Chapter 2
Callum
Diesel pulls me aside on Wednesday morning before the all-hands meeting and tells me I am being assigned to rally logistics, which in prospect language means I have been handed a clipboard and a tape measure and the implicit threat that if I screw this up I will be sweeping the compound floor until the next presidential election.
I say "Yes, sir." I say "Thank you, sir.
" I do not say what I am actually thinking, which is that I have been waiting two years for an assignment with this much scope, and the fact that they're trusting me with it at all means somebody — probably Razor — has gone to bat for me in a back room I will never be invited into.
I make a mental note to do something nice for Razor.
I make a second mental note to figure out what nice means to Razor, who once told me his hobbies were "lifting heavy things and disappointing my ex-wife. " This may take some thought.
The all-hands is held in the main room of the compound.
There are folding chairs. I am in charge of the folding chairs because I have been in charge of the folding chairs since my third week, which is a thing they do to prospects to test whether you can complete a simple task without complaint.
I have set up forty-two of them in seven rows of six, which is forty-two not forty-two, because somebody — I'm betting Havoc — has moved one to face the wrong direction and is waiting to see if I notice.
I notice. I fix it. I sit down in the last row, which is where prospects sit, and I pull out my notebook, which is where I write everything down, because I have learned that the surest way to forget a critical detail is to assume you'll remember it.
Diesel stands at the front. Razor stands at his shoulder.
Havoc and Mateo and the rest of the patched members fill the front rows, and three other prospects fill the row in front of mine — a kid named Tucker who is very good at not being noticed, a kid named Marco who joined two months ago and is still in the wide-eyed phase, and a kid named Reed who I genuinely cannot tell apart from Marco even though they look nothing alike.
I think it's because they have the same haircut.
I think the haircut is what's confusing me.
The meeting goes. Diesel runs through the rally calendar.
He introduces — without bringing her into the room, because she's not a member and the all-hands is closed — a contractor named Noor Abbasi, who is, he says, "running this show, and we are going to give her our full cooperation, and if I find out any one of you has been an asshole to her in any capacity, you are going to find out what I do to assholes, and you do not want that information.
" There is a thoughtful silence. There is a single, low whistle from the back, possibly from Havoc, who whistles when he is impressed and also when he is not. Diesel ignores it. He turns to me.
"Jinx."
I stand up. The folding chair does not collapse. This is already an improvement on my last all-hands.
"Yes, Pres."
"You're liaison. You report to Ms. Abbasi during business hours. You report to me at the end of every day. You don't break anything she can't replace, and you don't say anything she didn't tell you to say. Understood?"
"Yes, Pres."
"Sit down, Jinx."
I sit. The chair holds. Tucker, in front of me, twists his head and gives me a small, sympathetic nod, like a man watching another man go off to war.
Reed and Marco do not turn around. They have learned, with the speed of the truly cautious, that watching me too closely is bad for their own averages.
After the meeting, I go outside to where I am supposed to meet Ms. Abbasi for our first prep session.
She is already there. She has been already there for every meeting we've had so far — three of them now, including yesterday's tour of the fairgrounds — and I am beginning to suspect she sets her arrival time twelve minutes earlier than necessary as a permanent buffer against what she has correctly identified as my chronic margin-of-error problem.
She is leaning against the door of a sensible silver sedan.
She is wearing a cream-colored blouse and dark slacks and sunglasses with delicate gold frames, and she looks like she has been assembled by a committee of women with better taste than the average human. She is also frowning at her tablet.
"Mr. Brennan."
"Ms. Abbasi."
"You're early."
"I'm three minutes late."
"You're early relative to my projection. I projected eight minutes late. You are five minutes ahead of expectation."
I do not know what to do with this information, so I do what I always do when somebody says something I don't have a response to, which is grin.
I grin. She does not grin back, but the corner of her mouth does a thing — a small, unwilling thing — and then she catches herself and the thing stops, and she looks at her tablet again, and she says, "We have a vendor coordination call in fifteen minutes. Get in the car."
I get in the car. The car smells like jasmine and leather conditioner.
There is a tin of almonds in the cup holder.
There is a stack of laminated documents on the dashboard.
There is, taped to the dashboard above the speedometer, a small card on which she has written, in pencil, patience is a strategy.
I do not comment on the card. I do not, in this moment, want to do anything that would jeopardize the privilege of riding in a car with a card like that taped to its dashboard.
We drive to her office. Her office is in a converted bungalow on Linden Street, three doors down from a flower shop called Petal & Thorn.
There is a hand-painted sign that reads CONSTELLATION EVENTS in white lettering on a navy background, and there are hydrangeas in the front window, and there is a small brass bell on the door that rings as we walk in.
Inside, her office is the calmest room I have ever been in.
Pale walls. A long desk. A second desk for the assistant she's been telling me about — Camila, who is on vacation this week — and floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with binders that are color-coded by year.
There is a framed photograph on the desk of an older couple at what looks like a temple in Lahore.
Her parents, I'm guessing. There is also, propped against the wall, a small chalkboard that reads, in her tidy handwriting, the universe rewards women who color-code, and I have to walk over and read it twice, because I had assumed that was a joke when she said it on the drive over and the chalkboard suggests it is not.
"Sit down, Mr. Brennan."
"Callum is fine."
"I'll keep that under advisement."
I sit. She takes her tablet to the desk. She types. She sips a green tea that is, presumably, the right temperature, because she looks satisfied with it. She says, without looking up, "I have a proposition for you."
"All right."
"It is unconventional."
"All right."
"It is not technically a club matter, but it concerns my work with the rally and your duties as liaison, and I want to be clear from the outset that I have considered this from every angle and concluded that it is the most efficient solution available."
"Ms. Abbasi."
"Yes."
"I am going to need you to just say the thing."
She looks up. She takes off her sunglasses, which she has been wearing on the top of her head, and she sets them on the desk. She takes a breath. She says, "I would like to retain you, for the duration of the rally planning, as my fake boyfriend."
I sit there.
I sit there for, conservatively, six full seconds.
Then I say, "I'm sorry, what?"
"I am asking you to pretend to be in a romantic relationship with me, in public, for the next eleven weeks, so that the visiting clubs and other associated personnel will treat me with appropriate professional respect."
"You want me to fake-date you so bikers take you seriously."
"That is a coarse summary, but yes."
"Ms. Abbasi."
"Yes."
"Have you been hit on the head?"
"No."
"Are you on cold medicine?"
"I do not take cold medicine. It interferes with my judgment."
"Then I have to ask you, with respect, whether you have considered the alternative of just being yourself, because you are extremely intimidating already, and I have personally watched you make a vendor cry over tent specifications, and I do not understand the diagnosis here."
She looks at me for a moment. Then — and I want to be clear that I am not making this up, this is something that actually happens — she swivels her tablet around and slides it across the desk to me.
I look down. It is a document. It has bullet points.
The header reads FAKE DATING PROPOSAL — ABBASI / brENNAN — RATIONALE.
There is a rationale. There are subheadings.
"You made a document," I say.
"I make a document for everything."
"You made a document about fake dating me."
"It is not personal."
"Ms. Abbasi, I think it's a little personal."
"Read the rationale, please."
I read the rationale. It is, in fact, persuasive.
She lists, in numbered order, the specific behaviors she has experienced in the four meetings she's already taken with vendor representatives from visiting clubs.
She has documented them. She has documented one rep cutting her off mid-sentence to ask whether the Chamber had "sent an intern by mistake.
" She has documented another rep refusing to address her directly and instead routing every response through a male assistant from the mayor's office who happened to be in the room.
She has documented a third rep complimenting her appearance in a way that I, even reading it on a tablet two days later, want to drive over and have a conversation about.
The list goes on. It is bad. It is bad enough that I stop being amused and start being something else, which is a thing I have decided not to name.