I had time to gather my thoughts. Gather them up, have them split apart again. “Look, Ralph Mars, the state attorney down there, told me it was a very sensitive matter because of who was involved. He said he had to be careful the claims weren’t just politically motivated. That was all he seemed to be interested in.”

It was not good enough. Mr. Andrews twisted my words in his mouth and spit them back at me. “Politically motivated? A girl gets violently raped and you claim that all the prosecutor cares about is whether her complaint is politically motivated?”

“He wanted to know if the Senator had come into the library when Kendrick was in there with us. He wanted to know if the Senator had participated in any way.”

“Participated?” He was twisting again, making everything I said sound foolish.

“I told him the Senator just stuck his head into the room and I didn’t think he really could see anything other than, you know, there was a girl in there with a couple of guys.”

“A girl who was being raped.”

“Well, see, it wasn’t all that clear. Even to me.”

“What wasn’t … clear … Georgie?” He used the diminutive like I was a child. Like I was an idiot.

“Like whether she was …” I didn’t want to use the word again.

“Participating?”

“The thing is, she wasn’t saying anything. She wasn’t doing anything to stop them.”

“She was passed out, you perverted little creep.”

“She wasn’t passed out,” I argued, my voice rising. And then I cut it off.

“What was she doing, Georgie, while people were shoving things up her vagina?”

It was a candle. I had stopped Peter from using the candlestick … Peter’s dick maybe, although I hadn’t seen that for sure. And his finger. And Jamie’s finger.

“Look, I didn’t get Kendrick drunk. I didn’t invite her into the library, and I didn’t get her to lie down on the couch, take her shoes off, put her leg up.”

He bent at the waist, moved his face close to mine. “And you didn’t do anything when those scumbags began shoving shit inside her, did you?”

Don’t say a word. Don’t say anything, George. Let him hit you if he wants. Whatever it is he does, just take it. Take it and keep your mouth shut.

Mr. Andrews, however, still did not hit. He straightened up instead, pivoted as though he could not stand breathing the same air I did, and walked to the dining room table, where he looked at my books and my notebook. “Quite an accomplishment, you getting into this school, Georgie. How do you suppose that came about?”

“I had good boards.”

The man kept his back to me. “That so?” He picked up my notebook and flipped through it. “I happen to know that before you went to see Ralph Mars, you and your good boards had been turned down by every law school you applied to. You had given up any thought of going anywhere and all of a sudden, after a half-hour talk with a state attorney, there they were, acceptances from Boston College and GW, one school where the Senator lives and one where the Senator works. Pretty remarkable coincidence, don’t you think?”

“What I think is remarkable is that you seem to know so much about my life.”

“Oh, you can bet on that, Georgie.” Mr. Andrews turned with deliberate slowness. He held my notebook as if he were calculating its weight, and then tossed it behind him, showing no sign of caring when it hit on the edge of the table and slid to the floor. “Mr. Powell has lost his only daughter. Mr. Powell is one pissed-off, vengeful, resourceful sonofabitch who can buy things that aren’t even for sale. And Mr. Powell is going to burn your life down around you, my fatuous little friend.”

He put his hands behind his waist and rocked forward onto the balls of his feet as if he were very much going to enjoy the fire. “I can guarantee you that things are going to start happening now that never would have happened before. And they are going to keep happening in every aspect of your life until you get to the point that if you so much as buy a losing lottery ticket you’re going to think Mr. Powell rigged the game against you.”

Mr. Andrews kept his eyes on me as he walked to the door. He stopped when he got there. “You’ve gotten yourself caught up in a very nasty war here, Georgie. And I daresay, I think you’ve chosen the wrong side.”

2

.

“CHUCK, CHUCK LARSON,” AS HE ALWAYS INTRODUCED HIMSELF, was the Senator’s man. He would say his first name, then his whole name, then pause to see if you recognized him. It was not an unreasonable expectation. He was at least six-feet-five, at least two hundred and ninety pounds, and he had been a stalwart on the offensive line for the Washington Redskins for many years.

Chuck had a broad red face and sandy hair that was getting thin but was still long enough to form curls. He had the kind of face that was built to smile, that made you think the only thing that made him sad was not smiling. When I told him about my visit from Mr. Andrews, the outer edges of his pale blue eyes became a mass of crinkles and the lines at the corners of his mouth turned into grooves.

“Oh,” he said, “I am so sorry, George.”

“Like, I don’t know,” I said, because I really didn’t. “He was threatening me without actually threatening, if that makes any sense.”

“Well, they’re feeling bad in that family, George, you can understand that. Girl they gave birth to, loved and raised, did everything they could for, something like this happens and they’ve got to make it somebody else’s fault.” He nodded his big round head at the tragedy of it all. He bathed me in sympathy as he explained, “Otherwise, the universe is in chaos. You have to find a reason something happened so you can restore order. Usual thing is finding it was somebody else’s fault.”

He was sitting on my couch, the same place where I had sat when I received Mr. Andrews’s guarantee of how bleak my future was going to be. Chuck’s job was to tell me that wasn’t so. He was wearing a short-sleeved collared shirt that was white but had faint red stripes spaced several inches apart. He was wearing blue jeans that had to have been purchased in the Midwest for use as work clothes, and tan lace-up boots that you might see at a construction site. This was pretty much the way he had dressed when he had first come to see me in Philadelphia, back in the spring, shortly after the visit from Roland Andrews.

Roland appeared. Chuck followed. Except this time I had called him.

“It’s almost as if he was telling me he was putting a curse on me, you know?” I laughed lightly, because guys like Chuck and me knew there was no such thing as a curse.

“You know,” he said back to me, “I once broke my helmet. It was just a snap for the chinstrap, but I borrowed someone else’s and ran onto the field. Didn’t fit quite the same, but it was still a helmet just like the one I always wore. First play, I’m supposed to trap the D-end. Dude blows right by me, flattens our quarterback, who lets the ball go fluttering away like a homesick brick. I sure looked bad on television, on the game film, in the coaches’ eyes, QB’s eyes. I blamed it on the helmet.”

“What are you telling me, Chuck?”

“That we get knocked out of our ordinaries and it can bother us in ways it never should. Ever see that movie Pumping Iron? Arnold Schwarzenegger, there, he’s in some Mr. Universe contest or something, and he wants to throw his opponent off his game so he hides the guy’s yellow shirt. It’s just a shirt the guy warms up in, but the guy freaks. You watch him come completely apart and, naturally, he loses the competition. Arnold had gotten in his head, see?”

“And you’re saying this guy Andrews wants to get into my head by making me think Mr. Powell’s going to cause bad things to happen to me?”