordie.”

Port waited for Weil to fill his glass before he offered a silent toast.

Weil returned the gesture, though his eyes were slits. “I read the manuscript,” he said, as the glasses met. “You are way, way out of line.”

“What did your father say?” He sipped the delightful wine, a favorite for its taste rich in peaches and apricots, and heady floral bouquet. “He knows we have to take back—”

The thickset Weil leaned toward his guest. “Don’t, Jordie,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I read it. I don’t want to have to hear it.”

Port had known a warning was coming, and he surmised it might be Weil who delivered it. Off the Record, a favorite of the city’s political insiders, was a suitable venue: All of Washington would know he’d been chastised, and thus responsibility for his actions couldn’t be attributed to the American Center for Culture in Communications, of which Doug was president and his father founder and chairman emeritus.

But Port believed Weil could be swayed. “The principles your father shared with President Reagan mean nothing to these people, Doug. You know this.”

Jutted chin hovering above the table candle, Weil said, “Don’t be a simpleton, Jordie. We have what we’ve worked toward for more than thirty years. No one is walking away from it because of you.”

“When Ronald Reagan said a balanced budget was essential to restoring America, Doug, the deficit was $66 billion,” Port continued. “Today, it’s more than ten times that — after Clinton brought it to zero.”

“Jordie…”

The K Street lobbyists and White House staffers who peered with curiosity at the two men couldn’t tell from appearances what they were saying. They saw the twinkle in Port’s pale-blue eyes and his dimpled smile, an expression familiar to millions of Americans from talk shows, book jackets, magazines, and newspapers. All seemed well.

“Middle America is being compelled to act against its own interests,” Port said, as he returned the chilled glass to the table. “They need tax relief, affordable health insurance, a promise fulfilled on Social Security… Doug, the ACCC can help them. We can help—”

“Oh Lord.” Weil sat back, resting his folded hands against his vest.

“We’ve moved light years from what Ronald Reagan believed, and what I believe.”

“Are you kidding?” Weil sat upright and plopped his hands on the table. “Jordie, do you think we give a good god-damn what you believe?”

Port started to reply, but stopped when Weil lifted the bottle to refill his guest’s glass.

“Listen, we plucked you out of the cornfield because we knew you would do what you were told,” Weil said, as the golden wine flowed. “You’ve still got that farm-fed puppy look, but by now, people have been trained to know what’s coming out of your mouth before you open it. Hell, you go off message and they’ll shut you down.”

For effect, Weil laughed, reached across the table, and punched Port on the shoulder with the side of his fist. Not for a moment would he let Port know he was concerned. The manuscript Port had written used Reagan’s words and ideals to challenge the direction the Right had taken since the opportunity of 9/11. Once Mendes massaged the prose and smoothed out his newfound fanaticism, the book would be another Jordan Port bestseller. That could be deadly dangerous, a blueprint for a moderate coalition.

“So here’s how it works, Jordie. We’re going to issue a press release telling people you’re on sabbatical. You’re going up to the cabin our money bought you in the Casper Mountains to write another book. You won’t answer the phone and there’ll be no email. You’ll return when we tell you and we’ll give you your next manuscript.”

“Wait a minute, Doug, I—”

Anticipating the protest, Weil held up his hand. “Don’t worry. Mendes will be involved. She’ll make it sound enough like you.”

“I wrote those books, Doug. You can’t—”

“The words are yours, sure; yours and Mendes’s. But not the ideas.”

Weil took a short sip of the wine he considered pretentious and feminine, holding the glass by its stem.

“If it was up to me, we’d be done with you,” he said, as Port looked on in silence. “But my father likes you. You helped us get Hollywood on board and you helped us turn around the FCC. But the end is in sight if you don’t wise up.”

Port did not so much as blink.

“Think you’d be happy working your way back up to the copy desk in Davenport, Jordie?” Weil asked. “No, I would think not.”

The next day, Port joined Ana Mendes for lunch downstairs at Red Sage, a smart restaurant with a Southwestern theme. He ordered the salmon paillard, and his former mentor the pecan-crusted chicken dusted with red chili. In her briefcase was his latest manuscript, Betraying Ourselves

“Ana, if he could’ve gotten away with it, he would’ve shot me right there,” Port said, sipping the Sancerre he’d ordered.

“Wrung your neck is more like it,” Mendes replied. “Jordie, what were you thinking?”

She recommended him out of college for his first full-time job at the Quad Cities Times. Something about Jordie brought out a tenderness in her, and so they kept in touch and she felt a sense of pride when he became the paper’s film critic. She followed his career when he moved to Fox’s KLJB-TV, and in 1991 she wrote a reference letter to the ACCC. He was telegenic, personable, reasonably bright, and she knew Ronald Reagan was his hero. A true believer, he’d be a perfect public face for Douglas Weil’s political action committee.

Some years later, she asked one of Weil’s lawyers why they’d decided on Jordan Port.

He fit the profile, she was told. His father, a son of a Roosevelt Democrat, was described as aloof and unsympathetic, and he died when Port was nine years old. In turn, Port spent his school days and early career in an unwitting search for praise and validation, particularly from older, plainspoken men. They knew he’d adore Douglas Weil, whose warm, folksy manner belied his cunning and drive.

The clincher was his behavior as a film critic. Port gulped down every perk offered by every studio, from a sixty-nine-cent pen to a flight to Nice for Cannes. He’d convinced himself he had to do so for the job, not once questioning whether he really needed a foot-high figurine of Schwarzenegger as T2 for his desk, Molly Ringwald’s voice on his answering machine…

This kid was waiting to be bought, the lawyer said.

Mendes now sat across from Port and saw fear and determination mingling in his eyes.

“Jordie, there are faster ways if you want to kill yourself—”

She stopped short, remembering Port’s mother had committed suicide.

“It’s all true, Ana. I challenge you to tell me it’s not.”

Mendes sighed. “Jordie, this town is fucked. You’re not going to get anything done here. This book… I can’t make it happen.”

“I can take it to New York,” he said.

“Jordie, ask yourself if you want to blow up the bridge. Ask yourself if you have any friends on the Left.”

“Ana, I want to do what’s right,” he said earnestly. “Reagan’s legacy—”

“Jordie, will you… Jordie, stop,” she said sternly. They were a block from the Treasury Department, a short walk from K Street, and she was no longer certain she could match a face with a title. Looking around, she whispered, “Jordie, there’s no right or wrong. There’s no dissent and no discussion. There is what is.”

“They mock Reagan,” Port said, ignoring his salmon. “They call his philosophies ‘paleo-conservatism.’ They say his lessons don’t apply.”

“Jordie, I know,” she said tiredly. “I read your manuscript. So did Randy.”

Randy Dawson, her boss and stepson of a nationally syndicated columnist. The house, Patriot Publishing, was a subsidiary of a marketing firm funded by the pharmaceutical industry and an ad-hoc coalition of brokerage firms.

Port said, “I’m sick of going to these luncheons where they praise Reagan in public and then mock him when the paying guests leave.”

“Jordie, will you listen to yourself? I know you almost twenty-five years and you’re lecturing me,” she said.

She reached across the table and held his hand. “Please. You have to stop. You have no chance of success. They will bury you. Do yourself a favor and burn the manuscript.”

“I can’t,” he said, drawing up. “Someone will publish it. It’s good and it’s right.”

“Jordie, I’m trying to help you. You have to under—”

Port’s cell phone rang.

It was Douglas Weil Jr., and he asked Port if he was alone.

Without knowing it, Port had stood and was now next to the table. Last night, whenever he closed his eyes to sleep, Weil was there, teeth bared.

Mendes saw him quiver.

“Find a corner,” Weil told him.

Port walked to one of the private dining rooms, and he shut the door behind him.

“You’ve booked yourself on MSNBC tomorrow night,” Weil said.

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Cancel,” Weil said forcefully.

“Doug, I can’t. I’m—”

“Cancel,” he repeated and cut the line.

When Port returned to the table, he saw it had been cleared.

Mendes was gone.

Jordan Port was in the lead-off slot on MSNBC’s Hardball The producers knew him well — the appearance was Port’s seventy-third in the past fifteen years. There hadn’t been a more charming Clinton basher.

The guest host, with whom Port had scuba dived in the Caymans, called him Jordie. On air, he referred to him as “still one of Washington’s young wise men.”

He threw Port the softball he asked for.

“You’ve written a book Washington doesn’t want to see in print. Am I right?”

Eleven minutes later, Port ended his comments with a quote from Ronald Reagan:

“When we begin thinking of government as instead of they, we’ve been here too long.”

As he stepped into darkness outside the MSNBC offices on Nebraska Avenue, Port’s cell phone rang.

A senior producer from Larry King Live, who excoriated him for going elsewhere. She then cheerfully invited him to appear tomorrow night, asking if he’d messenger the manuscript to her.

Friday was a dead night for news, Port knew. But he figured he could parlay a King appearance into fodder for Sunday’s TV roundtables and shout fests. He’d send the show a chapter, but he’d hold the work close until he went to New York on Monday to find a high-powered agent. The media buzz would give him wings.

No sooner had he cut the line than the phone rang again.

The caller, whose voice he couldn’t recognize, gave him the address of a website and a password. In the e-address, the jordanport came after the second backslash.

Heart pounding, Port raced his ACCC-owned Lexus back to Dupont Circle. He parked at a fire hydrant, the car’s flashers flickering on his nineteenth-century red-brick row house.

Running into his dark apartment, he ignored the blinking light of his answering machine and scurried to his desk, still wearing his camel’s hair topcoat and the blue blazer, blue shirt, and blue-and-pink club tie he’d chosen for his Hardball appearance

His hands shaking, it took him several tries before he typed the correct address. He’d kept trying to put an ampersand between the letters.

Finally, the screen went blank, and then it flashed a site for S&M aficionados.

Port used the password he’d been given, drove down two pages, and found photos of a burly man in leather, cat-o’nine-tails dangling from his broad fist. On a table, face burrowed into a short stack of towels, was a naked man whose butt had been whipped raw.

The next photo showed the man’s face, and it was Port’s.

Port’s face, as clear as if in a Sears portrait, though he had never — not once — participated in such activity.

Much of Washington assumed Port was gay, but he n’t. He had little interest in sex, and hadn’t been with anyone in almost five years.

But there he was, in every photo.

Including several on the final page where the burly man in black-leather chaps was sodomizing him.

In the harsh light of the monitor, Port sat with his mouth hung open. His mind raced as he stared at the images.

He jumped when his cell phone in his pocket rang.

The same man who’d called earlier said, “Make it right on Larry King and the site comes down. Fuck up and the password comes off.”

Anxious, distraught, Port arrived at the CNN offices on First Avenue for the interview. A hard-driving storm pounded the city since dawn and though it had passed, he wore a Burberry trenchcoat over his suit, shirt, and tie. He wanted to give the impression that he spent the day running from meeting to meeting, but in truth he hadn’t left his apartment, answering the door only for the CNN messenger.

When the interview ended, he planned to stay at the Dupont 5 Cinema for as long as they’d allow, dodging calls by watching movies, hiding in the dark, preparing to flee by train to New York.

The segment producer, a young Asian woman in a khaki crewneck sweater and ill-fitting cargo slacks, met him at Security.

“What are you doing here?” She held a silver clipboard. “You’re cancelled.”

Port frowned. “No, I—”

“The ACCC called,” she said. “You’re not feeling well, you’re under some kind of stress…”

Port tried to smile. “I’m right here, Hisa.”

She touched his coat sleeve. “You look awful, Jordie.”

She was right: dread, a second sleepless night; listening to footsteps in the apartment above, cars on Riggs Place…“

But I can do it, Hisa.” He bucked up, thrusting out his chest. “Raring to go. Dependable as always.”

She looked at him. Agitated, fidgeting in place…

Her boss told her the pages he sent were an incoherent rant.

He saw confusion and sympathy on her face.

“Yeah, I’d better go,” he said, sagging. “I don’t know. This flu…”

“Rest easy, Jordie,” she told him, as she turned to scurry back to the elevator.

Five hours and two films later, Jordie arrived home.

The password no longer worked on the S&M site, and he permitted himself to think they’d taken the photos down. The thought lasted seconds.

He had several emails, but one immediately caught his eye. The subject line read, Urgent! From Ana Mendes via her home AOL e-address.

“Jordie,” she wrote, “I must see you. News! Meet me at the Bombay Club, Sunday, 1 p.m. Happy, happy.” It was signed, AM

The signature and the “Happy, happy” made it real for Port.

Years and years ago, he ran into Mendes at an Editor & Publisher conference in Chicago. Drinks, sentiment, more drinks; two people alone, despite the glad-handing at the banquet and bar. He wanted her — the embrace mattered, the affection — and she thought, Why not? Up to her room, and afterwards, as he lay with his head on her sweat-soaked shoulder, she asked, “Happy?”

“Happy, happy,” he replied.

Port stared at the email, and he permitted himself to think she had spoken to her boss, who somehow got to Douglas Weil Sr. at ACCC. A book promoting Ronald Reagan and his ideals was what America needed now. We ought to pull away from these guys, Mr. Weil. They’ve only got a couple of years left anyway, and the country’s not going to keep tacking right…

The thought lasted seconds.

It took Port less than three minutes to hustle through the early-afternoon chill to the St. Regis, and another two to reach the fifth floor. Room 523 was in the center of the long, rose-carpeted corridor that was lined with white floral-pattern wallpaper.

Not once did he ask himself why Mendes wanted to meet in a hotel when she had a town house in Georgetown.

Port knocked on the unlocked door. Then he stepped inside.

He saw the red bedspread had been tossed aside, and the bed was in shambles. On the off-white wall beyond the bed was an array of blood spatter. Blood was smeared from the center of the stains to the floor where Mendes lay. A dime-sized hole was above her right eye.

Port retreated in shock, stumbling against the desk chair, his arms flailing. He stopped when he hit the closet door.

Bringing his hands to his mouth, Port shuddered and he felt weak, and he understood.

Standing in a silence broken only by the hum of the heating system, he tried to remember what he had touched and who had seen him in the lobby or on 16th Street. Then he went over and looked at Mendes, a friend who had tried to warn him.

She wore a black chemise and was naked below the waist.

In death, she seemed terrified. Ana Mendes, the most self-possessed woman he’d ever known.

As he turned from her, he saw on the desk an almost-empty bottle of wine, a 2001 Viognier from a Virginia winery. There were two glasses, a mouthful of golden wine remaining in each, and he was sure one of the glasses wore his finger-prints, gathered days earlier at Off the Record.

Port hurried to the bathroom, grabbed a hand towel, and—

The front door opened, and Port was joined by the Indian busboy and the black man from valet parking.

The black man spoke with cool assurance, as the man from India barred the door.

“You have no possibility of escape,” said the black man. “But you are left with a choice.”

Port’s mouth had dried and he struggled to speak. “I didn’t—”

“Your call, Mr. Port.”

Port noticed they were both wearing latex gloves.

“First choice: You killed her in a fit of rage brought on by the depression that’s been responsible for your erratic behavior.”

“I didn’t — I wasn’t angry with Ana. I—”

“You argued at Red Sage. Several people noticed that she left when you took a phone call.”

“That’s not—”

“Dozens of threatening emails to her from your ACCC computer. Calls from your ACCC cell phone.”

The Indian man stepped next to his associate. “You quarreled because you learned Ms. Mendes had written a book about you.”

“About me?” he asked, his voice cracking.

The man counted on his thin fingers. “Your attempt to blackmail Douglas Weil and the ACCC with your latest manuscript. Your mental decline. Your troubled childhood. Your reputation at the newspaper. The sadomasochism…”

The black man now had a gun in his hand. With the silencer, the barrel seemed more than a foot long.

“I’ve read this book by Ms. Mendes,” said the Indian man. “Fascinating. Who would’ve known? This will surely profit Patriot Publishing.”

Said the black man, “If I shoot you from here, it’s the second choice: You were killed with Ms. Mendes when your tryst was interrupted. A jealous ex, a robbery? Someone with an obsession…”

“An obsession,” the Indian man repeated.

“Or I step up, put the gun to your temple, and make it look like murder-suicide. If so, Ms. Mendes’s manuscript is released, the S&M website… Your psychological records. Anecdotes. Your name will become synonymous with a spokesman gone mad.

Said the Indian man, “A Jordan Port is a pig looking for a new trough.”

Port’s mind reeled. He could see it unfolding — the headlines, the patter on talk radio, schadenfreude, the mounting disgrace; reporters invading Davenport to interview his step-mother, neighbors and high-school teachers to track down rumors fed them by Doug Weil’s PR machine.

“But I don’t deserve… I don’t want to die,” he said meekly, his voice dripping resignation.

“Mr. Port,” said the Indian man, “you are already dead. It’s a matter now of how you are remembered.”

The black man raised his arm.

“Take off your clothes, Mr. Port. Let’s do it right.”

As his tears began to flow, Jordan Port slowly removed his camel’s hair coat.

The Indian man hung it in the closet next to Mendes’s suit.

About the author

Robert Andrews, a former Green Beret and CIA officer, has lived in Washington, D.C. for over thirty years. His last three novels, A Murder of Honor, A Murder of Promise, and A Murder of Justice, feature Frank Kearney and Jose Phelps, homicide detectives in the Metropolitan Police Department.

Jim Beane was born at Garfield Hospital in Washington, D.C. and spent his early childhood in Michigan Park near the city line. He grew up in the ’burbs. His stories have appeared in the Baltimore Review, the Potomac Review and the Long Story. He lives in Prince George’s County, Maryland with his wife and daughters.

Ruben Castaned covered the D.C. crime beat for the Washington Post from 1989 through the mid-1990s. He has also written for the Washington Post Magazine, the California Journal, and Hispanic Magazine. A native of Los Angeles, Castaneda, forty-four, lives in Washington.

Richard Currey grew up in Washington, D.C. and environs and lives there today. His stories have appeared in O. Henry, Pushcart, and Best American Short Stor collections, aired on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts series, and performed at Symphony Space in New York. His novel Lost Highway was reissued in 2005 in print and as an audiobook.

Jim Fusilli is the author of the award-winning Terry Orr series, which includes Hard, Hard City, which was named winner of the Gumshoe Award for Best Novel of 2004, as well as Closing Time, A Well-Known Secret, and Tribeca Blues. He also writes for the Wall Street Journal and is a contributor to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

James Grad is the author of Six Days of the Condo and a dozen other novels. He has worked as a national investigative reporter and a U.S. Senate aide, and has published several award-winning short stories. Grady received France’s Grand Prix du Roman Noir in 2001 and Italy’s Raymond Chandler medal in 2004. He lives inside D.C.’s Beltway.

Jennifer Howard, a native of Washington, D.C., grew up in the Palisades section of town, around the corner from the old MacArthur Theatre. Her fiction, essays, reviews, and features have appeared in the Washington Pos (where she was a contributing editor from 1995–2005), VQR, the Boston Review, Slate, the Blue Moon Review, Salon, New York Magazine, and other publications. She now lives on Capitol Hill with her husband, the writer Mark Trainer, and their two children.

Lester Irby was born and raised in Northeast D.C. He was first arrested at age thirteen and later spent more than thirty years in federal prison for crimes ranging from bank robberies to two prison escapes. Irby wrote “God Don’t Like Ugly” while incarcerated in the Lewisberg Federal Penitentiary. He was released on parole in May 2005 and currently resides in Southeast D.C.

Kenji Jasper was born and raised in the nation’s capital and currently lives in Brooklyn. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and has written articles for Savoy, Essence, VIBE, the Village Voice, the Charlotte Observer and Africana.com. He is the author of three novels, Dark, Dakota Grand, and Seeking Salamanca Mitchell.

Norman Kelley is the author of three “noir soul” novels featuring Nina Halligan: Black Heat, The Big Mango, and A Phat Death. He is also the author of The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics, as well as the editor of R&B (Rhythm and Business): The Political Economy of Black Music. He was born and raised in D.C. and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Laura Lippman is best-known for her award-winning Tess Monaghan series, set forty miles to the north of Washington, D.C. She spent part of her childhood just outside the District line when her father was the Washington correspondent for the Atlanta Constitution. Lippman still frequents the city, home to some of her favorite people and restaurants.

Jim Patton grew up a D.C. suburb, then moved to the Left Coast. Back in the area after many years, he finds the summers even more stifling, the traffic more maddening. Worst of all, Shirley Povich is gone.

George Pelecanos is a screenwriter, independent-film producer, award-winning journalist, and the author of the bestselling series of Derek Strange novels set in and around Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife and children.

Quintin Peterson is a twenty-four-year veteran police officer with the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C., where he is currently assigned to its Office of Public Information as a media liaison officer. He is the author of several plays and screenplays and two crime novels, SIN (Special Investigations Network) and The Wages of SIN.

David Slater is originally from the Jersey Meadowlands, and has called D.C. home for more than two decades. During that time, he has worked in several dive restaurants and, for the last fifteen years, in environmental conservation. He currently lives with his wife and two kids in the Clarendon section of Arlington, Virginia.

Robert Wisdom grew up in the Petworth area of Northwest Washington, back when D.C. was still a town. He attended D.C. public schools and graduated from St. Albans. He was called Bobby growing up, which gave way to Bob in the world after D.C., got the nickname Bayobe from his Brazilian capoeira master, and currently plays a character named Bunny on HBO’s The Wire. He’s all about the B’.