Mandrake nodded:
“You’re saying that the kids of foreign diplomats, even if they’re born in Newark or Hoboken or Dallas or Washington, they’re not US citizens?”
Dupont smiled:
“Precisely,” he said.
The eyes of everyone in the hall flicked over to see Isabel biting her top lip.
Mandrake continued:
“Including the children of diplomats who are long since dead, like Isabel Diaz?”
“Like she,” said Dupont.
“So that’s your opinion, Professor?”
He glared. “It’s the law.” Humility wasn’t Dupont’s strong suit.
“Who says so, Professor?”
As Dupont paused to lean forward to answer, Isabel looked over to Oliver Pryor with some admiration, “Your grandfather is a surly old coot.” Oliver’s face flushed with embarrassment.
Dupont snatched up a large tome and levered it open.
“I say so. And if that’s inadequate for you, young man, the United States Supreme Court says so, too.” He almost spat the words out, “I refer you to the Court’s decision in US v. Wong Kim Ark. It’s older than I am. It’s from 1898.”
He slid his reading glasses out of his jacket pocket and perched them at the end of his nose. As he started to read the majority opinion, the relevant text flashed up on the screen together with the case reference: US v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 US 649 (1898). Close-up was leaving no doubt about where this was going.
Oliver was agog. Both his cell phone and Professor Millie Wilkinson who was on it dropped away from his ear. “So that’s why he brought up Orrin Hatch… it was about the Arnie amendment. We just didn’t figure out why.”
Ordinarily, Gregory would’ve been furious at Oliver—the lawyer was paid to understand why—but here in Detroit where they possessed the vital detail of mistaken identity, Gregory was relieved. “Thank God not a jot of this legal crap matters,” he exhaled.
Ed coughed, his craggy face suddenly as grey as a heavy cloud. “I’m afraid it does matter.”
In a single sweep, all present turned toward him like sideshow clown heads.
Ed was walking back in from the rear, holding Isabel’s photo-frame in one hand. Everyone could see he’d pried open the back. The old picture of Isabel’s dad was in his other hand. It had been glued all these years onto a metal backing square placed under the glass—Isabel had seen it herself many times—but with the blade of the knife, Ed had painstakingly peeled the photo off the metal. He passed it to Isabel.
Handling her beloved photo like it was coated with poison, Isabel quickly saw that what she’d devotedly kept with her all these years wasn’t a photograph at all… but a cutting from a glossy magazine cover. The name of the publication had been stripped off, but the caption beneath the face had been folded back behind the backing plate.
Yet another of her mother’s lies.
Isabel’s lip began to quiver as she read the text to herself:
“Lucho Gatica: King of Bolero. His smoke-and-velvet Bésame Mucho…”
That fucking Bésame Mucho, she thought, and slowly looked up at Ed. Her eyes, moist, went round the room, pausing for just a moment at each expectant face. Her shaky fingers wriggled into her pocket and locked onto the rosaries from St Hyacinth’s.
Ed wound his arm around her pulling her close, and she tilted her head briefly to nuzzle against him.
The tips of one of Gregory’s hands pressed against his lips and the fingers of the other hand were spread flat against his chest, as if he were palpitating and preparing to scream “oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God” once Ed or Isabel explained what the heck was happening. One thing was for sure: the campaign was not looking good. Nor was The Book.
Isabel straightened up and inhaled. Her eyelids dropped for less than a second and, as she looked back up, her free hand crushed the once beloved picture into a ball and it dropped to the cold, wooden floor.
No longer looking anyone in the eye, but with a smile weakly hanging on to her mouth, she said, “No debate tonight, folks. Not ever, apparently.”
And in the hushed gloom, the approaching noise from outside was all the louder… the long rolling crunch of gravel along the drive by CBS’s outside broadcast van and three other vehicles as they drew up outside the hall doors.
For months, America had been clinging optimistically to Isabel’s lustre like moths to the screen door of a lone shiny, bright room. Yet in fewer than thirty TV minutes, Mike Mandrake had doused those lights with a single flick of his microphone.
From that night, Isabel’s election posters, still beaming her candour, high-mindedness and sense of justice, would curl up into relics for a disheartened nation robbed of a candidate they adored.
And Mike Mandrake, the man to blame, would become a pin-up of a different kind.