far away from decent bars and good restaurants, and was fought by the kind of men and women whom Tate secretly despised when they weren’t wearing a uniform. But he was also cautiously in favor of some form of gun control, albeit a control mechanism that allowed him to own guns and kept them out of the hands of the non-white and the non-Christian; and he certainly did not approve of those who smoked in his vicinity, even while advocating the sort of lax environmental policing that in the long run was likely to have a significantly more damaging effect on the quality of the air that he breathed than the occasional breath of secondhand smoke.
In short, Becky thought, Davis Tate was an asshole, but that was why he was so useful. Still, recruiting men such as he required a degree of care, and their continued use involved careful diplomacy. They couldn’t be stupid or else they would be unable to perform their appointed role in the media, and they couldn’t be too smart in case they began questioning what they were doing, or how they were being used. The easiest way to ensure their continued compliance was to stroke their ego and surround them with those most like themselves. Hatred, like love, needed to be regularly fed and watered.
Tate continued to sniff the air.
‘You sure you don’t smell it?’ he said.
Becky sniffed. There was something, she admitted. It was faint, but unpleasant. She could almost taste it on her tongue, as though she’d just licked a smoker’s fingers.
‘It’s old,’ she said. ‘It’s on someone’s clothing.’ Their skin and hair too, because you didn’t get to smell that way unless the nicotine had ingrained itself upon your system. She could almost hear the cells metastasizing.
She glanced over her shoulder. At the very back of the bar, where the light was at its dimmest, she saw a figure seated in a booth against the wall, a newspaper spread before him, a brandy snifter in one hand, the index finger of the other gently tapping a rhythm upon the table as he read. She couldn’t see his face, but his hair looked greasy and untidy. He struck her as unclean, a polluted man, and not just because the tobacco smell was certainly coming from him.
‘It’s the guy in the corner,’ she said.
‘There’s no excuse for a man smelling that bad,’ said Tate. ‘At least he won’t outlive us.’
Tate was not certain, but for a moment he believed that the rhythm of the man’s tapping might have been interrupted, and then it resumed and he forgot about it.
‘Ignore him,’ said Becky. ‘He’s not why we’re here.’
‘Goddamn disloyal advertisers and fat station managers without an original idea in their heads is why we’re here,’ said Tate.
‘It’s not just the advertisers and the stations we have to worry about, though,’ she replied. ‘You realize that? The Backers are concerned.’
Tate’s mouthful of beer tasted wrong. It wasn’t just his suspicions about the bartender, misplaced or otherwise. He always felt this way when the subject of the Backers was raised. At first, their existence hadn’t bothered him so much. The Kelly woman had approached him when he was a minor player broadcasting out of San Antonio, with barely a dozen statewide syndications to his name. She’d arranged to meet him for coffee in the lobby of the Menger Hotel, and he hadn’t been impressed with her at first. She was dowdy and plain, and Tate suspected that she was also a dyke. He had no objection to dykes as long as they were pretty – that was probably as close to a liberal viewpoint as he’d ever managed to come – but the butch, masculine-looking ones bothered him. They always seemed so angry, and frankly they scared the shit out of him. Kelly wasn’t an extreme case: her hair was shoulder length, and she wasn’t making some protest about oppressive male views of women by refusing to wear makeup or avoiding skirts and high heels. No man would have given her a second look in a bar or a mall, though, and most wouldn’t even have bothered with the first look.
But when she started speaking he found himself leaning forward, hanging on her every word. She had a soft, melodious voice, one that seemed to him both entirely at odds with her appearance yet also curiously appropriate if you considered her as some kind of mother figure instead of a sexual being. She spoke of how there