The French Revolution (43 page)

Robespierre turned to the camera, eyes wide open and dizzyingly brown, her mouth circular and hot like a steamed-up jacuzzi. “Excellent question, Jessica,” she said, keeping her voice level, easy to trust. “The City of San Francisco has many connections to the federal government, which pays for a great deal of local services, sometimes by funding specific programs, but mostly through block grants to the state, which the state in turn distributes to us. Then they use our services while ignoring our rules. For example, the Presidio is considered federal land, so while they use city resources, our electrical grid, our sewer system, our gas lines, they don’t abide by city ordinances and aren’t held to the same local laws as the vast majority of San Franciscans who don’t live in the Presidio.

“Now, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors isn’t Congress. We don’t reflect the country as a whole. But we still have a duty to act against things that are wrong. I’m proud to live in a place where hatred isn’t tolerated, where the underprivileged are given the help and respect to get back on their feet, where art and music are treasured, where compassion is integral to our lives.” She laughed lightly, conveying delight and wonder, presenting a portal to everlasting joy. “Come on,” she sprayed, “where else could we have all this?”

Bedlam swarmed her, pandemonium crashing across the stage. “In San Francisco,” her voice rose an octave, “when we see our soldiers dying in a war that should never have been started, that is worsening our national security, that is mortgaging our future, that is killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people and forcing good people to do evil things, we have a moral obligation to stand up and declare that it is unacceptable.” She threw her arms skyward to evoke victory, her campaign’s capstone within reach. “This tragedy has been playing out for over a decade, and it’s as wrong now as it ever was. We must stop the war!”

Calls from the backs of throats, zinging whistles, beautiful back-breaking disorganized chaos. Esmerelda squeezed Jasper’s hand in the front row; he came back with a dry kiss on her forehead. Onstage, Joel Lumpkin parsed the dirt in his head and Leslie Han clapped politely.

“Mr. Lumpkin,” the political editor butted in when the clamor slipped a notch, “your question is from Randy Spiglowski in the Richmond. He asks: ‘I’ve seen your advertisements many times, and I’m impressed by your attitude and appearance. But what do you stand for? Everything I’ve heard about your positions is rumor, secondhand, or vague. What, specifically, would you do for San Francisco?’”

Murphy Ahn looked over the crowd, gunning for a friendly face to start with but finding only hostility, disgust, in many cases clear-cut malice. “I’m going to make the city transportation system free,” he began. “All buses, trains, and cable cars. I’ll pay for it by selling ads. I’m going to cut business tax rates to attract the biggest companies from Silicon Valley, which will pay far more in cumulative revenue in the long run to offset the near-term losses. I’m going to knock down dilapidated buildings in Bayview and build state-of-the-art office complexes for these companies to set up shop and rejuvenate the neighborhoods. I’m going to build twenty job training facilities and after-school centers in my first year in office, and triple the police presence in known gang areas, so we can stop the killing and move forward.
I’m going to get the 2028 Summer Olympics in San Francisco so the rest of the world can experience our marvelous way of life. And, in a point very dear to my heart, I am going to create a sexual assault center staffed by the police department and medical professionals to help the victims and families of the most psychologically ravaging crimes.” He paused to savor the freshly cut quiet, the slow accumulation of respect. He spotted Big D and Marat passing a pipe back and forth, then glanced over at Jasper Winslow, his marked head shaped like an anvil and oblivious.

“Of great concern to me is a rash of unsolved rapes that occurred in the mid-1990s here in San Francisco. I’ll give you an example. Tina Winslow is a handicapped woman who lives in the Excelsior. For years she endured rape and incest from her brother, but was too intimidated to report it.”

Esmerelda’s felt her husband’s hand fidget in her grip, his lungs pulling like a vacuum cleaner. “Honey?” she asked, and saw he was crying.

“These crimes have gone unpunished for decades. I’ve learned that the criminal is not only at-large, he is among us.” He went quiet, foreboding, true: “The rapist is Jasper Winslow.”

Voices real and imagined chopped across the plaza:

All eyes swept to Robespierre. Her throat clenched, and there was a pitter-patter in her forehead and some whine in her ears, and the worst thing in the world was happening, her life wrested away by her father, the long-lost pops, the dead man reborn as rock star; in the end he’d ruined her and Tina Winslow and everything but the stupid war in Iran, her only dad did all this.

Calmly she walked off the stage.

“Excuse me!” Leslie Han blurted. “I object! This is neither the time nor place for accusations out of left field! Let’s get back on track with the debate!”

Esmerelda turned to her husband. His face was choked and runny, his hand retreated from hers. “Jasper,” she said softly as he tugged on his earlobe. She pulled him close and kissed the tears on his sallow jowls, rubbed his bony shoulder.

“Ahhh,” he murmured. “Ahhh.”

The political editor was standing and saying something, but all eyes were fixated on Robespierre’s rapid poker-faced exit. Leslie Han left his podium and put his arm over her shoulder, walking alongside her until they were both off in the wings.

Joel Lumpkin was alone on the stage. Last man standing. As usual. He allowed himself a smirk, close-lipped and masked by his wrenched nose and cosmetic wallpaper. He closed his eyes and listened to the shocked silence of an underdog victory, everyone unsure of what to believe; could this be true?

When he looked back down at the world, the old sow in the front row was up and sidearming objects from her purse: Tic-Tacs, a can of tuna fish, a roll of dimes, fancy-looking scissors, a calculator with oversized buttons, a heating pad, what looked like a light dumbbell. Landing close, around him, slamming against the podium, accompanied by Esmerelda’s shouting: “YOU FUCKING DOUCHE BAG LIAR SCUM! YOU SOULLESS
LIFE-SUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! MY LAWYER IS GOING TO TURN YOUR ASSHOLE INTO A PRISON PARKING LOT!”

Even though it was strategically enervating, Joel couldn’t resist a few small chuckles. Did the stupid ever learn? He smiled broadly as a team of cops shoved past Big D on their way to clamp down Esmerelda.

Then Big D putting a gun in a cop’s face and pulling and screaming white noise, a cacophonous rebel yell.

Offstage, Marat hugging his sister and whispering that everything was going to be all right, he was there for her, always, his only sister, the only one who knew.

Big D and his boys pulling out guns and shooting at everything, cops and trees and TV cameras but mostly at Murphy Ahn, the shitfucker Octopus traitor hogging the stage, so many bullets they couldn’t miss, a fire hose on a match.

Joel Lumpkin’s bodyguards turning heel and skedaddling, they weren’t paid enough for that shit and the man was dead anyhow, fuck if they were going down with the ship.

The audience racing and shoving and frozen solid, thinking this is San Francisco this doesn’t happen here this isn’t real is this death am I dead where am I?

Murphy Ahn’s face an exploding jack-o’-lantern, black burgundy shrapnel over the San Francisco city seal backdrop. Screwed landless veterans watching the broadcast and cheering it on.

Marat holding his sclerotic sister, absorbing her sobs on his shoulder.

Leslie Han directing the police toward the shooters, identifying Big D as the ringleader and hurling his cellphone at him, nailing him in the eye and freezing him long enough for the cops to get him five times in the gut, his gold-plated incisors catching on the edge of a metal folding chair as he fell.

Jasper and Esmerelda on the ground, rolling through discarded programs and grass smelling of sulfur and spilled soda.

Police feeding bullets into Big D’s crew, every man taken down from seven angles, then kicked, cuffed, kicked again.

Errant bullets cutting common carotid arteries, lodging in legs, shattering shoulders.

Slicing screams into thick, wet wheezes.

In the back of Robespierre’s seating section, Karen Winslow walking Tina’s wheelchair carefully toward the subway, ninety-five years old and feeling it, lips buttoned in, barely able to see the sidewalk over Tina’s hair bun, pangs of misery hitting like thrown bricks.

Billowing crowd noise when they realized the shooting was probably over and it was safe to make calls, 911 and their mothers and boyfriends to tell them they were safe, this shit was unbelievable, there was death everywhere, and blood, and everything all fucked up, but they were safe they were safe they were alive.

An off-duty radiologist cupping a Van Twinkle volunteer’s head as she burbled on about Robespierre, how her heart belonged to Robespierre, flubbing her words with all the blood but still declaring her life for Robespierre’s ideals through the heaves until she stopped.

On his knees Leslie Han performing CPR on Big D, his suit jacket stuffed in the gangster’s side, pumping hard until Big D sputtered into consciousness, somehow.

Marat Van Twinkle carrying his sister to the paramedics, a scarlet curtain crashing down her face.

Twenty million dollars bubbling in the bank, ready to rebuild
.

Esmerelda Van Twinkle crawling on top of her husband and kissing his lips, wiping his nose, telling him she was his forever, prison and Tina didn’t matter, the restaurants and record deals didn’t matter, he had so much more now, meat on the bones, depth and struggle, you could hear it in his voice, her champion, begging him to hold her while he sobbed apologies to his sister. A final shared moment before accusations and trial testimony tainted the rest of their lives.

Marat sprinting through the war zone, threading the advancing SWAT team to find his parents rolling on the ground; pulling them up and shouldering them through a field of abandoned chairs to
huddle under blankets; the Van Twinkle family locked together; united and devastated; guilty and wronged; faces chiseled with the weight of hard-fought years; excruciatingly rich.

 

The national crucible cooling down, the Republic charred with glorious ideals, and faults.

 

 

And with that, France was saved.

Thanks to Meredith Norton, Caroline Roberts, and Ben Lorr for their careful reads through early drafts. Their delicate, thorough comments helped deliver this book from screaming infancy into rambunctious semi-adulthood.

Thanks to JJ Schultz and Jamey Graham for their generous technical help, which has made this book so much more than a book.

Thanks to my grandmother Dorothy Stewart for helping me understand how fiction makes life better.

Thanks to my parents, David O. Stewart and Nancy Floreen, for inspiring a lifelong love of words and letting me run down this rabbit hole for years guilt-free.

Thanks to Carrie Dieringer, Anne Horowitz, Tiffany Lee, Charlie Winton, and the rest of the Soft Skull/Counterpoint crew for making this book real.

Thanks to my awesome editor Denise Oswald for her deft touch and immense patience and for generally being a badass motherfucker.

Thanks to my amazing agent Lisa Grubka for making this book so much better and green-lighting all my zany ideas and never giving up.

Thanks to my wife, Karla Zens, for comforting me when I’m high and low and all over the place in between, for her countless reads and brilliant feedback and permanent love. You will always be my first and last reader.

Copyright © 2010 by Matt Stewart. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.