I immediately slunk behind a nearby pillar. Marie-Anne passed by and paused to see what I was looking at. I took her hand.
“What’s he doing here?”
“I invited him,” she said.
“You should have cleared it with me.”
“No. Let him see how great we’re doing.”
There was a chandelier right above him. George was reflected in every piece of glass. A thousand little versions of him. Just sitting there. Now drinking wine. Now fixing his tie. Now wiping his face with a napkin. I took a glance at Marie-Anne and then walked over to him.
“Hello, George,” I said, putting my glass down near his hand, confining him a little.
“Hello there.” He glanced up without a hint of surprise, as if he had known I’d had him under surveillance. “And hello to you, Marie-Anne.”
“Hi, George,” she whispered. “How is everything?”
“Everything is as it should be,” he said. “Dinesh couldn’t make it. And my wife is out of the country. I’m here by myself.”
“Why don’t you come over where the rest of us are?” I found myself saying.
“You’re over there?” He leaned to check out our side of the restaurant. “I thought it would just be us. That’s what I thought.”
“Just some friends. People from DC and Virginia. Some of the younger ones are from my new venture.”
“That is good. That is good.” George nodded, then stood up and adjusted his blazer, dropping a couple of twenty-dollar bills for his check. “I appreciate it. I appreciate the invite. It isn’t what I expected.”
Rather than asking me a follow-up, George turned toward Marie-Anne. “You are still working with MimirCo? I read about their activities recently. I remembered your relation to them from your party.”
She blushed and wavered a little. “That’s right.”
George lifted up his right hand and, using his middle finger extended fully and index finger bent in half, pointed at me. “I never thought you would approve of criminality.”
“I’m sorry? What criminality?”
“War crimes,” he said. “The angel-of-death game that MimirCo plays. It is outside the scope of international law. Is that what you are here to celebrate?”
“We are celebrating,” I said, “but not what you are suggesting. We are celebrating having the means to buy our apartment. The same place where you disrespected us before.”
“I’m glad,” he said. “But how will you live in a house paid for by the blood of the innocent?”
I raised my voice. “It isn’t like that.”
Marie-Anne put a steadying hand on my arm. But the sound of my voice was such that some of our friends in the other room heard it and came over, standing behind us now, forming a protective circle, turning their judgmental eyes in George Gabriel’s direction. They didn’t need to know who he was. As long as he aroused enmity in us, they considered him presumptively diseased.
I drew comfort from the circumference. One by one I introduced each of my friends. Name, title, status. Name, title, status. Name, title, status.
They came forward and took George Gabriel’s hand. He gave a nervous laugh and glanced toward the exit. I turned to Marie-Anne. She had plotted this moment. She had set him up for his demise and made certain I would be there to witness it. When George Gabriel’s authority and moral certitude would be defeated. When his wing-wide shoulders would break. When he would crumple to the ground in a clatter of spine. It was the reward she had set up for me for my loyalty.
I drew closer. My body glowed like the executioner’s knife. When there was nothing left I would put my hand on the small of his back and lead him to the exit, and on the way I would tell him that if he ever wanted to advance in Plutus, like his predecessor Tony Blanchard had, he should feel free to give me a call and I would hook him up with contracts in the Imperial City.
But I didn’t get to balance the equation of life with my vengeance.
Once George Gabriel finished greeting everyone he looked upon us as if we were a collective, a herd of gazelles merged into one another, his gaze a swift-moving cloud passing over us. His voice tore like a storm: “American jihadists. You’re all American jihadists.”
With that pronouncement he buttoned his blazer, turned on a heel, and made his way toward the exit. He flipped the curtain and disappeared from sight, the beads clattering against each other.
The scene George Gabriel left behind wasn’t exactly one of devastation. Most of the group was far too polished, far too experienced with the varieties of human opinion, to take George Gabriel’s evaluation as worthy of irritation. Mahmoud quickly made a comment about the blinkered worldview of certain secular humanists. Their inability to see that without the revitalizing work that the clash of civilizations represented, Western culture would make a fatalistic turn toward immolation, unable to shed from its bodice the fat of decadence and cowardice. He offered the example of the Ottoman Empire. The songs of their civilization were sung with the mouths of their muskets. But when the mystically inclined among them convinced those in power that it wasn’t geographic expansion but the pursuit of spiritual health that defined superiority, they took a fatal turn toward their demise. Karsten King agreed with Mahmoud and they quickly raised their glasses to toast all the worms, urchins, sloths, squids, bugs, and other spineless creatures with whom people like George Gabriel deserved to live. Laughter released the tension. The party returned to its earlier equilibrium. Marie-Anne released my arm and went back to drink. She was content with making him run. It was sufficient for her that he had been revealed to be a coward.
Every part of me wanted to follow Marie-Anne back to the party and to indulge in the mockery that came so easily to them. But I couldn’t let go of the edict George Gabriel had passed. How dare he think himself capable of telling me who or what I was. Had I not expanded since the last time I met him? Perhaps the first time he’d passed judgment on me I had no defense — because those condemned to Islam can’t really stand up for themselves — but this time around it wasn’t Islam that George had insulted. It was my Americanism. This thing couldn’t be touched. It was incomparable. It occupied a metaphysically exalted position, not afforded to any other concept in the world. Once you were American — truly, fully — you got to throw around yourself the cloak of perfect rationality, drape yourself in the colors of universalism, surround yourself with certitude. Once you became American, anyone who diminished America was presumptively wrong, presumptively wicked, presumptively lesser. I couldn’t have punched George Gabriel in the mouth for insulting Islam, because people would have called me a savage, declared me a terrorist. But if I scalped him, if I tore George Gabriel’s skin for insulting the honor of America, the onus would be upon him to show why he had provoked the master; he would be the one who would have to prove that he wasn’t an apostate. The revelation coursed through me as if I’d been embraced by a president who had come down from the pantheon that originated in Philadelphia.
I picked up a poker from the fireplace, its handle embossed with the name of the restaurant and its head marked with a sharpened cross, and I ran after George Gabriel. There he was, under the smoky halogen lamps in the forgettable night, a shuffling monster, casting three shadows simultaneously, one of which walked upright and moved forward toward the river, while the other two lengthened and shortened, lengthened and shortened. Snowflakes tried to land upon him and failed.
I followed him until he was on the pedestrian bridge on Spring Garden Street, the river a frozen battle underneath, the cars like cracking whips on I-76, the sky caving upon us. I said nothing when I drove the fire poker through him. Two-handed, with torque and twist. The human body is pierced by iron almost as easily as by words. George Gabriel’s mouth opened in a screamless scream. I took him into my arms and put my lips over his lips and let his words dribble into my mouth. Then I let him fall into the Schuylkill, wounded, and sent the poker with him. Down went the gnarled knight of derision. Never again to rise. Never to stand as an impediment in the expansion of this man known as M.