True Allegiance

Big Jim Crawford lounged in the marble shower of the luxury suite at the MGM, enjoying the feeling of the dual rain heads slapping him with their steady stream. He’d been penning an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, and the steam of the shower cleared his senses, helped him think. He’d get what he wanted, he knew.

He always did.

The game had become almost too easy. Big Jim didn’t think of himself as a con artist or a shakedown expert. He thought of himself as a leader in need of resources to bring change. If that meant skimping on taxes, what of it? Who hadn’t cheated in the United States? Who had clean hands? So long as he spent his days fighting for social justice, why shouldn’t he enjoy the benefits of a nice house, the ministrations of a young mistress? Martin Luther King Jr. had been sainted for his civil rights work, and nobody looked twice at his various financial and personal improprieties. The cause cleansed him, as it should have. History eventually deemed everyone either a saint or a sinner, no in-between.

The next step in Detroit, Big Jim knew, would be to give Levon an option for withdrawal with some grace. He’d already pressed Levon, and he knew Levon was waiting, hoping for something big to happen, but that seemed unlikely with the nation’s attention riveted elsewhere.

Big Jim climbed out of the shower, reached for his towel, wrapped it around his bulk, and gazed at himself in the mirror. He needed to lose some weight, and he sucked in his gut. When he got back to New York, he told himself, he’d start the diet.

Suddenly, he felt out of breath.

He plunged forward, grabbing the sink with both hands, but he could feel the strength in those hands weakening. He tried to push his fingertips into the marble, but they wouldn’t grip; for some reason, a desperate need to hold himself up rushed over him, and as he felt his bulk dragged toward the cool floor, away from the fogged-up mirror, he had the odd thought that the floor was red.

Then he realized it was. It was red and slippery with his blood.

He lost his grip, and his face hit the oozing puddle hard.

He never saw the man who fired the second round into his head.

Levon had his men watching Soledad’s men for any concerted movement. The T-shirted motorcycle gang seemed too professional for Levon’s taste; he’d originally thought them a group of overwrought, racist kooks, but they always seemed to encamp at the inflection points in the crowd—bottlenecks, thin spaces. They met up at night in one of the tents, but kept a guard stationed outside, armed.

Now, Levon’s men told him, the T-shirt gang was on the move.

There were eight of them, all told. Four had their hogs planted in the corners of the street, ready to move off at the first sign of trouble. Three of the other four planted themselves near the front of the crowd, near the steps to the detention center.

The lone remaining man, a white-bearded, big-bellied bear in his mid-sixties, stood near the center of the crowd. A group of young protesters screamed obscenities at him; he stood his ground placidly.

A buzz built at the back of the crowd.

More white men, all wearing the same T-shirts, pulling up on motorcycles. Silent. Saying nothing. The crowd of protesters moved up on them, expecting a confrontation.

That’s when Levon’s phone rang.

He picked up, heard the crying. He hung up without saying a word. His gut churned. Then he set his teeth.

He raised his right arm, his fist clenched.

“THEY KILLED BIG JIM!” he screamed. Then, again, this time for the cameras, which he knew would be zooming in on him: “THEY KILLED BIG JIM! TEAR IT ALL DOWN! TEAR DOWN THIS CORRUPT SYSTEM!”

Wailing and screaming broke out on the street. Women sobbed. Young men shouted, tore at their clothes. “THEY KILLED BIG JIM! THEY KILLED BIG JIM!” Media members, most of them white, stepped back a few feet from the seething crowd. A few lone police officers at the front of the crowd—Levon hadn’t even noticed police officers on the street at all—stepped backward quickly, moving into the detention center for protection as their compatriots opened the doors for them.

One of Levon’s men, a teenager carrying a tire iron, sprinted through the crowd until he was right in the face of the big-bellied white man. He grabbed him by the beard, twisted it until the man fell to the ground. Then he screamed, raised the tire iron, and brought it down with a sickening thunk into the man’s belly. Levon’s men pushed forward against the glass doors of the detention center; Levon could see the cops cowering inside.

“GIVE US O’SULLIVAN!” Levon screamed as he climbed the steps to the detention center. “GIVE US THE CHILD MURDERER!” A member of his entourage handed him a brick as he made his way forward.

He strode up the steps, the cameras catching him from behind, his huge back framed against the lights inside the detention center. Then he reared back and hurled the brick, spiderwebbing the plexiglass door.