The New Republic by Lionel Shriver

Author:Lionel Shriver [Shriver, Lionel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Terrorism, Political Freedom & Security, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780062103321
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

One Less Ugly Landmark

THIS TIME WHEN the zomboid Bebê Serio stood blocking the doorway, Edgar launched straight into the slab of super-ball flab, knocking the Cream backward. Serio staggered into the Rat with his elbows lifted and arms dangling, like the robot on Lost in Space flailing its coiled limbs and droning, Danger! Danger! Deep in the tar pits of Serio’s eyes stirred the beginnings of surprise. No one had slammed into that gut for a while.

“Desculpe-me, amigo,” said Edgar in a wide, careless Yankee drawl. He was chewing gum. “Thought for a minute there you were gonna get outta my fucking way.”

Jingling the keys to the kingdom on Rua da Evaporação in his pocket, and figuratively the keys to a great deal else, Edgar sauntered directly to the bar. He wasn’t about to be roped into another full round for that table. “Choque,” he ordered tersely, skipping his practiced, Quero uma cerveja de pera peluda, por favor. Still, Edgar left a generous two-hundred-escudo tip. All those SOB bumper stickers plastered around the register could as well have been decals scored from special-offer boxes of Cocoa Puffs. Edgar felt a funny flush of sympathy for the politically infatuated barkeep, much as he could be touched by the credulous enthusiasm of little boys for the A-Team.

To Edgar, the Barking Rat had overnight lost its edge. Glaring sullenly over bitter beers, murmuring in a mishmash of Slavic-sounding consonant blends, those thick-necked, shadowy Barbans lurking in corners had originally made Edgar uneasy. He couldn’t decipher their palatal mumble, and he’d had every reason to view the morose local patrons as shady characters. Yet now the zhuh-shuh-chuh shuffled with no more menace than an old man in slippers. Potato-heads no longer gooned from their posters with sinister stupidity, nor wielded ordnance with forbidding nonchalance; on examination, the automatics in photos looked distinctly plastic. The political ephemera scattered about the premises—LIBERTA A BARBA OCUPADA teaspoons, SOB ashtrays, and cherry-bomb spangled coffee mugs—winked with the bald artifice of tinfoil swords in community theater. In fact, the deformed plastic souvenirs over the booze exuded more integrity than the publican’s SUPORTE NOSSOS SOLDADOS OUSADOS tea towel. At least, if not half-melted, there really was an Eiffel Tower.

Approaching the foreign correspondents’ regular round table, Edgar forded another wave of unexpected compassion. After one more week absent SOB “violence,” the press corps emitted an air of impending dissolution, like a staff meeting in the last week of summer camp. Now that the fun and games appeared nearly done, they gazed at one another with a rash sentimentality safe only in moribund relationships. A fuzzy halo of nostalgia hovered over the gathering, that peculiar harkening back to the days you’re still living, a nostalgia for the present. Hell, this bunch might as well reminisce fondly now, since later they’d remember Barba and wince. Poor schmucks. Every last journalist in Cinziero had been suckered.

Trudy Sisson would never have seized on Tomás Verdade as a pinup heartthrob if she’d realized that the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.