elephant hide.
‘Danny!’ Vince cried out from the stairwell. ‘Come on!’
Great, just call out my fuckin’ name, Danny thought, as he tore his eyes away from the old Polish woman and started to run. But Vince wasn’t through. Just as Danny reached the stairs – the woman now standing in the hall looking at his back as he ran – Vince yelled again.
‘DeMarco!’ Vince screamed. ‘Move your ass!’
Joe DeMarco’s hand was on the doorknob when the phone rang again.
Mahoney’s secretary had called twenty minutes ago, waking DeMarco and telling him to get to Mahoney’s office right away. He took a quick shower, skipped shaving, and dressed in a white shirt and a dark suit. He’d put on his tie and shave in the cab on the way to the Capitol.
When the phone rang the second time he thought about not answering it, but maybe it was Mahoney’s secretary calling back, telling him the meeting with Mahoney had been canceled. Half the meetings he had with Mahoney were canceled. He picked up the phone.
‘Hello.’
‘Joe, it’s me.’
DeMarco couldn’t speak. He could barely breathe. It was his ex-wife. He hadn’t spoken to her in almost two years. He hadn’t even thought about her in … shit, maybe a week.
‘What do you want, Marie?’ he finally said. He tried to keep his voice flat, to let her know how much he hated her, but somewhere in the back of his mind was the thought that she was calling because she wanted him to take her back. It was pathetic that he should think such a thing, pathetic that he’d even consider such a thing.
‘I need your help, Joe,’ Marie said.
‘My help?’ DeMarco said. ‘My help with what?’
‘It’s Danny, Joe. He’s in trouble, big trouble. I didn’t know who else to call.’
DeMarco couldn’t believe this. His ex-wife was one of the vainest, most self-centered people he had ever known. And not all that bright, if he was honest about it. But he couldn’t believe she’d ask for his help when it came to Danny.
Danny DeMarco was Joe DeMarco’s cousin. Marie had had an affair with him, and then she divorced Joe and married him. She didn’t even have to change her last name when she married the asshole.
‘You gotta be shittin’ me!’ he said, and started to slam down the phone.
But he didn’t.
DeMarco sat impatiently in Mahoney’s office, staring at the photographs on the walls. In them Mahoney was posing with various famous people, mostly politicians, and in the photos all the politicians were smiling – as if they actually liked Mahoney.
The man that DeMarco and Mahoney were waiting to meet was fifteen minutes late, which was almost unheard of. Mahoney kept people waiting all the time because he was rude and inconsiderate – and, yes, busy – but no one kept Mahoney waiting.
DeMarco was five-eleven and Mahoney was the same height, but he always seemed taller than that to DeMarco. Maybe that was because of Mahoney’s bulk – or maybe it was because of his personality. The speaker had a big hard gut, a broad back, and a wide butt. His hair was thick and white, his features large and well formed, and his blue eyes were red-veined and watery. Mahoney had the eyes of an alcoholic, which he was. And like DeMarco’s ex-wife, Mahoney was vain and self-centered and selfish; he was conniving and manipulative. But, unlike her, he was very, very bright.
As DeMarco sat there, his mind kept drifting back to the call from Marie. He had no idea what he should do. No, that wasn’t right; that wasn’t right at all. He knew exactly what he should do: absolutely nothing.
While DeMarco stewed about his ex, Mahoney sat in the big chair behind his big desk and made phone calls. He was currently talking to someone named Bob. At least that’s what he had called the man at the beginning of the conversation, but in the last five minutes, as the phone call had progressed, Bob became Congressman and finally you greedy little asshole, as in: ‘Listen to me, you greedy little asshole! You’ve got four projects in that bill worth more than sixty million, including a fuckin’ bridge to nowhere that’s gonna have your name on it. Now that’s enough!’
DeMarco realized that Mahoney was talking about a so-called transportation bill, a bill intended to resurface potholed highways and prop up crumbling bridges that was, in reality, a five-thousand-page pork package. Every member of the House was squeezing into the bill as many pet projects as he or she could, and any link to transportation, no matter how remote, was considered a fair addition. The most outrageous example that DeMarco had heard of was the proposed construction of a velodrome, a stadium for racing bicycles. This was included in the bill under the guise that erecting such a structure would give birth to legions of bicycle-peddling commuters and thus save the country’s highways from future wear and tear. At least that was the most outrageous thing he’d heard until Mahoney began his dialogue with Congressman Bob.
‘I’ve been trying for six weeks,’ Mahoney was saying, ‘to get this thing finished. It’s already twenty billion bigger than what we agreed on, and every fuckin’ time – my language? I don’t give a shit about my language, you sanctimonious twit! Now I’m tired of this. It’s bad enough I can’t get the other side to line up, but when the people in my own party start pullin’ this crap. … Yes, Bob, crap! Why should the taxpayers have to pay for a freeway exit that goes right to your brother-in-law’s goddamn furniture store? Tell me that.’
The speaker sat silent for a moment, his large face the color of a boiled beet, as he listened to Bob explain how easy access to a retail store in his home state would improve the flow of goods and services throughout America.
‘Okay, Bob,’ Mahoney said, ‘I give up. I’ll leave the exit thing in the bill, but then I’m gonna call up every newspaper in your state and tell ’em it’s in there. I’m gonna tell ’em, because no one with a human-sized brain’ll be able to spot that little gem in five thousand pages of text. So fine, Bob, you win. Now you better get ready to explain your victory to everybody who’s not related to you.’ With that, Mahoney slammed down the phone.
‘Of all the jackasses on Jenkins Hill,’ he muttered.
‘Jenkins Hill?’ DeMarco said.
‘That’s what Capitol Hill used to be called,’ Mahoney said, ‘back before they built this building and started stuffing it with idiots.’
Mahoney sat there fuming a moment longer and then looked at his watch. ‘Go see if he’s being held up at security,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet that’s what happened. If I hadn’t been preoccupied with Bob-goddam-Meechum I woulda thought of that sooner.’
As directed, DeMarco left the speaker’s office and traveled to the door that approved visitors, those with appointments, used to enter the Capitol. Normally it took only a couple of minutes to get past security if your name was on the list, but DeMarco suspected, times being what they were, that the U.S. Capitol Police were exercising more diligence than normal – especially with this particular visitor.
The man who was keeping Mahoney waiting
