The Empress File

Marvel at the hotel meeting, she first thought it over and shook her head.
    “It’s an idea,” she said, taking a lick of the ice cream. “But no matter how much he wanted to help us—help himself—the governor couldn’t appoint a black majority to the council. That’d kill him for sure. The black caucus has got some clout, but there’s a country boy caucus, too. They’ve got more clout than the black caucus, and they wouldn’t stand for that shit.”
    “The governor doesn’t have to appoint a black majority,” I said. “Suppose we take out three white council members, leaving the Reverend Dodge and this Lucius Bell, the guy you say might be honest. OK?”
    “OK,” she said, nodding.
    “So the governor appoints the replacements: one of our people and two more machine members. They can be the worst rednecks in the state, we don’t care. But they have to be from our list, the list of people we can control—”
    “That we got dirt on,” Marvel chipped in.
    “That’s right. When the council is legally functioning again, we take out those two. We either sic the state cops on them, or the IRS, or just go right straight to them, show them the evidence, force them out—”
    “Blackmail,” said Harold.
    “Right. Push those two off the council. That still leaves three: our appointee, the reverend, and Bell. Three council members is a quorum. Three members
can
appoint replacements. You’ve got the reverend by the balls, for diddling these little girls, plus our new guy.…”
    “And those three appoint the two new members. That gives us four to one,” Marvel said, sitting up straight, the ice cream forgotten.
    “With four to one, we’ve got the votes to redraw the election districts,” I said. “We gerrymander it just like the machine did, but in our favor.”
    Marvel stared at Harold. “It could work,” she blurted.
    I T COULD WORK , but everything had to go right.
    Longstreet was six hours down the river. Wedid two hours that night and anchored behind the point of a sandbar. I hadn’t shaved since we left St. Paul, and the beard was coming on.
    “There’re too many white whiskers in it,” LuEllen said. “Writers have white beards; painters are supposed to have black. I’ve never seen a movie where the painter had a white beard.”
    “I look like Hemingway,” I suggested. “Except taller and better-looking, of course.”
    The next morning I added to the effect with my artist outfit: tan baggy-assed shorts, Portuguese rope sandals, a New York Knicks T-shirt, and a broad-brimmed canvas hat. LuEllen admired the outfit extravagantly. During the final run down the river she fell into periodic bursts of the giggles. I put it down to stress. We arrived at Longstreet at eleven o’clock and eased into the ramshackle marina I’d seen on my first trip down.
    The marina operator wore a cap that said “Port Captain.” He had an easy, sun-lined face that hadn’t seen much of anywhere and didn’t much care.
    “How y’ doin’?” he asked cheerfully. He took a quick look at me and a longer one at LuEllen. LuEllen was wearing a beige sundress that had a pattern of small rectangular holes across the bodice. There was no indication that she was burdened by a brassiere.
    “Pretty good,” I admitted. “You got hookups?”
    “Sure do,” he said. “Y’all planning to stay awhile?”
    I hopped up on the dock. “Maybe a week, maybe two, it depends,” I said. Up in the town I could see the tops of Victorian-era clapboard houses lapping around the edges of the business district. “I’m a painter. Last time I came through here, I saw some nice landscape.”
    As soon as I said the word
painter
, his eyes shifted, and I figured we’d be paying in advance.
    “I’m sure there is,” he said.
    “How about if I give you a week in advance? If it works out, we’ll give you another week.”
    My stock went back up. He hadn’t had to ask for the money, and we had avoided an awkwardness. “That’d be fine,” he said. “It’s fifty cents a foot, up to twenty dollars a day, with another dollar for every person over four?”
    There was a question in his voice, and LuEllen said, “There are only the two of us.”
    “So that’s twenty dollars a day for seven days; that’d be a hundred and forty dollars,” I said. I took out a pad of traveler’s checks. “Do you take American Express?”
    A T THE M EMPHIS MEETING , we’d talked about how we’d bring ourselves to the attention of the