20.
Jamal
We found Ray Spiegel sitting at a café table with his MacBook in front of him, the glowing white Apple logo matching his shiny smile and his lack of tan as he saw us come in. He stood and thrust his hand out to us. I put him at late twenties, longish hair down to the back of his neck that almost looked like a postmodern mullet, the kind of style a hipster might wear ironically. He also had a pitiful little pornstache on his upper lip while the rest of his babyface was totally clean shaven. “Hey, guys,” he enthused, shaking my hand as I came up to him. He sat down and gestured to the seats across from him. My brother and I each took one. He didn’t offer to get us coffee.
“This is a pretty good place,” he said, nudging the cup in front of him. “Not as good as Dolcezza, but not bad.” He wore a wide grin, the kind that said he knew stuff, or maybe was in on a particularly good joke. “So … you’ve only been in town a few hours. This your first trip to DC? What do you think?”
I shared a look with Augustus. It wasn’t our first trip to DC, but he didn’t need to know that. “It’s all right,” I said, skipping past that first question. It didn’t escape my notice that he knew we’d only been here a few hours. “Who told you we were in town?”
“Gotta protect your sources, y’know,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. He was playing hard on the boyish attitude. “I can give you guys some recommendations for great dinner spots and some bars that might be good. What are you into?”
Augustus looked at me and I could read his thoughts: This mofo’s trying to charm us, he seemed to say. My brother remained unimpressed.
“I’m into people who know stuff,” I said, trying to be a little nonchalant about it. “Where are the movers and shakers in this town?”
“Up by the hill, mostly,” he said, eyes still twinkling. “Try Le Diplomate. Very ‘in’ spot nowadays. You might even see your congressperson or senator there.”
“And wouldn’t that just be the highlight of a lifetime,” Augustus said with all due sarcasm.
“Heh,” Ray said, clearly picking up on it. “So … what brings you guys to town?”
“Sightseeing,” I said, and by Ray’s reaction I could tell he didn’t buy it.
“Listen, guys,” he said, still smiling smugly, “let me kinda lay it out for you, since you’re new in town and I’m sure things work differently in Minneapolis .” He made a funny voice as he said the city’s name, like it was some bizarre hinterland that lacked civilization or wi-fi. “DC is its own thing. Politics rules the roost here. It’s junkies for that kind of wheeling and dealing all the way down. Everyone here either works for the government or else works on the people who work for the government in some way—lobbyists, baristas, masseuses—whatever. This town thrives on two things—politics and the occasional sporting event.”
“So much for the Kennedy Center Honors,” I said under my breath. Augustus snickered.
“Because of that,” he went on, “the people who spin the wheels of politics—they have a lot of power. You probably know that, of course, but I doubt you know exactly how deep that power goes.” He smiled and leaned in. “See, I’m telling you this because you seem like nice guys, up and comers … and I wouldn’t want you to stumble into town and make a big mistake right off the bat, stick your dicks into the hornet’s nest instead of the honey pot, y’know?”
I blinked at him. The way he’d said it was a little surprising. “That’d be regrettable.”
“Exactly,” Ray said, snapping his finger and pointing at me. “And especially since it’s your first time here—we want no regrets, no mistakes—just a good experience, am I right?” He was grinning again. “So … what brings you guys to town? Work? Pleasure?”
“A little bit of both,” I said. If he didn’t have a pretty good inkling of why we were here, I’d have been prepared to chow down on his coffee cup.
“Mmmhmm,” he said, and jotted something illegible down on a yellow pad in front of him. “So the reason you’re here has nothing to do with a certain world-famous lady superhero-turned-villain who’s recently lost her powers.” He rested the pen against the corner of his mouth and waited for us to answer, eyes still twinkling.
I looked at Augustus, he looked at me. We were both cool, and I turned back to Ray and shrugged. “I haven’t seen her in years. Why would I come to town for her?”
“Because there’s this rumor going around, see,” Ray said, still wearing his smug demeanor like a jacket, “that there’s some kind of secret evidence that proves Sienna Nealon isn’t actually guilty of that stuff out in Minnesota .” He said Minnesota with the same goofball accent he’d said Minneapolis earlier. “Or that nuclear explosion thing in LA,” he said normally.
“Where are you from, dawg?” Augustus asked.
“I’m a Long Island boy,” Ray said proudly. “Born and raised. Got my journalism degree from Columbia.”
“Ooh, top marks,” Augustus said. “You must be a big brain, coming up that route and getting on this blogging thing like you have.”
“I have the most-read politics blog in DC.” Spiegel said proudly, oblivious to Augustus’s snarkiness. “Everybody reads me—staffers, reps, senators—I hear some of my work even makes it up to the Oval.” He winked. “I’ve met him, you know. President Gondry. A couple times. He’s not like what everybody thinks.”
I held my tongue on that one, because I didn’t know much about Gondry. I knew all about his predecessor, though. “That’s cool,” I said, not starting an argument I didn’t care about. “So, if you’ve heard rumors about this supposed evidence that clears Sienna Nealon …” Spiegel perked up when I said her name. “… what all have you heard about it?”
He shrugged. “It feels like kind of a MacGuffin, Rey’s parents, Clean Slate, wish-it-were-true sort of thing perpetrated by people … not in the know ,” and this last bit he said with delicious malevolence, like they were some disfavored caste. “Go with the conventional, reported wisdom on this one—it doesn’t exist. Cuz she did it all.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Hm.”
“But what if she didn’t?” Augustus asked, and I realized for the first time my brother had been on a slow boil this entire conversation. His temper was starting to come to a head, which was … worrying, given the company.
“She did,” Spiegel said, shrugging again. “Everybody who’s anybody knows it.”
“Then everybody who’s anybody is wrong,” Augustus said, as firmly as if it were one of his rock walls he’d just put up.
Ray snorted. “Look, maybe you feel that way because she was your friend or whatever—”
“She is my friend,” Augustus said, “no ‘whatever.’ And y’all are all wrong about her.”
He gave my brother a pitying look. “What makes you say that? Because if you’ve got evidence of it …” And he clicked his pen and set it to his notepad to write. “I’m all ears. Always on the lookout for a scoop.”
“Oh, I have all kinds of evidence,” Augustus said, and I was having a hard time figuring out if he was blustering or he had something particular in mind. “And you’ll see it—in one of the major newspapers, when the time comes.” He sneered, and I realized my brother had the measure of this guy maybe even more than I did. “I ain’t wasting the story of the year on some fringe politics blog read by a bunch of circle-jerking DC bureaucrats.”
Ray flushed, moving slightly more upright in his seat. “Sorry you feel that way,” he said, lips tightly puckered.
“I’m sorry you felt the need to come out here and waste my time,” Augustus said, pouring on the heat while I sat back, a little open-mouthed at all this, “Washington-splaining to me how things work in this town. Punkass, I know who your sources are, and I know the Custis family is rotten to the core and up over their heads in a cover up.” If I could have fainted dead away right now, I would have, because now he was giving away the whole game, and I lacked the presence of mind or ability to stop him because I was too busy sitting there slack-jawed in the face of it. “When this thing blows up, you’re going watch lots of the people you worshipfully report on and use for sources get dragged into the local jailhouse in handcuffs. Try and imagine how that shit’s going to feel, especially if some of your friends get found out for holding onto evidence, too.”
Spiegel broke into a smile again. “Wow. That’s, uh …” He laughed. “You’ve got a powerful delusion thing going on there. You think we’re sitting on a story like that?” He shook his head. “You’re crazy. Any blogger or reporter would kill to get an exclusive with evidence that Sienna Nealon is somehow innocent.” He almost snorted. “But you’d have to fight about fifty or so national reporters’ stories, since they were on the scene when it happened—”
“Bullshit,” Augustus said. “They were fleeing their asses away from the scene when it happened because they’d just been mind-controlled by one of the prisoners they’d been lovingly reporting on for days before. He turned them into nothing better than dogs and sicced ‘em on Sienna. I don’t know what it is they ‘recollect,’ but it ain’t what happened, because they were busy being chickenshits while it went down, running away so they didn’t get burned. And I find it funny that she somehow turned on everybody and killed all these criminals, but not a single reporter died in the incident, especially considering they were reporting right there live from the scene only minutes before, exactly where the explosion took place. Funny how that happened if they were all ‘on the scene.’” He sat back. “Almost like they weren’t there—or at least not close enough to get burned to death by a several hundred-foot blast of fire that leveled buildings around them.”
Ray just sat there, his face a little red as he considered his reply. “You’ll never make the case,” he said quietly, looking withdrawn. “Even if you had something. Never happen.”
“Oh, are you finally being honest with us now?” Augustus asked. I was still blinking through the horror of what I’d just heard, some seriously bad feelings stirring inside me about what my brother had just done—through impatience—yet again. “Is this part of your philanthropic ‘tour of Washington’? ‘Try the crepes at over here, and don’t go exposing the bullshit we pumped out to smear Sienna Nealon’?”
Ray gave another snort, but it was a weak one, and his eyes were fixed on his laptop closed in front of him, as well as the pen and pad that rested atop it. He adjusted them, then touched his phone—I realized at last—turning off the record function he’d had running during our entire conversation. Then he looked up, meeting my brother’s gaze with a much calmer one of his own. “Sienna Nealon is a cautionary tale. You might want to take a lesson from her.”
“Oh, yeah?” Augustus leaned in, too. “What’s the lesson I should take away?”
“She thought she was the most powerful person in the world,” Ray said. All his smugness had evaporated, and he sounded … almost dead inside. “But she wasn’t, and now she’s less powerful than ever.” His lips drew tight and anger creased his brow. “I tried to tell you about the way things work in this town. You do whatever you want, but you should really watch yourselves.”
Augustus stood abruptly, looming over the table and causing Ray’s eyes to widen. “You want to throw down with me?” he asked Ray, throwing his arms wide. “You want to threaten me?”
“Whoa, whoa, bro,” Ray said, putting his hands in front of him and smiling, though a lot more limply than he had at the outset of this conversation. “This isn’t the way this town works. It’s not fights, man. Having to throw a punch? That’s not power. And it’s definitely not the kind they deal in around here.”
He picked up his laptop and slid it into a manbag, along with his pad, and then picked up his phone. He slung the bag over his shoulder and it creased his short-sleeve dress shirt, his slightly chubby upper body weighed down by the contents. “I just came here to talk, to give you the info, gents. The Custis family that you’re thinking you want to get into a scratch fight with? Don’t do it. They’ve got nothing to do with whatever’s in your heads.”
“I just told you what’s in my head,” Augustus said. “If you think your friends aren’t connected, why are you trying so hard to protect them? Don’t you think we’ll just figure out the truth if they weren’t involved? That’s what we do, see—get to the truth.”
“No,” Ray said, almost laughing. “You guys fight. Brawl. With metas—you know, like the Custis family. But you don’t want to do that here.” He leaned forward seriously. “They’re not your enemy. But if you mess with them … they’re nice people, they probably wouldn’t rise to the bait. But they’ve got friends. Powerful friends.” Picking up his coffee cup, he nodded at Augustus, then at me. “Friends you don’t want as enemies. Because you guys seem … nice.” He might have been struggling a little to get that out. “I’d hate to see you end up like … well, your old friend.” He smiled tightly. “Take it easy, fellas. Maybe I’ll see you around.” And then he walked off.
I watched him go, kicking myself for being cowed into silence during the last half of the conversation, and I wondered as I watched him walk away exactly where—or who—his next stop was.