Failed State

by Christopher Brown

  “So the dudes who actually did the deed walk.”

  “We can bankrupt them too, but that’s not really the point.”

  “Your system sucks,” said Slider.

  “I agree,” said Donny. “But I’m making the best of what we’ve got.”

  “How much money are we talking?”

  “Seven figures, I think,” said Donny. “Maybe more. Definitely more if we can really build the case for a whole class of people they disappeared. There are hundreds of cases. Some say thousands.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” said Slider.

  Donny nodded.

  “How much do you get?” said Slider. He could do the math.

  “Just a third. Assuming the judge signs off.”

  “Just a third?”

  “A lot of lawyers would take half,” said Donny. “Understand: I only get paid if I win. And I will have to invest a lot in the case to do that. The risk is all mine.”

  “I’m the one who has to put his name on there as suing these guys.” He pointed at the draft pleadings Donny had pulled out and left on the coffee table.

  “We both have to put our names on it,” said Donny. “And I’m the one who has to sign the actual lawsuit. I know these are dangerous people we are taking on. The last lawyer who sued these guys ended up dead. You just need to sign this letter appointing me as your lawyer. If you want, I can even file with you as a John Doe, and keep your name out of it for now. But you never seemed the type who scares easily. Especially when it comes to seeking justice for what happened to your parents.”

  Donny pushed the document over to Slider, open to the flagged signature block, and held out a pen.

  Slider looked at the document, then looked at Donny. Then he took the pen.

  “You can put my name on it,” said Slider, grabbing the document and signing it. “Just don’t fuck this up, man.”

  “I promise you,” said Donny. “I’m going to win this.”

  Donny knew better than to make promises. But he meant it.

  “I hope so,” said Slider. “And at least you’ll be on the right side on this one. Fighting the killers instead of helping them.”

  This was two weeks after the ex-president’s sentencing.

  “I guess everybody heard about that. Even the people like you who don’t have phones or TVs.”

  “You definitely got people talking with that gig,” said Slider. “People are pissed.”

  “How about you?”

  “I guess I know you too well. You gave me enough lectures about how you didn’t want to have to defend me against the death penalty that I know you really mean it.”

  “Thanks,” said Donny. “He got what he deserved. And now he’s going to face the international war-crimes tribunal.”

  “Yeah, screw that. What do those people in Switzerland or India know about what he did? We need to take care of that shit right here.”

  “It’s how it needs to work,” said Donny. “We need a global system. Rules for everyone on the planet to follow. How else are we going to build a future people can live in?”

  “Fuck people. The animals and plants will be fine without us.”

  “I don’t think it’s that bad yet.”

  “Maybe not down in your fancy office. I mean offices.”

  “There’s nothing about my offices anyone would call ‘fancy.’ And besides, they kicked me out of my New Orleans digs. The radicals are seizing power.”

  “So I heard. They’re even more pissed about what you did than I am.”

  “Makes sense you’d know.” Digging, he said, “You’re probably in on the takeover.”

  “Well, your ex-girlfriend definitely is. She’s hardcore, man, even if she just says she’s our mentor, not our leader. But yeah, I’m all-in on that program. It’s our turn. Time for a new generation. And a new idea of liberation. One that starts with the creatures that don’t have a voice. You want rules for the whole planet? Wait till we get done.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Donny.

  “My luck’s going to improve if you can really win me that kind of money. I could do a lot of good with that. When are you going to file it?”

  “Soon,” said Donny. “Hopefully first thing Monday.”

  “They don’t need you back in Washington?”

  “No,” said Donny. “They’re done with me, and El Presidente’s case is done. Our part, at least. They’re getting ready to transfer him to UN custody for the international case.”

  “Oh yeah? When?”

  “A week from Friday,” said Donny. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  Slider pulled an invisible zipper across his lips.

  “Seriously,” said Donny.

  “Relax,” said Slider. Then he looked to the door at the sound of footsteps on the porch.

  Donny turned. The door opened, and a young blond woman stepped in.

  “Hey, baby,” said Slider.

  The woman was looking at Donny, her poker face not quite containing her surprise.

  It took a minute for Donny to realize who she was. The last time he had seen her, she was still in school.

  “Hello, Heather,” he said. “How’s your dad?”

  6

  Donny had been around Heather a few times over the years. The one he remembered best was a dinner party Donny and his then-girlfriend Joyce had attended at the home of Heather’s parents, Donny’s old colleague Lou and his wife, Helen.

  On the golf course and at the bar, they used to only half-jokingly ask Lou why in the hell he was still billing 2,300 hours a year when he was married to one of the richest women in Texas. His replies were always half-true, you could tell.

  She makes me.

  I love what I do.

  I need to get out of the house.

  I love the view from my office.

  I need to model a good work ethic for my daughter.

  Only their closest friends knew that Heather had an older brother, a boy whose name no one said anymore, because he had died as a toddler. It happened when Lou and Helen were out entertaining a client, and the kid was home with the nanny. The boy drowned in the pool. There was even some suspicion that it was not an accident, that the eccentric English nanny was crazier than the background check had revealed. Lou and Helen decided to channel their grief into the joy of a new kid, and making sure nothing bad ever happened to her.

  Some kids are born with a silver spoon. Heather was born with a trust in her name worth more than $10 million. And when her mother’s life was taken, she became a billionaire, if you counted all of the family holdings that traced back to her through the labyrinth of shell companies the corporate lawyers hid it in. The money that went into her trust upon the probate of her mother’s estate was old money, money that had been hard-coded before World War II by different lawyers—ones with white shirts under three-piece, three-button suits and wire-framed glasses—to never leave the lineal descendants of the man who first earned it. Even Lou couldn’t touch it.

  Now we know why you still practice law when you could be playing tennis all day, they teased Lou, when he first told them that he was the only dude they knew who had to sign a prenup.

  Heather had it all, and then some. More than money. She had the constant, unconditional love and support of two exceptionally well-educated parents, each with their own vibrant careers, Dad as a litigator and Mom as a professional investor, a rare woman at the top of the venture-capital business who helped ignite the biotech boom that was one of the bright spots in an otherwise war-worn economy. Heather was beautiful, in a stereotypically American way, a naturally blond and blue-eyed icon of Western white femininity, and also in a more classic way—chiseled and international, with her natural looks enhanced by the kind of grooming, wardrobe, and diet that privilege affords. Every time Donny had seen her, she had that sort of rich-girl tan that reminded him of a perfectly browned marshmallow. Maybe because she was outside so much. She was a great athlete, on the soccer and tennis teams, win
ning second in the girls’ singles at the state tournament her senior year in high school. The boys loved her, though most were also secretly afraid of her, which was fine with her. The girls loved her too, and mostly envied her.

  One of the other girls was with her the night of the dinner party. A friend you could tell was something more, a dark-haired French exchange student who was on the soccer team with Heather. They showed up just in time for dessert, which was served by another French-speaker, the Haitian chef named Aimée whom Helen had hired as the guest worker in charge of her kitchen. They lit up the room with the glow of health, very fine edibles, and the sacred sex of pure-strain teenagers. Heather already knew who all the guests were, greeted each in turn, introduced Chantal, and produced two more chairs when Dad invited them. They talked about the game that day, Dad bragging about the goal Heather scored and Heather bragging about Chantal’s assist. Lou opened some fancy German dessert wine that tasted like grapes that had been preserved in Alpine ice from an epoch before air pollution, maybe even before cities. His guests soaked up that libation somehow less enthusiastically than the vibrantly red-blooded youth—like vampires, Donny had thought, even as he himself indulged—but you could tell Heather was in charge, and controlling the dose.

  When Aimée came out of the kitchen with the insane torte she had made, like something you would see on one of those baking shows Joyce liked to binge, Heather put her own cherry on the evening by breaking out the French, which she had learned in school and polished in her own junior year abroad, as the kind of girl who could afford to learn a mostly useless and now politically suspect language. Heather, Aimée, and Chantal got going in a long aside that no one else in the room understood. Or so they thought, until Joyce dialed in, the lady who spent her Saturday mornings reading obscure works of Continental theory in the original. The way Joyce said it sounded like cranky snark, but it got Heather, Chantal, and Aimée laughing so hard that everyone wanted to know what the joke was.

  “It’s a secret,” said Heather, looking right at Joyce.

  Joyce nodded and smiled, and changed the subject by complimenting Helen and Lou on their parenting skills.

  On the way home, Donny asked Joyce what they had talked about.

  Joyce explained that they were talking about the Haitian revolution. Not the one that had happened two years earlier, inciting the US invasion and occupation, but the one that happened two centuries before, when Haiti was a French colony. The revolt in which the slaves killed their masters and took over the whole country.

  So what was the joke?

  Heather was asking Aimée if she could help her secure her own freedom. Freedom from her indenture.

  Doesn’t sound very funny to me.

  I know, but it was the way Heather said it. Funny, liberating, and a little bit sexy.

  So what did you say?

  Something about wanting to be free from men. Except I said it in a more vulgar and meaty way.

  Teach me.

  It means something like bag of dicks, but as big as the world.

  7

  Donny remembered the interaction a year earlier more clearly now.

  “My dad?” said Heather as she stood there in the doorway of Slider’s safe house.

  “He and I used to work together,” said Donny. “We met when you were a kid.”

  “Donny’s my lawyer,” said Slider. “He got me out of detention, twice. Now he’s helping me with my parents’ case. He’s okay.”

  Heather looked like she wasn’t persuaded.

  “Sorry, I don’t remember you,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” said Donny. “It was a long time ago. And a lot has happened in the intervening years. To all of us.”

  She nodded, warily. “I don’t talk to my dad much anymore,” she said. “Politics kind of got in the way.”

  “Sounds like my family,” said Donny, trying to make light of it. But what happened to both of their families wasn’t very funny.

  “Uh-huh,” said Heather.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” said Donny.

  She didn’t answer. She just gave Donny a look.

  “I should get going,” said Donny.

  “Sounds good,” said Slider. “We need to get going too.”

  “Where are you headed?” asked Donny.

  “New Orleans,” he said. “Back to work for me.”

  Donny looked at Heather. She didn’t need to work. But you could see which side she was on.

  8

  Inspectors Blonk and Abboud left Donny alone with these and other thoughts. What he needed to do was start digging through those boxes of research for other plaintiffs who could replace Slider as the anchor of his lawsuit. But instead he found himself replaying the untrustworthy reels of his own memory, wondering what story lines he had missed in his self-absorption.

  The idea that Slider had been on a team to kidnap Heather, even if they called it an arrest, was hard to believe. They had tried to downplay it that day when Heather walked in on Donny talking to Slider. But he saw how Slider looked at her. And even if they weren’t hooking up, or weren’t anymore, the suggestion that they or their leaders treated Heather as an enemy of the people seemed a stretch when you could see where her sympathies lay. Then again, loyalties were mercurial in those days, especially among the radical factions. You never knew what you might do or say that would have your face erased from the class photo. Donny knew. They had erased him from the roster of friends of the revolution, for doing what he thought the same principles that had first compelled him to help those people out required.

  Was it really possible that, rather than saving the President from execution, he had sealed his fate by revealing his whereabouts to Slider? The official story, supported by separate reports from both the Secret Service and the Justice Department inspector general, was that the President had been murdered by his own former loyalists—security personnel inside DOJ and the Bureau of Prisons acting on orders from others within what remained of the President’s party, to keep him from incriminating them for helping him suppress the opposition and enrich themselves through illegal and often murderous means. It made sense. But so did the idea that the President’s former victims would want the punishment Donny and his colleagues had persuaded the court to withhold.

  Free of his Interpol guests, Donny logged back in to the research web to see if he could find better answers. Maybe they had been hiding in plain sight all along.

  He had his own archived copy of the Drake Report, which synthesized the multi-agency investigations into the President’s death, and when he pulled it up he found his way into the findings, and then into the labyrinth of footnotes. Hoping to see the concrete foundations for the report’s conclusions, he found only provisos and obfuscations, when the details weren’t covered up with actual redactions. But they had confessions from two of the guards who had been part of the conspiracy, confessions that had them and one other colleague now serving time in Quantico, the secret prison that the rebels had pledged to close but instead had maintained “temporarily” to house the most dangerous counterrevolutionaries. It was too elaborate and consequential to be a cover story. But there was one other guard who had escaped arrest, and who some sources said was hiding in New Orleans.

  Finding no real answers there, Donny turned his attention back to Slider himself. He looked for more reports on the raid in which Slider had been allegedly killed, but there were only squibs with essentially the same information. He sought information about the underlying case against Heather, which was really against the family business holdings. The best material on that was, to Donny’s surprise, in the business press, handicapping the seemingly small risk of a financially crippling outcome in the series of cases the people’s prosecutors had initiated against them and several other closely held conglomerates. Donny understood the novel legal theories underlying the cases, because he had helped conceive them back when he was still welcome in New Orleans.

  That was a deep rabbit hole to
go down, and when he finally looked up, it was after five. He had spent the afternoon at the books, and accomplished little other than to make himself hungry and more confused than when he started.

  He went next door to Crazy River and grabbed a cricket taco to go. Insects had become a growing part of the American diet, usually processed to remind you of the meat you used to be able to afford. But these were prepared to a recipe older than America, a really good one. And as he sat there at his desk wiping hot sauce from the corners of his mouth, he looked over at Socrates and waited for him to ask the question that would turn the tumblers and solve Donny’s problems. But he couldn’t think anymore, so he decided to stretch his legs.

  He walked across the street and past the jail, which was really a complex of jails, all built up atop the levee that held in the Trinity. It was a very Dallas sort of thing that the river on which the city had been founded, its core geographic and ecological feature, had been engineered into near invisibility. They had channeled it to try to control it, moving it away from downtown. They had shaped the banks into terraced levees so sharply angled you would have mistaken them for pavement were it not for the neatly mowed grass. They had built a dozen bridges and overpasses so no one would ever have to enter that zone. And then they located all the nastiest land uses along the perimeter. Like the jail.

  Most of the jail buildings had been built in the last decade to house people rounded up by the prior regime—some for their politics, some for stealing what they needed in a city that operated on the “eat what you kill” ethos of unregulated competition. But one tower had been there since Donny was a kid. Thirteen stories of red dirt brick with castle slat windows behind chain link and concertina. Donny had visited it many times as a lawyer, and he had also spent a night there as an inmate, the summer after his junior year in high school. His dad had used his connections to get the charges dropped and the arrest expunged from Donny’s record, which came in handy a decade later when Donny was applying for his law license, but the experience had proven useful.