Bribe by Philip Ross

Author:Philip Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497649552
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

11

Saturday, May 25.

Still in a daze, Burt spent the morning driving kids around to deliver campaign literature. This week’s flyer carried the headline, “Mammoth George Washington Shopping Mall Plan Defeated.” Serota’s side countered with “Fort Lee Is Becoming a Concrete Jungle.”

When Burt told his workers to destroy any of Serota’s literature they could find, a fourteen-year-old girl asked him if that wasn’t unfair.

“Not at all,” Burt said. “They do the same thing to us, and I’m sure you’ve learned in civics class that equality is a basic part of any democracy.”

After lunch he went to Borough Hall where he had summoned fifteen dependable Greeks to divide the responsibility of getting out the Hellenic vote on Election Day. There were about a thousand Greek votes in town, a sizable bloc whose leaders Burt had carefully cultivated. The Greeks sat around a conference table as George Karageorge, the chunky owner of a local diner, read from the lists of voters. Karageorge sweated a lot and told jokes in an impish falsetto. And as he sat there yelling “Saponakis, who gonna take Saponakis?” Burt loved him.

Later in the afternoon Burt had an interview with a young woman who was writing an article on local zoning laws. The woman had a curious style: She would ask a question, look out the window while Burt answered, then smile enigmatically and ask, “You don’t really believe that, do you?” It went like that for perhaps twenty minutes. Then she asked Burt if he believed in regional planning. When he said he did, she moved in for the kill.

“And exactly what have you done to help further it?” she asked.

“Absolutely nothing,” Burt said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because I get paid five thousand dollars a year to be mayor,” Burt said, “and it’s a part-time job that I already spend forty hours or more a week at. That doesn’t give me much leisure time.”

The woman was not about to yield. “Well, what exactly do you do with your leisure time?” she asked.

Burt leaned across his desk, cocked his chin and whispered as if he were taking her into his confidence, “I spend my leisure time getting interviewed by dumb people.”

Laurie joined him that night for dinner at the home of Mamma Gallo, an elderly woman who had invited him in for tortoni when he was knocking on doors during his own campaign. He had been coming back ever since. Mamma Gallo treated Burt like a son, worrying if he didn’t eat enough of her vitello tonnato, plotting revenge against anyone who opposed him. Her skin felt like silk and her clear brown eyes would tear so much when she laughed that she would have to remove her glasses.

On this evening everyone was laughing. Mamma Gallo had recently been operated on, and as she described the medical outlook, Burt slapped his thigh with delight.

“The doctor, he say ‘You should be able to live a normal life to at least seventy-five,’” Mamma Gallo said, “and I say ‘That’s a wonderful news, doctor, since I’m a now eighty-seven.

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