“I guess, ashamed. Embarrassed.”
“Ashamed of what?”
“Do I have to say it? Ashamed of being his son. Of being a Fisk.”
“But you’re not a Fisk! That’s the point. You don’t belong to those people. Their sins aren’t on you. That house is not your home, and Fisk is just your name.”
I drove a while more. The highway was mostly empty, just a couple of semi trailers on the northern horizon, and when the sky cleared I could see a few chilly stars.
“You know I’m right,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “You’re one of us.”
* * *
After we crossed the border Amanda took the wheel and I checked my phone for voice mail.
There was a single message, from Lisa Wei.
“Trevor is in the hospital,” she said. “Call me as soon as you can.”
* * *
By the time we reached the city limits I had woken Lisa with a callback and managed to get the whole story.
Trev was in a hospital called Sunnybrook, north and east of downtown, and we drove there directly and shared a nervous breakfast in the cafeteria while we waited for visiting hours. Then we made our way to his room.
As early as we were, we weren’t the first to arrive. Damian Levay was already there, standing at Trev’s bedside and saying something quiet and urgent. Trev spotted us and broke into a grin, or what would have been a grin if not for the hardware attached to his face.
Damian Levay was the closest thing our tranche had to a leader, though none of us would have used that word. He was an early adopter, a Tau almost since the first assessments were offered three years ago. He was also lawyer, and in that capacity he had helped Taus all over the city, adjusting his fees to suit his clients’ income. He was full of ideas about the purpose and future of Affinity groups, and Amanda thought he was brilliant. What he had been discussing with Trev was probably the subject of Bobby Botero: it was Botero who had put Trev in the hospital.
Trev’s plan for defending Mouse had been ironclad, except for one thing: it presumed Botero would not continue to harass Mouse if it meant putting himself and his business in mortal danger.
What we had not reckoned on was Botero’s obsessive rage, which was beyond all rational constraint. Botero had no doubt wiped his computer drives, tidied up his financial loose ends, and convinced himself he could talk his way of any trouble with his ’Ndrangheta clients. He had then undertaken a more circumspect surveillance of Lisa and Loretta’s house, and yesterday, after he had seen L & L leave on a shopping expedition and he was sure Mouse was alone, he had come to the door with an aluminum baseball bat in his hand. When Mouse refused to let him in, he shattered a ground-floor window, climbed inside, and began a systematic room-by-room search for her.
Mouse, meanwhile, barricaded herself in her basement room and phoned Trev, who in turn called Dave Santos, the Tau cop who had helped us out in December. Both of them hurried to the house, but Trev was the first to arrive.
Mouse still had her phone, and she told Trev that Bobby was in the basement hammering on the locked door of her room. Trev had no weapon, but he let himself in and hurried down the stairs. In exchange for this act of heroism he took a blow across the face that broke his nose and dislocated his jaw, but he was far enough inside Botero’s swing radius that when he fell he took Botero down with him. Botero was strong, but so was Trev, and the lessons he had learned as a club bouncer served him well even as he was dazed and blinded by the blood flowing into his eyes.
They were still wrestling when Dave Santos crept down the stairs with his handgun drawn. Botero dropped his bat, and at that point it was all over except for the police car that took Bobby away to be booked and the ambulance that carried Trev to the hospital.
Trev’s jaw was supported by a wire brace that made it difficult for him to speak, and the bandages across his face were rusty-brown with blood. His eyes seemed a little vague—he was probably on industrial-strength painkillers—but he was more or less alert. He took a pad and pen from the bedside table and wrote,
THIS WILL ONLY ENHANCE MY RUGGED BEAUTY
—which caused Amanda to laugh and leak a tear.
“We’ve been talking about what happened at the house,” Damian said. “Trev’s going to need to sign a statement. With any luck, Botero is headed to prison for a stretch. The only possible complication is what you guys did—stealing his drives and threatening to expose him. We don’t want that coming out in court. Hopefully, neither Botero nor his lawyer will want to expose his mob connections. So we’re probably okay, but it could have been cleaner.”
We had acted carelessly, in other words, and Trev had paid for it. “I understand,” I said contritely. “What we did about Mouse and Botero—we need to stop doing things like that.”
Damian startled me by laughing.
“Stop it? Fuck no! We have to learn to do it better.”
PART TWO
A Theory of Everyone
In the early decades of this century we saw the world’s financial elites become increasingly divorced from national loyalties. The wealthy learned to think of themselves as essentially stateless—citizens of the Republic of Net Worth—while the rest of us clung to our old-fashioned patriotism. Now the masses (or some fraction of them) have discovered their own post-national system of loyalty. They would rather tithe to their sodalities than pay taxes, and they love their tranchemates just a little bit more than they love their neighbors. If this trend seems harmless, give it time. Politicians should be worried. So should activists. And so should the stateless, wealthy one-percenters, whose continuing influence over the legislative process is no longer assured.
—Mother Jones, online article, “Why the Affinities Matter”
One thing the church has traditionally offered, and secular society has not, is fellowship: a body of shared values and a time and place at which congregants commune for worship. This is not the essence of faith, but it is faith’s essential scaffolding. But the new secular communities—the Affinity groups—are beginning to make inroads into faith’s monopoly on fellowship. Statistics have demonstrated a falling-away from traditional doxastic communities commensurate with the rise of the Affinities. And so we must ask ourselves: Is this a benign social technology, or is it something more sinister—a counter-fellowship, a church stripped of all divinity, a congregation with nothing to worship but itself?
—Christianity Today, online article, “Fellowship Without Faith”
In the debate over whether the Affinities are making people happy, we risk losing sight of the fact that the Affinities are making people money.
—Barrons.com, “The Benefits of Membership”
CHAPTER 6
This happened seven years later, in southern British Columbia, on a two-lane road connecting a resort town called Perry’s Point to the Okanagan Highway. Three of us in a borrowed car, heading for Vancouver. Damian Levay was driving. Amanda sat up front, next to him. I sat in back, watching pine boughs whip past the rain-fogged windows.
Wet blacktop, a winding road, steep grades. Amanda had twice asked Damian to slow down, but he had eased off the accelerator only marginally. He was carrying several gigs of contraband data in his shirt pocket, and he knew there were people who would have liked to relieve him of it. So we came around a curve in fading daylight at an unwise speed, and when the headlights picked out a yellow Toyota parked on the verge Damian swerved to avoid it. It was a fraction of a second later that he saw the woman and the child crossing in front of us.
The rear of the car flailed as he braked, and although he avoided hitting either of them he risked sliding into a skid that would sweep them both down a steep embankment. So he stepped off the brake and twisted the wheel, which sent us hurtling into the forested slope to the left of the road. I caught a freeze-frame glimpse of the woman’s face, inches from the window as we passed: big eyes, pale skin, a cascade of dark, wet hair. Damian braked again and managed to bleed off a little momentum before the car sideswiped a lodgepole pine hard enough to pop the airbags.