Mia set down the phone. I’m sure she’s fine, she thought. I’ll call tomorrow, for an actual conversation.
* * *
Mia took car service to the event. The party—officially billed as a “Declaration to Country”—was being held at a midtown restaurant known for its two-thousand-dollar truffled lobster risotto and where years before Secret Service shot dead a comedian with a cream pie. “Somehow,” the Imperial Times would later write, “that tragedy made getting a table for lunch even more impossible.”
Body scanners marked the entryway like rock slabs. Men and women in formal wear moved through them with sporting patience, smiles and wisecracks never quite reaching their eyes. It was delicate work, maintaining one’s authority while feigning deference to the structures of modern life. Never let them see you sweat, Jesse would say. It’s how Mia had been raised. She removed her shoes for the body scanner and set her jawline to stoic.
Security was pronounced, a range of city police, homeland marshals, and private contractors cutting against the crowd in drab mosaic. A squad of Home Guard had posted in a near corner, with full kits and assault rifles slung low. Mia couldn’t help but notice the uniform deficiencies—the untucked bootlaces, the rolled sleeves, the private wearing a death skull patch on his helmet cover. Not my fight anymore, she reminded herself. She walked by the Guardsmen with a curt nod.
Past the entryway, Mia took a moment to soak in the air-conditioning and adjust to the ballroom’s faint lighting. The restaurant had once been a bank, complete with marble columns, soaring ceilings, and a large four-faced brass clock in the center. To her right, arriving guests took photographs in front of an American Service sign board with the party’s presidential candidate, a governor from out west who’d spent a tour in the Peace Corps. Mia went left, toward the appetizers.
Two crunchy sake pickles and four yogurt cheese balls did little to blunt her hunger. She’d seemed to have passed through the morning sickness phase and gone straight to cravings, a trade-off she appreciated even if she could hear her grandmother’s voice as she reached for a puff pastry: “In the history of civilization, no one’s ever been impressed by how much a woman ate.”
Sorry, Grandma, Mia thought to herself between bites of pastry. But this isn’t about impressing.
Mia grabbed a club soda from a passing waiter and began scanning faces. She recognized many in the crowd. The chief legal officer at her bank. Liam Noonan, the Navy SEAL turned bond trader, handing out business cards. The executive vice president of a pharmaceutical corporation who’d gone to Yale with her father, and was on the short list for new Sinai consul. A classmate of hers from Dupont who’d gained notoriety junior year for urinating on his RA’s door after a night of heavy drinking. When the RA opened the door in her pajamas, the stream didn’t stop. The college newspaper published the security footage to its website, and Dupont made national news that week for all the wrong reasons.
He’d been suspended, of course, but let back into school the next semester. Last Mia had heard, he’d left the US-Deutsche DataCorp Group to run his own equity fund. The finance world had its fair share of fools, Mia knew. But what world didn’t?
A man in a white tuxedo with neat black hair and a craggy face raised a hand to her in a half wave, fingers wrapped around a drink. She returned the gesture. Mia and Roger Tran had met again in his office to game-plan the meeting with the Lehman chair she’d secured. It had ended with him talking about his first visit to America three decades before: he’d been part of the lecture tour sponsored by the U.S. government that brought over Vietnamese refugees and soldiers to speak to the jailed American peacemongers. Her own mother had earned clemency through the program, though Mia kept that to herself.
“We were tourists most days,” Tran had explained. “Imagine what the Grand Canyon looked like to an ARVN grunt from Saigon—what the big sky looked like, what the air smacked like! At night, we were driven to camps to tell the wild American youth how self-involved they were, how they’d been bad humanitarians and bad patriots. After combat? An easy job.”
Tran had whistled then, low and sharp, before continuing. “Whoever put that together? Masters of messaging. Much to learn from it.”
There was, Mia admitted, even if the story had bothered her more than it inspired.
“Mia!” a voice whispered in the ballroom from behind her, quick and conspiratorial. “The RA Pisser’s here!”
She turned to find Sebastian grinning like a sleepy jack-o’-lantern. She gave him a quick hug and smelled bourbon. He wore his normal sunglasses and canvas sneakers and a cotton seersucker suit she hadn’t seen since college. And where was his tie?
“I’m trying to make it clear I don’t belong here,” he explained. The bourbon dripped from his words. “Finance and politics. We’re in the nexus of American church.”
Mia wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but he seemed pleased by the phrase. She left it alone.
“Some huckster gave me this.” Sebastian pulled one of Liam Noonan’s cards from his jacket. “Special Operations Lessons for Corporate Synergy,” he read in a voice fit for an infomercial. “Life is a war. Learn to thrive, from the battlefield to the boardroom. Join our business muster and dominate. All caps, DOMINATE, Mia. For the low, low price of five grand!”
“You’re shouting,” Mia told Sebastian, because he was.
“The RA Pisser’s here!” Sebastian repeated, dropping the card. “Wasn’t he a Sigma Chi? How high does the eagle fly! Douche-canoes.”
“You need to eat,” Mia said, thinking she could manage another puff pastry herself. She steered him by his elbow to the far side of the appetizers, where there were fewer bodies and, she hoped, fewer inquiring eyes. In an assembly of sleek striving and dark, serious suits, the man in the wrinkled seersucker stuck out just as much as he’d wanted to. She settled them among a cluster of red, white, and camo balloons loose on strings.
“How are you even here?” she asked.
“Look at all these thirsty jackalopes,” Sebastian said, not answering her question, instead scooping up a handful of chocolate Goldfish cracker bites. “Rich kids who didn’t join up after Palm Sunday. Now they’re all growed up and sloppy with guilt.” He paused to burp into his fist. “Pet the vet, talk about your grandpa in World War Two. Do the army commando workout from Men’s Health three times a week. Deep down thinking you’re too precious for that life. So here’s some money, here’s some feelings, cleanse me, broken souls.” He burped into his fist again. “At least I tried.” He shook his head and grabbed more cracker bites.
Mia was going to push back on his rant by saying he’d chosen to drop ROTC in college. No one had made him do that. But then Jared Kushner, a real estate prince who’d gone to prep school with her brother, walked by. He waved at Mia and she waved back. He was pretty and smart-looking, in a porcelain sort of way. Sebastian wouldn’t have any idea who he was but she didn’t feel like disagreeing anymore. Mia repeated one of her grandmother’s adages.
“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die, See-Bee.”