Politika

THIRTY-THREE

The light was lit atop the ornate Capitol dome. A red bulb glowed above the north doors. A bell tolled out a single extended note in the chamber. The majority and minority leaders greeted each other with courtly decorum and then repaired to their front-row desks at either side of the center aisle. The parliamentarian, clerks, and secretaries were seated, the president pro tempore took his gavel in hand, unobtrusive C-SPAN cameras winked to life, and the day’s session of the august legislative body came to order.

Up in the gallery, Roger Gordian watched the opening speaker, Senator Bob Delacroix of Louisiana, take the floor, striding toward the rostrum with starch, dark-suited dignity, a pair of well-groomed young aides respectfully following at his rear.

The stuffed black bear the aides were carrying between them stood six feet tall and had on red satin wrestling trunks embroidered with the hammer and sickle emblem of the long gone U.S.S.R.

“Friends and colleagues, today I’m going to introduce you to Boris the Wrestling Bear!” Delacroix boomed. “By the way, the reason he dragged his old shorts out of the closet is that they fit a whole lot better than the new ones!”

Chuckles and applause on his side of the aisle.

Sidewise glances and enduring sighs on the other.

“Boris might look like a nice bear, but don’t let him fool you. No matter how much he eats, he’s always hungry. That’s because he’s growing bigger and stronger every day… and you better believe he’ll bite the hand that feeds him!”

Gordian stifled a disgusted groan.

Ladeez and gents, he thought, welcome to the main attraction.

“Let me tell you a little story about Boris. It’s not pretty, and it won’t be for the fainthearted. But, hey, there’s a lesson to be learned from it,” Delacroix went on. “Once upon a time, Boris had an appetite so big he thought he could eat the whole world. Nothing would satisfy him! He ate and he ate and he ate until he got so heavy he collapsed from his own weight. That was when his kindly Uncle Sam stepped along, put him on the Dr. Freemarket diet, taught him manners, taught him how to be civilized, and tried convincing him to give up his gluttonous ways.”

Again there were snorts of laughter from slightly more than half the senators in the hall. The remainder looked embarrassed.

“Well, folks, for a few years the diet seemed to work, and Boris even squeezed himself into a pair of trunks that were the same red, white, and blue colors as Uncle Sam’s clothes — with the stripes in a different pattern, of course, just so nobody’d call him a copycat!” Delacroix’s voice projected to the chamber’s vaulted ceiling.

Gordian was suddenly reminded of Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker. Or was he thinking of that other movie, the one in which Lancaster played a tent-show evangelical? And the amazing thing was that it seemed to be working. Even if he was only preaching to the converted and semiconverted, they were becoming visibly roused.

“But then Boris fell back on his old, bad habits,” Delacroix continued. “Boris got hungry again. Only this time he’d become used to begging for handouts from Uncle Sam, sort of like those grizzlies in Yosemite that’ll come right up to your tent for food. And Uncle Sam, decent, generous soul that he was — overly generous, if you ask me — couldn’t bring himself to say no. See, Sam had convinced himself that by keeping Boris close to his tent, by letting him watch Uncle Sam conduct his daily business through the flaps, Boris would learn how to stand on his own two feet. Believe it or not, Uncle Sam gave him hundreds of thousands of tons of food. Tens of millions of dollars. You heard me, tens of millions, just to keep him sticking around! And you know what happened? Can any of you guess? Boris turned on him! Boris sneaked into the tent and did something so horrendous, so unthinkable I can hardly bring myself to tell you about it. But I have to, you see, I have to. Because some of you still haven’t realized that you can take the bear out of the hammer and sickle, but you can never take the hammer and sickle out of the bear!”

Rapt silence in the hall. By now every one of the senators had read or heard about the intelligence reports linking Bashkir to the Times Square bloodbath, and they pretty well knew where Delacroix was heading.

Gordian realized that even he was leaning forward, riveted by the performance. He had wondered earlier if Delacroix would step out of his Boris spiel when he got to this point, perhaps curb the histrionics, but that surely wasn’t going to happen. The senator with the Cajun roots was a showman to the end.

“… crept into Sam’s tent one night when he let down his guard, a night when he was celebrating, a night that was supposed to be about hope and peace and prayers for a glowing new century, and sank his teeth deep into his flesh,” Delacroix was saying. “He ripped at him, tore a chunk out of him, wounded him so badly, scarred him so grievously, that the pain will last forever. Forever! And you know what? Hold onto your seats with both hands, my dear friends, hold on tight as you can, because what I’m going to tell you next is really incredible.” Delacroix strode from behind the podium, his head craned exaggeratedly forward, his gaze ranging back and forth across the large room. “Are you listening? Are you holding on? Okay, here it is: The bear had the audacity to come back the next day and pretend nothing had ever happened. To actually beg for more food! And some people, some misguided, foolish people — I won’t mention any names, but we all know who they are — wanted Uncle Sam to close his eyes and do it!”

Delacroix stalked over to the bear now, grabbed it by the shoulders.

“Well, I’m not going to let that happen. Decide who to root for, everyone, make up your minds, because I’m getting in the ring with Boris. I’m taking a piece of him. I’m going to show him that his days of feeding off Uncle Sam are through, and that he’d better get on his way once and for all!”

Gordian had thought he was prepared for anything, anything at all, but what he saw next made his eyes open wide.

“Come on, Boris, wrestle me, take me if you can!” Delacroix frothed.

Then, the tails of his suit jacket flying out behind him, the tongue of his necktie whipping back over his shoulder, Delacroix took a running leap at the bear, knocking it down, locking his arms around it, tumbling around there before the eyes of the assembled senators, and the astonished observers in the public galleries, and the television cameras, until he’d rolled on top of the stuffed animal and pinned it to the floor.

“It’s over, Boris!” he shouted. “It’s over!”

And watching from the gallery, looking at the rapt faces of the senators, thinking about how Delacroix’s antics would play with public opinion once they made it to the nightly news, Gordian had the sinking feeling that it very well might be.