A few days later, the news finally breaks on TV: “Sources today tell us that a high-ranking advisor with Senator Andrew Marquette’s campaign for governor has gone missing. Whether or not this involves any foul play is still under investigation, but so far there has been no indication of malicious practice in the disappearance.”
We were crowded into Tennyson’s office. He sat behind the desk, while the lawyer Wolle and our communications director Beverly — who had already expressed how ‘unexpected’ my new appointment was in her last chat with the media — sat in front of it. The TV was on a side-table. I stood near the door, eyes shut, pinching the bridge of my nose. I didn’t want to see the photo of Dylan they were using. They’d had to crop a photo of him with the campaign team before I joined, a big shoulder covering up his chin. Dylan was always a real background player, content to stay out of the camera’s eye.
A few more details, then the picture cut to the reporter in the field, who paraphrased what had already been said, while b-roll of Marquette played. They only had one photo of Dylan that must’ve been taken in school, and one partial pic of him in a crowd beside Marquette.
When I closed my eyes, I saw him writhing. Screaming. Glittering. Eyes made up with mascara. I recalled passages from de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom, and wished I had never read it.
I opened my eyes and the room came back into focus. The news had moved on. Tennyson muted the sound and sighed.
“Well … cat’s out of the bag.”
Beverly almost choked. “Cat?” She glanced towards me. “I think it’s the entire pet shop.”
“Are we ready for it?”
She made a few blustery attempts to begin a sentence, but, God bless her, I actually felt sorry for her this time. In that moment, I saw what Andrew saw in her — the ‘average person’ whom the ‘people’ supposedly preferred to high-polish technocrats, professional types slick as a paint job on a Maserati politic spin.
She wasn’t terrible at her job. She was exactly where she was needed. The Senator knew exactly what he was doing.
Even with me.
After she and Wolle had been given their marching orders, they left us alone, Tennyson pretending to pay serious attention to an email on his phone while I slinked over to the chair vacated by Wolle and settled down. Crossed my legs the way I did in the privacy of my own townhouse. This was my first day in the office as a woman — or as close as I would ever be to one, according to Dr. Stravinsky — and at the same time I was trying to get comfortable in my new role as the campaign’s LGBT advisor. I had expected to feel weird. Instead, I felt some of Paula’s bravado warming my skin. Or maybe I was generating my own fire after seeing the shrink. I could do this, no problem.
Tennyson looked up. “How’s it feel?”
“Not bad.” The standard Minnesotan answer. Nothing was ever good, great, amazing, awful, tragic, or celebratory. It was always ‘not bad’.
Stiff nod. “Busy day for you. In person interviews at the locals, remotes for Duluth and Moorhead, and meetings with Black Lives Matter and a group of concerned gay voters.”
“Do I at least get a cake?”
“Better. You get your first conference call with trans-rights opponents and evangelical leaders this afternoon.”
He handed me a folder without bothering to take his eyes from other papers on his desk. I took it. Talking points I was already familiar with, some I had crafted. The schedule for the day, typed but already filled with penciled-in corrections and additions. I had thirteen minutes before I needed to get down to the car.
“When are we going to talk about the eight-hundred pound transsexual in the room, Tennyson?”
That did it. He grinned, finally gave me his full attention. “You know what they say about ‘half the battle is showing up’?”
“Yeah?”
“Bullshit. You sink or swim today, my friend.” A wink. “I like that shade of lipstick. Not trying too hard.”
“I feel in over my head.”
“Oh, you are. When I said I wanted you front and center, I didn’t mean this front and center.”
“So you don’t agree with the Senator on this?”
He pursed his lips, shook his head. “But as we all know, the man is a talent-spotter. If he was listening to me, you would’ve been working with voter registration, or fundraising, like Hans, but no, he said you could handle the spotlight. Still … I have a theory.”
“Please, by all means, enlighten me.”
“The press, they’re going to pull up your past. The ‘accident’. Getting fired from the cops. Insubordination. You’ll end up being the story for a while, and it’s going to suck. In the end, the Senator will either come to your rescue, or …” A shrug. “You resign, we help you slip into a quiet little job worth enough money to keep you happy, and by then the noise about Dylan will have died down. We’ll have found the little fucker by then, gotten the truth out of him, and moved on.”
Lump in my throat. “Um … yeah?”
Tennyson looked at his watch. “You’ve got to run, sunshine. WCCO awaits.”
First time in the public eye: Manny Jahnke, woman.
I am resisting the urge to put an asterisk up there.
This came after several days of cramming, like it was a final exam. Long nights, too much coffee, hardly any sleep. At least it helped take my mind off Dr. Stravinsky’s pronouncement, which I desperately needed. Still not sure what she could have meant. Me not ready. Of course I was ready. All this fucking waiting was hard enough. All I was asking for was a little help, right?
Focus on the positive. Practicing the interviews with some interns helped me. If they were shocked to see me expressing my feminine side more, they didn’t show it. For them, it was matter-of-fact, business as usual, reminding me that the State would be watching.
Not a one of them slipped up the pronouns, either. To them, I was a woman. No questions. Bless those millennials.
Just as Tennyson predicted, I spent a lot of time batting off mosquitoes about my recent ‘problems’, but what could they say if I brought up a climate of ‘sexual intimidation’ in most police forces, and how could they question Senator Marquette’s brave front in the face of yada yada yada, and thus he saw in me and other transmen-and-women all across the state, a variety of political opinions, all equally blather blather blather.
Listen, they’re all pretty words designed to say that fags, dykes, queers, and trannies aren’t all marching to the same political party in lockstep, but even without their votes, Governor Marquette would welcome all Minnesotans to the table, regardless of gender.
To that extent, I believed him. Maybe it meant we, the ‘others’, would have to swallow some bitter medicine along the way in order to deal with the nasties, but then it would be worth it to get past the whole ‘Christians are Republicans and Evil Liberal Satanic Cocksuckers are Democrats’ tune to finally sing something with nice harmonies.
Still, after three in-studio interviews, two over the phone, and two on remote from a room at Metro State University, I was mentally done.
Checked my messages on a break while I sipped Sprite Zero. My hand holding the can shook more than I would’ve liked. Tennyson, after each live interview, had sent critiques. Nothing bad, but nit-picky to the max. Would one ‘atta girl!’ have killed him?
Nothing from Joel. I was hoping he might have discovered more after we’d spent the previous day hunting in vain for Konzbruck, but all was quiet on that front.
There was no time to keep scrolling before my phone call with a group of evangelicals, all of whom wanted me to explain why they should still support Andrew Marquette if he was going to favor not only ‘abominations’ like gays, but utter freaks such as myself.
Before you ask, no, they didn’t call me a freak, nor did they say anything particularly nasty other than the abomination Bible verse — Leviticus 20:13’s the juicy one, about killing the gays — and how confused they were by anyone who didn’t clearly see tings their way.
Sigh.
In the end, they had their script, I had ours, and no one got anyone to change their minds. So now they could interpret our conversation for the media and put a whiplash spin on it to keep them in Marquette’s corner.
I almost told those bible bashers that if they really believed their own pronouncements, they should run as far away from Marquette and the Republicans as possible. The only course of action left to them would be to cut themselves off from the world, grow some crops, spurn modern convenience, and pray for the end.
Instead, I hung up the phone. Slumped into my chair, and gave myself a hug.
The next meeting was with a Tribune reporter, but the name on my schedule didn’t belong to the person who showed up at Spyhouse Coffee in the North Loop. The unexpected arrival was heralded by a familiar grin, a little sheepish but also adorable, camouflaging the hard-hitting investigative reporter behind it in an attempt to fool me into thinking she was ‘normcore’, as the kids said these days, in her nineties jeans, white Keds knockoffs, and frumpy cardigan wraparound.
Kristi Ferrari.
Honestly, I didn’t mind seeing her again, especially after the previous interviews I’d had that day. Our last talk had been interrupted by Joel’s impatience, back when we went hunting for Konzbruck, although Kristi had gone to the trouble of staking out my townhouse and waiting for us to leave. So now I was eager to hear her out.
“Persistent. I like that.”
She sat down across from me. “Sorry, but after what happened before—”
“No, I get it. That’s no problem.”
“Are you sure?”
I smiled. “What can I get you? My treat.”
She wanted some sort of fruity, fragrant tea, while I stuck to cappuccino and a flaky pastry. Kristi was nice, that was the best word for her. Not just Minnesota-nice, but nice-nice. I could see how she charmed people into revealing too much before they were even aware of doing so.
Some small talk first — Kristi congratulating me on the ‘promotion’, and telling me that I was coming along nicely with my appearance as I transitioned. I thought about brushing it off, telling her about my visit with Dr. Stravinsky, but no. I had to remember who I was talking to at all times. Friendly, but not a friend.
Not yet.
And at first it seemed we were just going to go through the motions, the standard questions about my new position and the Senator’s platform on LGBT rights. I kept bracing myself for ‘the question’, but it came right at the moment I had thought she might not ask it.
“Where’s Dylan?”
I sat back. Sighed. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“I wish I did.”
Kristi shook her head. The first sign of anger I’d seen from her. “I can’t believe this.”
Okay, let’s see how this plays out. “But you also know more about it than you’re letting on, isn’t that right? You know something, but getting it verified, that’s the problem.”
“All you’ve got to do is tell me.”
“I mean it when I say I don’t know. But …”
“Yeah?”
I leaned forward, elbows on the table. “It’s not good.”
She leaned forward too, mirrored my posture. We were close enough to whisper. “Not good in what way?”
“That’s the part I can’t tell you yet.”
“Because?”
“Uh huh.”
She twisted her lips, the sort of look little kids pull when they get mad. “Really?”
“Now ask me about why we’re looking for you know who.”
Her eyes widened just enough. “Phil Konzbruck.”
“Funny you should ask. It looked like he might know more about Dylan’s whereabouts.”
“It looked like a Democratic representative would know the whereabouts of the chief advisor for a Republican senator?”
“Maybe. One of us should dig into this a little more, don’t you think?”
She looked around, trying to keep calm but not doing the best job of it. “Let me ask you something else. How well do you know Dylan? Really, how well?”
“Not well enough.”
“What if I told you he’s much sneakier than he seems on the surface? Much more conniving?”
I wanted to tell her about the Fancy Room. I wanted to tell her about the torture. Jesus, I wanted to tell her everything. But if I did that now … it couldn’t help, could it? Blast this on the front pages. Walk away.
But if anyone could help …
“Give me your number. The one you actually answer. What’s the fastest way to reach you?”
She wrote it down and passed it over on a card that was blank other than her name, all caps, and a second line: Journalist.
I stood. “Give me some time. But meanwhile … I wish I knew where Phil Knozbruck was.”
She nodded.
I walked out quickly, got in my car, and drove away before she could think of any follow-ups.
There’s a reason people say, be careful what you wish for …
In the greenroom ahead of my next interview I had some time to kill. Back to the scroll of emails, not even feeling the energy to do more than glance at the subject heading when my thumb stopped spinning it like slot machine wheels.
It didn’t register at first. I mean, I had ‘Konzbruck’ on my mind already, so it didn’t seem off that I saw the same name in one of those subject headings.
But then something clicked in my head; I woke from my blurry trance and pulled the list back, back, back until I found that email.
Wouldn’t you know it? Another message from Dylan’s Guardian Angel.
And another dark web link.
This time, I didn’t give a shit which phone I was on, or what sort of damage it might do. I clicked that link immediately. And … listen, I suppose each and every one of us is due our own private kinks, and the vast world of internet pornography has shown us great generosity in helping us find people willing to perform those kinks on film so that we may indulge our smutty fantasies in the darkness of our own apartments at our filthy, lube-smeared keyboards.
But hiring someone to make someone do those kinks against his or her will in a room that is, despite the name, anything but ‘fancy’ should be an act punishable by the most visible and embarrassing torturous execution method our government is allowed to use once we amend the Constitution because every American citizen of voting age and sound mind would have no other choice, not in view of this video.
There’s a chance I even yelped out loud, because within seconds others came from nearby rooms to check in and ask if I was alright.
I had just watched Phil Konzbruck eat a bowl of live cockroaches like it was kung pao chicken.
You might ask, “How did you know it was real, Manny? Maybe it was CGI.”
I would like to believe that. I really would. But the words REAL LIVE COCKROACHES flashed across the bottom of the screen while he ate, and he gagged the whole time, occasionally looking off to his left, as if someone off-screen was forcing him to do it. The roaches crawled out of the bowl, across his hands, across the table, even in his hair. He was naked but for a giant bib, and looked to me as if he’d been drugged. Drool poured from the corner of his mouth to the tabletop. He could barely keep the fork in his hand.
Again, scrolling along the side I found comments from the peanut gallery:
Can you give him a bowl of something wetter next time?
Make him eat from a diaper!
A good metaphor for his political career.
Wait … that last one … these people knew who he was? I checked the name of the room, checked the full scroll to see if his name had been mentioned by the site administrator, or anything else about him, or any hint that he’d been recognized by one of the commenters, something like, “Hey, that’s Phil! Holy God, no!”
Nope. Nope. Nope.
But I had to stop and think: was this just more pranking? Konzbruck trying to cover his tracks? Him and Dylan both in on it?
If so, they sure knew how to commit to the punchline.
I turned it off and assured the people who were encroaching on my privacy that I was fine. Told them I’d seen something scary on YouTube. When they left, I went back to my email and sent a note to Dylan’s so-called Guardian Angel:
Not so hot on the Guardian part, are you?
Last time I’d tried to send one back, the email bounced.
But not this time.
And the answer didn’t take long, either: There’s nothing I can do.
Me: What am I supposed to do, then?
DGA: HELP THEM!!!
Me: Need more info. Where are they? How can I help?
DGA: Can’t tell you. I don’t know.
Me: Are they OK? Are they safe?
That took a while. For a minute I thought I had lost my only source of information.
Agonizing seconds later: No.
I was tight all over. Breathing heavy. My mind racing through ideas. My stomach churning acid.
I wrote: Meet me.
If this person was serious about helping Dylan and Konzbruck, if they truly needed help, I was going to need more leverage. All I had was yet another web link that would probably change again before I could get it to our tech.
I wrote: I’ll get an army of hackers to find out who you are. If anything happens to them, this is on you.
Should I have sent it? My anger was getting the better of me. That, and my embarrassment at being played for an idiot.
I wrote: Help me help them. Meet me. Tell me—
I didn’t even have to hit send.
DGA: Okay.
Then he gave me a time (later that night) and a place (not a place I wanted to go).
But what other options did I have?
Okay.
My next call should’ve been to Tennyson, asking him to get our resident geek Repo Man working on the link double quick.
It should’ve been.
Instead, I called Joel and asked for back up. Same as when I’d been due to meet Paula for the first time. Admittedly, that had led to Joel shooting a state agent, nearly killing him. Which in turn had led to both of us being fired from the police department. But this time was going to be different, right? Right?
Fuck it, I was done with self-delusion. I needed the guy. Simple as.
Last time, he’d needed convincing, though.
This time? “Let’s roll.”
And as a bonus, he told me I was getting some extra eyes on scopes this time.
I had no way of knowing there and then, but that meant he was calling in his ‘hunting buddies’ from the night rides — Dogged and Soulfather. Itchy trigger fingers and all.
The three of them met up at Dangerous Man’s taproom for a pre-mission beer. Or two. Or five. It wasn’t Joel’s idea, but it was the only way he could seal the deal. Neither one wanted to go in sober. Too much shaking, too much PTSD. So they downed some brews, except Joel, who stuck to coffee, and talked over the plan.
Dylan’s Guardian Angel wanted to meet in Frogtown, a neighborhood in St. Paul known for not being, well, inhabited all that much anymore. These days it was better known for lootings and shootings. The meeting place was supposed to be a street where most of the homes had been vacant for quite a long time. So the soldiers would scout out the place hours in advance and settle into three hidey-holes where they could cover all the angles — in, out, alleys, backyards, everything.
They slipped in after sunset, strapped mercilessly. And ‘unnecessarily’.
High-powered night scopes on high-powered rifles.
If I had known, I would’ve called the whole thing off before they’d even got the ammo out.
Seriously, these Full Metal Jacket freaks might’ve once been soldiers, but now they were just pretending. Why did they want to feel like soldiers again? Why did they want to see everyone on the streets as an enemy? When I’d asked Joel for help, I’d been hoping for someone to keep an eye on the places I wouldn’t be able to see. I most definitely hadn’t asked for three guys who were extra-amped at the chance to turn their real lives into video games.
Yeah, if I had known that back then, damn right, I would’ve called the whole thing off.
I would’ve been wrong, though. Even if it did take a while longer to realize it.
But let’s not skip ahead. At the appointed time, there I was, walking down the sidewalk on a mostly abandoned street in Frogtown. I say ‘mostly’ because who knew how many squatters were holed up in these dilapidated houses? To be on the safe side, I was carrying my .38 in my jacket pocket. Shivering. Me, not the gun. The remaining patches of snow were the ones that didn’t get direct sun during the day, so they refroze at night into miniature ice rinks, hard black portals to hell, treacherous in the half-light after spending all winter absorbing the soot and dirt from this godforsaken wasteland.
That was almost poetic, wasn’t it?
I certainly didn’t feel like Dante. More like Poe, but I still had no clue what quoth the raven.
I didn’t know where the soldiers had positioned themselves. I hoped Joel had told them what to expect from me — tight jeans, black boots, and a fitted suede jacket — but none of us knew who or what we were looking for in Dylan’s Guardian Angel. Part of me was hoping to see a real angel, maybe a fallen one, with singed wings and some sort of God-sword. Fuck me, Dr. Stravinsky would have had a field day with all that phallic symbolism.
I found the address, a narrow two-story duplex that had six old mailboxes hanging beside the front door, making me wonder just how that shoebox could’ve been cut into six apartments. An old tree twisted dangerously low over the roof, with branches and old leaves in a frozen heap. Good place to ambush someone.
In fact, great place to ambush someone.
Hands in my pockets, one holding tight to the gun.
Some shadows across the street. The streetlights that would’ve shown me more were either too weak or too not-there. A murmur of voices, getting louder. Three people? Yeah, three. Closer still. Louder still. I glanced left and right, looking for a place to keep out of sight, but with the snow still reflecting moonlight, and my own light complexion not doing me any favors.
Closer still.
He’d brought reinforcements. That wasn’t fair.
You did, too.
Yeah, well …
Closer still. But the voices were, I dunno, casual? Playful? No idea what they were jabbing about, but I could tell it didn’t matter.
Closer still. They passed under a murky streetlight beam and finally revealed themselves to be three Somali guys, teenagers most likely. Hardly even looked my way. I was a little insulted, maybe. Wasn’t I at least a nice piece of ass from a distance? Not even worth a wolf whistle?
No, no. Don’t think like some macho misogynist. You’re better than that.
Back to the lookout. I checked my phone. No new messages. DGA was twenty minutes late. Shit. How much longer was I going to wait?
A few minutes later, I thought I heard leaves rustling, crunching, as if someone was walking towards me through a yard. I turned around, scanned the neighborhood. It seemed like all the light had disappeared, the exact opposite of what you would expect after standing in the pitch dark for forty-five minutes.
Crunch.
The dark became even blacker when a set of headlights pierced with two sharp beams from down the street. So now I had two problems and I couldn’t see either. The closer the car came, the harder it was to see around me. I squinted. I stepped back until I had nowhere to go, flush against the chain link fence.
The car was slowing down.
The steps were coming closer.
A hand on my shoulder.
“No!” I spun, tried to yank the gun free from my pocket. But my attacker had already reached out, pinned my arm to my side. I shouted.
“Manny! It’s me! Manny!”
I kept struggling, and my eyes were flashing with the afterglow of the headlights. “Let me go!”
“Manny! It’s Thorn! Easy, easy!”
The voice was Thorn’s, absolutely, and I felt myself take a deep breath, then deflate. I turned to the car again, a familiar Mercedes, now idling in front of the house. The driver had lowered his window. It was Tennyson.
“Let’s get out of here.”
I nodded. Gladly.
As I slid on to the passenger seat of the Mercedes, Thorn climbing into the back, I almost mentioned Joel and his mercenaries. I’d already drawn a breath, but thought better of it and sighed. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
We got underway. The heat flowing from the vents felt wonderful. I held frozen fingertips in front of one, tilted my head back.
“How did you find me?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Did you hack my email? Seriously, how’d you find me?”
Thorn spoke up from the backseat. “This was pretty stupid. What were you thinking?”
How much did they know? Was this a test? There had to be holes on both sides. They didn’t know about Joel’s Heroes, and I didn’t know exactly how they had figured out my whereabouts. Had to be a backdoor into my phone or email account. Never even occurred to me.
After all, Thorn had a key for Dylan’s apartment, didn’t he? They had us all dead to rights, inside and out.
Freaked me the fuck out, I tell you.
“Why didn’t you ask for back-up?”
“Maybe for this exact reason.” I twisted in my seat to face Thorn head on. “Maybe because if I had, my source wouldn’t bother showing up. You know, which is exactly what happened.”
We were mostly quiet for the rest of the ride, which I quickly realized was taking me home. No strategy session to follow, no visit with Marquette. Just: “Bad girl. You’re grounded.”
Then, my phone buzzed. A text.
From Joel. Simply: ;-)
*wink*
I shoved it back into my pocket. Let the campaign folks figure that one out.