11
IT IS A SAPPHIRE, late October day, warm enough for shorts or hiking pants, but Leonard does his best to dress conservatively, a Bush supporter, though to dress like a Republican in Texas does not necessarily mean the light jacket, trousers, and button-down shirt that he has chosen from his few British clothes. It could mean the cowhide boots and the pair of Wranglers cinched by a buckle bigger than your brain that the president favors for himself at weekends. Or even the full black and unlikely business suit that Maxie has, without a word of explanation for its provenance, taken from his closet. His court suit, possibly. He looks less like a skinhead now, and less like a serviceman. His scalp stubble is only thirteen hours old but has already darkened. Today he seems most like an excitable Baptist pastor heading for a prayer breakfast or gospel brunch, with, at worst, a nerdish streak. No one can see how muscular he is, or wildly menacing, or know for sure what he has tucked under his shirt.
“My, don’t you look the part?” Nadia says, picking off bits of fluff and thread from the back and shoulders of his suit.
Maxie is surprised and elated by the sight of himself, it seems. He turns and twists in front of the mirror, changing his expression. “Well, look at me. I’m Tony Perkins for the day. So welcome to the Bates Motel. Your shower’s ready, Mr. President.” He glimpses Leonard’s tense, unsmiling, damaged face in the mirror. The men have not yet exchanged a civil word this morning. The fug of last night’s fights and squabbles has not cleared. Besides, Leonard is too nervous to be civil—and he is hoping to engineer a final row, something upsetting enough for him to take offense and run from Austin in a righteous huff, flying out while Bush is flying in.
“Buck up, Leon,” Maxie says eventually. “That’s yesterday. Today is gonna be your fifteen minutes of fame. We’re on active service now. Be big about it, man. Step up to the plate.” He pulls Leonard toward the mirror, gently, playfully. “Be sweet.” For a moment the pair pose, an arm round each other at the waist. Leonard knows that he has been defeated. There’s no escape. Then Nadia, still in her pajamas, comes up behind and rests her chin where their two shoulders form a cleft. “See what I see, right there?” asks Maxie, not entirely without irony. He jabs his finger at the mirror. “I see the Three Musketeers. Ain’t we the Bushbashers today? Ain’t we the warriors?”
“You don’t look good,” Nadia says, on tiptoe at their backs. Leonard can feel a soft breast pushed against his shoulder blade. She smells of warm cotton, a more provocative odor than any bottled scent.
“You don’t like the cut, lady?” Maxie rubs a hand across his scalp. “Feels like baby seal to me.”
“You’ll do just fine. No, I mean Leon Trotsky here.” Nadia pulls Leonard away from the mirror and sits him on a high-backed kitchen chair in the bright light by the window. “You look too weird like that. They’ll never let you through. I’m going to have to fix that face.”
“Boy, yes,” says Maxie. “A little field surgery. Hide those gaping wounds.”
Nadia stands between her one-time British boyfriend’s legs and dabs off the remnants of dried blood on his lips and jaw with a Q-tip. She cleans him up with arnica gel. “Bit shiny now,” she says, holding Leonard’s chin and turning his face into the light. “What we need”—she rummages inside her cosmetics bag—“is this. This is going to minimize the shine. This is going to make you matte. Grab hold.” She drops the moisturizer into Leonard’s hand and leans into him.
“Jesus, have you seen what’s in this stuff?” he asks, squinting at the small print on the tube and reading out the listed ingredients. “Palm oil, propylene glycol, cyclomethicone, stearic acid, hydroxylated milk glycerides, talc …” But Leonard is only trying to distract himself. The closeness of Nadia’s breasts to his eyes and face, that half-buttoned pajama top, that bedclothes smell (is it the smell of pregnancy?), the pressure of her knees on his when she opens her legs to crouch and peer at his cuts and bruises, have made him start to sweat, and worse. He wants to reach out, lay his hand across her abdomen, and bless the child. He wants to touch her everywhere. That’s why he’s come to Austin, isn’t it? Not to be caught up in some madcap plot. “Cetyl alcohol,” he reads, while Maxie stares across the room at him, shaking his head. “Sodium magnesium silicate, tocopheryl acetate …” He’s trapped. There’ll be no flying out. He no longer wants to find excuses, actually. What he most wants, for Nadia’s sake, is to be her bold comrade. “Titanium dioxide, paraffin—”
“Enough already,” Maxie says. “Paraffin schmaraffin. Who gives a shit? Let’s go. Come on, Snipers, hit the street.”
AmBush does not work out quite as Maxie hoped. The three participants set off at different times and follow separate routes downtown. Leonard is the first to leave. Following instructions, he walks along Seventh as far as the interstate and then cuts across the Red River district toward the southeast corner of the Capitol and its encircling lawns. He couldn’t get lost even if he tried. The sunset-red granite building with its commanding dome and its zinc-skinned goddess of liberty presiding over Austin is almost never out of view.
Leonard is carrying his passport, six ten-dollar bills, his ticket to the Laura Bush address, a Book Festival program, and spare keys to their apartment. “Penny plain is the order of the day,” was Nadia’s advice. She wrote her dissertation on Mondavi’s resistance handbook Infiltration and Identity and so knows the tested protocols of blending in, including the recommended contents of their pockets. Avoid too little and too much, is the rule; carry nothing to raise alarm, nothing to reveal your plans should you be stopped and frisked. She dropped an apple in Leonard’s pocket as he left the loft, “for authenticity, while you’re in line. Apples are the most innocent of fruit, Mondavi says.”
“Go tell it on the mountain. Let my apple go! Lermontov says.” Maxie is in a strangely expansive and skittish mood, now that AmBush draws close.
Leonard is eating his apple as he crosses San Jacinto Street. He does his best to keep to an unsuspicious pace as he nears the southern entrance to the Capitol and the already bustling festival tents in the streets beyond. He can hear some poet reading too close to the microphone, and there is laughter from a second tent and then applause. The adjacent streets have been closed to traffic by the Austin city police. Their cruisers are parked across the roadway. Only official vehicles can pass. Leonard is expecting to be challenged and half hoping to be turned away. He will have failed, but he will have done his best, or seemed to, anyway. To Nadia. Yet no one pays attention to him or any other pedestrians, even the ones who have not dressed like Republicans. The city police are entirely relaxed, just taking it easy with their thumbs in their belts and their backs against their cars. Why not? The day is mild. The president might wave at them.
It is not until Leonard has walked through the southern entrance gate that he sees anything of note: a family of five, three girls and their parents, dressed up Sunday smart and waving the Stars and Stripes together with a photo portrait of a uniformed young man. His name and dates are written underneath: Pvt. Alexander M. Sharp, 1987–2006. Leonard calculates the young man’s age and makes the appropriate face. It is a dreadful war, he reminds himself. It’s in this family’s interests that he’s here, on active service, though they might not appreciate it now. One of the girls has a T-shirt inscribed “Lubbock Loves Laura.” The father has a Bible in his hand, which he waves at Leonard and anyone that passes. “Support our troops,” he says. “God bless America.” And Leonard offers him and his family “Good afternoon” in return.
Although there is more than an hour yet before the scheduled arrival of the president and his wife, there is already another protest group gathering among the rose beds, lawns, and monuments on the west side of the Capitol and loosely circled by state troopers in their Boy Scout uniforms. This is the “silent fucking vigil” that Maxie has talked about, organized by the Texas antiwar coalition. Their message is laid out on a banner on the grass in front of them in letters three feet high and made from photographs of all the soldiers who have died in Iraq so far—Alexander M. Sharp included, presumably—and some Iraqi civilians: TROOPS. OUT. NOW. BRING OUR BOYS HOME. There are about thirty demonstrators, but the numbers are growing by the minute. They are working hard to show restraint and dignity, facing forward in two rows like veteran soldiers, doing their best not to fidget, talk, or seem amused or even angry when a younger, tattooed man, not one of them, calls out repeatedly and manically, from behind their backs, “Bring our girls home. Save one for me.”
Leonard could step up and join the vigil here and now. This is more his type of protest than the one he’s caught up in. He could happily stand in the second row, his bruised face well hidden, staying quiet and grave, until the president goes home again. These are people he can be at ease among. He understands their etiquette. Not one looks less than peaceable. He’s tempted to stroll across and offer them his smiles, more sincere smiles than the ones he gave to the family from Lubbock, until he is invited to take part. But he has to toe the AmBush line—and that means staying distant and discreet, not drawing any attention to himself or seeming to be anything other than a man who’s keen to hear the first lady talk about children, libraries, and reading. He turns away and kills time by walking round the building, looking at the monuments, “all the fucking brass and marble,” as Maxie has described it. “Monuments to whom?” Leonard asked. And Maxie replied, much to his own amusement, “Well, it sure ain’t Willie Nelson. And it sure ain’t Reckless Kelly.” What Leonard finds instead are tributes to a Texas that is both historical and cinematic: the heroes of the Alamo, Texas pioneer women, the Spanish War veterans (though not the Spanish War that Leonard cares about), the Boy Scouts of America, the Pearl Harbor survivors, the fighting men of the 36th Infantry Division, the heroes of WWI. Its lyric is vainglorious, “God and Texas, Victory or Death” rather than “Come lie with me, my Texas rose.”
By the time Leonard has examined most of the many monuments and numbed himself by reading the legends and dedications, as he had tried to numb himself that morning with the moisturizer ingredients, the atmosphere in the Capitol grounds has modified. The vigil has been separated from its banner and pushed back fifty yards toward Lavaca Street and the festival tents, where the protesters are required to be dignified, disapproving, and silent out of sight of the Capitol’s main entrance. The save-a-girl-for-me campaigner, after being frisked for drugs, is “taking a walk,” as advised. A platoon of state troopers has created a security corridor through which the ticket holders for the Bush event are required to walk. Secret Service men, in suits not dissimilar from Maxie’s but wearing sunglasses, ear sets, and chest holsters, stand on the Capitol steps watching everything and everyone. Security at last. Leonard’s throat goes tight and dry in seconds. He wishes he had kept the apple now. Eating it would give him something innocent to do while he takes stock, while he identifies his options. He needs a coping strategy.
It is only when he sees a now familiar shorn-headed man walking confidently toward the Capitol steps that he is prompted—is obliged, perhaps—to show himself and get in line, a few yards back from Sniper No. 1, and begin the shuffle forward into the shadow of the dome. He’s frightened every step of it. Self-conscious too. The bruises and the cuts are bad enough, but there is also women’s makeup on his face. He spreads and smudges it when he wipes away his sweat. There are flesh-pink marks on his jacket sleeve. He takes deep, cooling breaths. This is Leonard’s single chance to prove and validate himself in Texas. Maxie has made that much clear. “Be big about it, man,” he said, meaning that any other option would be small. So Leonard stays in line, fixes his eyes on the scalp ahead of him, and concentrates on Private Alexander Sharp, his cruelly wasted life. What’s the problem, anyway? What’s he frightened of? He reminds himself of Nadia’s reassuring gloss, delivered over breakfast that morning when Leonard admitted to feeling nauseous: This is just a demonstration. At a seat of government. In a democratic state. Against an elected leader. What could be more natural or more American than that? All he has to do, as agreed in every detail, is wait until Laura is at the podium, and when, as she must, she says child for the first time, simply get up on his two hind legs and shout toward the president.
“Shout what?”
“Jeez, Leon, speak your mind. Just make it loud. And keep it short and simple, yeah? All I’m sayin’ is, in circumstances such as this, ‘Out’ is way more eloquent than”—Maxie holds up his clenched fist, Mr. Perkiss style—“than ‘Let’s battle for the death of the fascist insect that preys on the lives of the people.’ You won’t get deeper in than ‘Let’s.’ You hearin’ me, my good advice?”
Leonard hears him. He’ll plagiarize the giant-sized words from the silent vigil on the lawns. He’ll call out clearly and with a space between each word, “Troops … Out … Now.” That’s his opinion, after all. U.S. troops and UK troops. And, as Nadia reminds him, as a Briton in America, he has the right, a duty even, to speak his mind; that’s what alliance means. “Respect with honesty—like, show them that you care by telling them the truth.” Anyway, it hardly matters what he shouts. As Maxie says, he cannot expect to get beyond the first two words before he’s bustled away, maybe pushed and shoved a bit, maybe questioned fiercely by one of those men in sunglasses, and then probably turned out onto the street as soon as the Bushes have returned to Crawford. The worst that can happen is that they all get slammed into Travis County jail for a night of “sobering up” with all the other weekend criminals, the drunks and speeding drivers, the wife abusers and the crackheads: “That’s why you’re carryin’ those six ten-dollar bills. Protection money, man. You gotta watch your ass.”
For a moment Leonard imagines being put into a cell with Nadia. Then something worse: he’s sharing a cell with T-shirt Man, whose eyes are black and whose wounds have not begun to close. “So, Brit, do you love my shirt today?” he says; his great hand takes the wad of ten-dollar bills and reaches out for bones and saxophones to crush. Leonard shakes away the thought and next imagines—hopes, almost—that rather than a jailhouse beating, he gets heroically deported. The police and FBI see he’s British, not a U.S. national, and feel obliged to treat him gently. They’re allies, after all. They run him out to the airport and they put him on a plane, untouched, unscathed. They add his name to those not welcome in the U.S.A., along with other progressive icons: Fidel Castro, Graham Greene, Paul Robeson, and the Marxist drummer Eber Hardt, one of Leonard’s idols, a complex and percussive man. They stamp his passport deportee, and—his heart jumps a beat at this—they say he won’t, “as in never,” be allowed back in again. “Don’t even try it, bud. You’re not welcome here. You disrespect our president.”
But what kind of jazzman can’t work in America? That’s unthinkable. Eber Hardt’s exclusion all but ruined his career. What Leonard does today might scupper his career as well. There is a dollar cost to everything. He shuffles forward in the line, trying not to panic but to persuade himself there isn’t any danger of exclusion. He must believe in order and civility, that in America men in uniform and men who work for agencies will show restraint and moderation as a matter of training, as a matter of course, as a preference. They won’t throw random punches or flout the rules or trample on his rights or send him home to Britain on a whim. Leonard will not be the victim of a beating or a rubber stamp for deportees, just the appropriate victim of procedures, and such procedures will not be capricious or violent. In America, it must be safe to exercise a right of protest, even a noisy one. Safer, probably, than exercising a right to barbecue.
Leonard lifts his head. He’s calmed himself at last. Ahead of him, Maxie has engaged some strangers in the line in conversation. He’s talking, as ever, but he is talking quietly, matching his demeanor to his suit and haircut. The elderly couple he has singled out seem fascinated with him. The man even takes hold of his arm briefly to mark a joke that Maxie’s made. So Maxie will reach the ticket and security check in respectable company. He looks just like a decent Texan now, on home leave from his army unit or his aircraft carrier, with his proud mama and pa, attending on his president. Leonard has to nod his head in admiration. Maxie is a true professional, a skilled and practiced blender-in. Leonard ought to do the same, associate himself with someone in the line. But he does not trust himself. His mouth is far too dry to be convincing. He’ll give himself away at once. Two words from the tongue-tied British weirdo with the makeup and the scars and they will call the police, he’s sure of it. So as the line progresses into the south foyer of the Capitol and begins to ascend the stairs toward the second floor and the legislative chambers, he stays quiet and studies every detail of the festival program, hiding his face, hoping to look busy. There is a color photograph of the first lady on the opening page, among the “highlights” and a long list of other participants. Who are these writers and celebrities? He’ll have to ask Nadia to recommend some new American novels. Frank McCourt, Kinky Friedman, and Gore Vidal he knows, with varying degrees of vagueness. But other names—Gutkind, Salinas, Obama, Minutaglio, Hinojosa-Smith—are unfamiliar, except that they seem to tell the same story about America as any U.S. movie credit sequence or war memorial or heroes’ monument: that the country is a melting pot.
Leonard pivots on his heels to look down the stairs, wondering if there are any black or Hispanic faces and to see if Nadia has joined the line yet. His back is turned when the commotion starts on the second-floor landing. The line of ticket holders breaks loose abruptly, creating space for the fracas like playground kids. Guests step aside or press against the banisters and walls. There is shouting. Maxie’s voice. Three men in black suits are struggling with each other at the top of the stairs, just before the ticket check and access to the representatives’ chamber, where Mrs. Bush is slated to speak.
“Ticket or no ticket, you’re not coming in, no way,” the smallest one is saying. “Now just step out of line, sir.” He reaches out and takes hold of Maxie’s wrist. “Make it gentle. Move away.”
“Don’t even touch me, asshole.” Maxie throws a punch, but it falls short. The third man speaks into his lapel radio—“Backup, backup”—while his colleague repeats, “You’re not going in. Just walk aw—” He catches Maxie’s second punch full on the cheekbone and the push-and-shove begins again, dangerously close to the stair top. The older man who shared Maxie’s joke a minute or so ago is backing away from the scrum, pulled clear by his wife. He’s holding his ribs and looking both shocked and bruised. The backup beef arrives in the shape of three DPS officers in their light brown uniforms. They hardly make a noise but just reach out and take hold of a limb apiece, as quickly and as undramatically as three shepherds taking up a ram. It lasts a minute at the most. This is democracy at work. Order is restored with firm civility. Maxim Lermontov is hoisted off the ground. Neatly, though not noiselessly, he is carried, cursing like a teenager, in his deceiving suit along the hallway, out of sight, and very nearly out of Leonard’s life for good.
Leonard, still in shock but oddly satisfied as well—he’s smiling, can’t stop himself—has taken his seat in the chamber before he catches sight of Nadia. When he left the loft this morning with her apple, she was wrapped in towels and standing, barefoot and pink-faced, at the mirror drying her hair. Now she is dressed, of course, and prettier than he has ever seen her. During their brief flirtation over politics in Britain, she always wore walking boots and trousers and kept her hair fiercely brushed back from her brow. She’d not worn makeup, or certainly no makeup that was anything but functional. Sunblock. Lip salve. Moisturizer. Dermatitis cream. Nothing colorful. Here, though, when he sees her walking down the left aisle of the chamber looking for her place, her lips are painted red and her hair is teased into a wavy bob so that she looks less like a Sniper and more like a neat schoolteacher or librarian. She’s wearing a granola-patterned linen pantsuit with a butterfly brooch on the lapel. She seems a little taller too. Heeled shoes, perhaps. She looks composed. She cannot know that Maxie has been—what, arrested or just marched out of harm’s way? Leonard’s tempted to hurry after her, whisper the latest developments, and hint that they’d best call off AmBush entirely.
Regrettably for Leonard, this eventuality has already been allowed for in their planning. There was always the possibility that one or more of the Snipers might fail to get inside or within shouting range of Dubya. Whoever’s left, whoever does get into the chamber, must see the whole thing through, and alone if need be: as soon as Laura Bush says child, “Stand up, point toward the president, and shout what you have come to shout, and then resist removal by clinging to furniture or to your neighbor. Grab your neighbor’s belt or necklace. Don’t let go.” So, as instructed, edgily obedient, Leonard stays where he is, near the right aisle, two rows back from Nadia on one of the chamber’s heavy leather chairs, at a representative’s desk with its own telephone and voting keypad. He watches her and hopes she will turn and see him watching. Then he can make the cancel sign. But once she has found her seat, she is immobile, like a worshipper at church, frozen in thought, focusing on the pulpit.
Even Leonard is more composed now. Maxie’s removal or arrest has unburdened him to some extent. He does not have to prove himself in front of the American. He does not have to fear excess—a hidden gun, perhaps; more violence. He only has to be a plucky comrade for Nadia, and he is practiced at that. Many’s the time that he and she have stood shoulder to shoulder in demonstrations or on pickets in Britain, chanting slogans harmlessly. He can do the same today. With any luck, Maxie will be locked up. He deserves it, Leonard thinks. Punching a Secret Service agent must be worth a night in jail. Then he and Nadia can spend the evening together at the apartment without Maxie’s brutish presence. Finally. Today’s three contrasting views of her, in pajamas first, and then the wet-haired woman in her towels, the pretty woman in her suit, have made Leonard think once more that possibly he could make his move on Nadia. Or that he ought to at least try. With Maxie absent for the night, with AmBush successfully or unsuccessfully behind them, and with Nadia’s pregnancy acting on her mood, it could just happen that she tumbles into Leonard’s arms. He’ll ask if she will fix his face again. She stands between his open knees … It’s just a feeble fantasy—he stops himself—but still he returns within seconds to contemplate them making love: this time she lets her wet towels drop, she reaches up on her high heels and lets him kiss her lipsticked mouth while Maxie watches through his prison bars. This will be his sweet revenge for last night’s incident at Gruber’s, for the Texan’s painful, spiteful, fifty-fifty grip on his shoulder, for his turning his back on the saxophone, for—here Leonard’s anger shakes him hard—the clatter of that thrown dime. All Leonard has to do is hold his nerve. The worst he’ll have to do is shout three words.
By now the oakwood chamber is almost full. All the seats are taken and ticket holders have occupied the galleries, but there is still no sign of any officials or dignitaries on the dais at the governing end of the room, under the canopied square arch with its IN GOD WE TRUST inscription, the national and state flags, and the Lone Star chandeliers. Leonard studies the festival program again, trying to steady his hands and keep his eyes off Nadia, until with hardly a prompt the audience goes quiet, all of its own accord, and attendants come from the back of the room and take up positions in the aisles and in front of the dais. Laura Bush enters through side doors, from the Speaker’s office. There’s no mistaking her, her ordinary smile. She is escorted by some tough old Texan reptile that Leonard recognizes from the local television news, by an awkwardly neat festival chairwoman, and by a younger woman in a black shift dress whom someone in the row behind identifies as Jenna Bush, the daughter. The audience applauds, and Leonard mutters to himself, “Child, child.” He wants the word to be set as a spring that snaps him into noise and action the very instant it is aired, right on the first beat of the bar, or at least before he has the chance to think. He needs to feel as triggered as an athlete waiting for the starting gun.
Of course, there’s someone missing, isn’t there? Leonard straightens at the thought. Where is the president? He did not accompany his wife when she entered with her daughter, that’s for sure. He isn’t on the dais. Leonard raises himself a little in his chair and inspects the front row of the chamber, where the dignitaries are seated in reserved places. None of them resembles George W. Bush. None of them has the president’s distinctive wiry crop of hair or his stiff shoulders, always halfway through a shrug. And none of them resembles George Senior or the president’s mother, come to that. He swivels round and swiftly checks the rest of the room, the galleries even, but not a sign. Laura and Jenna are the only ones. If the president and his parents have come to Austin, as Maxie has said they would, then clearly they will not be attending the first lady’s keynote speech, unless they’re doing it in disguise or are crouching behind the woodwork of the upper balcony. So, thank heavens, Maxie’s “private enterprise,” his plague on all their houses, has proved to be a thorough waste of time. A totally inefficient squandering of time. There is no Maxie and there is no president. AmBush has turned into a farce.
For the first time that day, the rigid knot in Leonard’s stomach loosens and unties. He is a happy man. Their plans can be abandoned. He will play jazz in New York. The Four T’s will not be his only gig in America. Bravo. Bravo. But his relief is still uncertain. Nadia will see, of course, that the president has not arrived and that AmBush should be called off. But almost certainly she cannot yet know that Maxie isn’t there. There is no predicting what she might do if she still thinks he’s with her in the chamber.
Laura Bush is talking at the podium. She looks, he thinks, a lot like Nadia might look in twenty years’ time, if she dyes her hair and smiles. Both women are dressed similarly, in fact, with churchgoing small-town white-bread values in every stitch of their clothes, although Laura’s pantsuit is more pearl than granola, and she has a textile bloom on the sprigging of her lapel rather than a metal butterfly. But the lipstick is almost a match. So, oddly, is the hair. They could be mother and daughter, Leonard thinks—Laura, Jenna, Nadia—and the mother comes across as personable rather than viciously Republican, even though she’s reading from the page a little stiffly. It’s something dull about the administration’s billion-dollar-a-year “national reading initiative” that is targeting “low-income children.” Children! Leonard almost jumps. But no, that’s not it. The word he fears is singular. He looks across at Nadia. She seems unstirred. All is safe and well, perhaps.
It is four minutes, actually, before, at last, Laura Bush says the word. But Leonard’s missed it. He is in a reverie. This time it’s Maxie sharing cells with T-shirt Man—and T-shirt Man has two big friends with him. Maxie is apologizing. Maxie’s pissing down his leg. Maxie’s head is making porous thuds against the wall. Leonard’s never hated anyone this much, hate and envy, all in one. For a moment it’s almost as if the commotion from the front of the chamber belongs to Leonard’s reverie and Maxie in his prison cell. But all too soon Leonard is half out of his seat, like everybody there, and trying to find a clear view of the dais. Nadia is on her feet, shouting, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and has already pushed her way into the aisle before anyone has a chance to seize her arm.
Leonard sits and lowers his head into his hands. He squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t want to hear or watch. Nadia sounds so screechy and so British—and so inefficient. Uncool, in fact. Unhip. Unblue. “Shame!”—constantly repeated as she dashes toward the podium in her high shoes—is an aimless slogan. Shame on what? Shame on the war? Shame on the planned withdrawal of troops? Shame on libraries? Does this woman have no sense of what’s appropriate? He’s overestimated her. America has poisoned her. Maxie’s knocked her out of shape. Does she not understand or care that the president’s not here and that this is only the president’s unelected wife, supporting libraries? All Laura Bush is calling for is that kids should read a book in bed at night. Everyone heard her saying as much a minute ago. Now where’s the shame in that? She’s just the meek, accommodating spouse. She could be married to a Democrat or to a pacifist and she would still want dads and moms to read their children nursery tales. This is silly, Nadia Emmerson. This is impolite. Sit down.
In fact, Leonard almost stands and shouts “Sit down,” as others are doing, rather than the “Troops … Out … Now” that he has planned. But he stays where he is, his face pressed into his hands, while pregnant Nadia succeeds in getting to the podium before any of the Secret Service men stir in their suits to block her access to the president’s wife. Indeed, Nadia has jumped up on the great oak Speaker’s table and has kicked off her spiky shoes before the first protector, a beefy, uniformed state trooper, has succeeded in grabbing her ankle and succeeded too in toppling Nadia off the table and onto Laura Bush. There is an audible clash of heads. Inexplicably, Nadia has not attempted to roll off her victim but is both gripping her by the lapel of her pearl pantsuit and pushing her back over her chair. Laura Bush takes hold of Nadia’s hair but does not tug at it. They’re wrestling. It’s an erotic fantasy made flesh, the blogs will say.
Now guns are drawn. Almost everybody in the audience is on their feet, shouting for this embarrassment to end. The Secret Service men have come alive at last, as have some men from the audience. Texan Volunteers. Heroes of the Book Festival. Nadia is pulled back across the table by twenty hands and forced onto the floor. Again there is a crash of heads. She screams and tries to shout, “Troops—” but is silenced with a hand across her mouth before she’s lifted up by ankles and by wrists and bundled away, through the governor’s door. Another friend is out of sight, though not immediately out of hearing, and very nearly out of Leonard’s life. Another eighteen years.
Leonard does not need to stand, or to speak. He no longer has to make a fuss. Any fuss he makes would be too late anyway and buried by the mayhem all around. Everybody else in the chamber is already making an excited fuss. What a historic tale they’ll have to tell their grandchildren. The nation’s first lady is being ushered from the room. She presses a tissue against her face. She holds her head with the other hand. Her nose is bleeding and blood is dripping on her suit.
Leonard lets his neighbors pass and waits for the chamber to clear round him before he even gets out of his chair. He’s calm but he is shaking. He’ll go back to the loft, remove his makeup, collect his bags and Mr. Sinister, and leave at once, before the police arrive. What other choice is there? He’s being sensible. His only hope is that the child has not been hurt, the child who will be Lucy Emmerson.