Chapter 5 #2
None of these people were on Reggie’s list of suspects.
He was bartending at one end of the room; he caught my eye and tilted his head slightly toward a middle-aged man in a navy blue suit making his way through an archway into a smaller parlor, a library lined with bookshelves holding miles of bound lawbooks.
Most of the men were wearing these boxy navy or dark gray outfits, which hid their bodies for an interchangeably somber dullness.
But this guy’s silver hair was a bit more carefully combed and his necktie more painstakingly knotted, in the manner of a Dixie gentleman.
He was on Reggie’s whiteboard: the notorious Senator Fleming Fairmont.
Keeping a few yards back, I trailed the senator into the library, where a younger first-term congressman was waiting, a chipmunky, gleaming-faced up-and-comer with a brush cut and possibly some muscle tone.
“Trent,” said Fleming, offering a manly handshake that went on a few seconds too long. “I hoped you’d be here. Are you settling in?”
“Oh, yes,” chirped Trent. “Committee assignments are announced next week.”
“Have you heard,” Fleming said, lowering his voice and gesturing to a tufted leather couch, “about the Blue Room?”
“What?” said Trent, way too eagerly, as he hadn’t learned to be cagey with gossip.
“Well,” said Fleming, “no one knows this, it’s been totally buried, but there was an attempt on our First Lady’s life. An unsuccessful attempt, needless to say.”
“Really?” said Trent, as if Fleming had popped a dog treat into his slavering mouth.
“No one knows who’s responsible, but I’m told the President is terrified.”
“He should be,” said Trent. “Are they doubling down on security?”
I was slowly but respectfully picking up abandoned beverages and grouping them onto my tray, while Fleming ignored me, as if I were a framed hunting print or an ottoman.
“I assume so. Because it won’t be the last time this happens.”
As Trent’s eyebrows shot upward, Timothy appeared with his tray and Fleming glowed, sitting up just a bit straighter.
Of course: Fleming recognized Timothy from his OnlyFans.
Timothy had also registered this; he’d told me that, wherever he goes, in any city, he can always tell who’s seen him naked, by the slack-jawed double takes, especially from men accompanied by their wives and children on the street.
Timothy was merciless, asking Fleming, “Another champagne cocktail?”
“I don’t mind if I do,” Fleming all but drooled, “young man.”
A few minutes later, Timothy glanced over his shoulder, causing Fleming to traipse after him into a cigar room nearby, with no one else in sight.
As Timothy blamelessly dipped a finger into a half-finished Scotch and licked it, Fleming almost came in his pants, which was when Reggie shut and locked the door, and Fleming saw he wasn’t alone.
Reggie, Timothy, and I stood equidistant from the senator, who trembled between panic and being stimulated by the presence of three uniformed men.
Fleming was a six-term senator from Alabama, and a connivingly familiar fixture on the Washington scene.
He relentlessly sucked up to anyone in power, and his lips and tentacles had become affixed to Reese Dantine, an evangelist with three soaring glass cathedrals (in Atlanta, Utah, and Dubai), a YouTube channel with over a billion subscribers worldwide, and an unparalleled fundraising apparatus, through which countless hand-scrawled checks from elderly widows, drawing on their pensions and Social Security payments, were funneled toward Reese’s five-hundred-acre estate with a twenty-five-vehicle garage and a man-made lake.
Reese had a solid chance at becoming the next Republican presidential nominee.
Without any damning government track record, but having attained mainstream celebrity and a worshipful Christian base, Dantine was charismatically positioned to run the country.
Sniffing a skyrocket, Fleming had been photographed during weekly prayer breakfasts at Dantine’s newly acquired Beltway townhouse.
Fleming was Klan-like in his voting record, which accounted for his popularity in his home state, with a caveat: at sixty-four, Fleming remained a “lifelong bachelor.” His ghostwritten autobiography, titled My Bold American Visions of Freedom, had described “the love of my life,” this nonexistent lady, as being “a flight attendant named Birgit on Air Denmark” who, after Fleming’s down-on-one-knee proposal of marriage on the tarmac, had “sadly returned to Copenhagen,” to pursue “her dreams of in-flight camaraderie.”
Fleming had opposed every LGBTQ+ civil rights bill, and had vociferously denied being gay, on Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Reese Dantine’s morning show, Wake Up with Jesus, which, as Brock had noted, “sounds super gay, especially if it’s a one-night stand.
” Smarmy and drawling, Fleming perceived himself as a kingmaker, anointing his chosen candidates, while he was really more of a perpetual lapdog, panting and groveling after whoever’s coattails could get him re-elected.
“Good evening, Senator,” Reggie began, “or may I call you Fleming?”
“What is this?” Fleming asked, trying not to seem rattled.
“It’s a discussion,” said Reggie. “Starting with your knowing about the attempt on Reata Pershing’s life.”
“I know a great many things. It’s part of my job.”
“But that action was instantly classified, and yet here you are dishing it up to that cute little Trent Pardue of Salt Lake City. Who played lacrosse at Brigham Young University, which explains the shoulders.”
“He’s a fine young lad.”
“Cut the shit. What do you know about Yuri Marfosky, the guy who tried to set off the bomb?”
“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard the name, but thank you so much for passing it along. And now I really should get back to the membership.”
“But can I ask something?” said Timothy, raising his hand. “You log on to my account as HillbillyCumdrainer, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“And you sent me that DM, asking if I sold my used jockstraps and if there was a price list.”
“I have no idea what you’re babbling about. Gentlemen.”
As Fleming headed for the door, Reggie didn’t block his path but said, “We have your credit card receipts. You log on to Timothy’s site over fifty times a week, twelve times today alone.
You’ve made specific requests for a molded lifelike plastic replica of his ass, dildos in sizes from Freshman Year Roommate to The Destroyer, and you sent him a photo of yourself in a yachting cap, a Miss Alabama pageant sash, and a leather codpiece, or is that your Christmas card? ”
“I’m not judging you,” said Timothy. “You’re one of my best clients.”
“I’m from Alabama,” I commented, with a fulsome twang. “My parents and grandparents attend the First Baptist Church in Mobile, along with your aunt Marcelline and your first cousin Candice Rayette. Everyone’s so proud of you and all aflutter about that splendid Mr. Reese Dantine, thanks to you.”
“But what we’re really worried about,” said Reggie, “is your fiancée, Birgit. Did your OnlyFans expenditures break her heart?”
Fleming looked at each of us, conceding our upgraded status as something other than disposable peons.
“What do you want?”
“Information,” said Reggie. “I’m not sure if you’re implicated in the bombing, which would be high treason and punishable by death. But you hover, scooping up tidbits to be bartered, to keep you relevant at parties like this. What have you heard?”
I could see Fleming rifling through his options, like a riverboat gambler with copious debts. He didn’t come back into the room, but he wasn’t leaving.
“I have no idea who’s behind the entire operation,” said Fleming.
“But it’s extremely well funded and international.
Your bombing suspect, as I’m sure you’ve already concluded, is a bumbling idiot with zero connection to whoever’s in charge.
But if I were you, I’d take a look at the Parnassus Group, a conglomerate based in Paris, Athens, and Geneva.
They have interests in oil tankers, the creation of luxury villas in gated communities, commercial space travel, and casinos in underserved locations.
And since we’re just jawboning—there may be an artifact in play. ”
“What kind of artifact?” asked Reggie.
“I’m not certain, but it’s extremely valuable, to numerous bidders. The rumor mill is buzzing. Which means Paranassus may not have intended to kill Mrs. Pershing.”
“Why not?”
“They wanted to scare her. Away from the artifact.”
“Fairmont…”
“Good evening, kind sirs.”
As Fairmont opened the door, Timothy mentioned, “There’s a sliding scale, depending on how long I’ve worn the jockstraps. I’ll also be doing private shows with Reynaldo, that other guy you like. If you sign up today it’s ten percent off for Platinum Club members.”
Fleming left, as I murmured, “Y’all come back now.”
As I walked home, I wondered exactly what sort of artifact Fleming had been referring to.
In classic espionage movies, the plot turns on one of two mechanisms: First, a nuclear device capable of unthinkable devastation, being smuggled by a cabal or a madman via high-speed rail and a convoy of container trucks.
The movie’s climax will revolve around a digital countdown as the lone hero either cuts the correct (red or blue?) wire or flings the ticking bomb into the sea while hanging by one arm from the strut of a helicopter.
The second and more layered option demands a mythological item, some fabled vessel or statue of immense historical import and rumored to possess world-altering magic—was this alternate setup underway?
Given Reata’s background in archaeology and ancient civilizations, her interest would make sense.