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“Because no one else is willing to,” Devine said. “Sound familiar?”
Evan didn’t rise to the bait.
“There’s always a bigger bully. Until me.” Devine hesitated. “And you.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Evan asked. “Why do you want to be understood by me?”
“Because …” Devine froze on an image of Evan from earlier in the evening, crossing behind Tenpenny’s back to the stairs. A disembodied skull drifting above black clothes. The biometrics wereat him hard, but all the connecting slots and windows were blank. No identifying features, no social media, no websites or images online. “You are the Nowhere Man. If you want to kill me, you will succeed. One way or another, you will accomplish it. I have not a prayer against you. My only hope is to convince you.”
“How do you know who I am? How did you—”
“Idon’t do anything.” Devine raised an eyebrow to the screen. “I get others to do my bidding for me. Why keep an ear to the ground when I can have well-placed people doing it instead? Why go to the trouble of running a major fake-news network when I can own the man who does? Why waste time politicking when I can motivate cabinet members and Supreme Court justices by alternative means?”
He leaned forward on the chaise, fingertips pressed together between his parted knees, the digits forming a globe. His face was flushed, and his speech had picked up to a canter. “They fear the kind of power I hold. Just like they fear yours. So they want me gone. But they can’t touch me lawfully. They need you. That’s why we are having this discussion. I believe that if you understand, you will leave me to my kingdom.”
Evan started to answer, but Devine held up a hand. “Let’s continue this somewhere more comfortable. I’ve always thought that there are few things in life that can’t be better discussed over two ounces of chilled vodka.”
“Finally,” Evan said, “we agree on something.”
Devine’s mouth reshaped itself into a smile that said that somehow he knew that already.
46
I Was Told There’d Be Vodka
“Ever since we pretended to outgrow religion, we’ve ceased to value humility, forgiveness, surrender. So what do we have? An arrogant generation that doesn’t know how to forgive or surrender. And who are we letting point our way?” Devine faced Evan from behind a curved mahogany bar immense enough to seat a Broadway chorus line.
The space, a drawing room of sorts, featured bookshelves, wainscoting, and a spectacular array of bottles. On the wall to Evan’s side, an enormous pencil-and-watercolor wash showed the face of the great Lebanese poet, his famous words writ large in melodic calligraphy:
Your pain is the breaking of The Shell that encloses your understanding.
“Bureaucracies disemboweled by meekness? Media-seeking crybullies? Leaders who armor themselves in the ideology of leftor right and mouth calculated sentiments to lord over their respective dung heaps?”
The voluble host had spoken unbroken for the past ten minutes, his words coming so fast they’d started to run together. No sign remained of the measured speech or inscrutable façade he’d presented earlier. It was as though once he loosed his thoughts, he could no longer control them; he just had to hold on and let them bull their way through the china shop. Evan sensed that the acceleration had something to do with the understanding Luke craved from those he deemed worthy—this tonnage of words shoved before him like the blade of a bulldozer, scarring his signature into the topography. It wasn’t enough for him to be the holder of the strings; he had to be revered for what he was, what he saw, what he could do.
“I was told there’d be vodka,” Evan said.
Half turning to run a finger solicitously across the spirits, Devine kept on. “They want to take the bloodsport out of business.” His finger ticked across a bottle of Beaufort, custom-made for the lower bar at the Savoy in London. “The iron-testing from education.” Next a squat Black Cow container that mimicked a milk bottle; a West Dorset dairy farmer had derived a pure milk vodka from whey. “The teeth out of art.”
Devine’s digit slid past Wyborowa with its twisted glass bottle designed by Frank Gehry. When it reached the next bottle, fat and round with a running wild boar on it, Evan gave a nod.
He’d not yet been able to get his hands on Atomik vodka, created with water pumped from a local aquifer in Chernobyl and grain grown on a plot inside the Exclusion Zone. The distillation process cut the radiation to almost zero. Almost.
Devine said, “They’re trying to rearrange the world to avoid any possible suffering. But we can never eliminate suffering. There’s no wisdom without it. It’s a tale as old as the Greeks.”
“And you’re good enough to provide the service?” Evan asked.
“No. I’m just not afraid to do it.”
“You think you’re pretty grand,” Evan said.
“Only in comparison to everyone else.” Devine didn’t grin; he was in dead earnest. He poured two fingers into a crystal tumbler.
“One rock,” Evan said. “Cube or sphere.”
Devine plopped a spherical ice cube into Evan’s glass and then poured himself a good five ounces of Macallan No. 6. “Shouldn’t we cultivate men and women who know how to withstand pressure, to persevere, to think outrageously? Did we forget that menace has to be met with will? That we’re competing against other nations? That we’re collectively responsible for the future of a planet?” He leaned forward on the mahogany plain like an old-fashioned barman. “We’re so far out of touch with our animal instincts we’ve made ourselves vulnerable to being ruled by the worst of them.”
Evan sipped. Atomik was rounded off but still hair-on-your-chest strong, more a grain spirit than true vodka. The water base had qualities of similar limestone aquifers from the south of England or France’s Champagne region.
