Gregory spoke at a hundred miles an hour, and he thought twice as fast which meant he sometimes fell over himself, not often, mind you; just occasionally.
Isabel adored him, but he made Ed cringe. To him, Gregory was a bald, pain-in-the-butt motor-mouth who, when he was a kid playing hide-and-seek would probably have been the one the other kids wouldn’t even bother looking for. Plus Ed couldn’t stand the guy’s voice. It wasn’t that Ed didn’t like Aussies. He’d fought beside many of them, and they were top troops, right up with the best. But Gregory’s stream of consciousness wrapped inside his nasal whine exhausted Ed. “Julia Gillard on speed but with better hair” was how one news clip had described Gregory’s voice. Despite Isabel backing Gregory as being brilliant, Ed just didn’t see it.
“I told you we had to watch out for this,” Gregory truthfully reminded Isabel. “And when we least need it, just when we’ve got Muslim America back in our tent eating olives out of our hands, that twisted…,” he paused when he saw her scowl, “… creep spits the damn seeds right in our face.”
“Enough!” Isabel said, charitably assuming the pressure had gotten to him. “Our campaign doesn’t talk or think like that!”
She didn’t talk like that, but Gregory knew from his polling that 30 percent of Americans did; he took a slurp of Diet Coke to stop himself from telling her that. This time, his mouth had really got ahead of his mind.
KARIM Ahmed was one of Isabel’s many success stories or more accurately, he had been. His father, Hakim, an Iraqi chemical engineer, had fled with his family as refugees to America after the first Gulf War. Hakim started out mopping floors in a Newark outlet of Isabel’s BBB restaurant chain; coincidentally the city where Isabel had been born. Despite being a practising Muslim, Karim’s father always hand-painted Isabel a Christmas card incorporating both traditional geometric elements and Christian icons—he was a fine artist who believed his new life exemplified how different cultures could cohabit contentedly. Every year his card offered his and his wife Najeeba’s thanks for the opportunities Isabel had provided for their family. By the time their son Karim was graduating high school, Hakim had risen to become manager of the LaGuardia airport BBB, one of the chain’s busiest and most profitable. Karim was a straight-A student, blitzing his final examinations and topping his class. He’d done well in his SATs and was desperate to take the undergraduate course at NYU’s Stern Business School but he’d narrowly missed a scholarship and the fees were a killer.
Isabel had gone to LaGuardia to take the shuttle to Boston and, as she often did, wandered over to visit the BBB restaurant, one of the hundreds she already owned at that time.
“Hakim, why doesn’t Karim apply for a BBB family scholarship?” she asked.
“There is such a scheme?” he asked.
There was, from that moment on, and Karim got to go to NYU.
To the Ahmed family’s surprise, Isabel turned up at Karim’s graduation, a tradition she maintained for all employees and their kids until she was elected to Congress and had to step away from the business.
“What’s that?” Karim asked, looking at the envelope Isabel had just popped into the black mortarboard cap he was holding upside-down, like a dish.
“Murray’s finally bought that ranch, Karim, and he’s aiming to retire in a few years. He needs a number two.”
He didn’t need to be the whiz that he was to know that she was offering him a job as assistant to BBB’s Chief Financial Officer, Murray Byron. Karim nodded, unable to speak. He knew about the CFO’s long-talked-about retirement plans—part of his scholarship had involved him interning with Murray during university vacations—but this!
“Eventually, Murray’s gonna head back to Texas to raise cattle, so BBB needs to start developing someone to jump into his saddle. Any ideas, Karim?”
Hakim and Najeeba looked at each other in disbelief. “We love America,” said Najeeba, her smile broader than the Tigris. “And we love you, Isabel.”
Hakim hugged her, “You are like a sister to us.”