Charles Pepper, president of Hovno Investments, paced in front of a dressing room mirror. A lout from the hotel rolled it into the television room of his suite earlier that morning at his tailor’s request; it was one of those flimsy mirrors, and it gave things a funhouse distortion. In it he saw himself, warped and expanded, a small red beast, tapered in every direction.
The tailor had snuck off in search of an acceptable tie, ages ago. Usually, Pepper couldn’t tolerate being made to wait for anything less than an invitation to a closed congressional committee. Today he felt slicked in aloe.
Like most tycoons, he had a thing for nature shows. Right now, the television showed a succession of profiles of different dogs baring their teeth. It could be breaking news about a dog show, or one of those perennial stories about an impending rabies outbreak. The volume was off, and the quiet lent the room an upside down feeling.
The thick carpet on the hotel room floor devoured all the other sounds. The press conference was due to start in a few minutes. Downstairs, a host of reporters lay in wait, ready to light him up in the press for a Christmas list of high financial crimes. Even so, Pepper wasn’t half worried.
He spun himself around in the open space before the mirror, stirring up a fine dust as he did. Long beams of light from the half-opened window curtains lit up the dust like snowflakes. It wasn’t that he thought himself too big to fail, as they were always saying a few years ago, but look at Charlie Pepper, he’s a really fine dancer. In his mind he could already sense the rhythm and the path through the tracers of incoming fire.
Before his vacation, he’d been feeling down, they all had that right. His health was fine, he was as strong as a cat, but he’d lost his taste for stirring things up. He’d left the business on autopilot for some time now and the early reports suggested huge losses. That was nothing new; the company hired extra graduates every year. Whenever things went south the heads on plates were young and dumb..
His problem was that the financial reports were not oblique enough, that took a sure hand and inspiration. Where the numbers should be cloudy, turbulent even, they were clear. And where it should be clear — over his own thick head of blue-gray hair — now hung a dark cloud.
His friends on the board of directors had picked up on this stink of nihilism. Their clients, including several governments, were beginning to worry. His daughter, Ginny Strouth, had suggested he take a vacation. And except that she had married a useless dickie of a man with pale political aspirations, Ginny was smart. At any rate, she was the only one Pepper trusted. So he had disappeared for a while.
There were always new faces in the pit. Not every hostile reporter would have a tell on their face, most would just look tired. It took them a while to shake off that look of wonder and fascination, before they tasted blood. His own flacks knew who was who.
Everything about the press conference had been taken care of before he’d flown back from Barbados. It was up to him now to pull the right shapes. Resolve, bold purpose, confidence, concern, even penitence, if it came to that, his body knew what to do. The press could write what they liked. Dab up the crumbs he’d dropped. Aim their sights. Or just say welcome back to town, Pepper.
His friends in government were as nervous as horses. The kind of attention he was drawing could put them all in prison. He’d sent messages to a few guys he’d helped put in office, and they’d sent messages back. So long as the press let these allegations slide into their back pages, the law would leave him alone.
This particular tie problem had never come up before, so far as he or his tailor knew, and it required a little trial and error. On this occasion the usual blue wouldn’t do. If he wore any variation of light blue tie today, next to this bright red suit, it would look like he was clowning.
Perhaps his vacation had run too long, the way the press had it. To read the op-eds, the shareholders were restless. Although the word indictment had not come up yet, there was salt on his tail. But right now, looking himself up and down in the mirror, Pepper couldn’t help but grin. His skin had a silky-mauve color to it. The sun-kissed look suited him. He could feel the juice in his bones.
For obvious reasons, he couldn’t wear a red tie. He couldn’t wear any kind of patterned tie either. He knew his Sun Tzu backwards and forwards, he knew about surprise tactics. At the same time, he didn’t need intend to look like an alto sax player in a cocktail hour jazz band. He just needed the tailor to do the right thing. He could smell the buzz downstairs. The hotel ballroom below was filling up with hacks.
“Ginny,” he yelled. “ Gi-nny!” he yelled again.
The bodyguard on duty poked his head into the room. “Sir,” he whispered, “Your daughter has stepped out for a cappuccino.”
“That’s fine, Pinkerton,” said the president, “I wanted to talk to you anyway. There’s a thing I need you to do.”
The bodyguard’s wince almost looked like a smile. That’s how Pepper took it, anyhow.
“Now I’m sure you know what I’m going to say, Pinkerton. This is Texas, not New York— we’re at home here— I want people to feel at home down there even before I walk in— So here’s what I need from you— I need you to talk to whoever is running this press gang and make sure that the front row is filled with cheerleaders— Tell them I want to see what they’ve got in pretty girls and fellows in nice suits— Anywhere I look I want to see nice smiles and American attitudes— Move the hard-faced ones and the unhappy ones to the back— I don’t want to see them— Everyone needs to do their part to give the right impression— You know the score, Pinkerton— I’m thanking you right now for explaining it to them downstairs.”
The bodyguard’s name was Lyle. He had long nursed a suspicion that he got most of his work due to his short stature. He wasn’t the smallest close protection officer in the business, but he was one of the smallest in North America, where the premium was placed on size and brawn over capability. And Lyle was capable. Some years ago, his employers at the security agency had noticed that many of their customers carried a Napoleonic gene marker. A pattern arose from this clientele. More often than not, they surrounded themselves with the biggest galoots, but fired them all in no time, selecting smaller and smaller agents over time. Until here he was, running errands for a man not five foot three in boots, got up in a bright red suit.
With the bodyguard gone, Pepper took a quick second to waggle his ankle like a bantam rooster. The suit was red, electric red, the way electric blue is blue. In the suit, he became almost invisible, more an idea than a man, a giant red stingray from deep deep down. Admiring his new form, the way it looked, the loose mass, the blindingly brilliant fabric, he auditioned the movements and postures he had been practicing. But only for a moment. As he heard the outer door to the room open with the tailor’s return, the president resumed an arch, executive stance.
His daughter Ginny walked into the room with the tailor several steps behind her. She was taller than her father, less earthy. To the papers, she wasn’t much more than an item in the society columns, married to a diplomat, a minor style icon in her own right, known for a colonial style of dress that she had taken from Katharine Hepburn. She had her father’s stone-gray eyes and his air of authority, hers softened by a cosmopolitan fluidity. She vetted everything he did. Where he went and with whom. She tallied his donations to charities and to political candidates of either party. It was her idea to keep her idiot brother in the tabloids, front and center, with a spotlight always shining on his notorious playboy lifestyle and all that went with it. His bad behavior kept journalists busy. And that was important. He had a hand in the business. Everyone in the family did.
The tailor laid out a dark rainbow of ties on the bed, indigo, wine-bottle green, black, even a mustard one, and by them a narrow rectangular box. Like most people drawn to the service of luxury and power, the tailor understood the theater. He positioned himself at the corner of the bed nearest the little box, and waited. Following his daughter’s eyes, Pepper passed over the array of ties. He opened up the box, lifting from it a bolo tie, the clasp decorated with an off-white stone.
“What’s this?” he asked the tailor.
“A bolo tie, sir, in the Southwestern tradition.”
“No, I know that already. What’s the stone right there?”
“Tiger tooth,” the tailor said.
Pepper didn’t clap his hands; he didn’t lick his lips, but it was as if he had. “What do you think, Ginny, has it all come together?”
“Red and more red, just like you said, Dad. I spoke to your bodyguard in the hall— He seemed nervous— What’s this about you sending him downstairs to talk to my people? It’s demeaning. ”
“Sorry, honey, I was just trying to mix it up a little bit. How do I look?”
“You know how you look, Dad. You look like as you intended to look. You look like a wrestling promoter. You look like a fire engine. You look like a Chinese flag. I’m headed down to the conference now. This thing starts soon, but take your time. Think about what you’re going to say. We’re going to make them wait.”
—
The hotel ballroom didn’t always smell like barbecue sauce, but many of the journalists, like most tourists, had been making the most of their trip to Houston. With their hands full of paper coffee cups, brown paper sacks of barbecue, and smartphones, they waddled in, jostling each other, loud and without purpose, like goats in a petting zoo. Gaffer tape marked out where the cameras were to set up. Chairs were in place for the reporters. A vast grid of them today, many more than usual. But something else was missing, today. There was no stage, no riser, no podium, no bottle of water on top of a little table to the side. Just a microphone on a stand, front and center, and nothing else.
Stephanie Jonque-De Lys didn’t hurry to her preferred place at the front, right-of-center. A way cleared for her. She was a little bit surprised to see a large man she had never seen before sitting in the front row, in one of the chairs which reserved for journalists from the bigger papers and networks. Everyone knew her, and she took pains to know everyone, and she didn’t know this large man. She had put in a special request with the editor to be here. She had an urge to follow this story. Not that she was any friend of the Pepper family as such, most of whom seemed jumped up. But, she had been to college for a while at the same time as Ginny Pepper, before Ginny had met the youngest son of the Delaware Strouths. And Ginny, although older than her by a few years, had been nice.
—
A few hours before, Gary Bosko had been lying on his back, staring at the orange peel texture of his ceiling, his enormous body dangling over his twin bed like a tarp, as he ran the hot water in his shower to steam the wrinkles out of his chocolate colored suit. He felt lucky, and a lucky man didn’t need an iron. Today was his first day on his new beat covering the big time news.
A buddy of his, the outgoing investigative reporter one cubicle over at the weekly paper, had come into some money. With that he announced his resignation and suggested Bosko as his replacement, if for no other reason than that the two men got on well. Bosko, being a large man, was used to being served first at the bar where they went after work, and his buddy benefited by that. Bosko’s genial nature served their friendship. His bad posture served their friendship. His lack of curiosity about world events served their friendship. It was like he was always out of focus. His buddy had a real thing for the news. He watched the news. He even read the news.
Bosko covered sports and arts & leisure. He’d never cared about sports, but people treated him like a former athlete, and wherever he went, people felt compelled to show off to him, trotting out their best bar talk about games and teams and players. He had a pretty good recall and wrote down what they said— their predictions for the year, their hot takes on the players and coaches — as he heard it, to which he added the final scores of the recent games at. He knew even less about arts and leisure, as the subjects never came up at the bar, but his fix for that was easy, he wrote about movies he had seen as a child, whenever they were remade. And that, coupled with the fact that he was a decent proofreader, seemed to be enough.
Before he had come into money, Bosko’s buddy had been following the stink of what he called a second Enron. In the pillory was Charles Pepper. The details were confusing to Bosko, but he wasn’t worried, it all came down to lying, cheating, and stealing. His buddy filed the story as his last professional act, and handed the follow-up duties to Bosko.
All Bosko had to do now was keep his phone charged, knot his tie, and make it to the conference room in the hotel early enough to get a good seat. He’d been guzzling water most of the morning, cup after cup. His high voice had a tendency to crack when at first he spoke. He wanted to be sure that his voice would be clear when it came time for questioning.
—
By her watch, it was showtime. More so than her family’s quiet role in the wings of history, more so than her own ease in almost any environment, Stephanie Jonque-De Lys prided herself on her ability read people. She had an uncanny ability to match names and faces, due in part to her secret phrenological frenzy— she imparted to each face a sling of ethical and socio-economic attributes. The large man seated near her had no cause to be where he was. She had never seen him before. Nobody else seemed to know him. It didn’t make sense. Every seat was spoken for, someone must have been displaced. She scanned the room for clues.
The lack of a podium or even a lectern was curious by itself. But over on the western side of the ballroom, near a hallway, surrounded by a small crowd of well-heeled men, with the usual cloud of underlings standing by, Ginny Strouth didn’t appear perturbed by that odd detail, or that the ballroom was full beyond its capacity, or by the fact that her father was already several minutes late.
Ginny Strouth stood just out of range of the cameras like a statue of Artemis. She could direct her flunkies with her eyes alone. The father too, seemed to have a system for communicating with his staff using little gestures and personal catcher’s signals. Stephanie Jonque-De Lys had noticed this before, the way that his personal assistants and security details seemed to dilate nearer to him and further from him, depending on little hand signs, and facial tics. She wasn’t certain about the facial tics. Those seemed to be common among executives.
As he sat there at the front, staring at nothing, it occurred to Bosko that he had to pee. The room was full, but nothing seemed to be happening, so he turned to the woman to his left and asked if she would mind saving his seat until he returned. She glared at him for a split second, but at last she nodded, and he began making his way to the restrooms.
As Stephanie Jonque-De Lys watched the large strange man in the rumpled brown suit lumber away, it dawned on her. What if the large man was a ringer, some kind of a plant? The higher up one traveled in society, the more one encountered the same tricks one might see on the street. Shills, stool pigeons, heels and mountebanks were as much a part of modern business as they had been at the time of the riverboat expositions or tulip mania.
Ginny didn’t notice the large stranger in the midst of things. Her father’s entourage was making its way down the service hall leading into the ballroom at that same time. The double doors burst open as a small procession of Pepper’s men entered the room. The effect was that of a championship boxer entering the ring.
First came a quartet of aides wearing headset walkie-talkies. They proceeded to flank what would have been the four corners of the stage, had there been a stage. Next came the security detail, what there was of a security detail. On most occasions, Pepper traveled with as many as eight bodyguards in his cortege, today there were only the two men, Lyle and his partner, attending his entrance. Padding in like tranquilized wild cats, the two small bodyguards stopped eight feet behind the place where stood the microphone.
There should have been the fanfare of a brass band, or arena rock piped in through the ballroom stereo, as Pepper made his way across the ballroom to his designated place at the front. He bobbed like a fighter, dropped his shoulders and stooped like a penitent, bounced like an evangelist, and spirited through the room like a red cloud of incense drifting from a censer at a High Mass. There was no sound as he staked his claim on the attention of everyone in the room. Later, off the record, several reporters admitted to a strange sense of arousal and wellbeing at that moment, as their cheeks flushed and their skin on their arms goose-pimpled and their pulses quickened.
Pepper was ascendant. Without the benefit of a stage, without a lectern for his notes, without notes even, dispensing with the illusions of strength and superiority, his physical presence, his own unlifted stature seemed at once humble and triumphant, his countenance wise and forgiving like that of a philosopher king who has seen horrible things and endured unrepeatable agonies so that the common run of decent men and women should not suffer terrible sights.
And at the same time, Gary Bosko was returning to his seat. He stepped on one colleagues’ foot as he shuffled forward, he knocked the to-go cup from yet another, and he still wasn’t getting anywhere. His own place, dead center in the front line of the press corps, seemed to recede into an impossible distance. As he made his way across one row then another, he kept blocking the president from sight.
For his part, Pepper tried to sidestep the shadow of this incredibly slow moving behemoth. As he moved this way and that, his red suit flapped like a matador’s flag before a big, dumb bull. But Bosko the bull seemed to have transfixed Pepper, too. Pepper’s footwork kept leading him back into the blind spot, and he stared into the dull eyes of this thing that was stealing his moment of grace. With every step this lummox took, a wave of bodies swished around in their chairs, another wave of bodies turned around to see what was happening, looking away from Pepper, in effect, breaking the spell he was casting. And also with every step, the oaf repeated his litany of stupidity, “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.” Pepper had prepared for almost every conceivable situation. But he was ill-prepared for the low-level disruption which seemed to swell from this dull-witted presence like electromagnetic waves. In effect, the room was divided between those staring at Bosko and those still staring at Pepper.
Pepper was divided, too. He struggled for composure. He had worked out a series of improvisatory figures in advance. What he might say, what he might do. He’d deployed these thoughts to staging places in the wings of his awareness, from which places they had seemed to wave to him, cheery and respectful. At first he could see each thought, limber and homespun, inspired water carriers, as ready as dancers, waiting and hoping to be called to center stage. But now a fog was moving in between himself and his thoughts. A big, brown, stupid fog with eyes set far apart from one another on either side of its foggy head. If Pepper had a compound bow with him now, the matter would be easily settled. But he had not thought to bring a compound bow to this meeting with the members of the press, where he was now to be tried by suffocation like a twelfth century midwife. Pepper had been a friend to language. Colorful simple language. His father and his grandfather had been born under tables. He’d been born in a storm, with lightning scaring the chickens and the dogs into the kitchen of the house where they swarmed around his mother and his father and the doctor. Language left him now.
The lawyers had much to say about what not to say. Don’t call the girls you chase after girls. Don’t curse. Don’t snap your fingers. Right now, he wasn’t sure he could feel his fingers. Wear a shirt. Well, he was wearing a shirt, and to prove it he pulled the lapel of his coat over his nose and up to his eyes. The lawyers hadn’t said much about what he should say. He was on his own there.
His vision was red. Through it he could see that Bosko before him, bearing down on him, almost on top of him now.
“Hey you,” Pepper said, in a low murderous voice. “What are you after? Why are you disrupting my mind with your idiot fog?”
Bosko was surprised to hear himself addressed. He wasn’t sure what any of it meant. He just wanted to sit down and become invisible again. Excuse me, he said. Unfortunately, he stepped forward as he said it, giving the words the possibility of menace.
“Moving this way and that, taking up space,” Pepper growled, but in an even lower voice, nearly inaudible.
Again, hearing himself addressed, Bosko stepped forward, leaning as he would in a bar or other crowded place, in the hopes of making out the words.
Ginny hurried toward her father, but in the strange buzz of the moment, most of the reporters and all of the camera crews had pushed in close to better account for what was happening, and her path was obstructed from every angle. Lyle, too, and his partner, were confused. Pepper was acting strange, but he was flashing them the three finger signal to stand-down.
The reporters who had been first suspicious, then enamored, then distracted and confused, were ready for this. They understood violence, the threat of violence. They understood attacks on public personages. Later they could put together sidebars and columns about the strange man who reared up in anger—who he was, what motives impelled him to act as he had. But for now, all they had to do was wait and see and write it all down.
“I flash on either side of you, and you’ll squirm out of the kitchen into the rain.” Pepper’s mouth was open. He was forming words. But Bosko couldn’t understand any of it. He stepped up so close to Pepper that he was now towering over the little president.
Perceiving a threat to his person, Pepper’s senses snapped back to the here and now. It made no difference where his mind was, whether back on a beach in Barbados, or trying on socks in his closet. Most rich men hire trainers for self-defense. Almost all small, rich men do. He struck the big man once. Then again.
Bosko, too, began to understand what was happening, and he was terrified. As Pepper prepared to strike him once more, he grabbed the little man around both arms, brought his arms into his body, tightening in on all sides like a trash compactor, and brought the man down to the ground. He looked around in worry. “It was a misunderstanding,” he said, to no one person. “He thought I was attacking him. You couldn’t see what I saw.”
Even as he moaned the words, the hammers were raining down on Bosko. Lyle demobilized him with a blow to the neck. As soon as his partner managed to pull Pepper out of the big man’s reach, Lyle lit up Bosko with a taser. They always say the pain is incredible, and it was. The pain was incredible. Even ten minutes later, zip-tied and left to sit in the walk-in cooler in the kitchen, Bosko kept feeling new spasms of pain in his joints and in his fingers and toes. As well as spasms of self-pity. His buddy had given him a new job and a story to print. He wasn’t going to write about sports anymore. He was headed for jail. He’d rather be writing about sports. These rich people didn’t fool around. He wasn’t one to cry, and he might have, but the door to the walk-in cooler opened.
Stephanie Jonque-De Lys didn’t like messy men, or complicated men for that matter, but she loved to flirt with power. As she glanced down at Bosko, looking just as alien on the floor of a hotel restaurant’s walk-in cooler as he had in a chair of honor in the hotel ballroom, she felt something like admiration for his cunning. Her insight had proven right once again.
Pepper’s right arm had been broken. He’d received some blunt trauma to his back and neck, but he seemed fine. A crew of paramedics had carried him out of the ballroom on a gurney. Before they had loaded him into the ambulance outside, he had let in a small coterie of reporters for a brief question and answer. The assault was the news now. They wanted to know if he knew his assailant. They wanted to know if Pepper would be pressing criminal charges. They wanted to know how soon before he’d be back to work,. Pepper’s answers were congenial. He had to bite down on his tongue to keep from smiling outright. Far from walking out of the hotel ballroom into the proceedings of a congressional grand jury, Pepper was on top of the world.
Inside the walk-in cooler, Stephanie Jonque-De Lys waved to the policeman behind her at the door, who came in and released Gary Bosko from the zip-ties. Even after he was released, Bosko continued to sit on the cold refrigerated floor. Whatever kind of person this fellow on the ground was, she was certain that he was an operator.
“Be the news or report the news, you can’t do both.” She smiled at him.
“What’s that?” Bosko asked, although at this point, even he was getting tired of his line of questioning.
Stephanie Jonque-De Lys mulled him over, and said, “I have a message for you.”
“For me,” asked Bosko, “from who?”
Stephanie Jonque-De Lys was a serious woman. For a moment she had considered taking this man home with her, at least for the day. He was not physically fit, or well-dressed, or blond, or even rich, from the looks of him, all of which qualities she usually required of a dalliance. But she had considered taking him home because she liked to solve puzzles, and until this minute she had taken him for a puzzle. She was pleased with herself for solving it without having to take him home. He was an actor. She didn’t care for the theater and she found actors boring.
“I don’t want to play this game, anymore,” she said. “I spoke to your boss, Ginny Strouth. She’s very happy with the way things turned out. She’s very happy with your performance.”
Bosko didn’t bother asking. He had no idea what was going on. That wasn’t unusual. He never really knew what was going on, but it was never like this.
Stephanie Jonque-De Lys nodded, ever more satisfied with herself. It was as she thought. He was only an actor. But, just the same, she must follow the rules. “I want you to know,” she said, “You never fooled me entirely. I saw right through you. Not all the way at first, but I can spot a ringer. Anyway, she said, Ginny Strouth has arranged a new position for you. You’re to be a wire reporter. You’ll get to travel everywhere and sleep in decent hotels. And from time to time, when it suits her interests, I’m sure she’ll have someone call on you to perform your little act. You know, acting belligerent, disrupting meetings, starting fights, tipping the scales. I’m sure you’ll like it.”