by David Pepper
The asphalt parking lot spun wildly, so I grabbed the SUV’s roof to steady myself. Standing still gave me a glimpse of my reflection in the window. From bloodshot eyes to bloated cheeks to gray skin, it was not a pretty sight. I raked my fingers through my salt-and-pepper hair, which I’d let grow longer than usual.
The walk to the restaurant’s front door took some time as I labored to keep my head still. Oversized yellow script towered over the modest diner: “Bad Apples. Established 1944.” A long way from Georgetown, but my kind of place.
The pimply ponytailed teenager working the hostess stand grimaced as if my appearance alone were dragging the place down.
“Can I help you, sir?” she asked, sounding like the few people I’d known from Milwaukee.
“I’m meeting a woman na—”
“Mr. Sharpe! Over here!”
Halfway down the left side of the restaurant, a thin arm shot high in the air as if hailing a Manhattan cab. A wisp of a woman leapt to her feet, her outstretched arm close to the ceiling.
It was definitely her. On the drive from Youngstown, I’d browsed her Facebook page so I’d recognize her. Her long, thin face; small pointed nose; and short black hair with long bangs definitely stood out. In the photo and again here.
What her profile photo didn’t capture, but which stuck out even more, was her unusual height. She topped six feet and, as thin as she was, appeared even taller.
“Never mind,” I said to the hostess.
I walked toward the booth, but she covered more than half the ground before my third step. She shook my hand with a firm grip while unleashing a wide, toothy smile.
“Victoria?”
Victoria Justice. When she’d mentioned her name in her first message, it had made me think of a superhero.
“Call me Tori, Mr. Sharpe.”
“And you can call me Jack, Tori.”
We squeezed our long legs into our respective sides of the booth. For a moment I lost my concentration. Head on, Victoria Justice’s crystal-blue eyes were startling. Light from the window also revealed elegant streaks of dark blue running through her hair.
“It’s nice to mee—”
Her eyes glittered as she burst into a hearty laugh.
“Rough night?”
It was like a hard jab to the nose. “Do you always ask that the first time you meet someone?”
“No, but it’s never such an obvious question.” She laughed again, gesturing toward the window. “You were taken aback yourself checking your reflection out in the car window. Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us.”
Outside the window, my Escape sat only yards away. She’d witnessed my entire wobbly arrival.
“You look like you’ve had a rough morning yourself.”
I’d noticed the bruises on her arms when she shook my hand. Since she didn’t bother to hide them—as my sister had for years—I assumed they weren’t caused by a man. So my snarky retort felt like fair game after her opening barrage.
“Oh, these?” She pointed to a purple spot on her left arm, below the sleeve of her gray T-shirt. “Badges of honor. I got ’em scoring three times in this morning’s rugby match.”
“You play rugby?”
With her height and build, I would’ve gone with tennis. Maybe volleyball. Rugby was for squat, muscular types. People shaped like bowling balls, not the pins. No wonder she had all those bruises.
“Oh, yeah. Nothing like a good scrum to start the weekend off right.”
“Well, I played football back in the day. So we have that in common.”
“Right! You guys wear pads and take long breaks between every play. Not a lot in common there.”
I took a deep, steadying breath.
I’d learned the lesson with my young colleagues at Republic. Millennials didn’t talk to their elders the way my generation had been brought up to. They just blurted out their thoughts. It wasn’t a sign of disrespect, just an intergenerational difference in style. Young Victoria Justice had no idea that every sentence she’d uttered was, at best, confrontational.
Mercifully, another ponytailed teenager came to take our orders. The interruption gave us a chance to start over, and she had the good sense to do so.
“Thank you for coming, Jack,” Tori said after our server walked away. “I’ve been eager to meet.”
“No kidding.” She’d called incessantly. “So you worked on the recent special? For Justice Beagle?”
I’d checked it out before coming. Justice Beau Beagle had beaten Judge Willie Flannery in the special election for a vacant Wisconsin Supreme Court seat two months back, a week before Tori had first called.
“I did.”
“Congratulations. That was a big win. Were you the manager?”
“No. The manager is off running a campaign for Congress. In Madison.”
“Good for him. What did you do, then? Field director? Comms? Finance?”
After campaign manager, the three big jobs in a standard campaign were finance director, communications director, and field director. Outside vendors handled much of the remaining work—mainly television ads, mail, and polling. That was where all the money was. Vendors made a mint, hired by staff who worked for peanuts.
“I was actually part-time. But I answered to the field guy and the manager.”
Jesus. I’d driven all this way for a part-timer who answered to the field guy? Back on my dad’s campaigns for state representative, the job title for that was “volunteer.”
“So what job were you doing for the campaign?”
“I was the voter file manager,” she said.
“The what?”
“You sound like my dad. It’s called the voter file manager. You know: I managed the campaign’s voter file.”
“The voter file?” I’d heard the term in passing. Like all of corporate America, campaigns and parties stored a lot more data on voters than they used to, but I’d never spent a lot of time digging into that side of things.
She scowled as if I’d confused the order of the alphabet.
“Jack, the voter file is how campaigns keep up with every voter they interact with. Everything we do is tabulated and sorted on the voter file. My job was to keep track of all that information.”
I nodded. “When I used to knock on doors for Dad’s campaigns, I’d bring my walking list back to the campaign headquarters all marked up.”
For me, knocking on doors had been the highlight of Dad’s campaigns. Dad had served as a state representative in Canton, Ohio, for years. Throughout the summer and fall of every election year, we went door-to-door, listening, talking, then closing with an ask. The conversations were mostly pleasant—a welcome reminder that most people were good-hearted. Nothing felt better than bringing back a precinct sheet with all the Y’s circled, meaning they were all going to vote for Dad. A secondary goal was YS’s, indicating residents who wanted yard signs. A street dotted with “Re-elect Sharp” yard signs had been the ultimate trophy for my political prowess.
For most of Dad’s campaigns, my sister had entered the results of our filled-out precinct sheets into a big spreadsheet. For hours a day, but as a volunteer.
“So,” I said, “your job was to input all the data and keep the file on it.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, but yes.” Her light sarcasm suggested I had just graduated from third grade to fifth grade.
The server reappeared, setting down our drinks and two large plates of scrambled eggs. I took a sip of coffee before digging into the eggs with fervor. Greasy meals had long been my preferred cure for hangovers.
I was halfway through my first bite when Tori pulled a small plastic package from her backpack. She took a moist cleansing wipe from the package and rubbed it between her hands.
I almost waited for her to lift her fork. But after Tori h
ad deposited the used wipe back into her bag, I shoveled a second bite into my mouth.
Still her fork remained on the table. She removed a second wipe and rubbed her hands just as feverishly, in the exact same places, while chewing on her lower lip. Rather than talking or even looking my way, she eyed her own scrubbing as if she were performing surgery.
Now well ahead of her, I stopped eating. She took out a third wipe, scrubbed, put it to the side, then grabbed a fourth. And that’s when I noticed that her hands were beet red, chapped on the tips of her fingers and thumbs, and along the sides of her palms.
Apparently my gaze was not subtle.
“I’m a real germophobe,” she said without looking up, “so I’ll just be a minute. No need to wait.”
I dug in again but couldn’t avert my eyes. She grabbed a fifth wipe, then a sixth. Only after a final scrub with the seventh did she place the package of wipes back into her bag and lift her fork. With only English muffins left on my plate, she dug into her eggs.
“So are you studying data or statistics?” I asked, trying to save a conversation that kept veering off course.
“Neither. I’m getting my master’s in literature.”
“Literature? Is that a common focus for voter file managers?” I regretted the words as soon as they came out.
“I know, right? The campaign manager asked the same question when I applied, but the judge actually liked it. The truth is, data work comes so naturally, it bores me. So I chose literature because it’s more interesting, and I’m a decent writer but want to get better.”
She paused, then batted her long lashes. “It’s almost as unheard-of as an injured jock becoming a political reporter.”
Only a hard choke stopped a morsel of English muffin from plunging down my windpipe.
“So you do your research.”
My path had indeed been a circuitous one. Starred at quarterback in high school and college with not entirely unrealistic NFL dreams. My throwing arm crushed by a sack my senior year at Youngstown State. Stayed in town after graduating to become a sports reporter, then moved over to the political desk. In fact, politics was what I knew best, but it had also stopped interesting me years ago, after Dad lost a nasty primary. But it paid the bills.
“There’s nothing that Google can’t get to the bottom of.” She lifted the last forkful of egg toward her mouth.
“Okay, Madam Voter File Manager with the hygienic hands,” I said, cutting to the chase. “I drove hours to get here. So tell me why you called, emailed, and messaged me for weeks about your candidate’s big victory.”
“Simple.” She downed her last bite and grabbed an additional wipe. “There’s no conceivable way that Justice Beagle won that election.”
CHAPTER 5
PORTOFINO, ITALY
Katrina didn’t flinch even as most of the older men who walked past her leered without subtlety or shame.
Natalie, standing on the other side of the ornate double doors, looked nearly identical: heels, black skirt, white blouse, none of it showy but all of it tight. And, like Katrina’s, Natalie’s dark brown hair fell halfway down her back.
“Good evening, Mr. Xi,” Katrina said as a round, graying Asian man approached her, a young stilt of a man at his side. “Welcome to the Pushkin. You may sit wherever you like.”
The skinny man whispered into his boss’s ear, translating her greeting. Mr. Xi bowed his head formally, then entered the large room behind her. As the yacht’s stately foyer swayed ever so slightly, Katrina looked down at the iPad in her hand and, touching her finger to the screen, marked off his name.
Katrina had studied all of the guests so she’d recognize them by sight, showing the required respect. But, even more important than their names, she knew their stories. Xi was a steel magnate from southern China. He’d grown up in the countryside, in a family of peasants, but had worked his way up the Communist Party to become one of the country’s wealthiest men. He then expanded his business into other parts of Asia until some impolitic moves impeded his progress.
A bald, round-faced man reached the top of the steps and bounded her way. He was exactly Katrina’s height and built like an anvil, with thick, tattooed forearms and a barrel chest that narrowed to a trim waist. He might’ve been attractive but for the crater-like pockmarks and dark skin tags hanging like ticks off his ruddy cheeks and down his neck. Steroids, Katrina guessed, but he should pay to have that mess cleaned up. He certainly could afford it. Curls of charcoal hair billowed up from beneath his patterned shirt, which was open a third of the way down.
Natan Terzian. Armenian, forty-two years old, from the mountains near Yerevan. He’d become a billionaire making rubber and selling it to the former Soviet republics, the Middle East, and China.
“Good morning, Mr. Terzian,” Katrina said to him, bracing for a crude reply.
He stopped with exaggerated drama, his steely eyes sweeping her figure up and down. “Good morning, beautiful,” he said in a deep, heavily accented English. “You have already made the visit worth my while.”
“Thank you.”
She nodded politely and cast a professional half grin. Men of this level misread almost any signal from an attractive woman as a sign of interest, usually triggering an unwelcome pursuit. And declining an entreaty later would cause problems.
“This will be a fruitful discussion. Please sit where you like.”
His lips twisted. “I can only hope we have fruitful discussions after our meeting as well.” His puffy fingers rubbed the small of her back as he finished the sentence.
In any other circumstance, she would’ve recoiled and scolded the offender. But she neither budged nor breathed. A blowup with a man of his temperament and importance risked sacrificing the entire meeting.
“Let us first have a fruitful discussion with the others,” she said, maintaining her forced smile.
He paused as if to speak again, pursed his lips, then walked into the large cabin behind the double doors.
She caught her breath, then placed a checkmark next to his name.
Over the next fifteen minutes, twelve more men and two women stepped onto the rear deck of the 180-foot yacht, walked up the stairs to the main foyer, and strolled past Katrina and Natalie into the grand dining room behind them. Like a UN convention but with an Eastern tilt. A Kyrgyz. A Syrian. Another Kazakh. Two Russians, one from Siberia and one from the Far East, closer to Alaska than Moscow. A Romanian, a Ukrainian, and two Serbians. Three more Chinese, an Albanian, and a giant Afghan.
Katrina glanced at her clipboard. Only two invited guests remained unchecked. She saw the Georgian listed but, certain he would not attend, drew a line through his name. Only one more.
The titans gabbed and gossiped behind her. Some had known each other before the gathering. Terzian, the Armenian, somehow knew them all, yelling out the names of the newcomers, then greeting them each with a bear hug. Global oligarchy was a small club, its members usually subdued about their elite status. But these visitors were more recent entrants, or still pounding on the door to get in, which explained the celebratory buzz in the room. They were hungry, which was why they’d been invited in the first place.
The final guest arrived with one minute to spare. The gentleman of the group, his gaze never strayed from her eyes. In his fifties, the founder of China’s largest internet search engine, Zhang Yong sported a buzz cut of jet-black hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He politely grasped her hand.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” he said warmly, in British-accented English. “It is good to see you again.”
“Thank you for joining us.” Katrina rewarded the rare charm with a warmer smile and longer grasp of the hand than she’d offered the others. “We are about to begin.”
After he walked through the doors, she made the final checkmark on her list. Out the window, dusk darkened the harbor and the steep Italian hi
llside towering over it.
“Show time.”
She and Natalie each gripped a door handle and pulled the double doors closed as they entered the dining room.
CHAPTER 6
APPLETON, WISCONSIN
Want me to drive?” Tori asked after I paid the Bad Apples bill at the front counter. “You still don’t look quite up to it.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” I conceded, pocketing the change.
We walked past several cars before she stopped in back of a beat-up Dodge pickup truck. Sun-stained red paint speckled about half of the track’s surface, the rest a combination of metallic silver and rust.
“Are you sure we’re gonna make it?” I asked.
“Hey,” she said, giving me the tiniest of shoves to the shoulder. Her jovial push forced me back a step despite her thin frame. Rugby made more sense now.
“This baby spent years hauling everything you can imagine on a working dairy farm. She’s earned every scrape she’s got.”
Unlike its exterior, the truck’s cabin was immaculate. The seats looked newly polished, the floors pristine, and the dashboard, center console, and steering wheel were all spotless.
“I see you’re waging your war against germs in here, too.”
“Definitely. You’ll learn that I’m a soldier of sanitation.”
We pulled onto College Avenue and headed into town. In the diner, after enticing me by claiming there was no way Justice Beagle won his campaign, she’d offered to show me proof.
“So what changed your mind?” she asked as the street we were on became the tree-lined boulevard of a college town.
“Change my mind about what?” I asked, worried about where this was going. I was here to interview her, not vice versa.
“Returning my call.” When I said nothing, she tossed in some refreshing flattery: “Why would a big shot like you call a lowly grad student back?”
Good. She didn’t know. So much for Google.
