Born to Run (6 page)

Debbie checked the notepad she always brought in with her. She and Isabel’s campaign manager swapped their bosses’ diaries every day so they could keep tabs just for times like this.
“Ms Diaz is meeting with Congressman Prentice in DC and then has a...”

Ed set down the photo and banged his fist on his open closet door so it slammed back against the wall. “Spencer Fucking Prentice! What
is
this? Be-Nice-to-Democrats Day?”

To Ed, Spencer Prentice wasn’t just a Democrat, he was far worse: not only had he once been one of those investment banker scum who’d almost ruined the global financial system, but
also Isabel had an affection for him.

Ed knew that Spencer returned his scorn. The last time he’d been over for dinner—yes, she invited the liberal bastard into their fine Republican home—he’d overheard a
snippet of their conversation when he returned to the dining room after taking a phone call.

“Isabel, Ed’s… using you.”

Ed saw her give Spencer a twisted smile, “What makes you think I’m not using him?”

It was a disquieting question. One neither Spencer, nor Ed, had ever entertained before.

DEBBIE knew this would be a bad day. An hour later, the FDA’s latest rejection of the
Clip’n’Drip
technology came in. She had tiptoed the letter into
Ed herself. And to make matters worse, the Karim Ahmed affair had reared its head in Isabel’s campaign yet again. Debbie had never heard so many “fucks” in one day, not since she
stayed at that Nantucket hotel with the paper-thin walls on her honeymoon thirty years ago.

Even with Ed’s heavy office door closed, she could feel the expletives pound into it from the other side. So no way was she going to disturb him to take a call from some sweet-talking
Close-up
TV researcher.

Ed was a man people admired when it was opportune and loathed when it wasn’t, but those people only knew the rigid, unyielding Ed, the
it’s my way, or the highway
Ed. Yet, as
Debbie knew, if anyone demonstrated commitment and loyalty to him, he returned it and multiplied it, whether they were the men and women from his service past or even the lowliest worker in his
sprawling corporate empire.

Debbie had been with Ed only eight months when her husband Angus was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Debbie, a professional, imagined she’d left her troubles at home but by the second
day Ed had sensed something was amiss and pressed her. He dropped everything, made calls, got Angus moved into a more comfortable room at the hospital till his battery of tests was completed,
arranged for the best oncologists to be swung onto his case, including the now-eminent son of one of Ed’s combat troops, and insisted on taking care of any expenses not covered by health
insurance. Despite Ed’s doggedness, they had to wait nine long days of Angus’s life before they got the prognosis… he had six weeks left.

“What’s that?” Debbie asked when Ed placed the thick envelope on her desk. She opened it slowly. Two tickets to Edinburgh, Angus’s birthplace. Pre-paid hotel vouchers.
Thirty thousand dollars in cash.

Ed could be as tough and gristly as a five-dollar steak, but if you looked after him, he looked after you.

THOUGH Debbie didn’t know it, Ed’s mood that morning had also been also cranked up by last night’s
Nightline
, which he’d seen on his office TV
and replayed twice. The interviewer had hit Isabel with a crack Ed had heard several times before, though until then it had never been dignified with the gravitas of a major TV current affairs
program.

Isabel was clearly her own woman—few others had ever turned such hardship into a fortune anywhere near as big—yet there she was locking horns with yet another pundit
over who’d really be wearing the pants in her White House. Ed, and everyone watching, knew the journalist’s biased intent: to pitch Isabel as a floppy female glove-puppet who’d
dance to the finger-touch of an unelected military, outfitted in the regalia of him, her husband.

If it had been him being interviewed, he thought at the time, he would have stared the liberal bitch down, but Isabel declined the dignified silence route and shrugged it off. After a few
theatrically demure blinks from her green eyes, she flicked her black bob behind her ear and said, “Molly, Ed Loane is my husband, not my ventriloquist. If the people elect
me
,
they’ll get
me
.”

He doubted the answer would finally park the topic. With the frequency it had been coming up in one offensive form or another, Ed knew it was no trivial issue for many people.

Soon enough, when America would be forced to confront it seriously, it would be no joke either.

E
VEN WITH WILLY Nesbit’s interview in the can, Mandrake needed his crack LA researcher to burn a bit more midnight oil. He’d seen that
Elia Cacoz got results. She had spine too, so maybe, he thought, he’d consider letting her screw him. Being on TV had to have some side-benefits.

A simple internet search of “Isabel Diaz’s mother” got you
Maria Rosa Diaz
in a millisecond. But where was Maria Rosa now? That was Mandrake’s question. Nesbit had
speculated she had returned to Bolivia. Mandrake already knew from one slammed down phone that she wasn’t the Argentinean senator of the same name. One down, a thousand or more Maria Rosas to
go.

Locating Isabel’s mother, even just discovering whether she was still alive… that was Mandrake’s mission. Voters needed to know what really triggered the fifteen-year-old
Isabel to run away. If Nesbit was to be believed, it was rape… and an especially horrific one. It gave more colour to the scar. Mandrake was already convincing himself that this was the dark
secret that drove the candidate.

He’d already got Willy Nesbit on camera drooling the snippet that Maria Rosa had been loose with her morals, if not a whore, and was relishing how the Republican National Committee might
choke over that morsel on prime-time. But that was only an appetiser, nowhere near enough for the splash he wanted to make… needed to make. Nesbit’s memory of the rape was too vague to
pin his story on. He needed more.

Another key, he was convinced, was Isabel’s father, Hernandes Diaz, but so far he’d drawn a blank there too, despite it being a name that was as common in many South American phone
books as a Kennedy was in Cape Cod.

Virtually every Isabel Diaz feature ever written painted Señor Diaz as a successful Bolivian industrialist whose life ended when he was kidnapped and killed in La Paz, sentencing his
pregnant wife—who he’d had the foresight to send to the US shortly before—to penury. Mandrake might have read it a hundred times, but he wanted proof. Mandrake always wanted
proof.

According to Elia, such murders were commonplace in Bolivia back then but official information from that era of Bolivia’s past no longer existed. The Presidential Palace in La Paz, Elia
told him, was called
Palacio Quemado,
the Burnt Palace, for good reason.

“NO find no
empresario
Hernandes Diaz, Señor Mike… no, er, businessman. But…”

“But, nothing…,” Elia heard Mike yelling into the phone as if it would motivate the La Paz gumshoe she herself had spent hours tracking down and hiring. As well as being a
part-time investigator, Carlos was also a
cocalero
, a coca trafficker, which she guessed might be a synergistic vocation.

“…but I find ’nother Diaz,” Carlos continued, ignoring the interruption. He knew he’d have Mike’s attention even if the gringo at the other end of the line
seemed incapable of understanding him. He spoke slowly and loudly, the same way gringos often spoke down to him. “Name of other hombre has letter ‘z’, not ‘s’. So is
H-e-r-n-a-n-d-e-Z. He is no businessman too.”

Carlos’s slow measured pace only riled Mike more, “Then you’ve got the wrong guy,” Mike screamed. “Wrong spelling
and
wrong job.”

This wasn’t an attitude the two-hundred-pound Bolivian was used to. “You hear me, Señor Mike…”

“You hear
me
, Carlos. Find
my
Hernandes, not some other Hernandez.” Mike was about to slam down the phone on him.

“Señor Mike! I am find him. You fucking hear?”

Mike was silent.

“I find you fucking Hernandez, okay? He
diplomático muy importante
, but he no businessman. And he from Chile not Bolivia, but he live in Bolivia. He vanish exact year you
say. His wife… she from Bolivia; a
paceños
family… indigenous, you say. I got wedding announcement from friend in Santiago. Chile have good records. This
diplomático
Hernandez with ‘z’… he has one wedding party in La Paz and ’nother
grande
one in Chile. Later,
un periódico
… a
newspaper in Chile say there is trouble in Bolivia and he send his pregnant wife away, maybe to America. Then he vanish...”

Carlos had to be on the wrong track, Mike was sure of it. “Carlos, you say you got the wedding announcement… what’s the name of the wife of this Hernandez-with-a-z.”

“
Un momento
… her name… Maria… Maria Rosa.”

OFTEN when she was alone, Isabel hugged her father’s photograph while her mind played back that morning…
She is
fifteen
…
it’s the last
kiss she will ever give her mother
…

The terror of that afternoon attacked her whenever it wanted to.

The shrink she’d seen briefly years ago told her that her preoccupation with that kiss, that morning, and with her father, was her brain desperately trying to supplant the horror of that
afternoon.

Mostly it worked.

Isabel knew that it was this momentary heaven set against the hell that had driven her to succeed, so that she would never again get close to that life, and could help others to avoid similar
fates.

She replayed the morning over and over, seeking both comfort and pain from each tiny detail. It wasn’t pretty, but it had been her life.

IT’S 7:15 AM and Isabel’s mami is flaked out, flabby and naked. Isabel is standing over her. Mami is beautiful, apart from her bruises. Her boyfriend is sprawled
out beside her and the yellowing sheet with pink flowers half covers the couple. He
’
s been mami’s boyfriend for two weeks. Isabel has chalked him up as staying twelve nights
straight. Suddenly, his arm moves and the snarling tattoo on his bicep, a wolf, disturbs her. Scares her.

She runs to tidy up the mess from the adults’ party from last night. She tosses out soggy trays of half-eaten nachos and curling pizza, and using her fingers as stoppers manages to take
out six of the eight empty beer bottles in one trip and lays them like bricks on the wall she
’
s been building outside. She’s already folded the newspaper he’d brought home
with him from the plant. That was the only good thing about this one: twice a week he brought home the newspaper. Her mami never bought one, preferring to zone out in front of the TV.

Last week Isabel gave a speech for the local Rotarians’ school citizenship contest and her teacher said she might win a prize. Her mami could sure use the money.

After Isabel picks up and folds her mother’s clothes, she silently slides open the bedside table drawer and takes out her father’s photo, their only picture of him. Mami hides it
in there to avoid trouble with the boyfriend. Isabel loves how handsome he was; she strokes the glass protecting his movie-star hair. She holds it to her heart and turns her head to the
bed.

She reviles this man with the wolf tattoo. If her father were here, he’d fix him. Isabel’s black eye shines back at her from the glass. She touches it gingerly but it throbs, and
in her fright she drops the photo-frame.

Her mother flips up in bed, instantly terrified: “No wake him,” she mouths. The boyfriend stirs and the two females are frozen but he rolls over, smothering his wolf under the
pillow.