The Boiling Season Read Online Free

the fine young man you’ve become.”
    â€œThank you, sir,” I said. “It’s very kind of you to give me this opportunity.”
    â€œIf only there were more like you.” The Senator took a puff from his pipe. “So many young people these days are content to do nothing. They complain about how hard their lives are, but they don’t do anything to change them.”
    â€œThat’s very true, sir,” I said, feeling another surge of exhilaration. I wanted to tell him the exact same thoughts had occupied me all night. “Where I grew up, it was exactly like that.”
    â€œBut your father showed you the value of hard work.”
    â€œMy father was very stern.”
    â€œHe would be very proud.”
    I said, “It would be wonderful to think so.”
    T he next day Senator Marcus took away my nondescript footman’s coat and slacks and replaced them with an only slightly used gray woolen suit. It was the first suit I had ever owned.
    Of the two roles I had been given, the latter was the most difficult, for I had never driven before—had never even sat in the front seat of a car—and the steep, twisting roads of Lyonville were a less than ideal place to learn.
    From the day I turned in my footman’s uniform to the day I finally left Senator Marcus’s service, five years later, I accompanied him virtually everywhere he went. Each morning I drove him to his office in the Legislative Palace. While he worked, I tended to errands downtown, always returning in time to take him to lunch. If I came back early, or if he had no errands for me to run, I waited in the anteroom. The wait was often long and dull, but there was a soft leather wing chair reserved for me, and I could sit there and watch cabinet ministers and ambassadors I recognized from the Marcuses’ parties come and go.
    And it was here, too, that I first saw President Mailodet.
    That morning had been otherwise uneventful. I had just returned to the Senator’s office after picking up some items at the market for Mme Marcus. Scarcely had I taken my seat when two enormous men in black mirrored sunglasses only a shade darker than their skin pushed through the door behind me. Instinctively I knew to lower my eyes. One of them was wearing mismatched socks, brown on the left, and on the right, deep burgundy with a grid of small gold diamonds. The diamonds above his outer heel were split where the sock had begun to run.
    The men’s arrival seemed to catch everyone by surprise. In my memory there was a collective, instantaneous intake of air as Senator Marcus’s secretary and his clerks came to a sudden, speechless halt.
    If the staff were trying to make themselves invisible, they apparently succeeded, for the only person the two men took note of upon entering was me. Seeing me sitting there, the one in mismatched socks came forward and ordered me to stand. When I hesitated, he reached down and lifted me by my lapel. While his partner watched, the man ran his hands roughly over my suit, pausing only when he felt the sharp edge of the car keys in my pocket. And then he was done, and again I must have been too slow to comprehend what he wanted, for he stabbed two fingers into my chest and I toppled back down into the chair.
    That was the moment President Mailodet entered. He looked precisely as he always did in the newspaper: a slight, older man with a soft, mild face upon which perched a pair of black-framed eyeglasses so thick and unwieldy I wondered fleetingly if they alone might be responsible for the stoop in his posture. A crushed felt derby at least one size too small sat precariously atop his head. Whether it was his shabby clothes or his milky expression I do not know, but just as in the paper he looked not the least bit presidential.
    By that point, M. Mailodet had been in power for only ten months. At this early stage of his term he still had the bearing of someone used to being hushed in