Born to Run (5 page)

Elia paused, weighing the sandwich on her palm as if it were one of the baseball gloves she sensed she’d be seeing lot more of. What could this guy have up his sleeve? She had to admit
that no one had ever gone very far down the “real folks” track, mainly because it was so long ago, Bolivia was so far away, and frankly it wasn’t likely to be interesting once
told. But then, she paused, what about all that birthist crap about Obama? His Kenyan father, his Indonesian stepfather, and whether he was a Muslim, or had
really
been born in
Hawaii… All that had all blown up into a huge storm of a story. So why couldn’t this?

In her head, Elia sped through what the whole world already knew: Isabel was born in Newark to a destitute Bolivian mother, spent her childhood being dragged from trailer park to trailer park
until… yada, yada. What more could Mandrake have?

“Okay… so why LA? Why are you here?” she asked him, intent on taking it as far as she could. “Last anyone heard about Isabel’s natural mother was in New Mexico
almost three decades ago, right? And her dad? He died in Bolivia before she was born.” She rubbed her chin. If any clues were out there waiting for Mandrake to find them, she thought,
they’d be in East LA. Hispanic central. Not, she smirked to herself, where he was swanking it up in his four-room hotel suite, three heel-clicks off Rodeo Drive where pretty much the only
Latinos were the housemaids.

Mandrake held her stare. She guessed he was debating with himself whether to bring her into his circle which, from all the hush-hush, she knew was a tight one.

“Look,” he said eventually but softly. “I’ve tracked down the guy who ran that trailer park she ran away from. He lives here in LA, and I’m meeting him
tomorrow.” He’d have savoured the sight of Elia’s mouth dropping more if she had swallowed all the tuna. “So,” he added, getting to why he’d come to her desk,
“have you dug out her birth certificate for me yet?”

As Elia kicked her chair back, rolling herself backwards to the printer, Mandrake ticked off the prep he’d done so far: “This guy is the best lead I’ve got. He’s the only
one I could find from her New Mexico days. You wouldn’t believe who I’ve spoken to… folks from Half Moon Bay, early BBB workers, members of her campaign team, kids from her
runaways charity, grown-ups who’ve graduated from it…”

Elia considered telling him her boyfriend was one of those graduates but, certain he’d ask her to fix him up with Simon for an interview, she kept silent.

Mandrake went on to explain he’d done all the hunting and all the interviews himself so far. It was the print media way, not the TV way, he said. “I know all of you are cheesed off
with me. You think I don’t trust you which, to be honest, is true. But frankly, I
should
have let you do the pre-interviews.” If Elia could have read his mind, she would have
known it wasn’t because he’d just had a revelation about the value of the team, but because none of those interviews had gone anywhere.

Mandrake was mentally shaking his head that if he had to sit through one more jerk-off repeating the same sickeningly sweet accolades about Isabel, he would gag: decent, intuitive, insightful,
loyal, empathetic, committed to the common good, having the drive and organisational skills to achieve goals, compassionate but decisive, a practical visionary, blah, blah, blah.

Bor-fucking-ring.

No way was his first TV piece going to be about some namby-pamby Little Goody Two-Shoes. The network hadn’t lured him from the peak of the print world for that.
Close-up
only did
controversy.

Typing was Mandrake’s preferred way to think. “Who is the real Isabel Diaz?” his fingers had tapped out on his laptop days earlier. “Mary fucking Poppins?” He
hadn’t been able to find one bastard out there with a bad word to say about her. Even how she was dealing with the Karim Ahmed scandal showed her in a depressingly positive light, despite the
Democrats trying to whip it up as her Trojan or rather, Arabian horse. Mandrake had been weighing up tossing in the whole story when he had stumbled over the whereabouts of the trailer park
manager.

Elia pleaded to have first shot.

“Not this time,” he said. Mandrake had a gut instinct about this one. He was going to change the course of history. It was why he won his Pulitzer. And he badly wanted another one to
prove he hadn’t lost his magic just because he had sold out to television.

“A
NOTHER MARGARITA,” MANDRAKE winked to the bartender for the third time, “and another Wild Turkey for my friend. How ’bout
a double this time, eh?” The wink was a coded conspiracy against Mike’s drinking pal, a signal he’d agreed earlier with the barman to hold back the tequila from Mike’s own
drinks so he’d stay clear-headed while the former trailer park manager spilled his increasingly well-lubricated guts.

Mike now knew he’d been right to do this prep himself, and alone. Willy Nesbit would be top TV talent. His baggy, crumpled surf shirt was styled—though that wasn’t quite the
right word—for someone thirty years younger and twenty pounds heavier. Nesbit had filched it from an unattended pile at the laundromat. Mike sniffed Nesbit out as his program teaser. Willy
was one of those tall, scrawny sleazebags whose rust-bucket of a truck would sport a peeling bumper sticker like,
You think this pick-up is filthy? Just try a night with the driver
.
Willy’s head was a total razor job, the shave exposing a macabre tattoo: two rats with their thick pink tails slithering down his neck. Perfect for TV.

Good journalism was in the details, Mike knew that, and at last they were coming to him. Like the “Gappy Hooker”. Mike couldn’t believe his luck when Willy blurted out the pet
name he’d given thirty years ago to a woman he knew as Maria Rosa, Isabel’s apparently toothless mother.

“It had its benefits,” Willy smirked, digging an elbow into Mike’s ribs.

When Mike was slow to follow, Willy worked his lips into a big O, bulged his eyes cartoon-style and, placing one hand at the back of his neck right on top of the tattooed rats, and a finger of
his other hand near his mouth, he bobbed his head up and down so his mouth slid over his finger. But it was Mandrake who gagged: a performance like that, while the tape was running… could he
slide it past the network censors? Willy Nesbit was a repulsive toenail-clipping of a man, but Mike Mandrake was pumped.

Luckily, Willy couldn’t recollect Maria Rosa’s surname or the name of her daughter and Mike didn’t enlighten him, worried that if the creep did remember he would hotfoot it
over to another network, get plastered again for free and spurt out everything to the competition.

Willy’s story was gold. Maria Rosa had paid him in kind for her trailer’s rent. It was handy not having to stray from his Cactus Flower Trailer Park to “get done”, he
said, even if it had to be during the day. “At least the kid was at school. The ma didn’a want her to know nuthin,” he said, “but she had to know somethin’. She was
fucken smart, that kid. Won some prize, I ’member… from the, ah, Rotarians. Made some speech to ’em. Maria Rosa got the spoils after the girl scooted. I ’member it cos
there weren’t no monkey business goin’ after that an’ she give me the winnings for the rent. After that, Maria Rosa just shut down shop. With her legs closed, she couldn’a
pay rent no more, so’s what could I do? A man’s gotta eat, right? So’s I kicked her out.”

“Why did her daughter leave home?” asked Mike before taking a sip of the drink the bartender had just slid in front of him.

“Was bad, man,” Willy said, doing likewise. “One of Maria Rosa’s boyfriends… she liked callin’ all us regulars her ‘boyfriends’… he did
her, you know what I mean?”

“Ah, not really.”

“He fucken did the kid.”

That Isabel had been the victim of a serious assault was well-known, but this…

“He’d been round a couple weeks, Mr Mandrake. I even sorta liked him. But not by the end. There was fucken blood everywhere, man. I had to hose out the fucken trailer after the cops
left. He fucken slit her throat ’n all.”

“Her throat!” Mike pictured Isabel with her fabled scar. So she didn’t get it in a mugging. That was the story the public had swallowed, but Isabel had always refused to
confirm or deny it, and the media had let up on it as private. Until now.

“The kid was lucky. But fucken ran away from the hospital after’n she got fixed up. Never even brought her sorry butt over to say adios to her lovin’ mami,” Willy said
snarling, his lips pulled back over his teeth, revealing Maria Rosa wasn’t the only one to have lost a few. “Broke Maria Rosa’s heart, Mike. Broke her fucken heart.”

“Where’d she go?” asked Mandrake, meaning the mother. His stomach clenched for the answer.

“Don’ fucken know, don’ fucken care. What she did to her bewdiful ma, man… first class fucken A-grade bitch, pardon the French. I loved her ma, Mike. Really loved
her.”

“I mean the mother. Where did
she
go?”

“How the fuck would I know? Had to turn her out, like I said. It was hard on me to do that, man. I loved her.”

“You must have some idea.”

Willie looked hard at the four fifty-dollar notes Mike had slipped out of his wallet and placed under Willie’s Wild Turkey. “Went back to Bolivia,” he said, taking another swig
of his drink and pocketing the cash. “Prob’ly had a few boyfriends back there… Lucky fellers, if y’ask me,” he said, breaking into a sneer and again poking the
cracked grey skin of his elbow into Mike’s blue cashmere sweater, this time catching a thread. But Mike didn’t care.

T
HE REPEATED LATE nights were getting to Ed Loane. He jerked open his closet drawer and picked out one of the small foil-wrapped
Clip’n’Drip
cylinders, this one an antibiotic. He peeled back the foil and after marvelling at the sharp, cone-shaped pellet spiking out of the cylinder, he ripped open an
antiseptic swab. With the four good fingers of his left hand, he yanked the front of his shirt out of his pants and swabbed a few inches from his navel. Bunching up the little skin he
could—even at his age Ed didn’t carry much flab—he placed the cone point over the sterile area, jabbed it in and pulled the spike back out clean, implanting the biodegradable
dose-release pellet.

Debbie Branson took a breath as she turned the handle on the door to Ed’s office. She’d been his personal assistant for years, yet it always felt like she was creaking open the gate
on a lion’s cage. She’d open it only a crack and he’d already be roaring his instructions at her, with her dodging to avoid the claws tearing at his many bugbears.

Despite knowing he’d pulled his third all-nighter in a row, today was one of the rare quiet times, though the churn in her stomach suggested it was just temporary. She saw Ed tucking his
shirt back in, but discreetly kept her eyes cast down at the files he must have flung over the floor last night.

“I can’t afford to get the flu,” he volunteered.

Her raised eyebrow suggested he said it with a touch too much guilt. Of all people, she fretted, the chief executive shouldn’t be breaking the law. But she said nothing. Ed could react
like a switchblade: whichever way he flicked, someone got sliced.

He plucked another tissue from the box, wiped his eyes and blew his nose. A ruse, she assumed, though he really did have a sniffle the last couple of days and was looking pretty run down. The
last few weeks had been exhausting, even for her, and she didn’t keep anything like his hours.

Ignoring her—or perhaps because of her, Debbie couldn’t be sure—Ed tipped his head back, sprayed some drops into each nostril and sniffed them in.

Debbie knew that Ed’s personal trialling of their big new drug implant product was for the company’s benefit, but she would never take that risk herself. One of those things would
never get jabbed under her skin until it got the all-clear from the Department of Health’s Food & Drug Administration. Not if her life depended on it... though, given her husband’s
history, maybe she would in a case like that.

Over the last twelve months she had sent hundreds of letters for Ed: to the FDA, the World Health Organisation, senators, congressmen, committee chairmen. She knew the corporate spin by rote:
“Our
Clip’n’Drip
dose-release pellet is so minute and non-intrusive, so reliable that once implanted, patients can simply forget about it and enjoy a normal life again with
confidence. The automatic releases of life-saving drugs in pre-programmed doses last up to one year per implant. Great for children scared of needles, a boon for forgetful seniors, and perfect for
the unreliable, such as addicts. We also have radio-activated
Clip’n’Drips
for when there’s worry about an epidemic, but authorities only want the drug administered if the
peril actually eventuates. This homegrown American invention can save millions of lives. You sir (or madam), should be championing it…”

Ed was glaring at her. Suddenly recalling why she’d come in, she straightened her tartan flannel skirt. “President Clinton’s office is on the line,” she said, avoiding
Ed’s eye. “They’re asking for a meeting… for later this afternoon.” She assumed it was about Clinton’s foundation. Debbie still had a soft spot for the former
President and suspected he wanted to press Ed to donate some of the company’s wonder drugs to Africa.

“Fuck that,” Ed muttered, not meaning for Debbie to hear, though she had. “And why,” he said, “does that sleazeball still get to call himself President?”

She said nothing, though her eyes couldn’t help scanning the plaque on Ed’s desk:

GENERAL EDWIN (Ed) D. LOANE

United States Army (Retired)

Chairman and CEO

“Why the hell should I want to see him?” he said as he picked up the framed photo of his son, Davey. “Tell them I’ve got a subsequent engagement. Ah… ring
Davey’s school. Yeah, I’m taking him to the zoo… this afternoon.”

Even Ed’s distaste for Clinton couldn’t stop him returning his eight-year-old’s smile beaming from the photo. He remembered exactly when Davey had taken the photo, only a few
months ago, by pointing Ed’s camera at himself into a mirror. “And see if Isabel can squeeze in to fly back to join us. It’ll be hot for the evening news.”