“Our occupying friends want to beat it also,” she said. “To death.”
“Because they’re true believers. The only thing I believe for sure is that I have too much doubt to throw bombs. I am constitutionally able only to sabotage myself.”
“You should get out more. A few years in Legal Aid will change your tune. Remember when we were in law school and I used to worship Clarence Darrow and Thurgood Marshall?”
“Defenders of the damned and dispossessed.”
“I have new idols now.” She picked up her empty martini glass and turned it upside down among the other empties on the table. “Do you know of La Malinche, the slave woman who toppled the Aztecs? Or Mir Jafar, the Indian prince who betrayed the corrupt Bengal Empire? Or Ephialtes, who doomed the Spartans at Thermopylae?”
“All a step down from Thurgood Marshall, don’t you think?”
“Different times demand different role models. History tells us that every sweet piece of carnage has had its inside man. Someone needs to know the names.”
“Melanie?”
“You want to know what I learned from Machiavelli? ‘He who wishes to establish a Republic where there are many Gentlemen, cannot do so unless first he extinguishes them all.’ I think we should order more oysters.”
“I don’t like that word.”
“Oyster?”
“Extinguish.”
She grabbed herself another shell. “You’re paralyzed by your aspirations, Victor. You always have been.”
“Don’t forget what we are, what we’ve sworn to uphold.”
“Robespierre was a lawyer, too, dearheart. The thing I love most about freshly shucked oysters is the way you can almost feel them squirming as they roll down your throat.”
As I watched Melanie swallow whole another Montauk Pearl, the true change in her became manifest. It wasn’t the straightened hair or the thinned cheekbones or the startling red dress. The real difference in Melanie Brooks was that her sincerity had been twisted, by what we the people have done to our politics, into something virulent and dark, a nihilism waiting for the right moment to leap and tear at the corruption, even if it meant tearing out a hundred thousand throats. It made me shiver, and made me feel ashamed.
“You know how farmers used to burn their fields after the harvest to rid themselves of the unneeded stalks?” said Melanie Brooks—sincere-and-committed Melanie Brooks, always-the-best-of-us Melanie Brooks—staring out now at the setting sun in a way that the light reflecting in her eyes matched her crimson dress. “All it takes is a match. Look at the sunset, look how gorgeous the light is as it spreads across the whole of the horizon. Like the landscape is igniting into a great field of fire.”
First thing I did back in Philadelphia was throw away the shoes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHOTO © SIGRID ESTRADA
William Lashner is the New York Times bestselling author of The Barkeep, The Accounting, Blood and Bone, and seven previous Victor Carl novels, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages and sold across the globe. Writing under the pseudonym Tyler Knox, Lashner is also the author of Kockroach, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Before retiring from law to write full-time, Lashner was a prosecutor with the Department of Justice in Washington, DC. He is a graduate of the New York University School of Law as well as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives outside Philadelphia with his wife and three children.
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